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Elsewhere
by afrai

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He is eating dinner when I come into the room. He's alone; his father has gone out, and, apart from me, there is no one else in this vast house he would eat with.

He looks up as I walk past the table, a flash of silvery eyes under pale hair. He doesn't speak. He rarely does, when we are alone together.

I don't feel hungry, so I sit down and watch him instead. He doesn't eat enough. For a growing boy, he has a surprising lack of interest in food, picking at it restlessly, always wanting to move on. I send him sweets when he is at school, but the bulk of those, I suspect, go to his friends. He doesn't really like them; he never eats them at home. They are for show, as so many things in his life are.

He is eating very little now, carefully picking out of the abundance of food the kinds that will give him the least nourishment. I don't tell him to eat some vegetables, or at least eat more. His diet seems to suit him; he gets sick if he eats more than usual. He seems to subsist on his nerves.

He would do it, of course, if I told him to. He saves his excuses and evasions for his father. He never disobeys me, never feels the need to put on a show of rebellion against me for what are, I must say, usually perfectly reasonable orders ­- perhaps because he doesn't feel the need to live up to his imperious rich boy image of himself with me. Or perhaps because I don't matter enough. I don't know.

And it occurs to me now, as it has countless times before, how little I know this son of mine. I wonder what he is thinking, how he really feels, but I don't know and I can't imagine. Like the shards of a broken vase on the floor, there is no explanation for how he came to be the way he is. And I don't ask him, because that would be breaking the pact of silence we have.

It is the only time when he is silent, I think ­- this time when we are alone together. With his father, his friends, the world, he is loud, open, emotion and intention written all over him like words on the pages of a book. He is always striving to burn himself into the memory of the world, trying to stamp some impression of himself that someone will remember. It makes me wonder what he is trying to prove, or if indeed he is trying to prove anything at all, if he really is the image he shows to the world.

But if he is, then who is this person that he is when he is alone? When no one else is there except me, when he seems to draw into himself and radiates a quietness, a peace that no one else gets to see. When he rarely speaks, and when he does, it is not to shape people's impressions of himself, or to declare his opinion, or to say anything that is not essential. When he sheds the myriad images others have of him: promising son and heir, troublesome student, enemy, friend . . . and is just utterly and simply himself.

There is a stillness to him in these moments, a distance, like the white-tipped blue peaks of a mountain rising out of a mist, remote and inscrutable. His quietness is the deep hush of a church; his voice, when he speaks, is mild and unaffected, nothing like the aristocratic drawl other people hear. I can almost feel his quiet awareness, his acceptance of the things around, something that is not there when he is with others, always speaking and acting, always in character, like something in a play.

I think this is Draco Malfoy, the deepest self that he was born with, beyond the name and the fleeting emotions and the noise of his personality. And I think I am the only person who ever sees him like this, who has ever seen him as a person, not a mere personality.

I would not let his father send him to Durmstrang because I was afraid that he would drown there, swallowed up by the expectations of the world. I was afraid that he would never get a chance to be silent, like he is now, and maybe in the end he would lose himself, in the idea of himself that others have of him.

But there are other times, when I fear that perhaps what I have mistaken for quietness is merely lack of noise, that his peace is emptiness, that Draco lost himself long ago and is nothing but the idea that others have of him. That maybe he is only silent with me because he cannot be anything else, for I have no expectations of him. That the feelings and thoughts his father and friends imposed on him are really his, because he has nothing else, and his petty hatreds and silly pride are really all that make up his life.

I hope not. I believe not. But I can't know. I can only wonder.

It is ironic that the only one, out of the many people who know him, who truly loves him and sees him as a person does not understand that person. I don't know who he is. I don't know what he thinks or feels. I don't know if his dedication to the name of Malfoy is real, if his extravagant hatred of his schoolmate Harry Potter reaches so deeply into his soul.

And I wonder if he sees me as a person, or just as another character in a long line of them -- Narcissa Malfoy, beautiful aristocrat and proud mother, someone to act the loving son to, someone he would not let anyone insult. I wonder if he ever thinks of me just as a person, someone who watches him when he is quiet, who worries about the future he will have. Someone who loves him.

Because I do love him, if for no better reason than that he is my son, and as little as I know him, there is still no other who knows him so well. I would leave everything ­- Lucius, my family, all the trivial trappings of this limited world we live in ­- if I were sure that this is not what he wants.

We could do it. I have a little money of my own -­ I could take him away, go somewhere else, where we could settle down and be ourselves. It would have to be far away, of course, and we might have to take certain precautions to make sure that Lucius could not find us, but it would be worth it to be free. It would be worth it to me if Draco could just be happy, free from all these expectations and hopes and dreams of our world and the sheer atmosphere of this house, the centuries of pride and hatred and power flowing away on either side, back into the past and ahead into the future.

And that is, of course, the problem. I don't know if he would be happy. Maybe I've got it all wrong, and this is all he wants, and I would be ruining his future, as he sees it, if I took it away from him. Even worse -­ maybe I've got it right, but he would still prefer this, this double life, only snatching little moments of quiet rest in between the everlasting masquerading as an imitation of a person.

As always, I cannot do anything, because I do not know enough to do it.

But I will have to come to some decision soon. The Dark Lord has risen again, and Lucius, I know, has joined him, because Lucius has no other choice. And how long will it be until the chains are tightened and Draco, too, is no longer allowed any other choice?

Lucius will say that we have trained him up for this, even though I have seen his fearful hope and his almost-belief that the Dark Lord would never return. I cannot accept that. I will not accept that. My son should have more than that, a lifetime bound in the service of others, always trapped in someone else's idea of him.

If only I knew that it was only someone else's idea of him.

So I sit, and brood, and watch as Lucius comes home and Draco changes as he enters the room. The silence slips away: everything about him, even the way he sits, is different.

As he starts to talk, I wonder for the millionth time if it is that he comes alive, or that he hides away.

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