Chapter Forty-Three of 'His Twenty-Eighth Life'- Reluctant Allies
Chapter Forty-Two.
Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (43/?)
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 Forty-Three-Reluctant Allies
“Harry, why do the Weasley twins visit so often?”
Harry turned and looked thoughtfully at his mother. Lily stood with her hands clasped in front of her, as if she thought she would have to dust them off in a second. Her wand stuck out of her sleeve, and her eyes were calm and demanding on Harry’s face.
“Their family is upset with their Slytherin Sorting,” Harry said. He hurried on, because he could see Lily’s face twisting, and he knew she was about to defend Molly and Arthur. “I mean, at least their youngest brother. And they don’t want to spend a lot of time at home. They come here to be with Jonathan. And me.”
“They know who you really are?”
Harry nodded. Lily abruptly rustled forwards and crouched in front of him, her hands on his shoulders.
“You must be careful,” she whispered. “You must. What happens if word of what you are spreads too widely? There will be people who seek to use you, Harry, or at least use your power. You must be careful.”
Harry touched her hand, and felt it trembling. He gently led his mother into the lab where she had started doing Charms experimentation. As he had thought she would, Lily relaxed a little around the proof of her own skills. She sat down in a chair and studied him.
“I know that word is going to spread,” Harry murmured. “I think it has to. I’m never going to be able to stuff it back into a box, not when both Voldemort and Albus know. And Jonathan isn’t that great at hiding that he wants to protect me, or that he’s getting extra training. Why should he be? He’s only twelve.”
Lily stared at him. Then she shook her head and said, “I was about to say that you are only ten. I-forget sometimes. And I worry about your brother, too.” She tapped her fingernails in a steadily accelerating pattern. “Do you think it possible that Albus might agree to leave you alone while you spread this word? Since he’s agreed to Sirius training Jonathan and he hasn’t made any obvious moves against you lately.”
Harry thought again of Grindelwald’s journal waiting upstairs and stifled a sigh. He still didn’t know what Albus had actually intended by giving that to him. “I think we have to convince him that we’re on his side and lying to fool everyone else. There’s no way that he’ll consent to leave us alone otherwise.”
“At what point in time can we stop the lie?”
Harry glanced at her. “Worried about what James is going to say?”
“Yes, I am.” Lily hesitated. Then she said, “I thought you being kidnapped would strain our marriage, but although we had our arguments, we also pulled together in the face of something we couldn’t do anything about. And then you returned, and it was like the sun rising. And then you told us the truth about how powerful you are, and that seems to have strained our marriage more than anything else.”
Harry watched her quietly. He didn’t know what to say. He’d never had a spouse who knew what he was. He’d never had parents before this who did, either. This was one arena where he didn’t have much experience to offer.
Lily looked into the distance, her hands tightening in front of her until Harry honestly wondered if she would snap off part of the tabletop. “I know that he just wants everything to go back to normal,” Lily whispered. “He’s still enjoying the freedom he has to go anywhere and do normal Auror work after years of hiding. But he doesn’t seem willing to recognize that Albus might be wrong about…anything. I’ve tried raising things that trouble me, and he brushes me off and tells me that Albus is older than us. And you’re older than us, so he seems to think you should understand each other and be natural allies.”
She turned to him. “I reckon that’s impossible.”
Harry nodded. “I frighten him too much. Recently, something happened that made him vulnerable, and made me understand him better. I thought he might reach out to me after that. And he did, but it was a hell of a weird gesture.”
“So he’s playing games?”
“I have to think that until I get some other proof. And I can’t ask him outright, because he’ll either lie or step around the truth.” Harry sighed. Albus honestly exhausted him sometimes.
“What if you just-told him that you’re confused and you want the truth? That you need to know the truth before you can ally with him?”
“You mean, make the question part of the general pretense that I’m going to be his ally?”
“Yes. If he doesn’t answer it, you’re no worse off than before. If he does…”
Privately, Harry feared most that Albus would manage to lie to him and he would do something based on that deception that would endanger Jonathan or Voldemort. But now that he thought about it, he had to admit that was highly unlikely. Harry was a Legilimens and could detect lies, and he knew Albus much better than Albus knew him.
“Thank you, Mum,” he said, smiling at Lily, who turned a bright red that reminded him of Molly in his twenty-third life, brushing over the accidental revelation of her affair with a Prewett cousin.
“Sometimes other people can see something you don’t yourself.” Lily stood up briskly. “While you work on Albus, I’m going to work on James and see if there’s some weak point I haven’t noticed yet.”
“Ew, Mum! I don’t want to hear that my mum is going to work on my dad and imagine what that means!”
Harry was exaggerating to give her some normality. It worked. Lily laughed and left the lab smiling, her wand hand relaxed once more.
Harry hesitated, deciding whether a letter or a personal visit to Albus would be likelier to get him what he wanted. In the end, he nodded and went to Apparate. Personal visit it is.
*
“Ah, Harry. I suppose that you haven’t seen Fawkes in your wanderings over the world?”
Albus kept his voice soft as he moved behind his desk. In truth, it had shaken him badly to feel Harry enter the school. There were protective spells that should have warned him about that much Dark magic heading his way. That they had not made him wonder what else they weren’t warning him of.
“I think Fawkes will need to come back on his own, sir,” Harry said, and sat down in front of the desk. His legs were still too short to reach the floor in the chair he’d chosen. Albus had to wonder if he was ignoring that or if he’d chosen the chair on purpose, to put Albus at ease by making himself look like a normal child.
“I merely asked if you’d seen him.”
“Not in my wanderings over the world.” Harry took a deep breath and leaned forwards. “I want to know why you sent me Gellert’s diary.”
“I suppose you know all about my history with him from other worlds.” Albus had tried to brace himself for that, because it was reality and he couldn’t change it, but it was still disconcerting to see Harry simply nod, as if it wasn’t a large change in Albus’s reality.
“Yes. And I know that you never gave me that kind of book before. Of course, you never knew about me being the Master of Death before. So what was the motive?”
Albus shifted a little in his chair. To see your reaction wouldn’t go over well.
“Albus?”
“I think you may be more Light than you pretend,” Albus finally said. “Because you came to my rescue. You haven’t reacted to-certain gifts as I expected. You encourage Remus to see himself as more heroic.” Albus was skeptical of whether such efforts would work, and it might still be that Harry wanted Remus to surrender to the Dark creature within himself, but it could also be commendable. “So I want to know why you didn’t destroy the Horcrux I discovered the other day. I want to know why you act as if you are also allied to Voldemort.”
Harry stared off into the distance for a second, his fingers plaiting themselves together in his lap. Then he nodded and turned back to Albus.
“I’ve always served the Light in my lives,” he said. “But that included being willing to take on the burden of hatred and scorn if people needed to not see me as serving the Light. I suspect you know yourself, Albus, that methods to promote the greater good have a high chance of being seen as evil.”
His gaze was piercing. Albus felt the impulse to squirm that he hadn’t had since the last time he visited Gellert. He managed to just smile. “Indeed, Mr. Potter.”
“I’ve come to question my own methods more and more lately. I’ve destroyed Voldemort’s Horcruxes in a majority of my lives. But is that the best way to go about subduing him? Is destroying pieces of someone’s soul ever the answer?”
Albus paused. “I can honestly say that didn’t occur to me before I went after the Horcrux in the Gaunt shack.”
Harry nodded. “It might be that there is a way to disempower the Horcruxes without destroying them. So that the shards of soul are forced to leave their objects and return to Voldemort, for example. That should make him more human and at the same time remove the protection of his immortality.”
“So you have been attempting to-”
“Persuade him to allow it. Persuasion is better than force, Albus. Even manipulative force.”
Albus clenched one hand below the desk, out of Harry’s sight. From the way Harry’s eyes focused on his shoulder and then politely flicked away, he might have known about it anyway. Albus attempted to relax his breathing. “You cannot really think that Voldemort will ever surrender his immortality.”
“I think speaking to him about it can’t hurt. And look what my speaking has done so far. We’ve had years free of war.”
“You cannot trust him.”
“But a Legilimens can detect lies. And I’m that among other things, Albus. I can always tell when someone is lying to me.”
His direct stare made Albus catch his breath. He shrugged away the uncomfortable feeling and shook his head. “He might tell you that he would give up his Horcruxes and sincerely mean it at the time, and then go back to them later. You cannot trust him to keep his word.”
“Then at least I would have given him a chance to repent. Then I could get on with destroying the Horcruxes and be content that I’d done the best I can.”
“What about all the people who might suffer in the meantime, for your misplaced trust?”
Harry showed his teeth, an odd sight that made Albus wonder on what face he’d first learned the gesture. “How many people could have suffered for your misplaced trust that three Animagus students could keep a werewolf contained, Albus? How many suffered for your misplaced trust in Peter Pettigrew?”
Albus jerked. It felt as though someone had slapped him. He hadn’t realized how close he had come to mentally accepting Harry as an equal.
“No one was hurt because of Remus-”
“Severus Snape.”
“That was more your father and your godfather than him,” Albus snapped, and shut his eyes. He had to recover control. He wondered now if, in their past conversations, Harry had been holding back in the name of not hurting him, of giving Albus a chance to “repent.” He certainly wasn’t now. “And while the incident with Peter was certainly unfortunate, in the end, no one was hurt either.”
“My parents suffer ongoing trauma because of my kidnapping. Remus is still mostly estranged from my family. Define hurt.”
Albus felt as though someone had decided to scourge him with a hot iron. Facing up to mistakes was something he’d never been good at.
But even then, were they exactly mistakes? He hadn’t intended for Lily and James to suffer that trauma. He’d known nothing about Peter’s plans. Harry could not hold him responsible for consequences and actions he could not have foreseen.
Albus swallowed and opened his eyes. “You will hurt more people than I have if you are cooperating with Voldemort.”
“Define cooperation.”
“Now you are simply being obstructionist.” Albus leaned forwards. “We are not discussing my past mistakes. We are discussing your inability to trust Voldemort in the future.”
“Really. I think we are discussing far more your refusal to trust him. You distrusted him from the first moment you met him, didn’t you? And I wonder why. Why let the word of an overworked, prejudiced woman at an orphanage control your own reactions? Why decide that the best introduction to the world of magic was attempting to burn Tom’s wardrobe? I never really understood that even when I saw the memories in a Pensieve in my first life. I knew you disliked him the second you laid eyes on him, but not why.”
Albus stared at Harry. Harry gazed back, his eyes almost empty, brilliant with a light that seemed to come from very far away.
Albus caught his breath and came back to himself. “What a child’s caretakers say about that child is often the truth.”
“Often, not always. I simply wonder why her words were enough to close your mind instead of make you wary.”
Albus shook his head. “That is not what matters here, Harry. If you give him too much room to play with your head, then he might-”
“Shall I tell you what I think?”
Albus sighed. “If you must.” Honesty from Harry was not at all what he had imagined it would be. Even with the desire to ally with him, Harry seemed committed to prodding old wounds instead of building bridges.
“She would have told you that he did things which were the product of wandless magic. You don’t like wandless magic or trust anyone who wields it because of what happened to Ariana.”
Albus flinched back before he could stop himself. Then he smothered his desire to exclaim with a deep breath, and did his best to smile at Harry in a grandfatherly way. “Perhaps that is the way it was in your first world. But not what happened to Ariana here.”
“She didn’t die in the midst of a three-way duel between you, your brother, and Grindelwald? She didn’t use wandless magic after her attack by Muggles in a way that made you afraid of it?”
Albus sat very still. He’d replayed those events in his mind almost every night of his life; he’d longed for the Resurrection Stone years after he gave up the desire for ultimate power and the other Hallows so that he could apologize to her. But there was something about hearing them spoken aloud by a rude, sneering voice that...
“You have no idea what happened to me. You have no idea what a man like Tom Riddle is capable of.”
Harry sighed. “Albus, after all these years and lives, that knowledge is the one thing I do have. I couldn’t always change what happened. The important part is that I can change the future. Give me time to persuade Voldemort that reabsorbing his Horcruxes is the best strategy. He trusts me a lot more than he would you.”
“But can I trust either of you?”
“I saved your life from that venom, remember? The last thing I want is your death.”
Albus shook his head, at a loss. It seemed to him that Harry might have saved him from that venom only to condemn the world as a whole to die at the hands of the insane monster he felt sorry for. But he doubted saying that would gave him any cooperation from Harry. He controlled his breathing again, made himself sit back.
“Can I trust you to have the same goals as I do?” he asked.
“What are you goals?”
“To defeat Voldemort. To bring peace back to the world.”
“Then of course you can trust me. If Voldemort absorbs those Horcruxes again, then he essentially won’t be Voldemort. He certainly wouldn’t try to take over the world and live forever. And we have peace now, which we can make more lasting and permanent.”
Albus shook his head. “Voldemort is like a disease. As long as he’s alive, then the world’s not immune.”
Harry’s eyebrows went up and stayed up. “I think that’s the strangest way I’ve heard you describe him in all the lives I’ve known you, and you’ve had some pretty fucking strange things to say about him.”
Albus gripped and held down his own shaking conscience. No. It was pathetic of him to be thrown off-stride by the casual way Harry spoke, or by the fact that he existed. He had to ensure the safety of the wizarding world that looked to him for protection.
“I will give you two years,” he said. “If you can’t persuade him by the end of your first year at Hogwarts, then I’ll move to destroy him.”
Harry considered him, then nodded. “That’s better than I thought I would get out of you. Agreed.”
“You thought-what do you think of me, Harry?”
“That you’re incredibly stubborn,” Harry said quietly as he stood and moved towards the door. “You cling to first impressions, whether those impressions tell you that someone is deserving of help or isn’t. You still think of me as Dark, even though I should have proved over and over by now that I’m not. You still think of Remus as someone who isn’t dangerous when he was an unsupervised werewolf who was running all over the Forbidden Forest. And you still think your ideas are better than anyone else’s.”
“I don’t see anyone else standing beside me trying to defend the world.”
“Then you’re blind, Albus. Because I am.” Harry paused with his hand on the knob. “And if you want to know why Fawkes won’t return to you, that’s why. Because you’ve gone beyond stubborn into oblivious and unforgiving. Phoenixes are creatures of change. As long as there was a chance that your mind would open again, Fawkes stayed. Now he won’t return unless you make a tremendous change.”
And Harry left, and Albus stared after him in stunned silence.
Chapter Forty-Four.
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