Chapter One: Return to Life

Some days Harry really enjoyed being Master of Death. There were some great perks that came with the job... immortality, power overwhelming, and access to an infinite number of dimensions. But then there were days like this and Harry was reminded that with an infinite number of worlds came an infinite number of problems.

"How could you all be such blithering idiots?" Harry paced in front of his desk as his two subordinates covered in fear before him. "Tell me again how they all just stopped working in favour of watching the mortals and placing bets. Oh dear merlin save me or I'll lose it."

One of the cowering figures flinched and cleared its throat. It was not immediately obvious what gender the figure was, nor whether it was human or just humanoid.

"Master, if you could... please don't. Last time you lost it we were held back for weeks doing damage control."

Harry took a breath and sagged back onto his chair. He steeped his fingers and massaged his forehead, tracing the lingering scar on his forehead.

"You're right, Peacock," Harry said with a reluctant sigh. "I won't banish those worthless beings to nonexistence and send more worthy reapers to that universe. It's tempting, though. So, very tempting."

Harry had learned to place less significance on his subjects' array of features and both of his advisors had learned to respond to Harry's not so flattering nicknames.

The space around them shimmered like warm air even though there was no such atmosphere to their current state of existence. Peacock, so named after his distinctive outgrowths on his forehead that resembled the tail feathers of the colourful Earth bird, carefully pressed against the far side of the wall to remove himself from the irate Death Master.

The other figure, so far still and silent, made a sound that Harry had come to interpret as a mix of frustrated resignation and opened two of its mouths to speak.

"Don't." Harry held up a hand and both mouths closed. "Just... let me stew for a minute, Panda. You can come back with your reason and advice and what have you, but right now, all I want is a cup of hot tea that I can throw in someone's mug. And a bloody large target for me to destroy."

The so dubbed Panda blinked its large, black rimmed eyes and rumbled out a thick agreement, again with the touch of resignation.

Harry slammed his hands on his desk and stood. He looked over the paperwork once more, flicking through page after page of red marked efficiency charts. "Ah damnit, how much work is this going to cost me? No, don't tell me. I don't even want to know. Is there anything that is going well today? At all?"

He glanced between his two closest advisers, neither of which seemed willing to speak out. Harry spun around, vanished the back wall of his office, conjured up a thick steel cube and then promptly collapsed it into a miniature black hole. He vanished it before anything more than a few sheets of draft paper were pulled into the gravitation well. No use. It wasn't as satisfying as he had hoped.

It was an odd bit of luck that his old mortal temper would place him so unfit for the role as grand master of paperwork and gambling employees. Well, he'd never had a problem with the latter problem, but there had always been something that Peacock and Panda could bring to him to mess with his day.

Harry tried something larger. More flammable. The explosion sent a shockwave that blew his papers clear out of their organised stacks on his desk and the heat wave threatened to blow his glasses clear off his face. That was better.

Although it did leave him oddly reminiscent of the feel of the sun.

"That's better," Harry said. "Now where were we? Oh yes, go on. What you were saying about the miss-communication?"

He reformed his leather back chair and sat back down at his desk, overlooking his paper strewn office and his two poor advisers standing in the corner. To their credit, neither reacted to Harry's stress relieving strategies and it was with the smallest of hesitations that Panda slid forward.

"Not a miss-communication as such. More a non-communication," it rumbled. "There has been a disconnection between the headquarters and their dimension. We have traced the break back to several centuries in their timeline and unfortunately, none of the regulations Master put into place has been conveyed to them."

Harry raised his eyebrows. "A disconnection? You mean they've been operating on their own for all that time? And we've only just noticed this?"

"Yes."

"I assume we have regained contact?" Harry tapped his fingers on the table - there would be no other answer, or the next explosion threatened to be bigger than the office could contain.

"We have," Peacock chimed in. The three feathers on his head tucked themselves behind the genderless figure as it stepped forward to collect the fallen papers. "They seem to have formed their own social structure, with a king and a system of distributing power in the form of notebooks. Of course, their society's severely regressed, to the point where sheer ennui has led to several deaths."

"Deaths?" Harry sat up and took his feet off his desk. He accepted the stack of papers from Peacock and chucked them unceremoniously to the side. "You mean they're doing their jobs and ferrying mortals right? Otherwise, this is much more serious than I'd thought."

Their silence was all Harry needed. A stack of papers began to smoulder and Peacock hurriedly banished the flames and straightened the paperwork once again.

"It might be wise to seek an audience in person, Master," Panda rumbled. "You have a way with persuasion and I'm sure you'll be able to put them to the straight with a visit. The link is stable if you have a wish to..."

"Good idea. Best thing I've heard today. No, no time for paperwork, Peacock, that will just have to wait until I get back. Actually, better idea, you get started on filling them out. I'll go and send them some persuasion like Panda said."

Harry swept out of the office, his cloak whipping behind him and Panda on his heels. He only had to focus on his destination - the circular hall where the portals to the multiverse lay - and they were there. In his domain, the Master of Death was master over all.

The place, if it could be called a place, was immense. It had to be, to fit all the compressed connections to the worlds under his control. Even minimised to a single speck of dust, an infinite amount necessitated an infinite space. At the centre of everything, several beings tended to the current opening, the one that Harry assumed lead to the problematic universe.

As one, they turned and bowed to their Master, not straightening until Harry strode past them to look into the portal. It was a desolate land, pure black rock, in places smooth as if formed from cooled magma. In the distance, thin spires reached into the ashen grey mist that hung above the land like a foreboding cloud. There was no sun. His creatures gathered in groups around depressions in the ground which gave off light and sound.

Harry stepped through.

They sensed his presence almost immediately as heads and eye stalks and twisted motion sensing vines turned his way. Harry, confident in his role as Master, stepped between his motionless vassals to the one who sat in a gilded throne, who wore a crown and overlooked the others as Harry overlooked them all.

The one who deigned itself king was quick to rise and quick to bow. "Master."

Harry nodded in acceptance. So not all was lost. Around them, murmurings started up as neighbours turned to each other and a cacophony of clicks and grunts and vocalisations filled the air.

"It has been too long," the king said. A thin, gnarly hand reached up to his crown and offered it to Harry. He refused, but the murmuring around them grew ever louder. Some even took steps to move closer.

Harry could see how the reapers here were deformed. Their bodies black, with teeth sharp as thorns and bodies that both resembled his own and were the opposite. While Harry didn't have the same command over the reality in this dimension as he had in his central headquarters, he knew he was in no danger.

"It has," Harry agreed. With a sharp turn, he addressed the reapers around them. "I'm here to return things back to normal. Keep you all happy and efficient and start you on doing your jobs properly."

A howl came from the distance and it was like a ripple had passed through the assembled reapers as one after another scrambled back to the depressions in the ground and hunkered over them. A sound like laughter and the exchange of coins. Harry frowned. It wasn't often he that he was ignored, not that it had ever been an issue. But it certainly wasn't welcome now when he was trying to fix up the damn system.

The king behind Harry sighed. "As you can see, Master, the task is not an easy one. Perhaps when they were all merely bored with existence you could have come and renewed their purpose, but now they are all trapped in their fascination. It is become a drug, and the events in the mortal realm prove tempting even for me. I doubt any would return to their duties before everything plays out."

The king gestured, and Harry followed as they moved to one of the nearby depressions. It was a hole, reaching down through the barrier and into the mortal realm. Oddly enough, it showed one of Harry's reapers hovering behind a teenage boy. They were watching television.

Harry turned to the reaper king in disbelief. "What is this?" A quick glance told him all the reapers seemed equally fixated on this boy, that all the mirrors into the mortal realm depicted the same scene.

"It is… difficult to explain. One of our own, Ryuk, saw fit to entertain himself with… Well, perhaps it would be best if you saw for yourself, Master. I cannot do the situation justice."

Harry eyed the reaper in the image. Ryuk, as the king had called him, had the flair of a werewolf in the midst of transforming. Humanoid, yet with the same grey-black skin his reapers here seemed to have adopted. Hair rose in sharp spikes from the top of his head – and Ryuk was obviously male – and a pair of bulging yellow eyes peered over the boy's shoulders onto the television screen.

He seemed to be laughing.

"Perhaps I will," Harry said. "It's been a while since I've visited a mortal dimension." He shrugged, mouth suddenly tilting upwards in a smile. "Maybe it'll be fun."

Without even a backwards look, Harry stepped forward and sank into the image. It would be fun, he decided. Peacock had kept him from enjoying his freedoms as Master of Death for too long with all the paperwork and the duties. He'd take a good look at this boy and he'd find out just how a mortal was keeping his subjects so enraptured.

Harry landed hard on the pavement below and cursed.

"Damn it. How could I have forgotten?"

His ankle throbbed from where it had twisted and a thousand little itches vied for attention. His clothes had changed to something more suitable to the era, a white cotton dress shirt and some slacks, but his Hallows were still with him, albeit in altered form.

A car beeped its horn at him and Harry blinked.

"Get off the road, you crazy fucker," the driver yelled as it swerved around him. Harry hurried off the road and took stock in a crowded store front.

There were people everywhere. The shimmering lights of advertisements and shop names made his eyes pound and his head spin with sensory overload. There was the chattering of humans, in groups and on their mobiles, the blasting of music from a speaker, the voice of hawkers and the steady, background thrum of the vehicles. Through it all, the scent of beef broth, the sharp clearness of air conditioning and the mix of both sweat and perfume. It was nearly too much.

Harry reached deep into his past and snapped his ill-used Occlumency shields back over his mind. They came with startlingly sluggishness but the lights and sounds were a little dimmer, a little easier to handle.

The world spun and it took a moment before he realised he hadn't breathed in a while. It's been a while since he'd been mortal. Harry lifted his head towards the sun and breathed in the first breath of real air that he'd had in centuries.

AN: My first story on ff =] Hope you enjoyed the start. I seriously love some master of death action, and I'm a huge fan of DN as well so yeah. Hope I can do both series justice.

Edited: 18.1.2014