Author's Muse: Den Mother Brianna

Brianna woke on the first day of classes to a face slathered with canine saliva. Her face wrinkled in distaste at the feeling of the wolf cub’s slobbery tongue as it flicked across her left eye lid. Her free hand reached up and gently pushed Sila away from her while she lifted her body into a sitting position.
She wiped her face with her hand in an attempt to dry it off. Her eyes blinked in their usual tired stupor while her mind made its normal, valiant, attempt to catch up with the current time of day. It occurred to her after about a minute of staring into the red velvet of her overhanging curtains to look at her watch to check the time. She lifted her right arm to check her wrist.
It was seven o’clock in the morning. Brianna sent Sila an annoyed look. Really, she could have slept for a little while longer before getting up.
Brianna reached up to run a hand through her long, tangled, bronze hair with a look of discontent on her face. Human form, elven form, it didn’t seem to matter; she always had tangles in her wavy hair whenever she woke from sleep. It was rather annoying.
The normal early morning routine consisted of the normal brushing of the hair, teeth and, sometimes, a shower whenever she had the time (at least every other day). This morning, she elected for the shower. It wasn’t like she didn’t have the time. On days when showers or baths weren’t an option (ie she woke up too late) she normally washed as much as she could with a rag and soap. It had the same desired effect and was a lot quicker than a shower. After all, it kept her from dissolving into puddy goop from the exquisite feeling of searing hot water cascading down her skin.
She had the time to soak this morning seeing as she didn’t have to even get to breakfast until eight, so she allowed her body to melt in the dorm floor’s shower with a slight smile on her face. She didn’t worry about other girls in her year needing it. Most of them used the showers earlier so they could style their hair in some way or another.
Brianna was maneuvering her wand (she really didn’t like using it for simplistic things like this) in an effort to draw the water off of the outermost coating of her hair when Hermione walked out of one of the showers wearing a robe. She looked a bit worried. Brianna could tell that by the way her friend abused her bottom lip with her two front teeth. The elf-girl didn’t give any outward indication that she noticed her friend’s nervous stance. She was, however, grinning inwardly to herself like a Cheshire Cat. She, Fred and George had already got a bet on when Hermione would crack from the pressure of taking too many classes at once.
“Excited?” she asked cheerfully.
“What?” replied a startled Hermione as she mimicked Brianna’s movements to dry her hair and also took the extra mile in an attempt to straighten it.
Brianna rolled her eyes at her friend’s futile effort. Hermione needed to learn how to wear her hair instead of trying to make it do something it obviously didn’t want to do. There were… advantages to having the types of ancient family members Brianna did. They (she who must not be named lest she hear the whisper of her name and come to perform a make-over on some poor unsuspecting girl who’d done nothing to deserve it) had been very enthusiastic when Brianna went through the trying ages of her twenties and thirties. The elven aging process was hell, after all; puberty took longer.
“Hermione, don’t straighten your hair. It’s too humid out,” Brianna attempted to advice.
The thirteen-year-old visibly sagged in disappointment at Brianna’s advice as she replied, “I wanted to look nice for my first day.”
Brianna smirked, “Then do what I told you to do about the problem and adjust your look accordingly. Your hair has its own natural perm. Taming it is pointless.”
“You have tamed hair,” Hermione pointed out.
Brianna snorted, “No, I have hair that I’ve lived with it for almost a century. In that time I learned that the best way to tame one’s hair is to let it do what it wants and work with it as little as possible. Wash it, dry it, heat it, tie it back, but don’t style it.”
The girl frowned at that and Brianna rolled her eyes. She had forgotten about the insecurity that came with the early stages of puberty. There was also the fact that a lot of the boys in the school (Slytherin’s were top of this list with Draco Malfoy taking the lead) who made fun of Hermione’s “bookworm” appearance. Brianna never really bothered with what a lot of the boys thought about the tomboy-ish sight she portrayed to the world. It had been a while since she felt so insecure about her appearance to care. In any case, these were boys and not men. There was a glaring difference between the two.
The thing was that Hermione hadn’t quite learned that lesson yet. She would, in the future, but the future was ways away. Today was the first day of class and her friend wanted to look clean.
Time for the yearly moral boost.
Brianna bent down into her bag and drew out a headband from its depths. It was elven-made, though simplistic with a quaint leaf and vine etching creeping toward the center from each end. Her aunt had given her a bundle of headbands for archery lessons and happened to be one of the few “hair-things” she actually willingly wore. She held it out to Hermione with a kind smile on her face.
“Here, I have a hundred more and you need it more than I do,” she said.
It was a mark of how desperate Hermione was when she just took the thing without protest.