Winning was easy, Draco was discovering. The difficult part was what winning made everyone else want to do to you.
In the week after the duel, Draco Malfoy became famous.
Not the good kind of famous. Not the Potter kind, where people whispered his name with awe and followed him down corridors. The other kind, the kind where people looked at you a moment too long and then looked away, where the older students' eyes went flat and measuring when you passed.
He had humiliated a third-year in front of the house. Worse, he had done it cleanly, which meant he could do it again, to anyone, and the older students of Slytherin had done the arithmetic and did not like the answer. A first-year who could beat a third-year was a threat to the whole careful order, and the order was closing ranks.
Draco felt it, and it should have worried him.
It didn't. That was the problem. He'd won, and winning felt like the thing he'd been building toward all year, and the flat looks and the closed ranks felt like respect wearing a disguise. He walked taller. He spent more. He stopped checking.
The spending was the first sign.
He'd always been careful about the Ledger, watching the rate, counting the cost. But after the duel, he stopped being careful. He bought things he didn't need, upgrades and refinements he'd been putting off, and he did it without looking at the price, the way a man who's won at cards keeps betting.
The memory dimmed. He didn't notice.
Theodore noticed. But then, Theodore noticed everything.
In the common room that night, Pansy was radiant, basking in the reflected glow of Draco's victory. "They're all talking about you," she said, practically vibrating. "Rosier's lot have been quiet all day. You've actually done it, Draco. You've made them afraid of you."
"Isn't that what I said I'd do?" Draco said, and the smile he gave her was the easy one, the one that meant he was pleased with himself.
"Afraid," said Crabbe, from somewhere behind him, and there was something in his voice Draco didn't catch, something almost like unease. "That's good, isn't it? Having them afraid."
Draco turned. Crabbe's broad face was creased in a frown, the way it got when he was trying to work something out. Goyle, beside him, said nothing.
"Of course it's good," Draco said. "It's the whole point."
Crabbe opened his mouth, and closed it, and shrugged, and Draco didn't ask what he'd been about to say.
Theodore caught him in the corridor three days after the duel, and for once Theodore's flat, unreadable face was not flat at all. It was sharp.
"You're making enemies faster than you're making friends," Theodore said, without preamble.
Draco laughed. "I'm a Malfoy. I've always had enemies."
"Not like this." Theodore stepped closer, and his voice dropped. "You humiliated Rosier in front of everyone. You've got Vane watching you. And you're walking around like you've already won the war, when you've only won a single battle against a third-year who was never that good to begin with."
Draco's smile flickered. "Is that meant to be a compliment or an insult?"
"It's meant to be a warning." Theodore held his gaze. "One of them is dangerous, Draco. Not Rosier. Not Vane. Someone else. And you're too busy being pleased with yourself to see it."
Draco shrugged. The shrug was a dismissal, and he knew it was a dismissal, and he did it anyway, because Theodore was always saying things like this, quiet things that didn't fit the arithmetic.
"Then they should be more careful," he said. "I've got nothing to fear from people who couldn't beat me in a fair fight."
Theodore looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "That's the thing about the people you should be afraid of, Draco. They don't fight fair."
And he walked away.
Draco dismissed it. He dismissed it all afternoon, all evening, right up until the moment he opened the door to his dormitory and found what was waiting for him.
His trunk had been opened.
His robes had been dragged out and slashed, the fine green cloth hanging in ribbons. His potions kit had been smashed, the bottles shattered against the wall, the whole room smelling of the expensive ingredients his mother had bought him. And drawn on the lid of his trunk, in something dark and sticky that Draco did not want to identify, was a crude, laughing face.
He stood in the doorway, and the other boys' beds were empty around him, and the room was very quiet, and Draco felt the blood drain out of his face.
Not the loss of the robes, or the potions kit, or the money it would take to replace them. Those were nothing. It was the closeness of it. Someone had been in his room, in his things, while he was gone, and he had not known, and he could not have stopped it.
He had wanted to be feared. He had spent a year building toward it, buying power and standing and the cold respect of his house.
And standing in the doorway of his own room, with the laughter drawn on his trunk, Draco was starting to understand what being feared cost.
Fear didn't stop people from coming for you. That was the lesson, and it arrived with the smell of his mother's ruined ingredients and the sight of his fine robes hanging in ribbons. Fear made people careful, and careful people waited, and watched, and found the moment you weren't looking, and then they came.
He had spent a year buying fear, thinking it was the same thing as safety.
It was not the same thing as safety.
That night he opened the Ledger, and he spent, and he did not check what he was losing, and the memory dimmed, and he let it.
The ink was still wet on his triumph, and already somebody had answered it.