Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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
- 27
- 28
- 29
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Eight—Their War
“What you describe is an ambitious plan that may not work.”
“I know that, sir.” Harry said it wearily. He’d been thinking about the drawbacks of his own plans too much in the last little while. He’d written to Voldemort, and gone to Hogwarts to talk with Jonathan, and listened to conversations his parents had with the wide-eyed naiveté that seemed to fool them so easily. And he’d listened to the singing of the Deathly Hallows in his blood.
They wanted to be used. Freeing Jonathan had soothed them for a little while, but now that mighty magic was in the past and they would demand a higher tribute.
“Why are you willing to risk it anyway?”
“Because I would risk anything for my brother, sir. And Voldemort is turning—stranger and stranger. I think he might threaten Jonathan simply to gain my attention and make sure that he had all of it.”
Albus’s face was as open as a child’s, for a moment. Or at least it was to Harry, who had known him in so many lives, for so many centuries. He was disgusted and intrigued at the same time.
“You can wield this obsession as a weapon?”
“Yes, sir. Voldemort goes almost mental when he doesn’t have access to me. I delayed writing back to him for a few days, and the letter that arrived…” Harry shook his head and produced the letter that Voldemort had written when Harry had asked for it. He had seemed overjoyed to be doing something that would trick Dumbledore and stretch the powers of his creativity at the same time.
Of course, he had required that Harry lean against him while he wrote it, and had breathed into his ear as Harry had read it. Harry’s plans to ignore his obsession weren’t working out as well as he had hoped.
“This is—I feel as if I’m reading someone’s mind, their confession of lust, not a letter.”
“I know, sir. And he believes he can get me on his side. He wants me there willingly right now, but he’ll rape my mind if he has to. He can’t stand the thought of me spending time with anyone but him, you see.”
“Then you must be careful as you age, Harry. You can’t have friends that are too close. You cannot have a lover when you are adolescent.”
Albus spoke gravely, but his hands tightened on the letter. Harry only nodded. Albus didn’t trust him yet, not completely. He would suspect a trick probably until years had passed. That was all right.
Harry would rather fool him and wind him into a maze where he chased shadows than have to kill him, the way he would if Albus hurt Jonathan again.
“I know. I don’t think I’ll have lots of friends outside my family anyway. I’m too strange, too different. And Jonathan is all I need to have someone to love and protect. Maybe I can have a normal life someday when Voldemort is defeated.”
Albus finally smiled. “I don’t want you to feel as if you’re putting your life on hold forever. Keep the idea of his defeat in your mind, and you have something to look forward to.” He sat back in his chair and glanced at the empty perch with a frown. “I can’t think where Fawkes has got to.”
Oh, Albus. Don’t you know that he’s abandoned you? But that might be literally unthinkable for Dumbledore. Harry certainly couldn’t think of any of his own lives before where it had happened. He made his face politely neutral and ate the tea and biscuits that Albus served him, ignoring the mild potions they were laced with. Albus probably hadn’t meant to try and control him. He put those potions in the food he gave others as a matter of course.
They slid off the Master of Death like water off weeds.
Harry left as soon as he could and went home. Lily was watching for him, and her face still looked pale and tense as she pulled him into a hug.
“Do you have to fight a war like this?” she whispered, stroking his hair back from his forehead. “Do you have to have discussions with Albus like an adult? Can’t you just be my little boy?”
Harry leaned against her. He was taller than he had been a month ago, but small for his age. He always seemed to be, in a Potter body. “I’m not a little boy, though. Not in all the ways that matter, Mum.”
Her hands tightened on his back for a second. Then she sighed and stepped away. Her smile wavered. “Come inside and eat dinner with your father and me as if you were for a while, though.”
And Harry smiled, and followed her, and did. Because he could give his parents some gifts to make up for depriving them of a normal son.
*
Lord Voldemort stepped back as Harry Apparated into the glade. Harry at once created a shimmering half-dome of a shield above his head, his eyes narrowing and fixing on Lord Voldemort. “Is there something wrong? Why are you acting as if this clearing isn’t big enough for me to Apparate into?”
Lord Voldemort didn’t answer for long enough that Harry turned in a slow circle, peering into the moon-created shadows around him. That didn’t impress or faze Lord Voldemort. It gave him more time to watch Harry, who had taken to tying his shaggy black hair back with a spell that shimmered and sparkled red in the uncertain shadows. Lord Voldemort had made it clear that he could likewise cut it with a spell. Harry had snapped that he didn’t want to.
He should follow his own desires more often.
“I merely wished to see you from a different angle,” Lord Voldemort said, when Harry had turned back and pinned him with that unwavering focus that threatened to get annoying.
Harry grunted and flipped his hands in a complicated maneuver. That called forth a book bound in wrinkled red leather. Lord Voldemort moved a step closer before he could stop himself, despite his desire to gaze. He recognized wyvern hide.
“This is the book you told me of last time?”
“Yeah. It took me a while to find it. The necromancer who had it in this world was either a different one or had a very different personality. He hid it under the sea beneath a huge black rock.”
Lord Voldemort lifted his eyes from the book, something that once would have been an impossibility. “How did you find it?”
“I tracked the feeling of the runes he’d carved. Well, I think it was he. Like I said, this could have been an entirely different person, so maybe it was she. But your magic gets influenced by the touch of the book after a while. Any runes you carve will feel like the runes someone else who owned the book would carve.”
“It would imprint its personality on mine?”
“I don’t think it could affect you. You’re too strong. But it would at least flavor your magic so the runes could be tracked. Don’t use the book if you don’t want any influence from it at all.”
Lord Voldemort took the tome slowly from Harry’s hands, basking more in the compliment than the knowledge of what he held in his hands. He cast a small spell that would find every page with an instance of the word “Horcrux” on it, and began to read. He knew what he would find in general, but the specific sketches and theories were beyond what he could divine from experience.
“Every Horcrux contains a bit of the soul I murdered,” he murmured after perhaps an hour, when Harry had settled himself on the ground and conjured balls of elemental lightning to play with. “I would have thought the soul I embedded in the object would have destroyed any lingering bit of the victim’s.”
“I think that happens most of the time,” Harry said. He lowered one of the balls of lightning to the ground and rolled it along. As Lord Voldemort watched, it flared out into the darkness of the night and dissipated harmlessly. “But your magic—the murders you committed were violent enough that it split the souls of your victims, too. The shards had nowhere to go. They clung to the only other souls near them weak enough not to bat them away. Or rather, the pieces of soul.”
“My soul pieces are not weak.”
“Yes, they are. You’ve weakened yourself immensely making Horcruxes the way you did.”
“How should I have made them?”
Harry made a frustrated noise and slumped against the tree he’d been sitting beside. The balls of lightning he hadn’t dissipated swung around his head, making him look as if he wore a sort of revolving crown. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t think you should have made them at all. But even then, there are less harmful ways to make them. Not making bloody five, for example. And trying for seven.”
“I was trying for six. Seven would count the shard of soul kept within my own body.”
“You shouldn’t have been trying at all.”
“I have killed people for saying less than that to me.”
Lord Voldemort meant, in the intricately composed corridors of his mind, that he had killed others for being cheeky to his face. But Harry didn’t take it that way. He stiffened and flung his head back, and suddenly the balls of lightning were narrowed into an arrowhead aimed straight at Lord Voldemort’s heart.
“Come on, then.”
Lord Voldemort shook his head and remained sitting on the ground with the book beside him. “You misunderstand me, Harry. I would not attack you. But I do make exceptions for you. Remember that when you are being honest.”
Harry paused, but let the moment slide past. He had been doing that more and more often lately. It both intrigued and infuriated Lord Voldemort. It was as if he believed that the moment they had shared after freeing his brother’s mind could never be repeated or topped, so he would avoid all other possible intimacies.
“Anyway,” Harry said, “that book can tell you how to become immortal in a certain way. But you would have to give up your Horcruxes first. Reabsorb them and then destroy the objects bound to them, and then find a way to send the pieces of soul still hanging onto your own peacefully into death.”
“I would not do that unless—”
“That book should really make the case for me that the method of immortality I know of is better than yours,” Harry muttered, burrowing down under the tree now. He kept one wary eye on Lord Voldemort, however, and his balls of lightning hadn’t started revolving again. “Don’t make me give you an argument.”
“I would not do that unless you agreed to follow it yourself.”
“I’m already immortal.”
“You know very well what I mean, Harry.”
“Why should I be afraid of death the way you are, though?” Harry lay on the grass and stared up at him with lazy eyes and coiled muscles that, of course, could move him in the right direction at any moment. “I know what comes after it. I know I’ll live again. There’s no reason for me to adopt your method, whether that’s Horcruxes or the one that your book is going to tell you about.”
“I would share this with you,” Lord Voldemort whispered.
Harry only lay there and looked singularly unconscious of the honor Lord Voldemort had done him. “We can share lots of magic. Not this.”
“Are you afraid of remaining in this world?”
“No. I’m just not afraid of death, I told you. I mean, a few weeks ago I was even considering the possibility of killing myself because I thought it might make people’s lives less distorted around me, but I decided against that because I don’t want to leave Jonathan alone. And it would condemn you to go mad again, probably.”
Lord Voldemort seized Harry’s shoulder. “You will not kill yourself.”
“No, I was telling you that. I decided against it.”
“You will not think of killing yourself.”
Harry stared at him. Then he reached up and removed Lord Voldemort’s hand from his shoulder and said, almost gently, “You would have to find some way to go on when I died, you know. You shouldn’t depend on me for your sanity. I want you to find a way to be immortal, if that’s the only method for you to get what you want, and then use it. And that means you’ll be sane, when you finish reabsorbing your Horcruxes, and you won’t need me anymore.”
“I will always want you at my side.”
Lord Voldemort knew he was speaking the simple truth. There was no reason for Harry to freeze and stare at him as if it had been a revelation.
Then he turned his head aside and said lightly, “Well, like I said, I decided against it. Now, would you read the book and decide if you’re going to attempt the method of immortality it’s talking about? It might be more work than you’d like.”
“I have never quailed at work.”
“But the kind of work that involves compassion?”
Lord Voldemort stared in silence at him. Harry laughed and went back to juggling lightning.
*
“You’re doing very well, my boy.”
Jonathan bowed and panted a little as he felt his adrenaline crashing around inside his body. It always did after a duel with Dumbledore, but then, just having a conversation with him did that to Jonathan nowadays. He let himself appear a little brighter than he probably had when he was under the curse, and didn’t look him directly in the eye often, and spoke about training and the war and Voldemort.
“I have noticed that you’re spending more time with the Slytherins than usual.”
You mean, the same amount of time that I did before you cursed me, Jonathan thought, but he and Harry had a lie for this situation. He widened his eyes and said, “Well, the twins are feeling abandoned by their brother, Headmaster. I just want to show them that not everyone thinks they’re worthless.”
“And Miss Parkinson?”
“She won’t leave me alone,” Jonathan said, with a sigh and a shrug. That was even mostly true. “And I think maybe I can bring her family over to our side if I just talk with her some more. But if you want me to stop talking to her—”
“No, no. Converting a Dark family is always worth the effort, Jonathan.”
Jonathan beamed at him. Harry had warned him that someone who was a Legilimens could mostly detect lies, so Jonathan had to tell the truth as much as possible around Dumbledore. But that was all right. If he said “our side,” it wasn’t his fault if Dumbledore thought Jonathan meant him instead of Harry.
And Harry was really the only one Jonathan considered himself fighting beside, right now. He really valued his friends, but they couldn’t help him with anything else yet. They didn’t know enough.
“Let us begin with the Shield-Shattering Curse again.”
Jonathan obediently took his place opposite Dumbledore. They were fighting in a small version of the Room of Requirement that the Headmaster had shown him. It had padded walls so that Jonathan never got hurt when he was flung, and lots of places to hide and random shields that flickered and traveled through the air.
Jonathan did sometimes limp from the duels, but he also got to learn brilliant spells to show his friends. And he was learning how to face powerful wizards on the battlefield.
Which one it would be, Dumbledore was free to assume.
*
Sirius stared miserably down at the letter in his hands. By itself, it didn’t mean much. It just said that Dumbledore was trying to revive the Order of the Phoenix and assumed that people who had been part of the first one would want to join in.
But the way he phrased it, the fact that Remus had Flooed Sirius that afternoon to say that of course he would be in it, the way Dumbledore talked about training Jonathan to face Voldemort, the way he said that they had a “powerful weapon” and Sirius knew he meant Harry…
Sirius put the letter down firmly.
My godson’s brother is not a weapon.
What he was, exactly, Sirius didn’t know. Someone immortal, someone Dark, the Master of Fucking Death, who knew at this point? But Sirius did think that he wasn’t going to sit around and wait for Dumbledore to move at this point, even if he hadn’t chosen his course of action yet. That meant he would be doing something.
Sirius went to write to Harry, and to ask what he could do to help.
*
Anaelyssa: Thank you! And Bellatrix never went to Azkaban in this world, so she's not as insane as she might be.
Fenrisboy: Hopefully the surprise can wait a while, since they want to trick Dumbledore.
- 27
- 28
- 29
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

His Twenty-Eighth Life