Draco reached for the memory of his father's face and found only a smear of light where it used to be.
He was alone. The dormitory was empty, the other boys at breakfast or in their classes, and Draco had deliberately arranged to be alone, because he had decided, for the first time in weeks, to look.
He closed his eyes and reached for the future-memory.
It was like reaching into water. The shape of it was there, the same shape it had always been, the same cold weight behind his eyes. But the edges were gone. Pieces drifted loose and out of order, and when he tried to hold them, they slid through his fingers and would not be caught.
He found the kneeling. That was still there, buried deep, his father on the marble with the cold voice. But the face above it, the face he had once known as well as his own, was nothing now. A smear of light. A blur. A person-shaped absence where his father had been.
The WHY of everything, the reason he had paid fifty thousand Galleons, the reason he was spending the future to buy the present, was fading, and he could not stop it, and he understood, with a cold, rising horror, that he was not losing details anymore.
He was losing the point.
He reached for the war, and found it a map with the borders drawn in but the towns erased. He reached for the Death Eaters, the faces he had once been able to pick out of a crowd, and found them blank as eggs. He reached for the Dark Lord, the most feared thing in the wizarding world, and found a cold shape with no features, a voice with nothing behind it.
He had bought the future, and he had spent it, and he could not now remember, with any certainty, what he had bought.
He did not panic. That was the strange part. He had expected panic, had braced himself for it, and it did not come.
What came was worse.
He sat very still, his hands flat on his knees, and he looked at the blur behind his eyes, and he tried to remember what his father's face looked like, and he could not. He knew his father's face in the present, in the dining room, in the drawing room, across the table at Christmas. But the face in the future, the face that had driven every single thing he'd done this year, was gone.
He tried to buy it back.
He opened the Ledger, and he asked it, as you'd ask a bank for a withdrawal, for the memory of his father's face. Just that one thing. Just the face. He would pay anything.
NOT FOR SALE.
He asked again. He begged, which was new, which was shameful, which he did anyway.
NOT FOR SALE.
And the copperplate said nothing more, and Draco understood, with a terrible finality, that this was the one thing the Ledger would not give him back. It had taken the memory, and the memory was gone, and you could not re-purchase what you had already spent.
He got up. He crossed the dormitory to his trunk, and he opened it, and he took out the little leather book, his own ledger, the one he'd been keeping all year.
And he began to write.
Not the plan. Not the prices. Not the arithmetic. He wrote what he remembered. He wrote, in his cramped, desperate hand, the scraps of the future he still had, the pieces that hadn't bled away. The kneeling, on the marble. The cold voice, saying again, Lucius. The Manor, grey. The peacocks, gone from the lawn. The robe, and the lips pressed to it, and the colour he could no longer name.
He wrote it all down, and it was not the same as remembering, but it was better than the blur. It was a map written from memory, and the map was not the territory, but at least it was something, at least it would not vanish, at least it was outside the Ledger, in his own hand, where the Ledger could not reach it.
He sat back, and looked at the page, and his handwriting filled it, and he understood what he had just become.
A man who writes down what he loves because he can no longer trust himself to remember it.
It helped, a little. He would be honest about that, much later. The written page was real in his hand, and when the dread climbed back in, he could reach for it, and hold it, and it would not blur or fade. It was a rope thrown across the distance, and it was his own, and the Ledger had no claim on it.
For the rest of the year, and long after, he would keep it. He would carry the little leather book with him everywhere, the way other people carried a photograph, and he would read the words when the future went dim and the fear began to press. He would hand his own memory over to paper, because the paper would not forget, and he could not say the same of himself.
But it did not fix the thing. It could not. The map in his head was bleeding, and the written map was only a copy, and a copy was not the same as knowing. He had spent the future to buy the present, and the future had been the only thing that made the present worth buying, and he had spent it, and there was no buying it back.
He closed the book and sat in the empty room, and the green light moved on the ceiling, and Draco Malfoy, who had wanted to be the boy who knew everything, understood that he was now the boy who had started forgetting.
The book lay in his lap, and its own weight was real, and he sat with it a long time before he moved.