[A/N] Warning: dead people. As in, like, freshly dead people, as opposed to the finely aged dead people you've encountered in this story so far.
The passage of souls between worlds was always a constant tickle in the back of Harry's mind—something he was aware of, but didn't feel the need to pay attention to. People were born, people died, people occasionally got reincarnated as sea slugs. The lives of mortals marched on, and the minds of immortals didn't bother paying too much attention.
Usually.
Harry Potter shuddered, twitched, and fell off the ceiling he was meditating on. He didn't necessarily have to sleep anymore, but meditation was a calming way to pass the time while everyone else was busy. Naruto-kun was sleeping over at Inoichi's with Ino-chan, and Harry had decided to take a night off with a cup of tea, peace, and quiet.
He'd only been meditating on the ceiling for five minutes before the vague itch in his mind he associated with worldly souls turned into something more akin to a static buzz. It was uncomfortable—the inside of his mind felt itchy—and told him that a bunch of people were dying really quickly somewhere in the world and as a BLEGH-AGH member he should really go check it out. He had tried to ignore it, but it was mostly impossible to scratch an itch inside your own brain, and it had gotten worse until his body had given a full-body, uncontrollable shudder.
Which was why he was now on the floor.
Oh well. Peace and quiet were overrated, anyways.
"Fine," he announced to the empty room and the universe in general. "I'll go, happy?" He could sense that the deaths were happening somewhere in the village, so at least he didn't have to go very far.
The itch didn't subside, and he could practically feel his mirror silently judging him.
"It's not like they're any of my mortals," he grumbled defensively. "I can't afford to get attached to every person I come across." He couldn't detect which souls were passing over, but he could sense all six or so people he actually cared about elsewhere in the village, and that was enough to know that they, at least, were out of harm's way. He had lived for way too many years for his softhearted saving-people-thing to survive intact.
He twisted his hand and stuck it into the pocket-dimension where he kept most of his things. Pulling it back, he gave the appearance of drawing a long black duster coat from a rip in the air. The BLEGH-AGH had no actual uniform, but Harry always wore the coat when he was on duty. It made him feel pleasantly dramatic and doom-filled. He also grabbed his messenger bag, specially treated to prevent it from leaking souls. Throwing both of them on, he shifted himself out of reality.
Because he was feeling difficult, he took a circuitous route while following the itch in the back of his brain. The plane he ended up in whenever he ducked out of normal reality was accessible to him only because he was a death god (more or less) and was a highly spiritual place. When he was in it, he could still see the normal world, but it was oddly faded, like looking at the world through a pane of frosted glass. What came into focus in place of the physical world was energy. He could see chakra, and the glow of life, and if he focused he could see the slowly ticking numbers above every living soul that signified when they would die.
And in the distance, he could see a great billowing cloud of death, a heavy black tint that hung over a cluster of homes, gardens, and training grounds. The Uchiha clan compound, he guessed, as he made his way closer. The buzz in his head was subsiding, now that he was nearer—someone from the Bureau had probably already been dispatched, but he should probably show up to help anyways. A psychopomp, no matter how many office promotions they went through, was still a psychopomp.
He walked through the compound wall and was met with the sounds of confusion. Horror too, and tragedy, but oddly enough, it was mainly confusion.
Everywhere he looked, there were ghosts.
Ghosts with pale skin and dark hair, ghosts of children and adults and the elderly, ghosts with broken chains dangling from their chests as they mixed and mingled among themselves. Some of them were crying, and some looked frozen in shock. Most of them were looking around blankly, appearing to have no idea what had just transpired. One of them was sitting on the compound wall, looking thoughtfully over everyone. Harry looked at him curiously—of everyone he could see, the teenage boy was the least affected by the massacre in front of him.
It took the teenager only a few moments to notice Harry. "You can see me," he said. It wasn't a question.
Harry nodded anyways. "Yes, I can."
"My name's Uchiha Shisui," the boy introduced himself. "Just call me Shisui—there's too many Uchiha here to keep us straight. I died by giving my eye to my best friend and jumping into the river. How about you?"
"I'm Potter Harry," Harry answered him. "I'm the Master of Death. I died by, well... it's complicated. I never really did, I guess. Probably."
Shisui frowned at him. "Haven't I seen you before? I've definitely seen you around the village. Are you sure you aren't just dead and crazy?"
"Hm…." Harry scratched his head in thought. "Well, I'm definitely dead, and I'm definitely crazy, but what's that got to do with being the Master of Death? I've been dead and crazy for thousands of years, now. It's pretty fun."
Shisui gave him a strange look. "I've been dead for days, now. It's pretty boring."
Harry threw a considering look at the chain hanging from Shisui's chest. It wasn't linked to anything, which meant the longer he was dead, the more the chain would wear away, and it was down to around five links. "That's strange," he said. "Usually the dead get collected sooner than that. Though I suppose they probably knew that this was coming, and decided that they'd pick you up when they came for everyone else." He swept an arm out to indicate the multitude of ghosts in front of them. "Speaking of which, why aren't you more bothered by the way your entire extended family just drop-kicked the proverbial bucket?"
Shisui looked out at them. His expression was regretful, and yet there was something hard and unyielding about his eyes. "I've seen this coming for a long time, Potter-san. My clan wouldn't—or couldn't, really—listen to reason. My best friend Itachi, the one I gave my eye to, did this, with the help of another man I've never seen before. And I won't say that it's the best possible solution, but…" he shrugged. "I'll side with Itachi above the clan, always. Even if he needs a good punch in the face sometimes, so he stops doing that stupid 'emotionless rock' thing. Shinobi are human, and humans have emotions…" he trailed off, gaze focusing on a small dead girl that was looking around with confusion. Another ghost—a woman who could be either her aunt or cousin or mother—picked her up and rocked her in her arms, comforting the child although both Shisui and Harry could tell that the woman was just as lost as she was. "If you're a Shinigami like you claim," he changed the subject, "shouldn't you do something?"
"Yes, he should," a smooth voice interrupted their conversation from behind them. Harry turned to look. Behind them, balancing on the edge of the compound wall, was a man with chartreuse eyes and black-framed glasses. He looked a little younger than Harry, though his two-toned hair was just as messy, and he was leaning on what looked like a lawnmower. "If he helps me, then the job will get done quicker, and I won't have any overtime. I've got a lovely lady waiting for me to take her out for dinner, and it would be ungentlemanly of me to stand her up."
Shisui looked at him skeptically. "I suppose you're going to try and convince me that you're a Shinigami as well?" he asked.
"Ronald Knox," the man introduced himself, " Shinigami. There's three very good ways to identify one," the man added with a conspiratorial tone of voice. "The glasses, the eyes, and the death scythe." He patted the lawnmower fondly, and pointed to the front where 'Death Scythe' was stamped into the metal.
"…That's a lawnmower," Shisui deadpanned. "And why doesn't Potter-san have a death scythe?"
"It's efficient," Ronald explained, the same time Harry said, "He's lazy."
"And I'm something a little tiny bit different than him," Harry continued, "so I get a magic wand instead of a scythe."
"He's similar enough to help, though," continued Ronald, "so if you don't mind, we have souls to collect. Like yours." His eyes gleamed predatorily in the dim light, and the lawnmower revved menacingly. At least, as menacingly as lawnmowers could get.
Shisui shrugged, eyes calculating, yet calm. "…Sure. Being dead is pretty boring." The teenager's voice was carefully nonchalant. "But Potter-san? Itachi loves only one thing in the world more than he loves his village—his little brother." His voice warmed noticeably when he mentioned his friend. "Little Sasuke-chan is probably still alive. Can you keep an eye out for him?"
Harry sighed mentally. Did he look like a babysitter? "I'll think about it," he promised. He thought about it for half a second, and came to no particular conclusion. "Now, rest in peace, Shisui-san." He pulled the elder wand out of his coat pocket and waved it in a figure eight, causing Shisui to fade into a ball of glowing white light. As he disappeared, the teenager nodded a goodbye. Harry reached out, caught him, and tucked him away into his bag.
"Well, that seems to be almost everyone," Ronald Knox said, looking over his list. His lawnmower made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a burp. "There's only two more names to collect here tonight—Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto—and I don't think they're even dead yet. Thanks to you, I'll barely be late for my date."
The other man was looking at him with a hopeful expression. They'd worked together before, so Harry could guess what Ronald (Harry would never be able to think of him as a 'Ron') was about to ask. "… Fine, go on, I'll finish up here. But you owe me a favour," he warned.
"As always, Master of Death, sir," Ronald agreed readily. Harry was usually pretty fair with his favours, not asking for anything too embarrassing or uncomfortable. Holding out his hand, they shook on it. "Now if you'll excuse me…" he trailed off, fading from existence.
The list dropped to the floor, and Harry picked it up. He scanned it carefully as he walked, ignoring silly material things like walls and corpses and simply walking through them. The name Uchiha Sasuke wasn't on the list, which meant that Shisui had probably been right—one Uchiha, at least, would survive the night's massacre. He looked up, tucking the list into one of his duster's many pockets, and stopped moving.
Now this, this was interesting.
A man with two hearts had once mentioned to him that really, time was less linear, and more a "big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff." In all his years, Harry had never met a description that he found more accurate than that one. It was especially evident in the half-reality he was standing in, what with the way that time swirled tighter and tighter around the house in front of him. Moving towards it was easy, while moving away from it felt like swimming through molasses—something inside was pulling spiritual time faster than the silly, linear time that the physical world tried to run on.
He walked in.
A red sky swallowed him.
There was a peculiar tingle in the air that told him he'd wandered into someone's mind. It happened, sometimes, when dreams and illusions managed to reach the borders between realities. He was in a black room with a black floor and white bloodstains, standing in front of a young teen, a child around Naruto's age, and two adults on their knees. They were all clearly related, and bore enough of a resemblance to the corpses outside for Harry to immediately recognise them as Uchiha.
And anyways, even if he tried to keep away from politics, it was impossible not to recognise the head of the Uchiha clan and his famous, prodigious older son.
As he watched, Uchiha Itachi stepped forward and slid his sword through each of his parents. The boy—Uchiha Sasuke, he assumed—whimpered quietly as they slumped to the ground. Itachi turned away, and the scene reset itself.
"You are still too weak to stop me," Itachi told his brother, then stepped forward and murdered his parents again. Sasuke let out a small strangled scream in his throat, even as his parents fell once more to the ground, even as the edges of the red sky crept in to restart the gruesome scene once more.
"Hate is strength. You don't hate en—" Itachi said, and Harry growled low in his throat, interrupting the prodigy mid-sentance. There weren't really that many parallels, but to see a young boy watching his parents die over and over again, in what would probably be his last memory of them…
"That's enough."
Uchiha Itachi turned his head slowly, taking care not to appear surprised. Tsukiyomi was his realm, a world where time and space were his to control. The only thing he couldn't control completely was his victim, and they were still bent to his rules and whims. That a man could appear here, fitting himself into the illusion and walking around as if nothing was wrong, was impossible. Itachi tried to weave his tsukiyomi around the intruder, freezing the man's movements—nothing happened.
"Who are you?" he demanded. "How did you get here?"
He twisted at the fabric of his illusion, this time throwing the man out of the room and slamming the door behind him. A second later, the man reappeared exactly where he'd been standing before, tucking his hands in his pockets and arching an eyebrow at him. Itachi tried to move him again, and failed.
"That won't work," the man told him, posture completely relaxed. "Snape would be ashamed of me if I fell for the same trick twice. Not to say he isn't ashamed of me already, but he'd be even more ashamed, and that would just be unfortunate, because I'm not sure that level of ashamedness has existed before."
Itachi narrowed his eyes at him. The man looked familiar—he'd seen him before, he was certain, even if there was something different about the man now. Something more. "I know you," he realised, focusing on foreign, piercing green eyes. He'd seen those eyes before – they were difficult to forget. "You work at the Yamanaka flower shop."
"Yup, that's me," the intruder smiled, bright and cheerful. "Potter Harry, humble shop worker. I feel so popular today—everyone knows who I am. You, and Shisui-san…"
Itachi's mind raced—the man made it sound like he'd talked to Shisui today, but that was impossible. Still, he blocked Sasuke-chan's eyes and ears in order to talk to Potter-san privately. The triumphant twinkle in the man's eyes told him that he'd done it on purpose.
"What are you doing here?" Itachi asked bluntly, getting straight to the point.
Potter-san sighed, shrugging his shoulders. "Shisui-san asked me to keep an eye out for Sasuke-kun—which, for the record, I still haven't agreed to do—so I wandered over here." A steely glint entered the man's eyes behind his glasses. "Shisui-san also said that Sasuke-kun was the person you loved the most in the world, and that's why I would probably find him alive. That doesn't explain why I found him alive and being tortured."
Itachi bristled—he had his reasons—but forced himself to act the role that he'd chosen. "He's only alive because he is too weak to kill," he said blandly. "Maybe this way, he will actually amount to something."
Potter-san looked at him blankly. "I seriously do not have time for your idiocy right now," he said. "I hate child abuse, and the only reason I'm not hanging you up to dry somewhere is because I can tell that there's someone you're protecting Sasuke-kun from. Someone else, anyways. And apparently you think that the best way to do that is to mentally scar him forever and give him a vengeance complex."
"He has to learn to be strong," Itachi defended, trying to figure out how the man knew so damn much. "This will give him motivation."
Potter-san glanced up at the red sky for a moment with an expression that spoke of exasperation and disbelief. "No," he said, looking back to Itachi, "it usually doesn't work that way. Look—just tell me who you're trying to protect him from."
"It does not concern you," Itachi insisted. "None of this concerns you—it is a family matter. Leave." The man had no right to judge him. Itachi knew it was a bad situation, but it was also the best outcome of a hundred other bad situations. If Sasuke-chan ever questioned the events of this night, then he would be made a target, and Itachi wasn't sure if he would be able to protect him. It was better to ingrain this version of events in his little brother's mind, deeply and irreparably.
"No," refused Potter-san. "Scarring him like that won't help anyone. I won't let you do it." It didn't sound like an empty threat, even if the man was just a civilian. There was confidence and certainty in his voice, and it was unnerving.
"Why are you doing this?" asked Itachi, confused. "There's no reason for you to protect him. You don't even know him." Even if he had once wanted to believe the best of people, he knew that humans were selfish. It was simple fact.
Potter-san's hands made a vague strangling motion in the air. "Because he's just a child!" he exclaimed. "Because I can tell that you, for all your stupidity, want to protect him from the whole world, and you're going about it the wrong way. Because there's enough screw ups in the world as is."
For a moment, Itachi considered letting him help. The man seemed genuinely willing—but if he was a good person, then that was all the more reason to keep him away from the mess his family had created. For all the shop worker's skill with illusions and mind tricks, he didn't doubt that Madara would be able to kill him in a heartbeat. "It's too dangerous for you to know," he refused. "The one who did this—he's something other than human, now. You shouldn't get involved."
Potter-san muttered something uncomplimentary under his breath at that, something that would get Itachi a reprimanding look from his mother and a stern lecture from his father about proper behaviour befitting a genius of the Noble Uchiha Clan. "You know what, I give up," he said, a statement that gave Itachi cautious hope. "I don't usually do this but hey—it's for a good cause, I swear. You might even thank me later."
The man reached into his sleeve, and Itachi tensed – however, all he pulled out was a rather knobbly stick. Before Itachi could relax, however, the man pointed the stick at him and made eye contact, piercing green eyes only magnified by his glasses. He tried to disarm the man—it was his illusion, and he should have control—but he was rooted in place, unable to move. Struggling to wrest back control, he felt, rather than heard, the man whisper, "Legilimens."
He was six years old and there was a red wrinkled bundle in his arms, a tuft of black hair plastered wetly to a tiny head, and his little brother blinked up at him and it was the most precious thing he'd ever seen.
…
He was eleven, looking down at a painted mask before fastening it over his face. He would do what had to be done – some things were worth protecting, no matter the cost.
…
He was standing on the pier with his father behind him, and there was heat burning in his lungs and pride beating in his heart as he breathed out a fireball that lit up the sky.
…
A man was tying a forehead protector onto his head as his clan looked on with pride, and the metal felt heavy as duty and honour, and everyone graduating with him was so much older, so much bigger, and yet he knew he could outstrip them all.
…
He was facing a man in an orange mask and clues were slotting themselves into place and the name Uchiha Madara danced its way across his mind.
…
He was sitting seiza before his clan elders, and they were proud of him, in the perfect position to betray the village he loved for the family he was bound to as they talked of hate and pride and birthright.
…
The room was lit with cool, functional white light, that didn't reach the corners or the blank-masked figures that stood within them. Shimura-sama was talking, and he hated him, hated him because the choice he was offering was really not a choice at all and he was still going to take it.
…
He was on the porch with his brother and Sasuke-chan was asking him to train with him, spend time with him, and it broke his heart to poke him in the forehead and tell him not today because it really meant never again, this could be the last time his brother looked at him without hate in his eyes and
…
And it was his memory, damnit, and he'd fought with Yamanaka before, and there was a trick to this, not a shield but a deflection, like his mind was stone worn curved and smooth with age, and
…
And he was looking through a sheer cloth curtain, rippling in a nonexistant breeze, into a room with tiers upon tiers of cold stone steps, and there was a woman with fiery hair and another that could be her daughter, and they were familiar and beautiful and just out of reach and
…
And that was private.
…
There was a jolt and they were staring at each other across a dark room where blood was soaking into wooden floor and Harry could see the ghosts of Itachi's parents whispering off to the side. The air was heavy and tense, the metallic tang of blood saturating it telling them that they'd made their way back to reality. The link between their minds had broken—Harry had cut it off the moment Itachi has brushed against his memories. Still, it took barely a thought to touch Itachi's mind with his own and promise, I will keep him safe.
Itachi made an abortive movement towards his brother, barely perceptible, before turning away and disappearing in a small explosion of black, shadowy leaves.
Harry heaved a mental sigh of relief, not sure if he had the patience to continue arguing with the young prodigy. The boy was too self-sacrificing, the sort of hero that cropped up every so often and made him feel annoyingly old.
A small, warm presence at his side pulled him out of his thoughts. He looked down—Itachi's little brother was standing next to him, hero worship in his eyes and one small hand clutching at Harry's own.
Which didn't have a glove on. Harry didn't bother with them when he was working.
Narrowing his eyes, Harry could already see the taint of death creeping over the kid from where he was touching Harry's bare skin. If he left the kid alone, Sasuke would be dead within the hour.
"You, kid," he muttered, mostly to himself, "are going to be so much trouble."
It took him a few minutes to detach himself from the recently traumatized Uchiha child, who had asked him to stay with such adorably pleading eyes it should have, frankly, been illegal. Then again, he had to leave to help the kid in the first place, so he hardened his heart and crouched down to eye-level.
"Sasuke-kun," he explained, "I'm going to have to leave you for now—I promised someone that I'd take care of you, but in order for me to do that I need to go deal with something right now."
Wide black eyes, so dark Harry couldn't detect pupils, stared into his. "You promised anik—Itachi?" There wasn't one defined emotion behind that question—rather, there were too many to count.
"Not only your aniki," he replied gently, "but he was one of them."
Confusion swirled through Saskuke's curiously flat-feeling soul. He wasn't angry, not yet. Harry was pretty sure he was in shock. "Then why?"
"I'm not sure yet," Harry said grimly, "but I have an idea. It's dangerous for you to know, though—the people who asked him to do this wanted him to kill you as well."
"So he did do this," Sasuke said slowly. "On someone else's orders. Why are you telling me this?"
"You have a right to know," Harry replied. "Someone tried to have you killed, tonight. You have the right to know that."
Sasuke shook his head. "Secrets are only told to shinobi who have proven that they can keep them, and you can't tell children shinobi secrets until they've at least graduated the Academy." It sounded like something he'd been told, before. Probably a good rule to live by in a village of ninja, but not something Harry was particularly keen on. He knew firsthand how maddening it was to grow up in the middle of secrets you didn't know.
"I trust you," Harry told him simply.
Sasuke frowned, worried. "But what if I tell someone? What if they make me tell? There's ways of getting secrets out of people, I know it! Mother told me so!"
Harry raised an eyebrow. "There's ways of keeping people from telling secrets, too," he countered. "I know several."
"Use one on me."
Harry blinked at Sasuke, taken aback.
There was a spark of determination in the child's black eyes, the most promising sign of recovery since Harry had confirmed that his brother was responsible for the massacre. "Aniki protected me," he said with utter certainty. "Aniki always protects me. This way, I can help protect him too."
"Are you sure?" Harry asked. "I'll seal away everything you learned tonight, so that you'll remember tonight but you won't be able to talk about it. You should be able to convince everyone that you lost your memory of tonight from trauma." The boy was only eight years old, but Harry knew from Naruto and Ino that he was one of the top students in their year in the Academy—ninja in training were really good actors.
Sasuke narrowed his eyes. "I'm sure."
Harry had sealed away the secret through a bastardized Celestial version of the Fidelius charm, condensing the seal until he could hide it as a passable birthmark underneath Sasuke's hair. Anyone who knew him well enough to notice it was new was out of the village—for undeterminable amounts of time—or dead. He'd spelled the boy to sleep, and jumped dimensions.
Several more rather subjective minutes later, Harry strode into his office with such calm seriousness that Minato dropped what he was doing immediately and spent several minutes panicking that something was wrong with his son. Harry wasn't able to hold his snickering in past the first thirty or so seconds, which in turn calmed Minato down once he stopped panicking enough to notice.
To deal with the whole dying-Sasuke thing, they ended up having to send for Urahara Kisuke, the former kind-of-but-not-really exiled head of the Research and Development department (it was a bit complicated, but things involving Kurosaki-taichou usually were). The man was cheeky and had the curiosity of a very determined cat, but he was a better option than his successor—that man was a sociopath, and disturbingly proud of it.
Anyways, Kisuke was a genius. Quirks were to be expected, really.
"The problem you run into," he explained, "isn't necessarily that your touch kills people. Rather, it loosens—corrupts, really—the bond between body and soul." He gestured to a diagram he was holding up, which strongly resembled a grade-schooler's doodling. "And since your main job is to guide souls over to their respective where-afters, the soul gets immediately sent on, instead of just getting the general out-of-body experience and being able to pop back in." He flipped the page, to a picture of a blob that looked a bit like a rabbit crossing a line labelled, 'Living World'. "The body dies before too long because the spark of life is just…gone." Another picture, with a barely identifiable creature with crosses for eyes. It was clearly meant to be dead.
Harry looked rather grossed out. "You mean I'm like a dementor?" he asked.
Minato looked confused—Harry assumed it was because he'd never explained to his secretary what dementors were, until the man opened his mouth and asked, "Did you get those drawings from Kuchiki-taichou?"
"No and yes," the scientist answered them, waving a white fan in front of his face to hide his expression. "…No, I lied. Just yes. There are a few differences of course, one being that you still have a proper face and eyeballs and whatnot. And when dementors remove souls, they consume them, and because the souls are still on the living plane the bodies are cursed to be empty until they die of natural causes. Bodies yearn for their souls, you see, and as long as they can sense each other they're not quite willing to give up. In your case, it's more like you're speeding up the process of mortals passing on. " He shut the fan with a slight snapping sound. "And these diagrams were indeed gifted to me by the lovely Rukia-chan. It's my understanding that Ichigo-kun gifted her with a new set of art supplies for their latest anniversary."
That explained the slightly garish colours, but Harry made no comment. One learned not to comment on Kuchiki Rukia's artistic talents when one worked with Soul Reapers. It was, apparently, a Sensitive Topic.
"Anyways—this means that the situation to your situation is simple enough. You just have to get the boy's soul back to his body before it dies. It's probably down in Reception right now, if I've guessed the timing correctly. Just take it with you when you go back."
Harry wrinkled his nose. Reception was a waiting area the size of the average planet, where the best way to locate people was ticket stubs. If he wanted to find Sasuke, he'd probably need to wander around it with a broom and a 'Point Me' spell. Once the soul had left, the body would take around two hours to die at most so he could probably make it in time – if he hurried.
A subtle flutter at the corner of his eye caught his attention. A black butterfly—a Hell Butterfly, it was called, used by soul reapers for communications in a way that almost reminded him of owls—dropped off a pile of paperwork on Minato's desk, before alighting into the air and blinking into another dimension.
"Kisuke-san," Harry said slowly, "Research and Development recently bred a new strand of Hell Butterflies that can deliver things between worlds, correct?"
Kisuke managed to nod in a way that was both smug and slightly patronizing.
"Can they carry souls?"
The scientist smirked. "My friend, I thought you'd never ask."
So that was how a butterfly ended up fetching Sasuke's soul and delivering it back to his body. Harry had made a point to watch the hospital room that Sasuke's unconscious body had ended up in—pointedly half-existent, because he really didn't like hospitals—and as the butterfly landed on the child's outstretched hand Sasuke's whole body lit up to Harry's seventh and eighth senses, assuring him that the boy was properly alive again.
No, the whole dying situation was solved without too much trouble. It was what came after that was a problem.
[A/N] You may notice that there has been barely any Naruto this chapter. This is because this was supposed to be the first half of a larger chapter - however, it's taking a rather long time and it seemed like a good place to pause. There will be more Naruto and Ino next chapter, I promise.
