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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.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Nine—Sirius Business
Harry cautiously scanned Sirius’s letter. He’d already cast enough spells that he thought he could detect any curses Dumbledore would have put on it, or that Sirius would have put it on it at his orders, although admittedly he didn’t know the Sirius of this world as well as he had some others. There were some curses he thought not even Dumbledore would use—
No. I can’t trust that anymore, can I? Not after he used the World-Blurring Curse on Jonathan.
Harry cast some of the Darker, harsher spells, ones that made the parchment tremble on the edge of disintegration. But nothing came back. It seemed Sirius was sincere in his request to help.
Harry hesitated. Sirius already knew that Harry wasn’t an ordinary child. There could be nothing gained by hiding his powers if Sirius really wanted to help. And he had to go quickly. His mother was visiting Mrs. Longbottom and James was at the Ministry, but they would come back soon.
He made sure he had firm hold of the letter, stepped outside, and Apparated.
*
Sirius nearly fainted when he turned around and found Harry behind him. “How did you get through the wards on Grimmauld Place?” he croaked, his eyes darting around. All the other furniture and magic that normally saturated the drawing room was still there. There was only one inexplicable nine-year-old boy in the middle of the rug.
Harry smiled at him. Sirius found himself staring in awe. Harry had dropped all the masks, he realized. Now there was a light burning in him that he let shine through his eyes and mouth. “Master of Death, Sirius. And I’ve been in this house a lot of times in different lives. In one case I was actually born here. I know all the tricks to circumventing the wards.”
Sirius nodded slowly. It was true that his ancestors had left those tricks, in case one of the family needed sanctuary someday and the wards had been closed against them by a vengeful sibling or cousin. And it was equally true that no one else should have known about them. Regulus was…gone, and Sirius’s parents had never passed the knowledge on to his cousins.
It hit him then, like a punch. Not the knowledge, but the acceptance. Harry had really lived multiple lives, had been a Black in some of them, and he was the Master of Death. Sirius staggered backwards and sat down in the nearest chair, which luckily was sturdy enough to hold him instead of the stool that Remus liked to sit on.
Remus…Sirius buried his head in his hands. His best friend had put himself on the opposite side of a war from a power that was going to win. Remus was going to lose.
“Are you all right?”
Gentle hands pushed on his shoulders, and Sirius blinked up at the boy who was much more than a boy. He swallowed. “How much do you hate Dumbledore and Remus?”
“I don’t hate them,” Harry said, although his eyes darkened for a moment. “Dumbledore is causing chaos out of fear, and I’m going to ask…someone who should know to tell me why in a little while. Remus sees me so powerful and at peace with what I am, and that makes him question whether he could have been at peace with his wolf side. And he runs away from conflict. How much more does he run away from internal conflict? He’s joining the ‘right’ side of the war to keep from having to think about that question.”
Sirius snorted breathlessly. “You know him pretty well.”
“I was his daughter once,” Harry said quietly. “In my fourteenth life. He was—a good father in a lot of ways, but he could never face up to some of the consequences of having children. He didn’t tell me he was a werewolf until I was eleven, and then I had to tell him that I already knew. He’s so afraid of hurting someone with his superior strength and speed that he’s gone the opposite direction and tried to make himself less than he is.”
Sirius nodded. “Will you hurt him?”
“I don’t see any reason to. He can’t hurt me. Unless he goes after Jonathan.”
“I—take it that would be a very bad idea. For anyone, right?” Sirius glanced at the legs of the chair. No, he wasn’t imagining it. There was actual frost on them.
Harry seemed to realize the frost existed at the same time, and then Sirius got to watch the Master of Death being embarrassed. “Merlin, I am so sorry,” Harry muttered, and hastily waved his hand. The frost melted and then dissipated into soft steam without ever touching the carpet. “Um, yes. Jonathan is unquestioningly loyal to me, and he’s the best sibling I’ve ever had. No one can touch him.”
Sirius leaned slowly back in his chair. He had hated his parents, but nevertheless, they had raised him, and he could figure some things out when his instincts were fully engaged. “Including Voldemort.”
“That’s right.”
“Because—he’s—held back by you? Afraid of you?”
“Neither of those answers,” Harry said softly, and held his eyes.
Sirius swallowed. He’d been fighting Voldemort since he was old enough to accept Albus’s invitation into the war. Even these last few years, when the war had essentially paused, he had considered himself a soldier on the side of Light. This was going to take some getting used to.
“Kreacher!” he called, and the house-elf appeared and glared at him. At least it was glares only now, and not poison in the tea. “Tea and biscuits for myself and my guest.”
Kreacher turned to Harry, and screamed. Sirius leaped out of his chair with his hand on his wand. He was used to Kreacher’s piercing shrieks when he didn’t get what he wanted, but this was a new category of shrill terror.
Harry only stood there, his eyebrows a little arched but not as if he was surprised, and studied Kreacher until he clamped his hands around his mouth. Then he said, “Are you going to lose control again?”
“No. Stranger.”
Sirius blinked. That was—he’d never heard Kreacher address someone that way. Either it was an insult or it was a cringing, fawning reference to being a master—although admittedly, Sirius hadn’t heard that since his parents had died. He waited until Kreacher had disappeared before he asked Harry. “Why did he do that?”
“Some older house-elves can see me for what I really am. It doesn’t work for all of them, or I would never dare visit a house that had them.”
“What you really are?”
“He can see all my lives stretching back into the past, at once,” Harry said calmly. “An elf in my twenty-fifth life told me that it was like I was a dark star, shining out these rays, and on all the rays they could see memories dancing of the people I used to be.”
It sounded overwhelming, and reminded Sirius again that he wasn’t dealing with someone exactly mortal. He breathed out and said, “Okay. How do you know that you can trust Voldemort to fight against Dumbledore but then not turn on you somehow?”
Harry looked vaguely ill. “Um. First I’ll ask you something. Have you ever heard of Voldemort treating anyone as an equal?”
“You ought to know the answer to that question.”
“This world is so different from any one I’ve ever lived in. I’d like to know if Voldemort did do something like that before I was born here.”
Sirius gave the question some thought, ignoring the way that Kreacher cringed at Harry when he appeared in the room again and left the food, and finally said, “No. He has some confidants who are pretty close, but even those, he degraded in the end. There was one wizard who stood beside him for years—I mean, before I was born, it was Albus who told me this—and then one morning they found his burned, broken body beside the fountain in the Ministry Atrium. I think he’ll turn on everyone in the end.”
He said it firmly, but Harry only smiled at him a little. “All right. Voldemort does see me as his equal. I have stronger magic than he does.”
“Then why don’t you just end the war right now?”
Harry glanced away, his eyes veiled. “What would happen if I did that?”
“The war would end. You know, you’re kind of mentally defective for a genius who’s lived twenty-seven lives.”
Harry began to laugh, and nearly choked on the tea. He shook his head and waved off Sirius’s attempted help, and then said, “That’s such a Sirius Black thing to say. You haven’t changed much from one life to another, you know. When you were born Sirius, I mean.”
“Who else would I be born? I mean, then I would be a different person, so why would you think of me as Sirius?”
“Well, sometimes you were born at the same time and the same position in your family, but as Alcyone Black, you know. Female.”
Sirius tried to contemplate dealing with blood coming from his vagina every month, and frantically shook his head. “Never tell me any of the details.”
“Fine. But if I used my power to end the war, then I would have to keep using it, Sirius. I’d have to crush anyone who displayed the same kind of thought as Voldemort, which would be most of his Death Eaters. I’d have to use it to take down Albus, too. I would end up with most people fearing me, or else asking me to interfere in the middle of disputes they should be able to handle themselves. I was a puppet-master once before, when I had no choice, when I was born that way. I’m not doing it again.”
“What life was that?”
“The one where I was a Dementor. I was born this kind of lord of the Dementors. It was horrible. The only way I got out of it was starving myself to death once I ate all the pieces of Voldemort’s soul.”
“Um.” Sirius had no idea what to say. Harry’s eyes were hard. “So you don’t think intervening with just a little bit of your power, once, would work?”
“No. Because of Albus. He’s already afraid of me. He would either step up his efforts to get rid of me or he would try to convince me to interfere with other things. And if I wouldn’t, then I would end up a pariah. I wish to fuck that I’d never told anyone in this life about my powers. I damage people’s free will just by existing.”
“You know it didn’t damage the love Jonathan has for you.”
Sirius watched Harry’s face soften and brighten, and thought he understood. His brother is keeping him human.
“No,” Harry said softly. “And—this goes no further than yourself, Sirius, if you want to retain our trust—Albus has interfered with Jonathan’s mind now. I’m not going to just outright kill Albus, but he is going to fall.”
He raised his head, and Sirius had to sit still in the face of the power that flared from his eyes. He swallowed. He thought he had a brief glimpse of what it had been like for Kreacher, to stare into the heart of a supernova.
“So part of the reason that you won’t just kill him is that you want him to suffer first.”
Harry blinked at him, then shrugged a little. “That, and Voldemort would go out of control if Albus simply died.”
“How are you going to keep Voldemort under control?”
“He thinks I’m his equal, I told you. And…” Harry hesitated, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a much-folded letter. He handed it to Sirius and busied himself with the biscuits that Kreacher had brought.
Sirius thought it was a generic love letter at first, maybe a fan letter that someone had written to Jonathan, although he wasn’t sure why Harry had it. Then he noticed the signature and the salutation, and choked.
“Voldemort is in love with you?”
“Yes. As much as he can be, I think. I don’t know if he’s really capable of love.”
“Voldemort is fucking in love with you? Harry!”
Harry sat there eating biscuits and sipping tea as if this revelation was one that he was used to. Now that Sirius thought about it, he probably was. Maybe Voldemort had been sending him letters for bloody years. Sirius stared down at the letter in his lap again and shook his head.
“I can’t make him do exactly what I want,” Harry said into the silence, “but I can keep a kind of leash on him, as long as I let him see and interact with me. And I’m persuading him to repair the damage to his soul that caused the war in the first place. It’ll take years, but in the end, there won’t be any more war because the impetus for it will have gone.”
Sirius blinked for a few minutes. Albus had certainly never talked about ending the war that way. Then again, maybe he didn’t even have the knowledge that it was possible.
“You’re big into free will, aren’t you?” Sirius finally asked softly, at last. “You want people to do things because they choose to. And you don’t like restricting people’s choices.”
Harry grimaced and looked away.
“Harry?”
“I’m not as big on it as I should be,” Harry admitted quietly. “I’m afraid that I’ll kill Albus if he touches Jonathan’s mind again. For now, Jonathan is protected, and he’s going along with the training and making Albus think that he’s on his side, but that can’t last forever. And—I don’t want to be that kind of person. Entity. Immortal being. Whatever. But when Jonathan gets hurt, I can’t hold back. I only managed last time because I had to use really delicate magic to free Jonathan’s mind, and it took all my concentration.”
“Do Lily and James know about Albus tampering with Jonathan’s mind? I know they would be on your side!”
“Either way, they would go straight to Albus and confront him about it. And then he would know, and then he would do something else, and then he’d die.”
Sirius opened his mouth to dispute it, then closed it with a sigh. Yes, they would, at least if they were the kind of people he had always thought they were. James would charge in. Because that was the kind of thing he did. And Lily wouldn’t tolerate someone abusing her children, and she would go to confront Albus without the kind of magic that Harry had to back him up.
“I’m not a saint,” Harry broke into Sirius’s thoughts. “I honestly want to make things easy on myself, too. It’s easy to give Voldemort the research and guide him into thoughts of repairing his soul damage. It wouldn’t be easy to constantly monitor Dumbledore and make sure that he wasn’t tampering with Jonathan’s mind or Lily’s or James’s or anyone else’s. And he would probably still manage to slip around me.”
“But if you aren’t going to kill him eventually, what is going to happen?”
“I’m going to help Voldemort repair the soul damage. And then he can end the war by confronting Dumbledore himself.”
“Um,” Sirius had to point out. “I don’t see how that would end the war. Except by them killing each other, maybe.”
“It’ll end it because Voldemort will no longer want the same things when he’s sane, like conquering the world. And it’ll mean that he can come up with his own devious methods to get around Albus, and I can rest.”
The longing that shone in Harry’s eyes made Sirius feel almost embarrassed to witness it. He didn’t think Harry would ever have a normal life no matter what happened in this world. On the other hand…he coughed and offered, “Does that mean that you think a sane Voldemort wouldn’t want you anymore?”
“Yes, I think that’s probably true.”
“Why?”
“He’d find other things to occupy his time.”
“And—do you want him to?” Sirius was uncomfortable sitting here having this conversation with a nine-year-old, but then, he reminded himself sternly yet again, Harry was no ordinary nine-year-old.
“Of course!”
Sirius looked at Harry thoughtfully, but saw no reason to push that line of questioning further when it would only annoy both of them. He nodded and murmured, “I hope that you expect me to swear an oath. I do know Occlumency, but I haven’t practiced it for a long time, and an oath would be the better means against accidentally spilling something to Remus or Dumbledore.”
“Yes, I will. And Voldemort would demand it, anyway.”
Sirius waited until Harry was looking elsewhere to pull out the Elder Wand, and then let out a full-body shudder. There was a tone of fond exasperation in Harry’s voice when he spoke of Voldemort that made Sirius imagine all kinds of things he didn’t want to imagine, so, in the end, the best thing was just to keep them out of his head.
“Ready, Sirius?”
Sirius moved to kneel in front of Harry, grinning up at him. “This feels so bloody weird.”
“You have no idea how weird it feels to me.”
“Yes, but you’re two thousand years old or whatever—”
“Around seventeen hundred—”
“Plenty of time to become accustomed to it.” Sirius held out his own wand demandingly, and Harry touched it with his own and began the intricate oath that would tie any magic Sirius wielded to the Elder Wand and thus to Harry. It was a secret of the Black family, but Sirius was no longer surprised that Harry knew it.
It is weird, Sirius thought as he watched the bindings settle into place, small glowing silver ropes with bright golden sparks intertwined with them. But at last, finally, I feel like I’m doing something right.
*
Anaelyssa: Bella is going to play an interesting role later on! And I'm glad you like Sirius. Here is a whole chapter about him.
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His Twenty-Eighth Life