Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Sparks in the Dark
Auror missions always looked tidy in ink.
“Locate. Apprehend. Secure.”
Three words that could fit on a line and never once captured the taste of ash in your mouth, or the way your heart climbed your throat when green light cut through smoke like a hunter.
Tonight the manor was a skeleton of its former arrogance—roof torn open to the cold sky, marble steps spiderwebbed with fractures, portraits burned into husks. I moved through its ribs in a half-crouch, the air loud with ricocheting spells. My wand ran hot, a living thing against my palm.
“Left flank!” someone shouted. Dawlish—older now, steadier, one shoulder permanent scar from the Battle of Hogwarts.
“I’ve got it,” I called back, and cut across the foyer.
A flicker—then the corridor ahead bloomed with curses: purple ropes, acid jets, a sickly green that made my magic buck. I threw my shield up—“Protego Maxima!”—and the world chimed as glass-humming power met fury. The shield held; the floor didn’t. Marble dust rose in a dragon’s breath as a section of landing gave way.
“Potter!” A Death Eater’s laugh knifed the smoke. “So noble. So tired.”
I was tired. Thirty-three and feeling all of it tonight. War didn’t end; it changed uniforms.
I stepped out of cover, robes singed, hair sweat-plastered to my forehead. “You’re trespassing,” I said, because it was easier than saying I’m so very done with you. My wand snapped up, a red cut through shadow. “Stupefy.”
Green met red. They hit, tangled—wrong. I felt it in my bones first, a pressure like storm-sky before lightning. The magic between us bent, shrieked, and then tore. White poured from the tear, not light so much as erasure—edges unmaking.
I didn’t have time to swear.
The floor fell out; gravity forgot me; the smell of ozone drowned the manor’s ash.
Then the universe changed its mind about where I belonged.
Impact.
Stone? Dirt? Both. Pain arrived in a chorus—dull, stunned, everywhere. I tasted copper and grit. When sound came back, it was not a ruined English manor. It was insect hum, wind through leaves, distant…bells? No—metal on metal, rhythmic, like a gate being patrolled.
I opened my eyes to stars I didn’t know and a sky too clean.
I lay in a smoking crater, cape half-buried in churned earth, wand still welded to my hand by reflex and stubbornness. Above me, silhouetted by moonlight, two figures peered down—armored flak vests, headbands with a metal plate stamped by a spiral leaf. Not wands. Blades, held with easy promise.
One barked something clipped and sharp in a language cousin to Japanese but not. My wand twitched up before my mouth could move.
“Don’t,” I said, and my voice was hoarse but steady. “I’m…lost.”
They didn’t relax. Reasonable.
Behind them—walls. High, curved roofs inside the perimeter, lanterns glowing in warm beads. The village looked like a painting set gently into a forest, except for the chakra—yes, chakra; I didn’t have the word yet but my magic did. It thrummed here, through earth and bark and blood, a second heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
The taller of the two put a hand to his ear, murmured into—an earpiece?—and nodded to me without taking his eyes off my wand. “Stay,” he managed in careful, accented Common. “Reinforcements.”
“Of course,” I muttered, and lowered my wand just enough to be polite but not foolish.
Minutes stretched taut. The air shivered; three masked figures fell out of the night and landed around my crater without sound. Bone-white masks. Animal faces. Cold eyes. The middle one—fox—tilted his head.
“Identify,” he said, precise as a scalpel.
“Harriet Potter,” I answered, picking my way to standing. The crater complained under my boots. “Auror. British Ministry of Magic.” The words sounded absurd out here. “There was a…magical anomaly. Fight gone wrong. I fell out of my world and into your sky.”
A pause like a held breath.
“Foreign chakra,” Fox said at last. “Unknown. Unstable arrival.” His gaze flicked to my wand. “Weapon?”
“Conduit,” I corrected, and offered enough of a smile it wouldn’t be mistaken for a threat. “Also a weapon.”
Another beat. Then he gestured, crisp. “You will come. Hokage.”
I glanced at the lantern-lit roofs, the watchful shadows. I could have fought—blinded them, run, vanished into trees I didn’t know with an exhaustion I couldn’t afford.
Instead, I nodded. “Lead the way.”
Better to meet the person who ran the village.
Better to look power in the eyes and introduce myself properly.
As they walked me through the gate, villagers looked up from their late errands and conversations, a ripple of attention trailing us. Children paused mid-game, a woman tightened her grip on her toddler, a shopkeeper’s ladle stilled over simmering broth. No accusations, no jeering—just wary, puzzled curiosity.
I kept my wand low and my chin high and counted details the way Aurors breathe: guard rotations, narrow alleys for vanishing, bell tower lines of sight, an archer’s roost one roof over, the scent of broth and cedar. And under all of it, that thrumming chakra river.
My magic pricked its ears and listened.
The tower—office?—was all pale wood and clean lines. The woman behind the desk took up space the way mountains do. Blonde hair tied back, green eyes the precise color of hospital corridors and haunted forests. She assessed me like a surgeon deciding between sutures and amputation.
“Report,” she said without looking away from me.
“Unknown chakra signature,” Fox answered. “Claims foreign origin and anomalous transit. Magic user.”
“Magic,” she repeated, flat. Then: “Name?”
“Harriet Potter.” I swallowed the urge to add yes, that one. Different sky; different stories. “Senior Auror.”
Her mouth creased at “senior,” but she didn’t challenge it. “I’m Tsunade. Fifth Hokage.” She leaned back, arms folding. “Talk.”
I did. The raid. The clash. The tear like silence made visible. The fall.
When I finished, she drummed her fingers once against the desk—only once, but the wood agreed it would not be wise to make her tap again.
“You fell out of another world,” she said. “Into mine.”
“I don’t recommend it,” I said, because humor is a charm you cast on yourself first.
The corner of her mouth twitched. “You’ll be held under observation. Not a cell.” She shot me a look that said I could. “You were carrying yourself like a professional. But this village has a talent for attracting disasters with manners.” She glanced to the side, as if remembering a blond hurricane with a grin. “You’ll have a liaison.”
“Reasonable,” I said. “Do I get a name?”
“Tsunade-sama,” a voice drawled from the doorway, lazy and bright as mischief diluted in tea. “Were you…looking for me?”
Silver hair that had never known peace stuck up at friendly war with gravity. A slanted headband hid one eye. An orange book peered coyly from his hand. He took in the crater dust on my boots, the scorch on my cloak, the wand, the set of my shoulders, and filed it all away behind a mask that wasn’t only cloth.
“Hatake Kakashi,” Tsunade said. “Babysit the anomaly.”
He looked at me. I looked at him.
Something poised and dangerous smiled behind both of our eyes.
“Hello,” he said cheerfully. “I like your stick.”
“It likes me too,” I answered, and didn’t lower it.
“Good,” Tsunade said, too tired to be entertained and too sharp to miss the click of two gears that might grind or mesh. “Take her. Feed her. If she levels a block, tell me before you apologize to the neighbors.”
“Of course,” Kakashi said. “Come along, Miss Potter. Let’s not traumatize the ANBU by making them stand still any longer than necessary.”
I tipped two fingers to the masks in thanks I partly meant, and followed the man with the orange book into a village that had just become my problem.