The easiest thing Draco bought all term was a friend. The hardest thing he'd learn was that you can't.
It happened in the corridor outside the Slytherin common room, three weeks into the term, and it happened so fast that Draco almost missed what he was doing.
A first-year he barely knew, a small nervous boy whose name he'd never bothered to learn, had been backed against the wall by two third-years who wanted his pocket money. The older boys were not especially clever about it, and not especially cruel, which was somehow worse. It was routine. It was the tax the strong collected from the weak, and it had been going on in this house for a thousand years.
The first-year's face was white. His hands were shaking. The third-years were enjoying the slowness of it, the way the fear drew out.
Draco had walked past a hundred versions of this scene without slowing down. His father would have walked past it too, and said nothing, because a Malfoy did not waste himself on other people's weaklings.
This time, he stopped.
Not out of kindness. He stopped because a cold little calculation had already run itself behind his eyes: a first-year in my debt is worth more than two third-years' pocket change.
He said, "That's enough," in the voice his father used on house-elves, and the third-years turned, and they saw who he was, and the bravado drained out of them like water out of a cracked cup. They let the boy go, and they did not argue, because arguing with a Malfoy was a kind of debt in itself, and everyone in this house knew it.
It was that easy. It was almost insulting, how easy it was.
The boy stammered his thanks, and Draco looked at him, and instead of hearing the gratitude, he heard the debt. This boy owed him now. He'd been saved, and saving, Draco was learning, was just another kind of purchase.
"Stay close to me from now on," Draco said, not unkindly. "People will bother you less."
The boy nodded, eyes wide, grateful and owned, and Draco felt the small, clean click of a transaction completed.
See? he thought. Loyalty can be bought. The Ledger's just wrong about how.
He did it again the next week. And the week after.
A Ravenclaw first-year being mocked for her accent in the library, her face burning, the older girls circling her like crows. Draco said a word, and the crows scattered. A Hufflepuff whose books kept disappearing, until Draco let it be known, offhand, that anyone touching the boy's things would answer to him. A Slytherin boy whose older brother had made his life small and miserable, and who looked at Draco afterwards the way a man looks at a door that has finally been unlocked.
Draco intervened each time, with a word here and a look there, and each time the gratitude came back to him the same way: as a debt, owed and unspoken, drawing interest.
By the end of the first month, he had a following. A small one, nothing like the crowds that gathered around Potter, but a following nonetheless. Children who sat near him at meals, who saved him a seat, who looked up when he entered a room. Debtors, every one of them.
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There was one who flinched, though. Draco noticed it one morning in the common room: a boy he'd helped, a small one with a nervous cough, and when Draco met his eye the boy looked away too fast, and there was something in the looking-away that wasn't gratitude.
Draco filed it and moved on. It didn't fit the arithmetic, so he let it go.
Pansy approved. She watched him gather them up, and her sharp little face was full of a satisfaction Draco recognised, because it was the same satisfaction he felt.
"It's working," she said, one evening in the common room. "They're all starting to see you."
"They're starting to owe me," Draco corrected, and Pansy laughed as if that were the same thing.
Theodore, across the room, did not laugh. He sat by the window, as he always did, watching, and Draco caught the flat, unreadable look on his face and could not decide what it meant, and filed it as later.
The thing that happened next, Draco did not know how to file.
It was a quiet girl. A first-year, Slytherin, so small and so silent that Draco had never once registered her name either. She came up to him after dinner, in the corridor outside the Great Hall, and she stood there twisting her hands, and she said, "Thank you."
Draco stopped. "For what?"
"For helping my brother," she said. "He's the one those older boys were hurting. The first one. He told me what you did." Her eyes were bright and very earnest. "He said you saved him. That no one ever does that. That you didn't even know him, and you saved him anyway."
Draco opened his mouth to say something smooth, something that turned her gratitude into the debt it ought to be, and nothing came out.
Because he hadn't saved her brother. Not really. He'd made a calculation. He'd seen shaking hands and a boy backed against a wall, and he'd priced the rescue at less than the loyalty it would buy. That wasn't saving. That was purchasing.
But the girl was looking at him as if he'd done something good, something he hadn't, and Draco felt, for one clear, unpleasant beat, a thing he couldn't name and didn't want to.
"You're welcome," he said, because that was what you said, and he walked away before she could see his face.
The thing followed him all the way back to the common room. He told himself it was indigestion.
And once, crossing the entrance hall with his debtors trailing behind him, Draco looked up and found Snape watching from the shadow of a doorway, black-robed and still.
The Potions master said nothing. He only looked, the way he had looked in that first lesson, weighing.
Draco, flush with his new following, misread the look entirely. He nodded, once, as one man of consequence to another, and walked on, certain he had been seen and approved.
He had been seen, certainly. Approved was something else.
That night, alone in the dormitory, Draco opened the Ledger and converted a proper sum.
Not one Galleon. Not ten. Fifty. Enough to buy a real edge, the kind that would make the third-years' fear of him a permanent thing rather than a borrowed one.
RECHARGE RECEIVED
50 Galleons → 40 Points
The rate had slipped again. He didn't let himself care.
The future-memory dimmed, as it always did, and this time Draco didn't bother to look at what was gone. There was no point. It was going anyway, one purchase at a time, and he was tired of counting the cost. That was what he told himself, anyway, lying in the dark with the lake-light moving on the ceiling.
He ran through the day instead, as he always did before sleep, and what he counted was not friends.
It was debts.
Pansy: useful. Crabbe and Goyle: muscle. The first-year whose name he'd never learned: owned. The boy who flinched: a problem to watch. The quiet girl: a loose thread, gratitude without a bill, a thing that didn't fit the arithmetic and could therefore be ignored.
And Theodore: a puzzle, still unpriced, sitting by the window with his flat, unreadable eyes, and a sentence Draco couldn't shake from the dark classroom. You don't have to do it alone.
Draco closed his own ledger and slept soundly, and he would later count that night, the night he stopped checking what he was losing and started counting what he was owed, as the moment it all began to go wrong.