Sheldon and Sakamoto left within an hour of each other, back to their own worlds and their own lives, though neither departure carried quite the same weight.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Sheldon informed Mary at the gate, in the tone of a man announcing a scheduled meeting rather than a farewell.
“I have several follow-up questions that require further investigation.” “We’ll be here,” Mary said, with the particular patience of someone who already suspected exactly how true that promise was going to be.
Sakamoto offered no such warning.
He simply inclined his head once, unhurried, and walked back across the bridge the same way he’d walked into it — as though the whole affair had been a mildly pleasant errand rather than a trip to another dimension.
• • Harry and Naruto stayed.
Five days folded past in Void City — five days and neither boy showed any particular urge to go home.
They ate well.
Mary made sure of that.
They dressed in clothes that actually fit, courtesy of Ai’s uncanny eye for exactly what a person needed before they asked for it.
Every employee they crossed paths with treated them less like guests passing through and more like something closer to family, ruffling Naruto’s hair on the way past or slipping Harry an extra helping at dinner without comment.
“This place is amazing,” Naruto said one afternoon, sprawled on the floor of the childcare center with a bowl balanced on his stomach.
“Everyone’s so nice.
Nobody’s nice to me back home.” “Same,” Harry said, from the window seat across the room.
“Well — nobody except you lot.” Naruto tipped his head back to look at him properly.
“You ever actually seen her?
The City Lord?” Harry shook his head slowly.
“Not once.
Mary talks about her all the time, though.
Like she’s some kind of — I dunno.
Legend.” “Bet she’s terrifying,” Naruto said, with the confident authority of someone who had decided this without evidence.
“Bet she’s not,” Harry said.
“Everyone here’s too nice for their boss to be scary.” Neither of them was right, though neither of them would find that out for a while yet.
• • Sheldon, true to his word, returned the next morning, and the morning after that, until his visits stopped being an event and became simply a fact of the schedule — as reliable as sunrise, twice as insistent.
“I require a laboratory,” he told Mary, for what she was fairly sure was the fourth time that week.
“A proper one.
Controlled environment, isolated variables, equipment capable of actually testing the physical anomalies this city is casually violating on a daily basis.” “You understand you don’t currently have anything left to trade for one,” Mary said, not unkindly.
“I’m aware of that.
Which is precisely why I’m proposing an arrangement, not a purchase.” Sheldon folded his hands with the air of a man delivering a business pitch he’d clearly rehearsed.
“Give me the space and the equipment.
Whatever I discover, whatever I build, belongs to Void City.
Full rights.
I get the lab.
The city gets everything that comes out of it.” Mary studied him for a long moment, weighing whether this was a genuinely reasonable offer or simply Sheldon finding a new way to get what he wanted.
She decided, in the end, that it wasn’t her decision to make either way.
“I’ll pass that along to the City Lord,” she said.
She did, that evening, relaying the whole proposal through her employee interface in terms considerably calmer than Sheldon’s original delivery.
[Message from City Lord: Noted.
I’ll think about it.] Mary read the reply twice, hoping for slightly more than four words, and got nothing further.
• • Far away, in a world that had gone seven days without its most famous missing child, Albus Dumbledore finally noticed that something had gone quiet where it shouldn’t have.
He’d been reviewing the usual reports from Privet Drive — routine, uneventful, the kind of paperwork he skimmed rather than read — when a particular detail caught his eye and refused to let go.
No sightings of the boy.
Not at the school gate, not in the garden, not through the kitchen window where he was occasionally glimpsed doing chores he shouldn’t have been made to do in the first place.
“Minerva,” he said, setting the report down with a frown that had settled somewhere between concern and genuine unease, “when was the last confirmed sighting of Harry Potter?” Professor McGonagall looked up sharply from her own work.
“Weeks, at least.
I assumed the wards would have alerted us if anything were genuinely wrong.” “The wards monitor his safety,” Dumbledore said slowly, already reaching for his coat.
“Not necessarily his presence.” Whatever calm had settled over his office a moment ago was gone entirely by the time he left it.
• • In Konoha, the calm had never returned at all.
Six days into a search that had produced nothing — no trail, no chakra signature, no witness, no evidence the boy had ever left his apartment by any means a shinobi could track — the village remained in a state that could charitably be called organized panic.
Patrol rotations had doubled.
The Third Hokage had aged what felt like several years in under a week, and at least two of his advisors had quietly begun drafting contingency reports for a situation none of them wanted to name outright.
“Still nothing,” one ANBU reported, kneeling before the Hokage’s desk with visible exhaustion.
“We’ve expanded the search radius three times over.” Hiruzen exhaled slowly around his pipe.
“Keep looking anyway.” Nobody in the room believed the search would find anything.
Nobody said so.
• • Mary took her one visit home during those five days, and she went carrying rather more than she’d left with.
Gold for her parents — practical, welcome, and entirely unremarked upon once she explained where it had come from.
A small tin of Void City’s pills tucked discreetly into her father’s study, with instructions murmured only to her mother.
And for her sisters, a bundle of silk and ribbon in colors Longbourn’s shops had never once carried.
“Mary, these are exquisite,” Kitty breathed, already unwinding a length of pale blue ribbon to hold against her hair.
“Wherever did you find silk like this?” her mother asked, turning a length of it over in her hands with open wonder.
“A rather extraordinary market,” Mary said, which was, strictly speaking, entirely true.
• • Ai’s visit home was quieter, but no less purposeful.
She arrived with a modest sum of gold tucked away for the twins’ expenses, and found Miyako considerably less frazzled than the last time she’d seen her.
“You look well,” Miyako said, taking the offered gold with only mild surprise.
“Wherever you’re working, it agrees with you.” “It does,” Ai said, and meant it, scooping up one of the twins before either of them could start fussing.
“How have they been?” “Loud,” Miyako said.
“Otherwise fine.” Ai laughed, soft and genuine.
• • Tsukasa’s trip home was, characteristically, entirely about supply logistics.
He returned to his own kitchen at Totsuki with a careful list already prepared, restocking ordinary ingredients — rice, vegetables, the kind of staples that had no need of Void Points when Japanese yen worked perfectly well and cost him considerably less in the process.
“Buying in bulk again?” one of the kitchen staff asked, eyeing the volume of his order.
“A new venture,” Tsukasa said simply, which satisfied absolutely no curiosity and ended the conversation regardless, exactly as he’d intended.
• • Back in Void City, the childcare center had, over those same five days, become something genuinely complete — a proper study room lined with books from more worlds than either boy could name, sleeping quarters with beds that seemed to know exactly how each child liked to sleep, clean bathrooms, and a small cafeteria stocked directly from Tsukasa’s kitchen.
Cinderella moved through all of it with the quiet, unhurried competence of someone who had spent her whole life taking care of things nobody else bothered to, humming under her breath as she tucked a blanket a little straighter or refilled a shelf of storybooks that hadn’t been there the day before.
“Best place I’ve ever lived,” Naruto announced one evening, sprawled across his new bed like he intended to personally test its structural integrity.
“Yes,” Harry said again, and this time, neither of them bothered pretending it was anything less than the truth.