The Other L (Harry Potter x Death Note)

Disclaimer: This story is fiction. All the characters, names and places belong to their respective owners.

"Talking"
'Thoughts'
Names of Things
"Memory Lane"
"Demonic Voice"
(Thought Bubbles)
Important Stuff

This is a short story. It's an alternative universe as Harry entered the realm of Death Note and reformed the Death Gods. They have been procrastinating for far too long! I estimated around 20k worth of words to this. There is no pairing for Harry since I don't feel like doing that for this kind of story.

=[The Other L]=
Exchange of Fate

"Thank you," the unruly jet-black hair man said with a small smile. He averted his eyes from the person by his side to the steaming cup of tea that was placed on the table before him. He then had a quick glance at the floor nearby.

"Shouldn't you clean that puddle over there? Someone might slip on it," the man pointed out and waited for the young waitress to acknowledge his words. She nodded to confirm and departed his table, allowing him to sip a little of the ordered tea. The cup was held in one hand via an elegant style that highlighted his ancestry to keen eyes as he enjoyed the drink immensely.

"I always enjoyed a good cup no matter where I am in the world," the man muttered to himself, placing the cup back on the metal table, which was bolted to the floor.

'Or in another world, for that matter,' the man finished the sentence with a thought and paid some attention to the television that was located in the middle of the diner.

There was special broadcast on.

"To the perpetrator of these serial murderers: You have committed the most abominable act in history," the man behind a desk on television stated sternly. The people, customers and waiters alike, within the restaurant abruptly stopped what they were doing. The newsman on the screen, who just taunted Kira, had their undivided attention. Kira, the accused, was a rising celebrity or serial killer depended on whose perspective.

Everyone was watching the broadcast except for the man with untidy black hair and startlingly green, almond-shaped eyes. He was doing something else with his black notebook with strange marking on its leather front cover. It was a symbol consisting of an equilateral triangle with a circle enclosing a circle with a vertical line splitting it into two equal halves.

He opened the book slowly, sliding his fingers between the empty white pages. That was what the pages appeared to be to the world. However, to his eyes, there were visible words that seemingly written in his own hand writing. Invisible to all, and the same could be said with his current, almost demonic, crimson red eyes. People would freak out if they saw it.

"Lind L. Tailor, a criminal on death row… he still has some times left today," the man mumbled as if he just read the description in the book for the first time. He returned his gaze to the screen as everyone in the restaurant was startled by a death on what implied to be a national broadcast.

"KIRA did it!" One of the customers called out. Several others were cheering on while the rest was visible appalled at the display. The jet-black hair man averted his eyes from the screen once more to his note book and away from the minor distraction. The black ink, previously formed the words in the victim's description, came together, merging into a blob before spreading out across the whiteness once more. New descriptions emerged from the onyx puddle.

"Lind L. Tailor died of sudden cardiac arrest on…" the owner of the book read the altered information and then stared back at the screen with a frown.

The television audio was replaced with someone else with a mechanical voiceover, as to create distortion in the voice and hid original no doubt, caught his attention once more. The black-haired man returned his attention to the book again afterward and flipped through the pages while thinking of who was dominating the news right now. This new person was calling himself L, which was obviously just an alias. Regardless of him never seeing L's face before, the book in his hand formed the required information for its master to read.

"L… so not an alias after all, Lawliet… male… human, died at age… 53, too much sweet," the man cited under his breath. He also noted the simplified info on some of L's endeavors and achievements in dot points along with a few unrelated things. The book, he acquired after entering this realm, sometime showed very strange things like L's addiction to sweet things. It also went on listing many tooth decaying substances, wasting much needed space on the page.

"Are you okay? You seem to be muttering a lot. Do you need a refill? Mr… " The girl with brown hair and blue eyes offered. She hesitated a little beforehand.

"Mr. Potter, but just Harry is fine. And do I mutter a lot? I'm sorry if it seems to be that way. There are too many things on my mind," Harry answered with a charming smile along with a thoughtful gaze. The waitress nodded in understanding while returning the expression.

"Oh yes, I would love a refill, Ms. Haruna," Harry added after noting her name tag in Japanese. Not that he needed to since her name was floating on top of her head in English. Being what he was had its own benefit after all. One of which had allowed him to understand any written or spoken language at will without needing him to use translation spell or similar. That ability saved him a few seconds only, but a perk was still a perk no matter how small or insignificance it may seems.

"Yukimo is fine, what do you make of this, Harry?" Yukimo asked as she indicated the television where L was now taunting Kira to kill him. Most viewers were in anticipation. Harry tapped the book to show information about Kira, but unfortunately the book remained silent as it was unable to determine who Kira actually was without Harry meeting or conversed with him before. It would have worked if Harry knew Kira's real name like L's, but the master of death lack the knowledge of that. Harry exhaled before looking up at the waitress again.

"Kira is someone using death as a game. I afraid I don't know what to think of that," Harry frowned, continuing to eye Yukimo. He was also clutching the open book in his hand with a slight anger. The girl had a brief glance at the blank white pages and smiled. She nodded lightly and moved along to the adjacent tables as she was called by other customers.

Harry looked at her retreating form and calculated the number associated with her floating names. It was slightly difficult because the numbers were viewed from behind. From them, Harry deduced that her life span was running out soon, and within the next hour or so. The green eyes man tapped the book in his hand, thinking about her as the note complied with his wishes.

"Yukimo Haruna… single… waitress… die at age 17, of gunshot wound and severe blood loss," Harry skimmed through the information and sighed at the end. It was her fate to die today, and what can he do to change that?

'So young; some died before they can truly live,' Harry thought grimly as he collasped the book in his hand. He had lived a full life, and died at old age happily in bed while being surrounded by loving relatives. Harry had thought that was the end, only for him to awake in a strange place and was giving many new tasks. That was so long ago and it felt like a dream now.

"You need to correct this world's balance. Hundreds of people just died in the past few weeks, and their remaining life spans were wasted. Some should have live until they're at an ripe old age, but they died with 60 or 70 years of their life remaining. These life energies is unclaimed and they are clogging up the birth and death cycles of that realm. What you need to do is as usual: Find out what's the death god of that world is doing and fix it!" A shadowy figure ordered from behind his elaborated desk with plenty of strange metal and bones ornaments on it. His crimson bloody, and glowing, red eyes was the only thing could be seen through the shrouding darkness.

"If I knew I couldn't move on because of those three items, I would never acquire the resurrection stone," Harry scolded himself before rubbing his head in annoyance. It was too late to change his fate, and his boss seemed like one hell of a creepy man. Even in death, he still has a lot of works to do.

Initially, finding out that his task entitled had really shocked him. He was to govern the thousands of world's balance and their associated reapers. Harry had tried to get out of it many times in the past, but the man in charge didn't let him. Harry even said he threw away the stone and broke the wand, but that was to no avail.

"Give it up already, even if you did that, you are still their master and thus, you cannot move on and avoid this until someone find them and claims them. Who every that is, would therefore replaces you and allows you move on to the afterlife. Oh yeah, don't bother killing yourself. Beside pointlessly hurting yourself, you just wind up here again and waste more precious time. Don't worry, you didn't miss much in the afterlife. Between you and me, it's kind of a crappy place. Just trust me on that," the man obscured by shadow said with a hint of mockery in his voice.

"Zero chance of that happening," Harry sighed, remembering what his senior had told him. The elder wand was broken into splinters with half of it thrown away and the other half was sealed in Dumbledore's grave for all time. The resurrection stone was left buried in the earth, undisturbed and unknown to all. The invisible cloak was cremated with him, and turned to ash even though it was a family heirloom. It was too powerful and easily abused as Harry stated in his will, and his children complied with his wishes. Being famous as he was, his tomb would forever be guarded against grave robbers, and even if somehow they could manage to recreate the cloak from its ashes, his successor must acquire all three items.

Harry saw there was no chance of that could happen unless there was some divine intervention.

And so, Harry had resided to his fate a long time ago, but that didn't mean he couldn't think about it whenever he had time and wondered how he could have done it differently. Back to the task at hand, Harry had taken the initiative of cleaning up the mess that called themselves the death god in this realm. They existed in a barren, dried and desolated place that Harry had dubbed purgatory. The atmosphere there was incredibly depressing, and the place badly needed to be rebuilt into a proper office. They, the Shinigami, were also annoying and lazy inhuman bunch, who had been procrastinating for far too long.

Most of them had completely forgotten what their actual jobs entitled to and needed to remind of that.

Harry did manage to find out from them, after the disciplinary actions, that many of them have gone rogue, running off to the human world to create havoc from the shear boredom. That effectively created more work for him.

Harry was in thought while looking at the puddle of the water on the tile floor. It still hadn't been mopped yet, and the black hair man pondered when an accident would occur. It was most likely very soon as death always accompanied him and made itself known at least once a day.

"Your wallets, money, give it here!" An unshaven Japanese man, in his mid-twenties, shouted at the top of his lung while pointing a gun at several customers. He previously barged through the restaurant's front door. Harry snapped out of his thought and looked up from his spot after hearing the demand. He scrutinized the armed robber's posture before sliding his finger across the notebook, causing the text to shift. The waitress, Yukimo, tried to persuade the thief but failing as he agitated started waving his gun around. From most view point, the man seemed to have an unstable state of mind at the moment.

"Norio Kobayashi, male, single, unemployed…" Harry muttered the new information along with a whole list of criminal activities committed by the same man. They were listed in order, past to present, including several recent attempted murders.

"Die at age of 41, overdose," Harry muttered while the book continued to describe what was happening currently in several short snippets with some jokes along the way like the man's body odor, and how it was affecting other people around him.

'The world really is unfair. He has at least fifteen more years left, but a young girl was to die on this day,' Harry thought with some guilt while watching the scene. He sighed after a while and laid his eyes on the book again.

'If I'm going to fix this realm's problem; I might as well help a few people along the way who truly deserve it,' Harry thought before nodding and gave a personal approval.

The master of death tapped the page on the book to transfer the remaining lifespan from one Norio Kobayashi to Yukimo Haruna, effectively switching their fate. Norio started to collect everyone's offered wallets. Once done with the first group, he moved closer to Harry's table. Everyone acted like a statue, seeing how the man was on edge, waving his gun around like a maniac. Norio tried to reach out to one elderly man's possession in haste, but in doing so, he wasn't paying much attention to his surround and slipped on the wet floor. He banged his temple hard at the metal edge of the tables before fainting.

The man's gun also went off as he collapsed to the floor, and the bullet grazed Yukimo's arm as she shrieked in pain. Fortunately, it wasn't a fatal wound so she would live. Many people in the store quickly dialed the emergency number on their phone and surrounded the collapsed form of their assailant. They were unable to help the man as he was no longer breathing. His blood pooled slowly across the former cleaned floor. It was constantly supplied from his wounded head. Everyone's attention was preoccupied with the deceased and the wounded, and no one had noticed a jet-black hair man was walking out of the store, leaving some money on the table, which was held down in place by an empty cup.

"Meddling with everyone's destiny is something we should not do. Everyone have their own fate, their own path that they must follow."

"Some people's fate should be change. Whoever Kira is, he's obviously using this realm reaper's power to take lives. If he's taking worst offender to make the world a better place then I would have looked the other way," Harry said, remembering some pointers from his superior moments before he entered this realm to carry out his task.

"But to kill someone out of spite because of simple taunt even if it's was on television… he crossed the line. How could I just stand by and do nothing? Has he killed so many that it became so easy for him to take the lives of other on a whim?" Harry added and sighed, looking around and seeing people names along with their remaining life floating on their head. Harry cleared his mind from all doubts and headed toward the city in the distant.

"I wonder how long this will take…" Harry muttered while shaking his head in annoyance. Death shouldn't be a game, and he will correct the mistake.

Author Note:

This story is very short and completely alternate universe (AU) as Harry, the master of death, fixes up some problem and punishes the offender. Mortals shouldn't have the powers to control life and death! If you must know, Harry is immortal. I implied it as such!

Comments, Criticisms and Reviews are welcome!
Flaming and Insults will be ignored.