Paper Faces on Parade

Title: Paper Faces on Parade
Challenge: Masquerade Challenge at It's Always the Quiet Ones
Author: Emily
E-mail: emnorth2002@yahoo.com
Pairing: D/Hr
Rating: NC-17
Dedication: To Inell for her constant showers of praise and support, not to mention her thoroughly inspiring example!
Disclaimer: With the exception of the very few original characters used in this story, the characters are owned and operated by J.K. Rowling.
Distribution: quietones.org, aff.net, and restrictedsection.org. Anyone else, if you want it, just ask. I always say yes.
Spoilers: Everything is fair game through Order of the Phoenix
Summary: Sometimes the best way to find happiness is *not* to be yourself.


Masquerade
Paper faces on parade
Masquerade
Hide your face, so the world will never find you
--Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Section 1:

Hermione didn’t bother to cry. Why should she? There was nothing to cry about. Crying was an act of mourning over the loss of something you valued, and there was really nothing to mourn. She couldn’t say she had lost something that was obviously never hers, to start with. All that was really gone was the illusion that maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to have the fairy tale ending she had secretly hoped for all those years. It was foolish of her to hope for that in the first place. She’d stopped believing in fairy tales when she was eight years old; she should have known better than to believe that Harry could give her a happily ever after.

She’d loved him for so very long. She’d spent her childhood buried in books, using them as an escape from the real world where she didn’t have any friends, and everyone made fun of her for the strange things that happened when she was around. Then she discovered she was a witch, and everything changed. Instead of being alone and isolated with her books, she had friends, actual *friends*, who dragged her away from her reading and took her on adventures and made her feel important and valued. It was like a dream come true. *Harry* was a dream come true. Harry was magic, pure and simple. It was easier to believe in everything when he was around, because it was so easy for her to believe in him. Her faith in nev never wavered, not in the seven years that they spent in school, or the two years after school that they spent fighting the war. She stood by his side and never lost faith. When they became romantically involved late in the second year of the war, she had been so happy, she was practically walking on air.

And then finally, the war was over, and Harry was the victor, just as she had always known he would be. The two of them were finally able to move out of Grimmauld Place and get a flat together. In the post-victory euphoria, anything had seemed possible. They were young and in love, and had their whole lives ahead of them. Within a matter of weeks, they were both installed in important positions at the ministry with high prospects for the future. Friends were settling down right and left now that they were no longer afraid of wartime casualties, and Harry and Hermione endured questions of when they would be walking down the aisle, themselves, as they attended half a dozen weddings in the span of a few months. It had been an absolutely beautiful night on her birthday when Harry treated Hermione to a romantic outdoor picnic and asked her to marry him. There were tears of pure joy in her eyes when she threw her arms around his neck and screamed yes at the top of her lungs.

In her heart of hearts, she should have known it was too good to be true. Years of being the one who was always assigned to “get to the bottom of things” meant that she knew better than to accept surface appearance so easily. But she had been so completely in love with Harry herself that she hadn’t wanted to look too deeply into his professions of loving her in return. She wanted to believe that he loved her, so she had fought her own intellect and refused to give credence to the nagging doubts in her head and her heart. Now, however, the time for denial had passed. She could doubt many things but there was no doubting the evidence of her own eyes.

He was cheating on her, and he hadn’t even had the balls to tell her himself. She had to find out by catching him in the act. She had stood there, hidden underneath his own, beloved invisibility cloak, and watched as he fucked the living daylights out of another woman, listened as he spoke of all the times they had met in the past and made plans for when they could meet in the future. That was something that she simply couldn’t overlook or ignore. He had been her first lover, her only lover, the only man she had ever wanted, and he was cheating on her. Flagrantly. *Frequently.* He had been her best friend since she was eleven years old, the person she trusted more than anyone in the world, the person that, only hours before, she would have sworn would die before betraying her, and he had lied to her openly and blatantly, without so much as a visible sign of regret.

And if she wasn’t such an insufferable little know it all, she might never have found out. Her horribly efficient mind just never stopped working, never stopped finding solutions to problems, even when she was doing something as mundane as cleaning the flat she shared with Harry. She had been lonely with Harry out of town in some “classified” location in the German countryside, and cleaning took her mind off her wish that he had been able to tell her where he was going. He always complained that these out of town ministry trips were deadly dull, and she would have loved to visit him for a few hours and keep him company, if only she knew where he was.

It had been pure chance that her eye had caught on the Marauder’s Map, throwing her back into memories of their school days when she only had to solemnly swear that she was up to no good to find exactly where Harry was located. Unfortunately, the range of the map only extended to Hogwarts grounds, and no amount of swearing, solemnly or otherwise, would make it capable of telling her where in Germany Harry was.

That was when the idea had first occurred to her. The Marauders had been students when they devised the charms for the map and cast the enchantments to lock them in place. While there was no denying that the four troublemakers had been quite bright, they had been quite young and not quite fully trained. If they, with their student training and experience, could put together such a map to completely and unerringly show the location of every person in Hogwarts, down to identifying any person or persons outside of the usual students or teachers who arrived, then who was to say that she, one of the most highly respected Charms masters in England, couldn’t recreate and adapt the charms to fit her own needs? It was doable; she was *sure* it was. With a glint of familiar determination in her eye, she set to work.

It only took an hour or two of studious work before she cobbled together an adaptation. With her careful alterations to the charms the Marauders had used, she was able to find a way to map not a specific location, but the surroundings of a particular person, namely Harry. It helped that she had loads of stuff with her that was attuned to Harry, especially his spare wand, that she used to center and align the map. It was close to Halloween, after all, and she didn’t want her map to be deceived by someone trying on one of the Harry Potter costumes that were currently all the rage.

She had been gleefully excited both at the chance to test a new charm and the hope of being with Harry soon when she activated the map. To her delight, a dot labeled Harry Potter immediately appeared, followed soon after by swirls of ink as the map, having locked on in Harry’s location, slowly began to trace in the details of his precise location. Her excitement shifted to confusion as she realized that the map showed, not open German countryside, but what was unmistakably a city street. However it wasn’t until the map finished shifting that the smile fell completely from her face. Harry was not, as he had claimed, in the German countryside but in London proper in a what looked to be a hotel room with the dot labeled Harry Potter covering but not obscuring the slowly undulating dot labeled Cho Chang.

She hadn’t wanted to believe it. Harry, she was certain, would never betray her like that. If he was in a hotel room in London with Cho Chang instead of in the countryside of Germany like he had told her, then there must be some rational explanation. Maybe an emergency had come up. Maybe Harry had been hexed in some way. Maybe she had messed up the charms and the map wasn’t working properly at all. Any of those possibies, es, even the possibility that she had messed up a charm, was preferable to the truth that the map showed.

It had taken swiping Harry’s invisibility cloak and apparating to the hotel to convince herself that it hadn’t been some sort of mix-up or mistake. There was no mistaking Cho’s face and figure, spread eagled across the hotel room bed, or the look of pleasure on Harry’s face as he drove into her body over and over again, groaning her name mixed with a startlingly large list of obscenities, before cumming inside her with shout, and the sighed exclamation that it had been even better than the last time. When their pillow talk segued into a discussion of their affair, and whether or not Ron could cover for him again so they could get together next week, Hermione decided that she had heard enough. There was no mistake. They weren’t under the influence of any drugs, potions, or spells. They were there because they wanted to be. Harry had lied to her because he had chosen to lie. And he had broken her heart of his own free will.

When she couldn’t stand the sight of them for another second, Hermione apparated back into her apartment where she stepped immediately into the bathroom and spent the next twenty minutes throwing up. When she was done, she headed into her bedroom and began to pack. Not for even a moment did she cry. Why should she? The only thing she had lost was Harry’s love, and she was realizing now that she had never really had that in the first place.

Instead of crying, she packed. Her wand waved through the air with clean efficiency, transferring the clothes from the closet into the large trunk she hadn’t used since her Hogwarts days. Once the clothes were neatly piled, she glanced around the room to see if there was anything else that she wanted to take. Both she and Harry had the reputation for being packrats, and the rooms of their flat were littered with snapshots, knick-knacks and mementos from the years they had known each other. Gathering up the few things that were exclusively hers; her parents’ wedding picture, the quilt her grandmother had made, and her hideous, orange cat, she finished her packing, shrinking her trunk down to fit into her pocket, and securing Crookshanks’ carrier.

One of her most prized possessions, a pensieve Harry had given her for her seventeenth birthday, she placed on the desk in front of her. Holding her wand to her head, she concentrated on the memory she wanted to extract, and nodded with satisfaction as she transferred it into the swirling silver depths of the pensieve.

With a wave of her wand, she shrunk the pensieve down to the size of a thimble and dropped in into a pouch along with a letter and the engagement ring Harry had given her on her nineteenth birthday. The pensieve held her memory of watching Harry rut with Cho in that seedy hotel and the note held only three words. “It’s over. Goodbye.” Attaching it to the leg of her pet owl, she sent it off to her ex-fiancé, and gathered the rest of her things, throwing a few special items into a paper bag. There was only one thing left that she needed to do. Walking over to the fireplace, she tossed in a pinch of floo powder and knelt in front of the flames, shoving her head inside.

“Rita Skeeter,” she announced firmly.

*******