Draco Malfoy had flown since he was six. He was not prepared for the boy on the school broom who flew like he'd been born in the air.
The flying lesson was on the lawn below the castle, on a blustery Thursday afternoon that smelled of wet grass and coming rain. Madam Hooch, a witch with short grey hair and yellow hawk-like eyes, stood them in a line and showed them the broomstick.
"Stick out your right hand over the broom," she barked, "and say up."
Draco had done this a hundred times on the Manor grounds, with brooms that cost more than most wizards' wands. He did not need to say up so much as suggest it, and the broom leapt into his hand as if it had been waiting all day to be held. He caught it cleanly, and felt the eyes of the other Slytherins on him, and was pleased.
Around him, the lesson descended into its usual chaos. Brooms rolled on the grass. Brooms whacked their owners in the face. A nervous Hufflepuff said up so desperately that his broom shot straight up a window and hung there, quivering.
Draco did not participate in the chaos. He stood holding his broom, patient and composed, the way his father had taught him. Flying was the one thing in his new life that had cost him nothing — he had been born to it, the way the Malfoys were born to most things — and he intended to let the whole school see it.
Madam Hooch walked the line, correcting grips, until she came to Neville Longbottom.
Neville was the boy Draco had been learning to ignore. Pudgy, forgetful, the kind of boy who carried his grandmother's disapproval like a weight. He had a round red thing in his pocket that he kept checking, and when Madam Hooch noticed it, she held out her hand for it.
"A Remembrall," Neville said, miserably, handing it over. "Gran knows I forget things — she wants me to remember to —"
"The point is, Longbottom," said Madam Hooch, holding it up to the light, "you don't want to forget to remember to bring it to class. Now —"
She tucked the Remembrall into Neville's pocket and walked them through mounting. Draco did it perfectly. The others wobbled. Neville, sweating, hoisted himself onto his broom and immediately looked as if he regretted every decision that had led to this moment.
Madam Hooch put her whistle to her lips.
"Now, when I blow my whistle," she said, "you kick off from the ground, hard. Keep your brooms steady, hover for a moment, then lean forward slightly and come back to the ground. On my whistle — three — two —"
But Neville, terrified, had kicked off early.
He rose like a cork out of water, straight up, and Draco watched with the particular fascination of a boy who had never once been afraid of anything in the air. Neville's broom climbed, and Neville's face went the colour of paper, and he hung there for one terrible second, and then the broom — which had never liked him — did what brooms do when their riders panic.
Neville fell.
It was not a long fall. It was not a dramatic fall. It was a stupid, ordinary fall, and Neville hit the ground with a crack that Draco heard from twenty feet away, and lay there with his wrist bent at an angle wrists were not meant to bend.
Madam Hooch went to him. "Broken," she said, crisply, and her voice was gentler than Draco would have expected. She helped Neville up. "We'll get you to the hospital wing, Longbottom. The rest of you, stay here."
She led Neville away, his face white and wet, and the class stood in the sudden silence of an adult's absence.
Draco moved before anyone else did.
He walked to where Neville had landed and bent and picked up the round red thing that had rolled from his pocket. The Remembrall. It glowed faintly in his palm, the colour of the smoke that rises off a thing too hot, and Draco held it up so the whole class could see.
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"Longbottom's," said a voice. It was not a challenge. It was a fact, stated flatly.
Draco looked. It was Potter, standing at the edge of the group, watching him with those green eyes, the ones Draco had spent a whole night not thinking about.
Draco smiled. It was the smile his father wore at Ministry functions, the one that promised nothing good.
"I suppose I'd better give it back to him," Draco said, and then, because the opportunity was too good to waste: "Some people should stick to what they're good at. He's better off on the ground, isn't he, with a face like that? And you —" he turned to Potter fully, "you should be careful, Potter. You're going to end up like him, if you keep hanging around with the wrong sort."
Potter's jaw tightened.
"You'd better give it back, Malfoy," he said, quietly, "before someone —"
"Or what?" Draco held the Remembrall higher, out over the grass. "I wonder what this does. Does it tell you when you've forgotten something? Like a — what is it, Potter, a mother? No, you'd have forgotten her by now, wouldn't you, you've had long enough —"
The moment the words left his mouth, Draco knew he had overstepped.
He had not meant to say it. It had slipped out, the way cruelty slipped out of him when he was flush with power and not watching, and the whole class went silent, and Potter's face went very still, the way it did when he was deciding whether to kill you with his bare hands or walk away.
"Give me the Remembrall," Potter said.
Draco should have given it back. Even he knew that. It was the sensible thing, the Malfoy thing — you didn't hand a Gryffindor a weapon when you could hand him nothing.
But he was eleven, and he had just been caught being cruel in front of the whole class, and pride did what pride does.
He threw it. High and hard and far, out over the grass, and he watched Potter's face as the red thing arced away, and he felt the cold, ugly satisfaction of a boy who has made a choice he knows he'll regret but is going to enjoy anyway.
"Go and get it, Potter," he said.
And Potter flew.
Draco had seen flying. He had seen his father's friends on the pitch at the Manor, and the professional players at the World Cup, and the way the really good ones moved on a broom like it was an extension of their own bodies.
He had never seen anything like this.
Potter's broom shot forward before Draco's eyes had finished following the Remembrall's arc. The boy didn't climb, didn't think, didn't hesitate. He was in the air and he was there, a hundred feet above the lawn in the time it took Draco to blink, and he caught the Remembrall a foot from the ground, pulling up so sharply that the broom's tail whipped the grass.
The class erupted.
Draco stood very still, and the smile died on his face, and he watched Potter land, perfectly, and drop lightly to the ground with the Remembrall in his hand, and he understood, with a cold, quiet horror, what he had just seen.
That was not skill. Draco could buy skill. He had bought skill, a hundred times, and it sat in his head like coins in a till, neat and finite and his.
That was not skill. That was gift. That was something born in the boy, something that had come out of the womb with him, something no amount of gold in the world could buy a copy of.
Potter looked at him across the grass, and there was no triumph in his face, only a flat, weary certainty, and Draco hated him for it, hated him for being effortless where Draco had to work and buy and scheme, hated him for the thing that made the Ledger's silence around him make a terrible kind of sense.
Not for sale, the Ledger had said.
And there it was, on a broomstick, in front of the whole class: the proof that some things really weren't.
Madam Hooch came back, saw Potter holding the Remembrall and Draco standing rigid, and took in the situation in about two seconds. She did not ask what had happened. She looked at Draco, and her hawk's eyes were flat.
"Fifty points from Slytherin, Malfoy," she said. "I saw enough of what I needed to see from the window. And I'll be having a word with your Head of House."
Draco said nothing. He could not afford to say anything.
He stood there, in the cold, in front of everyone, and he burned with it. Not the points. Points he could buy back. It was the seeing — Potter, effortless in the air, and Draco, watching from the ground, a boy who had spent his whole life learning that money could buy anything, learning in front of a hundred witnesses that it couldn't.
He walked back to the castle with his spine straight and his hands steady, and inside him, something had curdled.
He did not want to beat Potter in a duel. Duels could be won with a bought spell and a lucky second. He wanted to beat Potter the way Malfoys beat people — slowly, socially, in the arena of reputation, where the boy with no family and no name and no money could not follow. He would grind Potter down. He would make the Boy Who Lived a joke that no one laughed at, and then he would watch the castle forget him, the way the castle forgot everyone who didn't matter.
He was Draco Malfoy, and he had been raised to believe that gold and name were the only weapons that counted.
And as he climbed the stairs, Potter's effortless flight burned behind his eyes, and the cold question that would follow him for years rose up, unbidden, and would not be silenced:
What is he, that I can't buy my way past him?