Chapter Forty-Eight of 'His Twenty-Eighth Life'- Change of Mind
Chapter Forty-Seven.
Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (48/?)
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-Eight-Change of Mind
“Are you all right, dear?” Lily asked softly as Harry sat down at the table for breakfast that morning. “You’re moving-well, differently.” She paused, then added, “And you have a different expression on your face, as well.”
Harry smiled a little. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. I came to terms with some things that a friend told me a few days ago, Mother.” He attacked the eggs and sausage in front of him with an appetite that made Lily’s eyebrows rise. Harry supposed he couldn’t blame her for that. Most of the time, he just treated food as fuel to keep him going.
“You came to terms with them in a good way, I hope.” Lily’s voice was restrained, her eyes shifting back and forth between him and the plate.
Harry swallowed and nodded. “He made me realize that I’d been drifting through all my lives, and pretending that I couldn’t control anything. Or at least severely underestimating what I could control. I have to stop doing that. I owe myself and the world and even him more than that.”
“Even him?”
“He’s not a friend that I would have-done a lot for before this.”
Lily studied the ceiling. “I am going to keep my suspicions to myself,” she said, in a voice that quivered a little. Harry hoped it was with amusement. It sounded like amusement, at least. “I assume that you aren’t going to spend much time in the house today?”
Harry shook his head and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “But I’ll be back for dinner. I really need to talk to Dad.”
“Do you?” Lily tilted her head.
“Yes. Like I said, I was just letting things drift along because I was afraid of overstepping my bounds. But I’ve let it go on long enough. Dad and I are going to have a talk.”
Abruptly, Lily stood up and came around the table. Harry froze in shock when she hugged him. If anything, he’d thought she would beg him not to talk to James, to remain with the comfortable status quo.
“Thank you,” Lily breathed. “I know how hard it was for me to really think of you as a-a powerful being, and it’s going to be harder for James because you left it longer. If we can start accepting you the way Jonathan already has, then we can start really moving forwards as a family.”
Harry patted her back and finally smiled into her hair. No, he’d never had a family like this, in all the worlds.
He was already used to saying that kind of thing with Jonathan. He would just have to make sure that he extended the notion to Lily.
And both his parents?
Well, that would have to wait for tonight. In the meantime, Harry had someone else he needed to talk to, someone he’d avoided for the past few days and who he owed not only honesty but an apology to.
*
Lord Voldemort glided silently into the center of the clearing. It was more than unusual to receive an owl from Harry during the day requesting a meeting, but then, he had expected no more contact for perhaps months. He was more than willing to delay a report from his Death Eaters so that he might see Harry.
But there was-someone else in the clearing.
Lord Voldemort closed his hand carefully around his wand. It was not improbable that Dumbledore had intercepted Harry’s messages to him and tricked him by sending the request for this meeting, although it would have required a level of thinking ahead that Lord Voldemort was reluctant to attribute to Albus.
Then he walked past the tree that stood above the carved bench, and saw Harry standing alone. He raised as much of his eyebrows as he had at the moment. The return of the Horcruxes had not yet returned all his hair.
Harry turned around to face him, and smiled.
Lord Voldemort understood a moment later. He had felt as though there was someone else in the clearing because of the amount of magic hovering in the air. Harry normally kept his power quietly constrained, almost apologetic for the extent of it. For the first time, the restraints were gone.
Lord Voldemort often felt as though he was floating in the depths of water when standing near Harry or looking into his eyes. Now, he was standing on the shore of the sea.
“Hello,” Harry said quietly.
“I am surprised that you needed only three days to think on my words and change as much as you have.”
“You think I’ve changed that much?” Harry made a show of looking down at the ten-year-old body he wore.
More than ever, Lord Voldemort felt as though that body was a mask, one he would have longed to tear aside. But he kept himself to a flick of his eyes up and down, and an extension of his magical senses that nearly blinded and deafened them at the same moment. “You do not act as though you need to apologize for being the Master of Death anymore.”
“Apologize for what I am,” Harry repeated thoughtfully. “Yes, perhaps that’s what I was doing.” He extended one hand and snapped his fingers a little.
The looming magic in the air seemed to part and flow around Lord Voldemort. Now he was, in a way, on an island in the midst of the ocean, able to see the surface and the light gleaming on it, able to hear the cries of the seabirds rather than losing control of his senses at once. And for the first time, he appreciated how immense Harry’s power. His own magic was as a cup of water beside it.
Harry watched him with wary eyes. Lord Voldemort wondered if he was about to apologize again.
Then he understood. Of course Harry was still more used to the Voldemorts of other worlds where he had spent the past, as opposed to the nine years he had known the true Lord. He thought Lord Voldemort would be jealous.
“I am awed,” he told Harry, and he meant it, for the first time in his life. He glanced around again, using the eyes of his magic that told him what Harry’s power was really like. “I did not know that one being could contain this and still retain his humanity.”
Harry smiled, and the light in his eyes was everything Lord Voldemort had been craving, and had not known, since he first lifted a wand. It was what he had wanted magic to be and found that it was not. It was-
Lord Voldemort cut his thoughts off. He could not speak in a coherent manner now, and he would not embarrass himself in front of Harry when Harry had trusted him with such a secret. He settled for inclining his head and murmuring, “I meant what I said. I am glad that you were able to think through the thoughts I spoke and not the-tone in which I spoke them.”
Harry shook his head a little. “I realized that I’d been holding back, and also that I was the one who was choosing my life and being reborn.”
Lord Voldemort blinked. He had only meant to bring Harry to a realization of what he had and what he could be. He had not known that Harry had that much freedom. “And you chose to be a Kneazle? And a Dementor?”
Harry laughed. The trees above him bent nearer as if to listen. Lord Voldemort moved closer for the thrill in his chest. “Not that much choice, I don’t think. But I started working it through. Why was I never born somewhere that wasn’t Britain, or to absolute strangers? Why was I never born in a time period where you didn’t exist? The span of history is so vast that I ought to have been. But-I accepted what you said. If I am the Master of Death, then I’m the master of the Deathly Hallows, not their servant. I suspect there are probably arcane details to this that I don’t understand, such as only certain bodies being free to receive me at any one time. But I don’t need the arcane details. The way the Deathly Hallows reacted when I had that thought was enough to prove it.”
He extended his hand in front of him. At once, the Resurrection Stone was orbiting above his palm, although Lord Voldemort did not see where it had come from. And the Elder Wand and the Cloak joined it, shrunken so that they matched the size of the stone. Something soft and glowing filled the center of the ring they made, like a candle flame.
“I’ve been going about this last life all wrong,” Harry said softly, watching the Hallows instead of Lord Voldemort. When he considered it, Lord Voldemort was glad. He could not be sure that he was controlling the expression on his face. “I was cringing and trying to replicate the pattern of my past lives, not wanting to influence people too much.”
“I told you that.”
Harry nodded and lifted his eyes. The blaze in them made Lord Voldemort struggle to remain standing. He had been right, it was better to have Harry looking at the Hallows at first.
Mercifully, he turned his eyes back to them after a few moments, and halted their orbits with a simple flex of his fingers. “Yes, but you didn’t tell me what to do about it,” Harry murmured. “That was the thing I had to decide.”
He shot Lord Voldemort a small smile as he sank back on the bench. “I’m still going to let my ethics and principles chain me, just so you know. You needn’t think that you’ve convinced me to throw everything I believe in overboard.”
“I would have rejoiced to know that I have done so, but I did not truly expect it,” Lord Voldemort said, taking a seat next to him. He spoke the truth. “So what has changed, if your principles have not?”
“The way that we’re conducting this war,” Harry said, and his face altered, taking on the fierce cast of an eagle’s about to dive. “I was giving Albus too much room to play on the line. I kept thinking that I couldn’t tell him certain things-not because it’s practical, but because we hadn’t been enemies in other lives, and I wanted to maintain that relationship.”
“Now?” Lord Voldemort’s throat was thick.
“We need to get him out of the way,” Harry said. “Having him distracted with false reports of Horcruxes is a good tactic, but it’s not enough. I have to shift things so that he’ll fight a false notion of both me and you. That will give us room both to conduct the actual war through political means, and diminish his reputation.”
“Ah. So I see that you won’t simply kill him.”
“Part of me would like to.”
Lord Voldemort paused. “And that part of you cannot be in control?” he whispered.
Harry grinned at him. There were depths and darkness behind that grin that Lord Voldemort reached out to touch. But Harry simply squeezed his wrist once and lowered his hand, shaking his head.
“He cast a spell that could have destroyed my brother’s mind. Of course I want to kill him. But right now, it would just make a martyr of him. And I don’t know who else he’s told about your Horcruxes. If he’s spread enough information, or accurate information, then someone might be able to find them and destroy the ones that are left.”
“I have gathered all that are left to me. And when we are ready, you will piece them back into my soul. Except one.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I told you that the other methods of immortality I know about are a lot more reliable than those bloody things.”
“I will not destroy the ring.”
Harry paused. “The one with the protections that almost killed Dumbledore. Why not?”
Lord Voldemort settled slowly back on the bench. He had pictured confronting Harry, or perhaps comforting him if he had not come to terms with the implications of Lord Voldemort’s words. He had never pictured having to tell the truth himself. “The ring is unique.”
“Not just because it’s an artifact of your Slytherin ancestors,” Harry said quietly, and dropped into Parseltongue. “Tell me, please, Voldemort.”
Lord Voldemort stared into the distance. The light between the trees thrummed and sang with Harry’s power. To him, it also sang with something else. “I killed a traitor to create that Horcrux.”
Harry paused, but Lord Voldemort did not intend to speak again. He nodded and responded, “And someone who meant a great deal to you, right? Otherwise, I can’t see you allowing the fact that it was a traitor to matter to you at all.”
Lord Voldemort would have closed his eyes, but that would not have relieved him of the memories, or enabled him to make Harry understand. In the end, he said only, “I will not destroy the ring.”
“All right,” Harry said finally, after a disturbingly long and uncomfortable time when he simply studied Lord Voldemort, and switched back to English. “As long as you’ve gathered them and hold them safe, that’s what I care about, so that their destruction wouldn’t cause you any pain.”
Lord Voldemort managed to move from memories of the past to the reality of the present by listening to the thrum of the magic around them. “You need not be concerned about them. But explain what you mean by having Dumbledore chase false notions of us.”
“Exactly that,” Harry responded, and turned and stared at a spot under one of the trees. Lord Voldemort followed his gaze, but saw nothing remarkable there.
At least, he didn’t until the soil stirred and something rose up from it. Lord Voldemort narrowed his eyes. It resembled grave dust more than anything else, but was too flitting and dark to be that entirely. In fact, it seemed to flash and lighten at times, as if fireflies were mixed in with it.
Harry nodded. “This is something I haven’t done before, but I always knew I could do,” he said, and Lord Voldemort stifled the surge of inappropriate emotions that came with knowing he was the first being other than the Master of Death to witness this. Harry cradled some of the dust in his hands, while some of the other specks orbited his fingers the way the Hallows had earlier. “You know how memories of the dead linger in our minds even when they’re gone?”
“I understand the theory.”
Harry rolled his eyes at him. Rolled his eyes. Disbelief held Lord Voldemort still for a moment, long enough for Harry to hiss, “And, of course, you don’t at all remember the person you killed to make the ring a Horcrux.”
“I have told you to leave that.”
The air in the clearing seemed to still after he spoke. Harry’s eyes remained on him for long, motionless moments. Then he nodded, and turned back to speaking as if the shouting had never happened at all. “Well, the memories are often elusive. Anything might trigger them, and what some people associate with the dead would never matter to anyone else. I’m going to ask the dust to whisper rumors about us, to create images of us at various places.”
“And those rumors and images will be-”
“As elusive as memories of the dead, yes.” Harry’s voice was gentle, his smile sad, and for a moment, his eyes grew distant in a way that made Lord Voldemort sure he was seeing another world, not this one. He restrained the impulse to wave his hand in front of Harry’s face. “No one else will see them in the same way that Albus does. And this dust will have the power to travel anywhere the dead are buried.”
“There are dead around Hogwarts.”
“There are dead everywhere.” Harry swung his head a little to the side. “If you could see what I see, you would know that.”
“I want to see what you see.”
For a moment, Harry gazed at him, and Lord Voldemort thought Harry would refuse, perhaps because of his own stupid shouting earlier. But then Harry nodded.
He didn’t cast a spell. Instead, he simply reached out and clasped Lord Voldemort’s wrist.
The world wrenched. When he looked up again, Lord Voldemort was gazing at a world studded with skeletons.
Not only that, he realized after a moment. The world had gone black and filmy, the skeletons imposed on the living trees and grass. There were graves everywhere he looked, the outlines of the remains of small animals, the fallen corpses of trees, lines that delineated vanished human buildings. Layer after layer of the dead loomed around him, and when he looked closely at one, it peeled back, showing him squirrel on rat on weed on human on ancient lizard on wide-winged bird on lily…
He gathered his sanity with a gasp and turned to face at Harry. Harry tilted his head to the side. He was the only thing that did not look dead in this altered vision, but neither did he look alive. Instead, whirling motes of blackness assembled him, crowned his sleek living face, and danced around the blaze of his soul.
“There is death everywhere,” Harry said, and removed his hand from Lord Voldemort’s. The world snapped back into view.
“Because you are the Master of Death of plants and beasts and the landscape, as well as humans,” Lord Voldemort whispered, voicing what he had not acknowledged before.
Harry nodded. “And there is dead akin anywhere Albus treads. Dead rodents. Dead insects. Or what used to be the dead.” He breathed on the black dust still in his hand, and it sped away from him. “It will mutter and whisper to him. He will think that he saw us near the Chamber of Secrets, or the Room of Requirement. He will think that he heard someone talking about me or you being in France, or the Ministry, or the States. He won’t remember where he heard that or why he became convinced of it. Just as you never know where rumor began. He will breathe in fear with every inhalation, and exhale paranoia.”
“That might be worse than most of the other punishments you could give him,” Lord Voldemort concluded, after thinking about it for a moment.
Harry nodded. “And with Albus distracted, we have much freer access to the Ministry and the ears of the powerful than we did.” He grinned like the skull his face would never resemble and leaned forwards. “Now. Let’s talk about how we’re going to make things better through politics.”
Chapter Forty-Nine.
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