His Twenty-Eighth Life | By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Voldemort Views: 18824 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3 |
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Chapter Sixteen—A Black Owl
“Jonathan, I really want you to go to Hogwarts when your letter comes.”
“But why, Harry? I can protect you better if I’m close.”
Harry winced, as he always did when Jonathan started talking like that, but he managed to stay perched at the table, on a chair that was already taller than it had been just a few weeks ago. He’d started growing, now that he was eight, as if to make up for lost time. Meanwhile, Jonathan was staring at him.
Harry hated having to use this tactic, but he’d started to suspect there was no other way to do it. “But how can you protect me if you stay by my side with only the training that Mr. Dumbledore gave you?” he asked, and smiled when Jonathan frowned thoughtfully. “He doesn’t show you all that many spells. If you go to Hogwarts and learn more of them, then you can defend me better when the time comes.”
Jonathan tapped his fingers on the side of his cereal bowl. Lily was finally trusting both of them to fix their own meals most of the time, and she and James had both ventured out from under the wards lately. Harry approved highly. There was no sign that Voldemort had started to move, and they had to live their lives.
Dumbledore disapproved. Harry had come to fear the times they clashed more and more. This was exactly why he had never told the full truth to anyone in his lives before. They simply couldn’t handle the thought of what he was.
“I know what you’re doing.”
Harry jerked back to himself, and grinned a little at Jonathan. “Do you?”
“Yes. You just want me to go to Hogwarts. You don’t care as much about the fact that I could protect you better.”
“Well, that’s true,” Harry admitted, abandoning the attempt to manipulate Jonathan with some relief. “I do want you to go to Hogwarts. I had so much fun the times I was there.” Well, some of the times he was there, but he saw no need to burden Jonathan with trials like how hard it was to get up steps as a snake. “And I want you to be able to live your life without always staying around me.”
“Hmmm.”
Jonathan was stubborn to a fault, but that sounded encouraging. Harry ate a little more of his own cornflakes, studying his brother hopefully. Jonathan finally snorted and poured some milk into his bowl.
“We have almost a year to think about it, anyway.” Jonathan’s eleventh birthday was next June, and he’d only turned ten two months ago. Harry sighed and nodded, and waited until Jonathan left the table to go take a shower before he turned and glanced out the window.
He’d seen a black owl circling there some minutes ago, but it had only passed the window each time. Still, a wild owl wouldn’t circle obsessively like that. Harry suspected this was a message for him.
He even thought he knew who it was from.
Voldemort had been quiet for over three years. That was unprecedented in any of Harry’s lives. He thought it might mean Voldemort was setting up some dangerous Dark ritual that would take half a decade to complete, and he was going to taunt Harry now, but he still admitted to a bit of curiosity when he opened the window and the owl flew in and alighted in the middle of the table.
“Told only to find me if I was alone,” Harry muttered, and the owl gave him a haughty look. The wards would still have reacted if someone sent a letter with evil intent. That intrigued Harry more than anything else as he took the message.
Plain parchment, too, now the fancy shit that Harry thought Voldemort might have gone through to announce a real magical experiment. He raised an eyebrow as he opened it.
Just the salutation was almost enough to make him drop the letter on the floor.
Dear Harry,
I know you wouldn’t have expected to hear from me. Or perhaps you would have expected a declaration of war. But since when do I do what everyone expects?
You defeated me. I would have been stupid to approach you before now. But I have another bargain to offer you—one that you have the means of ensuring that I keep yourself.
Harry stirred with the impulse to go show the letter to his parents, but he didn’t. In the end, he did want to hear what Lord Voldemort had decided on in his overweening self-confidence.
I wish to make a bargain to learn as much of magic—ritual magic, the secrets of the past and future you have learned, and talents you derive from your many lifetimes—as you are willing to teach me. And I will labor to behave to your satisfaction. All you would have to do if I did not behave is withdraw your knowledge. I can never challenge you if I can never become as powerful as you are.
Harry rolled his eyes. There it was again, that reverence for magical power that both Dumbledore and Voldemort carried to extremes. He wondered idly if Voldemort knew how exasperated his words would make Harry. Probably not, though, or he wouldn’t have written them.
My behavior to your satisfaction will include no more raids, no more torturing of people who are not Death Eaters or do not attack me personally, and no more targeting of Muggleborns. I refuse to speak for my followers. I will not hold them back if they wish to work against Muggleborns on their own. But I will not support them or make them think I would lead them in it.
Harry stared at the letter in his hands. What the fuck. It wasn’t a word that he’d had a lot of cause to think since he’d been reborn this time, but it wasn’t like it was ever far from his thoughts. He’d done a lot of thinking of it during his sixteenth life in particular. But then, being raised by a mad necromancer would do that to him.
I want power of this kind more than I want power of the other kind.
Write to me with your answer.
Lord Voldemort.
That last line might be true, but Harry still didn’t trust the letter for a minute. No Voldemort, in any of his lives, had ever made a truce like this, with him or anyone else. They were incapable of even lying about wanting a truce—
That made him pause again. So if this Voldemort could lie about wanting a truce, he was already different than any of the others.
Harry had thought that before. None of the others had ever realized what Harry was, or managed to refrain from murdering people mindlessly for this long, or kidnapped him and made a bargain that had been even partially kept. Harry still didn’t know the number of this Voldemort’s Horcruxes, if perhaps that was the difference, or if it was yet another wrinkle in the way the worlds unfolded that had happened before he was born here. But he couldn’t deny it existed.
And if there was a way that he could keep that quietude going—that was only a good thing in the end. It would give Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix more time to get ready for the war when it exploded again. If Harry could make himself trustworthy enough to Voldemort, he might even be able to give them unique intelligence. Harry knew from conversations with Dumbledore that they had no spy among the Death Eaters this time. Severus was a miserable bastard in this world who had never turned.
Harry sighed. It wasn’t the first life he had had like that, but honestly, Severus led such a tiny, twisted existence when he didn’t come back to Dumbledore’s side. Harry mourned for what could have been for a moment.
Then he dismissed it and looked back at the letter. So, he would enter correspondence with Voldemort. For right now, this was nothing more than a discussion of theory, and Harry knew well how to cherry-pick what he would tell Voldemort so that any deadly spells or rituals he might try to use would be missing crucial components. And he could keep an eye on him, and perhaps weaken him.
For now, it was worth the minimal risk of a letter.
*
Lord Voldemort smiled when he saw the black owl winging down towards him. He had taken to walking more in the manor’s gardens over the last two days since he had sent the message to Harry, to give the bird a greater chance to find him in privacy. Death-of-Rabbits reared up curiously beside him as Lord Voldemort removed the message from the owl’s leg and opened it.
Dear Lord Voldemort,
I would be open to accepting your offer, if I can set a few conditions to it.
Lord Voldemort closed his eyes as bliss extended tendrils like a firework’s flaming strands through his chest. It was as he had suspected. Harry was open to this kind of trap as he would never be to brute force.
And Lord Voldemort would wind around him, as slow and subtle as the serpent. That had always been the better way, but Lord Voldemort had buried himself too much within human wisdom to see it. Now he would return to his House and his blood, and do things their way.
When he read on, for Harry’s conditions, they seemed so simple, compared to what a being of Harry’s stature would have the right to demand, that he wanted to laugh.
First, you will make an oath in blood and snake-scales on the night of a full moon that you will never harm my family. That includes the people that I think of as part of my family, like Remus Lupin. It won’t include any other active Death Eaters.
Lord Voldemort noticed the trailing dots of ink after those last words. He wondered in what strange lifetime Harry Potter had managed to harvest affection for one of his Death Eaters.
Second, you will make the same oath on the night of the next full moon that you won’t participate in the genocide, kidnapping, or torture of Muggleborns.
“How interesting, my snake,” Lord Voldemort breathed, “that you do not make the same demand of me for the safety of Muggles.”
Third, you will make the oath that you won’t use any of the magic I teach you in ways that I don’t approve of.
Lord Voldemort raised his eyebrows. Harry could have set a condition of theory only, and not practice, that he could never use any of that magic at all. And Lord Voldemort had learned better than to assume, as he once would have, that his opponent was not smart enough to have thought of that. Harry had the knowledge of constant lifetimes bristling and roiling within him. He had his reasons for reserving the approval to himself.
What he has thought can be unthought. His mind can be changed. Lord Voldemort returned to reading the letter.
Fourth, you will keep this correspondence private on your end. I know you can imagine what would happen if one of your Death Eaters saw it.
Lord Voldemort chuckled, a sound like dry scales scraping the ground.
Fifth, you will read books that I send you, and listen to me when I talk to you, about Light philosophy, and the reasons that I think your wars are a terrible idea. That is the last of my conditions.
I look forward to your reply, Lord Voldemort, and what will make you different from the Voldemorts of other worlds that I have slaughtered.
Harry Potter.
Lord Voldemort spent a moment smoothing the sharp tip of his fingernail over the inked words. Then he nodded decisively, and set the letter aside. He would do some research of his own on the oath before he made it—he had never heard of one made in blood and snake-scales at the full moon—and think about what conditions he wanted to set that Harry was likely to agree to. He would already have the motive to keep his correspondence private.
There was so much excitement, deep and dark red as the chambers of the heart, swelling inside him. This was the opponent he had been born to trick and argue to his side. He would have no other.
*
Albus stared down at his new wand. Ash with a core of thestral hair; he’d had to go to a secretive wandmaker in Sweden to get this one made. It obeyed him perfectly. He had touched it in the shop and lit the small dusty room with a white glow that meant he had to Memory Charm the wandmaker, in the end. He had been traveling in disguise, and that power would lead her to suspect too much.
It obeyed him perfectly.
He still missed the Elder Wand.
It wasn’t that the wand had ever acted around him the way it did around Harry. It didn’t quiver—except, he realized now, when he’d been using it in spells that should let him find or recover Harry. It didn’t leap to his palm the moment he casually stretched his hand out, which had happened to Harry on the last visit Albus made to the Potters’ house. He hadn’t even won a lot of duels with it.
But he had shown that he was a strong wizard, and so the wand had chosen to stay with him. Albus had been content with that. He would live out his long life, and the wand wouldn’t be used for violence again. His power would be enough to content it, too.
He had thought he understood the Elder Wand the best of all the Deathly Hallows, as the only one he had possessed. It had no concept of loyalty, the way he sometimes thought the Cloak might. It followed power. It cleaved to power.
But it was loyal to Harry.
Albus sighed and put that out of his mind. That had to do with being the Master of Death and stretching that mastery across countless lives. And he had to admit that he wouldn’t have been willing to pay that particular price, countless reincarnations. He was looking forward to resting when Tom was defeated, and seeing Ariana and his parents again. Perhaps, when Gellert died as well, they would meet in a place where they could apologize to each other.
His concern was whether the wand’s loyalty came not simply from Harry having collected the Deathly Hallows in his first lifetime, but also from core principles similar to the wand’s. Harry claimed he didn’t care about power, he cared about people, but a master manipulator would say that, wouldn’t he?
Albus wanted to rest. How badly he wanted to rest, he thought as he sat back and looked around his office, full of portraits of Headmasters who had mostly not lived to be as old as he was. But he had to keep the world safe.
And it might not be just from Tom. It might also be from a being so subtle and dangerous and powerful that Albus feared he would never understand him.
Luckily, he didn’t need to understand Harry to oppose him.
“What am I to do?” Albus quietly asked Fawkes. The phoenix cocked his head as if he didn’t understand the question. Albus smiled wanly. He could wish that he didn’t, either. “I don’t know for certain that Harry is a danger. But he’s so hard to hold onto, to grasp, with my mind or my magic. How can I ensure that he’s not a danger before I go to my reach?”
Fawkes threw back his head and trilled. Albus held his breath. Sometimes, when the phoenix sang, visions appeared in his mind, visions that were a guide to the future and could at least hint to him what he should do.
The colors in his mind shifted now. They seemed to be forming a pinwheel with eight blades, one in each of the eight House colors. The pinwheel turned slowly, in a stately fashion, about Harry in the center, who looked like he was eleven years old. And there was a snake coiled up near his feet, and a badger sitting on them, and an eagle on his arm, and a lion with a paw clasped on his shoulder.
A second snake appeared next to him and coiled on his free arm. That serpent’s eyes were red in a way that Albus knew only Tom’s were.
The vision faded. Albus closed his eyes and tilted his head forwards, his heart so heavy that he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it fall out of his chest.
“He will ally with Tom, then,” Albus whispered. “It doesn’t matter if I can’t find a way to oppose them both yet. I will have to try.”
And he turned and left the office, ignoring the way Fawkes trilled urgently behind him. He had only ever got one vision out of any one song. He would learn nothing else from the phoenix now, and he had a war to prepare for.
No matter how long it took, or what it cost.
*
Anaelyssa: Thanks for catching that.
And no, Dumbledore isn't primarily focusd on the Death Eaters right now. Rather, the information has made him much more cautious about Harry.
InvidiaRed: Right now, Harry thinks Voldemort incapable of love, and Voldemort has never let the thought enter his head.
SickPuppy: Harry is beginning to get suspicious of this life's complexity himself!
And Jonathan will get more independent, but that doesn't necessarily mean doubting Albus.
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