Disclaimer: I'm not Jo Rowling. This would also mean I am a) not British, b) not rich c) not the owner of Harry Potter…now you try and guess which depresses me most.
A/N: I've been in a funk of angsty fics lately and while that's all good and proper, this little ditty came to me while I was contemplating attacking my Spanish teacher with my binder…Ron PoV, vignette, NO HBP Spoilers.
She is not beautiful.
He decided this is first year as she walked out of the hospital wing after paying him a visit (Harry still hadn't come around yet).
No, Hermione Granger is not beautiful. Not in the least way.
She has bushy hair and her mouth pinches when she talks (which she does, all the time. And loudly.), and little sharp nails coated in clipping polish that dig into his palm and boney elbows that stick into his sides whenever she wants him to shut up, which she does, and often ( almost as often as she talks. Maybe because he is gifted with the uncanny ability of speaking before the words fully form inside his brain).
She isn't beautiful and of this he becomes more and more certain daily as he watches her. Playing with strands of knotted brown hair, biting clipped nails, worrying ink stained hands (she had a terrible habit of worrying about everything and everyone, and this annoys him. Noting more.) staring at him with brown eyes that are seemingly always shining even as the dark shadows beneath them grow (he has never stopped to think that perhaps they shine for him. They don't).
She goes on and on about elf rights one day, her hair wild, her hands flying, her mouth pinching in that way it does whenever she overstresses a vowel, and he knows what she is.
Barking.
Only someone completely off their rocker could possibly want to spend so much time around books, or chew their lips to ribbons on regular occasions, constantly worrying and fretting about the world. She is insane then, not beautiful, never that. Though she does have that glow about her, the one she has whenever she is passionate and he supposes some might confuse it for beauty. But he doesn't, because the insane (which she is) and the beautiful (which she is not) have never equaled one another in his book (Maybe in some Bulgarian edition, but not his).
Because there is Beauty and there's Hermione and the two don't add up (and mathematics are really everything in the end). Not even when she brushes her hair into a shiny twist at the back of her head, and her nails are painted smooth, shimmering in the candlelight, and all the books and lectures have been left in her dormitory and all that is before him is her, surrounded with sparkling light and floating periwinkle, laughing, dancing, smiling for Viktor –sodding—Krum.
He does not look at them with envy, does not look at her and want, does not see her and remember home and comfort and everything that may or may not be good. Instead he conjures images of icy blonde and untouchable silver (and the images do not fade away when compared to her)…
Later, much later, maybe years, they walk around the lake, the leaves, like scarlet and gold, falling all around them, catching in her hair, crowning her with autumn. She shakes her head to push them away and they break and cling. He reaches and pulls them away, twirling one between his fingers before letting it fall, tucking a faded purple flower its place.
Her eyes are bright and her pale skin flushed in the cold wind, and her fingers, blotched with spots of charcoal, are cold around his wrist.
"It's awfully silly." She says her voice softer than usual, almost unrecognizably so, and he wants her to be loud, scenery be damned.
"It's nice there." He says.
Nice, not beautiful (because she isn't anymore than he is brave).
She smiles.
End