His Twenty-Eighth life

3. 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.