Chapter Seventy of 'His Twenty-Eighth Life'- Old Souls
Chapter Sixty-Nine.
Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (70/?)
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 Seventy-Old Souls
“I’m a trusted ally of the Light now. We should be able to walk right up to the gate.”
Voldemort had only said it to get a rise out of Harry, and his mouth twitched at the disappointed look he received. Harry sighed and wrapped shadows more thickly around himself, so that he resembled nothing so much as a small Dementor gliding along above the ground-not that Voldemort was about to tell him that.
“What the Light means and what trusted ally means seem to be changing day-by-day,” Harry murmured as they negotiated the path that led up from Hogsmeade. Voldemort was surprised how well he remembered it, how the turns could be confusing in the dusk and how the dirt slipped beneath his feet. “Did you meet with the wizards from the Confederation?’
“One time.”
“What does that mean?”
Voldemort shrugged as he stepped over a stone and extended a hand to help Harry if he needed it. Harry stared at him and floated over the obstacle. “They don’t entirely trust me. Apparently there was a Dark Lord in the Netherlands ten years ago who promised to pursue the path to redemption and then turned out to have been using a different kind of political maneuvering to kill those who opposed him. They won’t consider me an ally of the Light until I have a more proven track record.”
“And here I thought you wanted to walk through Hogwarts’ gates, you were so trusted.”
Voldemort laughed softly, and saw the way Harry halted and turned towards him. Apparently, he was still used to hearing the versions of Voldemort in other worlds cackle evilly. “What I think of myself has rarely matched the perceptions that other people have of me.”
“True.” Harry hesitated. “Why did Dumbledore distrust you the moment you met in this world? I know some of the reasons he did in others, but then, you didn’t always meet the same way, either.”
“We met in the orphanage in this one when he came to deliver my Hogwarts letter. Is that similar to what happened in other worlds?”
“My first world, yes.”
Harry was always reserved when discussing the world where he had been a Horcrux, so Voldemort simply nodded. “He showed me magic, and I was startled and fascinated. I wanted to brag about my own abilities. I told him I could speak to snakes and I wanted to be great, and it was as if a gate slammed behind his eyes.”
Harry frowned at the path and then drifted to the side and through the gates of Hogwarts. “Why did he hate Parselmouths so much? That seems to be a constant of almost every world I’ve lived in, but I never knew why.”
“It might not matter why. It might be because he was a Gryffindor. It might be because a snake bit him as a child and this was the way he was expressing his trauma.”
Harry stared at him, a flash of unnatural green in the darkness. Whenever he let himself go, his eyes shone like a predator’s, albeit with no light to make them do so. Voldemort loved to watch. “Did you-did you just express yourself in a Muggle way?”
“It was called something else in my day.”
“Yes?” The unsettling glow continued to be aimed in his direction.
“Yes.” Voldemort nodded as they proceeded up the path towards the school, and he found himself torn between his desire to look up at the castle as he did every time he returned, and keep watching Harry. He compromised with a quick glance at the towers before he turned to face Harry again. “We called it a joke.”
For a moment, the air around him was still, in a strange way, with stirring power, and then Harry snorted and his feet came to rest fully on the ground again. “Git.”
Voldemort half-smiled and nodded at the immense doors, which were shut at this time of night. “Will you look like yourself as you walk through this, or do you intend to hide?”
“Hide us both,” Harry said, and soft darkness swirled out from him and caught up Voldemort. Voldemort blinked around. It looked as if he was inside a dark, gauzy tent with stars shining through the fabric. “No one will see us when we’re like this. We’re in my world, not the one that most people share.”
“Will Slytherin be able to see us?” Voldemort asked, falling into stride beside Harry. It seemed that, unlike an Invisibility Cloak, they had to make no effort to keep their bodies covered. “As he is immortal?”
“You still sound jealous when you talk about him.”
“I do believe I expressed why.”
There was silence, and then Harry began talking again in the tone of someone determined not to bring up that subject right now. “No, I don’t think so. There’s no death around Slytherin at all, no sense of it. He’s almost purely life. I don’t believe he could see through a shield comprised of Death’s power.”
Voldemort indulged in a small sigh for the long-gone days when he would have grasped eagerly at this proof that there was power over death, and continued walking into the school. They were bending towards the dungeons, where Harry had said Slytherin’s quarters were, but in spite of his claim that no one could have noticed them, he was walking hesitantly, peering through the darkness floating around them.
Voldemort finally grew impatient. “What are you looking for? What could come to trouble us here?”
“Not trouble,” Harry muttered. “I just was sure that-ah.”
And the dark shield around them dissolved even though they were barely a few corridors inside the dungeons, and not near the place where Harry had talked about Slytherin’s quarters being. Voldemort froze and let one hand rest on his wand. Ally of the Light or not, there were many who would not rejoice to see him here.
But then he noticed the slim dark-haired boy stepping out from behind a wall, and he sighed and put his wand down. “You didn’t tell me that your brother was to join us in visiting Slytherin,” he murmured.
Harry grinned a little. “Oh, he wouldn’t miss it. Not after what Slytherin said to us the last time we were here.”
Voldemort narrowed his eyes a little, not liking the implication of secrets shared with someone who was not him. “What did he say the last time you were here?”
“Stuff,” said Jonathan Potter, and smiled at him as Harry guided them into the hidden rooms.
*
“This is him?”
“Yes, it is,” Harry said, and stepped away from Voldemort as he stood motionless in the doorway of Slytherin’s rooms, staring at his ancestor. “He goes by Voldemort now. It’s the name he chose for himself.
Voldemort gave him a strange look. Harry wondered if it was gratitude for not speaking the name that he had attended Hogwarts with. Harry shrugged the speculation off. He wouldn’t refer to Voldemort as Tom, but he was perfectly sure that Slytherin already knew what name his descendant had carried.
“And you are the one who made Horcruxes.” Slytherin’s voice was low, but the last word uncoiled like a whip. Voldemort stiffened. “Do you know how dangerous, how insane, how destructive that is?”
“I needed a method of immortality, and there was no one to instruct me.” Voldemort wasn’t yelling the way Harry might have expected. He was still standing there, stiff and cold, his arms crossed over his chest, and his eyes fixed. “Do you think that I would have allowed myself to die, when you did not?”
“If you had read further, you would have seen that Horcruxes are the worst method of immortality available. You could have found something else!”
“It was forbidden knowledge. Deeply attractive. And there was no guarantee that I would have come on any other method if I had waited.”
“You’re intelligent. That’s what both Potters said, and so I’ll believe it.” Slytherin leaned against the wall of the chamber. “You would have found something else.”
“I ask you again, how was I to know that? I scarcely had the benefits of your perspective, and I was a frightened sixteen-year-old in the middle of a war-”
“You made your first Horcrux at sixteen?”
“Yes.”
Slytherin closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. “You were more insane than I thought, then. Do you realize that you essentially froze your soul as it was at that age? And not just the part of your soul preserved in the Horcrux. The rest of it, too. Your fear and your immaturity and-all the rest would have remained as it was, not changing.”
Harry blinked. He had never heard that particular theory about Horcruxes. He exchanged glances with Jonathan, who just shrugged at him and mouthed something that looked like, “Makes sense.”
“I did not have the benefits of your perspective,” Voldemort repeated, a hiss on the edge of the words. “Why did you never reveal yourself to me when I was here?”
“Because at that point, I was not revealing myself to anyone. I was deep in my research and did not want someone to discover that I was still alive and try to research me.” Slytherin grimaced and put a hand on the table next to him. Harry stared at him and saw a small flare of yellow around the center of his palm, which told him even more about the method of immortality Slytherin had used. “If you think someone wouldn’t attempt to capture me for it, then you know nothing about the current Department of Mysteries.”
“You retained enough connections to the world outside this room to know about the Department of Mysteries, and yet you would not help me?’
“Help someone who was essentially insane?”
Voldemort moved forwards a long step and laid his own hand on the table. Harry couldn’t help but compare them, but then again, over a thousand years separated Slytherin and Voldemort. There was no reason their fingers would look like each other’s. “You are making excuses. You are saying that-”
“There was no reason to make Horcruxes. It doesn’t matter how much you knew about your family at the time, or how much you feared death. There was no reason.” Slytherin paused and stared at Voldemort, then added grudgingly, “I will say that at least you were intelligent enough to accept help when it was offered and attach yourself to a power who could protect our line when it arrived. There is that.”
“Harry is not a power that could protect our line.”
Slytherin snorted. “Then I take back what I said about your intelligence.”
“I do not see him that way.” Voldemort was focused on Salazar as though he was about to move forwards and touch him, although Harry didn’t think he really would. “I see him as a human being.”
“You know he is not. He knows that he is not.” Slytherin considered Voldemort with a frown tugging hard at the edge of his mouth. “I am unsure where you got that impression.”
Harry sighed. He knew exactly where Voldemort had got it. He wanted to believe Harry was human because then his-feelings would have more reason to exist. There was no reason to care for a star or a storm, but he could care for a human being who had a nature a little like a star’s or a storm’s.
“I got it from the fact that Harry cared enough to help me reunite my soul.” Voldemort curled his lip. “I am unsure that you, my ancestor, are more intelligent than I am if you don’t understand that.”
Slytherin puffed up like a cobra about to spit venom, and Harry decided to intervene. “Why shout at each other? You know exactly what each of you think, and you both did things that the other one considered wrong. Why not just admit that both of you made mistakes, and then, Salazar, you can teach Voldemort the method of immortality that you used.”
“My descendant made such mistakes,” Slytherin muttered, eyes still fixed on Voldemort. “I am unsure that I can actually teach him better.”
Voldemort bared his teeth. “I have made mistakes, and I have atoned for them. I am willing to learn what you can teach me, but if you are as condescending about it as about this, then perhaps I will simply learn from Harry.”
There was a long pause, which wasn’t what Harry would have expected so far from the pace of their exchange. Then Slytherin shook his head a little. “You really do consider him human and someone who could teach you,” he whispered.
“Why would I not? He has not tried to betray me or condescend to me or turn his back on me, though he has a better right than anyone else in existence with how many worlds he has known inferior versions of myself in.”
Slytherin cast a frowning glance at Harry. Harry only tilted his eyebrows upwards and shrugged a little. He didn’t always understand what went on in Voldemort’s head, despite the fact that he had been responsible for putting together some of it.
Slytherin finally nodded. “I want to teach you. I want to see my line go forwards in time, and achieve great things. I want-perhaps to have a sanctum where I can emerge again into the light, and have someone who will protect me from the Department of Mysteries and others who would try to harm me. But you would have to swear that you would never consider any method of immortality again other than the one I would reveal to you.”
“As long as that method of immortality works, I would have no need to consider it.”
Slytherin still let his eyes flit back and forth between Voldemort and Harry as if searching for something else, but then nodded and folded his arms across his chest. “Harry tells me that you have been working with a faction that thinks of itself as the people of the Light. What kind of political work are you doing?”
*
Voldemort was quietly pleased at how the rest of the conversation had gone. Once Slytherin got over what he seemed to think was his right to yell at a descendant, they could discuss how similar they were. And Voldemort could see more and more traits of himself in his ancestor’s face and features, in the way he gestured, in the abrupt way he narrowed his eyes before he laughed.
Even if he thought their differences were greater their similarities, still, including their differences in the way they treated Harry.
Jonathan had been content to occupy himself with some runes that were apparently written about the room and were key to Slytherin’s version of immortality, but he stood up and smiled when the conversation ceased due to their having reached the limit of what they could talk about. From here, Voldemort would need to perform rituals and find the various materials, including stone he could carve the runes on, that would enable him to achieve Slytherin’s immortality. Slytherin, after a visible struggle, had also given him copies of the ancient books in which he had first found those rituals.
“Are you ready to go, sir?” Jonathan asked.
“I am.” Voldemort glanced back at Harry, who had turned to face Slytherin with a curious expression on his face.
“I merely wanted to speak to Harry about something,” Slytherin said, catching his eye. “He will be along in a moment.”
Voldemort tilted his head and left the room, but flicked his fingers as he did, casting one of the first pieces of magic he had ever learned how to manipulate wandlessly. It had been useful, in Wool’s Orphanage, to know when other people were talking about him and plotting some kind of attack. The magic hovered in the air, invisible, but bringing him every sound that happened in the room it was part of.
“What are we doing?” Jonathan asked as they leaned against the blank stone wall outside Slytherin’s quarters.
“Waiting for Harry, of course.”
Jonathan cast him a skeptical glance that turned into a smile at the edges. Voldemort ignored that, and concentrated on what his spell was telling him.
“I am concerned that my descendant thinks of you as human,” Slytherin was saying. “As a potential lover.”
“Why? It’s not as though you want me for yourself.”
Voldemort hissed under his breath. That had been a possibility he hadn’t considered.
“No, of course not.” Slytherin sounded revolted, which was at least momentarily reassuring, but not much. Voldemort had found Harry only the equivalent of an intriguing book at one point, after all, and had changed his mind. “What I mean is that your mind and morals are not human, and neither will his be after he becomes immortal. I worry that he is only pursuing this path because he thinks that he can court you, and will become disappointed enough after he achieves immortality and realizes he cannot that-”
“I would allow him to try.”
Voldemort released his breath carefully, hissing through clenched teeth without making enough noise that Slytherin or Harry were likely to notice. Jonathan cast him a curious glance.
“What?” Slytherin’s voice was incredulous and dry.
“If he wants to, I would let him. I don’t see the harm in it,” Harry continued, and Voldemort knew without seeing it exactly how he would be shrugging. “If you’re right and his mind is going to change that much after he becomes immortal, then it’ll come to nothing anyway.”
Voldemort rapped his fingers hard against his knee and fought back the temptation to march into the room and demand to know exactly what Harry meant by talking about it in this dismissive tone.
“You risk disappointment.”
“As if I haven’t had enough of that in my many lives.”
“This life is different.”
“How do you know?” Harry asked, but Voldemort wasn’t truly surprised when there was no answer from Slytherin. Harry sighed, and by the sound of it, moved towards the door that would let him out next to Voldemort and Jonathan. “If you ever decide that you want to tell me, then you know where to find me. For now, I’ve got to get your descendant back beyond the walls of Hogwarts before morning.”
Harry stepped out of the door at the same moment that Voldemort’s spell stopped recording Slytherin’s mutterings under his breath. From the unimpressed look Harry gave him, he knew exactly what that spell had done and had permitted it to continue existing for reasons of his own.
“He is wrong,” Voldemort told Harry.
“Then let time prove that,” Harry retorted, and started walking towards the entrance hall. Voldemort kept pace with him. Jonathan did, too, until they reached a cross-corridor that must lead towards the Hufflepuff common room, when he yawned and waved.
“Good night, both of you.”
“Good night, Jonathan,” Harry said, with a sudden smile that Voldemort coveted for himself. But he said nothing until they were not only out of Hogwarts but beyond the gates, on the path to Hogsmeade where he could Apparate.
“He is wrong,” he said softly, stopping Harry with a hand on his shoulder. “Slytherin is wrong.”
Harry gave him a smile that wasn’t the twin of the one he had given his brother, but one dazzlingly star-like, and Voldemort stared. This was the one that he wanted for himself, now that he knew it existed.
“Then prove it, and court me when I reach a good physical age for it,” Harry retorted, and swirled into darkness and dust under Voldemort’s fingers.
Voldemort Apparated back home in a properly quiet frame of mind. But nothing could dim or dull his determination.
He intended to prove it to both of them. To all of them.
Chapter Seventy-One.