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Chapter Sixty-Seven—Moves in the Light

"I'm sure you can understand why we're wary of trusting you, with your record."

Voldemort shrugged, a little bored. "Yes, I can understand, but after three interrogations with Veritaserum, four sessions in what you're pleased to call a court even though it has no legal authority, and five ambushes to see if I would cast Dark Arts, then you ought to be able to see that I'm intent on keeping my promise."

For Harry. That was the only reason he would put up with these people who called themselves Light at all. But then again, it was a better purpose than he had once dedicated himself to.

Augusta Longbottom gave him a long stare and a severe sniff. They were sitting in a drawing room of Longbottom Manor, supposedly drinking tea, or at least so the cups in front of them proclaimed. "I had nothing to do with most of those, Mister…Voldemort."

Voldemort held back his amusement with a sip of the dreadful tea, though less dreadful than the last batch he had been served because at least it didn't have a potion in it. He thought about telling her that his first name was "Lord" and she could call him that, but he wanted this meeting to be productive. "Are you convinced that the Wizengamot must change?"

"Yes. I told you that on the first day."

"Forgive me. You also told me that you would probably never trust me and could barely bring yourself to be in the same room as me."

Augusta huffed and crossed her arms. "The fact is that we've been in a holding pattern for a long time. Some people who might have sought power for themselves were content to follow—you, and some were content to follow Dumbledore."

Voldemort inclined his head. "That is true. But you should know that I do not act alone, and I will not act without consulting the wishes of my ally."

"Which one? Oh. Potter, of course."

Voldemort nodded once more. "I can anticipate some of what he'll do, and I can write to him if I'm uncertain. But you should know that there's never going to be a time when I'll do something politically expedient that he disapproves of."

Augusta stared at him with a frown, while through the open French windows came the singing of some exotic bird the Longbottoms had imported for their gardens. "He must have done something incredible for you to submit to him that much."

He repaired my soul, and he is the reason I live. But Voldemort saw no need to air his business like that in front of the old harpy. He shrugged and replied, "I owe him my life and sanity. He convinced me that a magical life was better than a magicless immortality."

Augusta inhaled sharply. "That's where your method of immortality was leading you?"

"How much," Voldemort asked softly, and felt the air around them shift, "do you know about my method of immortality?"

The old woman looked at him with a gaze as fearless as a hawk's, even though her hand was hovering right above her wand. "What Albus told me before he got taken away by that—deeply convenient attack of madness."

"If you're asking me whether I'm responsible for that, I will say no," Voldemort said, and leaned back in his chair. He would read her mind later, when she wasn't so alert and was less likely to feel his intrusion. And it didn't matter, he told himself, except for future political relations with Augusta's allies if she told someone. The Horcruxes were gone. It was outdated information. "But were you sorry to see him go?"

"He'd become untrustworthy." The old woman's fingers drummed for a second against the arm of her chair. At least she'd let go of her wand. "I don't know if he was really mad, but I know that he was spending too much time on plans to thwart an enemy who might not exist and not enough time on you or politics."

"An enemy who might not exist?" Voldemort questioned delicately.

"The Master of Death."

"You know he exists."

Augusta stared him down without blinking. "I don't know that he's an enemy."

Voldemort considered it and then nodded. Yes, he could see that, and if she wanted to play word games, well, he was hardly one to discourage her. Half of the games he and Harry played took place in that realm.

And he wanted Harry to have allies, people he was comfortable with who were not him. He did not think that he could tolerate Harry having lovers, but he seemed genuinely far from seeking them among the Light pure-bloods Augusta represented in any case. Voldemort could make sacrifices for the happiness of his—

Teacher. Say that for right now.

"The question that most of your followers will probably be asking," Voldemort said, and waited while she snorted at the word followers, "is what happens next, and what we intend to do to further the spreading of policy."

"I suspect you don't know that the Wizengamot received an ambassador from the International Confederation of Wizards yesterday."

Voldemort felt his muscles coil softly beneath him, and stilled them. He was not about to curse someone in Augusta's drawing room. Changed as he was with the return of his magic the way it was meant to be, he was sure he would have felt someone hiding there, whether under a Disillusionment Charm or something else. "No. What was the purpose?"

"They apparently came to decide whether they should sanction Britain."

Voldemort paused. That did not sound as if the Confederation was interested in investigating his former life and the Death Eaters' activities, as he had assumed they would be. "What for?"

"Our abominable attitude towards Muggleborns and our determination to make them live lives little better than servants', I believe is what the representative said," Augusta murmured. She took a sip of tea that couldn't disguise the way she was watching him, and of course she knew that Voldemort knew that.

"And you think that I would have an objection to that," Voldemort summarized. It was the logical thing to think, after all.

"How can you leave the philosophy that animated your terrorist movement behind entirely? You believed—"

"It was convenient."

"What?"

"It was convenient to blame Muggleborns for the ills of wizarding society," Voldemort corrected her in a low drawl. "When I began to move most strongly, in the end of the sixties, there had been several prominent cases of Muggleborns attempting to pass legislation that would have reformed us to be more like Muggle society, or threatening to expose us to Muggles. You are old enough to remember that, I know."

"I had other concerns at the time."

Voldemort snorted and shook his head. "I had returned to Britain a few years earlier, but not full-time. I had—research concerns that had taken me out of the country for decades." From the way Augusta's eyes narrowed, she at least suspected that he had been hunting down Dark Arts and suitable objects for Horcruxes, but she wasn't about to say it. "At the time, I saw few ways to make inroads. We had a popular Minister and a strong Ministry. The few disaffected people in Britain weren't popular or powerful individuals."

"So the cases of the Muggleborns—"

"Coincided with the retirement of Minister Leach," Voldemort finished. "When he was forced out of office and the pure-bloods who did it began to attain some power, I saw my chance. I did hesitate because I believed that Albus Dumbledore might decide to become Minister, and he would have started a coalition against me immediately. But when he refused, I decided it was my chance."

"What do you feel about Muggleborns now?"

"They are tolerable as long as they don't make the kind of threats that they did when they thought they could get away with it because they had a Muggleborn Minister," Voldemort said indifferently. "I don't think they will, now. Many of the ones who did climb to a position of influence in the Ministry are smarter than that."

"And with the Confederation coming…"

"I think they're still smarter than that. And with the dissolution of the Death Eaters, the pure-bloods don't have the kind of power in their hands that they did when Abraxas Malfoy forced Minister Leach from office. It took him years to maneuver that into position and make promises that won him allies. I essentially took over his organization when I returned to Britain. That doesn't exist now."

"You could make it exist."

"I could, couldn't I?"

"Frankly, Voldemort, this kind of declaration doesn't make you sound as if you're on the side of the Light."

Voldemort didn't manage to hold in his chuckle. "I have changed the things I stand for, Augusta, not erased history."

Augusta spent a few more moments studying him, then nodded. "Frankly, we need your help to avoid the sanctions."

"What would the sanctions involve?"

"It would mean that laws would be handed down to the Wizengamot for itself, and an Over-Minister would be appointed to dictate policy to the Ministry." Augusta gave her head a harsh shake, making her hair stand out from her head for a moment like sunrays. "I hate Cornelius, but he was elected, and we should be able to pass our own laws and repair our own mistakes."

"I fail to see how I would help you do that."

Augusta smiled, and Voldemort reflected that she might have made a fine, fierce Death Eater if everything in the world except that smile had been different. "I have a plan."

"I want to talk to you."

Harry turned around with a small nod as he watched the spirit of Salazar Slytherin materialize out of the wall. "All right. Do you want me to speak to you in Parseltongue so that no one else can understand?

"That would be acceptable." Slytherin conjured another false portrait frame behind him and sat there as he stared down at Harry. "How many different worlds have you lived in?"

"What a charming version of the question." Harry laughed and held up his hand as he settled back against the wall of the Slytherin dungeons. He had found a corner far away from everyone else during the first week and came here when his interactions with the children ceased to be fascinating for a while. "No, I just mean, most of the time people ask how long I've lived or how many lives. But this is a different kind of question, and it needs a different kind of answer."

"Why?"

"Because I used to think that my every life was in a different world. Versions of people I knew had different histories in all of them, and some of them had never been born, or had siblings and children and lovers they didn't in others. Then I thought it was variations on a theme, and everything was really one world with just slight alterations that were based on decisions or events that had happened differently in the past."

"And now?"

"I really don't know what could have happened in this particular world to make it so different from the others, but I'm sure it is. This is the first one where I've been known for who I am. The first one where my mortal enemy was capable of redemption. The first one where I've met an immortal creature other than myself."

Harry started pointedly at Slytherin. The wizard didn't shift, but the "portrait" frame around him brightened subtly.

"How did you know that I was more than a reflection of someone long dead?" Slytherin finally asked.

"I see death and life all around me, and the death and life of every individual being, unless I concentrate specifically not to," Harry said, and leaned back against the stone, letting his vision shift. He saw only light around Slytherin. "I know that you're not a magical portrait, which doesn't look alive at all, and I know that you're not a spirit that once dwelt in a living body and has since been ejected from that body."

Slytherin was still silent, and still studying him. But Harry had said what he intended to say, all that he intended to reveal. He leaned back on the wall and waited. He knew he was going to win. If he could spend most of a decade as a part-Kneazle in a pet shop, waiting for Hermione to come along and claim him, then he could do this.

And it was perhaps only half-an-hour before Slytherin seemed to retreat into the portrait frame and said, "Come along, then. You'll find the serpent on the sixth stone on the lowest row to the right of the corner on your left."

Harry walked quietly down the corridor and found the carving of a pit viper where Slytherin had said it would be, small enough not to be noticed although it wasn't much worn. He only had to touch it, not hiss, and the stone slid back and Harry reached out and carefully extended his fingers into the darkness.

He knew what this was, although he had seen it only once before, and so he didn't move as the darkness fountained out, grasped him, and pulled him through. He straightened up within the wall and stared around thoughtfully. Behind him, the block slid back into place.

The room around him was—clean.

Harry knew at once that no one had ever died here, not even the insects and rodents that had perished in many other places in Hogwarts. The lights that shone above weren't made of glass, glow-worms, or anything else that had ever been part of the living earth, but pure magic. The walls were stone perfectly preserved, and Harry smiled a little as he saw the shapes of the mountains they had come from.

And then the door in the far side of the wall opened, and Salazar Slytherin stepped through.

Harry studied him. Slytherin had eyes of one of those odd dark colors, which could be black in some lights and grey or a dark blue or hazel in others. Harry thought that that color, at least, had carried through to the Tom Riddle in some of the worlds he had visited. They had none of the red tinge that blazed in the eyes of his Voldemort, but—

Harry frowned and shook his head a second later. He had to be careful about thinking of the man as his Voldemort. Possessive tendencies in a being as powerful as the Master of Death had to be watched over and checked, carefully.

"You are the first in centuries to see me as I am."

"Perhaps the first ever to see you as you truly are," Harry said softly, letting his eyes unfocus and his spiraling sight trace the air around Slytherin, the pathways of magic, the relationship he had with the stones of the room. No, there was no trace of death anywhere. Nor was there age. He was simply extended life, continued immortality. "You never came close to dying, did you?"

Slytherin paused. "No." He had a harsh voice, but no trace of a particular accent that Harry could discern. He used one hand to gesture to the floor in front of him, and the stone shifted and ejected two seats, like miniature versions of the benches in the Great Hall. That made sense to Harry, since in some worlds there was lore that Slytherin had created those benches. "Please sit down, and let us converse."

Harry nodded and sat. Slytherin leaned towards him from the opposite bench. "You do not have the kind of immortality I do."

Others might have had anger in those words, but Harry had spent centuries learning to hear what was there. He nodded again. "I'm sorry. I'm not the kind of being you are."

Slytherin closed his eyes for a moment. Harry continued looking at the light around him, the light of pure life, and then added, "But if I'm not wrong, then one of your descendants is heading for the same kind of immortality."

Slytherin's eyes flew open. "From what I remember from speaking with Tom—"

"Yes, he made Horcruxes, but I convinced him to reunite his soul. He's jumpy at the moment. He doesn't like being mortal. But he knows that I'll defend him until he can achieve a different kind of immortality. The same kind you did."

Slytherin clenched his hands on his knees. "I had to look in old necromantic tomes—"

Harry nodded. "I spent one lifetime researching that sort of thing, and I've run into it in other worlds. I haven't met many people who even knew what it was, so not many who took that road. But it is real. And you could have company if you'll convince Voldemort that he could do what you've done."

Slytherin drew in air through his nostrils like a resting dragon. "Voldemort is a ridiculous name. To me, he'll always be Tom."

"Tom is truly dead, I think," Harry said quietly. "I don't have much hope of convincing him to return to that name, and I don't want it to be an obstacle between the two of you. If I bring him to you, will you accept that he's Voldemort?"

Slytherin's hands twitched on his knees. Then he waved one. "If I must."

"I think it would be best."

Slytherin bowed from a sitting position, his eyes intense and his dark hair swishing forwards around his face. "Then I shall yield to the wisdom of the Master of Death."

There were lots of things Harry could have said, but he merely nodded. His veins thrummed with excitement as he thought about it. He could give Voldemort a different kind of reassurance now, the sort that said the immortality Harry had promised him was possible, and a different kind of connection with his ancestry than he had sought by opening the Chamber of Secrets or emphasizing blood purity.

And, maybe, that meant that Voldemort could have other things that he needed, too. Like freedom from his obsession with Harry.

It's at least worth a try.