"I see her," Harry Potter whispered, and Draco, hidden in the dark, felt the Ledger go very still.
He had not meant to be there. It was past curfew, and Draco was on his way back from the empty classroom on the third floor, where he'd spent an hour doing the thing he now did most nights: opening the Ledger in secret, testing its edges, counting what it would and would not sell him. The corridors were dark and the portraits were asleep, and the castle at night was a different place than the castle by day. The torches burned lower. The shadows pooled in the corners like standing water. And the whole enormous building held its breath, the way a house holds its breath when everyone in it is pretending to sleep.
Draco had grown used to moving through it quiet as a cat. He'd learned which staircases to avoid, which suits of armour creaked, which doors the caretaker checked and which he didn't. Being out past curfew had stopped frightening him a week ago, and what had replaced the fear was something else, something that sat in the pit of his stomach and never quite went away.
He heard the voice at the turning of the third-floor corridor, and he stopped dead.
It was the wrongness of it that caught him first. A voice, low and soft, where there should have been no voice at all. He pressed himself into the shadow of a suit of armour and listened, and his heart did a slow, steady climb up into his throat.
Harry Potter stood alone at the far end of the corridor, his back half-turned.
He was not talking to anyone Draco could see. He was facing a tall, dark window, the kind that showed you your own reflection if you looked too long, and he was speaking to it as if to a person.
"I see her," he said again, softer. "At night, mostly. In the glass. In the water, sometimes. She's..." A long pause, and the boy's hand came up and touched the glass, lightly, the way you'd touch a face. "She's got my eyes."
Draco went cold.
The word for what he was watching rose up, and he pushed it down, and it rose up again: the boy was not alone in the way Draco had thought. There was something there with Harry Potter, or something Harry Potter believed was there, and Draco could not decide which was worse.
He understood, of course, what the boy was talking about. Everyone knew the story of the Potters. Hallowe'en, the Dark Lord, the house at Godric's Hollow, the mother who'd thrown herself in front of her son. Harry Potter had been an orphan for ten years, and now, at eleven, he was standing in a dark corridor at midnight, telling a window about the mother he saw in the glass.
Grief, Draco thought, with the cold clarity of a boy who had seen the future and knew exactly how little grief would save anyone. The boy was cracked. Loneliness and a dead mother had done it, and now he was holding conversations with his own reflection, and Draco should have felt contempt.
He reached for contempt, as you'd reach for a familiar coat. It would not settle.
Because something was wrong with the scene, and it wasn't only the madness of it. It was the Ledger.
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Behind his eyes, the Ledger had gone completely still.
Not quiet. It had gone quiet on the train, and around the castle, the way a dog goes quiet before a storm. This was different. This was still, as if the thing behind his eyes had stopped breathing, and the something that had made it stop was standing twenty feet away, whispering to a window about a mother with green eyes.
And green eyes were the thing. Draco had seen Potter's eyes before, at Madam Malkin's and again on the train, and he had filed them as odd and moved on. But now the boy was saying the mother had his eyes, and Draco's mind snagged on it like cloth on a nail.
A mother's soul, they said in old stories, could linger where love had been.
Draco did not believe in old stories. But the Ledger was still, and it never went still for nothing.
He should have left. That was the sensible thing. There was nothing to be gained from listening to a Gryffindor's grief, and every moment he stood in that shadow was a moment he risked being caught out past curfew, and a detention would mean questions, and questions were the one thing he could not afford.
But he didn't leave. And he didn't step out, either, though some part of him, the part that was still the old Draco, wanted to, wanted to announce himself and watch Potter jump and say something cutting about ghosts and madness and the famous Boy Who Lived losing his mind in a dark corridor.
He didn't. He stayed in the shadow, and he listened, and he hated that he listened.
"Sometimes I think she's trying to tell me something," Harry said to the window, and his voice cracked, just a little, on the last word. "And I can't hear it. I can't ever hear it."
The boy's shoulders were shaking. Draco watched, and filed it: the shaking, the cracked voice, the hand flat against the cold glass.
Weakness, he thought. This is what weakness looks like.
It was the easy thought, the Malfoy thought, and he clung to it. But underneath it, cold and patient, the Ledger stayed still, and Draco could not make himself believe that what he was looking at was only a mad boy talking to a mirror.
Because the Ledger never went still for people. It did not go still for Snape, with his black appraisal. It did not go still for his father, with all his borrowed power. It had not gone still for the Sorting Hat, which had looked inside him and called him an old soul.
Only for Potter. And the train. And the castle's older magic.
And now a window, and a dead mother, and a boy with green eyes.
Draco slipped back into the dark and left before the question could catch up with him.
He told no one.
Back in the dormitory, the other boys asleep around him, Draco lay staring at the green lake-light on the ceiling and tried to make the arithmetic work, and it wouldn't.
Still draws, the goblin had said, in the marble bank, and the words surfaced now, unbidden, and he pushed them down as he'd pushed down the peacocks and the goblin's face and a dozen other things he couldn't explain.
He tried, then, to buy the answer.
It was late, and the Ledger was the only witness, and Draco was tired of not knowing. So he opened it, and he asked it, as he'd ask anything else: What is wrong with Potter?
The copperplate did not answer for a long time.
Then it gave him the same answer it had given him for courage, for loyalty, for charm.
NOT FOR SALE.
Draco lay very still.
He'd half expected it. But the refusal landed differently this time, because it wasn't a wall he'd run into. It was a door. The Ledger wasn't refusing to sell him the answer because the answer didn't exist. It was refusing because the answer was held behind something it would not let him open, the way a vault holds gold.
What is wrong with Potter? he asked again, silently, and the Ledger stayed still.
And Draco understood, for the first time, that whatever Potter was, the account behind his eyes was tied to it.
He lay awake a long time, turning it over. His family's oldest account. The Boy Who Lived. A dead mother in a window, green eyes, a silence like held breath.
What, he thought, in the dark, does my family's account have to do with the Boy Who Lived?
He did not sleep well.