Chapter Text
Harry had thought he’d been coming to terms with Dumbledore’s various betrayals, but the cold dread that skitters down his spine proves that he wasn’t as successful as he liked. He’s been hoping, foolishly, that the headmaster isn’t aware that he’s got a bit of Voldemort stuck to his soul just yet.
“What makes you think he knows about it?” asks Harry, once he feels able to speak past the tightness in his throat and chest. His palms are clammy around his teacup.
Nicholas sighs, looking sad but not pitying. Harry is glad for this. He doesn’t want to know how he’d respond to pity at this very moment.
“I taught Albus everything he knows about soul magics. The boy has mage-sight. Not a particularly well-honed ability, but it would be enough to sense the Horcrux inside of you.”
“And he...you...it can be removed?”
Nicholas looks at him stoically for a long moment, but lets the conversation move away from Dumbledore. “Yes. It’s not easy in the slightest, but a master Legilimens can help guide the soul fragment away from your own. It’s painful, invasive, but necessary.”
“In our previous life,” Harry begins, throwing all caution to the fucking wind apparently, as Hermione and Ron sigh and the Flamel’s collective eyebrows raise in surprise, “I was able to get rid of the Horcrux by allowing the man who made it to shoot me with the Avada Kedavra.”
“...No,” says Nicholas slowly, drawing out the word as his eyes grow glassy, seemingly considering the matter at hand. Harry and his friends watch him in confusion, whilst the man’s wife sits by stoically, drinking her tea and looking fond. It doesn’t take long before Harry’s trademark impatience gets the best of him, though the two minutes of silence he endured seem rather reasonable, all things considered.
“No?” Harry asks, trying not to show his petulance.
Nicholas looks him in the eye, quite suddenly, and focuses.
“No,” he says, sounding decisive, “there have been quite a few studies on Horcruxes in the last two centuries or so, and I have been part of nearly all of them, excepting the two projects that were held in New York and run by Aaron Thompson, that absolute pillock.” Nicholas sneers, and on a face as jovial as his, it seems twice as condescending. Harry is vaguely glad that his name is not Aaron Thompson, the poor sod. “Excepting those, quite a bit of progress in the field has been made. If I had to make a decisive statement at this very moment, I’d say, with full certainty, that the Horcrux within you was simply weakened, thrust to the back of your mind as one tends to do with trauma of that scale.”
Ignoring, for the moment, the comments on his own trauma and the suggestion that Horcruxes are very well studied by literal teams of other wix, Harry latches onto the small sliver of hope offered, as he’s always done.
“Then you should be able to enter my...what, my core? My mind? And remove the extra little bit of soul.” He gives his most winning smile, the one that usually melts even the likes of Professor McGonogall. “Sounds simple enough.”
Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel laugh right in his face.
Looking back on the strained smile he had received from both Flamel’s, Harry feels like he should have realized the shit-show that was to come. But then, when has he ever been prepared for his absurd life?