In the dream, Draco opened the Ledger and found two columns instead of one, and his own name at the bottom of the wrong one.
The book lay open on a desk that wasn't his, in a room that wasn't his, and the light was green and came from nowhere. Draco knew it was a dream, as you know things in dreams, and he knew also that he could not look away, and that he did not want to.
The left-hand column was the one he knew. It was his, written in his own cramped hand, and it listed the purchases he had made: the Shield Charm, the knowledge, the points converted and spent. The credit column. The column of things he had bought.
The right-hand column was the one that stopped his breath.
It was written in a hand he did not recognise. It was neat, and old-fashioned, and it improved as he looked at it, the shaky first lines giving way to something steadier and more certain, as a hand grows sure with practice. At the top of the column the writing was faint and uncertain, the letters of someone learning. By the bottom, it flowed, and it looked, Draco thought with a cold lurch, almost like his own.
And the column was not a list of purchases. It was a list of him.
He tried to read the entries, and found he could not, except in flashes. A peacock, grey and gone. A face, sharp-eared, fading. And other things, older things, things he half-recognised and could not name, all of them written down in that foreign, improving hand, as if someone had been keeping careful count of every piece of him that had ever been taken.
His name sat at the bottom of it, halfway filled in.
And below his name, in letters that were not yet finished, was the start of a word he could almost read, and could not, and did not want to.
Draco woke gasping.
He sat up in the dark, his heart going like a hammer, and the green lake-light was moving on the ceiling of the dormitory, and the other boys were asleep, and everything was ordinary and terrible. His pyjamas were damp with sweat. The blanket had twisted itself around his legs. He sat there, breathing, until the hammering in his chest slowed to something he could stand.
He opened the real Ledger behind his eyes, as you'd check a locked door after a noise.
One column. His own hand, in the credit column. The balance where it always was. No second column. No foreign hand. No name at the bottom, halfway filled in.
He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding, and told himself it had been a dream. Just a dream. A boy who spent too much time thinking about ledgers had dreamt of a ledger. It meant nothing.
It meant nothing.
He lay back down and stared at the ceiling, and the green light moved, and the dream sat in the back of his mind like a splinter he couldn't quite pull out. Because it hadn't felt like a dream. It had felt like the Ledger talking. It had felt like the one language the thing behind his eyes had, and it had finally, for the first time, chosen to use it.
It's counting me, he thought, and the thought was not new, but it had never been so sharp.
He spent nothing that day.
It was not a decision he made so much as a thing that happened. He found himself avoiding the Ledger as he'd avoid a creditor, and he went through his classes, and he did not convert a single Galleon, and he told himself it was prudence and not fear.
But the memory felt different all day.
The memory was the thing he used to steady himself, the reason for everything, the image of his father on the marble that he reached for when the arithmetic threatened to swallow him. And all that day, every time he reached for it, it felt a degree colder. A degree further away. Like a thing seen through water, or a voice heard through a wall.
He caught it failing him in the middle of Charms. Flitwick had asked something about the Levitation Charm, and Draco, half-listening, had reached for the future to see what came next, the way he used to, and he had found nothing. Not a fog, not a blur. A gap, where a fact should have been, the way a page is blank where a word has been erased.
He answered Flitwick's question, because the answer was in his head, bought and paid for, and he sat down with the cold understanding that the future was not only dimming. It was going missing, in pieces, and he could no longer tell which pieces were gone until he reached for them.
By dinner he was so deep in his own head that he walked past the Slytherin table the first time and had to double back.
Pansy noticed, of course. She always noticed.
"You've been strange all day," she said, spearing a potato with unnecessary violence. "Is it Potter again? Because if it is, I can —"
"It's nothing," Draco said, and the lie came out so smoothly it almost felt true. "I didn't sleep well."
Pansy looked at him, and for a moment her sharp little face was uncharacteristically still, and Draco had the uncomfortable sense that she could see more than she let on. Then the moment passed, and she went back to her potato, and the subject closed.
Theodore said nothing. He sat a few seats down, as he always did, and he did not look at Draco, which was somehow worse than if he had.
Draco kept his head down and did not meet anyone's eyes, and the dream sat in the back of his mind, and the memory ticked in the dark behind it, and he understood, sitting there in the loud, warm Hall surrounded by his own house, that he had never felt more alone.
That night, alone with the green light and the sleeping boys, he reached for the memory deliberately.
He wanted to steady himself. He wanted to see his father's face, even fuzzy as it had become, and hear the cold voice, and feel the old, familiar terror that reminded him why he was doing all of this.
The memory came, reluctantly.
The Manor, grey and cold. The marble floor. His father on his knees, the proud spine bent. The cold voice somewhere above, saying again, Lucius.
And the robe.
His father's lips, pressed to the hem of a robe. The robe belonged to the Dark Lord, and in the memory it had always been a colour Draco could name, a colour he'd seen a hundred times in a hundred dreams of the future.
But now he reached for the colour, and it was gone.
He tried, as you try to catch something underwater. Grey? No. Black? No, it hadn't been black. It had been... it had been...
He couldn't find it.
The colour of the robe was gone, as the peacocks had gone, as the goblin's face had gone, as his father's face was going. One more thing, spent. One more piece of the future, paid out to the thing behind his eyes.
Draco lay very still in the dark, and the green light moved on the ceiling, and he understood, with a cold and perfect clarity, that the dream had not been a warning.
It had been a receipt.
He tried to remember the robe. Grey? Black? He couldn't. It was just the colour of a robe, he told himself. It was just the colour of a robe.
He did not sleep again that night.