Chapter Thirty-One of 'His Twenty-Eighth Life'- No Good Excuse
Chapter Thirty.
Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (31/?)
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.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-One--No Good Excuse
"You want me to piece your soul back together?"
Harry knew his voice sounded faint, but then, he felt that way, too. He honestly couldn't take his eyes off Voldemort and the small pieces of soul that coiled together in his palms, his and his victim's. When he did manage to look up, he encountered Voldemort's smile, and that wasn't much better.
He had never met something like this in all his lives. He had wished for excitement and change at times, thinking normality was boring, but right now, he would have given a lot to go back to a world where he knew everyone and they were nice, calm variations of the selves he'd known in his first life.
"Who better?"
"The method the book recommended--"
"Is too slow for me when I have the Master of Death by my side." Voldemort bent towards him, eyes brilliantly aglow in their sockets under the high forehead. "Who else would do it as well? Who else would do it with the care for my soul that I lacked when I broke it apart in the first place? Are you not afraid that I would once again not do as told?"
Harry scowled, because yes, that was on the list of his fears. "Your manipulating me into it is not going to work."
Voldemort slid to one knee the way he had the other night, his eyes still outshining the mass of soul in his hands. "I know I can't manipulate you into it. I can only mention the natural consequences of leaving L--me to piece my soul back together. I am impatient. I look for shortcuts. If that happens when I am attempting to disentangle part of my soul from another's, only imagine what could happen?"
"And you would go ahead and do it anyway and not wait the way the book says you're going to, all for the sake of the threat that can get me to do it."
Voldemort smiled without saying anything. Harry hissed at him in a way that had nothing to do with Parseltongue and held out his hands. The Elder Wand was between his fingers in seconds, the Cloak draped along his arms. The Resurrection Stone hovered above his palm this time, in the center of an expanding sphere of red light.
"What will you do?"
Harry was glad enough to answer that question. It might mean that Voldemort, his partner in discussing esoteric magical theory, was back, and not Voldemort, the man with the strange obsession with him. "I'm going to kill the bonds holding the victim's soul to yours first and make sure it can go on. Hush."
Voldemort opened his mouth as if to ask another question, but the Stone swooped down to hover above the brilliant shifting mass in his hands, and he shut it again. Harry focused on the Stone and reached out with it, channeling the power from the Wand and the needed finesse from the Cloak.
Harry sometimes regretted that his power was over death and not life, that he had to do things like this when weaving or binding or creating would be more beautiful and life-affirming, but not now. He fixed his eyes on the dancing colors of the souls, and they began to separate. A few that shone more scarlet shuffled off to the side and revealed themselves as wound in among, but not touching, the darker golden and purple shades of Voldemort's. Then the red strands flashed green and the golden and purple black and opalline, but Harry had marked their presence. He knew what to do.
The Stone sang in his hands, a high note that went soaring and shrilling past all normal physical ears. Harry brought the Stone down like a flint knife.
It touched and withered the bonds that kept the pieces of soul confined in the same prison; Harry had been wrong about them actually being tied together. This was more like severing the lock on a cage and watching the captive go free. Bits of scarlet motes, dancing like fireflies, scattered into the distance.
Harry watched them go with a smile, and nearly jumped when Voldemort touched his shoulder. He turned back to see Voldemort dividing his gaze between Harry and the colors cupped in his hands.
"Place them back into me. I can feel the separation now. I--do not want it."
Even knowing that Voldemort might have added some of the longing to his voice to make Harry react, Harry still drew a slow, deep breath. Then he sent the Stone to hover behind him, lifted the Wand, and stepped forwards and reached his hands into Voldemort's chest.
*
Lord Voldemort was seeing magic that no one had ever seen performed before, not in all the worlds.
He knew that because Harry had always destroyed him when he was born in his various guises, and destroyed his Horcruxes, not tried to piece them back together. He watched now, near-panting, as the flesh of his chest parted harmlessly around Harry's hands. No blood poured out. The muscles beneath moved aside, the bones shifted painlessly, at the sweep of a cloaking will.
"They know that I don't mean to harm them," Harry murmured. He was watching as the streams of soul-light swirled up and around his wrists, following the circular motions his hands were beginning to make inside Lord Voldemort's chest.
Inside. Inside him.
Lord Voldemort let his hands hover, but he did not touch. He would not interrupt this delicate, flexing beauty of magic for the world. He watched as the strands turned clear and glinting blue, the color of a sunset sky, in the moment before they reached into him and became stars of light. It looked as though Harry was placing those stars into him, and he wondered for a moment if it was so simple, if he could learn--
Then the soul-fusing began.
Sensation so intense it was neither pain nor pleasure tore through Lord Voldemort. He opened his mouth and made no sound. His mind was kicking higher, higher. He saw the dead world through which Harry had traveled when he cleared the curse from his brother's mind. He saw dark patterns swaying before him and swirling into the shapes of new souls that descended when a new life requiring them was conceived. He saw the secrets of the dead swarming and flashing before his vision, so thick he could not touch one.
The world shattered, and floating pieces stabbed at him. He saw the time of the murder that had created this, and heard the hissing of the serpent on the locket--knew it for that one's hissing and no other--and Bellatrix's voice and the sound of blood running and the crash of an ocean. Smells whipped past his nostrils, blood and dirt and rain and vegetation. Lord Voldemort gasped aloud.
The smells vanished, but he opened his eyes to the swarming world, so brilliant with purpose that he could not identify the purposes, only know they were there. And then even those vanished, down to a single thin horizon line that he sped towards, and became part of.
The murder was there, in front of him, the death of the Muggle tramp and his clutching hands and his wailing mouth and a nearby cat's teeth as it wailed too and his own young face. Young with excitement. Young with foolishness. Because he had not known there were other ways of immortality and he would discover them. He thought he had to do everything in his twenties.
If there was regret, it was for that.
Harry stood beside him, suddenly, watching the memory with ancient and compassionate eyes. He turned his head, and Lord Voldemort traveled down the road in his eyes. It melted into images of a young man playing a piano, and drinking tea, and laughing with his brothers, and concentrating as hard as he could to lift a wallet from a pocket, and running down an alley with darkness lapping at his ankles and his eyes wide as platters.
He was a thief. He deserved what he got.
And then you came and stole his life.
He deserved what he got!
Harry bowed his head, his hair rustling with a noise like thousands of leaves being crunched underfoot. As long as you really believe that, or use it as a desperate defense, then I cannot put your soul back together for you.
Lord Voldemort turned and faced the images again. His victim huddled under a coat to keep off the cold. His victim wolfing brown bread and soup that a faceless benefactor had handed to him. His victim staring up with terrified eyes at Lord Voldemort's own young form and green-flaring wand.
We were both cold. I in the orphanage and this fool on the street.
Harry made a rattling sound like bones being shaken in a caul. Lord Voldemort nearly stepped back, but that was the moment when the pieces of soul turned within his breast and fused back into one.
This time, it was as if he was a bolt of lightning striking itself. Lord Voldemort found himself trembling and rooted in place, his own hands reaching out for a succor that was not there. He gazed down and his bones shone through his skin, illuminated by a radiance much greater than any that Avada Kedavra could produce.
He saw Harry standing with his head bowed over the Cloak in his hands, stirring and sliding it back and forth.
He saw the Elder Wand aimed at him, and even in the depths of the fusing, the sensation inspired no panic.
He saw the Resurrection Stone spinning above him, enclosed with white strands like a spider encasing itself in a web, and then it melted down and seemed to become a scar on his hand before melting away and reappearing back in Harry's.
The final, ringing sensation gripped and shook his bones, and then ended.
*
Harry stood back in the clearing and studied Voldemort. He had expected some physical changes as a result of the man's acceptance of the Horcrux back into himself, but not exactly what he got.
Voldemort's skin was less pale now, and he appeared to have more hair, although it was flat and black and creeping like a mat down around his ears, while leaving the top of his head bald, like he was wearing a tonsure. His eyes had also moved a little forwards, and the sockets weren't so deep-set. His fingers appeared less spidery, with a touch of color on the palms that hadn't moved to the backs or his knuckles. His fingernails no longer looked like glass. He had a more prominent jaw and nose.
He had never looked exactly like the monster that had been resurrected in the graveyard of Little Hangleton in Harry's first life, and sometimes other lives. Now he looked--
Less like that, Harry thought, and that was all he would allow himself to think.
Voldemort opened his eyes. They still blazed ruby, a weirdly comforting fact. Harry reached down and extended his hands to help Voldemort to his feet without even thinking about what he was doing. Of course he would help someone up who still had spiderweb cracks in their soul where a piece had joined itself back into it.
Voldemort took Harry's hands and started.
"What is it?" Harry looked down. He thought he had banished the exhausted, satisfied Deathly Hallows, but sometimes they branded themselves stubbornly on the back of his hand or something like that until he needed them again.
Voldemort's eyes were burning at his. "I can feel more warmth through my fingertips than I could before this."
"Increased sensory information?" Harry smiled. "I'm not surprised. Creating a Horcrux isolates you from the world of living and dying things. You can sense them better when you've torn that cocoon."
"If you are about to compare me to a butterfly..."
"I don't think I'd care to try and break your wings."
Voldemort stood up and spent a moment examining his fingers. Harry was sure he was noticing the differences. A second later, he looked at Harry. His face was expressionless.
"No one has ever done for someone what you did for me."
"I would hope it's not fucking common to have the Master of Death piece your soul back together after you made five Horcruxes."
Voldemort shook his head. "It must be unique in all the worlds."
Harry nodded. "I'd rest for a few days if I were you. That didn't exhaust me only because the Deathly Hallows absorbed the blow for me, and they're almost drained. Thanks for suggesting that alternative to some other kind of high-energy magic they could have done. I'd also make sure that you have some story for your Death Eaters as to why you look different. Maybe cut off that hair."
Harry's voice trailed off uncertainly. No matter what he said, Voldemort kept staring at him as if he was trying to eat him alive with his eyes. "Voldemort? Are you all right?" Maybe some kind of delayed effect from reabsorbing the Horcrux was starting to happen. It wasn't as though Harry would know when he had never done this before.
"We accomplished a feat of magic that has never been done before."
"And I told you that I think you're right."
"In all the worlds that you have lived in, in all the worlds that have ever existed."
"I think you're right about that, too." Harry casually shifted his weight. Voldemort's voice was picking up speed and fervor. If he went mad and attacked Harry, then he had no worries about defending himself, but he would regret the necessity. "Why don't you sit down for a bit? I can Summon food for you. Do you need some juice?"
"I need nothing but your acknowledgment of how rare this is."
"It's rare. Of course it is. I already said that."
Voldemort captured his hands again. Harry frowned at him. His eyes really were burning with something on the edge of madness. If I made a mistake when he repaired his soul and he's about to go insane again...
"I do not need juice," Voldemort whispered, putting more contempt in the last word than Harry had heard in his Chosen One's name in some worlds. "I need your acknowledgment."
"You have it."
"You won't try to retreat. You won't try to say that this didn't happen."
Harry came near rolling his eyes, as much as he knew this moment was serious for Voldemort. "Of course I won't. I know that I stitched your soul back together as much as you do."
After another long moment of staring that made Harry flush without understanding why, Voldemort nodded and withdrew his hands from Harry's. "I will go back to the manor and make sure that my Death Eaters receive an explanation. I will take away the hair."
Harry gave him a faint smile as he moved away. "I noticed a while ago that you never speak of going home when we part here. Why?"
"A simple explanation. I do not have one," Voldemort said, and he Disapparated.
Harry stood in the clearing for a moment after he was gone, eyes closed and savoring the feeling of a world where something was new and he had used the power of the Master of Death for an unequivocally good thing. Then he Apparated to the home he was lucky enough to have.
*
Lord Voldemort sat within the largest study in the manor, the one he had appropriated for himself when he took the house over a decade ago. He sat before a roaring fire, within the embrace of a chair whose threads he felt at every touch like a breath against his skin, cradled in a body that sighed more deeply and tasted more richly.
But more than that, he sat within the reel of his mind.
The increased physical sensations made sense within Harry's explanation about an isolation from the world of living things that had partially ended when he reabsorbed the locket Horcrux.
The increased emotional ones did not.
Lord Voldemort did not imagine what Harry did when outside of his presence, except to imagine him fetching books and practicing magic and walking the long corridors of the mind of the Master of Death. He imagined it now. He saw Harry in his mind's eye--and no more than that, with no more certain knowledge--sitting at a large table with his parents and laughing. Pretending. Pretending to be the oblivious boy they somehow thought he could be, even knowing the truth about him.
And he hungered.
Not for the food in his imagination, not for the magic that Harry had shared with him. Having a piece of his soul rejoined to the rest satiated his appetite for magic for the moment.
But when he thought of Harry pretending and being as brave and isolated in his cocoon of pretense as Lord Voldemort had been in the cocoon of his Horcrux, something raised its claws and tore them down the surface of his mind.
He could not name the emotion.
He knew something else, with the same irritating certainty that his imagination of Harry lacked. He knew he could not have named his emotion long before he made his Horcrux. There was only silence when he asked his great genius what it meant.
He sat, with the silence and the whirling and the sensation of the world exhaling on him again, and besides the silence, knew only one thing with certainty.
He wished Harry was here beside him.
Chapter Thirty-Two.
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