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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-Three—Harry’s Plan
“Harry.”
I wish someone else besides Jonathan was that happy to see me, Harry thought, before he cut himself off. He had accepted the circumstances of this life. He could adapt further, and ignore the nagging problems. He had the power to leave if he wanted.
I need to stop whining, even to myself.
“Voldemort.” Harry nodded to him. They were in their usual meeting place, the clearing where Voldemort had performed his oaths and also his elemental magic. “I have a plan I need to suggest to you. Let me know if you agree to it.”
“This has something to do with Dumbledore?”
“How did you know that?”
“There’s a particular way that you stand when you’re exasperated with him,” Voldemort murmured, his gaze focused enough that Harry could almost feel its light on his skin. “I know that you must have an urgent message for me if it makes you seek me out instead of waiting for my invitation.”
Harry stared at him, then shuddered the wish that someone else knew him that well away. He wasn’t going to complain. “Yes. He’s convinced that you need to die. That this truce that you’ve set up isn’t real, and that you’ll start attacking again any minute. And he wants me to murder you.”
He found himself bracing his back against one of the small and now-almost-leafless trees. Voldemort in any other world would still have withered the air with rage. But this one, although he came a step forwards, only watched him thoughtfully.
“Why you?”
“He’s convinced that I have the power to do so, and he knows he doesn’t.”
“You do have the power to do so.”
“Um. Let me understand you. Are you saying that you don’t mind that? Or is it something that you only recently figured out?”
“I’ve known since our confrontation after you escaped.” Voldemort flicked his fingers as if conjuring and throwing away a miniature flower. “What is your plan for handling this? Do you intend to create a replica of my head and bring it to Albus?”
“He wouldn’t be convinced by that,” Harry said, while his mind grabbed that idea and gibbered about it a while. “No. What I’m going to do is convince him that you’re so obsessed with me you have no idea about starting a war.”
Voldemort laughed. Harry put a hand to his ears. That sound still seemed to ring some dark bell at the heart of the world.
“In other words,” Voldemort said, “you would tell him the truth.”
“I—”
Harry had no idea what to say. Put all the other differences aside and he still wasn’t used to a Voldemort that had this much self-awareness.
Voldemort had prowled towards him while he was standing there thinking about it, and now he was bending over at an odd angle so he could stare further into Harry’s eyes. Harry looked back. He couldn’t wait to be taller.
“You could do so much,” Voldemort said. “If you would. Conquer me. Destroy me. Albus is not wrong to think that. You could take over the world. You could imprison me somewhere I could never escape.”
“I—”
“Do not lie to me, Harry. You are an immortal being with gifts that you do not use only because of the constraints of your own strange morality. That does not mean that you could not use them. You used the gifts of a Dementor to escape me. You hate them, but you used them to save someone else. I have no doubt that you would murder me or imprison me if necessary to save the world.”
“But you’re not acting like you mind it!”
“Should I?” Voldemort bent a little nearer, and this time Harry was certain: the skin where the light of his red eyes fell was warmer than the rest of Harry’s face. “When the being that could do so is not Albus or a member of the Order of the Phoenix, but you? My equal?”
Harry’s brain gibbered again. The first thing he thought of was the original prophecy and the “mark him as his equal” line. His Voldemort, if he could think of him that way, his first Voldemort, had indeed been obsessed with Harry, but with hunting him down and destroying him. He wouldn’t have allowed anything like his equal to exist. He wouldn’t have been thrilled about it.
“Can you not act like a normal Voldemort?” Harry found himself demanding before he thought about the words and how ridiculous they sounded.
*
He is uneasy.
Part of Lord Voldemort thrilled to that, vibrated with the beginning of Harry’s terror, but the rest of him was thrilled only because it meant Harry was responding to him instead of locking his emotions away, the way he had tried more than once. He wished for other emotions. He stepped back, because perhaps his closeness was confusing Harry, but spoke on in the same soft voice, and did not look away from Harry’s eyes.
“Of course not. The others were defeated, broken, pathetic creatures. Why would I want to act like them?”
Harry continued staring at him for a second. Then his jaw firmed, and the emotions that Lord Voldemort suspected from him did the same thing. Lord Voldemort approved. Harry was not a child. He deserved to remember that and continue to display his power, that fine power that Albus feared so much.
Albus would drown the light of the future with his fear.
“All right,” Harry said. “So we use the truth. But we have to be able to explain to Albus why it’s true in a way that doesn’t put you in danger.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
Lord Voldemort sighed. “You told me you were a Gryffindor in your first life? And the majority of your subsequent lives thereafter?”
“Well, when I wasn’t born a snake or a Kneazle.”
Lord Voldemort paused, but this was too important a conversation to try and imagine Harry with scales or paws. “The traits still show through. I know you have the ability to defend yourself. Will you make the plans? What would you do if Albus tried to use your brother against you, or put you into a situation where you would die in that child’s body even if your magic was free?”
Harry blinked. “Then I’d die. I’d hate to think of leaving this world with everything unfinished, and leaving Jonathan like that. But at least it would mean Albus couldn’t use me as a weapon against anyone else, and I know I’d be reborn. Hopefully into a world that’s less insane.”
Lord Voldemort moved. Harry seemed to relax as he was pressed against the tree he’d been standing in front of. Perhaps he thought Lord Voldemort was breaking and falling apart like the others, that his soul was leaking, that the hostility on the air was for the thought of Harry Potter existing instead of not existing.
“And have you not thought of what else you will be leaving behind? A war that will start again when you are no longer here? Magic that can be shared and is not being shared? Me?”
Lord Voldemort had given Harry Potter a gift he had not acknowledged. The thought of being his equal, of the obsession that Lord Voldemort could feel turning the iron of his mind to steel—it would be acknowledged. It would be accepted as the gift it was.
Harry hung where he was. He looked patiently into Lord Voldemort’s eyes, and although Lord Voldemort did not use Legilimency on him, dared not use it, he could see ancient seas, blowing winds, wheeling stars. Harry spoke, and his voice had an echo to it. “I’m truly immortal. That means I’ve accepted death. It doesn’t mean trying to defy or cheat it. That’s where you’re still like the others. You want to live forever.”
“There is one way I am different,” Lord Voldemort said, and his voice scrabbled like a scorpion’s claws. “I wish for the one who can share my immortality.”
Harry blinked, once, and the glimpse of the lives he had lived was once again in the background. “I can’t do that. I can’t,” he repeated, when Lord Voldemort leaned closer to him, until their chins almost touched. “I always die of old age, or in battle, or something. I’m not physically immortal, the way you are. I don’t have Horcruxes.”
“But your magic is vast enough to figure out a way. You know of means of immortality aside from Horcruxes. Don’t you.”
Harry’s face mottled pale. The shifting branches of the tree above him cast down enough shadows to make it dark still. “I would never use them.”
“But you know of them. And if I told you that I would unleash war on the world otherwise, that I would decay and turn back into the kind of Voldemort that you always defeated—what would you do then?”
“Say that you’ve given me as much power over you as you have over me. I would defeat you, and then I would die. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way it has to be. It’s always—”
Harry stopped speaking, but Lord Voldemort was there already, as simple and pure as the strike of a snake. “Because it has always been that way, that means it must always be that way?”
*
Harry hated the feeling that the universe was punching him in the face and laughing at him. It could stop any time now.
He bit down against the impulse to say that, and nodded to Voldemort. “All right. So I’ve already changed my mind about that. But I’m not going to live forever, and I’m not going to use the methods I’ve read about.” Yes, he’d been a necromancer’s apprentice, and there were books waiting under the earth, written in salt and rock, that would mean he could stay in any body he chose. He’d never chosen. He wanted to die, wanted to go on. He wanted to live a normal life.
A cold talon seemed to stroke the back of his neck. The way that you wanted to be normal and get Albus to leave you alone, so you told him almost everything? Because that was normal, to trust him and be on the side of the Order of the Phoenix.
Harry closed his eyes to acknowledge the next bitter thought. The knowledge of twenty-seven lives should have taught you that you’d never be normal once you confessed your powers.
“If I threatened your brother—”
“Do that, and I am gone.”
“Gone?”
“I know magic that would make me immortal. I also know magic that would snuff my soul out forever in this world. I don’t know for sure if it would stop me from being reborn, but it would mean that I never would have existed in this world. It would erase all my past actions. It will happen if you threaten Jonathan again.”
For a moment, the possibility hung between them, twanging like a plucked spiderweb. Voldemort’s eyes were so wide that Harry thought he could see all the way to the bottom of his soul, to the fractures in it. Then he let go of Harry, and stepped away, and bowed.
“You are lord of more magic than I can comprehend,” he murmured. Harry heard the crackling greed in his voice, but it was a little muted. A little. “You are incredible. I will not threaten your brother again. I will use a different tactic.”
“What?”
“Akin to the plan that you intend to show Albus. You will tell him the truth. I will tell you the truth. I must make you want to live.”
Harry swallowed against a sharp dryness in the back of his throat. He didn’t nod. “I think that the plan should include false memories I can show to Albus in the Pensieve, but they have to be based on something real. Do I have your permission to take part of this conversation and alter it so that he has something to look at?”
*
Only Harry would ask something like that. Only Harry would be able to have this conversation with me.
It reminded Lord Voldemort of the first time he had tasted chocolate, when he was five and one of the other children at the orphanage had found some somewhere, or been given it. At this height above the mists of the past, which one it was seemed unimportant. The sudden sweetness in his mouth and the awareness of possibilities opening around him was like that.
How long had it been since he remembered the orphanage?
He shrugged that aside, and paid attention to Harry instead. “You may use memories of this conversation. It would be strange for you to mention the Horcruxes without me getting angry. You should leave the parts about me wishing for you to be immortal and share that immortality with me.” Although it is the deepest desire of Lord Voldemort’s will. “You should leave the part about me threatening your brother, as well, but change your answer.”
“Why?”
“It will convince Albus that I have not changed, and show the depths of my obsession with you. But if he knew that you had the power to either become truly immortal or change the past of this world, then he would be more paranoid than he is now.”
“You think he’d try to kill me.”
“Of course he would.” Lord Voldemort sneered. “Do still think so well of him, or his incarnations in other worlds, that you do not think that is true?”
“No. I meant—I knew that already. I just didn’t know if you’d be upset about it.” Harry sighed. “How has the world managed to change this much?”
Lord Voldemort wished to say that it was his own genius, that he had outlived the other Voldemorts Harry had faced with the power of his genius, but bragging might have the same result as talking about himself in the third person. He laid a hand on the tree trunk above Harry’s head instead. “We cannot know. We can only plan to counter the insanity that Albus would lay down.”
“Yeah.” Harry’s hands curled for a moment. “And this way would at least let him know that if he threatens Jonathan, then he’ll pay for it.”
Lord Voldemort had no objection to that knowledge passing into Albus’s hands. As they worked out which parts of the conversation would be tampered with and which wouldn’t, he watched Harry’s face under half-lidded eyes. He seemed to have calmed down, though now and then he would shake his head in exasperation about something, usually when describing Albus’s choices.
You have lost him, Albus. Lost him so thoroughly that I wonder if he realizes it himself. He allows his brother to tether him to the side of the Order of the Phoenix, but that is the only thing that does. And if his brother left…
I shall have to know more about the loyalties of Jonathan Potter before I can change the status quo. I shall have to know what would lure him to the Dark. Perhaps he knows some of the Dark Arts already, in his training. There may be a way for Harry to find out and for me to question Harry.
Yes, that was the best way. Lord Voldemort would find out the way to tempt Jonathan Potter, and when he was at Lord Voldemort’s side, Harry would follow.
And then they would not be parted.
That mattered more than Horcruxes.
*
Harry started as he Apparated into his bedroom and found the walls lit with fire. His first thought was that Lily and James had noticed he was missing and were waiting by the fireplace for him to come back. He turned around. “Mum, Dad, I can explain—”
And his voice died, because it wasn’t his parents. Instead, Fawkes perched on the mantel above his fireplace. The phoenix gave him a sad croon and swooped towards the arm that Harry instinctively held up. It was a long time since he’d needed to give a phoenix a place to perch, but he still remembered how. One didn’t have five lives in a phoenix’s company and forget.
“All right,” Harry said, when Fawkes had done nothing but rub his cheek against Harry’s for a minute. “You came to show me something, right?” He knew about a phoenix’s ability to show visions in flames, too. They were ambiguous, but Harry had plenty of experience interpreting them. “What is it?”
Fawkes turned and gave him a mournful look. Harry sighed. “I know that I’ve lived through hard things, and you probably know something about that. But I won’t be angry at you. Just show me. I’m anticipating terrible things sitting here.” He tried to smile, but he felt his mouth tremble, and had to stop.
Fawkes gave a low, troubled croon, and then began to sing. Harry watched the flames coalesce in front of him, and saw the vision of Jonathan’s first days at Hogwarts.
*
Anaelyssa: Thanks! You'l get a glimpse of both Jonathan and the Weasley twins in the next chapter.
And Albus pretty much figures that Harry is communicating with Voldemort. He just doesn't know the specifics.
Fenrirsboy: Maybe Jonathan being in Hufflepuff will be enough to make a difference...
I don't know that I implied Harry had this kind of relationship with Voldemort before. More of the "I hate you and am obsessed with seeing you dead" relationship.
Yeah, Harry is starting to agree with you about Albus.
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His Twenty-Eighth Life