Paper Faces on Parade

Section 7:

The Leo Smith reflected in the mirror looked dashing and confident in his perfectly tailored pirate’s costume. Meanwhile, the Draco Malfoy inside him, hidden under the carefully constructed glamour charms, was a massive bundle of nerves. Tonight was the night. He’d been promising himself for weeks that when the masquerade ended, he’d rid himself of all his masks. He’d tell Hermione that he was Draco Malfoy in disguise. He’d tell her that he knew she was Hermione Granger in disguise. And he’d tell her that as Hermione Granger or Paulina Farmer, he loved her with all his heart, and would do anything to be with her.

He had already gone to the ends of the earth for her. Literally. When she disappeared, he searched high and low for her, in every corner of the world he could think of. He visited every place she had ever mentioned visiting in the past, and every place she had ever spoken of wishing to visit in the future. He had teams of investigators searching for her, and often followed them, apparating himself to every random location imaginable, when the investigators thought they had a good lead. All in vain, of course. The traditional means of tracking a missing person proved on all fronts to be a colossal waste of time. If there was one thing Hermione Granger knew, it was how to out-think everyone around her. If she didn’t want to be found, then she wouldn’t be, unless he got very, *very* lucky. And as fortune would have it, Lady Luck smiled down on him in late April, six months after Hermione had disappeared.

The one year anniversary of Voldemort’s defeat was a media circus, as everyone expected. Nothing short of the permanent cancellation of Quidditch could have knocked the year-old headlines off the front page. The press, not surprisingly, were very interested in ‘where are they now’ stories. The villains of the piece were singularly uninteresting: by that point, they were nearly all in prison or in their graves. There was no such thing as a non-extradition wizarding country. But this meant that the focus was all the more heavily concentrated on the heroes. The hype over Hermione’s disappearance, which had initially died down after a month or so, became stirred up again. Papers loved to show pictures of The Great Harry Potter looking sad and miserable, and post underneath it the story that all the victory in the world couldn’t take the place of the woman he loved who had abandoned him most cruelly and broken his heart.

Codswallop, all of it. If the papers had ever discovered the *true* reason why Hermione left, they would have been far less likely to paint the moronic Potter as the hero of the century, and far more likely to show him as the cad of the millennium who thought that getting very lucky in an important battle where he had superb back-up meant that he had carte blanche for the rest of his life. Scandals always sell best. Especially the scandals of heroes. Fortunately for everyone involved, the true story never did come out. Rita Skeeter was possibly the only journalist in Britain with the temerity to dig it out, and she had promised Hermione that she would never write a word of it. The last favor she could do for the girl who had been her almost-friend was to make sure her name wasn’t dragged through the mud in some shocking (and inevitable) trash journal about how she wasn’t witch enough to keep Harry Potter happy. Better by far just to disappear with her dignity, if not her heart, mostly intact.

Draco had to fight against the urge to throw all the papers in the garbage in the weeks of regurgitated triumphs and foolxingxing nostalgic about the ending of the war. He had started getting an international variety of wizarding papers as soon as Hermione disappeared, hoping to catch sight of her in some foreign city, and read them all with religious scrutiny, but after spending a week and a half reading in paper after paper (and in a wide range of languages as well) about how Potter was the put-upon hero with a shattered heart was nearly enough to make him throw up his breakfast. But as luck would have it, he *didn’t* throw out all his papers, and he found a little story in the Witching Hour Gazette, a publication for the Southeastern United States, that talked about a little orphanage known as the Georgia Hope Children’s Home in Atlanta, Georgia.

The picture wasn’t even of her. The subject of the photo, in the very center of the frame with a wide, toothy grin, was a seven year old inhabitant of the house whose story the paper had chosen to give the story some particularly heart-wrenching human interest. The entire article was a rather manipulative sob story designed to wrench the heartstrings. Not that Draco was aware of this, of course. In all the hours after that which he spent staring at the article, not once did he read it. His sole focus was for the photograph. Hermione had her back to the camera, standing in the lower right-hand frame of the image, standing on tiptoe to put things away in a cabinet. Draco might have missed her altogether, but the picture was in color, and the flash of that platinum blonde hair caught his eye. As soon as he looked at her, he knew.

Draco had spent most of seventh year memorizing Hermione Granger’s body. As much as he valued her friendship and respected her as a person, he *was* a seventeen year old boy sharing a living space with a seventeen year old girl that he found achingly attractive. The hours he had spent covertly spying on her while she changed clothes in her room were not hours he was particularly proud of, but they were certainly memories he treasured. Robes covered her figure for most of the hours of the day, but the shape of the hills and valleys of her body, uncovered and exposed, were burned in his brain far to indelibly to be forgotten. His preference his mother had noted womewomen who were well-endowed stemmed from those very memories.

Everyone always said that clothing choices were much more casual and muggle based in the States than in Britain, and the picture certainly showed that to be true. All the people in the picture were wearing muggle apparel, including Hermione who was shown in a fitted pair of jeans a tan tank top. One glance at that unmistakable body was enough to send Draco’s heart into his throat. Minutes later, the paper was on the floor, the remnant of his breakfast were forgotten, and Draco’s favorite quill was very nearly broken in the enthusiasm with which Draco scratched out a note to the U.S. based detective agency he used to find all the information they could on a blonde woman working at the Georgia Hope Children’s Home in Atlanta, Georgia.

The rest, as they say, is history. By the end of the week, he had a full dossier on Miss Paulina Farmer, documenting every aspect of her life for the six months she had resided at the Hope House. He grinned a bit at the note the investigator had attached to the last page, stating that while he had been unable to find any concrete records of Miss Farmer before her arrival at Hope House, her impeccable paperwork and cover story ensured that he was equally unable to prove that it was an assumed identity. That was his girl, alright.

He had another full file on the Hope House, itself, that stated that the financial director was retiring to Florida, leaving a vacant position. All he required was a properly formulated identity, and the position could be his. Taking his cue from Hermione, he chose the name Leo. In the play Winter’s Tale, Leontes was Hermione’s king. At the end of the play, when Leontes was able to prove to Paulina that he repented his mistake and truly missed his queen, Paulina revealed that Hermione was alive, and still in love with him. Leontes was the embodiment of a second chance at love. If Hermione had become Paulina, then he would become Leo. And maybe, if he played his cards right, he just might be able to convince Paulina to bring Hermione back to life for him.

He chose Smith as the most boring, common, pedestrian name he could think of. Leo Smith would have no one judge him based on his family or backbackground. If people liked him, hated him, valued him or despised him, it would be because of *him* and not his father or his heritage. He recorded the voice of one of his New York employees and embedded it into a charm that he wore as an earring stud in the fashion of Bill Weasley to modify his voice and accent. Changing his hair and eyes from the distinctive Malfoy coloring was the next step, along with a few glamour charms to *slightly* alter his features. Again following Hermione’s lead, he kept his body the same, after the superficial addition of a tan. He’d always hated his bloody pale coloring. Natural sunlight made him burn, and tanning charms always looked fake. He’d always sneered when anyone brought it up in the past, saying that pale coloring was more aristocratic, but the truth was, it was nice to be able to have a tan, for once.

Once his character was fully formed, he sent a note to Hope House on Malfoy International stationary, stating that he heard the position of financial director was available, and that an employee in his New York office, who had his personal endorsement as an excellent businessman and a congenial employee, was interested in moving to Atlanta. The staff at Hope House was, of course, delighted to have someone with such high references interested in the position, and immediately invited Mr. Smith down for the weekend to meet everyone and see the town. Draco played the charming gentlemen as he was met at the airport apparition point and driven to the house, but inside, he felt like he was coming out of his skin as he literally counted down the minutes until he would see his Hermione again.

He was, admittedly, a little nervous about seeing her again. Part of it, of course, was the fear that she would see through his disguise. But the biggest part of his worry was the fear that he would *not* be able to see through hers. He was afraid that her experience had changed her too much; afraid that it hardened her, and made her lose some of that beautiful faith and trust in the world that had always been such an integral part of her personality. The strength with which she believed, truly *believed* that the world could be made a better place, and that the actions of a single person could make a difference, and that even a Malfoy could be redeemed, had been the light at the end of the tunnel for him throughout the two miserable years of the war. As long as Hermione believed in hope and believed in *him*, he found he was able to believe in himself. Harry’s betrayal of her faith and her trust had wounded her, unquestionably, and Draco was afraid it might have taken her away from the woman that he loved.

When he first saw her in her new form, she was lying flat on her back on the floor, laughing hysterically as a trio of six years old tickled her into a frenzy and he felt all of his fears melt away. She was still his Hermione, still the same sweet, trusting, completely open-hearted girl he had fallen in love with in the first place. He barely managed to fight back the urge to cry in sheer happiness and relief as he watched her. She turned the tickling around on her attackers quickly, turning the straight-out attack into an all-around tickle fest with her at the center before she noticed the crowd at the doorway. Her hair was a mused mess around her face, tears were streaming out of her eyes from laughing so hard, and her face was red. She looked so beautiful that he almost forgot to breathe. He was amazed that he was even able to speak when she rose off the floor and approached him to introduce herself, much less remember his cover story and act as if he had never seen her before.

Fortunately, she didn’t suspect a thing, and Draco had too much experience with masking his true thoughts and emotions to stay flustered for long. Within moments, he turned on his usual charm and even managed to flirt with her without slipping into any awkward behavior. He was even able to operate his thoroughly-dazed mind sufficiently to notice that she blushed when he took her hand. The part of his mind that wasn’t doing an internal victory dance at seeing her and touching her again filed away the fact that she found his slightly altered appearance attractive. That could be useful, he decided. That could be *very* useful.

As useful it was. He gloried in his ability to flirt with her and make her blush, using it on every occasion, and loving every piece of evidence that proved that she not and and appreciated him, as a man. It was such an unlimited *pleasure* to flirt with Hermione openly. Before, there had always been restrictions on how open he could be in teasing her and flattering her. Even after he joined their side, Hermione had a whole list of people (half of whom were Weas whs who hated him in the first place, just on principle) who considered themselves to be her semi-official bodyguards, and in spite of Hermione’s protests, none of them were pleased to see a Malfoy pay her any type of personal attention. It got worse when she and Potter made their relationship official.

But now, he had the chance to charm her as thoroy asy as he pleased, without anyone there to interfere. In fact, everyone from Jim Stander himself to the woman who helped with the cleaning and everyone in between seemed to be entirely in favor of him and Hermione becoming a couple. With a whole houseful of Cupids doing everything imaginable to play matchmaker, their eventual progression as a couple seemed to be almost a foregone conclusion. If Leo Smitntednted to be with Paulina Farmer, it seemed as if it would be a very easy thing for him to accomplish. But, Draco realized after he had been at Hope House for a couple of months, being Leo Smith with Paulina Farmer was *not* what he wanted. As much as he loved the ways that Hermione had grown as a person since becoming Paulina, he wanted *all* of her, not just the mirage that she had created. And he wanted her to want him, as Draco Malfoy, not as some picture-perfect facade he had created.

It became harder and harder with every day that passed to force himself to be Leo Smith around her. Naively, he had assumed that it would get easier with time, but he had underestimated just the effect that Hermione had on him. She made him want to give all of himself to her, not just the pretty parts that existed on the surface. He hated keeping anything from her, and wanted nothing more than to tell her the truth. He loved the freedom of being Leo Smith and the marvelously liberating sensation of being able to say and do precisely as he pleased without worrying about people’s preconceptions or having the Malfoy name and history hang like a millstone around his neck, but he missed being Draco when he was around Hermione. He missed being able to reference inside jokes and past memories and things they had shared as friends and former roommates and survivors of the war. He missed being able to show her what she meant to him, and how important she was in his life.

He loved her more every day. The time had come to tell her, which meant letting go of all of his masks, both the ones he wore as Leo Smith, and the ones he had worn in the past as Draco Malfoy. Looking in the mirror one last time, he slipped his Zorro-style masquerade mask into place, and hoped that all would go as he planned when the time finally came to take it off.

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