Author's Note : So, explanation.

This is a sort of crossover of a crossover. Of a crossover. Long story short, someone's about to go interdimensional-hopping into another author's fic. This is actually the very long continuation of the Canon Cast Meets Mesuji-verse series, since it will explain what the hell is up with the ending scene involving Natsumi and Minato dealing with the Uzumaki clan and Bear-sama's son/nephew's existence-yet-missing issue.

Who is it? Fiona.

She's got issues, upon issues, and since I glossed over the original ending of Natsumi vs Fiona that should've had a very large chunk of the ending of Déjà vu reserved for it before I cut it for reasons of my own… it still needs to be done.

So eventually, if you do follow along with this part and the next one to where she's going in the end, there will be a Fiona and Natsumi faceoff. Elsewhere. Very much elsewhere. You can also decide to not follow it down that path, since we're getting into kooky very NOT!canon things now.

I'll probably go back to writing actual scenes for Pawprints after this is done and Fiona's well on her way.

Next part will identify exactly where she's going and which author asked for her. As well as flesh out her stay here.

When Death Comes Calling… Part One

The Death Room in Death Weapon Meister Academy, Death City, Nevada

The Death Scythe named Spirit Albarn had not been expecting much from the very lazy feeling Wednesday. Shinigami-sama was for once catching up on his paperwork in his infinitely vast office space, his ex-wife still wasn't talking to him and in another city, his meister daughter and her demon weapon partner were between missions and attending class, no emergency had filtered back to them from any of the military branches.

The sky was still blue in the Death Room, puffy yellow clouds drifting along at their own pace. The desert of crosses spread around them stripped the landscape as they ever had. The row of red and steel guillotines lining the path to the room's doorway gleamed in the bright sunlight. The room's rather drab and severe view was only broken by the ornate, brass mounted mirror in the middle of the room and a large desk and throne only moved in a bare few hours ago.

And the several large stacks of paperwork that had random knickknacks from the school level being used as paperweights.

All in all, it was shaping up to be a rather forgettable day that he was tempted to nap through… until the mirror rang.

It had Shinigami-sama promptly abandoning his paperwork, over which Spirit despaired of getting the Death God to return to afterwards.

"Mirror-san, mirror-san, what do you have for me today?" Sliding one of his oversized fingers across the elaborate mirror's surface, Shinigami-sama peered into the reflective surface as his own reflection faded from view.

Spirit tipped back in his chair lazily, trying to see around his boss. The chair's legs thumped back to the ground solidly as he realized he couldn't see anyone in the mirror… but the Death God obviously could from how his head was nodding along to some conversation only he could hear.

Another Shinigami then. While not entirely rare, it still wasn't common for another Aspect of Death to speak with another. Much less for any Aspect that didn't tend to have psychically or physically viewable forms to interact with the living realm.

"Yes, I can understand how that might pose an issue. Come on through, then." Shinigami-sama drifted backwards…

A head of long white hair, pale purple short horns sticking out of the mass with similarly colored skin, and an unsheathed knife clenched between sharp looking black teeth emerged from the mirror's surface. The rest of the visiting Avatar of Death following through in short order, clad in a white yukata and black cloth pants.

This was a Shinigami Spirit had never heard of before, and he was sure any of the other Death Weapons or meisters able to wield them would've mentioned some Avatar of Death like that had they ever seen it before this.

One long-talon bearing, pale purple fist was clenched tight around something bright, flickers of light escaped the long fingers occasionally making strange patterns on the pure white robes it wore and the expanse of pale purple bare chest.

"Well… let's see this slight problem of yours." Shinigami-sama held out one oversized flat hand, and the other Death God tipped it's clenched fist then let go of the flickering light onto it. "…ah. Oh dear. Yes, I can understand how this might have given you some bad indigestion."

It was a soul… but not like any Spirit had ever seen in his life. It was only mostly one color, and of a size much greater than normal.

The center of the soul looked crystalized, sharp spires of solid-looking bluish crystal spiked out from the center. Alarmingly, there was a strange reddish-purple taint to the rest of the soul which, at least, seemed to be of the same consistency of a normal human one… except the very outer edge. The outside of the sphere was denser, likely as crystalized as the innermost parts, but that shell was showing great rents and cracks all across it's surface.

Spirit slowly rose to his feet, wondering if it was a new type of pre-Kishin soul. It wasn't a deep red, the core wasn't purple, nor did it have the half-shell of black plates coating the surface, but it was possible it was just a new type of one.

"Well… I suppose there is really no help for it." Shinigami-sama spoke slowly, as if pondering the state of affairs that lead to him holding such a… bizarre soul. "A price is a price, and it was paid in full despite… ah, later difficulties."

The Death Weapon hadn't been expecting it, so when the entity that was one of the Death Gods spoke in a voice not fit for living ears, it drove him to his knees on the ground. Not quite in pain, and yet it was painful to hear anyways.

He could not, for the steel of him, have said what it was that Avatar of Death had spoken of. All he knew was that if he never heard such a thing again it would be way too soon for him.

"Quite, quite. But… one thing. Would you mind not speaking again? You seem to be giving my Death Scythe a bit of trouble." Shinigami-sama drifted over to the desk Spirit had moved into the room that very morning, gently depositing the strange soul on top of it then turning back to the visiting Death God.

Dizzily watching the visitor, Spirit couldn't have said if the visage of the other Shinigami shifted or changed in answer.

After a moment it's strange yellow on black eyes flicked to him, the strangely silent but terrifying visage turned to retreat back into the mirror surface it had emerged from.

"Hmm…" Shinigami-sama turned his attention to the soul now residing on top of his desk, rubbing at where his chin likely was under his mask and over his cloak. "Well… I have no idea what to do now. How interesting."

Spirit staggered, trying to get up on his feet but feeling still queerly off-balanced. "B-but, interesting? Shinigami-sama…"

"I've never seen this before." The Death God spoke, in the same tone of voice one would usually comment on the weather with. "Admittedly, this isn't something that would ever naturally happen in this reality."

"Reality?" Spirit echoed, stupidly but he was still rather shocked over recent events.

"Death touches all things in the end, Spirit. All things. Everything, everywhere. So where there is a somewhere, there is a Death in charge of it." The cloaked form of Shinigami-sama suddenly slouched into his throne, almost childishly. "Thankfully Death is infinite in scope, otherwise I'd have even more paperwork to deal with."

Almost spluttering at that mind blowing bit of information, the Death Scythe weakly sank back into his desk chair.

More Shinigami? Worse yet, more paperwork?

They could barely keep up with what they had already. Spirit wouldn't have any kind of love-life if they had more than they generated in this world.

"S-so… this soul… is it a soul?"

"Oh yes, it's a soul. It's even human… or it was once upon a time." Shinigami-sama turned his attention on the spiky cored soul, inspecting it from different angles. "Debatable now, really. For… what make a human a human? Or say… a demon weapon a demon weapon?"

"Being alive…? The gene and ability to take the form of a weapon?" Spirit suggested with a crooked grin. "Although, if that soul's been disembodied… isn't it dead?"

"Technically… I'm not even sure it was alive enough to begin with to die… again."

"Again?"

Shinigami-sama turned to gaze at his Death Scythe, nodding slowly at first but the motion picked up speed as he continued to talk. "Oh yes. Twice-dead, technically. Therein lies the issue, you see."

Spirit blinked up at his boss blankly. "Err… no, Shinigami-sama, I don't see."

"Hmm? Ah yes, you wouldn't have been able to understand our recent visitor at all." The Death God rose out of his throne, circling the desk to view the bizarre soul floating just above it. "She sacrificed her place in the cycle of reincarnation in return for the Death Reaper's aid… but she wasn't really incarnated. You cannot give up what you didn't have in the first place. So it's more like she's… one and a half times dead, really."

There was only one part of that the Death Scythe understood, and that was, "…she?"

"Yes, she. Her. This soul's last gender was female. She gave the Death Reaper quite the case of indigestion for a good couple years while he tried to break down her soul, but as you can see that didn't happen. After a decade of trying he gave up, and now she's here."

Spirit was disgusted. No, he was outraged. How dare that other Shinigami try to consume the soul of a LADY, no less one he had yet to FLIRT WITH-

The side of a flat, oversized hand forcefully introduced itself to the top of the Death Weapon's head, knocking him flat on the floor. "Try not to shout next time you try your bid at internal rants, Spirit."

"S-sorry…"

Shinigami-sama shrugged that off, turning back to the soul still on his desk. "As you can clearly see for yourself, it didn't happen. I highly doubt she's even aware of the passage of time anyways, or what was supposed to happen to her during it."

Rubbing the spot he had been smacked, it didn't really hurt for the Old One had more than enough self-control to not really damage his own people, Spirit slowly picked himself up. "Alright then. If she's not human, is almost to the point of being twice-dead, and yet here… what does it mean?"

"I…" Shinigami-sama drew himself up to his impressive height, then sighed gloomily and drooped in place, "…have even more paperwork to deal with. She has to go somewhere, and since by her own actions she's barred from the world she just came from…"

"…she's staying here?" Spirit finished for his boss, warily eyeing the strange soul peacefully floating on the large desk.

"Yes, well… I don't see any other alternative, do you?"

The Death Scythe didn't, but he also wasn't entirely sure about just leaving a loose soul floating about. She made a pretty paperweight, if the soul actually could be used as one… but… there were Kishin-possible bad souls going around eating other souls, and just having one crystalized like that lying about sounded like a really bad idea.

"Shinigami-sama? Is that… soul… pulsing?"

"…oh my."

They both watched as the soul all but shivered, then a tiny spike of that crystalized inner spirit fell off and through one of the cracks in the outer shell.

"…what?" Was all Spirit could get out as they both watched the tiny bit of soul fall to the Death God's desk then roll off.

It hit the sandy ground with a surprisingly clear tinkle of crystal striking stone, then all of a sudden someone else was in the Death Room with them.

Short sandy blond hair, green eyes, tall and fit, the new woman rolled her neck to crack it then rubbed the back with one hand in a sheepish gesture. "Well… this wasn't what I was expecting."

"Hello?" Shinigami-sama cheerfully called out, attracting her attention up to him. "And who might you be?"

"…Fiona Hanson. Staff Sargent, US Army. Active duty… when I was alive." She rattled off on automatic, blinking wildly at the towering image of death before her. "Ah… I'm dead, right?"

"Oh yes, yes you are." The Death God agreed.

"…and you're death."

"Called Shinigami, actually. Shinigami-sama."

"…so, is this hell?" She asked next, sounding a little bewildered.

"It's actually Death Valley, Nevada." Shinigami-sama helpfully informed her.

"…what?"

Rapid motion out of the corner of Fiona's eye made her flinch with the itch to draw a kunai or a katana, both of which she didn't have and made her hesitate as they weren't her own reactions. The pause allowed the other man, the more reasonably sized one, to suddenly sweep her off her booted feet before she could decide on a proper reaction that wasn't borrowed from a cold-blooded assassin.

"Don't worry, pretty lady!" The man shouted into her ear, cradling her like some kind of swooning maiden. "Your dastardly treatment by that Shinigami is over now, you can rest easy under my watchful eyes. I swear, or my name isn't-"

The grope to her ass was the last straw for the soldier's nerves. Natsumi's nearly instinctive aversion to being carried when it wasn't necessary was fully embraced and Fiona used some of her skills to swing herself out of the man's arms and boot the asshole off the… desk?

Her position had been more perilous than she had realized, kicking the man in the ass for manhandling her and shouting in her ear ended up tipping her over the side.

Instinct, again not her own, had her planting her boots on the siding of the desk and reaching for a form of energy she did not have in her life.

Fiona blinked, now standing sideways via chakra control. On a… greatly oversized desk in what looked to be a desert.

The gleam of metal had her stiffening, and she redirected her attention to the man she had kicked.

…his arm was now somehow a curved blade, which he used to correct his fall in order to land on his own booted feet.

She was stressed. Aggravated. In a period of time which to her was less than a few days all totaled she had lost her squad to an IED, woke up with the lifetime memories of an assassin, got into an verbal fight with said assassin while preventing her torture by a Uchiha, ended up summoning a God of Death to help the assassin's sister-in-law contain a demon problem, and ended up… here.

Again, Natsumi's impulses made her want to beat the hell out of the man that decided getting a feel in while she was worse than mentally reeling. Fiona didn't see a problem with that, even if she knew it was probably a bad idea.

The man's expression when she dropped the chakra exercise in order to drop knee-first onto his head made her feel a slight bit better.

(ooo000ooo)

"…please tell me you're joking."

"Mmm… unfortunately, I can't." The massive, white skull-masked, black robed figure spoke while rubbing the spot she could almost assume was his chin. It was very gentle when he put one of those white gloved fingers out in a gesture that imposed her to stop kicking it's companion around, but also held the air and presence of one that gave the orders.

It was either a very twisted human being, or something else.

Fiona wasn't exactly going to bet on that. Given the sheer crap she had seen in the last twenty-four hours alone, from her perspective anyways, she wasn't even going to assume this 'Shinigami-sama' person was even human at all.

Unknowns were dangerous, especially so when it didn't fit prior known categories. She didn't need a lifetime of memories from a master assassin to know that.

A wheezing, choked gasp from under her feet reminded her that she was standing on yet another… person, she wasn't assuming was remotely human either. This one, the weird metal-shifting man-thing that tried hitting on her before she really got over the disorientation, was… well…?

A very good indication she still wasn't in Kansas anymore.

"I give up." Running a hand through her short hair… hair? She was dead, why did she have hair? Shoving that to another corner of her head, like how she could pin a living being to the ground when she didn't have weight in the first place, the ex?soldier stepped off the… man-thing and stalked over to a forlorn looking chair. "Now what?"

"Well… that mostly depends on you, my dear." The humanoid… thing spoke calmly, ignoring the fact his much smaller fellow was still wheezing on the ground. It instead shifted to keep her in it's line of sight. "I was just going to stick your soul in a box until we knew more, but then you pulled this… how do you have a form?"

"That, the question of how I have weight and how I can pick random things up, are bits I have been trying not to wonder about." Fiona informed him tiredly. "I woke up this way, and from what… memories I have but didn't gain the usual way I can only assume it has something to do with Yin Chakra and the Kurama kekkai genkai I… ended up becoming."

The scrape of a throne almost six times her own height getting dragged over to her was not ear-splitting noisy as much as teeth-shaking in vibration, but Shinigami-sama didn't seem to care about the noise or the furrow the chair's legs dug into the soft ground. It sat itself across from her, clasped his wacky flat hands together and aimed the skull mask eyeholes squarely at her. "Explain the best you can. I might be able to fill in a few holes, but only if you're completely truthful with me."

There was an instant of discomfort within Fiona. Natsumi's lifetime of being less than honest about most everything unless it was her kouhai or husband twanged at the idea of honesty, edges of memories where being truthful would've been deadly nibbling on her mind, but she shoved it all away ruthlessly.

Natsumi might have based herself off Fiona, but the soldier wasn't going to base herself off the assassin. If she wanted to be brutally frank, she would be. Even to something she didn't know. Integrity was a value almost drilled into soldiers like her, and she was going to uphold that.

"I suppose… it started when I died. The first time, I mean."

The massive being calling itself 'Lord Death' cocked the masked face at her. "I am afraid that you didn't quite die the second time, so this first time is really the only death you have."

"…I was afraid of something like that…" Something that is dead wouldn't be able to die again, meaning that even Fiona's hope of the Dead Reaper Seal actually making another, or even her first, death stick had been at most a shot in the dark. "Any way it happened, after I died… I woke up again. That time was… I was, less than a figment of an imagination. Worse, the figment of an imagination of a very successful assassin who feared me."

"These memories you spoke of?"

"They're Natsumi's, that assassin. She… I... we were pretty much mashed together, somehow. Eventually, she ended up with all my life experience and memories heaped on her. From her memories they assumed I died an age ago, and eventually it was assumed by her that the fact she was a bastard child of this Kurama clan was the reason she had my life and soul to use."

"Are you entirely certain of that?"

"The basis of that assumption was the fact several… individuals were able to read some of the languages I had known before my… death."

"That wouldn't necessarily mean you died well before this… Natsumi lived." Shinigami-sama pointed out with a shrug of cloaked shoulders. "As you've retained a surprising amount of individuality for a soul forced into close habitation with another in a single form, anyways."

Fiona wrinkled her nose as she tried to understand what was being suggested.

"Take the language we're speaking." The massive figure continued. "I had assumed that, from my fellow Shinigami's usual realm of responsibility, you would speak the native language he usually deals with. In other words, something quite similar to what I would know as Japanese. Yet we are conversing in plain English."

"I was American before my death."

"Be that so, you do understand Japanese although you may not have understood it in your first life. I was speaking it when I asked you to stop stomping on poor Spirit over there."

An oversized flat fist jerked an equally flat thumb at the man-metal thing picking himself up off the ground, warily watching her as she sat on what was likely his seat.

"If he wished to be thought of as poor he should not have groped me." Fiona flatly informed the being across from her.

Shinigami-sama heaved a sigh in response. "Yes, well… continuing. Most realms of existence share something in common, most notably languages. Sometimes bits of history, occasionally the same series of events which do tend to work out a slight bit differently. My point, Miss Hanson, is that language might have only been an indication of how far removed this Natsumi's world was from your original one. History might have been shared up to a point, then one world split to result in a different way than your originating one."

Since she couldn't counter that particular point, it did have to be included as a possibility. "I… alright, taking that into account, then… fuck."

"It's highly unlikely this Natsumi's world was anything remotely connected to your own, your soul and hers didn't merge as much as two souls in the same body would've explained. However, that didn't mean there wasn't any… ah, bleed-over that happened."

"Besides memories?" Fiona questioned sourly, thinking that possibility over.

"Yes, besides that." Shinigami-sama tilted his mask head to indicate the other individual in the area with them. "Out of curiosity, have you always been able to stand solidly on vertical surfaces?"

Blinking at the question, rethinking what she did nearly on auto-pilot when the man-steel thing tried to sweep her up off a flat surface while wailing about 'pretty lady' and 'dastardly treatment', the dead woman pursed her entirely questionable lips. "Err… actually, that's more Natsumi's thing than something I've always been able to do."

Planting her feet on the desk's sides while she regained coherency and an idea of what the hell was going on had been… second nature. Not hers, Natsumi's second nature. Chakra aided wall-walking it took the girl years to learn to do instinctively and not jerk away from the impossible.

…Fiona had the instincts and reactions of a jōnin kunoichi that specialized in assassinations. Perfect.

"So you were dead, then became attached to one Miss Natsumi for what I am guessing is the bulk of her life." Shinigami-sama summarized helpfully. Mostly, the soldier was sure, to draw her attention back to him. "What happened next?"

"…Mrs. She was married. Nara Natsumi was the bastard child of a shinobi clan, one called the Kuramas. They had this bloodline ability to take their greatest fears and turn them into living lethal weapons. Problem was, those weapons were pretty much monstrous in composition and likely not very… reasonable." This part Fiona was surer of, because of how much the girl had obsessed over if the soldier was her greatest fear or not. "Through everything, I hadn't really been complete asleep but also not really awake enough to do anything. I think. I've got… flickers of things I know are my memories and not Natsumi's donated ones, but one incident I have both her and my own memories of was likely the point of which she started to fear that I might not have been completely dead."

The Lord of Death sitting across from her went curiously still, even it's cloak stopped shifting around in the breeze.

"Yeah… we, I'm, still not sure if I'm manufactured from a combination of that kekkai genkai and what Natsumi had known Fiona was, or if I am the soul of one Fiona Hanson given some kind of out-of-body freedom." The dead woman shrugged a little listlessly. "Quite frankly, at this point I'm not even sure if that's quantifiable."

"That much, at least, I can answer." Shinigami-sama reassured her seriously. "You are a soul… or at least, you started out as the spiritual half of a living being. For all intents, you are the soul of a woman by the name of Fiona Hanson."

Fiona blinked, then gifted the being with a confused stare. "…started out?"

"Yes. Started." The being tapped his almost cartoonish hands against where his mouth would've been under the 'teeth' of his mask. "Well… a few things seemed to have gotten a little… twisted on you."

Frankly, she wasn't sure if she wanted to know at this point.

"From what I know of the world you came from, mostly surface information about how souls act in that world you understand, the… current main military force of that reality fights using a mix of spiritual and physical energy called chakra."

"Matches what I know from the memories of one of those shinobi." Fiona admitted.

"Perfect. Well… from what I can tell… you have both."

The dead woman blinked blankly up at it, opened up her mouth, and shut it without speaking.

"I am pretty sure they call one half Yin energy and the other Yang, correct?" It seemed perfectly happy to only get a nod, and it continued in that same 'lecturing tone' any tutor would've been proud of. "Your soul is a bit… bigger than most, mainly because of the overwhelming Yang energy you possess. You wouldn't happen to know how that came about, would you?"

"I… I borrowed heavily off Natsumi's Yang chakra while I was… with them there." Fiona started slowly. "That should've ran out by now, if the ten years of nothing really did happen."

"Well… you might be able to add or remove a few years from that count. Time is it's own master, and seems to delight in changing the 'real world' times when you switch between worlds."

Which really only left…

"Oh… fuck."

"Miss Fiona?"

"I… I might have half of what was once called the 'nine-tailed demon fox'. A bijuu, free-thinking and free moving mass of pure chakra. The Yang half. That's why I summoned the Dead Reaper, to take that half with me into death."

Fiona placed her right hand over her face as she realized it. Not just a dead woman, she was now partially demonic.

Joy…

"How much of that do I have?"

"Not a massive amount… I think."

Yanking her gaze upward once again, she gifted 'Lord Death' with an incredulous expression. "You think?"

"Half of your soul crystalized." It pointed out calmly, seeming unbothered by her probably disrespectful tone. "It will take time for that to… melt, for lack of a better word, and for us to get a better view of what is going on with you. It could be just the… method of which the Dead Reaper tried to break down your soul that resulted in it, or it could be the Yang energy of this bijuu refusing to go quietly. It could be compressed and allowing the crystalized parts to 'melt' will flood your soul with even more Yang as a byproduct, or it could just dissipate."

Somehow, Fiona had made away from the shinobi world with part of the nine-tail's chakra. She… kind of wanted to panic… but couldn't get the energy.

Way, way too much shit had happened in a short amount of time for her. Fiona just really felt numb, mostly.

What the fuck did she do to deserve this crap?

Shinigami-sama seemed to understand her silence, rising up to it's full height again and turning to the lightly beaten up other-man. "Spirit, would you please go fetch Sid for me? I think Miss Hanson requires rest, or at least some space to process things. And best to put like with like, at least for now."

"'Like with like?'" Fiona repeated, probably a bit dully as the named 'Spirit' left them to wander down under the row of guillotines behind her position. "Is he a soldier too, then?"

"Of a sort." The massive being answered with a shrug that didn't pull the hem of it's cloak off the ground. "A soldier… and also a master assassin. I didn't miss your internal conflict when Spirit tried to sweep you off your feet, Miss Hanson. Sid might be able to help you identify, or at least control, any ticks the lifetime of an assassin's memory might give you that you don't feel comfortable with. At least until we figure out something to do with you, or you finally adjust."

…Fiona was a refugee. Worse, a refugee part-demonic soul. Of dubious skills, a lifetime of memory not her own, and somewhere a being calling itself Lord Death ruled and metal-spawning men obeyed.

She wondered when the hysteria would set in, and if she'd laugh or cry.

"Shinigami-sama… I… formally request asylum. I don't think I have anywhere else to go."

"…I suppose that might be for the best."