Fake.
Everything about Rita Skeeter was fake.
From her peroxide bleached hair, to her ample beauty charms, to her inch-long, glazed nails.
Fake, fake, fake.
She wasn't fooling anyone either. People stared at her wherever she went. Women stared at her fake fur collars on her form-fitting outfits concealing body shapers of every type. They stared at her fake curls, in her unnaturally stiff, over-processed hair. They stared and they whispered, they gossiped and they poured out everything they had ever guessed about the infamous reporter.
Rita knew they talked about her. She laughed at the way the women slandered her. She didn't care. Despite their ridicule she knew they were the ones who rushed to read her column every morning, the ones who secretly worshipped her every scandalous report, every shameful interview.
Rita knew it, and didn't care. She stole their famous husbands, returned them bruised and scarred, the memory of her scratched into their skin as if placed there by her quick quotes quill. She knew her nighttime excursions with the married men broke up their families. The messier their divorce, the better the story she created around it.
Rita came to enjoy the howlers she got in return, to enjoy the singes that marked her countertops.
She was fake even when fucking the famous. They loved her fake breasts, fake opalescent skin, and the virgin-like tightness of her cunt, all retained by a pretty piece of spell work. They loved the way she moaned their names in forged ecstasy, the way she touched them in places their wives wouldn't dare.
The seduction, full of fake words of longing and fake passion, was all for the story. Her interviews were fake, fabricated through her quill, spun from the uninteresting truth. She never felt anything for the men whose lives she ruined.
Fakeness had sculpted her career, as it had sculpted her life.
Lying naked atop a foreign mattress, listening to her latest conquest snoring soundly, Rita stared at the ceiling. Her makeup was smeared and fading, her nails chipped, her hair limp and settled around her shoulders with her fake fur trimmed robes in a pile on the floor and her glowing skin dull, she had never felt so vulnerable.
Rita left him at dawn the next morning, placing a short note signed "R" on his nightstand, and heading towards the door, leaving a trail of silent tears behind. She left as soon as she collected herself, tucking her notes regarding the man into her authentic crocodile bag as she went. She would review those later before she wrote her article.
Rita walked by the same group of women that stared and rumored about her like she always did, with her makeup and hair set like always, her breasts in place and her heels clicking on the pavement, yet this time she offered them a small smile.