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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 Five—Launched on the Waters
“I wish to understand something.”
Harry slowly opened his eyes. He’d been drifting deep on the waters of his memory, looking for things that might help him escape Voldemort, but also simply reliving some of the more pleasant parts of his lives. “What’s that?” He was almost two years old now, and he had managed to force his tongue and throat to respect the English words.
Voldemort sat on the chair across from him, the only furniture in the room. Harry slept on a blanket folded on the floor and sat cross-legged on the floor itself, and Voldemort still Vanished all the mess he made and brought him food on a plate he gave Harry directly.
The monster frowned now, and said, “Use Parseltongue.”
“You can use it, my Lord.” The words meant nothing to Harry, they flowed past him, and that only seemed to infuriate Voldemort more—but not enough that he had insisted that Harry stop calling him by his title yet. “I prefer to use English, so that I don’t forget how to speak it.”
“You think you will see others you can speak to again?”
“You think that you’ll keep me from everyone forever? My Lord.”
Voldemort shifted again, frowning. Death-of-Rabbits lifted her head and looked back and forth between them as if trying to decide what to do about a conversation that she could only understand half of. Sensibly, she dealt with it by curling up and going to sleep. Harry heartily wished that was an option for him.
“I have no reason to reveal you to others. You could tell them what you told me, and then the knowledge would no longer be an advantage.”
Harry nodded slowly. Yes, he could see that. And he wasn’t worried about what the effect would be on him as he would have been about a normal child. He had the memories of past lives, human voices and faces and smiles and touches, to keep him company. He had already learned them. “All right. What did you want to know, my Lord?”
Voldemort leaned forwards. “I considered you my sworn enemy when I brought you here, and I laid down the conditions of you not escaping and sharing knowledge. I did not say that you must spend every day quietly, or not ask questions. Yet you rarely do. Why?”
Harry blinked. It wasn’t something he had thought Voldemort would ask questions about, but rather take as his due for being an intimidating bastard. “It’s easier for me. And you don’t need that.”
“I don’t need what?”
“You don’t need me running around and asking questions. Trying to meet Death Eaters would only make you harm my family, anyway, so I won’t try. Asking questions isn’t such a hardship, you aren’t torturing me.” Harry paused. He wondered if he should say the next thing on his mind, but Jonathan might be in trouble if Voldemort read it out of his head. “And if you’re here with me, it keeps you from doing things like torturing someone else.”
Silence. Voldemort’s hand worked open and shut on the arm of the chair. Harry just watched him in silent bewilderment. He didn’t know what was wrong, but it didn’t feel like something easily settled.
Finally Voldemort said, in a hiss so low that Death-of-Rabbits woke up with a start, “You have considered yourself my implacable enemy in every world since the first one you were born into.”
“Yes, my Lord,” Harry said, wondering where this was going.
“You have sometimes even thought that you were born again and again to destroy me, rather than because you collected the Deathly Hallows.”
“I thought that. I don’t believe it’s the truth, now. Otherwise, I would probably have been born as the Boy-Who-Lived more often. This is the first time for centuries that I’ve even been born a Potter.”
“But you had the suspicion in one of your early lives.” Voldemort used his clenched hands to push himself out of his throne. He prowled back and forth behind it, his eyes constantly on Harry as he moved.
Harry nodded. “Yes. Like I said, I don’t think that now. I’ve dedicated myself to your destruction of my own free will. And sometimes I’ve had to wait until late in my lives to accomplish it,” he added, thinking with a shudder of all the years he had spent caged up in the Magical Menagerie during his life as Crookshanks. It had taken forever before Hermione came and found him, and it had been worse because he had known all the while that Kneazles didn’t live as long as humans.
“Then you can join me of your own free will.”
Harry opened his mouth and found himself with nothing to say. He had never thought of such a thing. Even now, he didn’t think of himself as joining Voldemort. He had made a bargain to leave his family alone and give Voldemort knowledge.
Priceless knowledge. Knowledge that your family and Sirius and Dumbledore might think was terrible to ever give to Voldemort, because he would never have known it otherwise.
Harry shook his head firmly. He wouldn’t let his own doubting thoughts convince him to turn against his family and Voldemort’s enemies. That wasn’t the way it worked. He forgave people and let them do what they needed to do. In some of his other lives, his children had turned against him. He’d had to do abhorrent things because of who and what he was. His life as a Black heir had been absolutely no fun, but he’d slipped through it and survived. He’d had people he loved and trusted in most of his lives spit in his face in others, and he had wiped the spit off and gone on. It was—
It was so much larger than any one individual person. Harry had seen their crimes in so many places and times and lives, and known their nobility and courage in others, and that meant he understood facets of them they might not know themselves. He was the immortal being, even if he had never chosen to be so. That meant he was the one who ought to forgive and understand.
He hadn’t managed to forgive some of those he’d known in his nineteenth life, but then, he hadn’t really forgiven himself for what he’d had to do in his nineteenth life. Which was why he was not thinking about it.
Voldemort’s slithery footsteps startled him. Harry looked up and found Voldemort bending down to look him in the face, which was more courtesy than he’d shown so far.
“Yes, I can be courteous,” Voldemort hissed, his voice incredibly soft. “I can be merciful to my allies and servants. Those who are stupid and weak are punished, but you are neither, Harry Potter. Can you find it in your heart to forgive Lord Voldemort?”
Harry stared at him, his mouth slightly open. Now that he thought about it, nineteenth life and horrible adventures thereof excepted, Voldemort was the only person he had never forgiven. He could lose Ron and Hermione’s friendship and accept it with equanimity, he could have his wand broken by people who didn’t understand him and still warn them of coming danger. Why was Voldemort so different?
Because he’s my enemy! He’s always been my enemy!
And following up that thought was the swift one, And how often have you made him so? He would have ignored you in most of your lives if you hadn’t forced the issue.
Harry swallowed, and swallowed again. It was ridiculous. It was a ploy on Voldemort’s part. He wanted Harry to forgive him so that Harry wouldn’t be his enemy and Voldemort could go on getting knowledge from him. Even in his first life, Harry thought, when he hadn’t known anything about the world, he wouldn’t have fallen for anything so obvious.
But he did have to answer the questions that had arisen. The ones he’d asked himself, not the one that Voldemort had asked him.
What purpose did he have in going after Voldemort? Except that it had happened in his first life, and then in his other lives he had remembered the chaos and destruction the war had caused. So he had to help in other ways, because he didn’t want the people he loved to suffer—even when they weren’t the people he remembered in that first life.
But he had never tried some method other than destroying Horcruxes or otherwise interfering in Voldemort’s attempts at immortality. He’d never tried to restore him to sanity. He’d never forgiven him.
I’m so proud of being able to understand everyone in the universe and find excuses for them. Except him.
It was a long time since Harry had run into a new fact. He hesitated, and then he said, in response to the question that Voldemort had asked him on the other side of the transformation of his world, “I don’t know.”
And it was true for him. For his family. For his friends. It had nothing to do with Voldemort’s transparent manipulation attempt. Harry wanted to know for himself.
*
Lord Voldemort felt as though clouds of crystalline confusion swirling around inside his head had parted to let even more crystalline clarity through. He had found the question that made this being pause and consider its actions.
But of course he had. Was he not Lord Voldemort?
The information he had learned had been disconcerting. As he leaned on his hands and ankles in front of the child, in a pose that another might have considered undignified but which he knew to be royal because he was adopting it, Lord Voldemort remembered that. His other selves had tried to rule with terror, and had made themselves hated because of it. Lord Voldemort would not do that. He had already ceased all but the most necessary Death Eater activities, such as having his followers with influence in the Ministry spy for him and throw the Minister and Aurors off-balance with dark hints.
He would learn. He was the most magnificent of them all, the true genius, the true lord, the destined king of darkness—
The child stirred and spoke, and Lord Voldemort refocused. He must pay attention when the child spoke, but only as he would to a rare book or grimoire that chose to converse by voice instead of letting Lord Voldemort read what was printed inside it. The child was as valuable as that.
“I think I might be able to forgive you someday. The actions that you took in this world are different from the ones that your old self took in others. But that’s only if you don’t harm my family or hurt anyone else I like.”
“Did not Lord Voldemort promise to spare your family?” Lord Voldemort asked, reaching out to draw a finger down the child’s brow. He knew from seeing this Potter’s past memories that he was susceptible to touch, that he even believed love to be the most powerful force in the universe. The mere notion amused Lord Voldemort, filled him with gales of the darkest laughter, but he would use what worked. “Why would you think he would break his promises, if you keep your side of the bargain?”
The Potter child stared at him. Lord Voldemort suppressed the rising rage that would end with limbs and broken blood. Nothing had ever been as irritating as the fearlessness with which this boy regarded him.
But he would know, in the end. He would learn that he had only defeated inferior copies of the true Lord Voldemort. And Lord Voldemort was patient enough to wait for that day, as he had already waited for his revenge for countless decades.
“You might kill them anyway,” Potter said then, his voice so soft that Lord Voldemort felt it more as breath on his eyelids than as words. “That’s what happened the last time I tried to make a bargain with one of your other selves. I woke up the next morning, and two of my best friends were dead.”
Lord Voldemort traced his forehead again, focusing all his attention on those shining eyes. Also irritating that they were so clear, but at least they made Potter’s mind easier to read than some of the murky, swamp-infested minds of his Death Eaters. “Show me.”
Potter did, more easily than he usually succumbed to orders, which Lord Voldemort took as evidence of his swelling power, of his charisma, of his magical gifts that would bind all to him, of—
He frowned and restrained his own thoughts from following him into Potter’s mind. He could have them if he chose, a different kind of Legilimency intrusion, but not when he was looking for one specific memory.
And there it was, floating like a silvery Pensieve trace on green waters. Lord Voldemort plunged into it, and felt the cool spray of unrelated memories travel past him. Then he was within the midst of a crushing weight of grief.
Lord Voldemort coolly ignored it, watching the Potter at the table. He wore a different body in this world, of course, with dark hair more tamed, blue eyes like chips of ice—and considerably older. He sat with his head bowed and his hands shaking on either side of a newspaper splashed with photographs of murder. Lord Voldemort approved the photographer’s style, and whoever had chosen to set them highest on the page, even higher than the headline, so as to be easily seen.
Those pictures showed a tasteful kind of murder, with the blood spread out in a circle. Whoever had done this had taken the time to arrange it like that, probably with a wand. Lord Voldemort knew from experience that blood didn’t usually splatter exactly as you wanted, and even the most ingenious curses would rip flesh in unpredictable ways. He might be able to pity this Voldemort less than some of the others.
The headline said something about two Weasleys dying. These were presumably Potter’s best friends in this world. Lord Voldemort turned his attention back to the boy as he rustled the paper and laid it down.
He had to stare. The Potter he was familiar with had weak affection in his eyes all the time, and horror, and compassion. Those were manipulations that Lord Voldemort wielded like whips against the susceptible and the disobedient, but he did not succumb to them himself, and he did not respect anyone who did.
From the furious fire in Potter’s eyes, he might be forced to respect him. Or at least this version of him.
There was hatred there, so thick and stinking that Lord Voldemort couldn’t help trying to breathe it in through his nostrils, even though this was a memory. But as the grief had been crushing, so the hatred could be a miasma. The memory did at least feel lighter, better, sweeter to stand in than it had been before.
“I bargained with him,” Potter whispered, and his body gave a single, long shake of rage. There was a different kind of clarity in his eyes now, one that Lord Voldemort could not help but admire. “I bargained with him, I believed him. Like an idiot.” He tossed his head, and all the shining in his eyes had been twisted to a different kind of light, tainted. Lord Voldemort drew in his breath in delight. This was better than the photographs. “I will kill him.”
The memory faded, but another one floated on the surface of Potter’s mind. Lord Voldemort grabbed it, and it popped around him and drew him onto a rainy battlefield, where Potter stood over something strange. At first Lord Voldemort thought it was an altar, made of white stone.
Then he realized it was the body of another one of his selves, but longer and leaner and paler than his. Potter had used the same curse that had been in those photographs in the paper, the one that spread the blood around in a circle.
“How does it feel to die?” Potter hissed, and bent down, slipping into Parseltongue. “At the hands of someone who wasn’t even supposed to defeat you in this world?”
There was a garbled reply that made Lord Voldemort turn his head away, because he was not the weak, pathetic thing crawling shattered on the ground. He would rather watch Potter, the conqueror.
Potter took a step back and shook his head. He was still speaking in Parseltongue, but with a cold, sharp edge to it that was different from the impassioned anger of a moment before. “I don’t need to belong to a Dark family to know Dark curses. I knew that spell the moment I saw you use it. And you broke the bargain. You doomed my best friends to death. That doomed you.”
He snapped his arm down and Apparated, spinning away from the battlefield.
Lord Voldemort slid slowly out of Potter’s mind when that memory was done. And he reached out and put his hand on top of the boy’s wild mass of dark hair. Yes, it was wild in this lifetime. He had already seen how easily that could change.
“You killed him that time. Who was supposed to?” He was tilting Potter’s head back, looking into the green eyes that altered from lifetime to lifetime. But not the spirit beyond them, oh, no. And that spirit was capable of more than giggles and love. He knew it. He had known it. Was he not Lord Voldemort, who saw the corners of darkness in every blaze of light?
“A Hufflepuff named Victoria Graves.” Potter sighed, his mind spinning with what Lord Voldemort suspected were actually shards of the same memories, although at the moment he didn’t care to check. He would never want to live through anything less than the full reality now that he had done so once. “No one could explain it when they found his body, but in the end, they decided that her facing him in duels and destroying one of his Horcruxes was enough to fulfill the prophecy.”
“And you never wanted to claim the credit?” Lord Voldemort was sure the truth lay somewhere in the middle, that perhaps Potter would have given public credit to Graves but told a few select friends what had happened. The boy had been too proud, too Dark, in that lifetime to simply be content with letting someone else have the honors. Lord Voldemort had let someone else take the laurels for opening the Chamber of Secrets, but then, he had been sixteen. Potter’s body had looked older than that.
“No. Why would I? I only wanted to help people recover from the terror that Voldemort caused and live quietly with my friends.”
Lord Voldemort felt as though someone had splashed cold seawater into his warm fire. He withdrew and stared at the boy. Potter stared back, blinking. He was not lying. Lord Voldemort knew that very well.
But he may not know himself as well as he do. He may not be aware…of the many things that he might want…
Lord Voldemort nodded. It was like the boy’s surprise when he had asked if Potter could ever forgive Lord Voldemort. After twenty-seven lives, there must be depths in his mind and memories as black as the trenches of the sea. And Lord Voldemort would explore them all, and dredge obscure and terrible things into the light that the boy would flinch from looking at.
And he would make the boy look.
This was a challenge, at last, such as he had not had in years. The Potter boy in the prophecy had been dangerous, but more a trick, in the end; he could have defeated Lord Voldemort only if Lord Voldemort had been foolish enough to launch a curse at him without checking out all other possible perils. Since then, there had been no sign that the Potter child would grow up to be extraordinarily difficult to handle.
The elder Potter child. The younger one, of course, was Lord Voldemort’s.
The enemy to corrupt and conquer and pull down, until he was as Dark as he had looked in that moment destroying Lord Voldemort’s other self. And he was truly worthy of the time and skill it would take.
I shall win. Over a worthy enemy. When all know the truth, all cannot fail to honor me.
*
Anaelyssa: It would be very hard for Harry to redeem him in any way acceptable to his family! Which probably means he will not try.
And thank you!
Jan: Thanks! Here's the next chapter.
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His Twenty-Eighth Life