The troll smashed through the Great Hall's doors, and Draco, who had seen the future, had never seen this.
The feast had been glorious until that moment. A thousand jack-o'-lanterns floated beneath the enchanted ceiling, and the tables groaned under more food than anyone could eat, and Draco had been deep in a scheme, nothing serious, just the quiet arithmetic of the house, who to cultivate, who to let go. Pansy was saying something beside him, her hand warm on his arm, and he was only half-listening, as he always half-listened to Pansy. Theodore sat across the table, watching the enchanted ceiling as he watched everything else, and Draco had the passing thought, not for the first time, that Theodore was the only person he knew who never seemed to want anything from him.
He had been enjoying himself, in the cold, satisfied way he enjoyed most things, when the doors at the far end of the Hall blew inward off their hinges.
The thing that came through them was twelve feet tall and grey as a tombstone and it smelled of something that had died in a drain. It stood there for a second, blinking stupidly at the candlelight, its small head turning this way and that, and then it opened its mouth and made a sound like a mountain falling over.
The Hall erupted.
Everyone was screaming. People were climbing over the tables. Plates crashed. Dumbledore was shouting something Draco couldn't hear, and the prefects were waving their arms, and the whole careful order of the school dissolved in about three seconds into a stampede.
Draco did what he was built to do. He ran.
Not toward the troll. Away. His legs carried him before his mind had finished deciding, and he went with them, because running from danger was not cowardice, it was arithmetic, and a Malfoy did not spend himself on other people's survival. That was the creed. That was the house. That was everything he had ever been taught.
He was halfway to the side doors when he saw the first-year.
The boy was a Slytherin, a small, pale thing whose name Draco had never learned, and he had fallen. He was on his hands and knees on the stone floor, right in the troll's path, and the crowd was streaming around him and over him, and no one was stopping, because no one ever stopped.
The troll took a step. The floor shook.
Draco kept running.
That was the truth of it, and he would remember it later, in the dark, with the shame of it sitting in his chest. He kept running for three full strides, with the boy on the floor behind him and the troll's shadow falling over both of them, and the future-memory, the one he'd spent fifty thousand Galleons on, showed him nothing. Because he had never once, in all his planning, in all his careful arithmetic of the next seven years, pictured himself doing the thing he did next.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
He turned around.
He did not decide to. That was the strangest part, the part he would come back to again and again. His body turned, and his legs carried him back against the tide of the crowd, and he grabbed the boy by the back of his robes and hauled him up, and he shoved him hard toward the doors, and he did all of it without a single thought passing through his head that he could have priced.
"Move!" he shouted, and the boy ran.
And then Draco was standing between the troll and the boy, and the troll was looking down at him with its tiny, stupid, murderous eyes, and Draco's hand was already moving for his wand, and the spell that came out of him was a bought one.
It was the Shield Charm.
Rank 3, bought and paid for, sitting in his head like a coin in a till. He cast it without thinking, as you'd throw up your hands, and it flared silver between him and the troll, and the troll's club came down and bounced off it, and the shock of the blow ran up Draco's arm and knocked him flat on the stone.
The charm held for exactly long enough. It bought him the seconds the boy needed to reach the doors. It bought him nothing else. And as he lay on the floor with the troll looming over him and the silver already flickering, Draco understood, with a strange, detached clarity, that the spell was the one thing in this moment that had cost him money.
It was the only part of what he'd just done that wasn't his.
The choice had been free.
The troll raised its club again, and Draco scrabbled backwards, and then there were teachers, Snape moving faster than Draco had ever seen him move, and McGonagall, and a flash of green and purple light, and the troll went down like a felled tree.
The aftermath was loud and bright and full of people crying, and Draco sat on a bench with his back against the wall and his hands shaking, and he could not make them stop.
The first-year came to him. The boy he'd pulled out of the troll's path. He stood there, white-faced, and he said, "You saved me."
Draco looked at him. The boy was still shaking, too, and his eyes were enormous, and there was something in his face that Draco recognised, because he'd seen it before, on the girl in the corridor and on a dozen other faces he'd been collecting like debts.
"I didn't," Draco said. And it came out too fast, too sharp, and he saw the boy flinch, and he didn't know why he'd said it except that it was true. He hadn't saved him. He'd just... turned around.
Snape found him there a few minutes later, with the shaken first-year beside him, and he gave Draco a long, unreadable look, the same look from the first lesson, weighing.
Then he said nothing, and walked on.
Draco couldn't tell if it was approval or suspicion, and he found, to his surprise, that he cared which.
That night, lying in the dark with the green light on the ceiling, he reached for the future-memory and looked for this night.
It wasn't there.
The Hallowe'en feast. The troll. The boy on the floor. None of it. He had a memory of the Dark Lord's return, a memory of the war, a memory of his father kneeling. But this night, this ordinary, terrifying, free night, was a blank in the future he'd paid so much for.
The map was missing pieces. He'd known that, in the abstract. But it was one thing to know it, and another to lie in the dark and understand that the future he was spending his past to buy had never even contained the moment he'd just lived.
I could have let the troll take him, he thought, and the strange thing, the thing that kept him awake long after the green light should have put him under, was that he'd done it without thinking.
It was the first thing all year he hadn't priced.