Pansy Parkinson was shallow by self-design.
If asked, she'd never describe herself as thoughtful or caring or wise or even clever. In fact, she wouldn't describe herself at all. Pansy avoided the subject of self-reflection entirely.
She actively refused to be self-aware.
In true Slytherin fashion, she delegated the job of "analyzing Pansy" to others, and plagiarized the majority of her reflections from her friends and enemies. Forever putting herself in a position to be talked about, she had the advantage of borrowing from the resulting prose. As such, she talked about herself at great length, but never approached the topic of self-esteem. It was public opinion by proxy, she figured. She'd never have to rummage through her hidden depths, upsetting the monsters that lived there.
As a result, she had little insight into how she felt about herself. It wasn't until after the Second War that she wondered how much of the chatter she favored was true. With years of flattery and insults, she questioned the nature of her self-esteem in a world that revolved around her. She didn't doubt her brewing infamy. She knew on May 2nd, when news of the Dark Lord's fall reached the dungeons, that the cold, damp dark there was an indication of her immediate future.
Trapped by her own actions, she waited for the eyes of everyone she knew and didn't know to turn to her. When Crabbe died, when Draco left, when the Aurors came for her father, she receded into herself seeking an emotional harbor and found yawning, opinion-less silence.
I don't know who I am. Yet, she was to be her own advocate.
Her name became popular frighteningly fast:
Pansy Parkinson, The Girl Who Martyred the Boy Who Lived!
It'd only taken the one article to start the mayhem. The entirety of her private life was soon splashed across every visited media outlet in Wizarding Britain. Sections of the papers were dedicated to her. Britain knew that she was infertile before she did herself. Courtesy of a greedy mediwizard, she was outed as eighteen and unmarriageable to the sardonic and downright cruel majority. When the Malfoys left for Brazil, the papers crooned on her having been left behind. She was still monied, and her health predicted a long life, but these small fortunes didn't answer the rolling quiet in her chest. Meanwhile the masses made a spectacle of her pain-a long life, indeed, such was her good tidings.
The trials of the pure-blooded took her friends from her, as it did her fiance. Longevity was not, in her mind, a blessing. Nor was it so in the minds of her persecutors. So, quarantined in her family's country estate, she came to wonder about cosmic retribution.
Did she deserve this? She'd never asked about deserving, so much as taking and receiving. Now, left in solitude with the prospect of a long, lonely life, Pansy asked herself for the first time if she was truly such a terrible person. She asked whether she had cursed herself more subtly than in sacrificing Harry Potter, and brought upon herself to childlessness, friendlessness, an existence of counting the echoes of her soliloquies in empty rooms.
When it grew bored of her personal tragedies, the public took to clamoring for her arrest. At one point the Prophet reported the threats on her life as "a cry for much neglected justice." Official language was thrown around by every wizard with a wand: "conspiracy to commit murder" and the like. It was the Burning Times, as Blaise'd come to call the post-war counter-conservative backlash in his letters, before the owls stopped.
At one point, she considered leaving the country, when not even the pardon from Saint Potter himself could quell the blood lust. The hero himself stood frustrated and lost in all of the persisting outrage. He knew how mob mentalities worked from personal experience, or so he said. Still, he couldn't call off the public rage machine, and moaned to her about how he should be able to help.
"It's like there's no end to it, just rage, like I haven't already forgiven you."
"It's not about you, Potter," she said in their only face-to-face conversation after Hogwarts. A farce of an interview, a grand gesture of forgiveness, organized by her mother to keep the Parkinsons relevant. Pansy'd forgotten to fall in line, then, and spoke her mind while the reporter scribbled away. She had many such slips, ever more increasingly since her new isolation. Journalists throughout Europe need only be present when she opened her mouth to quench the silence. "They don't care about your olive branch, and they certainly don't care about me. I could be anyone else, and so could you if you were famous enough, and this would play out the same."
"Sorry, but I can't honestly believe that."
"I thought you had 'personal experience.' It's just mindless outrage pointed in one direction. Like with the giant, that one year, or the Headmaster or Draco or anyone. It can't be helped."
"But they should-"
"No. No. You wouldn't understand because you're simple. The Malfoys left the country, yes? The Notts, too, and the Zabinis have locked themselves in their lordly tower. Guess the pattern, Potter. I'm better off gone. Let them burn my effigy."
Neither of them talked for a while, after that. When something decided on itself in her soul, she made her first honest attempt at advice. "Potter. You might want to do the same. Disappear, before they're finished chewing on my bones."
The Quibbler cut that part of the interview upon her request. She didn't need a society of executioners privy to her plans.
Yet still, even after she'd accepted the invitation abroad to live with family, Pansy was cowed by the notion of invisibility. Not being talked about meant just that: her, with her budding thoughts about herself, with the nothingness inside. She'd be in hiding for Merlin knew how long, with few visitors to distract her. She panted under the weight of exile from familiarity, from notoriety, from the luxury of shallowness. Despite this, she left at midnight in mid-August for South America. Silently, she hoped to suffocate on her own panic before she saw "freedom."
It was sudden how she was forced into the company of strangers. People not unlike herself greeted her: beautiful in their own way, some, many of whom were simply striking or fabulously dull. Exile made these wizards interesting, and gave dimension to otherwise flat persons. Again, she wondered at herself, and if she'd become one of these depth-less beings lent mystery.
Newly alone in another country, without even her mother for conversation, she was asked by the great aunt hosting to "settle in and adjust." Perhaps it was meant that she lie low, stay on the property and busy herself with quiet pursuits. Choosing to misunderstand, she owled Draco at her earliest convenience and made plans to explore.
Her ex-fiance made a poor companion in that he bought into the age old disdain of foreignness he'd inherited from his grandparents. Moreover, he had the disposition for afternoons reading and flying over their land. Pansy sampled his stale routine for all of a day before remembering him for the predictable sod that he always was. They'd complemented each other before, when they were younger and she didn't care much for enrichment. Now, she hadn't the same capacity for deprivation and tedium when faced with endless hours with herself.
Briefly, she considered walking through the town on her own, but reconsidered, as stories of kidnappings were not unheard of. However, once, as a child, she dreamed to try the beaches outside of Britain, and she knew the oceans here transcended the sheer grays and browns and foamy whites by the British Isles. They were clearer and sang with degrees of blue-green. She itched to feel the depth of them, to bask in the light and salt and motion. Draco didn't understand her desperation, and she lost interest in trying to endear him to it. Still, she made for the smaller, warmer Malfoy property every other day and found better company.
Narcissa Malfoy surprised her one afternoon by entering in a casual, loosely formed dress. Her arms were bare, as was her makeup-less face, her hair in a chignon knot to keep it off her neck, and feet visible beneath the swaying hem of her pale pink skirts. She'd never seen the other woman in such a state of simplicity, and felt for a moment that she was witnessing her once would-be mother-in-law in a state of undress.
She found herself apologizing, for gaping and catching her unawares, and only stood to feel shamed when the willowy lady frowned. Pansy always held a store of respect for Draco's mother greater than for her own. The other woman had an aura of definition, of self-possession, that she envied even at her shallowest.
"I didn't think I'd find you in this part of the house. If memory serves, you were in the garden with my son."
It was true that Pansy had agreed to watch Draco fly while she took up space in the hibiscus, but the powdery scent bothered her and attracted flies. She'd slipped inside and disregarded propriety to wander the estate's corridors. The sitting room she'd taken to had gold accents and a rainbow of cut orchids in crystal vases. It seemed to be the most tended to room in the house, and she paused a while to admire it.
"I-well, Draco doesn't need me in the garden, Mrs. Malfoy. Sorry if I'm intruding." Pansy lost the privilege to call the other woman by her given name when her engagement to Draco fell through. The added formality only exaggerated her chagrin, as did flushing an ugly red that she couldn't yet blame on the heat.
"You are. I was just about to take my tea." Her childhood idol continued to frown and Pansy grew redder, still. The embarrassment stung.
"My apologies-"
"You already apologized. Would you like to join me?"
"I-" She stopped, gaped, and inhaled so quickly so as to squeak in an unseemly fashion. Pansy forgot the proper wording for "Yes, please, it would be my absolute greatest honor. I've admired you since I first held a wand, and tea with you would be the highlight of my young life." Instead, she nodded and took the offered seat with alacrity enough to shame a Creevey.
This began something of a habit for them. The two women sat a generation apart, but being alone otherwise, preferred to sit in each others' company. Before that afternoon, Pansy hadn't taken Narcissa Malfoy for a lonely woman. Then again, she rarely saw passed what the woman represented to who she was.
Pansy couldn't claim to knowing who the woman was, of course, but the quiet tea certainly raised the question.
Separately, then together, they contemplated the newness of their exile.
Pansy shared her dreams of the ocean, then complained about biting flies and damp heat. Narcissa didn't expect the humidity of Brazil, herself. ("I've never fainted until the moment that Portkey left me in this damnation. I can hardly stand for a whole day since.") Nor did she fathom the richness of the food. The stately witch met spices that were never quite the trend amongst delicate aristocratic types. She'd taken to keeping a diary of them, and though she didn't pretend an interest in cooking, she learned to eat passionately.
Sometimes, for sport, Narcissa tried her hand at sewing. She occasionally brought out dresses in bright colors, tailored to the younger woman's size, and Pansy would model them, turning this way and that while chatting about whatever came to mind. Every dress was something notable, and Pansy hoarded their colors and smells and sounds of swaying and tactile sensations-fabric against bare skin-to carry into the loneliness. She felt that, on some level, Narcissa preserved herself similarly; through the clothes, the food, the heat they established something of a rapport.
If asked, Pansy would never describe herself as profound. After years of practice, however, there were a great many other descriptors that she could easily apply to some idea of herself. She adopted them from the opinions and critiques from her social circle.
"Gregarious", as one aunt said. It bred a reputation of unworthiness. Older bloodlines held firm to the belief that young ladies were better seen than heard. Talkative witches were often considered bad investments for wizards of status, as they were likely to let slip important secrets. Her mother told her well into her formative years: "Mind silence, as loose lips do a poor wizard make."
"Outspoken", a hazard in pureblood girls as it hinted at distasteful behaviors not unlike forming opinions and independent thinking.
"Forward", which usually meant "fast" and predisposed her to youthful indiscretion. Draco had seen the better part of that.
However, the first word she found to describe herself did come when asked, candidly and without warning. It floated up from the lessened emptiness in her core and tripped over her tongue to fly over the hot sand and fall into the gorgeous sea. Draco was down by the water, being led by the maid's young son into the tide. Narcissa was overseeing the servants. Pansy's hair stuck to her forehead like black algae, and a seawater breeze ruffled her sundress.
"When I'd seen you," Narcissa said, "the summer before your sixth year, I thought 'this vapid girl is meant to mother my grandchild.' I asked myself 'what could this silly thing teach my son, to keep him turning into his father.'" She paused, blinking slowly in the white sun. "I feared for both of you, and if not for the contract with your mother, I'd have broken the engagement then. The infertility was a relief; I felt my son had been handed a pardon." She stopped again, and Pansy felt herself flush with embarrassment, as she was wont to do. Narcissa never minced her words.
"But then I saw you again in my sitting room half a year ago, ruining the arrangement of my orchids, and thought 'she's alive.' Don't ask me what that means, because I haven't the faintest, but by then I hadn't had a decent conversation with a real human being in months. So I invited this flustered, alive little you-red as you are now, redder even-to sit for tea with me, and I'm glad for it."
They turned to each other at the same moment, moving to take up the silence and extending it, instead. Pansy, lost for words, took a moment to calm herself before speaking again.
"I truly don't know whether to be insulted. If a bit of swimming is going to loose your tongue all that much, I think I'd rather we take tea indoors."
"I meant it, dear. I'm glad I caught you rudely snooping through my home uninvited, or I'd never regret ending the engagement to my son as I do now. He could do well with a young woman like you."
"Again, you tack a compliment to the end of an insult. One does not cancel out the other, whatever your ex-husband saw fit to teach you."
"Don't get cheeky."
"I hope you faint, skinny hag."
Narcissa laughed and the rarity of the sound soothed some of her hurt feelings. She turned from her grinning friend, too lovely and put-together in the sun, to watch the servants set up their place on the beach.
"Oh, have I really struck a nerve?"
"Not at all. I just sincerely hope you pass out in the tide and get carried out to sea."
"Honestly. How are you feeling, dear?"
The question was meant to be simple: how are you feeling? Yet, it stirred her silence like to answer an even deeper question. Perhaps it was the word "you", or the "dear" or just the person asking. Either way, she felt asked.
Pansy was grateful, then, that they weren't looking at each other. The struggle of self-definition must've played all over her face, and she hated to look so lost in Narcissa's territory. Knowing one's self necessitated a dimension that she wasn't sure she had. Narcissa herself had seen it, so it must have existed.
"You ask too many questions," she murmured. A wave slapped Draco across the back, toppling him over into the wet sand. She smirked when Narcissa snorted in an unladylike manner, and nudged the boy's mother with her elbow.
"Hmm?"
"I feel found, old lady."
"What?"
"Right now, I just feel very, very...found."
"You were lost, then, I suspect." Narcissa tweaked her elbow and moved for the shade of the umbrella. "I know that feeling. Found is good."