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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 Three—Wake the Serpent
Harry woke up in a huge room, which seemed to be made entirely of stone. Tapestries softened the walls, but since all of them seemed to show bloody hunts and snakes devouring screaming women, they didn’t make it cheerful.
He turned himself slowly around, hating the way that his clumsy baby legs dragged. He looked straight up at Voldemort, who considered him in silence. His head was cocked to the side, and he was stroking a serpent draped across his legs. It was too small and the wrong color to be Nagini, Harry was glad to see.
“I see no point in talking to you as a child,” Voldemort said, and his hand moved down the snake’s white scales with a slight rasping sound. Harry heard the same edge in his voice and realized that he was speaking in Parseltongue again. “We both know that you are anything but.” His eyes were intense as they considered Harry. “I am willing to let you live. But I might not do the same for your parents.”
“It would have been better for you to have killed me,” Harry hissed back. He could always manage Parseltongue more easily than English at this age, which had been helpful when he’d been kidnapped by enemies of his family in his seventh life and convinced an anaconda in their jungle hideout to help him escape.
His parents in that particular life, Arcturus and Melania Black, had been overjoyed to receive him when he returned to England after almost a year of traveling through South America. They’d been deeply loving people, actually, probably because they had no other children in that world. Of course, that also meant Harry had barely escaped being betrothed to Walburga, but. Well. He’d avoided that, in a rather dramatic fashion.
“Better for your family, of course,” Voldemort said and laughed softly. “I know that. It would have enabled you to die and use your sacrificial magic to ensure your brother defeated me. No, little Harry, I am not going to do that. But tell me how you defeated me in other lives, and your parents will live.”
Harry closed his eyes for a minute. Of course he had to tell Voldemort. The thought made him sick. So many things had been done in so many worlds, and to know that Voldemort would be able to avoid them all…
But the alternative was letting his brother grow up an orphan.
Harry had made hard choices before, but this was something that thrummed through him. Still, he knew what he was going to do. No one else was here to scold him for being selfish, and he had found many ways to defeat Voldemort, including times when he didn’t know what his Horcruxes were or when there had been no Boy-Who-Lived. He could do it again.
“All right,” he hissed, opening his eyes because he could hear Voldemort picking up his wand. Voldemort probably didn’t trust Harry without being able to use Legilimency on him. That was smarter than many of his incarnations were. “But what guarantee do I have that my parents are going to survive when I’ve told you everything I know?”
Voldemort laughed, a sound that reminded Harry of crackling flames and crumpling paper. “You have lived twenty-seven full lives. Do you think you will tell them to me even with years’ worth of time? It is the secret of the other Voldemorts’ defeats that I wish to know most prominently, but there are so many other things that you could tell me.”
Harry swallowed. He had never been in any situation half this bad. Yes, enemies had captured, tortured, killed him. But he had known he would be reborn each time, and since there was no way of knowing what had happened in the worlds he left behind, he had been able to be more at peace than otherwise. His death had always happened after he defeated Voldemort.
This time, he knew Voldemort would find a way to torture his parents and Jonathan without harming them enough for someone to be empowered with a sacrificial death.
His parents and brother balanced against the weight of the world.
But then, in his original life, how many people had died to keep him safe, believing he was more important than anything else? There was a prophecy that said Jonathan would be the one to defeat Voldemort. That had to mean he was in the position of the Boy-Who-Lived. And Harry was willing to make hard decisions based on that, too.
“And when I can tell you no more?”
“That will be years. You will come up with something new to tell me so that I will not butcher those you are tied to.”
Harry grimaced. So it all depended on him. But of course it did. That was true of so many things, and he wasn’t going to simply lie back and give up because it was harder this time.
Of course, Voldemort knew that, too. And he would be prepared for it. Harry would have to play this particular game in spirals, always aware that Voldemort could read most of plans out of his head when he came up with them.
“Yes, I can.”
Harry sighed and looked straight at Voldemort. “The bargain is over the minute I hear that you’ve done something to hurt them. And that includes killing their friends or torturing them, not just killing them.”
Voldemort sneered at him. “Lord Voldemort has no need for rule-breaking. Keep your side of the bargain, and I shall keep mine.”
Harry said nothing for a second. Then he asked, “How exactly are you intending to take care of me yourself? You’ll need to have Death Eaters—”
In response, Voldemort flicked his wand, and the disgusting wet feeling in Harry’s nappy disappeared. Another flick, and whatever traces of it were left vanished, too. Voldemort lowered his wand and leaned forwards. “You were saying?”
“I’ll get a rash if I keep wearing the same nappy all the time.”
Still watching him intently, Voldemort waved his wand and cast some non-verbal magic. Harry couldn’t imagine where he would have learned the spell to Transfigure something into a nappy, but apparently he had. A piece of bloodstained cloth draped over a table turned into one.
“You were saying?”
Harry sighed. All right, so there went that possible avenue of escape. He had half-hoped that Peter might be allowed to tend to him. He would feel guilty enough about betraying his friends that Harry could manipulate him—and he could manipulate with only a very little to go on, after so many lives.
“That is a skill that I intend to have you teach me.”
Harry stared before he could stop himself. “But you’re a good manipulator. And I know you would never accept help or a teacher.”
*
Lord Voldemort felt the ancient pieces of his mind shift with memories of Hogwarts as he laughed aloud at the expression on the child’s face, behind his eyes. In the back of his mind. All astonishment, no feigning. He did truly think that Lord Voldemort would never lower himself to accept another’s teaching. Because it would imply that the other person, his mentor or teacher, was better at something than he was.
That was the true genius of kidnapping this multifaceted being who chose to call himself Harry Potter. And it proved that no matter how long Potter had lived, how many people he had been, how many times he had defeated other Voldemorts who did not deserve the title, he was no match for the swirling depths of genius inside the true Lord.
“I can accept what is needed to help me become stronger.” The child looked away, and Lord Voldemort laughed again, secure in his triumph, mind filled with even more possibilities that multiplied like snowflakes under clouds. “There was a prophecy. I evaded it. I did not attack because I thought I needed to, because offensive force is the only thing that makes me stronger. That is not true. Defensive force will do the same thing. And I will learn from you.”
Potter said nothing for long moments, still as a waiting snake. Lord Voldemort watched him, and did not trouble to hide his amusement. Potter was not watching. Lord Voldemort had time to sit and let his joy and his pride dance through him.
No one is stronger. No one is more clever. The only other immortal being I have met is weaker than me—
It made Lord Voldemort remember, however, that he did not know how this being had come to be immortal, though he knew it was not through Horcruxes, because of the disgust in Potter’s mind when he thought of them, and he desired to know, so he reached out, lashing his will against Potter, bringing his head back around. “You will tell me how your first life conveyed immortality on you.”
Potter shook his head. Lord Voldemort nearly lashed again in his fury at a refusal, but Potter only said, “I think it was because I collected the Deathly Hallows. But I can’t know for sure. I’ve never found a book or anyone who could tell me that was it for sure.”
Lord Voldemort had read children’s books. Of course he had. There was knowledge to be found even in such books, and in the early days of his life, the ones after the orphanage, the only childhood of his that mattered, he read such books to know what fairy tales and other substrate knowledge those around him would expect him to have.
He need no longer cater to such expectations, and so the knowledge of the tales had slumbered in his mind. But he could call all such things back to life and memory when he chose. Was he not Lord Voldemort?
“How did you collect them without meaning to?” Because Lord Voldemort had seen the subtle traps in the descriptions of the Hallows, of course he had, even before he had reached the end of the tale. Lesser wizards hunted the Elder Wand to be the strongest power alive (never knowing they would only ever be second to Lord Voldemort), they hunted the Resurrection Stone to commune with the dead, and they might have hunted the Invisibility Cloak if they had known how different it was from other Cloaks or Disillusionment Charms. But the Hallows killed.
Lord Voldemort was wise. He avoided death.
“The Cloak belonged to my family,” Potter replied, his eyes seeing long ago and far away and with pathetic emotions. “The Resurrection Stone was in one of your Horcruxes, and Dumbledore, after he destroyed it, left it to me. I didn’t know what it was until I was almost dead the first time—”
“You will explain the first time.”
“And the Elder Wand belonged to Dumbledore, until Draco Malfoy disarmed him. Then I disarmed Malfoy, and the Elder Wand switched its allegiance to me.” Potter watched him for a second, eyes at least returning to the room, which was only proper when he was confronted with a power as wonderful and overwhelming as that of Lord Voldemort. “I went to die because I was one of your Horcruxes.”
Lord Voldemort stared. Then he controlled himself. Lord Voldemort was the target of stares. “How did that happen?”
“When you attacked me—I mean, when the Voldemort of that world attacked me. His soul was so unstable that a small piece of it came loose and attached itself to me. I didn’t know for a long time. But Dumbledore left me memories that alerted me of what I was. So I walked into the Forbidden Forest and let him kill me.”
Lord Voldemort sat still. The serpent in his lap stirred and hissed a question, but Lord Voldemort did not touch it. He stared at the child—not controlling himself, but it did not matter, the child was looking off into the distance, and he was only a toddler in body, he was no threat to the great and mighty Lord Voldemort.
But at that moment, Lord Voldemort found himself in the presence of a power, a might, a strength, that he did not comprehend. It was like turning around and seeing a dark ocean behind him where land had always been before.
He had found, when he had fallen into Potter’s mind in the cottage at Godric’s Hollow, a profound lack of fear. He had thought he understood why. Of course Potter would only be born again, and he had thought he would do some good by sacrificing his life for his brother and enabling Lord Voldemort to be defeated that way. That sort of sacrifice, Lord Voldemort could understand. Never commit, but understand.
But Potter had walked to his death when he had no idea that he would be reborn. The first time. When he had collected the Deathly Hallows accidentally. When he knew there was a Horcrux inside him, and if he simply evaded capture and that Voldemort’s wand, he stood a good chance of living forever.
That fearlessness was a power.
But Lord Voldemort did not know it. He could not comprehend it. It stretched before him, as alien and unknowable as—as nothing. Nothing he had faced before.
He brought his hand down hard on the side of the chair, startling the snake and bringing Potter’s gaze back to him. Potter tilted his head and looked at him with too much understanding. Lord Voldemort would bear past it. Because he was the genius and Potter was not. Experience was not the same as intelligence.
“That is hundreds of years gone for you. How do I know that I can trust you to remember it?”
“Ever since I started being reborn, I don’t forget anything,” Potter said simply. “When I found myself getting ready to be born after I died at the end of my first life, I suddenly remembered everything, including things that I’d been too old to recall for years. I could recite every conversation I’ve ever had.”
“Such memories are possible.” Lord Voldemort had found a spell in Egypt that imitated it, but he had never cast it because he had a perfect memory naturally, by right of birth. “But they would overwhelm your brain after a time.”
“Mine don’t. I think it has to be because I’m Master of Death—or whatever ridiculous title you feel like attaching to someone who managed to get all these artifacts together and didn’t know what he was doing,” Potter added with sudden disgust. “It’s like they’re in different parts of my brain. I have to concentrate to find them. But I know they’re always there, and that they won’t have faded the next time I look for them.”
Lord Voldemort remained silent, and stroked his snake. That was another power he did not have, did not understand.
But he could have had it. If he had wanted to use the spell in Egypt. If he had not had better uses for some parts of his brain. It did not concern him as did Potter’s lack of fear of death.
And even that lack, he would come to understand in time. There was nothing in the natural world that Lord Voldemort did not understand, did not comprehend, could not master.
“I wish to know when your last meal was, so that I may feed you and you will not be tiresome now.”
“I’m used to going hungry.” Potter shrugged. “It was a few hours before you—arrived. I’ll be fine until the morning.”
Lord Voldemort was glad enough to stand and leave. He did not see the necessity of threatening Potter a last time, because Potter understood the stakes, and because the boy was filled with the sickening belief that he needed to sacrifice his freedom for the good of his family, and because he was clever enough to have come up with the right threat the first time.
He did leave behind a blanket and pillow. Was he not a just and merciful Lord?
*
Harry leaned his head down into the pillow and sighed. Yes, he had decided after sorting through some memories of his previous lives that he usually left untouched, this was the worst single situation he had ever been in.
He had had worse lives. And even now, he could think of powers that he could use to escape from Voldemort.
But they lay unwanted and repulsive at the bottom of his soul. Harry wouldn’t touch them except for a better reason than he had now. Right now, he and Jonathan were alive, and so were Lily and James and Sirius—and presumably Remus, although Harry hadn’t had the chance to meet the one in this world. He could bear cold, mental and physical.
Harry smiled a little bitterly. If anyone should be able to, it’s me.
No, he would stay here until things either changed to become intolerable, or he was able to do something that would let him escape without endangering his family.
The one thing he thought of before he curled up under the blanket and fell asleep, the one threat that he hadn’t faced before, was a wonder as to whether Voldemort could corrupt him. If he stayed here, and Voldemort talked to him but didn’t threaten his family or torture anyone in front of him…
Hermione had told Harry in his twentieth life, when he was a Gryffindor called Zachary Bold who didn’t exist in any other world, that she was half-afraid of him. She didn’t know about any of his other lives. She just thought “Zack” was way too open-minded and tolerant, and forgave Slytherins too much, and would get betrayed someday.
Could I tolerate Voldemort? Could I start convincing myself that he’s not so bad?
But Harry didn’t truly fear that. Even if Voldemort was different here, less impulsive and insane, Harry had twenty-seven different experiences of him.
That’s the one good thing about being immortal and having such a weight of experience. They make it easy for me to forgive—but not forget.
*
Anaelyssa: All right, I won't hint anything about life 19. :)
His parents have a couple different ideas, but none that get close to the truth.
SickPuppy: Thank you! I will eventually reveal life 19, but not before time.
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His Twenty-Eighth Life