"Naruto, have you ever killed anyone?" Harry asked as I put a piece of fried bread into my mouth.
We were eating breakfast prepared by Kreacher. Of everything on the large plate, I recognized only bread, egg, and pork cut into thin, crispy strips. It wasn't bad—edible and quite filling. The breakfast conversation was unusual, though.
"Uh-huh. I've killed people." I swallowed and nodded. "But they were bad men..."
"There were a lot of them?" the 'local savior' continued, going faintly pale again and visibly nervous.
"Who counts?" I shrugged. "Mostly missing-nin—deserters—or bandits. The last man I killed had five hearts. My comrades managed to destroy two of them. We only learned about the five hearts during the fight, so things got hot. Literally hot. He unleashed a firestorm to wipe them out... My support team and I arrived in time, and I finished the monster with my newest technique." I smiled, remembering how Ino had come to see me in the hospital afterward. The blonde had taken the night shift in order to 'thank me for saving her.'
"Five hearts..." Harry seemed slightly overwhelmed.
"He'd lived for an extremely long time by replacing his hearts. Long enough to have fought the First Hokage of our village." I tried to remember what I knew about that 'immortal' Akatsuki member... I had forgotten his name—Zukuku or Kuzuku, something like that. It didn't matter.
"Hokage? That's what you want to become?" Harry smiled faintly.
"Yes. The Hokage is the strongest and most respected shinobi in the village—its leader and commander-in-chief. 'Ho' means 'fire,' and 'kage' means 'shadow.' It's a title. There are also the Mizukage, Tsuchikage, Raikage, and Kazekage. My friend Gaara is currently the Fifth Kazekage. And my father was the Fourth Hokage... He died sacrificing himself to save me and the village."
"I'm sorry..." Harry murmured.
"Sorry?" I asked, surprised. "What for?"
"That's just what people say. They're expressing sympathy for your loss," he explained, blinking.
"I'm proud of what my father did. I'm proud of him. And if becoming an orphan was the price I was destined to pay for that deed, then so be it. That's why I want to become Hokage too—to continue my father's work and protect the village, and the whole world if necessary. Don't pity me. Only weak losers need pity, and I'm not one of them!" He had managed to get under my skin a little. That took talent; usually only Sasuke could do it, and even he didn't always succeed.
"Sorry," Harry muttered into his tea.
The tea was black and too strong for my taste. The house-elf placed another little teapot in front of me, and from the aroma I could tell it contained green tea with jasmine. Just what I needed to calm my nerves.
"Thank you, Kreacher." I nodded as he poured tea into a new cup with a funny loop-shaped handle.
"Kreacher begs forgiveness for Master Harry," the elf muttered. "Master Harry did not mean to offend the great warrior."
"Master Harry can speak for himself!" the wizard snapped at the elf. Kreacher flattened his enormous ears and glared at him resentfully.
"So you said you had a difficult childhood with cruel relatives?" I snorted, looking at the wizard, then at the sulking elf. "It shows."
I left the table, abandoning a red-faced Harry who was making bubbling noises.
* * *
"Excellent camouflage," I praised him.
For the second time, Harry managed to surprise me when the house where he lived disappeared between the two buildings on either side of it, which stood together in one continuous row.
"Someone may recognize me. I'm very famous in the magical world," the wizard sighed, pulling the hood of his sweatshirt over his untidy hair and becoming vaguely reminiscent of Aburame Shino—except Shino's glasses were smaller and darker.
After turning around and studying the clothes of passing pedestrians, I used henge. There was no reason to stand out in my black-and-orange shinobi outfit with my village forehead protector. I took off the protector and placed it in the backpack Kreacher had brought, along with my pouches, scrolls, seals, and weapons. I kept only the kunai hidden inside my sleeve; no one would find it anyway.
I now wore heavy black trousers with a belt, an orange T-shirt, and a dark-gray zip-up sweatshirt. My ninja sandals had become fully enclosed shoes with laces, similar to Harry's. England was far from the warmest country I'd ever visited, and clouds already hung over the city in the morning. A gloomy place, and the architecture wasn't exactly cheerful either. Ah, where was my 'resort' on Turtle Island? It might have been full of poisonous, enormous, toothed, and dangerous creatures, but at least it was warm.
"Let me put one of my henge over you," I said. "That hood is too much. You're actually attracting more attention by trying to hide."
He nodded and lowered it.
"Done." I studied the boy in front of me. I had merely removed his glasses and scar and made his hair a little lighter and more ginger.
"Whoa!" Harry returned from examining himself in a shop window. "How long will this Polyjuice Potion last?"
"It's more like an illusion. I can maintain it for as long as necessary. The important thing is that no one injures you and disrupts the shell, and that you stay within about ten meters of me. In fact, something similar could be done with a wig or hair dye and makeup. You could buy glasses with a less distinctive frame, or dark lenses. Every six-year-old in our world can use henge, so it's mostly for fooling around. Strong shinobi can easily detect whether someone is using it. On missions, ninja usually rely on real disguise and makeup instead."
"You changed too," Harry said, peering at my face. "Those lines on your cheeks are gone, and your hair seems darker."
"Yes, you're very observant," I snorted. "I can't exactly walk around here with blazing golden-blond hair. While we were standing outside, I didn't see a single real blond. Everyone was dark blond, chestnut, auburn, or at best ginger or light brown. And I certainly didn't see anyone with pink, green, or blue hair..."
"So your friend Sakura... her hair is really that color?" The wizard's jaw nearly hit the pavement.
"Yeah. It's still rare, though. My mother's hair was bright red—the color of blood. They called her the Bloody Habanero because of it..."
"My mother had red hair, and eyes like mine. Otherwise everyone says I look exactly like my father," Harry muttered.
"Yeah, I know the feeling." I smiled. "All right, let's go to your Ministry."
* * *
London turned out to be an incredibly crowded city. Crowds and more crowds. In my opinion, Harry didn't know his way around it very well, because he bought a map.
"I... didn't visit London often. My relatives usually left me on Privet Drive. Then I started Hogwarts, where I spent the entire school year except summer," he said as though defending himself. "I only know a few addresses. And even then, people usually took me there, or I traveled by Floo..."
"It's fine." I shrugged and looked out the window. "I'm interested in seeing how other countries live. It's strange that you didn't ask Kreacher to take us where we need to go, since the elf brought you from your relatives' house to that one."
Harry froze, gave a crooked smile, and rubbed the back of his neck.
"I didn't think of that. I'm still not used to what elves can do."
By then we were already traveling in what Harry called a 'bus'—an iron machine on wheels. An amusing thing, though very slow. At least you could sit and do nothing. Now I understood why wizards were so scrawny.
"We'll take money from my vault. I don't have much left on me, and the bank sent me a letter about the Black inheritance a while ago, but I couldn't make myself leave the house," Harry said. "We'll ask someone to open the way into Diagon Alley... You know I can't use my wand during summer."
"That wand seems to cause nothing but trouble," I teased.
"Yes, maybe you're right about that, Naruto." The boy smiled sadly. "But I really like being a wizard."
"I really like being a shinobi too." I shrugged, and we both laughed.
* * *
"Diagon Alley counts as a magical location. The Statute of Secrecy doesn't apply inside it," explained the shaggy barman whom Harry had asked to open the entrance to the magical street. "So you can cast freely there. You're old enough, and no one's going to notice your particular bit of magic against the general background, lads."
"I didn't know that. Thank you." Harry nodded. Still unrecognized, we went through to the brick wall in the back yard of some pub, where a collection of strange people sat. I could sense that most of them possessed that same 'magic.'
"I wonder why no one told me," he muttered, touching the wall with his wand.
"Probably because you were younger. And, from what I've seen, because you haven't been especially eager to learn things on your own." I shrugged, watching the illusion collapse and reveal the entrance to another street.
"Amazing, isn't it?" Harry asked. "It's like stepping into another world..."
"Yes..." Now our clothes were the strange ones.
People walked around in long robes and cloaks Harry called 'wizarding robes.' I altered my henge to match the locals. Camouflage was everything.
"Oh, brilliant," my wizard said. "Now I can show you my magic, Naruto."
"Yeah. That would be interesting."
Harry thought, apparently trying to decide how to impress me. But in my view, the others might not appreciate him suddenly throwing magic around. It would be like me running through Konoha with Rasengan in both hands. Then one man caught my attention. He stepped into a puddle and splashed mud on his trousers, took out his wand, and muttered something. The stain vanished. Now that was useful. No washing required!
"Oh, that man used magic to clean dirt from his clothes. Can you do that?" I tugged Harry's sleeve. He deflated.
"Those are household charms. I don't know many of them... I only studied combat and defensive spells."
"Right, right. Dark Lord and all that. I understand. You can demonstrate the battle spells later, then. You wanted to go to the bank," I reminded him.
* * *
We entered the bank together, and I discovered that creatures like Kreacher were not the only intelligent non-humans in the magical world. There were also ugly little dwarfs. Harry said they were goblins. When we came in, they became nervous because they couldn't remove my illusion. I only released the henge in a private office, where they took Harry and me so the visitors wouldn't recognize 'the most famous young wizard alive.'
I didn't know what was worse—when everyone hated you, or when everyone loved you. In both cases, people saw only what they wanted to see and paid no attention to who you actually were. They saw a demon in me instead of Naruto Uzumaki, and they saw the Boy Who Lived in him instead of Harry Potter. It was complicated.
I didn't go into the vault. I stayed in the office, where I was offered tea. My ninja instincts told me that nothing here was as simple as it looked. Still, Naruto Uzumaki didn't pick on little people unless they picked on him first.