lomonaaeren

Chapter Thirty-Five.

Title: His Twenty-Eighth Life (36/?)
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 Thirty-Six—Reaching Out

Harry sat contemplating the Ravenclaw diadem for a moment, then shook his head at the Hallows and stood. “You brought this to me just so that I would have to contact Voldemort again,” he accused them.

The Resurrection Stone bounced up and down excitedly. The Elder Wand rolled back and forth on the bed. The Invisibility Cloak stretched and rippled.

“You realize that I’m never going to agree to be immortal with him the way he wants?”

Bounce, roll, ripple.

In the end, Harry gave up. Yes, he understood the Hallows much better than he had when he was younger, or when he had virtually ignored them in his first life, but that didn’t mean he could always convince them of his beliefs or understand what they wanted. He took the diadem and rolled his eyes a little when the Horcrux inside it immediately reached out to snare him.

“Your attempts are boring,” he told it, and sealed it inside a transparent barrier of magic that encircled it closely, before he flung it into a drawer of the small desk Lily and James had bought him. Then he sealed the drawer with a few spells that he would be extremely surprised to find anyone knew in this world, since they came from a grimoire that had been thrown into a volcano centuries ago.

The Hallows were still watching him expectantly when Harry turned around. Harry scowled at them. “I’ll see if he wants to reabsorb it,” he said. “But not today. Today is a day for family.”

And he went off to join the ones who were his family in this life, even if he sometimes felt more disconnected from them than in any previous life before.

*

Jonathan’s parents had given him lessons in letter-writing by the time he was five or six years old and began to write words properly. He should be courteous, neat, as brief as possible, and use proper salutations and closings, unless he was writing to a dear friend who wouldn’t mind if he skipped some of those procedures.

It was only when he sat down that he realized none of those helped with writing letters to a Dark Lord that you thought was your brother’s best friend.

Jonathan sat there with his quill dripping on the parchment and scowled at the blank paper. This ought to be easy. He just wanted to tell him that Harry was lonely and missed him and they should talk again. But he didn’t have any idea what he should write at the top. “Dear Voldemort?” “Dear Dark Lord?” Or should he not use “Dear” when he and Voldemort had never even met?

Finally, Jonathan shook his head and started writing again. He didn’t think Voldemort would get too upset if Jonathan broke some rule of etiquette. He might be more upset that Jonathan was writing to him at all.

Dear Dark Lord Voldemort,

I know that you had some kind of an argument with Harry that’s preventing him from reaching out to you. But you ought to. I think Harry is miserable and lonely here with no one except me and Sirius who understands him. Mum and Dad don’t. Remus and Dumbledore want to pretend that he’s different than he is or something. He’s probably never going to be immortal with you the way you want, but maybe you could talk to him? So he won’t be as miserable. I don’t like seeing my brother miserable.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Potter.

Jonathan read it over and carefully corrected a couple of the loops on the d’s and t’s that looked like they could be other letters. Then he cast a mild Drying Charm and sneaked out to the small owlery. He wanted to send this right away before Mum or Dad caught him. They wouldn’t understand why he was writing to Voldemort.

*

Three days after Christmas, Harry finally settled down to deal with Acanthus Parkinson’s letter.

He hadn’t been looking forward to it. In every world where he’d dealt with the Parkinsons, they’d claimed they were the ultimate pragmatists and just wanted to join in on the winning side. In practice, what that meant was they sat everything out until the absolute last minute and then pretended they’d been on his side all along.

It was unusual for one of them to write him a letter declaring possible allegiance when Harry hadn’t even made his side of the war public yet. Harry prepared to find himself tangled up in demands and vague promises and conditions as thorny as Acanthus’s name.

Dear Harry Potter said the precisely written and spelled introduction,

I had some trouble convincing my parents to take such a definite step as this. While neither of them are Marked, my mother did think about it. And she is wary of me spending as much time with Jonathan as I do.

But I’ve sent them some Pensieve memories of Jonathan when he’s practicing spells, and they acknowledge his power. And someone that powerful who follows someone else is worth listening to when they talk about their Lord.

My parents would like to meet you and talk about the possible future alliance we could have. I have a younger sister, Pansy, who would likely be present at the meeting as well, since she will be in your year at school. Please write back to me and tell me the time and place of the meeting.

Acanthus Parkinson.

Harry considered the letter for a second. It was a lot more direct than he’d expected. Maybe that was because Acanthus existed in this world, where she never had before, or maybe it was because Jonathan did.

Harry smiled a little. He knew which one he thought was more likely.

He fetched a piece of parchment and wrote a calm acceptance of the letter, but asked Acanthus to set the time and place of the meeting. He had no idea if the Parkinsons were on holiday at the moment, and he had also waited longer than they’d probably thought he would to read the letter and respond to it.

When he went to the small owlery to send it, he was surprised to see Jonathan walking away from there. “Writing to your friends?” he asked, pausing so that he could cast a Warming Charm on his hands. Snow was falling in whirling flakes right now, even though it probably wouldn’t remain for long.

Jonathan grinned at him. “Writing to let Fred and George know that their latest pranks made my hands dirty and didn’t do much else.”

“Sure,” Harry said vaguely. Jonathan was darting his eyes around and flushing the way people did when they lied. Still, Harry trusted his brother. If he was lying, he was doing it for some incredibly good reason, and Harry would find out about it eventually. “Well, I’ll see you inside later.”

Jonathan nodded and ducked into the house. Harry attached the Parkinson letter to the leg of a small saw-whet owl called Dusk that James had bought as a wedding present for Lily. Dusk seemed excited to take off; he didn’t get a lot of use. Harry watched him out of sight and then turned around.

James was standing there, his head hunched and his hands tucked into his robe pockets as if he wanted to hide them. “Can—can I talk to you, Harry?”

Well, Lily had had a few conversations like this with him. Harry supposed he should have suspected James would want to have one. “Sure, Dad,” he said, and kept his voice simple and eager.

James grimaced a little. Harry kept a careful eye on his face as he walked across the grass with him. Perhaps he would need to use a different tactic.

James took him to the study where Harry remembered him sometimes transforming into Prongs when Harry and Jonathan were toddlers so he could carry them around on his back. And then, to Harry’s shock, he reached out and took something from his neck, what looked like an onyx pendant with the Potter coat of arms on it. Harry stared at it. He didn’t remember ever seeing something like it in his previous Potter lifetimes.

“Castellum,” James muttered.

Wards slammed into place around the room that made Harry blink. They were as solid as some of the ones around the Ravenclaw Tower at Hogwarts, and stronger than the ones that Rowena’s ghost, tired of people searching for her lost diadem, had put around it in that one mad lifetime. Harry glanced back at his father, and found James tucking the pendant back under his shirt.

“Okay,” James said. “Those wards mean no one can listen to us here, or spy even if they have listening spells activated. And it means that nothing we can speak of here can be spoken of outside this room.”

Harry blinked and sat up. He could feel the magic twining around his inner self, now that James spoke of it. He listened for a moment, and detected the flaws in the chains. He could break free of them, if he had to. But he wouldn’t want to have to try. An impressive amount of strength was tied up in them.

“Okay,” he said, focusing on James again. “Why is this important?”

“Because I’ve tried to treat you as a child, and it hasn’t worked.” James rubbed his eyes the way he’d done in other lifetimes when he was exhausted from fighting a war. “So I’m going to treat you like an adult and see where that leads. Please tell me what you intend with the war, and Jonathan, and Albus, and Remus, and Sirius, and Lily.” He hesitated. “And me.”

Harry leaned back and studied his father. He hadn’t thought James would be the one to come and confront him like this. Remus, maybe. Sirius, maybe, if Harry hadn’t carried the facts to him first.

“All right,” Harry said. Of course he would limit what he told James, but he could give him some truths. “First, I love Jonathan completely. I would never risk him. He’ll always have my protection no matter what happens.”

James closed his eyes. “Thank Merlin.”

You really thought that I would hurt him, don’t you? Harry edited the truths he was going to offer even more. “I feel sorry for Remus. He’s hated himself in some of the other worlds where I knew him, but it never ceases to hurt me. He could make greater strides and come to peace with himself if he could stop worrying about being a werewolf. That by itself doesn’t make him a monster. Maybe if he hunted down people and bit them like Greyback did to him, it would, but he doesn’t do that. If I can encourage him to accept himself, then I will.”

“But werewolves who do that kind of acceptance are the ones who become monsters.” James sat up, frowning at him. “Remus has to maintain the awareness of being human, always. That’s why the Wolfsbane Potion is good for him. He can’t sink deep into the animal mentality and not come back.”

“Who told you that? Who did that kind of scholarship on werewolves?” Harry qualified, when James opened his mouth to probably say that Remus had.

James blinked and appeared to think about it. “I don’t know the names of the scholars for sure, but Albus was the one who told us how the Wolfsbane Potion worked, and explained why what we did in school was dangerous. Remus thought and acted like an animal when he transformed, then. Animals don’t have consciences. That isn’t what you want for him?”

Dumbledore. Of course. Harry wanted to roll his eyes, but James would ask questions he couldn’t answer right now, and honestly, Harry didn’t think that Dumbledore was maliciously lying to control Remus. He probably believed what he was saying. He encouraged strong consciences in other people, after all. “No. I think Remus taking Wolfsbane is definitely a good thing for him. But he can come to terms with the wolf in another way, you know.”

“I don’t know any other way.”

And James was bristling slightly as if he would defend Dumbledore and Remus against anything Harry said that was any different. At least he had agreed that Harry was worth arguing with instead of treating him like a child, though. “You wouldn’t,” Harry told his father. “It’s not known in this world.”

James blinked again. “You’re sure that it would work when it’s coming from another world?”

“Of course,” Harry said softly. “Remus was the one who taught it to me, and he ought to know how it works.”

“I suppose,” James said. “How does it?”

“Remus has to stop hating the wolf and thinking of it as something different from himself,” Harry said. “That’s one reason I got him that book for Christmas. If he can think of werewolves as potential heroes, then maybe he can think of himself as one, or at least a potential good person even if not a hero.”

James stood up abruptly. “How can you say that when the wolf is separate from him? He only changes into it every full moon! You can’t say that he’s really a wolf.”

“No, instead he’s been told all his life that he’s a werewolf, and that’s wrong. It obviously hasn’t worked to make him accept himself as human.” Harry folded his arms when James continued to glare at him. “Do you think of Prongs as separate from you?”

“What? Of course not. He’s just an animal I can become. It’s not like being a werewolf.”

“But you don’t think of yourself as a monster. You think of yourself as an Animagus, right?”

“Yes, of course. What does this have to do with Remus?” At least James had sat down again and didn’t act as if he was still trying to use his height to intimidate Harry.

“If you can accept that you turn into an animal, and that animal is harmless and under your control, then Remus can do the same. He’ll have to have the Wolfsbane to do it, but if he stops thinking of himself as a monster all the time, that will help.”

James snorted a little. “You sound as if you think it’s really that simple, Harry.”

“I do think it’s that simple. I watched it happen in other worlds.” Harry kept to himself that most of the time, it had been other werewolves and not Remus that he had been watching do that. Being in the forefront of the Werewolf Revolution in his twenty-second life had been…interesting.

“Well, I can’t see Remus agreeing to do that. He knows the truth about werewolves, and anyway, he’s pretty old to change his mind.”

He’s twenty-nine, just like the rest of you, Harry thought incredulously, and fought to keep his face from changing. But he only said, “That’s what I want to happen. I want Remus to gain more self-confidence. I’m glad that Sirius has got back some of his own and is teaching Jonathan. I love Jonathan and I would never do anything to hurt him. And I’d like it if you and Mum would treat me more like an adult sometimes.”

James sighed. “You’ll have to wait for your mother to adapt. She doesn’t like the thought that you’re not one of her little boys. If you’d been normal, then she would have smothered you even more after you came back from your kidnapping.”

“Please don’t use that word as a bludgeon.”

“What word?” James looked a little dazed by the diction, which was another sign, at least for Harry, that he hadn’t fully accepted the implications of Harry’s power or past lives.

“Normal. I’ve heard it a lot, and it’s always used as an insult and people are always sorry that I’m not that.” Harry took a deep breath. “If I was really normal, I would have died the night Voldemort came hunting me, or Jonathan would have, or Mum would have. Or maybe all of us, or both you and Mum. I wouldn’t have survived those years with him, either, even if he did take me away. Please don’t act as though you wish I was different. Would you rather have a dead child than an immortal one?”

James immediately rushed across the room and hugged him. “Of course not, Harry,” he muttered into his hair. “I’m sorry. Of course I am. I never wanted—we’ll work on it. And I’ll speak to your Mum. Sometimes she listens to me better than she listens to her own thoughts. It can just take a while.”

Harry hugged his father, and noted to himself that they’d managed to slip completely past the question of what Harry’s intentions towards Dumbledore were.

*

Lord Voldemort laid down Jonathan Potter’s letter, in an extremely thoughtful mood. He once would not have thought that he could be interested in the maunderings of any eleven-year-old boy.

Except Harry. And Harry was not eleven yet.

But since Harry still showed no sign of reaching out to him and forgiving that argument about immortality they’d had, this would do as a substitute.

I will have him in the end. We are both immortal. We can both afford to wait.