The platform was the first place Draco had ever stood where nobody cared that he was a Malfoy, and the first place it bothered him.
King's Cross was loud and grey and full of Muggles, and the barrier between platforms nine and ten stood exactly where it always had: ordinary brick, until you knew better. Draco knew better. He'd been through it a dozen times. But this morning, with his trunk on a trolley and his new wand in his pocket, the knowing felt different.
Narcissa and Lucius walked him to the barrier and stopped, because they could not go through with him.
"Write to us," Narcissa said, and smoothed his collar, and Draco saw in her face the thing she would not say: that she was afraid for him, and proud of him, in equal measure.
"Every week," he promised.
Lucius put a hand on his shoulder, heavier than it looked. "Remember what you are, Draco."
It was not a warning. It was a blessing and a collar in the same breath, and Draco wore both as he pushed his trolley through the brick.
The platform on the other side was everything the other one was not: steam and owls and families saying goodbye in a hundred different languages, and the scarlet Hogwarts Express waiting like a patient animal.
Draco left his trunk to a porter and climbed aboard, already counting.
He found an empty compartment and sat by the window, watching the platform through the glass like a trader watching a market. The first-years passed in a stream, and Draco priced them without meaning to: that one's robes were new, that one's were old, that one had too many siblings and would be hungry for attention and therefore useful. It was a habit now, this arithmetic, and he didn't know when it had become how he saw the world.
The compartment door slid open.
A boy stood there, thin and still, with a face that gave nothing away. Dark hair. A stillness in him that made Draco think, for no reason he could name, of a closed door.
"Full?" the boy asked.
"Empty," Draco said, and waved a hand. "Sit."
The boy sat opposite, and for a long moment neither of them spoke. Then the boy said, in a voice so flat it was almost rude, "Theodore Nott."
"Draco Malfoy."
"I know."
Draco waited for the usual thing: the flicker of interest, the slight bow that the name Malfoy pulled out of most people. It didn't come. Theodore Nott just looked at him, as if waiting to see what Draco would do with the silence.
Draco, wrong-footed, did the thing he did worst. He asked a genuine question. "And what does Nott want?"
"Nothing from you." Theodore's mouth moved in something that was almost, not quite, a smile. "You don't have to like me. I don't like me either."
Draco blinked. Then, to his own surprise, he laughed.
The door slid open again, and the compartment filled the way it always did: Crabbe and Goyle, broad and silent, and Pansy Parkinson, who sat down beside Draco as if the seat had been saved for her. They were his, he knew, not by choice but by gravity. Money pulled them in, and Draco let it.
But he kept half an eye on Theodore, who had turned to the window and said nothing, and wanted nothing, and was therefore the only one in the compartment Draco could not price.
It was Pansy who pointed Potter out.
"Harry Potter's on the train," she said, with the particular hunger of a girl who had grown up on stories. "With the Weasleys, I think."
Draco looked. Down the corridor, unmistakable now that he knew to look: the black hair, the round glasses, and the scar he'd been too busy counting robes to notice at Madam Malkin's.
Nobody, he'd called the boy then.
Target, he corrected now.
Because Potter was not nobody. Potter was the Boy Who Lived, and whatever else Draco was, he was a Malfoy, and Malfoys did not let an asset like that walk past uncultivated.
He stood. "I'll be back."
He found Potter's compartment and opened the door without knocking. Potter sat by the window with a red-haired boy, unmistakably a Weasley.
"Is it true?" Draco asked, as if opening a negotiation. "They're all saying it down the train. Harry Potter."
Potter looked up, wary. "Yes."
Draco took him in properly: the glasses, the too-big clothes. And the eyes, green, older than the rest of his face. The boy from Malkin's, who'd said I think I'll manage.
"I'm Malfoy. Draco Malfoy." He let the name land, as his father would have. "You'll find some wizarding families are a good deal better than others, Potter. You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort." His eyes slid to the Weasley, and he let them. "I can help you there."
The red-haired boy snorted.
Draco ignored him. He put out his hand.
"I can show you how it really works. Who matters, who doesn't. Save you a lot of trouble."
Potter looked at the hand. Then at Draco.
And Draco watched the calculation happen on Potter's face, not as Draco would have calculated, but something cleaner and more stubborn. He knew the answer before Potter spoke.
"I think I can tell the wrong sort for myself, thanks," said Harry Potter.
The hand hung in the air between them.
Draco withdrew it, slowly, and felt something he had not felt in a long time: a miscalculation. He'd read Potter wrong. He'd looked at the worn robes and the quiet answers and priced the boy as poor, therefore buyable. He'd been wrong.
"You'll regret that," Draco said, coldly, and left before he could say something stupider.
It was dark by the time the train slowed, and Draco had spent the last hour of the journey thinking about Potter, and losing.
"The lake," someone said, and the compartments emptied.
Draco climbed down onto the platform at Hogsmeade, and then the castle was there.
It rose out of the dark like something dreamed: towers and lit windows, stone older than his family, the whole of it vast beyond anything he'd been expecting. A giant's voice boomed across the platform. "Firs' years! Firs' years, over here!"
Draco looked up at the castle, and his stomach dropped.
Because he could not remember it.
He had seen the future. He had paid fifty thousand Galleons for it. He knew the shape of the next seven years: the war, the kneeling, the cold voice saying his name.
But the castle, the place where all of it would happen, was a blank. He reached for the memory of Hogwarts' interior, the Great Hall, the stairs, the common room he was supposed to rule, and found nothing. Not a room. Not a corridor. Not a single lit window, seen from the inside.
The future-memory had a hole in it the exact size of the place he was about to spend seven years.
Not this year, maybe not the next, but soon, he'd told himself back in his bedroom, thinking he understood what was coming.
He'd been wrong. The map was missing its own centre.
"Come on, then," the giant called, and Draco shouldered forward with the other first-years, into the boats, across the black water, toward a castle he was supposed to know and didn't.
The Ledger stayed quiet the whole way. It had been quiet all day, since the train, no humming, no surfacing, as if the magic of this place was something it preferred not to be seen near.
Draco filed that away with everything else he couldn't yet explain.
I know the future, he thought, as the boats slid toward the shore and the castle swallowed the sky. So why does it stop at the door?