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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.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Two—The Confrontation
“I can’t wait until you can come to Hogwarts.”
Jonathan’s arms were tight around him, and Harry leaned into his brother. Jonathan was ruffling his hair, his hand trembling as he did it. Harry sighed. He wished there was something he could say to reassure Jonathan, but there was probably nothing. Even when Harry told him that he understood the way James and Lily reacted and that he was being careful with what he told Dumbledore and Voldemort, Jonathan worried.
“I want you to go and have fun,” Harry said. “Write to me as often as you want, but don’t live for the holidays and coming home. Make friends. Please, Jonathan,” he added softly, when Jonathan opened his mouth. “I want you to grow to become the best friend you can be. You’re already the best brother.”
Jonathan closed his mouth and looked at him with troubled eyes. Then he nodded. He’d grown taller than Harry was at eleven, and his dark hair and eyes made him look even more serious. “Okay.”
“I mean it. Try, okay?”
“Jonathan—”
“Potter! Come on—”
“The train’s leaving!”
Harry grinned as he watched Fred and George rush up behind Jonathan. He didn’t really know some of the other children Jonathan had played with, since Lily and James tended to herd them apart when they visited. But he had always known and liked the Weasley twins. They were the only ones who didn’t change that much from life to life Harry lived, unless they just weren’t in that world at all. They were always pranksters, always a little vicious, and always together.
Jonathan gave him a final desperate glance. Harry just waved as the twins pulled Jonathan towards the Hogwarts Express. His brother really needed to get away and live at least some of his own life. Harry didn’t want him being in his little brother’s shadow for years. At Hogwarts, he would have to think about other things.
Harry leaned on the stone wall and watched the kids pile into the Hogwarts Express, some he knew and some he didn’t. He did spy Angelina Johnson hugging her parents, and Marcus Flint sneering disdainfully at the first-years. He suppressed the impulse to duck out of sight when he saw Oliver Wood with a broom over his shoulder. Oliver knew nothing about how he could fly in this universe and wouldn’t be looking to recruit him for the Quidditch team.
Probably won’t be looking to recruit me when I go to Hogwarts, either. The Sorting Hat knew perfectly well who Harry was whenever it dropped on his head, but it always Sorted him based on his personality and circumstances in this life. It said he gave it a headache, and trying to Sort him as the sum of all his lives was too hard. And Harry was pretty sure he wouldn’t be Gryffindor, this world.
“Harry, love? It’s time to go.”
Harry turned around, alert in a way that he hated. Because Lily had said those words in a soft, resigned voice that didn’t have tears in it. It would just have been tears if she had been upset about Jonathan leaving. And she didn’t say that they were going home.
“Where, Mum?” Harry held his hand up so that Lily could take it and lead him away. He behaved like a child in public.
“Albus wants to talk to you.”
“About what? Honest, Mum, I’ve told him everything I can think of!” A lie, but it was unlikely that Lily would sense it. She did believe, more than James, that he was a kid in her heart of hearts, and if he showed an emotion, that was everything he felt.
Lily bent down and hugged him so fiercely that Harry felt a thrum of uneasiness. “I promise that it’s nothing bad, sweetheart,” she breathed into his hair. “Albus—he found some magic recently that only powerful wizards can do. He wants to see if you can do it. It would help us immensely in the war.”
“The war that’s not happening?”
Lily flinched and backed away to look at him with huge eyes, ones that already looked as if they were about to swim with tears. Harry sighed. He hated when his mother looked like that. He always had, even when she wasn’t his mother.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t talk with him. I just think it’s a little strange to call what’s not happening a war.”
“That’s what Albus called it.” Lily didn’t look entirely reassured, but she gave Harry a timid smile. “If you’ll talk with him? It could mean peace in the end, you know. Not the kind of half-peace we have now, never knowing if Voldemort is going to come back and attack any day.”
He wouldn’t do that unless I stopped talking to him and coming to see him. It was strange to Harry to know that, once again, as in a few other lives, he was the guarantee of peace with Voldemort, but only because he was writing letters and answering strange invitations to bloody clearings in the middle of the night.
This war can’t be won through normal means.
But for now, he nodded and smiled back at Lily, and let her lead him to the Apparition spot. The meeting was going to be at Hogwarts, apparently. Harry pretended he couldn’t Apparate himself, or that he couldn’t see through the transparent kind of manipulation that this meant. It made his mother happy.
*
“Are you a hero or not?”
Jonathan looked at the dark-haired girl who had invaded his compartment. She had a look on her face as though she didn’t know how to meet someone’s eyes, because she’d rather tilt her nose and look down on them. Her hands were clenched next to her sides. Jonathan couldn’t see her wand.
That didn’t matter, though, not after some of the things he’d seen Harry do without a wand. Jonathan planned on being cautious.
“No,” he said. “I’m not. Voldemort never actually attacked me. He took my little brother away for three years, though.”
The girl gaped at him. Then she whispered, “You said his name.”
“Yes. I think it’s stupid to live in fear.”
“My parents aren’t stupid. But they would never say his name.”
All Jonathan could do was shrug. He still didn’t know who this girl was, so he didn’t have the slightest idea who her parents were and whether or not they were stupid. He thought they probably were if they were Death Eaters, though.
The girl sat on the bench across from him. “My name is Acanthus Parkinson. I know you’re Jonathan Potter. I have a little sister named Pansy who will be coming to school in two years. Along with your brother, right?”
Jonathan blinked a little at her flood of words. Despite being at parties with his friends like the Weasley twins in the past few years, he was still more used to his family and silence and few words. But he nodded. “Yeah. His name is Harry and he’s two years younger than me. What House do you think you’ll be Sorted into?”
“Slytherin, of course. All the best people are. Well, maybe not you.”
“No, probably Gryffindor or Hufflepuff for me,” Jonathan agreed.
“Hufflepuff? Wouldn’t you want to go home if you were Sorted there?”
“Why?”
“It’s the duffer House! The lowest of the low! The House of leftovers! My older cousin was at Hogwarts a few years ago, and she said the Hat sang this song about how Helga Hufflepuff just taught everyone no one else wanted to teach.”
“Then she probably had the biggest House, right?”
Acanthus paused as if she hadn’t thought of that before. Then she tossed her head. “My cousin also said that the Hat tries to Sort people evenly. You don’t have a huge number of students in Slytherin and none in Ravenclaw, for instance.”
“Then maybe the Hat just puts some people in some places. Not the best-suited ones. I could end up in Hufflepuff if Gryffindor already has enough students.”
“That shouldn’t work that way!”
“But it apparently does.”
Acanthus argued fiercely with him for most of the way about the Sorting Hat. Jonathan only answered vaguely. His thoughts were far away, with Harry, sometimes worrying how he would handle Mr. Dumbledore and his parents without Jonathan there to protect him, sometimes wishing he was here, sometimes wondering what Hogwarts House he would be Sorted into.
He smiled. He thought the Hat would be really puzzled by Harry.
“Are you even listening to me, Potter?”
“I don’t know, Parkinson. Have you said anything interesting yet?”
Acanthus glared at him and began her argument over again. Jonathan did listen a little more this time, but only because he knew Mum would have told him it was polite. He would take Harry’s advice and try to have fun and make friends at Hogwarts.
But it would be hard, knowing his real life was so far behind him.
*
“You know what I am going to ask you already, I suspect, Harry.”
Harry shivered a little as he halted in front of Dumbledore. Lily had brought him straight to the gates and then walked with him to the castle, pointing out Gryffindor Tower before she faltered and fell silent. Harry knew she was thinking of his other lives and how he probably knew the castle better than she did.
And it was true that Harry did. But he didn’t want that burden to weigh on her mind. Any more than he wanted Dumbledore to be consumed by thoughts of his magical strength, as if that mattered, and think of him as a weapon to win the war.
There was more than one reason that Harry had preferred to keep the knowledge of his past lives from everyone for so long.
Now he stood in front of Albus, and he felt a great weariness moving up through him, cresting near the top of his head. He sighed. “You’re going to ask me to make an attack on Voldemort. Or lead one. Even though he hasn’t done anything for four years now.”
“You know he’s gathering his forces. Getting ready to attack again.”
“I don’t know that. I think the last time he tried to attack me traumatized him. He’s not going to try again until he’s sure he can win.”
Albus seemed to pause and think about that. Harry watched him. It was true. If Voldemort had been anything like the ones in his other worlds, he would never have admitted fear, but driven himself mad trying to gain the magical knowledge to take down his enemy.
But this version of Voldemort wasn’t shivering in fear. He was staring in fascination. Harry knew it, as much as he tried to push himself away from knowing it.
Still. He had made worse sacrifices. All he had to do was keep Albus from tipping the balance and turning them back into full-out enemies, or making Voldemort think he had to make another Horcrux, or something.
“You cannot trust him,” Albus said at last. “No words of true. No promise of peace.”
“What would you trust from him?” Harry asked wearily. “He did keep that bargain not to attack my family for three years, you know. I don’t think he actually realized that Remus would count as someone I was fond of.”
“I will trust death. Nothing more. Voldemort cannot be trusted.”
Harry closed his eyes. If he refused outright, then he was sure Albus would do something that would fracture the balance and tip everything over.
But there was always deception.
“Let me try one thing first,” he said. “If it doesn’t work—and it probably wouldn’t, because I don’t think he trusts you, either—then I’ll become your weapon. But grant me this much. I have to have some time. If only to minimize the casualties.”
“You could use your magic and kill him right now.”
“If I wanted to become a murderer, of course I could.”
There was silence. Harry held Albus’s eyes. He knew him well enough to look away the moment he felt a sting of Legilimency, but there was nothing. It seemed Albus, in turn, knew him well enough to know when he was being sincere.
Albus sighed a little. “We may not have as long as you wish, Harry. Voldemort might murder more innocents.”
“Why would he suddenly break this calm that he’s maintained for the last few years?”
“Why would he preserve it?”
God, what’s made us enemies? Harry felt sadness pulse through his chest as he realized the truth. It was the knowledge of his past lives, nothing more. Albus had never reacted like this in other worlds, even ones where he’d been just as driven and had just as blind a faith in Voldemort’s evil and the prophecy being right.
I’m never telling anyone else about this ever again. Maybe next life I’ll go and hide away if I can, until the time comes when I’m needed to win the war…
Harry took a sharp breath as he realized he didn’t even know if that time would come. Now that he knew the truth about one Voldemort, he would probably look on the next one in the next world he was born into more kindly. Perhaps he could find ways to engineer a truce there, too.
Hopefully one that doesn’t depend on Voldemort’s obsession with me.
“I will give you one month.”
Harry came back to the present, the world where he was still Harry and Albus was—not with him. He nodded. “All right. I promise that I’ll do as you say if I can’t get my plan in motion.”
“Thank you, Harry.”
The tension in the room didn’t ease, and Harry felt the Elder Wand, in his sleeve as it always was, shiver abruptly. He sighed and backed up. It would leap into his grasp if it thought it had to defend him. It had happened before when Harry was trying to demonstrate a spell to Jonathan using just hand motions. The Hallows were too bloody eager.
“I promise,” Harry repeated, and hoped that his fake smile was more convincing than it felt. “But just let me try this first. I don’t want to become a murderer after my years of doing exactly that.”
Albus smiled and nodded. He was lying about being happy about this. Harry knew it. And Albus knew Harry knew it.
Harry fled the office before he had to confront the thought of what else he didn’t know. And although he made his way obediently to the front of the castle where Lily was waiting for him, he already intended to Apparate back later.
He had a Sorting to watch.
*
“Potter, Jonathan!”
Jonathan squared his shoulders and stepped forwards as he heard the murmurs travel around the Great Hall. He knew some people were confused about how to react to him. The Potters hid away because they were in danger, and then they returned and never confirmed exactly what that danger had been. They were under attack from Voldemort’s forces, then they weren’t. Some people had heard a hint of prophecy or specialness, and others had heard rumors of rumors. No one really knew what to say to him.
He moved under the Sorting Hat. It seemed to sigh softly into his ear as it touched his hair.
“You know what you are. You know what you want.”
Jonathan just nodded. Harry had told him about the Hat and that he could argue with it, but so far, he hadn’t heard anything to argue with. It was the truth. “To protect my brother.”
“There are many ways you could do that. By building walls of knowledge. By becoming good at the dueling spells that Albus has tried to teach you. By hiding in the shadows and barely letting anyone know about you. By gathering followers around you. By becoming his bodyguard. Which one do you want?”
“I thought there were only four Houses?”
The Hat laughed into his ear. Jonathan could feel the crowd around him shifting and murmuring. This was already taking longer than most students’ Sortings had. He thought he could feel Acanthus Parkinson watching him from the Slytherin table, her eyes narrowed shrewdly as she pondered where the Hat would place him.
“Your choice will still tell me much about you.”
“I want to protect him by learning how to protect him, a bunch of magic and dueling spells, but also—I just want to be there for him. I don’t think our parents know how to deal with him, and neither does Mr. Dumbledore. And he doesn’t really have that many friends his own age. They don’t know what to think of him, either.”
“Do you?”
“I know he’s my little brother.”
“To you, that’s enough.”
“It’ll have to be.”
“Do you think that will ever change?”
“No.”
“HUFFLEPUFF!”
The applause was loud from the Hufflepuff table. Jonathan took off the Hat and handed it back to Professor McGonagall, then hurried over to his fellow Housemates. There were already some older students shaking his hand and introducing themselves.
“Adrienne Richland, tremendous to see you, Potter…”
“Lyall Walker, same…”
“I’m Cedric Diggory! I’m a first-year like you!”
Jonathan turned around and watched the rest of the Sorting—in a way. He did hear the silence and then the roar of protest from the Gryffindor table when first Fred and then George Weasley were Sorted into Slytherin. He heard Mr. Dumbledore’s voice announcing the beginning of the feast. He saw the food appear on the plates; he even felt the hum of magic around his hands when it did.
But his attention was focused on the shadows of the corridor past the doors where they’d entered.
He could see Harry’s face there, his eyes bright and gleaming as he waved before he silently turned and headed away.
Jonathan took a helping of potatoes and began talking to Cedric with a healthy dose of satisfaction that filled him more than the food could have. He didn’t have to worry about his life being in two different places. Harry would always be with him.
*
Anaelyssa: Well, Harry would be merciful. Voldemort...not unless he thought it was a nice birthday gift for Harry or something.
SilentxxDreamer: Thank you!
Yes, both Harry's parents are floundering. They honestly still don't know how to deal with this revelation, that Harry is and is not a child.
Fenrirsboy: Harry thinks it's obsession, nothing more. He's dealt with that before. A sexual component is the furthest thing from his mind.
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His Twenty-Eighth Life