The wand shop smelled of dust and old magic, and the first wand they handed Draco refused to work.
It lay in his palm like a dead stick, and when he gave it the tiniest flick: nothing, not even a spark. The old man behind the counter, Ollivander, didn't seem surprised. He took it back and studied Draco with pale, watery eyes that missed nothing.
Narcissa stood by the door, elegant and patient, watching her son as she had since he was small. Draco kept his face composed. Inside, he was running the arithmetic.
Diagon Alley had done this to him all morning. The brick wall that opened at the tap of a wand, the cobbles, the shopfronts stacked with cauldrons and owls and apothecary jars — Draco couldn't see any of it straight. He saw prices. The cauldron shop sold pewter at a markup the goblins would have blushed at. The owl emporium wanted three Galleons for a bird his father could have bred for free. Even the cobbles under his feet seemed to be costing him something, though he couldn't have said what.
Make money, he thought, and the Ledger stirred behind his eyes, patient as always.
Ollivander handed him a second wand. Ash. It fizzed and went cold. A third, of elm, spat green sparks at the curtain. Ollivander only smiled, as if each failure pleased him.
"No, no. Not those." He disappeared into the shelves and came back with a long, thin box, handling it as if it were gold. "Try this one."
Hawthorn, unicorn hair, ten inches.
The moment it touched Draco's hand, the Ledger hummed.
Not the polite surfacing it did when he counted money. This was deeper, a chord struck inside his ribs, warm and wrong. The wand sent a shower of silver sparks from its tip, and Draco felt, for one dizzying second, that the two things, the wand and the Ledger, had recognised each other.
Ollivander's smile slipped.
"Hawthorn and unicorn hair," he murmured, more to himself than to Draco. "Curious. Very curious, how these old things remember."
Draco waited for him to say more. He didn't. He simply took the wand back, wrapped it, and handed it over with a look that was no longer quite so friendly.
"What's curious about it?" Draco asked, keeping his voice light.
But Ollivander was already turning away to serve the next customer, and the question hung in the dusty air, unanswered.
Gringotts was worse.
The bank was white marble and goblins and the smell of money held so long it had gone stale. Draco's mother did most of the talking, as she always did. Draco stood at the counter and tried not to fidget while a goblin named Griphook — long fingers and a look of permanent arithmetic — went over the Malfoy accounts with a quill that never stopped moving.
The goblin paused.
Not for long. Just a beat, a flicker of those black eyes, and then the quill moved on. But Draco caught it.
"Something wrong?" he asked, because he couldn't not.
"Wrong, sir?" Griphook's voice was dry as old parchment. "No. Nothing wrong. Only this." He tapped one line on the ledger with a single long nail. "This account still draws."
Draco looked. It was an entry from centuries back, the date in a script he didn't recognise, and the numbers were moving, slowly, like something breathing.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
"Draws how?"
"Draws, sir." The goblin looked at him then, and Draco had the sudden, unpleasant sense of being weighed the way Griphook weighed gold. "This account has never once been balanced. It draws against the family's line. It always has."
The words sat wrong in Draco's chest. The family's oldest account. His father's voice, from lunch, weeks ago. He'd thought it was a story.
"Has never been balanced," he repeated, to hear it again.
"Quite so." And the goblin closed the ledger with a snap, as if the subject were shut along with it. "Your school funds are here, sir. Will that be all?"
It wasn't all. It wasn't anything like all. But Draco nodded, because that was what a Malfoy did, and followed his mother out into the bright, indifferent street.
He slipped away from Narcissa at the ice-cream shop.
Not far. He could still see her through the window, choosing flavours with the same care she gave everything. He ducked into the shadow of a shopfront and let the Ledger open behind his eyes.
Ten Galleons. That was what he could spare without his mother noticing. He'd been saving it for exactly this, a test, small enough to hide, big enough to prove something.
RECHARGE RECEIVED
10 Galleons → 10 Points
The Points settled into the credit column. Ten of them. A pittance, really.
And then the future-memory dimmed.
It happened the way it always did, a softening at the edges, a detail going grey. Draco frowned and reached for the memory, as if feeling for a coin that had slipped between the floorboards.
The Manor, cold. His father on his knees. His mother thin. The cold voice saying again, Lucius.
And the lawn.
The lawn was... Draco stopped. He could see the Manor, grey and cold, and the marble, and his father's bent back. But the wide sweep of grass in front of the house, where the white peacocks should have been, he couldn't see it any more. He knew the peacocks had been gone in the memory. He could feel the shape of that absence, like a missing tooth.
But he couldn't picture the lawn at all.
Ten Points. One detail of the future, gone.
He told himself it didn't matter. A lawn. The colour of grass. What did it matter, in the scheme of things, whether he could picture the Manor's lawn?
It mattered. That was the trouble. It mattered, and he knew it, and he shoved the thought down deep where the Ledger couldn't reach it.
Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions was hot and smelled of fabric and pins.
Draco stood on a stool while a witch in mauve circled him with a measuring tape that moved of its own accord. Beside him, on the next stool, stood a boy he'd noticed earlier: black hair, round glasses, robes that had seen better days, and a scar half-hidden under his fringe.
"Hello," said Draco, in the tone he used when he wanted something. "Hogwarts too?"
"Yes," said the boy.
Draco ran his eye over him, tallying. Worn robes. No one with him but a giant of a man visible through the window. Muggle-raised, then, or poor, or both. His eye skipped over the scar and didn't linger.
"My father's next door buying my books and my mother's up the street looking at wands," Draco said, which was a lie he told as easily as breathing. "Then I'm going to drag them off to look at racing brooms. I don't see why first-years can't have their own. I think I'll bully Father into getting me one and smuggle it in somehow."
The boy said nothing, and Draco felt a small, familiar flicker of contempt. No ambition. No answer.
"Do you play Quidditch?" Draco tried.
"No," said the boy.
"I do. Father says it's a crime if I'm not picked to play for my house, and I must say, I agree." He paused, waiting for the boy to ask which house, to be impressed, to do something. "Have you got your own broom?"
"No."
"Play Quidditch at all?"
"No."
Draco looked at him again, properly this time, and felt the contempt curdle into something sharper. The boy was nothing. No name he recognised. No money to speak of. Draco almost said so. The old Draco, the one who'd died and been born again knowing the future, would have said so.
Instead he said, coolly, "You'll learn. Or you won't. It's all the same to me."
And the boy looked at him with green eyes that were older than the rest of his face, and said, quietly, "I think I'll manage."
The witch finished with Draco's robes and he stepped down, unsettled in a way he couldn't name. He filed the boy away as nobody, and found the word wouldn't quite stick.
They went home with the streetlamps coming on, the sun gone, and Draco's new wand a warm weight in his pocket.
But all the way home, in the carriage, he kept hearing the goblin's voice, dry as parchment.
This account still draws, sir. It has never once been balanced.
Draco didn't know what it meant. He knew, with a cold certainty that had nothing to do with the future-memory, that he ought to find out.
And that whatever it was, it was already counting.