Hello, all! I will now apologize in advance for any long absences due to school or any other time-consuming activities.

I will disclaim any perceived ownership for either Bleach or Harry Potter, though I feel this unnecessary given the nature of this site as a /fanfiction/ site. Specifically, the site is composed of and created for 'fans' of popular and semi-popular anime/manga, novels, movies, cartoons etc. writing 'fiction' in the universe(s) of their choice. If the actual author wanted to write further, they would either create another book/movie/cartoon, etc, or would do so on an author site instead of one meant for their /fans/.

I will also point out that much of the original inspiration for this comes from psychoticKisshu, and that I have her permission to use her ideas in this story, specifically, ideas adopted from her story Harry Potter, Shadow Shinigami. Admittedly, while the beginning will remain much the same, my story is my own and will not be exactly like hers, which is partly why I am rewriting even those parts that stay mostly the same.

Prologue : An Unremarkable Meeting

Harry Potter had never been quite normal by the standards of the universe. That's discounting his birth as a wizard, to an old-family pureblood and a muggleborn at that. It also forbore the mention of the occasional odd situation, like that extra milk carton coming into his possession even though the teachers were certain that little Harry had not left his seat. That was even discounting the fact that if one actually looked for records of him, they suddenly appeared at age 3, when the free local preschool began accepting students and people would have started asking uncomfortable questions of the scrawny ghost-child who could often be seen working outside 4 Privet Drive.

Harry had always known he was different than the Dursleys. If he concentrated, (and even sometimes when he didn't) things happened around him. This, Harry knew, was what made him different, made him freaky. Given the reactions to just having reason to guess that he would be a freak and these things would be possible for him, Harry wondered if doing his 'freaky things' in front of his relatives would be a good way to watch them all have heart attacks and end it. He'd heard about heart attacks on the TV through the cupboard door. He heard a lot of things through the cupboard door that he wasn't supposed to hear, and he was certain that heart attacks fell under a category that said that four year old freaks were not meant to know about them just yet.

He decided against it. Being freaky got him locked in the cupboard without meals, and a whole host of bruises. A totally uncalled for punishment, he felt, but not one he could do anything about. Doing 'freaky things' in front of them might get him killed one day, Uncle Vernon's fault. And, if they managed to die because of the impending heart attack, he would have to go to the orphanage, and the orphanage would be far worse than the Dursleys, he was assured.

Being smarter than Duddykins, doing something better than Dudders or anything of the sort were achievements that could only be private. If he let on to his Aunt's family, he'd be in for it, probably a few swats more and a few meals less for it. That was the best way to deal with disobedient freaks, after all. Freaks weren't supposed to be seen or heard. If he was the more intelligent child in the household, it was why he had learned not to ask questions and figured out what answers he could on his own.

And, being the more intelligent child in the houshold, even at the tender age of four, he had realized that he could see things that no one else could, people and monsters both. The people were odd enough, sometimes normal and sometimes wearing a black-and-white costume that looked nothing like Uncle Vernon's best suit. But the monsters were even weirder. Sometimes, they-the noise of crashing glass right near him made Harry jump.

He held his breath as he looked around for the perpetrator of the noise, hoping desperately that it was from the inside of Number Six's kitchen, whose window was open and had been tormenting him with the smell of baking bread for what seemed like forever. Skittishly, he recognized the pieces of Number Five's wind chime across the street, blowing in the sudden wind. He hoped he wasn't blamed, but that was likely futile. Then he saw the commotion on the strip of street between Numbers Three and Four.

It was one of the monsters with the white masks over their faces and holes in their torsos, he tensed, standing so he could run, weeding tool abandoned on the ground by Aunt Petunia's flower beds. This monster...it was bad, very bad, bigger and more dangerous than any other he had seen. Harry would be in unimaginably huge trouble if it saw him.

His attention was drawn as a man, one of those who wore socks with sandals and those strange black outfits that looked as big on them as Dudley's were on him, though this one had a long white coat on over it with a black symbol on the back. He stood frozen, trancelike, as the man pulled out a long knife, a lot longer than the one Aunt Petunia was teaching him to use for vegetables, and started trying to cut up the monster. It looked like he would succeed eventually, and as scary as the monsters were, this person was perhaps more dangerous.

Plots within plots, whispered a niggling thought, and plans within plans. Several goals, hidden ones, a whole hidden agenda. No one would suspect the man unless he wanted them to (and why would he?). The tousled light brown hair and the glasses could be as easily kind as menacing, the man's expression as capable of being sinister as being innocent. An innovative amoral hidden behind innocence. A man you could trust to watch your back as long as you were useful to him-at which point his knife would be at your throat.

The monster sort of exploded and then started fading slowly, and Harry knew the fight was over. The man with the false kind eyes touched his arm, and then flexed it. The wind was blowing towards Harry, and he smelled a faint scent of blood. The man was injured, and by the expression on his face was unsatisfied with that state. The man's expression was the disgusted one that Vernon always sported when he saw the freak inside the house, especially if he was eating any of the Dursleys' hard-earned food.

Suddenly, Harry sneezed, the noise loud in the new silence of the street. The man's head swiveled, and he caught sight of Harry. The man took on an inquisitive look that Harry didn't think was faked and took a step towards him. Harry was unable to help his taking a step back. The man's eyes widened, as he processed the implications of being seen. Harry took this hesitation as time to make a break for the forest, bolting like prey that had seen a hunting predator and was desperate to get away with its life.

He headed towards the forest that lay behind Privet Drive. He knew the forest, knew it well, and it was his forest. He wouldn't get lost. He could get to one of his hidey-holes and wait the dangerous man out, because the dangerous man did not know the forest at all. If he got to the hidey-hole, no one could find him. Not one of the people in sandals and socks and odd black clothes, not the people who bowed to him in the shop, not the monsters with white masks and empty holes where their hearts should be.

There! Just where he thought it would be, was a little cave formed by a huge tree being partially uprooted and a hollow forming where the foremost roots used to be. It was one of his hidey-holes. Looking for the man behind him and not seeing him, he scampered into the tiny cavity, heart pounding with the exertion. Inside, he sat down and focused on not being found.

Aizen noticed another presence just after he dispatched the now-useless experimental hollow, it having been revealed to him by an untimely sneeze. He felt himself prepare for a fight with something-anything-only to find himself looking at a raggedy little living boy whose clothes more resembled the wear worn by the losers of the fights in the Outer Rukongai Districts than anything a Living World child usually wore and was thinner than those children unfortunate enough to be dropped into such a barbaric, uncivilized, unlivable area. There was dirty, messy black hair over flashing green eyes, eye-catching eyes.

Terrified eyes. Curious, he took a step towards the boy. The boy took one back, and bolted as Aizen paused. Before Aizen could take more than a half dozen steps forward, the boy had already disappeared into the forest. Aizen could feel the curiosity welling up in him to explore the anamoly the boy represented as he followed him into the shadowed trees.

A few minutes later, Aizen had to truly commend the boy's knowledge of the forest. It had become clear the moment he entered the forest that he would have to follow the boy's reiatsu, which was surprisingly large for a human, much less a small child. The boy had definitely been able to see him, with that reiatsu. Besides, following him was well nigh impossible. Even with the focus he was putting on the hollow, he wasn't quite sure how he had missed this young boy's power. Whichever way, he most certainly recognized it now.

Moreover, the boy was frighteningly fast, and had great apparent ability to navigate and pick his way through the detrius covering the floor. Aizen barely dared to shunpo, given that the first time he did he had tripped over one of the larger roots and nearly broke his ankle. The child had to be tiring soon, and he would eventually catch up to him, and-the boy's reiatsu disappeared in the space of a moment, like a candle that had been blown out.

Aizen kept moving towards the direction he had last felt the boy. He stretched his senses, attempting to find the boy again, without any success. The reiatsu had just disappeared into thin air. Aizen frowned to himself. All of the captains could hide their reiatsu as it was often necessary to not crush the unseated shinigami with only a little reiatsu, but for a child, a living child, to be able to disappear so thoroughly…it was impossible. Fascinating.

At last he reached the place where he had last felt the boy. His arm was starting to hurt, but he ignored it in favor of finding the anamoly he had followed. He searched the nearby trees for signs of his passage, and found none. The boy was quickly becoming a source of both amusement and annoyance for him. A living child, perhaps three or four, was hiding from him to great success. When he died and came to Soul Society, provided he kept his reiatsu, would be a shoo-in for the Second Division and the Onmitsukido. He idly wondered how Soi Fon would react when he reported the strange human child with more untrained reiatsu than the average seated officer.

If he didn't manage to find the boy, he was sure she would try. He would find the boy.

If nothing else, he could not let such an opportunity as the chance to study this child unmolested by Gotei authority. What they didn't know wouldn't hurt him, and if what they didn't know hurt them, they wouldn't be staying as authority much longer. He'd proven that to his former Captain and his associates after that unfortunate incident with a different experimental hollow in Rukongai. It was one of the reasons he had a base in Hueco Mundo. Testing his hollows on other hollows drew much less attention than testing them on middle-outer Rukongai districts ever did when he felt the need. Or testing them on the Living World for that matter, where odd hollows would arguably draw the most attention.

The throbbing in his arm tripled in an instant, nearly sending him crumpling to the ground with sudden pain. The wound was poisoned, he knew. From what they could tell by its interactions with other hollows, the unstable hollow-creation he had killed had had a severe sadistic streak, waiting and watching its victims nearly die in agony and only eating at the last moment. Any less debilitating poison would have gotten the thing killed before he had had to put it down.

Then he felt the prickle on his neck that meant someone was watching him. This watcher made no attempt to talk to him, ruling out that a shinigami, had come after him. Not that that was likely after all-he was a captain and there had never been many captain-class shinigami. It could only be the boy, the one he had been looking for, who now had the perfect opportunity to get away if he was really as close as he seemed to be. He ignored the boy's presence in favor of looking over the wound on his arm.

Aizen would never admit it, he knew, but he nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the soft, almost hoarse voice behind him. "It's poisoned." The boy, it had to be. The hand on his arm was miniscule, and another of the same size was poking the wound. He wasn't sure when it had gotten there, which rang mental warning bells.

Aizen processed the idea of the boy's presence, then his words, all the while wondering why it was taking so long to work through it. "I understand, little one. I will get it healed when I return to the place I came from."

"Nu-uh. It's fast acting. Feel really weak, like world's spinning around really soon. Won't make it home before it gets to the heart. And then you'll be gone, like Thrasher the dog." The boy spoke confidently.

Aizen was all set to say that a small boy like him wouldn't know what he was talking about when a wave of dizzyness and weakness came upon him, and his knees folded under him. "Where are your parents, little one? You're much too young to be in a forest alone."

That earned him a dirty look. "They're dead. They've always been dead, so long as I can 'member," two tiny fists balled up, thankfully away from the wound. "And I'm not little" he added petulantly. "'Sides, I can heal it for you."

Aizen raised an eyebrow at the proclamation. "Can you, then?"

The boy nodded, biting his lip. Then he put his hands above the wound and his face twisted up in concentration. The sight would have been rather adorable if he hadn't been in the midst of healing a lethal wound at the time. A fine blackish mist that hinted of dark purple rose up from underneath the boy's hands. Aizen's other eyebrow rose as his head cleared of the haze it had been in. The mist cleared the moment the boy took his hands away, and beneath it was the pink of a healthy healing scar, paling quickly into one that looked almost old.

"You have quite the talent there, child." Aizen told the child, looking admiringly at his work. If Soi Fon wanted this boy, she would have to fight Unohana to get to him. With the ability to heal a lethal wound like that, and so young... Well, the young ones were always most impressionable.

The smile that the boy rewarded him with for his small complement was brilliant, dazzling even. Aizen instinctively, inevitably felt his own lips turn in a responsive smile. In that moment, he felt intensely protective of this little human living boy who had just saved his life. The boy was simply adorable, in a waifish sort of way. "Child, if your parents are dead, who takes care of you?" He felt like the father-figure he tried to emulate for the Arrancar he had managed to make.

The fear and terror he had seen when the boy ran from him in the first place was back in full force. It might have even been worse. The little thing was trembling like a leaf, or like an unseated shinigami exposed to his captain's full reiatsu for a few moments. "No! You can't! I won't let you!" The boy shouted, agitated. "You can't tell them about anything! You need to forget!" The boy's right hand flung violently sideways across his body, left to right before he turned tail and disappeared back to his nearest hidey-hole under the leaning tree

Aizen blinked, looking around the surrounding forest, feeling slightly disoriented. When had he gotten into the forest? He had been chasing that thrice-damned experimental hollow around. Perhaps he had followed it in? The thing was annoyingly agile. However, the loss of the memory of running into the forest after it that was most worrisome.

Simply put, there was absolutely no evidence of this ability from any hollow, let alone this one. He had devoted quite a substantial amount of time and resources into following this hollow, as had it been stable and not swung into further hollowification than he intended during that instability, it would have been one of his finest permutations yet. That wasn't to mention the truly enormous amount of time and resources he had allocated for hollows in general.

From there there was only one conclusion to be made; some being other than a hollow had repressed or stolen those memories of the last twenty minutes or so. The blank space in his memory was almost tangible to his senses. He frowned, having too much self-control to growl. Blanks like that were dangerous, and he had no idea what could have caused it, aside from the Twelfth, but they would not have been present here. He twitched,deciding to feel amused instead of annoyed that something unidentifiable had managed to attack him, and left no trace aside from what he couldn't remember-and, as he quickly found, couldn't reverse.

Perhaps they had something to do with the green eyes, bright frightened green eyes that were the only thing he could remember.