AN: The beginning of this may seem odd, but bear with it. I think it turned out beautifully.

If this is redemption, why do I bother at all?

I've been allowed a second chance, a chance to prove I am not my father, that I am not my heritage. And I am not the same. Because my father and forefathers fought for their beliefs, but now I…I have no beliefs. I want to work for something, I want to try for something, because that's better than sitting around on my hands, so I wander around, trying to be helpful.

But this doesn't feel like redemption. This feels like I'm drowning. Like there is no hope, no matter how much I fight for it. I see others rebuilding their lives and I wonder how they do it. How do they have the motivation to try at all?

I am beaten. I am broken. I am a shell of myself. I am alone in this world, with no sympathy and no help. I do not complain, I refuse to bemoan myself or whine, but it doesn't exactly light a fire beneath me either. I exist. I manage. I would never say I cope.

I try to pretend that the war was a terrible nightmare. That my parents were just people distantly related to me. That not growing up surrounded by love is nothing; that it does not affect who I am.

I remember the advice I had heard long ago. Meant to be a chastisement then, I take it as an outlook on life now, as an unchanging and universal truth. It probably was only meant as a chastisement, it was my mother who said this after all.

"Draco, put that fork down immediately. You know we don't eat until your father's at the table."

I was eight. I despised being chastised. I was my own man. What did I owe my father?

But now I know. I owe him everything.

I owe him the harsh discipline and the wealth of money. He taught me the lesson that everything can be bought – and if it cannot, it isn't worth having.

I owe him my looks, the ones that make people look twice when they see me walk down the street, the ones that make people pause before speaking to me, before sending any kindness my way. I owe him the looks that I have been slowly trying to change by acquiring a beard and a tan and allowing dirt to build up in my hair.

I owe him my stoicism, my loneliness, my inability to express emotion.

I owe him everything.

It is not to say that I blame him. It is to say that your history very much defines you. We would like to all pretend that it does not – that we can overcome this, and maybe we can. But overcoming the obstacle of our pasts is not the same as erasing it. As removing it from our lives. The baggage is there. The story, the feelings, the actions, the reactions, remorse, projections, repressions, they all exist in various forms. With you or with those that know you, it exists. And I envy those that overcome theirs, because I never quite know what to do with mine.

I feel unprotected without my power, my wealth, my status.

I am a shell of myself.

But I am not an empty shell. I am a shell full of secrets and regrets. Of lost hopes and dreams and fears. Where I once was prideful and self-indulgent, and slightly driven, now only shadows of these remain. I once was a leader. A piss poor one, as I was just a bully with cronies, but I led people all the same. Now I follow. I keep my head down in the pack and work where I'm able, where I'm welcome. And even then I get uncomfortable because shouldn't you feel connected to a place, to a person that is investing emotion in you? Instead I feel fear.

I moved to the coast and worked for a kindly old man at an apothecary. A small store that sold to only a select few, but the man was old and needed the help, he was not who he used to be. I am not who I used to be, and we are both disabled because of this.

I think he may have looked on me as some sort of adopted son after two years of employment there. But I had no use for any more fathers. They fail you; where they are supposed to protect and care they lie and deny and hate. So I left. Because I had already had one father and that was enough for me.

But why? This man, this elderly wizened man, was nothing like my father. He was kindly and caring and affectionate, and he knew my baggage and accepted it- I could have overcome my past with him, but I fled. Because I had nothing left for him. Because I was a lie, a cheat, he deserved better; I deserved less.

Because my mother told me when I was a child that I owed everything to my father, I left. I owed enough to one father, I had nothing left to give to another.

Once, when my mother was in a particularly passive aggressive mood, she spit venom at my father, within my hearing.

My father had been standing at the fireplace, smoking a pipe that filled the room with acrid grey smoke. He had dismissed my mother's attempts to beg him to put it out, she was ill and the smoke made her dizzy. He'd said something to the affect of, "Men must put themselves first, my love,"

And she had spat back at him in a low voice, "Never once has any man I've met been able to love,"

I hadn't understood. I'd been four or five and had run up to her stiff chair and touched her knee, looking imploringly at her. "Even me?" I'd said in my squeaky little voice.

She simply looked at my dirty hands in disgust and brushed me off, annoyed that I might have stained her gown.

And that was ingrained in me as well. If men were incapable in love, then what was the point of trying? My parents were right when it came to their wisdom. Those with wealth held power, those with power held respect and were allowed benefits. Why should they be wrong about this, about love?

When I was young I had to find a way to cope with this. I decided that love was a weakness that my parents refused to ever to succumb to, and I would be the same. In school I was a lust filled boy, and the inability to love felt freeing, ecstatically so. Now, it is still freeing, but not in the liberating sense. It frees me from being in touch with the rest of humanity. It separates, it isolates. I do not complain. Because when I see other men, holding hands with their wives, kissing their children, young couples rolling around in the grass, kissing over tea – I am not jealous. I am not empathetic to their love. I do not yearn for it. I wonder what it is like to live a lie. They cannot love, but they pretend. They pretend for that elusive something, for the want, the need to be uniform, to fit in, to meet the great expectations life has set, to follow the path of their fathers.

It always comes back to the father. He was a loveless man. And I grew up in a loveless household. But I do not despair. It was an honest childhood. Perhaps not innocent, but not ignorant either.

I think of this often. Whenever I try to decide what to do next, what my next move will be, I think back on these two things.

I owe my father everything.

I can never love.

And as I sit at the small café, staring out the windows, watching families and couples and other lives full of lies stroll by, I think on these.

So I don't notice that someone has sat next to me or that she is speaking to me softly.

I slowly glance over and blink at her. She looks familiar, but she doesn't seem to recognize me so I don't try to place her. Even if my childhood wasn't ignorant, I don't mind my adulthood having a little ignorance.

She smiles at me in fleeting way, a soft way, a polite way, but a genuine way. "Could I borrow your sugar?" she asks as she reaches for it.

I just watch her, my consent in my silence.

I look at her closely, observing her stirring sugar into her coffee. I notice her red rimmed eyes, like she's been crying or hasn't been sleeping. Her mousy brown hair glints in the rays of sunlight and looks unwashed and stringy, but it strangely smooths out her fly-aways; it suits her. Her cheeks are rosy, her skin pale, but her dark eyes define everything. She isn't sultry, she isn't cute, she isn't plain. She is a young woman who has seen heartache and sadness, joy and peace. She is worldly; she has an intelligent glint in her far away stare.

She blinks a few times, and her attention comes back to me.

She does her slight smile once again and really looks at me.

"Do I know you from somewhere?" she says in her voice, one that tickles my mind though I don't care to know why.

I shrug. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn't.

She shakes her head slightly in a cathartic laugh.

"It doesn't matter, does it? I'm probably intruding on your deep contemplation of life with my incessant need for sugar. And now I'm just blathering away like an idiot because I like the sound of my voice…well not truly but you know…sometimes you like to use it just to make sure it's still there. That you're still there…you know?" She looks at me for confirmation, and though I only blink, she sees some sort of agreement in my eyes because she doesn't get up to leave.

She stares off in her own deep contemplation for a moment before speaking, though her eyes stay far away.

"Have you ever realized that you don't know anything? I…I know it seems silly to say but I used to think I knew a lot, if not almost everything. But I seem to just be moving closer and closer to the realization that not only do I only know the smallest fragment about our world…but I don't know anything about myself. About what I believe. About what I know. I'm….having a bit of an identity crisis, I guess."

She rambles on, but I listen. Sometimes it's good to remember that I can hear other people, to remember that my ears work, that people see me as just another person, a person who listens. So I listen.

"Everyone has things that they believe…that are foundations to how they see the world. And I have some very logical ones, scientific and basic. But what about the ones that matter? That are passed down or that you come to on your own? I haven't got any of those, and I'm just now realizing I should."

She pauses and blinks and remembers she was talking to me but she doesn't seem embarrassed by momentarily forgetting my presence. It was just a fact she'd left in the back of her head and had only just picked up again.

"What do you know?" she asks me, her eyes patiently expectant.

It's on the tip of my tongue to tell her 'Nothing, I don't know anything, I've been in an identity crisis for years,' But I can't. So I don't.

Instead I tell her the truth.

"I know two things," I start off slowly, my voice deep and scratched from disuse. I look at her eyes, but they have the same patient look in them.

"I know that you owe everything to your father. And I know that men are incapable of love."

I wait for the scoff, the gasp, the laugh, the something that lets me know she's done speaking with me, that she thinks I'm batty, that she recognizes me and understands why I say what I say, but will refuse to understand me anyways.

But she doesn't. She gets that distant contemplative look in her eyes again and thinks on what I've said.

"Those are some sobering realizations," she says softly, whether it's to herself or to me I can't be sure.

"Could I be so bold as to possibly poke holes in those facts?" she asks.

I'm silent. She can try. She is the first person I've ever told these things to, but I don't think she'll sway me on my opinions; she has some logic, but I have a lifetime of evidence.

"You're right, though… your father…he is everything, he can be everything. But I don't think you owe him everything. You owe him…what you owe him. If he was good and kind you owe it to him to be just as good and kind as he was to you. If he wasn't…well you should be good and kind to him anyways, for as long as you can. And when he's gone…what do you owe him really? Your childhood? It already happened; you can only change what hasn't happened. Your father isn't really your everything. There are your friends…your other family members, your teachers, your idols, role models, enemies, experiences, your personality, your life. I think those things combined are what you owe everything to."

She looks at me, gauging my reaction.

"Why do you think you owe your father everything?" she says, it's not curiously asked, not nosily asked, it's just a question.

I pause. The long or the short answer?

"You don't eat until your father's at the table," I repeat the chastisement in all its naked simplicity.

She nods at me, accepting my evidence without question.

"Respectfully…that may have just been your family. Because when I was a child we didn't eat until everyone was sitting, together, as a group,"

My face remains the same but inside something jolts. Why? Why does it matter? I still know I owe my father everything. But maybe not everything. Maybe not. Maybe just part of me. But I remain silent.

She watches me think and I will my eyes to look blank.

She notices and continues, "As for your second piece of wisdom…well maybe you're right. I often wonder if men are incapable of loving anyone other than themselves…but I like to believe my parents loved one another. And if they didn't…" she scoffed here, "then they were wonderful liars!" She laughs a little at her own joke, but doesn't wait to see if I was entertained by it before continuing.

"But I know that I have been loved. I know my father loved me. I…I know my friends loved me….love me. Maybe there is no such thing as a desperate, romantic love. But there is caring. And there is kindness. There is sacrifice and dedication and there is happiness and contentment and there is passion. And I think love might be some kind of combination of all of these…So are men capable of love? I would say just as much as women. As long as they can care for another human being, as long as they can dedicate their actions to another, to sacrifice something of theirs for another person, as long as they feel some kind of contentment, as long as they find their passion…They can love."

I stare at her with a hard look, eyeing her, judging this girl in front of me. She was not lying. She is intelligent. She may have not blown away my truths, but she certainly planted seeds of doubt. I doubt where I have never doubted before. And I feel something swelling in my chest and in the same moment I wonder what it could be I realize- it is hope. Hope that if these are wrong, that I am wrong, that I can change. That redemption may be worth something after all.

"It…doesn't sound like you're having an identity crisis…that you don't know anything worth knowing," I state, in a slow way, trying not to offend this gardener of hope.

She blinks at me a few times and the small smile slides slowly across her face once more, a little longer, a littler larger than before.

"I can be a bit dramatic, can't I?" she muses.

I just look at her and feel a small smile of my own coming a long, a polite smile, a soft smile, a fleeting smile, but a genuine smile.

We drink in silence, and when she finishes her coffee she stands to leave, gathering her coat and donning her hat and gloves against the cold chill that has been building up all autumn.

I watch her as she focuses on her clothing but we say nothing, we are silent as ever.

She takes a few steps away from me, towards the door, and I watch as she pauses and returns to stand in front of me. She leans down and gently kisses my cheek, whispering, "Thank you," into my ear as she does so. When she straightens herself her little smile has returned as she pauses for a moment longer to give me one last piece of advice.

"Have a little faith, a bit of trust," she tells me and that's the last I see of her face as she turns and leaves.

I turn my head to continue looking out the window, as I had before she interrupted me. I continue to stare at the families and couples and individuals as they stroll by the café and I watch as she blends into the crowd, just another face, another individual, another small smile. I look out, in deep contemplation of my new hopes.

Hope that though the truths I know may apply to others, I may overcome them. Not forget them, never forget them…but overcome them. That I am more than my father, that I am capable of caring, contentment, of passion, of dedication and sacrifice, perhaps even of finding a love worth having.

For once I have some faith that redemption is worth bothering for, trust that I can change, that things can change. For once I have a bit of trust in hope.

AN2: Alright, First off. This is based on the song We Don't Eat by James Vincent McMorrow. There are some direct quotes from the song, no copyright infringement intended!

Secondly, this is VERY different from my usual but I was just inspired and it just came out and I had no idea where it was going until it got there but now I'm quite pleased. Did you like it? The style, the story, the ambiguity? Did you like the contemplation or the interaction better? Let me know.

Thirdly, this has little to do with this story and more to do w/ Time to Pretend. I meant to write another chapter to it but now I'm wondering if it isn't perfect as it is. Would you be terribly mad if I left it as is?

Anyways, let me know what you think in reviews and comments - they mean a lot and really help me figure out what the hell I'm doing.