Woah, elite readers spiked to 5.6%! Maybe just focusing on one story at a time and taking one day off a month to do nothing but write for it is a good plan.

Oh, and warning for the worst language so far.

They stared up at the dirty, towering, snarling monstrosity.

"A-a-a t-troll!" The girl squeaked.

"Fucking great." Harry groaned.

Birds of a Feather

The strange boy (Harry Potter of course, everyone - even Muggleborns - knew who he was) grabbed her and almost violently threw her to the side. He dove the other way and the troll's club came down where they'd been crouched a split second before.

She froze, horrified by just how close she'd come to dying. If he hadn't-

"MOVE, you crazy bitch!" The Boy Who Lived hollered, rolling to his feet and hurling a piece of stone dead at the troll's head, gaining its attention before he leaped up onto a sink - and jumped from sink to sink as the troll tried its level best to pulverise him.

"My name is Hermione!" She shrieked back, scrambling for her wand and brandishing it even as her mind blanked on spells to cast. For some reason, it kept reciting Gamp's Third Law like a gibbering broken record instead.

"Your name will be Dear Departed if you don't move your ass!" Came the accented retort, something about the vaguely American drawl making the whole situation seem more like a Hollywood movie than a scene of terror and death. As the troll smashed sink after sink, Harry almost skipped along ahead of it, light and athletic and regularly shooting sparks that seemed to irritate but not actually damage the troll's thick hide. He was distracting it though, and he was closer to the door than she was - he could escape, but he wasn't.

He was buying her time. She needed to think of something!

"Okay, okay, trolls are magical creatures of prodigious strength and immense stupidity." She recited swiftly half under her breath. "Their whiskers have magical properties, are sometimes used as wand cores, their feet have two toes and can be powerful potions ingredients-"

"Is this really the best time for a lecture?" Harry shouted, leaping up from the last sink to land on the Troll's outstretched arm and from there, running up to it's shoulder and head. A direct application of sparks to a giant eyeball made it roar in pain instead of anger and spin on the spot, thrashing as it tried to dislodge its tiny attacker. Hermione ducked the sweeping club with a shriek and barrelled on.

"They're dangerously violent and incredibly aggressive, often unpredictable and will eat human flesh if they can get it-"

"Hermione!"

"Their skin is highly resistant to magic but the males have a weak spot at the very top of their heads so that females can knock them out when they want to breed- Oh!"

"Right."

"Wingardium Leviosa!" Two voices shouted in unison, one tugging at the troll's club and the other shakily lifting several chunks of stone. As the troll stupidly tried to tug its club back, the floating stone was guided over it's head - and dropped.

Containing severely more mass than wood and several sharp edges to boot, the stone broke through the troll's weak spot and killed it dead.

Harry hit the ground and rolled as the troll keeled over, getting back to his feet with a grimace and a favoured left side.

"We did it." Hermione breathed, picking her way over to his side on trembling legs. "We're alive."

"Yep." Harry agreed, then turned to her with a challenging smirk. "Good thing we fought, huh?"

She stared at him for half a heartbeat, then laughed.

"Pillock." She grinned.

BoaF

Somehow, life got better after that. It shouldn't, she was sure, considering that when the professors caught her and Harry in the bathroom with the troll, Snape took fifty points from Gryffindor and Hufflepuff and Harry interrupted Professor McGonagall's attempt to mediate the situation by calling him a cock-sucking failure of an inbred squib.

They lost another hundred points after that, and Gryffindor and Hufflepuff both were furious with her for it.

It wasn't like she even had any classes with Harry either, to balance out the onslaught of negative attention. Ronald Weasley continued to be a prat, other students continued to mock her for volunteering answers and always being right or for reading books at the dinner table, but it just… it didn't seem to hit like it used to. It was like somehow surviving that troll had made her skin thick like no amount of bullying had ever done. She just didn't care what they said or thought. She felt settled, for the first time in as long as she could remember.

And maybe part of that was being friends with Harry too.

Well, probably friends. Definitely not not-friends, anyway. The Hufflepuff boy hero was flighty and elusive, apparently given to just not showing up for half his classes but still managing all the spells - possibly because he cast in the hallways without fear, no matter how much Filch shouted at him or points were taken from Hufflepuff. At the rate he was going, Hermione was of the opinion that he ought to be exempt from the point system entirely - it just wasn't fair to the entire rest of Hufflepuff House otherwise, who were swiftly learning to regret their jubilation at snagging the famous Boy Who Lived.

But, when they did cross paths, he always nodded to her. He addressed her as 'Hermione' when he had cause to speak to her. On the exceptionally rare occasion when he deigned to eat in the Great Hall, he'd saunter over to the Gryffindor table and pull whoever was sitting next to her out of their seat to take it for himself - staring them down in that way he had where he didn't even need a wand in his hand to come off as a threat.

It was… thrilling. There was no other word for it. Maybe Harry wasn't a normal sort of friend but she not only finally had one, she was about 98% percent certain he was responsible for the spiders that kept finding their way into Ronald's bed. Another lesson he was inadvertently teaching her - fighting back was even more okay if you didn't get caught.

She resolved to practice her spoon-to-spider transfigurations for the next time the red-headed twit started mouthing off about her being a know-it-all suck-up during a meal.

Weeks swept past, Ronald kept losing sleep and demanding he swap beds with the other boys in his dorm until they eventually got fed up with him and refused, all of which led him to be less inclined to pick on others. Christmas came and if she'd managed to wrangle Harry into telling her what he was doing for it, she'd have invited him to her place for the holiday - but the boy had vanished into the bowels of the castle, doing whatever it was that he did when he was avoiding other people.

Sometimes she wondered what had happened to him, to make him so unhappy to be here.

She told her parents all about him (omitting just how much danger she'd been in with the troll) and although they were happy for her, she sensed they were a little worried too. Still, they encouraged her to be more active about forging a friendship ("Maybe he doesn't know how to do it either." Her mum speculated.) and also seeing whether she couldn't make a connection with the other girls in her year too.

Yeah right. Cosmetic charms and boys and Witch Weekly - spare her.

It wasn't until New Years when she left the racket of her common room to find some sanctuary in the library that she finally pinned him down.

He was there in the otherwise empty room, seated way up on the fourth floor railing with nothing below him but empty space and frowning at a book that he held at arms length.

No, not frowning. Squinting.

He can't read it. She realised with something pretty close to horror. The Boy Who Lived, famous hero of the Wizarding world, confident rebel and the closest thing to a friend she had, had been struggling his way through classes all year without even being able to read the textbooks.

Any remaining shyness she had, fled. Hermione Granger was on a mission.

BoaF

"Glasses don't help." He rebuffed her well-meaning prying. "They already checked. I can see a flea on a dog a hundred meters away, but I can't read a fucking word on a piece of paper unless it's about the size of my fist."

He'd normally be embarrassed to admit to such weakness. He did feel a bit irritated that she'd found out, when he was careful never to show it in class - but it had been months now, and mostly he thought of it as the Wizards' fault for changing him back wrong, even though they said it was his for changing at all.

"What do you do for assignments then?" The bushy-haired girl pushed, obviously anxious. He snorted.

"I don't do 'em, of course." He laughed at her appalled expression.

"You don't… but you have to!"

"Not really." He denied. "They can give you a zero for classwork if you don't, but classwork is only worth, like, ten-twenty percent of your overall grade. Everything else rests on practical achievement and the end of year exams and since not everyone gets all the spells right first go, you don't even have to show 'em right away either. Just demonstrate them all by the end of the year and pass the exam and you're golden."

"But-but, but then how will you write the exam?"

He shrugged, useless eyes back on the blurred book below him.

"Dunno. They said something about a quill that writes what you say, so maybe they'll just ask the questions and I'll say my answer. They must do something for blind kids, right?"

"You're not blind," Hermione refuted instantly. He quirked a smile in her direction. No, he wasn't. He had no doubt he could see better than her, most of the time. Just not… close up, with words.

"I'll help you." She decided a second later, surprise making him lose his balance for a split second. A gasp and a fist in the back of his shirt later and he was being hauled backwards off the railing to land on his ass on the floor.

"Easy, girl." He groaned, feeling it like a punch because of his stupid weak bones.

"Sorry." She winced, before firming. "But seriously, Harry - you're my friend. And I think it's terrible that you're expected to just do your best with nothing but some inconsistent verbal lectures and, wait, what do you do for potions?"

He shrugged and ran a hand through his hair. He honestly hadn't worked out what he could do, for that. He had something of an excuse not to do the course at all, because of his eyes, but even if he could be excused from having basic brewing skills for the end of year exams, he'd still be expected to demonstrate theoretical knowledge. Since he'd rather set Snape on fire than take a lesson from him, he was shit out of luck on that front.

"Right then." The girl's voice took on a determined tone that wouldn't be out of place on a battlefield somewhere. "We're studying together, every day after class, no excuses. You can do whatever it is you normally do during class, but after class you are going to meet me right here on this floor of the library, where I am going to read the relevant chapters to you and we are going to discuss them until we both have them down. Understood?"

He stared at her, her face mostly a soft blur of cream and pink with a hint of freckles, brown eyes and long lashes and hair that went wherever the hell it wanted. He could see that her brow was furrowed and the line of her lips was set, but that was all.

He could hear something underneath her words, a tone that maybe said she wasn't as strong as she was trying to seem, but she was trying. She was fighting, because this was something she wanted, something she believed in.

And fuck, it wasn't like he didn't need the fucking help.

"…Okay." He agreed. "…Thanks."

She blinked. Dropped her arms. The cream of her face became a little bit pinker.

"You're welcome." She mumbled.

BoaF

And that was how Harry made his first friend as a human being. Hermione tended to chatter a lot, but that wasn't actually such a bad thing since Harry was used to being a bird who only chipped in every now and then. He didn't tell her anything about his life prior to Hogwarts and after a couple of questions, she seemed to understand and respect his silence. It occurred to him that she might be able to help him get the damned chain off of his neck - but he couldn't quite shake the paranoia that she might not instead. That she'd report him for trying, or wonder why he had to be tied down at all, or even just exclaim about it loudly enough that the fuckers who put it on him got it into their heads to make it even harder to break.

But she was downright invaluable when it came to looking up more magic. They went over the schoolwork first every day because she was a stickler for the curriculum (whatever that was), but if he paid attention and could recite or demonstrate the pertinent parts on demand, she didn't mind then going with him to browse and read aloud any other book in the library. Indeed, she seemed to enjoy it, although her enjoyment was from an academic standpoint where he just wanted expand his magical arsenal as far as he could. It didn't matter what it was - weather spells, vengeance curses, homecare healing or defence for dummies, he absorbed it all as best he could.

And in the quiet spaces between the classes he didn't bother going to, he practiced them all.

The downside of it all was that Hermione refused to move too far ahead in their schoolwork, generally limiting herself to a couple of weeks in advance study and busying herself with essay-writing when he'd much rather just get on with learning what he needed to learn to pass this world's stupid tests. She wasn't afraid to put her foot down though, arguing that a properly paced study plan resulted in better long-term learning - and he wasn't willing to share enough to explain why he wanted to learn so fast.

Still, their compromise meant he was learning more and faster than he had been before.

But.

For the first time, he wondered what he'd do if this ended up taking the full seven fucking years it was supposed to and he couldn't manage to escape before then. It was already late March, just four months shy of a full year since he'd been taken.

Maybe Clint had already forgotten about him, moved on with the rest of the circus, sad but accepting. Maybe he'd been relieved, not to have to think about the bird he'd promised to take with him when he left. Maybe, after he had some time to think about it, he'd been angry that Harry had never found a way to tell him the truth, that he was really a human on the inside. Maybe Clint had felt betrayed, or spied on.

Maybe Clint wasn't coming for him. Maybe he'd never even tried.

BoaF

Ron, Seamus, Dean and Neville had gone out on another adventure. This time, they'd been trying to sneak Hagrid's baby dragon, Norbert, to Ron's older brother Charlie in a midnight smuggling manoeuvre.

They'd managed it somehow, despite the dragon shifting about in its box and Hagrid bawling at the top of his lungs. They'd taken turns scouting ahead and Ron had even had some sort of map, borrowed from his brothers, that let him see people coming long before they came within eyeshot. They'd gotten the dragon to Charlie and his mates, waved them all off and headed back to the tower in high spirits at their success.

Then they'd gotten caught.

Too busy slapping themselves on the back to think of checking the map, they'd been sprung by Professor McGonagall herself and she'd been furious.

Fifty points from Gryffindor, each.

Two hundred points deducted, all in one night, dropping them right to the bottom of the school rankings just as the end of term was fast approaching.

99% of Gryffindor tower was fit to be tied. Older years started hexing them in the corridors. The Slytherins laughed and thanked them, the Ravenclaws tittered behind their backs and Hufflepuff eyed them with a mixture of sympathy and relief, glad not to be last for once themselves, especially with Potter having been dragging their points down all year.

Under the onslaught of scolding and cold-shoulders, Dean & Seamus split away from Ron entirely. Neville found himself wishing he could do so as well, but felt too guilty to actually do it - at least right now, when it would mean leaving Ron alone. That didn't seem like a very Gryffindor thing to do (even though it was exactly what most of the house was doing), so he didn't. No matter how tired he got of Ron's complaining. Even Ron's own brothers, who'd cheered him on for getting in so much trouble at first, were sick of listening to it.

But he stuck around. What else could he do? Even if he could make himself leave, it wasn't like he had anyone else to hang out with. He and Dean and Seamus had never really clicked, Seamus viewing him with very slight disdain on account of him being a Pureblood from a wealthy English family and Dean falling in with his mate rather than making up his own mind on the matter.

It was so unfair he just wanted to scream sometimes. His family might be wealthy, but he wasn't. Until last year, they'd thought he was a squib - and treated him like it. Nothing he did was ever good enough for any of them, and then he'd come to Hogwarts and nothing he did was good enough for anyone here either. Not his teachers, tutting over his poor wandwork, nor his friends who left him behind when it suited them and talked over him like he wasn't even there.

Sometimes he watched Hermione Granger, sitting so confidently by herself. He'd thought she was like him at first, lonely and shy, and he'd been working up his courage to go hang out with her even though she was a girl… but then something had happened. Something called Harry Potter, he suspected, since it was soon after that the girl started dragging the Hufflepuff in for meals and even when she didn't, she no longer seemed to mind being on her own - and he could swear he caught the tip of her wand poking out from under her book that one time Ron's dessert spoon had morphed into a spider and lunged for his open mouth.

She'd found something he wished he had.

He wished he at least had enough courage to look for something just like it, but he knew he didn't. Just like his family thought, he was a disappointment in every possible way.

BoaF

Harry was restless, but wouldn't tell her why.

Exams were coming up and for the most part, she went a little crazy in preparation for them. Harry, as she was getting used to, did the bare minimum required to pass and then moved on to practicing whatever else they'd discovered in the library that week. She couldn't help but frown at him for it, even though she intellectually understood that he was actually learning a wider variety of things than she was, even if it wouldn't be reflected by their respective grades. But, she figured, grades were what prospective employers looked at and she wanted a well-paying job after graduation. There was always her entire adult life to spend learning various non-curricular bits of magic and she even looked forward to that sort of relaxed, 'proper' Witchy sort of self-improvement. She dreamed sometimes, of a cottage out on the moors and enough magic and spells in her pinky finger to not need a job at all - to need nothing more than her magic and her wand.

But that was just a dream. In less than a week were exams, and they were much more important.

She asked what his plans were for the summer, again thinking about inviting him over (her first friend, she wondered if it was too weird to suggest a sleepover) but was startled and hurt when he snapped at her and disappeared until after the exams had begun.

He never did apologise for it, but he was… closer, for a while. His arm would brush hers whenever they stood or sat together, a slight rub of his head to her shoulder sometimes when he was pretending to get something out of his bag - it was almost like he was a cat or something (albeit one with feathers in his hair, feathers she was starting to suspect weren't just a fashion accessory), showing affection physically because he didn't know how to do it any other way.

It was a little bit sad, but it was more than enough. She didn't ask again, just worried, and tentatively wrote him a formal invitation that she dithered over giving him until it was too late and everyone was leaving for the train. There was a bit of a scene at the time, something about Ronald Weasley being found unconscious somewhere and something being stolen, and by the time everyone was on the train and she went looking for Harry… he was nowhere to be found. She didn't even know if he got on the train at all.

She kept the letter, but resolved to invite him next year. Since she didn't have an owl of her own (just Crookshanks, who always made himself scarce when Harry was around - or was it vice versa?), any letters she sent Harry had to be done the Muggle way - mailed to a PO Box where someone was employed to take all the contents and owl them on once a week. Wherever Harry was, the owls should be able to find him.

She kept at it, printing her letters as large and neatly as she could and mailed him a hand-held magnifying glass too. She didn't want to make him feel stupid, to get letters he couldn't read, but she thought letting him feel forgotten was worse - and she could always read them to him once she was back at school, she thought with a blush.

He never replied. She was disappointed, even though she didn't really expect him to. She'd never actually seen him write anything, and if he couldn't see what he was writing… he probably wouldn't want to send the result to anyone, not even her.

She understood.

She spent the summer with her parents, trying to enjoy it as much as she could before she went back. She was mature enough to know that Hogwarts was already stealing years of time with them away from her, time she'd never really get back unless she decided to move in with them for life after graduating…

But always, at the back of her mind, was Hogwarts with its library of spells and arcane knowledge.

Was Harry, with his endearing bird-like quirks and mysterious, damaged past.

Was her friend, the first in her entire life.

She missed them all.

BoaF

It had been a year since Harry was taken.

It had been a year since he'd been searching.

He'd found the family eventually - the Dursleys of Privet drive, Little Whinging, Surrey. (Small wonder he hadn't remembered the place - they'd never been to the damned town, just thrown a couple of shows in the county it belonged to.)

The family had been as piggish as he'd remembered. Shrill, inflated on their own delusional self-importance and utterly uninterested in the fate of their bird-slash-probable son.

"Never heard of him!" Vernon had bellowed in his face at the mere mention of the name 'Harry', before slamming the door and locking it.

He'd been all set to break in later that night, to force the answers from someone who clearly, after all this time, fucking had them.

But his brother had found him before he could, pulling up in a dark car and dressed like a bad spy movie - or maybe a high-end escort.

"I thought you joined the army." Had been the first thing he'd said to the man since the then-teen had left the circus - and him - for a better life that didn't include younger brothers.

"I thought you had better sense." Barney had volleyed back. "Lifting a purse is one thing - breaking and entering? That's crossing a line."

"You gonna report me?" He'd sneered, confident that not even his dick of an older brother - who had once yelled at him for turning in a man who'd beaten Clint bloody - would go there.

"Not only that, I'll take you in myself." Barney had shut him down, one hand extending to flash a badge - FBI, not army - as the other pulled his jacket back just enough to show the handle of a gun. "Tranqs, so don't go thinking I'll hesitate to shoot, little brother."

He could have pulled a knife and thrown it before his elder brother got a single shot off. He was certain he could.

He was not certain he could make that one throw count in any but a lethal manner… and he didn't want to kill his brother. Not really.

So he'd capitulated. Gone with him to a bar, where Barney had laid out just how many tabs he'd been keeping on his little brother over the years.

He knew about China. About the op he couldn't say no to, about the girl who died and how only Clint turning in evidence had spared him from Barney bringing him home in cuffs right then and there.

The sanctimonious prick shared that like Clint oughtta be thanking him, when all Clint wanted to know was where the fuck his brother had been when Clint had been picked up for that job - 'do it or die' made his contribution coerced in the extreme, not to mention where the fuck he'd been afterwards when Clint had suffered nightmares of that woman begging, screaming, dying.

No, he'd fucking sat back and just watched, like Clint's life was some kind of secret agent peep show. Only to swoop in now after presumably watching Clint spinning his wheels for almost a year, desperate for a sign of Harry and so, so close to getting some proper information, finally.

Only to come and tell him to stop, to heel, 'cause if he didn't, he was looking at a cell with Big Brother providing an escort right to it.

The ab. Solute. Fucker.

"You're better than this, Clint." Barney leaned forwards, hands cupping a glass of beer he hadn't touched, face rearranged to try and convey earnestness. No wonder he had the time to go chasing his little brother, he wouldn't be let out into the field with a shit mask like that. "Come with me. You've been clean since you left the circus, minus a little shoplifting which can be overlooked for someone living on the streets. You're almost eighteen now - the perfect time to turn over a new leaf. You'll never get such a blanket fresh start as the one I'm offering you now. The Bureau could use someone with your skills and god knows they'd pay you more than the circus ever did - plus dental and a retirement fund. You're smart, Clint, it wouldn't take more than a few years - ten on the outside - before you could be at my level - and I get some pretty sweet perks, lemme tell you."

He heard him out, more to try and work out how the bastard who used to be his brother, who'd stuck by him when their asshole of a Dad had been screaming and throwing things, had been keeping track of him. He'd changed most of his clothes except his shoes, although they were wearing out now. He'd kept most of his knives, his bag, and…

And his bow.

Fuck. The last thing he'd ditch, as anyone who'd been keeping tabs on him would know.

That didn't mean he didn't also have some kind of tracker embedded in him somewhere though - there were several periods in his life where he'd drunk maybe a little too much to remember just where all his resulting aches and pains had come from. If he wanted a hope at finding anything like that though, he'd need either a full body xray or to play along long enough to get his weasel of a brother to tell him.

"I just want to find Harry." He laid out, somewhere between a refusal and a plea for help.

His brother made a face.

"The bird? C'mon man, those things only live for around 10-12 years in the wild. How long did those people have it before you got it? What sort of care do you think they took? How much longer do you really think it'll live? Fuck, man, it might already be dead."

He clenched his fists under the table. Almost preternaturally sharp vision picked his older brother over, looking for any sign that the douchebag actually knew that Harry was much more than 'just' a bird.

There was nothing. Either his brother was playing a long game when it came to suckering him, or he really had no clue at all.

Either way, telling him about it didn't seem like anything but a bad idea, and with the FBI on his ass even in a foreign country…

He wouldn't put it past his brother to get him arrested, only to try the recruitment spiel again a few years later, positioning himself as his rescuer. And how would that help Harry?

"Fine." He agreed, hating the fleeting expression of smug victory that stained his brother's face. "But I'm not giving up on Harry. I want your word - fuck, I want it in my fucking contract - that any and all company efforts and resources will be there to help me find him. Even if it takes years."

"Fine, fine." His brother waved him off, although his expression betrayed him again. It was clear his brother thought him a delusional idiot, but was playing along long enough to wind him in a little deeper, get him to the point where not signing up was akin to volunteering for life in prison.

What a wonderful family he had.

As the two stood and a third man melted out of the shadows to flank him on their way out, Clint prayed he was making the right choice.

Hang on, Harry. I'll find you. I swear.

Birds of a Feather

How many of you guessed it was Clint's big brother Barney?

I took some liberties with the character. It's canon (one of the canons?) that Barney left the circus to join the army and then later became an FBI agent. He wanted Clint to join him and waited for it, but Clint arrived too late and just missed him. Both felt abandoned by the other, although Clint arguably had more reason to since he'd caught his circus mentor embezzling and got the crap kicked out of him for it, only for Barney to yell at him for not being loyal enough to keep his mouth shut.

In canon, the dude who beat him was Swordsman - in my story, it was the original Trick Shot (if you don't know who that is, it doesn't matter). I mention this only because I know some people know this stuff forward and back and might be a bit confused by my half-accurate, half-completely-wrong rendition of it all. I myself only know what I've picked up from various wikis and AgainstTheCurrent's input.

Note 1: Some troll text copied from the HP Wikia, with thanks, to assist in Hermione sounding like she swallowed a textbook. :)

Note 2: In the book/movie, it didn't seem to me that the club dropped from sufficient height to seriously knock the troll out, unless it had some sort of predisposed weakness there or something. Hence, the Mating Soft Spot(tm).