Hermione was completing her routine preparation for a sigh when her girlfriend quickly clasped a hand over her mouth. She considered biting her finger, but knew that Pansy would do that annoying thing she loved to do and call Hermione's attemts of getting rid of her cute.
Hermione was not cute, mind you. She was very, very not cute. She was brave and fierce, and could hide her fear of lifts so well nobody had ever noticed.
"Shh, Hermione, this is for your own good!" With that she thankfully removed the offending hand, but, instead of leaving her girlfriend to be grumpy in piece, she opted to set hands on her shoulders and try to spin her around.
Hermione watched her reflection resist the forced twirl and decided that she did like this skirt. It was a dark blue, had something she would describe as an in-built belt and was currently proving that inertia was a scientific idea with real world applications.
"Hm, I like the A-line skirt on you, but I think you could use a lighter colour...", she mused, then seemed to register that Hermione was still in the room.
"Do you like it?"
"Well", she felt like a jellyfish out of the water. How does one respond to such a question when one has almost no grasp on what an A-line skirt even is? 'Fake it 'till you make it' seemed like a good start for now.
"I like the... A-line, but yes, the colour could be different." Did it work?
It did. Pansy nodded, apparently willingly ignoring her victim's distress, and ducked back into the shop to find a skirt to match the description. Hermione allowed herself a sigh.
She didn't even want to be here. Hell, she didn't even want a skirt! And she especially didn't want to go to that formal purgatory of a birthday party. It had taken a day of boycotting clothes to persuade Pansy to let her wear a blouse and skirt in stead of a dress. Which had reduced Draco to a giggling mess and made Blaise's eyes grow to the size of saucers. Ron had opened the door to the living room with a smile in place, had frozen and then slowly walked backwards, shutting the door, the smile still on his reddening face. It had been quite amusing.
A thing she hadn't been able to talk Pansy out of were the heels she was to wear. They were to be at least four inches high, which, to Hermione, had not sounded too impossibly high. Until she'd tried a pair and promptly planted her face on the carpeted floor of the shoe store. She was used to low heels, the heels of her favourite pair of fancy foot wear were a mere one inch.
She was made to learn walking in progressively higher heels after that, and was now proud to say that she could walk the length of the garden in Pansy's shoes without intimately examining the grass. Which didn't mean that she enjoyed it.
The curtain parted and Pansy emerged with what had to be at least a dozen almost identical skirts draped over one arm.
"Here we go! I brought you everything from mauve to navy blue", she pulled a skirt out of the stack that looked marginally different, "and also one draped skirt in your size, because I thought you might like those."
Hermione smiled as she made to try them on - this might take a while, and the party most definitely wouldn't be worth it. But she knew Pansy's expression when she'd finally be satisfied with Hermione's outfit would be.