PART ONE
Chapter 01 - Mystery
[1]
Harria Potter—though she supposed she should start referring to herself as Potter Hariko again—wandered the bustling streets of Edo aimlessly. She faltered just as she stepped over an uneven arch of pavement and shook her head. No, that wasn't right. Tokyo. Edo was called Tokyo now.
She snorted ruefully to herself and ignored the startled glances a group of teenage girls shot her, absently noting that they were all fashioned in what she'd recently discovered was called Lolita garb. She hadn't yet decided whether she found the current fashion trend to be creepy as fuck or adorable. Currently her opinion was leaning towards the former.
Harria continued winding through the crowded streets, marveling at the myriad of buildings that seemed to impale the clouds.
'Tokyo' was nothing at all like the Edo she'd once known, where hard dirt and cobblestone had layered the ground and the tallest structure had been the Imperial Palace situated at the center of the city. Compared to the countless skyscrapers that now decorated the city, the Palace seemed like a toy model in comparison.
The changes were, frankly, astonishing.
But then, Harria had no way of knowing if the Japan she had once lived was the same one she currently dwelled—not without examining its history. For all she knew she could be in a different dimension, though she doubted that somewhat. Earth II (which was similar to her original planet, Earth I, except that the magical community had been extinct since before the middle ages, with a few unimportant variations here and there) tended to have a distinct smell—like ozone and storm clouds. Despite the cloying scent of gas, smoke, burnt metal, and artificialness that permeated everything, Harria could still detect a lingering hint of its unique scent in the background.
Still, she had only been in this version of Edo for a few days—having woken in Tokyo Bay with nothing but the shade of a bridge and the faint glow of dawn to clothe her—so she refrained from assuming anything. The last time she thought she'd landed on Earth II she'd been abducted by an alien in a blue police box and had been thrust in the middle of an intergalactic war.
Let it never be said that Harria Potter didn't learn from her mistakes.
The streetlight changed, and she crossed the street.
A particularly brightly-lit billboard screen on the next block caught her attention (were those tap dancing penguins?) and she stared intently at it, trying to figure out if it was real or another example of the astonishingly realistic three-dimensional animations that were literally everywhere. She turned a corner with her head still craned and—
Promptly collided with someone.
"Ow!" the other person cried as they crashed to the floor.
Harria would have apologized if she weren't seeing stars from the impact of the kid's head hitting her chin. With a pained hiss she squeezed her eyes shut and cupped her jaw, fingers rubbing the bruised skin. Gods, but that hurt.
(Harria Potter, the nine-hundred-and-something year old witch who had defeated three dark lords, a guild of necromancers, a horde of aliens, a trickster god, a goblin despot, an army of the undead, and the fucking boogey man, was conquered by a head to the chin. Oh, the irony.)
"Sorry, kid," she managed when the pain receded to something bearable.
The kid, still clutching his head, looked up at her strangely and it took her a moment to realize that she was speaking in modern Khuzdul. She hastily translated.
"Sorry," she repeated, the Japanese rolling off her tongue awkwardly.
"Just be more careful, would you? You could've killed me!" the kid said, waving her proffered hand away. He clambered to his feet, still grumbling under his breath.
Harria would have rolled her eyes at his whining if a flash of color hadn't edged into her periphery, stealing her attention.
They weren't alone.
Behind the kid stood a tall man. He was young, perhaps mid-twenties, and was dressed in a kimono that no longer belonged to that time period. He wore a tall hat over waist-length hair and had deep, violet eyes that were, at the moment, widened comically. The man was flailing behind the kid, arms outstretched like he desperately wanted to check to see if he was okay but wasn't quite sure if he could.
"Hikaru? Are you okay, Hikaru? Hikaru?" the man kept repeating.
Harria narrowed her eyes at him, and after a moment of careful scrutiny, dismissed the idea of him being some kind of actor. Her suspicions only solidified when the boy—Hikaru, her mind supplied—shot the man an irritated glare and he shut up.
Ghost, then, Harria decided with no small amount of curiosity. The man was unlike any of the ghosts she had encountered in the past, whom were all devoid of color and generally lacked a presence. But there was still something off about him, something that separated him from the living, imperceptible though it was. And had Harria not been who she was, she probably wouldn't have noticed.
For all he seemed real, the man was muted—a portrait made in perfect likeness to the original, but still nothing more than a concoction of paper and paint.
And wasn't that curious; ghosts in a world where magic shouldn't exist.
After dusting himself off and lifting his bag from the ground, the kid walked away without another word, the ghost trailing after him like a loyal puppy.
Harria watched their retreating forms with a cocked head.
If she were smart she'd walk away. If she were smart she'd forget the encounter and put it behind her so she could concentrate on figuring out where she was, and what she was going to do with herself if she decided to stay.
Unfortunately she had never been one to do what she ought to have, and if there was one thing about her that hadn't changed, it was that she could never let a mystery go unsolved.
And a young boy who could communicate with ghosts in a universe that had very little in the way of magic was definitely a mystery.
Cursing her innate curiosity (nosiness, a voice in the back of her head whispered), she broke into a jog. It didn't take long to reach the pair—they were at the edge of the block, waiting for light to change—and she sidled up next to them and blithely said, "Hey, kid? Did you know you have a ghost following you?"
Clearly he did, but it was as good a conversation starter as any.
The kid whirled around so fast it was a wonder he didn't get whiplash, and gaped at her in disbelief.
His counterpart, on the other hand, looked positively gleeful.
"You can see me?"
"Hard not to when you're wearing that," Harria answered, looking the ghost straight in the eye. Her lips quirked in amusement when he wiggled in place and squealed.
Harria couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a ghost do something so, well, human. The last few she'd encountered—on Earth V—had been dreadful. But then, the beings in that world hadn't been particularly nice, either, so it stood to reason they'd become even nastier when they were dead.
"A-are you dead, too?" the kid stammered, and Harria had to force down the urge to laugh at how dismayed he looked, no doubt at the prospect of being haunted by another ghost.
"No," she said with a grin that felt awkward on her face, as if it were no longer accustomed to accommodating such open expressions, "I'm still alive." Sort of. "I do have the ability to see ghosts, though. Among other things," she added slyly, just to get a rise out of the kid.
Hikaru didn't disappoint. He went pale and spluttered, doubtless at the thought of there being other things. Any guilt she might have felt about scaring the kid was pushed to the side as amusement thrummed inside her. It had been far too long since she'd been so entertained and wasn't about to let something as feeble as guilt ruin it for her.
No harm, no foul, and all that.
"Hey, hey, what's your name?" the ghost asked, drawing her attention away from the dazed kid. "I am Fujiwara no Sai. It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, medium-san!"
Harria snorted inwardly at the thought of her being a medium. Then again, she supposed it wasn't that much of a stretch, all things considered.
"Likewise, Fujiwara-san," she said, tacking on the suffix instinctively. She had lived in Edo—Tokyo—for almost a century at one point, after all. "My name is Potter Harria. Feel free to call me Hariko, if you want. It might be easier to pronounce."
"Harria?" the ghost repeated, butchering the pronunciation like she knew he would. Her name sounded like Hah-lee-uh when he said it. "That's an unusual name."
"Perhaps," she conceded, recalling the story of her naming that her godfather had told her so many lifetimes ago. Apparently her parents had been dead set on the name Harry and hadn't wanted to choose another even after discovering their child was a girl. Tacking on an extra syllable to make it sound more feminine was their way of compromising.
Honestly, it was a miracle she still remembered the story; there weren't many things about her first life that she did.
"I'm fond of it, though," she said absently, shaking her head against the rush of fuzzy memories.
"Then I'll call you Harria, too," the ghost insisted. "And you can call me Sai."
"Sai, then," she agreed with a curve of her lips; the ghost's enthusiasm was infectious.
Harria turned to the kid who was staring at her as if she were a Dementor about to consume his soul. It was hilarious. "And you're Hikaru, I take it?"
The kid took a step back and demanded, "How do you know my name?"
Don't laugh, she told herself. Out loud she said, "Sai mentioned it earlier."
He flushed. "Oh."
Harria lost the battle with herself and snorted.
"You should come with us, Harria!" Sai suddenly exclaimed, ignoring Hikaru's protest of 'No she shouldn't! I know enough weird people already, Sai!'
Deciding to take her cue from Sai and ignore the kid, she asked, "Where to?"
It wasn't as if she had anything better to do, she justified, aside from hunting down a library. And that being the least interesting alternative, it could wait.
"Hikaru is taking me to someplace called an in-te-roo-uh-net-oo ca-fee," Sai explained, and Harria translated that to mean internet café. "We're going to see some apparatus called a com-pee-yoo-tah," computer, "so I can play Go on this in-te-roo-uh-net-oo thing."
The ghost looked absolutely confused as he fumbled over the strange terminology, and Harria sympathized. She'd felt the same way when she'd landed on the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius a few decades ago, where the language consisted of words that ran as long as twenty syllables. As proficient with the tongue-adapting spell as she was, even Harria had had trouble learning it. After six months on the planet she still hadn't been able to hold a conversation to save her life.
Come to think of it, she had almost died because she'd inadvertently insulted someone important when she'd been trying to ask for directions. That hadn't been fun.
Harria shook her head against the memories and paused when the other thing Sai mentioned registered.
"Go? You mean the game with the black and white stones?"
If Sai had been excited before, he was positively vibrating with elation now.
"Yes, yes, that's the one! Are you familiar with it?"
Beside them, Hikaru slapped a hand over his face and groaned.
Clearly the game was important to the ghost.
"Mm. I used to play, though it's been a while," she admitted, omitting the fact that 'a while' was more or less three hundred years. Give or take a few decades.
"Oh, then we'll definitely have to play against each other!" He rounded on Hikaru and pleaded, eyes shimmering with tears that Harria wasn't sure were feigned or not. "Please, Hikaru? Please? I want to play her, Hikaru! Hey, Hikaru? Hikaru? Are you listening to me? Hikaru! I said I—"
"Alright, alright!" Hikaru exploded. "Just stop nagging me already!"
"Thank you, Hikaru!"
Harria chuckled lowly, more than certain now that some of his pestering behavior was contrived. As it had taken less than a minute for Hikaru to give in despite not wanting any part of it, it certainly seemed effective.
Clearly Sai wasn't as naïve as he looked.
"Do you still want to go to the café or not?" Hikaru asked irritably, glaring at Harria as if she were to blame for the odd turn the pair's day had taken. Though she supposed she kind of was at fault. Not that that it stopped her from answering his glare with a lopsided smile, or laughing outright when he muttered something unflattering under his breath.
Sai faltered and glanced uncertainly between Harria and Hikaru. After several seconds he looked beseechingly at Harria, his longing plain on his face.
"I'll come with you," she conceded, "and we can have a match after. That is, if Hikaru-kun over there doesn't mind me tagging along."
The puppy-dog expression was now thankfully aimed elsewhere.
"Don't you have anything better to do than hang out with a stranger and a dead guy?" Hikaru asked snidely. He purposely ignored Sai's affronted squawk.
"Not really, no," Harria said with an unrepentant grin.
"Ugh, fine. Just don't talk to this guy out loud, alright? I don't want people thinking I'm hanging out with a crazy person."
"I could always just pretend I'm talking to you," she pointed out, securing her bag over her shoulder and falling into step beside Hikaru as he stalked across the street. They reached the curb just as the light turned blue and cars started zipping past.
"Ugh, whatever. Do what you want."
She and Sai shared a triumphant grin and fell back so they could follow Hikaru's lead.
"So, Sai. How did you come about haunting that kid, anyway? 'Cause honestly, you don't really seem like the haunting type."
In front of them, Hikaru snorted.
Mottled red bloomed across Sai's pale cheeks and he averted his gaze in embarrassment. He stayed quiet for a long moment, so long that Harria was starting to give up on receiving an answer, but he eventually broke the silence with a soft exhale.
"Many, many years ago I was born in…"
[2]
Potter Harria.
A strange name for a stranger girl. And Shindou Hikaru wasn't just referring to her ability to see ghosts, though that was weird, too.
He observed the girl while pretending to read his manga. It hadn't started out that way—he had genuinely been intending to read it—but the strange girl was just there and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't keep his eyes from darting in her direction. It hadn't taken him long to abandon the comic and give in to the urge to study her.
Potter Harria. She was a foreigner, obviously, though Hikaru couldn't place her accent. Unsurprising; Hikaru hadn't met many foreigners and tended to only watch anime and live-action dramas when he was in the mood to stare at a screen.
Harria, as she insisted on being called since Sai was doing so anyway (not that he minded; Hariko was even weirder and it reminded Hikaru of those creepy paper dolls his grandma liked to collect), had dark, shoulder-length hair that looked like it hadn't ever seen a comb (which was really weird; didn't girls like dolling themselves up and stuff?). She had green eyes, like Hikaru, but hers were so much greener than his, like the gemstones that were sometimes showcased in shop windows.
She was also tanned, like he was, and favored comfortable, loose clothes, like he did, but that was where the similarities ended. Aside from their eye color, hair color (his bleached bangs exempted), tanned skin, and partiality to baggy clothing, Hikaru and Harria were nothing alike.
Honestly, Harria wasn't like anyone he had ever met before.
She looked to be only a few years older than Hikaru, maybe fourteen or so, but…she didn't act like a teenager. Her outdated patterns of speech notwithstanding (she said she'd learned Japanese from period dramas, and Hikaru didn't have a reason not to believe her; foreigners were weird that way), she just seemed so much more mature than she should. There was just something about Harria that made him feel like she was older than she looked.
Kind of like…Sai.
Hikaru swiveled his gaze towards the ghost who'd been haunting him for the better part of two months now and frowned. That was it, he thought. She was like Sai.
Sai was a whiny crybaby who took the term 'childish' to new levels and honestly made Hikaru forget that he was a thousand-something year old ghost and not some random five year old that had started to follow him around on whim. And yet, there were times when Sai would do something, or say something, or tilt his head just so under a certain angle of light and it would hit him just how ancient the ghost was—older than he portrayed himself to be in more ways than one.
Sometimes, when Sai thought Hikaru wasn't paying attention, the ghost would just stare at him, violet eyes piercing and shadowed with things that made Hikaru's breath catch in his throat. He'd look at Hikaru with such desperation, such loneliness, like he was afraid to look away even for a second just in case Hikaru might disappear.
And then Hikaru would think about how he'd been haunting a block of wood for hundreds of years, partially aware with no one to talk with, no one to touch, no one to know that he existed and—
That look was why Hikaru didn't argue excessively when Sai made him do things he didn't want to do. Why he didn't push him away when he got too clingy. Why he tried not to complain too much about his presence despite Hikaru rarely being given a moment to himself anymore.
Harria gave him a similar impression. She gave off an air of being sometimes laidback and other times playful, but then she'd do something to shatter the illusion. Such as when Hikaru pulled the foldable goban he'd wheedled from his grandpa out in front of her.
One moment she'd been smiling and teasing Sai and the next she'd gone completely still, eyes trained on the goban like it was the only thing in the room. For a moment, no longer than a heartbeat's pause, she had looked like a ghost herself, out of place or out of time, he wasn't sure. He only knew that she had seemed displaced somehow, despite her modern appearance and her familiarity with technology.
Hikaru had felt utterly trapped in the gravity of her gaze, ensnared like a fly caught on sticky paper. He hadn't been able to think, to move, to breathe. He had just frozen, the nearly weightless goban in his hands feeling far heavier than it should have, as she skewered him with eyes so old Sai seemed almost young in comparison.
And then she had blinked and the moment had shattered. Color and sound returned to the world, the air became breathable again, and no longer did it seem like his feet were cemented to the floor.
It had only been a moment, too sudden for even Sai to have noticed, but it had felt like an eternity.
Harria hadn't acted any differently afterward. He didn't know her well enough to determine if she'd been acting in a way that wasn't characteristic of her, but she hadn't behaved any differently than she had been before. She went right back to conspiring with Sai—
(Hikaru was certainly going to have his work cut out for him with those two partnering up. And he didn't even consider that Harria might not stick around. Harria didn't look like she had anything better to do and Sai would probably do everything in his power to keep her around. Hikaru knew Sai liked him, but he aware that he wasn't the easiest person to be around, so the amicable Harria was probably a breath of fresh air to the ghost. Not to mention, with the two of them keeping each other company, Hikaru might get some breathing space, as well.)
—and teasing Hikaru and just generally being a menace, and after a while Hikaru had seriously started to doubt what he had seen.
And then he'd catch the ghost of a shadow in her eyes and he'd be right where he started. Honestly, it was driving him more than a touch mad.
"I resign," Harria's voice cut through his musings and Hikaru flinched, startled.
"You're really good, Sai," she continued, eyeing the black and white stones on the board with something bordering on awe. "It's been a long time since I've played, but I can determine that much."
"Thank you, Harria." Sai smiled broadly, looking positively gleeful. "You're quite a good player, too."
Harria shot him a disbelieving look, and Sai shook his head with a smile that was more tame. "No, you are. You definitely have talent. Your hands are steadfast and your moves often unpredictable, so much so that you caught me off guard a few times and I've been playing for, well, quite a long time."
Here they shared a grin Hikaru didn't understand. He felt put out that they were already hiding things from him and they had only just met. Not to mention, Sai was his ghost. He definitely shouldn't be keeping secrets from the person he was haunting. Surely that had to be a rule or something.
Hikaru vowed to wheedle it out of Sai later. Maybe it was the the reason why Harria sometimes looked like that. He thought about it for a moment, remembered the way she had said "Other things," and shuddered.
…Maybe he would be better off not knowing after all.
"You have a confident hand, and you're relentless on both an offensive and defensive front. If you were more experienced at reading ahead you would have made taking back the territory over here," he pointed his fan at a cluster of white stones on the lower left side of the board, "much more difficult. Overall, it was a very satisfying game and I sincerely look forward to playing you again in the hopefully immediate future."
Harria chuckled lowly. "Flattery, Sai?"
Sai only beamed at her.
The sound of stones clanking together echoed in the room as Harria began to clear the board, sliding the black stones into one plastic go-ke and the white stones into another.
"Would you like to learn how to play, Hikaru-kun?" Harria asked, peering at him from the shadow of her bangs.
Sai promptly turned to him with a yearning look, pleading with his eyes.
"It would make Sai happy," she continued. The look in her eyes was knowing and she couldn't quite keep the hint of a smirk off her face.
Hikaru glared at her. "Why would I want to know how to play an old people's game, huh?"
From the corner of his eye he saw Sai's expression fall, and honestly, Hikaru would have felt less guilty drowning a litter of puppies.
"That's not true, Hikaru!" Sai inserted vehemently. "Go is a game for all people of all ages! Why, I was only a child when I started learning it—"
"A bajillion years ago," Hikaru muttered.
"—and does Harria look like an old person to you?" he continued without missing a beat. "Come on, Hikaru! It will be fun! I promise!"
"No," Hikaru said, crossing his arms stubbornly.
Sai thrust his lower lip out and hung his head in resignation.
From the other side of the room he heard Harria start to count. She made it to the number six when the sight of Sai's tears became too much for him and he sighed in defeat. "Just once, alright?" he groaned, lifting himself to his feet.
He pointedly did not acknowledge the fact that Sai's eyes were completely dry when he looked up.
"Oh, thank you, Hikaru! You won't regret it!"
"I'm already regretting it," he grumbled, just to be difficult. When he turned his head to the side to give himself something other than a bouncing Sai to look at, he saw Harria looking at him with amusement.
Six seconds, she mouthed.
Hikaru stuck his tongue out in response. It felt good to do something so childish after so much mulling. All that thinking was starting to make his head hurt.
[3]
"No, don't hold the stones like that!" Sai snapped, slapping his fan lightly over the back of Hikaru's fingers. "You put them between your center finger and index finger. Not like that, Hikaru! Of course the stone is going to slip if you—oh, Harria, could you just show him, please?"
Harria snickered as she made her way towards him and sank into the space beside Hikaru, close enough that he could feel warmth radiating off of her but not so close that they actually touched.
"Now watch Harria, Hikaru. Hey, are you listening? Hikaru? Hikaru! You'll never learn if you don't—"
With reluctance, Hikaru pulled his attention away from the hint of a dark tattoo that poked out of the opening of her long sleeve and tried to emulate what she was doing. He clumsily lifted a black stone from the go-ke the way she instructed and brought it to rest on a small square.
It hit the spruce board with a loud clack and Hikaru blinked, thrown off by how…good that had felt. It was nothing like the dull tap it had made when he'd been holding the stones between his thumb and forefinger. Placing the stones down with an appropriate grip was…actually kind of cool. Huh.
He reached into the go-ke for another stone and did it again, just to see if the same feeling of rightness would wash over him.
It did.
Hikaru was so absorbed by the what he was doing that he failed to notice the looks Sai and Harria shared over his head.
TO BE CONT'D
Author's Note: So what did you guys think? Drop a comment!
Terms: (1) Goban - Go board | (2) Go-ke - bowl that holds Go stones