"Scared, Malfoy?" Potter said, and Draco heard it for what it was: not a taunt, but an invitation to lose his temper.
So he didn't.
It had taken Draco two weeks to learn that fighting Potter the obvious way did not work. Duels were for Gryffindors. A bought spell and a lucky second would win him a duel and lose him the war, because Potter, whatever else he was, did not lose face when he lost. He got back up. He always got back up.
So Draco had stopped duelling.
He fought as his father fought, as Malfoys had always fought, in the arena where the boy with no family and no name and no money could not follow. He fought with whispers and standing and the slow, patient ruin of a reputation. A word here about Potter's scar, and how convenient it was. A word there about his friends, and how low he'd sunk. Nothing too loud. Nothing that could be traced. Just the steady drip of poison, like water wearing stone.
He watched it spread, and the watching was its own reward. He'd drop a sentence in the common room — odd, isn't it, how Potter always seems to be where the trouble is — and by dinner the sentence had become a rumour, and by the next morning the rumour had grown teeth. He never had to do anything else. The school did the work for him, because the school had always preferred a story it could hold to a truth it couldn't.
It was working. He could feel it working. The other first-years laughed when he laughed, and averted their eyes from Potter, and the boy from Godric's Hollow walked the corridors a little more alone than he had a week ago.
And Potter had finally had enough.
It was the third-floor corridor, between Charms and Transfiguration, where there was always a crowd, and the crowd had gone very still, because everyone had been waiting for this.
Draco turned. Potter stood in the middle of the corridor, hands at his sides, the flat, weary certainty from the Quidditch pitch back on his face, and the other students parted around him like water around a stone.
"You've been at me all week," Potter said. "Whispering. Sneaking around." He took a step forward. "If you've got something to say, Malfoy, say it to my face."
Draco looked at him for a long moment. The old Draco, the one who'd died and been born again knowing the future, would have risen to it. Would have snapped something back, something cruel, and given the crowd the fight it wanted.
The new Draco smiled.
"Say what, Potter?" he said. "That you've been skulking about at night, talking to yourself in the dark? That you've got nothing to your name but a scar and a dead mother's charity?" He let it land, soft and quiet, and watched Potter's jaw go tight. "Why would I need to whisper that? Everyone already knows."
The crowd inhaled.
And that was the thing Draco was learning: you didn't have to shout to cut someone. You just had to say the thing they were already afraid was true, in a voice soft enough that they had to lean in to hear it.
Potter's face had gone very still. For a second, Draco thought he might lunge. Then the moment passed, and Potter did something worse than lunge: he looked at Draco with those green eyes, the ones from the dark corridor, and he said, quietly, "At least I've got something worth staying up for."
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And he turned and walked away, and the crowd, disappointed, began to disperse.
Draco won.
That was what the other Slytherins told him afterwards, slapping his shoulder and grinning. He'd won. He'd stood his ground, and Potter had walked away, and the corridor had seen it. A victory.
But Draco saw, too, what the others didn't. As Potter walked off, two figures fell in beside him without being called: the Weasley boy, red-faced and furious on Potter's behalf, and the Granger girl, her arm already rising to put around his shoulders. They closed ranks around Potter the way a family closes ranks, and Draco watched it happen and felt the cold little click of a plan failing.
Potter had walked away, but he had not walked away alone.
And that was the crack in the whole scheme. Draco could turn the school against Potter. He could make the corridors colder and the whispers louder. But he could not make Potter alone, because Potter had something Draco had never managed to buy: people who stood with him for free, who'd choose him over the crowd, who'd walk into a cold corridor and put an arm around him for nothing.
Draco lay awake that night, and the word "victory" wouldn't stick.
Because he had won nothing. Potter had been hurt, maybe, but hurt the way a thing gets hurt and keeps being itself. Draco had spent two weeks and a hundred small cruelties, and achieved precisely nothing.
Winning the crowd wasn't winning. It was performing. And Potter, whatever else he was, was not performing. He was being, and being was the one thing Draco could not buy, could not counterfeit, could not take away.
Theodore found him on the stairs the next morning.
They walked down to breakfast in silence, and Theodore said, without looking at him, "You're treating him like a vault to be emptied."
Draco stopped. "What?"
"Potter." Theodore kept walking, hands in his pockets. "You keep trying to find the combination. Some insult, some weakness, some angle that'll open him up and let you take whatever's inside." He glanced at Draco, flat and unreadable. "He's not a vault, Draco. He's just a boy. And you're spending more on him than he's worth."
Draco laughed. It was the easy laugh, the Malfoy laugh, the one that said you don't understand. "He's the Boy Who Lived. He's worth more than any of us."
"Is he?" Theodore said. And he walked on ahead, leaving Draco on the stairs with the question hanging in the cold morning air.
Draco told himself Theodore was wrong. Theodore was always saying things like that, quiet things that didn't fit the arithmetic, and Draco had learned to file them and move on.
But the question followed him into breakfast, and it sat beside him at the Slytherin table, and it would not be filed.
Is he?
Because here was the thing Draco could not get past, no matter how he ran the numbers.
Potter had nothing. No family, no money, no name that wasn't a scar and a dead woman's story. He was the poorest, most unconnected boy in the castle, and by every rule Draco had ever learned, he should have been nothing.
And yet.
And yet he had friends who stood by him when the whole school looked the other way. He had a talent that could not be bought. He had a stillness in him, the thing Draco had seen in the dark corridor, that the Ledger recognised and would not explain.
Potter had nothing, and Potter was unbreakable, and the two facts refused to fit together.
Draco sat at the Slytherin table and watched Potter across the Hall, laughing at something the Weasley boy had said, and he understood that he would never beat Potter with whispers and standing, because Potter did not care about whispers or standing. He cared about something else, something Draco couldn't see and couldn't buy, and until Draco found out what it was, he would keep losing the war no matter how many battles he won.
So he would stop trying to break Potter, and start trying to understand him. Somewhere in the boy there was a weakness, a crack, a thing that would finally make him kneel, and Draco intended to find it. Every man had a price. He had been raised on that truth the way other children were raised on fairy stories.
And if Potter truly had no price, then he wasn't a rival at all. He was something else entirely, and Draco needed to know what.
Every Malfoy before him, he knew, had had an enemy they couldn't buy. His grandfather had had one. His father had had one, once, and never spoke of it. And now Draco did too.
He couldn't decide if that made Potter important, or just inconvenient.
He suspected, with a cold certainty he did not want to examine, that it made him both.