Draco's father had taught him that poverty was a moral failing. It took Ron Weasley, of all people, to make him wonder if that was true.
It happened over a corridor, as these things always did, and it started, as these things always did, with the boy's robes.
The Weasley robes were the first thing anyone noticed. Second-hand, a generation out of date, too short at the wrists, and patched in at least three places that Draco could see. The boy wore his poverty the way other people wore a badge, and Draco had been raised to read that badge and sneer.
"Hand-me-downs again, Weasley?" he said, and let his eyes travel down the robes. "I'd offer to lend you a Galleon, but I'm not sure it would survive the trip."
The corridor snickered. Ron's ears went red, that particular shade of red Draco had come to know well, the red of a boy who burned with shame and fury in equal measure and didn't know which one to reach for first.
"At least I don't have to buy my friends," Ron shot back.
And there it was. The blow landed, and Draco felt it, and the corridor felt it, because the worst part was that it was close enough to true to sting. Draco did not exactly buy his friends. He bought the people around him, which was not the same thing, except that it was, and Ron Weasley, who owned almost nothing, had just put his finger on it.
Draco should have left it there. He knew that, even as his mouth was already moving.
"Your family can't afford to buy you robes that fit," he said, coolly, "and you're lecturing me on friends? I've got a vault at Gringotts, Weasley. You've got a pet rat and a hand-me-down wand and a second-hand everything. Don't tell me about friends."
Ron went a deeper shade of red. For a second Draco thought he might actually throw himself forward, and part of Draco, the old part, the part that had died and been born again, wanted him to. A fight would have been simple. A fight was a transaction Draco knew how to win.
But Ron didn't fight. He stood there, fists clenched at his sides, and he said, in a voice that shook with the effort of keeping it steady, "You've got all that, and Harry'd still rather sit with me than with you. What's that say about what you've got?"
And he turned and walked away, leaving Draco standing in the corridor with the snicker dying around him, and the question hanging in the air like smoke.
It was the question that got him.
Not the insult. The insult was nothing, the kind of thing Ron Weasley said a dozen times a week, and Draco had long since learned to let it slide off him. It was the question, the thing underneath the insult, the thing Ron had said without meaning to say it.
Harry would rather sit with a broke Weasley than with a Malfoy.
Draco turned it over and over, and it would not fit. It defied every rule he'd been raised on. Potter had nothing to gain from Ron Weasley: no money, no status, no influence, nothing. A Weasley was a drain. A Weasley was a liability. A Weasley was, by every measure Draco had ever learned, worth less than nothing.
And yet Potter chose him. Chose him, and kept choosing him, and would, Draco suspected with a cold certainty, throw himself in front of a curse for him. And Ron Weasley would do the same for Potter. And neither of them, Draco was certain, had ever once stopped to calculate what the other was worth.
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He couldn't make the arithmetic work. That was the trouble. He couldn't make the arithmetic work, and it frightened him more than he wanted to admit, because if a broke Weasley could be worth more than a Malfoy vault to the right person, then every sum Draco had ever done was wrong, and the whole ledger of his life was balanced on a lie.
He watched them at breakfast the next morning, because the question wouldn't leave him alone.
Harry and the Weasley sat at the Gryffindor table, and Draco watched them from across the Hall over the rim of his goblet, and he tried to find the transaction in it. He looked for the calculation, the hidden ledger, the thing each of them was getting from the other.
There was nothing to find.
Weasley had pushed a plate of toast toward Potter without being asked, and Potter had taken a piece and said something that made Weasley snort into his pumpkin juice, and the whole thing was so ordinary, so unguarded, so free that Draco found himself looking away.
That was the part he couldn't price. Not the loyalty itself, he understood loyalty, he'd been trading in it for weeks. It was the ease of it. The way it cost Weasley nothing to hand Potter the toast. The way neither of them kept count. The way their friendship moved like water, effortless and unmeasured, where everything in Draco's life moved like a transaction, weighed and recorded and owing interest.
A fourth-year Gryffindor said something cutting to Potter, something about the scar, and Weasley was on his feet before Draco had even registered the insult, his face the colour of his hair, ready to throw down over a joke. Potter pulled him back down, laughing, and the whole thing passed, and Draco watched it and felt something cold settle in his chest.
A Weasley with nothing, defending the Boy Who Lived with his fists, for free. And Potter, laughing, pulling him back down, because he'd rather have the friend than the fight.
Draco couldn't make it work. It defied every rule.
He left the Great Hall with the question burning behind his eyes, and it followed him all day.
That night, alone in the dormitory, he asked the Ledger.
It was a stupid thing to do. He knew it was stupid even as he did it. But the question itched, and the Ledger was the only thing he had that might answer it, and he was tired of not knowing.
What does Potter have, he asked, that makes a Weasley with nothing loyal to him?
The copperplate was silent for a long moment.
Then it gave him the answer he'd known was coming.
NOT FOR SALE.
He lay in the dark and stared at the green light on the ceiling, and he understood that this was the same wall, the same refusal, the same door that wouldn't open. Courage, loyalty, charm, and now this. The thing that bound Potter and Weasley together, the thing that made a broke boy worth more than a Malfoy vault, was the one thing the Ledger would not — could not — sell him.
And because the question was still there, and because not knowing was worse than the cost, he spent.
Not much. Just enough to feel like he was doing something, enough to push the question down where he wouldn't have to look at it.
RECHARGE RECEIVED
5 Galleons → 4 Points
The rate had slipped again. He didn't care.
The future-memory dimmed on schedule, and this time the thing that went was the worst one yet.
His father's face.
In the memory, the one he'd bought for fifty thousand Galleons, the one that was the whole reason for everything, his father knelt on the marble with the cold voice saying again, Lucius. And now, when Draco reached for it, the face was soft at the edges, blurred, the proud features running together like a portrait left out in the rain.
He sat up in the dark, suddenly cold.
He could still see the kneeling. He could still hear the voice. He could still feel the cold weight of the future pressing in on him. But he could no longer see his father's face, and the loss of it was worse than he could have imagined, because the face was the why. The face was the reason he was here, doing this, spending the future to buy the present.
He grabbed for his own ledger, the little leather book, and he wrote in it, in his cramped, desperate hand, the question that would not leave him alone:
What does Potter have that money can't match?
He stared at the words. No answer came.
The question followed him into sleep, and it was still there in the morning, waiting.