Chapter Twenty-Six of 'His Twenty-Eighth Life'- The Master of Death Moves
Chapter Twenty-Five.
Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (26/?)
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 Twenty-Six-The Master of Death Moves
“Have you noticed something’s-”
“Wrong with Jonathan lately? Yeah.” Fred ran a hand through his hair and leaned back harder against the green couch that he and George had taken over. They’d charmed it red and made it so that the red color would stick to the robes of anyone else who sat on it. “He’s detached. Keeps talking about the greater good and vanishing off with Dumbledore and-”
“Not even talking to that Hufflepuff bloke. Right.” George propped up a foot so it dangled off the arm of the couch and waved it back and forth. Other Slytherins glared at him, but no one made a move to hurt him. They’d learned better. “We have to do something.”
“You do.”
Fred blinked and turned his head. He could hardly believe there was a Slytherin next to them, and he dramatically clutched his chest. “Am I seeing things, George? Am I still alive?”
George cast a charm that floated colored bubbles in front of him. “Still paying attention to the colors, Fred. I think she has to be real.”
“You know me. My name is Acanthus Parkinson.”
“Yes, but we don’t know-”
“Why you’re approaching us. No offense.” Fred swept the kind of bow that he’d seen illustrations of in old books. “My lady.”
Parkinson sat down on a stool in front of them, looking from one of them to the other. “I’ve invested too much in Potter to let him go without a fight.”
“A few conversations-”
“Is an investment?”
“I can see how great he’ll become,” Parkinson said impatiently, as if they were being the stupid ones by not taking her at her word. Fred felt a little offended himself. Everyone knew that you didn’t take a Slytherin at their word, a fact that he and George were already exploiting to their fullest. “It would be stupid to ignore him. But at the moment, he’s ignoring me. I think that’s foolish of him. And he wouldn’t start without a good reason. But he can’t explain the reason when I talk to him. He must be under some kind of enchantment.”
Fred scratched the tip of his nose thoughtfully. That was a thought he and George had shared, but no one else seemed to believe them. Jonathan was still concentrating in his classes and doing well. That was all the professors cared about. And Jonathan’s Hufflepuff friend Diggory stuck close to him and talked to him even though Jonathan barely talked to him in return. He didn’t really believe anything bad could happen in Hogwarts, either.
“Do you have any idea-”
“How to find out what kind of enchantment it is?”
“I know a few ways, but all the spells are beyond the level I can cast.” Parkinson flushed a furious pink. Fred made a mental note to find a potion that could make someone turn that color. It would embarrass some of the Slytherins who kept sneering at them about being blood traitors. “I was hoping you might…?”
“Without knowing what the spells are-”
“We can’t know.”
“Right.” Parkinson glanced around the common room, and glared down a few people who seemed to look at her as if she ought not to be talking to them. “I do know a private place we can talk and practice them. Come on.”
*
Jonathan floated through his days.
It was a strange feeling, sometimes, as though he had emptied half the thoughts out of his head and replaced them with water. But when he really looked at those thoughts, he couldn’t tell what was missing. He had to train, right? Because Voldemort had sent a threat, and that meant someday he would try to kill Harry.
Jonathan had to protect Harry.
So he trained with Dumbledore, and he did the extra homework, and he spent time with his friends when he could. Cedric was all right. He was as happy to make jokes and play Gobstones over homework as he was any other time, and he didn’t care if Jonathan took forever to make a move on the Gobstones.
Acanthus was more of a problem. She kept trying to talk to him about magic that Jonathan didn’t know and wasn’t interested in learning. And the twins gave him worried glances and muttered. Jonathan just had to shrug, in the end. He didn’t want to disappoint them, but Harry was more important.
Maybe he could come back and let them talk to him and play pranks on him once Harry was safe.
He went to Dumbledore’s office every afternoon and practiced extra spells. He wrote essays discussing what he would do in battle situations, and heard lectures on dueling from Professor Flitwick. Sometimes the little professor gave him strange glances, like he didn’t know why Jonathan was learning this.
But it would come down to stopping Voldemort so that he couldn’t hurt Jonathan’s little brother. Jonathan knew that. And he was willing to do anything in pursuit of that goal.
*
“Voldemort.”
Lord Voldemort had already known something was different. For the first time since they had begun meeting, the invitation to the glade didn’t come from an owl Harry sent to him. Instead, a brilliant, glowing silver stag had bounded through the wall of his bedroom, bowed its antlers to him, and spoken in Harry’s voice.
“The glade. As soon after moonrise as you can.”
Lord Voldemort let his power range behind and in front of him as he moved into the glade. There was no obvious danger, no hidden figure, no sign of Light magic, no disturbance in the moonlight that might have hinted at a spell-trap waiting in silence. Only when he saw Harry standing with his back to him did he realize one thing that was odd about those absences.
No sign of Light magic.
Harry always had some sort of Light power about him. He was balanced between Light and Dark much of the time, or shrouded in magic too pure for Lord Voldemort to bother questioning where it had come from.
Now, the air around him, the ground, the very atmosphere, was saturated with darkness.
Lord Voldemort’s tongue flickered, although he could not smell through it as a serpent would. He felt as though someone had reached out and passed a hand gently along the skin above his heart.
Harry turned to face him. There was a shimmer around his shoulders, another in each hand. Lord Voldemort turned his head, and Harry extended his hands at the same moment as he tilted forwards in what was unmistakably not a bow.
A silvery Cloak on his shoulders. A wand carved with elderberries in his right hand. A dark stone in his left.
“You have taken up the power of the Master of Death.” Lord Voldemort spoke the words in English, reverting to his native human tongue in wonder.
“Yes.” Harry straightened back up and settled the Cloak with another twist that somehow didn’t make him invisible. Then again, when the world around him was singing with power, Lord Voldemort could not imagine something that was not his will happening near Harry. “Dumbledore crossed a line that he has-he may have crossed it in other worlds, but never with someone as dear to me.”
“Something happened to your brother.”
“Yes. You know the World-Blurring Curse?”
Lord Voldemort paused. He did indeed know it. He also knew that there was little Albus would have abhorred more, at one point. “He used that on your brother?”
“Yes. Because Jonathan was catching on to the fact that, when other students bullied him and Dumbledore told them to stop, he was doing it in such a way as to make it worse. And that Dumbledore treated students differently based on House. And that he might have had plans for me that Jonathan couldn’t go along with.” Harry bared his teeth. “Dumbledore used it at first just to blur a conversation they’d had in Jonathan’s mind, but he also made him believe that a letter Dumbledore must have written himself was a threat from you.”
Lord Voldemort laughed. It was the low, hissing sound that no one else living had ever heard, because they all died right after they heard it. But Harry only watched him with fearless eyes and magic curling all around him.
Master of Death. Master of the worlds!
Lord Voldemort had once thought that he would never have respected the titles of another, let alone thought of them with such exultation. But that was what they were, titles, signs and symbols of his equal.
Yes, my equal. I must have him by my side.
And it seemed that Harry had agreed, if he had come to Lord Voldemort instead of trying to do something about Albus on his own.
“You cannot get your brother away from Hogwarts for the month that it would take to remove the World-Blurring Curse,” Lord Voldemort stated more than asked.
“No. I know a magic that can remove the curse from a distance. But it takes-well, it takes someone to act as anchor and someone to reach through space. And I have to ask you to act as the anchor.”
Harry had his arms folded and his doubtful glance fixed on Lord Voldemort. And Lord Voldemort knew without asking why. The anchor was a passive role, like drawing the circle in a ritual and then doing nothing else. Harry was sure he would not accept it.
Lord Voldemort dropped to one knee in front of Harry and held out his hand. It gleamed long and unnaturally pale in the moonlight, but the way Harry stared at it made it clear the color did not matter to him.
“Let me be your anchor,” Lord Voldemort said softly.
Harry opened his mouth, then shut it again. Those green eyes, full of intelligence that could only come from many lives, focused on him. Lord Voldemort did not doubt they would see a deception in an instant.
There was no deception.
“Permit me. Please.” And Lord Voldemort bowed his head.
*
I need him. I would have had to convince him if he didn’t want to do this. I should be happy that he’s agreed, grateful. I just…
Worry echoed through Harry as he stared at the kneeling man-or Dark Lord, or serpent-being, or whatever he was. Had he gone too far? Had he forced Voldemort into a role that was wrong, because never before in any of the worlds Harry had lived in had he seen him bow?
Harry didn’t want to make people into something other than they were. It was yet another reason to conceal his power. Look how knowledge of it had warped Dumbledore’s path. Look at how his parents feared him. And look at Voldemort, on the ground.
In the end, Harry sighed and resolved that he would just have to live with it. He couldn’t change the past. He couldn’t leave Jonathan to suffer. And although he could technically have made the reach to Jonathan’s mind without the anchor now, there was too much chance that he would affect the wrong thing-Jonathan’s actual thought processes, instead of the curse.
“Be my anchor, then,” he said softly, knowing that he strengthened their ability to do the reach with his formal acceptance. He reached out and laid his left hand, the one that held the Resurrection Stone, in Lord Voldemort’s.
There was a blaze of cold power between their fingers, and for an instant, icy spirit shapes whirled out of the Stone. Harry stared. He had never used the power of the Stone by itself since his first life. In most worlds, he didn’t use it at all.
But here it was, and the icy shapes surged up. Harry watched them. They must be Voldemort’s dead, since Harry hadn’t had anyone close to him in this life who had died, and he didn’t think the Resurrection Stone could reach between worlds.
The shapes were far more familiar than the dead Riddles or dead Death Eaters, though. They formed him, older than he was now, and Voldemort standing behind him. They writhed and danced as if they were tongues of flame, or both snakes. The older Harry tossed his head back and gave Voldemort a brilliant smile, furiously shining.
The shapes dissolved before Harry could catch his breath. But from the silent gleam in Voldemort’s eyes, he knew he must have seen them.
“You-you don’t want me bowing down to you,” Harry said weakly. “Or Marked.”
“I want you to smile at me like that.”
The charge in the air between their eyes was thick and deep and rich, and Harry faced sharply away from it. He couldn’t think about it right now. He turned, with the Cloak billowing around him and rising above his shoulders, and streaming like a tide of stardark against the stars. The Wand throbbed in his hand. The Stone sang, a chant of squeals and whispers rather than words that he had never heard before.
Harry hadn’t done this particular action before. He had read about it in his studies of necromancy. A necromancer might accomplish it who had an anchor as powerful as Voldemort and was also a powerful Legilimens. Might.
Harry would do it.
He rose, his mind and power flowing with the Cloak, dancing through the invisible world of the dead that intertwined with the world of the living. There was death everywhere, nibbling at the edges of life, caressing the petals of the newest flower, waiting in the heartbeats of the youngest child. Harry embraced it and whirled with it, and there were no defenses that could keep him out. In the world he traveled through, all such defenses were dead.
He was aware of the steadily beating power behind him, the thunder of Voldemort’s heart.
On his eyes was nothingness, neither dark nor light. Where death was, there was nothing. Not the distant stars Harry saw when he was reborn. He had never worked out yet what they were. But they were not here.
Harry stepped through stone and magic, and found himself in Jonathan’s mind, connected by love, supported by Voldemort’s magic and the fact that they were holding hands and the Deathly Hallows and even the prophecy that had driven Voldemort to attack his family. It was one shimmering cord among many, as everything around him burst into light while Harry shifted into a living world, the wildest world, the world of the human mind.
Jonathan had no grasp on even beginning Occlumency, not under the effects of the curse. The curse was everywhere. It clung to every thought, and distorted Jonathan’s normal ideas and wishes and interactions with his friends. Harry turned to face it.
It was everywhere, but so were his eyes. So was his magic. So was Voldemort’s magic, threaded and pounding with him and behind him and in him and through him.
Harry looked with the eyes of the Master of Death, and he saw the curse. He separated it, with his eyes, from Jonathan’s thoughts.
He held out approximations of his hands. On an approximation of his shoulders formed of thought, the Invisibility Cloak snapped into being. The Elder Wand was there, and worked with him, obeyed him. The Resurrection Stone sang to him.
Harry looked one more time with the eyes of the Master of Death.
With the voice of the Master of Death, he said to Dumbledore’s curse, Die.
There was a shriek of agony, because the curse was a living thing when given life by Jonathan’s mind. But Harry’s will bore down, and death was here, death that won all, that waited unwearying, that conquered because it did nothing but was.
And the curse…was not.
The strands of it unraveled, and could have done damage to Jonathan’s mind. This was yet another reason, other than not wanting to take up the Hallows and their full power, that Harry had never dared try this. The World-Blurring Curse had lived here. It could take the living thoughts with it. No necromancer could have enough power to gather every scrap. It would be luck rather than power that either let him find most of them, or that kept the damage to the target’s mind from being too extensive.
But not when the Master of Death gathered the scraps. Death missed nothing. Nothing was immortal, not in the end.
Except me.
And Harry breathed out softly through the lattice of his brother’s clear thoughts, which would slowly clear, and then stepped back through stone and magic and the worlds of the dead and the living and the waiting and the existing, back to the glade where he released Voldemort’s hand and flexed his fingers.
The Cloak settled on his shoulders again. The Wand ceased to throb. Last of all, the Stone ceased to sing.
Harry opened his eyes.
Voldemort watched him, still on his knee, his hand extended.
And Harry knew, with a whirling of his heart that he had never felt before, that he could not withdraw from what had opened between them any more than he could withdraw from claiming the power of the Master of Death. Voldemort would never allow it. And part of Harry himself, although certain dimensions of it would have to wait years…
A part of Harry wouldn’t allow it, either.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
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