Daphne Greengrass was the first Slytherin who looked at Draco and didn't price him. She just... looked.
It happened in the first week back, in the common room, and it should have been nothing. A girl across the room, reading, not looking up when he came in. But Draco's eye caught on her and stuck, because she was the only person in the room who hadn't registered his arrival.
He knew her, in the way he knew everyone now. Daphne Greengrass. Old family, older money, and a face that gave nothing away. He had marked her back in September, at the Sorting, as someone who did not look at him. And now, in January, she was still not looking at him.
It was, against all reason, infuriating.
He did what he always did. He priced her.
Not to her face, not at first. He watched her for a day, then two, as he watched everyone, looking for the angle. What did she want? Everyone wanted something. Pansy wanted standing. Crabbe and Goyle wanted a bigger name to stand behind. Theodore wanted... whatever Theodore wanted, which Draco still couldn't work out. Everyone had a price. That was the first law of the house, the first law of everything.
But Daphne Greengrass didn't seem to have one.
He watched Vane, the prefect with the face like an unbalanced ledger, try to lean on her, the way Vane leaned on everyone. Vane said something low, in the old language of the house, and Daphne Greengrass looked up from her book, and said something short and cool, and went back to her reading, and Vane — Vane, who made younger students hand over their desserts — actually walked away.
Draco filed that. It was either courage, or the certainty of someone who owed nothing and feared nothing, and either way it was interesting.
She did not court favour. She did not flinch from the older students. She did not trade in the small currencies of the common room. She read her books, and she kept her own counsel, and when Draco finally approached her, at the end of the first week, she looked up at him with cool, unimpressed eyes and waited for him to speak.
"Malfoy," she said, before he could. "I was wondering when you'd get around to it."
Draco's smile didn't waver. "Get around to what?"
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"You've been pricing the room since September." She closed her book. "You were always going to price me eventually. Go on, then. I'll save you the trouble." She looked at him, level and calm. "Whatever you're about to offer, the answer's no."
He tried charm. It bounced off her like light off water.
He tried condescension, the faint suggestion that her family, however old, was not quite the Malfoys. She looked at him as you'd look at a child throwing a tantrum, and said, "Was that meant to sting? You'll have to try harder."
He tried the implicit offer of alliance, the thing that had worked on everyone else in the house: his name, his standing, the slow machinery of his growing influence. He laid it out, not as a bribe, but as an arrangement, as two reasonable people arranged a mutually useful thing.
Daphne Greengrass listened to all of it, and then she said, "No, thank you."
Draco blinked.
"No?" he said.
"I don't need what you're selling." She picked up her book. "And you don't need what I'm not offering. So we're both spared a lot of tedious negotiation." She gave him a small, cool smile that was somehow more dismissive than any insult. "Good afternoon, Malfoy."
And she went back to her book, and Draco stood there with nothing to say, which was, he realised, not a thing that had happened to him in a very long time.
Theodore found him afterwards, and Theodore, as always, had seen the whole thing.
"Not everything's a market, Draco," he said, without preamble.
"Everything's a market," Draco said, automatic, because it was true, because it had to be true.
Theodore just looked at him, flat and unreadable, and said, "Is that why you're standing here looking like she slapped you?"
Draco opened his mouth to argue, and closed it. He had been about to say that she hadn't slapped him, that she'd simply refused, which was worse, and then he'd understood that Theodore already knew that, and that was the point.
That night, alone, he asked the Ledger what Daphne Greengrass wanted.
The copperplate was silent for a long moment. Then it gave him nothing at all, not even the refusal. Just a blank, like a page blank where a word has been erased.
A person, he understood then, wasn't a price. The Ledger could no more tell him what Daphne wanted than it could sell him loyalty or courage or charm. It was the same wall, the same door.
She wants nothing from me, he thought, and the thought should have been annoying.
It wasn't, quite. And that was the most annoying thing of all.
He caught himself watching for her over the next few days, in the common room and the corridors, and he told himself it was strategy, that a girl who owed nothing and feared nothing and wanted nothing was a variable worth understanding, as a merchant studies a rival he can't outprice.
He told himself that. It was a good story.
It wasn't, quite, the true one.
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