Author's Note: Warnings that this is a side fic to "Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds" and if you're not decently caught up with that you'll be fairly confused. The other warning is that this is NOT CANON, for obvious reasons.

The stillness of early autumn, the scent of summer still lingering the air, that afterthought of humid warmth still present, the bite of winter not yet rushing through the winds, and an open window through which one could observe as the thousands upon thousands of leaves gave their swan songs through orange, yellow, and bright blinding red.

Children from the academy, along with those from the few civilian schools, rush through the streets, laughing and grinning, perfectly oblivious to the adults who step out of their way and scold them for their after-school mischief.

This peace, the sound of shinobi children untried by war, that still sweetness to the air, was such a tenuous thing.

This was what Death saw when he looked out of his window onto the streets of Konohagakure.

"Perhaps it has not occurred to you, Eru-san, that you do not have the option of staying neutral in this world."

The man glanced at Senju Tobirama, invited into the small apartment he'd been generously allowed to purchase, not quite in the civilian quarter of the city but not in a strictly shinobi complex either, and met the man's hard red stare for a moment.

(There were many things reflected in Senju Tobirama's eyes, a man who was not quite of his time but not quite outside of it either, betrayal, pragmatism, ambition, a deep and almost undying fraternal love, loyalty, and even a tender, worn, and fragile hope locked away where even he could not recognize that such a thing existed.)

And he smiled at the man, thinking that he would have liked this man, when he had been younger and convinced he truly was Harry James Potter. He liked him now, of course, but the young Harry, caught up in his own bitter destiny and struggle, would have liked this man quite a bit for all his terseness, "I'm afraid it is in my nature to remain neutral."

Death, as Mark Twain had once noted, was the fairest of all beings for he would come for everyone. Rich, poor, black, white, madman, philosopher, and alchemist; they all came to meet him in the end.

"Your daughter seems convinced otherwise."

His all but adopted daughter, Eru Lee who looked so much like his mother it almost burned, was very young. Not quite as young as Harry Potter had been at her age, not quite as untested or naïve, but none the less she hadn't seen what she needed to see to come to the decisions he had reached.

(She would, someday, and it would be far from pleasant.)

"And you may have her support for your military."

The words, "But not mine" echoed silently through the room.

The man, the second shadow of fire, scowled across at him but said nothing. Seemed more than willing to let his argument, really more of a casual comment, slide. Of course, the man was proving to be something of a regular visitor and Death had no misconception that he would be seeing him again.

Whether it was to discuss English, mathematics, philosophy, calligraphy, runes, poetry, physics, magic, Earth, the Yggdrasil, and anything or everything in between he'd see Senju Tobirama again and the man would no doubt bring this topic up again as the tensions, unresolved from the last war, loomed like a great shadow over them all.

And while he might momentarily accept this answer, the answer that his own student and current leader had come to accept, that Eru Hari, a man that no one quite dared to call the Shinigami, was not needed as a Konoha shinobi and was not worth the hassle to vet either, he would ask again.

And he would, again, fail to understand why Death must decline.

Not only for the scent of death and burning cities still clinging to his clothing, the memory of that last light of sentient thought flickering out, or even older and more enduring memories of the god emperor and his terrible and uncontrollable jihad, but for something more intrinsic and damning than any of these.

When Death abandoned neutrality, when he became a god of war beyond simply a god of death, then all sides were truly abolished and they would all drown in the river of their ill thought consequences.

There were many things he could note about Eru Lee, a girl whose name he suspected once contained Potter inside of it. There were aspects of her less visible to the human eye, that aura of power, the way everything turned towards her like sunflower blossoms seeking light, and everything she touched or said or did gained significance. There was her striking appearance, so different than Harry Potter's had been, thick red curling hair floating around her, inhuman pale skin, her lean adolescent frame, dark lashes kissing cheekbones, and her eyes… His eyes.

But what he lingered on, the image that stuck in his mind, was her hands. Pale, thin elegant fingers, short nails, but far more calloused and worn than Harry Potter's had been at her age in spite of all of his weeding and chores. These were the hands of a warrior, an artist, her fingers told the tale of throwing knives lodged in wood over and over and over again. Yet they retained their delicate bone structure, their feminine grace, so that there was something paradoxical and tender about the sight of them.

She held her hand out to him, palm facing upwards, fingers tremoring only slightly, "Come with me,"

And sitting on the golden root of the Yggdrasil, the great tree that encompassed all the worlds and their wonders, he stared at her hand and how the soft golden light played off of it.

Not a child's hand, but not a woman's either, something far more ephemeral than either.

And her eyes, all he could say that they were like his, more like his than Harry Potter's ever had been even in his most transient of moments. There was no Clark Kent to this girl, no hiding behind a stretched façade of humanity, and in her eyes there was both the bright spark of new light and that terrible heartbreaking reflection of humanity's great and terrible potential.

"Come with me, father," she repeated, not moving, that hand still raised towards him, "To Konohagakure."

(He had once bore the name Harry James Potter, sometimes with resentment and sometimes with great pride, and he had once had a daughter he called Lily Luna. He had had two sons and a daughter, and a wife, and for a short while he had been content.

This girl looked nothing like his daughter had.)

And was it strange, how in the shape of her fingers, the light playing off of her shortened fingernails, the blood splattered yellowing bandages wrapped around her palms, he could almost sense the world he had abandoned reaching back tentatively towards him?

There are more worlds for you yet, it said.

(Slowly, uncertainly, he reached for her fingertips, in spite of the blood splattered across her torn clothing and the battle magic buzzing like hornets in her fingertips.)

The boy, Namikaze Minato, came often, mostly with Lee, as they acted as twins or else shadows of one another, forever bound together by some unseen force (a great seal, a plea, and a bargain), but there were times when he came by himself as well.

He wasn't like Ginny.

There was something great and terrible in this boy in the way that there had been something great and terrible in Harry Potter and even in Tom Riddle. He had this force of charisma that made it almost impossible to look away from him as well as a great cleverness and even greater ambition. While his golden hair and bright blue eyes didn't paint him Tom Riddle's shade of tall dark and handsome he did have this inherent symmetry to his features that would make him quite handsome in a few years' time.

More like Tom Riddle, beautiful, brilliant, wizard of his age, Tom Riddle, than Harry Potter then.

However, unlike Tom Riddle, this boy was well acquainted with friendship and love, a deeper more frightening love than most humans would experience in all of their lifetime.

And he wasn't like Ginny at all.

For himself there hadn't been anyone after Ginny. How could there be? If it had worked, if it was going to work, his great human charade, then it would have been with her. And he did love her, or at least, Harry Potter did. And she loved Harry Potter, or at least, thought she did. But… Looking at the way Minato and Lee stared at each other, the way Minato could see past the pale veneer of Lee's humanity to the great incomprehensible god that rested beneath, and the way he seemed to accept that she was more than she presented and more than he could understand, Death wondered if he truly had loved her.

Ginny had fallen in love with Clark Kent, with the coke bottle glasses wearing, awkwardly thin and half-baked looking seventeen-year-old boy, heroism thrust upon him, who so desperately wanted to be Just Harry that he turned himself into an illusion, and Death… he had been in love with the idea of being Harry long before he realized what it meant.

He didn't know if they'd really loved each other.

But then, outside of epics and fantasy, he had no idea if Namikaze Minato and Eru Lee's connection was something to be envied or even desired.

What happened to the world, after all, when a god and a mortal shared that kind of a bond?

(Seeing the boy for the first time, hearing Lee's brief explanation of winding up in Konoha, it had dawned on him that whatever this thing was between them it had been strong enough to tempt the young girl-who-lived away from Number Four Privet Drive and the entire world along with it.)

But that wasn't now, now they were playing chess, a game the boy related to shogi and had picked up fairly quickly. Truth be told, and perhaps even ironically, the boy had more talent at it than Death did. It was a bit of an urban legend that Death, that he, was a master at chess and that he would barter anyone's soul over the outcome of a match. If that was the case then Ron Weasley would have earned himself immortality twenty times over, let alone Tom Riddle. That said, he had been playing a long time and was more experienced than the boy, who until Death had shown up had played the eerily similar game of shogi, and so for the moment he was winning.

If only just.

(Good god, this boy was eerily intelligent, enough to have given twelve-year-old Hermione a run for her money if not a complex. Many of the children seemed older here than they should be, than they had been in Hogwarts even with a civil war going on, but even in this regard he seemed to stand out.

Distantly he wondered if the twelve-year-old Tom Riddle had been similar.)

He had asked once, that first meeting without Lee, in the middle of the night with insisting, blazing, pale blue eyes, if he truly was Eru Lee's father.

Death had told him, plainly, no.

The boy had not asked since.

Whether he believed him or not was another story, as half of the village seemed torn on the issue. Some, like Lee's teacher and Lee herself, seemed to have concluded that there was no other option for him but to be her father. They looked too similar, had that same fey quality to them that proved quite recessive in his own children, and his insistence that they weren't just seemed too convenient. However, others, like the strange contemptuous Orochimaru (who while sharing unnerving habits with Voldemort mostly reminded him of Severus Snape), hedged that they were probably related but claiming that he was her father with only inconclusive blood tests to show for it was hardly an argument for paternity.

And besides, if he was the girl's father, then where had he been this whole time and why had he only chosen now to appear?

However, Minato would roam to other topics during their chess games, sometimes easy to answer and sometimes quite difficult.

Today, the boy had chosen the difficult path that liked to mockingly disguise itself as something benign, "Are you from England?"

Of course, he had been asked this before, when he had first arrived seemingly out of nowhere to the wary eyes of these assassins and warriors, he had bluntly said no that although he was achingly familiar with England he hadn't been there in a very long time.

And the boy probably knew that through Lee or if not Lee then his teacher who had a front row seat to those immigration interrogations. Where after bickering, probing questions, and even legillimancy (that poor bastard who had to look inside Death's head, he often wondered if they considered it worth it), they had finally decided that letting someone with his sort of power, with his sort of connection to one of their most promising citizens, would be a horrific mistake.

Even though there were some who did not like this at all.

So he wasn't asking if Death had lived in England recently, or even if he considered himself English, but more were you from there originally, "I was born there, but that was a very long time ago."

A long time ago and no time at all to the twelve-year-old Eru Lee and all those who made it their business to know her and her history.

The boy moved a piece forward, dangerously close to check now, causing Death to reevaluate the board once again and get back into that headache inducing mode of looking for patterns and thinking twelve steps ahead, "But you've been there, you grew up there, you know England."

The stain of England, it might be said, was still dark across his soul, "Yes."

"... Is Lee right about it?"

Death paused, fingering a pawn of his own, and although he wished he could claim to be ignorant he couldn't quite manage it. Because it had become clear that Lee, more than Harry, had not taken the Dursleys well or at all in stride. Harry Potter hadn't lost faith in the world, in love, in friendship even after eleven years of living with them… And that wasn't to say that Lee had lost faith, as it seemed she had never been convinced to have faith to begin with, but the world seemed like it had been terribly disappointing to her.

Such that a world as a child soldier seemed like paradise in comparison.

"Lee has her own way of seeing things. She's not wrong, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would agree with her." He sighed, turned his attention to the boy, and wondered if he knew how torn he looked right then.

Because Minato wished that Lee had had a better early childhood, that she hadn't learned how to interact with people by being shoved in a cupboard, but at the same time he must know that if Lee's childhood had been a little easier then she might very well not be here today.

It was remarkable, really, how far Eru Lee had traveled in search of something worthy of living.

"Do you believe it, though? That England was never real in the first place?"

Sometimes it seemed like a dream, or something that wasn't truly him, all the times and places connected to Harry James Potter and his prophecy, and perhaps if he was a little more philosophical and a little less sentimental then he might ponder if he hadn't dreamed it all up out of desperation.

All the same, "No, but I think for Lee, it's easier to believe that the world is without reason or rhyme, that it is collapsing, than to try and rationalize all those things that we can never quite bring ourselves to understand."

After all, what madman could truly state he understood the carnage of war?

This is the story of Eru Lee, told to Death in bits and starts from many different lips:

A young foreign born genin, who without a doubt would be a chunin by the end of the year when her team took the exams. Wildly powerful, easily the most powerful of her generation, seemingly inseperable from Namikaze Minato, and Jiraiya of the sannin's student.

Painfully awkward socially, but perhaps to be expected given her astronomical amount of chakra, as well as her inherent genius in ninjutsu (for genius's always seemed to lack in something to make up for their abilities).

Who the rumor mill claimed, sometimes in jest and sometimes in horrified realization for the sense it made, that she was the bastard daughter of an Uchiha and an Uzumaki, raised in secret on some civilian island out in the middle of the ocean. Although which Uchiha and which Uzushio nin was regularly left up to drunken debate.

Although Death's own appearance had complicated this tale, now it was Eru Hari who was the illegitimate son of Madara, who had made love to some fiery ramen loving Uzumaki seals' master.

(And there were those here and there who quietly wondered if she wasn't a god and if that made any difference at all.)

But this is just what she presents, its not really what she is, and those who know her well enough know this. These are the ones who give her strained, and sometimes genuine, smiles and try to accept her as she is without bursting a blood vessel.

This is the story of Eru Lee, told to Death, in bits and starts from Eru Lee's casual comments in between television commercials:

She grew up Eleanor Lily Potter inside of her uncle's cupboard, barely tolerated, and too precocious for her own age and lacking any explanation for her relative's distaste, unrelenting anger, and stupidity she decided that they, that the world she inhabited, wasn't real in the first place.

Nothing proved her wrong.

And after only four years, sitting inside of that cupboard, arms wrapped around her legs, staring at the wall with blank determination, she decided that she had no reason to stay and every reason to leave.

Then, perhaps realizing this, or perhaps hearing a beautiful cry out of the darkness, she reached forward for the light that burned too brightly for the world it found itself in.

The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and you have burned very, very brightly, Namikaze Minato. Look at you: you're the Prodigal Son; you're quite a prize!

She abandoned her given name with striking ease, picked up her trade as assassin with worrying grace, and had decided that while this new world had not convinced her of its reality either it was wholly far superior to the cupboard she left behind.

(And unbeknownst to her, England wept for the loss of its prophesized martyr. Or perhaps she did know, deep down, and simply didn't care.)

He met the eyes of the horcrux once, passing through the Senju compound, and for a moment he had simply stopped and stared at Tom Marvolo Riddle dressed in eastern clothing with humming ink drawn upon his skin.

And he thought, more than remembering that sobbing boy under the bench in Purgatory or the monster Voldemort had turned himself into and how this young man looked nothing like him, that England would never defeat him now.

Not without Ellie Potter and her final horcrux.

His own lack of neutrality was more than alarming.

"Are you certain you wish to be a shinobi?"

Lee looked up at him, resting against his shoulder on the couch as they watched one of this world's fantastical television programs, and he could see that she didn't understand his question at all.

That he meant that she shouldn't, that handing her type of power to an overlord or even the people themselves was not wise, had led to the destruction of great emperors. That, more, she should be wary of her own overwhelming feelings for Namikaze Minato and perhaps even his for her. Because gods didn't love mortals for a reason, there was a divide between them for a reason, and to forget that…

But she only said, with the reflection of destroyed worlds staring out from her eyes, "Of course, why wouldn't I?"

Author's Note: Well this was a weird little poetic drabble thing, with obligatory Blade Runner quotes no less. Written for the 100th review of "The Strange Case of Merlin's Identity Theft", that's right, that weird side fic about Lily pretending to be Merlin has over 100 reviews. Written for the review by darkflare75 who asked for a fic where we see Death in Konoha, so yup, we have this.

Thanks for reading, reviews are greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Naruto.