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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
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Chapter Seventeen--Circles Within Circles
No, you wouldn't have heard of that vow. It's one that a Parselmouth made up ages ago when there were more of us around, and I only read about it in a book that my mad mentor Erik de la Vuelta showed me once. I haven't found the book in any other world. But I've taken the oath myself, and I know it works well enough, if spoken with good intent.
Lord Voldemort stood underneath the full moon, which sparkled above him in a space between two branches curved like the antlers of a stag. He breathed out slowly, and the air around him began to shine.
It was far more than the faint light of the moon. Lord Voldemort could feel that. The subtle power curled and sang around him, and then snapped straight and tugged. He fell to his knees. His eyes were wide, and he could hear Harry's voice speaking in his head as if the words came from a conversation instead of parchment.
An oath in blood and snake-scales on the night of the full moon that you will not harm my family. And following that came the instructions for the oath.
It had to be spoken in Parseltongue, of course. Lord Voldemort opened his mouth, and the words poured forth even as he reached towards the two butchered adders that he had prepared for this moment. “I so swear…”
The power that had already downed him flared brighter. Now Lord Voldemort could make out the sparks of light racing swiftly to the ground from the full moon, only here when it rose like this.
He gripped one adder, with the head hanging on by a strip, and tore off the head with his teeth. The sluggish blood that lay inside the neck did not pump, as the adder had been dead almost an hour, but that didn’t matter. The light of the moon caught and flared on the torn throat, making new white sparks leap from within it. At the same time, complementary red sparks started up from the dull scales.
Lord Voldemort bowed his head and drank the blood from the neck. He spared a stray thought for how strange Harry must have seemed doing this, during the life when he was a trained necromancer.
“I so swear that I will not harm Harry Potter, his family, or those claimed by him as family, no matter what they do, except in self-defense…”
The jellied, sluggish blood sliding down his throat was disgusting, but not more so than many potions he had swallowed in pursuit of less worthwhile goals. Lord Voldemort concentrated, and stood only when he had swallowed the last of it, and there was barely even an aftertaste lingering in his throat.
Then he reached out a hand until he was streaked by both sparks, the white ones springing from the blood and the red ones springing from the scales. When both were collected in his palm, he lifted his other hand, and the second dead adder, to his mouth. He tore open his palm with the adder’s fangs, followed by his own sharp teeth, the ones that he could imagine curved like fangs.
They were not. But it was a pleasing concept.
Would Harry be pleased?
The thought shot through his mind and then exploded into similar sparks and dissipated. At the moment, he did not care what the answer was. He cared about completing the oath in the right way, taking the steps in the process that would show Harry he could trust him.
That would woo Harry. Seduce him.
His blood poured out into the night, thicker and darker than human’s blood, the sign of what he was. Lord Voldemort tilted his head and poured it into the palm that still collected the dancing sparks from the first snake.
There was a silent explosion, made more of night than light. Lord Voldemort blinked his eyes open, and looked again. There was a small scar cutting across the center of the palm that had held the light, shaped like a serpent with lifted neck. The adders were gone.
At the same moment, the light from the moon winked out as though he had drawn a blind over it. Lord Voldemort gave a small smile. The oath was complete.
He stepped back and watched the far side of the clearing. Harry had said that he would know when the oath was finished, and he would—respond. Lord Voldemort suspected that would be an owl and he would not receive it for some hours, but he could not help hoping for a visit.
*
Despite knowing how stupid walking into the depths of the night on his way to visit Voldemort was, Harry was doing it anyway.
He’d had to admit to himself, slowly and with lots of fighting against the idea, that Dumbledore had become an enemy. He trained Jonathan harder than ever, and asked him questions that Harry knew were meant to break his stubborn loyalty to Harry, and had almost ceased his questions to Harry by this point. When they were together in the same gatherings with Lily, James, and Sirius, Dumbledore watched Harry all the time with sad and narrow eyes.
That was going to position Harry in a very complicated way relative to his family shortly. He didn’t think anything could make Jonathan abandon him, but his parents were both Dumbledore’s followers and his friends. They wouldn’t give up on him, but they could both be easily persuaded that Harry needed to be watched over and “protected” from doing anything Dark for his own good.
Harry had seen the same tactics work multiple times. Luckily, he’d managed to keep himself beneath Dumbledore’s piercing regard in most of those lives, so other people had been the targets.
It was a relief to melt into the darkness, to Apparate the way no one believed he could—Harry had conveniently left out that fact from the recitations of his powers—and visit the one person he knew whose manipulations would never be guided by some notion of the greater good, or Harry’s good.
That didn’t mean he walked into the clearing expecting tolerance or goodwill from Voldemort, of course. But Voldemort was so much less complex than Dumbledore, right now.
“Harry. Hello.”
Voldemort’s voice was low and seemed to vibrate the darkness in the clearing. Harry noticed the swirl of leftover power, and nodded. “You followed the instructions for the oath perfectly.”
Voldemort studied him with those devouring red eyes. His hair looked a touch darker than when Harry had seen him last, his skin paler, but those were the only changes. “You have grown taller.”
“Yes. That’s what happens over three years.”
Voldemort said nothing else for long enough that Harry wondered if this conversation would die in the water for different reasons than his and Dumbledore’s now did. Then Voldemort asked abruptly, “When my oaths are finished, what magic do you intend to teach me first?”
“Focus on elemental magic. There are ways of mastering it that most wizards don’t know. Yes,” Harry added mildly as Voldemort’s forked tongue flickered out to touch his lips, “I thought you might like that.”
“Do you not fear the destruction that I might wreak with the elements?”
“You’ll have made the oaths. I don’t fear the limits that your learning will be contained within.” Harry looked Voldemort mildly in the eye when he came a step nearer. “I’m watching you, you know. I will notice if you try to strike at me here, and I’ll use my own magic to make you regret it.”
Voldemort stilled again. Then he said, “You never mentioned the consequences for breaking this particular…oath.”
Harry wanted to ask him if he’d chosen an odd word in the sentence to pause before just to sound dramatic, but he held his words to himself. “It would unravel everything in you that’s connected to a snake. It would take your Parseltongue gift from you. Your tongue would revert to a human’s. And since I suspect that at least a few of your Horcruxes are either artifacts from Slytherin’s line or guarded with Parseltongue traps…”
Voldemort hissed, but it was wordless. “How do they treat you?”
“They believe me,” Harry said, but he knew that something must have given him away—perhaps the taut tone of his voice—because Voldemort lowered his head and flicked his tongue out again.
“Who believes you? Who does not?”
“My parents accept me for who I am. Sirius and Remus have some more trouble.” Harry shrugged. “My brother has no trouble accepting me. I think that he would have made a strong Boy-Who-Lived if you had managed to attack him, you know.”
Voldemort discarded that utterly, the first time Harry could remember him not reacting to news about Jonathan. “And what of dear Dumbledore?” He flowed off to the side, his head tilted as though he was listening for wind to come into the clearing. Harry simply turned to face him. Voldemort didn’t look put off. “Does he believe you?”
“Of course he does. He sees me mostly as a source of information, but he can’t deny what I am.”
“Is he easy with it?”
Voldemort spoke the word “easy” in Parseltongue. Harry wanted to roll his eyes. That way, the word had overtones that it didn’t if you said it in English. It meant “comfortably resting.” Harry supposed Voldemort thought he was pulling off a coup by speaking it that way and “tricking” Harry into confirming that Dumbledore couldn’t rest easy with what Harry was, and might never be able to.
“Not really,” Harry said. “But that hardly matters when we’re allies. I know how to handle Albus. He’s been exasperating in some of my lifetimes, but we never got to a point where we saw each other as enemies.”
“In this lifetime? Or does he see you as an enemy even if you do not return the favor?”
Harry only shrugged. Voldemort was good at guessing, but Harry saw no reason to reward him. “You pumped me for information the same way. There’s not much to choose between you, except that you’re less exasperating to me at the moment.”
Voldemort halted and stared at him. His eyes were still bright enough to glow in the darkness of the clearing even though the full moon didn’t shine down on them. Voldemort seemed to be holding some kind of internal debate. Harry patiently waited for him to make up his mind.
“You could come here, you know,” Voldemort said in a sliding tone that Harry didn’t trust in the slightest. He prepared to Apparate, but Voldemort didn’t make a move to get near him. He was simply speaking. “You could stay with me whenever Dumbledore becomes too much for you.”
“In this clearing? Preparing to set up camp here, Lord Voldemort?”
Voldemort’s chest swelled. He might actually breathe fire. Harry had seen it before. He Apparated to the other side of the clearing and got ready to raise the earth if that was what he needed to do.
But Voldemort let the breath go without igniting it. Perhaps he didn’t know the spells to do that in this universe. Well, Harry wasn’t about to teach him the elemental magic that would let him learn it, either. “I meant in my home. A different house than my Death Eaters currently use. I own several, legacies of old followers who trusted me more than their own children. You have already won peace for our world by forcing me to—reconsider—certain matters. You could win still more peace with your stabilizing effect on me.”
Harry stared at him, and didn’t bother concealing his dropped jaw. “Stabilizing effect? Are you listening to yourself? I would drive you mad, and you know it!”
“I do not know it.” Voldemort’s voice was incredibly soft and focused. His eyes shared the focus. “I know that I have spent the time since you left wishing you were back. And now you are here. I am content. I would be more content if you did not leave.”
Harry continued to stare. Just as no other Voldemort he had known would have been capable of taking that oath or even coming up with the lie to offer a truce, none would have been capable of speaking those words.
Does that mean…
Harry could hardly think the words, but they were there, anyway, pushing and shoving against his throat insistently.
Does that mean that he truly could be redeemed? If he is already so different?
*
Lord Voldemort waited. Harry Potter had grown, but not enough to not resemble a child. However, Lord Voldemort understood the vastness and grip of the power waiting behind that façade. He would hardly forget what had nearly severed him from his magic.
He waited as more time passed. He would have grown impatient three years ago. But those three years had passed, and he had spoken the truth. It would content him to have Harry back with him, to learn from his teacher not through letters but from his presence.
Harry finally dropped his eyes and shook his head. But Lord Voldemort, he of the keen senses, was watching, and that shake took Harry some effort.
“No,” Harry said. “I can’t. It would panic my parents, and it would make Albus absolutely certain that I’m up to something, instead of only suspecting it the way he does now.”
“Then you and Albus are more on the outs than would be wise for the old man to indulge himself in.” Lord Voldemort had an inner beast that threw back its head and hissed in joy. But he showed none of it on the outside.
“I’m not going to threaten him.”
“You would not threaten to sever him from his magic if he did something similar to what I have done?”
“But he won’t. Because he’s Albus.”
Lord Voldemort twisted his head to the side. Here was an opportunity he had not expected to have. “You do realize that he might do something as reckless, if not the exact same thing I did? We differ in degree, not in kind.”
Harry stared at him, power swirling in the depths of his green eyes. It was like looking down into an abyss stretching into the seafloor, and it delighted Lord Voldemort. “He understands what I am. He wants to use me, control me. It’s annoying, but that’s different from what you were going to do—”
He cut himself off. Lord Voldemort switched to Parseltongue, because only in that language could he express his glee, soft as the sheathing over retracted claws. “I was not going to control you? Albus was not going to control you the same way I was?”
Harry blinked and replied slowly, “He wasn’t going to control me for the same reasons that you were. I know you thought of me as a kind of intelligent grimoire that could feed you all the spells you wanted. He thinks of me as…”
He was quiet. Lord Voldemort waited. His throat ached with the need to supply the words, but he thought again of the reward that waited at the end of this path, and managed to keep silent. He had practice in that. He had managed to put up with Albus for seven years when he was a Hogwarts student, after all, and charm multiple people into believing him, following him, giving him the materials needed for his precious Horcruxes.
“A weapon,” Harry finally said.
“The apt metaphor,” Lord Voldemort replied at once. He would not make suggestions, but he had no problem with following them up and reinforcing them when they occurred to Harry. “Because a weapon can turn in the hand that holds it.”
“He has to know that I would never hurt Jonathan! Or my parents.”
“I suspect he is not thinking of them. Perhaps he fears that you would attempt to let a Death Eater go. Or collaborate with me. Or simply not do preciously as he wishes. For Albus, that kind of subtle rebellion can be more of a threat than simple opposition.”
“But—”
“Did I tell you that he thought of me the same way? I believe at one point he cherished ambitions of using me. There are certain things he said to me during my sixth and seventh years that I cannot interpret any other way. Something about how much I could accomplish with such power if I trusted others, if I saved and defended them.” Even now, Lord Voldemort could not think of such words without sneering. “As if he was wishing for what I might become in his hand if he had molded me the right way.”
Harry moved his head abruptly, not so much a motion of negation as of breaking free of a trance. “I have to leave before someone misses me.”
“The offer is open.”
“How in the world could I come to your manor without someone coming after me? And I could never abandon my family.”
“How did you slip away to come here? I did not say that it would have to be permanent, Harry. Only that I have the space and the desire to give you a place to escape, if you need it.”
Harry stared at him again, and then said flatly, “I have to go,” and Disapparated.
Lord Voldemort stood in silence and closed his eyes, his fingers feeling gently at the snake-shaped mark on his palm.
Never before had he made a sacrifice worth so much.
*
InvidiaRed: Well, I don't know that Albus is a Dark Lord. But yes, he does fall into the trap.
And thanks for catching that typo.
Anaelyssa: You could also interpret it that way! But Albus does not believe Voldemort could ever become peaceful.
Fenrirsboy: There may be means of redemption that do not involve feeling that kind of remorse.
And yes, Voldemort looks mostly human. He does have red eyes, the forked tongue, and very pale skin.
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His Twenty-Eighth Life