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His Twenty-Eighth Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Voldemort Views: 18821 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Fifteen—Meditation
Lord Voldemort thought. And thought.
Harry was a being that had existed for centuries, but not in the same body or the same life. He had somehow maintained his sanity. He had maintained his magic. His perfect memories probably helped to account for that. If he had had to start over in each life, he would not have been truly immortal, only someone who could reincarnate, the way some wizards believed every being did.
Lord Voldemort thought. And thought.
Harry had somehow retained his compassion and mercy, whereas all the laws of the mind Lord Voldemort knew would have dictated those wearing away like stone with water dripping on it. He had spared Lord Voldemort. He had not turned against those who betrayed him in various lives. He seemed to believe that they were truly reborn anew or different in each life even as he maintained his continuity.
Lord Voldemort thought. And thought.
Harry’s mercy was conditional. That part was familiar. But he had not spared Lord Voldemort on the condition that he cease fighting, or turn to the Light, or serve him, all terms that Lord Voldemort could imagine Dumbledore using. He had simply done it on the condition that Lord Voldemort refrain from attacking some people who would not have been important to him in any case if not for their relation to the Potters.
Lord Voldemort thought. And thought.
There was a place somewhere in these thoughts he was striving to reach. He would find it. He would.
*
Harry leaned back and rubbed his face. It had been six months since he’d escaped from Voldemort’s custody, and the things that hadn’t changed outweighed the ones that had.
Jonathan was still everywhere he was, and only the other day had said something about not wanting to go to Hogwarts until Harry could, even though he was old enough to enter two years earlier. Harry had argued with him, but Jonathan wasn’t budging so far.
Dumbledore still wanted Harry to write to him all the time and teach him all the “secrets” he knew about various Death Eaters and kinds of magic. Harry had cautioned him that the things he knew to be true of Death Eaters in other lives might not be the case here; Voldemort’s most feared Death Eater in his life as Humphrey Longbottom didn’t appear to even exist here. Dumbledore had wanted him to write them down anyway, and Harry had just finished giving the Potter owl yet another missive.
Lily still fed him and fussed over him and thanked him for telling her the truth. If she looked at him with frightened eyes sometimes, or teary ones, or hugged him hard right after he wrote one of his letters for Dumbledore…that was still so much better than the relationship they might have had that it filled Harry with a vast relief.
James was prone to random hugs out of nowhere, and he was the one who tried to treat Harry more like a child. Sometimes he called him “Har,” and he still transformed into a stag and ran around the garden with Harry on his back. Harry accepted it and hugged him back. Even if James was laboring under a misconception, at least it was a lot nicer one than it could have been.
And Remus avoided him, and gave him strange looks when he did visit and he didn’t think Harry was looking. At least Lily and James were welcoming him into their lives again. It didn’t matter much to Harry how Remus treated him. It was worth being a little uncomfortable for Remus to be happier than he’d been in half a decade.
Sirius was the one who had changed most. Sometimes he treated Harry like a boy, sometimes like an adult, and he kept asking him trick questions to try and catch him in a lie. He really didn’t seem to believe Harry at all. Of course, it was only Sirius’s bad luck that Harry’s perfect memory made him remember everything he’d ever said to Sirius. If he had lied, he’d remember that, too.
“Harry?”
Harry glanced over at his brother with a smile. Jonathan was practicing his own handwriting; he was pretty good at reading, but not writing.
And he’d set the quill aside, anyway. He was staring at Harry with his head cocked to the side a little, as if he could see the curling coils of magic that Harry could always feel dancing around him, just out of reach.
“What is it, Jonny?”
He was the only one who called Jonathan that. As usual, his brother smiled when he did it. “Why does Mr. Dumbledore keep training me? You’re going to be the one to defeat You-Know-Who, so why doesn’t he train you?”
“Because that’s not what the prophecy says.” Harry faced Jonathan. He was so serious and intent, not much like a little boy. Then again, they hadn’t treated him much like a little boy after Harry was gone, either. “Dumbledore has faith in the prophecy. It says that you have to be the one to defeat Voldemort, so that’s what he believes.”
“But you’re stronger.”
“Strength doesn’t always mean what you think it does,” Harry said softly, his mind full of countless times when magical strength hadn’t proven effective against foes. “And it can lead you astray.”
“How?”
“Voldemort thought that I had to be important because of my magical strength. Nothing else, really. He was interested in keeping me captive and learning from me, because I was strong. Nothing about whether I actually knew things I could teach him, whether I wanted to, whether I was a good person who might not teach him something that would destroy him. People think magical power is wonderful, which is fine, but it’s not the only wonderful thing. And both Dumbledore and Voldemort think it is.”
Jonathan’s brow was furrowed, as he struggled to grasp what Harry was saying. “But what does Mr. Dumbledore think you’re going to do? If I have to be the one to fight You-Know-Who?”
“I don’t know yet,” Harry admitted with a gusty little sigh. “Sometimes I think he doesn’t know. That he’s just keeping me around to keep his options open.”
“What does that mean?”
Harry winced and shot Jonathan a guilty glance. Jonathan was leaning forwards, utterly focused on him. Harry was starting to think that wasn’t a great thing. Jonathan needed to develop his own sense of independence and be able to function separately from Harry. Harry was a leader when he had to be, but he preferred not to be, and he didn’t want to indoctrinate a six-year-old into following him.
“Um, never mind—”
“No, what did you mean?”
All right. I don’t want to indoctrinate him into following me, but I also don’t want to deny him the truth. “I mean that Dumbledore doesn’t know how to wants to defeat Voldemort yet, I think. Or doesn’t know how he can, since the prophecy didn’t work. In the other worlds I’ve lived in, the prophecy has always come true in some way, even when it wasn’t the same way as my first world. And Dumbledore, when he was involved, always went by its guidance. This time, he’s acting lost without it.”
Jonathan was nodding as though he understood everything, but Harry didn’t think he did, really. Well, he would have to hope he could explain it more clearly. Honestly, he had never dealt with a child who knew what he was. The very few times that other people had glimpsed the truth before this, they had always been adults.
And they’d never had the full truth. Just parts of it.
“Tell me what you think he’s going to do, then.”
Harry shook his head slowly. He should understand Albus better, after so many interactions with him, but the Headmaster of Hogwarts was someone who seemed to change the most internally from world to world. He was almost always Headmaster—
Well, except for my sixteenth life, but that was honestly one of the weirdest lives for everyone in the universe.
But sometimes Albus had come to peace with his regrets, and sometimes he was self-righteous in his fury against the Dark Arts, and sometimes he wasn’t, and sometimes he was the sort of man who had killed a sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle with an undetectable alchemical poison the minute he murdered someone and then didn’t know what to do with his unkillable wraith, and sometimes he was the sort of stern teacher McGonagall had been, and sometimes he had looked at Harry with pity and understanding when he got some flicker of the truth.
I don’t think that’s forthcoming this time. Albus distrusted him at the bottom of his soul, this time. Harry sighed. He knows I’m telling the truth, but that just makes him more upset.
“Harry?”
“Yes?” Harry tried to smile at his brother. He couldn’t worry about what he couldn’t change, and the twists of Albus Dumbledore’s soul were one of those things.
“Tell me a story about one of your lives.”
Harry nodded, and faced him, and began to speak about the life he’d been a Kneazle. Jonathan laughed so hard at the part where Harry had to pretend to be interested in Umbridge’s female Kneazle to get close to Salazar Slytherin’s locket that some of Harry’s fear eased, as well.
It will work out. I don’t know what Albus plans to do yet, but he’s not the only significant player in this universe.
*
Lord Voldemort meditated. And meditated.
When he sank into the dark, cool places of his own mind, truths were waiting for him. That had always been the case, but he had not visited these places in decades. He knew the hot, dark places best, where he invented deadly curses never seen before and perfected plans of vengeance.
He had earned the right to that vengeance. The world had denied him everything he wanted when he was a child, simply because he had magic and that made him a freak to Muggles, and then because he was Muggle-raised and that made him a freak to wizards. Lord Voldemort had risen from the ashes of Tom Riddle’s miserable life. He had a right to fight back, to exact a price on the world that had wronged him, one of great Slytherin’s descendants, and a right to make them suffer as he had suffered.
But the dark, cool places were the ones he had visited when he first came up with other plans. Plans to assemble the Death Eaters, to make them respect him. And ones that allowed him to track down Dark Arts tomes and artifacts long thought lost to the world.
He went there now because he knew they were what could save him. He had tried his best to conquer Harry Potter with vengeance, to break him, to find a reason or a way to attack his family that would not result in the loss of his own magic—
And it did not work. He needed something that would.
But even the haven of that part of his mind, although it quenched his fury, could not tell him immediately what kind of plan he should hatch. Lord Voldemort sat and watched the serpents of his own thoughts as though they were something separate from him, crawling sluggishly through the chill. He needed to study them, to find the flaws and heal them.
It was impossible for many long months. He would return from the cold places, and speak with coolness in his voice to the Death Eaters, and set them to searching for more Dark Arts tomes, more artifacts, and extending his influence into Europe. Most of them went along with it in silent eagerness, either glad not to be tortured or thinking that he was creating a new, gloriously dark plan.
He never would have thought of them as glad not to be tormented before.
Lord Voldemort returned to the dark cool places of his mind again and again, and there came a day when his thoughts moved faster, like serpents who had learned to ignore the cold. He listened to them.
And he realized.
A mighty being in the world who could crush him, whom he could not attack and could not ignore and could not control and could not surrender to, because surrender even now revolted him, the mighty Lord Voldemort…
He must learn to work with.
And so Lord Voldemort set to meditating ways to do that.
*
“If you could just attempt to break through the illusions that I am going to conjure, young Mr. Potter…”
Harry watched with narrowed eyes as Dumbledore drew his wand and conjured those shadows. They were the sort of spell that he hadn’t trained with, in most of his lives, before he was ten years old.
But Jonathan only nodded and gripped his wand as though this wasn’t unusual. Then he sprinted at the shadows, and flung a spell with a shout that made Harry blink and jump.
The spell didn’t splinter the shadows or send them reeling, but it did carve a path of light through them. Harry watched in interest as Jonathan got almost to Dumbledore before the shadows thickened again and Jonathan cried out.
Harry surged to his feet. He knew how piercingly cold it could be in that kind of illusion, and just because Nestor had once used it to train him—
“Please sit back down, Mr. Potter.” Dumbledore’s eyes were focused more on him than on Jonathan. “I understand you want to play the part of protective brother, but there’s truly nothing here that should hurt young Mr. Potter.”
“You realize I’m younger than him?” Harry asked as he took his seat on the bench near the front of the house again.
“Not where it counts.”
There. Dumbledore’s eyes were haunted in the moments before they flicked over to Jonathan and he let the shadows go, beginning to tell Jonathan what spell he should have used before he attacked them. Harry watched him and saw his face go calm and genial, but he couldn’t fool Harry.
The reason he didn’t know what Dumbledore intended to do next, with the failure of the prophecy, was that Dumbledore didn’t know himself. He believed in fate and destiny, not coincidence. It had to be bothering the hell out of him that Harry, with all these powers that could be used for either Dark or Light, had fallen into this universe and seemed to be too powerful to be controlled.
Harry winced. I don’t want this to be like my eighth life. He’d had such an antagonistic relationship with the Dumbledore that life that he’d avoided him in his ninth one. And it had been for the same reason. Dumbledore couldn’t fathom that Harry couldn’t be controlled, he’d tried to, it didn’t work, and he’d ended up fearing Harry.
Merlin, don’t let that happen this time.
*
Lord Voldemort looked up at the moon.
It had been almost two years now since Harry had left him. He had spent the time well, he now thought, as he leaned on the wall of the manor house and watched Death-of-Rabbits hunting for a meal in the overgrown gardens. He had thought, and meditated, and pulled his thoughts and his impulses into order.
He did not yet have the magic and the power that Harry did.
But he had the ambition to be worthy of them. To make Harry see him as a worthy ally.
He had led an internal debate with himself for the last month concerning what he would do about Dumbledore. It was unlikely the old man would let Harry simply ally himself with Lord Voldemort and look the other way. Even if Lord Voldemort requested secrecy about his messages, it would be like Harry to show them to Dumbledore, which would have the same result.
Lord Voldemort sneered, but it lacked the requisite bite. He still showed that bite to his Death Eaters. Not torturing those who could damage him was a lesson he had learned from Harry. Much more satisfying to turn upon those who could not.
But if he kept his approach lawful, if he expressed his willingness to learn, if he refrained from his attacks on anyone, if he even suggested that Harry show the messages openly to Dumbledore…
Already he had seen the articles in the Daily Prophet expressing doubts about whether he was an uncontrollable madman after all. It annoyed him, to know that Dumbledore had used his raids and attacks to cast doubt on his sanity.
Perhaps it would have been true.
But Lord Voldemort had thrown that idea away impatiently. Even if it had been true at one point, Dumbledore would never have used that as a matter of concern for him, a suggestion he should come to St. Mungo’s for healing. It would have been a tool of the war only, to urge the wizarding world to fight him to the death.
Pull back, master his impulses, ask for what he wanted—which was Harry as an ally—and it had the magnificent effect of frustrating Dumbledore far more than anything else he could do.
Lord Voldemort smiled a little. The war was losing its momentum. Soon Dumbledore would have even more trouble recruiting wizards and witches to join the Order of the Phoenix. Soon the paranoia would lessen, and people would go back to their ordinary activities full time.
And he would be learning, in the background. Appealing to that compassion he had come to see as the mainstay of Harry’s strength, and a weakness as large as the universe.
He could wait. He could reach out. He could, with his honest conviction that only Harry had the right to cast aspersions on his sanity or be annoyed with him, call down an ally who would, in the end, defend him to others as someone worth forgiving.
Lord Voldemort knew Harry’s magic would turn on him in an instant if that was a pretense. But he need only shift his desires—to frustrate Dumbledore, to rule in less obvious ways, to make that source of powerful magic come willingly back to his side—and his tactics and the likely outcomes shifted with them, to something his enemies could not successfully oppose.
Lord Voldemort smiled at the moon. He felt more like a lord than he had in decades.
*
SickPuppy: Thank you! I hope that you still think Voldemirt is IC and Jonathan is adorable.
Anaelyssa: Yes, I don't mean Dumbledore to be evil. He's just frightened- and unfortunately, frightened people make mistakes.
Glad you liked the chapter.
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His Twenty-Eighth Life