Chapter Eight of 'His Twenty-Eighth Life'- Finding Harry
Chapter Seven.
Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (8/?)
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 Eight-Finding Harry
Albus settled down at the table in the deserted room he had been carefully turning into a ritual space. Then he closed his eyes and waited until the wavering flame of the candle in front of him had calmed from its overdose of his breath.
He had a chance of finding young Harry. But he needed absolutely everything calm and gentle. The candle flame had to burn standing straight up. Albus’s body needed to remain still.
His wand had to cease its enthusiastic trembling.
Albus opened his eyes. The Elder Wand had stopped shaking, finally. And the candle was normal. Albus stared into the flame and plunged deep into his own mind, shaking aside the clinging shadows of fear and doubt and wonder.
He could not start thinking about what young Harry might be like by the time they rescued him from the Death Eaters. Nothing could possibly matter except the finding of him. The beat of that particular heart. The stirring of that particular soul.
He had already burned a strand of Lily’s hair and a strand of James’s in the candle. And he had a last strand of Harry’s laid on the table in front of him. His hand lay parallel to it in his lap. He could not touch it. He could touch nothing.
He had to detach himself from his body. He could no longer feel the cloth under his hand. He had to float away. He had to look directly into the candle. His body ached with soft feeling. His mind rejected the soft feeling.
The darkness opened up ahead of him, a speck of blackness in the center of the flame that grew larger and larger, whirling out and all-encompassing. Albus stared. His mind was falling down the tunnel, and then he landed somewhere that was shadowy around him but made of solid enough light that he could lift his head to look.
Yes.
He was in a cottage, in a bare room, with a fireplace and a bed the only notable pieces of furniture. In the bed slept a child with dark hair and the same curling eyelashes that Lily had. Albus moved a slow step nearer. He would have to check the color of the child’s eyes to be sure it was Harry. He had seen the baby only a few times before Tom came and take him away.
The boy opened his eyes with a gasp. Albus’s heart ached in response. Yes. Green eyes. The kind of green one didn’t see every day.
He began to back up, to return to his body. He could create a tether that would lead him to this place in the world, but only if he didn’t remain here too long. Otherwise, his own tether would snap and he would become a wandering soul. Albus had once counted on the Elder Wand to keep that from happening to him, but he no longer trusted the wand.
“Professor Dumbledore?”
Harry was staring at him. Albus felt himself snap fully back into the room, and the shadows of the stones and the fireplace around him became more solid. He shook his head, dazed. There should have been no way that anyone could sense his presence, which was one of the reasons he had dared to use this spell to spy on Tom at all.
But he remembered the memory that Lily had shown him of the boy speaking with an adult voice and adult knowledge when Tom had attacked a year ago. Perhaps his surprise shouldn’t be so keen.
“You can see me, Harry?” Albus tried to speak in a calm voice, a low one. Then again, Harry hadn’t shouted out, either, the way he could have if he was trying to alert Tom. Albus felt a flare of hope, as bright as the flames when Fawkes was reborn. Maybe-maybe this could work. Maybe the boy wasn’t corrupted by living among Dark wizards yet.
“Not really see you.” Harry shook his head, his eyes fixed a little to the left of Dumbledore’s face. “More sense. It’s like a scent that stirs up a memory.” He hesitated. “Why did you come looking for me?”
Albus thought about how much it might be safe to reveal, given that Tom would probably read the truth out of the boy’s eyes with Legilimency. But before he could say a thing, Harry said it himself.
“You’re looking for me, to see whether I’m alive. Whether you can take me back.” Harry took a deep breath and rested his chin on his knees. “I’m alive. I don’t know if you can take me back or not. I made a bargain with Voldemort.”
Albus gave up on thinking of Harry as a child. He might not know what was going on, but he was far more than a toddler. “What bargain was it?”
“I would tell him things I knew, in exchange for him not attacking my family.”
Albus blinked. That made sense of a number of things, including Tom’s failure to fulfill the prophecy and the falling number of Death Eater raids over the last year and three months. “You-remember them that well?”
Harry chuckled a little. “I remember everything that’s ever happened to me, professor. But if you take me out of here, then it’s possible Tom might attack them again. Especially since he still doesn’t really know if the prophecy that said Jonathan would defeat him is fake or not.” He turned and seemed to focus a little more, and this time he was looking straight at the approximation of Albus’s eyes that his projection would have. “It was a real prophecy, right?”
“Alas, Harry, I cannot tell you.”
Harry sighed. “That’s okay. I kind of reckoned you wouldn’t be able to. I still don’t have good enough Occlumency shields to keep everything from him. But, listen, you’ve got to tell Mum and Dad and Jonathan that I’m still me, okay? Still Light. Voldemort is trying to change me, but I’m-”
There was a sound from behind him, and Albus whipped around. Of course, in his mental form, that only took an effort of will, but he couldn’t prevent a chill of dread from traveling through him when he saw Tom standing in the doorway of the room, his fingers stroking his yew wand. It had been perhaps two years since he had seen Tom in person.
“Who are you talking to, Harry?” Tom advanced a step, almost prowling across the floor.
Albus was more than startled to will himself around again and see Harry shaking his head at Tom. “You didn’t think this was going to happen?” he asked, and his voice had taken on a shade of bitterness that Albus thought almost burnt. “You’re keeping me here without any company other than you and the snakes. You didn’t think I would go mad and start talking to myself?”
For a moment, Tom stopped. Albus thought he might believe it. And then he cast a spell and hissed something in Parseltongue that made a black, shimmering curse leave his wand and start towards Albus.
Albus forced himself back down the tunnel into his body. He opened his eyes, gasping, and glanced at the singed hair on the table. He hadn’t stayed long enough for it to burn up completely. That meant he could use it again in the future, to locate Harry in the new place that Tom would doubtless move him to.
And now he knew it worked.
Although I still have no idea what Harry Potter really is, or the creature living in the body that calls itself Harry Potter, Albus thought, and stroked the once-more-trembling Elder Wand.
*
Lord Voldemort was transcendent in his fury. He had treated Harry Potter as he had never treated anyone. He had made of him a guest. And the boy dared to turn and throw that lie into the face of Lord Voldemort?
“You were speaking with someone. You will tell me. You are trying my patience, Harry, and that means trying the lives of your parents and your brother.”
Those fearless green eyes looked at him in a way that made it clear Harry still intended on doing whatever he wanted. Lord Voldemort slipped beyond them, though, and felt that clear sense of another’s visitation that had brought Harry out of his sleep. A sense of Albus Dumbledore, whom Harry had known in so many lives.
“As an enemy? Did you ever know him as an enemy?”
Harry winced a little, as though Lord Voldemort had figured it out, had applied his towering genius to the problem and found the answer. Then Harry faced him and clasped his small hands around his knees. “No. Although sometimes he didn’t exactly trust me, because I either used Dark magic or I was-well, born into a family that espoused the Dark Arts.”
Lord Voldemort narrowed his eyes. Did he not sense evasion as well as a snake sensed a Kneazle slipping behind a tree? “You will explain to me what that hesitation means, before you began to speak of the families you were born into.”
Harry stared back calmly. He was always calm. He did not understand the true power of Lord Voldemort, because the Voldemorts he had fought did not deserve their titles. But he would come to understand. He would.
“Legilimens,” Lord Voldemort hissed, and glided inside the child’s mind. The being’s mind.
Now that he thought of it, he had been uncharacteristically gentle the other times that he had used this spell, not ripping through Harry’s mind the way he always ripped through the minds of his victims. He had been caught by the trap that suggested, based on the body and size of his enemy, that he was only a child, and his memories would be too damaged to read by a frontal assault.
But this was an immortal being, and Lord Voldemort always rose above such traps in the end. He ripped in brutally.
Harry cried out. He did not let that stop him. Nothing could stop Lord Voldemort, immaculate genius of immaculate geniuses, strength and glowing power incarnate, the-
But he found himself in the midst of a dark, swirling field of darting shadows. Lord Voldemort halted and looked about. The power of his Legilimency pierced the darkness, but found nothing to settle upon. There were only more shadows, more thick water, spiraling away from him, forever and ever.
Lord Voldemort paused. The wise lord always did, before he began the use of another tactic. He marshaled his immense resources and tightened his grip on the mental representation of his formidable yew wand.
The shadows swung and swam back into line. Lord Voldemort stepped forwards through the heavy water of memories.
In the minds of most, even when they did not think of them as water, he had encountered this. His own amazing will would overpower their own imaginations and twist them into the illusions of sight and sound he worked best with-and, in this case, the illusion of touch. Thinking of memories as heavy seas made sense for a number of reasons.
But he had never felt water this deep, memories so thick that it was like walking through the real sea. And Lord Voldemort knew-because he was as brilliant as a bolt of lightning breaking apart the darkness-that he could search all his life and never encounter the one memory that would clarify his question.
He wrenched himself free, content when he heard another cry from Harry, and looked at the being lying on the bed. Harry was curled around his stomach, but his hands were wrapped around his head. Lord Voldemort rejoiced in the pain that he knew would be coursing through him.
“If you lie to me again,” he said, his voice soft and trickling and as deadly as undiluted Wolfsbane, “then I shall think of that as the violation of the bargain we have made. Do you understand, Harry?”
It took a long moment, but that moment passed, and the wild-haired head nodded. Lord Voldemort turned and swept out of the room. It was disappointing that the child was too consumed with pain at the moment to react with awe to the sweep.
There was something else in the back of his head, something besides disappointment, but Lord Voldemort hunted it down and crushed it to death before it could become troublesome. He was in complete control of himself, at all times. That included his emotions.
*
Harry had to pull together all the shattered memories of his many meetings with Dumbledore and rotate them around like he was swirling a healing potion in his mouth to soothe the pain Voldemort had inflicted on him.
He hadn’t anticipated that, but of course he should have, he thought as he sat up with his hand pressed to his forehead. He almost always got headaches in the exact same place the lightning bolt scar had been in his first life. He had lied without thought to protect Dumbledore, and Voldemort would pick up on that and be furious.
And now they were probably going to move. Of course, Dumbledore might be able to find them again by the same method he’d used this time-Harry was ninety percent sure it was sympathetic magic, focused on his body’s blood or hair-and would hopefully be more careful.
Harry stretched out his limbs and shook them, regarding them with a jaundiced eye until he was sure he didn’t have the shaking that often marked his encounters with Legilimency. He turned around with a sigh, and found himself face-to-snout with the green-and-gold snake who took turns watching him.
“Why do you do that?”
Harry cocked his head. He tended to avoid replying in Parseltongue to Voldemort too much, but it wasn’t like the snake would understand English. “Why do I do what?”
“Why do you anger the master?” The snake slipped towards him over the bed, and Harry allowed her to twine around his arm. Even if she was venomous, her poison wouldn’t kill him; Voldemort wouldn’t want that. “All you must do is obey, and he would not be angry.”
Harry had to smile. It was simple, being a snake. And he should know, since he’d been one once, and had them as pets more times than he could count. Being a Parselmouth was a useful skill he’d never denied after his first life.
“I can’t always obey him. Sometimes he wants me to do things that I can’t do.”
The snake seemed to take some time to think about this, still wrapped comfortably around his arm. Then she began nudging her head into the warm space under his armpit, saying as she did so, “Then tell him you can’t do those things. He will give you different orders, ones that you can obey.” She sounded pleased that she had solved the problem so neatly.
Harry saw no reason to trouble her with all the many, many ways that wouldn’t work. He just nodded and said, “I might try that.”
*
“But then-if he’s not Harry, what is he, Albus?”
As he had suspected, the report he had brought to Lily and James had raised more questions than it answered. Albus extended his hands to warm them by the fire and shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know, James. But-I think we can rule out possession. Not even Tom is mad enough to possess a baby and then talk to it as if it was really something outside himself.”
Lily had one hand pressed to her mouth. She had Jonathan asleep in her lap, stroking his back. Albus eyed the boy for a moment. He wouldn’t have chosen to have a discussion like this in front of the lad, but Lily didn’t want her son far from her right now.
When he had brought such distressing news of her second son, Albus could understand that.
“Do you think Voldemort changed him somehow?” Albus had to concentrate to make out Lily’s question, it was so faint.
Notwithstanding his doubts, Albus felt able to shake his head at once. “No. I think you can lay your mind to rest on that score, Lily. I’ve watched the Pensieve memory of the night Harry was taken hundreds of times now. Tom cast no compulsion spell immediately after he entered your house, and Harry was talking like that then. He couldn’t have changed him the moment they met and later.”
“Oh.” Lily looked down at Jonathan blankly, and ran one hand through his dark hair. The boy stirred and murmured sleepily.
“Can you find him again?”
Albus nodded to James. “It’ll take some more hair, if you have more, and more of your own hair, too. I’ll try to scry a general direction, first, instead of simply appearing in the room the way I did this time. And I think Harry will cooperate with us even if we just show up out of nowhere.”
James sighed explosively and ran his hand through his own hair, the way Lily was doing to Jonathan’s. “That eases one worry I had, at least. I thought Harry might not know who we were by the time we found a way to get to him.”
“Trust me, James. I don’t think Harry forgets anything he doesn’t want to forget.”
Albus kept one eye on Lily as he spoke. James seemed more purely relieved at the news, and inclined to make plans that centered on the rescue of his son. Commendable and understandable.
But Lily…
She thought Harry was not Harry. She had asked the most questions about the way Harry had spoken and acted, and she had shivered when Albus answered. He had viewed both her and James’s memories of the night Harry was stolen, and hers was far more drenched with terror. Not all her terror was focused on Tom, either.
Albus sighed. He would have felt better able to deal with Lily’s apparent feelings if he hadn’t had his own doubts, his own concerns, his own impossible questions to answer.
Inside his sleeve, the Elder Wand trembled.
Chapter Nine.
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