Simply A Mask

Summary: After the war, Hermione finds herself afflicted with a rather unsettling amount of melancholy and doubts about herself. Her attempts at a makeover leave everyone speechless with awe- except for the person whose opinion, she soon finds, matters to her most. A twist to the overdone 'Hermione gets a makeover' plotline. DH compliant, ignores crapilogue. Eventual HHr, but RHr and HG at first.

Chapter 1: A Lapse in Judgment

Hermione grimaced at her reflection, her eyes welling with tears as she painfully yanked on the frizzy curls that covered her head.

Ugly was the only word she could think of to describe herself. Plain was just that, too plain: it didn't expose the correct amount of disgust she felt every time she tried to drag a brush through her mouse-brown mane. Homely implied a sort of comfort, a familiar roughness and ordinary level of unattractiveness. Frightful was perhaps going a bit too far, although Malfoy may have disagreed with her on that score.

In her disenchantment, she turned away from the mirror in the bathroom at her parents' house. She had only recently bought back their house and retrieved her parents from the outskirts of Sydney, Australia. They had been rather miffed once the enchantments had been lifted, wondering why they had been transported to a country entirely across the planet with no explanation from their only beloved daughter. The guilt had been laid on thick, and one of the only ways Hermione could dissuade her shame was to spend the summer before she began her apprenticeship at St. Mungo's getting reacquainted with her mother and father.

Ron had been rather upset, much like a petulant child; it was the first summer in seven years that they wouldn't be spending at least a significant chunk of together along with Harry, and now that they were officially a couple, he couldn't help but feel neglected. Feeling pulled in opposite directions, she had agreed to share a flat with him and Harry once their respective jobs commenced- this way, they could 'make up for the time lost' over the summer.

Hermione couldn't understand, however, why he didn't understand that her family meant just as much to her as him and Harry. She had long thought that he acted like a spoiled child; his abandonment of his best friend during his most dire hour of need this past winter during the search for Horcruxes had affirmed that. Still, Hermione cared for him deeply, even loved him, and feared that mere owls and the occasional talk through the illegal Floo she had set up in her parent's fireplace wouldn't keep them from drifting apart.

During these periods of doubt, she was normally able to chastise herself- they had spent time apart as best friends, and had come back to each other quite easily, bickering and trading one-liners as if they had never been apart. But a needling little voice in the back of her head always managed to undo the carefully constructed rationalizations.

When she and Ron had merely been friends, there had been no pressure. There was no push to look gorgeous, because she knew, even if his fancies did err on the side of stereotypically beautiful girls, he would accept her no matter if she met him and Harry for breakfast in a rubbish bag and Luna's Spectrespecs. Well, he would have laughed at her, she conceded, but he would have at least tried to act normal. Maybe.

However, now that she has officially assumed the title of 'girlfriend', she felt an urge to always impress him, an impulse that she was surprised to find that she couldn't keep in check. This led to many an hour spent staring into the mirror in her bathroom, regretting every gene that made her looked like a cat who had just been let out of a wild-ride in the dryer. Each flaw was examined and unceasingly deplored, her self-esteem lowering by the day. Soon, she began to wonder how Ron was even able to look at her without wanting to hightail it in the opposite direction.

This went on for weeks, with even her parents noticing how despondent Hermione had become. A few days before she was to move into her, Ron, and Harry's apartment, her mom pulled her aside after breakfast.

"'Mione?" she queried. "Could you come here for a minute?"

Placing her plate on the counter next to the dishwasher, she stepped beside her mother as her father walked away with the newspaper in hand.

"Sure, Mum. What's going on?"

Mrs. Granger smiled at her daughter, looking her over. She had bags under her eyes, and her hair was barely tamed by the braid Hermione had plaited it into. Still, she was beautiful in her own way, and Mrs. Granger hated to see how sad her daughter had become. Why, even her father had noticed, which for a middle-aged man was rather spectacular. There was only one thing she could think of to cheer her daughter up, and to halt Hermione's sudden aversion to mirrors, particularly in her own reflection.

"I know you leave in a few days, and I had an idea for some last 'mother-daughter bonding time," Mrs. Granger began, finally making eye contact.

Hermione had been painfully aware of her mother's roaming eye, and began to feel her spirits slip.

"What was that idea, Mum?" she managed to force out with some semblance of cheeriness.

Ignoring her daughter's superficial emotions, Mrs. Granger clapped her hands in delight.

"We're going to spend a day pampering ourselves. No pressure, no worries, just shopping and a trip to the hair dresser's- and maybe even a massage!"

Hermione gaped at her mother, who had obviously lost her mind. Who has she been raising the past eighteen years? Did that memory charm have more of an effect than I realized? Hermione had never been the girl who went for make up, for the newest skirt shown in the pages of Vogue, who shopped not for necessity but also for pleasure.

"Mum?" she nervously asked. "Do feel alright?"

Mrs. Granger let out a tinkling laugh. "No, of course not dear. I've just noticed that you've been rather out of it lately. You haven't been tearing through novels like you normally do, you haven't reread your Jane Austen novels like you have every summer since you were old enough to understand them- and I know you, you're my daughter."

She sighed, her face becoming concerned, and motioned for Hermione to join her in sitting down at the kitchen table.

"Hermione, you're depressed, love. You've been listless for weeks, and don't think I haven't noticed how much time you spend in your bathroom, looking at yourself and wondering where your father and I went wrong. It's a natural part of the grieving process, and I know you lost many people close to you these past few years, and an inordinate amount in June. I know I can't help with the grief; you need your friends to do that, and you'll be with them soon."

She took a sip of the tea that was still in front of her.

"I can, however, help you feel happy with how you look. Can we do this? I'd like to see a smile on your face before you move out."

Hermione raised her eyes from the tabletop where they had settled during her mother's speech. Her stomach had sunk the moment she had mentioned those she had lost, those that she, Harry, and Ron had seen fall alongside them during the Final Battle. She had done her best to repress all thought of Remus, Tonks, Fred, everyone, even going so far as to use her parents as her excuse for not attending funerals. She had never handled death well; as a child she couldn't be present when her mother flushed her goldfish down the loo.

She had felt as if she was experiencing life outside herself this summer, not quite living it because she never permitted herself to feel anything. Ron, of course, would have told her she was being silly, and that she needed to feel it. He would feel his grief through anger, blaming various people in turn until he came to accept it. Harry, however, would have tried to drag her out of her melancholy, doing what she had done for him after Sirius, when he had felt so much, the emotions over-flowing to the point where he had known only his own feelings, and the world around him disappeared.

That was the key difference between her and Harry, she knew- while he tended to feel every emotion to the extreme and wore his heart of his sleeve, she had mastered the art of bottling everything up inside and replacing it with work, or books, or simply removing it from her mind entirely. Harry had probably spent many nights at Grimmauld Place and the Burrow unable to sleep, guilt and shame and sadness weighing down on him, something even Ginny would be unable to alleviate until he came to terms with it himself.

She felt a large pang of guilt; she hadn't been there for her best friends this summer, the summer when, most likely, they had needed her and she had needed them most. That, she reluctantly admitted, was probably why Ron has been so put out when he learned that she wouldn't be around at all, but with her parents. He wasn't acting spoiled; he simply needed her. And Harry- no one quite understood his mind like Hermione did. No one could pull him out of himself like she could- Ginny wouldn't know what to do.

Well, no more wallowing in her own self-pity. It was time to do something about it.

"Sure, Mum. When do we leave?"

Any doubts about her decision to go ahead with this day of beautifying herself were dimmed in light of her mother's delighted grin.