lomonaaeren

Chapter Fifty.

Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (51/?)
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 Fifty-One—Turn and Face

Lord Voldemort stood at the edge of what had once been the home of his ancestors, and looked at the darkness, the tangled brush, the remnants of footprints in the dirt from what must be Dumbledore’s visit.

He stood still enough and long enough and cold enough that a sparrow flew down and perched on his shoulder, then preened its feathers enthusiastically. Lord Voldemort did not move. His eyes were seeing memories far more than they saw the pitiful house in front of him.

When he at last moved, the sparrow flew away with a startled cry. Lord Voldemort did not look at it as he passed into the shack, but he knew that was at least partially because it might be the means of leading his gaze, and his body, back out and away.

He had promised Harry.

Inside the shack, the wards and the traps reached out for him. Lord Voldemort dismissed them with an easy motion of his hand. He had come to visit the ring before, and although they would part for no one but him, he had built the wards to melt at a gesture.

When he reached down and gathered up the ring, it lay glinting in his hand like the treasure he had dreamed of finding when he was a Muggle orphan, the treasure that was supposed to guarantee him a life of ease. It always did in stories, did it not?

Lord Voldemort turned away, his robe flaring around him like great wings. The memories were thicker in the air than the disturbed wards, than the magic trembling around the ring, than the poison that wanted to make its way down his arm and was held at bay only by his will. Did he want to bring the Horcrux out of its resting place? Was the prize that he would gain worth disturbing all these memories?

Then another memory took the place of the one breathing in his mind. It was Harry dissolving into pure power and expecting that to drive Lord Voldemort away.

Lord Voldemort had always been good at confounding the plans of his enemies. And perhaps he would have been at confounding his friends, as well, had he had any before Harry.

He dropped the Horcrux into his pocket, and left the shack.

*

“So the way that Albus appears to be going mad lately is something you did to him?”

Harry kept his face friendly and neutral, even though it was hard not to read an accusing tone into his father’s words. They were sitting at the table outdoors, since the weather was unusually warm and dry for late April. Harry listened to the call of a bird up in the nearest tree—it sounded nothing like Fawkes—before he replied. “Yes. He thinks that I’ve been sneaking into Hogwarts and taunting him, and the apparitions tell him whatever he most fears is true.”

Lily sighed and reached out to pick up her glass of iced lemonade from the edge of the table. “I would say that was cruel, but after hearing about what he did to Jonathan’s mind…”

Harry smiled at her. That hadn’t been a pleasant conversation, but he did value the way her eyes still shone like fire. This was the woman his first mother probably would have been if that first Voldemort had given her the chance to get older. “Yes. That’s the main reason I don’t have any pity for him.”

“But how did he get off the right track?” James asked plaintively. “What made him think that going around enslaving children was the right thing to do?”

“That’s something I want to find out,” Harry admitted. “This world is so different from every other one I’ve lived in. Something must have caused it. But it might be difficult to find out, because it could have happened before anyone here was born.”

“Are worlds that vulnerable to something coming along and changing them?” Lily was eating an ice now, which she’d Summoned out of the house to her rather than going to get. Harry smiled. He was always glad when he saw other wizards and witches at ease around magic. It meant they were less likely to get upset if he used a lot of it.

“Not vulnerable, not exactly.” Harry thought about it. “It’s a conglomeration of choices. It’s not always the case that one small choice changes everything. Most of the worlds I saw that were different had big changes. But yeah, you build up a lot of small choices, and it all topples downhill like an avalanche.”

“Is there a way of reclaiming Albus?” James’s voice was low.

“Not that I know of. This is the most stubborn and self-righteous one I’ve ever met. His phoenix left him and I saved his life, and he still doesn’t understand that maybe I’m less than pure evil and he’s less than pure good.”

“Fawkes left him?”

Harry nodded, watching the way that James’s face paled. “Yes. I’ve talked to Fawkes about why, but Fawkes doesn’t want to speak in detail. And he’s gone a lot now, flying around all sorts of places. I think he’s looking for a new master.”

“Funny, dear. I thought he would take you as his new master.”

Harry scoffed. “I don’t have anything like the purity of character a phoenix needs, Mum. That’s one reason I want to have a moral anchor—to hold me to morality. I’ve been vengeful and ruthless in so many of my lives.”

“But you still have so much compassion, so much humility…”

“That doesn’t always mean I do the right thing,” Harry said quietly. He’d really hoped they wouldn’t have to have another uncomfortable conversation, but that looked like what was on the horizon. “Sometimes my compassion led me to murder Voldemort as soon as I could, so that other people I loved from other worlds wouldn’t suffer and die.”

“But…killing Voldemort is the right thing…”

Harry sighed and shook his head. “In some worlds, maybe it was. But so often, I didn’t think of the moral arguments. I didn’t do it out of morality. I was fighting for my life, that first time. Mostly the lives of other people since. And I have an awfully long time to think about whether I acted morally when I have my childhood in my next life. I’ve concluded that most of the time I could have found another solution.”

James tapped his fingers on the table and stared at Harry. Then he said, “That applies in this life, too?”

“In this life, I already made the right choice.”

James looked away and said nothing. Maybe he was still afraid of asking. That was all right. It was still pretty new, this whole better relationship between them. Harry was fine with giving his father time to get used to it.

“If you decided it was the wrong thing, though, why kill him again and again?”

Lily’s question wasn’t comfortable, but it got his mind off the conversation with James, and Harry turned to her with a grateful smile. “Because then it would start seeming like the right thing in the heat of the moment. Or I would lose people and feel I owed it to them. Or I would have to do it because the ‘Chosen One’ in that world didn’t do it right.”

“Jonathan was meant to be that Chosen One in this world.”

“But prophecies aren’t commands,” Harry said, because he had heard a telltale note in James’s voice. “If they were, then there wouldn’t have been a way I could have interfered. Jonathan would have faced Voldemort no matter what. I would probably have died as a sacrifice for him, and provided him with the same kind of protection that—my first mother gave me.”

Lily and James exchanged a glance, and James nodded. Harry watched them wistfully. It was a kind of silent communication he had never achieved with anyone. No matter how close he became to lovers or parents or siblings or children in his other worlds, none of them had known the truth of him.

Now, people do.

Harry sighed. Yes, they did. But still there was no one who could match him in power, or really understand the full scope of who he was, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to make them try.

“Will you tell us what they were like?” Lily asked quietly, turning to him. “Your first parents. Those versions of us. We’d like to know.”

“I never knew much about them,” Harry said. “Only things that I heard from other people late in life, and the memories of those first fifteen months when I lived with them—which I didn’t get back until after I died the first time and my memory became perfect.”

Lily hesitated. “I was under the impression that they’d influenced you more than that, for you to be this kind of good person.”

Harry smiled tiredly at her. “No. It’s living forever that’s done that.”

“What were they like, though?” It seemed James was going to speak after all. He leaned forwards with his hands swinging between his knees and looked pleadingly at Harry. “Just—anything you know. Even if it’s from a child’s memories or another source.”

“Sirius in my first world told me a lot about the pranks those Marauders played,” Harry said, as neutrally as he could. His mind still blazed with the pain he felt over Sirius’s wasted life in his first world—one of the saddest fates that he’d seen anyone suffer in seventeen hundred years—and also the revelation of the casual cruelty that said that, even after the werewolf prank, Sirius and James hadn’t learned better. “They picked on Severus Snape a lot. James, I mean, my first father, wouldn’t stop harassing Lily to go out with him. But they loved me. They loved me so much that they gave their lives for me without hesitation.”

James, this James, stared at him with fascinated eyes. “It sounds as if you don’t especially approve of what those Marauders did.”

Harry took another breath. “I—understand it differently than I did then. Then, I just focused on how my father, who I’d loved and adored and never remembered, could have been so cruel, Such a bully. I grew up with my cousin, who bullied me, and I took against another boy on the train to Hogwarts in that world just for reminding me of my cousin. It wasn’t comfortable to suddenly see that in my father. But I know now how young he was. Younger than I’ve ever been again.”

James settled back and looked as if he wanted to think about that. Lily was the one who laid a hand on his arm and said in a calm, quiet voice that Harry didn’t think he’d ever heard from her before, “You grew up with your cousin? Who?”

Harry raised his eyebrows. He didn’t want to make this version of his mother feel badly about things that had happened in another world. On the other hand, he had no reason to keep this to himself. “The Dursleys.”

Lily closed her eyes. Her hands remained absolutely still, which was the only reason Harry knew for sure how upset she was. She was always gesturing with her hands, pointing and talking and laughing. He had never seen her go that level of motionless before.

“Who?” James was looking back and forth between them.

“My sister Petunia and her husband. And I assume their son?” She opened her eyes, and Harry nodded. Then he reached out and gently touched his finger to the back of her hand when she started to stand up.

“Really, Mum, it’s over and done with.”

He’d used the name Mum on purpose, and from the mild scowl Lily gave him, she knew it. But she did nod and settle back into her chair. “I never wanted to let Petunia anywhere near Jonathan, and then I got an awful letter from her that…” She sighed. “Well. It’s over and done with, as you said. But I don’t understand how you ended up with a Muggle family in the first place.”

Harry wanted to laugh. He’d never been a worm or an insect in any of his lives, but he thought he knew now how one felt when a bird pinned it with one bright eye. “Because they were my only living relatives—”

James opened his mouth, then sighed. “My parents died there the way they did here, right?”

Harry nodded. He’d only met his Potter grandparents in one lifetime, and that had been one where he wasn’t blood-related to them in any way. Diseases like dragonpox seemed less influenced by the differences between worlds than politics and other human actions. “And Mum didn’t have any other living relatives, either.”

“It just seems like a stupid decision for Sirius and Remus to make, though, unless they weren’t around?”

“Sirius was in Azkaban because they thought he was the traitor instead of Pettigrew. Remus was away for a long time, because he also thought Sirius was the traitor, and I didn’t even know he existed until my third year at Hogwarts. And, well, Dumbledore was the one who decided that I should go to the Dursleys.”

“Well, no wonder you want him to pay, then,” James said, with a shaky little breath that made it sound as if he was debating what to say next.

Harry caught his mother’s eye, and grinned a little. Lily looked as if she would like to launch into a tirade, but Harry knew that wouldn’t do anything to convince James. He held her eyes, and Lily finally nodded.

“It isn’t about that,” Harry said. “It isn’t about grudges that I carry from world to world. I think that this Dumbledore is going to do great harm to this world. I long ago forgave the man I knew for the mistakes he made. A perfect memory makes it easy to do that.”

James hesitated. “But you aren’t going to wake up and forgive this one someday?”

“Someday,” Harry said. “But not right now. And I don’t expect you to adopt my perspective, anyway. Hate him for what he did to Jonathan. I might understand his fear without forgiving him for it.”

His dad thought about that, then nodded reluctantly. Harry wondered if he would always have to fight this hard to convince him. Well, as long as James didn’t run away and betray them to Dumbledore, things would be fine. And Harry didn’t believe James was that kind of cowardly traitor, not like Pettigrew, who had been the same in almost every world where Harry had known him.

Then Harry turned his head. There was something plucking at his attention, as if someone had touched one of the Hallows. He closed his eyes and reached out along the lines of the connections that ran back and forth between him and death, through the world he had traveled when he freed Jonathan.

The sensation became knowledge. Harry had rarely felt something like this before, but he didn’t question it. He knew that Voldemort required his presence in the clearing in the woods where they often met.

“Harry?”

His mother’s tone brought him back. His strange drifting off and staring into the distance must have frightened them. Harry managed to turn his head and smile at them. The plucking ran through his body, rapidly building to a song, as hard to resist as the time in his sixteenth life when someone had stolen the Elder Wand.

“You have to—do something?” James asked, taking out his wand as if he thought that thing would be a duel involving them.

“A friend is demanding my attention,” Harry said. He hated being that vague, but on the other hand, he didn’t think they were ready for him being friends with Voldemort yet. “I’ll see you in a few hours, all right?”

James opened his mouth, but Lily put a hand on his arm and nodded to Harry. “Fine. We have to remember that you’re not actually ten years old and you can fend for yourself like an adult.”

James grinned a little. “Right. I do forget that.”

Harry raised one hand and then jogged away from the house to Apparate. There were other ways to get to the clearing, but his parents really had suffered enough revelations for one day.

When he arrived in the clearing, Voldemort didn’t turn to face him right away, as he had done every other time Harry had come there. He was staring down at something cradled in his hands, instead. Harry moved hesitantly towards him. Voldemort’s body tightened in the way of a coiling snake.

Harry stopped approaching and asked in quiet Parseltongue, “Do you want me to go away?”

“I required that you come here. Of course not.”

But Voldemort still didn’t turn to face him, and Harry was now virtually certain that Voldemort had called him without knowledge of what he was doing. Or maybe he hadn’t had any idea about the calling, and just wanted to salve his pride now that Harry was present. Harry circled off to the side, trying to see the object Voldemort held. It had been years since he’d cared about what he looked like in front of Harry; why did he care about it now?

It was the ring.

Harry leaned back against the nearest tree and watched the Horcrux instead of Voldemort. Voldemort was the one who had to make the choice to bring this up.

“I want to tell you what this means to me,” Voldemort said, in a rattling, hissing whisper like a snake with dry scales moving over the stone. “I want to tell you whose death this Horcrux was created with.”

Harry said nothing, but leaned closer. He knew what Voldemort was probably thinking, about the way he imagined Harry would judge him.

“Trust me,” Harry said, and let his voice deepen a little with his magic, in a way that he knew would make Voldemort look up at him, “there is no one in all the worlds who would judge you as little as I will.”

Voldemort stared at him with silent red eyes. Then he nodded, and began to tell the tale in Parseltongue.

Harry remained at his side, listening, giving what silence he could.