My response to the Proud v. Sexy Challenge on WIKTT. Rules wil be posted at the end. Please Review! I'll give you a cookie (ok well I'll try to give you a cookie but my e-mail doesn't take them as attachments) I'm also not really thrilled with my title, so I'm open to suggestions if anyone has any. I love my Beta she is awesome, seriously, I'm trying to figure out how to sent you gooey chocolate brownies by e-mail. Thanks for reading. Now the story:
"Arrgh!" huffed Hermione as she dropped her gym bag on the floor in her dorm room. "We need a women's only rec center, you know that Crooks?" she commented to Crookshanks who had raised his head from his napping position on her couch.
She stomped around the room getting dinner, and then settled at her desk to eat before she began working. As she chewed she contemplated Crookshanks who had begun to groom himself. "You know Crooks, I just don't understand males, you make no sense. Honestly, I hate trying to swim knowing I'm being ogled by all those ...boys," she spat the word as if it tasted awful. "Why do they all think they are God's gift to women? All those huge muscles don't look sexy, they look....abnormal."
She glanced at her calendar to see what homework she needed to do, with a start she realized that the only thing she had left to do was revision for the exams in a week. It was then that she noticed the parchment scrap sitting on her desk. She opened it up to find a note from her best friend; it read "Meet me at 8. We need to talk. –K." Hermione sighed and got up to take a shower and make herself presentable.
An hour later she was folded into an out of the way booth in the student center listening to Katherine talk about her new boyfriend. Hermione was trying to listen as K detailed her weekend with Chris. Her mind was continually wandering to the guys who had been working out and checking her out at the gym earlier. K seemed to notice this suddenly and asked, "'Mione what's wrong?"
"Hmmm," said Hermione, "Oh nothing. I was just thinking."
"About what?"
"I just can't figure it out. Boys, what's so great about them? I mean it seems to me that all they do is play video games, or Quidditch, and work out, so they can have those huge "sexy" muscles," Hermione rolled her eyes.
"Oh 'Mione you're just disappointed," Katherine retorted. "I told you that you should stay away from Aidan but did you listen? No."
"Honestly K could you just drop it? I was thinking more about the fact that I hate working out knowing I'm being ogled by a bunch of hormonal boys."
"They're not all boys--take Chris for example. He works out at the same time you do and he's definitely a man," she waggled her eyebrows suggestively. "You just need to find one you can tolerate and get him into bed. Do like Jimmy says 'find yourself a lover who will glue you to the floor'." Hermione looked utterly puzzled at this. "Jimmy Buffett. Honestly 'Mione, sometimes you wouldn't think you were Muggle-born."
"Whatever K. So finish telling me about the date." Hermione sighed as Katherine launched back into her recounting of the weekend. Both were completely unaware of the dark man who had overheard their entire conversation from the next booth. He smiled to himself and thought, "Indeed... Five points to Gryffindor for keen observation skills Miss Granger." In his experience women were pleased to be openly ogled and he was glad to see that "the most brilliant student to grace Hogwarts in a hundred years" had not fallen into that trap. He continued eavesdropping on the conversation and was surprised to discover that he found the totally one sided conversation to be utterly insipid, until Miss Granger broke in.
"K, why do you like him?"
"He makes me feel good; I can talk to him; we have so much in common... I don't really know."
"But you have something in common, and you can talk?" Katherine nodded. "That's my problem K--guys are intimidated. I hate Quidditch. I don't want romance. I'm totally backward. I think that there are more important things that go into love. I want intelligence, I want conversation. I'm not Marianne Dashwood." Katherine stared blankly at this. "She's a hopeless idealist who falls for a dandy who drops her faster that you can say "Wingardium Leviosa" and eventually marries a man who was a committed bachelor until he met her. I want the stuff outside the bedroom. I'm domineering enough that I'll make sure he pays attention to my needs." They both missed the soft snort from the next booth. "I want to be Eliza Bennet. Is that too much to ask?" Hermione finished.
"Who?"
"She was determined to marry for love."
Katherine thought for a moment and said, "No, it's not." Picking up her coffee she raised it in salute, "To being Miss Bennet."
Hermione raised her own glass, and responded, "To being Eliza Bennet."
Unbeknownst to the two young women, the dark man in the next booth raised his glass in his own salute, "to being Darcy," he mumbled.
Hermione and Katherine chatted for a bit longer, then parted to return to their dorms. Professor Severus Snape stayed in his booth quite a bit longer, pondering his idea. He had seen Miss Granger at the graduate poster session he had attended earlier in the day. He remembered seeing Miss Granger's name on the list for the undergraduate poster session the next day. He smirked as he decided how to be the Darcy to her Eliza Bennet. He only hoped that her opinion of him was not fixed as the Potter brat's had been, even after the Dark Lord had fallen. Of course, if her knowledge of Jane Austen was as thorough as he suspected, her current opinion wouldn't matter. He smirked as the plan formed itself fully in his mind. Once he was sure that Hermione and her friend had left, he too departed.