Chapter 9: The Heir
I really did mean to post this last Wednesday, but it just didn't happen before my daughter and I had to get a bus to NYC as the first leg of our trip up to the Amherst area, where she will be back in school the day after tomorrow. I don't think I could have imagined, when I was writing PS and ToGI, having an empty nest (her brother moved into an apartment about two weeks ago), so it's a little strange to revisit this now that they're so grown up! This may or may not give me more time to be online--we'll see how many boxes I have to pack to mail to her (with stuff she forgot to pack). Oh, if only we could do owl post...
Chapter 9: The Heir
1. "You're in agony. We shouldn't be doing this; we're neither of us in a fit state. I know it's tempting when we'll be spending the night in the same room, but w'’re both here for a reason. And this isn't it."
A lot of people were relieved that nothing was going to happen between Harry and Ginny in the infirmary! And not just H/Hr shippers. It was never my intent in the first place--that sort of "activity" happens later, and under even less auspicious circumstances. ;)
2. For two nights he and Ginny talked into the wee hours, and Harry knew he'd miss this when he returned to his dorm.
I felt that this and the reminder of the many letters they'd written to each other during the summer were both important in stressing that theirs was NOT just a physical relationship (for all of those who wanted to insist that Ginny was the one in the Tarot reading he was merely lusting after).
3. "What do you reckon?" Harry asked him. "How are they covering it up? How many girls do you think have had babies since you started school? Why didn't any of them ask Pomfrey for Prophylaxis Potion?"
Harry starts to get a little glimpse here of another difference in the two timelines, and many of my readers caught the similarity with The Handmaid's Tale (though no one was forcing girls to have babies per se, no one was forced to sleep with a married man, and conservative religion had nothing to do with it).
4. Many wizard fathers might be upset with Katie, but Harry knew that after ten years in Azkaban, after missing a decade of his daughter’s life, Sam wasn't about to be alienating her for any reason. Wait, he thought. Did Sam spend ten years in Azkaban? Harry remembered that he'd accidentally killed his wife before Harry's parents--in this case, just his father--had been killed by Voldemort. Unless he had been released early for some reason, Sam had still served his prison term in this life.
Harry is correct about Sam still serving his prison sentence, since he went to prison before 31 October 1981.
5. Could Draco be single-handedly responsible for all of the girls Stuart has heard in the birthing ward? He thought of Katie. Okay, so Draco isn't single-handedly responsible for all of the pregnant girls at Hogwarts. But I'll bet he’s responsible for at least one...
Harry's wrong about this, and it hasn't occurred to him that part of Draco's appeal is that girls who sleep with him know that they cannot get pregnant, but he doesn't know any of this yet.
6. It was his fault that Muggle-borns were excluded from the wizarding world; until he could find a way to change everything back completely, the least he could do was to rectify some of the horrible things that had occurred because of his saving his mother's life.
Except that it really would be the least that he could do, since he still doesn't know that full extent (okay, he'll never know the FULL extent) of the ramifications of the changed timelines.
7. He thought that it shouldn't be too difficult to find Ruth, if Maggie just called synagogues asking for rabbis called Pelta. It was probably an uncommon name in England, and synagogues weren't as numerous as churches (she could also immediately rule out the ones that didn't allow women to be rabbis).
This becomes important later, of course, for Harry's travels.
8. "A General Strike?" Draco said incredulously. "Where do you get terms like that?"
Harry-the-Muggle-raised rears his head! Hermione's influence is also seen here.
9. "I'm a Slytherin. I'm the last one the rest of the school would follow. We need Ron to be the public face of our campaign; he's the Gryffindor Quidditch captain, he's the most likely sixth-year prefect to be Head Boy next year--" he tried to ignore Draco's angry scowl "--and you and Ron and the rest of your family have just recently been reunited with your sister who's lived all of her life as a Muggle."
I know that I had Lily worried about Harry's natural leadership abilities, but he's right here that non-Slytherins would probably not do this if he were the leader. (She was mainly worried about Voldemort seeing his leadership qualities and being threatened by them.)
10. "I can handle dementors," he said stubbornly, but he felt a familiar cold lump in the pit of his stomach when she'd said this. I have a world-class Patronus, he reminded himself. Let them send dementors.
A little more foreshadowing for Harry having to deal with dementors ALL THE TIME.
11. "In January?" Ron went on. "Standing out on the castle lawn in January?"
Ginny threw up her hands. "What are you objecting to, Ron? The fact that we're witches and wizards, so we can make fires without wood to keep ourselves warm, or the fact that we can set up tents on the lawn that are just like cozy, three-bedroom cottages inside?"
Paraphrase: "Are you a wizard or not?" (Hee!)
12. "The wizarding world, the people who weren't with the Death Eaters, they didn't close ranks to protect the Muggle-borns; they turned them out, they said, 'Oh, sorry, you're no longer our concern. We have to watch our own backs.' No. We all have to watch each other's backs, before there's no one left. Soon everyone will have to be a Death Eater, or pretend to be one, just to survive. We can't let things get that bad."
Except--they already ARE that bad. Unlike in DH, Harry isn't witnessing the sudden changeover to a world controlled by Voldemort; it happened more gradually, and he--plus everyone else he knows--grew up thinking that was the normal way of things.
13. Ron nodded. He seemed to be enjoying himself now. Harry remembered the many scrapes they'd got into in his other life, remembered the Ron who had sacrificed himself at the age of twelve after commanding the life-sized chess pieces that blocked the way to the chamber where Flamel's stone was hidden. This was the Ron he remembered.
Harry knew he was the right man for the job.
One of the hardest things for me to do was to make Harry and Ron enemies at the start of the AU! I think Harry's abiding affection for Ron, from his other life, shows through here, even though he has Draco for his best friend now.
14. Harry leapt over the parapet.
He let himself drop at first, glad that the West Tower was so high; he held his wings still, angling them to catch the breeze. After a few seconds, he was able to bank before he began to actually move his wings, pushing against the cold air, driving toward the forest. He ascended as he approached the stand of trees, and soon he was flying far above them, alternately banking and floating and moving his wings energetically to adjust his height or direction.
I really enjoyed getting Harry back to his golden griffin self!
15. An irregular rectangle of bright yellow was superimposed on the pristine snow. He looked up to find Davy, the caretaker, standing in the doorway holding a lit wand, and behind him, a cozy fire burning in the large stone fireplace.
Just when Harry thought he hadn't been caught again...
16. "Albus! What can I do for you? Why are you in the cabin?"
Albus! Harry thought. He's--he's--
I really took my time revealing to my readers that they were right about Davy!
17. Grinning, he said, "You can stop pretending, Professor. I know it's you. It's all right; I won't tell anyone."
The blue eyes were no longer twinkling. He put his teacup down and pulled a large handkerchief out of his pocket, blew his nose noisily. While putting the handkerchief away, he said, "Sometimes," as though he were merely thinking aloud, "we don't mean to say certain things, but we do anyway. Especially if under, say, the Imperius curse..."
Of course, this Dumbledore doesn't know that Harry has some practice throwing off Imperius. He wouldn't expect him to be able to do such a thing. (And he also knows about Harry's Obedience Charm, which can't be thrown off, though he doesn't mention it here.)
18. "I haven’t much choice, have I? Someone else has decided I'm to be initiated on Saturday. I don't want to be his servant; I want to be yours."
He waved his hand, and now Harry could really see beyond the superficial external changes, could see the man he remembered in the eyes that looked back at him. "I don't want servants, Harry. We serve each other; we do for each other. We want an end of masters and servants."
This, to Harry’s ears, was very radical-sounding. He remembered Jamie's reaction to his thanking a house-elf. Can there be a world without masters and servants?
This is actually a bit more radical than what JKR did, as are some other things I did at the end of The Triangle Prophecy.
19. "I was the servant of Hogwarts when I was headmaster. Fulfilling your role in the greater scheme of things is a very satisfying way to spend one's life. If each person always felt that he had to be in charge, no one would ever be truly happy. Even if one individual was the true Master, he would be always looking over his shoulder, fearing all who are around him, always worried about being supplanted by someone else's ambition."
This sounds both like Fudge and Voldemort, now that I think about it. And probably like every dictator in history.
20. Harry told him about the fact that he was seeing Ginny, and his dad cautioned him against its becoming public knowledge. "Don't worry," Harry told him. "We're keeping it quiet for now. I think that when we tell her brothers they'll be all right, though. We've been--"
"No," Severus Snape said to him tersely. "It's not that. You don't want certain people to find out that she means anything to you; that she can be used against you."
You'd think Harry would get this by now. (Of course, you'd think he have thought of this when he started seeing Ginny in HBP, and kept it on the down-low instead of kissing her in the Gryffindor common room after the Quidditch final! But, you know--hormones. :D)
21. "It's bad enough that we both have to worry about your mother and sister and brothers. No need to bring others into this."
This is the real danger, of course, of Harry having a family. In his other life, Voldemort had to work to find out who was important to him. In this life, his family existing makes this a no-brainer.
22. The village was a winter wonderland; the buildings all appeared sugar-coated from the snow and every shop had at least one Christmas tree sparkling with fairy lights and singing ornaments. Green garlands touched with a frosting of snow were looped everywhere--garden gates, hanging from cottage eaves, winding around lamp posts on the High Street--and a group of younger children from the village school wandered the lanes singing carols, led by one of their teachers. The young voices wavered charmingly, the smallest ones either a third higher or lower than they should be, that unique sound of a children's choir. Harry remembered doing that when he was younger, laughing with Jamie as they listened to the daringly rude "substitute" carol lyrics Draco would sing surreptitiously.
We all know Draco totally would have done that, right?
23. He kissed her on the cheek and turned toward the door to the hall. He felt rather than heard her running toward him, and he turned. His mother virtually hurled herself at him, throwing her arms around him, and he held her tightly, his face in her hair, hearing her sobs, feeling her back spasming with her cries.
See? Lily really does love him.
24. Magical special effects allowed for spectacular scene changes when Scrooge started a tour of his past and then his present accompanied by the ghosts. A level of realism was achieved that he'd never seen before in a retelling of the tale: they had real ghosts who had come down from Hogwarts castle playing the parts of the specters.
This seemed like a good fit, like when I had the traveling wizarding opera company do Dido and Aeneas.
25. Harry watched the play, watched the actor playing Scrooge grow progressively more distressed as he saw what the results of his life-choices had led to. We never know, do we? Harry thought. Even when we mean well.
I purposefully did not refer, in the story, to that other Christmas tale that involves changing timelines: It's a Wonderful Life. But Harry is closer to living in that sort of universe than the world of A Christmas Carol.
26. "Everyone hold on tight," his stepfather said, holding out--a tin of deviled ham.
I don't think anyone ever got this joke. I guess using this to imply that Voldemort was a deviled ham was too subtle?
27. "Dover?" he asked his dad, who nodded.
"How did you know?"
Harry shrugged, glancing around. "Just a hunch."
A better answer than Harry's earlier refrain: "I can't tell you."
28. "So," he said in a rich, commanding baritone. "Our new Death Eaters"” Harry was confused; he had expected a strange, high voice. But, he realized, that was the voice of the re-embodied, formerly destroyed Voldemort. Somehow the re-embodiment hadn't quite extended to the voice. It hadn't restored this voice to him. He has a very-convincing voice, Harry thought. It's the sort of voice that could get you to do all sorts of things you know you shouldn't.
I never got how Voldemort was supposed to have accumulated a ton of supporters sounding like a strangled goose. So I guess I have a different opinion on this than JKR.
29. "“Harry Potter," he said, and Harry thought it odd that he had never heard anyone say his name in a way that made it sound more beautiful and mysterious. He shook himself mentally; this was clearly one of the ways that Voldemort had managed to garner so many followers, this Svengali-like ability to hypnotize a person by doing nothing more than saying the person's own name so that it sounded like the most lyrical poetry in the world.
Almost as good as Imperius, but more subtle.
30. "I found that a very curious thing happened to me, Harry, on the first of September. I found myself remembering all manner of things that I never had before. A great many things," he said very slowly, his eyes boring into Harry, while Harry wished he would speak again so he could continue to hear that smooth voice... "Did you remember anything-unusual that day, Harry?"
I thought that people understood that Voldemort experienced the time-change in the same way that Harry did, he's just expressing it here in a different way because Severus, Lucius and Draco are present. But some people seemed to think that his talking about remembering things he hadn't before meant that his experience wasn't like Harry's. I'm still not sure how I could have been clearer about that without a lot of boring expository speculation on Harry's part.
31. "Lily, let's be reasonable. You don't want Harry to have that wand, of all wands, and I do want Draco to have it. Why can't they just trade?"
Harry could see that she seemed nervous, but her voice was as confident as ever. He had a feeling that if there was something Lucius Malfoy wanted, she was determined to make certain that he didn't get it.
This seemed like something Lucius would do. He'd think that Draco being able to do tandem spells with Voldemort would make him his pet.
32. Harry and Jamie called goodbye to Draco as they followed their mother down the winding walkway; Mr. Malfoy was holding his son's biceps. Harry lifted his eyes to his mother again.
"Thanks, Mum. For the wand," he said with a smile, but his mother had that terrible expression on her face again.
She looked as if he had killed her.
Can we say foreshadowing, boys and girls?
33. He concentrated as hard as he could; suddenly there was no pain, only floating, floating above the cold grey landscape, watching with fascination the crackling amber light that connected his body with Voldemort's wand. He saw Draco's surprise; he saw his stepfather's surprise too, and Lucius Malfoy's. Finally, he saw Voldemort's eyes widening as the torture continued, and he watched his body serenely kneeling, arms outstretched as if in ecstatic prayer, his face peaceful and serene.
While I don't think I'd have Harry do the pain-blocking if I had to do it again (having read OotP I don't think it would be consistent with the fully-integrated Harry who should never have attempted Occlumency in the first place) I did enjoy including this passage in the initiation.
34. Finally, it was over, and Harry sank gratefully back down into his body, fighting the urge to touch his smoking arm, meeting Voldemort's eyes and saying what he'd told Draco to say.
"Thank you, my Lord."
I'd had Draco do this in the other world, but only Harry does it here.
35. A gasp went up from those assembled, and Harry was surprised to find that he too had gasped. The Heir! At last, he would learn the identity of the Heir!
Another gasp died in his throat as one thought occupied his brain:
Why did Voldemort seem to be looking right at him?
A few alert readers caught onto my use of "seem" and realized that Harry wasn't the heir before the next chapter. But a lot of people were previously convinced that Harry had seen Voldemort initiating Harry himself in the dreams Harry had early in TOGI. This debate raged on for a while before the next chapter was posted. (Plus a debate over who were the operatives, who the Teacher!Death Eater was, etc.
Goodness, that was a long one. We're getting to the really meaty stuff!
Chapter 9: The Heir
1. "You're in agony. We shouldn't be doing this; we're neither of us in a fit state. I know it's tempting when we'll be spending the night in the same room, but w'’re both here for a reason. And this isn't it."
A lot of people were relieved that nothing was going to happen between Harry and Ginny in the infirmary! And not just H/Hr shippers. It was never my intent in the first place--that sort of "activity" happens later, and under even less auspicious circumstances. ;)
2. For two nights he and Ginny talked into the wee hours, and Harry knew he'd miss this when he returned to his dorm.
I felt that this and the reminder of the many letters they'd written to each other during the summer were both important in stressing that theirs was NOT just a physical relationship (for all of those who wanted to insist that Ginny was the one in the Tarot reading he was merely lusting after).
3. "What do you reckon?" Harry asked him. "How are they covering it up? How many girls do you think have had babies since you started school? Why didn't any of them ask Pomfrey for Prophylaxis Potion?"
Harry starts to get a little glimpse here of another difference in the two timelines, and many of my readers caught the similarity with The Handmaid's Tale (though no one was forcing girls to have babies per se, no one was forced to sleep with a married man, and conservative religion had nothing to do with it).
4. Many wizard fathers might be upset with Katie, but Harry knew that after ten years in Azkaban, after missing a decade of his daughter’s life, Sam wasn't about to be alienating her for any reason. Wait, he thought. Did Sam spend ten years in Azkaban? Harry remembered that he'd accidentally killed his wife before Harry's parents--in this case, just his father--had been killed by Voldemort. Unless he had been released early for some reason, Sam had still served his prison term in this life.
Harry is correct about Sam still serving his prison sentence, since he went to prison before 31 October 1981.
5. Could Draco be single-handedly responsible for all of the girls Stuart has heard in the birthing ward? He thought of Katie. Okay, so Draco isn't single-handedly responsible for all of the pregnant girls at Hogwarts. But I'll bet he’s responsible for at least one...
Harry's wrong about this, and it hasn't occurred to him that part of Draco's appeal is that girls who sleep with him know that they cannot get pregnant, but he doesn't know any of this yet.
6. It was his fault that Muggle-borns were excluded from the wizarding world; until he could find a way to change everything back completely, the least he could do was to rectify some of the horrible things that had occurred because of his saving his mother's life.
Except that it really would be the least that he could do, since he still doesn't know that full extent (okay, he'll never know the FULL extent) of the ramifications of the changed timelines.
7. He thought that it shouldn't be too difficult to find Ruth, if Maggie just called synagogues asking for rabbis called Pelta. It was probably an uncommon name in England, and synagogues weren't as numerous as churches (she could also immediately rule out the ones that didn't allow women to be rabbis).
This becomes important later, of course, for Harry's travels.
8. "A General Strike?" Draco said incredulously. "Where do you get terms like that?"
Harry-the-Muggle-raised rears his head! Hermione's influence is also seen here.
9. "I'm a Slytherin. I'm the last one the rest of the school would follow. We need Ron to be the public face of our campaign; he's the Gryffindor Quidditch captain, he's the most likely sixth-year prefect to be Head Boy next year--" he tried to ignore Draco's angry scowl "--and you and Ron and the rest of your family have just recently been reunited with your sister who's lived all of her life as a Muggle."
I know that I had Lily worried about Harry's natural leadership abilities, but he's right here that non-Slytherins would probably not do this if he were the leader. (She was mainly worried about Voldemort seeing his leadership qualities and being threatened by them.)
10. "I can handle dementors," he said stubbornly, but he felt a familiar cold lump in the pit of his stomach when she'd said this. I have a world-class Patronus, he reminded himself. Let them send dementors.
A little more foreshadowing for Harry having to deal with dementors ALL THE TIME.
11. "In January?" Ron went on. "Standing out on the castle lawn in January?"
Ginny threw up her hands. "What are you objecting to, Ron? The fact that we're witches and wizards, so we can make fires without wood to keep ourselves warm, or the fact that we can set up tents on the lawn that are just like cozy, three-bedroom cottages inside?"
Paraphrase: "Are you a wizard or not?" (Hee!)
12. "The wizarding world, the people who weren't with the Death Eaters, they didn't close ranks to protect the Muggle-borns; they turned them out, they said, 'Oh, sorry, you're no longer our concern. We have to watch our own backs.' No. We all have to watch each other's backs, before there's no one left. Soon everyone will have to be a Death Eater, or pretend to be one, just to survive. We can't let things get that bad."
Except--they already ARE that bad. Unlike in DH, Harry isn't witnessing the sudden changeover to a world controlled by Voldemort; it happened more gradually, and he--plus everyone else he knows--grew up thinking that was the normal way of things.
13. Ron nodded. He seemed to be enjoying himself now. Harry remembered the many scrapes they'd got into in his other life, remembered the Ron who had sacrificed himself at the age of twelve after commanding the life-sized chess pieces that blocked the way to the chamber where Flamel's stone was hidden. This was the Ron he remembered.
Harry knew he was the right man for the job.
One of the hardest things for me to do was to make Harry and Ron enemies at the start of the AU! I think Harry's abiding affection for Ron, from his other life, shows through here, even though he has Draco for his best friend now.
14. Harry leapt over the parapet.
He let himself drop at first, glad that the West Tower was so high; he held his wings still, angling them to catch the breeze. After a few seconds, he was able to bank before he began to actually move his wings, pushing against the cold air, driving toward the forest. He ascended as he approached the stand of trees, and soon he was flying far above them, alternately banking and floating and moving his wings energetically to adjust his height or direction.
I really enjoyed getting Harry back to his golden griffin self!
15. An irregular rectangle of bright yellow was superimposed on the pristine snow. He looked up to find Davy, the caretaker, standing in the doorway holding a lit wand, and behind him, a cozy fire burning in the large stone fireplace.
Just when Harry thought he hadn't been caught again...
16. "Albus! What can I do for you? Why are you in the cabin?"
Albus! Harry thought. He's--he's--
I really took my time revealing to my readers that they were right about Davy!
17. Grinning, he said, "You can stop pretending, Professor. I know it's you. It's all right; I won't tell anyone."
The blue eyes were no longer twinkling. He put his teacup down and pulled a large handkerchief out of his pocket, blew his nose noisily. While putting the handkerchief away, he said, "Sometimes," as though he were merely thinking aloud, "we don't mean to say certain things, but we do anyway. Especially if under, say, the Imperius curse..."
Of course, this Dumbledore doesn't know that Harry has some practice throwing off Imperius. He wouldn't expect him to be able to do such a thing. (And he also knows about Harry's Obedience Charm, which can't be thrown off, though he doesn't mention it here.)
18. "I haven’t much choice, have I? Someone else has decided I'm to be initiated on Saturday. I don't want to be his servant; I want to be yours."
He waved his hand, and now Harry could really see beyond the superficial external changes, could see the man he remembered in the eyes that looked back at him. "I don't want servants, Harry. We serve each other; we do for each other. We want an end of masters and servants."
This, to Harry’s ears, was very radical-sounding. He remembered Jamie's reaction to his thanking a house-elf. Can there be a world without masters and servants?
This is actually a bit more radical than what JKR did, as are some other things I did at the end of The Triangle Prophecy.
19. "I was the servant of Hogwarts when I was headmaster. Fulfilling your role in the greater scheme of things is a very satisfying way to spend one's life. If each person always felt that he had to be in charge, no one would ever be truly happy. Even if one individual was the true Master, he would be always looking over his shoulder, fearing all who are around him, always worried about being supplanted by someone else's ambition."
This sounds both like Fudge and Voldemort, now that I think about it. And probably like every dictator in history.
20. Harry told him about the fact that he was seeing Ginny, and his dad cautioned him against its becoming public knowledge. "Don't worry," Harry told him. "We're keeping it quiet for now. I think that when we tell her brothers they'll be all right, though. We've been--"
"No," Severus Snape said to him tersely. "It's not that. You don't want certain people to find out that she means anything to you; that she can be used against you."
You'd think Harry would get this by now. (Of course, you'd think he have thought of this when he started seeing Ginny in HBP, and kept it on the down-low instead of kissing her in the Gryffindor common room after the Quidditch final! But, you know--hormones. :D)
21. "It's bad enough that we both have to worry about your mother and sister and brothers. No need to bring others into this."
This is the real danger, of course, of Harry having a family. In his other life, Voldemort had to work to find out who was important to him. In this life, his family existing makes this a no-brainer.
22. The village was a winter wonderland; the buildings all appeared sugar-coated from the snow and every shop had at least one Christmas tree sparkling with fairy lights and singing ornaments. Green garlands touched with a frosting of snow were looped everywhere--garden gates, hanging from cottage eaves, winding around lamp posts on the High Street--and a group of younger children from the village school wandered the lanes singing carols, led by one of their teachers. The young voices wavered charmingly, the smallest ones either a third higher or lower than they should be, that unique sound of a children's choir. Harry remembered doing that when he was younger, laughing with Jamie as they listened to the daringly rude "substitute" carol lyrics Draco would sing surreptitiously.
We all know Draco totally would have done that, right?
23. He kissed her on the cheek and turned toward the door to the hall. He felt rather than heard her running toward him, and he turned. His mother virtually hurled herself at him, throwing her arms around him, and he held her tightly, his face in her hair, hearing her sobs, feeling her back spasming with her cries.
See? Lily really does love him.
24. Magical special effects allowed for spectacular scene changes when Scrooge started a tour of his past and then his present accompanied by the ghosts. A level of realism was achieved that he'd never seen before in a retelling of the tale: they had real ghosts who had come down from Hogwarts castle playing the parts of the specters.
This seemed like a good fit, like when I had the traveling wizarding opera company do Dido and Aeneas.
25. Harry watched the play, watched the actor playing Scrooge grow progressively more distressed as he saw what the results of his life-choices had led to. We never know, do we? Harry thought. Even when we mean well.
I purposefully did not refer, in the story, to that other Christmas tale that involves changing timelines: It's a Wonderful Life. But Harry is closer to living in that sort of universe than the world of A Christmas Carol.
26. "Everyone hold on tight," his stepfather said, holding out--a tin of deviled ham.
I don't think anyone ever got this joke. I guess using this to imply that Voldemort was a deviled ham was too subtle?
27. "Dover?" he asked his dad, who nodded.
"How did you know?"
Harry shrugged, glancing around. "Just a hunch."
A better answer than Harry's earlier refrain: "I can't tell you."
28. "So," he said in a rich, commanding baritone. "Our new Death Eaters"” Harry was confused; he had expected a strange, high voice. But, he realized, that was the voice of the re-embodied, formerly destroyed Voldemort. Somehow the re-embodiment hadn't quite extended to the voice. It hadn't restored this voice to him. He has a very-convincing voice, Harry thought. It's the sort of voice that could get you to do all sorts of things you know you shouldn't.
I never got how Voldemort was supposed to have accumulated a ton of supporters sounding like a strangled goose. So I guess I have a different opinion on this than JKR.
29. "“Harry Potter," he said, and Harry thought it odd that he had never heard anyone say his name in a way that made it sound more beautiful and mysterious. He shook himself mentally; this was clearly one of the ways that Voldemort had managed to garner so many followers, this Svengali-like ability to hypnotize a person by doing nothing more than saying the person's own name so that it sounded like the most lyrical poetry in the world.
Almost as good as Imperius, but more subtle.
30. "I found that a very curious thing happened to me, Harry, on the first of September. I found myself remembering all manner of things that I never had before. A great many things," he said very slowly, his eyes boring into Harry, while Harry wished he would speak again so he could continue to hear that smooth voice... "Did you remember anything-unusual that day, Harry?"
I thought that people understood that Voldemort experienced the time-change in the same way that Harry did, he's just expressing it here in a different way because Severus, Lucius and Draco are present. But some people seemed to think that his talking about remembering things he hadn't before meant that his experience wasn't like Harry's. I'm still not sure how I could have been clearer about that without a lot of boring expository speculation on Harry's part.
31. "Lily, let's be reasonable. You don't want Harry to have that wand, of all wands, and I do want Draco to have it. Why can't they just trade?"
Harry could see that she seemed nervous, but her voice was as confident as ever. He had a feeling that if there was something Lucius Malfoy wanted, she was determined to make certain that he didn't get it.
This seemed like something Lucius would do. He'd think that Draco being able to do tandem spells with Voldemort would make him his pet.
32. Harry and Jamie called goodbye to Draco as they followed their mother down the winding walkway; Mr. Malfoy was holding his son's biceps. Harry lifted his eyes to his mother again.
"Thanks, Mum. For the wand," he said with a smile, but his mother had that terrible expression on her face again.
She looked as if he had killed her.
Can we say foreshadowing, boys and girls?
33. He concentrated as hard as he could; suddenly there was no pain, only floating, floating above the cold grey landscape, watching with fascination the crackling amber light that connected his body with Voldemort's wand. He saw Draco's surprise; he saw his stepfather's surprise too, and Lucius Malfoy's. Finally, he saw Voldemort's eyes widening as the torture continued, and he watched his body serenely kneeling, arms outstretched as if in ecstatic prayer, his face peaceful and serene.
While I don't think I'd have Harry do the pain-blocking if I had to do it again (having read OotP I don't think it would be consistent with the fully-integrated Harry who should never have attempted Occlumency in the first place) I did enjoy including this passage in the initiation.
34. Finally, it was over, and Harry sank gratefully back down into his body, fighting the urge to touch his smoking arm, meeting Voldemort's eyes and saying what he'd told Draco to say.
"Thank you, my Lord."
I'd had Draco do this in the other world, but only Harry does it here.
35. A gasp went up from those assembled, and Harry was surprised to find that he too had gasped. The Heir! At last, he would learn the identity of the Heir!
Another gasp died in his throat as one thought occupied his brain:
Why did Voldemort seem to be looking right at him?
A few alert readers caught onto my use of "seem" and realized that Harry wasn't the heir before the next chapter. But a lot of people were previously convinced that Harry had seen Voldemort initiating Harry himself in the dreams Harry had early in TOGI. This debate raged on for a while before the next chapter was posted. (Plus a debate over who were the operatives, who the Teacher!Death Eater was, etc.
Goodness, that was a long one. We're getting to the really meaty stuff!