Common Sense: The Odd Ideas File
Dumbledore's Last Secret
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Harry Potter sat in a chair at four thirty in the afternoon when he felt an intense little pain around his scar. It didn't feel like Voldemort was angry. It didn't feel like anything he had ever felt before.
He stood up and walked over to where Hermione was sitting. She had her eyes on a small mirror. Its twin was focused on the entrance of Gringotts.
"I think it just went off," Harry said.
"I'm looking at the mirror…." A billow of smoke erupted from between the twin doors of the white marble building. "How did you know?"
Harry had already wandered off. He looked upset…and a touch angry.
Harry settled into a chair and pulled the volume on horcruxes that Hermione had managed to steal from Hogwarts months earlier. He read through the rather thin volume and saw nothing to confirm or deny the suspicion Harry now had. Dumbledore had suspected it was possible to lodge a horcrux inside a living animal, such as Nagini. Now Harry had the first true evidence that his famous scar was more than just a curse scar.
Dumbledore had to have known. That was the part that drove Harry crazy. Dumbledore.
Eventually Harry came out of his introspective funk and called Hermione to him. He expected in a few words what he expected. She paled and thumped to the floor, still conscious but dazed.
"Why wouldn't he tell you something like that?"
"More of his bloody secrets."
"Language, Harry."
"Stuff it, Hermione." She opened her mouth to respond, but snapped it shut again.
After a few minutes Hermione snagged the book on horcruxes, which she had only read fourteen times, and began a new reading.
"Is it bound to your soul? To your brain?"
Harry looked up from his newfound misery. "What?"
"The horcrux? What's it tied to? The others were a ring, a diary. Is this tied to your body, to your magic?"
Harry understood. Hermione was looking for a loophole, something that meant that Harry didn't need to die. "Nagini he could control utterly and completely, but he can only send me visions. He tried to possess me and I was able to cast him out."
"So, maybe his soul fragment is loosely attached to you?"
"My scar?"
Hermione really looked at the ugly scar that marred Harry's forehead. "Perhaps." She began casting charm after charm at his forehead. Harry recognized some of them as medical detection spells; others as spells in the cursebreaker's arsenal.
Harry plopped down again, a bit exhausted from the display of magic.
"It shows strong elements of dark magic, even a decade and a half after you received it. It's full of magic…."
Harry had a tiny smile, a faint ray of hope, enter his life then. "Perhaps the soul fragment survives off the dark magic in my scar then?"
Hermione shrugged. She didn't know either way what the horcrux was attached to. "I wonder why you felt the destruction of the horcrux in Gringotts? You've never mentioned this before."
Harry hadn't considered the question. "I guess I was dying the first time I killed one…and I was in a lot of pain. A bit more wouldn't have registered. I was probably asleep when Dumbledore destroyed the ring. As for the locket…I don't really know why I didn't notice anything. It's strange. It was a strange day."
Hermione looked like she wanted to cry. She couldn't think of anything.
"I wonder if we can dispel my curse scar?" Harry asked.
At that, Hermione began to smile. Magic was something she could do. "One second. Let me dig out a few books."
"Take your time," Harry said. He knew it would be a while.
Indeed, an hour later, Hermione had tried three dozen different spells from her books. Harry still had his curse scar.
She sat down, defeated. Harry was processing through all the things Hermione had tried.
"The Killing Curse is just a spell, right?"
Hermione nodded. "A spell no one else has ever survived."
"Can you just cast a Finishing Spell at me? It works for pretty much anything. Satisfy my curiosity."
Hermione looked a bit disgruntled that she hadn't thought of something so pathetically simple. She cast the spell and a moment later Harry slumped from his chair, passed out from the massive pain that surged through his body.
Hermione watched as his curse scar began to fade…and as a nasty black mist seemed to pour out of the closing wound. Then the mist began to scream. It faded away.
Hermione knelt down next to Harry and tried to rouse him. It took a few moments of shaking but eventually his eyes blinked open.
"Wha?"
"It's gone… Your scar, the horcrux. I saw it come out of your head…."
Harry pushed himself off the floor. "Good. Good! I'm going to reanimate Dumbledore's body so that I can kill him myself. No wonder Snape didn't hesitate to kill the old bastard…."
"Harry!"
"Fine. I'll just go desecrate his monument, turn it into a giant turd?"
Hermione looked shocked and then she began to laugh. "Well, I guess that's almost as good a gag as Polyjuicing yourself to look like Rabastan Lestrange and having him command the goblins in Gringotts to take down his brother's and sister-in-law's effects to the family vault. A box, which incidentally, contained a time-delayed explosive acid bomb crafted by Fred and George Weasley…."
"Yes, a good little trick, isn't it?"
"Especially considering that the Malfoy vault happens to be directly beneath the Lestrange one and the Carrow vault is just to the side. You likely took out the combined wealth of three Death Eater families."
"I love it when a plan comes together."
"Get that dopey smile off your face."
"I'm not a horcrux any more. I can smile all I want. And then curse that meddlesome old coot until the other spirits turn on the old fossil and reincarnate him as a spineless flobberworm."
Hermione nodded and sighed.
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