A Little Piece of Sincerity Chapter One

A Little Piece of Sincerity

By: Provocative Envy

Nothing screams provocative quite like a dusty declaration of love trapped in a heady cloud of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume. Its tawdry and inelegant and the simplicity of those dreamy words is lost within that warped sense of romanticism that spurred the dreary allegation in the first place. Honor and honesty have no real meaning in this alternate universe of grimy street corners and flowery courtship; it’s a place of irony, skepticism, and deception. The sun never shines and anonymity is guaranteed. A brilliant façade of poetry and polite conversation embellished with insincerity enshrouds this world’s inhabitants, and their souls are blackened by a mystery too complex for their identical intellects to solve. They’re indefinitely stuck in an oblivion unscathed by acceptance and fantasy. And they adore it.

It was starkly beautiful in its ridiculous realism. It might have been about denial, or immorality, or any number of unwholesome endeavors. It was the last line that struck her as haunting, however.

‘And they adore it.’ It was so accurate. So thrillingly exact in its summation of human nature. Who didn’t love to delude themselves into believing that all was well in their pathetically insignificant life? Who didn’t instinctively ignore whatever unpleasantness they came across in favor of a misleadingly happy existence?

Whoever had written this appallingly honest description was clearly someone either depressingly sensible or horrifyingly experienced. The cynicism that so gracefully polluted the tattered slip of parchment bespoke of a subtle maturity generally not found in people under the age of forty. Despite this understanding, she doubted the author was a professor. This kind of observation was too raw to be an artful illustration.

No, this wasn’t meant to provide a picturesque, yet consciously blunt, depiction of a massively flawed society; this was uncensored, understated, and far too evocative.

Her instinctive characterization, far from helping her discover the writer’s identity, merely confounded her further. To her knowledge, there wasn’t a single student of her acquaintance that she believed capable of capturing her own murky, surely inexpressible, thoughts and feelings. If such a magnificently rare connection existed with someone she’d already met, surely she would have been made aware of it already?

Slowly folding the small piece of paper into her pocket, she mentally checked and double-checked all possible candidates. Truly, her best bet lay in a Ravenclaw; their intellectualism and penchant for philosophy matched the tone of this excerpt. There was even a hint of arrogance cleverly concealed behind the opinionated formation of each observation. And everyone knew that Ravenclaws were painfully notorious for their conceit in regards to their intelligence.

Dubious, she continued her trek to the Potions lesson she was already inexcusably late for. The only consolation she could see in spending the next two hours with the Slytherins lay in the obvious fact that none of the dungeon-dwelling, inbred morons could have composed it: naturally, there would be no wondering if her completely unaware soul mate was sitting across the room, simply waiting for fate to find them.

Someone was whispering her name. Their breath fluttered across her cheek, caressing her skin and making her spine tingle. The solitary word, murmured so melodiously, did nothing to break into her delightful slumber; rather, it heightened her reverie, comforted her gently, ensnared her most delicate senses in a frightening web of oblivion. She was sinking into a puddle of irresponsibility and was eagerly anticipating drowning in it. Never taking another breath laden with cruelty and unfairness. It would be so simple…so easy…

“Hermione!” the voice shouted into her ear, effectively destroying her daydream. She jerked awake, a wisp of thick brown hair catching on her lower lip as she fought to mumble a coherent response.

“Who’s there?” she finally got out, her tongue catching and causing a liberal amount of saliva to fly out and saturate the blank paper that lay in front of her. Mocking her, it seemed, with its flawless, creamy surface, so uninhibited by useless facts and empty knowledge. There was a wealth of potential in that single sheet of perfection; trust her to ruin it with a careless act of lazy typicality.

“Hermione, you’ve just gone and slept through an entire Potions lesson,” Harry Potter hissed into her ear, his dazzlingly green eyes cloudy with anxiety. No doubt his confusion stemmed from the peculiar behavior she was exhibiting, without any obvious explanation.

“Oh, no, Harry, tell me I didn’t,” she groaned into the desk, mentally berating herself for allowing exhaustion to overwhelm common sense. “Snape’s going to murder me.”

Harry’s face relaxed into an expression that Hermione recognized as the closest he could come to outright pity: clearly, he agreed with her assessment.

“I’m sure it won’t be all that bad,” he said softly, turning his attention to the lanky redhead that sat, laughing, at his left. “Stop laughing. Pissing yourself while Hermione’s got what she considers an actual problem isn’t going to help any.”

As soon as Harry had spoken, Severus Snape approached the table, his greasy hair glinting in the weak light of the dungeons.

“Potter, Weasley, please vacate this room immediately. I would appreciate it if those of inferior intelligence spent as little time as possible in what I consider to be my personal domain,” Snape murmured silkily, his tone an indication that his patience was waning and their departure was quite imminent to his own satisfaction.

The two boys were gone in thirty seconds flat. Hermione had never felt so betrayed.

“Miss Granger,” Snape began, pausing to see if the girl was even looking at him. She wasn’t. Her face remained firmly planted in her forearm. “Miss Granger!” he tried again, raising his voice slightly and elucidating his express desire to intimidate her with eye contact.

“Yes, Professor?” she gulped out, finally raising her head and glancing up at him.

“You slept through today’s lesson, Miss Granger. It is only natural that this displease me, and I’m informing you that your punishment is a week’s worth of detention with me every evening after dinner.”

“May I inquire as to the nature of this punishment, Professor?”

“No. I’ll see you at eight, Miss Granger.”

“A week? For sleeping through one bloody class? Crikey. Makes me wonder what he’d do if he knew how much I’ve slept through this term. Quidditch has been bloody exhausting, I’ll tell you that much. It’s only about once a week I actually end up in my bed at night,” Ron rambled on at dinner, dividing his attention equally between comforting his friend and consuming the mashed potatoes and gravy he’d piled onto his plate.

“I hope you realize how that last bit sounded, Ron,” Harry managed to put in between bites of his own meal. “Honestly, someone might think you meant that you frequently slept in other people’s beds, not the common room chairs.”

“Yes, Ron, the way you worded that particular sentence did lead me to believe you were the embodiment of promiscuity,” Hermione added, her lips twitching.

“What the bloody hell does that even mean? Harry, who else do you know who says things like ‘the embodiment of promiscuity’? I tell you, Harry, that’s just not normal,” Ron said pointedly, glaring at Hermione in bewilderment.

“Oh, Ron. Never you mind. I was just teasing. After all, it would be hard to be the embodiment of promiscuity without knowing what it means. Now that I think about it, I really should limit any future descriptions I may have of you to single syllable words. ‘Dim’, ‘dull’, and ‘thick’ come to mind right about now,” she replied tartly, sighing when Ron’s only reaction was to stare blankly into his pumpkin juice. “Well, besides that. I think I ought to be going now. Wouldn’t want Snape tacking on another week, would I? I’ll see you both later, I suppose.”

“Implying you’ll come out of it alive,” Harry intoned, winking at her when she rolled her eyes.

“Thanks ever so much for that expression of support and confidence, Harry. But I’m sure he only brings out the torture devices for you and Ron,” she responded sarcastically, tossing her book bag over her shoulder and walking towards the doors of the Great Hall. She heard her friends laugh loudly at her comment and smiled as she eased her way through the aisle that separated the Gryffindor table from the Slytherin.

“Oi, Hermione, watch it!” Seamus Finnegan shouted, too late. A small spoonful of mashed potatoes was flying with startling alacrity towards her, and her gasp of surprise was muted by the burst of laughter that had sprung from the Slytherin table as the sticky white glob landed in her hair. Her hand immediately flew to the back of her head, evaluating the damage; her fingers met with the moist, slightly warm substance that had immersed itself deep in the frizzy brown mass.

“Oh God,” she breathed, already calculating the amount of time it would take to wash the mess out. She’d never make it to Snape on time, not with this setback. Taking a fortifying gulp of air, she turned around to see who had thrown the offending portion of mashed potatoes. Draco Malfoy sat back in his seat, smirking at her in triumph.

“Looks like you got in the way again, Granger,” he told her loudly.

“Looks like you missed your target again then, Malfoy,” she shot back, vaguely noting that the confrontation had attracted a small crowd.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. One vulgar Mudblood is interchangeable with another, you know,” he explained in that superfluous drawl.

His voice echoed through her head, her mind zoning in on that one awful, offensive term that had brought tears to her eyes as a first-year and now merely a sharp pang in her chest. She recalled how she’d never really understood that senseless prejudice and the ostensibly natural disparagement she had to suffer at the hands of neurotic aristocrats bent on world domination. She still didn’t get it; degrading a person based on bloodlines rather than ability wasn’t logical. But she certainly had accepted the humiliation and recognized it for what it was: insecurity.

The supposed “upper-crust” of the wizarding world had nothing more than a family fortune and an inbred desire to exploit their ancestry to separate them from the rest of society. Magic had managed to outwit them and ingrain itself into unsuspecting Muggles, which was downright unnatural to those that considered themselves purebloods. Without their superior lineage, they weren’t any better than a Muggle. For possessing some modicum of talent was no longer special: if a Muggle could wave a wand and get precisely the same results, what was to stop them from slowly altering the wizards’ age-old way of life, the cultural stability that was outdated, to be sure, but so traditional, so…pure?

Purebloods had suddenly found themselves competing with muggle-borns for jobs and notoriety, for status and eminence in a world they’d long since decided they must reclaim as their own.

Hermione didn’t agree with their misguided reasoning, but she comprehended it.

“Oh, go on and shove it, Malfoy. I don’t have time for your innate insularity.”

She turned her back on his retort, checking her watch and grimacing. Ten minutes. She had ten minutes to find a washroom, clean out her hair, and get to the dungeons.

She desperately hoped Snape was in a forgiving mood. Another week’s detention wouldn’t sit well with her conscience: she had NEWTs to study for, after all.

She was in such a hurry that she didn’t even notice the small piece of parchment that had fluttered from her book bag and onto the worn, stone floor of the corridor.