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CHAPTER EIGHT
UTTER PERFECTION
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MORGAN HATED POTIONS. It was a horrible class with a horrid professor who expected perfection on the first attempt and only gave light to those who were excelling exponentially in class while ignoring those who weren't doing as well. She wasn't bad at Potions, no she was damn good at it, but it took her a second – she wasn't quick to it like Severus Snape or Lily Evans – and because of that Slughorn treated her like nothing.
She got no help in class, she got no praise for brewing up the potion he wanted, and she got no remark on how much she was excelling on all the papers she had to write for him. It was disheartening, and it made her hate Potions, and that was what she wanted to dedicate her life to.
Even though Morgan wouldn't admit a lot of things she wasn't good at, she would admit that she wasn't perfect. She couldn't go as quickly as Snape and Evans during Potions, she couldn't master every spell on her first try, and she couldn't do everything on her own. She made mistakes and she hated it, because she should be perfect. She was expected to be perfect.
Not by her Aunt Helen, bless the woman's heart. Helen Lee, with her dopey smile, expected for her to try where she failed so that one day she could succeed. She believed in try again, fail again, but fail better so that one day you wouldn't fail. And it was when she remembered that, she often wondered if her parents believed the same thing, or if this was just a little Helen Lee quirk.
But failure was not allowed in the likes of her house. There was the aura of perfection around them. With their unwrinkled robes, perfectly placed hair, flawlessly done makeup. A mistake equaled death, equaled a break in the façade they portrayed. Little Morgan Lee entering Hogwarts did not understand this. She had wrinkled robes and didn't wear makeup and her hair was never done perfectly because she didn't want to wake up early enough for that, and as a result she was shunned for a while. It was obvious that she was an outlier, that this strive her no hair out of place did not run in her family.
It was obvious that she wasn't a pureblood. And that was something worse than making a mistake to some of them. Morgan Lee became the outlier, but she still clung onto the ideal that she would not let any of those who sneered at her because of her blood status sneer at her because she was a hair out of line. So she wore her makeup, she used a spell to unwrinkled her clothes, and she made sure that her hair was done so flawlessly.
Even if they would not accept her, she would become them. She would integrate and be better than them, strive for perfection and strive for her own good interest, no matter what happened to anyone else.
Which was why she worked so hard, why she made sure there was no mistake in her essays, and why she would become a great potions master in the future. So what if she spent way too long writing her essay and correcting it before returning to the Slytherin chambers? It was all in the name of utter perfection, so sleep could wait.
