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Chapter Forty-Seven—Chains of Respect

"Um, can I talk to you, Potter?"

Jonathan stepped carefully away from the stream of Hufflepuffs headed to Herbology. Acanthus and the twins gave him sharp glances, but went on when Jonathan nodded to them. Marcus Flint was pale and sweating. Jonathan didn't really think Flint was going to do anything to harm him.

He did wonder if whatever this was had to do with Harry.

"What is it, Flint?" he asked, folding his arms and studying Marcus carefully.

Marcus coughed. "I—I believe all the stories about your brother. He called my family together last weekend and showed us what he could do. My parents didn't believe him, and most of my other relatives didn't, either. But I'm more sensitive to magic than some of my family is. I could feel it all around him."

Jonathan relaxed. "So that means that you aren't going to be upset if Acanthus spends time with me? That was the original argument in the first place."

"No." Marcus hesitated. "Since my family didn't believe he was really—what he says he is, they didn't ally with him."

"Okay?" Jonathan didn't see what this had to do with him.

"But I believe him. I want to ally with him." Marcus nodded as if he was making an argument to himself more than to Jonathan, who just stared at him, startled. "So I thought I could make an offer to him, and you could write to him and tell me if he approves."

"What sort of offer? I don't think he would want you to turn your back on your family. Harry really cares about family."

"I won't work against them, unless they decide to fight your brother. Then they're stupid and deserve what they get." Marcus folded his arms, and his muscles bulged like rocks. "But I was just thinking that I could be really useful to your brother by guarding you while you're at school."

"Guarding me from what?"

Marcus gave him a flat look. "Come on, Potter. There are enough people who hate you among the Slytherins. And there are people like my family who'll get frustrated with your brother and take it out on you. And there's even just ordinary students who are jealous and want to play pranks on you because they think you did better than them on exams or something."

"I don't need you to protect me from pranks," Jonathan said, a little disgusted. Exactly how weak did Marcus think he was?

"But when someone could be unexpectedly vicious? Or when the prank is coming from a Slytherin?" Marcus curled his lip a little. "You think that Acanthus and the Weasleys are the face of Slytherin, but they're not. I know my Housemates better than you do. I want to make sure that you get the kind of protection you deserve."

"You mean you want to prove yourself to Harry."

"That, too."

Jonathan sighed. "Fine. But you'll have to be subtle about it. You can't follow me around all the time without someone thinking that something's changed, and unless you want to advertise to your family that you're rebelling against them—"

"Trust me, I can be subtle when the time calls for it." Marcus grinned at him and cast a spell before Jonathan could flinch. Jonathan watched as it spread out over his head like a glittering purple firework before it faded.

"What was that?"

"Something that will make my job easier. It means that any charm or hex that hits you is going to be rebounded straight back at the caster. It won't do anything about curses, it's not that powerful. But it means that you have some protection."

"What if someone hits me accidentally or while we're dueling in Defense class, though?"

Marcus shrugged. "Best make sure that doesn't happen."

Jonathan glared at him for a moment. Marcus only looked back, so unrepentant that Jonathan started smiling in spite of himself. Sirius looked like that when they were doing dueling practice sometimes.

"All right," he said. "But you know that you're going to have to get along with Acanthus and the twins better if you're going to spend a lot of time around me."

Marcus grunted. "You have the good taste to have Slytherin friends—wait. Are you going to also expose me to that ridiculous Hufflepuff who spends so much time with you? And those Gryffindors?"

Jonathan smiled innocently. It was true that Lee Jordan had started to spend a lot more time with them in the past few months, intrigued by the twins' new skills—and Lee was a perfect Gryffindor, even if he did enjoy curses and pranks. "Get used to it."

Marcus stifled a groan.

"Okay. I'm here. You were the one who wanted to speak to me, so don't you think it's about time you showed yourself?"

Lord Voldemort remained hidden under the shadows of the trees at the edge of the clearing a moment longer, his whole being poised like a flame on the verge of going out. Harry's voice echoed calmly and naturally from the open; he didn't sound on edge. And why should he? He had such powers that he could guard himself, and he could also sense Lord Voldemort in a minute if he was willing to extend himself.

But at the moment, he was not. He was playing at being mortal. Lord Voldemort found the pretense irritating, but also endearing in an odd way. It would be one of the ways that Harry had managed to cling to his sanity through lifetimes of being born in different worlds.

When he comes to accept my gift, my offer, he will no longer need that, Lord Voldemort thought, and stepped out of the shadows. Harry spun to face him at once, and Lord Voldemort caught a sharp breath of delight.

For a moment, what he saw gleaming in Harry's deep green eyes, the color of water in leaf-shadows, was a bright, feral thing, no more human than a thunderstorm. Harry had seen the sudden movement and been prepared to defend himself against it. His hand had curled back, his fingers forming claws. Lord Voldemort had no doubt that Harry could deal a blow harder than any striking leopard.

I want all of him. The mortal and the immortal and the beast. I wonder if he has yet realized that?

"Voldemort," Harry said a moment later, and dropped his hand. He looked normal, mortal, and annoying again as he nodded. "What is this about? Sending me a vague letter telling me 'it's urgent' isn't going to work every time you want to see me, you know."

"It is enough that it worked this time," Lord Voldemort said quietly, feeling the vibration of the words in his throat in a way that he never did except when speaking to Harry. "And I wanted to know how you feel about others realizing that you are the Master of Death."

Harry sighed and leaned back against the bench beneath the tree that Lord Voldemort's magic had carved, shaking his head. "I'm not that enthusiastic about it," he admitted with a grimace. "I understand that certain people know and they can spread the knowledge, but the more people know, the more people start taking me into consideration."

Lord Voldemort frowned. That seemed to him an odd way of putting it. "Taking you into consideration?"

"They start basing their actions on what they think might make me react, or what would earn my favor. They calculate everything. I want to make as little impact on the world as possible. Just be a normal human being in every way that matters."

Lord Voldemort had not anticipated his own reaction, but then, he never thought that words so ridiculous would come out of the mouth of someone so self-aware as Harry, either. He threw back his head and laughed.

The sound boomed around the clearing, and the trees rustled their leaves and bent down as if they wanted to be near it. Lord Voldemort would not be surprised. He had affected these trees with his own magic—carving and shaping the bench, casting spells that singed their bark and affected their growth. It made sense that they would respond to an emotion he felt so seldom.

"What are you laughing about?"

"You affect the world by being here," Lord Voldemort said. "You would have even if you had succeeded in your mad desire to sacrifice your own life for your brother's protection when I first met you on that night nine years ago. You are not normal, Harry Potter. And I for one will never cease to rejoice in that fact."

Harry's mouth hung slightly open. The expression on his face was lost enough that he did sort of look like the gormless mortal that he claimed he wanted to be. But Lord Voldemort would not forget the immortal eyes that had looked at him when he first came into the clearing. He ceased to laugh and waited politely until Harry could find words, at least.

"But that would have been—I mean, it would have been unusual, and I know that it wouldn't have stopped you forever, but it would have been normal in a way. It would have been something that my mother did in my first life."

Lord Voldemort made a soft noise, but as much as he loved the tidbits from Harry's other lives, he would not be distracted now. "You are such a liar, Harry. Unless what you are saying is that you wouldn't have seen the consequences of that, the grief and the fear and the wonder, that you left behind you, because you would have been dead and then reborn into another world?"

"Well—yeah."

"Ah. I never took you for a coward."

Harry snapped his spine straight. "I am not. I'm practical!"

"Practical."

"The whole world changes when people know what I am! I've never had a relationship with my family that's like the one I have now, because they never knew what I was. I never had to be enemies with Dumbledore, even when I wasn't exactly his friend, because he never feared me as the Master of Death. And I certainly never had this—this," and he waved his hand in the air between him and Lord Voldemort. "I killed the Voldemorts in my other worlds or I helped kill them. That's the way it was!"

"It is new," Lord Voldemort agreed in as dulcet a tone as he was still capable of mustering. "So that means you fear it."

"I do not."

The clearing was darkening in a way that had nothing to do with the absence of light, unless the absence of light in a great being's soul counted. Lord Voldemort let his magic spread its wings to Harry's magic, and shivered in the tingle of pleasure down his spine. "You can think of this relationship that you have with your family and Dumbledore now as something other than twisted."

"Yeah?" Harry glared at him. "What?"

"Honest. For the first time in thousands of years, Harry, you are appearing to people as you really are. And if you are afraid of that, I suppose I cannot blame you. But I will mock you for your cowardice for as long as I am permitted to know you—and I am wondering now how much of your determination to continue to die and be reborn in distant worlds comes from that same cowardice. What would happen if you stayed in the same world? If you kept watch over the same people, and saw them die, and then came to know their descendants, who are new to you? Are you afraid that you would be unable to cope with it?"

"I do get to know different people in each world! I never had a brother like Jonathan before, and there's a Parkinson here who never existed before, and I was people who otherwise aren't born in most of the worlds—"

"But the majority are the same," Lord Voldemort said, his voice darting, probing, like the tongue of a snake. "And you do not live much past your own generation, do you?" Harry had never told him that, but suddenly he was certain it was true. "You live a wizard's normal lifespan, perhaps, but not the full length that a powerful one like Dumbledore can reach. You will not use your magic enough to aid you even in that, is that it? Or do you prefer to die and go on, so that you will not need to face a world where you will need to create new relationships, without the preconceptions you can rely on when you are born anew into a world that has Blacks and Potters and your schoolmates?"

Harry stared at him. He did not appear to be breathing. Lord Voldemort raised his brows and pressed the last blade home. "Death holds no terrors for you, I am certain of that. But what about life? Do you not fear that, Master of Death?"

Harry vanished. One moment he was there, the next moment a soughing black wind had carried him away. Lord Voldemort turned his head, listening. The trees rustled, and something came back to him, an indefinable impression again likely created by the impact of his magic on the clearing, that said Harry had become the air.

He was gone. He had not Apparated. Lord Voldemort did not know when he might return, and he had initially planned to spend more time in Harry's company.

But he could not regret what had passed between them. There had been, for the first time, a stricken look in Harry's eyes. Lord Voldemort had pressed his ideas beyond the flare of instinctive denial when Harry thought of immortality.

Lord Voldemort was well-pleased with his night's work.

Harry appeared under a tree at the edge of his parents' garden, and collapsed to the ground. It had been a long time since he'd done that, turned into a wind that could pass through the world of the dead and the living both at once. The Elder Wand was humming with contentment at his side that he had done something that demanded so much magic.

And his reason for doing it…

Harry wrapped his arms around himself and willed his skin warmer when he couldn't stop shivering.

But it truly wasn't the cold of the evening that had made him feel like this, or even the realms he had traversed. No, Voldemort's words had pulled away some sheer layer of self-deception that he hadn't even realized was there.

Yes, part of him was afraid to pass beyond the bounds of what he had always known. He remembered how disoriented he had been during the life when he was born as Sirius and Regulus's brother, a generation before most of the people that he knew and loved, and getting to intimately know many of those who, like Orion and Walburga, had remained distant in all his other lives.

He had known the same kind of disorientation when he was reborn as Hermione, but that had been so near the beginning that his sense of it had become blunted over the passing years. His memory was perfect, but he could still start to doubt whether he had felt that dizziness because of being reborn as a girl he knew, or being reborn as a girl, or being reborn at all.

Harry let his head fall back and closed his eyes.

Did I deal well with this kind of immortality only because it repeated itself so much? I was never born in a country that Voldemort wasn't rising in. I was never born in another century. I was never born into a life that had no connection with Voldemort at all. That's pretty fucking weird when you think about it.

For a moment, Harry entertained the idea that perhaps he had been created, destined, to defeat Voldemort, and there was some entity, perhaps Death itself, that wouldn't let him get too far away. But he discarded the idea almost immediately. If that was the case, he couldn't believe it would have remained hidden so long. And it surely would have indicated some disapproval of this life, where he was—befriending Voldemort, or whatever the hell the thing they had was.

That left the other possibility, something he had distantly accepted as a theoretical likelihood before, but never thought of seriously, never pursued.

I'm being reborn like this because I choose it. Because I want to.

Sweat broke out over his skin. He had never given it serious consideration because—well, because he had accepted that he was a pawn of the Deathly Hallows, essentially. Because he had thought that he had a purpose in defeating Voldemort even if he didn't have a destiny. Because he had regretted things during his first life that he had been relieved to have a chance to set right in others.

Because it was easier, perhaps, to believe that he was reborn in random worlds and couldn't choose his own fate than it was to think of the power that awaited him if he could.

Harry's world reeled and staggered around him. It reminded him of falling headlong into the heart of an active volcano (necromancy initiation was as fucking weird as never being born in another country).

What would happen if I chose to remain in this body and—just become immortal? Without even researching one of the ways I told Voldemort about? Just remain, say, thirty because I wished to?

The Elder Wand leaped out of his hand. Harry looked up, almost sure that it would manifest Death's disapproval now, and at least he'd know.

Instead, the Wand beamed like a second moon in the darkness, and the Cloak was suddenly on his back like a light breeze, and the Resurrection Stone sang like a phoenix.

Harry swallowed. It didn't sound as if they disliked the idea. It sounded as if they had been waiting for him to figure it out.

"It only took me seventeen hundred years," he said weakly, and then bowed his head on his knees, and contemplated having even more power than he'd thought to choose his own fate, while the Deathly Hallows danced around him.