The Ledger had never asked Draco for anything before. That February, it started to.
It began as a small thing, the kind of thing he might have missed if he hadn't spent a year learning the shape of the Ledger's silence. It surfaced behind his eyes when he hadn't called it. Not often, and not for long. Just a flicker of copperplate in his peripheral vision, there and gone.
At first he told himself he was imagining it. The Ledger didn't do anything unbidden. It was a tool, and tools waited to be used. That was the whole point of a tool.
But it happened again. And again. And Draco began to notice the pattern.
It surfaced in the corridors, near the castle's older magic. It surfaced in the Great Hall, when the ceiling flared with a storm. And it surfaced, brightest of all, whenever Potter was near.
The same stillness he'd felt around Potter in the dark corridor was gone now, replaced by something else. Something that felt, against all reason, like hunger.
He tested it, as he tested everything.
He stood near Potter in the corridor after Charms, close enough to feel the strange, cold wrongness of the boy, and he opened the Ledger, and he watched.
The copperplate was brighter than he'd ever seen it. It didn't hum as it hummed around the wand, and it didn't go still as it went still around the train. It leaned. It pressed against the inside of his skull like a dog at a door, and for one queasy second Draco had the sense that if he let it, the Ledger would have reached out and taken whatever it was it wanted from Potter, without asking, without a price.
He closed it, hard, and his hands were not quite steady.
What are you? he asked it, silently, and it did not answer, and he had not expected it to.
But the wanting was unmistakable. The Ledger wanted something, and the something had to do with Potter, and the wanting had not been there before February.
The exchange rate had slipped again, and this time he noticed it for what it was.
He was converting, running the numbers, and the numbers came back wrong, and he realised the rate had gone from eight Points to six without him ever seeing it happen. The Ledger was bleeding value out of his Galleons, quietly, as a dishonest clerk skims a till.
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And that was when the cold understanding settled over him.
The Ledger didn't just take what he gave it. It wanted him to give. The eagerness near Potter, the brightening copperplate, the rate that slipped faster every time he spent — it was all the same thing, and the thing was appetite. The system wasn't a tool. It was a shop, and shops wanted you to spend, and the Ledger wanted him to spend on something, and the something had something to do with Potter.
It's herding me, he thought, and the thought was so cold it stopped his breath.
He had spent a year believing he was the one doing the buying. It had never once occurred to him that it might be the other way round.
He made his first genuinely reckless purchase that week.
He didn't need it. That was the part he would come back to, afterwards, turning it over in the dark. He didn't need the upgrade at all. It was a defensive technique, a rank he'd been saving for, and he could have waited, and he knew he could have waited, and he bought it anyway.
Because the Ledger had been eager, and the eagerness had been infectious, and some hungry, impatient part of him had wanted to feel the power settle in, wanted the clean click of a purchase completed.
He overpaid. He knew the moment the Points left him that he'd overpaid. And he felt, in the instant of the transaction, a chunk of the future slide away that was bigger than anything he'd ever spent before.
He sat very still in the empty classroom, and the copperplate dimmed, satisfied, and Draco tried to work out what he'd lost.
He couldn't.
The future-memory was full of gaps now.
That was the terrible part. Not that he'd lost something. That he couldn't tell what it was. The future had always been a portrait in his head, complete and vivid, and now it was a portrait losing its paint, and he could not remember what the missing faces had looked like, or what the faded rooms had held.
He reached for the memory of his father kneeling, to steady himself, and found the edges of it gone soft, the cold voice thinner, the marble floor uncertain.
He reached for the Dark Lord's face, the face he had once seen so clearly, and found it blurred beyond recognition.
And he understood, with a cold and perfect clarity, that he was no longer the boy who had bought the future. He was the boy who was spending it, and the spending had stopped being a choice weeks ago, and he had not once stopped to ask what he was paying for.
That night, he made the decision that would cost him.
He would stop checking.
It was the only way. The checking was worse than the not-knowing. Every time he looked at the future and found another gap, another blurred face, another vanished detail, it was like losing it all over again. So he would stop looking. He would spend what he needed to spend, and he would not count the cost, and he would tell himself it was all going to be worth it in the end.
It was the first real lie he'd ever told himself. The second one, actually, but he'd forgotten the first.
It wants me to spend, he thought, in the dark, with the green light moving on the ceiling and the copperplate dim behind his eyes.
And for the first time, he wondered not what the Ledger could give him.
But what it was getting.