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2022-11-16
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2023-05-26
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For Want Of A Better Life

Summary:

Helena Jaime Potter had walked to her death with her chin held high and the weight of the world on her shoulders. Because what other choice did she have? She had been raised for this—the abuse the Dursleys had brought upon her, the quests Dumbledore had forced her through and the isolation the two people she had thought were her best friends had pushed her into. She had been raised for death and even if she wanted to escape her fate, where could she even go? She had nothing—no family, no friends, and no place to go—nowhere Lord Voldemort wouldn't follow. Except when she was hit by the curse that usually meant certain death, she was met with More. Not with death, but Death. And the entity had different plans for her life—far more illegal ones at that. But if she had to be reborn as an elusive, internationally wanted phantom thief to finally find happiness—well, who was she to refuse a request from Death?

Notes:

I had this idea like—a year ago? Maybe? It was 4 AM and I was absolutely shitfaced when I wrote the first three or something chapters and this mess has been rotting in my google docs ever since. And since I found it last week I've decided to share it with the lot of you because, why the hell not?

So just so you know: I swear a lot and I'm usually too tired to censor myself so Kaito will swear a lot, too. There will also be mentions of violence and blood and gore because Kaito is going to get shot and she's going to get hurt (and kind of killed) a lot. And last but not least, English is not my first language so if you find a mistake, feel free to come and yell at me, ig...

Oh and btw, I own nothing of this but you probably knew that already.

Have fun or whatever

PS. The title is a quote from Walt Disney because I love quoting pretty sounding things.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1: Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy

Chapter Text

Sometimes the girl who had once been Helena Jaime Potter wanted nothing more than to enter the realm of the deceased a little too early and deck Death right across their stupid, ugly skull-face.

“Get reincarnated.” the entity had said. “It’ll be fun!” they had said.

Well, six-month-old Kuroba Kaito was very decidedly not having fun. At all.
Being reincarnated with the entirety of her memories intact was not fun, but weird. It was weird and kind of gross and she hated the way people would stop to coo over her too tiny body, like she was some kind of adorable little kitten.
Being a newborn sucked.

Not only because she was an almost eighteen-year-old, war-worn witch stuck inside the body of a newborn baby in a world where magic was nothing but card tricks and confetti. That part was absolutely terrible and most definitely also a part of the problem, but the worst thing was actually the giant culture shock.

Helena Jaime Potter had been British.
And during her entire almost eighteen years of life, Helena had never left the island—not even once. The only big city she had ever seen had been London, and the only language she had ever spoken had been English (Parsel did not count, alright?). Hogwarts had been in Scotland, but all its students were from either Britain or Ireland. She had met the delegations of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, sure, but she hadn’t really spoken to anyone but Victor and Fleur—and never about their culture, or language, or traditions.
And even if she had done so, the other two had also been European.

Now Helena Jaime Potter was no longer Helena Jaime Potter but Kuroba Kaito and Kuroba Kaito was Japanese.

Suddenly, she could understand what people meant when talking about culture shocks, because she had absolutely no clue how she could ever even begin to hope to remember all the quirks that came with actually being a Japanese citizen.

Of course, when Death had booted her into this Dimension and Universe, he hadn’t just pushed her into a new body completely unprepared. He had taught her more than Hogwarts, than Dumbledore, had ever allowed her to know—wandless magic, elemental manipulation, a tad more than just basic shape-shifting, alchemy, and most of all the art of necromancy, the being’s speciality. And as the Master of Death, also her speciality.
She had learnt what it meant to be that Master, what it meant for her specifically. The ability to see magic, to see Death, that she wouldn’t die unless she wanted to, and the little thing called being a part of Death.

Kuroba Kaito might be technically speaking very much alive because her heart was beating, because she was breathing, but she was still Death. And for a being such as Death—well, languages were suddenly nothing but formalities, little more than annoying flies that were oh so easy to get rid of.
Language was no barrier for Death.

So, Japanese as a spoken language was not a problem.

Just everything attached to actually being a Japanese citizen was incredibly weird to get used to—including her new parents.

For one, the idea of actually having parents was a bit of a novelty.
She was sure that both James and Lily Potter had been great parents for the fifteen months of her first life when they had actually been alive, but that did nothing to change the fact that the only memory she had of them was their rather brutal murder at the hands of a more than just slightly unhinged megalomaniac.
All she knew of them was whatever white-washed bullshit their teary-eyed friends had told her over a decade later—that her mother had at first hated her father for his immature pranks, that her father had been a bully until mellowing out in their seventh year. All those heavily censored stories told to a child that was supposed to remember her parents in a good way. She also knew what they looked like; she had seen them in Snape's memories, photographs and Voldemort's own thoughts.
But they had never actually been her parents.
James and Lily Potter had been concepts she had lost, a mere idea, people she had never known and would never know. They were the people who had created and then died for her.
But they had never quite been her parents.

Her new parents, though, were named Toichi and Chikage and Kaito was sure that James Potter would have loved both of them to absolute pieces—which was actually as much of a description as it was a warning.

Chikage seemed, superficially, to be more of a stay-at-home parent kind of type, a bit like Aunt Petunia—except a perfectly normal stay-at-home parent, like Petunia had always pretended to be, would not be caught dead juggling with kitchen knives during dinner preparation or mixing various very dangerous-looking chemicals in her kitchen sink. Not to mention that the worst thing Petunia had ever hidden around the house had been some sweets back when Dudley (and the rest of the household by default) had been forced to go on a diet—not actual guns hidden just about anywhere a toddler couldn’t reach.
Sometimes Chikage told Kaito’s new father about family members of hers—an absolutely lovely aunt out and about counterfeiting money in Paris, some really amusing cousin stealing a famous painting in Russia, an honest to god grandfather of Kaito's own grandfather leading an entire criminal empire over in America despite already being 103 years old.

Her new mother had, very apparently, grown up with the life of organised crime and spoke fondly of a time where she herself had held her own heists as what she called a Phantom Thief.

Funnily enough, between the two of them, her new father somehow still managed to make himself seem like the weirder one.

Kuroba Toichi was a magician by trade.
Not the wand-waving witches and wizards Kaito had been more than used to back when she had still been Helena Potter, The-Girl-Who-Lived, but the kind that stuffed a rose down their sleeve just to make it appear back in their fist in a dramatic cloud of smoke and some slick sleight-of-hand trick.
And he was a good magician—one of (if not the) best.
He liked to play little pranks on her new mother, little bursts of glitter and coloured smoke erupting from various places, flowers blooming from crevices like freshly conjured by a master transfigurist. He liked to swoop into the living room or kitchen or whatever other room her mother was in with all the grace of a proper pureblood, twirling a giggling Chikage in his arms until her ordinary day-to-day clothes turned into beautiful ball gowns, their joyous laughter echoing around the house as they danced around their furniture, lost in their own little world. Whenever he came home from one of his tours, her father would take both his wife and his little daughter out to the park, wandering around as he informed them of all the mischief he'd gotten up to while he had been gone, listening with a fond simile as Chikage proceeded to do the same.

But whenever he wasn't being too busy being disgustingly in love with Kaito's mother, Kuroba Toichi also liked to talk about heist notices, the world's largest gemstones, and weird men shooting at him.

So Kaito (and what the hell was up with that name? Both of her parents were thieves and they actually thought it a good idea to name their daughter Kaito? Seriously?) was sure of approximately four things, more or less at least.
One, her parents were criminals. Obviously. And at some point in the future, Kaito would undoubtedly end up getting involved with that world as well—which would most likely lead to whatever mission Death had chosen for her, because why else would they have chosen her to be reincarnated as the daughter of this particular couple? (Yay on that front.)
Two, her parents were at least slightly insane (if not completely bloody mental), because Kaito was relatively certain that no one of sound mind would ever even think of keeping some thirty odd pigeons in their bedroom, and take the throwing of very sharp and pointy weapons at each other's faces as declarations of undying love.
Three, no matter what happened in her life, she wanted to learn magic the way her new father did because—well, who cared about actual magic? Anyone with actual magic could conjure up a perfect flower, but to do so without magic? That was an actual bloody talent right fucking there!
And, last but not least, she was going to fucking deck Death right across their ugly skull-face the next time she saw the deity because what the actual fuck?

When the deity had dumped her into this Universe, they had told her she would have the chance to just have fun. To play a few games, to pull some pranks, and then somehow play an important role in this Dimension's order.
You know, no biggy.

What they had apparently failed to mention were the thieves and guns.

It seems like a stupid thing to be mad about considering the literal magical terrorist that had hunted her arse for almost eighteen years straight, but they had promised her fun.
Theoretically, she could see how the whole being-a-criminal-and-a-thief-thing could even be considered fun, yes. It’s not like she had ever actually cared much for authorities or, Merlin forbid, the law. In her time in the magical world, Helena had broken just about every school rule imaginable, attacked multiple of her teachers (and straight up murdered one, too), used at least two out of three Unforgivable Curses, and broken into both their main government building (twice) and Gringotts’ bank. Not to mention that one time she had smuggled a very illegal dragon baby out of the country and the general amount of property damage she had left in her wake that last year when the state had dubbed her their number one enemy—her greatest accomplishment to date, without a doubt.
Stealing nice, sparkling gems sounded like a potentially very interesting thing to do to combat her already growing boredom.

She just had a slight problem with the guns.

As amusing as a bit of criminal activity sounded, she was not all that fond of the whole bleeding because of high-speed metal bits literally piercing her body thing. Sure, the Cruciatus Curse hurt, but at least that shit did not involve blood. None of her injuries had ever really involved blood—at least all the ones that hadn’t ended up as scars.
She had been forced to deal with blood then, but honestly?
She hadn’t even been able to think (or see) straight when that basilisk had bitten her, never mind focus on the blood on her arm. The Blood Quill hadn’t actually caused her to bleed so much as it had stolen her blood, and the few times her scar had bled, she had not exactly seen it do so (for obvious reasons).

The concept of bleeding from hurtful wounds was basically unknown to her and she would be lying if she said that the thought didn't absolutely terrify her, as pathetic as that was. Helena Potter, the famous Girl-Who-Lived, afraid of blood.

Luckily enough, neither of her parents were expecting their six-month-old daughter to voice her opinion on blood, guns, and/or thievery. Neither did they expect it from their one-year-old daughter. Or even their two-year-old daughter.

By the time Helena-now-Kaito’s third birthday rolled around, her parents had just about stopped talking about anything even remotely illegal sounding in her general vicinity.
Where her father had once regaled her mother with the tales of his nightly activities as a thief, he now stopped mentioning his second "job" altogether. Her mother, usually talking about the various exploits of her almost-definitely mafia-adjacent relatives, now stopped talking about any kind of family that was not Toichi or Kaito herself. Where her parents had spent evenings brainstorming over heist notices worded as riddles for a man they called Kudou, they now... didn’t. Toichi would speak about his tricks and legal shows instead, making no mention of the grand and very illegal tales he’d spun before.

Kaito was four when her father started teaching her his craft—magic, not theft; mischief, not crime.

He started her off with card tricks, went on to the ones involving coins, and then began the trials and errors of teaching her how to make roses appear out of seemingly nowhere.

She was happy about that—about not being involved in the life of crime right from the get-go.
Neither of her parents made any move to introduce her to a criminal life, which just proved... they really cared about her, didn’t they? They were not dying for her, obviously, but they were actively trying to give her as normal a life as they could, given the fact that she was already working towards becoming a professional magician at the age of four. And wasn’t that ultimately more than Lily and James had ever managed? They had saved her life, but that life had been so utterly ruined by Dumbledore's meddling that Fate herself had begged Death to get her out of there. In the end, Lily and James Potter had died for nothing, leaving Helena behind to be miserable on her own.

Her new parents, though... they loved her, protected her and, most importantly, were actually there for her.
They were alive.
And they were teaching her something that was unique to their family—the magic of showmanship.

By the time she was five years old and meeting the little girl set to move in next door, to become her first friend that hadn't been coerced into spending time with her, she had promised herself to learn every trick her father could teach her in a completely muggle way.

The wixen she had been so used to in another life had always looked down on their non-magical counterparts, despising them for not being able to solve every problem with a flick of their wands and a mumbled incantation. Everything a muggle could do, they claimed, could be done way easier with the help of magic. And logically speaking, Kaito knew that sleight-of-hand would be easier if she put a notice-me-not on the thing she tried to vanish and knew that a stasis charm would help make the roses not look as rumpled whenever she slipped one out of her sleeve.

But this was the legacy of her new family, and she would not cheat her way into being the best she could.

Especially not when her muggle father could produce perfect, not rumbled-looking roses.

She would master every single magic trick Kuroba Toichi could teach her and when she was finally done with that, she could think of ways actual magic could help in turning her performance into something no one but her could ever possibly manage.

The more time she spent with her parents and their new neighbours—little Aoko and her father, Nakomori Ginzou-keibu—just playing around, having fun, doing and learning magic more fascinating than the standardised stuff they had learned at Hogwarts, the less she wanted to deck Death across the face.

The deity had promised her fun and, for the first time, the girl who had once been Helena was actually having fun. It wasn’t even for one evening before the world came crashing down. Not for a single week, before her fellow students found another anomaly to blame her for. Not for a few months, before the terrorists tried to attack her again.

It had been years, and Helena was still having fun.

Or she had been having fun until she was nine years old and entering the backstage area of her father’s latest magic show, half an hour before the trick was about to start—only to see Death tightly clinging to her father’s shoulders, its claws deeply and irrevocably embedded into his being.

It wasn't unusual to see, not for her, the literal Master of Death. Every person was in a constant state of slow, withering death, their cells ageing and dying just to be replaced by others, new and fresh—a cycle that would inevitably stop one day. Some had more of a shadow than others—sometimes because they ended lives, sometimes because their own was nearing its end.

And her father's death was just around the corner.

Kuroba Toichi would die performing this last magic trick, and there was truly nothing she could do about it. Fate had made her decision, and the minute the cloak of Death had settled on his shoulders, it became impossible to stop.

So instead she clung to his form in one last hug, crying into his tracksuit as he tried to console her, undoubtedly confused about her behaviour.

“What’s the problem, little dove?” he asked her as he patted her head, running his fingers gently through her unruly mop of hair.
“I will miss you,” she told him truthfully, aware of the glances he exchanged with her mother above her head.
“What are you talking about, Kaito-chan?” He tried, carefully trying to pry her off his chest to look at her face. “You will see me right after the trick is done.”
She sobbed once, tears running down her cheeks like a waterfall.

“I won't,” she told him softly, “and I will miss you, Oyaji.”

His assistant called him before her father could find it in himself to answer.

Kaito cried when she settled onto the benches next to Aoko, prepared and yet not at all to watch her father die on stage.
She cried when the trick started, cried when the coaster began rolling, and cried when it crashed and burst into flames, the little light of her father’s life spluttering weakly before fading from existence, slipping from her awareness like the grains of sand through her hands.

Kuroba Toichi was dead.

For the second time now, someone had robbed the Girl-Who-Lived off her father.

That night Kaito did not go to sleep, choosing instead to spend her entire time sitting on her windowsill, looking at the tiny stone laid in her palm, the engraved symbol shining ominously in the darkness of her bedroom.

A triangle.

Her Cloak.

A circle.

The Stone in her palm.

A single line.

The Death Stick hidden in her closet.

Even in her last life she had never used the Stone of Resurrection, not seeing any reason in calling upon the souls of people she'd thought she would soon be reunited with.

It hadn't happened like that, obviously.

Instead of dying upon being hit by Lord Voldemort's last Avada Kedavra, she had been met with a more literal form of Death, who had taken her under their wing and allowed her to be reborn in a life where she could finally experience what living actually was.
She would never see her first parents ever again now, yes, but she had gained so much by making that decision that she barely felt that loss. The mirror of Erised might have shown the image of Lily and James Potter, with their parents and grandparents, but in the end she had only ever wished for a family.

And she had a family, here, in this brand new life.

Kaito had two loving parents, a friendly uncle in Ginzou-occhan, and genuine friends in both Aoko and, to a lesser extent, Keiko.

Except that she only had a mother now because her father was dead.

Kaito spent the entire night staring at the little black stone with the power to bring her father’s ghost back to her, contemplating the choice that lay before her in the literal palm of her hands.
By the time morning arrived, her mother found her still on the windowsill, fast asleep, stone clutched tightly in her hand, never once turned, least of all thrice.
When she woke, hours later, she put it back into the dresser she had taken it from, refusing to look at it again.

Her father was dead. Toichi had left this plane of existence and was now in a better place, waiting for her mother and Kaito herself to join him. One day, after a long, fulfilled life.
He deserved to rest now.
He didn’t deserve to be dragged back from the dead.

She would be better off trying to figure out how he had died. Better off avenging her father—because no matter what the police might say, Kaito had once been Helena, and Helena knew her way around Death.

And this death was dodgy as hell.

 

 

♠ ♣ ♥ ♦

 

 

Kaito knew that her mother was going to leave, probably even before Chikage herself did.

She saw it in the way she tried not to cry when looking at Kaito’s face, at her magic tricks, at her hands. Saw it in the way she avoided her father’s doves like a plague, the birds chirping sadly whenever the woman ran from the room, tears clinging to her eyelashes and running down her cheeks. The way she took down the pictures of their family after she realised that looking at them for too long hurt her too much, too grief-stricken to look at her husband's eternally frozen smiles. Knew it by the way her mother would cry herself to sleep every night, the near-silent sobs echoing loudly in the suddenly too empty house, like a ghost hunting the corridors.

In the end, Kaito was more surprised that her mother lasted an entire year before finally breaking.

To her credit, the woman waited until her tenth birthday had passed, but on the morning of August 1st, her mother sat her down in their living room, a foreign, serious expression plastered across her face that she had never seen her wear before.
“Kaito—” she started, then stopped again, unsure of what to say. Were she any less good at what she did, Kaito was sure she’d be fidgeting in her seat. Her poker face was down (because it was the one rule in their household: no poker face when talking as family), but that was no reason to let go of the tight control she had over her body.

Her mother opened her mouth once more, but Kaito interrupted her before she could say anything, sparing them both the hassle of explanation.
“Where will you go?”
Her mother blinked at her once, the surprise clear on her face.
“You know?”
“Of course,” Kaito mumbled back as she leaned over to take her mother’s hand in her own, not even sure who it was that she wanted to comfort with the gesture—her mother or herself, “staying here, with me, is hurting you. So where will you go?”

And for the first time in months, her mother chuckled; the sound so dry that it sounded almost painful. The phrase ‘I should’ve known’ was painted across her face as clearly as if she had spoken the words out loud.

“America.” Chikage finally said, raising her free hand to run her fingers through Kaito's hair, carefully pushing a strand back behind her ear, like she had used to do when Kaito had been even younger, running up to her mother to excitedly show her whatever new trick she had succesfully managed that day. “I’ll be gone for three months. Will you be alright, all by yourself?”

“Don’t worry, Kaa-san, I’ll be fine.”

Two hours later Kaito stood on her front porch, waving after the taxi her mother had just entered, the car driving off towards the airport, knowing that she would not see her mother in person for another three months at least—probably longer.
She was going to live alone from now on—because, deep down, she knew that as soon as the three months were up, her mother would simply depart on another journey, to a different place. To a place that wasn't haunted by the ghost of her dead husband.

But that was fine.
Kuroba Kaito had once been Helena Jaime Potter, and that meant that she was now almost thirty years old, a grown woman trapped inside the body of a child. She knew how to cook and take care of a garden; she knew how to do not-all-that mundane magic tricks and how to perform truly magical spells.

She was physically too young to do anything about her father’s murder or live alone, but she could train to be ready and take care of herself better than she reasonably should be able to while doing so.

Kaito would be fine.

 

 

♠ ♣ ♥ ♦

 

 

Kaito found out about Kuroba Toichi’s biggest secret shortly before turning fourteen.

She had just come home from school, a grocery bag in each hand from the brief stop at the convenience store she and Aoko had fitted into their schedule on the way home. It was her turn to cook that evening—a system the girls had established some three years ago. One day, dinner would be at the Nakamori's house; the next evening, it would be Kaito’s turn to cook. On weekends, breakfast would be cooked by whoever would wake up first (usually Kaito) and dinner would be cooked by the other person (usually Aoko).

That day she had barely closed the door behind her before her magic was lifting the weight of her groceries off her hands, the plastic bags floating towards the kitchen to begin their unpacking as Kaito herself toed off her shoes and started climbing the stairs, already having rid herself off her shirt by the time she reached the top. She threw it over the back of her desk chair as she made her way through the open door into her room, absentmindedly tugging her skirt down her legs.

Which was the point at which things went wrong.

One miscalculated step, a silly little mistake that shouldn't have happened considering her usually almost perfect balance, and she was tripping over her own skirt like a clumsy toddler, stumbling, losing her balance, and suddenly she was falling and—she hit the big portrait of her father with a startlingly loud boom, the sound echoing loudly behind the painting.

Behind the painting, a place where nothing but a wall should be.

Confused, Kaito stared at the portrait, unsure if she had imagined the sound or not. There couldn’t possibly be a secret passage in her own room that she had failed to discover. Surely not.
But she should still check, right? Just to be absolutely certain.

Grabbing a too-large shirt, an old one of her father's, and a pair of shorts, she got to work right after getting dressed.

She had already tried to remove that painting once, two years ago, because, as much as she loved her old man, it was incredibly creepy to have his face staring at her in that size. Unfortunately, taking down the overly large portrait proved to be about as successful as taking down the portrait of Sirius's mother had been—which is to say, not at all.
Kaito was just glad that at least this one hadn't screamed insults at her face while she had tried her best.

This time around she was a bit more thorough in her investigation—which was really just a fancy way of stating that she literally said to hell with decorum and vanished the entire thing without caring whether her mother would find the impossible removal suspicious or not.

And behind the painting, lo-and-behold, was a secret passageway.

Now, Kaito had spent her entire first teenage years in a magic castle with curtains parading as walls and walls pretending to be doors, all hiding various secrets. She was more or less used to this kind of thing happening.
But that had been a thousand-year-old magical castle—not the house of her parents in Ekoda, Tokyo, Japan.

Her parents, who were secretly thieves.

Blimey, why had she not been expecting a secret passageway in her bedroom?

Chancing one look at the clock on the wall, Kaito decided she had more than enough time to do a bit of exploration before she'd have to start worrying about dinner. 
Eating dinner, that is.
There was a faint tug on her magic as the ingredients in her kitchen got working on preparing themselves, but she barely paid any attention to it as she descended the spiral staircase that brought forth some rather uncomfortable memories of Dumbledore's office—particularly the last time she'd been in that room. Luckily, the room she ended up in at the end of this staircase was not the messy office of an old fool but instead some kind of bunker, one that was far beneath their cellar—so far in fact that Kaito couldn't help but wonder when it had been created. It couldn't possibly have been a part of their house, originally at least, right? The stairs ended at least ten meters beneath their actual cellar, the air still and stale and cool in a way that showed that no one had been inside the room in years, little particles of dust dancing in front of her eyes from what little light reached down from her bedroom far above.

Kaito was just about to conjure some light (Merlin bless whoever had invented the Lumos Charm) when something in the darkness clicked.

There was a click, and then a loud rattling sound, and then, barely a second later, light flooded a little bunker the size of the Gryffindor common room, finally illuminating the secrets laid within.

Someone had shoved a huge workbench against the wall opposite the staircase, littered with mechanical bits and pieces, random chemicals, and a few greyish white feathers—some that obviously belonged to some of their doves. A brilliant white car stood to her left, the licence plate graced by nothing but a big, black clover (Kaito was rather certain that this was not a legal plate—neither in Japan nor anywhere else), the steering wheel strangely enough on the wrong side.
There were countless costumes crammed onto a hanger next to it—fine dresses, casual shirts, and more than a dozen suits in a multitude of colours and styles. The shelf next to them had been stuffed full of different wigs—some male, some female, long- and short-haired, black and blond and red and everything in between. There was a vast mirror too, next to another shelf filled with make-up, all of it stashed opposite the old-looking jukebox, painstakingly standing in the exact middle of the empty wall to her right.
A single spotlight was illuminating the music box, another one trained on the red, comfy yet slightly dusty-looking chair at the centre of the room, and yet more lined the edges of the ceiling, shining down on the black and white tiled floor beneath her feet.

Kaito took another step forward—to sate her ever-rising curiosity, incredibly unbothered about the possibility of threats existing here because nothing in this room designed by her father could ever be more dangerous than giant three-headed dogs and strangle-happy plants, not to mention the sentient chess pieces and the honest to god poison Snape had tried to feed them.

A huff sounded through the room in response to her movement—the sound air made when the pressure dropped, the sound her self-made smoke bombs made when she threw them on the ground. The big clock on her right chimed once, twice, drawing attention to its visible, clunky gears and the rows of cards presented on the shelf next to it.

Kaito didn’t know where to look first; there was just so much to see.

The music box gave a loud click as if to show her, a brief hum of electricity at work, and suddenly two rows of standard card symbols were plastered to its front: two red, two blue, and four black. Abruptly, the top lit up—a startling blue light illuminating the rows of cards painted across its lid. Then, slowly, the lights turned purple—another whirring sound, another click, and in the next second, the blue clover on the front lit up, triggering a row of mechanical sounding reactions inside of the box.

She really, really wanted to know what the bloody hell was going on here.

Perfectly timed, the answer came to her not even a second later.
The jukebox whirred once more, and Kaito watched in astonishment as a record wheeled out of place as if by magic, the bottom of the box lifting to connect, the needle dropping on its surface, and suddenly her father’s voice filled the silence of the secret hideout.

It was a tad wonky, though, the message not making much sense.
Her father spoke as if he had expected her to be older for one and also incredibly stupid apparently, not to mention that he had the gall to bait her with a question and then end the record without telling her the answer.
Not that she actually needed him to answer that question, honestly. What is the most important tool for a magician, Kaito? What was she, five? She had learnt about his stupid and very relatable obsession with poker faces before she’d been able to do more than blubber incoherently.
He knew that as well.

For a single moment, Kaito felt nothing but disappointment.

There were no records of her father—not outside of professionally recorded magic shows, at least. No videos, no voice recordings, nothing that was ever as directly addressed to her as this recording had been.
And instead of some last loving words, an unnecessary apology for no longer being there, or literally anything else that showed her how much her father had loved her, she got a Magic 101 for extremely stupid five-year-olds.
If she hadn’t been this disappointed, she’d probably be insulted, even more so when one considered the fact that it most definitely sounded as if she hadn't been supposed to find this room, not yet at least. How stupid did her father think she was?!

But before the feeling had much time to settle in, the lights of the jukebox dimmed, and, with another bit of mechanical whirring, a white closet rose from the ground, its doors opening by themselves.

Kaito immediately recognised the outfit within.

It had been fourteen years since she had last been inside Death's realm and an even longer, unknown amount of time had passed while she had training with her powers, both as a witch and as the Master of Death.
But she would and could never forget the first time she had ever entered the realm. Couldn’t forget how she had awoken on the top of an unknown skyscraper, overlooking the skyline of a city that she could now easily identify as Tokyo but had been entirely foreign back then. Awoken clad in that exact outfit she could now see before her, inside of her late father’s secret closet.
The same white slacks, the same posh suit jacket, Ravenclaw-blue shirt, and pinkish red tie. She could recognise the ridiculously dramatic cape she had fallen in love with on that rooftop, the old-fashioned top-hat that fit her head so perfectly, and even the kind of completely useless but still weirdly stylish monocle, with its string and triangle charm still as attached as it had been in Death's realm, the clover on its surface polished, gleaming brightly in the artificial light of the ceiling.
Only the long cylinder that came clattering out of the closet seemed slightly foreign.

So. What the actual fuck?

The outfit was obviously connected to whatever Death wanted her to “take care of” in this Universe and Dimension, but she couldn't fanthom how her father was connected to that. She had always assumed that his night job might be another connection to her mission, but there was no way her father would go out stealing gems in this outfit. Right?
Right?!
Blimey, who was she even trying to  kid; of course Kuroba Toichi would go out stealing gems in the most ridiculously dramatic outfit in existence—he actually announced his own heists per riddle to invite the police; why wouldn’t he do the actual heist in the most extra way possible as well?

Honestly, why couldn’t her fathers ever be sane?
At least this one had never turned into a bloody deer. There was only so much weird shit she’d be able to swallow—even if it was totally wicked.

 

 

♠ ♣ ♥ ♦

 

 

With the discovery of her father’s outfit of choice, it suddenly became laughably easy to find the name of that rather illegal stage persona.

She had always known that her parents were both thieves (which, again, was a terrible thing to name your child after, no matter how hilariously spot on it was), but she never knew where to look for them. They had talked about their heists when she had been a baby, yes, but her concept of time back then had been less than stellar.
There had been no references to look for, no time frames, or actual targets.

Now she knew to look for an incredible extra thief dressed in white with a hang glider, who announced all his heists beforehand and possibly did some magic tricks as well.

What she found was internationally wanted Phantom Thief 1412, commonly referred to as Kaitou KID or The Moonlight Magician, who was known for sending notices about his heist in advance, usually written in riddles or extremely fancy words, before he would finally come to steal whatever gem had caught his attention with the use of highly complex magic tricks. He'd escape into the night on the white wings of his hang glider, returning the gem he had stolen after the next full moon, always claiming that the gem hadn't been "what he was looking for".

The logical side of her—probably the one that would've gone to Ravenclaw if not for Dumbledore's meddling—wanted to ask questions.

Why had her father been stealing gems he would always return to their owners right after, for example? What had he been looking for? Was it that specific gem Death wanted her to find? Was it the reason her father had died?

The other part of her simply thought it might be fun.
She just wasn’t quite sure if it was the part of her that was supposed to go to Slytherin or the one that had been a Gryffindor through and through.

Kaito could already feel her adrenaline spike at the mere thought of the recklessness being an international wanted thief would undoubtedly come with. The recklessness needed to announce a heist beforehand and then go through with it dressed in spotless white, the arrogance and pride of a true lion that knew its place in the world. Knew that it wouldn’t be defeated. There was the thrill of adventure pumping through her entire system, thrumming through her veins the same way it had done when she had first discovered the secret of the third-floor corridor so many years ago.
But she could also feel her inner snake rearing its metaphorical head, eyes gleaming at the thought of outwitting the entire international police forces with artistically crafted riddles and carefully laid traps, of putting on a show and tricking nations with her magic.

A little, teeny tiny part of her brain wished to be a Hufflepuff, just for a bit, because the ‘Puffs were clearly the only Hogwarts House with something at least akin to self-preservation, no matter what the Slytheirns liked to claim.

But how could she have any form of self-preservation when her recklessness was, oh so clearly, a genetic problem?
She really wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry when the Nakamoris came over for dinner and Ginzo-occhan, her father's best friend and neighbour, took one look at the research still open on her laptop and started an almost two-hour-long rant about Kaitou KID and how he, the head of the Kaitou KID Taskforce (because apparently that was A Thing™), would capture the thief one day, when he would undoubtedly return.

As much as Kaito loved her father—loved Kuroba Toichi with her entire, only slightly dead heart—she couldn’t deny that the man had been absolutely bloody insane.

“He’s always been like this,” Aoko told her softly after the inspector had left, the two of them standing side by side at the sink, washing and drying the used dishes. “Whenever KID would host a heist when I was a child, everything else would fade; nothing could ever be as important as his hunt for that stupid thief.”
There was bitterness in her voice—understandable bitterness, even—and for the first time Kaito found a reason not to become this very same thief once she'd get older.

Becoming Kaitou KID would allow her to have the biggest fun she was probably ever going to get. It would allow her to perform magic on the biggest stage in existence, to fly again, and to be free. Allowed her to find her father’s murderer and take him down. To find whatever Death wanted her to find, to finish the mission the being had given her.

But becoming Kaitou KID might also hurt her best friend.

“Do you hate him?” she asked, somewhat subdued, before she could stop herself, handing Aoko the next plate to dry without looking at her.
"I... he always embarrassed my father, and he is a criminal.” Her friend told her, staring at the dripping plate in her hands, “That means he’s a bad person, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t think so.” Kaito murmured back, still starring at her soapy hands. “Sometimes good people do bad things and sometimes bad people do good things.”
“Are you a fan of Kaitou KID?” Aoko asked her and Kaito instinctually shook her head.
“I’m a fan of his magic. He’s almost as good as Tou-san.”
“I guess you’re right. Even if nothing else speaks for him, his magic is stunning.”
“So you don’t hate him?” Aoko pursed her lips, finally continuing to dry the plate still in her hands. “Hate is probably too strong a word. He is amazing at what he does, but he is still a criminal and a thief. Mainly, I just used to hate the fact that he’d take Tou-san from me—but, well, he’s gone now, isn’t he?”

And that was all that mattered, right?
Should Kaitou KID ever return (and he would because Kaito herself would be KID someday soon), she would just need to make sure that her friend's father wouldn’t focus his entire time on catching her.
Everything would be alright.

 

 

♠ ♣ ♥ ♦

 

 

The discovery of her father’s secret—the proof of something she had known all along—prompted her to up her training. By a lot.
Not that her training before the discovery had been anything to scoff at. Blimey, no. She had spent a lot of time on her physical abilities; she had worked on her stamina, flexibility and general gymnastics. Some time ago, she had even talked Aoko into a competition involving the scaling of buildings—a skill they now both possessed and liked to use. They had also started on some rudimentary parkour training, which was just about the coolest shit they had ever done. Not to mention all things her father had dilled into both her brain and her body—he had trained her to be ambidextrous pretty early in life, together with the multiple magic skills he had shown her.

Kaito was as skilled as she was talented.
That didn’t mean that there wasn’t room for improvement.

Helena was technically in her mid-thirties and yet unable to drive the car still hidden in her new hide-out or literally anything else that might be useful. There had been a gun filled with metal-lined cards between the gadgets found on the table, but she couldn’t even use one with real bullets—and cards were an aerodynamical nightmare, so much harder to control than a perfectly shaped bullet. Flying as Kaitou KID did might also be a problem, because while death-defying manoeuvres on a broom were as easy as walking on flat ground, doing so on a hang glider was definitely proving to be a lot more complicated.

So Kaito got to work.
She expanded her father’s secret cave magically, adding her own personal shooting range for training, a miniature racing track to drive her car on and even a brand new laboratory for her various chemical projects and magical potions.

When the next holiday rolled around, she packed her bags and booked herself a rather lonely cabin in the middle of nowhere, taking along nothing but her essentials and KID’s hang glider.

It was a week of trial and error to learn the ins and outs of this way of flying. The brooms she had gotten used to so easily had been simple to manoeuvre, the movement instinctual and uncomplicated. Flying with a hang glider was anything but easy.
There was the physics involved; the maths needed to figure out angles and the strength and directions of the wind. The length needed to take a running start, the amount of weight she could reasonably carry, and what weather was not suitable for this kind of flight.

And when she had finally crammed all of that into her thick head, she had to see how magic could tweak the statistics to her benefit without actually looking like magic.

She wanted people to question the possibility of something. Not for them to figure out that she was using actual magic because her stunts were just too impossible to work without supernatural help.

Impossible stunts, she had sworn herself, were reserved for absolute emergencies.

The only magical things she had allowed herself to use freely were Fred and George's Instant Darkness Powder—an invention that was simply too good to ignore. It was a delightful addition to her collection of various smoke, gas, and even blend grenades. And then there were potions—the healing kind, the one for dreamless sleep and, most importantly, the Polyjuice Potion.

Nothing made disguising as easy as first magically changing into your target to note down all the details that were needed for a convincing disguise.

By the time her fifteenth birthday came around, she had picked up just about anything she had set out to learn.

She could drive both a car and a motorcycle, as well as most types of boats. She was even sure that she'd do a decent job of flying an aeroplane should the need ever arise, which it hopefully wouldn’t, but she was rather safe than sorry. Her hang glider was still not as easily usable as her broom, but a close second, and her aim with her magically modified never-running-out-of-cards card gun was impeccable. Her tricks were up to her own standards, her sleight-of-hand was better than ever before and she had even started on a list of gems her father had already stolen and others she could still steal without making it obvious that she wasn’t the original Kaitou KID.

Luckily, she wouldn't need to limit herself to Japan in her exploits.
As the Master of Death, she was powerful enough to just hop across the pond or halfway around the world without splinching herself in the process. She could easily do a heist in London and still go to school the next day—she might be tired as hell but at least she'd be present.

There were only two problems remaining.

One, Kaito still had no clue what kind of gem her father had been looking for, just that those he had already stolen were not the right one. Which just left her with some good few hundred gems to steal and search for something that she knew absolutely nothing about.

And second, she still didn't know when to actually start with her night job.

Before she had been reborn, in her time between being Helena and becoming Kaito, she had asked Death about it once. The being had told her she would have a mission in this new life, but when she had asked when to start with that mission, all they had said had been "Don't worry, you'll know".

Which was, you know, entirely unhelpful.

Kuroba Kaito was fifteen years old.
She was a fully trained witch, a completely trained magician, and a probably capable phantom thief—all wired up to start her mission, just waiting for a signal, anything, to start.

A week passed.

A month passed.

The leaves were falling off the trees when she finally snapped, her body too strung up in anticipation to take anymore of it.

She needed an outlet.

Kuroba Kaito was fifteen years and three months old when she began her career as a prankster that would have made her first father and godfather weep with joy.

 

 

♠ ♣ ♥ ♦

 

 

Pranking changed her.

Deep down, she had always known, subconsciously, that Kuroba Kaito was nothing but the surface level of her being. Not even that actually, since the only difference to her former physical appearance as Helena Potter had always been the Asian tilt of her eyes, the one change that sometimes still looked foreign when she looked at herself in the mirror.

Deep down, Kuroba Kaito had always been a name she used but not a person she had been, although Toichi and Chikage were Kuroba Kaito's parents, and Aoko and Keiko were Kaito’s friends.

Helena Jaime Potter had learnt that it was always better to keep her head down. The fewer people noticed her, the better, and the fewer friends she made, the fewer friends could betray her trust. Trust that was never supposed to go to adults, because no matter what, adults never wanted what was best for her.

In her time between, when she had learnt to become Death's Master, she had not changed as much as she had simply grown more powerful.

And when she was finally ready to be reborn, she had not changed.

Helena Potter had been a child soldier, and Kuroba Kaito was born to fulfil a mission. Why should she change what she undeniably was when she'd be needed to fight anyway?
So instead of going out and seeking out the fun she had been promised like she had initially wanted to, she had trained the way Dumbledore had taught her, only allowing herself to indulge that desire for fun when it came looking for her. She had taken information only when it had been shoved right beneath her nose and learnt whatever was needed to succeed. It had been fun, yes, but no matter what she had told herself, she hadn’t been living.

When she played her first ever prank—just a harmless change of colour on her classmates uniforms—the various reactions had filled her in a way nothing she had ever done before could compare to, not even catching the snitch in a Quidditch game against Slytherin.

That was the day she realised something.

Her entire life as Helena Potter, she had been watched.
In Privet Drive, her relatives had nitpicked everything she had ever done while old Mrs. Figg had spied on her for Dumbledore. The other children had liked to keep an eye out for her so that they could easily avoid her should she ever dare to come any closer.
And when she had entered the magical world, they had immediately thrust her into the role of their chosen one, never once not watched by her fans and enemies alike.

Attention had been a bad thing, back in that life.

Attention had meant hurtful worlds hurled at her head, strangers presuming things about her, talking badly behind her back.

Kuroba Kaito had prepared herself for her entire life with the enthusiasm of a true child for the one thing that was new in this existence—for magic, for performing magic tricks. She had learnt every trick she could and invented or planned even more; she had prepared every necessary skill and even her own gadgets.

The only thing she had never allowed herself to do, she realised as she looked into the thrilled faces of her classmates as they watched, totally entranced, as she performed a magic trick for them, was to actually do this.
To perform.

Oh, and how she loved to perform.

 

 

♠ ♣ ♥ ♦

 

 

Kuroba Kaito was not yet sixteen when her mission unofficially started.

The day had started like every day before it did—the ringing of her alarm, getting dressed, making breakfast, eating with Aoko, and going to school together. Her friend had complained about her father spending the night sleeping at the station and Kaito had in turn told her about the little magic show she had planned for lunch break, not explaining the tricks as much as she described the overall theme.
By the time they reached the gate of Ekoda High, their topic had switched to the upcoming parkour tournament they were thinking of joining.

The day stopped being normal when they sat at their desks and one of the girls standing at the front of the class turned, spotted Kaito, and lit up.

That wasn’t necessarily strange, okay?

As weird as it sounded, Kaito was popular. Not because of some historic feat like the unexplainable defeat of a murderous megalomaniac, but because people seemed to genuinely like her, to like her tricks. Some showed it by randomly coming up and talking to her, some invited her for parties and some even asked her out (and what a novel concept that was).

So when sweet Tanaka Momo made it very apparent that she wanted to speak to her, it wasn't overly strange.

The topic was, though.

"Kaito!" the girl yelled from the other side of the room, the other students growing quiet at the sudden, loud voice, "What do you think of Kaitou KID?"

Kaito froze in her seat, Aoko next to her looking just as confused as she felt.
"Why?" she immediately shot back. "That dude hasn't been seen in ages."
"You don't know," Momo realised then, hastily making her way over to their side with the rest of her little group.
"We thought you'd be all over that," Keiko supplied next, leaning on Aoko’s desk. "He sent a heist notice yesterday. Everyone's talking about it."

And what?

That simply shouldn't be possible—her father was dead, Kaito herself was basically set to be Kaitou KID, and neither of them had sent a notice. She had it in fairly good authority that this notice couldn’t possibly be from the Kaitou KID.

Did she have a copycat? A fake pretending to be her late father’s alter ego?

But why would anyone pretend to be one specific thief?

"He's back?" Aoko mumbled next to her, a lost look plastered across her face—because Kaitou KID coming back meant that her father would be back to chasing after him, no matter what that meant for his family.
"Are they sure the notice is genuine?" Kaito asked then, both for her own and her best friend's benefit. "It's been years since his last heist."
"Police says it's the real deal," another one of the girls supplied and Kaito almost snorted at that.

The police being sure of something was no sign of truth whatsoever; she was rather certain of that.

“Well, in that case I’ll look forward to whatever trick he’s going to pull,” she finally answered Momo's question, silently adding a rather sinister to escape from me in the privacy of her own mind.
There was a fake Kaitou KID on the loose and whether this was the sign Death had told her to look out for, Kaito would make sure that this copycat would never even think of daring to pose as her father ever again.