Chapter Fifty-Five of 'His Twenty-Eighth Life'- The Greater Being
Chapter Fifty-Four.
Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (55/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Eventual Harry Potter/Voldemort; mentions of others, including canon pairings, in the background, and past Harry/others
Rating: R (more for violence than sex)
Content Notes: violence, torture, gore, manipulation, angst, Master of Death Harry Potter, reincarnation, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts
Summary: Harry Potter has been reborn again and again into new bodies as the Master of Death, some of them not human, none of them exactly like his old one-but he has always helped to defeat Voldemort in each new world. Now he’s Harry Potter again, but his slightly older brother is the target of the prophecy, and Harry assumes his role is going to be to support Jonathan in his defeat of Voldemort. At least, that’s what he thinks until Voldemort comes that Halloween night, discovers what Harry is, and kidnaps him. The story of a long fight between Voldemort’s sadism and Harry’s generosity.
Author’s Notes: This is going to be a very long fic, exploring some fairly dark character interactions. While the heart of the story is Harry’s relationship with Voldemort, that’s going to change only slowly and over time, and there will be plenty of concentration on other characters, too. Also, please take the tags/content notes seriously.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fifty-Five-The Greater Being
“Okay. I know that you’re not human, not if you can sense things like that. But-” Harry paused and let his vision blur and become the vision of the Master of Death, the view of the world he had showed Voldemort. Most of the time, he consciously repressed it when he was around other humans.
The bones of mice haunted the floor, and the walls spoke to a long-ago murder with a human skeleton buried behind them. The dirt was leaf mold, and insect shell casings shed over the centuries, and the soil that remembered the roots of dead plants. The beings in front of him blazed with life in the midst of that.
The kind of life that Harry had only seen before when he looked at the few fully immortal creatures he had come across. The kind of blaze that he saw when he met his own eyes in a mirror using this sight.
Harry released the vision and smiled. “What kind of being are you? How did you come here? Have you lived in other worlds, like I have? Why can you tell me about how things have changed here?”
The hag in front of him laughed, while a few of the other bodies did, too, and others opened their mouths in silent versions of the sound. “So curious, Master of Death,” the voice murmured. “I will answer the questions, but one at a time.”
Harry nodded. He settled back on the dirt floor and cocked his head, letting his gaze wander from one body to another. The being didn’t seem to move them all equally; some yawned or covered their mouths sometimes or rolled their eyes at the ceiling, and others remained as still as if they were made of wax.
The hag who had met him in the alleyway shone for a moment, and then the blue-silver light moved to a younger white witch, who twitched slightly pointed ears and said to Harry, “I am what you would call a conglomerate of souls.”
Harry felt his eyes widen. He had learned about this in his necromancy training. “How did you form?” Battlefields were the usual way, when many souls died at once and clung together, or in the wake of a pandemic. But Harry had dealt with conglomerates like that, and none of them had been as self-aware or as calm as this being.
“I chose to form.”
Harry paused. “But where did the souls that make you up originally come from?”
“Many places. Some of them from Hogwarts, ancient ghosts who had faded and no longer knew anyone who walked the halls. Some of them from wizarding villages that were abandoned when Muggles moved closer, and who were lonely. Some of them from battlefields, and some from plagues, and some from shipwrecks. So many places, Master of Death. The common thread binding them is that they did not want to be alone. And now they are me.”
Harry grinned. “That is brilliant.” It would also explain why this being seemed so different from the other conglomerates of souls he had met in his necromancer training. The only desire those beings had was usually for mindless vengeance on everything they could reach.
Harry had something else to ask, though. “Where did you get the bodies? It sounds, from what you said, that most of them can’t be the original bodies your ghosts lived in.”
Several heads shook, but only the woman the being was now inhabiting spoke. “The bodies of those who died alone, or who were murdered and never found, or who died of disease and would not be touched. Those whom no one else wants, I gather.”
“Er-excuse me for saying this, but I can’t see a lot of wounds or marks of disease.”
“When I have had them for long enough, I can heal them. My presence inhabiting them and moving them around restores them to the peak of health.”
Harry whistled. Yes, that was unique. Conglomerates of souls usually remained bodiless until they possessed someone or found objects to hurl. And it increased his hope that the being might be like him in one way. “Have you lived in other worlds?”
There was a long silence, and the blue-silver glow around the young woman seemed to dim until she answered gently, “No, Master of Death. I have always been in this one, largely undetectable.”
Harry closed his eyes and sighed as he accepted the blow he hadn’t realized would be a blow. He had never encountered anyone like him who was born into multiple worlds. He had only found two beings who could travel from world to world, and both of them had immediately tried to destroy him. He had hoped that he might at last have found kin.
“This distresses you.”
Harry opened his eyes again. “Yeah, but it’s not your fault. It was just-I wish I knew someone else like me.”
“There is no one identical to you. But there are those like you, I think. I am one of them. Is not your Voldemort another?”
Harry stared at her. Then he said, “You still haven’t explained how you know things like that. Or how you could sense me. Or why this world is different.”
The woman nodded and turned, loose blonde hair flying behind her as she gestured with one hand. Some of the bodies moved aside as a chair came flying towards him. Harry smiled and sat down. “Thanks. But aren’t you going to sit down, too?”
“After so many centuries of having so many bodies to handle, standing is more natural to me.” The woman folded her arms and regarded him thoughtfully, the blue-silver glow dancing around her head like a halo. Two of the children behind her did the same thing, although the glow was less intense in them, and some others looked at Harry in what Harry could have said was curiosity if the being had been animating them at the moment. “I am part of the reason this world is different.”
“Because you existed?”
“In part. Also because I gathered up ghosts that might have influenced others to take certain actions. Either good or bad actions, truly. Inspiration or depression.”
Harry paused, then nodded. He could see that. He had seen, first-hand, how often contacting the shades of the dead made someone else long to join them, or how someone might use the constant company of a ghost to dedicate their life to something the dead person had never achieved.
“Another reason,” the being added softly, “is that your Voldemort is stronger here.”
Harry blinked. “You mean, he was already more stable or sane than in other worlds?”
The being tilted the woman’s head, then leaped to the body of a young black girl, who studied Harry with a serious expression as the blue-silver glow danced atop her head. “Perhaps that. I was referring to his magical strength, however. He is the most powerful wizard to have been born since I became aware of how to sense wizardly power.”
The being didn’t explain the next conclusion, but Harry’s mind had already leaped to it much like the glow moving around between bodies. “So he was able to withstand the Horcruxes better. He didn’t lose as much magic to them.”
“And perhaps his power also preserved his sanity, rather than his sanity being inherently stronger in the first place.”
Harry bit his lip as he thought about that. It did explain certain things, perhaps. Why this Severus had stayed with Voldemort instead of turning to Dumbledore earlier; the lure of that power had compelled him, or he had thought Voldemort more likely to win the war. And even Voldemort’s Death Eaters obeyed him and seemed to stay more loyal in this universe than in most worlds Harry had been.
“You are another factor.”
“Well, yes, I knew that. I’ve never lived in a world where people knew me for what I am before.”
“Not just that,” the girl said, with a frown that revealed she had died too young to grow in her front teeth. “The weight of beings like us distorts the world, did you know? We cause ripples like a stone being thrown in a pond simply by existing.”
Harry blinked. “I-think I knew that, too. I mean, obviously there are things like prophecies that I’ve interfered in, because I wasn’t just going to let Voldemort go undefeated.”
The girl shook her head and sighed. “I don’t think English is a good language for talking about this in, but then, there’s nothing that’s better, either. I mean that even before we take an interest or decide to actively interfere, events begin to move in a whirlpool around us. Even if your parents had never known who you were, and you’d never been kidnapped by your Voldemort-”
“He’s not my Voldemort.”
“He’s more yours than any of the others or any other Voldemort in any other world. My point is, you simply existing here caused a disturbance that I felt. I couldn’t track it to its source or tell what it was until you got kidnapped by your Voldemort, though. You are the source of some of the changes here that would have occurred around the time you were born.”
Harry sat in silence, thinking about that. The being let him, the blue-silver glow jumping to the head of an old man with a beard as long as Dumbledore’s, then back to the hag, then to a warlock with limbs as gangly as a starfish’s.
Before he had accepted that he had been the one determining where and when he was born, that idea would have caused him incredible distress. He would have been thinking about the best way to mitigate that impact and restore the world to what it would have been without his presence.
But now…
Well, it was stupid to think that I could stay neutral or out of the war, anyway.
Harry nodded and focused back on the being. The warlock stopped idly inspecting his legs and turned to face him, eyes shining so intense a silver that Harry couldn’t see what their original color had been.
“I don’t suppose you would be interested in helping me understand more about this? And whether there are other beings like us somewhere? Maybe in worlds that we can travel to without dying?”
The being smiled, with almost all its faces. “I would be most interested.”
*
“I can’t believe that you thought I would let you win the war, Albus.”
Albus closed his eyes. This time, the boy was behind him, standing in a slit of shadow that ran along the side of his office desk. The wards around the office-the wards around Hogwarts-should have prevented him from getting anywhere like this. Albus couldn’t fathom why they weren’t working.
Except that perhaps the wards were never meant to stop the Master of Death, to stop someone as powerful and evil as the monster that now possessed the Elder Wand.
“You must be stopped,” Albus whispered. “I don’t know how, but I know you must. For the sake of the wizarding world.”
Harry sighed, following it with a giggle. Albus turned. The boy’s face was covered with blood, and he was chewing, slowly, something that was thick and black-red. Albus glanced away again. He knew enough about viscera to be fairly sure that the boy was consuming a heart.
From whose chest had he torn it, probably still beating? Albus felt faint and sick. While he had been up here pitying himself and thinking about what would have happened if only he had managed to retain the Wand, the boy had been killing people.
“What do you think is going to happen when I tell your parents about this?” Albus challenged. It was a weak strike and he knew it.
The boy rolled his eyes and went on chewing. He must know it, too. “Why would they listen to you, Albus? Have they come to you to express any concerns about my behavior or to protest their loyalty to you? Of course not. I have them coiled up in my nets.” He smiled and leaned forwards. “The same way I have everyone in wizarding Britain. Do you know what they’re saying about you now?”
“I have read nothing in the papers.”
“Respect for your name keeps it out of the papers for right now.” The boy snorted. “And probably that bitch Augusta Longbottom, too. Did I tell you that I was her grandson in my last life? She was just as intolerable there as she is here. She thinks she always knows best, and she always takes your side.”
Albus caught his breath and tried not to exhale hope. That was true. That was right. If something happened to him-if this demon-child killed him-then Augusta knew about the Horcruxes and could receive Severus’s reports and make sure Tom died.
“But I never told you about the gossip spreading that Augusta has managed to keep out of the papers so far,” the boy said, and smiled at him. “Mad old man. That’s what they’re calling you.”
Albus flinched in spite of himself. He had cultivated a reputation for barminess for years, and there had been people who thought him senile. But he had never wanted to be called mad. Madmen had no one listen to them.
Well, perhaps that was not true. Tom had managed to gather a large group of people around himself despite being as mad as Harry Potter.
But Albus would die before he allowed himself to embrace Tom’s particular brand of madness.
“You’re the one spreading that gossip, of course,” he whispered.
Potter laughed. “Hardly. I might encourage it, but just about everyone still knows me as a child.” His face took on an obscenely innocent expression. “Who would believe a ten-year-old capable of participating in vicious rumors? All I’m doing is shaking my head and sighing sadly a little when someone has a conversation like that in front of me, and that’s enough for right now.”
Albus closed his eyes, doing his best not to listen to the child. He could not listen to the child. This was not real. Not really. It could not be. Surely his own fears were playing out in front of him, not reality-
And then he froze. If that was true, did it not prove that Harry and the others were right, and he was mad?
Soft laughter startled him enough to make him jump. Harry was shaking his head as though he had followed every coil of Albus’s thoughts. Which meant that he had managed to get inside Albus’s Occlumency shields.
“I’m only surprised that it took you so long to start seeing reality as the rest of us see it,” Harry whispered.
Albus whipped out his wand and cast a curse before he thought about it. Harry blinked out of existence, and the curse shattered the stone behind him. Albus stared at the hole in the wall, panting.
“You still haven’t understood everything I wanted you to understand.”
Albus turned around slowly. Harry now stood on the far side of his desk, near the fireplace, actually making Albus wonder for an absurd moment if he was about to Floo out.
“But that’s all right,” Harry continued, in a voice hardly louder than the rustling of cobwebs. “You’re old, but not as old as a wizard can get. We’ll have plenty of time to make you understand. And Albus?”
He would have liked to respond, but terror had congealed the words in his throat.
“I won’t leave you until the last moments of humiliation I can possibly wring out of you are past. Don’t worry, old man, you’ll have company on the downwards slide.”
And the monster of Albus’s deepest nightmares vanished in a whisk of darkness and laughter.
*
“Uh, what can I do for you, Augusta?” Sirius watched with a wrinkled forehead as Augusta paced around his drawing room. They had worked together in the Order of the Phoenix, but they hadn’t seen each other for years, since the war had ended and so had regular meetings.
“You can share the burden of this task that the Headmaster laid on me.”
“All right,” Sirius said, watching as Augusta unrolled a gigantic parchment across the table in front of him. It looked as if it had so many notes on it that Sirius’s eyes crossed looking at it. “What is it?”
“You-Know-Who has something called Horcruxes. Albus has had me hunting them, but with no results so far. And the last time I tried to talk to him about them, he said…some strange things.” Augusta shook her head to dismiss those strange things, and stabbed her finger at the parchment. “You’re going to help me research ancient Dark artifacts he could have corrupted to be his Horcruxes.”
Sirius found his mouth open and no words coming out. Augusta peered at him sharply. “If you’re about to refuse, young man, then you’ll need to offer me an alternative suggestion.”
Sirius swallowed air and said, “No. I’ll help. Why don’t you tell me what kind of rituals you’ve conducted so far to find the Horcruxes?”
Internally, he was rolling his eyes. Harry is not going to believe this shit.
Chapter Fifty-Six.
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