Harry Potter :Diamond Heart

'Mr Potter,' he heard the stern nurse exclaim as his charm and his legs finally failed him.

She rushed across, whipping her wand at the curtains around the other beds so they closed and kept him from view.

'Drink this,' she ordered. Something vile and peppery flooded down his throat. His next breathe was so cold it felt like he'd swallowed ice and he gasped hoarsely.

'Sweet Merlin,' Madam Pomfrey exclaimed. 'What did you do to your hand?' 'I burnt it,' Harry answered, still searching for a plausible reason behind his injury. The weeping, seeping cracks in the limb were oozing something clear and syrupy. Harry watched it fascinatedly. He'd never seen burns quite so, well, bad.

'What with!?' she burst out incredulously. 'I haven't seen burns like this since the last war. If I find out you were trying to cast Fiendfyre, Mr Potter-'

'I wasn't,' Harry interrupted. 'The last thing he needed was for someone to think he was beginning to dabble in dark magic.'

No matter how true it might be.

'Then how, exactly, did you do this?' Madam Pomfrey was running her wand tip over his mutilated limb and, ever so slowly, the flesh and skin began to creep back over the bone, filling in the horrible, pink cracks.

'The golden egg was guarded by a dragon,' Harry explained, hoping his excuse was good enough to stave off an interrogation by anyone else. 'I thought fire might make it reveal its secrets.'

'That was incredibly stupid of you,' she remonstrated, watching carefully as the blackened, ashen flesh sloughed off to make room for the regrowing hand.

'Not even a hint of the tongue of Mordor,' Harry joked weakly. Madam Pomfrey blinked, not understanding the reference, but whoever was in the bed next to him laughed.

'You're healed,' she sighed, tucking her wand away. 'I would insist you remain here for the night, so I can keep an eye on you, you've exhausted most of your magic with whatever you were doing, but I doubt you'd stay.'

'Already?' Harry inspected his newly restored hand, flexing it experimentally. It seemed as good as new.

'Yes, Mr Potter, already. Now, go, and this time take more care. I distinctly remember telling you that I did not want to see you here again at the beginning of the year.'

'Well,' he smirked, 'if you insist.' An overdramatic swirl of his wand later and he was gone beneath his disillusionment charm. It was almost perfect while he was stationary, but the dregs of magic he had drawn on were already running dry.

'Get out, Mr Potter,' Madam Pomfrey sighed.

He made it out of the door just before his charm failed completely.

Now he was healed and without pain he could think clearly enough to remember what had happened.

I failed.

He'd ripped Tom Riddle's horcrux, or whatever it had become, from himself, but he'd lost control before he could destroy it or push it into something else.

Harry needed to speak to Salazar, or read the book again. He had no idea what happened to a soul fragment once it was outside the body and released.

Retracing his steps he made his way back through the bathroom and down into the chamber. 'You came back,' Slytherin exclaimed the moment he must have heard the door open.

'What did you do?' he asked Harry the moment he became visible.

'I fractured my soul.' Strangely, all the disgust he had previously felt was gone.

'And?' Salazar was peering at him very carefully.

'I found the horcrux that Riddle left me,' Harry's revulsion resurfaced, 'it was almost a part of me, but I ripped it all away.'

Salazar Slytherin let out a most undignified sigh of relief. 'So it's gone.'

'I don't know,' Harry responded quietly. He listened,searching once more through the screams of his soul fragments, but could not find the image with the echo.

'How can you not know?' Salazar demanded. 'You ripped it out, didn't you?'

'I might have,' Harry muttered, remembering the sticky, tar-like, black tears and the swirling smoke. 'I lost control, it hurt.'

'Can you feel it?' Salazar asked intently. 'If you have a horcrux linked to you then you should be able to feel it. Any sort of feeling of warmth, familiarity or anything from anywhere or anything that was not there yesterday.'

Harry relaxed, but felt nothing unusual, only the warmth of his wand against the skin of his forearm.

'No,' he answered finally. 'There's nothing.' 'Then it it is either destroyed, or, more likely it returned to something it was linked to.'

'Something it was linked to?'

'Can you feel the piece of Tom Riddle's soul?'

'No,' Harry replied immediately. That distorted echo of himself was gone from amongst the myriad of inky, whispering reflections.

'I would hazard a guess that the horcrux returned to whatever it was most strongly linked to, Voldemort, and whatever you ripped off from yourself returned back where it belonged.' The founder did not seem particularly sure.

'A guess?'

'Soul magic is not my area of expertise,' the portrait reminded him. 'However, neither fragment can survive alone unbound to an artefact or living thing, and since there is no new link to you no part of your soul is out there. That leaves only two options. My guess or the alternative.'

'I'd like to know what you think the alternative is,' Harry decided. Salazar was playing a little too evasive.

'You reabsorbed both fragments completely.'

'So I could still be a horcrux.' A tiny pinprick of ice formed in his chest.

'If you cannot feel the piece of Riddle's soul in the state that your soul is in then I do not think it is possible that it remains within you and independent. It is either gone, or absorbed completely into your own.' The founder patted the head of his serpent companion as he thought. 'Absorbing a piece of soul was mentioned in the book and Tom Riddle's notes, but, like almost all of the material I read it was hypothetical and vague.'

Harry relaxed and the tiny shard of ice vanished. Salazar had yet to be wrong, if he did not think there was a chance that Harry was a horcrux then Harry believed him. I helped greatly that no matter how much soul-searching he did there remained no sign of the echo of Voldemort.

I'm free.

He was not really free, not completely, Voldemort would still come after, Dumbledore was unlikely to believe he was no longer a Horcrux and he was still alone, but he didn't have to die an unappreciated sacrifice. He grinned. A genuine, bright, half-smile beaming up at his ancestor whose expression softened.

'Looks like you'll have to put up with having an heir who acts like Godric a little longer than I thought you would,' he joked.

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