Draco had spent a fortune to be good. Potter was good for free.
The first match of the season was Slytherin versus Gryffindor, and the whole school had turned out for it, and Draco sat high in the stands with his house around him, wrapped in green and silver, watching a game he already understood better than half the people on the pitch. The banners snapped in a wind that smelled of frost and grass, and the sky was the colour of wet slate, and below him the pitch lay swept and waiting like a green stage.
He had studied Quidditch through the Ledger. It had cost him more than he wanted to think about, and it sat in his head now like everything else he'd bought: complete, and cold, and somehow not quite his. He knew the angles. He knew the feints. He knew, the moment the Slytherin Chasers began their opening move, that they'd fumble the pass in three exchanges.
They did.
Beside him, Pansy was on her feet, shouting herself hoarse, her scarf clutched in both fists, and she had not once noticed that Draco wasn't watching the same game she was. Theodore sat on Draco's other side, silent, eyes on the pitch, and if he'd noticed, he said nothing, which was Theodore all over.
But it wasn't the Chasers anyone was watching. It was Potter.
Harry Potter hung high above the pitch on a school broom, small against the grey sky, and Draco found himself tracking him the way a compass tracks north.
It wasn't a choice. It was gravity. The match happened down below, the Quaffle moving, the Bludgers flying, the whole noisy business of scoring points, and Draco watched none of it. He watched Potter, because Potter was the only thing in the air worth watching, and because some cold, hungry part of Draco was trying to work out how the boy did it.
The answer was the same answer it had always been. Potter didn't do it. He just was it. The broom under him wasn't a tool, it was a limb. The air wasn't a thing he moved through, it was a thing he belonged to.
Draco had paid for skill. He had paid for knowledge. He had paid and paid and paid, and what he was watching now, from the freezing stands with the green scarf around his neck, was the thing all that paying had never once bought him.
Not for sale, the Ledger had said, the night he'd asked it what natural flying would cost.
And there it was, above him, not for sale, flying like a thing that had never heard of money.
The match turned on a single moment, the way matches always did.
The Slytherin Seeker was a fifth-year called Higgs, and Higgs was not bad, and for one clean, breathless second, Draco saw the Snitch. It was a flicker of gold, low over the grass, and Higgs had seen it too, and he'd committed, and he was diving, and the whole of Slytherin was on its feet.
Then Potter moved.
Draco would remember the way Potter moved for the rest of his life. Not because it was fast, though it was. Not because it was clever, though it was that too. Because it was effortless. Potter didn't dive. He simply decided to be where the Snitch was going to be, and then he was, and the Snitch was in his hand, and the crowd was roaring, and Higgs was still three lengths away with his arm stretched out for nothing.
Gryffindor won. Of course Gryffindor won.
And Draco sat in the cold with the roar washing over him, and he felt something move in his chest that he did not have a name for.
It wasn't jealousy. Or it wasn't only jealousy. It was a wanting, and the wanting was not for the win, and not for the crowd, and not for any of the things Draco had spent his life learning to want.
It was for the thing itself. The flying. The being up there, alone with the wind and the Snitch and nothing to buy and nothing to sell. Potter had it, and Potter had not earned it and could not sell it and did not even seem to know he had it, and Draco wanted it so badly that his hands hurt inside his gloves.
He filed the feeling as ambition. That was the safe thing to file it as. He would make the team next year, and he would be better than Potter, and he would do it the Malfoy way, with gold and name and the quiet application of pressure.
He told himself that, all the way back to the castle, and it almost worked.
But that night, lying in the dark, he let himself ask the question he'd been pushing down all afternoon.
What would it cost, he thought, to be able to do that?
And the answer came back, from the cold copperplate behind his eyes, the same answer it always gave.
NOT FOR SALE.
Draco lay very still. And for the first time, instead of the old, familiar panic, instead of the cold sliding fear that came with running into a wall, he felt something else.
The first, faint, infuriating stirring of a hunger to earn it.
He did not understand it. It did not fit the arithmetic. There was no price on it, no column for it, no way to buy it or sell it or weigh it against anything else he owned. And yet there it was, refusing to be filed, sitting in his chest like a second heartbeat.
He closed his eyes against the green light, and the wind still smelled, faintly, of frost and grass.