Cookie Cutter
She always thought her life was picture perfect.
She was a top student in primary school, academic, popular, and beloved. Teachers said she had real potential, classmates that she was fun to be around. Creative, inventive, talented in the most curious ways—her marks were high, her ideas brilliant, and everyone expected to see great things from her.
That all changed when Mary Macdonald boarded a train at King's Cross.
She was pretty, it could not be denied. Glossy brown hair that fell past her shoulders and proud brown eyes against a tanned complexion—it was true. Didn't change how she was poor with a wand and didn't stand out against the Hogwarts crowd.
It was vibrancy she lacked, Mary supposed. She was good enough to pass but lacked the magic of those around her, and it disappointed rather than angered her because she missed the cookie-cutter lifestyle she so loved.
Once, she was unique for seeing the world in shades of gray—that was what the Muggles could not do. But it seemed she had left behind the standard rainbow colors in her haste to prove herself in a community to which she no longer belonged.
Even around her friends Mary paled in comparison—but perhaps that was only to be expected. She stuck by Lily at first, Lily of the red and green, always overshadowed, always outshined by the embodiment of radiance. And yet there was no leftover fire; but perhaps she should have seen that coming from the likes of Severus Snape.
She didn't protest when they hexed her, called her Mudblood. She didn't make a fuss when she only scraped three O.W.L.'s. She didn't even wonder why she was never invited into the Order as she watched her friends trickle into it one by one.
She was nothing special, after all. Just a spectator, a minor character, meant to only watch the plot thicken and unfold.
Cookie-cutter and better off that way.
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A/N: Written for collaborative Reviews Lounge project—the theme was "rainbows". It'll be posted on the RL account as well; if you like the idea for this, go read the rest of them! They're posted under the RL's account, "The Reviews Lounge".
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