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Summary
Draco Malfoy is eleven years old the first time he asks if he'll ever be wanted, and it takes him six years to gather the courage to ask again.
Sixth year; a Vow he cannot break; a Cabinet he cannot stop mending; a task carved with Dumbledore's face attached to it. None of it was supposed to leave room for anything else...
Harry was supposed to be watching Malfoy. He is. He has also begun to see the boy beneath...tired, cornered, quietly drowning in a war he never chose. And somewhere between a shared detention and a locked bathroom door, watching became something else entirely.
Something neither of them has a word for yet.
A slow-burn retelling of The Half-Blood Prince, except this time, Draco is not alone in the dark.
Time knows how this ends. It does not know what it costs. And that only makes what is coming harder to survive.
Some boys are forged into blades.
This one only ever wanted to be held.