Chapter Text
What greets him on the other side of the door is unexpected, in the sense that he had no idea what to expect in the first place. Nature has taken over much of the brightly-lit location, with what looks like a large collection of colorful tropical plants taking up most of their immediate surroundings, and only squinting past the tall vegetation does Harry manage to spot sand-colored walls half-covered in vines.
“Where are we?” He wonders out loud, looking back toward the blond who’d followed him. He blinks, eyes trailing up the archway that occupies the space behind them where the doorway to the office has now disappeared after being closed. The upper part of the building is half-crumbled into itself, leaving a large pile of rubble to occupy most of the room, and what might have once been large metal doors to compliment the giant archway – which does seem to have broken hinges on its sides, strengthening his theory – is now bent metal half buried under the rubble.
“Nowhere I’m familiar with,” Minato informs him in a low voice as if raising their tone might disturb the ruins that surround them.
Not for the first time, Harry wonders how the doorway chooses where to deposit him in the world. “I guess we keep going until you recognize something,” he suggests, taking another step forward only to hear a crack under his feet and jump right back. “Wha-” Looking down for the first time, his eyes go impossibly wide and he takes a couple of steps back, only to feel the ground slip out from under him as he trips on a piece of rubble and falls through the archway, only barely protecting his head from hitting a sharp piece of fallen stone. Crack, something under him sounds, and Harry freezes for a moment before scrambling back up to his feet and managing to put a solid wall at his back.
He hadn’t seen it, not at first, but now that he knows it’s there, it’s all he can see. Amidst the crumbling remains and growing vegetation, moss and fungi have grown over and within sun-bleached bones. They jut out at odd angles, some cracked and splintered, worn by the elements and the relentless passage of time. Any remaining tissue has become a leathery substance, clinging in patches to the bones like a shroud and reminding him a little too closely of his run-ins with dementors.
“I-” Harry tries to sound out, but his voice doesn’t leave his tightening throat as his eyes follow the path of the closest skeleton to the archway and meet the skull’s hollow eyes, its empty sockets staring into nothingness.
Suddenly, he’d rather be anywhere else but where he’s standing, and his legs hurry to grant that wish before he can stop to think about where he’s going, ignoring the blond’s calls of his name and focusing on not tripping on anything – on anyone, don’t think about it – as he pushes past the plants and toward a more sunlit path.
So focused on getting away, Harry startles when his arm is grabbed and his body pulled back, though his breath catches when Minato’s warning of “Careful!” makes him look back at where he’d been pulled from and notices he’d nearly walked off the edge and plummeted to his – however temporary – death. Taking a more careful step forward, he peers over the edge.
“Oh,” he breathes out at the sight. They’re very high up, but that’s not what seems to punch the air out of his lungs. Standing on that edge, he can see the entire city spiraling from the center – from where he’s standing – in circular sections of varying height levels. Most of the walls have crumbled, as have a large part of the visible structures, and while vegetation doesn’t seem to have spread heavily enough to encompass the entirety of the ruins, there are still various spots of green spread around the many sections below them.
Harry chances a look at the spirit accompanying him, but the blond seems to be simply studying their surroundings in silence, a calculating look in his eyes.
Too bad for him that Harry doesn’t want to spend a moment longer in this place, “Let’s go,” he calls and turns on his heels, scanning the structure behind them – it looks even more grandiose from afar, and a lot more tragic for it – before spotting what seems to be stairs and heading in that direction.
“I know where we are,” Minato informs him once they descend another level, though Harry only gives him a hum in acknowledgment, too focused on the sinking feeling in his gut as he side-steps another pile of bones, eyes catching on a rusted-looking sword abandoned to natures’ whims and just out of reach from a withered skeletal hand. “This is- used to be Uzushio.” Given the lack of any large body of water in the proximity, let alone whirlpools, Harry assumes it’s the name of the city. As in Uzushiogakure no Sato, the place he’s supposed to eliminate every Nōmen mask from. Later, he tells himself as the blond adds, “It fell a long time ago.”
Harry wants to ask, because they’ve had to zig-zag their way down nearly collapsed sets of stairs and jump over demolished walls, and nothing that looks like this dilapidated fortress – he refuses to think of Hogwarts, trying to stand strong against the enemy’s attack but slowly crumbling on top of their own – falls on its own, but ever since accidentally stepping on those forgotten remains his tongue feels like lead, so he’ll save his questions for when this place is just a spot on the horizon behind them.
Seven, he mentally counts as they descend the last set of stairs, remembering the sight of the city from above. They’re in the last ring – finally – and the gate he’d seen should be somewhere around-
A soft displeased noise to his side tells him Minato is staring at the same thing he is. Piles of corpses almost entirely take over the path to the gate. However, these aren’t the same as the ones they’d come across on their way down. No, these seem to vary in size, and the sight of a skull too small to belong to anyone but a young child – were they Hogwarts age? Is this what Voldemort’s victory would have looked like? – has him turning around, knees faltering and hitting the ground as he retches, lacking anything in his stomach for the action to pull out, which leaves him panting and dry-heaving as the image of the great hall filled with children’s corpses overlaps over the bones scattered by the gates.
“Hari-san,” He hears the call from behind him, but it’s almost as if he’s underwater and the sound is having trouble reaching his ears. It’s too far away.
Something wet touches his skin, startling him. It didn’t rain that day – there was a rain of spells, blood, and grief, but the sky had been clear – so what- oh. Something touches him, making him flinch, before he hastily rubs his eyes against his forearm, looking anywhere but at the blond whose hand lightly squeezed his shoulder. “Sorry,” he mumbles, mostly out of habit – Hermione never did manage to knock it out of him – before shrugging off the hand and climbing to his feet. He doesn’t look down – if he does, those skulls might turn into familiar faces and he’ll never make it past the nonexistent gate.
Deep breaths and strategic steps help him reach the final barrier between the ruins and the outside world, though Minato’s silent nudges guiding some of his movement seem to help the most – what a pitiful sight he must make for a Master of Death, reacting like this to what’s supposed to be his domain –, but as soon as he makes to cross what’s left of the city’s entrance, something stops him with enough charge to make him step back, skin tingling at the contact.
“What?” Harry mutters under his breath, extending a hand toward where some sort of barrier seems intent on keeping him out – or rather, in –, and he sees Minato copy his movement with a frown.
Both their hands meet resistance exactly at the point where a gate would have been if it had not been thoroughly blown up in the past, and it makes no sense because Minato is a spirit and not supposed to even have matter for any sort of shield to hold back, not unless it’s something like the barrier in the office. He can only touch Harry, much like other spirits, due to his status as the Master of Death, but it wouldn’t make sense for anything else to be able to keep him contained.
“I don’t know how you got here-,” a voice suddenly chimes in, not quite cheerfully but with a somewhat amused undertone behind the audible confusion, and they’re quick to turn back around, Harry’s reflexively cast spell – a stunner that’s half startlement and half to blame on the flashbacks of the war this bloody place was pulling him into – joins one of Minato’s knives as both head toward the direction it came from, narrowly missing their target as a man hastily dodges both attacks. “Huh,” the man – young, probably close to Minato’s age, Harry notices – hums with a considering look, which is made more unnerving by the fact that one of his eyes is almost entirely red. Harry’s mind momentarily flashes back to the last pair of red eyes he’d faced – narrowed, cruel, with a cat-like slit instead of a normal pupil – but this isn’t a pair, only a single red sclera contrasting with a very light blue iris as if the result of some sort of injury. “As I was saying,” he continues as if nothing was amiss, “You’re not going anywhere.”
It doesn’t properly register in Minato’s mind, not until that moment, that Hari-san is genuinely young. Unfortunately and against his best wishes, he has grown used to the children in his life, teenagers as they may be, acting as is expected of them with the burden of being a shinobi upon their shoulders. This reaction, this expression – the one that tells him the teen was momentarily pulled back into a personal nightmare as he retches on an empty stomach – is trained out of them – was trained out of him – long ago in the academy, in between survival exercises that include trapping, killing and preparing their prey to be eaten and quite graphic lessons on the expected results of each of their techniques, not even as a cautionary tale but to improve their efficiency.
Considering that, it’s not a surprise that the surroundings he’s been carefully cataloging – Kushina will want to know what became of her village when they meet, whether in life or death – seem to have shaken the teenaged Master of Death. It is a massacre – the remains of one, at least –, there’s no other word for it. He’s never been too familiar with the layout of Uzushio, but it’s clear that even their built-for-siege architecture wasn’t enough against the might of allied villages. He’s spotted more than a dozen spiral hitai-ate among the few materials that have yet to rot with the remains of their owners – some fabrics more resistant to time than others and various metals in a better state than something left out to the whims of nature should be – but they are fewer than he would have expected of a city this grand.
From what he’s been able to glimpse past the rubble and wear, the city's two outermost – and largest – sections seem to have been mostly commercial areas. They may have walked past residential areas as well, but he had yet to see so much as a training ground like the many present in Kohona. Uzushio feels, at its core, like a merchant town instead of a military village such as his own. It makes the sight near the gates – so many fleeing bodies, not one set of bones past the walls’ limits – all the more mournful.
Minato is forced to reevaluate his opinion of the teen yet again when, after nudging him on a path through the remains toward the exit and finding it summarily blocked, he watches Hari-san react with the same instinct as him to an unknown voice catching their attention. He doesn’t know what the red light would have done if it had connected with the man’s body, though he guesses it would be less damage than his three-pronged kunai, but neither manages to strike true.
“You’re a spirit,” Hari-san blurts out, to his surprise, and seems much less tense than a moment before. Probably due to realizing this is something within his domain instead of a situation Minato may have to help him out with – help which isn’t quite easy to give as a spirit himself.
It takes him longer to figure out how Hari-san may even have been able to tell that, since the blue-haired, dark-skinned man in vaguely samurai-style clothes – a mix of something he’d expect to see in the Land of Iron and stripped-down shinobi wear – looks like any other person to him, but if he focuses on the feeling around them- he doesn’t feel like death, not in the way the reapers seem to, but it’s a somewhat faint echo of it all the same.
“And you’re not,” the man says, sounding distinctively puzzled as he turns his eyes – light blue, one sclera entirely blood-red, probably the result of whatever incident gave him the scar cutting diagonally through said eye from his right jaw to the forehead – toward Minato instead, “but you are. Who are you people, and how did you make it in?”
Minato nearly opens his mouth to reply before closing it again, looking at Hari-san instead. Sure, he’s the one familiar with this world and its people, but this is a spirit and not exactly his area of expertise. His deference earns him an apologetic look, which he doesn’t know quite how to interpret before the reason becomes obvious as the feeling of death inundates his senses. It only lasts a moment before it retreats, leaving him slightly unbalanced at the whiplash-worthy demonstration, though he does not show it.
The other man isn’t nearly as composed. “Shinigami-sama,” he says, offering a bow that would have been too low even for a daimyo. Minato glances at Hari-san, noticing the quickly hidden bothered expression, but his attention returns to the man who adds in an almost hopeful tone, “Has something changed?”
He can almost see the cogs turning in the young Master of Death’s mind at the question, trying to decide how to reply, before settling on “Just Hari’s fine.” Minato absently wonders if somewhere in the bookshelves of the office they came from there might be a book to teach the teen how to get more comfortable with formality and deference. If not, this kid is in for a long and possibly uncomfortable eternity – or however long his tenure as Master of Death is supposed to last. “What do you mean by that?”
The spirit’s eyes narrow slightly at them and Minato notices one of his hands – the one covered in ink-black markings, a seal he would like to look at with some time to spare – signaling almost behind his back. Not the only one, then. Still, only another spirit would be able to see the signal, so he doesn’t worry when his eyes don’t spot anyone hiding in the vicinity.
“He just signaled to someone,” he tells Hari-san under his breath all the same, wishing the teen at least knew Konoha Sign so he wouldn’t have to be so obvious about his delivery of information.
“I believe one of my friends might be able to answer that question better than I could,” The man justifies his action. “I can take you to him if you’ll follow me.”
Minato can almost see the teen’s mind weigh the need to have his question answered against having to go back into the ruins. “It’s fine, I’ll be back for those answers another time,” Hari-san says instead and turns back toward the exit.
Oh, right, the masks. It makes sense that he wouldn’t want to return to the city right now when he’ll have to come back another time to fulfill his promise to Yuzuki-san. Still… “What of the barrier?”
“You won’t manage to walk out,” the spirit warns them, seeming unconcerned.
“I don’t have to walk through it to leave,” Hari-san remarks before disappearing with a crack, only to reappear face-first into the barrier and slide to the ground with a grunt. “What the-”
“It absorbs all attacks,” it’s what the man unhelpfully informs as if that had not just become clear.
“I wasn’t attacking it,” Hari-san grumbles as he stands, dusting off the dirt from his pants. “I was trying to move past it.”
“Like I said,” Minato is starting to get a little annoyed at the spirit’s knowing tone. Where’s all the respect from a moment ago? “You’re not leaving any time soon.”
Hari-san frowns, waves a hand at the barrier, and they watch as a quick beam of red light impacts thin air only to disappear in a shimmer of shining symbols. He repeats the process a few more times and yet every color of light gets absorbed by the shield, so the volley of attacks – he’s still curious about what exactly the colors stand for but isn’t about to ask now – proves ultimately useless.
“Fine,” he caves with a sigh of nearly palpable resignation. “Let’s talk to your friend, maybe they can tell us how to get past it.”
Harry decides, in the privacy of his mind, that he has at least some right to be upset that some barrier from a different universe won’t let him apparate out of the city-wide graveyard they’re stuck in. He doesn’t say it – for obvious reasons such as he should probably not be mentally cursing another world’s version of magic in the first place – but the fact that the first encounter with something chakra-related has left him so obviously stuck is at least a little unnerving. Sure, he hadn’t expected something that let people summon literal death gods to be weak, but he’d apparently subconsciously expected it to be weaker than his magic simply by default.
At least there are no more bodies on the way to wherever we’re going, He notes with some relief. Instead of turning back toward the center of the city, the spirit – who, upon being called out on not introducing himself, told them to call him Kaneko – leads them further to the right of the gate, past piles of fallen rubble and deteriorating remains of wooden structures and toward the furthest corner nearing the end of the lower section, where the vegetation starts to grow heavier as it climbs over the walls and up the side of the mountain.
“Where-” Harry starts to ask when they make a turn by a tree that looks the same as any other and find themselves in front of a half-collapsed house which their guide promptly slips into – straight through the fallen wall, like the spirit he is – and doesn’t come back out.
“I think we’re supposed to follow,” Minato points out when Harry simply continues to frown.
He gives the blond an annoyed look, “I can’t exactly walk through walls,” he pointedly motions toward the complete lack of an entry point. “Well… I don’t think I can,” he adds since the reapers mostly seem to be able to. Should he be able to? Huh. “But I can just…” he focuses on the structure in front of him and makes an anti-clockwise motion with his extended hand. The barrier had kept him from leaving, but not outright apparating, and his spell had almost hit the spirit before that, so his magic apparently works just fine inside it.
A sharp intake of breath comes from his side as he watches the rubble rise from the ground and slowly repair itself into its previously held shape, a small house made mostly out of stone and timber, which added to the ease of his spell in putting things back in their proper place. Harry had learned it when helping repair the castle after the battle, as well as some tidbits from Mr Weasley who often repaired – and expanded – the Burrow by himself, and found that wood and stone are more cooperative than stuff like concrete or plastic since they seem to remember their intended shape for a larger period of time.
“Hey!” a high-pitched exclamation from their left breaks his focus, but the house is thankfully already structurally sound and doesn’t need the spell to hold it together any longer. “What d’you think-” the rushing woman – spirit, Harry is quick to notice – comes to a stop slightly in front of them, staring at the rewound structure for a moment in disbelief before turning back on him with wide eyes, leaning close enough that Harry has to take a step back so the teal-colored orbs aren’t the only thing in his field of vision. “How’d you do that?!”
“Magic,” he informs – because no such thing as the Statute of Secrecy exists in this world – and takes another step away from the woman with visibly pointy teeth that are still way too close for comfort.
“Asami,” a soft male voice calls from the direction the woman had appeared from and Harry looks over only to spot yet another person, this time a pale young man – another spirit! How many are there and why haven’t reapers taken them away yet? – with pastel blue hair who looks exasperated at the woman’s behavior. “We were supposed to watch.”
“But Hoshi-kun, look what he did to my house! Look!” The blonde hurricane who seemed about to pounce on him was suddenly gone, now closer to the house and motioning exaggeratedly towards it.
Someone walks through the newly restored house’s door as if on cue, but it’s immediately clear that it’s not Kaneko coming back. The man who steps through is slightly shorter than their guide, with lighter skin and long, blood-red hair reaching down to his waist. His tired-looking purplish-blue eyes immediately take in the scene and he seems to suppress a sigh as he speaks, “I was under the impression we would be talking inside.”
“Oi, look what stranger-kun did!” The one he assumes is named Asami from what ‘Hoshi-kun’ called her exclaims, bodily turning the red-haired man around to look at the house just as Kaneko phases through the door in time to follow their eyes toward the rebuilt building.
The redhead and Kaneko trade a significant look – whose meaning is entirely lost on him – before the newcomer turns to give Harry his full attention. “You’re not a reaper,” he states more than asks.
“Feels like one,” Kaneko points out from a step behind the man, “and spirits can touch him,” he adds pensively, “but he can’t cross the barrier.”
“He’s standing right here,” Harry snaps with some irritation, never enjoying being talked about like he’s not present when he clearly is. “I’m not a reaper, I’m their boss. And no, I’m not death,” he clarifies in case one of them also decides to call him ‘shi-sama’ or something equally uncomfortable. “The title's technically Master of Death, but just call me Harry, ok? None of this ‘sama’ stuff.”
“Hari-san isn’t really one for formalities,” Minato sees fit to quip and Harry catches a slight smile on his face from the corner of his eye, as if the blond is entertained by the situation.
“You’re the boss of them?” Asami is back to staring at him in a flash, “That means you can help!” she turns on the redhead with the same speed, “He could help, right? We could leave!”
“You can’t leave?” Harry asks with a frown just as the redhead calls the blonde’s name sharply enough to make her silent for a moment. “Haven’t reapers come for you? Usually, whoever is left behind chooses to stay.”
Some of the spirits open their mouths to reply but a raised hand from the redhead stays their words, “Let’s continue this discussion inside,” He tells them with enough authority to get at least the spirits moving, and turns back around to enter the newly restored house with the three local spirits at his heels.
A considering hum from Minato keeps him from following right away and he turns to the blond instead with a questioning look. “He is- well, was, the leader of Uzushio at the time of his death. The kanji on his haori means Whirlpool Lord.” Harry’s eyes widen slightly. He’d missed that entirely, mostly because he isn’t as used to searching out kanji the way his eyes would absently find and read any sign or label in English.
The new knowledge makes him wonder if village leaders in this world are always so young. The redhead does look older than Minato – and somehow perpetually tired even after death – but not by much.
“Better not leave him waiting then,” he mutters and heads to the door, opening it – after a small push to test if it was securely in place just to be sure – and stepping inside.
Stone walls reminiscent of his time at Hogwarts were the first thing Harry noticed, followed by polished wooden floors and a lot – as in, more than he’d ever seen put in a room together – of pelts and fur. Apparently, his spell hadn’t only restored the outside of the house but the inside as well, probably because everything in sight seemed made of wood, stone, or something of animal origin instead of metal, glass, or plastic. There were some exceptions – he spotted a wooden shelf holding some misshapen objects he couldn’t name at a glance and wasn’t sure if the spell had reached any other room except for the one closest to the entrance – but that still left them with a living room that looked somehow modern and rustic at the same time.
The two large couches seemed to have somehow been sculpted out of massive tree trunks, and though they lacked cushions there were plenty of furs spread around to make up for their lack. The floor under said couches was lined with a large rug of sewn animal pelts of similar coloring, a spotted dark brown bordering on black, and in the center was a table made of a pretty, wavy-looking log. Wooden shelves on the walls weren’t quite attached to them so much as to a large plank of wood that looked like the result of taking away a vertical section of the center of a tree trunk, with all the textures and movement of the wood included. There was no source of light other than a closed window, though he hadn’t expected one since magic and electricity don’t quite mix, but there didn’t actually seem to be any light switches in the room and he couldn’t find anything like a misshapen lantern he’d failed to restore or somewhere to put a torch either, even with everything about the ruins he’d seen so far indicating at least some level of electrical development.
“Can I open that?” He asks the blonde who is staring around the room with barely contained awe, pointing to the large window behind one of the couches, and walks over to do just that after receiving a distracted hum of agreement and a nod.
The open window opens toward the forest, but there’s enough space between the trees to let the light through and the fresh air isn’t unwelcome either. When Harry turns back around, the second – and largest – couch is occupied by the redhead and two of the spirits – Asami and Hoshi – while Kaneko stands behind the part of it that isn’t too close to the wall like a guard, stiff posture and all. A glance around for Minato shows the blond standing next to Harry in a similar position, which he chooses not to think about too hard as he sits down with his back to the open window.
It would be a dumb move if he feared some sort of attack coming from the forest, where Hoshi and Asami were supposed to be watching from and where there may be additional spirits hiding, but, well… he’s not. Afraid of an attack, that is. Not from spirits. His magic may be somehow weak to the barrier around the city, but that was made by living people, not ghosts, and spirits are – for better or worse – his domain now.
Plus he’s immortal. If they manage to kill him, it’ll be annoying at best.
“First of all, we should probably introduce ourselves,” the redhead says, breaking the silence first. “I’m Uzumaki Suichū,” he motions with his hands at the blonde and her light-haired companion, “these are Yamauchi Asami, Hoshinoumi,” and finally nods toward Kaneko, “and Kaneko Kaiousei.”
“A pleasure,” Harry says as he takes a moment to think about his introduction, mostly because they might want something more formal to call him yet the R’s on his last name don’t quite translate well into Japanese, before settling on a second option which is simple enough to work, “I’ll go by Kuro Hari,” he makes a point to pronounce his first name the way Minato does, not remembering any words that sound the same in Japanese but not caring enough to ask if it means something. “And this is Namikaze Minato,” he adds with a motion to the blond still standing by his side. “Now, what exactly did you mean by needing help to leave? Reapers aren’t supposed to keep anyone who wants to from moving on.”
It’s only because he’s paying close attention to the Uzumaki that he notices a slight wince before the man speaks, “It’s not that they’re keeping us from moving on, but we’re… stuck, for lack of a better term. Too anchored to leave this plane,” the redhead explains. “You may have noticed the barrier around the city?” At Harry’s nod – and undoubtedly annoyed look – he continues, “We’re the ones powering it.”