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The Dove With Razor Claws	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 2318 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Title: The Dove With Razor Claws
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst, internalized homophobia, AU (Voldemort died in the battle at the Ministry)
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Summary: In sixth year, following the destruction of the Dark Lord and the Horcrux inside Harry, both Harry and Draco are trying to figure out who they really are.
Author’s Notes: This is for a request by bicrim, who asked for your take on an old school, classic H/D. Think "Unthinkable Thoughts" by Aiden Lynch, that 2003-2005 era. School age, usually set in 5th or 6th year, just figuring out their sexualities, coming to realize that they can learn to not hate each other. Lots of teenage angst, good stuff. This is AU because, admittedly, I couldn’t think of a way to do the same kind of story while acknowledging HBP. This will be a five-shot, updated every Wednesday.
The Dove With Razor Claws
Chapter One—After the Thunder
            Draco walked slowly into the school, past the thestral-drawn carriages. He could have ridden in them. He knew that. All his friends—well, the ones other than Vince and Gregory, who had chosen to flee Britain with their fathers—were riding in them.
            But he wanted to walk alone, and think about how he could now see thestrals, and his father was in prison.
            He finally looked up and around at the familiar stone walls of Hogwarts. He thought the only thing that was really different was a lighter note in some of the chattering voices around him. He supposed people were glad that they didn’t have to worry about the Dark Lord and the war anymore.
            But Draco also noticed the little silence that followed him around; people stopped talking as he walked past. He tried to act like he didn’t notice. Before, the silence would have delighted him. It would have meant people were thinking about his father and his family, their money and what Draco could do to punish them.
            Instead, they were thinking about how his father had fallen from grace and his family didn’t have any power left. They still had the Manor and most of their money, because his mother had brought a lot from the Black family when she married his father and the Ministry couldn’t touch that when she hadn’t been involved in any wrongdoing. But they didn’t have the respect left.
            If they were Slytherins, they might be thinking about taking over the power in their House from Draco.
            Draco just ignored them as best he could, and walked over and sat down at the Slytherin table. He had a lot to think about, and power struggles in Slytherin weren’t the most important thing. For one thing, he had to decide if he was going to stay at Hogwarts at all.
            He honestly didn’t know why he had come back, except that the silence following him around was better than the dead silence of the Manor.
            He looked up when he heard a chuckle from the Gryffindor table across the way. It was Weasley, who eyed him like Draco had turned into pudding. Draco just turned to the side. He wasn’t interested in taunting Weasley, either.
            Well, that’s at least one thing I’ve figured out I don’t want to do.
*
            “Look at Malfoy! Someone took the prance out of his step, huh?”
            Harry shrugged, not sure what Ron wanted him to say. Harry still had…well, a lot on his mind. Two months weren’t really enough to get over Sirius’s death or Voldemort’s sudden defeat in the duel with Dumbledore.
            After Voldemort had cast the Killing Curse at Harry, and Harry hadn’t died.
            Two months weren’t enough to get over the fact of having been some sort of bloody immortality anchor for Voldemort.
            Harry glanced once at the Head Table. Dumbledore wasn’t there yet. He had explained a little to Harry at the end of last year about Horcruxes, what they were and how he had started thinking that Voldemort had more than the diary. But he had said most of the explanation would have to wait for the school year.
            For the first time, Harry wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear more.
            “Harry? Are you okay?”
            That was Hermione. Harry smiled at her tiredly. He appreciated that Hermione wanted to make him feel better. Her letters had been one of the few things that cheered him up when he was living at the Dursleys’, sometimes staring at the walls for minutes at a time and then realizing what he was doing.
            But he couldn’t say that he was okay, and he didn’t know if he wanted her fussing over him right now. He offered a shrug, which made Hermione bite her lip, but then nod.
            “You know I’m right here if you need me,” she whispered, and sat back.
            Harry glanced across the Great Hall, noticing that several Slytherins were missing from their table. Well, that wasn’t really a surprise. A lot of people had fled Britain right after the battle. Harry supposed they thought it was for the best. And if his parents had fled, he would have wanted to go with them...
            He shook his head. He had gone with his parents into hiding, even if he didn’t remember any of it. And look how that had ended.
            Malfoy was sitting almost alone. He caught Harry’s eye and gave him the same sort of dull stare. Harry nodded to him, because why not? He supposed Malfoy could hate him, but all Harry had for him was oceans of indifference, the way he did for most people who weren’t sitting right beside him.
            “Harry! What are you doing?”
            That was Ron. Harry shrugged at him, too, and sat back. Dumbledore had appeared at the Head Table, almost glowing with magic and happiness as he beamed at everyone. Harry relaxed. At least someone could be happy about the end of the war without acting like he was the one personally responsible.
            “Greetings, students!” Dumbledore swept his wand back and forth, and enormous piles of food appeared on all the plates. “Normally I would make announcements at this time, but joy does not need words. Eat hearty, and listen for announcements at breakfast tomorrow!”
            Some of the Gryffindors laughed. Harry managed a smile. He picked at some of the food on his plate, but there were unusual things he’d never seen before, and Hermione did coax him into trying some of the cheeses that were almost slumping off the plates and a bowl of light, fluffy balls of—something. Harry had no idea what they were, only that they tasted of citrus.
            He had almost finished the bowl when a small paper crane flew over to him. Harry stared at it, and then blinked and grabbed it. Unfolding it, he recognized Dumbledore’s handwriting.
            Please come see me as soon as possible, Harry. I’m partial to Grinning Gobstones.
            Harry nodded and glanced at the Head Table. Dumbledore had left without him even noticing. He stood up and with a mutter of “Dumbledore” at Ron and Hermione, left. Other people stared after him.
            Well, let them. It was none of their business.
            Harry was walking quietly along the corridor towards the gargoyle when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around, and there was Malfoy, taking the same path. Malfoy only held up a paper crane by way of explanation.
            “The Headmaster wants to see me.” Malfoy’s words almost blurred, he was speaking them so fast. “He said—what’s this about Grinning Gobstones? What does it mean? Is he going to tell me that I can’t—”
            Harry blinked, and wondered what Malfoy was going on about. But he said, “Dumbledore isn’t going to tell you that you can’t do anything. He wouldn’t have asked you to be here at the same time I was if he was going to tell you something like that.”
            That didn’t seem to have occurred to Malfoy. He relaxed with a blink and swatted his hair back behind his ears. “You really think so?”
            “Yes,” said Harry, as mildly as he could, and walked up to the gargoyle. He wanted to tell Malfoy that Dumbledore wasn’t the bullying sort of person and wouldn’t tell him something bad in front of Harry, but he didn’t think he could make the argument. He was tired of arguments.
            And Malfoy might see Dumbledore differently. He didn’t know.
            “Grinning Gobstones,” Harry told the gargoyle, which seemed to glare at Malfoy before it leaped aside. Malfoy gaped a little. Harry rode the staircase up with him in silence, and knocked on the door of the office with Malfoy behind him.
            “Ah, come in, boys.”
            Right, not a mistake, then, Harry thought, as he opened the door and stepped in. He did hope that Dumbledore wasn’t going to talk about the Horcruxes in front of Malfoy, but again, he couldn’t think of a reason why Dumbledore would do that.
*
            The Headmaster’s office was full of delicate, hanging crystals. Draco blinked at them. They dangled from the ceiling and the shelves and the perch that the man’s phoenix sat on. He had the impression they were new.
            From the way Potter’s eyes widened slightly, maybe they were. He sat down in one of the chairs in front of Dumbledore’s desk, though—the more comfortable one. Draco scowled and hurried into the other.
            Dumbledore clasped his hands in front of him and studied them both with twinkling eyes. Draco tried to brace himself. He wanted to believe Dumbledore wasn’t going to revoke his permission for Draco to attend Hogwarts, but maybe it was the sort of thing he would think was great fun to do in front of Harry Potter.
            “I called you here because you are both in some danger from the remaining Death Eaters,” said Dumbledore calmly. “Harry, for obvious reasons.” Potter just tilted his head, his fringe falling in front of his eyes. “But you, young Mr. Malfoy, because they consider that your father was a traitor and a failure, and they seem intent on making sure you pay the price for his crimes, since they cannot get at him in Azkaban.”
            Draco closed his eyes. He should have anticipated this, he told himself dully. Of course he should have. It was too easy for him to walk back into the Manor and listen to silence for the rest of the summer.
            “That means,” Dumbledore was saying when Draco opened his eyes and looked at him again, “that I must ask you both to tolerate the presence of guards whenever you are outside. The professors will be aloft on brooms all through your Quidditch games, watching you, and at least one will need to be outside during Quidditch practice. That is a duty we intend to rotate.” He beamed at both of them. “And expeditions into the Forbidden Forest are absolutely, well, forbidden.” He chuckled.
            Draco wished he could muster up a smile. Potter had mustered up a protest. “What about Hogsmeade?”
            Dumbledore sighed softly. “I am afraid I will have to restrict you from moving around in the village, boys.”
            Draco stared at his hands, and nodded. He knew the village was watched and patrolled, but not enough. Not when you were talking about Death Eaters on the loose, which included some who were related to him.
            His Aunt Bellatrix had escaped the Department of Mysteries, after all.
            “And Care of Magical Creatures class?” Potter’s voice was subdued.
            “Oh, Hagrid has a new pet which should serve as a suitable guardian,” said Dumbledore, and leaned forwards as if about to confess a secret. “I find myself more than a little intimidated by it!”
            Draco shuddered. Wonderful. He had been considering dropping the Magical Creatures class anyway, since he didn’t feel like being glared at by half the people in it, but this made it a certainty.
            “How long until the Ministry thinks it can capture the Death Eaters?” Potter asked abruptly
            “At least a few months, my boy,” said Dumbledore, and Draco almost smiled at the sudden tender tone in his voice. Dumbledore might call them both “boys,” but all he had to do was change it a little, and Draco knew who he really cared about. “I am sorry that you should have your freedom so restricted after suffering in the name of freeing our world, but I also do not wish to see you lose the life you fought so hard for.”
            Potter made a choking noise. Draco stared at him, and saw that his face had gone pale.
            Wait. Potter is suicidal? It seemed absurd, but Draco couldn’t imagine a lot of reactions that would prompt Potter to go pale when someone was talking about him being alive.
            Dumbledore apparently could, because he said briskly, “So! Confine your movements to Hogwarts for the moment, and inform your professors of when you intend to practice Quidditch.” He clapped his hands briskly and stood up. “You should stay behind, Harry. You and I have much to talk about.”
            Draco knew a dismissal when he heard one. He stood up, vaguely disappointed. He didn’t want to be sent home from Hogwarts, of course not, but once again, he was just an afterthought to Potter.
            He glanced over his shoulder once before he left. Potter was sitting hunched, head hanging, on the edge of his chair cushion, and Dumbledore had let all the twinkle fade from his eyes. He looked almost as if he’d start lecturing.
            Start lecturing him on how ridiculous he is to be that upset when my father is in prison for life and no one even bothered to care that I was in danger from Death Eaters until I came here, Draco thought, and abrupt passion flared in the center of his chest. He has to stay close to the castle for a few months, boo-hoo. While probably no one’s going to care much if I die, and they won’t care at all when I go home, if someone finds their way past the Manor’s protections.
            Draco clenched his hands into fists as he rode the moving staircase down. His mother had talked to him often during the summer about how he had to be more adult, because outsiders mustn’t guess how much the Malfoy family had suffered from his father’s imprisonment.
            But Draco didn’t care about that right now. He wanted to prove that some things hadn’t changed, just the same way that the Headmaster favoring Potter hadn’t.
            I’m going to make sure that Potter doesn’t spend the next few months getting to stare tragically at the wall and contemplate his horrible existence of being worshipped. He’s going to have other things to think about.
            Draco didn’t know what those things were yet. They had to be better than his plans to get Potter back in the past, which had never worked.
            But he would find something. And Potter would have to wake up.
            He doesn’t get everything, while I get nothing.
*
            “You have questions about Horcruxes, I know,” Dumbledore said softly. “And why I allowed Tom to cast a Killing Curse at you instead of moving you out of the way.”
            Yes, Harry had questions. And yes, part of the overwhelming misery he was walking around in came from the idea that the Headmaster didn’t care at all about his life, as opposed to what his death could do for the wizarding world.
            But he hardly wanted to ask the questions. It meant he would have to wake up. Pay attention.
            Do something other than drift.
            Now that he was here, though, he knew Dumbledore wouldn’t just let him walk away. So he looked at Dumbledore under his fringe and asked simply, “Why?”
            Dumbledore nodded gently, his eyes distant and wise. “Because you were an accidental Horcrux, and the part of Tom’s soul that attached to you—the night your parents died—was not prepared in the same way as all the other Horcruxes were. Those required deliberate murder and the preparation of a valued object. Dark rituals, as well. Some things I think you have no desire to know.”
            Harry shook his head at once. He didn’t particularly care to hear how Tom Riddle’s diary had come to be, and he especially didn’t want to hear about what he would have been like if he—
            Bile crept up his throat. He swallowed it down.
            Dumbledore nodded. “Well. Those objects that became Horcruxes were utterly corrupted by the bits of soul in them. They served Voldemort’s will. Much as the memory of Tom Riddle was still trying to unleash the basilisk on the school, for instance.
            “But you, my dear boy.” And Harry could hardly bear the appreciation and love in Dumbledore’s eyes, so he ended up staring at his hands instead. “Because of your strength of will, because of the accidental nature of the Horcrux you became, and because, I also think, of your opposition to Voldemort from the moment you became aware of him, you never served his will. The shard of soul was separate from your own, and destroying it could not destroy you, the way that the destruction of every other Horcrux also ruptured its vessel—”
            “You found them and destroyed them all, sir, right?” Harry interrupted. He was suddenly shivering uncontrollably. “You couldn’t have missed one—”
            “No,” said Dumbledore gently. “Tom’s reaction, the way he fell unconscious when his Killing Curse destroyed the shard of soul embedded in you, proves that. He had not reacted in such a way to the destruction of any other Horcrux. You were the last one, and the shock of suddenly losing his immortality powered that reaction.”
            Harry swallowed and nodded. The shivering fit was gone. “Sir,” he said, and the question that had haunted him came out of his mouth without him willing it, “why did it have to be him? Why couldn’t you just have done something to get the shard of soul out of me yourself?”
            Dumbledore sighed deeply. “My dear boy. It is possible that I could have.”
            Possible. In that word, Harry thought he read the answer, and he would have been content to have Dumbledore shut up and let the question go.
            But Dumbledore was still talking. “I didn’t know for sure. I only knew that, from the mechanics of Horcruxes as I understood them, and from your mother’s protection and love, you possibly had a chance at life if Tom was the one to cast the Killing Curse at you. And it had to be the Killing Curse. The first spell that you survived, that you only survived thanks to Lily’s sacrifice.”
            “I understand,” Harry whispered. Maybe Dumbledore could have done it with a different spell, but he hadn’t wanted to take the chance. And there was also, always, the possibility that Dumbledore couldn’t find it in himself to cast the Killing Curse.
            You have to mean them! shrieked Bellatrix’s voice in the back of his head.
            Harry scratched at his scar, although it hadn’t hurt since the moment when Voldemort had fallen to Dumbledore’s spell, a golden spell that seemed to wrap around him and just pick him up and drop him dead. It was habit, though.
            “Now, Harry, another thing.”
            Harry tensed, but kept his head bowed. He wondered if Dumbledore was going to talk about Harry’s feelings on being a Horcrux, and if Harry wanted him to.
            “I am afraid you will have to return to the Dursleys the next summer as well.”
            Harry felt as though all the ash covering his emotions had blown away, and revealed the explosion waiting underneath it. He lifted his head, and Dumbledore fell silent and blinked at him. It was something Harry had never seen before.
            “You might have wanted me to return there this summer because of Death Eaters,” he whispered. “But you said they’d be caught in a few months. You said.”
            “The Ministry hopes they will be, of course.” Dumbledore was frowning slightly. “But they can’t be sure, and—”
            “And,” Harry continued, his voice soaring in spite of himself, “they’ll be caught then. And I’ll be of age next July. You can’t send me back there. You can’t.”
            “Harry, it will only be for a few weeks. You need the extra protection that your mother’s blood provides.”
            “They starve me,” said Harry without preamble. “My cousin beat me up every day when we were younger. I slept in a cupboard. They made me stay there until I was eleven, and then they only changed things because they thought you were watching!” He stood up. “But you weren’t watching, were you? You didn’t care!”
            “Harry,” Dumbledore whispered. His face was white with—shock? Harry didn’t know. But he was bitterly glad to see it.
            “I only stayed there this past summer because I needed to think about things away from the wizarding world,” Harry snarled at him. “I would have moved out in a hot second if Sirius was still alive. And if I could have made myself. Now, I will. I’m never going back there again. Never.”
            “I had no idea,” Dumbledore whispered.
            Harry shook his head, refusing the disclaimer. “You had to have some idea. When you knew they hated magic, when you saw how thin I was, when you said that you knew you were condemning me to ‘ten dark and difficult years.’” He still remembered those words from the talk that Dumbledore had given him in his office after Voldemort’s death, at the same time he told Harry about the prophecy and Horcruxes. “And I don’t care. I’ll run away, if I have to and the Death Eaters are still after me. I’ll disappear. But I am never staying with my aunt and uncle again. Never, never, never.”
            Dumbledore shut his eyes. “I’m sorry, my boy,” he whispered.
            He didn’t actually say what he’s sorry for, Harry thought cynically. Whether it’s for sending me there in the first place or deciding that he’s going to make me go back.
            “Yeah,” he said. “Of course you are.” And he turned and left Dumbledore’s office without looking back.
            His heart burned in him like an ember as he went down the stairs. He knew Ron and Hermione had been worried about him, discussing if he was still in a state of shock over Sirius’s death, whether they should do something about it.
            Well, I’m back now. And I’m going to live. No Death Eaters are going to keep me from doing that. No Voldemort.
            And no Dumbledore, either.
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The Dove With Razor Claws