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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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Chapter Four—Slow-Motion Destruction
Thoughts went through Lily's head every day, looping like an old film through its reels.
If I'd done something.
If I'd thrown myself in front of Harry when I realized Voldemort was going to Summon him.
If I'd only stood up to him instead of sitting back and letting Harry defend himself and us.
Then the thoughts would turn into speculation about why Harry had spoken like that and why he seemed so much older than his age, but those thoughts had no end, either, no resting place and no answer. Her mind would return in seconds to the thoughts she knew were useless—she couldn't have anticipated that Voldemort would Summon Harry, no one could have—but couldn't get rid of.
Yet even they were better than the thoughts that came and haunted her nights, making her lie motionless beside James as they both pretended they were asleep.
What happened to Harry? Did Voldemort kill him? If he's kept him alive, what kind of tortures is he going to make him suffer before he dies? Should I wish that he was dead, because that would probably mean less suffering?
Lily hated the other thoughts that crept in, the ones that wished Voldemort had killed Harry in front of them. Not because she wanted her child dead. Not because it might have absolved her of some of her guilt, that she hadn't protected him and prevented him from being taken away.
Because anything was better than not knowing.
He's gone into silence. I can't ask him. I can't ask Voldemort. My precious baby boy...anything could have happened to him, and I wouldn't know.
Lily had believed, until it happened, that the worst possible thing in the world was watching your child die. Now she knew better. The worst possible thing in the world was watching your child swept through the door and carried away by a man in a black cloak, who you knew had already tortured and murdered countless others.
I want to know. That's all. If they find a body, that would be horrible, but at least I would have the answers. Let me know.
*
James found it so hard to continue smiling at Jonathan.
His older boy had always been serious, much more so than Harry, the baby who seemed to giggle the instant they picked him up and barely cried at all when he was born. But that just made it better for James to come up with a story or a prank or a game that would make them both laugh, or sneak around the corner and surprise Jonathan into a squeal or a smile.
Now...
Now there was only one, and James knew it would be more than worth the effort to cheer Jonathan up. But he kept looking at the spot where his second son should be, and the smile dissolved in midair.
Sirius took him to task for it, one day about two months after Harry had been taken when he came over to try and plan Lily's birthday party. James listened to whatever he said, and agreed to whatever he wanted. Sirius sat up abruptly on the other side of the dining room table and glared.
"You have two children, James." He'd never growled like that even when he was Padfoot and playing around at Hogwarts. "I know you're mourning Harry—believe me, we all know—but you have to think of Jonathan, too. He doesn't deserve it for you to just turn your back on him."
James stared at Sirius with his mouth open. Jonathan was taking a nap at the time, or he knew Sirius would never have said it. But that didn't matter. James always remembered there were two children missing from the room, not one.
"I don't treat Jonathan like that!"
"Yes, you do. You never smile at him anymore. You never turn into Prongs and play with him anymore."
"I was Prongs just last week—"
"Last week? When before Harry went it would have been last afternoon?"
James flinched. What Sirius said was true enough. He had to force himself to play with Jonathan. And it wasn't anything Jonathan had done wrong. He wasn't the same, but he was still the boy James had loved since the moment he laid eyes on him. Of course James wanted to hug him and play with him and reassure him that everything would be all right.
But the faith that everything would be all right had been brutally burned out of him. James opened his mouth and the words just weren't there. What could he say? For all he knew, Voldemort would come back tomorrow and take Jonathan with him.
"James." Sirius reached across the table and took his hand. His voice was low and rough. "God, I love you like a brother. Your parents took me in like a son. I loved Harry more than anyone but you and Lily and Jonathan. But you can't go on living as though the rest of you died when Harry did."
"Lily says it would be better if we could know he was dead." James whispered the words. He hadn't dared voice them aloud before this, just in case he accidentally said something in front of Jonathan.
Sirius sighed, let his hand go, and spent a moment looking at a picture above the mantelpiece. It had been turned so its face was to the wall. It was a moving photograph of Lily cradling Harry in her arms, James standing behind them and grinning fit to burst, and Jonathan kneeling down beside his mother, his hand entwined in Harry's, his rare smile lighting up his face. They'd taken it on Harry's first birthday, and it had been James's favorite picture. He'd wanted to take it down, but Lily absolutely forbade it, until they knew if Harry was alive or dead.
That meant it might never come down.
"I don't know about that," Sirius finally said, his voice as harsh as lye. "As long as we don't know, there's some hope. And if we could just capture Peter..."
James felt hatred surge to life in his chest. It was in him like salt was in the ocean. He wanted to curse his traitorous friend, he wanted to grab him and shake him and ask why, but most of all, he wanted to ask the bastard where his son was.
“I know,” he said instead of ranting about Peter. Sirius had already heard it all before, and done most of the same ranting himself. “But we can’t. And that means—how do we live with this, Sirius?”
He hadn’t meant to, but he sounded as if he was about to have a breakdown when he said those words. Sirius immediately got up and came around the table, wrapping his arms around James and rocking him the way he had when Lily had nearly died fighting Death Eaters.
“It’s all right, Jamie, it’s all right,” Sirius said, and his voice was feral and fierce and really what James needed to hear right then. “We’ll find him. Or we’ll avenge him. Hell, we’ll avenge him anyway, when we capture Peter and take You-Know-Who down.”
James clung back, and let himself believe in his friend’s promise, for just a little while.
*
Albus sat back behind his desk and slowly rubbed his forehead. If he did that enough, then maybe he would get rid of the throbbing ache that had taken up residence there, compounded of raw grief and rage.
And blame. He couldn’t forget that, because he hadn’t made sure that all the papers bearing the secret of the cottage’s location were burned, Tom had been able to find Lily and James after all.
And little Harry had been taken.
Albus had only seen the boy a few times, mostly when he was asleep, and he had visited to reassure himself that the little family was safe and Jonathan growing strong. He had seemed a chubby and contented baby, with accidental magic already showing. Except that he had wished him well, Albus hadn’t thought much about Harry Potter as separate from his family.
He had to now, of course. He had to do something to make it up to Lily and James.
Albus leaned back and looked at the device standing on his desk, with his hands cupped on either side of it. It was—not enough. But it was as good a first step as he could imagine. The delicate silver wires twined around each other to form a hollow sphere, and on the pedestal at the bottom, the projecting wire at the top, and the outermost strands glowed small purple jewels. Pieces of raw amethyst, Albus had bound them into the wires and then worked them with his magic, rather than his hands, chipping and cutting and carving until their magical energies aligned with the silver.
And the small hank of Harry’s hair, caught in a comb that Lily had fruitlessly used on him, that Albus had placed in the center of the globe.
Now to see if it works.
Albus waved his wand back and forth, calling on all the power that he didn’t often use with the Elder Wand, especially in the last few months, when it had started to behave erratically and not always cast the spell he wanted. Now, it responded strangely, with an eager thrum that Albus could feel all the way up his arm.
But if it meant that he could give Lily and James some reassurance about young Harry, he could only welcome the help.
Albus slashed his wand down in the last pattern and thought, as hard as he had ever incanted a nonverbal spell, Vita.
The amethysts flashed beams of purple light at each other that the silver wire caught and magnified. Then the device drank in all the magic that Albus could bring to bear on it, and pulled more from the Elder Wand when he thought he didn’t have any to give. Albus gasped and draped himself over the desk for an instant.
Behind him, he could hear the portraits of the other Headmasters muttering to each other. He managed to lift his head and give them a weak smile.
“The device is working,” he said, and sat back and watched the way the amethysts winked to each other like Muggle signal lights, and the hair in the middle of the globe began slowly, slowly, to wend itself around the wires. The magic would last until the hair was completely consumed, which would hopefully take at least a few years.
Albus clenched his jaw. Only hopefully, because my greater hope is that we find and rescue Harry before then.
But in the meantime, they would have this proof that Harry was alive. Wizard hair was a sensitive magical material. Just as Polyjuice could only be made from the hair of a living person, this device could only employ the magic of Harry’s hair if the little boy was alive.
Let him die, and it would cease functioning immediately.
Albus let himself rest five minutes to start recovering his magical strength, then sighed and stood. He would take this device to James and Lily now, and give them as many apologies and reassurances as he could.
And keep his greater fear—that by the time they saw Harry again, he might have been raised into an obedient minion by Tom—to himself.
*
“Are you all right, Augusta? You’ve been glaring at the wall for the last half-hour.”
“I know I have.”
Her daughter-in-law looked at her expectantly. After a second, when she didn’t respond to her, Alice rolled her eyes and caught up Neville, saying, “If you want to be that way.” Then she carried Neville into the next room, and cooed and clucked at him.
Augusta blinked and looked harder at the far wall. It didn’t deserve the glare, really. This was the room that her Francis had decorated for her when they first married, pale blue with silver curlicues on the walls. She had loved this room for one year and hated it ever after. But she wasn’t the sort to tell Francis that. He would have been heartbroken.
He always did like to think that love lasted.
Augusta sighed and stood. Alice was probably telling Frank at the moment how moody and unreasonable she was being. And if she stayed here much longer, Frank would start thinking it, too. He thought rocking in her chair and staring at the wall in this room was morbid, brooding on her husband’s death. Then he would come along and talk about how she was “aging before her time” and he wanted her to get out in the nice fresh air.
I’ll age as fast as I bloody well want to.
Augusta turned and stumped out of the room. Frank met her on the staircase and beamed at her. “Come have dinner, Mother. Great-Uncle Algie decided to go to Muggle London tonight, so it’s just us.”
Augusta nodded and followed her son down. If Frank had a fault, it was that he talked too much. He almost babbled now, so eager to fill the silence with talk about Neville and how quiet the Death Eaters had become and how the Ministry had almost shifted off its war footing that he never noticed her silence.
Even though that’s a much more morbid symptom than just spending time in the room Francis decorated for me.
But Augusta couldn’t keep her mind from running in hard circles. On the one hand, yes, the Death Eaters had gone quiet. That meant nothing much. It had happened before, and then You-Know-Who would come roaring back and restart the war as if he’d last attacked yesterday. It was good in that it meant more nights at home with her and Neville for Frank and Alice, and more of a chance that Neville wouldn’t be left an orphan or a half-orphan when he was so young.
On the other hand, this silence felt different to Augusta. No reason for it to. She wasn’t an Auror or a strategist or even someone who heard anything special and important about the war beyond the hints that Frank and Alice sometimes dropped accidentally.
But she trusted her gut. This silence might extend long enough to become peace.
And the only thing that was different about this from other periods in the war was that You-Know-Who had taken the Potter boy.
Augusta gave one of her hard looks at Neville, who was too busy waving his arms and babbling about corn to notice. Alice did, and chided her with a glance. She said Neville was too young to learn manners and what she called “that stuffy nonsense.” That only confirmed to Augusta that Frank hadn’t married Alice for her courtesy.
But in this case, Augusta was just trying to think of what Neville would be like if he grew up under the “care” of Death Eaters, believing everything they did was right.
The Potter boy wasn’t important or special in and of himself. But he was the potential Chosen One’s brother. Augusta had sat in on enough Order of the Phoenix meetings (under protest) that she knew that.
And if You-Know-Who made Harry Potter into a weapon against Jonathan Potter…
Augusta trusted her gut. She trusted it would be a bloodbath of the kind that no one sane wanted to go through.
*
Harry sat with his eyes closed. He was still too young for Occlumency to be much use against Voldemort—excuse him, Lord Voldemort—but he could meditate enough that some of his more excited thoughts would calm down and be far beneath the surface by the next time Voldemort went looking. And he had things he wanted to bury, now.
He sat in the small stone room that Voldemort had brought him to that first night. The snake who wasn’t Nagini—apparently Voldemort called it a hiss that translated “Death-of-Rabbits”—kept watch on him when Voldemort wasn’t there. But it couldn’t read his mind, either. And it wasn’t a Horcrux, thank fuck.
Harry carefully sorted through his memories, and buried the most recent ones in the place where he kept most of the small thoughts about his first life—Al’s first baby laugh, and the time that Jamie and Lily had got in a shouting match about who could say “certificate” better, and the myriad little grumbles and spats with Ginny. Voldemort could still find them, but it would be like diving into the ocean and striking straight for the bottom. He was more interested in the surface, and the many pieces of information Harry offered him freely.
Harry tucked the conversation he’d overheard yesterday in between Lily Luna’s first steps and a sunlit summer day when he and his first family eaten lunch outside.
Yesterday, he had heard soft voices outside the window of this room. He would have thought they were snakes, but they had a different kind of hissing quality, and he had to concentrate harder to understand them. The skill to speak their language had only been with him for eleven lifetimes, whereas Parseltongue had been with him since the beginning.
But he knew them for what they were. The voices of cats.
In his seventeenth life, he had been born as Crookshanks, and he had retained the ability to speak with Kneazles and other felines even after he died.
This might lead to an escape. Perhaps. Or a useful weapon.
He would have to wait and see.
*
He didn’t understand all the words and concerns at the time. He didn’t understand why his mum wept when she took the silver globe from Mr. Dumbledore, and he didn’t understand why his dad turned their picture to the wall, and he didn’t know why Sirius was so sad when he called him “kiddo” and ruffled his hair and carried him around on his back as Padfoot.
But he understood later. And he couldn’t forget that there used to be a little brother he could hold in his arms and laugh with, and now there was no one.
As he grew up, Jonathan Potter made his own vow: no one was ever going to steal someone from him again.
In the name of his brother, he was going to fight.
*
Anelyssa: Eventually, life 19 will be explained, when it's necessary for the plot.
And yes, Harry could escape if he was willing to condemn his family to death. And he may, if other prices would be too great.
SickPuppy: Harry's big advantage, as you can see in this chapter, is that he's lived so many lives that he can bury memories in the sheer chaos of his mind. He can't defend everything, but he may be able to protect what's most important.
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His Twenty-Eighth Life