Authors Note: This story was written for my friend and beta Robert, who is turning 18 on the 30th. I'm very pleased to present him with this birthday gift and hope he likes it! It started life as a oneshot, but quickly turned into a short story and will probably be around 5 chapters in total. Many thanks to my beta's Laurel and Shannon!!

The title was inspired because of its double meaning, one as a term of endearment and two as another term for a voodoo doll.

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It was fate that brought him past the tiny fading pink doll shop that afternoon. Fate that made him stumble on a broken cobblestone and nearly fall, catching himself with one pale hand on the store's windowsill.

The face of Harry Potter stared back at him, grinning and proud, holding his wand aloft as his famous scar stood glaringly apparent against his sun-kissed skin.

It wasn't actually Harry Potter, of course, but rather a likeness of him in doll form. They were being sold in various wizarding shops since the war had ended, along with Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley sidekick dolls and jumpers emblazoned with idiotic catchphrases like 'I watched Harry Potter defeat Voldemort and all I got was this lousy tee-shirt'.

More annoying than the fact that they bothered selling these things was the fact that people actually bought them.

He couldn't go anywhere without seeing Potter's face following him, from dolls and tee shirts to the cover of magazines, he was everywhere. He dealt with it better than he had expected to and mostly ignored the pomp and circumstance, but that day was different.

Draco had just recently picked out a new book from his father's library. He was allowed to choose one book on dark magic per year and study it as much as he wished throughout the year before having to return it and choose another. Everyone thought that Lucius merely relied on dark arts for his magic, but he never allowed Draco to focus on dark magic over light, and believed that a well rounded wizard was the most powerful wizard.

Normally this would have meant nothing and Draco would have gone about his way, cursing the stone that tripped him and sneering at the store clerk that stepped outside to check on him, but the book he chose from his father's secret collection just three days before made all the difference in the world.

Fate is funny that way.

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The Great Hall was filled with the chatter of students as they ate breakfast and talked of the previous night's activities, or who had done what class assignments, and even occasionally about the war. The summer after Harry defeated Voldemort had been one of Harry's most difficult times, going from funeral to funeral, all the while trying to avoid journalists and his growing sea of new fans.

It had been with a heavy sense of dread that he agreed to go back to Hogwarts and complete his final year along side all the others that who missed the year during the height of the war. His fear was unfounded however; as he boarded the Hogwarts Express he was greeted with the same amount of awe mixed with casual intrigue he had been shown in previous years.

Apparently the summer had rid them of their fascination with him and they had all moved onto more relevant topics.

He was thrilled to find out that the majority of the students had moved through the mourning phase, gotten over the exciting chatter about the boy hero and his daring feats and they were just as eager to put the entire ordeal behind them as Harry was.

It was promising to be the most boring year he would ever spend at his beloved school, and Harry couldn't be happier about it.

Except for one minor detail.

"Harry, really," Hermione chastised. "Have you even heard a single word I've said?"

"Sure, sure," Harry replied noncommittally, his attention was otherwise occupied on a certain blonde Slytherin who was talking animatedly with his housemates.

"If you keep staring at the ferret your eyes might catch on fire, mate," Ron teased.

Harry merely huffed and violently sliced into his crepe. "I just can't believe McGonagall would let him come back," he muttered angrily.

"Harry, we've been over this a thousand times since the term started. Yes, it sucks, yes he's a slimy git who doesn't deserve a second chance, but he got one, and now it's time for you to get over it," Hermione lectured severely. She had heard about enough of Harry's whining about Malfoy to last her a lifetime and didn't understand why Harry couldn't just be happy to be alive and not under Voldemort's rule.

Ever since they arrived and saw Draco, one of the few Slytherin's to attend Hogwarts for their makeup classes, Harry had been practically stalking the boy, trying to figure out what dastardly plan he was concocting and informing Ron and Hermione of his progress, or lack thereof.

Ron, in one of his brief moments of perceptiveness, noted that Harry needed a cause, and if one didn't exist, that he may well just make one up. Ron hated Malfoy just as much as the next Gryffindor, but even he could see a change in the boy since the war that was seemingly lost on Harry.

Harry sighed in frustration and took a bite of his breakfast. "I just don't understand. I've been watching him at meals, watching him in class, and even making sure he's not out wandering the halls at night-"

"Like you?" Hermione interrupted with narrowed eyes.

Harry simply ignored her and pressed on. "But I can't figure out what he's up to."

"Maybe that's because he's not up to anything," Ron offered logically.

"Malfoy is always up to something. You two didn't believe me last time either and look at what happened," Harry scoffed. He knew it was an unfounded argument. Draco had been up to something, but he now knew that Dumbledore would have died regardless of whether or not he had caught the Slytherin earlier. Still, the boy had managed to cause a great deal of havoc by letting Death Eaters into the castle.

Hermione and Ron knew this as well and chose to ignore Harry's dig. "Have you finished your potions homework?" she asked, changing the subject to something more palatable, for her at least.

"Nearly," Harry replied.

"Harry, really! It's due in an hour," she reprimanded. "You're letting this obsession with Malfoy ruin your marks."

"I'm not obsessed with him," Harry protested. "And what's Slughorn going to do to me? I'm his favorite," he boasted.

"I thought you said you wouldn't be using your status as Voldemort Defeater to help you gain special treatment," Ron warned.

"This is hardly the same thing. I was Slughorn's favorite before the war," he countered.

"It seems like the same thing to me," Ron muttered, still a little envious of his famous friend.

"It's my fault," purred the delicate voice of Harry's girlfriend, who had caught the end of the conversation as she walked over to sit beside Harry. "I kept him up rather late last night," she added with a wink toward Harry.

"Gin!" Harry exclaimed, ignoring Ron's groan. "Good timing as always." Harry was happy to dodge the minor argument, though slightly less happy to see Ginny.

She had in fact kept him up very late the night before, but not the way she alluded to. Right after the war, the two began dating and things had gone brilliantly until she pressed him to take the next step and he suddenly found he couldn't. He had fantasized about his first time with Ginny, but when it came to it, he just wasn't able to get aroused for the actual act.

The first time, though mortifying, had at least been easily explained away as nerves, and the second time explained away as performance anxiety after failing the first time, but after over a dozen attempts to make love to his stunning and effervescent girlfriend, Harry began to wonder if there was much more to it than nerves.

For her part Ginny had been a pillar of understanding, going so far as to tell Harry that she loved him no matter what and that she wouldn't tell a soul that he was incapable of getting an erection.

Although, that wasn't entirely true. Harry had in fact woken up on several occasions, each time after cloudy erotic dreams, with his sheets soaked through from mysterious erotic dreams he was having most nights lately. He kept this information from Ginny though, so as not to hurt her feelings. It was obviously someone else that he dreamed of, though he could never remember who by the time he woke up.

As she practically crawled into his lap, Harry tried to focus on her, and not the laughing table of Slytherin's. It was no use though, for he could hear Draco's distinctive voice like a bell across the hall and honed in on it naturally when he heard his own name.

Harry looked over to see Malfoy staring up at him, his stormy eyes gleaming with some mischief still unknown to Harry. With a mocking smirk the boy raised his palm and after pressing is lips to his own fingertips blew Harry a kiss, sending his Slytherin friends into a bout of uproarious laughter as they clapped him on the back for his minor torment.

Something about the act, however, rankled Harry more than it should have and his face flushed a deep crimson which made Draco's friends laugh even harder. Not Draco though, no he seemed content to just continue watching him from across the room. Harry felt stuck, drawn by Malfoy's turbulent eyes to keep meeting his gaze until Malfoy broke his trance with a wink. Harry blushed even harder at this and swiftly turned away to try and absorb himself in whatever mundane conversation was happening between his friends.

"Would you just bleeding ask her already?" Ginny ordered her brother.

"I have!" Ron shouted, clearly not happy with being ambushed. "She said no."

"I said no because you asked me out of obligation, not because you wanted to," Hermione huffed.

"All I said was that since we were sort of dating, maybe we should show up at the ball together," Ron corrected. "What's so bad about that?"

"Very romantic, Ron," Ginny chastised.

"Exactly," Hermione agreed and went back to her studies.

"What are you guys talking about?" Harry asked distractedly. Even though he was no longer looking at the Slytherin table, it felt like Draco's mocking eyes still followed him and it took all of his willpower not to look up to see if he was right.

"The Yule Ball, which I might add you still haven't asked me to, Harry James Potter," she criticized.

Harry cringed at the use of his full name. He hated when Ginny did that. She was doing it more often lately and it made her sound just like Mrs. Weasley; he felt like a little boy about to be spanked. Part of him wondered whether it might be better to look up at Malfoy again and let him continue to wink and blow kisses at him, anything to keep from having this conversation.

"Ginny," he began, clearing his throat to try and buy himself some more time. "Would you like to go to the dance with me?" he asked with all the gentlemanly charm he could muster.

"I would love to," she cooed, batting her eyelashes demurely and winding her arm around his shoulders, planting a kiss on the corner of his lips.

Without thinking Harry let his eyes flick over to Malfoy for just a moment and he noticed that the boy was frowning at his and Ginny's display of affection. Before he knew it, he was kissing Ginny squarely on the lips, making his tongue flick across her bottom lip, all the while knowing that Draco was watching the show.

"Hermione, would you like to go to the dance with me?" Ron asked, jarring Harry out of his lapse of reason.

She only laughed harshly at him and got up from the table. "You'll have to do better than that! You can't just copy Harry, Ronald," she scoffed before storming from the great hall in a huff.

Ginny leapt up and followed her, blowing Harry a kiss as she left, a kiss that did not make his face heat up like it had when Malfoy did it. Harry assured himself it was just because she meant it, whereas Malfoy was just being a prat.

Ron looked at Harry in dismay, his shoulders slumped and his fork only scooped up half the food it would have normally which indicated something was very wrong. "I never know what to do," he complained. "She's always upset about something, and no matter what I say, I just seem to make it worse."

"Welcome to the world of dating, mate," Harry chuckled.

"Ginny is far lower maintenance than Mione though," Ron countered. "I mean, at least she said yes."

Harry shrugged, thoroughly disagreeing with Ron's assessment, but he could hardly gripe about how bitchy and pushy his own sister got. "Maybe you should do something special for her. It's Hogsmeade weekend this weekend, maybe you should take her somewhere nice and ask her then?" he suggested.

Ron nodded and grinned. "Thanks mate, maybe I'll take her to Madam Puddifoot's."

Harry cringed at the name of the tiny teashop he had taken Cho to for their Valentine's Day date, but nodded all the same. Maybe Hermione would find it romantic rather than repulsive as he had.

"We better get a move on, don't want to be late to Potions," Harry offered, scooping up his books and sparing one last glance toward the Slytherin table. A shiver ran down his spine as he realized that Malfoy was still watching him, his cold eyes trailing him out of the room.

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Draco stretched along his green velvet sofa. It was his sofa, the one he had claimed on his first day at Hogwarts and no one, not even any of the seventh years, ever dared challenge him for it in all that time. He had spent most of his school career untouchable simply because of who his father was and how his family was favored by the Dark Lord.

Things had changed drastically since then.

The Dark Lord was no more and his father had little favor with anyone these days. Still, Draco's position at school hadn't changed too much since he returned, the major difference being that he had far less minions to boss around.

Out of his personal bodyguards, only Goyle was left. Even Pansy had been sent to Durmstrang by her grandmother for her final year after both of her parents were sent to Azkaban for their activities in the war. Thankfully Draco hadn't needed to worry as much as he did for the same fate was not thrust upon him. Someone somewhere was still loyal to his father and got the entire lot of them off scot-free. He imagined the same thing must have happened when he was a small boy, back when his father pretended to have been under the imperius curse at the time of Voldemort's first rise to power.

He sighed as he thought of his diminished influence in wizarding society and then Potter's gleaming gemstone eyes. The two were always correlated somehow; in fact, there wasn't an iota of his existence that couldn't somehow be pinned to Harry Potter. It was both frustrating and intriguing. It made him curious to find out how much of Potter's life could be pinned back to him.

He didn't need to wonder for long, however, as deep down he already knew the answer and had since their first day of school. The truth of it was that Draco mattered very little to Potter, and that fact infuriated him. Draco didn't think it was fair that the raven-haired Gryffindor could have such an affect on him, while the opposite was true for Potter.

He wished he could change that fact but even causing a scene as he had done that morning at breakfast, had no effect on the hero whatsoever. That's not to say it was a totally useless gesture. Seeing Harry blush had been worth the effort.

It wasn't until he passed that dreadful doll shop as he made his way to the castle from Hogsmeade station on their first day back that he realized there might be something he could do that would affect Potter.

He had read page after page of the book he had borrowed from his father. It was called 'Tools of the Bokor, and Other Vodou Talismans' and Draco absorbed it like a sponge as he memorized each passage and finally he thought he might be ready to enact some of his new knowledge.

Draco consulted his pocket watch and confirmed with a quick look around the common room that everyone should have gone to bed. With careful and silent movements he got up from the sofa and paced toward a small armchair until he stepped on a floorboard that creaked and gave under his foot.

He knelt down and pulled the edge of the rug up and pried the board loose. He reached into the crevice below and pulled out the items he had been carefully and secretly gathering for more than a month now.

As he pulled each of them from his secret cubby he checked them off his list. A branch of holly and a branch of hawthorn, four mallowsweet leaves and a dozen sage leaves, a stargazer lily picked on a full moon and a lock of thick black hair all sat next to him on the floor as he replaced the plank.

He pulled the last two items from his robe pockets, one was the book he had borrowed from his father's collection and one was the doll with the likeness of Potter that he had bought from the doll shop in Hogsmeade that first day. It had been a task to purchase it unseen by any of the other students, but once he had it the doll never left his sight.

With careful and practiced motions he set his tools around him. The art of vodou was more akin to ritual magic than the kind of magic modern wizards used on a daily basis, but the magic of a ritual was much stronger than anything you could conjure with a wand because it needed intent, not just muttered words, swishes and flicks.

He lit the leaves of both plants on fire and let the fumes clear his mind so that he could focus more completely on the Gryffindor he wished to ensnare.

Draco concentrated on his victim as he picked up both branches, pulling away the exterior bark, peeling back the fibrous strands of each and wrapping them around the doll like rope. This bound his wand to Harry's and vice versa, but with the hawthorn on top, Draco would be the controller of this particular magic.

Then he carefully tucked the brilliant pink and white lily into the folds of the rope, as a symbol of purity and innocence, as well as Harry's mother's namesake, it would prevent Draco from doing any harm to the Gryffindor he coveted.

It was a fairly last minute decision to include the flower in his ritual, but he thought it prudent to make sure he could never get too carried away with his fun.

The last, but certainly not least, part was to add the lock of hair. It had been nearly impossible to secure the small piece from Harry's own head. Harry would have never willing let Draco have it of course, thus Draco had to sneak into enemy territory and into Harry's bedchamber to snip it off while he was sleeping.

Getting in hadn't been terribly difficult, just a stolen password and a few placating words to the fat lady, but once he was there he found himself dumbfounded by Harry's peaceful and angelic form as he slept in his oversized burgundy bed. Draco just wanted to crawl in with him and sleep there beside the attractive boy.

It was a hard revelation for Draco when he discovered that he was in fact infatuated with Potter. Once he acknowledged it though the logic seemed simple enough. Malfoy's were always drawn to power, and who was more powerful than Potter? It certainly didn't hurt matters that the Gryffindor was always in top physical shape, had that messy 'just rolled out of bed' hair and those soul searching green eyes.

He found that prying himself away from the sleeping beauty was much harder than sneaking in, but he managed to get his lock of raven hair all the same and as he twined it with the rope and flower he felt the magic of his ritual complete.

As the doll's eyes began glowing an otherworldly green, Draco knew that Harry was now completely at his disposal, and he couldn't wait to test his new toy.

Authors Note: The challenge was: Harry hates Draco, pure and simple. However, Draco acquires/creates a Harry voodoo doll and uses it to show the other boy how love and hate can be easily confused. In essence, seduction by voodoo doll

Random things to include: strawberry ice cream, a pocket watch, snow, apples, scorpions, and a blender.

I have only included one of these keywords in this chapter, but they will all be used within the course of this story. I hope you all enjoy it (Robert in particular) As always there is a header for this fic on my yahoo group which you can find the link for in my profile. Please join, I love lots of readers! (I'm greedy that way!!)