Summary: As Master of Death, Harry Potter, after his mortal body dies, is tasked with sending his legion of mindless death minions to take the lives of those whose times have come. However, in a moment of distraction, Harry accidentally kills one Sawada Tsunayoshi before he's supposed to die. Out of a sense of obligation (and boredom, really), Harry decides to take his place. This goes just about as well as one would expect. Prompt taken from writing-prompt-s on tumblr.
A/N: To get back into the spirit of writing. Probably is going to stay as a very vague oneshot.
XxX
"Boss, I've taken care of Sector 354 in the United States for today."
Harry Potter hummed, staring at his laptop to figure out the logistics of who, exactly, needed to die tomorrow. There was that warlord in Sector 213 in Africa, but it wasn't his time yet, exactly. Just because he was a horrible man didn't mean Harry could decide to kill him off willy nilly. However, the child in Sector 947 in Japan was supposed to be a stillbirth, which would inspire the kid's father to donate thousands to charities and in turn save hundreds of lives. Harry signed off on the baby's form and dumped it in the 'To Kill' pile.
"Good job. Take Sector 836 in Korea. There's going to be a robbery that goes wrong, so it's going to be busy. Take along someone else if you need to," Harry muttered distractedly to the awaiting death minion. The black hooded figure nodded and shuffled through several piles on Harry's cluttered desk to retrieve the needed papers for Sector 836 and floated out of his office.
Harry sighed and rubbed his eyes. Day after day, year after year, he'd been taking care of the logistics of killing people after his unfortunate death. Apparently, the title of Master of Death was not for show, and upon the eve of his demise, Harry found himself surrounded by floating grim reapers reminiscent of Dementors (complete with black hoods and scythes) and being told in no uncertain terms that he was now in charge of them. Instead of the bloody work of chopping off heads, this job entailed sitting at a desk and micromanaging his minions. While this should have been accompanied by a heady sense of power, Harry found himself instead bored to tears. That business man had 5 more years until he died via car crash, that terrorist would die tonight from assault, that doctor would live until the ripe old age of 95, and that lawyer would meet his end at the hands of a very angry client.
Harry wasn't quite sure how long he'd been doing this job, considering whatever space Harry and his death minions lived in was essentially timeless and hours and days and years didn't really matter, but he really regretted picking up the damn wand and ring. He didn't regret the cloak, though. Good times were had with the cloak.
"Boss, I'm here for my next assignment."
Harry crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes at the newly arrived death minion.
"What's your name?" Harry usually asked every minion the same question, but he never remembered the names. It was more of a politeness thing than real curiosity.
The death minion shifted, bemused at the strange question. "Joseph, sir."
"Joseph, Joe, can I call you that?" Harry asked rhetorically, since he wasn't really expecting and didn't even want an answer. "Joe, how were you guys managing all this death business before I collected the Hallows?"
Joe seemed to shrug, a ripple around the shoulders of the cloak. Tendrils of darkness rose and whirled in the air with the motion, and the shadows on the wall behind the figure clawed at the surface.
"It was a joint effort among all of us, sir," he replied as another death minion floated through the door and waited politely to receive his files and be on his way to possibly kill that poor college student who had just gotten into grad school. Shame. "It was disorganized, and there were many incidents in which we accidentally killed the wrong person and let another live past his deadline. It's much better with you here, sir."
Harry hummed and waved at a small stack of papers for the second minion to take. He (she? it?) took them obediently and floated out the door. Joe seemed envious of the departed death minion.
"And what would happen if, say, I disappeared?" Harry wondered.
"Probably the same thing that happened during Grindelwald's reign," Joe replied. "We accidentally let him live past his time and couldn't find a good time to kill him off. We had to overwork to then account for all the deaths during his time as a Dark Lord. Hopefully you won't leave."
Harry gave the minion the stink eye, to which the hooded figure shrank (as much as a 4 meter tall personification of death could shrink) apologetically.
Harry signed off on another form, slid it onto a stack that was starting to lean to a side dangerously, and motioned to it. "Your next assignment, Joe. After that, take a good vacation, go visit the Bahamas or something."
"Sir," the minion acknowledged and whisked the pile into a dimension pocket. Because, you know, death minions could do that in addition to harvesting souls and carrying around a scythe.
XxX
It was very rare that Harry made a mistake since that first year. The first couple of times Harry tried his hand as the Master of Death was horrendous. Some countries experienced unexplained deaths (it was when Harry was in denial about the whole thing, okay, he didn't mean to kill all those people) while others were reporting about how the nursing home housing 110 year old people in Brazil hadn't had a death in years. Everything had, thankfully, stabilized the more familiar Harry got with his job and found which forms meant what. That didn't mean, however, that he didn't occasionally make mistakes.
"Sir, you gave me the wrong person to kill," a death minion whose name Harry learned was Sally said blandly. She (and it was going to be a she because, despite no outward signs of gender, Sally was typically a girl name and thus, to save Harry's slipping sanity, Sally was going to be a she) waved around a form that had red ink dripping off of it slowly, usually an indication that that person wasn't supposed to die. There was a pool of red starting to form on the ground, with the muted screams of the dead echoing out of it. Harry ignored it.
"Did I really?" Harry frowned, grabbing the paper and peering down at it. He then consulted his trusty laptop (thank Merlin this realm seemed to have a fantastic IT department) and said, somewhat wonderingly, "Oh, it seems I did."
"How should we fix it, sir?" Sally asked in a rumbling tone.
See, Harry had made this exact same mistake many times before. Instead of that farmer dying by getting run over by a cow, that gymnast died from what should have been a fantastic and successful back flip but instead ended in a broken neck. Like mentioned earlier, Harry hadn't been a very good Master of Death when he first started. Now, though, Harry was a paperwork god. Unfortunately, Harry was still human (if humans were immortal and orchestrated a bunch of grim reapers) and still made mistakes.
"We didn't really fix any of my past mistakes," Harry stated. "Why do we need to fix this one?"
"With all due respect, sir, your past mistakes didn't affect the state of the world. The people you accidentally killed or let live weren't very important, so we just killed whoever was supposed to die and continued our duties. However, this child would shape the history of the underworld, and unfortunately, killing him may make modern society take a turn for the worse. In effect, sir, you've fucked up." The report was concise and accurate, and Harry didn't take offense.
Harry nodded and held out her next assignment. "For you. Give me a while and I'll come up with a solution."
The minion tilted her head, which cast light on the rotting flesh and beady eyeball underneath, took the papers, and floated out.
XxX
After a bit of pondering (during which Harry froze time because apparently that was also in the list of powers being the Master of Death had given him; he needed to fix this problem, and freezing time seemed to be a prudent thing to do during this time of crisis), Harry waved in a death minion when it passed by his open door.
"What's your name?" Harry asked as the minion stood ramrod straight in front of his desk.
"Benjamin, sir." What was up with death minions with bland names?
"Ben, how do you propose we fix this mistake?" Word had gotten out, it seemed, about the problem Harry had on his hands. Death minions, in reality, were horrible gossips.
Clearly Ben was as out of his depth as Harry was. This did not make Harry feel any more comfortable.
"Well," Ben said slowly, which only served to make the grating tones and shrill screeches of death in his voice more pronounced, "one of us could take his place. We know how his life will play out and how he will die, so all we have to do is follow a script. Perhaps the world will not end up exactly as how it should were the real boy still be alive, but with Fate's help, I'm sure we can manage."
A very prolonged and pregnant silence filled the room. Despite their affable nature, death minions didn't seem like the ideal replacements for humans, in Harry's opinion. Harry also hated Fate after all the shit Fate put him through when he was alive, and if Harry ever had to see the big lumbering male twirling his moustache and fucking up people's lives just because he could, it would be too soon. If Harry had to live out another life as directed by Fate one…more…time…
"What if I filled this guy's life?" Harry asked slowly, a genius plan forming in his head.
Ben did not think it was a genius plan. It was very entertaining to watch the death minion, whose reactions were usually muted to shifting subtly in disapproval or straightening their bodies in satisfaction, actually jerk in alarm.
"You cannot!" Ben said, somewhat desperately. "We cannot return to the dark times before your arrival, sir. The chaos and the disorganization…" The minion was clearly traumatized, and the terrified pleas of the dead became more pronounced in the room. There was a clear sense of terror pervading the room. Harry cheerfully ignored it.
"I will, and as my minions, you cannot stop me," Harry said, somewhat gleefully. A chance to be human again! An opportunity to feel his heart beat in his cold dead chest and to feel warmth tingle in his blackened fingertips, a chance to have actual eyeballs instead of rotting holes in his head and to eat real food. There was no way in hell (or any other realm, fictional or otherwise) Harry was letting this opportunity pass. "I'll fulfill the role this guy was supposed to have, and I'll return when he dies. The lives of mortals are only a blink to us, right? So I'll be back in a jiffy."
"You cannot!" Ben repeated, and by now the poor thing was clearly distressed. There were several minions waiting outside the door to receive their assignments, and their heads crowded together to hear what the commotion was about. For a bunch of immortal, powerful beings that dealt death like candy, they sure did act like a bunch of children sometimes, hysterical Ben included.
"Don't worry, I'll work extra hard to get the next 30 years of work done so you'll have your assignments," Harry soothed. "And then you guys can probably handle it for another 30 years before I return, right? It says here that the guy dies when he's 67, so I'll be back before you know it."
And that is the story of how Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, the Master of Death, took the place of Sawada Tsunayoshi.
XxX
A/N: Yes, that's it. That's the story, which was meant to be a humorous oneshot as an apology to everyone who's waiting for that next chapter of any of my other stories to come out and will probably be disappointed. Apologies.
Sincerely yours,
haplessgrapefrut