Author's Note: To those about to read this I offer the warning that this is a side fic to "Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds" and makes far more sense if you read that first. I also offer the warning that this is NOT CANON, for very obvious reasons.
Minato and Lee didn't normally have guests in their apartment.
It wasn't that they were against the idea of entertaining guests or even unprepared to entertain guests but more that there was an unspoken rule about the public and private lives of Minato and Lee.
There was something more private, more intimate, that could be expressed without concern inside of their apartment. Minato could shed the necessity to translate for Lee as well as to buffer her from the outside world and the outside world from her, and as for Lee, she could allow herself to believe that she understood things as they truly were and that no one would try to correct her.
Inside they could switch between the common tongue and English without batting an eye, talk about tessering, relativity, and everything and anything in between.
It wasn't that Minato was against other people in their apartment but nevertheless there was something in him that hesitated when Jiraiya and Haru first visited. It'd been impromptu, Jiraiya's insisting, because it certainly hadn't been Haru's idea.
Haru looked mildly terrified, probably thinking that it looked too normal considering Lee lived there too, he kept looking around as if expecting to find a hole to another dimension or one of Orochimaru's dissected Lee clones.
And Jiraiya kept rifling through their things, "You know, I really didn't expect this place to be so clean."
"Well, we don't really own enough to make it messy, sensei." Minato said, not to mention they usually ate out anyway so they didn't have to clean the kitchen that often.
"It's actually mildly creepy how clean it is, squirts, that's just not natural for kids your age." Jiraiya said as he moved from opening drawers filled with clothing, inspecting Lee's brightly colored English tunics and shorts that she sometimes would wear on off days, to the books and papers that had been placed on top of the wardrobe.
"I find it mildly creepy that you invited yourself over to rummage through our stuff." Lee helpfully pointed out as she lounged by the table with a cup of tea, eyebrows raised as she watched Jiraiya's movements.
"Hey, it's perfectly natural for a sensei to be concerned about the living situation of his two least favorite students." Jiraiya said before adding with that grin that he probably thought was charming, "You two are way too young to be engaging in the delightful naughtiness that comes when a man and a woman share an apartment."
Minato spit out his tea and started choking, his face flushing red, and in a moment he realized that he had never thought about the fact that Lee was a girl and one day soon would fit Jiraiya's definition of a woman and that there was a possibility that someday he and Lee really would be engaging in Jiraiya's delightful naughtiness.
(And there was another part of him that had always noticed, deep in the depths of his subconscious, that beyond her poppy red hair and leaf green eyes Lee's hands had always felt smooth and soft against his skin…)
Lee seemed perfectly unaffected, sipping her tea calmly, and replying, "You mean your favorite students."
Jiraiya stopped, considered her and Minato, and then dully said, "No, I mean my least favorite students."
Jiraiya returned to rummaging leaving Minato sit uncomfortably in the silence, noticing the gaping expression that Haru was looking at him with, and he just knew that the next day every genin in Konoha would think that he and Lee did delightfully naughty things in their apartment when no one was watching.
Kushina would think he and Lee were doing delightfully naughty things in their apartment and she would probably say something about Lee being… slightly more dominant.
Minato felt like his face was on fire and he wanted to die.
"Hey, what's this, code?" Jiraiya said, and in his hand he had one of the origami containers that stored messages (Lee had called them envelopes).
"Hm, oh, that's just English." Lee said, barely having to glance at the letter, but Jiraiya was much more interested and had stopped all pretense of searching through their things to stare at the characters.
"English? That's the country you're from, right? Where the village of Surrey is?" Jiraiya said, opening the envelope and taking out the letter, his eyebrows raising as he scanned through even more of the English characters.
"What does it say?" Jiraiya asked, frustrated, looking over at Lee.
Lee raised a hand and used the grabbing jutsu to summon one of the other duplicate letters towards her and in an unimpressed tone read the familiar message on the envelope, "Eleanor Lily Potter (we'll just leave that as Eru Lee), Apartment 3B, The Village Hidden in the Leaves, Land of Fire."
She quickly cast the envelope aside, pulled out the letter, and began to translate it in the same tone using the same words she and Minato had settled on almost a year before, "Hogwarts Academy of Witchcraft and Impersonating Gandalf. Headmaster: Dumbledore Albus (Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Gandalf, Super Gandalf, Supreme Mugwump, Isengard)."
They had never managed to figure out what a Mugwump was or what the difference was between a Grand Sorcerer and a Chief Warlock. After debating for a few days they had decided that there probably wasn't a difference and settled for calling anything related to the English word wizard, a Gandalf.
It probably wasn't the best translation but he and Lee had found much better uses of their time since then.
"Dear Eru-san. We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts Academy of Witchcraft and Impersonating Gandalf. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July. Yours sincerely, McGonagall Minerva, Deputy Headmistress." Lee threw the first page away and then flipped to the second where she continued, "Then it lists a bunch of things I'll need… Three sets of black kimono for work, a pointy hat, one pair of dragon gloves, one cloak. A bunch of books that… No, we're not even getting into the books. And we're definitely not getting into the equipment section."
Jiraiya just stood there, blinking, much the same way that Minato had when Lee first read him the first letter they'd received, "What is that supposed to mean?"
Minato and Lee looked at each other, because they still weren't quite sure what it meant. Lee insisted the letters were a sign from God that reality was falling apart and that it had started spamming her with gibberish.
Minato was still on the fence about the whole thing but he did know that he didn't think it meant that reality was really a giant genjutsu like Lee insisted.
"A year ago owl summons kept showing up to give Lee letters from England and wouldn't stop until Lee helped them win some skirmish in the summons dimension." Minato said, as far as he knew the owls were still getting the letters, they'd just stopped flooding Minato and Lee's apartment with them.
"Owl summons? Does anyone in Konoha even have a contract with the owls?" Jiraiya asked, clearly thinking it over, but the owls had never really talked about who they were contracted to or where they had come from.
They'd been just about as irritated by the whole thing as Lee and Minato were saying that they'd gotten the damn things off of owls in another dimension who also were very tired of the letters at that point.
"And what do they mean by academy?" Here Jiraiya's eyes sharpened and looked over to them but they just shrugged.
"You said there weren't any shinobi in England." Jiraiya said and Lee nodded causing Jiraiya to add, "But here it says they're inviting you to their academy."
"Well, yes, but I don't think wizard equates with ninja." Lee said, and it had taken a bit of explaining on her end when they'd gotten the first letter, to explain the concept of a wizard, "Not that there are wizards in England either."
"Well, someone sent you this letter." Jiraiya said to which Lee, again, shrugged which was her way of wordlessly conveying that in English the letter had sounded even more ridiculous.
Minato had actually blamed Kushina for it for months, because it was just the sort of thing she would try in there last few months in the academy, even though he knew there was virtually no way for her to learn how to write in English let alone be able to speak it fluently when Minato himself still had trouble sometimes.
Kushina hadn't appreciated his commissioning an army of Lee-clones to rival Orochimaru's whose only purpose was to inconvenience her at every turn. Although, when the whole thing had been sorted out, she actually admitted that she wished she'd thought of the never-ending nonsensical letters first.
Hers would just insist that she'd be hokage and that Minato would one day turn into a beautiful princess instead of an invitation for Lee to attend a wizard and witchcraft academy.
Jiraiya didn't look nearly as dismissive though, instead he put the letter back into the envelope and said in a voice that sounded casual but was anything but, "All these letters say the same thing then?"
"We stopped reading after the hundredth but I'd think so." Lee said before adding, "I really don't think it's all that important though."
"Well, you never know, besides my old sensei might want to have a look at it too. Not to mention I'm sure the nidaime would get a kick out of actually seeing English instead of just listening to you and Minato-kun whisper secrets and giggle at each other."
Sometimes Minato really had problems with his sensei and wondered why he respected the man so much or why anyone respected him. Of course, that was why he did it, because it distracted you from what he was really after.
Like the fact that Jiraiya was taking this letter straight to the hokage and the hokage before him, perhaps even the shodaime as well. There was no hint of it in the casual way he strolled out of their apartment though, whistling a tune, waving the envelope back and forth in the air like a little white flag but it was there residing underneath the underneath.
Lee, for all her purposeful obliviousness must have noticed it to, because as soon as he was out of sight she turned to him and asked, "Why do I have the feeling that our lives just became ten times more complicated?"
Four men seated together overlooking the hokage's desk, each feeling more or less as ridiculous as the next, huddled over two sheets of parchment and an envelope with indecipherable and unfamiliar characters. Next to this, far messier, was the working translation of its contents.
"Are you sure this is what it says?" The shodaime finally asked with raised eyebrows at the contents, even though he had been invited more for formality than anything else.
When Jiraiya had brought the letter initially to the hokage he had expected to be working on it himself along with the nidaime and maybe a Nara or Orochimaru (although Oro had never really had an interest in encryption or codebreaking for all his genius).
But there wasn't really a point in that, because it wasn't a code, it was another language with an entirely different script than the one they used.
So instead it had become a political matter, one which the current hokage felt it best to bring his two predecessors in for, as they'd come to be more or less unofficial advisors.
"Well, since this is the only sample of English I've ever seen and Lee-chan and Minato-kun don't exactly go out of their way to even speak it that much it's about the best I can do. We really have to take Lee-chan's word for the contents…" Jiraiya winced, because taking Lee's summary of anything at face value was always a recipe for disaster. It wasn't that she was ever… wrong, it just only made sense if you titled your head a little to the side and squinted.
"This is becoming a problem." The nidaime said with an irritated scowl, "Not to mention that we've been avoiding the uses of an unknown completely unfamiliar language for years. This could be extremely useful for encoding."
Unfortunately, that boiled down to taking language lessons from Eru Lee which was why it still hadn't happened and Minato was the only one who had managed to pick up any of it. Minato probably only had managed because he'd been almost five at the time and he and Lee had that weird mental connection and probably had been terrifying twins in a past life.
"No one is stopping you, sensei." The hokage said with a small smile, as if he was thinking the exact same thing as Jiraiya, and just picturing the nidaime trying to sit down and learning how to speak another language from Lee.
Lee-sensei, God help them all.
"Not the point, the point is that Lee said it talks about an invitation to an academy." Jiraiya said before they all got off track, "She said it wasn't a shinobi academy, and still insists that there aren't any shinobi in her homeland but…"
But the word academy and the other words that Lee had associated with it sounded dangerously close to how an ignorant civilian might talk about jutsus and chakra. Magic was the word used by the uninformed and Lee had specifically mentioned witchcraft.
"But she was very young when she came here." Hashirama completed for him, "But maybe this is a good thing. It's been a year since they received the letters and nothing has happened since, if there is a hidden village in England, this can be our way to establish ties."
"And make contact with what remains of the Eru clan." The nidaime added, still convinced almost irrationally that Lee couldn't have just sprung up from nowhere, that some clan would have a history of her ridiculous blood limit.
"I don't know if it's a great idea." Jiraiya said before hastily adding, "Look, it could work out great but… This means we'd have to send Lee-chan and Minato-kun at the very least, that they'd have to translate for everyone. Now, I like Lee-chan, I believe in her potential but I don't trust her to translate for me or tell me exactly what someone else is saying. Not to mention, that if there is a hidden village in England and they realize just how powerful Lee-chan really is, or if she's from an established clan, then it will be very difficult to get her back to Konoha."
They would make a kidnapping attempt, if Jiraiya was kage he would be planning as soon as she set one foot on the country's soil, ANBU would be following her every move and just waiting for an opportunity to strike.
Only a great fool of a kage would let that sort of power, power that had been born in their own village, walk in and back out again.
"They also might not, we know nothing about this village, or even if there is a hidden village at all." Hashirama said before wistfully adding, "After all, Konoha wasn't even a concept before Madara and I came together."
Jiraiya had never lived during that time though, had grown up inside the village, so it was hard to conceive a world without a village or a world without hidden villages that would still invite children to an academy that taught jutsus.
They could just walk away, ignore it, but then perhaps one day England really would come to them. These might be the best terms they received, and better to know your enemies and friends now, then to realize you should have sought them out later.
"Well, I hope to God there aren't any plant zombies in England." Maybe they could finally get in a decent pseudo C-rank for once even if all the unknown elements could stick it anywhere from C to A.
"No way."
Jiraiya looked at her, looking disappointed, as if she'd just crushed all his hopes and dreams but for all she cared he could continue to look like that. There was no way in hell that she was going to teleport to England.
As far as she was concerned, and had been concerned for the past seven years, England didn't even really exist anymore.
Konoha, while flawed, was just so much better than England had ever been that there was no competition. There was no reason to go back and the idea had never even occurred to her until Jiraiya had come out of nowhere saying that it was time to pack up and visit Lee's homeland.
"Hokage's orders, Lee-chan, afraid it isn't something you have a choice in." Jiraiya said and that had sealed the deal on many things but visiting the Dursleys, in its own way, was much worse than dealing with Tora the demon cat.
"There's nothing even worth seeing there!" At least, not when she'd been there, the most exciting her days had ever gotten was finding new ways to outrun Dudders when he got bored of the television. Most of the time the place had been hopelessly dull and when it wasn't dull it was empty, as if it was hollow and only the image of the world remained within it.
"Clearly, according to your letters, there is." Jiraiya said, waving the stupid Hogwarts letter in her face again, "So we're going, we're going to see what the fuss is about, and then we're going to report back."
"But there's nothing to see!" Lee cried, almost tearing her hair out, but her sensei wasn't even listening anymore had really stopped listening to her a long time ago and now only would listen to her if Minato verified it.
She looked to Minato, her last chance, but he looked torn and not convinced that there was absolutely nothing worth seeing in Surrey whatsoever. She'd told him already, had told him even when they first met, but something about England just seemed exotic to him and always had no matter how many times she'd told him it wasn't.
Minato wanted to go to England.
And if Minato wanted to go to England, Jiraiya wanted her to go to England, and now the hokage wanted her to go to England she more or less had no choice than to go to England.
"Well, if there's nothing to see then we'll just head back early." Jiraiya said with a shrug, "Besides, the nidaime's wanted to go to England ever since you brought him back from the dead, you can't disappoint him now."
Now even the nidaime hokage wanted to go to England.
She felt herself sinking to the grown, sitting, disappearing into the earth like a very determined mole who never wanted to see the sunlight or people who wanted to go to England ever again.
"…Lee-chan?" Jiraiya asked, somewhere in the distance.
She looked up, at the dubious face of Dead Last, at Minato's raised and worried eyebrows, at Jiraiya, and said simply, "When we get there, I will tell you that I told you so, and you will have no choice but to listen."
Everything Lee had ever said about her aunt, uncle, and cousin, since she and Minato had first started communicating had been more or less alarming. Over the years a very bleak picture had come together, to the point where he understood why it was that Lee seemed so indifferent to the prospect of blood family.
He didn't know if she had really lived in a cupboard, he didn't know if she had been forced to do D-ranks without pay, he didn't know if her uncle would scream at her and sometimes hit her, he didn't know if she'd almost been eaten by her aunt's dogs, but he knew that she had never once looked back to England after she arrived in Konoha.
But at the same time England had always held a sort of mysticism for him simply because it was so foreign. A place where they didn't wear kimono, where film theaters were more common than kabuki, where they had sent men to the moon in flying ships made of metal, where chakra didn't seem to exist at all, where there were ten thousand languages each sounding different than the next, where everything was fantastic and unfamiliar.
He had wondered sometimes what it would be like to see it for himself, instead of hearing stories second hand from Lee, tales of Shakespeare, Star Wars, and everything in between.
When the five of them had arrived he began to realize just why Lee had been so insistent on walking away and never turning back.
Lee's teleportation jutsu was always disorienting, she always seemed more or less fine, but every time Minato got pulled along with her there was a moment where his head spun and his stomach did backflips and he would be two seconds away from vomiting. One day, he thought to himself, he'd master teleportation as well just so that he would never have to deal with that nauseous feeling again.
This time was even worse than that, it was painful, he could feel himself stretching and his bones shaking as Lee pulled them further than she ever had before. The experience, the moving, itself seemed to take longer than it usually did and he could feel himself being pulled in all directions.
And when they arrived it wasn't into an open field or spacious room but instead inside somewhere small and dark with spider webs in the corners and dust caked on the floor. They didn't even really all fit, and instead were more or less entangled, sensei somehow managing to barely squeeze himself into the place.
"Uh, Lee, did you mean to bring us… here?" Haru asked, his face inches away from Minato's, looking a little more green than Minato would have liked given their positions. (If Haru threw up on him, so help Minato, he could not be held responsible for his actions)
"I can only teleport places I've been and the cupboard's the place I remember the best." Lee said, somewhere to his left, tangled up with the nidaime, "I spent some good quality time in this cupboard I'll have you know."
"Well, I would rather not." The nidaime said and then asked, "Who's closest to the door?"
"I think that's me, or my foot." Jiraiya said before adding "I don't think they really built this place for people my size."
Looking around, at the ceiling, the floor, and at the drawings left untouched on the wall (green fields and blue skies, trees and flowers, all in too bright colors but with exquisite details) he felt something in him curdle as he realized that Lee once did have to make do with this place.
There was a large crack as Jiraiya kicked open the door and they all came tumbling out into bright and artificial light and as they did they were met with a woman's scream. The nidaime and Jiraiya were on their feet in a second with hands ready for seals, Minato and Lee a half second behind, but then it became clear that this was not someone bleeding or dying or even an enemy but a shocked and horrified woman staring in horror and rage at them, and at Lee.
(But there was steel in Lee's eyes, the kind that had lingered after she had faced her regenerating plant jonin, as if this woman was just as dangerous as any enemy ninja.)
"You! You… You left! You disappeared!" The woman screamed, rapidly in English, and her expression was torn between rage, grief, and old bitterness that had long since gone sour.
"Well, it wasn't exactly my idea to come crawling back either." Lee said, more or less casually, but her fingers still terribly motionless and two seconds away from summoning a kunai or else a shuriken.
A bright smile (the fake kind that would close like a shutter over her face) appeared and she turned, forced herself to turn, from the woman to team seven and the nidaime, "Everyone, this is my Aunt Petunia, she is… Probably not a real person. Aunt Petunia, this is everyone."
There wasn't much of a resemblance between the woman and Lee. They were both leaner than most, taller, but this woman had a pinched and bitter look to her that Lee had never had. She was brittle, thin, and everything about her was unwelcoming and severe.
"…The freaks, oh, I know who these people are. I know perfectly well who these freaks of nature are! I thought they would come for you later, like they did with my sister, but they came early didn't they? And now they've come back to leave you here with us again, got tired of you, found out you weren't what they wanted after all. Just like they did when they put you on our doormat the night your parents died." The woman pointed at Lee then to the side, where another taller door was, presumably one that led out of the house, "But you are not welcome here anymore, Eleanor Lily Potter. So I suggest you get out, stay out, and never think about coming back."
They stood in silence, in this unfamiliar hallway, one filled with more pictures than Minato imagined could have been taken (pictures were for the wealthy and for administrative purposes, to see so many, of seemingly inane moments was unthinkable), and with furniture whose styles were just as alien as Minato might have predicted.
But Minato couldn't think about that, instead he could only look between this civilian (clearly painfully civilian) woman, and Lee and wonder why he couldn't even process what was happening.
Jiraiya placed a hand on Lee's shoulder, causing her to twitch, but at the sight of his expression (a tired, pained, and angry thing) she relaxed somewhat, "Let's go, kid."
"Didn't you want to talk with my clan?" Lee asked, somehow more dully than usual, hesitating over the word clan and then spitting it out as if it burned her tongue.
Jiraiya looked at the woman again, something dangerous glinting in his eyes, and then glanced over at the nidaime whose expression was more unreadable. Minato looked back to the broken door they had just exited from, the dark hole, the thick futon shoved into the back and those bittersweet brightly colored pictures on the wall.
"No, I think we've seen enough of your clan."
Lee nodded and without another word to her aunt, or to the rest of them, stiffly walked outside the door and into the midday sunlight and an alien world. Every house looked exactly the same, or almost, they were the same shade and the same model, only small human differences distinguished them. Otherwise looking in either direction it appeared as if these white identical houses extended forever, separated by a river of black concrete, and perfectly square fields of grass.
They stood, blinking and dazed in the sunlight, but Lee seemed to think nothing of it. Instead strode purposefully forward as if this was any street in Konoha and leaving them to trail behind.
"What is this place?" Haru asked, looking around in a daze, flushing when children on the streets stopped, stared, and pointed as if they were the ones who were alien here.
"The suburbs, civilian central basically." Lee said, as if she found this mildly irritating, and while that was familiar she was still too stiff (if they were alone, in their own apartment, Minato and her might talk about it but here in front of everyone she would let it simmer and fester inside her).
"Everyone's a civilian here?" Haru asked again.
"That's not so unusual, hidden villages are actually quite rare, most villages are comprised almost entirely of civilians." The nidaime said, "The Land of Iron, in fact, is a country which itself has almost no shinobi and has no hidden village."
But it was odd to Minato too, to think there were places which were almost entirely absent of shinobi. Where people would stop, stare, and point at their hitaei (although Minato knew that was not all that these children were pointing at).
"This is the village of Surrey?" The nidaime asked, and although he hid it better than Haru was, it seemed he was out of his element too.
"A part of it, Little Whinging, if you want to be specific."
They reached what looked like it could have been training equipment, poles sticking in the ground with bars that one could climb across, but it was filled with small children who looked as if they were doing anything but training.
Lee jumped onto the roof of one of the structures and they followed, staring with her out onto the street, "So here it is, gentlemen, England in all of its glory."
All of its glory, and maybe if they hadn't met that woman first, maybe if Lee now didn't seem so very tense, maybe it would have been glorious. But Minato couldn't see it, everything he saw (cars everywhere, the pavement, the strange metal structure he was sitting on), seemed tinted by unspoken bitterness.
"Lee," He said, looking at her face, at the way it gave nothing away in that moment, "What happened back there with your aunt?"
"It appears that I have been thrown out of Number 4 Privet Drive." Lee said with a shrug as if this couldn't be helped, was a fact of life that could not be questioned or circumvented.
"I know that, but I meant…"
"She's always been like that, they all have, it doesn't bother me. They can't help it, after all, they are fundamentally inhuman."
(And there it was, what she'd always said about them, and suddenly it made sense. Because Lee couldn't find a reason why that woman would hate her so much, would throw her out of her house when she had been missing for seven years, so she had come up with the only logical solution she could think of.
That her aunt, uncle, and cousin didn't really exist.
That reality itself didn't really exist, that it was a genjutsu, one with contradictory elements and rules.
One that did not even bother to hide itself.
And something inside of Minato was tearing at the thought of that because he had never thought to ask himself why she had been so certain. And he never would have believed it if she tried to tell him.)
"Well, right, there's that. So, any idea how we find these letter writing people?" Jiraiya asked, after they'd sat for a moment in silence, each thinking over the ramifications of what Lee had just said.
"Nope." Lee said.
"What do you mean no?"
"It just said return by owl." Lee said and added, "Plus we already even tried that and the owl summons didn't want to touch the things."
"Well then why don't we find an owl and…"
"Jiraiya-sensei, do you see any owls here?" Lee asked, motioning around to the playground, "Do you see any birds for that matter? We'd probably be luckier if we tried to send it by cat. Plus, I'm pretty damn sure the letter isn't even real."
"Why…"
"Because nothing has ever been real in England! It's like a fundamental place of non-reality, and it isn't even good at it. It sends you letters about wizards through owls; there's just something weird about that." Lee said, a bit too loudly, as the children who had already been staring at them continued to stare harder and their mothers appeared to grow concerned.
"Eleanor? Eleanor Potter?!"
Lee's head whipped down to look at an elderly and very strangely dressed civilian woman with large thick glasses. Lee blinked, apparently stunned, then asked, "Mrs. Figg?"
Mrs. Figg's house was still filled with too much lace and too many pictures of cats. Only, now that Lee was a genin and not just a four-year-old little girl, she noted that the cats probably were nin cats. There really was no other way to explain their watchful herd like behavior and the way they prowled around the five of them.
Of course, the idea of Mrs. Figg being a ninja with enough chakra to employ dozens of summons at a time was frankly ridiculous, so she pinned it down to England being England.
She had forgotten how very English England truly was over the course of her time in Konoha. She supposed it was good for her to have a reminder or two, of course, it didn't mean she liked it.
Mrs. Figg had kindly provided tea for them, which none of them took, and instead watched as Mrs. Figg ate and drank rather awkwardly by herself.
"Ellie, my dear, we were all so worried when you disappeared. What happened? Where have you been all this time? Have you been safe, well, are these your friends?"
Lee, for her own part, was wondering who she meant by 'we'. As far as Lee had known there was no one who would care about her disappearance. The Dursleys would be inconvenienced by being shorthanded but they also wouldn't have her freakishiness, which must be a pleasant change. Mrs. Figg she hadn't even bothered to consider.
(Quietly Minato was translating for Mrs. Figg to the rest of her captive audience, his voice hushed and his eyes darting between Mrs. Figg and Lee and back again. Minato was restless, almost as restless as Lee was in this place, really it would be best if they just got all of this over with and went home already.)
"I immigrated to the Village Hidden in the Leaves and became a genin, so I'm relatively safe, and these are my teammates… And the honorable second Shadow of Fire." Lee said, motioning to her teammates and then the nidaime in turn.
Mrs. Figg, far from being reassured by this explanation, looked a bit more alarm, "I'm, sorry, my dear… You went where and did what?"
"I immigrated to the Village Hidden in the Leaves and became a ninja." Lee said, although judging by Mrs. Figg's expression this second explanation was working just as well as her first attempt, which was to say not at all.
"Lee, see if she can do something about the letter." Jiraiya said, pushing the letter into her hands, and maybe he was desperate because this was the first person who was actually talking to them and not throwing them out of their house but the idea of Mrs. Figg having any hand in the English wizard spamming scheme was more than a little bizarre.
Of all the people Lee could have blamed she never would have suspected crazy Mrs. Figg.
Regardless she pushed the letter over to Mrs. Figg, "I started getting spam about a year ago…"
Mrs. Figg's eyes lit up in comprehension though, "Oh, that must be your Hogwarts letter!"
What.
Lee felt all of her thoughts drift from her, exiting away as she was forced to come to the conclusion that Mrs. Figg, Mrs. Figg who owned at least a dozen cats, was involved in the Hogwarts letter scheme and possibly the mastermind behind the whole thing.
It was happening again, the genjutsu, it was messing with the very fabric of reality and no one else seemed capable of noticing.
Because no one knew Mrs. Figg and soon there would be some sort of half assed explanation and everyone would nod their heads and move on as if it wasn't completely bizarre and incomprehensible that Mrs. Figg had been sending her spam about wizards for a year.
Only Lee, only Lee, ever dared to keep track of these inconsistencies, and somewhere the asshole that had casted the genjutsu was laughing his ass off.
And soon enough there was Mrs. Figg, prattling on, leaving Minato to translate and flounder over unfamiliar (and frankly hard to translate words) like witch and wizard and wand and Hogwarts and Scotland and you were supposed to be in Scotland magic school a year ago, Lee.
And then there was a fireplace jutsu that looked like a mix between teleportation and a bloody phone system and then other people were coming in, all dressed in brightly colored robes and pointy hats, looking old and wise and not at all lethal.
And Lee was done.
When the letters had gone out in 1991, the year that Eleanor Potter would have been old enough to attend Hogwarts, the world had held its breath. But unfortunately, while the letter had been sent out, it had never returned and on the first of September Eleanor Potter remained missing.
Not dead, Albus had insisted on that, perhaps in mortal peril from time to time but not dead either. Just… nowhere to be found.
Minerva had raged at him for that, to think that he had put the girl with her relatives and then lost her, lost her before she'd even turned five and hadn't bothered to tell anyone for years but Severus.
It'd only gotten worse when she'd gone to meet the Dursleys herself. She knew there had been a falling out between Lily and her sister, that Lily's sister and brother in law had not attended her and James' wedding, that Lily had hesitated to visit her sister or even include her in her will, but she had never thought that human beings could be so vile.
The boy was a pig, the husband worse, and Lily's sister… She wasn't Lily.
There was some regret there, some bitterness, rage, disbelief, that they had lost Eleanor Potter while she had been in their care but it was hidden beneath a very thick wall of apathy and relief. As if they were glad to be rid of her and her kind forever.
And she was just gone, like she'd never been there in the first place, there one morning they said and then gone in the blink of an eye. And no one had seen her since.
After twelve years of seeing neither hide nor hair of the girl Minerva had begun to lose hope.
But then, much like the seemingly ordinary day Eleanor Lily Potter had disappeared, she returned with just as little fanfare. There was a call from Arabella Figg (who had already tried Dumbledore and just missed him), to come quickly because the girl who lived had returned with a strange group of foreign men asking about her Hogwarts letter, and then Minerva was off.
Not even thinking about what she was going to say to the girl, if she was going to introduce Hogwarts the way she would to any student, if she would talk about the girl's mother and father (who it seemed her bloody relatives had taken to calling drunkards), if she would talk about the night her parents had died and she had become an orphan while the rest of the country had been saved.
She didn't think, she just went, without even sending a patronus to Albus and telling him that the girl-who-was-lost was now the girl-who-was-found.
So perhaps it was natural that when she stumbled into Arabella's living room and caught sight of Arabella's guests she was struck dumb and speechless.
Her first thought was that Arabella was right to call them foreign.
It wasn't merely in their clothing, not quite muggle but not quite traditional wizard's robes either, something oriental and exotic yet at the same time like the robes of an auror, designed for wear and combat. All, the children and the adults, wore a headband featuring a metal plate with the intricate design of a leaf carved into the silver.
It also wasn't their features, although they were striking. They had almond shaped eyes and features that were usually found in the east, but only the dark haired boy with dark eyes looked as if he could have been from Japan. The other boy's blonde hair and blue eyes somehow made him look more alien, with his features, and that wasn't even getting to the men. The men who did not look as if they were family but both shared silver almost white hair, despite their clear youth, both had tribal red markings on their faces and the smaller man had red eyes.
No, the true strangeness of them came in the way they held themselves, the stillness, the sharpness of their eyes, and the solid presence of magic as if with no more than a twitch of their fingers they could send the living room into chaos.
And there was Eleanor Lily Potter, James and Lily's only daughter, as English a girl as there should have been, sitting in the middle of them and looking just as foreign and unfamiliar as the rest.
The sight of her though, her hair as wild as James' but as red as Lily's and her eyes like her mother's, brought Minerva back to herself.
"Hello, Ellie, I'm professor McGonagall the deputy Headmistress at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Arabella said she told you a bit about the school and about magic." Minerva started sitting across from the girl.
The girl's eyes darted upwards, and at once Minerva felt ill at ease again, because this was not a look she had ever received from a twelve year old girl before. It had never struck her what a strange and alarming color of eyes Lily had, but they were, both strange and alarming.
Ellie Potter had a way of making them burn, making them cold, that Lily never had as if there was no warmth in them at all but only steel.
Distantly she heard the blonde boy murmuring to the men, softly and quickly, unfamiliar foreign words that sounded almost like Japanese but not quite.
The men simply watched.
"You were supposed to get your letter earlier, on your eleventh birthday…" She started but the look in Ellie's eyes didn't falter only strengthened and Minerva wondered if it was her imagination making the shadows in the room stretch, "I suppose you must be very curious, perhaps even skeptical, I realize now that your relatives might not have… told you about your parents and where you came from."
She expected something at that, some spark of curiosity, and there was from the blonde whose expression had shifted slightly as he continued to murmur translations to the adults but from the girl there was no hint of interest.
One of the men asked Ellie something, the thinner man with the red eyes (as if he was a vampire or had vampire heritage), and Ellie responded something short and terse back before turning to Minerva with a sigh.
"The honorable second Shadow of Fire would like to hear more about my parents." Ellie said, sounding more like a sullen student failing her Transfiguration course than an orphaned girl asking about her mother and father.
"The shadow of…" She started and Elle jerked a thumb towards the thinner man, an action which caused him to narrow his eyes somewhat, but he made no audible complaint.
"The honorable Tobirama Senju, the second Shadow of Fire." She repeated, as if this repetition physically pained her, "He's always had an interest in my clan."
Clan, not family, that made it seem so impersonal as if she wasn't asking about Lily and James but instead about the noble and ancient house of Potter or even the house of Black. Somehow that tore at Minerva's heart, to see James and Lily reduced to only their blood.
"That's a long story, Ellie, and one I wish I didn't have to tell." Minerva started, knowing that she did because the Dursleys had not told her, had told her some trite story about a muggle car accident as if that could have killed Lily and James, "Before you were born there was a terrible war going on in Britain, against a dark lord, one that we were losing desperately. Your parents were heroes, part of a resistance against him and his followers, and they never gave up hope. They were smart, brave, courageous, and they loved you very much. One night though, October 31 1981, your parents were betrayed by a close friend and the dark lord found their hiding place. He killed them and then he came to kill you, but something very strange happened, the spell that never backfires and never fails, the one we call the killing curse, left only a scar on your forehead and somehow burned his body and destroyed him." Minerva paused, watching the girl's expression, and getting a hold of her own thoughts and trying to decide what was important to say now and what later.
How to explain to a girl who knew nothing of magic what the killing curse meant, that it never failed, that everyone on the receiving end had always died, and yet somehow miraculously she alone had survived and destroyed the caster.
Or how to explain that James and Lily had fought until the very end, that they had found Lily's body next to the crib, as if she had been standing over it in desperation.
"…I don't think that's what he meant." Ellie said uncertainly, her eyes darting back to Tobirama Senju, "I mean, I'm sure he's very interested in an instant assassination jutsu and my mysterious not dying, but I think he was thinking more blood limits."
Before Minerva could ask what blood limits were, or let her affront and anger over something as petty as blood being brought into this conversation, the other man started speaking, asking Ellie something and motioning for her to translate.
"Jiraiya-sensei wants to know why I grew up with my civilian relatives since my parents were jonin war heroes and I clearly had a powerful blood limit."
Civilian, that must be their word for muggle, although it was an odd one to choose and not one Minerva ever would have thought of. Then there were those words blood limit again, one that they clearly did not mean offense by, but seemed to be some concept she'd just never heard of along with that word jonin and jutsu.
Suddenly Minerva realized that these were all clearly wizards, powerful wizards at that, but she had yet to see any of them bring out or reach for their wands or any of them make any mention of wands or spells. Instead using strange words she'd never heard of.
But she tried not to get caught up in that, in these details, she could ask questions about these people and where Ellie had gone later, "Well, unfortunately, the people your parents had listed as god parents were unable to care for you because of illness, death, and… Anyway, Albus, thought it best that you remain with your muggle relatives for your safety."
The girl didn't appear to take that answer well, neither did the others, the taller broader man seeming somewhat alarmed by this even and all more or less looking somewhat confused.
Finally, the girl said, "That's it, I can't do it. I'm done. No more giant genjutsu for me today, thank you very much."
The girl then rapidly started speaking the language the others spoke, and at each syllable their expressions seemed to become caricatures ranging from disbelief to affront, exasperation, anger, and panic.
Then there was a great crack and all five of them were gone, as if they'd never been there in the first place, leaving only kneazles in their wake.
And in the hokage's office there was chaos.
"Dammit, Lee-chan, you can't just prematurely pull out of a mission…"
"She was getting really personal and creepy with the questions! Didn't you see that look in her eye, like she knew me, like she wanted something! Besides England's not even a real place anyway…"
"Eru-san, when you've been a kage as long as I was you know a genjutsu when you're in one and that was not a genjutsu."
"Hey, I lived there, trust me it is. It's the only way to explain half of the weirdness… They wanted to send me to wizard academy!"
"Of course they wanted to send you to their shinobi academy, Lee-chan. Granted they may have been idiots to leave you apparently unwatched in the middle of a civilian village but that doesn't make them complete idiots!"
"Wizard academy, sensei, not shinobi. Believe me, there is a large difference between wizard and shinobi. We don't wear pointy hats or wave about ninjutsu sticks muttering garbled Latin."
"Lee, I don't think the hats were the point." Minato pointed out, but was ignored as Jiraiya, Tobirama, and Lee engaged in an epic glaring and shouting match while Minato and Haru stood by the hokage's desk.
"You realize we have to go back now, don't you?" Jiraiya asked, throwing his hands in the air, the loudest of all three of them by far. The nidaime wasn't loud when he was angry, he instead was terribly quiet, as if he was holding it all in and on the point of breaking.
"The only decent thing to come out of this is that they are fully aware that we can leave at any time. Otherwise we have minimal information on your clan, the English hidden village and academy, the English jutsus and their wands, almost nothing of value except the certainty that we'll have to go again and speak with this McGonagall Minerva without being certain of her position."
"That could take months! They said the academy lasts seven years! I can't afford to be out of Konoha for seven years!"
"It wouldn't be seven years!"
Then there was shouting about insubordination, docked pay, consequences beyond imagination while Lee stood there two seconds from either disappearing or blowing something up (as she apparently had done as an infant) and just standing there in silence.
"So, it went that well." The hokage said to Minato and Haru.
And they just nodded and watched as the chaos unfolded.
Author's Note: I make the excuse that England returns in the main fic later, so I won't linger here. Written for the 200th review of "The Unwinding Golden Thread" by NTSFroes who asked for a fic that ties "Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds" back to the original world of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" I twisted that to mean England.
For those of you who pay more attention to these things than I do you'll note that I apparently have done two fics for the 200th review of "The Unwinding Golden Thread", I just forgot about the other one until this was already written. So yes, I now feel very dumb, but it was still enjoyable to write. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU HAVE OVER 100 STORIES ON YOUR SITE, IT IS MADNESS.
Thanks for reading, reviews are nice.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Naruto