Professor Snape looked at Draco the way the Ledger looked at gold: weighing exactly how much he was worth.
It was the first Potions lesson of Draco's life, and the dungeon classroom was cold and full of shadows and pickled things floating in jars. Snape had swept in like a man who owned the room and everything in it. Black robes, black hair, black eyes, and a voice that carried to the back of the class without once rising above a murmur.
"You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making," he began, and Draco, who had been born into a family that understood the subtle science of everything, sat up a little straighter. "There will be no foolish wand-waving in this class. I don't expect many of you to appreciate the beauty of a softly simmering cauldron." A pause, and the black eyes swept the room. "I can teach you to bottle fame and brew glory, and even stopper death, if you aren't the usual pack of dunderheads."
Draco almost smiled. This was a man he understood.
Then Snape's gaze found him, and Draco felt, for the first time, what it was to be assessed by Severus Snape.
It was not like being looked at. It was like being priced.
"Mr Malfoy." The name came out flat, but the eyes stayed on him a beat too long. "Our new Slytherin."
The pause before "Slytherin" said more than the word. Snape had expected him, and Draco, who had spent his life being expected, understood that this was different. This was appraisal.
"Tell me, Mr Malfoy," Snape said, without looking up from the roll of parchment on his desk, "what would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"
It was not a first-week question. It was not even properly a first-year question. Draco knew this because the rest of the class had gone very still, and because a girl with a great deal of bushy hair — Granger, he'd heard — had shot her hand into the air beside him like a signal flare, and because he knew the answer.
He knew it because he had bought it.
"A powerful sleeping potion," Draco said, smoothly. "Known as the Draught of Living Death."
Snape's quill stopped moving.
"And where," he said, very quietly, "would you find a bezoar?"
"In the stomach of a goat, sir. It will save you from most poisons."
A ripple went through the class. Granger's hand was still up, ignored. Snape set down the quill and looked at Draco properly now, and Draco saw it: the flicker of recognition in those black eyes, sharp as a blade. Not pride. Not approval. Recognition, and a question attached to it.
"Correct," Snape said. And then, in a voice the whole class could hear though it seemed meant only for Draco: "I have taught first-years for eleven years, Mr Malfoy. I have never once had one answer a question like that in their first week."
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The room was very quiet.
Draco said nothing. There was nothing to say. The truth, that he had purchased the knowledge from a blood-bound ledger behind his eyes, was unutterable. The lie, that he was simply a prodigy, was the story he was already telling everyone else. Snape let the silence stretch, and then, as if the matter were settled, moved on.
But Draco knew better. The matter was not settled. It had just been opened.
"Potter!" Snape said, and the name came out like something spat. "Our new celebrity."
Draco turned. Harry Potter sat a few stools down, caught mid-flinch, and Draco watched with a kind of dark interest as Snape bore down on the boy with the same questions, the asphodel and the bezoar, and a third about the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane. Potter, to his visible misery, could answer none of them.
"I don't know, sir," Potter said, quietly, again and again.
"Tut, tut. Fame clearly isn't everything."
Granger's hand was trembling in the air now, arm straight up, and Snape ignored it with an air of great enjoyment.
Draco watched all of this and filed it. Because here was the thing: Snape's cruelty to Potter was not the ordinary cruelty of a Slytherin master toward a Gryffindor. It was personal. It was old. It had the weight of a grudge carried so long it had become a habit, and underneath the grudge, Draco could have sworn he caught something else. Something he couldn't name.
He filed it as odd, as he'd filed the Ledger's stillness around Potter, and the goblin's words, and a dozen other things he couldn't yet string together.
What is it about Potter, he thought, that everyone with power keeps looking at him like that?
The bell rang, and the class drained out of the dungeon, and Snape said, without turning around, "A moment, Mr Malfoy."
Draco stopped.
The door closed behind the last student, and the dungeon was suddenly very quiet and very cold, and Snape stood at his desk with his back to Draco, sorting vials with long, pale fingers.
"I have known your father for many years," Snape said, not turning. "Lucius Malfoy was memorable. And I see a great deal of him in you."
Draco waited. There was a "but" coming. He could feel it, like a storm building.
"More than a great deal," Snape continued. "Almost suspiciously much."
He turned then, and looked at Draco across the desk, and Draco understood that the appraisal from the start of the lesson had never once stopped.
"A first-year who can answer questions I reserve for my N.E.W.T. students. A boy who moves through this castle as if he has already walked it." Snape's eyes narrowed. "I will not ask how, Mr Malfoy. I am not Dumbledore, forever poking at things that are not mine to poke. But I will tell you this." He stepped closer, and his voice dropped to a murmur that was somehow louder than a shout. "Whatever it is you have, and however you came by it, you would do well to decide what you intend to do with it before someone else decides for you."
Draco's face stayed smooth. Inside, his heart was going like a hammer.
"I intend to do well in your class, sir," he said, in the Malfoy voice, the smooth one that never cracked.
Snape held his gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then he said, "Yes. I'm sure you do." And he turned back to his vials, and Draco understood he was dismissed.
He walked out of the dungeon with his spine straight and his pulse loud.
All the way back to the common room, Snape's voice turned over and over in his head. Decide what you intend to do with it, before someone else decides for you.
Snape hadn't asked how he knew. Snape hadn't asked anything, really. He had only looked at Draco the way he'd looked at him all lesson, weighing him, and then offered a warning like a coin flipped across a table.
It was the first time anyone had looked at Draco Malfoy and seen that there was more there than a boy. And instead of running, that someone had simply waited for him to decide what he was.
Draco didn't know whether to be flattered or terrified.
He settled on both.