'Occlumency,' Fleur realised. 'I am passable,' she shrugged, it's a requirement for applying to the Bureau d'Éngimes. My veela magic helps as well, my allure affects the connection.'
'Could you defend your thoughts if someone tried to steal them?' Harry asked.
'I believe so,' Fleur decided. 'It would take a very talented practitioner of the mind arts to steal my thoughts.'
'Avoid Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort, and it will be fine,' Slytherin surmised. 'I assume this is the discussion about horcruxes.'
'Well if it wasn't it's going to be now, isn't it?' Harry pointed out acidly. 'So I'm right either way then,' the painting shot back.
Fleur blinked twice. 'What are horcruxes?'
'A very horrible piece of magic that tears a piece of your soul away and binds it to an object. It acts as an anchor against death until it is destroyed, and it is how Voldemort survived without a body.'
'So you're planning on destroying it,' Fleur guessed.
'There's likely more than one,' Salazar elucidated, glancing at Harry who shook his head ever so slightly when Fleur wasn't watching. 'It was a horcrux that caused my poor basilisk to be unleashed again before Harry killed the mad creature and destroyed it, but Voldemort survived its destruction to return to a body, so there must be at least one other out there somewhere.'
'The prophecy is just the first step,' Fleur realised. 'You're getting ready to kill him.'
'And anyone we have to in the process of getting to him,' Harry added quietly. 'He won't ever leave me alone, and I suspect the prophecy has something to do with it. Why would a powerful wizard try and kill a baby unless he knew that infant might be a threat for some reason.'
'What do we do?' Fleur demanded.
Slytherin laughed and Harry scowled at him. 'I need to see the prophecy, and I need to get the Ministry to accept the truth before Voldemort launches a surprise attack and crushes the majority of his opposition.'
'We,' Fleur corrected immediately. 'You're not coming to the Department Mysteries,' Harry reminded her, 'you promised.'
'It is still our goal,' she told him firmly.
of
'Fine,' Harry relented. 'There is so much to do,' he told her. 'I need to be so much stronger, stronger than Dumbledore and Voldemort, but they're so far beyond what I can do.'
'Why do you need to be stronger than Dumbledore?' Fleur asked. 'Is he not on your side?'
'He believes I am part of his side,' Harry explained bitterly, 'but he is not on my side. Dumbledore keeps me in the dark, if I had done as he hoped I would have been dead in my first year.'
'Why don't you show her how far you have come?' Salazar suggested mildly. 'It will be easier.' 'We can duel,' Fleur agreed excitedly, eyeing him speculatively and striding back out into the main chamber. 'I will see how long you last against me,' she called back.
'Proud, isn't she,' the painting commented in parseltongue.
'With good reason to be,' Harry replied in kind.
'She reminds me of my wife a little,' the founder remarked. 'I hope she is as good for you as my wife was for me.'
'You make it sound like we're married,' Harry frowned uncomfortably.
'You seem close, even if you didn't want her to know that you were a horcrux.'
'It would just upset her and make her worry unnecessarily,' Harry shrugged. 'She's going to get a surprise,' he finished, reverting to english as he left the chamber.
She was waiting in the middle of the chamber with her rosewood wand, extended out to her right.
'Don't worry about the chamber,' Harry smiled. 'I've broken the effigies many times.'
'Normal rules,' Fleur decided, conjuring a glowing circle across the floor. 'Nothing too dangerous, and no speaking anything but spells to try distract your opponent.'
Her wand snapped up without warning, and Harry immediately flicked his into his palm in preparation.
'Good reflexes,' she commented, 'the other ritual?' 'I haven't done that yet,' Harry admitted, 'it takes time to recover afterwards and I don't need Madam Pomfrey getting too suspicious of me when I'm injured again and mentioning it to the headmaster.'
'Shall we begin,' Fleur returned her wand arm to its original position and Harry mirrored her, forcing himself to look away from her eyes and consider her an enemy.
Fleur struck first, unleashing a trio of jinxes that Harry didn't recognise, her wand movements sliding from one spell into the next without halting.
He deflected two of them back at her, side-stepping the last and attacked himself, throwing every one of the borderline useless spells he had learnt to teach to Neville back at her, but Fleur proved impossible to touch. She stepped around them, weaving fluidly, almost dancing amongst the beams of magic, deflecting the few she could not dodge back at him and constantly turning and twisting him along the edge of the ring stretching the angles he could deflect her spells at to their limit.
Harry couldn't seem to pin her down, no matter how fast he cast, and his spells were slicing across the air from his wand tip twice as fast as Fleur could send them back. She was glorious in action. It was hard to ignore the way she moved to avoid his magic, the way Fleur curved away from his hexes was almost hypnotic.
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