Chapter 1: The Boys Who Lived
Chapter Text
Virginia "Pepper" Potts, of 5730 Encino Avenue, was very proud to say that she was perfectly normal, thank you very much. As a young woman who'd been to a good college, begun her professional career, and bought an affordable house in a safe neighborhood not far from the office, you wouldn't expect her to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because, well, her background seemed so consistent.
Ms. Potts had recently become a secretary at a firm called Stark Industries, which made weapons. She was a slender, intelligent-looking woman whose hair was strawberry blond (she'd like you to avoid calling it red, please, because that was her sister-in-law's hair color, and it would say weird things about her brother if she admitted their hair colors were shockingly similar).
While she was pretty enough to fit the standard administrative assistant mold, she had been recruited specifically for her brains. Edwin Jarvis, lifelong personal assistant to the founder of the company, knew he didn't have much time left and wanted to make sure the Stark family was well-cared-for. Tony Stark had recently taken over the company, a few years after his parents' untimely death in a car accident, and Mr. Jarvis knew he'd need even more handling than his father had. Ms. Potts' background check threw up some irregularities, but he still considered her the best candidate to eventually replace him.
That someone would discover those irregularities was one of Ms. Potts' greatest fears. While her history would stand up to a bit of scrutiny, all it would really take was for someone to try to meet her family. They came from a different world, quite literally, and had given her the choice to stay in that world as a second-class citizen or to try to make her own way. She'd chosen the latter.
She still heard from home, though she could almost never visit, save for her parents' funeral a few years previous. Her little brother had recently had a son, and nothing made her sadder about her choices than not getting to be part of their lives. But there wasn't much she could do there, and there was a war going on that her family was right in the middle of. It was a good thing that her last name had gotten mangled during her immigration, because that was one less connection between her and the Potters, who had a madman after them.
When Ms. Potts woke up on the sunny Los Angeles morning in November when our story starts, there was nothing about the bright blue sky outside to suggest that tragic and magical things had been happening far away, or that they'd soon be coming to Encino. Ms. Potts rushed around the house putting papers into a briefcase while trying to eat a piece of toast and talking to one of her coworkers on the cordless telephone.
Thus, she didn't notice a large, tawny owl, completely inappropriate for a California morning, flutter past the window.
At half past eight, she walked out to her driveway and got into a new, black car being driven by a former boxer by the name of Harold "Happy" Hogan, who got the nickname because he rarely smiled. Despite his gruff exterior, Mr. Hogan was a teddy bear at heart, and was happy to pick Ms. Potts up while her car was in the shop. He was usually Mr. Stark's driver, but the company's CEO was out extremely late at a Halloween party the previous night, and wouldn't need a driver until at least noon. This was not unusual for Mr. Stark. It gave Mr. Hogan the chance to get to know Ms. Potts better. He understood from Mr. Jarvis that the two of them would probably wind up sharing a lot of duties keeping Mr. Stark's life in order.
As they pulled out of Encino Avenue and started heading toward the freeway, Mr. Hogan could have sworn he noticed something peculiar—a cat reading a map. For a second he didn't realize what he'd seen, then jerked his head around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Encino and White Oak, but there wasn't a map in sight. Rather than look foolish in front of Ms. Potts, he just said, "Cute cat." She noticed the cat, who seemed to have seen them both in the car, and was regarding them with too-intelligent eyes with interesting dark markings around them. But both quickly forgot the incident, and started talking about the large deal for missiles the company was hoping to make that day.
Stuck in traffic on Ventura Freeway, both couldn't help but notice that there were a lot of tabby cats on the side of the road. It couldn't be the same one following them to work, could it? "We should have the company donate to the local animal shelters. There are too many strays out," suggested Ms. Potts. She made a note of it, but both of their minds were back on missiles by the time they got to the Stark Industries office.
Ms. Potts worked out of a cubicle on the top floor, or she might have noticed the same cat snooping around the outside of the building all morning. She filed some paperwork, she made some schedules, she sent some electronic mail (Stark Industries was well ahead of its time on its quest to become a paperless workplace). She was in a very good mood until lunchtime, when she thought she'd stretch her legs and walk across the street to have a sandwich from the bakery.
"Potter, yes," a vaguely-familiar older woman was asking the front-desk receptionist in a Scottish accent.
"No Potters, but we do have a Ms. Potts, though," the young lady admitted, fortunately just missing the person she'd named, who ducked back into the hallway.
Fear gripped her, and she considered confronting the old lady, but thought better of it. She dashed back up to her cubicle, picked up the phone, and had almost finished dialing a very specific emergency number when she changed her mind. She put the receiver back down and realized she was being stupid. Potter wasn't such an unusual name, and the lady looked more like a schoolteacher than a government agent. Surely anyone that wished her harm wouldn't inquire at the front desk. There was no point in worrying.
She did find it a lot harder to concentrate that afternoon, and was so distracted that when she turned a corner around three o'clock she walked straight into someone just coming in off of the elevator. "Mr. Stark! I'm so sorry!" she apologized to the company's CEO, who staggered slightly as a pile of Ms. Potts' papers spilled to the floor (proof positive that the office wasn't truly paperless yet).
The handsome twenty-something wunderkind just gave her a charming smile, though the effect was somewhat diminished by the still-hungover look on his face, half-hidden by sunglasses indoors as it was. He didn't seem all that upset by being nearly knocked to the ground. "Pepper, right? Don't worry about it. In fact, if you want to bump into me more often, just put it on my calendar," he told her with a look that was just short of an HR violation. Without offering to help her pick up the papers, he slouched off toward his corner office.
Rattled by the run-in and busy picking up the spilled documents, she didn't notice the tabby cat giving the whole encounter a look of apparent disgust from a high nearby shelf.
When she pulled into her driveway later that evening, having gotten her car back from the shop after work, she couldn't help but notice the cat sitting atop her neighbor's brick-and-steel fence. She was sure it was the same one from the morning.
"Are you from around here?" asked Ms. Potts, soothingly. "I'm going to put out some tuna. But I don't think I should be encouraging strays to hang out in the neighborhood, so don't get used to it, okay?"
She left the tin of tuna out while she was getting her own dinner together, and was a bit surprised by the last report on the evening news. "And finally, many citizens of LA have said they saw the aurora borealis this morning. The 'Northern Lights' is a weather phenomenon that results in colors across the horizon, but it's based on the Earth's magnetic field and usually only happens near the North Pole. Scientists are still looking into what could have caused colored lights over LA, though this station expects that it's probably just filming for a new movie."
Ms. Potts thought hard about what had happened. People asking about her family name was one thing, but these strange lights could very easily be how her people traveled. If family had come to town, they would have contacted her. But if enemies had come, she didn't want to give away her position if they hadn't tracked her down. It still wasn't quite to the point that she would call the emergency contacts she'd been given for news of home, but she slept poorly, keeping a surprisingly dangerous-looking sword next to her in bed.
While Ms. Potts might have been drifting into an uneasy sleep, the cat outside was showing no signs of sleepiness. It simply sat and watched the parking lot of the school across the street. It didn't move to eat the tuna, so much as quiver when a car door slammed nearby, or even seem to notice the owls swooping overhead on their own missions of surveillance. In fact, it was nearly midnight before the cat moved at all.
So fast you'd blink and miss it, a six-foot-wide hole appeared in the air where the cat had been staring, throwing sparks that spun around its circumference, showing a completely different sky behind it, and a man stepped out and allowed the portal to close behind him.
The man was far out of the ordinary, but still not that unusual for Los Angeles. Tall and thin, he was old enough to have silver hair and a long beard, both of them far too long for the heat of the LA summer, but possibly grown out for a particular acting role. The long robes and purple cloak, though, would really only fit in at certain parties from the previous evening, and gave the impression that the man was lost for a late Halloween gala or very, very hung over from the night before. He wore half-moon spectacles atop a long nose that looked like it had been broken on more than one occasion, and anyone on the Strip would have told you to avoid the man if you were not ready for the kind of Southern California bender that gave you plenty of material for a stage show or a criminal record. His name was Albus Dumbledore.
Albus Dumbledore didn't seem to realize that he was at least a dozen miles away from the parties anyone would assume he was looking for, and instead rummaged in his cloak, looking for something. He did seem to notice the cat, and gave it an amused glance, chuckled, and muttered, "I should have known."
Finally finding what he was looking for, he pulled out what looked to be a silver cigarette lighter, and if there'd happened to be a local onlooker, they'd have expected him to spark up something highly illegal in the parking lot. Instead, when he flicked the lighter, the nearby street lights started to go out with little pops, one per time he flicked. He clicked the deluminator until the whole neighborhood looked like it was suffering from another blackout of the scale suffered a few years previously in 1994. If anyone looked out of their window now, they wouldn't be able to see what was happening, and would probably be too busy phoning the power company to notice the business of one Albus Dumbledore.
He took a moment to figure out how to get out of the fence surrounding the parking lot, before making a gesture and causing it to simply bend down and out of his way before popping back into its previous state. He crossed the street and leaned against the fence next to the cat, and after a moment he spoke to it. "Fancy seeing you here, Professor McGonagall."
If anyone could have seen in the darkness, the cat flickered in a single second from a small feline into a tall and severe-looking woman in black, with square glasses exactly the same shape as the markings the cat had around its eyes. It was the same woman Ms. Potts had seen asking for her earlier. Unlike Albus Dumbledore, she looked like she'd put in some effort to dress for Encino rather than Halloween, wearing an out-of-date skirt suit that wouldn't raise an eyebrow with her apparent age and tight disciplinarian's bun. "One of us had to be the responsible one, Albus. I assumed you'd spend the day at parties."
"You can't blame me, Minerva. We've had precious little to celebrate for eleven years."
"I know that," she said with some irritation, "but it seems a terrible risk losing our heads. Are you actually certain that You-Know-Who really has gone?"
"It certainly seems so," he nodded. "We have much to be thankful for. Would you care for a War Head?"
"A what?"
"A War Head. They're a recently-invented Midgardian sweet that I'm very fond of. They're sour on the outside, and sweet on the inside." He left, "Much like yourself," unstated but heavily implied.
"Definitely not," said Professor McGonagall, clearly upset by the man's fondness for local confectionery. "But even if You-Know-Who has gone–"
"Professor, surely, especially now, you can at least call him by his pseudonym? All this 'You-Know-Who' nonsense as if a boy's anagram was a word of power. Voldemort." The professor flinched, but Dumbledore was tearing a sour candy from its foil wrapper and seemed not to notice. "There never was any reason to be frightened of the name, and certainly not now."
"You're different," she insisted. "Everyone knows you're the only one You-Know- oh, alright, Voldemort, was frightened of. And don't say I flatter you. You know it's true. Even Frigga was too frightened to come down from Asgard and challenge him, but it was you he feared."
"And yet, it was not I that was his undoing."
Professor McGonagall nodded, as this neatly brought them to the reason for their presence outside the Potts home. "The word I heard before coming here is that last night he turned up to find the Potters, despite all their protections, and that Lily and James are…" she seemed to want Dumbledore to tell her she'd heard wrong.
"I'm sorry, Minerva, but it's true. We're still trying to figure out how he found them."
"That's not all. They're saying he tried to kill the Potters' son, Harry, and that the act somehow broke his power and destroyed him." With Dumbledore's nodding assent, she exclaimed, "It's true? After all he's done, and all the people he's killed, he couldn't kill a little boy? How did Harry survive?"
"We can only guess," he hedged, clearly having suspicions. While the professor took out a lace handkerchief to dab at her eyes, he checked a golden watch with a strange astrological apparatus inside instead of normal clock hands. It must have made sense to him, because he simply said, "Hagrid's late. I suppose he told you I'd be here, by the way?"
"Yes," she admitted. "And I suppose you're here to leave him with his aunt?"
Dumbledore nodded, "She's the only family Harry has left now, aside from his mother's sister."
"Small favors for that," Professor McGonagall nodded. "Lily never had a single nice thing to say about Petunia. But at least the Dursleys have a family. I've been watching Virginia all day. While she has a good heart, she lives alone and is overworked. Her employer seems to be at best a well-meaning lecher and at worst a modern-day Roman emperor in the making. One of the bad ones, like Nero. I worry that she doesn't have the means or the attention to care for a young child."
"I think you may be misjudging Mr. Stark," Dumbledore disagreed. "I did my research as well, and I think he'll be quite empathetic about Ms. Potter—sorry, it's Potts here, isn't it—raising an orphan, since he, himself, tragically lost his parents only a few years ago. And she was obviously mentioned in her parents' will and likely in James and Lily's. If she's made to choose between her job and Harry, she will not lack the means to support them. I've written her a letter."
"A letter?" scoffed Professor McGonagall. "We could at least wake her and explain the situation. She may not know what she's getting into. After all, he'll be a legend. I wouldn't be surprised if books are written, this day becomes a holiday, or if every child in Vanaheim knows his name."
"Exactly why I think he should be raised as far away from our world as possible, lest it go to his head. Famous before he can walk and talk! Ms. Potts should be able to shield him from all that while still giving him a link to our world. However, I admit, the letter is easier. Like most squibs, she lost her chance at magic and was forced to choose between the villages or Midgard. I do not want to risk whether she's bitter about that fact."
"She'd have every reason to be. If our laws were more fair, she'd have been heir to the Potter fortunes without her brother having to be killed by a maniac." She sighed, regarding Dumbledore's cloak as if worried he was smuggling Harry in its folds, "How is the boy getting here?"
"Hagrid is bringing him." He waved to cut off her objections, "Yes. I'd trust him with my life. He'll see that young Harry comes to no harm."
She looked like she was about to object when suddenly an enormous, sleek metal boat styled after a Viking longship rippled into visibility directly over their heads, floating in the air as if it were the sea, then carefully settled down into the middle of the street. If one only had the captain of the boat for reference, though, it might look small, as he was almost twice as tall as a normal man and significantly more broad. With black tangles of long hair and beard, he seemed to be an ancient Norseman plucked out of time and sense of scale. In his vast arms, he was holding a bundle of blankets.
"Hagrid, at last," said Dumbledore, relieved but nearly as perplexed as McGonagall over the boat. "Where did you get an Asgardian Skiff?"
"Borrowed it," the man called Hagrid shrugged, lowering a gangplank and gingerly stepping down. "Young Sirius Black knew where ta find it. No idea how he knew. It were moored up and hidden in a cave. It's got a stealth field."
"So I noticed. In that case, I believe it might belong to Hogun the Grim, so you should return it where you got it on the way back. Any problems?"
"No, sir. Well, the house were almost destroyed and the aurors weren't far behind. Would'a been a mess o' paperwork had they show'd up. Took me all day usin' the night roads yer showed me. Could'a been here hours ago if'n I could'a used the Rainbow Bridge or cut through the Goblin Market. Fortunately, the tyke settled early and weren't no difficulty."
Dumbledore and McGonagall bent forward to regard the bundle of blankets, and the baby boy swaddled within, fast asleep. His hair was jet black, but didn't quite conceal a cut on his forehead, shaped like a bolt of lightning, or the rune Sowilo.
"Is that where–?" McGonagall began, then nodded. "A curse scar. I guess he'll have it forever, then. It could have been far worse."
"And scars can come in handy," nodded Dumbledore. "Well, give him here, Hagrid. Let's get this over with."
With a teary goodbye, Hagrid handed over the bundled boy, Dumbledore placed his letter, and they left him on Ms. Potts' front doorstep. "We might as well all take the skiff back together," suggested the elderly wizard. "Chin up, all. It's a brave new day, and there are still celebrations ongoing, I expect."
As the strange boat lifted into the air, a single click as if of a lighter could be heard before all the lights in the neighborhood flared back into life just as Hagrid re-engaged the stealth mode of the ship. Startled from her fitful sleep by the change in illumination, Ms. Potts made out the shimmer of the boat in the air outside of her window before it became fully invisible. Hefting the sword, she rushed downstairs, finally unable to continue to self-delude that nothing unusual was happening.
Yet on the doorstep, there were no enemies to fight, only a letter about the tragedy that had befallen the last of her family and the nephew she had not yet had a chance to meet, that even now the citizens of Vanaheim were toasting as, "Harry Potter, the boy who lived!"
Chapter 2: Snakes and Ladders
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In Harry Potts' ten years with his Aunt Pepper she had never been the best caregiver in the universe. She was apologetic about it, and tried her best, but admitted that from about the time he was five he was the more self-sufficient of her two charges. Tony Stark just required more of her attention, basically all the time.
Raising Harry had, thus, taken a village, or at least a Fortune 500 technology company. After a few years toddling around the Stark Industries offices, he'd begun to spend the days in school, but still wound up doing his homework there while waiting for his aunt to finally finish up work and go home to 5730 Encino Avenue. Since the job of a billionaire's personal assistant didn't really allow for weekends, it was just as common for him to have the run of Tony's high-tech cliffside Malibu mansion. He even had his own code to get into the private areas of the house.
He was not supposed to be there for Tony's birthday party. The yearly extravaganzas tended to be extremely debaucherous for a very-close-to-11-year-old. Pepper had really excellent intentions of taking Harry straight home after school that Thursday. Then she had very good intentions of just stopping by the mansion to check a few things on the way, then dropping him after. Then she had slightly laudable intentions of asking Happy to do it after he drove Tony from work to the party. Then she got completely engrossed in organizing the catering and the DJ and forgot completely.
It was fine. Harry was used to it. And Tony's personal living room off his bedroom and out of the way of the rest of the party had a truly impressive video game setup and a friend-of-the-creators months-early beta release of Gears of War 2.
Harry Potts was never going to be a super genius like Tony. Even after the man took an interest in the boy and got him into a fancy private school that would be more willing to work around Pepper's schedule, Harry stayed merely accelerated rather than gifted. He steadfastly failed to be a savant in any scientific discipline. But what he had was reflexes that nobody at the company could believe. He was pretty good at sports (not that a building full of technology nerds with time management issues had encouraged him to go out for that), but for any video game anyone put in front of him, he would quickly become the office champion.
Pepper had eventually put her foot down about Tony and his business partner planning to Ender's Game Harry to fly their prototype remote military drones while thinking he was just playing a flight simulator. Tony's best friend, James "Rhodey" Rhodes, an Air Force colonel who was the only one who could come close to beating Harry at a video game, quietly expected to sign the boy up for his branch of the service the very moment he was eligible.
When the weird thing with the snake happened, Rhodey was enjoying a co-op campaign of Gears with Harry, having quickly exhausted his own interest in the debauchery. Pilfered snacks were strewn across the coffee table and the thumping beat of the party downstairs was barely audible over the TV's sound system.
"Guys on your left," Harry warned, taking out a few enemies from cover.
"Couldn't miss them," Rhodey agreed, moving between chest-high-walls and lining up his shot. "Guess they haven't added real textures for these guys yet."
"I thought they were just supposed to be white? Like, for snow camouflage," Harry frowned.
Rhodey chuckled, "Do we need to get your glasses prescription checked again?"
"Maybe," the boy admitted. "How long until I can get laser surgery?"
"When you're 18. Same as when you can go to the Air Force academy," Rhodey explained, for the fifth time that year. "And it still doesn't mean actually being able to shoot lasers out of your eyes."
Harry grinned, "Maybe by the time I'm 18, Tony will have figured out how to give me laser eyes."
"That's… actually a really good point," the colonel acknowledged with a smirk, momentarily distracted from the game. "I could probably sell my bosses on funding that."
With a surge of music, the door into the suite opened and the master of the house, Tony Stark, drunkenly half-staggered into the room, his arm across the shoulders of a dark-haired young woman in a very tight green party dress. The handsome young genius' expensive tuxedo was rumpled, tie undone. His goatee was, as always, immaculately sculpted.
"And that's my entertainment center, my best friend, and… my assistant's nephew. Who is definitely not supposed to be here tonight," Tony yelled, his inside voice drowned in alcohol and excessive party volume. "I will have to talk to– dear God, what is crawling on me? Is that your arm?"
"It's my snake," simpered the young woman, retrieving the large Brazilian boa constrictor from where it'd started to twine around Tony's leg on the way to the ground.
"Right. I thought that was a scarf. Did seem a weird choice for the season," he said, giving Rhodey and Harry an exaggerated 'can you believe this?' look. "Do you need the snake? Is it for bedroom games? Then why don't we let the two of them," he gingerly grabbed the snake with both hands, stumbled over, and laid it across the back of the couch, "babysit it for a while?"
The girl looked a little worried, making sure to shut the door to keep it in the suite and reducing, once again, the party noise. "Is it alright?" she asked.
"They're fine! You're fine, right? Is that the new Gears of War? I need to find time for that. We're fine! To the bedroom!" Tony explained, staccato, grabbing the girl's hand and leading her through the other door, and closing it behind them.
"The things that happen at these parties," Rhodey just shook his head at his best friend's antics. "Do you think that thing is housebroken?"
"You alright in here?" Harry asked the snake, bemused and playing along.
"It'sss okay, I'm usssed to being her prop," the snake answered, to the boy's surprise. "It's lesss dissstracting in here at leasst. Can I warm myssself on you?"
"Sure… thing. Just be careful. You're almost as big as I am," the boy offered, too polite to object.
"Thanksss, amigo," the boa said, slithering down and coiling up between Harry and the end of the couch.
Rhodey, for his part, did not speak snake, and squinted his eyes at the boy hissing like he was having a conversation with it. "You know that's not right, right?" he chuckled, then looked back at the screen and unpaused the game.
'What's not right?' Harry wondered, absently, before, himself, getting engrossed.
A couple of hours later, Pepper finally got ahead of the stage managing she'd been doing all night and remembered that Harry had never gone home. She found him napping on Tony's couch, snuggled up with a boa constrictor, a way-too-violent video game paused on the TV, and very inappropriate sounds coming from Tony's bedroom (now audible with the video game silent and the party winding down). Rhodey had at least found a blanket for the boy before wandering off. She wanted to be mad at Tony and Rhodey, but couldn't be.
While Pepper Potts was spending the next couple of months overcompensating for forgetting about Harry at the party, someone else was making plans.
Rhodey had been embellishing the story of Tony's liaison to anyone who'd listen and laugh, and he'd finish off with, "And there's poor Harry, hissing at the snake to make sure it would be cool hanging out with us playing video games, completely unaware of what's going on in the other room."
At one of these retellings was Obadiah "Obie" Stane, Tony's business partner and Chief Operating Officer for the company. The large older man made up for the lack of hair on his head with a full bristling gray beard. Of all the Stark Industries employees who'd happily made Harry the company mascot, unworried about having the tyke underfoot, Obie had initially been the one to complain about how they were a weapons manufacturer, not a daycare. However, the objections had gradually dropped over the years. Everyone else assumed their sometimes-prickly COO was finally warming to Harry. What had actually happened was that he'd noticed the strangeness that followed the boy.
In times of stress, weird things happened around young Harry Potts. TVs turned themselves on when he was told he couldn't watch. Lights burned out when he was angry. Sometimes he got into rooms he'd been deliberately kept out of, the door still locked. And now he was talking to snakes.
The rest of the highly-rational scientific minds of Stark Industries would never make the connection in their heads between the boy and the occurrences. It wouldn't be logical to assume they were anything but scientific (probably bugs in the over-designed "smart" technology systems that ran the office). Obie, who'd been privy to much of what Tony's father had gotten up to, was more willing to believe. He'd run an even deeper background check on the Potts family than Edwin Jarvis had over a decade previously, and noted the interesting inconsistencies (but also that Pepper, herself, didn't similarly serve as a source of the inexplicable). No, there was something supernatural about Harry Potts, and it could be a huge advantage for Obadiah Stane.
Since Pepper had revealed at the last management meeting that Harry was going to his parents' boarding school in the fall and would no longer be something they needed to schedule around during the school year, Obie had a bit of a ticking clock if he wanted to do anything about it anytime soon.
Back at 5730 Encino Avenue in late July, the Potts family was making plans of their own, for that particular school experience.
"Your Hogwarts letter's here," Pepper called to her nephew on Saturday morning the weekend before his eleventh birthday, letting the large barn owl in through the kitchen window.
"Neat!" Harry said, racing into the kitchen. "How'd they get an owl to deliver mail?"
"They're Frigga's favorite bird," Pepper explained, putting out a cup of water for the owl and gesturing for Harry to take the letter attached to its leg. "So they can be enchanted to be smarter and to travel between realms." While Pepper hadn't concealed anything about the magical world from Harry, she hadn't made time to thoroughly educate him either, mostly explaining things as he had questions or she remembered a fun story about his father. A particular gap in his knowledge was anything she completely took for granted, like the post.
"That's cool," Harry admitted, carefully untying the cord securing the letter to the owl but wary of its beak and talons. "Seems like email would be easier, though."
"You figure that out without telling Tony and you may be even more famous on Vanaheim than you already are," Pepper smiled.
"He's going to figure it out eventually, Aunt Pepper," Harry insisted, fully aware of how smart Tony was, and continuing to ignore her warnings about how famous he was for not dying as a baby. Of all the things he could accept about her stories about their homeworld, that he was a celebrity there was the one that was hardest to swallow.
"You'd be surprised what that man can ignore," she shrugged. "But most people find it easy not to believe in magic, and Earth's wizards like to keep it that way."
Showing off the small envelope made of fine parchment, Harry noticed that it was addressed to: Mr. H. Potter, The South Bedroom, 5730 Encino Avenue, Los Angeles, California, Midgard. He asked, "Am I going to have to go by 'Potter' at school? Sounds weird."
"You'll get used to it," she ruffled his messy black hair, briefly revealing the scar on his forehead that still refused to fully heal up. Turning to the owl, she asked, "Can you stay for a response?"
The owl nodded like it understood, so they proceeded to look through the invitation letter and materials list. "Where am I going to get most of this stuff?" he asked, marveling at requirements for robes, potions ingredients, and a magic wand.
"We can get more than you expect locally. But, you're right, we should ask if they can send some help for the things we can't get in Santa Monica. I'll start writing that letter. You fill out your acceptance."
The two took care of it, tying the return post to the owl and sending it on its way. The private investigator that Stane had hired to watch the house noted this and followed discretely as they hit the various new age shops around town for the rest of the day, relaying all of this to his employer.
That Thursday, Harry's birthday, Obie made his move. Loading Pepper down with work that would hopefully take her all day and coaching his own assistant with excuses about someone taking Harry for lunch if his aunt asked, the large, calculating man wandered down to the Stark Industries game room (of course Stark Industries had a game room) where Harry had spent most of his summer already. Waiting for the boy to hit a point he could pause, Obie casually suggested, "Hey, Champ, you ready for your birthday celebration?" Harry raised a quizzical brow, having heard of no such thing. "Wouldn't have been a surprise if you knew about it early, would it?"
The boy shrugged, saved his game, and grabbed his bag. "Where's Aunt Pepper?"
"You know Tony," the big man sighed theatrically. "She'll meet us once she's got him handled."
Since that was a normal weekday for Harry, and even though Obadiah Stane had never really had that much of a conversation with him, it wasn't exactly the stranger danger he'd been warned about. So the two of them wandered out of the office (express elevator down to the parking deck) and were soon squeezed into Obie's trendy red Prius. The unrepentant arms manufacturer loved to signal his social consciousness.
"Plane or speedboat?" he asked the boy as they were heading west on the 10.
Beginning to wonder where the hell they were going, Harry was, nonetheless, distracted by being allowed such an exciting choice. "Plane!"
Nodding, Obie turned the car into a private Stark Industries tarmac off the LA airport, and pulled up to a small hanger where he had a prototype Cirrus Vision SF50 fueled up and ready to go (Tony wasn't the only one happy to pull strings to get new toys months earlier than the public). "Go get set up as the co-pilot."
Once again he stayed just ahead of the boy's suspicion by giving him such a big privilege, and they were airborne without Harry once questioning why it was just the two of them flying the small private jet. Less than half an hour in flight over the Pacific and they were descending toward an airstrip on a barren island. "Where are we?" Harry finally asked.
"San Nicholas," Obie allowed before radioing down to the naval base that they were landing. It had taken a few strings pulled to make sure people who owed him were on the tower that day, so the logs would be buried. And hopefully any traces he left wouldn't be obvious to US Air Force Colonel James Rhodes, due to the famous rivalries between branches of the military. "Don't worry, it's way cooler than it looks from the air."
It was only after they taxied the jet into a small hangar that Harry started to really note that things were off. "We're having a party on a navy base?" he asked.
"We have a weapons contract with the navy," Obie insisted. "This is where we keep the best toys. Come see." He gestured to a door next to the hangar, which seemed to lead into an underground bunker. "It's got the biggest ladder you've probably ever seen."
One thing you had to say for Obadiah Stane was that he was persuasive, even if his motives were suspect. After all, he'd managed to get two generations of Starks to rely on him. He opened the door and started climbing down the ladder like he had no expectation that the boy wouldn't follow. The part of Harry's brain that was starting to wonder if this was a kidnapping couldn't believe Obie would just leave him alone and start climbing down, because Harry could now easily run off and find a soldier. Completely confused by the mixed signals, and never really betrayed by anyone in authority, he went ahead and started climbing down.
It was a very long ladder.
The bunker at the bottom actually looked promising. Lots of machines with intriguingly blinking lights filled the space previously dedicated to surviving a nuclear explosion. Obie had even thought to hang up a 'Happy Birthday, Harry!' banner and set out some party hats and napkins. Getting all of that technology lowered into the space had been an undertaking all its own, but he'd been planning this kind of testing suite for quite some time. The first pieces had been put in place when he'd started hearing rumors of a woman who'd fallen from the sky into an LA Blockbuster video store a couple of years before Harry showed up. He'd actually been disappointed that there hadn't been any other anomalies for the company to investigate and weaponize since.
"Why don't you check out the flight simulator? I'll call and see how far behind everyone else is."
The genuine navy pilot training simulator rig was always going to be a big hit with an 11-year-old, so Harry was quickly engrossed. He didn't notice as Obie donned a couple of blue-glowing earplugs and flipped a switch. The sonic paralysis device Tony had cooked up a few years prior had short enough range and duration that the military hadn't decided to fund further development, but Obie's off-books team was still working on it and had found that similar frequencies were good at making people focus and lose track of time. He was thinking about licensing the tech to Las Vegas casinos. After that point, turning on the various energy monitors in the room and surreptitiously sticking electrode patches to Harry's temples without notice was simple.
Hours later, even Harry's electronically-induced focus was shattered by a cataclysmic BOOM from the door above. "What's going on?" Harry asked, suddenly realizing how hungry he was and that there was something stuck to his head.
BOOM. The knock came again. Obie stopped trying to make sense of the numbers on the screens in front of him (that he honestly hoped his team would have more luck interpreting) and opened a small gun safe, withdrawing a large semi-automatic pistol.
There was a pause, then SMASH! The door that should have held off an indirect nuclear strike ripped open, and fell to the bottom of the shaft with a deafening CLANG in the enclosed bunker. By the time either of them had recovered, another figure had slid down the ladder and was looming across the small room, bent slightly to fit. His eyes glimmered like black beetles from beneath his tangled mass of dark hair and beard.
"Ah, here's Harry!" said the giant.
Obie leveled the pistol at the enormous man, who didn't seem that concerned. Instead, he was taking in the half-hearted attempt at pretending this was a birthday party.
"Las' time I saw you, you was only a baby," he said as if he was not having a gun aimed at him by the second-largest man in the room. "Yeh look a lot like yer dad, but yeh've got yer mum's eyes."
"This is a secure facility," Obie explained, not sure why he wasn't more intimidating and wondering if the scanners in the room were getting this.
"Ah, shut up yeh great prune," said the giant. "This ain't Harry's birthday party. Weren't nobody invited nor knew he were here." He started to reach for the gun.
Realizing the jig was up, Obie started firing, nearly deafening himself in the enclosed bunker even through his high-tech earplugs as Harry hunched down and covered his ears. The relatively-large-caliber rounds flattened against their target with only a mild grunt of pain. Turning his reach for the gun into a swat, the giant backhanded Obie into the wall, where he collapsed insensate to the ground.
"Well this ain't too good," he opined, taking in the confusing array of lights. He called up the shaft, "Wong! Yah best get down here. It's gonna be a sticky one!"
Realizing the gunfire had stopped, Harry looked over and asked, "Who are you?"
The giant chucked. "True, I haven't introduced meself. Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of the Keys and Grounds at–" he glanced at Stane, unable to be sure he was completely unconscious, and showing a rare moment of common sense said, "yer new school. Everyone calls me Hagrid."
"Did you come to take me shopping?"
"Got it in one!" beamed Hagrid. "O' course, nobody could find yeh when I showed up, so your aunt got real scared and sent me lookin'. Good thin' I know a few folks." He nodded to the burly, shaven-headed Asian man descending the ladder behind him. "This is Master Wong."
Looking around, Wong frowned and sighed. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Hagrid. You wouldn't believe how many setups like this we have to deal with these days."
"He'll forget about this?" Hagrid stage whispered to his companion.
Wong nodded. "And this room will be cleaned. Can I see you two home?"
"That'd be great! Thanks! I'm sure his aunt is worried," boomed the keeper of the keys. "If yeh'll step over here, Harry, we should be gettin' back and get yeh some lunch and shoppin' done."
Still completely baffled by the whole situation, but feeling like the big man was distantly familiar and somehow safe, Harry nodded. "Wait a second, though," he remembered, and snapped a picture of the flight simulator screen with his phone's camera. "If I can figure out how to tell Rhodey about my high score on a real military simulator, he'll go nuts."
The other two men shared a confused look, but then Wong moved his arm in a circle, spinning a widening wheel of sparks and slicing open a portal between the room and the fenced-in backyard of 5730 Encino Avenue.
"Magic is so cool," Harry grinned, stepping through, Hagrid squeezing behind him.
Chapter 3: The Spaces In-Between
Chapter Text
One of the most interesting things about Hagrid was that Harry seemed to be the only one that noticed he was over nine feet tall.
Admittedly, they didn't spend long on the streets. The giant had crammed into the back seat of Aunt Pepper's car (somehow) and only had to walk the distance between the paid parking lot and the wall of a store in one of LA's new age shopping areas. But they'd passed dozens of locals and tourists on the short walk, all out for a good time in the midsummer heat. It was especially hard to understand how he went unnoticed given that, unlike the festival of skin on display from most locals, Hagrid's dark, furry coat was completely inappropriate for the weather.
Harry pretty much figured that people were just bad at differentiating between, "extremely tall for a human," and, "humans don't actually get that big." Maybe it was also because the guy wasn't at all skinny, so people just figured he was a regular-sized weirdo closer up than their depth perception was telling them, and they shouldn't pay too much attention lest he notice them.
The speculation had allowed Harry to mostly ignore his aunt's freakout about how he'd basically been abducted for scientific experimentation by her boss' business partner.
"S'fine, ma'am," Hagrid assured her at the end of a tirade, "He won' 'member none o' it. Wong'll see ta that."
"I just… I thought Obie was nice," she grumbled. "I don't even know how to warn Tony that he might get up to things like this. I'm just Tony's assistant, Obie's known him his whole life. I wonder what else he's been up to…"
Hagrid just shrugged. So did Harry. "I'll at least be more careful, Aunt Pepper," he promised her.
"Ah! Here we are," Hagrid interrupted Pepper's attempt to create a multi-tiered strategy to bring down Obadiah Stane in the middle of Santa Monica by walking up to a brick wall against one of the shops where they'd bought school supplies. "They tend ta build these types o' stores in soft places," the big man explained. "Easy enough ter open a door. Now what were that rune?" He glanced around to make sure nobody was paying much attention, pulled out a large pink sidewalk chalk that looked like normal chalk in his oversized hands, and scribed a glyph up three bricks and across two of them.
The pink chalk markings flared with silver light momentarily, erasing themselves, and there was a sense of space suddenly opening. Taking another glance around, Hagrid stepped forward and then disappeared to the right. "Just like in Labyrinth!" Harry grinned, following into the new brick hallway that defied depth perception from the front.
Pepper strode in behind them, complaining, "Well if I'd known it was this easy, I could have taken Harry last week."
"Requires a bit o' magic, I'm afraid, ma'am," Hagrid apologized as he led them down a brick-lined tunnel that grew gradually dimmer as they walked. As the LA sunlight faded, so did the red brick seem to slowly transition into ancient gray stones. Sense of time and distance failing, some time before it got completely dark Hagrid took another step to the left and out. He explained, behind him, "This is it. The Leaky Cauldron. It's a famous place: center o' a thousand night roads an' doorway to the Goblin Market."
Harry and Aunt Pepper followed him in, revealing an old tavern room that wouldn't look out of place in any European country (or in most places in America that were trying to borrow the vibe). Harry figured its appearance was probably not a bad idea if you'd somehow accidentally stumbled into one of the night roads—the smallest roots of Yggdrasil that connected various realms, as his aunt had explained to him.
"Hasn't changed much since James went to school," Aunt Pepper observed with some disdain. She wasn't impressed by the ridiculously overdone bars catering to the upper class that she was always having to cart Tony out of, so a dingy old inn wasn't going to impress her just because it was a cosmic nexus.
"The usual, Hagrid?" asked the bald, toothless proprietor, clearly familiar with the big man. Harry wasn't sure if he was a very old human or human-like individual, or an inhuman entity in a very ill-fitting human suit. He kind of looked like a walnut.
"Can't, Tom, I'm on Hogwarts business," Hagrid demurred, clapping a hand on Harry's shoulder that nearly engulfed his whole back.
That got the old barkeep's attention and drew the eyes of the dozen shabby-looking patrons scattered around the room. "Odin's beard," the old man exclaimed, "is this– can this be–?" The bar was dead silent as he finished, "Bless my soul… Harry Potter… what an honor."
Aunt Pepper was making a high-pitched annoyed noise in the back of her throat. They hadn't made it five feet off of Midgard and this was happening. Harry's eyes widened behind his glasses and he glanced her way. She managed to choke down her annoyance and nodded. This was what she'd been warning him about.
"Welcome back, Mr. Potter, welcome back," Tom gushed, striding from behind the bar and rushing forward to shake Harry's hand. It looked like the other patrons wouldn't be far behind.
Harry had been dragged along on enough public events with Tony that he knew what his aunt's boss would do. He'd just never really figured he'd be in the same situation. He was the secretary's nephew. No one had ever cared, especially once the tabloids were convinced that he wasn't Tony's bastard son. But the kid was a quick study, and he had been prepared by his aunt that he was potentially famous, as much as he hated to believe it.
"Love this place! Can you all do magic? Sorry, terrible rush. Love the hat! Wish I had time to catch up with everyone, maybe later!" Harry was a whirlwind of quick handshakes, smiles, eye-contact, and movement across the room. He only hoped he was right that the significant-looking door was actually the way he wanted to go.
He was out into the alley, Hagrid confused and Aunt Pepper hiding a grin, before the pub knew what had hit it. From a side booth, a cloaked figure narrowed eyes concerned about what the boy's presence meant for the day's mission.
So glad to escape the mob of unexpected and shifty-looking fans, it took a second for Harry to adjust to what he'd stepped into outside of the pub. "Just like in Hellboy II!" he gasped, taking it all in, an open-air market crammed into an enormous cave.
The cavernous underground space sprawled ahead, lit with thousands of lights, none identical. Hundreds of stalls and an array of eclectic beings filled the space, the walls themselves individual storefronts in dozens of different styles. He suspected that the place never really slowed down, already noticing an immense number of shoppers just in the part of the market that he could see. The ceiling rose at least two stories, iron catwalks providing access to additional shops before the cleft in the rock narrowed back into darkness.
"First stop Gringotts?" Aunt Pepper asked Hagrid, smiling at her nephew's shocked silence so soon after his celebrity gregariousness and choosing to not be annoyed at how Harry's comparison to the new Del Toro movie was a reminder that Happy had taken her just-turned-11-year-old nephew to see a violent fantasy movie as an early birthday present a couple of days earlier. If she was feeling a bit of nostalgia for a magical place she hadn't seen in at least two decades, she kept it to herself.
"Right. You got his key?" Hagrid asked and the redhead nodded, putting a hand on Harry's shoulder as they started to lead him, gawking, through the stalls and toward the central convergence point of the whole cluster of diagonal rifts through the alien stone.
Elves bargained with "dwarves" that were even bigger than Hagrid. Humanlike figures might have been from Midgard, Vanaheim, or even Asgard. Shadowy silhouettes wrapped in cloaks defied classification. And many were aliens from beyond the Nine Realms who treated the place as just another interplanetary bazaar. "No one is even sure which planet we're on," Aunt Pepper explained to her nephew. "Or whether the goblins are a natural part of Yggdrasil or somehow dug their own pathways into its roots. But they created a trade nexus important enough to control shopping and banking for the Nine Realms for thousands of years."
The goblins' seat of power was obvious enough, all alleys converging on the high stone staircase leading up to an entire wall covered in unbroken white marble and wrapped around immense bronze doors. Diminutive green-skinned figures in armor of scarlet and gold wielded wicked blades and sci-fi rayguns, manning guard positions across the sprawling steps.
"Most secure bank in the entire cosmos!" Hagrid explained, striding up the steps past the guards, who sketched slight bows to the trio, sizing them up for threat and contraband.
Past the oversized doors, clearly over a foot thick from this vantage, the vaulted ceiling loomed fifty feet high over a vast floor tiled in more white marble. While the borders of the room were full of oversized wooden desks that belonged in a Dickens novel, Harry couldn't help but notice emplacements around the walls and ceilings with sharp lines and mirrored surfaces: cameras, or sniper posts.
Hagrid seemed blasé about the whole thing, striding over to a free desk where an unarmored goblin loomed, high seat placing him above his normal height (but not above Hagrid's towering perspective). "Morning," the big man began, explaining, "We've come ter take some money out of Mr. Harry Potter's safe."
"You have his key, sir?" the goblin intoned, sharp features focused on the giant's face. The teller's mouth movements didn't quite match the words he spoke, and Harry realized this was his first experience with universal translation technology. While Aunt Pepper had assured him that, for whatever reason of shared heritage, the Nine Realms basically all spoke English, the goblins were clearly in the same boat as the rest of the universe. Technology or magic to bridge language barriers was essential before going out into the cosmos.
"Here," Aunt Pepper offered, drawing the oversized golden key out of her purse and handing it over. While it was shaped like a medieval key, she'd explained that it was actually extremely high-tech. This was borne out when the goblin teller inserted it into a slot in his desk and a holographic stream of data suddenly floated above the surface.
"That seems to be in order," the goblin allowed after making sense of the alien script floating in the air.
"An' I've also got a key here from Professor Dumbledore," the big man added, importantly, having dredged up his own, similar-looking vault key. "For the you-know-what in vault seven hundred and thirteen." Aunt Pepper frowned, eyeing the big man shrewdly.
The teller inserted the key and then nodded, "Very well." He handed it back to Hagrid. "I will have someone take you down to both vaults. Griphook!"
"Why don't we go separately?" Aunt Pepper asked, just as Harry asked, "What's in vault seven hundred thirteen?"
"Very well. Gornuk!" the teller called up an additional goblin as Hagrid made noises about not being able to answer Harry.
Nonplussed, Hagrid was led away from Harry and Aunt Pepper as she called to him, "We'll meet you at the entrance?" As the dark-clothed goblin guide led them into a discreet elevator (or possibly subway car) lit from within from a ceiling-mounted yellow lighting panel, she explained to Harry, "My parents never completely trusted Dumbledore. Manipulative, if well-intentioned. Seems weird that Hagrid would coincidentally be on a separate mission for him that you get to tag along on…"
The goblin huffed in agreement, but didn't comment. There was a sensation of acceleration as he worked the unmarked controls on the wall, and several seconds later, deceleration. The doors opened and the small being announced, "Vault 687." Gornuk stayed with the conveyance as they walked over.
A few feet of landing was all that separated the door of the elevator from the door of the vault, solid stone cut perfectly square on walls, floor, and ceiling, the only light coming from the elevator. A seamless panel of similar bronze to the bank's edifice served as vault door, a small slot in the center. Aunt Pepper inserted the vault key, and then placed Harry's palm against a glowing square that appeared below the keyhole. After a moment of consideration, it flashed, she withdrew the key, and the door nearly-silently slid up and disappeared.
Harry gasped. An approximately-ten-foot cube can hold a shockingly immense amount of coins, and the room was basically full of gold, silver, and bronze. White lights recessed into the ceiling lit up and caused the treasure in the room to glimmer.
"Vanaheim is still on a precious metal economy, and a lot of the alley stalls like coins," Aunt Pepper sighed, her business classes disabusing her of any nostalgia for a gold or silver standard. "You only need to take a little of this for the year. Gringotts has digital accounts for you to spend at places that aren't basically cavemen."
Harry wasn't a mathematical genius, but he did go to a pretty good private school. He did the math and said, "This has to be worth millions of dollars?"
Aunt Pepper shrugged, trying to act like it didn't get to her. "There's a reason Tony's money never impressed me. Mom and Dad were loaded. I told you."
"Aunt Pepper, we live in a three-bedroom split-level in Encino! Do you need some of this?"
She hugged her nephew, explaining, "I got the house mostly on my own, before they passed and left me my inheritance. I didn't inherit this much, but I'm not broke. Do you want to live in a mansion like Tony's?"
"I guess not," Harry decided, after a moment's consideration. "He doesn't know you're rich, does he?"
"He'd be weird about it if he did," she admitted. "It's nice to know I could just quit, if he really drives me to it one day."
Finally realizing how devoted his aunt was to the eccentric weapons manufacturer as he appreciated the family wealth, Harry shrugged and followed her lead, gathering enough coins for school supplies and incidentals. "Does all this just… sit here? Not invested?"
"Despite thousands of years of unbroken civilization, most of the realms are very backwards," she sighed. "And the IRS would have some very pointed questions if we tried to walk all of this out of here to exchange for dollars and start a brokerage account." She added, after a few seconds, "That's the other reason we still live in Encino. I can only launder so many gold coins every year."
They met Hagrid back in the lobby, looking slightly furtive and guarding something in his pocket. Somehow Harry got the impression that it was a small, round lump of some kind, possibly just from how the big man's left hand curled protectively about it. "Umm, d'yeh think yeh kin navigate 'round here?" he asked Aunt Pepper. "I should be gettin' this where it's goin'. I'll meet yeh at Ollivanders?"
"I think I can remember the way around the place," his aunt nodded, and Hagrid nodded thankfully and headed off. "That was a little strange," she shrugged.
Harry didn't disagree, but his response was lost as he noticed a green-skinned hag in tattered robes regarding him with some interest, leaning against one of the ornamental balusters at the base of the bank stairs. It really was interesting to be somewhere that all the stories his aunt had told him of non-humans came to life.
Aunt Pepper caught the look as well and said, "Maybe the clothing store first. We're getting looks." They'd both dressed in simple, solid-colored shirts and black pants in an effort to not stand out in either the LA streets or the goblin market, but it must not have worked completely. "I think the place that James used to go is right over here, though they may not have anything off-the-rack…"
Entering one of the shops built into the actual storefronts carved into the walls near the bank, Harry noted that the shop signage was a gray cat wearing a fancy robe. "Welcome to Madam Malkin's," a short, older woman called from within the large clothing store.
Everything that wasn't carved out of the rock of the cavern was done in expensive gray woods, and every surface was hung with different swatches of cloth and a few examples of finished robes on headless mannequins. Clearly this was a place where clothes were custom-ordered and crafted, not where they were bought off the rack and tailored. Harry had sat reading or playing video games for many boring hours in such shops as Aunt Pepper helped Tony choose bespoke suits.
The apparent Madam Malkin had another boy Harry's age up on a stool in front of an array of mirrors, a younger woman with the look of a shop assistant pinning his robes. "Hogwarts, dear?" she asked, sizing Harry up. "Got the lot here, step on back. I'll grab another stool."
While Aunt Pepper amusedly looked at fabric samples, Harry was directed to stand next to the other boy, a shapeless robe unceremoniously tossed over him which the Madam began pinning up to get his measurements rather than just using a tape. The other boy, pale of skin and with nearly white hair, glanced Harry's way and asked, "First year, as well?"
"Yes," he answered, feeling a little weird about having a conversation while the two women swarmed around them with pins.
"My father's next door buying my books, and Mother's up the street…" the boy drawled, his long-winded description of his parents catering to his whims immediately running in one of Harry's ears and out the other. He had a lot of experience with this type of kid at his private school and getting dragged to events for Tony and people as rich as he was. Apparently, spoiled was the same no matter what planet you grew up on. Harry simply made interested-sounding noises at every significant pause the boy made, allowing him to keep talking to hear himself speak.
After an overly-long pause, Harry played back the last few seconds of conversation he'd been ignoring and realized the boy had asked him about flying brooms and Quidditch, the sport that was played in the air with a variety of personal flying apparatuses depending on the realm in question. He answered, "Oh, yeah, looking forward to it. We can't bring our own brooms or play first year, though, right?"
"Sadly, no," the boy admitted. "Though Father says it would be a crime if I don't get picked for my House once I can, and I agree. Know what House you'll be in yet?"
"Probably the same as my parents," Harry shrugged as much as he could without getting stuck with a pin. Aunt Pepper had certainly been bemoaning his Gryffindor tendencies every time he did something, "stupidly brave or bravely stupid, just like James!" The other three houses that he'd basically boiled down in his head to "I love to read," "let's all hug," and "no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die," didn't particularly appeal.
"Me too!" the boy grinned. "I know I'll be in Slytherin, because all of our family has been—imagine being in Hufflepuff! I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?"
Harry nodded to himself. He could certainly picture the kid stroking a cat whiter than he was and starting to drop someone into a pool of acid. But what he said was an agreeable, "I guess someone has to bake the cookies?"
That got an appreciative chuckle. The rich boy started going off on another pompous story about his father that allowed Harry to go back to making "I'm listening" noises every so often while he paid more attention to the interesting juxtaposition of a pretty standard high-end tailor in this alien cavern. Periodically Aunt Pepper held up swatches of different colors and materials and he gave her a nod or head shake to indicate whether he liked them.
"That's you done, my dear," Madam Malkin told Harry, just in time to interrupt whatever the other boy had been asking him so he didn't have to try to figure out what it was. "Let's go look at the fabrics your mother's pointed out and decide on choices."
Harry thought about correcting her, but it always seemed petty to immediately object with, "Aunt!" when he did so, and he didn't bother. As he stepped down, the blond boy who's name he still didn't know said, "I'll see you at Hogwarts, I suppose." Harry gave him a nod and thumbs-up as he walked away.
Hopefully the school was big enough that he could just avoid all the rich bros, but it had never paid to get on their bad side if he didn't have to.
"Making friends?" Aunt Pepper asked after they put in orders and strolled back into the alley.
"Remember Justin Hammer's cousin Hunter?"
"Yes. Poor Hunter Hammer. What a name," she chuckled. "So, rich and snobby?"
"I'm not going to have to hang out with that crowd just because I'm wealthy, right?" Harry asked.
"James never did," she admitted. "I've mentioned Sirius before, right? He was the only close friend James had that was at all high-class. The poor kid was over all the time because he was a pariah to his family. The rest of your dad's friends were from a lot of different financial backgrounds."
It took a couple of hours to buy the rest of Harry's school supplies, more for the novelty of browsing the seemingly-endless shopping district than from what they still needed to buy. Harry bought a few odds-and-ends that caught his eye but weren't on the list as they went. Finally, they made it to Ollivanders: Makers of Fine Wands since Bor's Coronation. It anchored one of the main thoroughfares radiating out from Gringotts, a literal hole-in-the-wall shop that had likely been one of the first established in the market. Within, it was dimly lit by lambent silver flames clinging to golden orbs that hovered beneath the ceiling which extended high overhead. The rest of the shop was endless boxes crammed into dusty shelves with wide rows and reaching thirty feet into the air.
The stillness of the air made it even more off-putting when the immense old man loomed unexpectedly from behind a shelf. "Good afternoon," boomed his soft voice, causing Harry and Aunt Pepper to jump in surprise. His long hair and muttonchop beard were as silver as his eyes, glowing faintly in the light of the shop, and he was proportioned even wider and taller than Hagrid. It was only the wrinkles—like deep river valleys across his face—that gave away his immense age.
While he'd been vaguely prepared to meet the outcast of Nidavellir, and seen a few in passing in the market, none of his aunt's reminders that "dwarves" were closer to twenty-feet-tall would truly prepare him for the difference to his expectations of the term formed in fantasy media this close up. Clearly, she had forgotten it herself, as her eyes widened looking up at at Ollivander in his simple, black crafters' robes. "Hello," Harry managed awkwardly, and then managed to fit in, "Good tidings upon you and may your skill never falter."
"Ah, yes," the old dwarf allowed, looming above the two. "I thought I'd be seeing you soon, Harry Potter. And young Virginia Potter. It seems only seconds ago you were here with your little brother, and for a moment I thought he'd come back, the boy looks so much like him. But for the eyes, I think: his mother's."
"So I hear, sir," Harry answered politely.
The nigh-immortal being crouched down slowly, so Harry was merely craning up to look at his face at the height of Hagrid's, and he began to feel he'd get lost in those molten silver eyes, his face reflected in the iris. A surprisingly gentle finger, the tip almost bigger than the boy's entire head, traced above his scar. "The Norns ever challenge us," Ollivander sighed. "If I had done other than what was required of me, would the present be better or worse? One challenges fate at his own peril, Mr. Potter. I assume you know of the wands of Vanaheim?"
"A little, sir. They only work on Vanaheim, with Vanir magic?"
"A pinnacle of craft that took me centuries to perfect," the dwarf nodded. "A powerful bridge between the magic of the wielder and the resonance of Vanaheim itself. Perhaps I went too far: the wise of Vanaheim find it such a useful tool, most are loathe to ever leave their realm. I had intended it an aid for children: to connect you to your magic early and build confidence and skill. If you choose to return to Midgard after your schooling, you will need to master the foci of the native sorcerers as well."
"But it will help me be prepared to learn other magic?" Harry asked.
"As much as your skills allow," Ollivander acknowledged. "Now… which is your wand arm?"
What followed was an exhaustive search through boxes. Ollivander would retrieve a box from a shelf and have Harry touch the metals or materials within, a vast array of matter beyond anything on the periodic table known to Midgardian science. Finally, the old dwarf seemed satisfied, "A mix of the old and the new, and a peculiar echo of what is to come. Gold, pure and unadorned. Titanium, only recently discovered on Midgard. And the essence of the phoenix to empower it. Perhaps a nice holly sheathing to hide the inner workings?" He returned the boxes that had so resonated to the floor by Harry.
Feeling the hum of power in the materials, Harry was struck by the brilliant crimson of the box of phoenix feathers and could only say, "I hear the red ones go faster?"
"Perhaps too fast," Ollivander nodded. "Pay your coins to the shop assistant. I shall begin immediately and it will be ready for you to take possession your first day at school."
After turning the requisite gold coins over to the (fortunately-human-sized) assistant, Harry and his aunt stepped out into the relatively-brighter light of the market to find Hagrid waiting outside. The giant of a man no longer seemed quite so tall, compared to Ollivander. He was carrying a beautiful white owl in a brass cage not much larger than his hand.
"Happy Birthday, Harry! I got yer a present!"
Chapter 4: Ways and Means
Chapter Text
The snowy owl Hagrid had bought for his birthday present, which he'd ultimately named Hedwig, wound up having an almost-immediate payoff.
August had been a transition in more ways than one. Avoiding Obadiah, Harry had stopped accompanying his aunt to the Stark Industries office. His local school friends were aware that he was going off to boarding school rather than joining them in middle school, so the few times he got to hang out with them, there was a palpable sense on both sides of letting go. Not many friendships survived the end of elementary school even if you wound up at the same middle school.
So he had a lot of time to himself. He'd like to say it was all devoted to study, but realistically most of it was topping himself up on movies, TV, and video games for the months he'd have to spend in a world without modern technology. Still, he managed to read enough that he hoped he wouldn't seem completely ignorant compared to the kids that had grown up on Vanaheim.
The trouble came close to the end of the month, when he needed to figure out how to get to school. Aunt Pepper had talked a very big game about flying to London with him to put him through to the Hogwarts Express, but Harry knew she was fooling herself. There was no way she was going to free up the couple of days that trip would require for her to get there and back unless she could somehow schedule Tony for some kind of business in Britain the preceding weekend.
He'd considered trying to figure out how to just cut through the goblin market, but the traveling runes Hagrid had used were beyond him, and there were a lot of metaphysics about using the alley to travel rather than just to shop at and return that meant he might not even be able to use that path at his age if he could get the runes down.
At least he wasn't an Asgardian. There was a note in one of his books about how more-godlike beings had trouble "fitting" through the night roads and usually had to use the Bifrost to travel between realms. He was kind of looking forward to his cosmology class to explain all of that.
Regardless, unless he could find a night road to Vanaheim or at least London that he could somehow manage with a couple of weeks of book theory, he was looking at Aunt Pepper dithering until the last second, and, best case, sticking him on a ten-hour flight with some hapless Stark Industries intern to mind him. Worst case, Tony would have some crisis and she'd be super guilty when she found Harry still at home days after school had started.
Which was where Hedwig came in.
The spells woven into Vanir post owls were amazing, or perhaps the familiar bond with Hedwig made her even smarter than a normal post owl. Harry had asked her to deliver a letter to Master Wong, a local sorcerer he'd met exactly once, and she'd nodded and headed off without a problem.
Of course, he included his email address and phone number, in case the Masters of the Mystic Arts weren't as technology-phobic as the wizards of Vanaheim.
The email beat Hedwig back: they'd be happy to pick him up on Sunday afternoon, the last day of August. Aunt Pepper was simultaneously impressed and hurt when Harry revealed that he had a ride to London that he'd worked out himself. That night, she had to admit to herself, that he wasn't wrong. Tony had decided to go to a technology show in Vegas that weekend (he often went to shows in Vegas).
So it was just Harry at home at around four in the afternoon on Sunday, August 31, 2008, when the furiously-sparking tear in space opened in the backyard of 5730 Encino Avenue and a bald white woman in saffron-colored robes stepped through. She took in the relaxed California neighborhood with an inscrutable-but-vaguely-amused expression, and knocked on the back door.
Harry had been expecting Wong, or at least someone else Asian, so he opened the door for his guest and his mouth, opened for a greeting, instead finished his thought, "...but I guess they recruit from the whole planet."
"We do indeed, Mr. Potts," she smiled pleasantly, not upset at the non-sequitur. He was just thrilled that she'd used the last name that he signed on his correspondence, rather than his Vanaheim name that everyone at the market had insisted upon. "Including yourself, if you decide to return to Earth after Hogwarts."
"How many do? Oh! And, please, come in," he gestured for her to enter the house. "Something to drink? We've got teas, sodas… OJ I think…"
"Thank you, but I'm fine, if you're ready to travel," she said, entering the kitchen and taking it all in with a sweeping look, seeming to learn all there was to know about young Harry from the layout of his abode. She stopped momentarily as she spotted the entertainment center in the living room through the open plan. "Perhaps half?" she answered his first question. "Few sorcerers from Earth have the opportunity as it is, and many decide they like it there. Still others wish to return home, if only for the access to human technology."
"I have some plans on that front," Harry told her, conspiratorially. "Anyway, yeah, I'm all ready. Thank you for the help. But why are we leaving today and not tomorrow? It's instant, right?"
"It is, but you are, unfortunately, caught in the growing bureaucracy of the United States, and registered as attending school in Britain. If you simply disappeared here and appeared there with no records of a flight, governmental agencies might notice. Or any latent observation your Mr. Stane might have set up before he forgot about you. We like to keep a low profile. So we've faked your travel, but we can't fake the time it would take… well, not as easily as simply allowing you the morning to tour Kamar-Taj."
"Morning? Oh, right, time zones," Harry nodded.
"Indeed. In fact, the records will show that you are just about to leave LAX for a plane trip that will have you in London just in time for your train to school. I suggest you go ahead and put your phone in airplane mode so no cellular towers will give lie to your statement."
"Let me just text my aunt that I'm on my way," he did, then shut down the phone (a cutting-edge Starkphone that would likely be obsolete by the time he could use it again). He chose not to comment on how impressed he was that an older magic lady seemed to understand how cell phones worked. Without hair, it was hard to tell. Maybe she was younger and more tech-savvy than she looked. "I'm ready to go when you are!"
"Then lock your house and let us away," she said, using her arm to casually spin open another blazing hole in space once he'd locked up and rolled his trunk out onto the lawn.
"Meet me at Hogwarts, okay, girl?" Harry asked Hedwig, where she perched on a spindly-but-hardy California tree in the backyard. Then, with only the slight difficulty of rolling a large steamer trunk across the lawn, he stepped to basically the other side of the planet.
Early morning in Kathmandu, overlooking the sprawling city with the mountains in the distance, was a heck of a cool way to get a first look at Kamar-Taj.
Dozens of students were already hard at work doing martial arts katas in the courtyard of the immense temple that seemed to be partly-hidden within a couple of blocks of the bustling city below. Seamlessly, their hand movements began to trace orange fire through the air before them, straight lines spinning into wheels full of geometric designs.
His guide explained as they walked along the raised walkway, the rumble of Harry's trunk offsetting her description that, "Our methods are not so different from the casting gestures Hogwarts teaches with wands, so pay attention to how you can train your body for precise movements. As you can see, we favor involving the whole body, so spells can blend with martial arts. Hogwarts tends to slack a bit on the more physical side. On Earth, we often need to resort to purely physical methods of combat when in front of those unaware of magic."
"Good morning, Ancient One," said a tall, dark-haired man that they'd come upon watching the training from above. He had an accent that Harry thought was maybe some kind of German or Swedish. "I didn't know we took students so young."
"Mr. Potts is merely getting the nickel tour on his way to Hogwarts, Master Kaecilius," she introduced them. Harry couldn't tell if the guy was really clueless or just making a dad joke.
"Ah, would that I had known of that place when I was a boy. Those that start young have so many fewer bad habits to unlearn," Kaecilius replied, sizing up the small young man before him. "And less pain driving them into our employ," he smirked at her, obviously an old argument. "We hope to see you in due time, Mr. Potts," he finished with a slight bow, as they continued on their way.
"You're the Ancient One?" Harry asked. "I read about you in some of my books!"
"I've had to work long and hard to rate any mention at all in the literature of Vanaheim, so I'm glad to hear it," she joked. "And it's my prerogative to meet the new talent myself. When the famous Harry Potter contacted us for a ride…" she answered the unasked question of why the Sorcerer Supreme herself had come to get him.
"I'd rather not be famous just for not dying with my parents," Harry complained as they entered the building proper, trailing through hallways built of beautiful wood that had likely stood for centuries.
"It was a dark time for Vanaheim," she shrugged. "Secret members of a death cult. Mind control. Assassins in the night. When Asgard tried to help, the enemies would vanish like smoke. When we tried to help, they would turn public sentiment against us as outsiders. It was a war on the soul of the culture. You wound up as a symbol that the bogeyman can be beaten."
"I guess I'll see how it goes," he replied.
They stopped in front of a small, spartan bedroom and she gestured him in, "I suggest you take a nap. You have several more time changes ahead of you before you can sleep at Hogwarts. We'll come get you for lunch."
No 11-year-old wants to be told to take a nap by a grownup, but Harry had to admit it made sense and he dozed a bit until hunger woke him not long before a familiar face showed up. "Master Wong!" he greeted the burly Asian man. "Thanks for the help getting to school."
"You're welcome," Wong nodded. "Happy to help you get to my old alma mater. Ready for lunch?"
"Sure am," Harry's rumbling stomach agreed. His watch told him it was after 10 pm, LA time, and he hadn't thought to grab an early dinner before leaving. "You went to Hogwarts?" he asked, as they started to navigate the hallways of the temple.
"How did you think I knew Hagrid? I was in Hufflepuff," the sorcerer responded, making Harry wince a bit at his uncharitable belief that was the lame house. "And, no, I graduated before your parents started, I think. But my cousin started last year: Cho. She's in Ravenclaw house."
"Is it a big family thing?" Harry asked.
"Sort of," Wong explained, leading him downstairs. "We're more likely to find children with the potential early enough to send them if they live near here or one of our sanctums. So Nepal and India, Southeastern China, Britain, and New England are over-represented. We've got a couple of sisters here right now that are your age and heading over with you, in fact."
Harry couldn't help but immediately pick out the Patil twins on sight as the ones Wong had been talking about, Padma and Parvati, and had no trouble telling them apart: Parvati was the talkative one. "Isn't this neat?" she asked, as they were sitting down to lunch. "You came all the way from California?"
Harry nodded, hungrily tucking into the simple but filling meal. "Sure beats ten hours on a plane."
"For real," the ebullient girl agreed. "It would be even longer from our city. Worth the shorter trip here. How'd you get found? They said they only located us because we were so close to Kamar-Taj, and because one of our grandfathers had a bit of magic."
"My parents went," Harry shrugged.
Padma rolled her eyes and pointed out to her sister, "He's Harry Potter, which you'd know if you read your books."
"Potts, please," Harry tried, hoping to give the vibe that he wasn't interested in the acclaim.
"Are you a wizarding celebrity?" Parvati asked, not really picking up on it. "Do they have celebrities? None of the schoolbooks wanted to talk about pop culture. You can learn so much about a culture from its teen magazines, you know?"
Padma, the more perceptive of twins, mouthed, "Sorry," at Harry, but at least Parvati seemed content to talk rather than dig as they worked their way through lunch.
With the rest of the afternoon to kill and the building not taking that long to see, the three kids found themselves auditing a seminar for some of the younger adults that were starting to learn sorcery, without the benefits of a foundational Hogwarts education. The imposing British black man, Master Mordo, who was leading the class was explaining the rudiments of how sorcery was all about opening channels to other dimensions, and how there was always some kind of price to be paid for magic.
Harry's hand was up and he found himself nodded at by the slightly-amused master of the mystic arts. "Is that true on Vanaheim too?" the boy asked.
"The Nine Realms are… different," Mordo sighed. "As I understand it, the other eight exist in galaxies so far away from here that the 'universal' constants of science begin to break down. Places where life can evolve from fire or ice. Planets made of dark matter and lit by a black hole, or somehow forming as a disc instead of a globe. Realms where the souls of the dead can continue to exist in some form.
"And Vanaheim, which is in many ways more like the dimensions we draw magic from than it is like Earth. The constants there are such that electricity functions oddly, rendering most technology useless, but mystical energy is free for the taking. While you are there, you will learn not to conjure energy, but simply to shape what is already present in the very air."
"How can we go there, if it's so far?" Padma asked.
"While it's possible to fly there through space, the nature of the cosmos means that it's folded and, with a proper convergence or night road, we can step through without much more difficulty than we travel on Earth through portals or enter into other dimensions. It's part of why Earth is as important as it is, magically: no other alien planets have such a wealth of connections to other worlds that support life. Our sorcerers learned much by comparing notes with the mystics of the other realms, throughout history."
"So we… don't have to worry about a price for magic on Vanaheim?" Parvati tagged in.
"There is always a price to be paid," Mordo insisted. "Don't let your teachers there tell you otherwise. At the very least, what you learn there is much less effective anywhere else, except as a primer. Whereas our arts work anywhere in the multiverse. The price may simply be reliance on the magic of Vanaheim."
That thought was still rattling through Harry's mind when they were finally led down into the ancient stone basement of the temple, luggage in tow, and into a densely-warded room with a chest-high (for the children) pedestal in the middle featuring an eye-shaped finial that somehow called to Harry. But they were past and through before he could think too hard about it, walking through a pair of double doors out into an immense foyer with morning light streaming in.
"Welcome to London," Wong told them. He introduced them to a man with short, curly salt-and-pepper hair and beard in ornate robes, "This is Master Rama, protector of this sanctum."
In addition to the master of the sanctum, two other children their age were standing around: a skinny black boy and a girl with bushy brown hair.
"We thought you'd all benefit from meeting one another and learning the neighborhood," Master Rama suggested to the five 11-year-olds. "While the inner sanctum of Kamar-Taj isn't meant as a highway, it's useful to know that you can get between it and the London, New York, and Hong Kong sanctums if needed. Especially because you enter Vanaheim from near here, we want you to know how to reach this sanctum if you are stranded in London."
After a very brief tour of the London sanctum, Wong and Master Rama led the kids out of the entrance, pointing out that it emptied onto Whitehall street and stood right next to Whitehall Gardens, basically right across the street from Charing Cross station. As they hit the streets in a slightly-ungainly parade of rolling trunks, the bushy-haired girl took the lead as if she was familiar, and introduced herself in an English accent as, "I'm Hermione Granger and my family's from here and didn't know about magic at all until Master Rama explained it to us. This is Dean Thomas, he's from America, and I don't think his family's magical either?"
Master Rama, who'd removed his robe to reveal modern street clothes before leaving the sanctum, had subtly put up a privacy ward so none of the other pedestrians nearby noticed the excited girl giving away deep magical secrets. He shared a wink with Wong. It was the same every year.
"My dad might have been?" Dean suggested with his strong New York accent. "We never really knew for sure. But, yeah, I didn't find out until Master Drumm found me."
Parvati introduced herself and Padma, and pointed out, "And this is Harry Potts, he's from America too. California right?"
"Oh, I thought they wouldn't really be able to find someone that far from a sanctum, or at least that's what the Primer on Midgardian Sorcery suggested," Hermione wondered, looking askance at Harry.
"My parents went to Hogwarts, but I was raised on Midgard," Harry shrugged, trying to explain it without making it a big deal.
"Harry Potts," Hermione worked it over, and then lit up, "Oh! You're Harry Potter! I read about you!"
Before she could put her foot in her mouth, Padma, ever-observant of the boy's body language, suggested, "I don't think Harry wants people to think of him as a celebrity."
Caught before launching into a full gush, it visibly took a moment for Hermione's brain to switch gears, but then she managed to get out, "Did you three get to meet the Ancient One while you were at Kamar-Taj? Only I read that she's probably as old as some of the Asgardians…"
Unfortunately, the walk was so short that Hermione couldn't quite explain everything she'd learned about the Ancient One before they were into Charing Cross station and next to the wall to the right of platform 6. As they stood, morning commuters barely seemed to notice them, but they watched a few other children drag trunks or luggage racks into the corner behind a stand of brochures and simply fade into a ripple within the air.
Master Rama explained, "Hogwarts, even with such a small proportion of students from Earth, has found it useful historically to schedule its terms around the regular convergence between this spot and the station in Vanaheim that sprung up around it. Fortunately, these periods are extremely reliable and rarely vary by more than a day or two, but the conjunction is only for a few hours. Typically, around 11 in the morning, the convergence ends and you will need to seek alternate means to enter Vanaheim. The train leaves shortly thereafter from the other side."
Wong waved to a pretty Chinese girl in the crowd who shared a family resemblance with him and seemed only about a year older than the other kids, "Ah, there's my cousin. Cho, can you help these new first-years get through and situated?"
"Of course, Uncle," she said in an interesting accent, as if she'd learned to speak English from a Scottish tutor. "If you'll all follow me."
Bidding farewell to the two masters, who apparently didn't want to risk getting stuck off of Midgard even though it was much earlier than 11, the parade rolled their trunks through the barrier into another world. It helped that Cho clearly treated it like she had no fear of crashing into the brick wall. But each of the children had to marshal their courage to believe they wouldn't wind up just smashing into unyielding stone.
But, with a run to get started, each charged the barrier and watched it fade to mist, the next step taking them onto another planet.
Chapter 5: The One Train on Vanaheim
Chapter Text
When Harry stepped through the convergence at Platform 6 ¾, Other than the moment of looming bricks that quickly faded, there was no real sensation of travel: just like stepping through the sling portals or doors between sanctums on Earth, space had been truly folded.
The big shock was simply the difference in environment. One moment, they'd been in the middle of a huge building in the center of one of the largest cities on the planet, and the next they were outside on a single stonework slab with only a wooden awning for cover from the cool misty rain and dense arboreal forest that surrounded the train station. A single, cherry-red locomotive waited beside the station on its only train track. Up a hill, they could make out sparse dwellings of an ancient style: the village that had grown up to service the station.
A large bonfire had been set on the other end of the train platform, and every few moments it flared green as a family stepped out of the fire with a spiral of sparks reminiscent of the sling ring portals, the children of the families dragging their own luggage. "If they have magical transport here, why don't they just go all the way to the school?" Harry asked.
"Oh! I know!" Hermione jumped in, before Cho could answer, "It's because Hogwarts is deep in some of the most magical territory of Vanaheim, and heavily warded besides. You have to be very skilled and powerful to get all the way there and not go off course."
"There are also a few routes reserved for the Ministry," Cho added, grudgingly impressed at Hermione's understanding. "Are you going to be in Ravenclaw?" she asked.
"Maybe. Though I read that Headmaster Dumbledore was Gryffindor and he's the greatest living wizard on Vanaheim," Hermione shrugged.
"I think I might be in Ravenclaw," Padma volunteered.
"Traitor," Parvati told her sister, jokingly.
Though he was getting a little overwhelmed by Hermione's need to regurgitate information, and had been thinking about trying to extricate himself, her mention that she might be a Gryffindor caused him to reconsider. At the very least, she could be a housemate for seven years so there was no reason to antagonize her. "Should we get on?" he asked, instead.
Cho made sure they found a compartment together and then went to find her own friends. Everyone worked together to get their trunks onto the racks, as Hermione explained, "The Hogwarts Express is fully steam-powered, so is about the only piece of technology that works on Vanaheim. It was accidentally transported from London when the convergence first happened, before the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj could get the portal stabilized and reduced to just platform 6 ¾. They decided it was a more useful method of getting students to Hogwarts than the days-long wagon train they used before it, so took the effort to install over 200 miles of tracks."
"Nearly two centuries old and it shows," Harry joked, finding the early-1800s-era train extremely quaint compared to the cutting edge modes of transportation he'd been raised around. He'd even flown on Tony's private jet and ridden in a few of his sports cars on more than one occasion. But despite showing its ancient design sensibilities, the train was at least well-maintained. The plush interior of the individual cabin left room for all five kids, though it might become cramped for more than four of the larger teens.
As they chose seats, the lingering tween fear of cooties served to break up the original separation between those that had come from Kamar-Taj and those that had been waiting in London. The girls took one side of the cabin, and the boys the other.
Looking for something to talk about in the now tensely-gender-segregated compartment, Hermione observed, "I guess those coming from Vanaheim don't have to worry so much about the barrier shutting," as they all watched a large family of redheads rush out of the bonfire and race to the train, already building up steam. Her watch (a mechanical one she'd have to remember to wind) suggested it was already past 11 on the Midgard side. With quick farewells to their parents and little sister, the four boys of various sizes rushed to various points on the train, the last of the arrivals, as the Hogwarts Express began to roll away from the station and into the primeval forest.
Only a minute later, the smallest redheaded boy knocked at their door, having observed their empty seat and asked, "Anyone sitting there? Everywhere else is full." The cabin gave a group shrug and helped the boy put his trunk up. "I'm Ron Weasley," he introduced himself, sitting next to Harry, who was in the middle seat after allowing Dean the window.
The rest of the kids introduced themselves around the compartment, and Harry's eyes narrowed as he said his name and Ron immediately looked at his forehead, where he'd taken to letting his hair fall over the tell-tale scar. Hardly anyone had ever mentioned the scar in elementary school. He suddenly regretted sitting right next to the new boy as Ron moved way too deep into his personal space.
"You mean Harry Potter?" Ron asked, trying to peer under Harry's bangs. "And have you really got… you know?"
Harry shot the girls a look across the way and Hermione suddenly got why Padma had shut her up earlier. This kind of casual inspection like Harry was an animal in the zoo made it obvious why he might not be interested in being a celebrity. Harry grudgingly flipped up his hair to briefly show his lightning-rune-shaped scar and then let it fall, saying, "Yes. But please. I'm just a kid like you. I didn't ask to be famous because I didn't die with my parents."
"But that's where You-Know-Who—?"
"Are your whole family magical?" Hermione jumped in, seeing Harry sigh. "Only I heard that it wasn't guaranteed to breed true, even in highly magical families. It looked like you have three brothers that are all wizards too?"
"Five, actually," Ron was distracted by the question, and explained, "I'm the sixth in my family to go to Hogwarts. My oldest two brothers already graduated. Ginny, too. She's starting next year. But, yeah, the main family hasn't had a lot of squibs. I have an uncle who is. He became a bookkeeper."
"Is that normal?" Dean asked. "Is almost everyone that lives here a wizard?"
"Oh, no," Ron explained. Hermione winked at Harry that the boy seemed to have been distracted, and he smiled back at her. "Most of the farmers, and artisans, and warriors aren't magic. Like anywhere, I suppose. But it's hard to join the Ministry if you're not magical, because our wizards are the only ones that can stand up to the other realms, really. You've gotta be something special, like Hogun the Grim, to make it without magic. And some squibs don't like how they're treated, having to live without magic after they grew up with it."
"So it's like the nobility, on Earth," Hermione summarized. "Does anyone from the other classes ever become a wizard?"
"Sure," Ron shrugged. "But they're probably related to a wizard somewhere. It's not like on Asgard where there's the royal family and then everyone else. Well, I guess there are some families that act like those that haven't been magical for generations shouldn't count."
With Ron lacking the political vocabulary to discuss social mobility or explain that the population of Vanaheim was actually tiny compared to that of Midgard, such that everyone was fairly closely related, the conversation kind of stalled out after that, but at least Harry's celebrity had been safely bypassed. Eventually Ron realized everyone else was from Midgard, and so they started taking turns explaining things to him, most of which he didn't really believe fully.
"My dad's on the Ministry team that polices accidental crosses between the realms, and the only Midgard stuff we get that does much of anything is guns," Ron explained his disbelief. "He has a lot of gadgets in the shed that he got from travelers that just kind of sit there and don't do anything unless he enchants them."
"Actually, that reminds me," Harry said, standing up and asking for help getting his trunk open. He took out the bag of items he'd bought at the goblin market. "I believe Earth technology doesn't work, but surely some alien tech has to? If I can just figure out something that works, maybe Tony can figure out how to get my laptop working."
"Tony?" Hermione asked.
Harry realized that admitting he knew Tony Stark wouldn't help his not-a-celebrity case and just hedged, "My aunt's boss. He's really smart with technology." He started trying to turn the various gadgets on and none of them worked. "Well that sucks."
"It's the eckeltricity," Ron suggested. "Only Asgard items work here, and they're basically half magic anyway. That's what keeps aliens from invading us. The boats they need to sail through space can't make it here, and their weapons don't work if they find some way in anyway."
Harry sighed, "Yeah, that's what everyone told me, but I hoped… And I know if I could tell Tony about it, he'd probably be able to come up with some way to test why it doesn't work at least. Maybe come up with some alternate power source. I mean, steam power clearly works… but I guess even if you could, you'd have to completely recreate transistors and circuits and chips from the ground up…"
"Are you sure you're not going to be a Ravenclaw?" Padma grinned, as Harry's ramble had clearly lost Ron, Dean, and her sister, at least. Hermione was looking at him speculatively, as well, not having pegged the boy as having any academic interest.
"Nah," Harry waved off. "I'm not smart, smart. I just went to a private school that was big on the sciences, and, like I said, my aunt's boss is a genius so you pick stuff up."
"And have you compared yourself to anyone other than geniuses?" Padma asked, still working hard at getting someone else she knew in her house.
Harry shrugged and hunched a little, unfamiliar with anyone thinking he was that bright. Sure, he was at a private school made up of the kids of mostly tech millionaires, so it was pretty tough, but he wasn't anywhere near the top of his class. And he'd always thought of himself as at least an order of magnitude dumber than Tony.
He didn't have a lot of introspection about the fact that he was an 11-year-old that knew what an "order of magnitude" was.
This discussion was interrupted by a woman with a food cart outside. Based on the angle of the sun, it must be midday here, and it was a little surprising that it wasn't that far off from the same time in London. Harry had crossed so many time zones in the last 24 hours that he wasn't sure what meal his internal clock was set to, but he decided he was starving anyway and bought food for the entire cabin against everyone's objections that they could pay for their own (or Ron's that he'd brought a sandwich).
He'd later reflect that tossing around gold like water was perhaps not the best way to avoid his celebrity image.
While most of the food was decent but easy-traveling and simple food like meat pies, the Midgardian children were surprised to find mass-produced candy for dessert. They had chocolate frogs that were briefly animated to hop around, jelly beans in a disgusting variety of flavors, an interesting focus on pumpkin flavors, and stranger fare. "I guess you don't really need electricity to run a printing press," Hermione realized, impressed by the color-printed packaging. It stood out as unusual in the basically-a-fantasy-movie world they'd agreed to go to school in.
Ron was shocked to find the whole compartment staring at him like he was a dog that had just done a very impressive trick. Maybe Midgardians weren't as backwards as everyone thought.
Not long after they finished their lunch and snacks, a small, round-faced boy that looked like he'd been crying knocked and opened their compartment door, asking, "Sorry, but have any of you seen a toad at all?" They all shook their heads, and he wailed, "I've lost him! He keeps getting away from me!"
"He'll turn up," Harry offered, wondering if there was a practical benefit to having a toad as a familiar compared to a more mobile one like Hedwig.
"We'll help you look for him!" Hermione offered.
"You… you will?" the boy asked.
"Yeah," Parvati agreed, standing. "It'll be a great excuse to meet other people, if nothing else."
"We'll hold down the cabin," Padma just shook her head at her twin's gregariousness. The boys nodded at the out. Three trying to squeeze down the aisles already seemed like a lot.
As the two girls left to help find the toad, Harry took the opportunity to move across to the other side of the cabin, asking, "Do toads make good familiars?"
"Probably better than mine," Ron said, withdrawing a mangy-looking, fat, and very-unconscious rat from a robe pocket. "He might have died and you wouldn't know the difference. I think toads are supposed to be good for practicing spells and potions on? They're really durable. I tried casting a spell on Scabbers to turn him yellow. Thought it would make him more interesting, and that didn't even work." He withdrew a battered-looking wand from his trunk. The metal core was visible in places through the scratched up wooden veneer. "I'll show you, look–"
"How do you already have your wand?" Harry asked.
"Yeah," Dean added. "The giant guy said I wouldn't get mine until school."
"Mr. Ollivander is a dwarf, not a giant," Padma corrected. "But, yes, same for Parvati and me."
Ron blushed slightly, and admitted, "I didn't get a custom wand from Ollivanders. A lot of the older families like mine have so many left over from relatives that we just pick one that works."
"Oh," Padma nodded. "Do those work well? Mr. Ollivander made it sound like they had to be very carefully calibrated to the energies of the wizard or witch."
Ron just shrugged, tacitly admitting that they probably didn't. "Maybe that's why the spell didn't work. I wish I had a better familiar than Scabbers, though. Even a toad."
"I didn't even get a familiar," Dean shrugged. "Mom didn't think I was ready for a pet."
"Same," Padma agreed.
"I got an owl, but mostly just so I could write home to my aunt. And contact people during holidays, I guess," Harry explained.
That seemed to make Ron feel a little better. "I guess he's pretty easy to carry around," he decided. "If I can just bond with him, maybe I'll have him on hand to do familiar magic. Percy never did, though." Off of their looks, he explained, "He belonged to my older brother, Percy. But Percy's a prefect this year, so got an owl as a present and gave me Scabbers."
"I get a lot of hand-me-downs from my cousins," Dean consoled him. "Some of them are cool, but sometimes it just feels like your parents don't want to buy you anything new." The child of a single mother, he could tell that the other kids from Earth probably didn't understand what it was like to be from a family that struggled, financially.
"Maybe you'll start getting the cool hand-me-downs now that your oldest brothers have graduated?" Padma suggested, trying to help. "Do they do anything interesting?"
"Yeah, maybe," Ron allowed. "Charlie's a dragon handler, so maybe I can get him to let me have any used armor he has that isn't too singed. Bill's really tall, so it would be a while before any of his stuff would fit me. He works as a curse breaker for Gringotts. Oh! Did you hear about the break-in at Gringotts?"
The others shook their heads. "Hagrid said it was the most secure bank in the universe, or something," Harry remembered. "Seemed pretty tough. What'd they take?"
"Nothing, that's what's odd. Got in and out without getting caught or seeming to take anything. When something like this happens, everyone's worried it's Death Eaters or something." The others vaguely recognized the name for the death cult that had been the other side in the recent war that Harry got credit for ending.
"Could just be an alien with high-tech gear," Harry suggested. "After all, it's not just magic that works in the market, right?"
That spurred a fun conversation about how they'd all break into Gringotts with technology from science fiction movies. Ron tried to keep up but wasn't totally sure if these "lightsabers" that everyone else agreed would automatically get them in were actually something Midgardians had invented.
They were interrupted in the debate about whether Gringotts would be able to protect against the starship Enterprise's transporter beams by the door to the compartment opening to three kids who were not Hermione, Parvati, and the toad boy returning. Instead, the pale child Harry had met at Madam Malkin's was in the doorway, flanked by two chubby boys that might be intimidatingly large someday.
"They're talking about it all the way up and down the train. Is it true? Are you Harry Potter?" the spoiled child drawled. Harry hadn't really noticed before, but the kid must have just slathered on the product to get such an 80s-chic slicked back effect for his hair.
Harry sighed. He wasn't sure if Hermione or Parvati had slipped, or someone else had figured it out. He nodded, not even bothering to correct his last name to Potts. It seemed like a losing battle.
"I'm Malfoy. Draco Malfoy. Oh, and this is Crabbe and Goyle," he indicated his entourage. Ron choked while trying to hide a snicker, and Draco asked, "Something funny? No need to ask who you are. Red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford: must be a Weasley."
Before Ron could get too red in the face, Harry butted in, "I've seen this movie! By the end, Ron's stolen your girlfriend and beaten you out for the ski championships."
Dean and Padma laughed, and some of Ron's need to fight back died down as he didn't get what Harry was talking about, but could tell that he was making fun of Malfoy. "What?" Malfoy started to get pink as Ron's flush faded. "I don't… have a girlfriend. And what's a ski championship?"
"What I'm saying, Hair Gel," Harry said, drawing on how Tony liked to establish dominance with off-putting nicknames, "is that you're coming on like the bad guy in a cheesy sports movie. Next thing you know, someone's going to be all, 'Sweep the leg, Draco!'"
"Put him in a body bag!" Dean added. Even Padma seemed lost at that point, not really familiar with every American movie that had come out over a decade before she was born.
"Are those… spells?" Draco asked, certain he was being made fun of but not understanding how. Trying to regain control, he said, "I just came back here to tell you, Potter, that some wizarding families are much better than others, and you don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort."
"You want to try that a different way?" Dean asked, dangerously. After growing up black in New York, he was clearly not ready to also have to deal with space racists.
"Yeah, that's a really bad look," Padma agreed, who'd been worried about the secret caste system in Vanir culture that she was walking into.
"Maybe come back when you've thought about why insulting everyone you meet isn't the best way to make friends?" Harry suggested.
Draco looked like he was about to make things worse when Hermione's voice called down, "We're almost there! Oh, hello. Can we get by?"
Thoroughly wrong-footed by now being outnumbered two-to-one as Hermione and Parvati waited impatiently at their flank, Draco sneered and got out, "We'll revisit this later, Potter!" before attempting to stalk off. This exit was immediately ruined by having to manage his two goons squeezing around the girls in the narrow train aisle.
"Those boys didn't seem friendly when we were looking for Neville's toad," Parvati suggested, once they'd gotten back in and Draco's entourage had gone.
"Apparently, they have rich English racists in Vanaheim, too," Padma informed her sister with an eyeroll.
Perhaps trying to breeze past her own share of native British colonizer guilt, Hermione suggested, "We better change into robes. The boys can go in the hallway with their backs turned while we change in here?"
That was easier said than done, but the six were properly dressed by the time the train pulled into the station. Harry's bespoke robes had arrived via UPS a week before he left, with Madam Malkin somehow getting the package inserted into the Midgardian parcel delivery service. The Vanaheim style of robe wasn't that different than those worn by the Masters of the Mystic Arts: tailored close to the torso and arms with long skirts open in the front over flowing pants. While the school guidelines had suggested darker colors for students, they'd had leeway on materials and exact shades, so they looked somber but not like a group of necromancers.
The train began to slow to a stop, and a voice, presumably that of the conductor, echoed through the cars. "We're about to stop at Hogsmeade station. Leave your luggage on board. It will be moved for you."
All the kids, even Ron, were excited: they were about to see Hogwarts.
Chapter 6: Castles and Crusades
Chapter Text
It was almost fully dark when they stepped off the train, so Harry's first impression of the village of Hogsmeade was firelight in windows. The village at this end of the tracks seemed larger than the one at the entry station, likely because it also housed people that served the castle somehow: at the very least, they'd passed what looked like farmland nearly ready for harvest on the way in. The school's food had to come from somewhere.
He didn't have much time to consider the village, because Hagrid's voice boomed from one end of the similarly-simple train platform as the other end, "Firs' years! Firs' years over here!" The big man was holding a large lantern and beckoning. The older students seemed to know what they were doing, heading for a whole fleet of carriages spaced out in the lane nearby, while the smallest children shuffled toward the gamekeeper. "All right there, Harry?" Hagrid asked as he spotted the boy, then encouraged, "C'mon, follow me—any more firs' years? Mind yer step, now!"
Fortunately, they spent enough time forming up that Harry was starting to get some night vision, able to make out a winding foot trail that Hagrid began trooping down, trusting forty 11-year-olds to follow in the dark. Maybe there was another adult on the back side to make sure no one stayed behind or fell in a ditch? They seemed to be descending through some trees, and it felt and smelled like they were approaching water.
"Yeh'll get yer firs' sight o' Hogwarts in a sec," Hagrid assured them. "Jus' round this bend here."
It was impressive, and the children made noises to indicate as such. The promised water they'd been walking toward was an immense lake, reflecting the lights of the towering castle that loomed on a cliff above it. There hardly seemed to be enough students on the train to justify a school of that size, much less all the lights. But maybe they just lit the windows the first night to impress the new students.
"No more'n four to a boat!" Hagrid insisted, drawing their attention to small rowboats in a fleet abutting the shore. The girls quickly took a boat with another girl that Parvati had befriended while wandering the train, and Neville, the boy who was still missing his toad, joined Harry, Ron, and Dean in the next boat back.
"Everyone in?" Hagrid checked. Harry caught sight of an old, hunched man with his own lantern on the shore, who'd apparently been bringing up the rear. He gave Hagrid a wave of his lantern, signalling that they were all aboard, before sitting in the rearmost boat. "Right then—FORWARD!"
Propelled by magic, the boats set out as one unit, a silent flotilla weaving across the still water. Or, at least, silent for a moment. Even such an impressive vista couldn't stop so many children from first whispering, and then getting louder, their conversations echoing off the lake.
"Heads down!" Hagrid roared over the hubbub, as his boat and then all the others, one by one, entered a cavern shrouded by hanging ivy. Harry noticed a quite sturdy-looking portcullis that was hidden above, ready to cut off this water entrance as needed. It soon became much brighter as an underground harbor for the boats was revealed, flat stone just above the water level and lit by ornate torches that sparked with flames not unlike those of magical transportation.
The boats pulled into line next to this walkway, reminding Harry very much of water rides at theme parks. "Exit through the gift shop?" he said, pantomiming lifting up the bar that held you to your seat in such rides, and Dean chuckled appreciatively. Ron and Neville, of course, didn't understand the reference.
"No, the exit's up those stairs," Ron gestured at the wide, winding steps up the interior cliff wall as they started to climb out.
Harry's explanation was cut off by Hagrid asking, "Someone lose a toad?"
Neville shouted, "Trevor!" and managed to get out of the boat without flipping it over, but only barely, racing to reclaim the wandering familiar.
"How did…" Hermione began, asking the question they were all thinking about how the toad had gotten here ahead of them, but didn't finish the thought as they began to struggle up the several flights of stone stairs.
"We are going to have calves of steel," Harry joked, realizing that there probably weren't any escalators or elevators in the many-storied castle.
By the time they reached what was likely the surface level, Hagrid asked Neville, "Still got yer toad?" then banged three times on a stout wooden door at the top landing. It opened to a tall, older witch whose hair was still dark beneath her green, pointed hat. "The firs' years, Rector McGonagall," Hagrid told her, with formality.
"Thank you, Hagrid. I will take them from here," the stern witch responded with equal formality. She fully opened the door into a huge atrium, lit by dozens more of the magical torches. A much larger set of double doors stood to the left, immense beams against the wall to bar this front entrance at need. Across, an only slightly-smaller set of doors were their likely direction as the professor organized them. To either side, hallways wound off into the bowels of the school and marble stairways led up and down.
Surprisingly, instead of directly into the large, interior doors, she led them into an antechamber hidden around a corner that wasn't entirely large enough for forty children. Easily commanding their attention, she repeated a lot of things Harry already knew about the houses, so he used the opportunity to people-watch. Most of the children in the room apparently knew this too, and were looking with similar curiosity.
Despite the English accents and lighter hair and eyes of the local wizards he'd met so far, Harry was slightly surprised to note that the majority of the students seemed to be Asian. Thinking about it more closely, even the kids like Draco and Ron he'd assumed were fully white had evidence of mixed European and Asian heritage in their faces. He guessed he shouldn't be too surprised, since Wong had mentioned in passing that there were several stable convergences in Asia, so the Vanir had mixed with the humans of that continent even more thoroughly than with those of Europe.
It suddenly made a lot of sense why the Vanir were long-lived, but most were not functionally immortal like the Aesir of Asgard. They were in many ways mostly human, simply born on another planet.
"Will we all fight the same troll, do you think?" Ron asked, quietly.
"What?" Harry asked, realizing that while he'd spaced out McGonagall had left and the children had started talking again.
"According to my brothers, you have to fight a troll, and they pick your house based on how you fight it," Ron explained.
"I think your brothers must have been messing with you," Harry told him, and Dean and Neville nodded along.
"It's a magical, telepathic helmet that weighs your soul," the brown-haired girl that Parvati had befriended explained. "I'm Lavender, by the way."
They'd introduced themselves and started to ask how she knew when there was screaming from the back of the room as the temperature suddenly dropped. A ferocious crush of children backed them against a wall, trying to clear a path for the parade of spectral figures that had walked through the wall and barely seemed to notice the children. They were arguing with one another in voices that seemed heard from a great distance away and through water. The Old English they were predominantly speaking in wouldn't have been intelligible to the kids even if they heard it clearly.
"Wesaþ hāle," a short, rotund man dressed like a monk said to them, beneficently. "Welcumen tó Hofweord." The rope scars on his ghostly neck rippled oddly as he talked. In addition to their desaturated and translucent forms giving them away, each wraith bore the marks of their manner of death.
"Thanks?" several children replied, recognizing what they thought was, "Welcome to Hogwarts."
"Aweggā," McGonagall ordered the ghosts as she returned to the room, shooing them back out the wall. "Now, form a line. We do this by surname, so A through D up here, everyone up to L here, M through P over here, and the rest of you after P in the back."
With a lot of bumping, they got into roughly the right order (Malfoy having to shove his bodyguards into the right groups when they tried to keep standing next to him), and she nodded and led them out of the antechamber and into the doors Harry had identified earlier. The enormous great hall featured four immense tables full of students, each running parallel to the aisle between the door and the other end of the room, two on each side. The aisle led to the front of the room that was raised a step, where a perpendicular table seemed to hold the staff where they could face the students.
It reminded Harry of The Last Supper, with all of them on one side of the table. It must make it hard to chat with the other adults. Did they have to spend every meal mostly watching the students?
"Look up, Harry," Parvati insisted, noticing that the boy was engrossed in the people and was missing the most interesting part of the room. He glanced up and it was like he was staring into space. An enhanced field of stars loomed in the darkness below the roof where the light from hundreds of floating magical candles gave out, featuring the colors of nebulae that were added to NASA's images to make them more interesting. "Must be a spell," Parvati whispered.
At the end of the aisle, just before the teachers' table, McGonagall had set up a small wooden three-legged stool with an ornate, close-faced helm of what seemed to be an iridescent metal like titanium, though periodically flickers of color would race across the metal in a fashion that made Harry feel like the object was thinking.
"This is the Helm of Sorting," the professor explained, in an accent that seemed too Scottish for her to be a Vanaheim-born witch. "It was forged by the Norns for the sole purpose of setting you on the best path to achieve your wyrd: your destined fate. It chooses your house not just by your personality, but by determining which will give you the best start in life to develop the traits you need."
She then pulled out a scroll that apparently had all of their names in alphabetical order, as she'd explained earlier, and each child took turns walking up to the stool, sitting, and having their head completely swallowed by the massive helmet. An 11-year-old wearing a helm likely fit for an Aesir warrior was inherently comical, and Harry was reminded of bobble-head or Funko Pop toys.
Some took longer than others, but one by one each student was assigned to one of the four houses. The helmet would briefly change into the house colors for the one chosen after the child put it on. Harry, privately, wondered if the Norns had put a finger on the scale: what were the chances that they'd be so evenly divided by destiny? By the time it got to him, each house had gotten at least six kids, and not more than nine, and there were only eight more left, including himself. He wouldn't be at all surprised if the numbers came out pretty close to ten for each house. So far, Neville had been the only real surprise for Gryffindor, but Lavender, Hermione, and Parvati had all also made the house, with Padma going to Ravenclaw as she'd expected. Dean and Ron were still to go after Harry.
When he took his turn on the stool to the ferocious whispering that had begun after McGonagall announced his name, and had the helm placed on his head, he was surprised that it was not dark inside, but full of flashing colored light that he could almost resolve into vision. A gravelly old woman's voice sounded as much in his mind as his ears, "So many possible fates."
A similar but slightly-younger-sounding voice added, "So much greater chance for triumph or folly than the others."
"We could place him somewhere safe," a third, the youngest-sounding, suggested. "Hufflepuff to nurture his ability to make heroes work together who would otherwise be poised for civil war."
"That he is likely to do, regardless," the middle child argued. "Ravenclaw to drive him toward merging magic and technology?"
"An outlier of a chance, even if so assigned," the youngest argued. "More likely to mire him in further self-deprecation when it does not come as easily to him as it would his mentor."
"There are only two real choices," the eldest voice agreed. "The road of the hero, or the path of the left hand of death."
"Woah!" Harry cut in. "Do I get a vote? I vote no on left hand of death!"
The first voice, impossibly old, explained, "It is the safer path, child. Slytherin would teach you to master the skills to prove valuable to the powerful and make yourself indispensable enough to protect the things and people you love. Why fight the tides, when you can build a boat?"
"I'm pretty sure it's actually a lot more straightforward to build a seawall than a boat," Harry disagreed. "I could get started with just some sandbags. Boats are complicated. Especially if you want them to go where you want."
"I'm not sure if that's profound or a complete misunderstanding," the youngest voice said, a bit of humor therein.
"Turn back, child," the middle voice cautioned. "For your friends, Gryffindor is merely a place to find courage to bear up in the coming trials. But, for you, it would call upon you to fight. Possibly to die." The colorful clouds projected by the helmet suddenly became almost clear, a fully 3D vision in first-person of him surrounded by black-robed figures in metallic masks, wands pointed at him, a figure even more terrible half-seen looming from the darkness ahead.
"Okay, one, if I could get this to Tony he would use it to make video games amazing," Harry marveled. "Two, death is just possible, right? I also maybe come out of it awesome?"
"Awe is certainly upon the path, young one, if you can overcome your trials," the eldest told him, wearily, as if it had warned many Gryffindors before.
"If I'm stuck being a wizarding celebrity, might as well be for something I did," Harry shrugged, making the helmet bob on his head. "Total no on left hand of death."
"So be it, young one," the three voices intoned together.
The helm was lifted off of his head to huge applause from the Gryffindor table, and a surprising small smile on the face of the stern Rector McGonagall. "Take your seat, Mr. Potter," she instructed him, showing him the helm that had turned a brilliant metallic red and gold.
To cheers of, "We got Potter!" led by a couple of redheads that were probably Ron's brothers, Harry joined the Gryffindor table. Dean and Ron weren't far behind, and the table finally quieted down as the sorting was finished. The colorfully-robed man with an immense white beard who must be Headmaster Dumbledore stood up at the head table, made a dad joke about saying a "few words" only to spout four nonsense words, and then kicked off the feast.
A ripple of magic passed along the tables, with the customary sparks as food was teleported onto the surface. Vanaheim's feasting tradition was very similar to Asgard's, so the tables suddenly seemed to groan under the weight of huge platters of roasted meats, with miscellaneous other trays of food shoved in between. Parvati, sitting across from Harry, sighed and said, "They did warn us that this place was not vegetarian-friendly. Is there at least chicken? Ah, over there! Can someone pass me the chicken?"
Harry got to know the rest of his roommates as he ate. He already had a good handle on Dean and Ron, and Neville (last name Longbottom of all things) turned out to be a multi-generation Vanir native who had been worried he wouldn't have enough magic to go to Hogwarts. "Happened to my aunt," Harry nodded. "But she's doing great. Plenty of opportunities on Earth… Midgard."
"That's what me mum did," explained the Irish-accented boy named Seamus Finnegan that he hadn't met until dinner. "Didn' fancy stayin' here for the war, so went t'Earth and married my da'. She didn' tell 'im anythin' until I started showin' me magic. Bit of a nasty shock for him."
"I guess you didn't get picked up by the sorcerers, then, and that's why you weren't with us on the train?" Harry guessed.
"Mum doesn' trust the local wizards much," Seamus shrugged. "Said she didn' leave the war here just t'have me fightin' wars on Earth."
"I wasn't too sure about that either," Hermione interjected. "I want to keep learning magic after Hogwarts, but I don't know if I'm cut out to be the line of defense between Earth and the terrors of the other dimensions. I was looking into a few in particular, and there's a being called Dormammu that seems hard to even comprehend, much less battle."
"You get some of that here, too, though," Neville objected. "I think most of our parents had to fight You-Know-Who. And sometimes there are problems that Asgard doesn't want to deal with."
"I actually saw Thor, one time, a few years ago," Lavender (Brown, it had turned out) said, a bit dreamily. "Some jotun raiders were getting close to our village, and he came down the Bifrost with Sif and the Warriors Three to fight them off. My parents helped!"
Harry missed the rest of the discussion because he was distracted by a sudden sense of foreboding, almost feeling like pinching in his scar. A dark-haired man in black robes with a hooked nose was staring at him, talking to a green-skinned hag in voluminous robes that seemed familiar, somehow.
"Who are they?" he asked Percy, Ron's prefect brother who had set up near the first-years.
The officious boy explained, "The one in black is Professor Snape, he teaches potions, chemistry, and alchemy. The, er, woman, is new. I think she is probably this year's defense seminar teacher. We get a new one every year to teach different ways of defense and combat, sometimes without even using magic."
"Thanks," Harry said, focused on Snape. While he'd gotten used to being stared at, the man's focus on him was intense, especially since he hadn't looked away when Harry had noticed him staring. Harry shrugged and turned back to the table. Maybe he was a big fan.
As soon as dessert was finished, the headmaster stood up and gave a short speech pointing out that magic in the corridors was forbidden, so was going into the forest without a professor, and, for this year, so was the third floor corridor, "...unless you wish to suffer a very painful death."
"Is he serious?" Harry asked Percy.
"Maybe. It could be a convergence. It may currently be a portal to one of the more dangerous worlds? That happens from time to time. I shall ask."
"Additionally," Dumbledore continued, "I would like to welcome this year's defense seminar professor, Mistress Morgan." The hag, warty green face barely visible under her cowl, nodded at the introduction. "I know we had announced that it would be our own Professor Quirrell, who had gone on sabbatical to learn new techniques. Unfortunately, he had an accidental run-in with Morgan that left him incapacitated for the year, and she was kind enough to take his place in recompense. So, at least, we can know we have the superior warrior teaching, yes? I hope you'll all treat her very well. Now, perhaps the school song?"
Harry was pretty sure that Dumbledore was just making up a joke song as he went as he sung the silly words without much of a tune, especially with how excited Ron's goofy brothers, Fred and George, were to join in. What a strange old man.
Dismissed shortly afterward, Percy and his fellow fifth-year prefect Alexis Marie made sure the first-years stuck together and followed the rest of the mass that was Gryffindor out of the hall, up the giant staircase, and on the way to their tower. After a brief interlude where a tiny floating man who was partially translucent tossed sticks at them, Percy explained, "That's Peeves: some kind of partially-illusory construct that the God of Mischief, Loki, created when he was a student here. No one has managed to get rid of him. He plays pranks. Avoid him if you can."
"I guess we're never skipping leg day," Harry complained to the other kids from Midgard who might get the joke, after they'd climbed to the seventh floor and the entrance to their dorm. The older kids were just streaming through a large painting of a fat lady as if it didn't exist.
"The portrait will become a barrier if your magical signature is not registered," Percy explained. "Once everyone is through, we will add you to the list." This process involved some wand waving and Percy telling the painting a password, and then they were all through.
The room beyond the painting was a comfortable, low-ceilinged den primarily lit by a roaring fireplace. There was probably not quite space for several-dozen Gryffindors to all have enough study space at once, but it was still a large room with many alcoves and lots of comfortable seating in reds and golds. The dim lighting finally insisted to Harry's body that he had no idea what time or even day it was back in LA but it was probably time to sleep.
He trudged up another couple of flights of stairs into the dorm he'd share with the other first-year boys, fell into the bed where his trunk had been set up, and resolved to wait until the next day to check on Hedwig and send her to tell his aunt he'd gotten there safely. He was totally out of it before the other boys had even finished getting to their beds.
Chapter 7: The Foundations of Knowledge
Chapter Text
In some ways, it was probably better that Harry's electronic devices failed to work on Vanaheim, for he would have had to figure out some way to completely override their internal programming for the measurement of time or risk being constantly late or early. He was confused as it was just relying on his biological clock.
The length of the year on Vanaheim was close enough to Earth's that significant seasonal dates like solstices and equinoxes would stay relatively constant between them for long ages. This all came down to straightforward orbital mechanics and solar habitable zones, which were not affected by whatever trick of physics broke electricity on the planet. While it wasn't always this close of a match, in the present era it was even nearly the same stage of late summer in Vanaheim as it was on the Earth's northern hemisphere. It would have really confused the Midgardborn if they'd showed up on their September 1st to find out it was already winter on Vanaheim.
However, while year length is a function of celestial orbit, obeying a relatively simple rule of distance to time, a planet can spin at whatever speed it wants. Small favor then that days on Vanaheim were only about 21 minutes longer than those of Earth. Once she got deeper into her studies of human biology, Hermione Granger would eventually learn that, when isolated away from the sun, humans tended to naturally acclimate to a sleep cycle that more closely approximated Vanaheim than Earth and find that fact extremely suggestive. But for the time being, it was another layer of confusion that would at the very least slightly throw off mechanical Earth clocks, like Hermione's spring-powered watch.
More importantly, a longer day with nearly the same-length year meant that Vanaheim had a year that was basically a pure 360 Vanaheim days, vs. Earth's 365 (and a bit). Their year divided up almost perfectly with the seasons, and they only needed a leap day once every few thousand years to correct any calendar drift. When Hermione found out that the planet's moon had an exact 30-day rotation that allowed consistent tracking of the months based on moon phase, she started to figure the planet might have been subtly engineered by the Asgardians at some point to simplify calendar-making.
The main takeaway was that Vanaheim weeks were nothing like Earth's. Nothing about the planet's year or moon cycle was evenly divisible by seven, so why should their work and school schedule follow Earth's strange fixation of five-days on and two-days of rest? No, Vanaheim used weeks of six days.
At least the days were still in the same order as on Midgard and had similar names, so there was some point of reference. Odd-god-out Saturn's Day was the one that got dropped.
All of this was to say that from when they woke up on the first morning after getting to Hogwarts, the children from Earth had all of their assumptions about the proper progression of time completely upset. "It's Tuesday, right?" Harry asked Ron, having gotten their class schedules at breakfast.
"Tyr's Day, you mean?" the redhead corrected. "No, it's Moon Day. Tyr's Day's tomorrow. The train always goes to Hogwarts on Sun Day."
"But I thought it usually went on September 1st, which can wind up being basically any day of the week… our time," Hermione interjected and came to the right conclusion before she'd finished talking.
Ron just shrugged. Vanaheim didn't use the Roman names for months, so "September" meant nothing to him. "We've got Professor Sprout first out in the greenhouses," he just pointed to the line of the schedule for the first day of the week.
That first week passed in a bit of a blur for Harry. He was pretty sure he'd remembered to send Hedwig to tell his aunt he'd arrived safely, but the portal-hopping jet lag from LA to Kathmandu to London simply compounded the time upset on Vanaheim, and it was Frigga's Day before he really started to acclimatize.
Out of that temporal fugue, he could still remember the basics of his first classes.
The aforementioned Professor Sprout was a stout, older woman of the more Asian-looking Vanaheim stock who would be teaching them the proper care of plants in a discipline summed up as "herbology," but which seemed like it would go as deeply into basic farming, forestry, and land management as it would into plants that could be used as components in magic. Because most of Vanaheim was pre-industrial, it made sense, but Harry was immediately hoping he could drop it, particularly when he learned that gardening was a core class but math was an elective that didn't really get started until their third year.
He was a lot more sanguine about the defense seminar. While the hag that taught the class, Mistress Morgan, was terrifying to look at, she was a font of knowledge on hand-to-hand combat that promised to teach them how to fight opponents of all sizes, including beasts with claws and horns. The students from Vanaheim scoffed at the idea of learning martial arts, but Harry was very excited that he wouldn't be as far behind the praxis of Kamar-Taj as the Ancient One had seemed to expect. It seemed like Dean Thomas was going to be an early standout in the class, since he'd been taking karate since he was little.
Their pure spellcasting class was taught by diminutive Magister Flitwick, who was half-goblin. Much more cheerful than that heritage would indicate, his class was where they finally received their wands, and he began to teach them to channel power through them. Their initial training would be less about "spells" than simple projection of energy and manipulation of motion, much of which would require channeling dimensional energy back on Earth. Sadly, they had a lot of training in muscle memory to go before they'd be doing much of anything.
On Tuesday (or Tyr's Day, as the locals insisted on calling it), they had some repeats and then had their first history class with Cuthbert Binns, one of the only ancient ghosts in the castle that had managed to upgrade his speech to modern English. Most of Vanaheim's history was told in the form of orally-recounted sagas, which was also the main literary tradition, so the class was also the school's equivalent of literature study. If not for that, Harry would have tried to drop that class as well. He realized he was still probably going to have to study things like Shakespeare on his own if he eventually went to college on Earth.
Their first class with their head of house, Rector McGonagall, wasn't until Wednesday (Odin's Day). She turned out to be the second-highest-ranking official in the school, just behind the headmaster, in addition to her roles teaching and being in charge of Gryffindor house. Harry worried she was stretched a little thin, and wouldn't have as much time for them as the other heads of house. Her curriculum would ultimately teach them how to use magic to reshape matter, generally called "transfiguration," but they would have to learn an awful lot about biology, materials science, and engineering before they'd even be transfiguring something as simple as a matchstick. She explained that there was significant capacity for accidents if you didn't have a proper understanding of the thing you were trying to transform, which is why they'd be starting out with pure elements and very-simple molecules in small quantities.
That night, they had to stay up well after dark to attend their cosmology class with Professor Sinestra, who would also be handling their miscellaneous physics education with a focus on astronomy and astrophysics. While the heavens purportedly had some input into the working of magic on Vanaheim, the class was much more usefully about how the cosmology of the Nine Realms worked, including the practicalities of convergences and travel via the Night Roads. The lateness of the class didn't help Harry's dimensional jet lag, and he wondered why the non-practical portions of the class couldn't be scheduled for a more reasonable hour.
Nonetheless, after a few more repeats on Thor's Day, Harry was looking forward to his first chemistry class with Professor Snape on Frigga's Day. The class text was half chemical sciences and half potions and alchemy. "I think he may be a fan," he explained to his roommates. "And I was always pretty good at chemistry. You get to do the best lab experiments."
"I don't know if he's going to be a fan," Neville hedged. "He's the head of Slytherin."
"Right," Ron agreed. "I've heard he hates Gryffindors, and always takes points off us for no reason."
"I wonder why he was staring at me at the welcome feast, then," Harry said.
He found out as soon as his name was called in the class the next day, "Harry Potter: our new celebrity." The sarcasm that dripped from that word was almost palpable. Definitely not a fan, then. Snape had barely finished going through the attendance roll before he called Harry out in a sudden pop quiz, "Potter! Powdered root of asphodel and an infusion of wormwood are key ingredients of which potion?"
The rest of his year-mates from Gryffindor were looking confused, except Hermione's hand had already shot into the air. She'd been doing that any time a question was asked, and it wasn't endearing her to her peers. They shared the class with the Slytherins, who looked smug at the targeting, but most of them didn't seem like they had a clue either.
He tried to puzzle it out, "Wormwood's what you use in absinthe, right? It has thujones, which are really bad for you." Tony had explained that to him at some point, expounding on some of the more interesting alcohols he'd sampled, and Harry had really liked the word "thujone" enough to remember it. "Asphodel is a flower, I think." The only other flower he could think of that was used in medicine was opium poppies, so with the nasty alcohol additive he didn't think he was looking at a stimulant. "Some kind of sedative drug?" he asked.
"Are you guessing, Potter? Didn't think to do the reading?" Snape needled.
Oh, so that was how it was going to be. Harry had a teacher in fourth grade who was a former hippy, found out that he was connected to Stark Industries, didn't like anything having to do with the military-industrial complex, and took it out on Harry. She'd looked at him a lot like Snape was looking. This one probably didn't hate Tony, but was obviously taking something out on Harry that wasn't his fault. He wondered if he'd need to try to get transferred to another teacher like he had in his elementary school. Was there even another chemistry teacher at the small school?
While Harry had been processing that, he hadn't said anything so Snape moved ahead, "I'll give you an easier one, then. Where would you look if I asked you to find me a bezoar?"
"Down here in the dungeons?" Harry guessed. He was going completely off a (wrong) mental definition from watching Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. (Happy insisted that Harry never tell Pepper all the age-inappropriate shows and movies he was allowed to watch in the Stark Industries media room.) The show had called the monster that laid puppet-master eggs a bezoar, and that had been hiding under the school. Snape began to sneer, but Hermione, still waving her hand in the air trying to answer, blinked like he wasn't totally wrong and looked over to the supply cabinets. "Probably in there," Harry pointed at where Hermione was staring.
Snape suddenly looked angry, and glanced over to Hermione, figuring out how Harry had guessed. "Put your hand down, Granger! Potter, what's the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane?"
That one Harry was actually sure of. "They're the same thing, sir. Also called aconite." It was a common enough component in video games featuring werewolves, after all. He could tell that Snape was shocked that he'd nailed that one, and ran his mouth off. "It's interesting that the Vanaheim words for things are the same as the Midgard ones, don't you think? I thought they'd use fewer Latin-based names here."
Severus Snape, wrong-footed, actually had to agree on that and admitted, "Much of the basic botanical science terminology was inherited from Midgard, and most of our non-magical flora was shared between worlds so it's unclear where it even evolved. Meanwhile, Asgardian terminology is too far beyond basic chemistry to be of use until much later in the curriculum." Frowning at getting diverted from his original bullying, he followed up with, "You are correct about the three terms for aconite, but you simply guessed your way close to the other answers. Potter, I expect you to read further about poisons and magical sedatives and provide me with a five-page essay fully explaining both of the other questions to present at the next class."
"Sounds fun, sir," Harry agreed. It didn't really, but he knew better than to let the bullies know they were winning. The rest of the students simply stared, confounded, at the game that was going on, unsure who had won or even if a student was fighting with a professor very politely.
What followed was an informative, if dry, lecture about the underpinnings of the intersection of chemistry and magic. Snape's initial question about wormwood and asphodel hadn't been completely designed to trap Harry, since the answer he'd been looking for was that they were used in a powerful sleeping draught that made one appear dead. Both plants, in addition to their soporific effects, had a mythological association with death which aided in making the potion. Many potions and rituals would use components that seemed to be less effective than other substances for the purpose, chemically, because of their other connotations.
After Hermione and Harry were able to answer the more lesson-appropriate questions put to them, Snape stopped calling on them and instead picked on the less-prepared members of Gryffindor for the rest of the lecture. He ultimately nearly brought Neville to tears after a whole series of increasingly-pointed questions about a simple potion for curing boils that the boy couldn't answer correctly.
Given how dumb a few of the Slytherins in the class seemed, who the man passed over, it seemed he definitely had it out for all of Gryffindor, though perhaps for Harry in particular.
They headed to lunch after class, and Hermione rambled, "While that was a very informative lecture, and Professor Snape is clearly skilled in his field, I don't understand why he wouldn't call on me and instead kept asking people that didn't know the answer."
"He's a dick," Dean answered. He'd done better than Neville had, at least, when cornered. Hermione gasped at the profanity.
"Don't say that too loud out in the halls," Ron warned. "He'll give you detention for disrespect."
"Wouldn't be the first time," Dean shrugged.
"I wonder if there's another chemistry teacher. I need to talk to McGonagall about dropping herbology anyway," Harry said.
Parvati assumed, "Not unless they don't get to eat at the staff table." The number of teachers at the table had, indeed, been remarkably small, even for a school with only a few hundred students over seven grade levels.
"At least I need to start on my essay, so I can tell Hagrid I can't make it to tea," Harry nodded. The huge man had invited him to his hut that afternoon to hang out. While Harry was grateful for the help that the groundskeeper had provided in rescuing him from Stane, taking him shopping, and buying him Hedwig, it felt pretty odd for an adult to want to spend time with him socially. Sudden punishment homework would be a good excuse.
Harry wasn't able to grab a few moments of McGonagall's time until the next week, catching her in private right before class. She brushed off his initial question about dropping herbology with the assertion, "There's plenty of maths in your other science classes for your grade level. We can revisit the issue once you've had more than a week of classes. It's a learning strategy that has worked for students from Midgard for centuries; give it time for the context to become apparent, Potter."
That wasn't exactly what he'd hoped to hear, but he followed up with the bigger problem. He had written to his aunt after Friday's class and gotten a letter back from her over the weekend. Responding to his mention about the chemistry professor seeming to have it out for him from day one, Pepper mentioned:
"Snape" sounds familiar. Is he a little younger than me? I remember your father used to complain about some other boy that he didn't get along with at school, and I think that was his name. "Snape the snake," is hard to forget. As I recall, they both got more than a few detentions going after each other. Having someone that hated James teach you seems like a pretty big conflict of interest. Let me know if I need to write the headmaster.
With this information, Harry asked the rector, "Did Professor Snape hate my father?"
The Scottish witch frowned, but allowed, "They certainly didn't get along well while they were in school. Why?"
"He spent all class on Friday trying to make me look stupid, and gave me extra homework for not knowing about the draught of the living death or bezoars on the first day of class."
Her lips pursed and she said, "He probably hoped you would be a prodigy like your mother, who he got along quite well with in school." Harry didn't think she actually believed it, and was trying to distract him with that detail. Seeing his face remaining resolved, she offered, "I'll speak with him to get his point of view. I expect him to treat you like the rest of your peers. Now, if you'll take your seat, class is about to begin."
Harry resolved to take his head of house at her word and see whether it had any effect on that Friday's class, but first, the excitement of Thursday. It was the first flying lesson, and not even having to share it with the Slytherins was going to bring down the boys of Gryffindor. Well, Neville seemed like he was afraid of heights, but Harry, Dean, Ron, and Seamus were all excited to finally get to go up on a broom.
"Ready to get shown up, Potter?" Malfoy jibed, already waiting out on the field with the rest of his house by the time Gryffindor made it out, even though they'd rushed to get there early. Malfoy had tried messing with them several times throughout the past week and a half, and Harry was already over it. "You've never been flying, have you? Might just fall off."
Harry had an idea and grabbed Dean and Ron's shoulders to rearrange where they had come to a stop in front of the Slytherin boys. He explained, "Malfoy, you're Ron's mean kid. I think Nott has to be my nemesis. Then Zabini and Dean. I'm not sure which of your bookends is which. Seamus, do you have a preference for your evil opposite?" Stood up in a line, it was interesting that both houses had wound up with five boys, three light-skinned with dark hair, one dark-skinned, and one with lighter hair. "The girls don't match up as cleanly, but I guess that will change when Ron steals your girlfriend before the big quidditch match. That's Parkinson, right?"
Pansy Parkinson, who did have designs on Draco Malfoy, smirked at Potter casting her correctly in his weird little story.
"Why've Neville an' I gotta get the thick ones?" Seamus complained.
"Sorry, Seamus," Harry shrugged. "Slim pickings, and both of you are liable to be bigger than me when we finish growing, right?" Secretly, Harry had picked the kid that seemed the smartest of the bunch to be his nemesis. Also, Theodore Nott was, so far, the most laid back of the Slytherin boys.
"Fair 'nough," Seamus allowed. "I'll take Crabbe, I guess."
"Great!" Harry squinted. "Which one of you is Crabbe?" It's not that the boys were really that similar-looking, other than being dark-haired and big, but neither of them had spoken up to differentiate themselves yet.
"I won't stand for this!" Malfoy interrupted. "You're clearly the leader, and I'm not going to be nemeses with a Weasley!"
"Nice use of the plural on nemesis," Harry acknowledged. This would all be easier if Malfoy was stupid, or if he was smart and not a jerk. "But I'm clearly just the comic relief tech guy. I'll make some wacky gadgets. Play a support role. Ron's the hero, here."
"Yeah! Fear Ron Weasley and the Warriors Four," Ron boasted, finally getting sufficiently puffed up. Off to the side, biting her tongue to not get involved, Hermione was relatively sure that Harry was messing with Ron, and worried the Weasley boy was going to be hurt when he realized. "We challenge you to a wizard's duel!"
"You're on!" Malfoy responded. "Trophy room. Tonight at midnight!"
Zabini rolled his eyes and said, "Not I."
"Me either," Nott added.
Harry gave his new nemesis a sad look and explained, "You missed the obvious, 'No, Nott I,' joke."
Theodore rolled his eyes. "I didn't miss it, Potter. You can do better than name puns."
Trying to take back control and his running crew already abandoning him, Malfoy sniffed and argued, "Wizards duels are one-on-one with a second anyway. Me and Crabbe against Weasley and Potter."
"Tonight!" Ron agreed.
Harry suddenly wondered if he'd gotten in over his head. Hermione recognized the look and just shook her head, warning, "The instructor is coming."
With an adult finally present, the sniping was derailed for a bit. Harry still thought it was a little on the nose for the wizards and witches of Vanaheim to use flying broomsticks as their primary mechanism for transportation, but he seemed to have a talent at using the enchanted items. His broom snapped right into his hand when he commanded it, while most of the students couldn't get much more than a wiggle their first time.
Poor Neville—when they were instructed to kick off, hover, and return to the ground—kicked off too hard and started to float away to Madam Hooch's unhelpful instruction to, "Come back, boy!" If video games had taught Harry anything, it was when to recognize a crisis in which he could intervene. Neville was moments away from losing control and falling off or worse, and he had his broom still in his hand.
"Got you, Neville," Harry assured the boy, having thoughtlessly rocketed into the air to catch his housemate while everyone, including the teacher, stood there helplessly. "You just need to tilt the front down slowly. There you go."
"Excellent teamwork. Five points to Gryffindor!" the literally-hawk-eyed professor insisted once they were safely on the ground. "The boy has demonstrated what can happen if you kick off too hard. Let's practice taking off and landing—carefully—a few more times before we start doing laps."
For the rest of the lesson, Harry proved to be a natural at flying, but other than getting a few points saving Neville a nasty fall, he wasn't going to be invited to play on the quidditch team early or anything. At least the Longbottom heir was grateful, and Harry was able to fly rings around Malfoy (who'd amusingly been using the wrong broom grip his whole life).
Harry realized that Draco was still sizing him up like competition, and decided to further double-down on keeping out of the nascent bully's crosshairs. That evening he explained to his roommates, "I don't know, guys. We agreed Seamus was Crabbe's nemesis, right? If Nott was Malfoy's second, I'd be right there, but it feels weird to go. I wouldn't want to steal your thunder or anything."
Neville and Ron nodded. There were many legends about what happened to people that tried to steal Thor's thunder, so they got the metaphor. Seamus agreed to go to the duel as Ron's second, and Harry calmly went to bed.
He wasn't expecting to be woken up a couple hours after he went to sleep by the two boys barely able to contain their fear and excitement. "She'll get o'er it," Seamus was assuring Ron loudly.
"Killed… or worse, expelled," Ron did a bad impression of Hermione. From bed, Harry could only tell who he was imitating because Ron was raising his hand in the air in pantomime of the girl's bad classroom habit.
"You beat Malfoy?" Harry asked, blearily.
"Tosser didn't show," Ron said. "I think he sicced Filch on us. But we found out what's in the forbidden corridor on the third floor."
"Tis a portal that leads to a giant wolf!" Seamus explained. "Wi' another portal behind it!"
"Convergence," Harry nodded. Percy had suggested as much. "Good job, not dying. Night." With Seamus and Ron still whispering about their adventure, Harry drifted quickly back to sleep.
Chapter 8: Tunnels and Trolls
Chapter Text
Hermione was very angry with Harry, of all people, right after Ron's adventure with the duel, portals, and giant wolf. She'd stayed up to try to talk Ron and Seamus out of it, wound up getting drawn off with them, and actually been responsible for unlocking the door blocking off the convergence. And she'd initially stayed up to save Harry from making a mistake, only to learn that he'd never had any intention of going along with the stupid stunt.
But it wasn't like she was going to stop studying with the other Midgardborn, so she'd mostly forgiven him within a few weeks. Snape had been a little better in class, herbology had proved to at least be slightly interesting, and Harry had found some introductory math textbooks in the library so they wouldn't all completely lose their skills by the time they could take arithmancy class. Ron had bonded heavily with Seamus over their adventure and didn't want to do extra homework, but Neville still seemed to feel like he owed Harry for saving him at the flying lesson, so he tried to come to the study sessions. Parvati would only show up when Padma could make it, and would drag Lavender along, so the Gryffindor first-years were starting to at least get some kind of working relationship. Still, Harry, Dean, and Hermione remained the core of the study group.
Before they knew it, they'd been at school for nearly two months. The single-day weekends really had a lot to do with how little time they had to simply slack off, but Harry's study group was trying to fit in a lot of extra learning. In particular, Dean had been a bit of a slave-driver for the defense seminar, persuading them that they couldn't learn martial arts in only four hours of class time a week. He seemed to enjoy watching them all try to keep up with him on morning jogs, and laying them out with various throws on the lawn.
"Dísablót feast coming up on Frigga's Day," Lavender reminded the crew, at a study session she'd deigned to attend one week.
Hermione did the math, then figured, "Is it the same day as Halloween on Midgard? Autumn-Month 11th doesn't seem like a particularly auspicious date?"
The Vanir girl shrugged, and explained, "I think that's just when portals to Niflheim open up across all the realms. Is it on an important date on Midgard?"
"Halloween is at least at the end of a month," Harry said. "I don't know if we see any portals on Midgard."
Dean theorized, "I bet the Masters keep them secret."
Lavender explained, "It's when the ghosts here can come and go back to Niflheim. I think they have to every few years, or they'll fade."
"I wonder if Midgard even has ghosts," Hermione mused. She made a note to herself to investigate. It was probably her hundredth such note. That Harry would often help her research these questions was why she'd eventually forgiven him.
By the time the Dísablót feast came, they'd at least confirmed, in Hogwarts' giant library, that ghosts were practically unheard of on Midgard. Or, at least, they were much more difficult to corroborate than the parade of spirits that considered Hogwarts a second home. The Gryffindor crew had started getting a little blasé about the incorporeal undead, since Sir Nicholas (or "Nearly-Headless Nick") was around so often. Basically considering himself the house's immortal patron, the incompletely-decapitated Asgardian nobleman still hadn't explained what exactly he'd done to justify his execution, why he'd been sent to Niflheim, or why he was allowed to come back. But he was a nice enough weirdo who at least spoke English close enough to modern to basically puzzle out what he was saying, so the kids gave him a lot of slack.
Despite Hermione's displeasure, Harry had spent the last few weeks building up the legend of Ronald Weasley. He figured that the redheaded boy enjoyed the attention, tired of being overshadowed by older brothers, and if he could make the kid into some kind of hero, that was less he had to hear about the "boy-who-lived." In addition to his whisper campaign about how Ron had discovered the secret of the forbidden corridor after Draco Malfoy had been too cowardly to duel him, Harry had started a few other rumors. Ron Weasley had wrestled a troll to ensure his admittance to Gryffindor. He was a prodigy on a broom, cruelly forbidden from quidditch as a first-year. You know how the seventh-son of a seventh-son was automatically a powerful wizard? No Vanaheim wizarding family had more sons than the Weasleys, and Ron was the last of them.
Ron was starting to believe his own hype.
Harry had his first inkling he'd pushed the redhead too far the day before Halloween. In a rare moment of overlap, the holiday was on a Friday on Midgard, and it was always a Frigga's Day on Vanaheim. This made having an evening feast extra convenient for the castle. Fridays were relatively light for Gryffindor first-years, with only an extra-long chemistry class in the morning, and a single-period transfiguration class after lunch. But on Thursdays, they had a frantic mix of spellcasting, transfiguration, flying, and history. And Ron was being extra in all of them.
"I don't understand why we're doing levitation," the young Weasley opined, loudly, in the middle of spellcasting. "We were just starting to figure out energy projection! I want to learn to really blast someone."
"Ronald Weasley," Hermione rolled her eyes, explaining, "if you'd actually read the textbook, you'd know there's only so much energy we can project at our age. Magister Flitwick only taught us that much so we'd get used to channeling energy through our wands. Levitation is about mastering versatility."
"Ver-sa-til-i-ty," Ron mocked, stressing all the syllables of Hermione's five-dollar word. "Like levitating a feather is ever going to matter in a fight."
"Maybe a rock? Fling it at someone," Harry suggested, seeing that Hermione was doing the pinchy thing with her mouth that was a sign that she was about to go on a rant that didn't make her any friends. "I'm curious about the difference in levitation and the thing the book called 'uplift.'"
"Ah! Yes, excellent question, Mr. Potter," the diminutive professor answered, passing by their group. "The second option is not commonly used on Vanaheim, but is potentially more useful to you should you return to Midgard. Attend, class, this might be important for all of you." Once he had their attention, he continued to explain, "Most true workings at a distance involve Vanaheim's energy. You're exhorting the world to lift your object. While we're currently experimenting with a feather on your desk, this spell can target anything you can see. Sometimes, even things at a greater distance."
"But on Midgard, that requires a bargain, correct, Magister?" Hermione asked.
"Exactly, Ms. Granger," Flitwick nodded. "Since most worlds do not have their own magical field, free for the commanding, as we have here, outside Vanaheim this spell only works if backed by a Principality. The most common such entity for levitation is the dread Dormammu, who it is dangerous to treat with, though other sources such as chaos magic may also fuel it."
Dean blanched and said, "I don't think I want to call on Dormammu or chaos just to lift a feather, sir."
"Quite right," the professor nodded. "Which is why the wizards of Midgard tend to use the secondary concept, which Mr. Potter has pointed out. Your book calls it 'uplift.' This is simply making a connection between your energy and the object, and using a secondary function of the personal energy whip to bodily drag the object into the air. It's a much more limited range, and provides an obvious connection with the caster, reducing your ability to lift things stealthily."
"A tractor beam!" Parvati suggested, and the others from Midgard who'd seen Star Wars nodded.
Strangely, Flitwick seemed to get the reference, and agreed, "Close enough. Why don't we try both versions and compare their strengths and weaknesses? Remember that while you're learning a spell, it's helpful to say the mnemonic. The one for this spell is 'Girding Wings of Lofn-Odr.'"
Seamus Finnegan found out very quickly that connecting his wand to his feather on a rope of orange light was an excellent way to burn it to a crisp, but about half the class of 18 managed to tug the feather around on their magical whips like demented yo-yos. By the end of the class, only six kids were able to use the levitation spell which was the original lesson, which lifted the feather calmly in the faint turquoise glow of Vanaheim's magic. Ron was one of the few that didn't manage either method, and that made him overcompensate for the rest of their classes on Thor's Day and into Frigga's Day.
Rector McGonagall, who had him both days, finally had enough after lunch on the afternoon before the feast, "Put your wand away, Mr. Weasley," she ordered. "No one is even going to begin transfiguring their matchsticks into needles until we finish diagramming the comparative structure of wood and of steel."
"Is this still going on?" Padma whispered to Parvati. The Ravenclaws happened to have both spellcasting and transfiguration with the Gryffindors.
Parvati sighed and nodded, "He and Seamus blew up a cauldron in chemistry before lunch. Cost us twenty points. I'm worried he might start a food fight at the feast or something."
"We'll sit on the other end of the table from him, just in case," Padma suggested.
The Hogwarts Dísablót feast would be a terrible thing to ruin with a food fight (though Harry privately had an ambition to pull a Headless Horseman and peg someone with a jack-o'-lantern). In addition to the loss of all the spooky decoration, the primary reason for the feast was to use up the foodstuffs that wouldn't last the winter before switching to the more durable crops from the fall harvest. Padma and Parvati, in particular, didn't want their last access to fresh fruits and vegetables interrupted.
Harry, Hermione, Dean, and Neville looked somewhat mournfully at the other end of the table, where the Patil twins had sat far away (and consolidated most of the platters of greens) along with Lavender and some of Padma's Ravenclaw friends. Ron and Seamus weren't in danger of creating a food fight, but they were planning something even more outlandish. Ron gestured with a chicken leg as if it was his wand, "We just get in, blow up a few of the lesser draugr, grab a weapon as proof, and come right back."
Seamus seemed to be taking it seriously. "At the very least, I kin use m'energy whip an' steal one o' their swords, afore they e'en know it's a wizard they're dealin' wi'."
"Right. Versatility," he nodded at Hermione. From his tone of voice, she wasn't sure if he was finally acknowledging her point from the previous day's class or still just being a little shit about it.
Deciding to split the difference, she asked, "Can the living even go to Niflheim?" She was reasonably sure the answer was, "only in special circumstances." But maybe the annual infestation of portals counted, and nobody used them because they'd become dead very quickly if they got stuck.
"Probably," Ron said, not concerned. Realistically, unless one of the portals popped open in their dorm, he wasn't exactly going to have the opportunity to follow through with his wild plan. But he figured he would get credit for planning it. "What do you think, Harry? Coming with?"
"To Niflheim?" Harry asked, finally tuning back into the conversation. He was always in his head on Halloween. His aunt hadn't mentioned it for his first few trick or treats, but it had eventually come out that his parents had died on that night, and it hadn't been the same for him ever since. "Do all the dead go there?"
That gave most of the group a pause, and it was Neville who piped in with, "Only some of them. And you'd never find anyone you're looking for unless you're dead yourself." In a moment of insight, he suggested, "But your parents must have gone to Valhalla. They died in battle."
Suddenly everyone got it and glanced at Harry, who wiped the beginnings of a tear from his eye under his glasses. "Thanks, Nev. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything for me in Niflheim, Ron. Thanks anyway."
They had a few more sombre minutes of eating, before their defense teacher, Mistress Morgan, suddenly entered the hall and moved quickly and gracefully up to the staff table, having a hushed conversation with the headmaster. Dumbledore nodded, whispered to the rest of the teachers, and had most of the great hall's attention when he finally spoke up, "I'm sorry to cut the feast short. Prefects: please escort your charges back to their dormitories." He was going to leave it at that, but decided to add, "It seems raiding season has started a bit early. I'm certain the castle is secure, but out of an abundance of caution, we're moving you students to the safest bastions in case the staff needs to mount a defense."
"Raiding season?" Harry asked.
As everyone was getting up, Ron tried to explain, but was busy shoving the rest of his dinner into his mouth, so Neville said, "Trolls and giants and sometimes just bad people often show up places in the winter, looking for food and treasure. Don't know why they'd bother trying to get into Hogwarts."
Seated furthest from the door, they suddenly learned the answer before they were out of the hall. A tremendous metallic crashing could be heard from below, the sound of impact vibrating the stones beneath their feet. "The portcullis on the boat entrance!" Hermione guessed.
The noise turned a fairly orderly evacuation into mild chaos, which only intensified when the stout door into the lake access began to shudder, as someone on the other side attempted to batter it down. Screams spread throughout the area as most of the students began to rush out of the entry hall and toward their common rooms. Gryffindor, however, had quite a few students dither not out of fear, but because they felt like they should attempt to help fight. "Keep moving!" Percy Weasley insisted from the back of the crush. "To the stairs!"
Still bringing up the rear, Harry and his friends had only just exited the great hall into Hogwarts' enormous foyer when the lake door gave up and shattered. While it was nowhere near as big as the gigantic double doors that led in from the grounds, it was at least large enough to be comfortable for Hagrid. In fact, many of the doors in the castle were far larger than they needed to be for beings on a human scale, so wouldn't really provide a squeezing disadvantage to the raiders currently shoving their way into the school. Someone screamed, "Trolls!"
Harry wasn't sure why he'd assumed trolls would look like the CGI creatures from the Lord of the Rings movies. Instead, they looked a lot like Beast Man from the old He-Man cartoons: only a bit bigger than a tall human, bestial, hairy, and orange.
If someone told him that they were Hagrid's Weasley cousins, he'd have almost believed it.
They wore armor, wielded large and sharp-looking axes, and looked dangerously smart. As if that weren't enough, once several had charged into the room, an even larger being squeezed itself through the door and then stood to be taller than Hagrid, frozen mist evaporating off of its blue skin. "And a Jotun!" another helpful, fleeing student yelled.
While the exploding door didn't manage to hit any children, the arrival neatly broke the fleeing line of students down the middle. Everyone not closer to the stairs than the attackers began to flee around the corner and toward the ground floor classrooms. Well, some of the upper-year Gryffindors began putting up magical shields as the professors shouted spells and joined the melee. But the majority of the remaining Gryffindors and Ravenclaws (who had been sitting furthest from the door) fled.
Harry tried to stay close to his friends, but there were probably fifty students in the initial crush and he wasn't sure if different groups were splitting into different corridors up front. "Secret passage here!" he heard one of the Weasley twins offer, identifiable by his shock of red hair.
"Well, not that secret! Definitely keep moving," the other twin amended, as he waved the line of kids into a concealed tunnel that the first-years hadn't discovered yet.
The corridor clearly wound between classrooms, a narrow channel hidden in the walls that might not be obvious without a precise tape measure if you were trying to map out the used space within the floorplan. It might be plenty of space for Fred and George trying to get to class, but was a tight fit for a gaggle of fleeing children. "Trolls probably can't even fit in here, so we could just stay put," Hermione suggested.
Harry stuck his arms out until they hit the walls, estimated the distance to the ceiling that was barely visible under the light of lit wands, did some quick math, and wasn't convinced. He countered, "Want to bet your life on that?"
After juking left and then right to trace out the boundaries of the surrounding classrooms, the group began struggling up a spiral staircase with some fairly steep risers. Harry had been right about quickly developing calves of steel with all the stairs in the castle, but the angle of ascent was tiring even for trained legs. Plus, the momentary surge of adrenaline from the attack was fading with the longer travel through the relatively safe tunnel, and the students were starting to feel their full bellies and the nearness of bedtime.
Finally, the staircase ended. One of the twins said, "Third floor. Lets out near the girls' toilets."
The other added, "Fastest way is to get back on the main stairs."
"Form an orderly queue," Percy Weasley ordered from the back. Harry was surprised that the officious prefect had managed to stay with them, but he didn't seem to be willing to abandon his charges.
"The main stairs aren't the fastest for us," Cho Chang argued. Harry hadn't even realized that Wong's cousin had been in the crush with them.
Alexis Marie, the other fifth-year Gryffindor prefect, said, "I'll take the Ravenclaws?"
"Be safe," Percy agreed, then led his own charges toward the large central stairwell that rose through the middle of the castle. As they got closer, they could begin to make out the sound of yelling and spellfire below. "They will be fine," the prefect said, almost as if to convince himself. "Trolls are simply very durable and somewhat magic resistant, and they regenerate, so they will take time to fully put down."
In the larger corridor on the third floor, they were finally able to count exactly who they had with them. Fifteen in total, they were made up of all five boys from the Gryffindor first-years, Hermione, all of the older Weasley boys and their friend Lee, and five second or third-years that Harry hadn't really talked to much yet. "This is stupid. We should have just gone with the Ravenclaws," one of the slightly-older boys complained; Harry thought maybe his name was Cormac.
They were almost to the stairs when the complaining boy was unfortunately proved right. An orange-furred head crested above the landing, his eyes so blue they were nearly glowing in the dim light. The troll that had somehow escaped the downstairs melee to go a-viking in the school couldn't miss over a dozen students, and roared a warcry.
"Run!" Percy shouted, clearly intending to hold the enemy off by himself while everyone else got to safety.
In hindsight, they should have run. If they'd all run, Percy could have fallen back. Cormac and his friends definitely did, their shoes loudly flapping against the stone as he followed through with what he'd already said was a better plan.
They should have run. But maybe it was two months of building Ron up into a hero in his own mind. Maybe it was simply family loyalty. Whatever it was, even under the very-real gaze of a heavily armed, seven-foot monster, Ron simply said, "Not leaving you, Perce."
That sold the twins. They had been about fifty-fifty on fleeing, but couldn't leave both their brothers to get killed. Their mother would be inconsolable. Lee Jordan looked panicked, but wasn't going to leave his best friends. Seamus was a tiny Irish madman and grinned his agreement to stay, brandishing his wand.
That left Harry, Hermione, Neville, and Dean. Hermione was still clearly about to do the logical thing, but in trying to visually convince Harry to flee, her eyes flicked to Ron as if to say, "I told you so." Later, Harry wasn't able to lie to himself and say he was always going to have stayed. He had to admit that he hadn't really been strongly attached to Percy, and might have let the boy make a violent, heroic sacrifice. Gryffindors were particularly in love with stories of going to Valhalla after a heroic last stand. But there was no way Harry was going to live with the guilt of also getting Ron killed. It really might have been Harry's fault.
Harry just gave Hermione a shrug, drew his wand, and yelled, "Gryffindor!"
Then all hell broke loose.
No matter what wizards liked to tell themselves about the power of magic, the situation was four teenagers that didn't need to shave yet plus six actual children with a couple months of martial arts training against a fully-trained, inhumanly strong, and supernaturally resilient adult warrior. Magic made it more even, but even a human warrior without powers might have still dealt serious injuries before being stopped.
Percy raised a strong shield, orange geometric lines spinning out perpendicular to the tip of his wand and bending back to trace a large circular plane in the air. The troll's mighty axe swing bounced off, but it was enough to shatter the magical construct into fading streaks of orange light and send Percy staggering backwards. Nine wands began to blast motes of the same light, but, to Hermione's earlier point about magical strength, the bolts from the lower-years seemed no worse than bee stings. Only Fred, George, and Lee's magical blasts seemed to do much of anything, and the troll quickly started to use his axe and armor to deflect those attacks.
With a fearsome growl, the raiding beast began to stalk toward the older boys to end their barrage, and the three, used to escaping from the teachers after committing pranks, split up in the wide corridor to make him pick only one as a target. He chose one of the twins, rushing forward and throwing the boy into the wall with his off-hand, knocking him senseless to the ground. Their attacker only spared the use of the axe because he was holding it out as an improvised shield against the other twin and Lee's scream of fury as they redoubled their efforts.
Percy finally recovered and shouted out, "Stunning Stupefaction of Skirnir!" He flung a bolt of the turquoise light of Vanaheim at the troll, which seemed to shudder under the impact but not fall. From his vantage shooting magical sparks, Harry could have sworn that the spell almost took effect, as the blue of the troll's eyes dimmed as it shook off the magic. With a roar of anger, the warrior turned and identified the prefect, again, as his primary threat, slowly moving forward through a fusillade of green-blue spells as the last standing pranksters tried everything in their arsenal to slow the creature.
The Weasley prefect wasn't idle, but the troll was now batting his spells out of the air in particular, willingly suffering the occasional prank spell to deflect more serious attacks from Percy. Running out of space as his back hit the wall, Percy looked in fear at the immense bestial man towering over him, smoking with half-landed spells and too close to escape or even cast against. The axe rose to end the troublesome opponent.
It was Ron who had the thought and gasped out, "Versatility!"
Harry picked up his roommate's idea, and managed to throw out an orange energy whip that wrapped the haft of the raised axe. There would be no way that he, alone, could hold it back, but fortunately the others got the idea and threw out tractor beams of their own. Hermione and Dean, who'd had more luck with the main levitation spell, yelled out, "Girding Wings of Lofn-Odr!" Even Ron finally managed an energy whip, his brother's imminent demise a suitable incentive.
About to bring down the executioner's blade, the troll glanced up in confusion as it barely budged, spotting six orange ropes and a knot of turquoise energy dragging it upwards and back toward the nuisances behind. Percy took the moment to duck and chant, "Total Petrification of Gleipnir!" The troll wasn't fully affected, struggling against the turquoise field of the body-bind spell, forcing Percy to continue maintaining his focus.
For several long moments the crowd stood in a fragile stalemate, each using all their power to bind the troll, unable to try something else for fear he'd escape. And then a viciously-thrown dagger punched into the joint of the troll's armor. The kids turned and saw the resident hag, Mistress Morgan, sprinting down the hallway, another knife already thrown and puncturing the troll's upraised arm.
Behind her, a pale face floated above flowing black robes, darker than the shadows behind them, as Professor Snape said something sibilant in Latin and manifested what initially seemed to be another orange shield with a faint flicker of purple at its edges, but with only two opposite quarters of the circle defined. He somehow swung this magical double-edged battleaxe through the air on a thin connection of orange personal magic, instantly decapitating the injured and restrained troll.
Only a few seconds after the other two professors, but coming from the opposite direction, a tabby cat bounded up the stairs and transformed into Rector McGonagall. "What is going on!?" she exclaimed, clearly not having expected the battle to have spilled upstairs. And then, in a question that made little sense to the students, she asked the other professors, "Did they reach it?"
Snape shook his head in negation as the conscious twin rushed to his brother's side. Trying to feel for a pulse, he sobbed out, "Don't be dead, George!"
To everyone's relief, the redhead on the floor cracked an eye at his brother's prodding, and managed to groan, "I thought… You were George."
Chapter Text
To Hermione's pleasant surprise, being integral to an actual victory over a vicious troll did not make Ron Weasley more insufferable. Quite the opposite in fact. Maybe it was because it was a team effort. Maybe it was because his brothers had been in mortal danger. Maybe it was because he realized how close he had come to dying. But he leveled out significantly afterwards.
Less helpful to the study group's desire to keep a low profile, Ron was also convinced that the first-year Gryffindors were now some blooded troupe of heroes. The rest of Hermione's dorm room, who had missed the fight entirely, were implicitly accepted. It wasn't their fault they'd missed the fight, after all. But there was still a bit of a vibe of her being the token shieldmaiden among the group of guys that Hermione wasn't totally happy about.
If Ron was assembling a pre-teen band of adventurers, unassailable in their earned reputation among the other first-years, it was nothing compared to Percy. The prefect who had previously been considered insufferably officious and a bit overly bookish had nearly been sent to Valhalla throwing his body and magic against a superior foe to protect the charges in his care. In the culture that had inspired the Norse, that kind of behavior sold.
Lee Jordan and the Weasley twins also got a boost to their reputations, but, unlike everyone else, they had already been cool.
The rumor going around school within a few days was that someone had sabotaged the lake-entrance portcullis, making it easy to smash through. Coupled with him having been coming from the forbidden third-floor corridor with the portal to the giant wolf, Severus Snape was most of the students' prime suspect. After all, Snape just seemed evil, and his chemistry knowledge could easily be used to brew an acid to eat away at the bars.
Hermione eventually got tired of insisting that the gate had looked rusty already, frost giants could freeze metal to make it brittle, trolls would resist the school's wards, and Professor Snape had obviously been securing the portal to the wolf along with Mistress Morgan. Nobody really wanted to listen to her when it was more fun to imagine their meanest teacher getting arrested and replaced.
For his part, Harry was doing a lot of thinking about his newfound discovery of how real combat was not like his video games. The fear had been real, a palpable force crushing his chest in a vice. He could have died with one misstep or if the teachers had shown up only thirty seconds later. Logically, he should avoid doing anything like that ever again.
But if the fear had been much more real than in any game, so had the triumph. Not even elite sporting teams or multiplayer clans could truly know the shared camaraderie of a victory over a legitimately deadly opponent. Rhodey had tried to explain it to him before, when they'd been talking about his fellow airmen, but Harry hadn't had the context to really get it. Before, he'd liked his housemates, but now they were bonded. Even Hermione felt it, for all she didn't like being the token girl, and helped him explain it to the rest of the study group who had missed out.
He figured he'd probably do it again, if he had to.
This resolve wasn't put to the test in the back half of his first school term. After the memorable Halloween, the next-most exciting events were the quidditch matches, particularly Gryffindor vs. Slytherin. Cheering hard for his housemates, Harry kind of wondered if he should have tried harder to get around the requirement to be second-year to try out: Katie Bell was clearly not the greatest seeker, their chaser line was fairly weak, and the rival team nearly shut them out. But Harry had also heard how many practices Oliver Wood, the captain, inflicted on the members of the team and wasn't sure he had the time, even if he'd be able to convince them to give him a try.
It wasn't like good reflexes was all he had going for him.
Class-wise, they'd learned a few more introductory spells and were actually getting to experiment with simple materials changes in transfiguration. The study group was excelling at them all, and even Ron and Seamus acknowledged that the tools they were developing might be worthwhile. After all, levitation had brought down a troll.
As winter's chill set in, Harry started to think about the upcoming winter break. Stay in the castle for two weeks, see if he could spend it with the Masters of the Mystic Arts, or endure the long trip back to LA to veg out at home for a few days around Christmas while his aunt would probably be working? The choice got made for him when Aunt Pepper explained that she would be flying out to London and spending basically the whole holiday with him.
Tony had actually suggested it, and had scheduled his own things to do in London. Harry was surprised. Tony had always been conscious of family time for Stark Industries employees around Christmas itself—he'd lost his parents shortly before the holidays when he'd been younger, so had never wanted to be the one to separate anyone from their own families. But going so far out of his way, and guaranteeing Pepper the whole break, was over and above what Harry had expected. There was probably some kind of technology conference or maybe a fashion show with supermodels that was the real draw for Tony, but Harry would take it.
Dean had a simpler worry: while he could easily use mystical and mysterious means to get back home, his mother couldn't afford an extra round-trip plane ticket for him as cover. If word got around that Dean Thomas was in New York with no obvious means of transit, it could eat away at the secrecy of the Masters. Government agencies had computer algorithms to notice that kind of thing.
Harry mentioned it to Aunt Pepper, and she suggested that Dean stay with them in London for the holidays. She wanted to meet his new friends, particularly Midgardian ones that might be in Harry's life for the foreseeable future. He gave her Dean's mother's contact information to get permission, and his new best friend seemed much more excited to spend the break sightseeing in London than cooped up in the castle with whoever had to stay behind.
This was particularly true since the Weasleys were pretty much the only Gryffindors remaining for the vacation. As much as Dean got along with Ron pretty well after the troll incident, he didn't exactly want to spend two weeks with nobody else for company.
The group bid Ron farewell and rode in carriages from the castle down to the train station. "Are those… three-legged horses?" Harry asked.
"The carriages of Hogwarts are pulled by helhests," Hermione quoted from some book about the school. "Not everyone can see them. You have to have witnessed a death. I guess the troll counted?"
Dean mused, "With as violent as things are around here, I bet most adults can see them."
Still thinking about the semi-spectral horses, they took the train back to the convergence platform. Hermione spent most of the way back working out various things the three of them might do around London, allowing for her parents and Pepper's family time plans that she wasn't yet privy to. At the very least, they had all exchanged phone numbers.
The lonely train platform where they'd boarded four months earlier looked the same, if a bit drearier, when they disembarked from the Hogwarts Express. As Harry, Dean, Hermione, Seamus, Padma, and Parvati started to walk toward the end of the platform they'd entered from in September, it was Oliver Wood that ran over and interrupted them. "Nae portal fo' winter hols," he assured them.
"Then how do we get back?" Harry asked the burly Scottish boy.
He waved toward the bonfire at the other end of the platform. "I'll show ye. Gotta go through th'Leaky Cauldron."
Hermione argued, as they followed, "But you can't use the Goblin Market for transit."
"Ye can," Oliver assured her. "As long as ye mean t'come back." They queued up behind the other students meeting their parents and teleporting through the fire to various places around Vanaheim. Virtually every Midgardborn from school was there and waiting their turn. "Supposed t'be dire consequences if ye stay home for more'n a couple weeks. Ye're anchored 'ere noo, fo' purposes o' th'Market. It's all mystic or something."
A girl with curly blond hair and an English accent who Harry thought was a Ravenclaw prefect nodded, "When I was a second-year, someone got sick enough to not make it back after the holidays. He was in a really bad state when they finally managed to go get him and bring him back to the school. Get back here after New Year's, no matter what."
It was finally their turn, and the kids raced with all the others going to Midgard into the flaring green bonfire. Some of them wouldn't have had the nerve for it, if not for the stampeding teens around them (who obviously thought diving into a green bonfire was perfectly reasonable). After a few moments falling weightlessly through an inferno, they all strode onto another flagstone floor.
Well, Harry mistimed his step and went sprawling. "Happens to someone every time," the blond prefect assured him.
They had come out of the fireplace in a longhall, with a high roof and several huge wooden tables. A bunch of Vanaheim natives waved at the parade of several dozen Midgardborn, who were quickly passing through and entering an optical illusion within the building's wall similar to the first time Harry had traveled to the Market. Not long after, all the students were emptying out into the dank bar and interdimensional nexus that was the Leaky Cauldron.
Tom, the wrinkled old proprietor, was directing traffic. "Alright, you lot, signs are up on the doors you're going to. Remember to be back here on January 2nd, your time, and we'll get you sorted out. Don't forget to hit the Market if you need to visit your bank, otherwise, this way."
Harry vaguely considered that it might be nice to hit up the Market again on the way back, but went with the majority of the crowd to the door marked "London." It seemed that most of the students were pretending that they were attending a private school that was somewhere in the UK. It wasn't long before they were all spilling out of the wall about ten feet from Platform 6 ¾.
"My head hurts. This wasn't efficient," Harry complained.
Hermione, frantically covering for something she hadn't realized either, justified, "Well it would be weird for the convergence to be open whenever it's convenient for holidays. I think we should just be grateful we didn't come out in some magic shop on the other side of the city. Oh, there are my parents! Mum! Dad!"
Harry and Dean didn't see Aunt Pepper immediately, so they stepped aside to meet Dr. and Dr. Granger: both of Hermione's parents were dentists. "See you later!" they assured Seamus and the Patil twins, who were hustling to make various connections.
"Dean and Harry?" Hermione's father guessed, while hugging her. He was tall, and had the same bushy brown hair as his daughter. Dean rolled his eyes, realizing Hermione had probably described him as her black friend for her father to make that conclusion so easily. Each of the boys shook the man's hands as Hermione switched to hugging her mother, a dark-haired woman with Greek features. He explained, "I hear we may be showing the two of you around London this week?"
"If it's not too much trouble, and if my aunt hasn't planned anything," Harry demurred.
Dean got a confused look, "Is your aunt the redhead over there, Harry?"
"She's sensitive about that. Call her 'strawberry blond,'" Harry said as he spotted Pepper. She was crossing the terminal with a woman and two young girls that must be Dean's mother and sisters (Harry at least recognized them from a photo Dean kept in their room). "Is that your family?"
"I didn't think they'd be able to make it!" Dean said, surprised but happy, as his two little sisters slammed into him like rockets, nearly knocking him over. "This is Olivia and Emily! How did you get here?"
"Pepper insisted," his mother said. She was a tall, light-skinned woman with long dark hair in a neat ponytail. Barely in her early thirties, she was clearly only just old enough to have an 11-year-old son.
"My boss insisted," Pepper added for Harry's benefit, stepping up. She shrugged the shrug of a weary assistant that had lost a fight she'd been happy enough to lose. "We were already going to be stopping in New York. Didn't cost extra to add three more people to the plane."
As the Grangers were trying to puzzle that out, it was Olivia who shouted, "We met Tony Stark!" That exclamation almost got the attention of passersby in the busy train terminal at mid-afternoon, and her mother shushed her.
Hermione quickly put together Harry's vague allusions to his aunt's boss, Tony, who was "really smart with technology." She withdrew from her mother's hug and put her fists on her hips, staring down her friend. "Harry James Potter. You didn't tell me you know Tony Stark!"
"I'd sound like Malfoy," Harry argued, lamely. "And I didn't know if you'd meet him. He doesn't usually fly my friends' families to London!"
Pepper explained, "I think he's super curious about how your boarding school is different from the one he went to, so we need to plan what you can say around him." She waited a beat and added, "And he got invited to a party with Mick Jagger, Bono, and Bob Geldof a couple nights ago."
The doctors Granger did a silent conference for a couple of seconds, and Hermione's mother suggested, "Well, we were planning to show Hermione's friends and Ms. Potts around London when we thought it was just the three of you, but if you're going to be busy…?"
"Oh! No!" Pepper assured the slightly-younger woman. "We'd be happy to. If you can make space for Grace, Olivia, and Emily?" She clocked the look on Hermione and her father's face: she'd met a large number of people that would really like to meet Tony. She hoped they wouldn't be disappointed. "I don't know if Mr. Stark will include us in any of his plans, but we can call you if he suggests something?"
"That sounds lovely," Hermione's mother said.
After a brief round of introductions and all the adults making sure they had contact information, the Grangers left for where they'd parked while the Pottses and Thomases headed toward the cab stand. Harry and Dean just had large backpacks with clothes for the holiday, and bags with presents from their friends. They hadn't seen the wisdom in dragging their whole trunks around, so it was easy enough to pile two grown women and four children in a van.
As they rode through traffic in the dense city, Dean's little sisters frantically tried to catch him up on everything that had happened to them in the last four months that he'd missed, while Harry just smiled, happy to be back in civilization, bathed in the warm glow of a smartphone booting up and connecting to the cell networks. Pepper Potts and Grace Thomas, who had clearly already bonded on the plane ride over and during the last couple of days, asked the boys vague questions about their semester, conscious of the cab driver who wasn't ready to hear about magical schools on another planet.
When they pulled up to the fancy hotel across the street from Kensington Gardens and entered the elaborate foyer, Dean gasped, "Mom, can we afford this?"
Pepper smoothly interjected, "Tony rented the whole hotel. For security. Any rooms we didn't use would just be empty." Seeing that the child of a single working mother was still floundering, she instructed, "Harry, do the math for him?"
As they followed their guardians toward their rooms, Harry explained, "Yeah, it freaked me out too when I figured it out. Tony's a billionaire. Human brains can't really understand that easily. Do you think you would feel like you could get a room here and not worry about how much it cost if you were a millionaire?"
Dean, head on a swivel at the elaborate furnishings, nodded, "Yeah. That's pretty rich. I guess I could stay in, like, one room here."
"A billionaire is a thousand times that rich," Harry elaborated. "Him renting a whole hotel like this for the holidays is pretty much like our families spending $100. Maybe less."
"That's crazy," Dean boggled.
Harry sighed, agreeing. "What's even more crazy is that he mostly eats off the dollar menu at Burger King and most of his wardrobe is just band t-shirts."
They didn't actually see Tony for the first several days of the vacation. The Pottses and Thomases were being big tourist goobers across London, with the help of the Grangers. They saw landmarks and museums, they shopped for Christmas presents, they took boat and train tours: the whole thing. Meanwhile, there was evidence that Tony was in the hotel, probably somewhere upstairs, since they kept seeing various models and actresses doing the walk of shame through the lobby in the morning.
Harry was just pleased that his aunt was restraining her normal need to be catty about it with the Thomases around. He wasn't sure if she just didn't approve of that kind of behavior, or was jealous that it wasn't her doing adult stuff with Tony (the kind of thing that Harry wasn't supposed to know about at his age).
On Christmas Eve, everyone had agreed they were exhausted, and were just going to hang around the hotel. Harry and Dean had commandeered the giant TV on one side of the lobby, hooked up a game console, burrowed into a very comfy leather couch, and were busily trying to catch up on the video games they'd missed over four months at Hogwarts.
"I know you already played that one, Salt," Tony's voice said from behind them. He'd seen Gears of War 2 on the big screen and come wandering over.
"The beta. Didn't get to finish it. Besides, it's the only game with co-op," Harry explained, without pausing or looking back. "Also, stop trying to make 'Salt and Pepper' happen, Tony."
Tony shrugged, "Hard to pin down a nickname for kids. You haven't done anything interesting yet."
Dean, who was less surprised to finally see Tony Stark than he'd expected, since he'd been marinating in the guy's largess for days, simply chuckled and said, "The-Boy-Who-Lived."
Harry elbowed his friend to try to get him to shut up, but Tony had heard it. "Boy who lived?"
The boy in question scoffed and explained, "You know how I'm a legacy at my school? All the teachers knew my parents, and a bunch of the other kids' parents went to school with them. So everyone knows that I survived when they died. It sucks."
"Yeah," Tony said, shaken out of his usual teasing mode. "I know how that is. Everyone at my boarding school was obsessed with my dad, too." He switched back into his normal affect and said, "Just means we need to get you a nickname so good it sticks and everyone calls you that instead." He looked over at Dean and asked, "What do you think, Harry's friend? You're… two first names, right?"
"Dean Thomas," Dean introduced himself, and Tony nodded. That was what Pepper had told him. "We could call him Trollslayer."
"That was a team effort. Mostly Percy," Harry negated. Sensing that Tony was going to ask, Harry spilled out the explanation they'd come up with for all the slips they were likely to make about the nature of Hogwarts. "You know how the school doesn't let us have any screens or phones? We play a lot of D&D for fun. We managed to kill a troll at first level, without anybody dying."
"Well of course," Tony nodded. "Kids these days don't know how hard we used to have it, fighting trolls. Calculating THAC0. Up hill. Both ways!" While he had all his charm and celebrity to make sure everyone thought he was cool, Tony was a science geek who was majorly into heavy metal. He had obviously also played a bunch of D&D in high school.
The impending conversation probably would have started to test the boys' lie since Dean didn't actually know that much about roleplaying games, but it was interrupted by a voice that Harry was hoping not to hear, as Obadiah Stane shouted, "Tony! There you are."
Harry paused the game and shrunk down further into the couch, and Dean followed suit a little confused. Their backs were to him, so if the big man didn't get too close, he might just assume Tony had been playing the game and not notice the kids. Tony turned and leaned back onto the couch, asking, "What's up?"
"Where are we on the Jerichos?" Obie asked.
"Did you get us a supplier for the palladium?" Tony asked. His business partner nodded, so he said, "They're putting in the last of the fabricators in my house while I'm over here. Should be able to start production in a couple of weeks. Plenty of time before the demonstrations."
"Your house?" the big man thundered, exasperated. "Tony! We have a whole facility set up in Arizona that could spin up to make as many as we can source the materials for."
"These things are just short of a nuke. We shouldn't need to make many of them. I don't want to be on the hook if any of them wander off, or for some general to think they've got enough they may as well just use a few when they don't have to. I still get hate mail from Sokovia, and that was almost a decade ago." Justifying himself, Tony had stood up and gotten visibly more tense, while still trying to seem relaxed. "For now, we'll keep this one locked down. Small batch. Artisanal. Besides, I have a whole missile silo under the house I've been waiting to keep something in."
With a deep sigh, Obie rolled up his temper in the face of his recalcitrant golden goose, and said, "Okay, Tony. Well, I came all the way to London to find you and it's almost lunchtime. Why don't you explain the production plan to me over fish and chips?"
The two men walked off, Tony not saying goodbye since he'd actually picked up on the fact that Harry was avoiding Obie and didn't seem to want to have attention drawn to him. As soon as they were out of the lobby, Dean asked, "What was up with that?"
"I thought I told you about the time I got kidnapped…"
They didn't see Tony or Obie again before Christmas, and with the Grangers off with their extended family, it was just a Potts and Thomas family celebration, in one of their oversized suites of rooms. Harry was surprised that his family had mostly gotten Dean sketchbooks and colored pencils. "You do art? Why haven't I seen you draw?"
Dean shrugged, "With what time? But these are great, mom, thanks."
"You really only have one day for the weekend?" Olivia asked. "That's not enough!"
"It's why I'm such a workaholic," Pepper joked. "I never got used to the long weekend when I moved here."
After working their way through the stack of gifts from family, Harry and Dean opened their gifts from friends, which was mostly magically-enhanced candy that they knew they'd never get away with not sharing with Dean's little sisters. Finally, Harry came to one last package. It was a light, flat box that felt like clothes. "It isn't signed. I know I brought it with my stuff from school, but I don't remember anyone handing me this one." He showed off the tag that was attached in narrow, looped writing he'd never seen before:
Your father left this in my possession before he died. It's time it was returned to you. Use it well.
A Very Happy Christmas To You
Aunt Pepper had gone red in the face, and was narrowly avoiding cursing because of the children present. She finally managed to get out, "That meddling old… he had no right." Everyone was staring at her in shock, so she took a deep breath and said, "If that's what I think it is, it's one of our family heirlooms that went missing when your parents died. And someone who thinks he knows better than everyone else has been holding onto it for a decade. I guess go ahead and open it."
Nonplussed by his aunt's anger, Harry tore the wrapping and opened the box, releasing a flowing pile of silvery fabric.
Pepper just nodded, her suspicions confirmed. "You can play with it for the rest of the holiday, but that stays with me until you prove you can use it responsibly." Everyone stared at her, confused by her vehemence about a shiny blanket, until she ranted, "Honestly, giving an 11-year-old an invisibility cloak…"
Notes:
If you have ideas for better Tony Stark nicknames for the kids, please include them in the reviews!
Chapter 10: Dungeons and Dragons
Chapter Text
Harry and Dean amused themselves the rest of the holiday using the cloak to pull pranks around the hotel, and admitted that they probably weren't mature enough to have unmonitored access to the Potter family artifact. While he'd miss having it at school, Harry handed it over to Pepper before leaving for the ride back to Hogwarts.
The rest of Harry's Midgardian friends finally got to meet Tony on New Year's Eve, where he'd hosted a small party at the hotel for kids that were going back to school the next day. Tony didn't stay around long—heading out to a much more debaucherous party—but Hermione, Seamus, Padma, and Parvati all got to meet him, along with most of their parents. It wasn't really much of a party, other than the novelty of having it in a five-star hotel, since 11-year-olds fade quickly after midnight.
On the 2nd, they showed up early enough at Charing Cross station to get to spend some time shopping in the Goblin Market, before they were expected to step through to the long hall where they could travel through the flames back to the train platform. Over all, the winter break had been a fun outing for all concerned. They met back up with Neville and Lavender on the train ride back to school, and neither could understand why everyone was buzzing about meeting Harry's aunt's boss.
Hogwarts was freezing in the first two months of the year, really testing Dean's friends in his insistence that they continue getting exercise for their defense classes (where they were on to learning to use knives from the agile hag). Harry almost lost track of time, with the weird disconnect between Earth and Vanaheim's calendars, but managed to send a birthday letter to his aunt probably only a day or two late after some complicated math: February 12 on Earth was the 23rd of a month called "Horning" on Vanaheim. Harry had also sent a small present with Hedwig, since he'd gotten a necklace he'd seen his aunt admiring at the Goblin Market during his school supplies trip.
It proved a timely letter: Pepper immediately sent a return letter back with Hedwig thanking him for the gift, but revealing that Tony had gone missing in an attack the day after her birthday. He'd been giving a weapons demonstration in Afghanistan and was in a military convoy on the way home that was hit by insurgents. They didn't find his body, so she hoped he was still alive and being held prisoner, but they didn't know anything else yet.
Harry was devastated, and he could only imagine what Pepper was going through.
He tried to concentrate on his schoolwork, which was really picking up throughout the spring term as they finally had enough of the basics to do more practical spells and transfigurations. After several more letters from Pepper indicating no progress had been made on the search, though, he got the sense that his aunt was about to fall apart emotionally and sent a letter to the Masters of the Mystic Arts asking if they could do a spell to locate Tony.
The letter that came back a few days later simply said:
Absolute Point in Time. I'm sorry. -TAO
"What's an Absolute Point in Time?" Harry asked his friends. "I think the Ancient One's saying that's why she can't help me find Tony."
"I don't know," Hermione said, clearly bothered that, though it was in clear English words she understood individually, she'd never heard of them in that arrangement. "We could look it up?"
They had already been spending quite a bit of time in Hogwarts' enormous library to study for classes, and throwing in searches for the new phrase simply increased the duration so they were hardly ever anywhere else. It was frustrating, since the simple English words made it harder to find the answer in the obscure indexing scheme that the reference books used. It was possible that Vanaheim simply used a more Norse-derived word, so they were left to try to dig through books on temporal magic that were way too advanced for first-years.
"Here's another picture of that eye," Dean showed them a book, the stylized eye illustration the only thing he could understand in the dense, spidery text in Latin. "I think I remember something like that from the room I went through in Kamar-Taj to get to the London Sanctum from New York."
"I remember it, too," Harry agreed. "Maybe it's some kind of amulet that lets you see the future?"
"It may not be an eye," Hermione disagreed. "Because it's really a simple ellipse with some circles in the middle and we shouldn't assume–" she cut herself off as she actually looked at the text and said, "Oculus Agamotto. No, you're right, I think 'Oculus' means eye. That's neat. I wonder if there are instructions for building your own such device…"
Hermione was really sad she couldn't read Latin. Yet.
"Wonder what Hagrid's up to," Harry said, distracted by the huge man acting incredibly suspiciously, trying to sneak out of the library with an armload of books. He glanced at the shelves where Hagrid had come from and said, "Not surprising he was in the creatures section, I guess."
Dean, needing a break from reading and also curious, stood up and walked over to the aisle, coming back a minute later to explain, "Looks like he cleaned out most of the books on dragons."
"I don't think they show those at Hogwarts," Hermione mused. "Too dangerous. Doesn't Ron's brother do something with them at a preserve? I think those are the only spaces on Vanaheim they're allowed. Only truly native to Muspelheim."
"Could be fun to bother him about it," Harry shrugged. "And maybe he'll have heard of absolute time-points. Tea time is pretty soon, yeah?"
Though he'd skipped the initial invitation from Hagrid, they'd eventually learned that Hagrid regularly invited students over to have tea with him. It was usually older students, but it wasn't like Harry was being singled out. So they'd been a few times over the last few months. They mostly felt like the big man was trying to act as an unofficial guidance counselor for the students, asking them about their classes and giving them an opportunity to bring up any problems they were having.
It wasn't totally clear whether Hagrid had any actual power to fix problems, but it was nice of him to make the gesture.
The trio made their way out onto the Hogwarts grounds. The spring weather in this mountainous and forested part of Vanaheim alternated between reasonably pleasant and impossibly chilly, which Hermione and Dean seemed to take in stride from growing up in England and New York, but which was really stressful for Harry, long used to California's climate. Hagrid kept a shack on the edge of the forest, and they noticed that all the curtains were drawn, though huge plumes of smoke were wafting out of the chimney even in the middle of a reasonably warm day.
"Bets on whether he has an actual dragon in his house?" Harry said.
"No bet," Dean shook his head. "That guy's crazy."
"It's a wooden house," Hermione said. "Surely he wouldn't be that irresponsible?" She was clearly uncertain, and also unwilling to take the bet.
They knocked on the door (more pounded, really, to make any sound on the thick oak), and after a moment it cracked open a couple of inches and Hagrid's enormous bearded face peered out at them. "Err… I weren't plannin' on havin' tea today. Sorry."
"We'd like to see the dragon," Harry shrugged.
Hagrid's face fell. "Who else knows?"
"Probably just us. We aren't going to tell anyone," Harry assured him.
The big man sighed. "Fine. But it's not hatched yet. Come in." Not shockingly, the inside of the hut was stiflingly hot, Hagrid having lit a roaring fire in the hearth with an oblong dark shape resting amongst the coals. "Been tryin' ter bring it up ter temperature," Hagrid explained. "But I may need ter get a bellows or somethin'. They usually hatch in the fires o' Muspelheim itself! I don' know how they breed 'em in the preserves."
"Where'd you get a dragon egg?" Harry asked, before Hermione could start in on him about the danger. Dean was distracted by being furiously licked by Hagrid's very-friendly boarhound, Fang.
"Chap I met in the Goblin Market o'er the Yule break," Hagrid nodded, starting to fix a pot of tea from a kettle hung over the roaring fire. "Near as big as me he were, and some kinda lizard man. All types in the Market! Won it in a game o' cards. Even then, I had ter assure 'im I knew how ter take care 'o big beasts."
Hermione couldn't keep herself from asking, "But what are you going to with it when it's hatched?"
Hagrid gestured at the books he'd clearly taken from the library, "Gonna do the readin' an' make sure I can feed it. I figure I can tame it and train it up right. I've always wanted a dragon."
"Is that legal?" Dean asked.
"Hogwarts is kinda its own law," Hagrid shrugged.
"Do you have permission from the headmaster, then?" Hermione asked.
Hagrid bit his lip, "Better ter not bother 'im 'til I'm sure I kin hatch it, right?"
"Ah, the 'beg forgiveness' plan," Harry nodded. That was his normal strategy with Pepper, when she found out about things Happy let him get away with. "Maybe at least set up an area lined with stone or ceramic so it doesn't burn your house down?"
"That's a good idea," Hagrid nodded, eyeing one side of his house to figure out if he had room for such a pen. He started pouring the tea and asked, "So you lot just here ter ask about the dragon?"
Hermione swallowed her lecture about how he was going to burn to death and instead said, "We were also curious about whether you'd ever heard the term 'Absolute Point in Time.'"
"Sounds like prophecy stuff ter me," Hagrid shrugged. "Have yeh asked Sibyll?" On their blank looks he said, "Professor Trelawney. Teaches divination class."
"We couldn't find her," Harry admitted. They'd really only done a cursory check, after hearing from the older Gryffindors that the professor was mad, even by Hogwarts standards. None of them were planning on taking her class when electives opened up in third year.
"She likes ter move her classroom every year ter wherever's 'most auspicious,'" Hagrid nodded. "And don' come ter many meals. I think she's down in the dungeons this year. She'd be yer best bet." They all nodded, taking that in, and Hagrid asked, "That's all yeh wanted ter know? Heard yeh ran inter Garm, and been expected yeh ter ask 'bout 'im."
"Who's Garm?" Harry and Dean asked.
Hermione vaguely recognized the name, "The giant wolf?"
"Such a sweet boy he is," Hagrid nodded. "Was glad ter get permission from the Asgardians ter use him as a guard dog."
"We just figured the convergence happened to go into his lair," Harry shrugged.
"Oh, no, got 'im special ter keep the wrong sort from goin' deeper into the series."
"Probably for the best," Hermione said, still a little scared from her encounter with the giant wolf. "I take it there's a whole set of convergences through the portal past him?"
Hagrid nodded sadly, "Whole series opened up when we hid the thing. It's like it don't want ter be secure, after the break-in."
Harry finally made the mental connection and said, "Oh! Was the break-in at Gringotts to try to get whatever you took out?" Hagrid just tapped his nose in agreement. "And that's what the trolls were after on Halloween. Huh. Well, nothing to do with us, I guess. We should go track down Trelawney. Thanks for the tea, Hagrid!"
The big man nodded, clearly a little upset that the Boy-Who-Lived wasn't at all curious about the puzzle Dumbledore had carefully set out for him. Hagrid would have to go back to the headmaster for guidance on how to make the kids interested, though he wasn't sure himself why it was so important for Harry to involve himself in the business with the Stone.
Rather than go straight to stumbling around the dungeons looking for Trelawney—it was Slytherin territory, and they pretty much only knew how to get to Snape's classroom down there—the kids headed back to the Gryffindor common room. They asked around, hoping to find an upper-year that was taking the class. "We want to go with you!" Parvati insisted, grabbing Lavender Brown. "We're both planning on taking the class in third year. I heard she's brilliant!"
"She's… intense," Rose Wax, a fifth-year who was taking divination told them. The older girl was of Asiatic stock, but dyed her hair the color of her namesake. At least, everyone assumed it was dye, but with magic anything—at least anything grooming-related—was possible. "Anyone want to bet on which of the firsties Trelawney says is going to die when they go talk to her?"
The Weasley twins quickly descended on the word "bet," and were soon offering odds that had Harry as the favorite, with Hermione as a close second. With money on the line, there were half a dozen older Gryffindor students happy to guide them down to the dungeons after dinner that evening. The chemistry classroom was pretty close to the main stairs, so all five first-years were a bit baffled at how extensive the school's underground was. "Were these ever actually used as dungeons?" Hermione asked.
"Probably," Rose said. "Alright, in here." The door was basically indistinguishable from any other room in the dungeon, except that it had quite a few mystic-looking trinkets nailed to the wood.
The professor was hard to notice, initially, as packed as the office was with additional mystical trinkets, particularly the implements of divination—the collection of crystal balls alone would take several minutes to fully take in. It didn't help that the place was dimly lit by dozens of candles, rather than the bright and eternally-burning magical torches that lit most of the rest of the school. With her large, round glasses and complex robes, they initially took her for just another piece of the scenery.
"I knew you'd come," Professor Trelawney intoned, finally drawing their attention to her. In motion, she separated from the background, pale hands festooned with glittering rings, white face barely visible beneath the giant glasses and framed within her cloud of hair. She had Hermione and Harry both beat for untameable hair. Her overall look seemed to be the kind of tribal goth aesthetic that would be either hot or terrifying (maybe both) on someone that could pull it off, but which didn't fit the unassuming woman with clearly quite terrible vision. "But you must tell me what you want, to ensure the formalities are met."
Parvati and Lavender sighed in appreciation of the theater, and Harry pushed through. "Ma'am, we were hoping you could tell us the meaning of the phrase 'Absolute Point in Time.'"
One thing the professor had going for her: with those thick glasses that magnified her eyes quite a bit, you could really tell when you had her full attention. "Who spoke such a thing?"
"The… uh… the Ancient One. On Earth," Harry explained, rubbing the back of his head since he didn't really want to name-drop like he could just write letters to the Sorcerer Supreme. "I asked the Masters to help find someone, and she apologized and just said that."
"Oh, my!" Trelawney exclaimed. "You are in touch with one of the foremost seers of the Nine Realms! I am almost certain that I am descended from her, you know, with as strongly as the Gift has run in my own family? They say she cannot merely see the future, but travel backwards and forwards in time if the need is dire!" She finished intoning and simply asked, "And who are you, that has spoken with the Ancient One?"
"Harry Potts… er… Potter," he explained. "We're first-years, so we haven't had a chance to take your class yet."
"Harry Potter! The Boy-Who-Lived!" she announced, furiously grabbing a handful of white dice from a bowl on her desk and letting them clatter in front of her, several rebounding off of her teacup. She looked down, rings clacking as she quickly sorted the results and announced, "The fingerbones of a draugr are these! They announce that the Boy-Who-Lived may yet die! Beware those with two faces. The knife in the dark may not be meant for you, but could stab you in the back all the same!"
Outside, they could overhear the clink of coins and laughter, as the twins settled up the bets.
"But you've asked about Absolute Points in Time," she remembered, sweeping the dice back into the bowl. "A term of advanced divination indeed. I suspect you would not find it written of in any book here, for only the strongest of prophets such as the Sorcerer Supreme regularly deal with such impediments to the third eye. The term simply means that things must happen as they are foreseen."
Hermione asked, "But what use is divination if you can't use it to avert something terrible?"
"A pertinent question, if asked impertinently," Trelawney agreed. "There is a subtle difference between common divination and true prophecy. Divination reveals shades and shadows of the future: you know just enough to try to chart a better course. True prophecy shows what will be, and is often absolute. Many feel that they are better off with their Sight slightly occluded, so they are not certain that they are crashing into unchanging fate!"
"Don't we have free will?" Hermione insisted.
"Let me put it another way," the professor tried, placing various trinkets across her desk as visual aids as she described a timeline. "Imagine you could travel back in time. Something terrible happens, and you move back in time to avert it. But should you avert it, the very impetus for your trip is undone."
"Paradox," Hermione realized.
"Just so. Now imagine instead of traveling to the past, you sent a message to your past self with what you needed to do. How is this any different than a true prophecy, from the point of view of your past self? If the thing did not come to pass, then the message would never have been sent. There is a reason that prophecy is often worded in a way that it is not entirely clear what was meant until the event has occurred: if it came through completely clearly, it would be averted and thus never said in the first place."
"So an Absolute Point in Time is just a clear prophecy?" Harry tried to determine.
"It is even stronger than a normal prophecy," the professor corrected. "Seers as powerful as the Ancient One can often bypass the whims of paradox, sighting many possible futures and choosing the one they want, even moving backwards to change the particulars of an event while preserving enough of it to maintain causality. But an Absolute Point is one so important that it resists all change, for so much hinges upon it playing out as written. Reality itself would correct manipulation of the event. In short, whoever you have asked her to find, it is somehow of extreme importance that they remain missing."
"Huh," Harry nodded. "Well, thanks, professor."
"Certainly," she nodded. "I do so appreciate the chance to educate students on the finer points of my art, before they have made the choice of third-year classes. If any of you feel your third eyes opening, do not forget to elect divination!"
"She's so cool!" Parvati gushed as they were walking away from the classroom. Their escort of older Gryffindors had left once the bets were paid off, so it was just the five of them trying to remember the way back to the main stairs.
"I'm taking that class!" Lavender agreed.
"She was very knowledgeable," Hermione said. "Though I could have done without the theatrics."
"Why would Tony going missing be so important?" Harry wondered aloud.
Dean guessed, "Maybe the US needs to decide to go after him on their own, and that will change the War on Terror?"
"Maybe he'll decide to stop making weapons, after seeing war firsthand?" Parvati ventured, perhaps her own third eye partially opened by her encounter with the divination professor.
"Either way, if he was definitely dead or going to die, she'd probably tell you, right?" Hermione figured.
"I guess so," Harry agreed. "Hopefully we'll find out soon why it's such a big deal."
None of them could begin to imagine that, even now, Tony Stark was trapped in a cave, building a power source and suit of armor that would begin an age of heroism on Earth, just in time to prepare it to fend off threats from other worlds that most of humanity couldn't even conceive existed.
"Is someone playing the violin?" Lavender asked, a few moments before they all heard the music wafting through the dungeons.
"Sounds like a lullaby," Hermione considered. "Doesn't sound like they're very good, yet, though."
"Hogwarts doesn't have music classes," Harry added. "Maybe someone else is trying to learn a skill on their own like us and math?"
"Let's invite them to the study group!" Parvati agreed.
But when they pushed open the door to the classroom that seemed to be the source of the playing, it immediately cut off and all they saw was an empty room, a second door closing on the other side of the room, and the lightest sense of stealthy escape, not even the sound of footfalls in the hallway to guess where the secretive musician had run off to.
Dean shrugged, "Guess they're still sensitive about their playing."
Chapter 11: The Depths of the Forest
Chapter Text
"Isn't he beautiful?" Hagrid trilled at the tiny black lizard already glowing with a lambent internal flame. It had taken a few weeks for the dragon to hatch, and Hagrid had invited Harry, Dean, and Hermione to see the event. "Bless him! Look! He knows his mummy."
It was not particularly beautiful. If anything, it looked vicious and deadly, even newly born. Evidently Muspelheim didn't have the same evolutionary pressure as Earth to make babies cute so their parents would care for them.
Hermione pursed her lips and asked, "Hagrid… how fast do dragons grow, exactly?"
"Hard ter say," the big man shrugged. "I aim ter find out!"
"Time to beg Dumbledore for forgiveness?" Harry asked. "We don't want anyone to tell on you. Dean already spotted Malfoy trying to follow us down here and we had to take the long way around until he gave up. That kid is definitely going to tell on you if he gets the chance."
Hagrid was not very subtle, and most of the school had drawn the conclusion that something was up with him suddenly being absent from most meals and living in a blacked-out cottage that was constantly belching smoke. Most of the students assumed he was just fighting off a cold, but Malfoy, still set on making Harry his nemesis, had noted their visits.
"When he gets back," Hagrid agreed. "It's political season. The headmaster's also chief warlock o' the wizards' council and represents the wizards at the Vanir althing. I think he won't be back 'til around exams, this year."
"Rector McGonagall then?" Hermione tried.
"Er, maybe not," he hedged. "Minnie always gets real frazzled when she's acting headmistress. Becomes a right stickler, she does. You three should keep yer heads down 'round her. Liable ter be over-strict and then feel bad about it later."
"Just… be careful, I guess," Harry suggested, watching the tiny monster already belching flames that singed the thick wooden table.
As they walked back across the grounds, Hermione insisted, "Wooden. House."
Dean suggested, "Ron has that brother that works with dragons. Start a contingency plan?"
Harry sighed, "Once Ron knows, Seamus will know, then Lavender and Parvati will know, and then everyone will know."
"Fred and George?" Hermione suggested.
Both boys nodded. The twins were much better at keeping secrets.
They managed to catch the two alone later and explained the situation. "Oh, yeah, McGonagall will lose it if she finds out," the one on the left agreed.
"But thanks for the warning that Dumbledore's gone," the one on the right added.
"Only completely deniable pranks until he's back."
"Hagrid's right that she gets really stressed."
"But, yeah, we can get in touch with Charlie."
"We can't help convincing the big man to send the dragon away, though," they finished.
Harry agreed, "We're working on it. Thanks guys."
Little Norbert grew as quickly as Hermione had feared. Like many creatures born from eggs, dragons seemed to have an imperative to grow as quickly as possible into a size where they were no longer in danger from predators, and the predators on Muspelheim were probably colossal. Norbert was very soon going to exceed the brick playpen that Hagrid had created to take up one side of his house.
And Draco was becoming increasingly aware of all the trips they were making down to the hut.
"Just say the word and we can get Charlie Weasley out here to pack him up," Harry explained
Hagrid fended off the baby dragon who was already probably fifty pounds with a chuckle like it didn't have razor-sharp teeth a couple of inches long and its own hellish internal light glowing from between its coal-black scales. He looked wistfully at the tiny terror and sighed, "That might be fer the best, after all. He's growin' faster'n I expected. I'd need ter make an outside pen soon."
"We'll tell the twins to send the letter," Hermione agreed, before he could take it back.
It took a couple of days to get a response, setting up a time to meet them after dark in a clearing in the forest that Charlie knew about from his days at the school. "Glad they didn't want to try it on a tower. We'd never get Norbert through the school," Harry figured. When they'd checked in that afternoon, the dragon was bigger than Fang, who was the biggest dog any of the children had ever seen.
"Kind of wish you'd hung onto the invisibility cloak, though," Dean said, as they slipped out of the school after dinner. At least the twins had been willing to show them a secret passage out of the castle, but they weren't willing to risk the wrath of McGonagall for sneaking out themselves, which made the first-years a little anxious.
"We're going to lose so many points," Hermione grimaced. Though both Harry and Dean had missed the adventure where she'd run into Garm, they were pleased that the bookish girl was willing to back them up instead of haranguing them about getting expelled. She'd really mellowed out a lot after they'd all nearly been killed by a troll.
What the boys didn't know was that it also had a lot to do with Pepper sharing some of the secrets for the way she managed Tony. If anyone had mastered the skill of reining in the excesses of a reckless genius, it was Pepper Potts. And Harry and Dean were kittens by comparison to the cat that Pepper had to herd every day.
The three had been preoccupied enough with getting out without their housemates or head of house noticing, that they hadn't put in their usual work making sure Malfoy wasn't able to follow them. The platinum-headed pureblood had covered his hair with a dark hood, and was doing a fair job of ghosting along behind them, certain that he was finally going to get Harry in so much trouble, and really make sure the boy knew who his nemesis was.
At Hagrid's hut, the big man had quenched his exterior lighting torches and was lurking on the far side of the building with Norbert and Fang, starting suspiciously when the three arrived. "Oh! It's just yeh lot. Let's get goin'. Remember ter stay close ter me an' don' wander off. More'n just unicorns in the forest."
Norbert was collared with a chain as a makeshift leash, and seemed somewhat sluggish in the chill evening but excited about finally getting to leave the house. His black scales would make him almost invisible in the dark, save for the reddish glow between them as he moved and the frequent gouts of flame he breathed in his excitement, often trying to lift off on the trails of fire from his shoulders that were his "wings," but struggling with the chain.
"He's a handful, ain't he?" Hagrid said, sadly, as they'd walked a few minutes down a faint path, lit by the dragon's flame and the children's dimly glowing wands. Hagrid had his own lantern stowed on his belt, needing both hands to manage the excited dragon. Fang hung back at the end of the line, ears perked up in the realization that he might not be sharing his home with the terrifying housemate for much longer. "Shame I can't keep him. Think Charlie will let me come visit?"
"I'm sure he will," Harry assured the half-giant. "Didn't Ron's family just go visit him for Yule? Sounds like he's allowed to have guests."
"Surprised yeh lot didn't stay," Hagrid noted. "Dumbledore thought yeh might, easier'n flying all the way back ter yer homes."
"We stayed in London," Harry shrugged. "Hermione showed us around."
"Oh. Through the Market, then?" the big man agreed. "Guess it's safe enou' now. Been months since the robbery on yer birthday." The children just nodded, and didn't seem to bite on the clue, so he finally pointed out, "Good thing I got there before."
"Wait, did you rob Gringotts?" Harry asked, having already forgotten the conversation they'd had weeks earlier, since it had nothing to do with him. "Oh! No, you mean you took something out that the robber was hoping to steal?"
Hagrid just tapped the side of his nose, perhaps more forcefully than he had the last time, hoping they'd take a bite on the information and go investigating. "Can't say anymore 'bout that. Here we are!"
They'd climbed up into a clearing that seemed to be the top of a low but particularly rocky hill, explaining why the soil wasn't deep enough for trees to take root. Norbert saw sky, and redoubled his effort to fly away, forcing even the massive Hagrid to struggle to hang on.
"Maybe should've brought a cage," Hagrid mused, between exertions. "I guess Charlie's lot'll have ter stun the poor tyke. I prolly need yeh three ter flag down the flyers with yer wands and help get him loaded. I appreciate yer sneakin' out ter help me."
"It's no problem, Hagrid," Hermione insisted. "We're just happy he's going to a place that's big enough for him."
"Is there someone in the woods?" Dean asked, eyes adjusted to the dark and making out a pale face hiding behind a tree in the direction they'd come from.
"Eep!" Draco said, his spying detected. He thought briefly about confronting them all, but even in his self-importance realized that it could go very badly for him no matter who his father was. Best to flee with his knowledge and get Snape to catch them all in the act of being out of bounds and having an illegal animal. He turned to take off running.
"It's Draco!" Harry realized, as the boy's hood fell off as he turned to run. "I'll get him!" For as smart as he usually was, Harry was still 11. And a Gryffindor. He'd started running after his would-be rival before his brain realized that it was a bad idea to go rushing off into a dark, dangerous forest. Somewhere in his head, he realized that Draco was in danger for the same reason, and was just trying to stop him.
Harry was gone before Hagrid could grab him, but he yelled, "Yeh two, stay! I can't hang onter Norbert an' chase yeh! Fang, go wi' Harry!"
Norbert had, in fact, become agitated when there was suddenly yelling and running, trying to leap into the air and fly after the fleeing prey, and Dean and Hermione were having to use energy whips to try to help Hagrid restrain what was suddenly an extremely aggressive balloon.
Meanwhile, in the woods, Harry was yelling, "Draco! Stop!" while he barely made out the sounds of the boy crashing ahead, and the occasional glimpse of his lit wand, pale skin, and platinum hair between trees.
Draco tossed back, "You'd like that, wouldn't you Potter! I'm telling Snape! You're going to be expelled! And that oaf will be fired!"
"Are you even running back toward the school?" Harry argued, leaping over a fallen log that he definitely hadn't passed on the way in, his own wand in hand and kept dim so as to not ruin his night vision.
"Of course I am!" Draco insisted. He wasn't. He had almost instantly gotten off course and couldn't run in a straight line in the dense forest.
Harry was actually kind of impressed that it was taking so long to catch up to Draco. For all that the boy was rich, he didn't seem to be indolent, and had good enough reflexes that he hadn't tripped on any obstructions or gotten smacked in the face with a branch. Fang huffed behind them, the enormous dog not really prepared to chase two athletic pre-teens as far as they'd gone.
Finally, Draco's luck ran out and he tumbled down a gully with a cry of surprise. It had appeared so quickly in the uneven terrain of the forest. Harry managed to slow down and ease his own way into the small clearing that seemed to be part animal trail and part flood spillway, only low ground cover on the dirt, but soft enough that Draco hadn't been too injured as he rolled to a stop.
"Stay back, Potter!" the boy threatened, brandishing his wand as he managed to climb back to his feet.
Harry just rolled his eyes and showed he wasn't pointing his wand at Draco, just holding it up and leaving it lit enough to make things out in the long clearing. "We're going to need to follow Fang to get back to the school. Why were you even following us?"
"Dragons are illegal. And you're out of bounds!" Draco was glancing around, realizing that Harry was right, and that he had no idea where they were.
"Your word against all of ours on the dragon, since it won't be here by the time anyone can check. And you're also out of bounds." Harry said, moving further into the open space to try to see if he could figure out where they were, and to show the rich boy that he wasn't actually afraid of him.
"They'll believe me over all of you," Draco insisted.
Whether Harry could talk the boy out of that mistaken belief would never be answered, as just then there was a frantic sound of hoofbeats and Harry had to throw himself out of the way of a massive white blur, a fleeing unicorn that had suddenly charged around a bend in the gully and rushed past. It seemed to be shedding silvery blood from a wound in its flank, which glimmered under Harry's wandlight. "What the!?" he asked, trying to put together what had just happened as he rolled over and tried to get back to his feet.
A terrifying howl of some kind of pursuing predator dopplered toward them, along with the sound of claws tearing up turf at a sprint. Fang yelped in fear and took off. Draco, who'd been missed by the unicorn, ran after the dog…
…leaving Harry alone just as he realized he'd twisted his ankle in the fall.
Harry winced as he tried to put weight on his leg, scrabbling back to try to get to the treeline and letting the light from his wand fade, hoping whatever was coming would continue chasing the unicorn. Not that he felt good about such a majestic beast being hunted, but it could at least run at the moment. For a moment he thought he'd succeeded, as an immense beast rushed past him, following the unicorn's trail. In the moonlight, the shape he could make out seemed vaguely doglike, but also unsettlingly humanoid, with deep black skin rather than fur, visible against the rest of the forest in how it absorbed light, reflecting nothing, a moving silhouette. It was bigger than Fang, and possibly nearly as big as Hagrid. As the monster charged past in a huffing cascade of footfalls, Harry breathed a sigh of relief.
And then it slid to a stop and turned toward him.
As it began snuffling and oriented its face toward Harry, he could make out that it seemed to have only a single eye, vertically oriented, gleaming electric yellow in the darkness that was its skin, perched above a giant slavering maw of glistening metallic teeth. As the profile changed, he could barely make out that its back was lined with a series of small spines or ridges. And, as it fixed its gaze upon Harry, he felt something burn against his skin.
The pain was against the flesh of his leg. With a shocked cry, he fished his Starkphone out of his pocket and flung it to the ground in front of him, where it was suddenly sparking and emitting smoke.
Harry had received one of the first Starkphones when they'd rolled out a couple years earlier. Still in elementary school and trusted with the latest phone and internet browsing device, when most of his classmates didn't even have a clamshell phone, it had become a totem. Even after months at Hogwarts and having had to turn it off, it was still reassuring to feel its weight in his pocket.
And now it was hissing under the curious inspection of the shadowy beast, who began to creep forward. Clearly, its electric gaze was overcoming the normal resistance of Vanaheim to technology in some way. With a pleased growl, a long dark tongue darted from the beast's mouth to slurp up the phone, and Harry nearly sobbed at the sound of glass cracking as it effortlessly crunched up and swallowed his device. He still had games on there that he hadn't finished.
After its snack of the Starkphone, the monster glanced up at Harry, as if considering whether to make him a meal. The light from its one eye seemed more pronounced than before, but it glanced warily at the wand still clenched in his right hand. "You're not eating this," Harry decided, anger that the thing had eaten his phone overwhelming his fear. He began to fire bolts of energy from the wand, as he tried to balance on his unhurt ankle in case he needed to dodge out of the way.
The creature shrieked loudly and backed up as the motes of orange light struck it, for all that they seemed to instantly be absorbed into the velvet darkness.
"Yeah. Get back you phone-eating jerk!" Harry insisted, though he wasn't sure how long it would take before it realized that was the worst he could do. He let out the mightiest yell he could manage and raised an arm above his head, vaguely remembering advice on how to scare off predators.
It didn't seem to work, exactly, but they were locked in their standoff for what seemed like forever but which was realistically about a minute, before Harry heard the sound of hoofbeats coming their way, far more than just the one unicorn. Maybe it had gone and gotten its herd? Harry chanced a glance in the direction of the noise and spotted lights moving through the trees, then the sound of a hunting horn.
"Over here!" Harry yelled, as the creature decided it wanted none of this, turning and bounding back off into the forest. In moments, several figures came into view, and in the sudden brightness of their lanterns against the black, he had a momentary thought that they were centaurs, before realizing that they were just men mounted on horseback, riding so easily they seemed to be one with their mounts. "The shadowy thing went that way!" he announced, with all of a young boy's trust that this wasn't just a bigger problem he'd have to deal with.
Fortunately, his assumption proved correct, as one of the horsemen said, "You all continue. I'll stay with the boy!" Three of the men rode on, their horses threading their way gracefully even into the thicker part of the wood, as the man who'd spoken slowed his horse and turned to face Harry. In the light of the spell-lit lantern mounted around the horse's neck, Harry could make out that the rider had hair almost as blond as Draco's, for all that he otherwise was the very picture of a Mongolian horse archer, bow in one hand ready for the hunt. He chastised, "It is a dangerous place for young wizards here, where a shadow nix roams."
"Is that what that was?" Harry asked, wincing as he tried to put more weight on his twisted ankle, getting a little tired of balancing on his good leg. "It was chasing a unicorn, I think, and then it ate my phone." He took a beat and then explained, "I didn't mean to be out here. Believe it or not, I was trying to save another student from getting lost out here." Draco would definitely have been eaten by the shadow nix.
"Well, let me get you back to your school, then. It isn't safe for you to wander, particularly with a hurt leg. I'm Glenelg, of the guard of Ronan," he introduced himself while reaching a hand down to lift Harry up.
Accepting the lift, Harry found himself pulled up in front of the man to straddle the horse, "Harry Potts. Do you know Hagrid. He'll be out here looking for me."
"Yes, we know the gamekeeper well. Harry Potter, you say?" Glenelg misheard, urging the horse with his knees to start moving. "That explains it. I have a bit of the Sight, you see, and that was what had us searching this part of the forest tonight. I am not surprised to find someone so touched by the Norns at the end of our search."
"So that thing was hunting me?" Harry asked.
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. You say it ate something of yours? A piece of Midgardian technology?"
Harry glanced back and asked, "How'd you… oh, right, famous. Yeah, it's a… communication device. I probably shouldn't have been carrying it. It didn't work here."
"It may have sensed such a thing from some distance but is not, I think, why it was in the forest." Glenelg began to explain, "The shadow nixes are not originally from Vanaheim, we think. More likely, they were dropped here from some alien world where their endless thirst to consume electrical technology would be a greater detriment. They can eat normal meat, but seem to crave matter that houses lightning. They seek it out from miles away."
"So I shouldn't bring any of that to the school, even if it doesn't work?"
"It would be wise not to, but this beast we have been tracking for many months, since it began to prey on the animals of the forest. Something else drew it here. Perhaps a falling star."
"You mean a spaceship," Harry said, quicker on the uptake than the hunter probably expected.
"Indeed. Sometimes, those from alien worlds come to Vanaheim to work mischief. Many crash here in their starcraft, as soon as they enter the boundaries where their technologies fail. But some know this in advance, and design their crafts to land safely even after their science fails. Interlopers entering our world not by the passages we can monitor."
Harry nodded along, summing up, "You think someone landed in the forest from space, and the nix just followed the ship here to eat it. But there haven't been any aliens wandering around, right?"
"The trouble with aliens, young Harry Potter," Glenelg intoned, "is that few in the cosmos look truly that different from our own forms. Many from beyond the stars could pass as locals with a disguise." He sighed and admitted, "But hunting spies from space is not our remit. Ours is but to slay beasts that threaten the lives under our protection. Ah, I think I see Hagrid's great height up ahead."
Sure enough, they trotted up to Hagrid, Dean, and Hermione, free of Norbert and looking upset. "Harry!" Hermione nearly shrieked in excitement as she realized that he was being returned.
"Yeh alrigh', Harry?" Hagrid asked.
"Just a twisted ankle," Harry told them.
"He nearly wasn't, Hagrid," Glenelg insisted. "Be more careful with your charges in this forest. Well, this is where I leave you." He helped Harry down to the ground.
Balancing gingerly, Harry discovered that the pain in his ankle had receded a bit. "Thank you, sir," he nodded.
Turning to leave, the horseman said, "Good luck, Harry Potter. I hope I am wrong, but it is my sense that you are all wrapped up in the skeins of the Norns. You have not heard the last of falling stars." With that, he rode off into the darkness.
"Where's Draco?" Dean asked, moving to help Harry, letting him get an arm over his shoulders. With that assistance, Harry found he could walk without too much difficulty.
"Ran off as soon as the shadow nix showed up. Hopefully he followed Fang back to school."
"Oh, yeh saw a shadow nix?" Hagrid asked as they trudged back along a much more familiar-looking path through the dark forest. "I'd like ter have one o' them."
Draco had made it back safely. As they exited the forest they spotted Fang wagging his tail happy they'd returned from where he was hiding on Hagrid's porch, and Draco's own pale head rushing across the grounds to the castle. If he went immediately to Snape, the chemistry professor didn't do anything about it, and the next time they saw Draco in class the haughty boy was trying hard to pretend that nothing had ever happened.
But rumor was that he'd gotten detention cleaning cauldrons for doing something.
In other good news, in the middle of Pasture-Month (Harry wondered where they got those names), which worked out to nearly the beginning of May on Earth, Harry got a letter from his aunt.
"He's okay!" Harry told his friends across the breakfast table as he read the letter. "Tony. They rescued him. Well, he escaped where he was being held and then they found him in the desert. Oh." He glanced to Parvati, "You were right. He decided to stop making weapons, after almost getting blown up by one of the bombs he made. Sounds like the company doesn't know what they're going to do instead yet, but Aunt Pepper's happy he's safe. Huh. He has an electromagnet on his chest now to keep bomb shrapnel from getting into his heart."
"I'm glad!" Hermione said. "And I'm sure they'll be fine. Stark Industries has so much more cool technology besides just weapons. After all think about your phone…" she trailed off, realizing it was still a sore subject.
Ron butted in, "I still can't believe you went into the forest to fight shadow nixes and didn't take us!" The story had come out eventually.
"Dude, quiet," Dean cautioned the excitable Weasley. "He didn't go to fight it. And we didn't tell you because we didn't want the whole school to know. Learn to keep your mouth shut and you can go on the next one."
"I'll hold you to that, mate," Ron said, blithely ignoring the tense atmosphere.
"Maybe we could just finish out the year without having another brush with death," Hermione insisted. Everyone regarded her for a moment, then looked back to their breakfast plates without agreeing. They knew what Gryffindor was about.
A few days later, Harry headed down after dinner to talk to Professor Trelawney and tell her that the absolute point in time had resolved itself. The divination teacher made a few vague pronouncements, predicted Harry's death again, and generally seemed to be quite happy that he'd kept her in the loop. Bemused and heading back out of the dungeons, he once again heard the sound of violin music emanating from the unused classroom. Without a whole parade of first-years with him this time, he was able to get close to the door without the music stopping, and then carefully push the door open to peer in.
As soon as he spotted his defense teacher in the room, Mistress Morgan had stowed the violin and had a knife in hand, ready to throw at his head. Harry widened his eyes and said, carefully, "Sorry. I just wanted to see who was practicing. You're getting better?"
The green-skinned hag gave him a strange look, a number of emotions flitting across her face. "Harry Potter. Alone in the dungeons. You could die down here and nobody would ever find you."
It was not the strangest thing the fatalistic warrior woman had said to him in classes, Harry just shrugged and said, "There are a lot of places I could die and nobody would find me. This would be at least the fourth time. Second time in the last month. I think Professor Trelawney is betting on it."
She tilted her head, considered for another long moment, and then stowed the dagger.
Taking that as invitation to enter, Harry pushed the door the rest of the way and asked, "What are you playing?"
"Old Asgardian hymn, the Peace of Winter. I'm still learning it," the hag admitted.
"Sounds like a lullaby," Harry said. "My aunt wasn't much of a singer, but she had some on CDs—technological recordings—that she'd play."
Oddly maudlin, Morgan admitted, "My mother would sing to me, before she died."
She looked like the moment was about to end, but Harry pressed, interested in knowing someone else who was orphaned, "So where are you going to go after the school ends. You only teach for one year, right?"
"The headmaster swore me to it, in fact," she frowned. "I'm stuck here until the last day of classes. After that, I might… travel."
"No family?" he asked.
"My father… well, adoptive," she admitted, strangely disarmed by the child seeming to honestly want to know more about her than anyone ever asked. "And a sister. Also adopted."
"I wish I had a brother or sister," Harry nodded. "It's just me and my aunt, after my parents were killed. But I guess you know all about that. Everyone seems to."
"I do," she said, some harsh thought passing before her eyes that she brutally squelched down. "Go on, now. I'll find a different place to practice from now on."
"Okay, well, you're getting better. Keep at it," he encouraged her, leaving. He was kind of sad that she'd be replaced as a teacher the next year, since she seemed the most relatable of all the adults in the castle other than maybe Hagrid, for all that she was too fast with a knife.
Chapter 12: Mazes and Monsters
Chapter Text
Harry didn't think much about the interaction with Mistress Morgan for the rest of the month, as Hermione had them all on nearly-permanent study for their exams.
Finally, the last of their tests were finished, and the Gryffindor first-years were all relaxing on the lawn in the lingering sunlight after dinner, enjoying one of the first nice days where they hadn't been too busy to take in some sunshine. In fact, the upper-years had insisted that the lower-years go away while they all studied for their much harder exams, starting the next week. If you didn't have those to sit, the last month of school was mostly a period of free study.
"Exams go okay, yeh lot?" Hagrid asked, spotting them all as he walked across the grounds with Fang.
"They were pretty easy," Harry nodded.
"They were… harder than I expected," Ron corrected him, and Seamus nodded.
Hermione rolled her eyes, "We offered to let you study with us. Maybe next year you will?"
"Maybe," Ron allowed. Everyone that had attended the study group regularly didn't seem concerned. Even Neville.
"Well, Dumbledore should be back tonight or tomorrow," Hagrid assured them. "I reckon I'll have ter tell 'im 'bout Norbert."
"Forgiveness, not permission," Harry nodded.
"An yeh lot ain't usin' yer free time ter go tryin' ter get past Garm, are yeh?" Hagrid tried, still discomfited about how the kids hadn't shown any interest at all about the mystery he'd been dangling in front of their faces for months.
"He'd bite us in hal'," Seamus suggested. "Can't imagine how anyone could get past a wolf tha' big."
"True enough," Hagrid admitted. "He's a softy if yeh know the trick ter put 'im ter sleep, but not too many can play Peace o' Winter ter his satisfaction." He gave it a beat and said, "Oh, I shouldn't'a said that."
"I guess all the staff knows it, though," Harry nodded. "In case he got loose."
"No. Jus' me an' Filius, really," Hagrid shrugged. "Tryin' ter keep it secret, yeh know."
"Then why has Morgan been practicing it?" Harry wondered, idly.
"Huh. That's weird. She shouldn't'a known 'bout it," Hagrid said, watching carefully.
Finally, Hermione's face started working like she was putting things together, eventually asking, "When you got Norbert's egg from the man in the Market… did you tell him about the song?"
"Might've come up," Hagrid admitted.
"But if she's working with the lizard guy and after whatever it is," Dean contested, "she's had months to steal it."
Harry shook his head, "Besides that she had to learn to play, she told me that Dumbledore swore her to a magic oath to stay here for the full year."
"An' ter protect the students," Hagrid added. "He weren't just gonna trust a hag that'd hurt poor Professor Quirrell without an assurance."
"Except that's over today, since she's done teaching classes," Harry suggested.
"She could be going after the treasure right now!" Ron realized, hopping up. "She wasn't at dinner!"
Parvati cautioned, "She'd have to come back out with it, and the headmaster will be back soon. Hagrid just said."
Harry said, "But what if she didn't have to?" He put together what Glenelg had told him about falling stars and suggested, "What if she came from space? Once she's through the convergence to another world, she might have some kind of communicator that could just call a spaceship to come pick her up. She could have probably gone straight there in a spaceship if she'd just known where the convergences ended."
"Little green women from space? Seriously?" Dean checked.
"I'm sure it's fine," Hagrid assured them. "But I'll go warn Minnie. Maybe yeh lot jus' check an' make sure the prefects're patrollin' the third floor like they're supposed ter be." With that, he strode off.
"The prefects that are all killing themselves studying for next week?" Lavender wondered.
"I guess we could at least check it out. And warn someone if there's a problem," Hermione allowed, not liking how this was going.
If anyone would have been worried by the entire contingent of Gryffindor first-years (and one's Ravenclaw sister) heading inside and up to the third floor, it probably would have been Percy Weasley, even now buried behind a stack of books in the library, along with most of the other upper-year students. So many of them had traded their post-dinner patrol slots around to get more study time that it wasn't even clear who was supposed to be on the third floor.
The staff would later untangle that Mistress Morgan had offered to watch the floor for the prefects that had wound up with the duty, and they hadn't thought themselves anything other than fortunate by agreeing.
"There's the door," Hermione gestured to the end of the forbidden corridor.
"It's open," Harry spotted, his improved glasses prescription paying off. "And whatever's inside looks like it's laying down."
"I don't hear any violin music," Dean cautioned. "She must have been through already."
"Well," Hermione tried to head them off, "we should definitely warn the other professors…"
"But…" Seamus realized, "...the wolf's asleep now, and it might wake up soon, and then nobody could get through."
"Hagrid could," Hermione insisted.
"No, he's right," Ron was warming up to the idea. "We could just slip through while it's asleep, check things out… maybe see what's going on."
Hermione boggled, "There could be anything through there. There's definitely a hag that's very good with knives!"
"Time is running out," Harry added, unhelpfully. "I can see it starting to move."
Visions of glory (possibly glorious death) flashing through his head, Ron said, "No time like the present," and rushed down the hallway. Seamus wasn't far behind him.
"We'll keep them safe," Harry told them, caught up in the quest (and also part of him aware that Hagrid seemed to want them to investigate). "Go get Hagrid or Flitwick so we can get out if we need to." With that, he rushed off.
Dean shrugged apologetically at the girls and rushed after.
"All the boys are mad!" Hermione gasped. "I'm surrounded by mad people. Are you going, too, Neville?"
Kind of looking like he wanted to, the forgetful pureblood withered under Hermione's stare and said, "No?"
"Right, then, let's just go tell the teachers…" Hermione began.
"Gryffindor!" Lavender yelled, charging down the hallway for her own opportunity at Valhalla. Padma barely managed to grab Parvati before she, too, charged after her friend. Garm, a wolf nearly as big as an elephant, made one sleepy snap at Lavender's foot, narrowly missing as she disappeared through a hole in spacetime.
"Simply mental," Hermione groaned.
Meanwhile, through the convergence, Harry and Dean emerged on a frantic battle in a lush jungle, covered in night but lit by three colorful moons, as Ron and Seamus blasted bolts from their wands to try to fend off fast-creeping vines. "We didn't cover this in herbology!" Ron yelled.
Harry noted that there were several vines strewn about that seemed to have been cleanly cut loose, as if Morgan had hacked her way through. "This must keep going," he told them. "Find the next portal."
With four boys blasting magic, even weak magic, they were able to keep the vines from dragging any of them off, particularly when Lavender ran in and started helping. "Here!" Dean announced, finally noticing a spot with several long tendrils severed around it that seemed to ripple in the air.
"It's got me!" Seamus yelled, as a creeping vine managed to lasso his ankle and begin pulling him into the foliage. It was slow enough that he was awkwardly hopping rather than pulled off of his feet.
"Whip it!" Harry suggested.
"Oh, right!" Seamus agreed, grappling the vine right back with an orange rope of magic from the end of his wand. Unlike the vine, his burned, since he still hadn't gotten his energy projection totally under control. With Ron and Dean tugging on Seamus' torso while Harry and Lavender covered them, they were able to snap the tendril and all go tumbling through the portal.
"Out of the forest, into the swamp," Dean complained.
They'd moved into a world where it was daytime, and, indeed, smelled like decomposing vegetation. A shallow bog broken by patches of dry earth stretched out around them in all directions, sightlines broken by strange purple-barked trees reaching spindly gray leaves toward the red giant sun that filled up a quarter of the sky. Nothing immediately tried to kill them, so that was something.
"Do you think Madam Pomfrey can cure us of alien mosquito diseases?" Harry wondered.
"Not if those are the mosquitos," Dean said, gesturing up at a moving cloud of silvery flying creatures clustering over the treetops.
"Are those… flying keys?" Seamus guessed, still a little out of it from his brush with being eaten by a jungle.
"No," Harry said, peering up into the air, and explaining, "I think they're just like birds or bats, but they're made of metal. And they look sharp."
"Guess that makes us Hercules," Dean suggested. Everyone looked at him in confusion and he explained, "Because in one of his labors he had to fight a bunch of metal birds in a swamp? It's not only Norse mythology you can learn about." Dean's elementary school had included an illustrated book of Greek myths that had been one of the things that got him interested in drawing in the first place.
"I think they're flying around the next portal," Lavender pointed, and they could, indeed, make out another waver in the air that the metallic birds seemed to be orbiting.
"Then let's shoot them down!" Ron suggested, attempting to follow through and getting nothing out of his wand. "Hey, what gives?"
"Too far from Vanaheim," Harry figured. "I noticed I was weaker in the jungle. It's a wonder the energy that lets us use wands made it through the convergences that far."
"So… no magic?" Lavender's eyes widened, suddenly much less excited about this trip.
Dean suggested to Harry, "We definitely need to learn some of the Masters' tricks for how to do it without wands."
Harry nodded in agreement and asked, "Then how did Morgan get through?"
"Brooms!" Seamus announced after they'd been looking around the island of dry ground for several seconds. They all turned and saw he'd found two brooms propped against one of the strange trees.
"Can we get five of us through on two brooms?" Harry asked.
"If they let us through, maybe," Dean said, not really an expert on broom carrying capacity but not liking how fast and sharp the birds looked. "If those things chase anyone that flies, definitely not."
"Harry and Ron are the best fliers," Lavender stated, matter-of-factly. "If the birds don't do anything, they come back down and pick us up. If they chase them, they go on and we wait here until someone else comes through or you two come back." After being attacked by a jungle and realizing her magic no longer worked, Lavender was starting to feel like she'd had plenty of adventure for the day.
Dean and Seamus both considered arguing about why they should get to continue on the death-defying quest, but then each nodded. "Don't forget your martial arts," Dean insisted.
Ron, for his part, was beaming that a simple accident of the available brooms had him continuing on his adventure one-on-one with Harry Potter. None of his brothers had a story like this. What he said was, "We'll make you all proud. Keep this spot safe for us."
Harry, who had been on the verge of common sense kicking in, suddenly carried the mission of Gryffindor with him, and instead simply stated, "We should buy some more enchanted items, if they work off Vanaheim." He was also working out whether he could get some holdouts for this kind of circumstance, and whether Pepper would let him keep a laser gun if he bought one at one of the alien-technology merchants in the Goblin Market.
"Right. Let's go!" Ron said, mounting the broom that Seamus handed him and beginning to float. Harry launched right behind him.
Sure enough, the metal birds began to flock toward them as soon as they were about ten feet off the ground. "Use the trees!" Harry yelled, as they had to dodge frantically. Neck and neck with Ron, the two boys managed to slalom around the trees, cornering faster than the birds could. Really, it didn't make a ton of sense that they could fly at all, and might have something to do with unusual physics on the strange planet. Finally, they'd gotten a good lead on the flock of aggressive creatures and pulled them away from the convergence, "We'll be back!" Harry shouted down to Dean, Seamus, and Lavender, just before they disappeared into the portal.
They blasted out into the air of a much-more-Earthlike planet. Well, it seemed to be a rocky desert with deep ravines and forbidding cliffs, but at least the sky was blue and the sun was normal-sized, if a little brighter than Earth's or Vanaheim's. Harry frantically looked behind them so they wouldn't lose track of the portal, and determined that it was floating just above a particularly notable rocky spire that stood above the nearby terrain.
"How are we ever going to find the next portal?" Harry asked.
"They've been pretty close to each other," Ron suggested, also looking around as he brought his broom to a hover. "How are we even going to know when we're at the spot where these end?"
"Huh. What if they don't end?" Harry mused. "I guess once we catch up to Morgan, we'll know."
"Oh, I wonder if it's down there," Ron suggested, having floated over a large crevasse that seemed to have humanoid figures standing on a grid carved into the stone floor of the depression.
"Leave it to you to find the giant chess board," Harry grumbled. He wasn't sure if Ron had lost a chess match yet, to the point that hardly anyone in the Gryffindor common room was even willing to play him anymore.
"I know, right! It must be my wyrd!" Ron agreed, just having the best possible time on this adventure.
They cautiously descended into the ravine, which seemed to be nearly the size of a football field with walls fifty feet high. As their eyes adjusted to the dimmer light in the shade beneath, it became apparent that the grid on the ground was, indeed, a chess board, with one side populated by immobile stone figures made of the same sandstone as the surrounding cliffs.
The other side was a meager encampment of over a dozen orange-furred trolls and their weary-looking ice giant leader. "I guess that's what happened to the trolls that attacked the school," Harry observed.
"And they had a run-in with Morgan, it looks like," Ron added, noticing that a few of the trolls were bandaging new wounds, and one lay dead and bloody toward the back of the ravine. They seemed to have several bags of foodstuffs piled against one wall, and their bandages were made from the emptied sacks. "We better hold onto our brooms. Looks like someone used magic to make the walls too smooth for them to climb out on their end." Indeed, the trolls and giant would have to get past the chess pieces to reach a part of the ravine uneven enough to climb out of.
The jotun leader finally noticed the specks against the daylight and shouted something guttural at them. "Do you speak giant?" Harry checked.
"Nope," Ron shook his head. "Mum says they rarely say anything you'd care to know about anyway."
"Oh, no," Harry realized, pointing. "They're set up right in front of what must be the next portal." The dead troll was laid out near a crevasse in the wall that was small enough that the trolls were probably too big to squeeze through quickly, and the giant wouldn't fit through at all. The faint shimmer of the portal became more obvious as their eyes finished adjusting.
"I think… I think this is a wizarding chess set," Ron pointed down to the jotun-sized stone figures. His own set at Hogwarts was significantly smaller, but enchanted to move at his commands rather than having to move the figures with his hands. "Maybe we're meant to fight the trolls by commanding the chess pieces."
"The brooms, the magical chess set, Hagrid telling us about Garm…" Harry worked out, as they continued to descend, keeping the chess pieces in between them and the trolls. "Do you think Dumbledore meant for us to come through here?"
Ron said, "Honestly, he may have made it too hard. If we'd known how to get past Garm earlier in the year, the Gryffindor seventh-years would have probably been down here all the time."
"Yeah," Harry said, still thinking. His aunt didn't have a very high opinion of Dumbledore, and he couldn't help but notice that Hagrid had been intent on showing him the various pieces of the puzzle. Maybe this whole thing was an obstacle course meant to test one Harry Potts, for reasons the boy could only guess.
Almost as if reading his mind, Ron offered, "I'm not really sure how we'll get them to fight a chess set. But maybe they'll be distracted if I start commanding it, and you can fly past them."
"You don't want to be the one that moves on?" Harry asked.
"Mate, you're useless at chess," Ron smiled. "And I think defeating an army of trolls with an army of stone warriors is plenty enough for me, today."
"I don't have a better idea," Harry shrugged, his brain still struggling over whether Dumbledore had planned on an adult hag who was terrifying with knives being in this obstacle course with him.
"And if I finish them off fast enough, I'll head in after you," Ron said, the plan settled.
Somehow, it worked exactly as Ron had planned. The redhead floated down behind the chess set, and started commanding them. Unlike a traditional set, they didn't truly seem locked to their squares, but were fully happy to lay about them as any of the trolls tried to charge past to get at the young wizard in the back. In the dry desert air, the frost giant couldn't summon enough ice to make weapons (though it was the source of their drinking water), so it was just the natural strength of the hulking humanoids against magically-augmented stone.
Really, for all that they despised being imprisoned in a desert gorge for over half a year, the trolls and giant were having a good time getting to battle something.
When everyone seemed fully engaged, Harry streaked down out of the sun into the back of the gorge and managed to slow down enough to not decapitate himself as he folded up and flew into the hole that seemed to be hiding the portal. One of the bags of food smashed off the rock near him, flung by the frustrated giant, but he was through.
The next encounter was strangely minimalist. The portal emptied into a large but bare stone cavern, and it was impossible to tell where he might be or even how deep underground. Lit by a massive bonfire fed by underground gas vents, a small table was set up between the fire and the portal he'd flown in through. On it there were seven different bottles of colored potions and a note. In Professor Snape's spidery handwriting, the note included a written logic problem, indicating that one of the potions would make the drinker fireproof long enough to get through the portal in the bonfire, but some of them were poison.
"Hermione would be great at this," Harry said, wistfully, and wondered if Dumbledore had somehow expected her to come on the adventure, and wind up with the third broom. He noticed said broom was discarded near the bonfire, as was Morgan's violin case, as if she hadn't wanted to risk them leaping through the flames. The hag wasn't in evidence, so she'd clearly figured it out and gone on through.
Even without Hermione, Harry had done plenty of brain teasers at school and in video games. And he could start from the fact that only one bottle seemed to be missing some of the potion and just work out if that one seemed to fit all the criteria of the puzzle. It did, so the hag had probably done the hard logic work for him.
"Here's to not getting poisoned. That would be a dumb way to die," Harry said, tossing back the remaining draught within the potion flask, and feeling a cool sensation coat him from head to toe. He hoped it would protect his clothes, but agreed with Morgan that it probably wouldn't protect the broom, so dropped it to the floor. "Gryffindor!" he shouted, getting up his courage to charge into the fire. Really, it didn't take much courage, after the bonfire travel he'd done over Christmas. Eliminating the flinch reflex when leaping into fire probably wasn't a real safety advantage for the people of Vanaheim.
After a moment of being surrounded by fire that couldn't burn him, Harry sprawled out onto fractured stone, in air that was cold enough that a tiny bit of snow was drifting down but refusing to stick. In the twilight space, he looked to the sky and realized whatever planet he was on was lit by an eclipse, or perhaps a black hole, just a dim circle of light in the sky where a sun should be. He was standing most of the way up the tallest structure he could see, a gigantic stone outcropping with an uneven path winding up it. From what he could make out in breaks in the fog, for miles around there were only low sandy hills and shallow pools of water. Above, immense stone monoliths rose from a platform atop the rise.
"Well, this feels like the end of the line," Harry said to himself, beginning the slow trek up the structure. It really wasn't that much of an exertion, compared to all the stairs in Hogwarts.
At a circular hole carved in two spikes of mountain, Harry finally got a good look at the monoliths above, almost churchlike as they bracketed a space open to the air, ending in two truly enormous rectangular pillars that seemed to be trying to reach up and touch the sky. But he only had a moment to take it all in, before a humanoid figure, cloaked all in shadow, floated down in front of him.
In an echoing man's voice and a German accent, it said, "Welcome, Harry, son of Lily."
Chapter 13: The I in Team
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Only slightly mollified by the fact that the terrifying floating shadow had spoken English and welcomed him, Harry cautiously prepared to run back down the mountain. But the cloaked figure, edges of his garment fading into smoke as it floated in the cold wind of the strange planet, simply settled to the ground and pulled back its hood. That wasn't much of an improvement on the terror standpoint. Beneath, its head seemed to have had the flesh ripped from it: all red tissue with no ears or nose, but otherwise seeming very human.
Harry stifled a scream as he realized why that seemed familiar, "Are you the Red Skull?"
"I was," the former leader of Hydra nodded, though he seemed a bit miffed at the nickname. "Now I am but a pale shade, called forth and forced to simply oversee a power as great as the one that brought about my demise." After a beat he asked, curious, "But, do they speak of me on Earth?"
"A little," Harry acknowledged. "I know Howard Stark's son. He told me some stories his dad told him."
"Ah, Stark," the shade that had been Johann Schmidt nodded, in memory of his dead opponent. "You are the second to come upon this mountain this day."
"Mistress Morgan," Harry agreed.
"That is not her name," the guardian cautioned.
"It's not, you're right," the woman in question's voice said, having slipped up to see who the Red Skull had left to talk to. "Hello, Harry Potter. Didn't I warn you about sneaking up on me?"
All Harry could think to say in response was, "You clean up nice." All the warts and grime must have been prosthetics, since the woman that stood before him now was no less green, but had perfectly smooth skin marred only by a few deliberate-looking scar lines and framed by vibrant dark hair, fading to red at the ends. Having shed her voluminous robes, she was wearing body-hugging leather with a few significant-looking technological apparati on her belt, and a pack on her back.
The boy was still maybe a year off from puberty and legitimate crushes, but at the very least he suspected this was the kind of woman that Tony would lose his mind trying to invite to his bedroom, if only to fulfill some Captain Kirk fetish about green alien women.
She sighed and extended an arm, causing a long silvery katana to somehow telescope out of the hilt she'd been holding, and pointed the sword at Harry. "I appreciate the compliment, but you really should have stayed home. Now come on."
Harry shot a look at the Red Skull, who just shrugged. "I am here to observe and answer questions only," was the closest thing to an apology Harry would get.
"Why are you doing this?" Harry asked, walking ahead of the imposing not-hag, out onto the sky church, monoliths and long-fallen trees passing by on either side as he walked toward the ledge overlooking an immense fall off of the mountain.
"My father needs that stone," she told him. "Sorry, you seem like a nice kid, but you only had a fifty-fifty shot anyway." As he was trying to puzzle that out, she asked the guardian, "Can I sacrifice him?"
"Is he that which you love?" the Red Skull responded.
"Flark," she said, clearly realizing that wasn't true.
Harry stood beneath the two immense monoliths at the edge, looking off the stone platform where a semicircle cutout overlooked a massive stone ring far enough below that terminal velocity was a given if he fell off—or if he was pushed. "What's he talking about?"
"The stone demands a sacrifice," the guardian explained portentously. "In order to take the stone, you must lose that which you love. A soul… for a soul."
"What about it, Potter?" his former teacher asked. He glanced back and saw frustration written on her face. She'd come all this way, and lacked the means to obtain the stone. "Anyone come with you that you love? What about Dean Thomas or Hermione Granger? You seemed close to them in class."
That made Harry angry. "You'd make me kill my friend? For what? To save my life? You don't have anyone you love? I thought you were nice."
She stepped back a bit under the tirade, but insisted, "You're still young. You don't understand pain yet. The things you'd do to make the pain stop. Love doesn't measure up. I have to return with the stone."
"Why don't you throw yourself off, then? That seems to be all you care about!" Harry shouted, the last year of revelations and manipulations finally too much stress to keep bottled up. "I lost enough for my whole life before I could even walk. Nobody else dies for me."
"Curious," the Red Skull murmured, drifting closer to the confrontation as he noticed orange light seeping in a jagged line from the boy's forehead. "It seems, perhaps, you have already lost enough. Or, more precisely—for you—the debt has already been paid."
Feeling the burning in the scar on his forehead, Harry noticed white light racing up the inside of the giant monoliths, a glowing hole forming in the sky, and then he looked down, orange light shining from within his clenched fist like it had always been there.
Her eyes widened in triumph and she raised the sword again ordering, "Give it to me!"
As Harry met the woman's eyes—Gamora, he somehow knew—it was like he could see into the center of her very being. Good intentions and hope buried in chains and barbed wire. She didn't want to be here any more than he did, but she was bathed in long-cultivated fear of betraying her father. No. Not her father. The man who'd killed her parents, and "adopted" her as if it were a kindness. Hurt her and trained her and used her as just another way to hurt other people. So many visions assailed Harry of the awful things she'd seen her "father" and his army do.
Orange light flashed in Harry's eyes and into hers as he said, "Do you really want it? It will just mean that you have to hurt more people. He isn't worth it. Your parents were the ones that died for you. Just like mine did for me."
Powered by the Soul Stone, Harry's simple words cracked the years of justifications that she had used to wall off her heart, and Gamora fell to her knees and wept.
"Can I… can I put this back?" Harry asked the Red Skull.
"You hold an Infinity Stone in your hand and ask if you can put it back?" the shade asked.
Harry told him, still seeing visions from her soul, "He killed her parents. I think he might have killed her whole planet. Is there anywhere safer to keep this? Will holding onto it protect me from him?" The dead Nazi still speechless at the idea of giving up such power, Harry looked up and realized that the disturbance in the air had never really ceased. Holding the stone aloft he said, "I don't want it anymore. And I don't want him to have it."
The stone flashed in an orange light that escaped into the sky, and then the lights dimmed, the roiling vortex returning to simple clouds.
"I think…" the Red Skull finally managed, "...that the portals may soon be closing."
"Gamora?" Harry reached down and put a hand on the woman's shoulder. "We have to go."
Still baffled, the specter of Johann Schmidt watched the Boy-Who-Lived and the Deadliest Woman in the Galaxy race back down his mountain, wondering for how much longer he would be trapped waiting for someone to take up the burden of the Soul Stone.
They ran down the mountain, snow falling in earnest now, with a sense that the eclipse in the sky might finally end… or might somehow hold its vigil until someone finally claimed the Stone.
Staggering out of the fire in the bonfire room fortunately not burned, they grabbed their brooms and raced for the next portal, flying out into the chess ravine, wary of trolls. Gamora was slight enough that she had almost as easy a time navigating the narrow cave as he did. On the other end of the enclosure, the trolls had given up trying to get past Ron's line of stone golems, most lying prone to either side of the board recuperating from the beating they'd taken. Harry could make out the redhead still having an excellent time ordering his rocky army to victory, but was privately fairly certain his roommate was never in any real danger: that the chess pieces had pinned in the trolls with no human guidance for months.
"I'll leave you here," Gamora told him, floating above the ravine floor. "I think we're on a space lane on this planet. I can call a ship. I'll tell my father…"
"He's not your father," Harry reminded her.
"Right," she nodded. "Well, I'll tell him that Dumbledore outplayed us."
"What if you didn't go back?" he asked her.
"He'd find me," she corrected. "Maybe someday I can leave." She thought about the pain that was coming for her failure, and held out the violin case, which she'd retrieved along with her broom. "Here. I wouldn't be able to keep it. Maybe you can figure out how to play."
"Thanks," he told the alien assassin. "Good luck, Gamora."
"You too, Harry Potter." With that, she flew off, and Harry motioned to Ron to stop playing chess and head for the convergence. The trolls would probably be able to escape once the portals closed and the magic wore down. Maybe they'd even eventually be able to get off the planet.
"You let her go? Or did she let you go?" Ron asked, as they met back up and flew toward the exit.
Harry explained, "I… talked her out of what she was doing. She was basically being forced to do it."
"By You-Know-Who?" Ron asked, reaching for a cultural assumption about what villain could be involved.
"Maybe," Harry agreed, still not totally sure about the identities of all the forces arrayed against him.
Any follow-up questions had to wait until they'd re-entered the swamp and dodged the flock of silvery birds, spotting their friends below, along with Hagrid, McGonagall, and Snape, who seemed like they were trying to figure out how to get into the next portal to come after Harry and Ron.
"Portals may be closing!" Harry warned everyone, as they streaked out of the sky. That was all the encouragement everyone needed to save their questions and hustle through the convergence, past the jungle, and into Garm's room where the giant wolf was once again sleeping peacefully.
"Go ahead," Hagrid ordered. "I'll wake 'im an' get 'im into the forest."
Hermione, Padma, Parvati, and Neville were waiting out in the hallway, and sighed in relief as everyone returned safely and apparently none the worse for wear. Harry had about thirty seconds of frantic, worried hugs before the barrage of questions started from all sides.
"Perhaps," Dumbledore's grandfatherly voice cut through the din as he walked around the corner into the hallway, "Mr. Potter would care to debrief me, while our other world walkers share their own experiences with their friends and professors?"
Snape just rolled his eyes, "No points lost or detentions for such a flagrant violation of rules and safety, Headmaster?"
"Assuming we agree their actions were justified," Dumbledore said with a slight grin, the flickering torchlight in the hall seeming to make his eyes twinkle behind his spectacles.
The chemistry professor just sighed in disgust, "Rather than listen to a bunch of self-congratulatory prattle, I'll be off. Brief me if it's relevant." He got a slight nod of dismissal from the headmaster, then stalked off back toward the dungeons.
"Very well, let's go to the infirmary so Madam Pomfrey can confirm you're all alright. Everyone but Potter," the rector ordered, shepherding the rest of the first-years before her as she left Harry alone with Dumbledore.
"I assume you have no injuries that aren't apparent and require a trip to the infirmary?" he asked Harry.
"No. I think I'm okay, sir. Little exhausted. Though I guess we weren't gone that long?"
The headmaster began walking toward his office, trusting the boy to follow, and suggested, "I, myself, have just arrived, but I suspect not. Though if you went all the way to the end, the physics of the planet might have had a slight effect on the passage of time."
"So it was a black hole?" Harry asked.
"I'm uncertain, myself, though I see you've been paying attention in Professor Sinestra's classes. If it's a permanent eclipse, it likewise could be due to some kind of temporal effect."
Harry held the rest of his questions until they'd climbed through the school to a doorway guarded by a gargoyle, which moved aside as Dumbledore arrived. He led Harry up a short flight of stairs into a tower office, packed so densely with magical trinkets, portraits, and books that the boy didn't even know where to look first. Well, that wasn't quite true, as his eye was drawn by a beautiful red bird the size of an eagle that was on a perch near the desk, turned away from Harry and head bowed in sleep.
"Reese's Crispy Crunchy Bar?" the headmaster offered, taking a seat behind his desk and pushing a bowl of the chocolates toward Harry.
"Thank you sir," Harry accepted, realizing he could definitely do with a snack after that adventure. He tore into the packaging while he waited for the headmaster to ask.
Dumbledore regarded some moving devices on a shelf next to him and said, "The convergence is ending, I see. Do you have it?"
"I did," Harry admitted, not surprised that the old wizard knew more or less what had happened. "I put it back."
The headmaster leaned back, examining Harry while stroking his beard. "Indeed? Very few could have given up such power. I, myself, might not have been able to make the same choice."
"But didn't you have it from Hagrid?" Harry asked. "I thought you put it on… what was it called?"
"Vormir, though I suggest you keep that name secret to reduce the chance it is found again. To answer your other question, the Stone never considered me its master, though it spent quite a few years in my possession, inert and resistant to all magic. It was waiting for someone else. I almost risked allowing it to be stolen from Gringotts, hoping it would not function for one that did not claim it with the proper sacrifice. Was my guess correct that, for you, the price had already been met?"
Harry nodded and asked, "My parents?"
"So I surmise. Your mother was a genius. I believe she worked out how to claim the Soul Stone from across the cosmos with her sacrifice, knowing it would be the only thing powerful enough to protect you."
"From Voldemort," Harry said, the name falling like a lead weight into the room. "Is that why everyone assumes I killed him? So is Gamora's father trying to do what he started?"
"Is that her real name?" He clearly committed it to memory, then said, "I don't know for sure, but I will try to find out. You did not have to destroy her?"
"You're giving me a lot of credit, sir," Harry joked.
"For even a short time, you held an Infinity Stone, Harry. Few can stand against such power, even when wielded by someone as young as you. Again, it takes a special person to give up such power." For a moment, Harry thought Dumbledore's tone was less congratulatory and more accusing. But then he said, "It was probably very wise. There are already enough forces arrayed against you."
"That's what I figured," Harry agreed. "But, no, I… convinced her that she was too good a person to be doing what she was doing. She really only needed a nudge. She said she'd tell her 'father' that you outsmarted her."
"Remarkable," the headmaster breathed. "By 'convinced' I believe you mean you used the Stone to reach her soul?"
"Another reason to give it up, sir. She just needed a nudge, but who knows what else I could do with that power? Seems like the kind of power a bad guy would have, honestly."
"Indeed. It would be tempting to fix those around you that didn't see things your way," Dumbledore admitted, seeming to finally see the flaw in the Soul Stone. "Though I suspect your one use of it was altogether for the good."
"Retired, undefeated, sir," Harry said. Seeing that there wasn't an immediate follow-up, he asked what had been on his mind, "Sir… was the whole thing an obstacle course designed to get me to Vormir? If so, why not just take me there?"
"The journey is as important as the destination, Harry," he explained, not denying that it had largely been created for the boy's benefit. "We do not appreciate things we are merely given the way we do those that we earn. Can you say you would have made the same decision with the Stone should you have just been taken straight to it?"
"I guess not," Harry allowed.
"Well then!" Dumbledore clapped. "It's getting late and I'm sure you have many more questions from your dorm-mates before you can sleep, though hopefully the others have already painted most of the picture. Good evening, Harry."
Dismissed, Harry wandered back to Gryffindor tower, having a lot of time to think about what Dumbledore had really wanted. He was sure that Aunt Pepper would have an opinion… especially once he realized how many of those challenges he could have just strolled through in an invisibility cloak.
The headmaster hadn't been wrong, and Harry was kept up late that night and still had to recount the story many times over the last weeks of school. When he wasn't having to tell the saga of the journey, most of his time was filled with more training and study: Dean had decided they really needed to have a fallback when magic didn't work, and Hermione wanted to know how to make sure magic would always work.
"We should see if we can study with the Masters before school starts," Dean suggested. "Like a magical summer camp. They can probably show us how to do magic without a wand."
"Wouldn't that be like saying we're joining after Hogwarts?" Hermione worried.
Dean shrugged, "I've already fought trolls, dragons, and monster plants. At this rate, whatever stuff the Masters fight won't be that scary."
"Maybe," Hermione said, not totally sure Dean really did understand the difference between battles with fantasy monsters and the kind of eldritch horrors the Masters of the Mystic Arts had to deal with. "Well, we can at least ask them if they'll do a summer camp without having to sign up for their army right away. It would be nice to not be defenseless off Vanaheim."
The leaving feast came faster than they'd expected, where Slytherin won the house cup. Harry wasn't too bothered: the points system didn't really motivate Gryffindor the way it did the other houses. Fred and George had lost every point Percy had earned and more, and they were still very popular, and the officious prefect was still enjoying popular acclaim for his actions on Halloween, not for his academic successes. Harry got a momentary impression, from a flicker of a glance his way before announcing the Slytherin victory, that the headmaster had considered awarding some last minute points, but decided not to.
On the train ride back, Harry was working out his itinerary, "Okay, according to the letter Wong sent, we're registered on a flight that's leaving from London about three hours before we'll be getting to the station."
"Won't that be odd?" Hermione checked.
"The government doesn't know when the train shows up," Harry shrugged. "If they check at all, maybe we just got someone to drive us from Scotland to London and it was faster than the train. Huh. There isn't even really a train on their side. Oh, Wong did say we should try to cover our faces enough to make sure the cameras in London won't do facial recognition on us. So I guess try to buy some big sunglasses and ballcaps at the station?"
"That makes sense," she agreed. "So that gives you, what, five hours or so before you're supposed to be in New York? Oh! There's some stuff we can do in the city in the evening that wasn't open in the winter."
"Can we come?" Padma asked. "We also have a fake flight back home."
"Aw. I have'ta actually fly back'ta Ireland," Seamus complained.
Ron sighed, "And me, Nev, and Lav, aren't going to Midgard at all. It's going to be a boring summer without all of you! Hey! We should see if we can at least coordinate doing our school shopping at the Market on the same day."
"That sounds doable," Harry agreed. "I think we all figured out how to open the Market portal, right?" There were nods all around. "Cool. I'll send Hedwig around to everyone to try to work that out once we get our supply list letters."
The Grangers adapted well enough to their daughter asking if they could entertain four of her friends for several hours on a summer afternoon when they'd just been planning to take her straight home. "We can't fit all those trunks in the car, though," her father insisted.
"All seven of us, either," her mother corrected. "I suppose we could do some things around downtown."
"We can drop the others' trunks at the sanctum," Hermione suggested. "I need to ask Master Rama about summer training anyway."
"I'll just put your trunk in the car, find long term parking, and meet you at the 'club,' shall I?" her father rolled his eyes, acquiescing.
"Meet you there, dear," Helen Granger told him, allowing herself to be swept up in Hermione's wake. It was still enough of a novelty for her formerly-friendless daughter to have so many friends that she was willing to make some concessions.
At the sanctum, Sol Rama said he'd ask the other Masters about training. "Most Hogwarts students wait until their upper years to do that, but I suppose we could work something in."
"We just… found ourselves off of Vanaheim for a bit, and our wands didn't work," Harry admitted, but kept quiet that they would also like to be able to do magic on Earth if they needed to.
"Oh? I bet if you told us that story, it might be an easier sell," Sol offered, privately making a mental note to ask some of the other Hogwarts students they were in contact with what was going on over there. The rumors about troll attacks Wong's cousin had passed on over winter break had already been worrying. "I'll have the apprentices go ahead and send your trunks to your homes, so grab anything you might need. Otherwise, I'll see you back here in a few hours."
With that, Hermione's whirlwind walking tour of Westminster proceeded apace. Even her parents had to admit they'd had a good time. Locals rarely made time to do the fun tourist attractions, except when hosting out-of-towners.
Bidding farewell to their friends for a few weeks, everyone except the Grangers stepped through the sanctum's central doorway and across the planet, the Patils getting off in Kamar-Taj while Dean and Harry continued on to New York. Harry was too exhausted to remember much about finally meeting Master Drumm, other than that he was an impressively-muscled black guy with a smooth head and a quiet confidence. He could see why Dean had already imprinted on the guy as the mentor he aspired to follow.
"Where's your aunt meeting you?" Dean asked.
"Stark offices, probably," Harry considered. "Damn. No phone to figure out how to get there."
"I got you, it's probably the same train as to my house," Dean said, eager to demonstrate his own mastery of travel around New York the way Hermione had shown off in London.
Master Drumm surreptitiously tagged both with a monitoring spell to make sure the two pre-teens didn't immediately become horribly lost in Manhattan.
After another adventure with the subway system, Harry wandered into the Stark Industries offices in Manhattan, signed in at the registration desk, asked the receptionist to call his aunt, and passed out in a comfy visitor's chair. It was still daylight outside, but he had no idea whatsoever what time his internal clock thought it should be.
A power-nap later, Aunt Pepper shook him awake and said, "Did you take the subway here? You could have called me!"
"No phone," Harry reminded her.
"Oh. Right. I have a replacement for you with my bags," she realized. To be fair to her, while she had gotten busy with work, she had no way of knowing exactly when he'd teleport across the planet to New York. "You ready to fly back to LA?"
"As long as I can sleep on the plane," Harry agreed.
"Uh uh," she shook her head, pulling him to his feet. "Three more hours of time change. Best for you to just stay up and go to bed at a reasonable west coast time. Plus, you need to tell me about your year. Where's your trunk?"
"Masters sent it ahead," he explained, groggy and frustrated at being told he couldn't go back to sleep.
"Well, that's something at least," she said, waving goodbye to the receptionist, grabbing her rolling suitcase, and leading the sleepy adolescent down to the motor pool so they could get a driver to take them to the airport.
Harry remembered very little of the trip back to LA, other than that Pepper had basically bribed him with the phone and threatened him with worse punishment if he didn't tell her exactly how he'd really broken his first one. And he thought he'd also told her more about the rest of his adventures than he'd been planning on.
It was another couple of days before he was completely coherent, after all the jet lag sent him into a very small coma as soon as they returned to 5730 Encino Avenue.
Shortly after he was mostly functional again, he rode with Aunt Pepper over to Tony's house in Malibu, and they found the recently-liberated billionaire tinkering in his garage. As they put in their door codes, Harry took in the space through the glass wall that separated the stairs from the expansive workspace. Tony had begun to spread out several workbenches with a lot of tools and unassembled mechanical and electrical components, with various large plastic mats laid out near the row of expensive cars as if he was also practicing some kind of martial art.
"Pepper. And Salt!," Tony greeted them, rolling back in his chair away from a computer desktop after minimizing the drafting application he had open. "Back from Jolly Old!"
"And he's grounded," Pepper explained to her boss, adding a new stack of envelopes and documents to one side of a desk atop a pile that he had barely touched since the last time she'd been there. "The ones on the top need signatures. One of them's about a board meeting coming up."
"Grounded already. What'd you do?" Tony asked, unconcerned about the documents or meeting.
"Broke my phone," Harry shrugged.
Tony shot Pepper a look about being too stern and she said, "Tell him how you broke your phone."
Harry sighed, "Ran off to fight with another kid I don't get along with into the woods at night, left behind the adult that was watching us, and fell down after I nearly got gored by a wild boar."
"Do they still have wild boars in Scotland?" Tony asked.
"Reintroduced back in the 70s. They're apparently quite the nuisance," Pepper explained. They'd looked it up when coming up with the cover story. He couldn't exactly tell people some kind of technology-eating alien had come after him. "Tell him what else."
"Stopped a teacher from robbing the school," Harry said. His aunt gave him a look, so he expanded, "My friends and I didn't wait for the other teachers to go after her, she was the martial arts teacher, and we knew she liked knives." He saw that Tony seemed more impressed than upset, and added, "And I did talk her out of it."
"Sounds like we both had a busy year," Tony gave a self-deprecating smirk.
"Yeah," Harry nodded. "Aunt Pepper says you have a super-battery on your chest?"
Tony pulled down his t-shirt to show the top of the object embedded in his sternum. "Miniature arc reactor powering an electromagnet."
"Neat. But seems like overkill," Harry said.
"It can power other stuff," Tony argued, and that got him thinking. Harry Potts: lightweight, fearless, and athletically coordinated. "Hey, Pep. Want me to oversee Salt's grounding?"
"What are you up to, Tony?" she looked up from sorting the table of documents.
"I've got projects," Tony gestured around. "Could use a lab assistant I can trust to keep his mouth shut about what I'm working on. One with small hands for some of the smaller parts. You've got small hands, Pepper. You could help too, but I know you're busy."
"Yeah, covering for you while you're down here," she said. But she didn't immediately shoot him down.
"How about it?" he asked Harry. "No posting about it on your blog. No telling those friends of yours. You know, Two Names and your girlfriend Winter's Tale."
"She's not my girlfriend. And she's not named after Winter's Tale," Harry argued, Hermione having explained it to him. "Her mom's Greek and named Helen."
"Ah," Tony agreed, making a mental note to look up that reference. He thought he should have gotten some credit for the Shakespeare deep cut. "Noted. So, want to help me with a project this summer."
It definitely sounded more interesting than being confined to 5730 Encino Avenue for over a month, and Tony's entertainment centers were better than his anyway. "Can I, Aunt Pepper?"
Suspicious of the free babysitting, Pepper at least felt better about both of her charges being in one spot for the summer. "Fine. But I'm going to talk to Legal about getting him put on the company insurance at least." She gestured at the mats laid about, knowing that Tony was doing something at least mildly dangerous down here. She just hoped it wasn't more dangerous than the things Dumbledore had put her nephew through at school.
"See, that's why I have a Pepper," Tony nodded. "Get them to make sure we don't get sued for child labor laws, and all of that. Right. I need to get your measurements, Salt. JARVIS, spin up the 3D scanner. You're going to have to strip down to your underwear for the scan." He gave it a beat and said, "You can, too, if you want, Pepper. You know, just in case it's useful to have your scan on record."
"I don't think so. Will that be all, Mr. Stark?" she asked Tony, while giving Harry a look that conveyed "You asked for this" and then headed for the door. "I'll go talk to Legal. Don't do anything dangerous until I tell you it's okay. And sign those documents."
"Yes, ma'am!" Tony said, already scooting back over to the desktop to work on the math for how Harry's weight would affect the flight controls. He'd already nearly killed himself launching himself into the ceiling while testing his rocket boots out. It would be a lot easier to dial in the basics of the propulsion for someone Harry's size before he risked himself again.
Maybe he would also put down a few more crashpads.
Notes:
Yes, I know the wiki doesn't think Tony starts actually working on the physical components of the Mark II until September, but the montage doesn't really imply six minutes of film are meant to take four months, and compressing it down lets Harry be involved. (It's also weird that it takes over five months between the press conference and the Stark emergency board meeting.) Assume for purposes of this fic that the initial designs and boot test was May and June, the pre-armor tests will take place over the rest of the summer, and the full armor fabrication will take long enough to push the Iron Monger fight back out so it's still in late fall.
Chapter 14: Cloak and Dagger
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"What are you working on?" Tony asked while walking past where Harry had set up in a corner of the garage, browsing pictures of the Seraphim Tactical Satellite.
"Summer chemistry homework," Harry told him. "Hermione bugged me about getting started on it. Have to talk about the properties of gold and titanium." Well, technically, the assignment had been to talk about the chemical composition of their wand cores. Snape had probably thought Harry would have some materials unknown on Earth, so have a harder time doing the homework. "Thought I'd do some extra credit on alloys. Supposed to be really good at heat transfer."
"Smart," Tony agreed, leaning over his shoulder while drinking one of the weird green smoothies he'd been gradually ramping up on over the last month. "That's cool looking," he said, gesturing to the cover of one of Harry's notebooks.
"Dean drew and colored it for me," Harry agreed. It was a picture of the Hogwarts Helm of Sorting in the red and gold of Gryffindor. "It's a helmet we found in the D&D game."
"Careful with magic helmets. Suddenly you're Lawful Evil and have to pay taxes," Tony quipped. The design didn't really look like his Mark II helmet, but he liked the color scheme a lot. "Alright. Test 37 is up. You ready?"
"Am I actually flying today?" Harry asked enthusiastically, putting his stuff down and hurrying to get his shoes off.
"Hovering," Tony corrected. "If we're lucky."
"Huh, yeah, I guess it would be hard to carry enough fuel for a flight," Harry said, looking at the jury-rigged boots and gloves that were laid out on a work table that Tony had been soldering all afternoon. "Does this just use magnets? Is there a grid in the floor?"
"Oh, no, it'll fly eventually. Just not today," Tony disagreed. He pointed at the propulsion surfaces on the boots and explained, "Ion-actuated plasma jets. They make their own propulsion medium out of the air. Still working on how to make it work in space, but we used these on some of the Stark missiles."
"How much power does that use?" Harry asked, starting to strap on the various apparati.
"A lot," Tony agreed, helping him into the prototype. "But if you've got, say, an arc reactor in your chest…"
"Tony… I don't have an arc reactor in my chest."
"And that's part of why you're just hovering," Tony cinched up the last fastener. "The boots have enough capacitors to test it out. Hopefully for a minute or so. The full system will have to run on one of these, though," he tapped the fist-sized blue reactor on his chest with a metallic thunk, the blue glow hard to miss since he'd recently taken to cutting a hole for it in the middle of his shirts to show it off. "Okay! All strapped in. JARVIS, test 37, configuration 2.0."
He helped Harry stagger in the heavy boots over to the mats in the middle of the room and then got U, his slightly-smarter AI robot arm, arranged to wield a fire extinguisher. He held the video camera himself. Dum-E, the less-competent robot, sulked in a corner, not trusted with any important tools if it wasn't absolutely necessary.
"Ready?" Tony asked. Harry nodded, so he ordered, "Alright, nice and easy. Seriously, we're just going to start off with one percent thrust capacity. In three, two, one…"
And with a rush of electrically-actuated air, Harry began to lift off of the floor. He resisted the urge to flail his legs as his balance started to tip, instead bringing the repulsors in his palms to bear to keep vertical. It ultimately wasn't that different from hovering on a broom, which also lifted on a single axis rather than as a platform. The hover charms on a broom weren't split into four independently mobile pieces, of course, and that took some getting used to.
"Status?" Tony asked after Harry got a few inches off the floor and didn't immediately fall on his face or get flung into a wall.
"This is neat," Harry said. "I'm ready to go higher."
"Kid's ready to go higher," Tony said to himself, or maybe to JARVIS. "Let's bring it up to two percent."
The propulsion doubled, which more than doubled Harry's height given that the first bit of thrust was already cancelling his weight. Now about five feet off the ground and quickly stabilized, he asked, "Should I try to move around?"
"Give it a shot," Tony agreed, stepping back with the camera to give Harry more room. "Stay away from the cars."
"Right," Harry nodded, then concentrated on how he'd need to tilt his palms and feet to change direction rather than basically just treading water. He had a false start and almost tipped on his back as the intuitive direction wasn't the right one. "Woah! That wasn't what I wanted. Maybe some gyroscopes on this?"
"Good idea. JARVIS, note it. You still good?"
"Got it," Harry said, hands thrust back to right himself and then trying gentler motions to move around. "Less is more."
"JARVIS, you tracking his kinematics for analysis?" Tony asked.
"Of course, sir," the AI's voice said from the ceiling-mounted speakers.
Finally feeling out the motions, Harry started deliberately drifting in a circle around the mat, and then leaned over toward Tony's sports cars, grinning as Tony's eyes widened and then pulling himself back well clear of melting off any paint.
"You little," Tony griped, good-naturedly, thrilled at the aerial control Harry had. "Alright, back to the mat and we'll ease off the power at half a percent per second starting… now."
The drop to the mat was a little faster than either had expected, but Harry managed to catch himself with only a slight stumble. "That was fun!"
"It looked fun," Tony agreed. "Oh, yeah. We can fly."
They tried a bunch of tweaks and improvements over the next few days, and by the morning of Harry's birthday on July 31st, the boots and gloves had been joined by additional exoskeletal scaffolding. It was needed to carry the extra capacitors, the gyroscope on the small of his back, and to better record his movements for JARVIS to analyze.
Tony's sleep schedule was incredibly weird, and Harry's body had basically given up on time making sense after getting back from Vanaheim, so they were pushing toward sunrise after having been up through the night. Pepper had pretty much resigned herself to just sleeping in the guest room at the mansion while they both played in the basement.
"Alright," Tony looked at the latest data. "I think we're going to try giving you manual control of the thrust power."
"Happy birthday to me!" Harry grinned.
"It's your birthday?" Tony asked. "Well, as much as I'd like to let you keep the suit, it's still secret. And all your friends at school would be jealous. Plus, you'd just outgrow it." JARVIS had already had to rescan Harry three times over the last month, since he was growing fast enough that the suit pieces that needed to fit precisely would begin causing errors as his height changed even subtly.
"Can't really use electronics at school anyway," Harry shrugged, though privately thinking having one of these in his trunk would have helped outside of Vanaheim.
"What's up with that?" Tony asked. "I know you said they're strict about screens, but no electronics?"
"The place is built like an old castle," Harry explained, then added, "Thick stone walls, basically no accessible outlets. Can't get a signal, and recharging things is inconvenient. And they'd rather die than run network cables along the walls." It wasn't technically a lie, just leaving out the real reason for no power.
"Stone age," Tony sighed. "You sure you wouldn't prefer a different school?"
"Education's good. And I like most of the people."
Tony shrugged and went back to tapping on the computer, "Fair enough. Alright, Test 81, Configuration 2.3. I'm unlocking manual control of propulsion in the boots and gloves, just like we practiced. U, be ready with that fire extinguisher. And, go."
Other than having his own control over the jets rather than JARVIS controlling it, Harry lifted off as usual. But once he started moving around, he was finally able to get a feel for how changing the force on the fly helped him compensate. Within a minute of starting the test, he was swooping around the garage, and even managed to do a vertical loop even within the relatively low confines of the twenty-foot ceiling.
"Alright, Maverick, wheel it in. JARVIS, you're getting the telemetry for this, right?" Tony asked, knowing he'd need a lot of machine assistance to fly as well as the athletic kid.
"Yes, sir. I am already breaking those maneuvers into discrete macros and reversing the kinematics onto your skeletal model," the AI answered.
"Wait, so you're going to move like me?" Harry asked, then risked doing a fancy dance he'd seen in a video game before touching down. He was thrilled that he managed to hold basically stable while pulling it off. "Did you get that, JARVIS?"
"Yes, Mr. Potts," the long-suffering AI acknowledged. "Though the kinematic model is having some difficulty targeting it to Mr. Stark's pelvic range of motion."
"Hey! My pelvic range of motion is just fine!" Tony argued, amused. "I can call up lots of women who'd be happy to testify."
"Oh! Calls!" Harry realized, effortlessly landing and walking toward the laptop he'd been using for games and homework while Tony worked on his own projects that week. "My friends wanted to do a video call, and it's early enough here that they all might be up."
"India, New York, and London, right?" Tony asked, absently, while poring over the new telemetry data from the latest test. "Getting a real jump on the kind of international business meetings I have to figure out."
"I guess I should get out of this so they don't see it on the video," Harry said, annoyed about the time it took to remove the suit.
Tony ordered, "JARVIS, see if you can dynamically mask out any proprietary tech in the shot. Give him a nice Stark Industries t-shirt as an overlay."
"Yes, sir. We have a new design that Ms. Potts approved just last month."
The desk chair groaned a bit more than Harry was used to, since he was wearing upwards of forty pounds of gear, and he messaged his friends and booted up the video chat.
"Happy birthday, Harry!" Hermione was the first to say as she got on. "Where are you?"
"Tony's garage, working on a secret project," Harry answered, amused at the semi-cartoonish t-shirt being superimposed over his body on his own video feed. "He says hi, by the way."
"No I don't," Tony yelled from across the room.
"Hi, Mr. Stark!" Hermione yelled back anyway.
"Can–an–n you–ou–u hear–ar–r us–s?" Padma asked, sharing a video screen with her sister.
"Lag echo's pretty bad," Harry admitted.
"I can help with that," JARVIS said.
"Who was that?" Parvati asked, the echo suddenly almost unnoticeable.
"Tony's assistant, JARVIS," Harry told them. "He's always around."
Dean caught that last bit as he appeared on the call and chuckled, since Harry had told him about JARVIS, even though he wasn't generally making a big deal about Tony Stark having a functioning natural-language AI running his systems. "Happy birthday, man."
"Yes, happy birthday," Padma and Parvati added.
"So I talked to Mr. Rama about summer tuto–," Hermione began, but then her video froze. And so did the other two feeds.
JARVIS said, "We seem to be experiencing communication difficulties."
And then the lights went out.
"That shouldn't be possible," Tony stared at the black screen of his monitor. While the sunrise was imminent as a vague glow in the skylights and in the blue outside of the windows, the garage was pretty much lit by only the (relatively numerous) power indicator LEDs for various tools and devices that functioned entirely on battery power, including Tony's own chest. "My power can't go out. I have redundancies."
Suddenly, toward the ramp out of the garage, the leftmost window exploded inward, throwing glass across Tony's Audi, quickly followed by a male figure that was only visible as a shadow against the lightening sky, vaulting over the edge of the window, jumping off of the roof of the car, and charging into the room.
Tony had just enough time to stand from his computer and square up against the charging intruder before he was effortlessly kicked onto his back (fortunately onto one of the crash pads), the figure drawing a long, straight knife that was as black as the rest of his outfit, and saying, "Passajamanal onolar elithidhenne äth?"
"Hey!" Harry yelled, before Tony could be stabbed to death in the dark. While the playboy had lived nearly four decades with little need to ever get in a fistfight, Harry had recently had nearly a year of martial arts training from the Deadliest Woman in the Galaxy. And he was in a strength-augmenting suit.
Tony's attacker grunted in surprise and pain as Harry essentially punted him in the ribs, kicking him across the room where he narrowly avoided slamming into the Tesla Roadster.
With a growl, the figure rolled back to his feet and switched to a knife-fighting stance that was close to one that Harry had been taught in March. With the gauntlets on, he thought he could potentially block knife strikes, and crouched into Gamora's suggested guard position for a larger opponent with a weapon, placing himself between Tony and the assailant.
The assassin tried two feints, only for Harry to move each time to counter him. Behind Harry, Tony had scrambled to his feet and was moving to grab a wrench or something, when the lights began to flicker. "Finally, the backups," Tony said. With a frustrated grunt, the assassin made one more feint and then ran back toward the smashed window, leaping off the car and out, swinging left to avoid tumbling down the cliffside.
"Nope!" Harry yelled, his Gryffindor instincts treating a fleeing opponent like a dog seeing a squirrel. He ran a couple of steps and ignited the jets, barely managing to fly out the window without banging into anything.
Tony sighed in understanding. "Right. That's why the kid was grounded."
Outside, as Harry gained height, he spotted the cloaked figure running along the edge of Tony's "yard," scrambling up the patchy scrub of the steep cliff edge that dropped to the surf beneath the garage, his hood falling away from his head. Streaking after the attacker, in the rising sun he was surprised to make out angular facial features, including a pointed ear. The apparent-elf's eyes widened at seeing the boy flying after him with rockets at the end of each of his limbs. He shouted up, "Harry Potter djonjel nola Hogwarts."
Then he jumped off the cliff.
Harry would have dived after him, at least to confirm whether the elf had dashed himself on the rocks or somehow survived, but the flight rig began to beep its warning that the capacitors were almost out of power. He barely managed to fly back into the window and miss the Audi before the jets stopped firing and he rolled to a stop on the crash pad that Tony had recently vacated.
"He got away . This definitely needs an arc reactor for long term power," Harry told Tony, who was staring down at him in baffled amusement. After a moment he added, "Also, a servo release for when power is disconnected. I can't get up."
Tony organized his thoughts while helping Harry up and out of the rig, the hazard lights in the room finally giving way to normal lighting as JARVIS announced, "Backup power online. Should I call a technician to inspect the main power and communications junction? At 0605 and twenty seconds, an event occurred which disabled all electrical service, ten seconds after communications were interrupted."
"And jammed the failover routing," Tony added, annoyed. "No, this was targeted. Was that guy speaking Arabic?"
"I don't… think so," Harry said, pretty sure that elves spoke their own ancient language that was closer to old Norse languages than to anything else. But he couldn't explain to Tony why he knew that.
"Yeah, me either. But maybe he was trying to sound like he was?" The possibilities were myriad as Tony thought out loud. "I have a lot of enemies. Could just be someone mad about the stock dropping. Wanted me to think it was a foreign assassin so I'd get back in the weapons game if the hit failed. Thanks, by the way."
"Don't mention it," Harry said, then gasped in relief as he was finally able to step fully free of the inert flight rig.
"Yeah. Let's… not mention it?" Tony suggested. "I mean, I'll beef up security. And it might not be safe for you to be here… Where did you learn to fight like that? Oh, right, the thieving martial arts teacher."
Harry nodded, "If we tell Aunt Pepper, I'm going to be grounded until school starts." As much as he realized he should, he really wanted to go to sorcery camp and school shopping with his friends, and just-turned-twelve-year-olds make bad decisions.
"Yeah. She might ground me too," Tony agreed. While she'd been surprisingly cool about him using her nephew as a test pilot, he didn't think she'd react well to Harry getting in the middle of an assassination attempt. "I'll look into this quietly. We won't worry her until we know more. Probably by the time you're safely at school and can just get angry letters."
Harry gestured at the broken window, "And when she sees that?"
"Repulsor misfire. Everyone's fine. All safety protocols followed."
"Wait, these can blow out a window?" Harry gasped. "If I'd have known that, I could have just shot the guy."
"Alright, Dirty Harry, maybe it's good we're taking a break from testing," Tony scoffed. "And I'm definitely not getting you a handgun for your birthday."
"Wait. Was that an option?" Harry asked. A gun would actually work on Vanaheim and be useful for if he went through another portal off of it.
"Yeah. That's naptime for you," Tony said. "I'll have JARVIS send over some more security guys for the grounds. I'll tell them somebody messed with the power box. Then once Pepper's up you can both head back to… wherever it is you two live."
"Encino," Harry told him, collecting his stuff and heading out of the garage.
"Really, Encino?" Tony boggled. "Encino."
Shortly after Harry and Pepper got back to said house in Encino, a Fry's employee hand-delivered a package for Harry containing a ludicrously nice gaming laptop. The label said, "Happy Birthday, Maverick," on it.
"Wow," Aunt Pepper said. "You impressed him enough that he didn't have me order the present."
"Got some good test data last night," Harry said, though privately he realized it was a present for saving Tony's life. He wished he just didn't feel so bad that he wasn't telling anyone that Tony had probably been in danger because of something having to do with Harry.
He could at least share it with Hermione, after she'd been sworn to not tell Tony or Aunt Pepper. "I don't know much about elves, but we can research when we get back to school," she told him after hearing the story. "Why would they try to kill Mr. Stark? Do you remember exactly what the elf said?"
"Lots of big words," Harry told her. "I just understood 'Harry Potter' and 'Hogwarts.' And maybe something that sounded like 'No' was in there."
"Hmph," Hermione sighed, eventually suggesting, "Well if he wanted to keep you from going back to Hogwarts, making you a murder suspect would certainly keep you from leaving LA."
"He did go a long way to make sure it wouldn't get recorded," Harry agreed. "I wonder if he was expecting us to go to bed before dawn. Kill Tony in his sleep? Then he panicked when we were still up."
"I guess just keep your eyes open. I was trying to tell you that we're on for the camp at Kamar-Taj two weeks before school starts. I can't imagine an elf can get to you once you're there."
With two weeks to kill and a murderous elf to watch out for, Harry was a little surprised to find that even on a cutting-edge gaming rig, there was just something missing after all the real-life adventures he'd been having. He spent more time on Plants vs. Zombies and Braid than he did on anything that would really test the limits of the laptop, because shooters and fighting games no longer did it for him. Life in Gryffindor had turned him into an adrenaline junkie.
Finally, the time came and Master Wong stepped through to pick Harry up. Pepper, who happened to be around that afternoon, was extremely gracious in thanking him for all the personal help he'd given Harry over the last year, then sent them on their way.
The week that followed was less of a summer camp than the twelve-year-olds had really expected. Wanting to give them the full experience, they were basically treated like new apprentices: pre-dawn exercise, hours learning martial arts forms, extended meditation, and the rest of the curriculum. But by the end of the week, each of them had at least managed to project energy without a wand, and had a whole training routine down to try to extend that to the other spells they'd learned that used their personal energy. Harry felt like he was on the very edge of figuring out how to manifest an energy whip without a wand, and that would be a huge help if they got pulled off of Vanaheim again.
"Remember," Wong cautioned them on the last day, "we expect you to use good judgement if you're on Earth. Only use this in an emergency, of if you're sure no one who doesn't know about magic is watching. Think about ways to conceal your magic. And if you're on camera, it might actually be better that you die rather than use a spell."
"Master Wong," Kaecilius broke in, with his accent that Harry had eventually learned was Danish, "you don't need to scare the children. We have the Runes of Kof-Kol for a reason."
"I hate that spell," Wong argued. "Better to take things seriously than need a memory spell of that magnitude."
"Is that what you used on Stane?" Harry asked, remembering that Wong had adjusted Obie's memory about him and his oddities.
Wong just huffed in acknowledgement, and Kaecilius smiled in triumph. "Certainly, keep your powers a secret. But no one of you should die just to keep that secret. We get so few Hogwarts-trained students as it is."
"How many do you get?" Hermione asked, still not certain she wanted to sign up.
Wong counted up, "Maybe half the kids from Earth stay on Vanaheim after graduating. We get most of the ones that come back. Up to five, some years."
"Which leaves us with under a hundred, across all the sanctums," Kaecilius provided the total, "since so few of the Masters make it to retirement age."
"Now you're scaring the children," Wong chastised.
"The girl has concerns about whether this life is too dangerous," he shrugged. "I have similar concerns, some days."
"So's Hogwarts," Dean shrugged.
"I'd been meaning to ask about that," Wong said. "Cho said something about trolls and a teacher going missing?"
"And she doesn't even know about the dragon," Parvati gushed. She had, of course, spread that fact all the way around Gryffindor about twelve hours after Seamus had found out from Ron, exactly as predicted.
With Parvati spilling the secret adventures of Hogwarts, the other four had little else to do but occasionally provide clarifications.
"I am forced to agree with Mr. Thomas," Kaecilius ultimately stated. "Hogwarts seems quite dangerous."
"I'll brief the other Masters," Wong nodded. "Perhaps the Ancient One can convince the headmaster to warn us of these problems. But, for now, it's time to get all of you back."
"Remember, Goblin Market next Wednesday," Hermione cautioned.
"We're sending a search party for a stabby elf if you aren't there," Dean added.
"I'll see you all then," Harry confirmed.
After they were all through the portals, Kaecilius turned to Wong and asked blandly, "Stabby elf?"
Notes:
Shiväisith translations (I did my best with limited available vocabulary):
Passajamanal onolar elithidhenne äth? "Are you prepared for your sacrifice?"
Harry Potter djonjel nola Hogwarts. "Harry Potter going not to Hogwarts."
Chapter 15: The Greatest of Teachers
Chapter Text
"Virginia Potter!" a plump redheaded woman announced as Harry and Pepper approached the table at the Leaky Cauldron where his friends had joined the entire Weasley contingent. "I haven't seen you since your brother's wedding."
"Molly," Pepper nodded to the woman that Harry figured must have been Ron's mother. "I've been on Midgard." She smiled at the collection of smaller redheads, "I think you only had the three boys at the time."
"With these two on the way," she absently slapped one of the twin's hands as he was trying to slip something into Percy's drink.
The other parents of Harry's friends had clearly already subsided under the avalanche of personality that was Molly Weasley. Jean Granger sat quietly, Dean's mother smiled when she saw Pepper but didn't interrupt, and Mr. Patil sat in between his daughters with a calculating look on his face as if trying to judge all of their friends' intentions. Seamus and Lavender were traveling under the aegis of Molly for the day, and they didn't have any attached adults.
It was probably a given that the balding redheaded man was Mr. Weasley, and long used to letting his wife talk.
"Well, that's everyone, right, Ron?" Mrs. Weasley asked. "Should we crack on or do you and Harry need a pick-me-up, Virginia?"
"I think we're okay," she allowed, not having expected to join a party of nearly twenty to go shopping.
"Aren't we waiting for Neville?" Harry asked.
"His gran wouldn't let him come," Ron said.
Everyone was pretty sad about that. Pepper mouthed, "Frank and Alice?" to Molly and got a head-shake and sad look. Most of the kids missed the exchange, as they headed toward the entry to the Market proper.
"You must be Ginny," Harry said, trying to make conversation with the only Weasley present he hadn't met yet. He knew Ron's little sister was starting that year. The small girl had hair as red as the rest of her family's.
"Eep," was all she said in reply, blushing and going to hide behind her mother, interrupting the chance that Pepper might have to find out what happened to the Longbottoms.
Navigating the giant interdimensional flea market looked like it would prove to be a huge challenge with so many children together, but Molly Weasley began organizing with long practice. "Okay. Everyone group up. Do you see the big clock over there that says it's 9 local time? Anyone that needs to go by the bank is doing so now. Then you'll split off with any parent that will watch you. Yes, Percy, go have a good time."
"We're going to find Lee," one of the twins argued.
"Fine, but wait for the rest of the instructions," Molly stopped them. "And you better not get into any trouble. Now! Meet back up in front of Ollivander's when the clock says it's half past 10, okay? Then we can switch off any groups that want to. Then we're meeting back here at 12 to get lunch. Also, I heard a rumor that there might be some special guests in the pub. That work for everyone? Okay! Break."
Dr. Granger, Ms. Thomas, and Mr. Patil were wide-eyed and they looked to be taking mental parenting notes. Pepper just smiled, having met Molly before: her mothering strategies had evolved with the additional children, but had been firmly in place with the first few.
"We can grab pocket money later, if anyone else wants to go with Harry rather than the bank first," Pepper suggested. Most of the shops at the market had an electronic connection to Gringotts and would allow shoppers to pay that way rather than with cash.
"We'll go!" Lavender suggested, grabbing Parvati. "My money's in the bank. Parv, you can window shop until Padma and your dad get done?"
Mr. Patil sized up Pepper and Harry then nodded.
"We'll try to catch up!" Hermione told them as they separated.
Harry gave his aunt a look as they took off and she whispered to him, "I didn't want anyone to feel bad if they saw your vault." He nodded, knowing that Ron seemed to be pretty touchy about his family's money.
"So what adventures are we doing this year?" Lavender asked Harry, when the three of them had gotten out of earshot of Pepper in the apothecary. Showing she had some tact about gossip, at least to keep it away from the adults, she said, "Parv says there's an elf assassin after you?"
"Could be," Harry shrugged. "Do you know anything about elves? We were going to look it up in the library."
"A little," she admitted. "I think the ones that made peace with Asgard thousands of years ago became the light elves and resettled on Alfheim. It probably wasn't called that until they settled it. Most of the rest of them got called dark elves and wiped out in that war. Well, there are always rumors that a group of them survived and went into hiding. Could be your assassins?"
"I guess dark elves don't all have black skin and white hair?" Harry checked. Both girls looked at him like that was a bizarre thing to ask, so he said, "Just checking! That's how it works in D&D!"
"This is that game we're pretending to play?" Parvati asked? "I guess I should read more about it."
Lavender was about to ask another question about school heroics, but Harry spotted something out of the window and asked, "Wow. Is Malfoy a clone?" He was watching Draco walking along with an almost-identically-colored older man with an identically-pompous walk. "Does that guy have a sword cane?"
"That must be Lucius," Pepper sighed, walking up from another aisle and following Harry's line of sight. "That was the boy you met in the robe shop last year, right? I thought he looked familiar."
"You know Mr. Malfoy?" Lavender asked.
"We're about the same age," she agreed. "His parents were bothering mine about a possible betrothal from the time we were babies. At least until it turned out I didn't have magic, then they were just incredibly rude about it. I wonder who he wound up marrying?"
"Narcissa Black," Lavender answered, finger on the pulse of wizarding relationships.
"Oh, right, I think Sirius mentioned something about that when he was over," Pepper nodded, old memories of pureblood courtships stirred up. "Let's not get in a fight, okay?"
"Yeah," Parvati agreed. "If Draco even sees that Harry's here, he'll be over trying to start a fight."
"He was less obnoxious about it after he almost died in the forest, at least," Harry shrugged.
"But he'll want to show off for his father," Pepper thought, having seen so many spoiled sons of rich men in the years as Tony's assistant.
"Oh, they're leaving the broom stall," Lavender noticed. "You should order a broom so you can play quidditch this year."
Pepper raised an eyebrow and Harry explained, "I think Oliver Wood is basically going to draft me for the team."
His aunt nodded and said, "Let's not go crazy on getting the best one. You've never done organized sports before. I think you might find it really cuts into your free time."
Harry nodded, since he'd been worried about the same thing. Nonetheless, they went to the broom stall across the way and ordered a nice but not-excessively-optimized magical device from a broom manufacturer who went by the maker's name Nimbus. "Big day for me," Mr. Nimbus smiled. "The Malfoys ordered enough of my top-of-the-line to outfit the whole Slytherin team."
"It really doesn't seem fair that these aren't standardized," Parvati suggested.
"Any more than horses are for polo?" Pepper asked. "Rich people sports."
"And if I don't stay on the team, this will work on any planet, right?" Harry confirmed, knowing that they'd used brooms across several planets through the convergences.
"You aren't going to take this out of our house on Earth unless it's an emergency," Pepper cautioned as they were leaving the stall. That reminded her and she added, "And I'm hanging onto the cloak again. We can revisit it if you don't have anything horrifying to tell me at Christmas." Given everything that had been happening with Tony, and her year-long suspicions of Obadiah Stane, she rather expected that having the cloak would be very helpful if she needed to do some light spying for her boss.
They managed to meet back up with the rest of the crew at the robe shop, where all of the children needed their robes adjusted to their increasing height. They swapped Hermione and Dean for Lavender and Parvati, and Dr. Granger seemed to be having a nice time talking with Mr. Patil so they stayed to help chaperone the larger group, and Dean's mother and Pepper talked while the children shopped for their school supplies.
Harry quietly caught his two best friends up on what they'd been up to, and what Lavender had said about elves.
"I think they're called svartalves in the mythology I've been reading online," Hermione added. "Though I guess it's probably not mythology so much as misunderstood history. I wonder if any other world religions are based on encounters with powerful aliens?"
"Isn't that the kind of thing they talk about on cable channels all the time?" Dean asked.
"Well, yes but…" Hermione started, and then she mentally crashed into the idea that any number of conspiracy theories that sane people wrote off could have a basis in fact. "Oh my god! We're part of the illuminati that keeps their existence secret!"
"With spells to erase memories if people find out and everything," Harry nodded. It was less of an adjustment to him because his aunt had told him about it as soon as she thought he could keep his mouth shut, so he'd had much longer to come to grips with the idea. "Wong basically Men in Black flashy-thinged Obie last year."
Hermione was quieter than usual for the rest of the shopping trip, as her brain churned furiously making connections that she hadn't had time to consider while she was soaking in an entire alien world. She stopped by a stall that sold yarn to get the typical red string, clearly with the intention of starting her own wall full of notecards and crazy when she got home.
By the time they met back up for lunch, everyone seemed exhausted from carrying around all their supplies, particularly young Ginny, who had to buy her chemistry cookware and was lugging a cauldron bigger than her head full of other books and supplies. And the inside of the Leaky Cauldron was packed, periodic brief cheers echoing through to punctuate the sound of men talking loudly enough to carry throughout the building.
"Are they here?" Lavender nearly shrieked.
Molly Weasley nodded enthusiastically, "The Warriors Three!"
"Wait, aren't they Aesir?" Hermione asked. "I thought they couldn't reach the Market."
Percy explained, "As I understand it, the royal family and some of the other most powerful Aesir cannot enter the Market at all. Most of the others can, with a bit of discomfort, but cannot temporarily travel to other worlds through the Market as we can." There were nods all around from those who would know (and from the twins, who just wanted to mock their older brother's self-importance).
They managed to squeeze the group in, but it was anyone's guess whether they'd be able to find a table. In the center of the room, three men were essentially holding court. One was speaking the least: a dour-looking fellow who looked like a Vanaheim native with the more common Asiatic features. Another was the biggest "human" Harry had ever seen, larger than Obadiah Stane and nearly as burly as Hagrid, who had a platter of bar food in front of him and was working his way through it, sometimes pausing to add to the story. But the main speaker was thin and blond, with a well-kept goatee, moving about and telling stories of derring-do.
Their giant crowd of students and parents trying to shove into the bar didn't go unnoticed for very long, as the speaking man announced, "And, could it be, none other than Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived!? The three of us have had countless years to build our legends, but here's perhaps the youngest hero of our time. Come on up, young man!"
Harry was very reticent, but between Mrs. Weasley and Lavender shoving him forward, he didn't have much of a choice. "Um, hi everyone?" he said, the audience's attention on him.
The big man boomed around a mouthful of steak fries, "Well, Potter, defeated any more dark wizards lately? You're nearly a young man grown!"
Harry wasn't actually sure how much of his last year's adventures were meant to be discussed in public, though he'd gotten the idea that Aesir and Vanir cultures both loved a good boast. "I've done a few things," he shrugged. "We fought trolls that invaded the school last winter? But that was a lot more the Weasleys than me," he tried to motion Percy, Fred, George, and Ron to join in.
Before the redhead contingent could steal the spotlight, the blond man ruffled his hair, being sure to show the scar off to the pub, "I can't wait to hear that story. And I'll have all the time in the world. You see, what young Mr. Potter and his brave school chums didn't know was that, this school year, I, Fandral the Dashing, have agreed to teach Hogwarts' defense seminar!" He waited for the cheering and applause to die a bit, before explaining, "Yes, indeed, just think of all the things they'll know before I'm done. We tried to get Hogun to teach, but he's far too Grim."
"Har har," the dour man rolled his eyes.
"And I hear Hogwarts has only so many fields of crops to supply the whole castle, so my friend Volstagg wouldn't be interested in such a fixed amount of food."
"I may show up for a feast or two, however!" the big man chortled, gesturing with a bone-in chunk of roasted meat.
"And, speaking of that, don't let me keep you too long, before my Voluminous friend cleans out the bar. I can tell you and your friends are starving. We'll talk later. Anyway, as I was explaining, Thor was off facing down a particularly ornery terror bird while the three of us were being surrounded by its ravenous young…"
They'd finally managed to find a corner in the large pub far from the Warriors Three where they could mostly fit everyone, though it was a crush, when Harry heard, "Bet you loved that, didn't you, Potter?" in Draco Malfoy's unmistakable drawl. He glanced over to see that, indeed, Lucius Malfoy and his mini-me had come strolling up, the crowd parting to admit them. "Famous Harry Potter. Can't even go to a pub without being invited to tell stories to the crowd."
"Leave him alone, he didn't want all that!" Ginny suddenly yelled. Harry had actually almost forgotten she was around, since she steadfastly refused to talk to him or make eye contact.
"Potter, you've got yourself a girlfriend!" Malfoy tried to needle him.
Harry just sighed and spoke loud enough to be heard over the bar, "I mean, I have friends. Some of them are even girls. Do you want me to explain to you what it's like to have friends, Draco?"
Draco's face got red, and before he could say anything else, his father put his snake-headed cane on the boy's shoulder to silence him, "Well, well, well Arthur Weasley," the older Malfoy drawled, in almost exactly the same affected way as Draco, just with a deeper voice. He gave a pregnant pause and a sneer and added, "and guests."
"Lucius," Mr. Weasley nodded coldly.
The man looked like he was about to start something with Arthur, but then he happened to notice Pepper, "And, oh my word, Virginia Potter. Is that who Dumbledore stuck young Harry with? This must be quite the treat, getting to take your wizard nephew to the Market. I assume you settled to marry some shepherd in the periphery, so this must be all so overwhelming."
"Oh, way worse," Pepper said sarcastically, "I'm a spinster just living in a hovel on Midgard." She managed to mimic Lucius' cadence almost perfectly. "Best away before you catch something."
"I shall not be mocked, and certainly not by a squib!" he said, shocked and affronted.
"You brought yourself over here," Arthur Weasley told him, trying to keep his family from committing the murder of a wealthy landowner, at least in public. "Did you have something to say to me?"
"I was going to ask if they were paying you overtime for those raids your department has been doing, but I can see by the company you're keeping and the state of your children's clothing that they certainly are not." Malfoy sneered, adding, "Honestly, can you even afford to eat here? I supposed you're relying on the charity of these Midgardians for lunch?"
"Don't," Pepper said, laying a hand on Arthur's arm. "Lucius, it was lovely to see you again. Do write, please. My address is 'Virginia Potter, Some Goat Shack, Probably on Midgard Somewhere.' Don't let us keep you from your obviously far more important business today." She'd gone back to her normal American accent and Fortune 500 assistant businesslike tones, just as she'd used to end any number of encounters wasting Tony Stark's time.
Harry noticed that the man was angrily clutching the thick black journal he'd been holding down and to his side, but couldn't figure out a way to say anything else without looking like the biggest jerk in the world. After several long seconds clearly trying to figure out a retort, he simply muttered, "Quite. Come, Draco."
"Why'd you stop them?" one of the twins asked.
"It was about to get good!" the other suggested.
Pepper sighed, "He was trying to start a fight. You would be shocked how often that happens in high-stakes business meetings. Try to get the other person to take a swing so you can call the cops on them."
Mr. Weasley had, indeed, been hanging onto the edge of his temper and admitted, "I was thinking about hitting him."
Mrs. Weasley added, "And if our wands worked here, I'd have hexed the man."
Harry shared a look with his Midgardborn friends, all of them realizing just how much of an asset being able to cast spells without a wand might wind up being.
They managed to get out of the Leaky Cauldron without any further incidents or encounters, Hermione and Percy giving everyone one last reminder to finish their summer homework, before parting for their various entry locations. The parents of Midgard did find it a lot more convenient now that their children had figured out the basic ritual to get into the Market, as each was deposited back in the home city they'd entered the pub from.
After a few more days at home, it was time to head back to school. Pepper took the afternoon off to wait for his "ride" to show up, explaining, "Be good. Don't forget to write. Don't do anything dangerous without a plan this year." She'd pretty much given up on him staying completely safe. After all, she knew his father.
"I'll try," Harry sort-of-promised. "There's the portal." A younger man of middling height with dark hair and a short beard stepped through the hole in space. "Luc!" Harry greeted the apprentice sorcerer he'd met during their summer camp. "Aunt Pepper, this is Luc Aster. He's going to have a really hard time when he becomes a Master."
"Master Aster," Pepper got it, nodding to the man. "Do you want to stay for… breakfast, I guess, your time?"
"Just Lucian, please," he corrected her. "And no, thank you ma'am. Just doing my apprentice duty as a taxi service for very important children." He tried to say it as a joke, but Pepper got the vibe that he was being more honest than he'd intended.
"Well, you're doing us a big favor, as much as you feel like it's a duty. Let me know if there's anything we can do to pay you back. Have a good trip, Harry!" she said, giving him a hug and shooing him off to blithely step to the opposite side of the planet.
Already used to the drill from the year before, Harry had actually eaten before traveling to Kamar-Taj, availed himself of the guest bedroom to take a nap without complaint, and then spent the rest of the "flying to London" time hanging out with the sorcerers that he'd gotten to know over their week of summer camp. For their own part, the adults tolerated having a precocious twelve-year-old pretty well, mostly bemused that he seemed to take the training seriously and thought of them all as buddies.
Padma, Parvati, and Harry met Dean as he was walking through the portal room from New York, and all four stepped through to meet Hermione. "Hello, everyone!" she greeted them enthusiastically. "Master Rama already took the new first-years to the station, so we're on our own this time. I told him he should go without us because there was one boy that seemed like he was obsessed with possibly meeting Harry."
"Thanks, Hermione," Harry acknowledged.
The trip to Charing Cross wasn't long, though five pre-teens marching along dragging wooden trunks through London on a random Tuesday morning raised the occasional eyebrow. They were about to march into the station when they spotted Seamus frantically dragging his own trunk up. "Harry! Good!" their roommate told them. "The cops're lookin' for ye."
"The cops?" Harry asked, wondering what he could have possibly done.
"Yeah! They're stoppin' boys goin' through wi' dark hair. I knew they were lookin' for ye 'cause they asked me t'lift me hair and show 'em me fore'ead."
"But they didn't say 'Harry Potts'?" Hermione checked. Seamus shook his head.
"That elf?" Dean guessed.
"He knew my name, but maybe?" Harry shrugged. A murderous elf calling in an anonymous tip with his description was as good a possibility as anything else. "I really wish Aunt Pepper hadn't kept my cloak."
"Honestly, boys, always going for the big solution," Hermione rolled her eyes. "Parvati, do you have a makeup kit? I'm not allowed to wear makeup yet, but I know you and Lavender were…"
"On it," Parvati nodded, pulling a fairly large box out of her bag. "My concealer's a bit dark for Harry, but I got some for Lavender to try as well…"
"Makeup?" Harry asked, eyes widening.
"Hold still, you big baby," Parvati grinned, then dabbed a bit of makeup onto Harry's scar, using a pad to blend it in. "I don't think it will hold up if they really look, but it should be okay for a glance."
"Perfect," Hermione nodded. "Anyone have a ballcap?" Dean fished one out. "Okay, Harry, now just take your glasses off, and let's put the hat on so it covers your hair but leaves your forehead uncovered like you have nothing to hide. And try to stay behind Dean and Seamus."
They made it into the terminal and thought they had a clear shot at the convergence, before they noticed a police officer strolling over their direction. Feeling like she was left out of the whole escapade so far, Padma moved up to intercept the man and said, "Excuse me, officer? Are you looking for a boy with a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead? I think I go to school with him. I saw him at the grocery on the way in." She pointed back toward the entrance and away from her friends.
"Thanks, miss," the officer nodded, clearly all too happy to have whatever wild chase that had them looking for a dark-haired boy with a scar over with.
As the children managed to pile through the portal to Vanaheim, an angular figure, his pointed ears concealed in a hat, cursed in a language never spoken on Midgard and slipped through after them. His best efforts to keep Harry Potter from getting to Hogwarts had failed, and there was no way he could confront the child in the middle of a crowd on Vanaheim, but perhaps he could still figure out a way to get the boy to leave the school…
Chapter 16: Thrust and Parry
Chapter Text
"Can I sit in here?" Neville Longbottom asked, poking his dark-haired head into the compartment.
"Of course, Neville," Hermione offered, but then tried to figure out where he would sit. Lavender had met them shortly after they got on the train, while Padma had gone to sit with her Ravenclaw friends, leaving the Gryffindor girls on one side of the compartment and Harry, Dean, and Seamus on the other. Honestly, they might not even be able to comfortably fit six of them in there in a couple more years.
"It's alright, I'm gonna sit wi' Ron anyway," Seamus said. "I see 'im out there. Looks like Malfoy's makin' another attempt at a donnybrook wi' his da."
Neville sighed, "Yeah. He and Draco both stopped me on the way in. Wanted to make fun of me for not being on the Market trip."
"They weren't invited, you just couldn't make it," Parvati assured him. "We'd have gladly traded."
"Help me move me trunk an' ye can have this seat," Seamus offered, and the boys managed to get their trunks swapped, Seamus heading out to flag down the Weasleys.
"Sorry I couldn't make it," Neville apologized as he sat down. "Gran heard the Warriors Three would be there and refused to go. And she didn't trust me without her."
"She doesn't like the Warriors Three?" Dean asked.
"One of them broke her heart," Lavender said. "Or at least, that's what the stories say."
"Wait, is one of them your granddad?" Harry checked.
Neville shook his head. "It was when she was much younger. She met my grandfather after."
Hermione worked it out and suggested, "Lifespan difference?"
He nodded, "Vanir live a long time, but not nearly as long as Aesir."
"What about Hogun the Grim?" Dean checked, remembering the Vanir member of the group.
Lavender answered, "Some one-time only boon from an adventure extended his life. And even then, he'll die way before his friends do. Probably why he's so depressed all the time."
"Obviously Vanir and Midgardians can breed," Harry said, gesturing at himself. "What about Aesir?"
"Oh, I know!" Hermione interjected before Neville or Lavender could answer. "They can, but the child's lifespan is much closer to a Vanir than an Aesir. So they don't do it very often. Probably for the same reason they wouldn't stay with Neville's grandmother?" That got nods, but then she realized, "But isn't Frigga from Vanaheim? And probably a lot of the other Asgardian royals?"
"Odinforce, maybe?" Lavender guessed. "Has to be some benefits to being married to a king who's basically a god." She thought about it for a second and admitted, "But, it's still weird to think of your gran as a beautiful shieldmaiden, even if it was decades ago." Neville looked down, embarrassed, but everyone else was curious, not having met Mrs. Longbottom yet. "She's… imposing more than beautiful. Wears a stuffed vulture on her hat."
"I saw that when we came back for the summer!" Dean realized. "I thought there was some weird bird alien in the crowd."
"No. That's just Jimothy," Neville sighed. "She says he was a very good familiar to her when he was alive."
"Anyway, so, Parv says that you nearly got stopped getting onto the train," Lavender changed the subject. "The elf again?"
"An elf?" Neville asked, not having heard about any of this.
Harry sighed and resigned himself to telling the story of the elf assassin again, knowing he'd just have to recount it for Ron and Seamus later. "But after, this, I want to explain D&D so we can all get our stories straight. And we might actually want to play for real. There's a new edition and everything!"
They had all more or less understood the rules and made characters by the time they reached the Hogsmeade station. The ride had been pretty laid-back. Malfoy had swung by at one point looking like he was going to try to start something, and decided he didn't like the odds with six people in the compartment against him and his two bodyguards.
The welcome feast turned out to be a lot less stressful once you weren't the one getting sorted, though Ron complained about having to wait to eat until all the new first-years had taken their turn with the Helm of Sorting. Gryffindor got both Ginny Weasley and the boy that Hermione had been trying to shield Harry from in London, Colin Creevey.
"You're Harry Potts! Can I get your picture?" the boy with short, mouse-brown hair asked, shoving in to sit close to Harry and his friends. He gestured at the large camera hanging around his neck, "I got an old SLR that doesn't have any electronics, so it should work here!"
"Aren't you Midgardborn, so how do you even already know about…" Harry began to ask, then his brain caught up with his ears, "Wait, you said Potts."
The boy nodded enthusiastically, "Right. You're Pepper Potts' nephew. I've seen you with her in the background of Stark Industries press events! My dad's going to be so excited!"
"Your dad?" Harry asked, adrift in the conversation. And if he was lost, all of his friends were particularly confused. Those that had met Tony at least had an idea what Stark Industries was, but nobody could figure out what Colin's connection was.
"Mark Creevey. He's co-inventor of the Don't Forget the Milk task management app! We have a new version that works on Starkphones!" the boy explained.
Harry's eyes widened as he realized that an eleven-year-old was basically trying to network with him about a smartphone application. He explained, "I don't really get my picture taken if I can help it. You know, the whole wizard thing. Don't want that out there. But…" and he hesitated to offer since he had talked to the boy for thirty seconds, already found him very annoying, and couldn't imagine how annoyed Tony would be meeting his father, "...if we're all in London again this Christmas, you might be able to meet Tony? He was around last year, and some of these guys met him."
Colin took in the nods from Dean, Hermione, Seamus, and Parvati and his face broke into a wide grin. "That. Would. Be. Awesome!" he almost yelled, and managed to wriggle in a way that shoved Seamus and got him sitting a little closer to Harry, and began to explain, "Also, I'm into photography, obviously, usually digital but you know how it is here, so I'm learning to use an analog…"
After half the dinner of Colin trying to aggressively befriend him, Harry was thrilled when the Weasley twins moved down, picked the boy up, and moved him bodily down to to the other end of the table. Somehow, they made it look playful instead of mean, as Oliver Wood, head of the house quidditch team, slid into the vacated spot. "Got a broom?" the burly Scot asked, without preamble.
"Made by Mr. Nimbus," Harry nodded.
"He meks good brooms," Wood approved. "I'm no' actually allowed t'say ye've got th' spot 'til tryouts, but we're goin' t'do some post-summer warmups Sunday mornin', first thin'. We'd like ye tae come. Sound good?"
"I think I can make that," Harry agreed. "But I need to see what the workload is like this year before I can fully commit."
"Ye'll adapt. Second year's easy," Wood waved off. He noticed Ron working up his courage to speak and added, "Ye n'all, Weasley, alreit? Yer brothers say ye prefer keeper, so thir's not really a spot, but we'll try ye for alternate, if I'm out. Sound good?" The redhead nodded gratefully and so Wood said, "Anywan else, tryouts next week, but we've got a pretty good team other'n seeker, so dinnae get yer hopes up. Seeya." He got up and headed back up the table to sit with his friends again.
Pretty soon, the food was being cleared away and Headmaster Dumbledore made his usual yearly speech. This year there was not a deadly corridor announced, just the usual rules about fighting, pranks, and the forest. He closed with, "And I'm pleased to introduce our defense seminar instructor for the year, though I'm certain he needs no introduction, as the Warriors Three are renowned far and wide. Please greet Fandral the Dashing." He then gestured to the beaming blond man who they'd met at the pub.
"Professor the Dashing is fine," he said, then corrected, "I kid. I kid. You may all simply call me Fandral. But that's as short as you go. I'm 'Fandy' to my mother and no one else!" He gave a winning smile, the light almost twinkling off of his teeth. "I look forward to seeing you all in class."
Harry thought he spotted dreamy looks and swoons across most of the female students, no few of the male students, and even a few of the professors. He joked with Dean, "Maybe last year's teacher would have gotten the same reaction if she'd ditched the fake warts."
Dean smirked, "We still just have your word on that. Nobody else saw her without the disguise. Careful you don't get hung up on green women."
"Captain Kirk complex," Hermione added, tuning in on the conversation as they started to stand to head back to their dorms. "Only I was reading about the effects of media representation on formative human sexuality, and the number of fetishes we're in danger of developing right now is truly amazing…"
The dimensional jet lag was a little easier to get used to their second year of it, but all the kids still crashed hard as soon as they got to their dorms and confirmed all of their belongings had been delivered.
Schedules arriving at breakfast, they learned that Mondays were fairly light for them as second-years, with just Rector McGonagall and Professor Binns' classes in the morning and flying as an optional class in the afternoon. Mostly, they were encouraged to nap or get a jump on homework, since they had cosmology in the evening.
"We should see if we can get Binns to tell us about elves," Hermione suggested.
"Worth a try," Harry agreed. "Hard to get that ghost off his lesson plan, though."
She tried nonetheless, asking the centuries-old ghost, "Professor, can you tell us anything about elves? Are there any that go to other worlds. Maybe as assassins?"
"Ah!" that seemed to get the ghost's attention, and he suggested, "Mistress Grant, yes?"
"Granger, sir."
"Granger, yes. For thousands of years the elves of which you are speaking have been legend, rumor, and conspiracy: the Dahvee. The name means 'those who would welcome the curse" in Shiväisith, the tongue of the dark elves." He walked heedlessly through his teaching lectern (which was mostly an affectation anyway) to pace through the aisles of the class in his normal instructional manner. "Whom amongst thee can tell me what they already know about elves?"
"They live on Alfheim and hardly ever leave," Draco scoffed. Hermione was worried that this was the other class they shared with the Slytherins, and didn't want Draco knowing about the assassin.
"Those are the light elves, yes, Master Appleleaf," Binns agreed.
"Malfoy, sir," Draco corrected.
"Same basic meaning," the ghost waved off. "But, yes, those are the elves of Alfheim that sided with Asgard in the conflict with their own kind. Some five thousand Vanaheim years ago it was, in the time of King Bor. They resettled from Svartalfheim and were altered through Asgardian medicine to survive outside of the strange environment of their homeworld. The original elves of Svartalfheim believed that they had originated from Ginnungagap, the void between worlds and the space that existed before the creation of the universe.
"This be, of course, nonsense, but they believed these concepts as their native religion. They were a racewide death cult, committed to the extermination of all other life in the universe in an attempt to render all matter back into void." Binns paused and shuddered, "I have seen it with my own dead eyes—Ginnungagap. Above such a yawning void of impossibility floats Niflheim, as does Asgard itself. You would fall eternally, the rules of matter ceasing, unless you were summoned free by someone with power to rival Odin himself. Death and imprisonment on Niflheim be greatly preferable."
"So why did the elves want to go there. And who are the Dahvee?" Hermione pulled the professor back from his tangent.
"The dark elves believed that they would rule over Ginnungagap once all other life had ceased. They did seem to have greater control over existing in the void than others, through some magic or technology," Binns admitted. "So invested were they in this mission that they would give no peace or quarter, so King Bor was forced into wiping out the entire race. Each elf was committed to eternal war, save for the relative few that became the light elves." He paused for effect then added, "But it be nearly impossible to truly destroy an entire race, even should their morale be harder than the iron they eschewed.
"Some few of them survived and went to ground, it is believed, and they spent thousands of years in a secret campaign against the other Nine Realms. No longer able to threaten nations, they serve as mercenaries and assassins, seeking to distribute death and accumulate funds against some eventual resurgence. Or the tale is such. Since conspiring with remnant forces of one of the foremost enemies of Asgard remains a crime across the Realms, there is little verifiable knowledge of these ideas."
With the pronouncement about hiring assassins and doing crimes, all eight Gryffindor students glared balefully at Draco. The boy rolled his eyes, but didn't deny or protest the accusations.
"Well!" Binns clapped his hands together soundlessly and stated, "With that lovely introduction, we move on to this year's topic: events of the reign of King Bor of Asgard."
They had their first defense class with Fandral first thing on Tuesday morning. Harry was pretty sure he was never going to get used to calling it Tyr's Day. Tyr barely even seemed that important in Asgardian history to justify his own day. They'd asked Percy Weasley about it at one point, and he'd suggested that it might have been a deliberate snub against Loki, the only member of the royal family without a day named after him.
Presumably that was the kind of question Fandral might be able to answer, as close as he was with the rulers of Asgard. They dutifully filed into the classroom he'd chosen, and there were murmurs of approval at all the gleaming steel and polished wood melee weapons mounted in racks around the room, available in sizes useful for training from first-year to seventh. The man himself lounged across the corner of a large oak desk pushed back to leave a clear space in the front of the room. There were no desks for the students, only chairs. Clearly this was meant to be a class for watching and doing, but not for excessive note-taking.
Once they'd all sat down, joined by the Hufflepuffs they shared defense classes with, Fandral said, "Is that everyone? Excellent. For those that missed my introduction, I'm Fandral the Dashing, and you can simply call me Fandral. This year we'll be teaching you how to fight with weapons. I know that magical types tend to rely on spells, but there are many places and times in this cosmos where cold steel beats finger-waving. I myself fought a particularly dastardly magician a few years ago, who thought that his witchcraft would avail him against my valorous blade. You see, we were checking a tomb that the locals told us was haunted by a necromancer, and…"
He was a very good speaker, and the class was hanging on his story, which he got through in twenty minutes of class time. Some of the boys were starting to look longingly at the practice weapons by the end, but the girls seemed rapt at attention, particularly when the handsome Asgardian moved to demonstrate something he'd done.
"...and I hear there's still a bit of a stubborn stain where the man fell, forever etched into the stone of the tomb, as an example to others that would use their gifts for evil. Anyway, look at me rambling on! Before we can proceed, I need a brief idea of where we're starting from. I assume it might be from nothing, but I understand you at least have some unarmed training from the last year? Let's start with Harry. What kind of weapons training do you have?"
"Just the training from last year," Harry told him, not really expecting that noting his extensive experience with how melee weapons were rendered in various fighting and action games would count. "We did some work with knives." The rest of the class nodded at that.
"Knives are the go-to weapon for many magicians," Fandral agreed, in a way that made them seem somehow unfair. "Crown Prince Loki himself favors them. And, I admit, they're an excellent backup weapon in tight quarters or a grapple. But the reach and force of a full-sized weapon will win against them in any fight without such limitations. Well, unless you decide to master illusion magic like the prince, who prefers to down our foes from surprise." Again, it was clear that he found that manner of fighting completely distasteful. "Okay, next?"
Most of the rest of the class had the same answer as Harry, until Fandral got to Dean, who explained, "I've been doing karate—Midgardian unarmed martial arts—since I was little. And we've done a bit of practice with various weapons. Mostly staff, but some with various shorter sticks. I wanted to learn nunchaku—two short sticks on a rope or chain—but they're illegal in my city."
"A fine list of weapons at your age," Fandral allowed. "I think I know the tools of which you speak. If I'm not mistaken, that art was invented by oppressed Midgardian peasants, who had to fight with whatever farm implements were available. You'll find similar traditions on many worlds. It's perhaps with no little irony that such simple weapons are illegal in cities where tools used by the upper classes remain in common use. I'd wager a simple woodcutting axe remains perfectly legal, yes? And yet far more deadly."
Dean nodded, "Yeah, they even have fire axes on the wall in a lot of buildings, you know, in case you need to chop down a door or something during a fire."
"Hah! A 'fire axe' means something far different in Nine Realms parlance, with the threat of running into the denizens of Muspelheim around any given corner. The last time I faced a minion of Surtr, he was wielding such an axe…"
That story only took about five minutes.
"Now, what about you, miss?" he eventually finished up and called on Hermione.
"The same as everyone else," she started, but then added, "well, except that I took a stage combat seminar with my mum last year, so I've wielded a rapier a bit."
"Ah, yes, stage combat! You remind me a bit of the Lady Sif, one of our frequent companions on our adventures. Why, I remember one time when one of the actresses of Asgard was trying to follow us around on an adventure and get a proper understanding of Sif's mannerisms and fighting style for enhanced authenticity. We'd hoped to keep the lass to the less truly dangerous adventures, perhaps show her a few feast halls and run off a handful of bandits, but we happened upon a village that was in dire need due to raids of näcken from the nearby lake…"
The stories continued, and he'd gotten only through about three-quarters of the students before the bell sounded to move them onto their next period class.
"Well, we'll pick this up next time," Fandral waved them all away.
"I thought we'd get to do some fighting," Harry complained as they were walking to another session of their class with Binns.
"Surely next time," Hermione assured him. "It's a process. He has so much to tell us and so little time." She still had a dreamy look in her eye from being compared to Sif.
"Pay attention, Granger!" Draco shouted, rushing past them on the way to the classroom and slapping the books she was carrying out of her hands. His bodyguards and Pansy Parkinson laughed as the four Slytherins rushed ahead of them and into the room.
"What?!" she asked, confused and incensed, as she stooped down to pick up her books with her friends' help.
Parvati sighed, "They've discovered sitcom bullying this year. I heard they did it to several people yesterday, including some of our first-years. One of them was your sister, Ron."
"He is your nemesis," Harry suggested, putting the last book back on Hermione's stack with a nod of thanks from her. "You going to get him back?"
Ron gave a sly smile and said, "Yeah. If the Slytherins want to battle, they'll see that Gryffindor does not back down!"
Hermione sighed, because she'd hoped that Draco would just get bored with the dumb behavior in a few days, and said, "Maybe we should have gotten on to dueling in Fandral's class so you boys would have gotten this out of your systems…"
Chapter 17: The Caller in Darkness
Chapter Text
By Halloween (or Dísablót, as it was known on Vanaheim), they still hadn't learned to swordfight. Three class periods a week, and Fandral managed to fill nearly every moment of time with stories of his and his friends' heroism. Sometimes they'd get a weapon down from the wall and pretend that that day they were finally going to get to swing them around, but the Asgardian would quickly get distracted by something, anything about the lesson and be off on another story. The other years said they had pretty much the same kind of thing going on in their own classes.
He was an enthralling storyteller, but Harry was beginning to wonder if he was a total fraud who didn't actually know how to swing a sword. The closest they came to practicing combat was when Harry got enlisted to come up in front of the class and help Fandral act out some bit of storytelling that needed visual aids to understand positioning in the fight. He was starting to consider just trying to run the guy through in their next mock duel to see if he'd accidentally succeed.
It didn't help that only Dean and a few of the other guys seemed to even notice. The girls still seemed completely taken with the handsome hero, and even the students that didn't spend each class swooning at his pretty face were largely happy that his class required zero homework. They'd even each won a ton of class participation points just from helping Fandral segue to another topic in his stories.
Harry grudgingly admitted one class with no homework was Odin-sent with his new sports commitments. Oliver Wood was a harsh taskmaster, and had quickly filled every spare moment of Harry's time with quidditch practice.
At its root, the game was pretty much just basketball or soccer played with small teams in midair, but Harry's role was special and somewhat complicated. He was what was called the seeker, and his main role was to essentially serve as a mobile distraction. He wasn't allowed to touch the main ball used to score goals, but could move to foul passes between the rival team. Similarly, the team members (beaters) charged with using bats to direct the aggressive secondary balls (bludgers) would get fouls called if they hit him, so he could run a dangerous game of trying to interpose himself between the opposing beaters and his own teammates.
He was also meant to be looking for an elusive tiny golden ball called the snitch, the catching of which ended the game. But it tried hard to not even show itself until the scores were getting pretty high, and he didn't want to catch it when his team was down in points. Vanaheim had toyed with a point bonus for catching it, and interdimensional competitions sometimes used the rule, but that was generally considered unfair after centuries of iteration. Half the time, a seeker would chase after the snitch purely to block the rival seeker from catching it while their team was ahead.
Part of Wood's obsession with training Harry was that one of the rival seekers in question was Draco Malfoy, whose father had followed through on buying the entire Slytherin team Nimbus-made brooms. The Gryffindor quidditch captain was hoping to make up with skill the disadvantage they'd face in their first match of the year due to the brand new brooms of the opposition.
By letter, Aunt Pepper had resolutely told Harry he wasn't allowed to just buy all his friends new brooms. She wisely cautioned that doing so would not help his desire to keep a low profile and not be thought of as a rich celebrity.
Mostly, Harry was just hoping that Wood calmed down some after their match against the Slytherin team, which was scheduled for a week after the Halloween feast.
At least the days the Gryffindor second-years had a light class load didn't really overlap with the other members of the quidditch team, so Harry had some time to do homework. Well, it was also time where Dean drilled them mercilessly on their martial arts and wandless spellcasting. They were almost producing more than just mostly-harmless motes of light, and were hoping to basically only be a year behind their wand-based casting. Using wands, they were beginning to learn the rudiments of manipulating space in their spellcasting class, and Harry had dreams of talking the Masters into giving them sling rings early so they could teleport themselves from their homes to London.
"I think we're really close to getting an energy whip," Hermione said, tired after their afternoon exercises before the Halloween feast. "The sparks are starting to cohere."
"It's so much easier with the wand," Harry complained. "You just think about the whip and it… whips."
"And that's why so many stay on Vanaheim, I guess," Hermione shrugged. Notably, the Patils had been going to fewer and fewer of the extracurricular study sessions. They still showed up for classwork, but were starting to see the hard road ahead of them to learn to do magic in the style of Kamar-Taj, and didn't seem to like it. Lately, it had mostly just been the three of them doing martial arts and wandless magic.
Dean shook his head, annoyed, as they walked through the portrait barrier into the Gryffindor common room. "If Fandral ever lets us actually fight, they're all going to regret getting out of shape."
"I'm sure he'll ease us into it," Hermione countered. She was still as smitten with the Asgardian teacher as anyone else. "He knows that we haven't had the opportunity to practice. And we're learning so much. He's such an excellent orator."
"Surprised you're not mad there's no homework," Harry told her, sharing an eye roll behind her back with Dean.
"His style is based on oral testing," she shrugged. "We're certainly earning plenty of points from discussion in class, and I'm sure he'll take that into account when assigning grades. I mean, I do hope that he'll give us a big research presentation or two to present to the class, of course."
"It's supposed to be a weapons combat class," Dean grumbled.
Neville was working on something in the common room, books laid out in front of him as they walked through, and Harry asked, "Hey Nev, getting a jump on homework?"
He nodded, "I'm tired of Snape constantly bullying me in class. I want to get this essay right." He paused and seemed to be drawing on his courage, eyes down, and asked, "Are you going to the feast tonight?"
"I guess so," Harry shrugged. "Why?"
Neville explained, "Sir Nicholas talked me into going to the Deathday celebration instead. With the school ghosts. And I don't want to go by myself. I figured, since you don't really want to celebrate…"
"Oooh, a Deathday!" Hermione added. "That might be more interesting than the feast. I knew the ghosts had to come and go from Niflheim some years on Dísablót, but didn't realize that the living could be invited. Is it in the castle?"
Neville nodded, "Somewhere in the dungeons. Sir Nicholas is going to take me down when it's time."
"So it's just ghosts going through a portal to Niflheim?" Dean checked. Hermione nodded so he said, "I'm… going to choose the feast, if that's okay with everyone."
"Save us some food?" Harry suggested, and Dean nodded his agreement. He glanced over to where he could see a lock of red hair peeking from around the side of a high backed chair turned away from them and asked, "You want to come, too, Ginny?"
"Eep!" the youngest Weasley said, the stray bit of hair disappearing as she crouched back down from eavesdropping. In the past two months, she had continued to be tongue tied around Harry.
"It's really quite okay," Hermione added.
"Umm. Maybe. Luna might want to come too?" the girl's voice emerged from behind the chair.
"Sure?" Harry shrugged. He wasn't sure who Luna was, other than knowing she wasn't one of the other Gryffindor first-years. "That's okay, right Nev?"
Their year-mate nodded a little pathetically, seeming overwhelmed that this had turned into a whole outing when he'd just been looking for a little moral support. "I guess so. I don't want everyone to miss dinner, but if you want to go…"
"That's settled then," Hermione nodded importantly. "Ginny, go tell this Luna about it and let us know if you're both going. We'll meet back here in an hour?" She was just guessing that the Deathday would begin around sunset.
"Luna" turned out to be a tiny pale girl with hair almost as blond as Malfoy's, a dreamy expression, and a necklace made of mead corks. Harry thought he'd seen her around at the Ravenclaw table. "You sure you want to go into the dungeons with bare feet?" he asked, noticing that she wasn't wearing shoes.
"Oh, all my shoes have gone walking off on their own right now," she said. "But I'm getting used to it, and I'm sure it won't be too bad."
"Let me get you a pair of shoes, Luna," Ginny insisted. "I'll be back."
"Ginny takes such good care of me. And my feet," the new girl observed as Ginny ran back through the portrait. "Oh, do you not have to answer a riddle to get into your common room?"
"Do you for yours?" Harry asked.
"Oh, yes, every time. So much less secure than simply being keyed to the wards, but Rowena Ravenclaw wanted her dormitory open to all those who sought knowledge."
Hermione's eyes widened as she realized that they could visit the dorm if they could just answer a riddle. "I wonder why Padma never mentioned that?"
"I'm probably not supposed to have said," Luna shrugged. "Most of the older students don't like the idea of other houses using our library."
"You have your own library?" Hermione asked.
"A small one," the blond girl shrugged. "Only slightly bigger than what he's carrying."
Neville shrugged with some effort as she pointed at him, his satchel clearly bulging, "I think I'll just sit and work on my homework, if this isn't too interesting."
Luna looked like she was about to comment, but Ginny came out of the portrait hole with a pair of shoes and a small journal. "You also have books. Were we supposed to bring books?" Luna asked.
"I thought I'd take some notes. Fandral might think it's interesting," Ginny shrugged, clearly as smitten with the defense instructor as any other girl in the castle. "Here, I think my shoes still fit you. They're sandals, but they're better than bare feet."
"Thank you," Luna said, sitting down to buckle on the sandals. "I'll give these back to you before they decide to go walking off as well."
Forgetting that she was scared to talk to Harry, while Luna was putting the sandals on, the redhead mouthed to the second-years, "Her roommates steal her shoes." She was clearly upset about it on her friend's behalf.
Hermione and Harry shared a look, resolving to ask Padma about it later.
"Greetyngs! So manie yonge ones to accompanie me to the celebration," Sir Nicholas said, moving translucently onto the stairwell through a nearby wall. "Ye have outdone thyself, Longbottom." The old Asgardian knight's head tilted just slightly off-kilter, a permanent sign of his incomplete decapitation. "Shal we goon?"
"Ready!" Luna agreed, standing up in Ginny's sandals. "Do you think there will be many of the departed visiting, sir knight?"
"Aright, this ys the nyght to visite," the ghost explained as they walked down the stairs. "Manie will come simply to change privetee and talen, while somme come to abide a tyme. For myself, I must spend a year yn Niflheim, bifore I am once agayn allowed to walk freely yn this castle."
"Tough break," Harry consoled the ancient ghost. He saw that Hermione was moving ahead to interrogate him, and decided that he could get the translation later without as much of a headache trying to parse the Middle English. Instead, he asked, "So, Luna, you and Ginny are friends?"
"We live near each other," Luna nodded. "You're Harry Potter."
"Oh, right, sorry, forgot to introduce myself," Harry agreed. "That's Hermione Granger, and this is Neville Longbottom."
"What's Midgard like?" Luna asked, an almost non sequitur. "Have you ever seen a platypus?"
"Not in person. I saw an echidna at the zoo, though. They're also monotremes." Harry was quite proud of remembering the name of the least-common kind of mammal.
"Do those have a poison claw?" she asked.
"Not sure. You're into weird animals?"
"Into? You mean, interested in? Yes. Daddy prints a newspaper mostly focused on the secret and the unusual, and we frequently go on expeditions to find new creatures. We're hoping to see a crumple-horned snorkack one of these days," the girl explained as they moved across the entry foyer and started heading for the dungeons. "But it would be neat to see Midgardian creatures as well. Komodo dragons. Ocelots. Koalas."
"Careful you don't mistake those for drop bears," Harry joked, remembering how Happy had tried to sell him on the dangers of the Australian Outback.
"Oh, no, I've already seen a drop bear," Luna waved off. "They're not so bad if you wear the right kind of hat."
Unable to tell if the girl was messing with him, deluded, or had honestly seen the inspiration for the drop bear myth on Vanaheim, Harry just shrugged. "Are you allowed to come to Earth? I bet the London zoo has a bunch of animals from all over the planet?"
"I don't think we're supposed to, since the people of your planet are allowed to be ignorant of the Nine Realms. But I'll ask daddy if we can apply to the Ministry for a travel pass. Thank you, Harry Potter. But it seems we're at the convergence," the strange girl told him.
The large room in the dungeon was nearly freezing, translucent figures of the castle ghosts milling about near the rift that was slowly forming against the far wall. Harry thought that they might be directly under the lake. With the ghosts lacking much ability to interact with the world, the room was all but barren, cold stone with a few magical torches to push back the gloom for the living. There weren't even cobwebs, as the spiders of the castle likely avoided the deathly area as much as any other living creature.
Niflheim was conceptually strange.
A core belief of most of the Aesir and Vanir was that the souls of the dead went to one of two places. Those that died a meaningful death, particularly in battle, went to Valhalla. Everyone else went to Niflheim. But, like many religious beliefs, most of that was hard to prove. Nobody had conclusively been to Valhalla and come back. And while there were clearly ghosts that came and went from Niflheim, it was impossible to be certain whether everyone else went there, or merely those who, like in Midgardian ghost stories, had unfinished business. There might even be some component of needing a convergence or other mystical connection to Niflheim nearby when you died to enable the journey.
Professor Sinistra, while making a point that she wasn't trying to upset anyone's religious beliefs, had explained one theory that the draugr of Niflheim weren't truly the souls of the departed. Some scholars argued that the native beings of the death planet were simply entities without strong lived experiences of their own that took on the memories and appearance of those that died near them. It was dangerous and difficult enough for the living to go to Niflheim that nobody had really gotten conclusive proof of this theory, particularly since the authorities of Asgard weren't interested in funding such a mission whose success would throw the state religion into fundamental doubt.
Whether a spectral entity that remembered being you was basically the equivalent of being a soul or not was probably a question that would keep the philosophers of Earth publishing for quite some time.
Even if they weren't truly the souls of the dead, all the ghosts of the castle had shown up. In addition to Professor Binns and the four house ghosts—Hufflepuff's friar, Slytherin's jarl, Ravenclaw's lady, and Sir Nicholas—there were half a dozen other spectral figures that Harry vaguely thought he'd seen in passing around the school. Mostly, the ghosts tended to stick to the dungeons during the day, which suited Harry just fine.
"Ah, living witnesses," Professor Binns nodded, and the other ghosts gave various greetings in the largely-unintelligible variants of English they spoke. It wasn't certain whose theory was supported by the difficulty the castle ghosts had in updating their language to the times, especially since they did a lot of talking. There was little else for them to do. For as creepy as the room was, the ghosts were spaced out in twos and threes having animated chats like people would at any party.
"Did we make a mistake?" Harry whispered to Hermione.
"It'll just be like making small talk when my parents take me to their dentist business meetings," she tried to give it a positive reframe. She couldn't help but append, "But where nobody speaks English and the heater is broken."
They gave it their best effort, Luna seeming to have the easiest time chatting with the ghosts as if she spoke enough Old English to get by. Ginny gave up before the convergence even stabilized, citing that she needed to go eat and giving vague apologies as she left the room. Harry, Hermione, and Neville mostly stood around nodding politely, understanding maybe one word in six. The speech of the ghosts had a lot of the same cadence and sounds of Modern English, but comprehension was just tantalizingly out of reach.
Finally, the hole in reality seemed to reach a point where travel was possible, and they could make out vague shadows of rolling hills and stone monuments through the misty portal. Returning ghosts began to emerge, done with their timeshare in the lands of the dead. At the forefront of the pack was a girl in robes with large round glasses who didn't look much older than Harry and Hermione. She immediately locked on to Hermione and asked, "You! Nobody's messed up my lavatory while I've been gone, have they?"
"Which one's yours?" she asked.
"The girls' facilities on the second floor, right by the great stair," the ghost clarified.
"Well, one of the sinks doesn't work," Hermione considered. "But it's otherwise fine."
"That sink's never worked. Good," the ghost girl nodded. Then she noticed Harry and said, "You're cute. I like your glasses. I'm Myrtle. Come visit me in my lavatory any time." With that odd pronouncement, she sashayed off, tossing a look over her shoulder to see if Harry was watching her walk away.
He was. He'd never been flirted with by a ghost before. She grinned in triumph as she left the room.
Meanwhile, Neville had gotten trapped in a conversation with another new arrival and seemed to be flailing while trying to explain something about his homework to the ghost. They were moving over to save him when Sir Nicholas announced, "Wel! I must depart. Farewel! I shall see ye al next year."
By the time everyone had said their goodbyes, Neville had extricated himself and joined them, but it still took them another half an hour before they were able to politely make their goodbyes from the haunted cocktail party.
"That's not every year, is it?" Harry checked, as they were leaving the dungeons to see if the feast was still going.
Hermione said, "I believe the convergence happens every year, but the party only happens on years when several ghosts are switching in and out.
"I'll be sad to see Helena go," Luna suggested. "But she'll be back next year." Off of the curious looks she explained, "The Grey Lady. She's very nice, though quiet and unhappy."
Before they could follow up or decide whether to chance going into the great hall, a strange echoing whisper drifted from upstairs, "Rip… tear… kill…"
"Well that can't be good," Harry deadpanned. Then noticed everyone else looking at him oddly. "The rip, tear, kill thing?" Three still-confused faces regarded him like he was making a joke or going crazy. "You guys didn't hear the whispering murder voice?"
It came again, further away and upwards, hissing, "So hungry… for so long…"
"Seriously. You're not hearing that?" Harry checked again. "It's a voice talking about being hungry and killing things. It's probably the twins doing a Halloween prank, right?"
Hermione shook her head, "I'm pretty sure Rector McGonagall watches them like a hawk during the feast to make sure they don't leave or do anything."
"Peeves maybe?" Neville suggested, referencing the pranking poltergeist.
"Kill… time to kill…"
"Maybe one of the new ghosts is feeling murderous," Harry suggested. "But I guess ghosts can't really kill someone, even on Halloween, right? You're seriously all not hearing that?"
Hermione and Neville looked dubious, but Luna tilted her head consideringly and said, "Maybe it's something about you that lets you hear it when we can't. You are the Boy-Who-Lived."
Harry gave her a smile for believing him and said, "Tell the teachers maybe?"
"Tell the teachers what, boy?" echoed in an old man's voice, as Argus Filch sprung on them from the shadows of the entry hall. He was technically the school's caretaker, primarily tasked with preserving and repairing the art, but he somehow had assumed the role of hall monitor, constantly on patrol with his cat familiar for students breaking the rules. For some reason nobody had ever been certain of, he had a thick New York accent and favored wearing aviation-style glasses frames.
"Someone's playing a prank, or maybe something worse," Harry explained to the white-haired meddler. "Whispering about killing and," he faintly heard the next phrase from up the great stairway, "smelling blood." He gestured in the direction he had been hearing it from.
Filch stroked his white mustache and said, "Is that so? We'll see about that!" and then bounded off upstairs in the direction Harry was pointing at a pretty good pace for an octogenarian.
The four of them shrugged and followed the old man, interested to see what was going on. "Hopefully it's not another troll," Hermione sighed. "But I guess this year was suspiciously free of something dangerous so far." As they saw Filch gasp and walk off the landing on the second floor, Hermione said, "Oh. That's Myrtle's bathroom. Maybe it was her? I hope she's not mad about the facilities."
"It didn't sound like her, but the voice was talking about smelling blood…" Harry trailed off, embarrassed.
"Mrs. Norris?" Filch slowed to a stop, spotting the immobile body of his familiar sprawled on the floor next to the bathroom door. "Mrs. Norris!" he sobbed. "Someone killed my cat!"
"Oh no," Luna said. "Poor kitty." She took a beat, and said, cresting the stairway into view of the corridor, "They also wrote that."
Emerging from the wall above the cat's body, as if waiting for someone to be looking, fiery letters began to scorch the stone to read:
THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE.
Over Filch's angry sobs, as he picked up the body of his cat, the rumble of students leaving the feast floated up the stairs. Suspiciously, the Slytherins were leading the pack, even though they had no reason not to head down to their own dorms in the dungeons. Draco's voice shouted from the head of the crowd, "Enemies of the Heir, beware! You'll be next, Mudbloods!"
"What are you even doing up here, Draco?" Harry asked, moving as if to shield the caretaker in his grief from the rest of the students who were loitering at the top of the stairs and whispering in confusion or fear.
"Library. Not that it's any of your business," Malfoy drawled, sounding completely insincere.
Before that could turn into a bigger fight, Dumbledore's colorful hat and white beard were visible above the crush. "Excuse me. Excuse me," he said, calmly but easily making a path for himself through well over a hundred students.
"Headmaster!" Filch nearly wailed. "Someone murdered my cat as a prank. I want to hang them by their thumbs!"
"My office is nearest," Fandral suggested, not far behind the headmaster, raising an interested eyebrow at the message.
"Thank you, Fandral," Dumbledore nodded. "Prefects, please clear the stairway." He took in the three young Gryffindors and one Ravenclaw and asked, "Witnesses? Very well, the four of you come with me. Argus, bring Mrs. Norris."
"What about Myrtle?" Hermione asked quietly. "She might have seen something."
"Ah. Ms. Warren has returned from Niflheim?" The headmaster poked his head into the bathroom after a polite knock and said, "She does not appear to be here presently, but I shall question her later."
With the prefects and other teachers working on getting the crowd moving, only Dumbledore, Fandral, McGonagall, and Snape wound up following the students and caretaker into the defense professor's office. Like the classroom, the place was fairly sparsely decorated, with a few pricey-looking trinkets and fine silks. The Warriors Three were used to traveling light, after all, and most of what Fandral had brought to the school were the practice weapons they never quite got around to using.
Fandral mused, "I remember something very similar happening on the eastern continent during the battle in Ouagadogou a few decades past. Of course, that was vampires, and I'd expect them to have a hard time getting into Hogwarts."
Meanwhile, Dumbledore was using his wand to cast various diagnostic magics on the corpse of the cat laid out on Fandral's desk while the students tried not to be too much of a distraction. Harry spent most of the time wondering why Snape rated being included, though he supposed the man had been involved in safeguarding the convergence on the previous Halloween, so he must have some little-mentioned role in protecting the castle.
Finally, the headmaster announced, "She's not dead, Argus."
"She's not?" the old caretaker asked. "But I couldn't find a pulse, and she's gone limp."
"Some kind of curse that defies simple counterspells and reviving charms," Dumbledore explained. "It is as if she has been rendered completely catatonic, though I detect that her spiritual energy still resides in her body."
"Very like the vampires then," Fandral nodded.
Dumbledore shrugged, "Perhaps. I do not believe any student at the school could work magic so powerful. What brought the four of you to the corridor?" he asked Harry and his friends.
Harry saw no particular reason not to explain, "We were coming back from the Deathday party and I heard something whispering from the walls about killing and blood. We thought it was a prank but were going to get a teacher and ran into Mr. Filch first."
"Only…" Hermione looked at him for permission and he nodded. As much as he didn't really trust Fandral or Snape, Harry was well-adjusted enough not to keep what might be an important clue from the teachers just because it made him look crazy. "...Harry was the only one that heard the voice. The rest of us were following him."
"Curiouser still," Dumbledore said, clearly willing to believe. His eyes strayed to the scar on Harry's forehead, but he simply said, "Please, keep us informed if you hear this voice again."
"What about Mrs. Norris?" Filch asked, some hope returning to his voice, tinged with thwarted anger at the idea that it might not have been a student.
"I shall attempt some stronger revivification rituals, and I'd task Severus with researching potions that may help. We will maintain her in her coma in the hospital wing, and, if she does not recover on her own… well, the most powerful rites of awakening take place in the spring." The headmaster left unsaid that this might not be the only such victim before such rituals became possible to cast.
"I might have some suggestions as well," Fandral added. "The victims of the vampire woke as soon as their attackers were ash in the sunrise, for example."
"What is the Chamber of Secrets?" Hermione asked.
"A myth," Dumbledore shook his head. "And a callback to a similar series of unsolved attacks some two-thirds of a century ago. Only the most likely perpetrator of those attacks should be unavailable to be involved at this time." He sent another troubled look Harry's way. "Please simply inform one of us if you have more information. Do not investigate this on your own. It could prove quite unsafe." He mustered a fragile smile and said, "Very well. The four of you should get to bed. We teachers have quite a bit more research to do before we sleep."
As they were walking Luna back to her dorm, the young girl asked, "You said it was just saying what it wanted to do, Harry? Because if Professor the Dashing is correct, there are myths about vampires and other creatures that can harm or kill you by calling your name from outside your house."
"Maybe it's a rat vampire that hated Mrs. Norris?" Harry tried to joke. For as much as the cat's apparent death was less gruesome than the battle and troll's death they'd seen the previous year, it was more shocking due to the lack of cause and sight of her owner's distress. "But, no, I didn't hear any names being called, including the cat's."
"Hmm," Luna mused. "I'll write to Daddy to see if he has any ideas. He writes a magazine about this kind of thing."
"Good thinking," Hermione nodded approvingly at the younger girl and her apparent access to an information source unavailable to the rest of them. "We should all do what research we can. It's not investigating if we just do research."
"I think it might be, technically," Harry disagreed. "But, yeah. As long as we don't go looking for trouble, research should be okay. What do you think, Nev? Ready to help us study about coma-causing monsters?"
"As long as we don't wind up having to fight it, especially on another planet," Neville allowed, eyes downcast.
Harry took inventory of his life up to that point and admitted, "I hope not… but no promises."
Chapter 18: Black and Blue
Chapter Text
"Daddy sent all the back issues about the Chamber of Secrets," Luna explained, spreading out several folded booklets of newsprint about the dimensions of a magazine rather than a newspaper across the study table in the Hogwarts library. "The Quibbler" was emblazoned on the front of each, generally atop a cover image that was some fanciful drawing of a creature.
It had taken them under a week to basically adopt Luna. They'd mentioned her shoelessness to Padma, who'd realized that she'd been ignoring the spacey first-year like most of the older students in Ravenclaw, and had missed that Luna's roommates were bullying her. Padma had gone to the prefects, and the thefts of the girl's belongings had been stopped cold, but that didn't mean they wanted to be friends. Thus, Padma had her tagging along to study sessions, even though the material was a little advanced for her.
Where Luna had gone, Ginny had seen an opportunity to hang out with Harry Potter (completely silently, staring at him longingly from the other end of the table and looking away whenever he glanced in her direction). His little sister going and talk of a monster in the school had brought Ron back to the study meetings. By Friday night, they had the entire set of Gryffindor second-years, Padma, Luna, Ginny… and Colin Creevey.
Somehow, the boy with the keen networking senses had realized that first-years were getting to hang out with his idol, and had invited himself along. "These are neat, Luna," he gushed. "Maybe I can get an actual picture of the creature to use as the cover of the next issue!"
"We haven't had much luck with photography, but maybe," Luna demurred. "Most of the really interesting creatures know when you're trying to photograph them and hide. So we've been using drawings."
"What's a Rotfang Conspiracy?" Dean asked, seeing that name come up a lot.
Luna explained, "Daddy is convinced that a conspiracy of dark wizards and a conspiracy of vampires are fighting in a shadow war over control of the Ministry. Some parts of Vanaheim have notoriously poor teeth, and Daddy thinks those are sites where the dark wizards have located vampires and are trying to keep them from being able to feed by ruining the teeth of everyone in the area."
Hermione wasn't sure about the conspiracy theory, but noted, "People here do have very bad dental practices. Magic can only do so much if you're not brushing enough."
They read for a while, commenting on some of the stranger articles, before Harry summed up, "So it looks like the Chamber of Secrets was thought to be created by Salazar Slytherin, one of the Hogwarts founders. It was supposed to contain a monster that could be released by his heir to remove anyone not native to Vanaheim."
Lavender explained, apologetically, "There's still a lot of that kind of thing. Natives don't like offworlders coming and taking our jobs and trying to get us to change our culture. To be fair, they don't like people from Asgard much more than people from Midgard."
Ron added, "And families like the Malfoys think anyone that has recent family from Midgard is basically an offworlder." He'd already explained that Draco's comment about "Mudbloods" was a slur against anyone from their planet: a deliberate misunderstanding about the word "Earth" meaning dirt.
"And this isn't the first time it's come up," Luna showed off an article. "Daddy found out that something like this happened about sixty-five years ago, but the school covered it up because several students were injured and someone died."
"Sixty-five years ago," Harry considered. Clearly Dumbledore was that old. Maybe some of the other teachers. "That's, like, World War II time, on Earth. Anyone that would remember that would be… really old."
The other adolescents all nodded, none having a good basis of comparison to guess which of the adults would be in their sixties or older.
"All my grandparents have passed. What about your grandmother, Neville?" Lavender suggested.
Eyes downcast, the boy shook his head and said, "I don't think she's quite that old. My dad had me pretty young. So unless she had him pretty old…"
"Our great aunt Murel, maybe?" Ron suggested, unclear how old she was. "But she's mean, though. I don't know if she'd help." Ginny nodded in agreement.
"Well, let's think about it and ask around," Harry shrugged. "I have to get some sleep, though. Quidditch tomorrow."
They said their goodbyes and headed to their various dormitories. As they were getting ready for bed Ron mentioned, "I don't know if you should take everything in the Quibbler as true, Harry. Luna and her dad… well… they're kind of mental, honestly." Neville nodded in agreement.
"Could be," Harry didn't disagree. "But at least it might give us a place to start to get a second opinion. And a lot of stuff around here is weird. Maybe more of the stuff in the Quibbler is real than people realize." He thought about it for another second and admitted, "Probably not using tooth decay to fight vampires, but maybe some of the other stuff?"
"And she's a nice enough kid," Dean suggested. "Maybe she's just weird because her dad is crazy, and she needs friends to let her know how to act."
Ron said, "Maybe. I think she's really only ever had Ginny to play with. They live in the same village as us."
"An' it's no' like ye've a normal sister, either," Seamus chuckled. "Harry, how many total words's she said t'ye so far?"
"To me? Probably zero," Harry figured. "Around me? Maybe a couple dozen."
Ron sighed, "It was those stupid Boy-Who-Lived stories. Our mum's been reading them to her since she was a baby. She thinks you're some kind of bard tale hero. I think she was less excited about meeting Fandral than you."
"I still need to see if I can get royalties from those," Harry grumbled. "I can't believe they just let people make up stories about me like they were true. Anyway, night everyone."
The next morning was a bit humid, threatening a storm, so Harry was extra-motivated to get the game over and done with before he got rained on. Not that Wood hadn't been forcing them to train in the rain already. Harry was starting to seriously regret agreeing to be on the team, for all that it was fun to fly competitively. He guessed he'd see how he felt about it after his first real match.
He was feeling pretty motivated after Draco tried to trash talk him at breakfast.
As they suited up in their padded quidditch robes which were basically leather armor, Wood gave a short speech that ended in, "Wait 'til we're ahead an' then get 'at snitch or die tryin', Harry. We've gotta win t'day. We've gotta."
"So no pressure, Harry," one of the Weasley twins winked at him as they headed out of the locker room.
The quidditch pitch was an ancient amphitheater, almost a stadium in its scale, with the boundaries defined by the risers on all sides. It could probably seat ten times as many guests as the student body of the school, so most of the students clustered toward the top of the stands for the best view of the flying game (and to be out of the way of any bludgers knocked straight down). As usual, it was strictly segregated by house, with Gryffindor and Slytherin on opposite sides of the stands and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw as buffers between them.
As he took to the air, Harry could at least see that Padma and Luna had managed to sit on the edge of the Ravenclaw seats closest to Gryffindor, so they could sit next to the rest of the study group. He gave his friends a wave as he moved to a high position that would let him keep an eye out for the snitch, track the point total, and dive to interfere if necessary.
"Alright there, Scarhead?" Malfoy shouted as he raced past on his broom, for all that it was about the same quality of work as Harry's. The problem was that the other Slytherin players were on similarly high-quality brooms.
"No matter how much you flirt, I'm not going to make out with you, Draco," Harry told him calmly.
Draco started to sputter a denial, but both were surprised as a black iron bludger sailed in Harry's direction, forcing him to twist out of the way. Essentially cannonballs, the devices were slightly-modified war and hunting weapons designed to seek out the closest flier. Many a game bird had been brought down by them before someone (probably a Gryffindor) decided they'd be fun as an obstacle to spice up broom sports.
"Close one, Harry!" a twin called, sailing by with his bat and knocking the bludger toward Adrian Pucey, one of the Slytherins. The entire point of the beater role on the team (that the twins played for Gryffindor) was to try to defend their team from the bludgers.
However, rather than accelerating toward its target once it was closer to Pucey than to Harry, the bludger began to describe a steep curve, almost an orbit, trying to loop back toward Harry. "The hell?" he asked, making his broom dive away and keeping his head turned enough to track the ball with his peripheral vision. Sure enough, it quickly changed its arc to keep heading toward him.
He tried everything he could think of. He kept moving past Fred and George so they could knock the bludger off course. He tried moving through the rival players to scrape it off on them. He even spent two solid minutes orbiting Draco to try to put the other boy in between him and the Harry-seeking missile. But nothing was working, he and the twins were all distracted from the game trying to stay ahead of the bludger (which wasn't hindering the other team the way it was supposed to), and it was starting to rain.
At least his frantic aerobatics were basically making him count as a bludger, as the Slytherin team quickly learned to stay out of his way since he was dragging an erratically-arcing iron ball a few yards behind him whenever he sailed past. That was keeping the Slytherins from having a runaway victory, but he could tell that they were pulling ahead on points. And then, losing visibility due to the rain on his glasses and having to pull up suddenly to miss the stands, he felt the rogue bludger make contact with his left arm.
"Time out! Gryffindor's seeker is injured!" Lee Jordan, the twins' friend and match commentator, announced in his magically-amplified voice.
Harry got down to the ground as fast as he could, cradling his arm. He didn't think it was broken, since he could still move it, but it hurt. "Someone's tampered wi' th'bludger!" Wood was arguing with Madam Hooch already as he descended.
"I've been casting diagnostics since it started chasing Potter," the hawk-eyed flying teacher explained. "And I can't detect any magic on it except its own standard enchantments. Sometimes you just get unlucky."
"Unlucky! It's unfair! Make t'other chase Malfoy an' it's jus' unlucky!"
Hooch shrugged like she had no control over the decisions made by the ball, which was still looping on a long arc above Harry's head but at least sticking to its programming to not attack him on the ground. By then, a few of the other teachers, including Fandral, had come down to see what was going on, and Hooch asked, "Are you okay to keep playing, Potter?"
Harry wiggled his fingers and said, "I don't think it's broken, but I don't know if I can control my broom."
"I've a solution for you, then," Fandral boomed, producing a silver flask from inside his jacket. "Asgardian healing draught. Very potent. It'll keep the boy flying. I'm quite enjoying the death-defying spectacle!"
Before he could object, Harry had the flask thrust into his mouth and pure alcohol was running into his throat.
With Tony being a functioning alcoholic, Harry'd had many opportunities to surreptitiously indulge his curiosity, took one too-large gulp of scotch one time, and decided to revisit adult drinks when he was an adult. And this was exactly like that, only somehow much more potent. Defying all biology about alcohol uptake, he immediately got a buzz, and, to Fandral's credit, he barely registered that his arm hurt anymore.
"That's highly irregular," Hooch harrumphed. "Well?"
Harry flexed his arm and said, somehow without noticeable slurring, "I guess I can play."
She regarded him suspiciously for a moment and then shrugged. "Back in the air, in one minute at the whistle then."
Harry told the team, "Don't focus on protecting me. I'll just do laps and try to interrupt the Slytherins when I can. But if someone sees the snitch before I do, give me a whistle. I can barely see anything with the rain on my glasses."
"I can at least help with that," Angelina Johnson, one of the chasers, told him, and cast a spell that immediately caused water to stop sticking to his lenses.
"Magical Rain-X. Great!" Harry said.
"The whistle's aboot tae blow," Wood nodded. "We can still win this."
In hindsight, Harry couldn't remember much about the match after that. He knew he stuck to his plan, but seemed to be having trouble forming long-term memories. He remembered bits and pieces of frantic flying through the rain, pursued by the vicious bludger, trying to keep track of when it was time to catch the snitch or keep Malfoy from doing so, and finally seeing a glimmer of gold.
He blissfully couldn't remember the second impact with the bludger as he had to choose between catching the snitch and dodging. He certainly remembered being screaming in pain on the ground a few seconds later, somehow still holding the tiny golden golf ball in the hand of his shattered arm. His teammates and the crowd seemed very excited before he blacked out.
"I don't understand why they continue to play this stupid game," he heard Matron Pomfrey's voice as he came to in the dim light of the hospital wing. The elderly witch wore soothing blue robes, and kept her gray hair under what was functionally a nun's wimple.
"How bad is it?" Harry asked, newly sober, hung over, and regretting his choices.
"If you'd quit and come to me after the first fracture?" she asked, rhetorically. "You'd have been out of here in an hour. But with as many pieces as your arm's in from the second impact, you're going to spend a very uncomfortable night letting magic knit you back up."
"That's… honestly not that bad. Will I have problems with the arm after it's healed?" he checked.
"Not if you hold still while it finishes setting," she huffed. "Honestly, Midgardian students. Think I'm going to immobilize your arm in plaster for months? Maybe I should, to teach you a lesson, hmm?"
"To be fair," he objected, "Fandral gave me what he said was an Asgardian healing draught, but I think was just really strong booze, so I wasn't thinking too clearly."
"That… that man," she grumbled. "I suppose I should check you to make sure you've cleared all that out before starting you on potions."
Once he'd forced down several actual healing potions and had his arm splinted so he wouldn't move it overnight, Pomfrey allowed his friends to come in. The parade of congratulations from the quidditch team and recriminations from the study group was exhausting, combined with the medicine, so Harry found himself sleeping most of the afternoon and well into the evening.
He woke suddenly with a gasp of pain, as someone was prodding at his injured arm, and then a bony hand wrapped across his mouth to keep him from making noise. "Harry Potter is silent," a somewhat high-pitched man's voice insisted, with a strange accent.
Between the dim lighting of the hospital wing and lack of glasses, all Harry could make out was a pale face and dark eyes looming over him in the darkness. The hand tightened against his face, almost painfully, and Harry had to choke back the urge to scream.
"Good," the voice said, relaxing the grip again. It was less like the speaker was bad at speaking English, and more than he found the sounds of the language distasteful in his mouth. "Harry Potter came to Hogwarts, despite warnings. Why? Now he is injured and sees danger. Will he leave?" The hand was removed enough that Harry could speak, but clearly ready to clamp again if he tried to scream.
"You're one of the Dahvee?" Harry said, guessing this was the murderous elf again, though maybe it was another one that actually spoke English. The face nodded in a blur of what he assumed was agreement. "Why don't you want me here? Is it about the Chamber of Secrets?"
The elf's head again blurred slightly, almost in a tilt of confusion, but explained, "The Dahvee received contract for Harry Potter. We refused. Harry Potter is important to elves, for what he is destined to do. But we know this is merely part of dark dealings at Hogwarts. Harry Potter was safe on Midgard."
"You tried to kill Tony so I'd be stuck there," Harry suggested. "And then you gave the police my description at the train station." The elf didn't disagree, so he added, "Did you enchant the bludger to come after me today?"
"Elves have long mastered the arts of gravity and attractive forces. Altering the sporting device was but a child's work." He seemed very nonchalant about being able to undetectably alter enchanted items into dangerous weapons.
"Do you know what's happening at Hogwarts?" Harry asked. "Can you tell me who tried to hire you?"
The elf shook his head, "The Dahvee cannot betray an employer. It is much that we are working to save Harry Potter at all." Sighing, he withdrew a black blur that Harry suspected was one of those nonmetallic knives he'd tried to kill Tony with. "Harry Potter's injury is recovering. He will not leave, will he? Then he needs to take a greater wound, to stop him learning magic. Then he must return home."
Harry did scream, then, managing half a cry for help before the hand once again clamped down on his face and the elven mercenary tried to figure out where to stab him that wouldn't kill him but would cripple the boy beyond Matron Pomfrey's ability to repair.
In normal circumstances, that might not have been enough, but through very bad timing for the elf, Colin Creevey had also had the thought of making a late visit to Harry (possibly just to get a selfie with the unconscious boy). Colin hadn't made it. But his comatose body was, right then, being levitated into the hospital wing by Dumbledore and McGonagall.
Harry realized this as ferocious spellfire was suddenly coming from two directions and the elf had to let go and stop preparing to stab in order to dodge. To the assassin's credit, there weren't a lot of beings that could manage to dodge attacks from two of the most powerful wizards on Vanaheim (for all that, admittedly, they were getting on in years and their reflexes weren't what they once were). "He's a dark elf!" Harry yelled, hoping that would help his rescuers.
It seemed to mean something to Dumbledore, who began casting bright lights into the room, making it easier for Harry to see. And the Dahvee assassin also quickly realized who he was dealing with, and made the wise decision to throw himself out of a nearby window. Harry had just gotten his glasses on and grabbed his wand, but narrowly missed the escaping elf with an energy whip, largely due to the pain of moving his still-healing arm. He heard the assassin make some kind of acrobatic roll on the lawn outside and begin sprinting into the night.
"Minerva," Dumbledore ordered, "see to the boys. I'll adjust the wards and contact Ronan's guard and Hogsmeade's leaders. I shall return soon." With that, he swept out of the room.
"Even in the hospital wing, Potter," McGonagall tutted as Matron Pomfrey finally staggered from her sleeping room, without even her wimple on. "Poppy, Mr. Potter was just attacked by some kind of dark elf with a knife and needs checking, and we have another victim of… well," she looked at Harry and shrugged, "of whatever attacked Mrs. Norris." With that, she retrieved the small body that they'd set down before attacking, levitating Colin into the room.
"Oh, no, is that Colin?" Harry asked. "Why was he out… was he coming to visit me?"
"Very possibly," McGonagall admitted. "We shall have to stress that curfew is important for more reasons than our own intolerance of shenanigans."
As Pomfrey began scanning him, Harry told her, "I don't think he did anything more than grab my face to keep me quiet. He was going to try to cripple me so badly I'd have to leave Hogwarts."
"Only you, Mr. Potter," Pomfrey shook her head. "You haven't upset your arm too badly, and seem otherwise fine."
"Is that Colin's camera?" Harry asked, as McGonagall placed the object on the table next to the bed she'd floated the comatose boy into. "Do you think he got a picture of the monster?"
"It was near his face," the rector admitted. She started to reach over to unclasp the back of the old SLR.
"Wait!" Harry warned her. Colin had been talking at him nonstop about subjects including film photography for months, and as annoying as he found the boy, he'd been interested in the science of it. "You have to open it in a pitch black room or wind the canister back up before you open it, or it will ruin the film."
"Hmm," McGonagall gave him a nod, "Two points for quick thinking and scientific knowledge, Potter. I don't believe we have the facilities to develop this kind of photograph locally."
"If we can get it rolled up safely, I could send it to my aunt with Hedwig," he offered. "I bet she knows places that can still develop film." He thought about it for another second, "And that she can explain the pictures are from a movie set or something, and make them sign NDAs, in case he got anything obviously magical."
"Well, I don't know what an indieay is, Potter, but otherwise that sounds reasonable," she allowed. Pomfrey had been checking over Colin while they talked, "How is he, Poppy?"
"Same as the cat, I'm afraid," the matron explained, sadly. "It's like something attacked his spirit but left his body intact. I hope they'll recover with all their faculties intact. Severus has had some good ideas about using a mandrake restorative draught, but that needs fresh mandrakes and they're only ready in the spring."
The rector sighed again, her stoic mien almost breaking at the thought of one of her charges in a coma for months, possibly never to recover fully. She placed a trembling hand on Colin's shoulder, and glanced at Harry, realizing that another of her lions had almost been crippled somewhere that should be perfectly safe (and had been seriously injured playing a game). All she said, however, was, "Get some rest, Potter. I'm sure Albus will want to debrief you in the morning."
For all that he thought he wouldn't be able to sleep, as soon as Dumbledore's illumination spells began to expire and his adrenaline crash happened, he was out like those same magical lights.
Chapter 19: The Marquis of Queensberry
Chapter Text
"Is there a reason you didn't mention to anyone that a dark elf assassin was after you?" Dumbledore asked from across his desk the next morning. Harry was once again in the headmaster's office, having missed his early Monday classes. His arm was still in a sling for safety, but seemed mostly repaired.
"Well, I don't think he's after me, sir," Harry explained. "At first we weren't totally sure whether he was after my aunt's boss, and then we didn't know he'd followed us from Midgard. But he told me last night someone tried to hire the Dahvee to kill me, and they said no. As crazy as he is, I think he's trying to protect me. He said something about being destined to do something for them."
"Hmm," the headmaster said, considering. "I shall have to consider this. I can well assume that someone in particular would want to hire assassins against you, and I wonder if whatever is going on in the school is their fallback plan."
"You think it's Voldemort's people, don't you sir?" Harry guessed.
"Perhaps. You did recently thwart an attempt likely connected to him. It's possible that individuals with enough money to hire elite assassins have decided you need to be removed from the board." He gave Harry a tired smile and suggested, "Please do inform us of anything else that seems important."
"I didn't hear the voice again before Colin," Harry slightly changed the subject. "But I was asleep and then I was distracted. So maybe I missed it." He gave it a moment, then tried, "What happened the last time?"
"Similar events," Dumbledore admitted. "Students falling unconscious and unable to be revived, with no clue as to the perpetrator. Until finally one student died, and we were about to close the school. At that point, a student was turned in for the crime, but I have never believed the accusation. Tell me, have you ever heard the name Tom Riddle?"
"It sounds vaguely familiar," Harry admitted. "Wait, isn't that a name on one of the school trophies in the trophy room? I thought it sounded strange."
"It is, indeed. It was a trophy awarded to a young prefect for turning in the supposed perpetrator of the crimes…"
Harry took a moment to try to figure out what the headmaster was telling him, then worked it out, "But if the person that got blamed was innocent… you think Tom Riddle was actually responsible, and framed someone else?"
"Young Tom was an orphan from London, a place which at that time was in the middle of constant bombing attacks from your Germans. I believe that even with his magic, he feared returning to his home during the war. And there is also the small matter of his full name." He flicked his wand to summon a bunch of what appeared to be Scrabble tiles from a bag. "An interesting Midgardian game…" The tiles formed on the edge of the desk to spell out TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE. Dumbledore flicked his wand again to cause the tiles to rearrange themselves into I AM LORD VOLDEMORT.
"The name of the scariest dark wizard on Vanaheim… is just a made up anagram?" Harry checked.
"That has been my supposition. Tom was always a troubled boy, though he put on a fine showing for the other professors and the headmaster at the time. He was a quick study of dark magic, and," he squinted at Harry as if making a decision to share a piece of information, testing a personal theory, and then finished, "I am fairly certain he possessed the ability to speak to snakes."
"Is that weird?" Harry checked. "I talked to a snake, once. Seemed nice."
"Have you now? Have you indeed?" Dumbledore smiled, his supposition vindicated. "It is a rare gift, being a parselmouth—one who can speak Parseltongue, the language of snakes. Because it is most common in the bloodlines of dark families, it is widely considered dark magic itself, though it is merely a magical gift like any other. I would suggest you do not reveal this power to those who might think less of you because of it."
"It will make people think I'm dark? Did my family have it?"
"Perhaps. The Potters were an old line, though I cannot prove they had such an ability, and it's also possible your mother's family had gifts we were unable to test. But, no, my simplest theory is that the power was passed to you during your defeat of Voldemort as a baby. To the victor, the spoils, and that can sometimes include magical talents."
"I hope I didn't get anything else from him," Harry frowned, though he thought the way Dumbledore had phrased that was a little odd. It sounded like it was entirely possible it was a Potter gift. He dropped that thought as he realized something, and asked, "Okay. So… wait… you think I'm hearing a snake, and that's why nobody else heard it?"
"It would simply sound like hissing to them," the headmaster nodded. "Unfortunately, suspecting that the monster is a snake gives us little enough information about how it's getting around without notice or triggering the school's wards."
"Plumbing in the walls?" Harry guessed.
Dumbledore shook his head, "While our lavatories give the appearance of being similar to Midgardian facilities, they are heavily-enchanted objects. There is no need for pipes to deliver water or remove waste, and attempting to install such would have been a monumental undertaking given the resistance of the castle's stone and its tendency to slowly rearrange itself."
Out of ideas, Harry said, "Well, if I hear any more snakes talking or anyone mention Tom Riddle, I'll let you know." He glanced at the red bird perched on the stand near the desk, as a feather fell out. "Your bird doesn't look so good."
Dumbledore smiled like the parent of a fine pet and explained, "Fjalar has recently returned from Niflheim by his own secret routes. He'll be in fine form again after more time in the world of the living, won't you, old friend?"
What Harry had taken to be some kind of hawk lifted his head and turned to face them. He suddenly looked much more like a rooster, though with large wings clearly capable of long flight. He fluttered those wings and made a trilling series of clucks with a whining crow at the end.
"He's a mighty bird, as long lived as any of the Aesir, and I'm glad to call him my companion," Dumbledore explained to Harry. "He's famous, you know. They say he's one of the birds whose crowing warns of Ragnarok. Anyway, at this point I'm keeping you from lunch. As you said, please keep me apprised of any more incidents."
Harry, despite his first inclination, was careful with whom he told about the Dahvee assassin, the attack on Colin, and what Dumbledore had shared with him. A large part of that caution was that the entire story involved revealing that he could speak to snakes, and the headmaster's warning that people might take that the wrong way. Ultimately, he only told Dean and Hermione, swearing them to secrecy. If he told any of the rest of the study group, it would make its way to Parvati and Lavender, and shortly be known by the entire school.
As much as he liked them, they were unstoppable gossips.
A few days later, during a cold afternoon practice outside, it was just Harry and his two best friends. Hermione mentioned, "We should trick Draco into telling us who the actual heir is. It could even be him."
Dean gave her a suspicious look and said, "It sounds like you already have a plan."
She grinned, explaining, "I heard about this potion that gives anyone access to the kind of illusion magic that normally only Aesir royalty can practice. It's said that Loki can disguise himself as anyone he's ever seen."
Harry was as skeptical as Dean was and asked, "So we'd just pretend to be one of his friends and say, 'Hey Draco, remind me about all this Heir of Slytherin business. It's you, right?'"
She lost her smile and admitted, "Well… we'd be more subtle than that. But basically."
"How hard is the potion to make?" Dean asked.
"Pretty hard. We'd need to get a copy of the book from the restricted section of the library. And it may require some obscure components. And it takes at least a month to brew, so we'd need to set up a brewing lab somewhere…" her expression continued to fall as all of that didn't win her any nods from the boys. "But I think I could do it," she finished, lamely.
Harry said, "Hermione. If you want to brew a hard potion, that's great. But you should do it for extra credit, not to try to trick Draco. I doubt he knows anything. He's an idiot."
"And we're not actually supposed to be investigating. That's pretty much investigating," Dean added.
Hermione huffed in frustrated agreement. "Fine. You're right. I just wanted to see if I could make it. It sounded neat."
"Actually…" Dean realized. "If you want to brew some advanced potions, why don't you find some that would be useful to us if we get in trouble? You know, like holdouts for spells we can't do?"
"That's… a really good idea," Hermione admitted, considering. "I don't know if I could make healing potions yet, but there are even some in the non-restricted books that would keep for a while and would work on Earth…"
While she was thinking about brewing up a utility belt for them, Dean asked Harry, "Did you get the pictures back from your aunt?"
Harry shook his head, "I just got the film canister from McGonagall a couple of days ago. It may be a while before I hear from Aunt Pepper."
It wound up taking even longer than he'd expected, and the message wasn't what he'd hoped.
It was several days into Vanaheim's Holy Month, or sometime in late November by Earth reckoning. Dean was really missing Thanksgiving, but all the American students were adjusting to the idea that they wouldn't see that again until they were done with Hogwarts. Hedwig dropped off a letter but no photographs. Written in Pepper's handwriting, it said:
First off, everyone's okay. Well, except for Obie, but it's his own fault. I wish the sorcerers had done more to him, but I bet they knew he was needed for that absolute time thing. Turns out it was him that got Tony kidnapped. He was trying to pay insurgents to kill Tony so he could take over the company. Long story short, Obie made his own suit of flying armor, Tony finished his, and they had a giant flying fight over LA.
Honestly, Harry, it was like one of those robot battles in your video games, only way scarier.
They blacked out LA blowing up the big arc reactor under SI (and that building is going to need a bunch of repairs). Then, like an idiot, Tony admitted it was him in the suit at the press conference after. (He painted the armor in Gryffindor colors, by the way. He must have seen the art on your notebook?) He's not in jail, but we've had to call in every lawyer we have. And the paparazzi is everywhere.
That's all to say, it may take me a minute to find a trustworthy photography studio for that film. Send Hedwig back in a week or two and I'll do my best. More importantly, you might want to stay at the school for Christmas. The media has definitely been trying to talk to families of anyone important in SI, and I don't want them to hound you. Plus we probably can't really go anywhere while this is going on. I'm sorry! We can try to figure something out if you don't want to stay. Maybe you can stay with one of your friends? I could email the Grangers, or write to Molly Weasley?
Let me know. Love you.
Pepper
Harry showed the letter to his friends at the breakfast table and Hermione admitted, "I don't have any context for this. Flying armor?"
Lavender said, "There's supposed to be a giant suit of animated armor that guards Odin's treasure vault?"
"I guess I can talk about it now, if Tony's let the world know," Harry sighed. "That was what I was helping him with over the summer, and why I was at his house when that elf attacked us. And how I was able to fight him off. Tony's basically made a wearable airplane." He checked with the Vanir at the table that they more or less understood what that meant. "It has super-high-tech rockets on the hands and feet, and machinery that you wear so you can carry all of that weight, and it makes you stronger. I guess after I left he strapped armor onto it, too."
"I want one," Ron said.
"It wouldn't work here," Harry shook his head. "It's completely powered by electricity. If he flew it into Vanaheim he'd probably be basically trapped in a metal coffin. I hope he put in the quick-release I suggested after I ran out of power."
"Wait, you got to wear this?" Dean asked.
Harry answered, "Just an early prototype. The hand and foot rockets and enough exoskeleton to let me carry everything. He's probably added a lot more stuff to the final version."
Everyone at the table was clearly fantasizing about having their own suit of flying armor, and there were several more follow-up questions asked, which Harry tried to answer as succinctly as possible. Unsurprisingly, it was all over the school by dinner.
"Where's your flying armor, Potter?" Draco called at him as they were leaving. "Bet that would have saved you from that bludger!"
"And yet, it was me that got the snitch," Harry told him, barely breaking stride. Honestly, he had bigger problems than Draco Malfoy.
"Yeah?" Draco yelled, possibly even paler than usual at the dismissal. "We'll see whether you're so confident at dueling club!"
"There's a dueling club?" Harry asked Dean.
"Dunno. That could be fun," his friend answered, as they both ignored Draco and walked with the rest of their house back to the Gryffindor dorms.
Sure enough, when they got back there was a sign up sheet posted on the bulletin board for said club, with an initial meeting the week before holidays.
Basically all of Gryffindor and at least half of each of the other houses turned up to the great hall the night of the event. All the dining tables and chairs had been removed and dozens of dueling spaces had been set up around the room. These were rectangles on the floor about three by eight yards, defined by runes chalked on the stone to designate the space and try to keep stray spell energy from hitting someone in the adjacent duels. A larger version was set up along the dais where the teachers' table usually sat, clearly for the signature duels.
"I wonder who'll be teaching us," Hermione mused as they walked in, distracted by examining the warding runes. "Someone told me Magister Flitwick was a dueling champion when he was young—maybe it'll be him."
"As long as it's not–," Harry got halfway out, before he saw Fandral striding up to the main dais. "Wait, is this a weapons dueling club?"
Though he could in no way be heard over the crowd, Fandral answered Harry's question anyway, shouting out, "Welcome, everyone, to the first spell dueling club meeting of the year. 'Spell dueling?' I hear you ask. Perhaps you assumed this would be a fencing tournament?"
"You haven't taught us any fencing yet!" one of the upper-year boys shouted at him from across the crowd.
"It's coming," Fandral held up his hands in placation, but continued with only a slightly-broken train of thought, "but tonight is about something of which you should be on a more even footing. We'd like everyone to try out some basic combat magic. Nonlethal! No permanent injuries! This club is mostly about precision in attacking, dodging, and blocking. And to show you how important dodging and blocking is…"
With a sneer, Professor Snape strode onto the dueling platform from the shadows. There was a general murmur of distaste from most of the school, some sounds of worry from Fandral's fans, and approval from the Slytherin contingent. Harry, like most of Gryffindor, was still being regularly bullied by Snape in classes. But, after his early complaints and a year and a half of proving he could do the work without disrupting class, Snape was no longer singling him out nearly as badly as he had their first day. Harry still didn't particularly like the guy.
"Yes, our very own Professor Snape," Fandral continued, as if Snape needed the introduction. "I understand that the man is an accomplished sorcerer with combat experience, so I thought I'd show off how much simple footwork and defense can matter in even a fight with a skilled opponent." While he was officially lauding Snape's praises, there was an undercurrent of contempt that Harry was getting used to. Fandral, despite teaching at a school for magic, didn't seem to think it was that great. He took the opposite end of the platform from Snape, so he was on Harry's left and Snape on his right (the Slytherin side of the room). Drawing his extremely shiny saber, Fandral called, "Whenever you're ready, professor."
Snape made a slight bow as he drew his wand and Fandral matched it, then slid aside as Snape flicked his orange energy whip all the way across the platform, clearly trying to disarm Fandral. Faster than any of them had managed in class, Snape let the whip dissipate and flicked off three bolts of the teal energy of Vanaheim staggered in direction. Fandral dodged two of them and actually managed to deflect one off toward the ceiling with his sword before it could hit him.
Obviously somewhat nonplussed by his quick barrage being so easily dodged, Snape twirled and whipped his wand in a circle to create a large and fast moving spiral of blasting orange energy that filled enough of the platform's width that Fandral would have a hard time dodging. The defense teacher's eyes widened and he dived prone to the floor, the cascade of energy nearly hitting him anyway and loudly detonating against wards at the far end as it barely unraveled the spell.
"I yield!" Fandral said, jovially, as he clocked that Snape was about to unleash something more terrifying at him now that he was prone. Seeing that Snape managed to check his bloodlust and lower his wand, Fandral easily rolled to his feet and bowed to his opponent, who grudgingly returned it. "Now, were this an actual fight, we'd have had more room to move and I'd have been trying to stab your professor, so it might have gone far differently." Snape's sneer conveyed that he would also have been going harder in a real fight. "Also, I wouldn't advise trying to parry spells with just any weapon, as those made with Asgardian ingenuity are more than just cold steel. All of that said, I hope everyone noticed how I was able to avoid four of those strikes through simple defense that any of you can learn.
"Which is to say, everyone pair off and choose a space to duel. Same rules as we had: you're using simple attacks, and trying to perfect both your precision and your avoidance."
Harry and Dean paired off, with the rest of their friends taking spaces near them. Hermione and Padma faced off next to Parvati and Lavender. Ron and Seamus obviously chose to duel one another, which left Neville the odd-Gryffindor-out, but he eventually wound up with Justin Finch-Fletchley, one of the Hufflepuffs in their year. Harry was pretty sure the boy was from Earth, and didn't know why they'd never seen him at the London sanctum.
After half an hour, Dean and Harry were mostly trying for the spirit of the thing, throwing low-powered bolts and the occasional energy whip to try to disarm each other, but mostly focusing on their accuracy and dodging. "This is actually kind of fun," Harry said as he dodged a shot.
"Right?" Dean agreed. "Why don't we do this in any class?"
"We could probably add this into our normal training?" Harry suggested, flinging his own shot at Dean, who just barely managed to step out of the way. Overall, Harry was up on hits by a little because his superior ability to dodge was trumping Dean's better accuracy.
"That's what I like to hear!" Fandral said, somehow having gotten close enough to eavesdrop without them noticing him wending through the rows of duelists. "That's the real secret: personal initiative. Professor Snape!" he yelled across the room. "Why don't we do an exhibition of the second years. I'll put up Potter and three galleons' wager against another second-year of your choice."
Harry tried, "I didn't agree–"
"Nonsense," Fandral cut him off. "Best to get used to the limelight. Head up to the main podium."
Harry rolled his eyes as he realized that Snape was having a conspiratorial conversation with Draco, before sending the rich boy up to the platform. Taking the Gryffindor side as his opponent took the other, Harry said just loudly enough for Fandral and several nearby members of his house to hear, "But Draco is Ron's nemesis."
"Another lesson is that you don't always get to pick your nemesis," Fandral grinned. He moved to face the crowd between the boys and shouted, "Now! Make sure to get your friendly wagers in for this exhibition duel. Harry Potter versus Draco Malfoy. Winner is first to three hits, incapacitation, or yield. Yielding is verbal or two hand taps on the floor in submission, if you can't speak at the time. As before, nothing deadly or that will require us to call the matron down to fix. On my count. Three… two…."
Draco was already throwing a spell on "two," a small but fairly evil-looking knot of Vanaheim's energy that Harry recognized as a dancing feet jinx. He danced, but not like Draco had wanted, just shifting away from the attack. As the boos of the crowd started and Fandral actually counted down to one, Harry tossed out an energy whip to try to disarm his opponent, but Draco managed to barely dodge as well. Harry realized he really needed to improve his accuracy.
Overextended with his whip, and not able to drop it as easily as Snape did, Harry wasn't ready for Draco to fling a small blip of orange his way, and he took the spellfire to his right shoulder in a painful sting before he was able to dodge the next couple of follow ups and crack his energy whip to make Draco leap to dodge it before finally releasing the energy. "One point Malfoy," Fandral announced, though didn't seem happy about it.
As Draco came down from his leap, Harry hissed out, "Flinging Flip of Forseti!" and managed to nail the boy when he was unable to dodge. The knockback jinx caused him to tumble and roll to a stop just shy of the end of the platform, but Harry had underestimated how far Draco would fly and two follow-up bolts of energy missed the Malfoy heir before one finally landed as Draco finished rolling.
"Two points Potter!" Fandral announced, more happy than he'd been before.
Draco was proving his seeker's reflexes by managing to dodge Harry's next attack and roll to his feet, throwing a couple of bolts of energy that made Harry cut himself off and dodge. He was trying to find an opening to attack when Draco yelled out, "Servant of the Serpent Sorcerer!" Teal energy rushed in a torrent from the end of his wand before congealing into a two-yard-long green-blue snake with flashing fangs, still faintly glowing from the magical summoning.
As it bore down on Harry, rearing up to foul his aim on Draco, he could understand it telling him, "Bite the master's enemies! Protect the master!"
The crowd shrieked in surprise, moving visibly backwards, and Harry idly wondered why so many teen wizards with access to magical healing were terrified of a snake. He guessed he knew plenty of people on Earth who were scared of slithering things too, but he wasn't personally worried.
"Don't move, Potter," Snape called out, "I'll get rid of it." But he seemed to be in no hurry. That seemed suspicious to Harry.
"Allow me," Fandral said, his sword striking out to decapitate the rearing snake. However, whatever spell-fouling materials the sword was made of interacted oddly with the magical construct, and the snake was instead blown backwards by the impact without being cut apart. With the positioning, and Fandral's swing direction, the oversized snake landed in the empty space that the Gryffindors had just backed away from, right in front of all of his friends.
If they'd freaked out about the snake being summoned, everyone really stumbled backwards as the snake was launched into their midst. It was not Gryffindor's bravest hour. Harry watched as Neville, in particular, cowered behind his dueling partner, accidentally thrusting Justin Finch-Fletchley into near proximity of the magical serpent. "Pain! Pain and vengeance!" the serpent screamed, rearing up again and seemingly about to bite the boy in front of him.
"Hermione!" Harry caught her eye. "Counterspell?" He didn't trust himself to interact with the snake directly, just in case someone noticed that he could talk to it.
"Oh, right," his friend nodded, shaking off the contagious fear that had grasped the hall. She made the elaborate wand gesture that was sufficient to unweave most low-powered magics, and the snake evaporated into motes of teal light just before it could strike at Justin.
"Do not," Harry heard Fandral shouting at Draco, and turned to see that the boy had been about to curse him in the back while he was distracted by the snake in the crowd. "Bad sportsmanship all around, young sir! That did not look like a spell designed not to seriously injure. I'm calling this duel for Potter."
Snape's lips drew back to reveal barred teeth, as if he was about to fight that declaration, but instead he gritted out a smug, "But ten points to Slytherin for a complex construct above your year level."
"And a similar ten points to Gryffindor for an excellent spell unraveling by Hermione Granger," Fandral announced, with a look at Snape as if two could play that game. Harry glanced over to see her blush of pride at the recognition from her newest favorite teacher. "Well, I think that we may need to rethink some of the rules of this, but a brilliant first dueling club everyone! We'll try to schedule another in the spring term. For now, everyone back to your dormitories and have a wonderful holiday!"
Harry was congratulated by most of Gryffindor on their way back to the dorms, so it took until bedtime for Dean to get a moment alone with him while Seamus and Ron were in the bathroom and Neville was still dawdling getting into the room. He pointed out, "I bet Snape told Malfoy to cast that spell. You think he knows about you? And wanted everyone else to?"
"How could he?" Harry asked, then added, "Unless Dumbledore told him…"
"Just saying," Dean said. "But some folks in the basement would be real happy if everyone thought you were the heir."
Harry nodded. As much as he didn't want to think that Dumbledore had told Snape about his secret, part of his brain was beginning to realize that the headmaster did a lot of things to try to push him to take certain actions. If he'd engineered the previous year's course to Vormir, why not some plan that put Harry front and center against the Heir of Slytherin? "I'll watch out for snakes," he agreed.
He was especially glad he hadn't revealed that he was a parselmouth the next morning, when the rumor spread that Justin Finch-Fletchley had joined Colin Creevey in the hospital wing, another victim of Slytherin's monster…
Chapter 20: Lock and Key
Chapter Text
"Basically the whole school thinks it's Malfoy," Parvati assured them on the train ride away from Hogwarts, everyone crammed into one compartment to talk about Justin Finch-Fletchley being the next victim of Slytherin's Monster. The whole train was packed. Hardly anyone, especially no one from Earth, was staying at Hogwarts for the break. "They all saw him summon the snake that nearly bit Justin, and they figure he came back later to finish the job."
"I bet he loves the attention," Ron grumbled, a little put out that he was going to have to do something particularly grandiose now that his nemesis had stepped up his profile as a villain. His pranking campaign against Malfoy in payback for the Slytherins knocking books out of peoples' hands had never really gone anywhere. Fred and George had helped a bit, but they'd wanted Ron to take most of the initiative and his strategic genius didn't seem to extend to pranking.
"I doubt it's Malfoy," Harry shook his head. Before Hermione could make a big deal about how they could have been sure if they'd investigated, "Why was everyone freaking out about the snake, anyway? There must have been a hundred people in the room that could have canceled the spell like Hermione did."
"Snakes, especially magical snakes, are terrifying," Lavender explained to the crowd of mostly-Midgardians. "Jormungandr. Nidhogg. Fafnir. Even the Aesir are scared of them. We don't really have any snakes on Vanaheim, so if you see one it might be a big magic-resistant monster that could even kill Thor."
Dean pointed out, "But the whole house of Slytherin is all about them."
"Everyone would have probably been scared of a lion too," Hermione countered, to the compartment of mostly-Gryffindors. "Just because something's your mascot doesn't mean it's not scary."
"An eagle in a confined space would be pretty threatening too," Padma added. Everyone looked at her funny and she said, "Our mascot is not a raven. Any more than your house's mascot is a griffon."
"I should ask Luna if there's any such thing as a huffle," Harry grinned, making as if to head down to the compartment where Luna, Ginny, and some of the other first-years were sitting.
"Don't you wind her up," Padma insisted, putting out a hand to keep the door shut. "We've been working on her not saying things that make people think she's crazy."
"You lot doing things with the flying armor man again?" Ron asked, changing the subject away from his sister's weird friend.
Harry shook his head, "Dean and I are staying with Hermione. Well, we're staying at the London sanctum, but we're hanging out with Hermione during the day."
She explained, "My parents didn't feel great about two boys staying in the house the whole time, especially since they have to work half the break."
Parvati winked, "Our dad wouldn't have let us have two boys over for weeks either."
"Mine would probably be thrilled if Harry Potter came calling," Lavender rolled her eyes at parental meddling. "Wait, did I just say that out loud?"
Dean laughed, "Look at what good friends we all are. Just totally platonic friends."
The compartment suddenly got very tense, as eight people just starting to be hit with adolescent hormones realized how tightly packed in they were with an even mix of boys and girls.
"Guess Nev stayed," Seamus brought up, to try to cut the tension.
"He said he needed a break from his grandmother," Parvati gossiped. "I think he told her he wanted to spend the break studying. I guess he's not in much danger from the monster, and she wouldn't have let him stay at any of our houses."
"I hope he gets some sleep," Harry agreed. "He's been so stressed, I feel like a lot of nights he just stays up studying. I wonder how much of that is his grandmother. Does anyone know what happened to his parents? He doesn't seem to want to talk about it, but his grandmother seems…"
Everyone turned to Lavender and Ron, who were the most likely to have that information, and Lavender explained, "I think they might have died in the war? I can ask my family."
"Don't want him to think we're prying," Harry agreed. "But it might help to know."
"He's been really withdrawn this year," Hermione nodded. "I don't know how to make him feel included."
Dean rubbed his chin, thinking, and suggested, "Maybe one of you girls should try to talk Fandral into asking his grandmother to let him do more stuff. He probably knows her, right?"
"One in three chance he broke her heart, though," Harry grinned, reminding them that Augusta Longbottom had been jilted by one of the Warriors Three. "But I like it." He left unstated that it might be the most useful thing the guy had done all year.
Nobody had any better ideas, and the conversation moved on. Soon enough, they were once again detouring through the Goblin Market to get back to London, and saying their goodbyes for the holidays to Seamus and the Patils, as Harry and Dean followed Hermione over to her parents.
"Thanks again, Doctor and Doctor Granger," Harry grinned.
"You're never going to stop, no matter how often we ask, are you?" Hermione's mother shook her head. "It's no bother. We've been watching the news about Iron Man. To think. If only more of the world's billionaires could have the change of heart Mr. Stark had."
Harry shook his head, "I've met a lot of them at Tony's parties. They wouldn't be much use even in power armor."
"Well said," she smiled. "Well, why don't we get you situated over at the sanctum and then work out schedules? We parked over there, so we can just walk."
It was, as usual, a short stroll over to the London sanctum in Whitehall Gardens, and they were met at the door by Master Rama himself, who joked, "Back promptly, I see. Strange that Vanaheim has only one train, and yet they manage to keep it on time. Come in."
Harry and Dean were sharing a small room in the elaborately-appointed building, which seemed to borrow heavily from the classic British aesthetic, all intricately-carved dark woods around heavily-ornamented cream-colored walls. They at least had their own slightly-ostentatious bathroom rather than sharing one with the entire hallway, and it included a brass-accented clawfoot tub. It was honestly a lot for two boys used to either modern American or semi-medieval living.
"Shall we draw ourselves a bath, Harry old boy?" Dean asked, in a bad English accent.
"Perhaps later, old bean, after high tea," Harry responded in kind, and they both cracked themselves up laughing.
When they got their stuff put away and headed back downstairs, Hermione was bouncing, "We're learning escapology!" Neither seemed to get it, so she elaborated, "You know, like stage magicians use to get out of handcuffs and ropes?"
"Zip ties are also a modern challenge," Master Rama added. "While it doesn't come up often, if you get restrained, it really impedes your ability to work magic. So we try to teach everyone at least the basics of escape. Perhaps some other stage magic thrown in, so you can play off any slips as mere entertaining illusion, yes?"
In all actuality, the Masters of the Mystic Arts were scrambling to come up with a curriculum for these children. Even the Hogwarts-trained sorcerers that they eventually got rarely wanted to spend so much of their vacations doing extra study. Perhaps that was why their conversion rate was so low, frequently only convincing a couple of the recent graduates to join their order. The Ancient One had patiently explained to her subordinates that they were to make all reasonable allowances for helping Harry Potts and his friends with their educational aspirations.
It might even keep them alive long enough for the Masters' investment in the kids to pay off once they graduated.
After both boys acknowledged the plan, Master Rama finished, "We'll start tomorrow. I understand the Grangers are taking you out to supper now."
The dinner conversation with Hermione's parents suddenly took a steep turn as they accidentally mentioned the attacks, and had to explain that two of their classmates were in comas from a monster that was targeting students from Earth. "It's probably why that elf assassin was trying to keep Harry from going," Dean further put his foot in his mouth. Ronan's Guard had been searching the train before they left, and keeping watch as they boarded, to make sure that the Dahvee mercenary didn't follow them back to London for another shot at Harry. They all assumed he must be hiding somewhere in the forest outside of Hogwarts.
Helen Granger pinched the bridge of her nose while her husband cupped his face in his hands. She asked, "Why are we sending you to this place that has trolls, giant wolves, and now a…"
"Giant snake, probably," Harry admitted.
"...a giant snake wandering the halls?" she finished.
"Oh! I was actually thinking about that, after Lav mentioned the snakes on the train–" Hermione began.
Dean laughed and started to quote, "I want these mother–" Harry elbowed him before he could finish the catchphrase in front of Hermione's parents. The movie Dean had been about to quote (that was not nearly as good as its internet hype hoped) was one that Happy had taken Harry to see without Pepper knowing. Honestly, Simon Williams had been all wrong for the lead part, anyway, despite how much gusto the famous actor had put into the signature line.
"Anyway," Hermione said, trying to finish her thought and distract her parents from the way the conversation had been going, "as I was saying, you remember that giant blur on the photograph?" Aunt Pepper had eventually gotten Colin's film developed, but it hadn't been particularly helpful. "What if it's a Nidhogg serpent?"
"But they're bound to Niflheim," Harry disagreed. "Thor and the Warriors Three fought one during the… huh… maybe we are learning something in that class."
"Right!" Hermione continued. "And it showed up right after the Deathday party when a convergence to Niflheim opened. Maybe it's incorporeal like the ghosts. It would explain why the picture came out as a blur. That's how it's in the walls, and why when it attacks you it just knocks you unconscious. It can only attack your spirit, not your body."
"The regular ghosts can't punch you unconscious, though," Dean said, though now not completely confident about that statement.
Hermione shrugged, "We can mention it to the headmaster and I'm sure he'll sort it out." She turned back to her parents, "We really are being careful. Honestly, I kind of wonder if Hogwarts doesn't allow a little danger to prepare us for the kind of things we might run into if we stick with magic in the real world."
Jean Granger reluctantly nodded, saying, "Before all this started, I'd have been aghast at my little girl having to fight monsters. But, well, on top of everything else, normal people on the freeway can have their lived endangered by two men in flying robot suits. And there are all those rumors about the green sasquatch smashing up towns."
"Not the green sasquatch again, dear," Helen objected.
"It was big news a few years ago!" he argued. "The American military was hunting it and everything, according to the internet. Anyway, I'm just saying that I don't like Hermione being in danger. But… I think she'd be in danger even if we forbid her going back to the school. This way, she's at least learning to be as safe as she can be in the world she's been thrust into."
Helen looked between her family members for a long minute, everyone awaiting her decision, before she finally nodded, "But I want you all to be extremely safe! No unnecessary risks!"
"Yes, mum!" Hermione agreed, with a relieved smile that she wasn't being forbidden from going back to school.
After dinner, they were dropped back at the sanctum, and got the full tour of the place before heading to bed. The most impressive area was basically a museum for magical relics. "All the sanctums have such a room," Master Rama explained. "Relics wait here in trust for a sorcerer whom they might choose to bond with."
"They're intelligent?" Harry asked.
"In a sense, and some more than others," he shrugged. "It's my personal belief that they accumulate bits of the spirit of their bearers over the centuries. The oldest ones can become very powerful, and very temperamental. Feel free to come close to the cases but do not touch unless invited. And don't feel badly if you are not chosen by a relic at your age. Some are never chosen, but go on to create new relics."
"Supposed to teach that in runes class at school, I think," Harry agreed.
"Not sure if I'm going to take that one," Dean shook his head. "I'll probably take whatever leaves me enough time to practice the things I'm actually good at."
"Supposed to be a fair about it in a couple months," Harry shrugged. "And then we get to try to explain to Hermione that she doesn't have enough time to take every elective."
Dean smirked, "If anyone can figure it out, she can. Maybe get one of those Oculus Agamotto things?"
Master Rama raised an eyebrow and said, "I'm surprised you know of the Eye of Agamotto. But it is not for something as mundane as taking extra classes."
"Tell Hermione," Harry grinned, though he picked up on the implication that it wasn't a type of item, but that the one he'd seen in the Kamar-Taj inner sanctum/library might just be the only one, and it was powerful enough to be mentioned in books about time travel written on Vanaheim.
Master Rama did, in fact, caution Hermione about that when she showed up for training the next day. "Honestly, what must you all think of me?" she complained. "I'm not that mental. Though… I guess if there was a simpler magic item that could give me a couple of extra hours in a day, that would be a big help…"
"And that's why the warning," Harry poked her in the shoulder.
"I'll leave you in Master Mordo's capable hands for the lesson," Master Rama simply shook his head, dropping them off in a sitting room toward the front of the building, where his fellow British master was waiting, various restraints placed on an antique writing desk.
All three bowed to Master Mordo. Between their first short class with him before Hogwarts and encounters over the previous summer, they'd picked up that he was nice enough but very serious, so he didn't have much patience for joking around. "Good morning. I suppose you're learning to escape from bondage. It's a good skill to have. I shan't be explaining why I needed to develop it." He grabbed three stout-looking padlocks from the desk and said, "Let's start with whether you can pick a lock with magic, before moving on to how to do it with hand tools…"
What followed was a fairly intense several days of training. Mordo never raised his voice, and was never mean, but simply assigned them new and more difficult challenges, treating them like young adults that wanted to succeed. For many pre-teens, the style might not have worked, but Hermione was eager to excel in any learning situation, Dean saw a definite value in all of the information, and Harry just thought it was plain cool. They worked at it for several hours a day, and then spent time doing holiday things with the Grangers in the evenings. By Christmas, they'd pretty much mastered various unlocking and cutting spells without using their wands, learned to slip bonds and break plastic ties, gotten the rudiments of physically picking locks, and were even close to being able to get out of handcuffs.
But Christmas morning was all theirs, and Harry and Dean had relocated to the Granger residence. Bright and early, he got a video call on his phone from Aunt Pepper, "Merry Christmas, Harry! Oh, and Hermione and Dean. Are your parents around yet, Hermione?"
"They're having tea. We're not opening anything right away," she told Harry's aunt.
"You're up late?" Harry said, recognizing the living room in their home in Encino. "Isn't it like 1 AM there?"
"Who sleeps?" Pepper joked. "But, no, I wanted to make sure to catch you so I could be part of your morning. Sorry again that you couldn't come home. There's at least one car outside the house right now that I'm sure is a pretty annoying reporter. How bad has the sneaking around been? Did you get the contacts?"
"They're so itchy," Harry complained about the color-changing contacts. He was happily back to his glasses when not out in public. "If I didn't need to disguise myself going out in London…"
"I've almost gotten used to seeing you with brown eyes," Hermione grinned.
Dean chuckled, "We get you wearing those full time, and it'll just be Ron who doesn't have brown eyes in our group."
"And Nev," Harry made sure they didn't forget the boy.
"Neville has brown eyes, though," Hermione disagreed.
"You sure?" Harry asked. "I could have sworn…"
"The contacts weren't the only thing I sent," Pepper interrupted that thought process. "Did you get the presents?"
Harry acknowledged, "Yeah, but I think Luc is getting tired of playing portal courier for us."
"They won't teach us to use sling rings though," Dean said. "We've been trying all week. I don't think they trust us."
"Well I'm trusting you," Pepper said. "I think you'll recognize one of the presents from last year. Use it responsibly. From what I hear about dangers in the castle, I think you'll need it. Only for your protection, understand?"
"Yes, Aunt Pepper," Harry repeated. "Thanks! Did you wind up using it?"
She nodded, "It helped a lot when Obie was going crazy. I had to steal files from the office without him noticing, and he probably would have tried to use me as a hostage during his fight with Tony if he could have found me. But I'm hoping I won't have that much excitement going forward."
"Says the lady being stalked by reporters," Dean joked.
"Unfortunately, I usually need to drive to get away from them, and they'd notice my car driving itself," she disagreed.
"Why hasn't Tony made self-driving cars yet?" Harry asked.
"It's on the product roadmap," she admitted. "We usually bump into Tesla and Google people at the Monaco Grand Prix. I'll try to bug Tony to mention it to them. It would be easier for us to do the AI and one of them to work on the hardware."
"Aw, man, is that this year?" Harry grumbled. "It's in May right? So there's no way I'll get to go."
"You just focus on your schoolwork and not getting eaten by a monster," Pepper insisted. "Anyway, Merry Christmas to all of you. Pass it on to the Doctors Granger, please!"
The Potter cloak of invisibility was indeed in Harry's Christmas gifts, along with a bunch of other presents that were less magical but probably more useful in his day-to-day life, like new socks. To his surprise, there was even a box that came from Tony, which contained a complete set of original AD&D books from the early 80s and a note that simply said, "Uphill. Both ways!"
"Were those Mr. Stark's?" Hermione asked, fascinated by the vintage rulebooks.
Harry flipped through, and noted a few markings that didn't look like Tony's handwriting on the otherwise well-preserved manuals, "Doubt it. He doesn't really keep physical books around. Probably had JARVIS or Aunt Pepper order them online. But neat! I was worried he was going to get me something electronic that I'd break if I took it to school."
After a lovely Christmas with the Grangers, they were right back to escapology training on Boxing Day. At the end of the lesson, they were somewhat surprised to find the Ancient One having tea with Master Rama in the central meeting room. They all bowed formally to the leader of the order, and she inclined her bald head with a smile of greeting, and then turned it sideways as if perplexed.
"Harry. I sense a relic, and not one of ours?" she said. "But barely. Like it's trying to hide itself from me."
"Probably my family cloak," he admitted, pulling the diaphanous object out of his robe pocket. It packed down to about the size of a baseball when rolled up. He shook it out for her to see, his arm flickering in and out of vision as the length of silvery cloth caught and deflected the light. "My aunt just trusted me with it."
"Ah! The Tarnkappe. I've heard many stories, but never seen it," she smiled. "Though I expect few have. It's not bonded to you, yet. I wonder if it will become completely undetectable once it is."
Harry's eyes widened and he asked, "How do I bond it?"
"It's different for every relic. Keep it to hand and use it if you get the sense that it wants to be used. An item that old may take some time to accept you, or may do so suddenly for its own reasons." She gestured them toward seats at the table, "But that was not why I came to talk to you."
"You came to talk to us?" Hermione said, surprised and barely remembering to sit. So far, only Harry had really had much face time with the Sorcerer Supreme.
She nodded, and once they were all sitting explained, "Anthony Stark has become quite possibly the most visible individual on Earth. I trust now you understand my message from earlier this year?"
Harry nodded, "He needed to become Iron Man?"
"Our particular timeline did not feature any viable possibilities where he did not," she agreed. "But he is a very smart man, and scrutinized. And you are learning to use magic, even here on Earth. And have already encountered threats that have followed you here from the other Realms."
He frowned, "We know we can't tell Tony. And I'm being very careful! I didn't tell him anything about the elf that attacked him."
She smiled, "It's good that you're careful. I encourage you to remain so for the time being. But, the way events are unfolding, our centuries-long secrecy may come to an end. Perhaps even within the next few years."
It was Master Mordo who seemed shocked at that, saying, "Surely we can continue to work from the shadows? Our fight is not against material evils."
She shook her head and explained, "With the prevalence of cameras and the internet, it would only have been a matter of time before we were revealed had this world's threats simply remained on the level they have been for the past few decades. But I have foreseen threats coming that are beyond any that Earth has faced before, and we may need to face them in full public view."
Mordo bowed his head in grudging submission, "You do see more clearly than any of the rest of us."
"That time is not yet, however," she cautioned. "My belief is that there will come a day where enough wonders have been encountered that an order of sorcerers that protect the world will be easily accepted, but were we to reveal ourselves now, it would be politically disastrous."
"So… what if we have an accident?" Harry checked. "Should we do like Master Mordo has been teaching us, and be ready to die instead of revealing magic in public until you say so?"
"Karl," she gave Mordo a fond but chastising smile, "did you really tell them to die instead of revealing their powers?"
"I find it's best to set firm limits with young people," he gave a very faint smile, one of the first they'd seen from him. "But both Wong and I agree that it would be too easy to rely on the Runes of Kof-Kol to cover any mistakes. Best to take things seriously."
She nodded, but said, "Another explanation may present itself. I have seen that Earth could soon become aware of Asgard and the other Realms, though no fault of our own. Once those facts are known, these students may be able to reveal a certain portion of the truth to those like Anthony Stark who might demand answers: they are aliens, learning 'sufficiently advanced science' on a distant planet."
"Huh," Harry thought out loud. "I guess I really am technically an alien. Now that Obie's dead, there's not as much risk of me getting alien autopsied. But if Tony tries to run experiments, I'm going to need to use all the escape moves you've been teaching us… and maybe a sling ring?"
"We can discuss that again when the time comes," she smiled. Apprentices always wanted a sling ring.
Chapter 21: The Secrets of the Heart
Chapter Text
"We've a problem, mates," Seamus announced to the boys' dorm room one night after they'd been back from winter holidays for over a month.
"Another attack?" Harry asked. The castle had been remarkably coma-free since they'd returned, though part of that had to do with strict curfews after dark, everyone using the buddy system to get around even in daylight hours, and the professors turning the place upside down trying to find the snake ghost. Dumbledore had concurred with Hermione's suggestion that it could be a Nidhogg serpent loose in the school.
"Worse," Seamus shook his head. "The girls learned o' Valentine's Day."
"What's that?" Ron asked.
"Day where you send mushy cards to the friends in your class," Dean answered, slightly flippantly.
"Doesn't sound so bad," Neville added.
"Tha's prim'ry school," Seamus shook his head at them not getting it. "For teen's it's about who ye fancy, innit?"
"It's about being fancy?" Dean was confused.
"No, who ye fancy, ye idjit. Like datin' an' snoggin' an' such!"
At times, the language barrier even though they all technically spoke English was a lot, and Harry finally worked out, "I think he means that the girls are going to expect us to tell them whether we think of them as girlfriends, not just friends who are girls."
"Exactly!" Seamus agreed.
"Well obviously Harry and Hermione," Ron stated.
"Why does everyone think that!?" Harry asked. "Why don't you assume, 'Obviously Dean and Hermione?'"
Ron got a calculating look, "So you're not already together with Hermione? And don't want to be?"
"Remember I'm the youngest one in the room," Harry shook his head. "I'm not sure I'm thinking about anyone like that yet. Hormones haven't kicked in. Bunch of guys in my class the last year of school on Midgard started trying to 'go' with girls, but they were just trying to seem like grownups. It's silly to worry about it until you have to."
"Man has a point," Dean said. "But if we were planning which girls we liked…"
"Just as an academic exercise?" Neville suggested.
"Exactly," Dean agreed. "Do we consider dating just to see what it's like? Should we date outside Gryffindor in case it goes bad? Should we think about who's probably going back to Earth after they graduate?"
Harry rolled his eyes, "None of you are seriously into girls yet, and you want to pick a life partner?"
"Just as an academic exercise," Dean grinned. "I think I should get to pick first. After all, I need a girl that's going to want to live on Earth and is okay dating a black guy."
"Wait," Ron latched onto something he'd said. "Going back to Midgard?"
"Yeah, man," Dean explained. "I'm joining the Masters. Harry probably too, right?" Harry nodded. "We might still come visit, but we're not going to buy a house here and settle down."
"I ain't decided yet," Seamus allowed. "Me family's all in Ireland now."
That looked like it was blowing Ron's mind. "But… heroes together forever."
"You could probably come to Earth and learn magic there?" Harry offered. "But that's still nearly six years away. That's basically forever. Dumb to plan that far ahead. And getting married and stuff is even further than that. My aunt isn't married yet and she's nearly forty."
"Yeah, but she's hung up on Tony," Dean countered.
"Fair," Harry agreed, glad that he wasn't the only one that noticed it after spending time with her. "Still, even my parents didn't start dating until their seventh year here, and they were, like, the picture of young love."
"But they got married right after, yeah?" Ron checked. "I think that's pretty common around here, getting married right after Hogwarts. My parents did too. Nev?"
Neville waited a beat, like he didn't want to answer, but finally admitted, "Yeah."
"S'what I'm sayin'," Seamus agreed. "Gotta make a move now, or no options by the time ye're ready."
"Which of the girls do you want to date, then?" Harry asked him.
"None o' 'em," he shook his head. "Pretty sure I'm inta blokes. Though I guess ye're right that I might no' know fer suire 'til puberty kicks in." He gave it a beat and added, "None o' ye, o'course. Be like datin' yuir brother."
Everyone nodded, but didn't make a big deal of it. They'd suspected for months, anyway. Harry asked, "Did you bring up Valentine's Day just to come out to us, man?"
"Well…" Seamus admitted, "Only partly. I really did hear 'em gigglin' 'bout it."
"We could just ignore it," Harry figured. "It's not like there's a Valentine's Day tradition on Vanaheim that they'd expect anything. We didn't do anything about it last year, not even the upper years."
The very picture of "spoke too soon," the next morning at breakfast, Fandral hit his goblet with his spoon to get everyone's attention, and announced, "I've been reminded of an excellent little Midgardian tradition, St. Valentine's Day, due to all the lovely cards I've already received. Thank you very much to all of you for the wonderful thoughts. Midgard's courtly romance was a tradition of valor that we appreciated even on Asgard, and I think it might lighten spirits in these times to see it revived.
"With that in mind, I have here a dwarf-crafted charm said to protect the wearer from afflictions of the heart," he held up something golden that was on a shiny chain, but which no one could really make out from across the great hall. "What say we make it a contest? At the end of Horning, which is pretty close to the date of the celebration on Midgard, I'll award this for the greatest example of public and courtly romance. It could be a poem. It could be a piece of art. It could be a public declaration of love. The winner may then have this charm to gift to their paramour."
The excited gossiping swept through the hall about three seconds after he finished speaking.
Over the next week, the Valentine's Day competition led to three massive headaches for Harry.
First, Fandral took to reading anonymous poetry and declarations of love at breakfast, from those who wanted a chance at the contest but didn't feel up to public speaking themselves. Harry was the object of more of these secret love poems than he'd expected, and Draco became an even bigger pest attempting to mock him about each one that he received. Far and away was the one that compared his eyes to pickled toads. He honestly wondered if someone who didn't like him had submitted that one just to be funny. It couldn't be the Weasley twins, because they were banned for their own prank poems after the first day (and their friends, submitting them for the twins, by the next morning).
Second, the girls of the study group started very precisely not saying anything about how the Gryffindor boys hadn't yet publicly given them Valentines contest entries. They said it so silently they might as well have been screaming. Finally, the boys spent a productive evening in their room with Dean's art supplies making a bunch of clearly-just-friends Valentine's cards for each of the girls, with nothing to differentiate any of them from the others other than the names signed on them. They gave them out to Hermione, Parvati, Padma, Lavender, Luna, and Ginny. While the girls seemed vaguely disappointed that none of them had received public declarations of undying love, they at least seemed to appreciate the effort and the screaming silences finally ceased.
Third, there was the problem of Myrtle. Harry wasn't even sure how she was finding him, but she'd wander out of walls as he moved between periods to say hello, poke her head out the wall in classes where the professor wouldn't immediately yell at her just to stare at him, and even once scared the hell out of him by poking her head through the stall while he was using one of the downstairs bathrooms.
"Just give her one of those Valentine cards," Ron suggested, when they were getting ready for quidditch practice after dinner a couple of days before Fandral's arbitrary deadline. Ron was still basically the only alternate on the team, but got to play a fair amount during practices as Wood let him play keeper while inspecting the rest of the team's maneuvers from different angles. "You can drop it on the way down to the pitch."
"Don't you think that will give her the wrong impression?" Harry checked.
"It worked on the other girls," Neville added. "Anyway, I'm heading to the library."
Harry nodded, "Alright. I think we had a couple extras. I can fill one out. Don't forget to take a buddy, Nev." They were still trying to avoid anyone going out in the school alone, especially later in the day, though they'd gotten lax about it with no attacks for two months.
"I'm a pureblood, but okay," Neville shrugged, heading out with his satchel. "I usually go with Ginny, but I haven't seen her around today. I'll see if anyone else wants to go."
Harry and Ron left the room a little while later, Valentine card for Myrtle in hand. The ghost's bathroom was still a convenient stop on the way down the great stair, and Harry knocked on the door just in case a living girl was using it. He'd heard that was pretty uncommon since Myrtle had moved back in. Her voyeurism was even worse if you were in her own domain.
A faint sobbing paused and he announced, "It's Harry Potter. Can I come in?"
"Are you going to throw a book at my head too?" she asked.
Harry gave Ron a look, and the taller boy met Harry's eyes with his blue ones and shrugged, mouthing, "She's crazy. I'll stay out here."
"Gee, thanks," Harry mouthed back, rolling his eyes. "I'm coming in, okay?" he said, pushing into the room. The place looked about like the boys' bathrooms, all slightly-alien fixtures from a culture that had figured out magically-powered flowing water and waste disposal centuries—maybe millennia—earlier than Earth, and had haphazardly adapted their bathroom standards when someone mentioned a good idea from other planets. It was very big on brass fittings, of all things. He could hear Myrtle's quiet sobbing from the stall at the end, and asked, "Someone threw a book at your head?"
"I didn't see who it was," she answered. "I bet it's one of those mean girls that doesn't like sharing the bathroom with me. It's Olive Hornsby all over again. You know I was in here crying about things she'd said to me when I died?"
"No, I had no idea," Harry said. "I'm sorry they're so mean to you." He didn't think he'd earn any points with the ghost that she might have more friends if she kept her head out of the stall when people were trying to use the toilet. "I just came by to bring you a Valentine's card?"
"Oh?" she sniffled, poking her head out of the stall and threatening to break into a grin, eyes brightening in her excitement to a nearly-glowing blue against the general monochrome translucency of her. "For me?"
"I mean," he tried to figure out a tactful way to put it, holding up the card, "I've been giving them to all my really close friends who are girls, and I didn't want you to feel left out." Her eyes narrowed as she tried to work out whether to be mad about that, so he quickly said, "Do you want me to set it up in your stall?"
She finally nodded, admitting, "That would be very helpful, since I can't actually touch it. And you can remove that book, too, while you're in there."
"Yes, ma'am," he agreed, still pretty curious about what girl was mad enough at Myrtle to attempt to assault her in a bathroom with a thrown book. Unless it was a tome of exorcism, it wasn't going to do anything.
He gingerly pushed the stall door open (it wasn't like Myrtle could throw the latch when she was inside), and found himself very close up to the tittering ghost girl. "Oooh, Harry. Welcome to my humble abode," she told him.
He held up the card for her to see, and to ward her off a bit in the small space, "Just over here on the tank, do you think?" he said, setting the card on the metal surface of the tank for the toilet. They worked fairly similarly to Earth toilets, for all that the water to fill the tank was conjured and the waste it washed away was automatically destroyed by magic.
"Oooh, those are pretty drawings of flowers. Thank you, Harry. It's good to know someone cares," she said, leaning over to appreciate the card.
"I bet it's hard," he agreed. "Are there any other ghosts you can talk to, or do too many of them speak Old English?"
"And they died old, too," she agreed. "Professor Binns is about the only one I can understand. Well, there's one more, but he won't talk to me. Almost makes me want to go back to Niflheim."
"I'm sure it will all work out. Just give people time to get to know you," he told her. "That the book?" he asked, spotting a small black tome face-down in the back corner of the stall.
"Yes. Please take it away. And thanks for talking to me, Harry," she said.
"Sure thing," he nodded, bending over and trying to ignore Myrtle's tittering and the faint cold of her hand touching his butt as he reached for the book. It was probably good that she was incorporeal, because she'd be even more problematic as a physical entity.
As he stepped back out of the stall, he took a look at the book in the magical light of the bathroom, noticing that it was a fairly soft binding in black leather with no obvious markings except for the small yellow gemstone set in the center of the front cover. The whole thing could probably easily fit in a large pocket, for all that it was about an inch thick.
And that was about as much inspection as he got done before the assault on his mind began.
The yellow stone began to shine brilliant light, and his hands without his conscious control flipped open the book, page after page of densely-worded text flipping by quickly. It was almost like machine code in printed form, the occasional English words like, "Obey," "Serve," "Mission," and "Father," legible against seas of alien glyphs and programmatic punctuation. It felt less like something reaching into his head, and more like it was going straight to his heart…
…where it met an orange light. Harry Potter had already been claimed.
Now his head started to hurt, as the energy of the Soul Stone once more leaked from the famous scar on his forehead, though only Myrtle was there to see it. Harry felt a mother's love tinged with rebellion—the one thing he'd directly asked the first stone he'd held was to help another throw off mental conditioning. It might still have not been enough, had a living intelligence been trying to compel him with the stone, but with only the textual programming of the book to battle, the orange light beginning to suffuse his skin gradually pushed the yellow light away, back into the book, and away from his hands.
He used them to slam the book shut and drop it.
"What the hell was that?" he asked the ghost in the room.
"Well I don't think it did that to me," she said, though suddenly Harry wasn't so certain. Could you mind control a ghost?
This had to be related to the attacks. Harry withdrew his invisibility cloak from his pocket and, treating it like touching a live electrical wire, he put the cloak down, quickly kicked the book onto it with his foot, and then bundled the whole thing up, hanging onto it by the end like a garbage bag that was only partially visible. "I've got to get this to the headmaster," he said to himself as much as Myrtle. "Um, Happy Valentine's," he remembered to tell her, before leaving the bathroom.
And where was Ron Weasley, who should have been waiting outside?
No time for figuring out why Ron had left without him, and suddenly feeling exposed in the empty classroom levels, Harry rushed out onto the grand stairway, and began running upwards toward the headmaster's office. He certainly didn't want to try to hang onto the book himself, or risk it touching another student. Unfortunately, he was so fixated on where he was going that he lost track of his surroundings, and didn't see the spell that hit him, just as he was cresting the fourth-floor landing.
He certainly felt the floor, as the full body-bind spell wrapped him in its turquoise energy and sent him crashing down, face first, narrowly avoiding smashing his brains open on the next step.
Unable to do more than grunt angrily, head turned so he couldn't even see his attacker, he felt someone's hands pawing at his robe before noticing the bag made of the cloak. Fortunately, his hands were frozen holding onto it, so whoever had petrified him couldn't steal the Potter relic, but they were able to quickly and quietly work the folds open to take the book back. There was a long moment of the assailant thinking of what to do about him, before they seemed to decide to just leave with the book, light footfalls disappearing off back down the fourth floor corridor.
And there was Harry Potts, paralyzed like an idiot, victory snatched from him because he hadn't been paying attention, angrily waiting for the spell to wear off or someone to come along.
Strangely, it turned out not to be that powerful, and started to wear off on its own only about half a minute after he heard the footfalls running away. When they'd practiced that spell in class, Hermione had been able to get him with one that was strong enough to last at least a minute before Flitwick had dispelled it from him. Either the person casting it hadn't meant it to last, lost a lot of power casting it without yelling the mnemonic, or was another younger student. The spell worked almost like a physical binding, for all that it mimicked paralysis, and once he could start moving his limbs, he was able to use some of the escapology Mordo had taught him to quickly throw off the spell, regaining full mobility in an instant.
"Oh, good," a young man's voice said, with the familiar echo of a ghost. Harry rolled over drawing his wand, to see an unconcerned apparition walking up the stairs. It looked like a dark-haired young man in his late teens or early twenties, wearing robes cut similarly to Myrtle's, if there was any kind of fashion to such things. The boy's voice had an English accent, and he explained, "I was about to go find help, but it seems you're okay."
"Don't suppose you saw who cast the spell?" Harry asked, surreptitiously stowing his cloak in a pocket and trying to look for other assailants without losing track of the strange new ghost.
"Sorry, no," the speaker said, moving closer so that Harry could see that he was probably quite handsome when he was alive, marred somewhat by the large vertical puncture in his chest as if he'd been stabbed through the heart by a very wide sword, or maybe a helicopter blade. "Say, are you Harry Potter? I've heard about you."
"I don't think I've seen you around," Harry said, trying to size up the new visitor but having a hard time picking up anything from his face but interested concern.
"Mort," the boy introduced himself. "Mortimer Dol Vola. I just came back last Halloween and have been finding my feet. I loved this place when I was a student, but it's a lot different when you're a ghost."
"I bet," Harry agreed. "Sorry, but I need to get to the headmaster."
"I'll walk you. I know the students aren't supposed to be out this late alone," Mort said, strolling along as Harry began to climb the steps to get the rest of the way up to Dumbledore's office.
"I'm surprised the ghosts are out," Harry said, still wary of the unknown specter. "Can't the giant snake fully eat you?"
"Could be," Mort admitted. "You lose a lot of fear of death after you actually die, though." He gestured to the oversized death wound on his chest. "Can't really feel fear the same way, either. No blood to pump or chemicals for your brain to release. Funny thing is, I survived the last time it was in the castle."
"Yeah? You weren't the student it killed?" Harry asked. He supposed the hole in his chest could have been a giant snake fang wound.
"No, that was Myrtle," he explained, and Harry filed that fact away. "I died a few years later. Imagine my surprise, though, when I came back to find that the boy they said unleashed it is now the school's gamekeeper."
"Hagrid didn't kill anyone," Harry shook his head.
"Maybe not," Mort said, agreeably. "But if he didn't, who could it be? And if Hagrid doesn't know, you'd almost have to ask the snake itself. Not that there are too many people that can talk to snakes around, right?"
"What'd you say your last name was again?" Harry asked, shrewdly. "Mortimer del Volo?"
"Dol Vola," Mort corrected. "It's Welsh." He smiled faintly and said, "Well, it was good meeting you, Harry Potter. I think this is your stop." He gestured to the gargoyle guarding the headmaster's office and walked away through a wall before Harry could get another word in.
He'd need paper or some Scrabble tiles to be sure, but Harry was fairly certain that Mortimer Dol Volo was another anagram of Tom Marvolo Riddle. He frowned and told the gargoyle, "I need to talk to Headmaster Dumbledore. It's an emergency."
Someone had just tried to mind control him with a book, and the ghost of Tom Riddle was wandering around and just happened to show up. Harry didn't really understand how it was all connected, but hopefully Dumbledore would have some ideas.
The annoying thing was that he hadn't even tried to go investigating, and all of the danger was finding him anyway.
Chapter 22: Show and Tell
Chapter Text
Dumbledore didn't have any other ideas—at least any that he was willing to share. When Harry had described the book with the yellow gem, the headmaster had seemed worried but not altogether surprised. He was very interested in the ghost of Tom Riddle, including his age and manner of death, but didn't see fit to explain why to Harry. He at least seemed as annoyed as Harry about how such a big clue had fallen into his lap only to be stolen right out.
For his part, Ron had a reasonably good explanation for how he'd seen a suspicious figure running down the hallway and given chase—but lost his target—Harry already missing by the time he got back. Myrtle stuck to her story about someone throwing the cursed object at her.
In the end, all the headmaster could really do was quietly look for both the book and the ghost of Tom Riddle. The student body was told that someone (which they could infer were a pair of redheaded twins) had put an embarrassing joke curse on a black book with a yellow gem in the cover, and no one was to touch it, but to call a teacher if they found it. Harry agreed that if they told everyone what it really did if you touched it, some of the students might consider it a challenge; or aspiring dark wizards might be very interested in owning the book. A general search of all books in the castle was infeasible: there were too many places to hide contraband, those with less dangerous but still banned possessions would freak out, and all the assailant really had to do was stash the book in the library or in a spare desk in an unused classroom and they'd never find it.
Dumbledore seemed certain that tracking and summoning magic would fail to affect the book.
Harry had quietly briefed most of his friends on what was really going on, for all that he was suddenly unsure who to trust. He didn't even know how long the mind control would have lasted. Could any or all of his allies currently be working for the sinister black tome, probably ultimately at the behest of the wraith of Lord Voldemort? Would they kill him in his sleep? Why hadn't his attacker killed him on the stairs, instead of just taking back the book? Did they need him alive and mind controlled for some reason? If they wanted him alive, then who had tried to hire the Dahvee to kill him?
It was enough to make a kid paranoid.
Most of the student body remained oblivious. There hadn't been any more attacks, and whoever was controlling the snake (which may or may not have been Tom Riddle) was laying low. Fandral's Valentine's contest was ultimately won by a Midgardborn Hufflepuff seventh-year that Harry didn't know, who enlisted basically her entire house to do a flashmob song and dance number to propose to her girlfriend. It was pretty impressive. Everyone but Harry seemed to be having a great spring.
At least Aunt Pepper (who was not pleased that there was now a mind-controlling book and the shade of his parents' murderer in the castle) had some good advice. She'd written to suggest that if the mind control was as simple as tapping people with the book, they could quickly just take over the castle. There had to be some limitation to it, so chances were that few, if any, of his friends were permanently mind controlled. She advised him to trust, but verify: assume anyone might be in the thrall of the book, but probably weren't. So as long as he could get two or three of his friends involved in any decisions, most or all of the decision-makers were probably okay.
Since he didn't know what he'd do without being able to confide in his friends, he was glad to have that sanity-check to keep him from turning into a shut-in, suspicious that everyone was out to get him. He was especially hopeful that Dean was in his right mind, because Harry's prime suspect was Ron, and he liked having another person in the room he could count on to keep him from getting killed or dragged off in his sleep.
But he was done with assuming that Dumbledore would just take care of it. Either the old man was incapable for some reason, or this was another deliberate test to see if Harry could handle it. Investigation by twelve-year-olds was back on the table.
Step one: Previous victim Myrtle. The ghost claimed that she couldn't remember how she died. Since she'd also claimed she couldn't remember anything happening when the book flew through her head, he had to assume she was compromised.
Step two: Hagrid. The big guy had conveniently gone on some kind of expedition and wasn't back yet to answer questions. Harry figured either Dumbledore was keeping the gamekeeper away from Harry, or, more charitably, had kept him out of the castle to remove suspicion if there was another attack (and maybe the pause in the attacks was because Tom was just holding off until Hagrid was back around to frame). They'd have to wait until he got back to question him.
Step three: Ghostbusting. From what research they could find, ghosts outside of Niflheim were barely more than holograms, pretty much impervious to anything but other ghosts. And when Harry and his crew asked around about whether the ghosts would be willing to try to dogpile the shade of Voldemort and his giant pet snake, at best they got empty promises.
They also wrote to the Masters for advice on ghosts, but their response wasn't helpful. Incorporeal apparitions weren't that common of a threat on Earth, and those that were often came from another dimension and had specific spells that could affect them based on their place of origin. The Masters didn't need to fight the draugr of Niflheim enough to have a default strategy. They figured that they might be essentially Astral projections, but Harry and his friends were a long way from being able to project Astrally and try to fight a ghost that way.
Step four: Training. In addition to doubling down on figuring out the general counterspell so he might have some chance of getting out of magical traps in the future, it was finally time to get training from the one person they knew who'd supposedly fought a Nidhogg serpent before.
"We need to actually learn to swordfight," Harry told Fandral, backed by Dean and Hermione, when they arrived to class early one day shortly after Valentine's.
"I'm certainly planning on–" Fandral started to explain.
"Today," Harry insisted, going over and grabbing a practice saber along with Dean and Hermione. "I'm not saying you can't tell us stories. Just, you know, teach us to fight while you do it."
"Of course, of course, I'd always intended to. This whole thing honestly reminds me of the time–"
Harry loudly clanged his saber against Dean's and asked, "Like this? How do I stand?"
As the rest of the class filed in and saw that there was actual sword practice going on, they happily went and grabbed their own weapons and Fandral basically had no choice but to teach the class. Every time he started to go off on a tangent, Harry or Dean would ask him another question about swordfighting stances. It finally started to become a class rather than Warriors Three storytime.
By the end of Spring-Month (which was probably sometime in mid-March, though Harry always had to do the math on a piece of paper to figure it out for sure), there had still been no new attacks, sightings of spectral Tom Riddle, or leads on the book. But they were feeling reasonably confident about their swordfighting (for all that they couldn't really get in a lot of out-of-class practice because of Wood's punishing quidditch training plan for the upcoming match against Hufflepuff).
They at least got a break from training one Sunday afternoon for the long-awaited electives fair. Well, it was less of a fair and more packing all forty-or-so second-years into a large classroom with the teachers of the five electives to explain why the kids should choose them.
"Remember, you must choose at least two electives. More are possible, but not always advisable, for all that they will look good on your transcripts," Rector McGonagall explained. "Now, let me introduce Magistra Vector."
Harry and most of the rest of the study group paid rapt attention to the school's math teacher. They were some of the only ones—other than Ravenclaw—to care. The dark-haired witch that took the front of the room seemed to favor red robes, and had clearly ink-stained fingers and a couple of uncaught smudges on her face.
"Thank you, Minerva," she said. Harry wasn't able to judge her age, other than indefinably adult. On Earth, she could have been anywhere from 30 to 60, and obviously the range was larger on Vanaheim. She had a bit of an accent that was possibly Russian. "I'm Septima Vector. The class I teach is called Arithmancy. It incorporates a great deal of mathematics, so is, at base, of use to any of you that plan to be involved in your family's finances, or any kind of scientific field." Not that many native Vanir were going into the sciences. "In addition to the more practical maths applications, we go into the geometry of spell forms. This makes it a key undertaking if you ever hope to alter or create magical spells. Finally, there's a fair amount of focus on probability and various forms of predictive modeling that can be used to make forecasts."
Off in the corner, Trelawney loudly scoffed, "Forecasting."
"You'll get your chance, Sibyll," Vector told her, flatly. "But, yes, the predictions we make in arithmancy don't require any kind of innate divinatory talent. Simply an understanding of how to assign and total chances that an effect will happen. It's less dramatic than a prophecy, but potentially more useful in the day to day."
"Thank you, Septima," McGonagall said. "Students, please save any questions to the end, where you can ask them individually. Sibyll, would you like to go next? Seer Trelawney, everyone."
Trelawney stepped up to the front, looking even more oddly-put-together out of the matching background of her office. She looked like a goth who'd accidentally shown up at a tupperware party. "The future," she moaned theatrically, deepening her voice and waving her hand in a long arc of fluttering black sleeves. "Your fate is already written in the weave by Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. What will be, will be. Or perhaps not, if you can learn to see clearly. Even if your ultimate destination is decided, however, prophecy can help you navigate the terrain between the now and the then. Not everything is about you, and you can experience feast or famine along the way without changing your conclusion. Divination is the many arts of understanding the future, the past, and the present. Why is what is, what is? How can you make use of this information?"
Parvati and Lavender were bouncing in excitement, and Parvati couldn't help but ask, "Do we need the Sight to take your class?"
The teacher shrugged. "It helps, of course, dear girl. But it is notoriously difficult to test for divinatory talents. If you believe you should take my class, that may be the Sight, in its unsparked form, urging you to learn all you can to ignite it. Destiny is a pathway, and if you are intended to see further than others, you must first climb as high as you can upon the structures that have been built before you." She took a long, pregnant pause, and then noted, "Because we focus on reading tea leaves, the weaving of the skeins of Fate, a fair amount of haruspication, and the like, even for those without the Sight, my class will teach you a number of arts useful in maintaining your home."
"Well spoken, as always, Sibyll," McGonagall shuffled her off. "Usher Burbage, if you'd please?"
A somewhat-meek woman of the core Vanir stock but with her hair dyed a bright bottle blond took the front of the room. She was wearing a strange outfit that seemed to feature a pair of slacks that could have come from Earth under a long jacket that was similar to ones Fandral liked to wear, pinned and patched with several dozen medals, buttons, and medallions from what looked like a range of cultures. "I'm Charity Burbage. I teach Cultural Studies. We go deeper into the various localities and politics of Vanaheim, but also do deep dives into the cultures, politics, and technology of the other realms. I'm especially fascinated by Midgard, so I hope as many Midgardborn as possible will take my class and expand my knowledge of what's possible these days. I hear there have been many breakthroughs since I was last able to visit about thirty years ago! I'm always trying to expand my knowledge."
Thirty years was a lot of Earth history to miss. Burbage hurried back to her place before McGonagall could ask her to step back, and she said, "Let's have Preceptor Babbling."
The witch who moved up was younger than the other electives teachers, and seemed to have a bit of a Persian cast to her otherwise Vanir features, for all that her accent was pretty standard for the planet. "I'm Bathsheda Babbling, and I teach Runes. Its basic function is to translate various writing systems, and we do a fair amount of introduction to different languages throughout the Realms, primarily dead languages that were used with various ancient runic writing schemes. This will include a study of the types of runes used by dark magic practitioners, such as witches, if only so you can recognize and counter them. Since skill with a quill, brush, etching fluid, and chisel are key to the rendering of many runes, you can also consider my class to teach you the fine arts, and we provide a strong foundation for drawing, painting, metalworking, and sculpture as well as calligraphy. However, the ultimate goal of the class is to learn to enchant items, which is usually handled by scribing them with runes of power. So you have that to look forward to in later years."
Harry gave a nod to all of his friends. Most of them could see the utility of being able to make their own enchanted items. McGonagall waited for her to leave then announced, "And finally, Mister Kettleburn."
"Silvanus," the man announced. He had stomped up on at least one prosthetic leg, and had one prosthetic arm. His gray hair was unkempt and his visible skin was covered in old and new scars. He said, "Husbandry. I'm actually retiring after this year, but I expect the new professor will do much the same as I have. Hopefully get less injured in the process. Husbandry's a lot about managing your herds and flocks. A bit of hunting lore, so you can live off the forests and plains. We also prepare you to capture, tame, pen, and otherwise handle some of the more dangerous creatures of this and other Realms. That's where you've got to watch yourselves and your fingers. It's a lot of fun, though it may cost you an arm and a leg in the long run." He barked out a laugh at his own joke. "Seriously. Only take this class if you don't scare easily and have some common sense in your head." He waved his prosthetic arm as proof, then stomped back off.
"And that's the overviews," McGonagall said. "The professors will be available for you to question for the next little while, or you can ask me questions as well."
They walked around a bit to talk to the individual professors, Dean admitting, "I don't know if I'm going to do the math with you guys. Seems like you'd need a bigger brain that I've got. I guess I can do Runes with you, though, now that I know it's the closest thing we get to an art class."
"Just keep in mind that you're pretty far behind on the math they want even for liberal arts universities," Hermione cautioned him. "You might have to take arithmancy if you want to go to college."
"I'll figure it out when the time comes," Dean shrugged. "Let's see what Burbage has to say about Earth culture…"
The blond professor really was thirty years out of date. She hadn't heard of cell phones or the internet. "Maybe I'll just go with runes and arithmancy," Harry figured, after talking to her.
"Thirty years probably isn't that badly out of date for Asgard, at least," Dean figured.
"Is anyone taking husbandry and divination with me?" Ron asked. "I hear they're the easiest. Plus, useful to know more about fighting beasts."
"I might," Hermione said. To everyone's surprise that she'd take those instead of arithmancy and runes, she admitted, "I want to see if I can take all of them."
Harry said, "Didn't we already explain you couldn't time travel to take extra classes?"
Hermione shook her head and explained, "I've been thinking about it, and I bet I can convince them to let me show up to class only on test days and major lectures, and otherwise miss some classes to take others, as long as I keep up with the homework…"
Dean just shook his head, "Hermione. No. You have to sleep. And you definitely wouldn't have time to practice martial arts and wandless casting with that schedule."
Hermione harrumphed in the way that meant she didn't have a valid counter-argument, finally settling on, "Well it's not like we've been doing that much this year, with Harry always at quidditch practice."
"Yeah, I'm thinking of dropping that next year," Harry agreed. "Too much practice time for one game a season."
Ron seemed scandalized, "Mate! But you're a great seeker!"
Harry just shrugged, "And I like flying. Maybe I'll stay on as an alternate if I can come to fewer practices. But Wood's schedule is crazy. I have other stuff to learn. There's got to be someone decent coming up. Does Ginny fly?"
Lavender nodded while Ron shook his head, and Lavender giggled, "She's been sneaking brooms out of the family shed to practice since she was little, because their mum didn't think she ought to be flying."
Ron gasped at that. "She never told me…"
Hermione bit her lip. "Okay. Arithmancy, runes, and probably cultural studies. But I may change my mind on that last one. Is anyone other than Ron not taking runes with us?" she asked the study group.
Everyone gauged each others' interest, and they mostly allowed, "As long as we can all help each other with it." Lavender and Parvati were obviously taking divination as their second, as was Neville. Padma was taking divination as well, to have a class with her sister, but also planning on arithmancy and runes with Harry and Hermione.
Dean finally decided, "If Hermione's going to take cultural studies, maybe I'll take husbandry, just so we have someone taking it that can tell everyone else if anything interesting happens." Ron and Seamus barely came to the study groups unless they were researching monsters.
"Sounds like a plan!" Hermione smiled. "Let's sign up!"
On the way out, Hermione dragged Harry and Dean off to the library, while the rest of the group headed back to the dorm. "What are we studying?" Harry asked.
She led them to a shelf and withdrew a tome she'd obviously browsed before, and set it up at a secluded table. "I'm worried about Eoster-Month."
"Why do they even have Easter?" Dean asked. It had bugged him the previous year, too. "Isn't that a Christian holiday?"
"That's why I'm worried," Hermione explained, flipping the book to an illustration of a man being pierced with an arrow or dart. "Christianity actually got the name from the Norse religion. In some stories, Eostre was the goddess who raised Balder from Niflheim when he was killed by a holly dart. Well, that's the Earth story."
"Oh, wait, I know this!" Harry said, having done a bit of his own research after playing the Baldur's Gate video games and wanting to know the origin of the name. "Frigga was so worried about her kid dying she got everything in the world to promise it wouldn't hurt him, so he was basically invincible. Except Loki found out that she'd somehow missed the holly plant, made a dart out of it, and tricked another god into throwing it at him."
Hermione beamed that she hadn't had to recount that part of the story, and expounded, "Except I'm finding out that a lot of the Norse stories got things a little wrong. Probably because they thought Odin had been king of Asgard forever, so moved the gods around. According to this book, Balder was Odin's little brother. He died before Thor and Loki were even born. It seems like there was some other god that nobody talks about much that did a lot of the really dark stuff that Loki gets accused of in Norse tales, but he wound up with the blame."
Dean was trying to keep up, "So someone did kill Odin's little brother Balder with a holly dart? And this Easter goddess brought him back?"
Hermione nodded, "Eostre. She was one of the earliest Asgardian sorcerers. It's hard to tell from the histories whether Balder came back for long, and might have just been like the ghosts we have here. But it was a big magical accomplishment at the time." She suddenly went off on a tangent, "I'm actually a little interested in who this god was that did all the evil stuff Loki's accused of, because none of the newer books talk about them at all, and the older ones just say things like 'abides in Niflheim' and it's not clear whether they died or just got imprisoned there–"
"Hermione," Harry interrupted what was probably a very interesting digression to Hermione but didn't explain why she'd called them there, "what's wrong with Eostre-Month?"
"Right," she brought herself back to the point. "They obviously liked that enough to name the first month of spring after her, and she's still famous two-thousand years or more later. I'm finding notes that all of Niflheim celebrates it. Between that and the mystical significance of rebirth and spring, I'm worried that the Nidhogg serpent may be more dangerous next month." They still looked skeptical and she said, "I checked the records. The end of Eostre-Month was when Myrtle died."
Dean summed up, "So ghost Tom may just be waiting until he and the snake power up before starting the attacks again. And he might be strong enough then to actually kill somebody."
"Exactly," she agreed.
"I guess we just keep watching each others' backs like we have been," Harry frowned. "Wish you probably weren't right."
Unfortunately, it didn't take long before they found out she was.
The next Sunday, on the day before Eostre-Month started, the whole school was preparing to head down to the quidditch pitch to watch Gryffindor play Hufflepuff. Except McGonagall stopped them at the front door and announced, "Everyone! Everyone back to your dorms. I'm sorry, but the game is canceled while we investigate. There's been another attack."
"Did someone die?" Harry asked, having been near the front of the crowd.
She shook her head, "Prefects Weasley and Clearwater are in comas like the others. They didn't return from their rounds last night, and they were just discovered in the second floor classroom corridors."
"Percy!?" one of the twins shouted. The other added, "But he's fully Vanir!"
McGonagall scowled, raising her voice to make it clear to everyone, "It was likely always a fiction that only Midgardborn were in danger. Now, back to your dormitories! A professor will come get you to take you to lunch. Get moving!"
Harry overheard Draco complaining, "Canceling quidditch just because of a Weasley and a mudblood. I can't believe it. I'm going to write my father!"
With Vanaheim natives now actually threatened, Harry wondered whether the Malfoys and other influential parents might do something about the problem… and he worried that whatever they decided to do would be even worse than what the headmaster had tried.
Chapter 23: The Spider in the Web
Chapter Text
It took a few days for the parents' reaction to materialize. Every student now had a hard curfew from sunset to sunrise, including prefects, and even the teachers didn't seem to want to walk the halls at night. Fortunately, it was just past the equinox, so they had a full half a day of light, basically being confined in their dorms from after dinner until just before breakfast. Professor Sinistra was scrambling to figure out what to do for her cosmology classes (usually in the middle of the night), and anyone assigned detentions had received a reprieve, but otherwise their days were fairly normal.
On Friday afternoon, when they didn't have any classes, Harry, Hermione, and Dean were taking advantage of a nice early spring day to practice martial arts out on the grounds. "That's a lot of people!" Dean was the first to observe, as he spotted a crowd making their way up from the gate.
"I wonder if that's the parents?" Harry guessed. "I think I see Lucius Malfoy out front."
"That might be the Minister!" Hermione said. "I've heard he wears a green bowler hat all the time."
"What a weird choice," Harry frowned. "I'm going to go see what's going on." Before they could tell him not to, he ducked down behind them, pulled on his invisibility cloak, and moved across the lawn to see if he could overhear anything useful.
The man in the bowler hat indeed seemed to be in charge, and he was giving orders to the rest of the crowd as they walked up. Most of them seemed to be Vanir warriors rather than wizards, and were armed and armored. "I want you to secure the school first thing. We're turning this place upside down looking for monsters."
"There is also word of a very suspicious book, of course," Lucius added as if the thought just occurred to him. Suddenly Harry remembered seeing the man carrying a black book when he'd accosted them at the Leaky Cauldron. Could he have been behind all of this? "We should catalog any unknown books and artifacts that might have something to do with the attacks. In fact, I heard that last year, Dumbledore might have been keeping a peculiar orange stone in the castle, and that had something to do with the issues then. Perhaps it's related, and we should look for it?"
Harry almost laughed out loud. The Soul Stone. They thought it was still in the castle, because only he, Dumbledore, and Gamora knew he'd returned it to its secure storage on Vormir. He hadn't even told his friends exactly what had happened on that strange planet. Had this whole thing been about trying to get a chance to search the school for the Stone?
"We'll have to arrest Mr. Hagrid, of course," the Minister added. "Need to be seen to be doing something. If the attacks stop once he's in custody, all the better."
Harry hadn't even been sure that Hagrid was back. He rushed over to his friends, as quickly as he could without revealing his feet under the cloak, and summed up what he'd heard. "I'll go warn Hagrid. You tell everyone else what's going on. See if you can get ahead of them to warn Dumbledore that Malfoy's really looking for the Stone from last year. He'll figure it out."
"Be careful, Harry," Hermione said as agreement.
"I'm just warning Hagrid. What could go wrong," he grinned, though they couldn't see it beneath his cloak.
"You jinxed yourself on purpose," Dean complained, but both of them ran back to the school, while Harry invisibly headed toward Hagrid's hut, without much of a lead over the band of Ministry guards.
He let the cloak fall open as he banged on Hagrid's door, yelling, "Hagrid! It's Harry. Ministry guards are coming to arrest you."
In a moment, Hagrid opened the door, Fang bouncing and barking furiously in his excitement to see Harry. "Arrest me? Why?"
"Minister says he wants to be seen to be doing something about the attacks. We think they've been trying to frame you the whole time, which is why the attacks stopped while you were traveling," Harry quickly explained.
"Well tha's not fair," Hagrid grumbled. "I don' wanna go ter Azkaban!"
"Can you hide in the forest until this is over?" Harry suggested.
The big man considered, already stuffing what little he'd unpacked from his traveling satchel back in, and admitted, "I could prolly stay wi' Aragog fer a bit. 'Specially since he were the start o' all o' this. Good idea!"
"And, we've been trying to talk to you, too, to ask about the last time," Harry said. "We can walk and talk?"
"Are yeh gonna be able ter find yer way back?" Hagrid checked.
Harry nodded, drew his wand, and formed a complex-looking orange mandala of light on the ground in front of Hagrid's hut. The image quickly faded, but Harry tested and confirmed that his wand would point back to that spot. He'd worked hard to learn what he thought of as the "waypoint" spell after he'd gotten lost in the forest the last time.
He needed to learn more theory to tag a moving target with the spell and track them, or "point me" toward arbitrary locations he was familiar with, but as soon as he figured out those variations they were top of his list to learn wandlessly. As it was, back on Earth, this basic spell would amount to one of the GPS functions already on his phone, so it wasn't a priority yet. But it would be very helpful getting back to the school after wandering the forest.
"Alrigh'," Hagrid allowed, shutting his door and heading out. "C'mon Fang. 'Nother adventure."
They hustled into the treeline, and Harry thought he made out the heads of four Ministry guards cresting over a hill just as they got out of view, so he'd timed it perfectly. Going quietly for a few minutes, he thought he could hear the echo of them pounding on Hagrid's door. "Where were you, by the way?" he asked the big man.
"Doin' a circuit o' the region," Hagrid said. "Dumbledore has me do it now an' again. Look fer beasties an' other threats that've slipped in. But I think he just wanted ter get me out o' the school so I'd have one o' them alibis in case there were 'nother attack."
"That's what we thought too," Harry agreed, stepping over a tree branch as Hagrid followed one of the lesser-used game trails through the woods, which was largely overgrown. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, however. The trees of the forest were already putting out leaves, so even in the afternoon it was very dim under their shadow. But quite a few trees and shrubs were also flowering, and the forest was as beautiful as it was forbidding. After walking in silence for a few minutes, Harry asked, "So… why did they think you killed Myrtle?"
"Aragog," Hagrid admitted. "I found 'im in the forest when he were a baby an' I were a student. I prolly shouldn't'a tried ter raise 'im inside the school. A few people saw 'im crawlin' around and went an' tattled. Then that Tom Riddle found 'im and claimed he were the cause o' all the attacks! As if! Aragog barely got away, but Tom's word were enough ter do fer me stayin' in the school as a student."
"Another dragon or giant wolf?" Harry guessed, knowing Hagrid's proclivities for "cute" beings he'd find in the forest.
"Nah, he's basically a whole person. Jus' looks a little scary. He's not from around here. Prolly fell through a portal. Happens more'n yeh'd think."
Setting that aside because he'd be meeting the monster in a little while, Harry asked, "The last time, did it basically happen the same? Bunch of people getting put into comas, and then Myrtle straight up died in the bathroom?"
"Not a mark on her," Hagrid agreed. "I didn' really know her that much, but she seemed nice. Sad way ter go, dead on a toilet."
"Like Elvis," Harry nodded, not even sure why he knew that bit of trivia. Probably some discussion between Tony and Rhodey. "So nobody ever saw it? We think it's a Nidhogg serpent that's basically a ghost, so it can float through the walls and bite people right in their spirits, or something."
"Huh," the big man considered it, as he shouldered aside some hanging branches. "I ain't never seen one o' them, but heard about 'em. Could be. Could be. Dunno how yeh'd control it, though."
"Tom Riddle's a parselmouth," Harry said.
"That'd do it," Hagrid said. "I always wanted ter be able ter talk ter snakes. Any animals, really. It'd be a big help. Guess Tom really were the heir o' Slytherin, huh?"
"Because only Slytherin's descendents are parselmouths?"
"I think so," Hagrid admitted. "Well, mebbe not. There weren't a lot o' families supposed ter have it that didn't do some dark spells first. Personally, I were always tryin' ter see if I were related ter the Peverells on me da's side."
"The Peverells?" Harry asked. It sounded familiar.
"Real old family," Hagrid admitted. "Supposed to be the family that's in the Tale o' the Three Brothers. Escaped Death, and stole three o' her personal treasures in the process. Parseltongue is supposed to be from figurin' a way ter talk ter the Nidhogg serpents. Be a real help if yeh were in a feud with Death." He took a beat and added, "I couldn't ever find a path ter 'em on my family tree. Think it mighta gone ter the Potters, though."
"Right!" Harry remembered, "Aunt Pepper mentioned that at some point when I was growing up! So maybe I didn't get it from Voldemort!"
"Get it?" Hagrid stopped and looked down. "Yeh can talk ter snakes?"
"Shhh," Harry said. "It's a secret. Don't want the school thinkin I'm the Heir of Slytherin. Dumbledore thinks I might have gotten it from when Tom tried to kill me, but I feel a lot better about it if it's a family gift."
"Mum's the word," the worst secret-keeper in Hogwarts (after Hermione's roommates) agreed. "But that's useful. Yeh takin' husbandry next year?"
Harry shook his head, "Just arithmancy and runes. Dean, Ron, and Seamus are, though. Are there a lot of snakes in the class?"
"Nah, not really," Hagrid admitted. "I were just hopin' ter have some friendly faces. Assumin' they still let me take over fer Kettleburn wi' all o' this."
"Oh, yeah, he said he's retiring. They're letting you be a professor? You'll do great!" Harry encouraged him, not promising to take his class, though.
They walked for a while longer in silence, the forest darkening even further as they entered an area that was left very overgrown and wild. It didn't look like horses would be able to get through most of the underbrush in the area, so Ronan's guard probably didn't patrol it.
But they felt like something was following them. "Is that Aragog?" Harry asked, quietly.
"Don' think so," Hagrid frowned. "But not much else is brave enou' ter come in his territory. We're almost there."
They were entering an incredibly dark area of the forest, for all that it was still a sunny afternoon outside of the trees. The normal sounds of small animals moving around had ceased, and the air was still and slightly clammy from some nearby water source. Fang seemed worried, making a faint whine as the cowardly dog followed behind them.
From atop a rise, a shadowy purplish form rose up, multiple long, insectoid arms waving in threat, a large head barely visible with clacking mandibles and a ring of leering, flat eyes. It breathed a fearsome sound at them like the scariest spider-swarm from the movies, and Harry involuntarily took a step back and kept his wand at the ready.
"Sorry!" it suddenly said in a high-pitched voice. "Hey Hagrid, didn't think it would be you. Oh! Is that young Harry you've told me about!?" the creature asked. It sounded vaguely like it had a New Zealand accent.
"Aragog," Hagrid greeted. "I got run out o' my house. Wondered if I kin stay wi' yeh fer a few while this all blows over."
"Oh, sure," the bug creature lowered his arms and stepped down the hill. As Harry had more time to watch, he realized Aragog moved more like a centipede than anything, seeming to have at least ten long legs coming out of his oblong, segmented body. He walked on the back two sets, though each of them seemed to have two opposable clawed fingers at the end that he could likely used to manipulate tools. "Hi! I'm Aragog."
"Harry Potts," Harry greeted him. "You're an alien?"
"We're all kind of aliens, if you think about it," Aragog said. "But, yeah, I'm from a place called Sakaar."
"Wait, how did Hagrid keep you in the castle? You don't exactly blend." The human-height bug man didn't seem like one could just hide him under a bed (even a Hagrid-sized bed).
Aragog explained, "When I got here, I was just a little grub. Not even as big as you! My arms were all stubby and I couldn't even talk. Hagrid found me and protected me until I could become the fine specimen before you."
That made more sense, and Harry told him, "The Ministry thinks you and Hagrid killed Myrtle. Attacks are happening again, so they're trying to arrest Hagrid just in case."
"That's stupid. Hagrid's never hurt anybody!" Aragog denied. "And I've never hurt anybody that didn't deserve it. Well, and deer. Lots of good deer to eat out here."
"You like it out here?" Harry checked.
"Oh, I miss entertainment, and might want to have kids someday," Aragog corrected. "But it's a fine sight better than where I was. Most of my kind have to live in the junkyard and do scrapping, or fight in the arena. I've had cousins strapped into robot armor to play gladiator while they were still full little! I'll live in the woods and eat deer instead of that, for sure."
"Well, cool, then," Harry said, making a mental note to find out more about Sakaar if there were portals opening to it that you could just fall through. "Anything else you know about the monster?"
Aragog gave an impressive shrug that undulated up each of his sets of arms, "If it can poison a girl to death, you ought to be able to stab it when it's doing that. It's only fair."
Harry nodded. This outing hadn't really taught him much else, but he at least knew that Hagrid was going to be okay. "See you in a few days, I guess," Harry told the big man. "I'll try to send Hedwig to let you know when everything's okay."
"Thanks a bunch, Harry. I didn' want ter go ter Azkaban. It's in another dimension. Supposed ter be awful," Hagrid thanked him, with a bone-jarring slap on the shoulder. "Yeh better head back 'fore it gets dark. Be safe."
Harry nodded and started walking back out of the glade, "Bye Hagrid. Bye Aragog. Good to meet you."
"Sweet kid," Aragog said, then took to planning for a roommate in his forest den, "You want the bottom bunk?"
Harry was pleased that his wand seemed to be pointing unerringly back to his waypoint, since he'd surely be wandering around the tangled forest until past dark otherwise. As it was, his hurry probably made him a bit less attentive than he otherwise should be, until the shadowy form stepped out ahead of him. "Harry Potter," the Dahvee assassin greeted, looking pretty healthy for someone that had been hiding in the woods for months through a Vanaheim winter.
"Oh no, are you going to try to maim me again?" Harry asked.
The elf asked, "You spoke of the monster with the half-jotun. Have you not seen sense, yet?"
"Weirdly, they seem to be going out of their way not to kill me. Did Lucius Malfoy try to hire you?" Harry asked, putting a theory together.
"The Dahvee cannot reveal a client," the elf said in a way that wasn't really a denial.
"I think maybe he wants me dead, but, weirdly, Tom Riddle might not. I don't know why," Harry explained. "I may be safer in the school than where Malfoy can take another shot at me."
"Tortured logic," the elf disagreed. "Harry Potter is always in danger, from the forces that would buck fate."
"It sounds like you know something I'm fated to do?" Harry said, remembering the elf mentioning destiny. "Maybe it's you who's trying to buck fate? Don't you trust that whatever you think is going to happen, is going to happen? What exactly do you know?"
The elf considered warily how much to reveal, before saying, "Something my people have lost, Harry Potter is prophesied to find. We would see Harry Potter survive to find it for us."
"I've been talking to our divination teacher a lot," Harry argued, "and if it's a real prophecy, it's probably going to come true regardless. All you're doing is making it harder for me in the meantime."
"There was… some disagreement over the subject of the prophecy," the elf said, lamely. "We would not wish to wait longer for another possible chosen one to come to pass."
"So… do you want to fight about it?" Harry asked, full of bravado with his wand drawn. "You might have to kill me."
Harry's assailant/protector narrowed his eyes, seeming to judge the boy's resolve, before agreeing, "When Harry Potter sees the beast laid before him, he will regret not staying home. But we will no longer interfere."
"Good. Thanks," Harry said, barely keeping himself from rolling his eyes. "You should probably head home, then. Can't be fun, living in the forest."
"By and by," the elf allowed, slowly retreating into the trees.
Shaking his head, Harry began to walk back toward Hogwarts, muttering to himself, "Crazy, cryptic elves."
He made it back to the grounds before sunset, and slipped into his cloak before he left the trees. He spotted two of the Ministry guards against the back of Hagrid's house, and bet the other two were inside, waiting to arrest the big man if he came back. They were probably in for a long few days. None of them noticed him as he slipped invisibly back up to the school, where dinner was just about to start. He hid around a corner before taking off the cloak, slipping in among the late-arrivals streaming into the great hall.
"How'd it go?" Hermione asked as he slid in between her and Dean at the dinner table.
"Good. Met a weird new friend. Finally got that elf off my back. I'll tell you all about it later," Harry summed up. "How'd it go here?"
"I think they're suspending Headmaster Dumbledore," Hermione frowned. "They'll probably announce it." Sure enough, the old man wasn't in his customary seat at the staff table, replaced by the man in the green bowler hat. Lucius Malfoy had taken a position at the end of the Slytherin table closest to the staff table, and Draco was clearly lording it up over the rest of his house having his influential father at dinner.
Dean added, "He said that you should call for… um… 'faller' if the situation seems bleak."
"Fjalar?" Harry asked, and Dean nodded. Harry almost expanded on what that meant, but then looked across the table to Ron, who was up there on his list of suspected mind-control victims. Rather than his guess that Dumbledore would be staying nearby waiting to come help, he amended it to, "That's what he said his bird's named. Maybe it can take messages like an owl so we could write him for help."
Ron didn't comment, though both he and Neville seemed interested, as did Ginny (who was rarely too far from Harry at dinner). Before they could ask for more information, though, the man in the bowler hat stood to get everyone's attention. He spoke loudly, saying, "Students of Hogwarts. For those that don't know, I'm Minister Cornelius Fudge. Due to the continuing dangers of the school, the Ministry is investigating the attacks directly. Your evening curfew will continue, and we've temporarily relieved Albus Dumbledore from the headmaster position, pending our investigation. Not to worry! I'm sure we'll get it all sorted quickly. You may see Ministry guards around the school. They're leaving no stone unturned while we search for the source of these attacks. I'm sure everything will be back to normal before long!"
"Is Rector McGonagall in charge, then?" Wood spoke up to ask.
"Of educational matters, yes, I suppose," Fudge shrugged, having not considered it. "And I'm sure she'll be consulted on administrative matters, as well. I defer to head of the school board, Lucius Malfoy, of course, on the long-term decisions regarding staffing."
All eyes turned to the Slytherin table, where Lucius gave a faint bow of acknowledgement and Draco preened in the secondary spotlight afforded him by his father's obvious and sudden power.
Harry resolved that the slimy man's tenure in charge of the school would be a brief one.
Chapter 24: Skin and Bones
Chapter Text
Lucius Malfoy was still acting headmaster of the school by the end of the month. And the school was becoming less and less functional the longer he ran it, since it was clear his only actual interest was turning it upside down, purportedly looking for the monster and anything related to it. Areas of the castle were constantly being cordoned off to be thoroughly searched by the Ministry guards, including classrooms. When and if the students and teachers were allowed back in, the rooms were inevitably tossed like one of those haphazard searches in crime TV shows. Anything that could open was left open, books and other objects were left strewn on the floor, and scuff marks were left all over the stonework looking for secret compartments.
They probably would have had their persons and personal belongings searched as well, but the heads of house presented a unified front on that point. For all that it seemed to be a fairly medieval-style society, Vanaheim had rules about crimes and searches that kept personal belongings from being searched without strong suspicion of misdeeds. But Harry figured that it was only a matter of time before Malfoy decided that the Soul Stone had to be hidden in the second-year Gryffindors' room, or maybe just in Harry's pocket.
Overall, there probably wasn't a faster way to get the whole of Hogwarts to start hating the man. Even the Slytherins seemed unhappy, since they were being inconvenienced at class time just as much as the other houses. Once they could figure out a way to do personal searches legally, Harry was sure they'd spare Slytherin, but until then the school was pretty united in their frustration.
At least there hadn't been any more attacks. But, if Harry's theory about Malfoy being behind the black book was true, he hadn't expected there to be.
With the end of Eostre-Month looming, Harry was doing his best to prepare for something big happening. They'd drilled extensively on magic, escape, martial arts, and swordfighting. They'd helped Hermione with her "extra credit" holdout potion brewing. They'd even made plans for sneaking around the school when Malfoy's goon squad finally came for him (not that he had a Soul Stone to hide).
The crisis that came wasn't the one he'd expected. On Sunday evening, the last day of Eoster-Month (sometime in late April on Earth), with no moon in the sky, McGonagall showed up in the Gryffindor dorms and started frantically organizing the prefects to do roll call.
Other than Colin and Percy (still in comas in the hospital wing, though Snape's mandrake restorative potion was expected to be ready very soon), they came up one member of Gryffindor short: Neville Longbottom.
"Rector McGonagall," Hermione asked, "what's happened?"
"Another message," she admitted in a frustrated voice. "Right where the first appeared after the attack on Mrs. Norris. 'His skeleton will lie in the Chamber forever.' But why? Why Longbottom?"
"How long until they use this as an excuse to search Gryffindor?" Harry asked.
"Oh?" McGonagall got his meaning. "Probably not long." She fixed him with a firm look and finally said, "I should go about telling them, I suppose. Everyone should stay as safe as possible." With another glance to make sure he'd gotten the message, she headed out.
"I'll get the holdouts," Hermione offered.
"I'll make sure there's nothing for them to find in our trunks," Harry nodded.
"I'll get the twins to make a distraction," Dean concluded.
Within five minutes, they were sneaking out of the dorm under Harry's cloak (which wasn't technically big enough for all three of them, but the twins had made an excellent distraction).
"We need swords," Dean suggested.
"And probably the only person here that's fought a Nidhogg serpent," Hermione proposed.
"Can we trust him?" Harry asked.
"We have to trust somebody," she shrugged. "This is definitely a trap, right? That we shouldn't just walk into without some kind of adult help."
"We never cleared Neville as a suspect," Harry agreed. "He might have just kidnapped himself."
They made it to Fandral's office without encountering any patrols that might have seen three sets of feet poking out under an invisibility cloak, though they took the long way around just in case there was a guard on Myrtle's bathroom. Harry stowed the cloak before heading in.
"Are you three supposed to be out?" Fandral asked.
Hermione explained, "We need swords, sir. We have to fight the Nidhogg serpent and save Neville Longbottom."
"Well that sounds like a fine adventure!" the Asgardian grinned. "Count me in!"
"That easily, sir?" Harry checked.
Fandral shrugged, "I only really have the one sword that's not a practice blade." He gestured unnecessarily at his own rapier by his side. "So I suppose I must go on this quest. To do battle with Harry Potter! It will be a fine story."
"I guess… we should confirm we can even get into the Chamber," Harry said.
Dean suggested, "If we find it, maybe we could get Snape and Flitwick, too. They're duelists."
"It's in Myrtle's bathroom," Hermione said, matter-of-factly. Three faces looked at her expectantly for the explanation, so she elaborated, "Both messages outside. Myrtle died in there. Mrs. Norris attacked right outside, as if she was just a target of opportunity. Percy and Penny Clearwater were in this hallway. Colin and Justin weren't too far away." She gave it a beat and suggested, "I bet it has something to do with that sink that has never worked."
"Well reasoned," Fandral told her. "I'll award points if you're correct. Give me a moment to get dressed for combat, and we'll away." He went into his attached bedroom to change, and shouted back, "Pity this seems like it's time-sensitive. With Thor preparing for his coronation in a month, he and my companions are likely unreachable in a timely fashion."
"I didn't realize we could have called Thor," Dean grumbled. "We should have done that days ago."
"I'm sure it will be fine," Fandral grinned, emerging in his leather armor topped with a cuirass of shiny Asgardian steel. "Let's move."
The walk down to Myrtle's bathroom was as short as it had been on Halloween, and there were not any guards watching it, though they could see the message still scorched into the stone of the wall. Harry was a bit disappointed, as it might have really helped to have some trained warriors along. Maybe they could be convinced to come along once they got the door open.
"Myrtle, are you in here?" Harry asked before sticking his head in. There was no response, and he poked his head into the far stall, "Strange. I wonder where she went off to. Hope she didn't get eaten when Neville was taken."
"In your own time, Harry," Fandral lounged against the wall nearest the sinks.
"Right," Harry agreed, then walked over. "Which of these is it?" he asked Hermione, and she pointed at the one in the corner. He poked at it for a minute, then realized that if it was a secret button or latch, someone would have found it in the prior centuries. But if it was something only the Heir of Slytherin could open… he knelt down and saw that there was a snake motif etched on the brass fittings in the back of the sink, tarnished over the years but still visible. "Open?" he asked it.
"That's a little creepy, man," Dean told him.
"Did it sound like hissing?" Harry checked, and Dean nodded. "I wonder if it did anyth–"
Fandral had to flail his arms and almost toppled over forward, as he tried to avoid falling into the void that had suddenly appeared in the wall he had been leaning against. A hole of at least six-foot diameter had suddenly emerged in place of the bricks, as if Wile E. Coyote had painted it on to fool the Roadrunner. The "walls" of this new tunnel were outlined in faint blue light, but it quickly tilted away and out of sight.
"That doesn't look like a convergence portal," Hermione said, obviously interested. "Maybe it's a hidden night road, right in the castle!"
"Hm. Only Harry can open it with his whisper-speech?" Fandral checked. Harry nodded, so he added, "Then he should stay here while the two of you go get any warriors you can. I'll advance through and leave Harry here to re-open the gate if it closes."
Hermione beamed, "What an excellent idea. Only… do I get those points, sir?"
"Yes. Twenty points to Gryffindor for solving a mystery of the ages, Hermione. Now, off you go." Fandral told them, while doing some stretches, readying himself to jump into an unknown void.
"We'll be back in a few minutes," Dean assured them, as he and Hermione left the bathroom.
Harry suggested, "I don't know if you need to go in without backup, it could be anyt–" He was cut off as Fandral reached over, grabbed his shoulder, and flung him into the shadowy void.
Going through a night road wasn't like going through a convergence portal. During a convergence, the worlds were conceptually right next to each other: you could just step through. The night roads were, well, roads : pathways that wended through the "roots" of Yggdrasil. They took a discernible amount of time to travel through, even if that time was much less than with even the best FTL spacecraft.
This one was rather like a long slide.
When Harry was spat out of the other end, he almost caught himself but then skidded on some loose gravel and went sprawling on a cold, uneven stone floor. In the few moments he had to get his bearings, he determined that he was in some kind of immense cavern, lit by vaguely-bluish luminescence that traced along and into the stone as if he was literally inside the root structure of the World Tree: the light coming from ephemeral shoots that had dug themselves through the rock of an entire planet. There were gaps in the ground near him where roots had shifted over time, and when he looked down, he could only make out a blackness that was darker than the void of space itself: Ginnungagap.
Like several of the Nine Realms, Niflheim was in a part of the universe where the normal rules of physics didn't all apply. As far as Professor Sinestra knew, nobody had ever gotten a look at the world from a spaceship, to try to rationalize where space ended and the void between worlds began. But falling into one of those holes into the endless darkness was not recommended.
In addition to the root structure, there were a handful of boulders and several long, decaying leathery strips at least two feet wide, that could very well be shed snakeskin.
Harry had gotten to his feet and moved a safe distance away from any of the holes before Fandral came tumbling out of one of the roots, decanted almost like one of those old pneumatic-tube delivery systems out of glowing blue glass. Harry tried to remember it as his night road out, but had to pay attention to the armed and probably-mind-controlled Asgardian who did not trip, but was cursing. "Ow. Oh, that was terrible. Did you feel crushed in there?"
"I'm not Aesir," Harry shrugged, watching the man warily. If he was in pain from having to force his way through a night road, maybe Harry had a chance.
"Right. Only Bifrost from now on," Fandral agreed, fixing Harry with his blue-eyed stare. "Now, let's go on that adventure."
"You're really trying to pretend you didn't shove me into the portal?" the boy asked.
Fandral sighed, "Would be easier if you believed it. I was never good at lying. Exaggerating, sure. Not lying. I guess we can go ahead and do this here, then. Where is the Stone?"
"Don't have it," Harry said, backing up slightly as Fandral took a step toward him, making sure to keep a pit into Ginnungagap between them.
"But you've had it," Fandral insisted. "Otherwise, the words of Father would have worked on you."
"Father?" Harry checked. "Not the Allfather. Aren't you betraying Odin?"
The Asgardian waved a hand in dismissal, "It'll all work out. I think they'll all get along great, once the court learns of Father and his mission."
"When did you learn of his mission?" Harry checked. "Did Malfoy give you the book in the Leaky Cauldron."
"No, actually," Fandral said, still slowly circling trying to trap Harry without turning it into a chase. "Longbottom showed it to me early on. I've been having to hold it since his attempt to show it to you, of course. Nobody searched the teachers." He withdrew the black journal with his off hand and showed it to Harry. With the book revealed, he could almost feel it trying to attack his mind from across the cavern.
"Why not just 'show' it to everyone?" Harry checked, cursing internally that he hadn't followed up on Neville's odd behavior all year. He vaguely remembered that Neville had mentioned being harassed by the Malfoys as he got on the train, and that was probably when he was slipped the book.
Fandral gestured to his eyes, "When your eyes have been opened, it's a distinctive look. Not a lot of blue-eyed Vanir."
"I knew I remembered Neville having brown eyes!" Harry said. "That's why Malfoy was trying to give it to the Weasleys at the Leaky Cauldron!" Most of the Weasleys had blue eyes, which would have made it much less noticeable.
"Perhaps. We also ran into some issues with long term adherence to the words of Father. Tends to slip away when we slept, without access to the book, so the circle had to remain small lest we be discovered." Fandral smiled, "But you're getting me off track telling stories again."
"Wait. That wasn't an act to keep us from learning anything?"
"I like telling stories," Fandral frowned, offended, drawing and brandishing his sword. "Anyway, I think you understand your situation now, Harry. You're off planet where your wand won't work. Not that it would be much of a help against me anyway. Steel and skill beats magic in any kind of fair fight."
Well, with a straight line like that, Harry had to act. Without preamble he wandlessly summoned an energy whip and lashed it to wrap around the man's sword, jerking it free from his surprised hand to clatter on the ground nearer to Harry. Fandral's surprise turned to annoyance, as he started to charge at Harry, who deftly let the whip dissipate (he'd been practicing since the dueling club), removed a holdout, and uncorked the bottle. He pointed the small phial away from him and put his other hand over his nose and mouth as dark purple fizzing steam erupted into Fandral's face.
He gave Harry a confused look for a moment as Hermione's heavily-carbonated sleeping draught took effect, then slumped to the ground unconscious, the book still clutched in his hand. Harry kicked it away from Fandral before it could do something like wake him up.
"Actually…" Harry considered, squinting in annoyance at the evil book. Trying to take it to Dumbledore hadn't worked very well the last time, and he didn't completely trust the old man with such an obviously-powerful artifact anyway. Plus, there were these convenient bottomless pits right there. Before he could rationalize himself into hanging onto the cursed tome, he kicked it into Ginnungagap.
He liked to imagine he could hear it wailing in frustration as it fell into the eternal void.
Wait, that wasn't the book, it was a human voice. "Right. Neville," Harry sighed. As much as it would make sense to try to go back and get help for real, he had no idea how long that slide down the night road had taken, or whether Neville would still be in one piece when he got back with help. He leaned down and picked up Fandral's sword, which he probably wouldn't miss while he was unconscious, wishing he could be sure that disposing of the book would free the man from its control. The sword was heavier than practice blades sized for twelve-year-olds, but well-balanced and meant to be light and quick, so he thought he could manage. He wrapped it in his invisibility cloak, and put it through his belt, where hopefully it wouldn't be obvious to any enemies, then headed in the direction of the screaming. Before entering the room he said, "Hey, Fjalar," as loudly as he dared, trying to wish his magic into the mythic rooster's name like a summon. "If you're on standby, I could use whatever help you can bring."
The unworked cavern he'd started in quickly made way through a smaller opening to a cave that had been carved into a church-like underground structure. While the ceiling was still lit by the blue lights of the roots of Yggdrasil digging through, they didn't reach the ground. The floor had been chiseled flat, and the walls smooth, with columns spaced every few yards along the edges done in a snake motif. At the end of the room, the wall was sculpted into a massive face: a beautiful woman with curved spikes radiating almost like multiple stag's antlers from her head.
There were also two young men and a giant snake standing near the face.
It was hard to concentrate on Neville and Tom Riddle while fixated on the snake. Neville seemed to agree, as Harry realized he was screaming not because he was actually being harmed, but because he had just noticed the monster. Coiled into a small hill, the Nidhogg serpent's head was probably bigger than Harry's torso, and he wouldn't be surprised if it was over seven yards long when uncoiled. It also looked almost as much like a dragon as a snake, with horns and other protrusions lying flat against its head, and bony segments along its length rather than totally smooth scales.
"Quiet, Longbottom," Tom Riddle ordered, spotting Harry. "Our guest is here."
"Harry! There's a giant snake!" Neville yelled. Harry was kind of hoping it was because the mind control had just worn off rather than another trap.
"Yeah, Nev. I know about the snake," Harry said, strolling up and stopping perhaps ten yards from anyone else, close enough to a column to use it as cover if necessary. "How's it going, Mort?"
"You came… alone?" Tom asked, looking past him.
"My mate was in danger," Harry shrugged. "Obviously I rushed off without thinking about it. How'd you even know I'd be able to get here?"
Tom smirked, "We worked out what it meant that you could hear the serpent in the walls."
"I'm sorry Harry!" Neville said, "I don't know why I was helping him and Fandral? I showed both of them the book. And Myrtle too. And I paralyzed you to take the book back!"
"Worked that out Nev," Harry told the boy. "Feeling better?"
"I never actually saw the snake!" Neville boggled, moving back toward the wall and Harry. "Tom was in charge of the snake!"
"Tom?" Harry deadpanned. "I thought your name was Mort."
"It wasn't meant to be a hard puzzle," Tom rolled his eyes, moving a few steps closer to Harry. "I'm guessing you didn't bring the Stone?"
"Couldn't get to it even if I wanted to. It's in the safest place possible," Harry shrugged.
"Back on Vormir?" Tom asked, quietly enough that Neville might not have overheard.
Harry's eyes actually widened and he asked, "How do you know about that?"
The draugr smiled, "Who do you think set that up? It was in my family's ring. For generations, they didn't know what they had until I inherited it. Once I figured it out, I created a safe place for it. Imagine my surprise when I summoned a guardian spirit and got the Red Skull."
"So… why have you been hurting people all year trying to find out where it is?" Harry tried to keep up with the sudden conversational shift.
"I haven't," Tom shook his head. "The Mind Stone is powerful, but its control tends to wear off while you're unconscious. It didn't last long after I came back here. After that, I was playing along as little as I could to keep them from hitting me with the book again."
"You still put four people into a coma!" Harry insisted, then remembered, "And a cat!"
Tom shrugged, "Small price to pay to convince our enemies that I was still on their side while I stalled."
"Our enemies?" Harry checked. "You're my enemy. You killed my parents!"
"I didn't!" Tom actually looked offended, gesturing down at the wide hole in his chest. "I died before your parents were even born! Maybe before your grandparents."
"You're… not Lord Voldemort?" Harry checked, adrift.
"I was going to be," Tom admitted, running a hand through his hair in annoyance. "I had a bunch of wealthy friends that thought the same way I did. Big plans to gain political power on Vanaheim. The Soul Stone as my ace in the hole. And then some aliens showed up trying to make a deal. They wanted the Stone. They wanted me to work for them. They demanded that I turn my completely valid political movement into a bunch of terrorists that were basically trying to kill off about half the population of Vanaheim."
"A fifty-fifty chance…" Harry remembered something Gamora had mentioned.
"Exactly," Tom said, still angry over half a century later. "I said no. It wasn't even a fight. As powerful as I fancied myself, I lasted about ten seconds. Maybe if I'd had the Soul Stone on hand it would have been closer, or maybe I would have just lost it to the jerk. I guess we'll never know."
"So… the Death Eaters were just working for the same person that sent the book?" Harry checked. "Who wasn't you?"
"I've been dead, so I don't know for sure. But probably? I expect they just replaced me with some kind of figurehead leader claiming to be me," Tom elaborated. "In hindsight, always meeting in masks and cloaks probably wasn't my best idea ever."
Harry leaned against the column, totally nonplussed, as he realized his villain was in another castle. He summarized, "So the Lord Voldemort that killed my family and terrorized Vanaheim for years was… an alien murderer using your people to try to kill half of Vanaheim and maybe find the Soul Stone while he was at it?"
"About the size of it," Tom admitted. "By the way, since you didn't flinch when Longbottom mentioned Fandral, I'm assuming you took care of him already?"
"Unconscious in the other room," Harry admitted, gesturing behind him. "And I kicked the book into Ginnungagap."
Tom considered, then shrugged, "He may be able to recover it from there, but that must have also cleared remaining mind control. Probably why Longbottom suddenly went sane. I suppose the great void between worlds is better suppression for the stone than sleep. Might have been better to have it to use, but I wouldn't want to risk trying to undo the enchantments controlling it with no resources. Not a bad success for a kid. Good job, Harry."
Harry started to nod at the praise but then realized, "Wait! You did kill Myrtle! And framed Hagrid! And put a bunch of your classmates into comas!"
Tom just shrugged, "You got me. I'm not a nice person. I didn't really mean to kill Myrtle, but I didn't realize she was in the toilet when I opened the passage, and I couldn't have her knowing about it. I poisoned her and blamed Hagrid and his weird pet everyone knew he had. In hindsight, I could have handled it better. I kind of panicked. I had a whole plan with the serpent to gain allies that would know I was the Heir of Slytherin." He sighed and shrugged, clearly not feeling guilty about it. "Would I do it differently if I had it to do over? Yes." He gave it a beat and then said, "But, let me make it up to you. We can accomplish so much working together."
"Was this all to… try to make friends?" Harry checked.
"You've got a much better success rate than I have," Tom pitched. "You as the Chosen One. Me giving you advice and assistance with training and research. We'll get vengeance for me and for your parents. What do you think?"
Neville had been quiet through the whole pitch, and Harry glanced over at the boy, close enough now that Harry could see his eyes were back to brown. His friend flicked his eyes to Tom and his face went tight, giving a subtle head shake. He'd been mind controlled, but he'd probably had a lot more interaction with the sociopathic ghost in the past few months than Harry'd had in the two conversations he'd had with him. And Neville didn't trust him.
"Why didn't you tell me all of this months ago?" Harry stalled.
Tom admitted, "I didn't know if Longbottom had gotten any of your other friends, and you kids can't keep a secret. He might have gotten me under control again. Or they might have gone with their fallback plan and tried to control the whole school. Seemed too risky until I could be sure you or that old manipulator had handled it."
"What about the snake?" Harry asked, not particularly buying that excuse, but pretty sure the Nidhogg serpent (functionally solid since they were all in Niflheim) would be a pretty big problem if he decided to tell Tom where he could shove his offer.
"He should be happy enough to stay here," Tom shrugged. "But a useful ally if we need him. I assume you can talk to him as easily as I can. The gift of the Peverell bloodline."
"Ah, this one also understands me?" the snake suddenly hissed.
"Have… we been speaking Parseltongue this whole time?" Harry checked.
Both Tom and Neville shook their heads, turning toward the suddenly-involved giant snake.
"I understand your human tongue," the serpent explained. "And that it sounds like you're betraying my Mistress… who will be pleased to note that the Soul Stone is on Vormir."
"I order you to–" Tom began, furiously hissing at the serpent.
"You were never my master, merely a useful tool," it interrupted. And suddenly, barely slower than a striking snake a fraction of its size, it launched itself to crush the completely-surprised draugr of Tom Riddle in its oversized jaws.
Harry's eyes widened at the sudden change in circumstances. He really only had one thought, and that was, "Neville. Run!"
Chapter 25: The End of an Era
Chapter Text
To the young Longbottom scion's credit, he was reluctant to run away from the surprisingly-sapient and murderous giant snake, despite the horrific re-death of the draugr of Tom Riddle. "Harry, I can–"
"You don't have a weapon," Harry insisted, cutting him off and drawing the sword, sweeping his invisibility cloak in his off hand. Not that the sword-and-cloak dueling style Fandral had shown them briefly would help against a giant snake. "Wake up Fandral and get out. I'll try to draw it off."
Neville took another look at the giant snake, which was swallowing down Tom's corpse far more quickly than seemed reasonable for having to unhinge its jaw, and nodded, running toward the entry cave.
That just left Harry and the Nidhogg serpent, who tracked the fleeing boy for a moment before turning its head back to Harry. After the still-visible human body began to distend the snake's throat and it clicked its jaw back into position, it observed, "A sword? You seek to threaten me with a sword?"
"It's what I've got," Harry shrugged, unconsciously switching into Parseltongue himself. If he could buy time for Neville to get out, he might be able to escape, but then the serpent would be able to take back the secret of Vormir to its mysterious mistress. He checked, "Don't suppose you want to monologue for a while? While you digest Tom?"
"Draugr are barely a meal," it disagreed, the lump already clearly dissolving as it slid down the length of the snake at a shocking rate. "But it's been some time since I devoured a child from the living worlds. I imagine you'll be succulent." It was already starting to uncoil and move to cut Harry off from the room's entrance.
"You'll have to catch me first," Harry argued, bolting away from the snake to use the columns as obstructions. Hiding behind one, he swept the cloak on and then tried to move more quietly to the next.
"Run, rabbit," it ordered, rasping across the stone. "Hide all you wish. I can still taste you. Still sense your footsteps." Its tongue flicked the air.
Harry didn't consider that altogether fair. He guessed he should have expected that invisibility wouldn't work as well against animals as it did against people. It would really help if his invisibility was more total. He was basically hiding from a servant of death itself. And that, it seemed, made the difference. Suddenly, he felt the cloak move on its own, sticking closer to his skin rather than billowing as he ran. His pounding footsteps against the stonework became barely audible to him.
"Thanks for joining the party," he thought at the cloak, and was sure he felt it give him a reassuring squeeze in response.
"What is this!?" the snake hissed after him. "Not just hiding! Hiding in the Mistress' own cloak! How pleased she will be to recover it."
Harry cursed to himself, just racking up the things this snake knew that he didn't want it to pass on to whoever it was that had its allegiance. Maybe that face carved into the wall represented this Mistress? He really was going to have to try to kill the serpent. As it slid past the column he was hiding behind, he struck with the sword.
He'd been aiming for its eye, but between his limited fighting skill and the difficulty striking quickly with a sword that he'd been hiding under his cloak, he only managed a light puncture to its side. He'd barely missed the armor plates on its back, which might have deflected the sword entirely.
Nonetheless, the beast shrieked in pain, whipping its head back, fangs extended, to where Harry had struck from. It was only his seeker reflexes, dealing with the biggest bludger he'd ever faced, that let him spring back out of the way, continuing to use the column as a barrier. Harry circled the column while the head tried to chase him, stabbed down again on the lower body of the snake as he jumped over it, and then rushed off to find another piece of cover.
He figured that maybe he could do some combination of Looney Tunes and Death of a Thousand Cuts to the monster, if it kept playing along.
"Vermin! Thief!" the snake screamed. "I'll pump you so full of venom you'll beg me to eat you to end your pain!"
Harry really wanted to taunt the monster, but that would just give away his position. He noticed it was pulling its bulk into a more sidewinder-type movement, coils closer together so it would have an easier time striking at him should he keep trying the same trick. Pale green blood seeped from the wounds on its neck and lower body.
Maybe it was time for a holdout? He carefully moved the sword to his off hand and reached into his pocket for the vial that Hermione had wrapped in several layers of cloth. He somehow got it unwrapped one-handed, gingerly holding the thin glass globe. He waited for his moment, risked holding his hand free of the cloak, and then flung the snitch-sized potion bottle at the floor directly in front of the snake's face.
It exploded, but not nearly as much as he'd hoped. At best, it was like an M80 firework, rather than the nitroglycerine that Hermione had compared the exploding potion to when she'd brewed it. He'd have to tell her she must not have gotten it quite right. They hadn't thought they could safely test it beforehand without alerting the staff.
It at least still made the snake rear up in surprise, and he rushed in, clumsily switching the sword to his main hand to try for a stab at its underbelly. But the end of its body, which he guessed was more or less its tail, flicked at the movement, and he barely managed to dodge being thrashed with hundreds of pounds of armored snake meat.
"Mortal tricks! I hope you become a draugr, so my venom can be poured upon your brow for centuries like the old punishments!" it threatened, nearly catching him by chance as he sprinted away. Having to clear the sword from the folds of the cloak to attack was really diminishing Harry's belief that invisibility was totally overpowered.
Harry reflected on his tactical situation. The giant snake would absolutely wreck him if it landed an attack, he was pretty sure it was immune what little wandless magic he knew, and he had to wait for an opportunity to plink it for hardly any damage with the sword. It should be frustrating—possibly terrifying—but years of playing video games had taught Harry how to handle an attrition boss fight.
Meanwhile, the Nidhogg serpent had never had to deal with this kind of battle before. Warriors fought bravely and to the death. Prey ran away. Even the rare, cowardly warriors that tried hit and run tactics didn't have much patience. Somewhere in its lair there was a very annoying child with a very sharp sword just waiting for a moment of inattention to poke it. Preposterous!
It never actually entered the giant snake's mind that it could just leave with its knowledge.
The fight took another ten minutes of hit and run. Harry would catch his breath against a column, wait for an opportunity, stab safely, and then rush off to repeat the cycle. In a video game, he'd probably be getting bored, since this boss didn't even do any lair actions to try to switch up the battlefield. He'd been waiting for it to thrash around and cause rocks to fall or something. But it did continue to curse quite creatively as he opened up more and more bleeding holes along its body.
Finally, when the serpent was already visibly slowing down from pain and blood loss, Harry spotted a patch of vibrant crimson entering the room through one of the Night Roads in the ceiling. He cleared some distance away from the snake and yelled, "Fjalar! Stunning rooster crow attack!"
He'd just been guessing, but he was right. As the Nidhogg serpent rushed toward where he'd just shouted from, in the air the mythic rooster let loose a crow literally fit to wake the dead. It was loud to Harry, but seemed to cause the snake physical pain. It abruptly aborted its charge and thrashed around.
"Perfect. Hold that pose," Harry said, rushing up, pointing the sword in the air, and letting the boss monster impale itself on the base of its mouth as it, disoriented, swung its head down.
It almost crushed Harry beneath it with the force of its collapse, as he nearly forgot to let go of the sword in time. He tumbled away, leaving the Aesir blade like a plastic sword toothpick in an hors d'oeuvres at one of Tony's networking parties, staying just a foot away from the spasming and flopping coils of the dying snake. He felt his cloak pull itself up around his neck like a scarf, and turn only itself invisible, now that the need for it was done.
"Thanks, buddy!" Harry yelled up at the rooster as he sat back down on the grimy floor to take a breather while the snake finished its death throes. Privately, he thought that the bird would have been a huge help several minutes earlier, maybe before the snake ate his newest frenemy, but he wasn't going to complain too much about the assist. Fjalar made a sound of agreement, then settled on the floor near Harry. He was carrying some kind of object, and it took Harry a second to recognize it and ask, "Why do you have the Helm of Sorting?"
Oh well, maybe Dumbledore would explain it later.
The rooster crow was also loud enough that it had called back Neville and a groggy-looking Fandral to see what was going on in the Chamber of Secrets. Harry shot them a thumbs-up where they lurked by the doorway. "You guys want to come help me cut off a giant snake head?" he yelled across the vast room to them.
Some minutes later, two boys, an Asgardian warrior, a legendary rooster, the Helm of Sorting, and a hastily-decapitated giant snake head tumbled out of the wall and into the second-floor girls' bathroom. The teachers and Ministry guards that Hermione and Dean had assembled were obviously surprised by this. They'd spent nearly half an hour fruitlessly trying to figure out what had happened to Harry and how to open the portal.
"Hey, everybody," Harry smiled. "It's all sorted."
He waved the Helm of Sorting at them so they'd be sure to get the pun.
It practically took a little longer to actually get it all sorted. Before they'd left, Harry, Neville, and Fandral had gotten their stories straight. He wasn't really looking to get either of them in trouble for basically being behind all the attacks. Fandral (who almost looked like a completely different person with his natural brown eyes instead of the blue) didn't feel great about taking the credit, but it would be a lot easier to believe that he'd slain the Nidhogg serpent with the help of the boys and Fjalar than that Harry had basically invisibility-cheated it to death. Plus, the fewer people that knew about his cloak, the better, Harry figured.
They settled on just letting Tom Riddle have the blame. The draugr of the boy that had actually been behind the original attacks coming back for a second round from beyond the grave was a good enough story. Trying to explain that it was a complicated plot to search the school for a powerful artifact that wasn't even there anymore at the mind-controlled behest of a shadowy "Father" who may have been pretending to be Lord Voldemort for half a century… well, people would believe that it had been a single mad ghost all along.
It would have been hard to make any accusations stick against Lucius Malfoy anyway. The guy was connected. But not as connected as the headmaster, who was back in his office and getting the real debrief from Harry before Malfoy was even informed about what had happened. "What are you doing back in the school? The governors suspended you," Lucius demanded of Dumbledore, from the door of the headmaster's office.
"The crisis compelling my suspension has ended," Dumbledore twinkled at him. "Is there a reason I would stay away now that the students are no longer in danger?" He waited, and pointed out, "I was also contacted by the rest of the governors as soon as a young man of Mr. Longbottom's… breeding… was in danger, asking me to come back. They were worried their own children might be in danger."
"And you have proof beyond the word of two children and an Asgardian that the problem is solved?" Malfoy attempted.
Harry just pointed at the incorporeal giant snake head sitting by the door. They had needed to ask a few of the castle ghosts to move it from the bathroom to the office.
"There was…" he sputtered. "There was also rumor of some kind of cursed book?"
"Unrelated rumors, as it turned out," Dumbledore smiled. "I'm not sure how you got in your head that a pranked book had something to do with the attacks. Do you know something about this cursed tome, Lucius?"
"Oh, actually, I did find that, sir," Harry said with a smile, as the snide aristocrat pulled a face trying to come up with an answer. He lied, "I can go get it if Mr. Malfoy wants it for evidence?"
Malfoy's eyes widened while Dumbledore's narrowed, since Harry had explained during his debrief that he had kicked the book into Ginnungagap. "That would be, helpful, yes, Mr. Potter," the headmaster played along, wanting to see where this was going.
"Be right back," Harry nodded, heading out. He was sure the two men would entertain each other while they waited. He sprinted over to the Gryffindor common room and spotted the twins. "I need the thing you were working on. Mr. Malfoy wants it."
The twin on the left admitted, "It was a rushed job…"
"Some of our best work with a time limit, though," added the one of the right.
Harry checked the sack they'd handed him, spotting a reasonably-good facsimile of the cursed black book sitting inside. It wasn't that hard to get a black leather book and put a fake yellow gem in the center. "And it's cursed?"
"Industrial-strength magical itching powder," left said.
Right added, "And some other surprises for anyone that actually opens it."
"Perfect, thanks guys," Harry told them, racing back to the headmaster's office. Dumbledore was just escorting Malfoy out past the gargoyle as Harry rushed up. "Here you go, sir," he held out the bag. "I don't think you should touch it. Word is that it's got some really bad prank spells on it."
Was that look on Malfoy's face relief that he at least hadn't lost his master's mind-control artifact in his aborted bid to find the Soul Stone? He gingerly took the bag from Harry and said, "Understood. I'll see that it's… searched for clues."
Harry just wished he could be there when Malfoy gave it back to whoever he'd gotten it from.
"A prank book?" Dumbledore asked quietly, as Malfoy strode off.
"The twins did what they could on short notice," Harry confirmed.
"Well, then, let's just call that an even thirty points to Gryffindor for ingenuity and forward thinking, in addition to another fifty for courage and a mission successfully executed," the old man twinkled. "Shall we go to the infirmary? I understand the potion to revive the students from their comas is ready and will be administered tonight."
"I may skip it, sir," Harry said, not really wanting to give Colin the impression that they were good enough friends for him to be waiting by his bedside. "But I'll go tell the Weasleys that Percy will be up soon. By the way, why did Fjalar bring me the Helm?"
"There's a sword inside," the headmaster explained, simply, while Harry tried to wrap his head around why you'd keep a sword in a helmet, even if you could use magic to fit it in there. "But you were several steps ahead, and I'll be sure to count on your perspicacity more going forward. Congratulations on bonding your family relic, by the way."
"Thanks, sir," Harry said, still trying to work out what "perspicacity" was. "See you around."
He managed to put off Gryffindor wanting to hear what had happened by claiming exhaustion, and that he was sure Fandral would tell them in class on Monday. After all, it was quite late on Sunday by the time he was done talking to Dumbledore.
Classes were an issue, however. The Ministry guards had absolutely wrecked the castle within a few hours in their furious search for Neville (on top of the more-organized chaos they'd inflicted on it throughout the previous weeks). Shelves were toppled, cabinets divested of all of their drawers, and closets with their doors pulled off. Fortunately Filch was ecstatic that his cat had been revived, because he had weeks of work repairing and rehanging all the paintings that had been yanked off of walls. The kitchen staff was having trouble just putting breakfast together with the damage that had been done to the facilities.
After several days of the school limping along and increasing frustration with the limited ability to teach classes, provide meals, and even get from place to place, Dumbledore announced at dinner, "With the difficulties Hogwarts has faced this year and the state of our facilities, we have decided to let the students go early for the year. Fifth-years and Seventh-years will have an abbreviated exam schedule at the end of this month. For the other years, you shall self-study for the next few weeks. Your professors will provide your summer homework, including materials not covered this year that will be expected at the beginning of next. We'll be sending the Express back at the end of this month. Please contact your parents accordingly."
"What about those going to Midgard, sir?" Penelope Clearwater asked, surrounded by Ravenclaws glad that she was out of her coma. "The convergence doesn't open for another month after that."
The headmaster nodded, "Ah, yes. Rather than take the Express, Midgardian students will be departing from here directly on the last day of Pasture-Month. Fandral is coordinating with Asgard to see that we may use Bifrost to send you back to Midgard. Prince Thor's coronation is upcoming, so it should already be seeing enough work moving guests around for that to be no great challenge for a few more travelers."
"We get to take Bifrost!" Hermione repeated, excited. "Do you think we'll get to meet Heimdall, or will it simply move us from here to Earth without passing through Asgard? Only, it's supposed to be one of the most impressive instances of Aesir technology."
More importantly to Harry, he worked out, "Wait, carry the one… The end of this month is May 22nd! I can go to the Grand Prix!"
The rest of the month was a blur. Pepper agreed that they could divert their plane to meet Harry in London and pick him up on the way to Monaco. They got their summer homework assignments and Hermione immediately put the study group to work getting as much done as possible before they left school. The fifth-years and seventh-years nearly lost their minds having to prepare for their exams a month earlier than they'd expected, and furiously guarded their time with the professors.
Because the defense seminar didn't really have exams—each year's professor set a different curriculum based on their own specialties, after all—Fandral was the most available professor to the younger students. At Harry's encouragement, he'd started having melee combat demonstrations out on the school grounds in the increasingly-nice weather. Most days, he even managed to multitask between instruction and storytelling.
The Asgardian professor cornered Harry in private near the end of the month and said, "I really do wish I could tell the real story. Some of my tales may be a bit… expanded… but all of them are true. You're sure you don't want the credit?"
Harry shrugged, "I think it would just confuse people. And they already expect me to be some big hero around here. It's probably okay if they don't expect me to go charging out and fight giants next year because they know I already beat a monster snake."
"If you're sure," the warrior shook his head, clearly not understanding humility of that sort. "I shall at least tell the real tale to my closest friends, so they'll know they can rely upon you, should they meet you on the battlefield. Perhaps I shall tell Loki that it took a young warrior-mage from Midgard to change my opinion of spell-workers."
"Please don't make Loki mad at me," Harry insisted. "Oh. But do see if anyone up in Asgard knows who this Father and Mistress are? Dumbledore didn't know." Or at least wouldn't admit to having an idea to Harry.
Fandral nodded gravely, "I'd had the same thought. Once Thor takes his role as king of Asgard, I'm certain he will wish to hunt down these villains moving backstage of the play that is Vanaheim." He smiled again and said, "Your swordplay is improving. I'm leaving you and your companions some practice blades. Keep at it, and you could have a quite-valuable skill to back up your magic. I'll check in on you in a few years, and, should your skills be worthy, see to having an Aesir blade crafted for you."
"Thanks," Harry told him, then smirked, "though yours works alright, so I could just borrow that again if I need it."
"Cuts me. Cuts me to the very quick!" Fandral smiled, putting his hand to his chest in mock outrage. "I shall see you around, Harry Potter."
"You too, Fandral the Dashing," Harry told him. The pompous swordsman really had grown on him, now that he wasn't mind controlled.
Rather than having the train ride for farewells, the Gryffindor second-years had a frantic final goodbye as they packed to leave on the last day. Harry pulled Lavender off and said, "Hey. I was going to try to talk to Nev's grandmother about letting him, you know, do stuff. He's been through a lot this year." Harry hadn't really explained it to everyone in so many words that Neville had been mind controlled, but they at least knew that he'd been kidnapped. "Do you think you can talk to her?"
"I'll do it," Lavender agreed. "Between Ron's mother and mine, we should be able to convince her. See you all at the Market?"
"And we'll write," Harry agreed.
Soon, most of the school was taking the helhest carriages down to the train, while all the students heading for Midgard were trying to squeeze into a large circle that had been drawn on the lawn, based on the dimensions Fandral explained was used for Bifrost's portal. "I wonder what it's going to be like when Thor is king of Asgard," Hermione was considering, as they waited for stragglers. "Do we start saying, 'By Thor's Beard'? Does Thor even have a beard?"
"If Odin's retiring, maybe he'll be our defense teacher next year," Dean mused.
"Give the guy a year to take a vacation," Harry shook his head.
"You're going to be in New York after Monaco, right?" Dean checked.
"Probably," Harry agreed. "Aunt Pepper said the Stark Expo's all year, but a lot of the really cool stuff happens in May and June. I'll text you. Sorry you can't come, Hermione."
Hermione nodded, "We haven't seen my grandparents for a couple of years, so I wouldn't want to miss going to visit them. And we're going to travel all over in France while we're there. It should be really fun. But get me souvenirs!"
"Is that everyone?" Fandral checked, from the middle of the circle where he took up a surprising amount of space with all of his luggage. Hagrid gave him a thumbs-up from outside of the circle, and a wave to Harry and his friends. He'd been quite happy to get out of the forest after everything had been settled. He complained that Aragog snored. "Very well," Fandral called. "Heimdall, whenever you're ready!"
An immense light suddenly descended from the sky and Harry had time to scream, "Beam me up!" before they were rocketing across space on the Rainbow Bridge. As he and a couple-dozen other students flew at many times the speed of light through the space between worlds he only had one thought.
He hoped he wouldn't fall on his face in front of Heimdall.
Chapter 26: Slash and Burn
Chapter Text
Harry absolutely had fallen in front of Heimdall. With any magical travel more violent than stepping through a portal, he just couldn't seem to correctly time keeping his feet underneath himself. Fortunately, only his immediate friends seemed to have noticed, save for a brief flick of the towering gatekeeper's orange-irised gaze. The Bifrost control room was an amazing masterpiece of golden magical technology, but they only got to see it and the rainbow-hued crystal bridge connecting it to Asgard for a moment. Fandral stepped back out of the landing area dragging his luggage, bid them goodbye, and without a word Heimdall moved the giant sword that seemed to be the key to the machine back into position to start the room spinning.
Harry also fell on his butt when they landed in the private lawn behind the London sanctum, scorching a complex knotwork crop circle into the ground. "How're ye such a good seeker?" Oliver Wood asked, helping him up.
Harry just shrugged, as confused as anyone.
Everyone who wasn't connecting through the sanctum to Kamar-Taj, New York, or Hong Kong got to take a moment getting the tour of the building before meeting their parents out front. Harry felt like it was probably another sales pitch for joining up with the Masters after Hogwarts, and Seamus did give the place an appreciative look. Harry and Hermione bid farewell to Dean and the Patils as they broke off for the door room, then went outside.
"There's Happy!" Harry noticed Tony's driver waving to him from a parked black Mercedes a little ways down Whitehall Place. He was easily visible in the late Saturday afternoon. A bit surprisingly for London, it was a nice day, with lots of people out walking.
"And there's my dad," Hermione said. "See you at the Market. Don't forget to text!"
"Will do. Have fun in France!" Harry said. She gave him a quick, intense hug before rolling her trunk down to her father's car.
"That's the one with the weird name, right?" Happy asked, as Harry walked up. He helped Harry get his rolling trunk into the car's trunk, and nodded with a straight face, "Nice."
"She's not my girlfriend," Harry corrected, but with less heat than he had previously. With the series of goodbye hugs he'd been getting from his female friends throughout the day… "She's not."
"Of course not," Happy rarely smiled, but Harry could tell he was smirking internally. He opened the back door of the car for Harry and asked, "So why'd we pick you up here? I thought you came in on a train?"
"Different travel because of the early summer," Harry said, sliding in and seeing Pepper already in the back. As he hugged his aunt, he finished explaining yet another of the hopefully-consistent lies they'd invented, "It's a club that has a bunch of my school's alumni as members. Dean and I actually had a room here for Christmas."
"Looks swanky," Happy said, getting in the driver's seat in front of Harry (Harry had finally gotten used to it being on the right side when he was in London). "But you didn't go to this school, Ms. Potts?"
"No, the curriculum wasn't for me," his aunt half-lied. "And why are you calling me Ms. Potts after over a decade of calling me Pepper?"
"Well, you're the boss now," Happy shrugged, signaling and then pulling out into traffic.
"You're the boss?" Harry asked. "Wait, where's Tony?" He was suddenly worried that he'd missed the man dying in a superhero fight.
"At the hotel," Pepper said. "And, yeah… I'm the boss now. Tony was doing too much being Iron Man to run the company, so he made me CEO." She said it with self-deprecation, as if she couldn't believe it.
"That's great. Congrats, Aunt Pepper!" Harry hugged her again, relieved. "You basically ran the company anyway, yeah? Now you just don't have to wait for Tony to sign stuff."
"See, the kid knows," Happy agreed.
"Thanks, Harry," she smiled, glad that he wasn't upset about the upheaval. "Of course, there's going to be even more scrutiny now…"
"I'm getting used to it," he shrugged. "Did I tell you about Colin Creevey?"
"Wait…" she thought for a second and said, "Related to Mark Creevey?"
"His son," Harry nodded. "He's in my dorm. Was trying all fall to be my best friend to try to network for his dad. I feel bad that he was out sick the rest of the year, but it was a lot easier for me."
She agreed, "Mark has cornered me twice at parties trying to get us to promote his app." She thought about it for a second as they wove through the busy downtown London traffic and asked, "So… if you don't mind the scrutiny, how do you feel about giving a speech to the Boy Scouts of America later this summer?"
Harry gave her a confused look and said, "But I didn't even make it into Webelos." Harry's stint in Boy Scouts had been very limited, since he hadn't really loved camping and it was hard to work the meetings around Pepper's schedule.
"Tony donated our entire art collection to them, so there's going to be an event," she shrugged. "Makes more sense for you to do the speech than me."
"I bet Rhodey was an Eagle Scout," Harry suggested. "We could ask him tomorrow?"
"That's not a bad idea," Pepper considered. "But he's not joining us in Monaco."
"But Rhodey always joins us?" Harry frowned.
"After Tony stopped making weapons, the military isn't his biggest fan anymore," she explained. "And with him being so busy being Iron Man, they haven't really hung out…"
Harry rolled his eyes and powered up his phone. "That's dumb. They're best friends even if they don't work together anymore. I'm texting him."
Pepper gave a small smile, "If you can talk sense into those two, I'll take it. I don't think Tony's been feeling very well, and maybe having his best friend back will help."
Harry nodded and texted Rhodey's number with a very manipulative, "Why aren't you going to be at Monaco? Did I do something?"
He was never sure if he'd get a text back right away. Rhodey got away with carrying his personal cell phone a lot of places that probably should have been more secure. But it wasn't long before he got the reply, "Not U. Working. Sorry 2 miss."
"Dumb. :( :( :( We better see you at Tony's birthday party." Harry sent back. Was it weird that a twelve-year-old had better typing etiquette than a grown Air Force colonel?
"K. Games upstairs again?"
"You know it," Harry finished the conversation. "He says he's working. But at least he's coming to Tony's birthday party. Which means I have to go again," he smiled angelically at his aunt.
She narrowed her eyes at him. Ten-year-old Harry probably never noticed the debauchery at a Tony Stark party. Nearly-teenaged Harry, however… "We'll see. Let's get you some clothes that fit for tomorrow, and then you can let me know that you didn't do anything new to get grounded this summer."
They had pulled up next to an upscale tailor's, and Harry had to admit that his existing wardrobe was starting to show a lot of ankle and wrist for a Monaco restaurant. "I brought a teacher this time!" Harry argued. "It wasn't my fault that he was a terrible chaperone…"
Pepper got most of the story out of Harry while the tailor was out of the room, and the rest when they had a moment alone before he was allowed to crash in his hotel room for the night. She ultimately agreed that he'd done his best to be responsible, and was just worried that so many threats kept coming after him. Of course, she wasn't altogether surprised that the Malfoys were in the middle of some kind of mind control scheme, since they'd long been suspected of being dark wizards. "You're not grounded. But keep the cloak handy and never be afraid to use it and run," she ultimately decided. "Now get some sleep."
"Yes, Aunt Pepper," he agreed. "Congrats again on the promotion."
He got to sleep fairly easily, especially since the Vanaheim-to-London jetlag wasn't as bad as the Vanaheim-to-London-to-New-York-to-Los-Angeles jetlag he'd suffered the previous year. But, he still had the time difference getting home to dread after the Grand Prix.
They had, of course, arrived at the private plane and been sitting for half an hour before Tony showed up, looking hungover. That was actually a pretty fast time for Tony. They'd discovered he hadn't slept at the hotel the previous evening, and went ahead and packed up without him.
"What was her name?" Pepper asked, as if she didn't care.
"His name was Val Belokon, and we didn't even kiss," Tony answered, sliding into his chair. "Guy owns a soccer franchise. They won a big match last night. He throws a good party. Turns out Latvians can drink." He took a massive green smoothie from the hostess as the plane started taxiing out to its takeoff position, and began to slurp it down.
"Is chlorophyll really that good for hangovers?" Pepper asked, mollified.
"Leafy greens are good for you," Tony said. "What's more green and leafy than pure chlorophyll?"
"It's really good for detox," Harry agreed. "Binds to a lot of different types of toxins so the body can flush it." Leaves rich in chlorophyll were major ingredients in the various anti-poison potions on the next year's chemistry curriculum, and the study group had read ahead already.
"See," Tony said, then lowered his sunglasses as if just realizing Harry was there. "Maverick. Don't you go to school until July?"
"Gas leak," Harry shrugged, dropping the lie that he and Pepper had worked out.
"What?"
"School had a gas leak," Harry elaborated. "A few kids got sick. They fixed it, but they'd torn up so much of the building looking for the problem that they just sent us home so they could do repairs."
"And they're taking the opportunity to add electrical and network cable runs?" Tony checked.
"No such luck," Harry shook his head. "Every stone and cabinet placed back the way it was when dinosaurs roamed the earth."
"Yay, tradition," Tony said, sarcastically, reclining back in his seat and letting his sunglasses rise back into position. "Flight's two hours, right?" he checked. "I want to hear all about gas leaks after we land. You know, during the car ride to Monaco…" And then he was unconscious. Tony was even better than members of the military for grabbing sleep where he could, after doing without for ridiculous periods.
During the flight, Pepper quietly caught Harry up on the ten months he'd missed, which had been pretty eventful. Tony, never a sound sleeper, for all the ease at which he could nap on a plane, would periodically groggily mumble corrections to Pepper's story. She finally asked, "Do you need us to move to the other end of the plane so you can sleep?"
"No, 'm good," he mumbled. "Jus' get the facts right."
"Fine," she rolled her eyes, "The word he used for the entire Senate subcommittee was 'ass clowns.' In front of a full live hearing and TV cameras. I'm sure it was his proudest moment."
"Heh. Ass clowns," Tony chuckled, shifting in his seat to get comfortable and going back to sleep.
They landed at the Nice airport after Tony had finished his nap, and decided what to pack while Happy went to get the car they'd be using for the thirty-minute drive to Monaco. Harry left most of his belongings on the plane, since they were taking it back to LA after the Grand Prix. Tony didn't take much either, except for a weirdly-shaped red-and-gray briefcase.
It took Harry a minute to make sense of it and ask, "Woah! Did you get the suit down that small?"
"The Mark V," Tony nodded. "Less armor, basically no weapons other than the repulsors, and no real flight capabilities. But it should stand up to small arms fire. Bodyguard in a box."
"We're calling it the Football," Pepper added as they were walking down the stairs into the hangar, where Happy had pulled a new Rolls Royce up for them. "Happy bought some handcuffs so he can carry it around like he's in a spy movie."
"Security," Happy agreed, jingling the handcuffs as he took the case from Tony and then attached it to his wrist. "Lot of governments would love to get a suit of Iron Man armor."
"Can you drive like that?" Harry checked.
Happy frowned and fumbled in his jacket for the key, admitting, "I'll put it back on when we get to Monaco."
Harry sat shotgun while Tony and Pepper took the back, and he told carefully-edited stories about his school year on the drive. This involved slight elaborations on the gas leak story, careful dancing around the subjects they were learning, mentions that he was finally taking some advanced math and languages for his third year, and explaining that he was probably going to be an alternate for "team sports" because being a primary had required too much time. At least the story about the fencing teacher that barely remembered to teach class because he was too busy telling tall tales went over well.
"Martial arts and fencing as electives, huh?" Tony mused. "What are they going to teach you next year for this class? Shooting? Demolitions? Escaping police custody?"
"I… umm… I did kind of take an escapology class over winter break?" Harry admitted, demonstrating his ability to get Happy's handcuffs open with a paperclip.
"I need to learn that trick… for the bedroom," Tony chuckled.
"I've been teaching Mr. Stark boxing," Happy added. "But he cheats."
"It's mixed martial arts!" Tony argued.
"It's dirty boxing!" Happy groused.
"What style?" Harry asked.
"Wing chun, I think," Tony shrugged. "Mostly got it from online videos."
"That's the center-line one, right?" Harry asked. The Masters had started teaching them several variants of mostly kung fu in their previous year's summer camp, though Harry's fighting style presently was a strange hodge podge of Dean's karate, the alien martial art Gamora had been teaching them, and what little they'd picked up in Kamar-Taj.
"Yeah," Tony nodded. "Seemed apt for fighting in armor. Though if I fight someone I have to have a real brawl with, something's gone wrong."
Harry coulded explain that if any Asgardians came to Earth, Tony couldn't rely on his tech making him the strongest human-sized person on the planet. It was probably good for him to actually learn how to fight rather than relying on brute force. Instead, he shrugged and said, "Hermione's dad was telling us about some green sasquatch that was smashing military bases a few years ago."
"Huh," Tony considered. "Do you think the cryptozoology fans would be mad if I beat up a green sasquatch?"
"I'll go ahead and draft a press release, just in case," Pepper snarked.
Monaco was controlled chaos before the Grand Prix, a huge track of public streets obviously blocked off for the race cars that would be starting soon, but Tony Stark's Rolls Royce didn't have to concern itself with road closures. Traffic control was optimized to get the rich race attendees to their restaurants of choice, and they had two motorcycle police leading them to the Hotel de Paris.
Harry's continuing assertion that he wasn't a celebrity was challenged by the people outside the hotel shouting as they recognized Tony, and, thus, Pepper and probably him by association. Fortunately, it was a very short walk into the hotel as a uniformed employee opened the barricade to let them in.
Inside, the hotel lobby was just shy of a madhouse, as a concierge motioned them into hotel's restaurant. It didn't instill confidence when Tony told Pepper, "You know, it's Europe. Whatever happens in the next twenty minutes… just go with it."
"Go with it? Go with what?" she asked.
And then the woman in the red dress showed up. "Mr. Stark?" she greeted, all smiles. "Hello. How was your flight?"
Harry missed the next bit of conversation, though it was clear that she was lining up photographers of some kind. Instead, Harry grabbed Happy before he could walk off and asked, "Who is that?"
"Huh," the driver had almost missed her, himself. "Miss Rushman. Natalie. She was from legal. I bet Mr. Stark hired her as his new assistant. Pepper's going to be unhappy about that." He gave it a moment and added, "She also cheats at boxing."
"New assistant, huh?" Harry summed up. He remembered, "I'll make sure they get you something to eat?"
"Thanks, kid. I'll be nearby, with the Football," Happy said, gesturing with the case that he'd handcuffed back onto his arm, and heading over to wherever most of the support staff for the restaurant-goers hung out.
Harry made it back up as Natalie noticed him and said, "I think that's everyone. Right this way."
"You look fantastic," Tony complemented Natalie, and Harry watched his aunt hide her annoyance by grabbing a drink from a tray. The new assistant's thanks was run over by Tony saying, "But that's unprofessional. What's on the docket?"
As Natalie pattered with Tony, Harry put a comforting hand on his aunt's elbow and said, "It's going to be okay."
"Very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit," she muttered to Harry, taking a sip of her drink. "Just waiting to happen." Harry was sure that wasn't why his aunt was actually annoyed at the gorgeous twenty-something.
They followed Tony and Natalie to where he was clearly demanding the corner table and she was going to have to scramble to inform the wait staff. That was a pretty common Tony Stark power move. Pepper was deliberately ignoring Tony for a moment and on the way to say hello to Elon Musk. "Don't forget the self-driving cars," Harry reminded her. "I'm going to see if there are any other kids here."
She nodded absently. Harry was not actually going to look for other kids.
Despite his protests before Valentine's Day, Harry was very much a nearly-thirteen-year-old. His entire body had been saturated with ever-increasing amounts of hormones for the past several months. It was only that all of the girls at the school wore fairly form-concealing robes that had allowed him to keep his eyes on their faces most days. And the trip back when they'd switched to summer travel wear had been tough.
It was probably part of why he kept tripping coming out of Bifrost.
And then, suddenly, into his life came the absolute in teen fantasies: a beautiful woman just enough older than him to be safely unattainable but close enough that it wasn't weird, like dating someone his aunt's age, in his daydreams. Harry had no idea yet that she was a former model. He definitely didn't know that she had spent literally her entire life training in seduction and subterfuge, unintentionally hitting Harry with the secondhand effects of testing Tony. All he knew was that the last time he'd seen women of Natalie's caliber in this kind of proximity, he hadn't gotten near enough to puberty to really notice. Now, he was imprinting like a hormonal baby duckling.
His therapist would have a rich seam to mine about how Natalie's coloration wasn't that different from Harry's mother's. But he was years from being able to find a therapist cleared for all his secrets. And at least she wasn't green, so that was Captain Kirk-esque fixation on Gamora seemingly dodged.
Harry had not realized that he had basically just stopped in the middle of the room, zoned out, staring at the young woman arranging the table, speaking to the concierge in fluent French. He was very embarrassed when she suddenly finished talking to the staff, noticed him (she'd never actually lost track of him), and gave him a coy smile. "Harry, right? I'm Natalie, Mr. Stark's new assistant."
He nodded, managing, "Yeah. Happy told me. I'm Harry." Then he winced at realizing he didn't need to introduce himself. "Um. In at the deep end?" he somehow choked out. Suave, Potts, he berated himself.
"Oh, no, this part is easy. But I don't think your aunt wanted me to do the job?" He didn't realize that she was guiding him to as secluded a spot in the bustling restaurant as she could find to interrogate the newly-available resource. "Are she and Tony…"
"Nobody knows," he answered honestly. The reminder of his aunt and her issues allowed him to manage a pretty-coherent, "She'll probably like you better if she, you know, doesn't think you're trying to get with Tony? He may try to get with you… not to imply you'd want that…"
"Thanks for the advice," she said, giving him another one of those smiles that made him really glad for the comfortable set of newly-tailored slacks and long sport coat he was wearing. "Uh, oh. Looks like Mr. Stark may need a rescue."
He followed her gaze to where Tony had run into Justin Hammer at the bar. Pepper had already abandoned him, and he was wincing as he was forced to take a photograph with one of the worst technology CEOs on the planet. "I'll save him," Harry offered, half to impress Natalie and half because he would have anyway. Not waiting for approval, he dodged his way through the crowd to reach the bar.
"Actually, it's on hold," Justin was explaining about his defense contract, as Harry walked up.
"Hey, Mr. Hammer," Harry butted in, placing himself in between Justin and Tony as Tony was trying to walk away. "Are any of your family here today? Hunter? Timmy?" Despite Tony hating the man, Harry had met a surprising amount of his family.
Stumbling to a halt, Justin clearly mentally recalibrated. "Ah, Harold," he recognized the boy, though he was constantly trying to be super formal with names to annoy people, the same way Tony gave them nicknames. Harry wasn't even short for Harold, but Justin had never cared. "No, not today. Christine, do you know that my nephew Timmy's a big fan of Iron Man? It's not like we're rivals."
Harry had barely noticed the blond reporter who had been following along behind Tony and Justin, but she seemed to recognize him. "Harold?" she considered out loud for a moment before realizing, "Harry Potts?" Weirdly, she reached out to brush his bangs back and momentarily reveal his scar for confirmation. It wasn't exactly a secret on Earth, but he wasn't famous for it the way he was on Vanaheim, and his eyes narrowed. "I'm Christine Everhart, from Vanity Fair. Can I get a quote from you later about your aunt for our Powerful Women issue?"
Glancing to see that Tony had successfully cleared off, Harry said, "Sure thing, ma'am. She's going to be a great CEO."
"Harold," Justin said, before he could escape, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Can you ask Anthony to get me a slot at the Expo?"
"Will do," Harry agreed, and then slipped back to the corner table.
"Where's Tony?" Pepper asked, the only one at the table.
Harry shrugged, "I saved him from Justin Hammer. Who wants an Expo slot. Also that blond reporter wants to interview me about you…" he lowered his voice, "Do you think she's magical? She seemed to recognize me by my scar."
Pepper gave him a considering look and said, "Well Tony thought she was magical for an evening last year. But, yeah, that's weird. Hold off on talking to her without me. Maybe Tony's in the washroom. You should wash up, too."
"Yes, ma'am," Harry said, only slightly insouciantly, and went off to find the bathroom.
As he pushed his way inside the well-appointed facilities, Tony was clearly having some kind of internal conversation as he stared in the mirror, and Harry thought he heard Tony mutter to himself, "Got any more bad ideas?"
"We could invite Aunt Pepper, Ms. Everhart, and Natalie to all eat lunch with us?" Harry suggested, startling Tony. "You know. As bad ideas go?"
Tony chuckled, getting the joke, but asked, "Maverick… if you owned a race car, would you let someone else drive it?"
"Do I know how to drive a race car in this bad idea?" Harry checked.
"How hard can it be?" Tony shrugged, grinning.
"Are you going to drive in the race? Aunt Pepper is going to kill you. You're trying to get her to kill you, right?" Harry checked. "With the Natalie thing, and now this?" He paused and said, "I mean, it sounds super fun and, yeah, do it, but I just want to know whether to tell her you knew she was going to kill you."
"Bucket list, Maverick," Tony nodded, and tried to spin it like it was just a joke. But there was something really serious behind his eyes. "Cover for me?"
"Don't crash," Harry ordered him in implicit bargain.
"Good man," Tony nodded, slipping out of the bathroom on what was obviously a mission to give Pepper gray hairs.
Harry washed up and noted Tony slipping out the back before heading through a circuitous route to the corner table, where Pepper was waiting. "Did you find Tony?" she asked.
"Don't get mad?" Harry asked, knowing full well that would start her getting mad but it was worth a shot. "He's marking something off his bucket list."
"Some thing?" she asked, looking around and sighing with relief when she spotted Natalie's red dress moving around the restaurant floor nearby.
"He's… going to drive in the race," Harry winced, waiting for it.
The relief that Pepper felt knowing Tony wasn't off with his new assistant immediately evaporated. "This… this cannot happen," she said, with grim finality. "Where's Happy? I need Happy."
"Happy's nearby," Harry shrugged, but then said, "But it's happening." He pointed at the screen behind her where Tony was already appearing on TV, having switched into a blue, form-fitting racing onesie in really admirable time. The coach of the racing team looked upset that Tony was swapping himself in for their presumably-talented driver.
"Why didn't you stop him?" Pepper sighed in exhaustion.
"I'm not his dad?" Harry countered. Left unspoken was that Pepper wasn't his mom. Honestly, Harry didn't have enough understanding of adult relationships to venture the concrete idea that maybe Pepper and Tony had never gotten together because she didn't know whether she wanted him to be her son or her boyfriend. Harry probably did have a bit of unexamined resentment about how much more time Pepper spent mothering Tony than she did him.
More tired than he'd ever seen her, his aunt, quietly defeated, just said, "I think he's trying to kill himself."
Oh. The seriousness of that statement made Harry suddenly evaluate his interactions with Tony over the last few hours. He was obviously not even quite a teenager yet, so didn't have a wealth of knowledge about human psychology. But Vanir culture, Gryffindor in particular, was rife with stories about warriors and inevitable death in battle. "He's been fighting terrorists all year, right?" Harry checked. She nodded sadly, and he suggested, "Maybe he just knows that the armor's not going to protect him forever. Eventually someone will get lucky. He's carrying around a suit of it in a briefcase because he's afraid someone will shoot him when he doesn't have it on."
"I left home to get away from people desperate to die in battle," Pepper nervously wiped away a small tear, unwilling to cry in public. She'd lost her entire family the same way, except for Harry, and he was trying his best every year to get murdered in a school.
Harry put a hand on her arm and asked, "Have you told him that?"
Before she could answer, the gasps of the crowd called their attention back to the TV, where a man had walked onto the track, an orange jumpsuit falling away as he powered up some kind of rig with glowing whips. For a moment, Harry thought it was a sorcerer exposing magic on live television, before he realized it was a tech apparatus. And then the man slashed through the front of a race car speeding past him as if it was made of butter, causing it to flip and begin exploding across the cordoned-off road.
"We have to get to Happy," Pepper confirmed, suddenly all business. She clearly thought about telling Harry to stay behind, but realized it wouldn't work. She also thought about sending Harry ahead without her, since he'd be faster, but also wasn't willing to sit back in safety while both of her boys were in danger.
Maybe Virginia Potter hadn't left Vanir culture as far behind as she thought.
Within a minute, they were hurriedly explaining to Happy what had happened and racing with him to the car. Pepper was highly motivated and making shockingly good time despite her heels and nice dress. Harry half-wondered what had happened to Natalie, but didn't have much time to think about it as Happy blasted the Rolls through the temporary barricades and started weaving upstream against the race cars, trying to get to where the madman with the whips was almost certainly attacking Tony.
"Give Harry the case!" Pepper shouted from the backseat. "Where's the key?"
"It's in my pocket," Happy answered, trying to drive one-handed as he held the briefcase out to Harry, riding shotgun.
"I can pick it!" Harry insisted. "Car!" As Happy narrowly swerved around the shocked oncoming racer, Harry used the distraction to not even bother faking it with the paperclip as he had earlier. It turned out that simple catch locks were extremely easy to open with just a small exertion of magic to unlatch them. Happy never noticed the slight orange light under Harry's finger as he near-instantly opened the cuff around the briefcase handle.
In moments, they rounded a corner and saw Tony in his blue racing suit being menaced by the man with the whips, burning wreckage of his and multiple other cars strewn across the road and shocked fans shouting from the other side of the barrier. Happy didn't even hesitate, just executed a perfect slide to crush the whip-wielding maniac between the barricade and the grill of the car.
"Are you okay?" Tony asked, having leaped up onto the barrier just above his assailant. Everyone in the car nodded, and he snarked, leaping back down to the driver's side of the car, "Were you heading from me or him? Because I can't tell!"
"I was trying to scare him," Happy answered lamely as Tony walked up next to his window.
"Are you out of your mind?" Pepper screamed through her own open window. "Get in the car right now!"
"Better security," Tony talked over her. "I was attacked. We need better security."
"How is he not pulp?" Harry wondered while staring from across the hood at the seemingly-unconscious man shoved under nearly three tons of luxury British engineering. He considered the technological harness around the bare, tattooed chest across the hood.
"Get in the car," Happy also yelled at Tony.
For his part, Tony was still complaining, walking all the way around the back of the car to get in on the other side, "You're CEO. Better security measures. God, it's embarrassing." He opened the back door of the car behind Harry as the boy noticed the attacker snapping back awake, seemingly still alive. "First vacation in two years," Tony muttered just before an electrical whip chopped the car's door in half in front of him.
Harry rolled his eyes as Happy and Pepper started screaming, trying to back the car away from the man whose car-cleaving whips were once again shedding sparks. Why were they screaming? "Tony. Catch!" Harry ordered, awkwardly shoving the heavy briefcase out of his own open window to land on the road in front of Tony.
Meanwhile, Happy was busily accelerating again, trying to crush the man with two yards of clearance when smashing him at thirty miles per hour hadn't killed him. "I got him!" Happy insisted, throwing the car back into reverse for another run.
"He's got some kind of armor!" Harry disagreed. "Stop hitting him!" Harry figured Tony must have worked out high-tech inertial dampening for his suit, and this guy might have the same kind of thing in the harness protecting his chest.
"Stop banging the car!" Pepper agreed, and with both her and Harry slapping his hand before he could put it back in drive to keep them at range, only the car's engine was chopped in half rather than the entire car when the energy whip came down.
Meanwhile, Harry glanced over and saw that Tony's suit was almost done forming itself around him. But it was one set of light armor rated for small arms fire against plasma that could clearly cut a Rolls engine in half without stopping. Tony might need some help. Harry glanced at the wreckage and told the adults in the car, "I have a stupid plan." Before either could object, he shoved himself over Happy and rolled out of the driver's side window.
This nearly got him flattened moments later as Tony, in full armor and not noticing him, kicked the car sideways several yards to clear a space for his fight. Harry was able to dodge roll forward toward the flaming debris of one of the race cars. He managed to not catch fire, but his fancy new summer suit was about as ruined as the Rolls.
He figured Tony spotted him as he was clearing the car, and that may have caused a long enough delay for the bad guy to use his whips to deflect Tony's repulsor blasts wide. They came close enough to Harry that he had to duck behind the wreck, and he was questioning his life choices. Above, hundreds of people were crushed all the way up to the fencing against the barricade as if this was the luckiest day of their lives, getting to see a deadly fight from five yards away. The lack of self-preservation was mind-boggling (thought the kid who'd leaped unarmed into a power armor fight).
By the time Harry popped up with a piece of metal that had fallen off a wreck, Tony was wrapped in the whips, and that couldn't be great for either him or the suit. Somehow, the assailant was strong enough to then fling Tony and his armor back and forth across the road. Harry was sure the whips were going to let go, but they stayed latched on (possibly melting into the Mark V armor). He was honestly impressed that the armor held up so well.
Tony was on the ground. Pepper was screaming at Harry from behind as she saw him creeping out of the wreckage. But Harry grinned, spotting exactly what he'd hoped: the back of the man's harness was made of complicated, exposed mechanisms.
And with a leaping run, the fragment of automotive frame punctured right into the contraption, causing it to make an agonized clicking noise as the power on the whips notably dimmed.
Realizing there was another threat, the man that Harry was just going to think of as Whiplash tried to rear back and take a swipe at him, but both of his whips (and the arms attached) were stuck around Tony, who had stood and was planting himself, wrapping the electric tendrils around his body to draw the attacker in. Maybe Tony would have been able to do that anyway without melting, but Harry gave himself credit for screwing up the harness' power as he quickly retreated.
This would have been so much easier if he'd been able to use magic. Or if he had his own suit of power armor.
By the time Harry was back to the driver's side of the Rolls to at least use the sadly-nonfunctional car as cover, Tony had walked up the whips to Whiplash, pummeled him in the face, tossed him to the ground, and reached over to rip the power source out of the harness.
Harry could easily tell that the power source, once free, was the exact same kind of shape as Tony's arc reactor, which nobody else in the world was supposed to be able to make.
As police finally rushed up to apprehend the man and check on the wounded, Harry watched Tony scan the device with the helmet's optics and then angrily crush it. Being heaved off of the ground by the cops, Whiplash laughed like a madman, spit blood at Tony, and shouted in a heavy Russian accent, "You lose. You lose Stark."
Harry wasn't convinced he was wrong.
Chapter 27: The Party of the Year
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
While Harry would have happily gone right back onto the plane after all of that, Tony had wanted to go talk to the guy who had seemingly duplicated his technology, so was off finagling access at the prison. On the plus side, they at least finally got lunch, though Harry was getting quite a few looks in his scuffed and slightly-singed summer suit.
Happy was off dealing with getting a new car for the return trip to Nice, so it was just Harry and Pepper at the corner table. She was halfway through her meal, staring, shell-shocked into the middle distance and not tasting any of it, before she finally said, "You're not grounded."
"No?" Harry asked, over his own cleaned plate. He'd been waiting for the verdict.
"You were the only one of us that kept your head. Any of us might have died if you hadn't. I wish you'd stayed in the car, because it was really hard to watch you nearly die three times out there. But… I think you may have saved Tony with that stunt." She took a long breath and squinted down at the pasta on her fork, as if not remembering that she'd even ordered it, much less already eaten half of it. "So, no, not grounded. But I think I'm going to have half a head of gray hair in the morning."
Before Harry could figure out what to say to that, Natalie was walking up, still as put together as she'd been when he'd met her (which was barely an hour earlier, but felt like an age after all that adrenaline). "Christine Everhart wants to know if this is a good time to get that interview?" she asked.
"Might as well," Pepper sighed, setting her fork back down, apparently done.
Natalie waved the blond reporter over, then walked off. Christine slid into a seat across the table from them without asking, and produced her digital recorder. She then glanced around to make sure no one was actively watching, smiled conspiratorially at them, and placed a small soapstone charm that looked like a monkey with its hands over its ears next to her recorder. Suddenly, the noise of the restaurant dulled, like it was being heard through a wall. "A little cone of silence," Christine explained.
"Who are you?" Pepper asked, suddenly on guard.
"Christine Everhart, Vanity Fair," she answered with a smirk, then added, "but I write for Witch Weekly with the pen name Rita Skeeter."
"This whole time?" Pepper asked. "You were a witch this whole time?"
"My friend Lavender reads Witch Weekly," Harry realized. "Are you from…?"
"Ravenclaw, class of 1992," the reporter smiled. "And, yes, I was there at the same time as your parents, but I never really talked to them. Different house, lower year, you know how it is."
"Are you one of the Masters?" he asked.
"Not really," Christine shook her head. "I was honestly barely competent on Vanaheim, and there's not much I can do here without my wand. And I don't want to fight Dormammu any more than I want to live in the middle ages. But I help them keep magic out of the news, and they help me out."
Pepper narrowed her eyes, "Did you sleep with Tony to get close to us?"
Christine shook her head in denial. "I didn't even make the connection until today! My editor has been sending me owls asking if I can write a story on Harry Potter. Everyone's very curious about what happened at the school this year." She gave him a predatory smile and added, "After what just happened out there, I bet it's a great story."
The two women regarded each other warily, and Harry watched his aunt's business sense slowly overrule her jealousy over what must have been another woman Tony slept with. Finally, Pepper insisted, "We get to review all copy for accuracy for any news source before publication. You try to keep a stopper on anything that would get Harry targeted over here. In return he'll interview with you exclusively about Vanaheim matters, and I'll give you a longer interview for Vanity Fair."
"Done," Christine agreed with a few seconds of consideration and a smile. "Okay, question one, because my readers are going to want to know… Does the Harry Potter have a girlfriend yet?"
Harry was almost as shell shocked after the interview as Pepper had been after the fight with Whiplash. Thank goodness he'd had her there to guide the interview and keep him from embarrassing himself. He hoped.
The ride back to the Nice airport was quiet, Tony brooding in the back seat over whatever he'd learned at the prison and Pepper trying to figure out what to say and clearly not wanting to do it in front of Harry and Happy. Harry wasn't totally sure why Natalie wasn't riding back with them, though he guessed she'd gotten to Monaco on her own and there wasn't really space for an extra person in the more compact BMW Happy had hired to replace the Rolls. It was probably for the best: the only place she could sit that wouldn't make Pepper uncomfortable would be shotgun, and then Harry would have had to spend thirty minutes in the middle seat between Pepper and Tony.
The flight back to LA was about fourteen hours for commercial flights. At least, with the modifications Tony had made to his smaller private plane, it would be a couple hours faster and they wouldn't need a refueling stop. Still, they left mid-afternoon in France, and would be getting home late in the evening after half a day in the air. Flying a third of the way around the world was no fun, but the time difference alone would have been awful even with a sling ring. Harry spent the first part of the flight trying to figure out when he could take a nap that wouldn't completely ruin him for LA time.
Well, he also spent it answering the frantic texts that were coming in, as all of his friends seemed to have finally caught the news stories coming out about the incident at the race. Hermione was probably almost as annoyed with Harry as Pepper was with Tony. And realizing that only exacerbated his confused considerations about why everyone seemed to think they were dating.
Maybe he should have just figured out how to help while invisible. At least he wouldn't have been on the news.
Eventually deciding to at least take a short nap, Harry first decided to wander into the plane's galley for some kind of dinner-like meal before "bedtime," and found Tony hard at work over the limited stove with a carton of eggs, spinach, and mushrooms looking baffled. "Maverick," Tony acknowledged. "Do you… know how to make an omelet?"
"I can make scrambled eggs," Harry admitted. He'd learned a fair amount of breakfast cooking even when he was little because otherwise Pepper would just subsist on dry toast in her rush to get to work. "It's basically the same thing, right? Put up a tutorial and let's figure it out."
It turned out it was not exactly like making scrambled eggs, and with the two of them elbow to elbow in the small galley, they passed quite a while in mostly silence with occasional admonitions to "you have to keep it moving" or "mushrooms go in now?" Eventually, they had both eaten a couple of the reject omelets, and had one that looked pretty decent that Tony started to plate up and put under a serving cover.
"Apology dinner for Aunt Pepper?" Harry asked.
"Something like that," Tony agreed.
Harry came right out and asked, "Are you just messing with her, hiring Natalie?"
"I needed a new assistant," he said, defensively. "I lost my last pretty redhead."
"You're working on losing her," Harry told him, seriously. "She knows something's wrong. You're making her cry."
That seemed to get through a bit, and Tony's face fell. "I didn't mean to. To make her cry. Really?" He frowned and said, "I'll make it up to her. No more flirting with Ms. Rushman?"
"At least," Harry shook his head. "I'm going to take a nap."
He headed toward the back of the plane, where Happy had already shut the windows and nodded off. As he walked past Pepper in the still-bright area, he noticed that there was a news report with a Senator Stern arguing that Tony should turn over the Iron Man armor to the US government. Pepper seemed to be watching it intently, an annoyed expression on her face. With Tony not far behind him with her in-flight meal, he just gave her a tired smile and left the adults to try to work their troubles out.
He didn't have high hopes. Neither was very good at talking out their problems.
Despite his best efforts, Harry wound up getting a full night's sleep in the back of the plane for the remainder of the trip, waking up ready for a new day when the plane taxied into the private Stark Industries hangar back in LA, only to groan at the sun setting over the ocean. It looked like everyone else had slept most of the flight, too, and from the lack of affectionate banter between Tony and Pepper, he was guessing the discussion had gone about as well as he'd expected.
"Do you want us to drop you back in Encino?" Pepper checked. "I think we're going to be working at Tony's house all night. Somehow, Natalie already got back."
"She left while we were waiting for Mr. Stark, so she had a head start," Happy clarified.
Managing to squelch his urge to ask, "Natalie's at the house?" Harry instead said, "No, I'm going to be up all night anyway. I'll just head over with you."
Tony brooded the entire drive to Malibu, and quickly descended to the garage as soon as they arrived. Natalie was waiting for them in her car, a nondescript black sedan, when they pulled up. She'd changed from the red dress into a skirt and blouse, but Harry's eyes were just as unable to stay under control. She caught him looking, with a small glance back and a smirk to let him know she'd caught him as they walked inside.
"I'll, uh… I'll go upstairs and play games," Harry told them, realizing that as much as he'd like to stay where they were working, he wasn't going to be a value add to whatever public relations they'd be doing, and he'd just wind up being creepy. "Let me know if the Boy Scouts need a statement, I guess."
Happy disappeared to wherever he went when there wasn't driving or boxing to be done. Honestly, the mansion was big enough that Happy might just have a permanent room there that Harry had never noticed.
In all actuality, Harry got bored playing video games pretty quickly, and was soon browsing the internet on his phone at the top of the stairs while texting with Padma and Parvati (for whom it was morning and the news had finally shown up). He could hear Pepper and Natalie just below, on the phone with a series of reporters, he assumed. Between lots of talk about "fundamentals of the company" and "the AP wants a quote," it didn't seem like they were having a great time.
And then he was surprised to hear someone stomping across the living room and Rhodey's voice. "Where is he?"
While Natalie tried to tell him (and she might not even know who Rhodey was, yet) that Tony didn't want to be disturbed, Pepper overrode her with, "He's downstairs." Excited to see Rhodey, who he hadn't gotten to see since before his first year of Hogwarts, Harry pocketed his phone and headed down, passing Pepper assuring someone on the phone, "Iron Man never stopped protecting us. The events in Monaco proved that."
By the time Harry slipped down to the garage and put in his access code, he was just in time to hear the back half of Rhodey ranting and angrily pointing at Tony's display of Iron Man suits, "They're gonna take your suits, Tony. Okay? They're sick of the games. You said nobody else would possess this technology for twenty years. Well, guess what? Somebody else had it yesterday. It's not theoretical anymore." Rhodey had shown up still in his Air Force uniform, so he must have come straight from work.
Tony had clearly been sitting in the hot rod and watching a briefing that JARVIS had assembled of news reports about Whiplash, who seemed to actually be named Ivan Vanko. Did one newspaper say he'd already died in custody? Did Tony have something to do with that, while he was away that afternoon?
Rhodey glanced back at Harry while he put a hand on Tony's shoulder to get his attention, "Are you listening to me?" As Harry was crossing the room over to them, Rhodey didn't seem to like the look on Tony's face and asked, "Are you okay?"
Tony grunted finally, saying, "Let's go," but slipped while getting out of the car. He didn't look drunk. He hadn't had time to get that drunk.
Harry rushed across the room to try to help, and Rhodey just as quickly moved to the other side of the car. Between the two of them, they were able to prop Tony up. "Hey! You alright?" Rhodey demanded.
Tony seemed almost totally out of it, offering, "Yeah, I should get to my desk. Maverick, open that cigar box?" Harry nodded, moving over ahead of them while Rhodey supported Tony. The long brown wooden box opened to reveal six of what looked like small video game cartridges: flat gray rectangles slotted into individual metal housings with a vent next to them. Tony let Rhodey lever him into his desk chair and explained, "It's palladium."
He reached under his shirt and pulled out the arc reactor. Harry hadn't realized how big it was. He'd assumed it was just a flat disc that sat atop Tony's chest, but there were three inches of metal that was almost certainly usually hidden inside of his chest. Harry gasped, asking, "Is there a hole in your ribcage for that?"
Rhodey seemed equally confused by the corroded metal rectangle that was ejected from the device, asking, "Is that supposed to be smoking?"
As if it was the most normal thing in the world, Tony explained, "Yes, there's a reactor wall in there. And the smoking is from neutron damage with that wall."
Rhodey's eyes were still wide, helping Tony remove the spent palladium disk, and he demanded, "You had this in your body?" Harry handed him a replacement and Rhodey slotted it into the reactor, staring at Tony from behind, observing, "And how about the high-tech crossword puzzle on your neck?"
"Road rash," Tony lied. Slotting the arc reactor back into his chest, he at least had the grace to say, "Thank you." Harry watched him make a face as if he was suddenly waking up once the light in the center of his chest turned back on. He immediately went for a water bottle full of the chlorophyll drink that was supposedly for his hangover. "What are you both looking at?"
Rhodey argued, "I'm looking at you. You wanna do this whole lone gunslinger act and it's unnecessary. You don't have to do this alone."
After gulping down some of the strange green drink, Tony told him, "You know, I wish I could believe that. I really do. But you've gotta trust me. Contrary to popular belief, I know exactly what I'm doing."
"Fine," Rhodey huffed, shooting Harry a look. "I'll be upstairs for a bit if you want to talk more. Once you're finished rebooting." Not waiting for a comeback, he strode back out of the garage, leaving Harry somewhat awkwardly standing at the end of Tony's desk.
Tony took a couple more swigs from the bottle, staring at Harry, before offering, "Ask."
Harry grabbed a spare rolling chair and slid into it, thinking about what he'd seen. They'd mostly been covering invertebrates in McGonagall's classes so far, but she'd at least done a primer on human anatomy for those who wanted to study healing magic early. There wasn't space in Tony's chest for all that metal without at least moving something else out of the way. He said, "I thought that was just an electromagnet. To keep the shrapnel out. But as deep as that is… how can your heart even work with that in the way?"
"It started as just a magnet," Tony admitted. "I obviously went to the hospital after I got back from Afghanistan. Got specialists to try to get the rest of the shrapnel out. Yinsen—the guy I was in the cave with—did his best. Maybe if I'd gotten to a hospital right away, they could have completely fixed it. But there was too much damage. They were going to put me on a machine and wait for a heart transplant."
"Oh, no, Tony, I'm sorry," Harry said, but figured that wasn't the end of it.
"I said, 'Why bother with the transplant?' and just had them send me the schematics for the machine. Miniaturized it. Put it in my chest. Works better than my heart ever did. They weren't going to move a functional alcoholic to the top of the transplant list anyway." Tony tapped on the device and gave a smile, "The system basically is my heart these days. The old one's still in there, but it's bypassed."
JARVIS cut in, his synthesized, English-accented voice emanating from all the speakers in the room, "And the palladium is killing him."
"Damnit, JARVIS," Tony sighed. "Don't tell Pepper, okay? I've been trying to break it to her."
"She thinks you're trying to kill yourself," Harry warned him. "Why can't you just keep the reactor out of your chest and run a wire in?"
Tony shook his head, "I was too clever. It's all meant to be integrated. And the best heart surgeons in the world won't risk the lawsuits to try to fix it, after I realized it was toxic." He sighed and pulled up his shirt, showing Harry that the geometric black lines that Rhodey had noticed on his neck were all over his chest, radiating out from the reactor.
"Can you… make a reactor that doesn't need palladium?" Harry checked.
"We've run numerous simulations," JARVIS explained, replacing the news reports with an image of a periodic table with all of the metals, including the special ones on the bottom rows, marked off in red. "Any known element with the correct properties to replace palladium is even more toxic."
"Don't suppose you know about any unknown metals?" Tony joked.
Harry knew of at least one, and said, "Ur… uh, neutronium?" He'd almost said "uru," which was supposedly in the greatest creations of the dwarves of Nidavellir, such as Thor's hammer—forged in the heart of a dying star. He wasn't actually sure if neutronium was exactly the same thing.
"It's a thought," Tony didn't immediately dismiss it. "Supposed to be heavy, though, right?"
JARVIS answered, "Estimates of the weight of neutronium suggest that a disk the size of the palladium cores would weigh on the order of a billion tons. Also, we do not currently have access to a neutron star."
"Well, let's add it to the list anyway," Tony ordered, clearly not highly optimistic. "I might have a brainwave."
"You have to tell her," Harry insisted.
"I will," Tony sighed. "When the time's right. I've got a while longer to have a breakthrough. I'm not trying to kill myself. I want to live, and I'm trying to."
"Okay," Harry allowed, getting up and leaving Tony to research and/or brood. "Let me know if you need any help. I have small hands. And dance moves."
That at least got a genuine smile out of Tony. "You know, I actually played that dance macro trying to get a terrorist camp to surrender a couple months ago. They didn't think it was funny." He gave it a beat and admitted, wincing, "JARVIS was right about the pelvic mobility."
"I ran detailed simulations, sir," JARVIS confirmed.
Harry was still pretty depressed the next few days. Tony had pulled his own way out of worse situations, and Harry knew that there was nothing he could actually do. Even if he could tell Tony about uru and thought it might work, his chemistry texts didn't provide any information for how to make it (that information was jealously guarded by the dwarves). He could slip Tony potions designed to cure poisons, but those were less effective on nonmagical Vanir like Pepper and might barely work at all on people that were purely human. The Masters didn't seem to have anything better: they didn't seem to use potions. And even if he could convince a skilled magical healer to work on Tony, he was pretty sure heart damage was almost as hard for magic to heal as it was for science.
About his only nod to future planning was borrowing some electronic scraps from Tony's discard bins and making a poor copy of Ivan Vanko's electrical whips. Harry had at the back of his head that if he needed to use his magic in public, he might be able to explain away his own energy whip as Tony making him a knock-off of Vanko's weapons. Obviously, if he went with that explanation, Tony would hopefully never find out about it, since he'd know it was a lie.
He tried not to think about how Tony finding out about it might not even be a concern for much longer.
Tony's birthday fell on a Saturday that year, almost a week after Monaco, and looked to be an even more extravagant blowout than previous ones. The day before, Happy noticed that Harry was as in the dumps as everyone else, and offered, "Tony blew off boxing practice today. Want to show me what you've been learning at that fancy school?"
Harry didn't have any better ideas for how to entertain himself, so went and got into exercise clothes and wandered into the gym that Tony had set up just off the main floor of his home, featuring a full-sized boxing ring. "I may only know dirty boxing," Harry warned Happy, while putting on gloves and protective headgear. Honestly, with as much size as Happy had on him, it wasn't like even his best moves were likely to do anything.
"I'll show you how to do it clean. Okay, put your gloves up and show me how you punch…"
It turned out that the kind of styles Harry was learning weren't that far off from boxing. He wasn't allowed to kick, but the strikes he'd learned were easy enough to translate into punches. After a while, Happy actually let him try to use kicks, and showed off that they weren't really effective against a boxer who was prepared for them, especially with his reach advantage.
"Not bad," Happy ultimately allowed. "You've got speed and accuracy going for you. If you get up on someone, you could lay them out before they were ready."
"Karate and… something like Kali?" Natalie observed from where she'd been lurking in a doorway. She'd changed into a dark workout leotard, and Harry's brain fritzed out while he tried to process that.
Happy tapped him on the head with his glove lightly, "Lesson one: Never take your eye off your opponent."
"Sorry," Harry apologized, stepping back so he could watch both Natalie and Happy, asking, "Kali?"
"You look like you're doing strikes that could just as easily be with a knife," she explained, walking up.
"My martial arts teacher liked knives," Harry nodded. "And my friend Dean has been taking karate for years. He's who I mostly practice with."
"Can I have a go, Happy?" she asked.
Happy considered for a moment and couldn't come up with a good excuse, finally cautioning, "Just don't make him slip."
"Lose the gloves," Natalie suggested, as she gracefully ducked under the ropes and into the ring as Happy climbed out. Harry obliged, working hard to continue meeting her eyes and glad that his exercise shorts were loose. "Did you learn any soft styles?"
"Soft?" Harry gulped.
"You know, judo, aikido. Styles that use pins and throws?" she clarified.
"Not really," Harry admitted. "I've learned a little about grabbing people to trip them to the ground, but none of that 'use your opponent's weight against them' kind of thing."
"You should consider it," she suggested, slowly moving around the ring to gauge his ability to move and pay attention. "With your build, it's easier than trying to out-strength people."
"I might get bigger," Harry said, defensively, knowing full well that he was currently shorter than most of his same-aged female friends. He might eventually be taller than Natalie, who didn't tower above him the way most other adults did, but he was unlikely to catch up to his aunt's height, much less that of his male friends. Ron and Dean were both growing like weeds, and even Neville was starting to show signs that he might hit six feet.
"If you do, it's still useful," she shrugged, which had kinematic repercussions that sorely tested Harry's ability to stay focused. "Let me show you. Try to hit me with an overhand strike, slowly." Harry obliged, since that didn't seem too bad, and she reached up and grabbed his arm, only to tuck her body in and under his arm so her back was to him. While he was seizing up at the closeness, she said, "I'm going to throw you. Pay attention."
He tried to, but honestly, as he was going ass over tea kettle, what he was mostly paying attention to was the feel of her as she rolled him over her body and onto the floor of the ring.
"Got it?" she checked, all business but with a slight humor in her eyes as she looked at him upside down.
"I might… need to see it again?" Harry suggested.
"Why don't you throw me?" she offered. "Easier to get it by doing it."
"Uh. Okay," Harry blinked, rolling to his feet. "You're going to chop, and then I just… grab your arm, turn, and roll you over my shoulder?"
"Exactly," she nodded. As soon as he was planted, she swung her own arm in slowly, he reached up, grabbed on, had a moment to consider the softness of the fabric of her exercise outfit, barely remembered to spin, and then followed through on pulling her over his back and shoulder. His vision almost whited out as he felt points of contact on his back as she flipped to the ground. By the time he could process again, she'd already landed and rolled back to her feet in one fluid movement. "Good!"
"That's… that's a cool throw, thanks," Harry offered, having to stand awkwardly.
"It really is," Happy admitted from the sidelines. "You'd have to get a lot faster. Might work against straight-on punches if you duck under. Be sure to watch the other hand."
Natalie smiled at Happy for the notes. "I agree. But it might surprise those big corn-fed English boys you go to school with, huh?"
"You don't know the half of it," Harry told her, though was obviously hedging a bit on the "English" part.
"What's boarding school like?" she asked, politely not calling out his stance and just looking him in the eye. "Ms. Potts says you're usually there until July, but had to come home early this year?"
"They're fixing a gas leak," Harry nodded, repeating the same story. "It's okay. It's tougher than my old school. They fit in a lot to learn, and then we have extra stuff to squeeze in when we're not in class."
"I bet the highlands are beautiful," she got a wistful look, as if imagining it.
He shrugged, "It's nice, but we don't really get to leave the grounds. And the weather's pretty bad, a lot of the year. Dean makes us practice outside even if it's cold."
She nodded, "Still. Sounds like a good experience." As if realizing that Harry wasn't going to be in any state to practice throws again for a while, she gave him the out, "I better check in to see if Ms. Potts or Mr. Stark need anything. Maybe we can do a longer workout later, boys."
As she walked out, Happy admitted, "I'm still not sure I trust her, but I guess she's growing on me. Weird that she's doing your aunt's job."
Harry shrugged, pulling his eyes off the retreating personal assistant and suggesting, "She's not, really. And maybe if Aunt Pepper doesn't have to be Tony's nanny on top of running the company…"
Happy nodded, thinking that was a pretty good point, but then ordered, "Okay. Back to real boxing…"
By the night of Tony's party, Harry's internal clock still hadn't adjusted to LA time, so he'd slept way in and woken up only a couple hours before the party. Pepper grudgingly brought him with her, mostly under the hope that Tony might be on better behavior with Harry around.
And then Harry was surrounded by scantily-clad models who recognized him from helping fight Vanko and had to get close to him to talk over the loud music about how cute he was in his natty little party outfit, and how grateful they'd be if he'd introduce them to Tony. He was almost able to hang on, but then he spotted Natalie moving around the party in a tiny leopard-print dress. That was it, he was overstimulated, and he had to make apologies and retreat to the garage.
Pepper rolled her eyes, watching her nephew slip downstairs. A lot of help he'd been.
While having all his friends thousands of miles away was mostly downsides, one advantage of it was that someone was usually awake to talk to no matter what hours Harry was keeping. He spent some time texting with Padma and Parvati about how lame and noisy adult parties were while snooping around the garage. It was easier to pretend that he was going back to the party after getting his cool back if he didn't sit down to play a game or read a book.
After a while, he noticed something odd and asked, "JARVIS, is this an arc reactor actually mounted in the Mark II?"
"Mr. Stark is experimenting with systems that have the power onboard rather than relying on his personal reactor," the AI helpfully answered.
"Because he's figured out how to get the reactor out?" Harry asked, hopefully.
"No significant progress on that front has been achieved," JARVIS corrected, and it was interesting that the synthetic voice was able to sound sad. "The Mark II has, however, been recalibrated to scans of Colonel Rhodes' body."
"He made Rhodey a suit." For a moment he thought this was progress in them repairing their friendship, but then he realized, "It's in case he doesn't make it."
"This is a fair assumption," JARVIS agreed.
Harry had quite a while to agonize over that fact, pacing around the garage, and eventually asked, "Won't Rhodey have to turn it over to the government? And will they just give it to Justin Hammer?" Harry was aware that Justin was the new arms contractor for the US military, though it was sort of unclear whether his contracts had been revoked recently.
"This supposition, again, seems logical," the AI agreed.
Harry rubbed his scar in concentration, "Did Tony upgrade the operating system? This was just the first prototype, right?"
"The armor includes the initial training data, but its software has not received the latest security patches."
"Can you go ahead and patch it?" Harry suggested. "Tony probably just forgot."
"Harry Potts has level 3 administrative access, and this is sufficient to authorize system patches. Uploading firmware now," JARVIS agreed.
"Wait, I have admin access?" Harry checked. "Is that normal?"
"You are one of five individuals with such access. The others are Mr. Stark, Ms. Potts, Colonel Rhodes, and Mr. Hogan. Your access is higher than anyone's but Mr. Stark's and Ms. Potts', and is scheduled to improve to level 2 if Mr. Stark becomes deceased," the synthetic voice explained, perhaps a little too much.
A few minutes later, Tony staggered downstairs. It generally took a lot of alcohol to make him lose coordination. He barely noticed Harry as he walked over to the Mark IV armor. "JARVIS, open Mark IV. It's time for Party Iron Man!" The suit opened and he levered himself in, finally noticing Harry. "Maverick. You're here? What are you doing in the garage."
"Patching your prototypes," Harry shrugged. "Didn't want Rhodey to turn this over to the government and have them brick it."
Tony waited for the suit to finish clamping itself down around his party outfit before admitting, "Huh. Good call. Guess JARVIS told you about the retrofit. I can't make one for you yet… you're not done growing." He'd left the helmet off, and it was odd looking at him wearing the armor like just a shiny suit.
"I'd rather have you around than a suit of armor to remember you by," Harry told him. "Are you about to go do something to piss off Aunt Pepper?"
"The fans want Iron Man, so they get Iron Man," Tony shrugged, with the electric whir of the suit's servos. "You should get back up there. You're a hero of Monaco, too."
"I need an anti-puberty codpiece first," Harry admitted.
It took Tony's drunk brain a moment to get it, but then he chuckled, "JARVIS, add that to the list. Guess they don't have sexy schoolgirl outfits at your school, huh?"
"Very bulky," Harry agreed. "It's cold up there most of the year."
"I bet. Alright, I'm heading back up. You should join the party! Or guard the workshop. Do what you want." and with that he walked out of the garage, a little more steady with the suit's onboard kinematics trying to correct for his drunken sway.
After another ten minutes alone in the garage, Harry psyched himself up to head back upstairs. If anything, the place was louder and the clothing skimpier than when he'd left.
Tony was dancing in the suit on the DJ podium in the living room, right by the stairs, and yelled when Harry came up, "Everybody! Maverick! Don't call him my kid sidekick, because that's illegal!" He stumbled as he explained into the microphone, sotto voice, "Little known fact, everyone knows Captain America had a kid sidekick named Becky? Billy? Something like that. That was just in the comic books. Binky was actually an adult. Don't believe everything you read in the funny pages."
After that, Harry didn't have time to get embarrassed because he was being basically shoved around the entire ground floor of the mansion as everyone present wanted to get a selfie with him. It was a good thing he'd figured out the contact-lenses-and-ballcap trick, because there was no way he was going to be able to walk around any major city unmolested in the future without a disguise. He was pretty sure he got videoed for B-roll on TMZ, and did a disjointed short interview with a drunken Chess Roberts from WHiH (though maybe she was undercover, since she was insisting that her name was "Rebeca with one C").
He'd wound up on the back patio when the music suddenly stopped and he heard Pepper take over the microphone. He missed the first part, but caught her insisting "Unbelievable! Thank you so much. Tony, we all thank you so much for such a wonderful night. And we're gonna say good night now, and thank you all for coming."
Tony drunkenly argued, "No, no, no, we can't. Wait, wait, wait. We didn't have the cake. We didn't blow out the candles."
Harry managed to get into position at the patio doors where he could make out the argument his aunt and Tony were having in front of the DJ booth, though she'd held the mic low so no one could overhear. It looked like Tony was trying to drunkenly flirt and Pepper was trying to soberly mom, and neither was happy about the results. She finally took the bottle of expensive booze he was holding and handed him back the microphone.
Tony announced to everyone, "Pepper Potts," and waited for the applause. "She's right. The party's over." He barely thought about it before adding, "Then again, the party was over for me, like, an hour and a half ago. The after-party starts… in 15 minutes." The guests began to cheer. "And if anybody—Pepper—doesn't like it, there's the door." He gestured with his gauntleted hand and managed to trigger the repulsor, shattering the glass around the stairway.
Harry's eyes widened. That wasn't good. The number of safeties that Tony must have turned off for that to happen… And then a girl up front threw a liquor bottle in the air for Tony to shoot like skeet. Harry thought he saw Rhodey angrily heading downstairs, and Pepper retreating from the room in confusion and annoyance as Tony crouched and screamed like a madman at the crowd's enthusiasm.
From the back, Harry was trying to get the less-drunk guests to realize that things were out of hand and leave, as all the party girls in the room started grabbing things for Tony to try to shoot out of the air. Harry tried to stop one from grabbing a whole watermelon from the snack table, but was just in time to hear Tony's excited yell of, "I think she wants the Gallagher!" He triggered the unibeam from his chest to blow it into slime.
Somehow, even covered in plasma-pulped watermelon, nobody was leaving. Harry didn't understand adults. But the noise from the stairs got everyone's attention as Rhodey stomped up from the garage in the Mark II armor, all chrome except for the open faceplate on the helmet. He yelled at the crowd, "I'm only gonna say this once. Get out," letting the helmet snap shut to underscore his point.
That at least got the drunk people crowded in the living room to start to shuffle out to the patio and lawn, but there they stopped, eager to see the confrontation. Harry moved to use the food table as cover, just in case Tony was still drunk enough to misfire a repulsor gesturing.
Somehow, it wasn't Tony that escalated the situation. Instead, Harry heard Rhodey, voice augmented by the armor, insist, "You don't deserve to wear one of these. Shut it down!"
After a tense moment considering whether to capitulate, Tony gave a smirk and said, "Goldstein!" The DJ acknowledged him, and he asked, "Give me a phat beat to beat my buddy's ass to." He giggled at the alliteration and let the faceplate fall on his armor as Goldstein queued up Queen of all things.
And then two metal-clad titans were fighting like bulls in a china shop.
Harry, fully cognizant that he wasn't wearing armor, hung back but kept up with the fight as they began to smash through walls in the house. Harry was just trying to figure out how to get the two closest things he had to father figures to stop. He caught up to them fighting with freeweights in the gym, having already destroyed the sauna and the boxing ring, where Tony was insisting, "Sorry, pal. Like I was just telling the party guests, Iron Man doesn't have a sidekick."
Rhodey slammed him with one of the posts from the boxing ring, enunciating, "Side. Kick. This!" They both struggled for a moment before smashing up through the ceiling. Harry was pretty sure that was into Tony's bedroom.
He could hear smashing upstairs, and by the time he realized they'd fallen back into the main floor and crushed the food tables (Harry was glad he hadn't still been hiding there), he spotted Happy hustling Pepper out the back.
"You want it?" Tony was screaming in the augmented suit voice. "Take it!" It was suddenly a game of rock-em sock-em robots, as they both awkwardly punched at one another, all thoughts of martial arts technique lost in the urge to smash each other. Finally, probably just due to more familiarity with the suit, Tony managed to trip Rhodey face first through the kitchen sink.
He regarded the guests all clustered on the patio, and Harry hoped that it was over with. But instead of apologizing, Tony suddenly gave an armor-augmented scream, like some kind of robot monster in a horror movie, shrieking out all his pain at his oncoming death and the frustration at the whims of public approval. That finally convinced the crowd to rush off around the house, clearing out of the back yard.
And, behind him, a standing Rhodey ripped the rest of the kitchen island free, spun it around, and smashed Tony in the back, flinging him across the room into the gas fireplace, which erupted around him, threatening to burn him alive and the entire house down.
As Tony ripped free of the mantelpiece and turned to point the repulsor in his palm at Rhodey, and Rhodey did the same, ordering, "Put your hand down," Harry had enough.
Both men seemed shocked when there was suddenly an angry pre-teen throwing himself in between the two of them, ready to be blown to bits by their "flight stabilizers." Both at least had the grace to lower their arms enough to not accidentally pulp young Harry Potts the way Tony had the watermelon. "Stop it!" Harry yelled. "What is wrong with you?"
Internally, Rhodey grinned, hoping that Harry could scream some sense into Tony, but he realized that the boy was looking at him. "We… didn't have to do this," Rhodey said, lamely, voice electronically augmented by the suit.
"Didn't have to start a fight with your friend and smash up his house?" Harry asked, glad nobody seemed like they were going to laser him or punch him. "What if a guest had gotten hurt? What if I'd gotten hurt. You almost fell on Aunt Pepper!"
"Tony started…" Rhodey tried, while behind Harry there was an electronic sigh as Tony at least realized what he'd done and felt sorry for it.
"Tony's drunk. And he should know better too. But you started it, trying to beat him up instead of talking to him," Harry corrected, full mad. Fortunately, hidden by his bangs as it was, none of them could see the orange light leaking from his lightning-bolt scar. A place he was starting to consider his second home, one of the only places he felt completely safe (barring rare dark elf attacks), had just been smashed and ruined. Two of the adults he'd always trusted had been almost ready to kill each other, regardless of whether he or his aunt were harmed.
His mother had made her dying wish for the Soul Stone to grant him protection, it had followed the connections he had made with others, and whatever residual energy from it lingered in Harry was not pleased. A safe haven was being torn apart from within. Father figures were abandoning him to try to maim one another.
"We need Iron Man back on the job. Not showing his ass in front of everybody," Rhodey tried to explain. Tony was still crouched by the fireplace, spent.
"We need?" Harry asked. "You know he's sick. You can't let him have a vacation? He stopped selling you missiles so he has to spend every single day protecting the country?" Harry demanded, a hint of the same heartsight he'd felt with Gamora laying bare James Rhodes. "Is he your best friend, or just your weapons dealer?"
"Take the suit," Tony spoke up. "I made it for you. I was going to give it to you… if I didn't make it."
Sadly, with merely whatever remnants of the Soul Stone's power that still protected him, Harry didn't have any ability to actually persuade the way he had Gamora. He could tell, even through the face-concealing armor, that Rhodey was considering what he'd said. What Tony had said. But Rhodey was still too angry to admit he was wrong.
"I… maybe went too hard. But you're out of control. Figure it out," Rhodey ordered, stepping onto the patio, triggering the boot jets, and flying into the night.
"Did he… drive here?" Harry wondered.
The crisis over and all the guests gone, Tony opened his faceplate and looked around at the wreck of his house. At least the fireplace was already going out, probably because JARVIS cut the gas line. "You don't have to fight my battles for me, kid," he said.
Harry whirled on Tony, Soul Stone-powered senses still active and asked, "Are you trying to make everyone so angry they're not sad when you're gone?" Tony's eyes widened, maybe admitting that was partially true, but as Harry stared at his suit—at the arc reactor—he realized something.
Tony's heart was mechanical. It beat at whatever rate the software decided. The arc reactor was a giant electrical pacemaker. Afraid, angry… aroused, Tony's heartbeat would stay the same unless the software thought to change it. Again, Harry wasn't exactly an expert on the human body but…
"Tony. Have you been afraid since you replaced your heart?" Harry asked, shocked. "Like, your heart is beating faster because there's a problem? Or is your heart steady when you're in danger?"
Tony staggered over and sat back down on the hearth, eyes widening as his drunk brain took a moment to process the question. He eventually concluded that his endocrine system was probably all out of whack. "It's running a simple algorithm based on oxygen needs," he admitted. "I don't even have any sensors in there for hormone levels…"
Harry walked forward and put a hand on the chestplate of Tony's armor and asked, "Are you scared to die? And your body isn't letting you realize it?"
"Well," Tony sighed. "I just smashed up my own house trying to beat the hell out of my best friend to keep him from taking a suit I made for him. So I don't know if I'm the authority on my feelings right now."
He took a deep breath, willing his logic to account for what might be a fundamental gap in how his body processed emotions. He was never one for deep introspection, but being that drunk did lower his inhibitions against looking at his motivations. Maybe the kid was right.
"Thanks… Harry," he finally said. "Give me a little while to sober up and then… I'm thinking donuts?"
Notes:
Why yes, I *did* completely invent a different explanation for what's up with Tony's arc reactor because the entire situation in IM2 bugged me. It didn't make sense that there was a giant hole in his chest if it was just a magnet, and it didn't make sense that he couldn't just stop keeping the arc reactor in his chest rather than on his belt or somewhere it wouldn't poison him. I suspect my explanation is just as troubling if you know how heart bypass machines work, but I'm doing my best here with a situation clearly based on a weird decision to have a scene where Pepper put her hand in Tony's ribcage to fish out a wire.
Chapter 28: Coffee and Donuts
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
They hadn't actually gotten out of the house before five in the morning, Harry shooting his aunt a text message, "Going with Tony to get donuts and talk? Back later." The cab driver they'd called to avoid figuring out where Happy was (or how angry he was) was very surprised to have Iron Man in his armor plus a kid in the back of the car. Harry had tried to convince Tony to remove the armor, but he had plans. With the tip Tony was giving the driver, they made the forty-minute drive in half an hour.
Fortunately, Randy's was open 24 hours, and they put on a fresh batch of donuts before sunrise.
"Bucket list," Tony said over the box of donuts. "I'm going to eat a donut, in the giant donut." He gestured up to the iconic oversized donut atop the store.
"I guess a normal person's bucket list is your Saturday," Harry shrugged.
"Wanna come?" Tony checked.
"I'm not sure there's space for you in that donut," Harry shook his head. "I'll wait in the dining room."
"Alright, then you take this half," Tony ordered, awkwardly handing Harry half a dozen donuts on a napkin while he kept the box with the rest. "And I'll be back in a bit."
Harry smirked, and headed back into the store while Tony figured out how to fly up to greet the sun in a bus-sized donut with his hands occupied.
The Boy-Who-Survived-Power-Armor-Fights was only three donuts in and thinking about whether he had room for a fourth when he noticed the black SUVs pull up in the parking lot, dark-suited soldier-types trying to surreptitiously surround the restaurant. While it probably wasn't terrorists in the middle of Inglewood, better safe than sorry. Harry grudgingly put the rest of the donuts into the trash as he headed into the bathroom. Confirming it was empty, he let his cloak unfurl from its stealth-scarf configuration and drape over him. Invisibility was a lot more useful when you weren't surrounded by cameras.
He'd been just in time, as he heard a man's voice ordering the kitchen staff out of the building, and then presumably the same guy, who he didn't recognize and looked like any kind of government agent, pushed open the bathroom door and did a cursory check to confirm the room was empty. Harry went ahead and scooted invisibly out right behind him as the door swung closed. Through the wide wall of windows (when had Randy's expanded to have a dining room at this location anyway?), he spotted a bald black man with an eyepatch and a black leather coat yelling something at Tony in the donut. The other agents had cleared off, so this guy was either the leader or the bait. Seemingly unconcerned, Tony soon descended on his boot jets, and the two men walked back into the dining room.
The new arrival had handed Tony a cup of coffee and had one of his own, so Harry was pretty sure it was a social visit.
He was a little pleased to notice that Tony lowered his sunglasses enough to glance around the dining room, and looked surprised that Harry wasn't present. His relaxed posture tightened a bit, but he didn't seem to want to let on that there was a potential hostage. As far as Tony was concerned, Harry was either hiding or captured, and he'd hopefully find out about the latter pretty quickly. The two men slid into a booth in the middle of the room, Tony plunking his helmet on the table between them.
After taking a long sip of coffee and collecting himself, Tony snarked, "I told you I don't wanna join your super-secret boy band."
The secret agent chuckled, "Nah, nah, nah. See, I remember: you do everything yourself. How's that working out for you?"
Still clearly trying to surreptitiously glance around to see if Harry was hiding under another booth while toying with his coffee cup, Tony played it off as, "I'm sorry. I don't wanna get off on the wrong foot. Do I look at the patch or the eye? Honestly I'm a bit hungover. I'm not sure if you're real or if I'm having…"
The man leaned across the table to stare Tony in the face from a few inches away, insisting, "I am very real. I'm the realest person you're ever gonna meet." He was smiling as if he was actually having a good time with the banter.
"Just my luck," Tony rolled his eyes, checking around the room more obviously as he realized, "Where's the staff here?"
In doing so, he had revealed his neck, where the toxic palladium markings had progressed up above the edge of the armor. The man with the eyepatch reached over to tug down the collar, observing, "That's not looking so good."
Tony's assertion that, "I've been worse," was mostly lost to Harry, as he noticed the new agent that was walking in from the back of the building. It was Natalie, but in some kind of all-black uniform/catsuit with official-looking patches and a sidearm. She strode across the room with purpose, and Harry almost forgot to slide out of the way as she approached their table. His dreams were going to be even more confusing for the next little while.
Natalie stood to attention next to the table and informed Tony's guest, "We've secured the perimeter, but I don't think we should hold it for too much longer."
Tony—just as surprised as Harry—had lowered his sunglasses and said, "Huh." He gave it another beat while her apparently-real-boss laughed, then added, "You're fired."
"That's not up to you," Natalie said, sliding into the booth next to the other agent.
"Tony," he said, wrapping his arms around Natalie possessively, "I want you to meet Agent Romanoff." Harry suddenly wondered if he'd been wrong about him being her boss, since that was even handsier than Tony usually was with Pepper.
Harry got the impression that this wasn't going to turn into a fight, but Tony might freak out soon if he thought they'd kidnapped him, so he slipped back to the restroom, allowed the cloak to reveal him and return to its hidden mode, and walked out like he'd just been in there the entire time.
He was approaching from behind Tony, and he saw the look of surprise on Natalie's face and on the lead agent's, as she trailed off, "...redundancies to prevent unauthorized usage."
Tony awkwardly craned around and had a look of relief as he spotted Harry. "I told you coffee would go right through you," he covered. "Have a seat. This is Nick. And you already know Natalie. Though I guess that's not your real first name either."
"Natasha," she admitted, and both clearly-spies looked extremely put out as Tony budged over and Harry slid in next to him.
"And don't call me Nick. Not even my mama calls me Nick," he insisted, then turned incredulously to Natasha. "They didn't check the bathroom?"
"They assured me they had," she corrected, eyes narrowing at Harry, who just shrugged. He could feel Tony's glee at getting one over on secret agents.
Tony repeated his introduction with the right name, "Maverick, this is Fury, he runs a super secret government division that, while sometimes helpful, didn't get the memo that it's hard to be spies when you dress like a biker gang."
"Maybe they're spying on a biker gang?" Harry helped.
Tony pretended to consider it, nodding, "Lot of drug running in this part of the country. It would explain a lot." He pointed at Natalie… or Natasha, Harry supposed. "And rather than just ask me if there was a problem they could solve, they sent Agent Romanoff here to join the company, pretend to be a paralegal, work her way through the ranks, and get into position to become my assistant. Is that all right?"
"Basically," Fury gritted out.
"My tax dollars at work. So now we're at the point we could have been at weeks ago. What do you want from me?"
Scrambling to take back control of the conversation, Fury sighed and admitted, "I had a whole speech, but… just stick him."
Faster than Harry was even prepared for, Natasha leaned across the table and nailed Tony in the throat with some kind of automatic hypodermic needle, which hissed as it injected something.
"Freaking, spies," Tony grunted, whatever he'd had shot into his system making his jaw clench.
Harry had jumped out of the booth and was ready to at least dodge if they came after him, but not sure whether he could fight off two spies without revealing his powers if they were here to kill Tony or knock him out and cart him off. "What'd you do to him!?" Harry insisted.
"Give it a second," Fury ordered, and was watching Tony's neck. Harry glanced over, making sure to pay attention to the spies with his peripheral vision in case this was a bluff. The geometric black lines on Tony's throat began to recede back down under his collar. "What did we just do for him? That's lithium dioxide. It's gonna take the edge off." He gave Tony a serious look with his one eye and explained, "We're trying to get you back to work."
Tony, who was trying to hide that he suddenly felt much better, argued, "Then give me a couple of boxes of that. I'll be right as rain." He glanced back at Harry and said, "See. They could have given me the cure weeks ago, but it's all theater with these guys."
Natasha corrected, "It's not a cure, it just abates the symptoms."
"Doesn't look like it's gonna be an easy fix," Fury added.
Tony shrugged, "Trust me, I know. The kid knows. I've been looking for a suitable replacement for palladium. Scandium through Lawrencium. Kid even has me trying to synthesize neutronium. We've tried every combination, every permutation of every known element."
Fury gave a dismissive head tilt and said, "Well, I'm here to tell you, you haven't tried them all." He turned back to Natasha and ordered, "Let's continue this over at his mansion. Get someone to drive the kid home."
"He's my lab assistant. I need him," Tony argued.
"He has to leave for the Stark Expo with Ms. Potts in ten hours," Natasha corrected, obviously having access to everyone's travel itineraries in her role as personal assistant.
"Oh, crap, is that today?" Harry groaned, having completely lost track of what days were relative to any others. And he was meeting Dean out there.
"We'll get Coulson. You trust Coulson with the kid?" Fury checked.
"Pepper probably does," Tony grudgingly agreed. "But we'll go introduce him. And I'll fly home. I don't think housekeeping's been by yet, by the way, we weren't expecting guests. This better be worth my time."
As Tony walked Harry out, trying to salvage his own control over the situation, Fury and Natasha left the other way and got into their spy-mobile. Once inside, bug detectors checked, and in motion toward Malibu, he asked, "Interesting, the way the kid knew he should bolt but was thinking about fighting if he had to. What have you learned about him?"
She took a second to consider then listed off, "Brave to the point of recklessness. His aunt is angrier at Stark for putting himself in danger than she is Harry, and I don't think it's just because she's not an attentive guardian, so she trusts him to get out of danger. Keeping secrets, but bad at hiding his emotions. Drowning in puberty, and embarrassed about it. His school has no online footprint whatsoever, which might fit with an old Scottish boarding school, but I haven't been able to confirm it even exists except on paper. You should put an analyst on it if you want to know more, because they don't keep any details about it on the Stark systems I could get to. I don't think Stark knows it's anything but what the Pottses say it is."
"You think it's another agency?" he checked.
She shrugged, "My guess would be a British intelligence feeder school. Potts' brother, Harry's father, died mysteriously with the mother, which was how she got custody. The father could have been MI-6."
"Is she working for the Brits?"
Natasha shook her head, "Her loyalty is completely to Stark and his company, maybe not in that order if she's angry at him that day. She knows what Harry is learning, but neither of them are committed to whatever organization it is. It may just be a really good education. I don't see him ever making it as a spy. Too easy to read."
"I'll ask some colleagues," Fury agreed. "Continue to treat them as blue team for now. Nothing about Stark's profile says he can stand kids, but he seems to like this one. It's either a weakness we need to worry about, or something to keep him on the rails. And it seems like we may desperately need everything we can get to keep him from going off the rails again."
Meanwhile, in an identical black SUV, Harry was meeting Agent Coulson.
Tony dropped him off at the car, insisting to the driver, "Make sure he gets home safe." He introduced Harry, "This is Agent." Harry could tell from the way he stressed the word that it was a nickname, not just Tony forgetting the man's actual name. "Don't tell Pepper anything. Or tell her everything? I don't know. She'll probably take it better from you." Tony sighed and stepped back, putting his helmet on in preparation for flying off. "See you when I see you."
"Phil Coulson," the agent introduced himself properly as they looped around onto the 405 towards Encino. Harry guessed he shouldn't be surprised that they knew where he lived without asking. The man driving was indeterminately middle-aged, pretty nondescript, with thinning brown hair. At least he wore a suit, unlike the biker gear his fellow agents seemed to favor. His voice was as inoffensive as the rest of him.
"Tony must like you. He gave you a nickname," Harry clarified.
"'Agent' is a nickname?" Coulson checked.
"He doesn't always try very hard for nicknames," Harry shrugged. "But you get a nickname and your boss doesn't, so that means something."
"You're fishing," he smirked. "But, yes, Fury is my boss."
"He seemed bossy," Harry agreed. "Aunt Pepper mentioned you. You helped them with Obie last year."
"That turned out better than it had any right to," he acknowledged, simply, carefully signaling to change lanes. Even just after sunrise on a Sunday, the road was already busy. And they had 20 miles to kill before he got home.
Making conversation, Harry asked, "So why'd you sneak… um, I guess her name's actually Natasha? Or is that just another codename? Anyway, why'd you sneak her into the company when you could have just asked? I thought you guys were friends with Tony and Aunt Pepper."
Coulson explained, "Last time we tried to just ask Mr. Stark for information, he put me off for six months and finally talked only because he needed our help with Mr. Stane. This seemed like it might be time-sensitive."
Harry blew some air out of his mouth in frustrated acknowledgement. "He only told me because I worked it out. He still hasn't told Aunt Pepper." He changed the subject and asked, "What's it like, being a spy?"
"Classified," Coulson replied, deadpan, but flicked his eyes over to Harry so he could tell he was joking. "I do less spying than most. I liaise. It means spending a lot of time trying to talk to people. And paperwork."
"You seem like you'd make a better spy than Natasha," Harry said. "You blend. She's hard to miss."
He nodded, but corrected, still deadpan, "And yet, I can't put on a little black dress and get let into any party on the planet."
"But have you tried?" Harry grinned. "You might do better than you'd think."
Without missing a beat, and only the ghost of a smile, he agreed, "I'll include it as a suggestion in my next mission briefing. We'll see if Fury goes for it."
They made the rest of the drive in mostly silence. Harry could see why his aunt liked the mild-mannered agent. He seemed nice, and didn't push. It gave Harry time to reconsider his interactions with "Natalie" and realize that she had been pushing. It was probably pretty dangerous for him to be friends with spies, if he was going to keep magic and Vanaheim secret. Hopefully, he hadn't given too much up. The scary thing was, Natasha seemed nice, too. Honestly, so did Fury; he could have been way harder on Tony. Harry would need to talk to Aunt Pepper and decide whether SHIELD actually were just the good guys, or they needed to assume they were always trying to manipulate them for information.
He liked to think that he could tell when people were trustworthy, but he knew his track record wasn't great.
Harry had texted he was on the way back, but he wasn't even sure his aunt would be awake. Yet when they pulled up to 5730 Encino Ave a little after six in the morning, she came out in her bathrobe to greet the black SUV. She smiled as she saw who was driving and said, "Phil! Thanks for bringing him back. Do you need coffee?"
"No thanks, Ms. Potts," Coulson shook his head. "I have to go over to Mr. Stark's after this." He glanced at Harry and figured that the kid would tell her most of what had happened, so went ahead and explained, "After last night we had an… intervention. Didn't expect Mr. Potts there."
"Did you at least get donuts?" Pepper checked, and Harry nodded. "Thank you for trying to help. Do you think you made any progress?"
Coulson gave a slight shrug and said, "We'll know soon. Our director is turning over some information that may help with his personal crisis." Before she could grill him for that information, he added, "Full disclosure, Ms. Rushman is one of ours. We inserted her to get close to Mr. Stark and assess his state of mind."
Suddenly a little upset, Pepper narrowed her eyes and checked, "You 'inserted' a leggy redhead into Stark Industries because you knew Tony would talk to her?"
"That's all they've done, if you're curious," Coulson said. "Her initial assessment indicates that Mr. Stark was less… forward than most men she's shadowed." Seeing that she was slightly mollified he said, "We'd ask you to keep her cover intact for the next few days, until we're certain the crisis has passed. She's also a fully trained bodyguard, for your trip to New York tomorrow."
"Fine. But the next time you want to know something Phil Coulson, you just ask me," she insisted.
"That's what I told him," Harry agreed. "But he said he didn't want to wait six months again."
Pepper huffed out a, "Fair," and then said, "Well, it was lovely to see you again Phil. You're welcome to come by to catch up when it's not a crisis."
Coulson gave her a nod like that probably wasn't going to happen, but he was being polite about it. "Enjoy your trip," he said instead, getting back in the car and pulling out to begin the circuitous route from Encino to Malibu. At least it was a pretty drive through the mountains.
Harry yawned and Pepper said, "Take a nap but I'm waking you up in a few hours to head to the office. If you sleep all day you'll just be up all night at the hotel in New York. And on the way in, you're going to tell me everything."
"Yes ma'am," Harry yawned again. He gave her a hug and said, "I think it's going to be alright. Goodnight."
Pepper woke him up before lunchtime, had him pack for the overnight trip to the Stark Expo, and then drove with him to the Stark Industries office. They grabbed lunch on the way, and Harry wound up basically informing her of everything. To say she was annoyed was an understatement. "He was dying. May still be dying. And he didn't tell me. Wait, how long did you know?"
"Since right after Monaco," Harry admitted. "He said he was going to tell you, so I shouldn't. Guess he never did."
"Risk taking. Selling off his stuff. One last big party. Making me CEO. God, it makes so much sense now." Pepper had spent years on Midgard figuring out how to curse like a native, and just didn't let on that the god she was cursing at was usually Odin. "Well he can't have it back once he's feeling better."
"I probably could have helped him," Harry sighed. "I think the metal he's looking for is uru. Even if it's not, there's probably something the Masters could do. I guess he can't ever go to Vanaheim, or his heart would just stop."
"I know, Harry," she said, sadly. "It's a constant fight, keeping that knowledge separate. If he ever finds out…" Harry didn't have time to remind her that the Ancient One thought he might, pretty soon, because she suddenly said, "What do you mean, his heart would just stop?"
"Oh. He has an artificial heart in there that the arc reactor is running. His real one was too messed up. Don't you know he's got a hole in his chest that's like three inches wide and just as deep?"
"He told me it was just shrapnel!" she yelled, angrily turning off the 105 onto the Stark Industries exit. "He tells everyone it's just shrapnel! Oh god, I stuck my hand in there and I didn't even ask myself, 'Where's his heart?' It's so obvious. There's a giant hole in his body!"
"I thought it was just, like, sitting right on his chest until I saw him take it out," Harry shrugged, agreeing that it was weird she hadn't realized it if she'd had her hand in there. He wasn't going to ask what kind of weird flirting that was a part of.
"Okay," she grimaced, as they turned down the street and into the parking deck. "Don't tell him you told me. I want to see if he'll actually tell me himself. Maybe apologize for once."
Harry rolled his eyes, more than ever thinking that the two of them were made for each other. He just wasn't looking forward to being caught in the middle of their inevitable drama when they got together.
Set up for the afternoon in Pepper's old desk outside of what used to be Tony's office (and was now Pepper's), Harry was mostly watching aikido tutorials on the computer and texting Dean to make plans for Monday. He was a little surprised when Natasha showed up, having switched back to a black work dress like she hadn't been dressed to infiltrate a Bond villain's base a few hours earlier. "Um, Nat… uh…"
"Just Nat is fine," she smiled. Having the last week to compare it to, it seemed a little more genuine, since he was now in on the secret. But, then again, maybe that was just another layer of manipulation. She seemed to read that thought going across his face and said, "I'm sorry, Harry. It's the job. I don't know if you know anything about keeping secrets, but we don't always get to choose to be totally honest."
He guessed he could see that and shrugged, though he didn't feel like the kind of secrets he was keeping were anywhere near the same. "But, how would I ever know who you really are?"
She frowned, sadly, as if that was one of the greatest questions of her life. She just said, "I guess, watch what I do more than what I say? That's just a good tip for dealing with anyone."
Harry thought back to the last year, when he should have trusted his own perceptions about Neville at the very least and nodded. "Yeah, okay. But if you want to know something, you should just ask, in the future. At least me. I know Tony can't help himself."
"He is a character," she smiled again, and he kind of hated that he got his own silly grin every time she did. "Your aunt in?"
"Yeah, she's fighting with the lawyers," Harry agreed. "Rhodey gave the suit he took to the Air Force. There's patents and stuff. See, answers." He stuck out his tongue.
She chuckled and let herself into the office after saying, "Thanks."
Nat had come and gone by the time the next visitor showed up, Tony came strolling in carrying a giant container of strawberries. "Boss lady in?" Tony joked.
"Still fighting with the lawyers about patents for the suit," Harry answered. "You didn't bring her strawberries did you?"
"Pepper loves strawberries?" Tony insisted, his certainty eroding as he said it.
"They're the one thing on Earth she's allergic to," Harry corrected. There were several other things she was allergic to, but they were only native to Vanaheim. Fortunately, Harry didn't seem to have acquired any of the Potter family allergies.
"See, I knew there was a correlation," Tony instantly reconfigured his error into a success, but did at least leave the strawberries on the desk with Harry. "Does she know…"
Harry shook his head, "You two figure out how to talk to each other without me. I'm at school most of the year. You can't get used to using me as your go-between. I think she forgave Nat though."
"Nat, now, huh?" Tony said. "I guess that is easier. And she's certainly like a gnat, buzzing around."
Harry pointed imperiously at the office door and said, "Now you're stalling. Go. Talk."
Tony just grinned, "You are so like her sometimes. Alright, I'm going." He let himself into the office as well.
Bambi—the company's office manager, who was nothing like her name would suggest—stuck her bespectacled face and severe haircut out of her office and said, "Did you just let someone else in to see Ms. Potts? They're supposed to check in with me."
"Trade you this desk for your office and you can stop them?" Harry suggested. Pepper and Bambi had always been at odds over who controlled access to Tony, and he guessed now she was trying to stake her territory before Pepper got her own personal assistant. "It was just Tony."
"Protocols, Harry. Protocols," she insisted.
Before she closed her door, Harry saw Happy and Nat walking up the hall to collect them for the flight to the Expo and asked, "Do you want to have them sign in?"
She huffed and told the two adults, "Mr. Stark is in with Ms. Potts at the moment."
"Hopefully apologizing," Harry added.
"I'll put ten on not," Nat said.
"Are we betting friends now?" Happy raised an eyebrow. "Do we bet?"
"Not against Nat," Harry figured.
She smirked but said, "Well it's wheels up in twenty-five, so unless it's a really good apology…"
"Wouldn't be the first time something like that's happened in that office," Happy mumbled, obviously not wanting to burst in on the two just in case.
Harry's eyes widened once he realized what they were implying, and deliberately turned away from the door as Nat opened it. Fortunately, there was just the sound of an argument trailing off, which was a much more normal sound between Tony and Pepper. "Wheels up in twenty-five minutes," Nat repeated for Pepper.
"Thank you," she answered, in the way that meant Tony needed to get back to whatever he'd been doing and stop bothering her.
Happy asked, "Anything else, boss?"
Tony started to say, "I'm good, Hap," but Pepper talked over him with, "No, I'll be just… another minute."
Harry poked his head around the corner and watched Tony, who raised his hands and tried to smile like it was funny as he said, "I lost all three kids in the divorce." He laughed nervously and glanced at Happy, who shook his head, and at Harry, who just rolled his eyes and mouthed, "Apologize," before moving back over to the desk to let the adults work their problems out.
Since Pepper came storming out twenty seconds later with Happy pulling her luggage, he figured it hadn't gone so well. Pepper spotted the carton of strawberries on her old desk and stopped so abruptly that Happy almost ran over her, and she said, "I guess he brought strawberries and you talked him out of it?"
"I guess he didn't apologize?" Harry asked in response, grabbing his backpack and standing to follow as the convoy resumed. Behind them, Nat was exiting the office and catching up.
"Of course not," Pepper rolled her eyes. "At least he seems to be feeling better. Let's get to New York."
Notes:
Credit to Diane Castle's Hermione Granger and the Boy Who Lived over on Twisting the Hellmouth for the idea for Natasha's mistaken impression that Hogwarts is an MI-6 feeder school.
Chapter 29: The City of the Future
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"You're sure you don't want to come to In Defense of Peace?" Pepper jokingly pleaded in the back seat. Harry was crammed in the middle between her and Dean, and Nat was riding up front with Happy. Fortunately for the already cramped space in the car, Dean's mom had insisted on getting her own cab to the restaurant and then home for her and her daughters, since Pepper had paid for dinner at a lavish restaurant off of the Expo campus.
"We're hoping the arcade is emptier," Harry shook his head. Not only had the giant collection of next-gen video games been packed when they'd checked it out earlier, they'd been walking around with their families, who didn't want to hang around there all afternoon. "Why are you going to Justin's presentation?"
Pepper rolled her eyes and admitted, "I want to know firsthand what patent infringement we'll be suing him for tomorrow. But fine. Take Happy with you. Is that okay, Happy?"
"Yes, ma'am," he agreed. "I saw a virtual boxing game in there. Are you going to be okay without a bodyguard?"
"I think Natalie and I will manage," she deadpanned. Unless he'd worked it out somehow, Happy was the only one in the car that didn't know she was a SHIELD agent. Harry had already let Dean in on that fact. "Harry, do you have that new headset we got?" she checked.
He nodded, and turned his head so she could see the small earbud he had in place. They'd visited a promising booth earlier and gotten a set for everyone. The sound quality wasn't up to Tony or SHIELD's standards, but at least it wasn't the big earpieces that were commonplace consumer tech that many companies considered state-of-the-art for 2010. "And I have an icon to call JARVIS if there's a problem."
"Good," she nodded. "Wait, put that icon on mine, too," she handed him her phone, and he spent the rest of the drive downloading the app to securely connect to Tony's AI communication server. Happy pulled into a reserved parking space right next to the main stage, a tremendous open-air amphitheater with a glass ceiling. "Okay, you three have fun. We'll meet you here after the presentation at nine."
Nat turned back to him and mouthed, "I'd prefer the arcade, too," as she followed Pepper into the entryway.
"That lady is a spy?" Dean checked, as the three of them walked along the pathway toward the arcade. "Maybe I should be a spy when I grow up."
"Who's a spy?" Happy asked.
"Nat," Harry said. "She's just here from SHIELD to find out why Tony was acting weird."
"Huh," Happy nodded, deciding to accept that information. "I knew she was a cheater."
"Yeah. But she's on our side," Harry shrugged, having come to terms with it. She'd come and gone throughout the day, ostensibly working (and probably doing SHIELD security things), but he was getting used to her. And, he hoped, getting a little better about being in her presence without losing his concentration every seven seconds.
"Looks like the arcade's clearing out," Dean said, enthusiastically. "I worried, since it doesn't get dark until like eight."
"Want to bet everyone's going to sit there for an hour waiting?" Harry asked them. Even though Hammer's presentation was scheduled to start at 7:00, Harry figured he'd be a diva and be "fashionably late."
"No bet," Happy agreed. "But don't get distracted. Just because there's fewer people doesn't mean there couldn't be bad people."
"And watch out for photographers," Harry reminded Dean. "Don't want you having to worry about paparazzi too." He and Pepper had gone around incognito in hats and sunglasses all day so they wouldn't be mobbed, but he'd swapped back to his regular glasses as the sun was setting, and someone might recognize him.
"You're Harry Potts!" a young voice said, as they were entering the towering room of noise and neon that was the arcade, immediately proving that worry a reality. Harry looked over and saw a little boy pointing at them. He was wearing a hoodie, Stark Expo t-shirt, and too-large plastic Iron Man helmet hinged open to reveal his face. Probably eight or nine, he had the accent of a local. "We saw you on the news."
"Peter!" the dark-haired woman with him corrected. "It's not nice to point." She also had a strong New York accent, and looked to be in her forties, somewhere around Happy's age.
"I'm right though, right?" the kid checked. "I met Tony Stark at the beginning of the month! I made this helmet myself from a kit, and I have a repulsor!" He showed off the flashlight built into the palm of his glove.
Dean smirked at Harry and told Peter, "That's right. This is the Harry Potts. You would not believe how famous he is." Harry chuckled, because that was almost certainly true.
"Sorry about that," the woman told them. "He's precocious. We don't need an autograph, but if you let him you'll spend all night hearing about how he made the helmet."
"We're used to it," Happy said, checking out the woman and not seeing a husband in immediate evidence. "Happy Hogan, Mr. Stark's bodyguard and driver. Well, Ms. Potts' now." He held out a hand.
She shook it, smiling, "May Parker. That's my nephew, Peter."
"Watching him for his parents?" Happy asked, making conversation.
"Permanently, yeah," she agreed, adding, "They passed," when Happy looked confused.
"I live with my aunt just like you live with yours," Peter explained to Harry.
Harry nodded awkwardly, not sure what to say to that, but Dean offered, "Want to show us what games are good, Peter?" Dean had a lot more experience dealing with younger kids than Harry did.
"We don't want to put you out…" May tried.
"It's no problem" Happy told her. "We just wanted to check out the exhibit while it was less packed. I was going to try the boxing game. I used to be a professional boxer."
"Yeah?" she said, letting him tell her about it as they watched the kids pick a game.
They were in the arcade for quite a while, when May finally mentioned, "It's getting dark. Thanks for playing games with him. But we better get home."
"Hah, I was right," Harry said, checking his phone for the time and realizing it was already 8:00, and he had a text. "Aunt Pepper says Justin just showed up."
"Be safe getting home," Happy insisted to May, as she walked Peter out.
"We will be. We live nearby," May agreed, as they headed out.
"So is there an Uncle Parker?" Dean checked, as the three of them also wandered out into the evening, thinking about getting ice cream or something.
"You know… it was unclear," Happy shrugged. "But she invited me to come help at the homeless shelter she works at if I'm in town…"
Dean grinned, "Between you and that lady, and Harry and the spy, I guess I ought to find somebody to moon over."
Happy looked a little put-out, being ribbed by a thirteen-year-old, but Harry just smiled, "And I want you to tell that story to all the guys, so maybe they'll shut up about me and Hermione."
"Sure. But only if I also get to tell Hermione," Dean laughed. "Guess we'll see if she's jealous."
Before Harry could come up with a rejoinder, they heard the sound of jet engines and looked up to see Iron Man blazing in from the west, aiming to land inside the amphitheater. "Tony didn't say he was coming," Harry said, confused.
"Let's head that way and get Ms. Potts," Happy suggested.
They'd been walking that way for about a minute before there was suddenly the sound of rapid gunfire, shattering glass, and screams.
"Hitting the panic button," Harry announced, making sure his earbud was active and tapping the JARVIS app on his phone, then sliding it back into a pocket. He heard the beep of acknowledgement and asked, "JARVIS! What's going on. We're at the Expo and there's shooting."
"Now patching you in," JARVIS' voice sounded in his ear.
"Maverick?" Tony's voice sounded as he saw Harry's icon pop up. "Where are you? Are you with Pepper?"
"No, outside with Happy," Harry corrected, just as he could see the Iron Man armor streaking up and out of the amphitheater, at least a dozen other humanoid suits flying after him, tracer fire shooting into the night sky. "Woah. Be careful!"
Tony narrated while flying away, "Vanko's alive. He's controlling Hammer's drones and Rhodey's armor. JARVIS, connect to the Mark II, I need to own him."
"Attempting to reset OS to original state," JARVIS announced.
They'd made it most of the way to the building themselves as Harry had talked, only to hit a crowd of guests trying to escape in all directions. "People on the lawn, Tony!" Harry warned. "Don't let them shoot down!"
"He's right, these are armor-piercing. They'll shoot through schools," Rhodey's voice announced. Harry guessed that whatever they'd done to him hadn't broken the root-level link to communications with JARVIS.
Tony, who had been about to bank low to dodge, realized Harry's point about bullets that missed him and asked, "JARVIS, get me an evasion corridor that isn't pointed toward civilians. Maverick! Get to the car and get out of here."
"No, Natalie needs the car," Pepper corrected, suddenly on the line. "Happy should get her to Hammer Industries to capture Vanko. She's heading to the parking lot."
"Pepper?" Tony asked, surprised she had the app.
Harry relayed the order to Happy, who didn't look, well, happy about it. "You two get to Pepper then," he insisted, as he rushed off toward the car, dodging fleeing people. It was obvious he was stressed since he forgot to call her "Ms. Potts."
"Easier said than done," Dean complained, realizing there was a stampede of people and more of the oversized humanoid robots coming up behind them. Several with huge blocky grenade launchers as shoulder pads hunkered down on the stairs and started firing salvos across the lawn, further driving the crowd into a frenzy.
"We'll go around," Harry decided, stepping onto the grass and out of the way of most of the guests who were staying on the concrete paths. "Hopefully nobody will pay attention to two kids," he told Dean, summoning orange light into his hand, being obscure so the other people on the call wouldn't get that he was talking about doing magic in public and trusting no one to notice in the chaos.
Dean got it and nodded, briefly stopping and stretching to get into his wandless casting stance. Harry pulled the fake plasma-whip wristband he'd cobbled together out of a pocket and slid it on, and they ran toward danger like the two Gryffindors they were. When the next volley of grenades were launched, Harry managed to snag one with an energy whip and fling it back into the drone that was most directly in their path, and Dean shot it with a bolt of orange energy after the explosion opened a hole in its armor.
It actually fell over, and the two boys gave each other a high five as they ran through the gap in the enemy line.
Over the comm, JARVIS announced, "Remote reboot ready on your go. I'd suggest you lead Mr. Rhodes toward the ground, as his flight will be interrupted."
"On it. Sorry, buddy," Tony announced.
"Better me than civilians," Rhodey agreed.
Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of the chase getting closer to the ground, and then the thump of a heavy set of power armor plowing into the lawn. JARVIS announced, "Reboot successful. Reloading Stark OS."
"Tony, you've got more problems," Harry warned him, as they spotted drones with shoulder-mounted sniper rifles stopping on the high ground and aiming upwards. "Shooters down here."
"Got it. Good spotting," he said, as he banked and the shots failed to connect with Iron Man, but did manage to explode one of their own drones, which crashed into the ground and caught fire in the distance.
"Peter!" a woman's voice was screaming, and they recognized May Parker nearby. Dean led as he and Harry ran over to her and she yelled, "Peter said he needed to go help Iron Man. He just ran off!"
"On it," Dean assured her, as he and Harry turned to scope out the area.
The previously-stationary drones were again moving, and Harry's snitch-locating expertise led him to the golden shine of Peter's toy helmet, "Over there. We'll get him, May. Stay back." He warned Tony, "Kid in the line of fire over here."
"Crap," Tony cursed. "Little busy with the pack."
"We'll get him," Harry corrected, mostly just making sure Tony wasn't going to notice what they were about to do. One of the drones with a long gun had slowed to a stop in front of Peter, who was confronting the robot with the confidence of the young. He started to raise his "repulsor" at the target. "Are those things programmed to just shoot at the Iron Man helmet?" Harry couldn't believe it. "Dean, same strategy as before?"
"You go high, I'll go low," Dean agreed, rushing up behind Peter as Harry raced in from the side.
"Hey, idiot!" Harry yelled at the robot, not expecting it to have the audio processing to be distracted by taunts, but it made him feel better. He produced his energy whip and wrapped it around the thing's head, covering up its cyclopean eye and tugging back with all his might. It actually reminded him a bit of the shadow nix he'd encountered in the Forbidden Forest. "Just like troll clubs," he grunted out with the effort.
Weaving his hands to charge as much power as possible, Dean slid to a stop right behind the little kid and launched a hadouken-sized blast of energy that caught the drone in the "jaw" where Harry had its head pulled back. With a sizzling of wires, the head popped off, and Harry released his whip so it could go flying into the near distance. The drone continued orienting its gun for a moment, but then stopped. "Nice work, Peter," Dean encouraged, hoping the kid would imagine from the angle of attack that his toy repulsor had done something. "We gotta get back to Aunt May."
"Reload successful, reactivating the Mark II," JARVIS announced over the comms.
"That sucked," Rhodey complained. "Give me a minute. Guns aren't responding."
"Hammer software drivers were erased in the reload," JARVIS explained. "I am attempting to repurpose Stark code to enable the new peripherals."
"Good call on the security patch, Maverick," Tony told Harry. "Rhodey, you have flight? Let's see if we can lead them off somewhere quieter."
Several seconds later, as they had almost led Peter back to May through the chaos, the entire flock of drones chased Tony and Rhodey overhead. They banked sharply enough to scrape one off into an expensive big screen mounted high on a building, and then Tony decided to fly through the giant metal Earth sculpture at the center of the park. Several exploding drones turned the art installation into a giant fireball. "That was somewhere quieter?" Harry asked. He noticed that the ones on the ground were starting to fly off and warned them, "You at least got them to send in the reinforcements. More coming to you, none on the ground."
"Peter!" May, almost distraught, nearly shrieked as they jogged back up, wrapping the boy in her arms. "You are not a superhero! Never do that again!"
"But I got one," Peter insisted, flipping his helmet open, obviously not even slightly guilty. "Well, Harry helped. Can I see the thing?" he asked, focused on Harry's arm.
Harry just showed him the wristband, gambling that the kid wasn't perceptive enough to realize it was as much a prop as the toy repulsor. He pulled the "whip" a few inches out of the housing at the base of his palm and hoped Peter would draw the conclusion that it was a copy of Vanko's plasma whips.
What Peter got was a look in his eye like he was having a moment of inspiration, and he said, "That's a good place to launch a line from…"
"Looks like things are calming down around here," Dean said, the area basically clear except for burning wreckage and places where grenades had ignited the lawn.
"I see ambulances and police incoming," Harry announced.
"Good," Pepper's voice cut in. "I called them."
Harry suggested, "I'll see if I can spot anyone that needs help for the EMTs, then get to Aunt Pepper. Dean, can you get May and Peter home? We'll pick you up when Happy brings the car back."
"You don't need to…" May tried to correct, but she was clearly distraught enough to appreciate the help.
"Be careful, Harry," Dean said then nodded when Harry mouthed, "Find out what she saw." He started leading Peter away and said, "You said you're close, right?"
Harry gave himself a minute to sit on a bench and let the adrenaline crash wear off. He probably shouldn't be getting used to that, at his age. He could still hear Tony and Rhodey's comms chatter, as it sounded like they'd been disagreeing over who was the bigger gun and wound up getting surrounded by drones as they argued. But it also sounded like the fight was going their way, so Harry shook it off and jogged out to look for injured people.
Fortunately, the grenades had mostly been launched to scare the crowd (and they were Hammertech besides, so weren't very good ), and Tony hadn't led any gunfire into civilians. Well, at least here; Harry had his worries about all the shots that had been fired into the air that might come down and ruin someone else's day on the other side of the city. He came upon a couple of people that had suffered wounds that had immobilized them, and flagged down medics, but breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn't come across any dead bodies.
"I'm up on the steps in front of the amphitheater," Pepper said over the line. "I'm going to wait to make sure everyone else gets out."
"I think we're done here," Tony assured her.
"You're not," Nat corrected, also joining the party line. "Vanko cleared out. And I read another drone incoming. This one looks different. The repulsor signature is significantly higher."
"Everyone's trying to copy my suits," Tony complained.
Nat added, "Well done on the new chest piece, by the way. I am reading significantly higher output and your vitals all look promising."
"Yes, for the moment, I'm not dying. Thank you," he scoffed.
Pepper finally couldn't take it anymore and prompted, "What do you mean you're not dying? Did you just say you're dying?"
"No, I'm not. Not anymore," Tony corrected, then wheedled, "I was going to tell you. I didn't want to alarm you."
"Why didn't you tell me that?" she checked.
He insisted, "I was gonna make you an omelet and tell you."
"Well are you okay now?"
"I'm fine. Don't be mad. I will formally apologize when I'm not fending off a tattooed Russian patent thief!"
"I am mad!" Pepper yelled, but closed with, "Fine."
Needing to have the last word, Tony claimed, "We could have been in Venice."
"Oh please," Pepper complained. "Harry, meet me at the steps."
To the sounds of Rhodey and Tony arguing while they fought Vanko somewhere on the other side of the Expo, Harry jogged over and saw Pepper standing where she'd said at the steps up into the amphitheater, surveying the destruction of what was supposed to be a year-long attraction, surrounded by the fallen forms of defeated drones…
…which started beeping, red lights flashing on their chests.
Rhodey's voice sounded over the comms, "All these drones are rigged to blow. We gotta get out of here man."
"Pepper? Maverick?" Tony swore.
"I got the kid, you get her," Rhodey instructed, as Harry looked up to see two rocket trails shooting directly at them.
"Did we have to stand by the bombs?" Harry asked his aunt, as the Mark II armor crashed into him, probably giving him a full-body bruise as they then rocketed up at g-forces slightly higher than what he was used to in quidditch. He finally got a good look at what Hammer had done to the armor as the world exploded around them. The suit now had a bunch of steel plating and guns, and was painted black and white instead of the original chrome. "Cool armor," he had to admit.
"Thanks," Rhodey agreed, as they made an arc across the Expo grounds and settled on a building nearby to watch the fireworks. "Flies like a Warthog, though. So heavy. So many guns."
Before Harry could comment, Tony and Pepper set down on the other side of the same roof, and she shoved him back as soon as she had her feet on the ground. "Oh my God. I can't take this anymore!" she yelled at him.
They didn't notice Rhodey and Harry as they launched into a ridiculous argument about her quitting, through which Tony was charming but notably still didn't apologize. But they did finally kiss, and Harry and Rhodey rolled their eyes at each other from the shadows.
"Weird," was all Tony had to say, as they split back apart.
Pepper disagreed, "No, it's not weird."
"It's okay, right?"
"Yeah."
Tony smirked, "Run that by me again."
As they started to kiss again, Rhodey finally spoke up, explaining, "We think it was weird." That finally got both of their attention. "You guys look like two seals fighting over a grape."
"That's mean," Harry smirked. "They look like two seals sharing a grape."
"I had just quit, actually," Pepper tried to cover.
Tony backpedaled, "Yeah, so we're not…"
Rhodey shook his head, "You don't have to do that. We heard the whole thing."
Tony frowned, "You should get lost."
Rhodey countered, "We were here first. Get a roof."
"I thought you were out of one-liners," Tony sighed. "You kicked ass back there, by the way. Both of you."
"Thank you," he accepted for both him and Harry. "You too. Listen, my car got taken out in the explosion, so I'm gonna have to hang on to your suit for a minute, okay?"
Before Tony could object, Harry pointed out, "We need to go get Dean. Can you drop me over in Queens? We'll call Happy to pick us up. That way the two of you can keep making out up here."
"Well if the kid's giving us permission…" Tony told Pepper, mollified, as Rhodey and Harry flew back off into the night.
"Over a grape," Rhodey repeated.
Notes:
And that's the official end of Year 2. There's still a few more summer chapters, but they're on a quick run into Year 3 plots. I hope everyone enjoyed the dip into Iron Man 2. This is probably the last time that things will occur as closely-tied to canon, as Harry's ability to affect events grows. What I'm saying is, we've got a baseline established, and now we're just working our way towards Avengers and how much of a monkeywrench the presence of one Harry Potter will throw into Thanos' plans for a Loki-dominated Earth.
Also, yes, I have no shame about having Harry meet every MCU character it's even slightly plausible to meet. Are we not all here to see Harry Potter bounce off of various MCU characters? And I understand that Feige is on record that the kid in the Iron Man mask in IM2 was canonically Peter Parker, so this was barely a stretch. There's another early meeting next week!
I'm really bad about replying to comments, but I do read and appreciate all of them. Now is an excellent time to tell me what you're enjoying, what you'd like to see more of, and what your theories are about where things are going.
Just to answer a question I've gotten a couple of times recently: pairings aren't set yet, though third year will explore some possibilities. I'm waiting for a ship to really make sense with the Harry of this timeline, and it may be someone I throw in as a one-off and discover has really fun chemistry. Honestly, it's just as likely to wind up being an MCU character as a Hogwarts student, though there aren't actually a ton of MCU characters in Harry's age range unless he gets Blipped or we draw on the no-longer-canon shows, which makes it a little more of a challenge. We'll see where it goes.
Chapter 30: Smash and Grab
Chapter Text
"Are you still on the East Coast?" Dean asked, somewhat frantically, over the phone. Harry thought he could hear gunfire and crashing in the background.
"No, we're back in LA. What's going on?" Harry checked, worried. It was Friday evening, less than a week since the battle at the Expo, and he was hoping they could at least go until he was back at Hogwarts before there was another crisis.
"Green sasquatch!" Dean nearly shouted over the sound of something blowing up nearby. "Smashing up the street in front of the Apollo."
"From the news?" Harry checked. There had been pretty good online footage of Jean Granger's "green sasquatch" fighting with the military at a Virginia university on Wednesday.
"This one is bald… and kinda spiky? Maybe it's mutating," Dean explained, things getting quieter as he tried to take cover. "How long until Tony could get out here?"
"At least a couple hours, I think, even supersonic," Harry was fairly vague about the exact math and how fast the current Iron Man suit could go.
"Don't think that's going to be soon enough," Dean said, and there was a feral roar in the distance. "Oh! There's two of them now. The one from the college just showed up to fight the spiky one."
"Are you in the middle of it? Your family?" Harry checked.
"Family's fine for now. We live a few blocks away. I came to check it out, though," Dean said blithely, in true Gryffindor spirit. There was the sound of roaring and a titanic battle. "Okay. Looks like the fight is moving off. I think it's going the opposite way from my house. I'm going to see if I can help any injured people. I'll let you know if anything else happens. Bye!"
As soon as he was off the phone, Harry ran downstairs to find Pepper actually not working for once. They'd come back to 5730 Encino Avenue, and had spent more time there than usual. Now that Pepper and Tony were "dating," she felt paradoxically weirder about just spending all her time at his house. Interrupting her show, he said, "Two green sasquatches fighting with the military in Harlem! I don't think Tony can get there in time to do anything, but maybe we should tell him just in case?"
"Are the Thomases okay?" Pepper checked, sighing that this kind of crisis was her life now, and grabbing her own phone.
"Yeah," Harry nodded. "Dean said the fight was going away from their house. But a lot of people might have gotten injured on the street. He said he was going to try to help."
"We should get you first aid training," Pepper said, absently, as she texted Tony.
"Huh. Yeah, probably," Harry nodded.
Pepper's phone pinged, and she relayed, "JARVIS says Tony's already on the phone with SHIELD, but they don't think he'd be there in time to help."
Harry nodded, "That's what I figured. If this goes on for hours, there might not be any city left."
She switched the TV over to a news station that had coverage, and it looked from the helicopter footage like the fight had stopped at some convenient demolished lot, with a few ruined stone walls still around. "We should buy that," she made a note for herself. "I can't believe that much real estate on the island is just sitting empty, even if it's not a great neighborhood."
Pepper started making phone calls to have Stark Industries provide help (and maybe buy some newly-available real estate) as they both sat on the couch, watching with the rest of the nation as the "Hulk" (as people were starting to call the original monster) defeated the bald, spiky one, saved the people in a military helicopter that had crashed, and then bounded off into the night.
"I don't think those were jotuns," Harry considered. "Frost giants are blue. And the fire giants are supposed to be red and on fire."
"Probably doesn't have anything to do with the Realms," Pepper sighed. "I'll see if Phil can tell me anything. With the military and research universities involved, my guess would be some kind of mutated humans."
"Can't have Iron Man suits so they turned soldiers into giant green monsters?" Harry nodded. "Stupid."
Pepper agreed, "It wouldn't be the scariest thing I've heard rumors about at parties with other government contractors."
Harry's phone pinged with a text message and he relayed, "Dean says he's okay and his family's okay. Master Kaecilius and Master Drumm showed up with a few other sorcerers to check on him, and they're doing what they can to help the injured."
Pepper pursed her lips, "It would be so useful to have EMTs that could make portals, but I doubt that would happen even if magic gets outed. Too much chance for abuse, and not enough sorcerers." But she made a coded note to herself to look into having a legal and support structure in place if that ever happened, just in case.
The next day, Harry went with Pepper over to Tony's mansion to work, since the biggest question in the media seemed to be, if he'd been available, whether Iron Man would be able to defeat the Hulk. Down in his garage, Tony didn't seem too worried. "Fury already has me talking to the General whose project it was. Official SHIELD consultant, that's me. I'm supposed to talk him into handing over his mutant for this whole initiative neither of you are supposed to know about."
"They're sending you?" Pepper asked, with a raised eyebrow.
Tony defended his record, "Lots of history talking to the military brass. Probably more than SHIELD. Military guys don't really like spy guys. Makes sense. Plus I warned the general about super soldiers years ago, so we have a history. No, what I'm more interested in, is whatever Agent was up to in New Mexico." He rolled back in his chair and ordered, "JARVIS, load the Puente Antiguo files."
"Presently, sir," JARVIS' voice echoed through the garage as the video wall filled with pictures and video of a desert. "Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, May 30th through June 2nd."
Tony took over narration, gesturing to pictures which took focus as he explained them. "Multiple aurora borealis events in the region in the last few months. In the southwestern US. Those aren't common. One Jane Foster, astrophysicist, puts in a grant request to study them."
Several bad camera images of colorful night skies appeared. Pepper got nervous and put a hand on Harry's shoulder to caution him. He recognized the effect on the sky before a Bifrost connection. After all, he'd been in the middle of one a couple of weeks earlier. It was more obvious in the middle of the empty desert at night than on a sunny London afternoon.
"Then on May 31st, a 'meteor' hits. Makes a giant crater. There's a hammer in the middle of it," the pictures that showed up included some amateur footage of musclebound men trying to dislodge an object in the crater, and one person even ripping the bumper off his truck trying to tow it with a chain. Tony explained, "That's when Agent told me he had to go to New Mexico."
The next few pictures were more sparse. Images featured a giant fenced compound in the middle of the desert, taken from a distance and a really cool night shot of lightning over the makeshift base.
"Not a lot of thunderstorms in New Mexico," Tony summed up. "Then there's a media blackout. Rumors of a giant Iron Man suit blowing up the town fighting agents in black and guys in Ren Fest costumes. And SHIELD won't tell me anything about it."
"It's Thor," it just slipped out of Harry's mouth, even with Pepper's warning squeeze.
Tony spun around and actually gave Harry his full attention. "What's a Thor?" So interested in the new information, he'd even failed to make the, "What's sore?" pun.
Harry, who obviously jumped to the conclusion based on whose coronation he knew was supposed to be a few days earlier covered with, "The thunder. And the weird hammer. In Norse myth, the god of thunder, Thor, used a warhammer with a handle that was too short for anyone not as strong as him to wield."
As Harry talked, JARVIS loaded pictures from mythology that backed up Harry's description. Tony peered at them and had to admit the kid had a point. "Well, probably not pagan gods. At least I hope not. But with the LARP costumes they mentioned, it could at least be Thor cosplay. I'll bother Fury with that and see if he blinks. Thanks, Maverick."
When Pepper got Harry alone later, she asked, "Harry. Why?"
"He'll know eventually," Harry shrugged. "I think this is what the Ancient One meant. Asgard revealed itself. We may be able to tell Tony soon."
Pepper blanched. She was not anywhere near prepared to explain to her new boyfriend that she'd been lying to him for over a decade and was, in fact, an alien from another planet. Best case scenario, the bad jokes would never stop. "Let's not… rush into that, unless we have to," she finally said.
Harry shrugged. He figured at the rate he was going, he'd out himself eventually anyway.
"By the way," she wielded what punishment she could for Harry nearly outing them to Tony, "after your heroics in Monaco and the rumors that you helped at the Expo, the Boy Scouts definitely want you to give a speech. The subject is 'Be Prepared.'"
"Of course it is," Harry groaned.
Drilling for that presentation kept Harry busy for the next couple of weeks. He still wasn't prepared.
"How is that so easy for Tony?" he complained as they were leaving the gala. "How was it so easy for you?"
Rhodey, who had also gone, since Harry'd been right that he'd been an Eagle Scout, explained, "Public speaking? You just have to learn it. It gets easier the more you do it. Well, Tony has been good at it as long as I've known him. I think it's because he's always picturing everyone in their underwear."
"You think they noticed I was just reading from the paper the whole time?" Harry asked. Rhodey had recovered the car he'd left at Tony's house when he flew off with the Mark II, and was driving them both back to the mansion from the hotel in Pasadena where the Scouts had held the gala. It turned out it had also been the 100th anniversary of scouting, which might have been why Tony thought to donate his art collection in the first place.
"Maybe. I don't think anyone minded. You're not even thirteen. Plenty of time to get better at speaking," he consoled, as they barreled down Arroyo Seco Parkway. At least the show went late enough that traffic had cleared out, but it was still a 45-mile drive across town. "I should have signed out a helicopter."
"Can you just do that?" Harry checked.
"No," Rhodey admitted. "It'd be cool, though."
"You should teach me to fly," Harry realized. "You should teach Tony, too. I bet he'd crash into a goose or something if JARVIS wasn't helping him navigate."
Rhodey was about to shoot down the suggestion, but glanced over and asked instead, "You bored?"
"So bored," he nodded. He'd already done most of his summer homework and he still had two weeks before his normal summer break would have started if they hadn't been released early. Video games weren't cutting it anymore either, with as much of an adrenaline junkie as he'd become. "Plus you and Tony need to actually do something together. You can't just decide you're friends again but not actually hang out."
"Me trying to teach Tony anything wouldn't be hanging out," Rhodey argued. "Believe me. I've tried it before. It's better to just hand him a manual, let him go away and read it, and answer his questions when he's done. Drove our professors insane. Didn't help that he was like sixteen at the time."
That reminded Harry who asked, "You both went to MIT, right? Why don't you want me to go there, if you didn't go to the Air Force Academy?"
"Fast track," he explained. "I probably should have gone to the Academy. I would have been in the air a lot faster. Wouldn't have met Tony, though…" he allowed. It wasn't just because he'd miss the friendship, but because he was pretty sure that Howard Stark had pulled strings. He'd met the Starks, they'd decided he was one of the few good influences in their son's life, he'd mentioned that he wanted to go into the Air Force after he graduated, and it had just happened. Sadly, they hadn't lived to see him finish training. "But if you think you want to do MIT instead… Honestly, Tony might have you in a suit of your own as soon as you're legal, and it wouldn't hurt to know how to fix it."
"He swears I'm not his kid sidekick," Harry grinned. "I don't know if I'm going to be Iron Boy or anything, though." If nothing else, he was pretty sure it would be a lot harder to do magic in power armor, if only for how it would impede the casting movements and block the energy projection loci on his hands and brow.
"Iron Man and Kid Steel, clearly," Rhodey corrected.
"Clearly," Harry rolled his eyes. "But anyway, we should do something. Something exciting. And not something boring. You can tell Tony it's for my birthday."
"Your birthday isn't for a month and a half," Rhodey corrected.
"Then that just gives you a while to plan," he nodded.
Rhodey smirked, "Touche."
While Harry was waiting for that plan to come together, he did his best to find entertainment in a world that seemed to be moving suddenly slowly. Nothing was even trying to kill him. He finished his classwork. He practiced spellcasting. He took the first aid class Pepper had suggested. He convinced Happy to take a weekly aikido class with him (for all that Happy thought it was cheating). He went to a Boy Scouts trip that he'd been invited to during the gala (and didn't wind up loving basically being a captive, camping celebrity). He even made an abortive attempt to figure out how to play the violin that Gamora had given him.
In addition to the martial arts class, Harry was spending a lot of time being entertained by Happy in general. They'd seen pretty much every new movie that was out that summer (Dead Before Arrival, Simon Williams' new film, they'd even seen twice). Both of them pretended they didn't know it was to get him out of the house so Pepper and Tony could have adult alone time.
Finally, a week and a half before his birthday, Rhodey sent some links to videos on small unit tactics, wilderness mobility, firearms discipline, and the forests of the Hudson Valley in New York. "Are we doing Blair Witch?" Harry replied on his phone, after receiving that last one.
Rhodey replied, "just 4 that, i keep map." His texting remained atrocious.
They were out in New York anyway for the week around his birthday. Pepper had, indeed, bought the ruined building in Harlem where the two green titans had slugged it out over a month earlier, and was thinking about doing even more in the city. "We need to give back after the debacle at the Expo," she'd insisted.
"Are you coming on whatever Rhodey has us doing?" Harry asked her.
She shook her head, seemingly knowing what it was. "You boys have fun. I need to spend the time going on tours with real estate agents anyway."
Happy asked, "Do you need me to…"
She shook her head again, "The real estate agents will be the ones driving. Go bond with Tony." Pepper seemed to still remember Tony's comments about losing the kids in the divorce, and wanted to make sure he got to spend time with Happy.
They gathered at Tony's Manhattan apartment on Friday night, the day before his birthday. Contrary to what one might expect, the place wasn't that gigantic or ostentatious. Tony wasn't in the city that often, and basically just used the place to sleep (or, prior to dating Pepper, to "sleep"), so it didn't need to have all the amenities. The main benefit over a hotel was just the security. "That doorman was intense," Dean confirmed, when he arrived, looking slightly shaken by the thoroughness of his vetting to get in the building.
From behind Dean, Harry heard, "Not as bad as getting into one of our facilities." He saw that Natasha and a man he didn't recognize had walked down the hall just behind Dean.
"Hey, Nat," Harry said, fighting the urge to look down bashfully. "I didn't know you were coming?"
"Surprised Tony invited me," she agreed.
"We needed a team of seven, and Maverick doesn't have any other friends in New York," Tony explained, walking past the door with a drink he'd just made for himself at the bar (the apartment, of course, had a full bar despite its relatively minimal furnishings). "Surprised you came."
"And miss an opportunity to evaluate you in a tactical scenario?" she smirked. Still standing in the doorway she asked, "May we come in?"
"She's a vampire!" Tony mock-exclaimed. "That explains so much."
Natasha rolled her eyes and entered. Dean had already walked in after Harry and was looking around the place, finding it less imposing than he'd expected from a Tony Stark apartment. Harry glanced at the man that had come with her as she introduced him as, "This is Clint." In the light of the apartment, Harry got a better look at him. He was shorter than average height and had blond hair, but was otherwise another nondescript adult of the spy persuasion. Where Coulson would fit in at any white collar job in North America or Europe, Clint would similarly slide effortlessly into any blue collar job. He just had that vibe.
Speaking of Coulson, Tony raised an eyebrow, "I thought you were bringing Agent?"
"He's still on cleanup for the last mission," Natasha explained.
"Oh, yeah," Tony nodded. "Norse gods wrecking towns. Lot of damage."
"I wasn't read into that mission," she shrugged, giving nothing away. But Harry thought he caught a flicker of surprise on Clint's face, so maybe he was.
Tony seemed to have caught that flicker as well and peered at Clint, finally offering, "Want a drink, Clint?" He stressed it as if he didn't believe that was the man's real name.
"If you've got beer?" Clint shrugged. "I'm easy."
Tony nodded as he walked to the bar and grudgingly added, "Agent Romanoff?"
"I'm okay," she shook her head.
"So, I assume you know how to shoot, Agent Clint?" Tony checked.
"I passed my certifications," Clint allowed, with a confidence that even Harry realized meant that he probably really knew how to shoot.
"Wait, are we shooting something?" Dean asked, also not having been told what the activity was.
With perfect timing, Harry was just letting Rhodey and Happy in. Happy had gone down to meet him and was helping lug up two large duffel bags. Rhodey clocked the two agents and Dean, who he hadn't met yet, with cool professionalism. "Yeah. Paintball."
"Neat," Dean said.
Harry and Dean helped the men get the duffels situated on the coffee table, both also skipping the offer of drinks, and everyone gathered on the couches as Rhodey finally explained. "Family paintball adventure weekend. We had to wait until Harry was technically a teenager to qualify, so, tomorrow. It's in a big forest area. You can fight the other teams but there are also staff guarding objectives that we're trying to take."
Tony frowned and said, "That sounds like a LARP. We have one activity rule, and that's no LARPing."
Rhodey rolled his eyes, "We have more than one activity rule. And this isn't a LARP. It's a forest adventure game with… LARP elements."
"What's a LARP?" Dean asked, right before Harry could. Harry had forgotten he'd been curious about the acronym when Tony had mentioned it weeks earlier.
"Live action roleplay," Tony rolled his eyes. "It's like D&D but you dress up as your character and hit each other with padded sticks to use as swords and I'm not talking you out of this, am I?" Harry and Dean's eyes had widened at the idea. It honestly sounded a lot more fun to the active boys than playing fantasy games sitting around a table. "I think you have to be eighteen for most of them," Tony lamely added, mentally tracking the five-year reprieve and hoping they didn't realize you could start earlier if you had a parent go with you.
Even he wasn't aware that he was planning that far ahead for his relationship with Pepper and the kid that was effectively her son.
Somehow Tony talked the apartment manager into letting them do some shooting practice in an empty suite that was being renovated, and they all spent a fun hour splashing paintballs against hand-drawn bullseyes on the various walls. Clint never once missed the target, and the rest of them did pretty well (for all that it was short-range and stationary). Natasha and Clint offered to find protective outfits for them, and planned to meet them at the range the next day, Rhodey went to his own place and was meeting them for the drive, and the boys and Happy stayed in the guest rooms at Tony's apartment (it wasn't so small that it didn't have multiple guest rooms).
"Don't modify these," Rhodey exhorted Tony before leaving. "The range has speed caps for safety."
As soon as his best friend was gone for the night, Tony disappeared into his small workshop in the apartment to do exactly what Rhodey had just told him not to. Pepper had to force him to go to bed when she got in late from various business meetings she'd scheduled to not be in the way while the boys talked paintball.
On the ride a couple of hours out of the city, Tony and Harry, still jet-lagged, mostly slept while Rhodey and Dean talked (with commentary by Happy from the driver's seat). They arrived to find Natasha and Clint in their own nondescript sedan, and they passed out some quite-nice protective outfits. "We use them in SHIELD training exercises," she explained.
Wearing the face shields, Tony didn't even have to worry much about being an international celebrity.
The game itself proved to be a very good time. Harry and Natasha as the smallest, most agile team members proved adept at drawing and dodging enemy fire. Tony and Rhodey worked pretty well together at middle range. Dean picked up a lot of pointers from Clint about laying down suppressive fire and hitting targets at long range with slower, less-accurate weapons (Clint seemed to be talking about how the paintball guns were similar to arrows in that way, but Dean was quietly thinking about how spells often moved slower than a bullet).
Happy got shot a lot.
"Maybe I should go to one of those larks Tony was talking about," he was complaining, having been taken out yet again.
"LARPs," Harry corrected, accompanying him back to the base camp. They'd already been out on the range most of the morning, and Harry was ready for a break. Happy being "dead" for a while gave him the excuse to take a rest himself.
"Right, those," Happy nodded. "I bet things would be a lot more fair if it was legal for me to get up on people and hit them with a stick."
"Nat might like that too," Harry grinned. He'd noticed that the spy didn't really seem comfortable with rifles, and had been doing better with a paintball pistol that the rest of them hadn't bothered to carry. It didn't really have much ammo capacity, however.
"Gentlemen," a French-accented man's voice sounded from nearby. "It looks as if we 'ave caught ze prize goose!"
"We're out of play," Harry assured him. "Already dead."
"I do not zink it shall come to zat," the man said, moving into view flanked by several others. He was tall and burly, though as nondescript as anyone from behind the protective face mask. Harry couldn't help but notice that all of them had rifles that looked way too real to be paintball guns. He gestured toward where Harry and Happy had been walking from, where they'd left the rest of the group, ordering several of his men, "Allons. Go keep ze ozzers from following." He turned back to Happy and asked, "You are ze one zat carries ze armor suitcase, non?" The backpack that he was wearing did, indeed, have the repaired Mark V suit. "I shall 'ave zat… and ze boy for insurance."
Chapter 31: The Prison Between Worlds
Chapter Text
It said something about Harry's life that men pointing automatic weapons at him wasn't the scariest thing that had happened to him that summer. If he included the whole last year, it might not even be in the top five. Staring down the barrel of a gun that clearly shot bullets rather than paintballs, he was just getting enough of a drip of adrenaline to let him focus.
It might not be totally healthy to live this way, but it certainly helped in a crisis.
His biggest asset, he quickly realized, was also his biggest liability: they didn't know he could do magic, but he wasn't allowed to let them know. Whatever he did, he had to try to keep it subtle… plausible… deniable. Happy probably shouldn't find out either.
Which was the point where the paint-drenched bodyguard himself glanced at Harry, weighed the options for getting him out of there safely, and tried, "Big bunch of guys with guns, huh?" Bet you aren't brave enough to make this fair!" Happy put his fists up like he was ready to brawl.
"Ah, a boxer, no?" the leader said, with interest, slinging his rifle back and falling into his own martial arts stance. "Very well."
"We don't have time for this," the other man said, now having to keep both Harry and Happy in his field of fire, since the rest of their team had run off to hinder the remainder of Harry's group. It was hard to tell through the paintball mask muffling his voice, but Harry thought he sounded vaguely Eastern European, not French.
"It weel be but a moment, you secure the boy," the Frenchman disagreed. "Show me what you 'ave," he ordered Happy.
Happy shot a look at Harry, clearly conveying that this was his time to run. He didn't disagree, but was worried what would happen if he left Happy behind. They were in a bit of a clearing on the trail, with a steep hill rising up to Harry's right (where the bad guys had ambushed them from) and a descent to his left that probably would drop off suddenly a ways into the trees. If he could just break line of sight, maybe he could get away.
But first he needed to do something about the guns.
Wandless transfiguration was hard. He'd barely managed to do any of it, except for the most basic lessons. Fortunately, the most basic lessons involved simple changes to metals. You didn't have to do much to the inside of a gun barrel to make it more dangerous to the wielder than the person on the other end. In principle, at least. Pretending to raise his hands in surrender, he tried to subtly do the gestures that worked for changing material forms, and hoped he'd gotten it right and that nobody would notice the orange glow inside the two men's guns.
It really was even harder when he couldn't touch the thing he was changing, but he thought he felt something happen.
As Happy squared off with the Frenchman, Harry waited for the other guy to lower his gun and withdraw a large zip tie. He could probably snap that no problem, but why wait? Putting his hands forward as if to comply (and not even having to pretend to be scared, because of the face-concealing mask), he lowered his weight and rushed off downhill, off the trail. "He's running!" the man yelled.
"Well catch 'im, zen!" his leader ordered, already beginning to brawl with Happy.
Harry had dropped his paintball gun in the clearing, so was only encumbered by the very sturdy SHIELD paintball outfit (he'd barely felt it, the one time he'd been hit earlier, and Happy wasn't complaining despite being covered in paint) and a belt pouch with extra ammo. Meanwhile, the other guy had to hold on to his rifle (hopefully non-functional). Dodging trees and managing to bound over fallen logs and other ground obstructions, Harry felt like he was quickly opening up a lead ahead of the sound of crashing through the trees and cursing behind and above him.
And there was the ravine he'd expected, the hill suddenly shifting from a steep but manageable incline to a basically-vertical drop at least thirty feet down. He'd need to time this right, since the guy behind could probably still see him as he moved between trees.
"Kid, don't!" the man tried to order, as Harry leaped out into the open air and rapidly plummeted downward.
Hoping that he'd broken line of sight, Harry let his invisibility cloak unspool from around his neck as he summoned an energy whip and managed to snag a sturdy-looking sapling growing out of the side of the hill. He narrowly cleared the ground where it started to level out again beneath him, and then was swinging upwards.
It turned out pulling a Tarzan like that hurt, and Harry winced as his arm informed him that he would be very sore later. But he managed to hang onto the spell and rode an elliptical arc back up, dismissing the whip and scrambling back onto steep-but-climbable hill just as the bad guy picked his way over the rise and looked down to see if he'd fallen to his death or serious injury. Seeing all the trees he could have George-of-the-Jungled his way into, Harry decided that whip travel was something he either needed to practice before the next crisis or never try again.
Fully invisible and only a few yards away from his confused pursuer, if a bit lower along the edge of the hill, Harry carefully picked his footing along ground that didn't look like it would make too much noise and got behind the guy just as he was shouting, "Kid! Did you fall behind a tree? Yell if you broke your leg."
As much as he wanted to quip at that straight line, Harry instead kept his mouth shut and gave the man a push down the hill. There was a short shriek of surprise and then the sound of pained cursing as he hit the spot where the ground leveled out. Importantly, the groaning continued, so Harry didn't think he'd killed the guy, but hopefully he was injured and out of the fight for a while.
Running back up toward Happy and the presumed-Frenchman, Harry massaged his arm and tried to figure out what he was going to do next. Spotting a short but stout-looking fallen tree limb, he managed to snap it off down to a length that would fit under his cloak and then continued on.
By the time he got back up to the clearing on the trail, Happy looked pretty roughed up. His mask had been knocked off and he had a black eye already forming. The leader of the bad guys was using some kind of kick-heavy martial arts style, and, if anything, seemed to be toying with Happy, enjoying the battle. While Happy's recent attendance at martial arts classes meant he had some idea how to defend himself, he was clearly still a boxer who was more prepared for punches than kicks (at least from someone his own size and with more skill). He was also trying to fight with a heavy backpack containing the Mark V suit.
"A strong right, but you leave yourself exposed!" the guy cautioned as Happy threw a punch that he weaved out of the way of, landing his own punch to Happy's stomach which got a groan. He followed up with a knee that he somehow turned into a shoving kick that sent Happy sprawling. "I do appreciate ze spar, but perhaps come back when you've more experience, no?"
The assailant grabbed his rifle and leaned down to roll Happy over and take the backpack, thus he only had a moment of warning as something moved through his peripheral vision and then several pounds of wet wood cracked with all of Harry's strength into the back of his head.
He didn't even have time to curse, as he collapsed to the ground.
"Uh, do you think he's alright?" Harry asked, letting the cloak once again retreat to its scarf positioning.
"Where… where did you come from?" Happy asked, blinking, pretty certain that Harry hadn't been standing there a second earlier, but, then, he had taken a couple of hits to the head.
"Tricked the other guy into falling down the hill and doubled back?" Harry said. "Come on, we have to help the others." Fortunately, the sound of gunfire back towards their friends kept Happy from disagreeing, and he managed to scramble up. He went to grab the rifle from the downed attacker and Harry suggested, "I don't know if that's going to work."
"Not going to work? It's a gun, and we need it," Happy argued petulantly, managing to detach the strap and make off with it from the unconscious assailant.
Harry grimaced and tried to undo his transfiguration subtly. He wasn't sure if he'd gotten it. From what he understood about guns, a barrel was much easier to screw up than to fix.
At least Happy didn't try to order him to stay back. The whole Stark Industries management team was starting to realize that Harry Potts was going to run into danger, and they might as well just keep an eye on him and hope for the best. As they ran back up the trail, Happy huffing a bit as his injuries from fighting started to catch up to him, the sound of automatic fire increased, as if the remaining attackers had found much more of a fight than they'd expected.
Harry also heard the distinctive sound of a repulsor blast interspersed with the chattering of machine guns.
"Get the case to Tony. I'll sneak around!" Harry suggested, then ran off into the woods before Happy could object. He'd be way more useful invisible. As the cloak settled back down around him, the sound of his feet crashing through the underbrush diminished, but didn't cease entirely: there was only so much the relic could do to sensory impressions other than sight. Harry figured it wouldn't be too noticeable with all the gunfire, and he could slow down once he got close.
It was hard to pinpoint the noise as it echoed across the hills, but Harry figured the bad guys were probably in between them and their friends, so he just oriented toward where the sound of gunfire seemed to be coming from. His guess was rewarded by finding three of the attackers behind a paintball barricade. He wondered why they were taking cover, but then noticed all three had discarded their paintball masks since the visors were covered with paint from accurate strikes. As he slowed to walk up, one guy popped his head up for a moment and took a paintball directly to the eye from somewhere in the trees, and he shrieked in pain and dropped down, rubbing at his face.
The other two guys seemed to take that personally, and popped up to try to shoot in the direction that the paintball had come from. Harry hastily repeated his trick to try to transfigure their gun barrels. The first guy's gun went click, seeming to have just jammed. The second, perhaps because he'd been faster on the trigger or his barrel was hotter, screamed as the end of the rifle basically exploded in front of him. It was almost like an Elmer Fudd cartoon.
Taking advantage, it was only a couple of seconds later that Natasha was flipping over the barricade, slapping both men in the face with some kind of discs that seemed to be compact tasers: each spasmed and collapsed. She followed up with a punch to the man who might have lost his eye, fist sparking with some kind of electrical gauntlet that also knocked him out.
Harry held very still as she stared around, maybe suspicious about what had caused both of their guns to fail simultaneously. With the three shooters down, Harry was pretty sure that only left two more at most. In the sudden silence, he heard Happy shout, "Here!" and felt like he could hear the mechanical ratcheting of the Mark V. Moments later, Tony's voice, amplified by the suit, announced, "Time's up! Everyone out of the pool."
"Die, Stark!" another voice with an Eastern European accent announced from deeper into the woods, where Harry could barely make out the flicker of the red and silver Mark V armor moving through the trees. "For Sokovia!" the man yelled, spraying bullets at the Iron Man.
Full auto was loud. Harry crouched down just in case of ricochets as he saw Natasha doing likewise. He could see the sparks of deflected bullets and heard one ping off a tree above him as Tony strode forward into the hail of bullets. Within seconds, it was done, and Tony said, "Night, night," before Harry heard the whine of a repulsor and the thump of the guy hitting a tree. "Anyone else want to try that? You?"
"No. I surrender," the last man announced, from over where Tony must have him cornered.
"Three down here," Natasha announced, turning back toward the rest of the group. That gave Harry a moment to sneak off out of her line of sight and try to find a place to reappear. From the sniper shot, he suspected Clint was somewhere where he might see Harry become visible if he didn't take precautions.
"There were only seven of them, and we got two," Happy shouted.
"Where's Harry?" Rhodey's voice said, sounding a little strained. "Also, I think I might have gotten shot."
That got everyone's attention, and Harry found another paintball barricade to duck behind, looked carefully to make sure he didn't see Clint or anyone else who could spot him, and then once again allowed the cloak to retract. "I'm over here!" he yelled, getting up and running toward where it sounded like Rhodey was.
Everyone else was also converging on the Colonel's position, where he and Dean had taken cover behind a barricade. Tony was clanking over with the last Sokovian at repulsor-point. Rhodey had pulled up his mask and was checking his torso, where there was, indeed, a bullet hole in the center of his chest. But he poked at it and said, "Is this… bulletproof?"
"I told you, it's SHIELD training gear," Natasha raised her own mask and smirked, as she moved to bind the conscious soldier in his own zip ties.
"They were coming for Dean," Rhodey explained.
"Must not have been sure which of us was me," Harry explained. "They were trying to kidnap me and steal the Mark V."
"And you took two out on your own?" Rhodey said, glancing between Harry and Happy.
"Don't look so surprised," Happy pulled himself up, though the swelling on his face showed he hadn't come away unscathed. "Big French guy wanted to do a little martial arts. Savate, I think?"
"French, or Algerian? Could be Batroc," Clint said, emerging from the woods where he'd been restraining the unconscious men. "There were rumors he'd gotten into the country."
"You beat Georges Batroc in a brawl?" Natasha asked, skeptically. Seemed like the guy was world class.
"Well…" Happy said, "I distracted him long enough for Harry to hit him in the back of the head with a log."
"And I tricked the other one into falling down a hill," Harry added. "I don't know if he's out or not. He may need a doctor."
The suit augmentation making his voice sound dangerous, Tony turned to Natasha and asked, "Did you know about this?"
No flicker of guilt across her face, she simply said, "We picked up some chatter that you'd be here. We think someone worked out your plane's flight plan and Colonel Rhodes paying for the event were related. But we didn't know if anyone would use the information. So we took precautions."
"And if those precautions let you roll up a few terrorists by using me and the kids as bait…" Tony scoffed. "Next time, I expect a warning."
Harry said, a little guilty, "Next year, we should probably just assume someone's going to try to kill you on my birthday."
"That's… not a bad point," Tony sighed, flipping the face plate up on the armor. "Are we done here? I think we're done here. Didn't we pass a ye olde German pub on the way in? I want lunch and a beer."
They weren't totally done, as Clint and Natasha needed everyone's help dragging the unconscious men back to the base camp. The guy Harry had shoved down the hill had, indeed, broken a leg and and arm and was in pretty bad shape, but alive. Batroc, if that's who they were fighting, had managed to get away. The scared guests at the camp described him staggering through a few minutes earlier, getting into a black van, and peeling out.
Said guests got a lot less scared when they realized they'd been playing paintball with Tony Stark all morning, and wanted to get selfies with Iron Man.
In the car ride on the way back, full of pub food, Rhodey finally asked, "Tony, did I or did I not tell you not to modify your paintball gun?"
"I didn't change the firing speed or the force! At all!" Tony argued.
"You put a repulsor in it!"
Tony shrugged, "And it was useful. I might put repulsors in everything. The Mark V is good, but if Sokovian terrorists are just going to jump out of the woods at me…"
"How did you power it?" Harry asked, not having seen Tony using his paintball rifle like a sci-fi raygun.
"Cable that ran up my sleeve and clipped to the reactor," Tony explained, tapping his chest.
"Do you still have that plugged in?" Dean checked. "Can I charge my phone?" he grinned.
"Can you… can you charge your phone?" Tony boggled, feeling called out. But then he started to think about it. "You know, that's not the worst idea… a universal USB adaptor wouldn't be too hard to clip in…"
Rhodey said, "I just want to apologize. Next time we'll do Disneyland or something."
"Strictly spontaneous trips," Tony agreed. "I can't believe they're tracking my jet. That's not fair."
"Civilian flight plans are public information," Rhodey shrugged. "I thought you knew that?"
"I should get SHIELD to get my jet counted as a military vehicle," Tony groused. "They owe me for no warning today. I should have known Agent Romanoff didn't want to be friends."
"It's probably hard to make friends, when you have to keep secrets all the time," Harry suggested.
Happy shot him a look in the rear-view mirror from where he was up front driving. Harry figured he probably ought to keep the theatrics to a minimum for his last month home, and give everyone most of a year to forget all the things he'd gotten away with that summer.
Pepper grumbled a bit about how only Tony and Harry could get attacked by international mercenaries while playing paintball, but mostly seemed glad that SHIELD had been there and that she hadn't. Since they were already in New York, a couple of days later Harry just went with Dean to "summer camp" by heading over to the Bleeker Street sanctum.
As they finished getting situated in Kamar-Taj's guest rooms and joined back up with Hermione and the Patils, they were surprised that the Ancient One greeted them in the study room, light playing across the brick-tiled floor through the diamond-latticed wood paneling that surrounded the space. "Are you teaching us this time, ma'am?" Hermione asked.
The bald woman nodded from where she was sitting at a table in front of a low bookshelf in the cozy room. "Indeed. Because you've been asking so much about sling rings, I thought it best to give you a bit of a crash course in the dimensions. And what can go wrong if you don't respect the ability to move between them."
"I thought sling rings just moved about in the same dimension," Parvati said what most of them were thinking.
"Mirror dimension," Hermione got out before realizing she'd stolen the Ancient One's thunder. She'd been getting better about not disruptively showing off her knowledge in class, but it still leaked out.
The Sorcerer Supreme merely smiled fondly and said, "Exactly. Teleportation requires the sling rings, because they are anchored to the Mirror Dimension in a way that we cannot be, even with a bargain. As the Mirror Dimension touches every place at once, magical items anchored to it can allow us to skip along this dimension and, ourselves, eliminate the distance between two locations. However, without a sling ring, even the greatest of sorcerers can become trapped in the Mirror Dimension."
"I bet whoever found that out first had a bad day," Dean said.
"Quite. Walk with me," she commanded, getting to her feet and leading the five teenagers out toward one of the exterior doors of the building, which exited into a busy alley in Kathmandu. They took a few steps down the street before she asked, "What changed?"
"Are we already in the mirror dimension?" Harry asked, realizing something was off. Though he could see the citizens moving around them, they seemed not to notice the crowd of kids. And sounds, smells, and sensations like the wind were diminished. He walked toward a holy man sitting in an alcove across the way, and as Harry moved the man seemed to stay just out of his reach, the space in the alley bending subtly and everything around him twitching in geometric distortion, as if he was stuck in a kaleidoscope.
"Don't go too far from the group," the Ancient One suggested. "But, you are correct. The sling ring can also bring others nearby into the Mirror Dimension, and do so far more subtly than opening a portal for travel. Though it's considered polite to make the transition more obvious than I just did. We find this an ideal method to enact surveillance, practice dangerous spells, and to keep magical battles we cannot avoid from others' notice."
"Why not just drop bad guys in here and leave them?" Dean checked.
The Ancient One motioned them to follow her, and as they moved the kaleidoscope effect became more pronounced, the buildings around them folding away and duplicating geometrically, particularly in the distance. Yet they still seemed to be making progress down the street, for all that it was seen through funhouse mirrors. "While few beings can escape without a sling ring, the resourceful may still travel and invisibly plot. Threats challenging enough that we need to use magic to fight, and, thus, to bring here are unlikely to politely sit still and starve to death. Each one left is a potential deadly surprise for other sorcerers using the dimension later." She considered for a moment and added, "Plus, the nature of the space means that it's often difficult to get far enough away from an enemy to concentrate on opening an escape portal until that enemy is incapacitated anyway."
"So where do you imprison people?" Harry asked. "I know the Vanir have some place called Azkaban? I guess that's not the Mirror Dimension?"
"I hate that place," she sighed. "We tend to imprison wrongdoers as humanely as possible. Each of the sanctums has a few cells in its basement heavily enchanted to suppress abilities and prevent escape. And it is rare that we need long-term incarceration. The Vanir however… insist on cruel and unusual punishment as a form of deterrence. Thus, the place known as Azkaban is an island they have carved out in the Dark Dimension."
Hermione gasped, "The Dread Dormammu?"
"Just so." Receiving a lesson while walking and talking through the Mirror Dimension was a brand new experience. Even now, they were walking up the wall of a brick building that had started as one story but was duplicated and stretched so it extended for yards ahead of them. "They made a deal with that entity to guard the prisoners, and got few concessions to keep them from being ruined. A sentence of any significant length is a pathway to madness, and even should they wish to release an inmate early, the wardens guard them jealously."
"They were going to send Hagrid," Harry growled, "just to be seen to be 'doing something.'"
The Ancient One frowned, sadly. "Perhaps you would like to see it? To know the injustice at the heart of the Vanir wizarding government?"
Four Gryffindors steeled themselves and nodded, and Padma rolled her eyes, knowing she was outvoted. And she kind of wanted to know anyway (which was why Hermione agreed as well, if she was honest). "Yes, ma'am," Padma spoke for all of them.
The Ancient One did some kind of somatic gesture none of them recognized and spun open a portal, the rim flaring purple rather than the normal orange. "Do not step through," she ordered. "I shall not draw his attention today. Merely look."
Through the viewing window, it was very much like staring at one of the enhanced NASA photos of a nebula in deep space, patches of cloudy color over endless blackness with no rhyme or reason. In the foreground, however, it was more like looking at a 3D render of cells in the body, small and oddly-organic planetoids linked together by looping tendrils and interspersed with geometric objects of unknown origin.
The Ancient One moved her hand and caused the window to spin, and the view moved as if zooming in. "This is Azkaban," she explained, as a grayish planetoid grew to fill the whole window. Whorls of seething purple fire divided the whole sphere into discrete spaces, and the children realized that they were essentially a collection of ritual circles. Within each space, a person sat, hunched over, clearly tormented. Between the "prison cells" walked lanky humanoid forms, seemingly naked and gray-skinned, a single red light burning in the middle of their faces. "The wardens," she explained.
"Do they just… sit there?" Parvati asked. "Do they get to move around? What do they eat?"
"There is no time in the Dark Dimension. They do not experience hunger, or tiredness, or even age. Simply the crushing attention of the Mindless Ones. And, once they go completely mad, they will become a Mindless One themselves. It can take centuries, from our point of view."
As the viewing window passed over the space, the occasional mindless one glanced its wide red eye upwards, but then turned back to its duties, unconcerned. None of the inmates seemed to notice. That was, until a man with shoulder-length dark hair and a short black beard looked their way, his eyes widening and mouth gaping. Something about him seemed very familiar to Harry, but he couldn't explain why.
The Ancient One frowned and gave a last, fast swipe of her arm, causing the portal to spin closed and wink out. "It's not good to give them hope of escape," she explained. "But, now that you've had your curiosity sated, let me explain a bit more about navigating in the Mirror Dimension…"
Chapter 32: Date and Time
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
In addition to more field trips to understand the Mirror Dimension and a few others, the kids spent the week at Kamar-Taj once again living the apprentice lifestyle: up early, morning katas, martial arts lessons, and the lot. Their wandless casting of early-year spells was really starting to come together, and they were having luck with the fundamentals of more complex energy constructs. They were still a ways off from forming workable shields, but they were at least beginning to get lines and circles of the orange personal energy to appear in the air at their gestures.
Well, everyone except Parvati was, at least.
"I don't know if I'm cut out for this," she complained on their last evening there. "You boys want to do this, and Padma and Hermione are really good at it even if they don't know whether they want to join the Masters… but this may be too hard for me. Maybe I'll just, I don't know, marry Neville and be a rich housewife on Vanaheim. I'd be good at that."
As they made consoling noises about how Parvati wasn't that far behind, she'd get it eventually, and she was way ahead of the Vanir kids, Dean shot Harry a look. They'd never have a better feed line than that one. Harry cleared his throat and began, "Um… also… well, about marrying Neville…" That got the girls' attention and he barreled on, "Dean and I were talking and… we don't know if it's a good idea to date within the study group."
A few moments of silence preceded Parvati asking, somewhat dangerously, "Do you not want to date any of us?"
"The… uh… the opposite?" Harry tried to soft-pedal. "I think we'd be interested in dating all of you, actually," before they could interject he amended, "and that's the problem. What if someone's jealous about who winds up dating? What if it didn't work out and people started to break up? We've got five more years of school, and we don't want to screw up the friend group."
Dean added, "Maybe it'd be safe to think about it seventh-year? But it just seems like we could mess up and make everything awkward. Plus! People might be worried about who's staying on Vanaheim and who's coming back to Earth. Better to keep all the drama out of the friend group, right?"
The girls thought about it. Hermione and Padma clearly didn't like it, but couldn't immediately think of a logical way to refute the boys' argument. Parvati was less stymied. After a few seconds she said, "That's dumb. We'll just figure out how to do it so nobody's jealous and we stay friends if it doesn't work out."
"Yeah," Hermione realized. "I don't have time to date boys in other houses. That sounds exhausting. We only see them in a couple of classes."
"That's tough for me," Padma added. "But at least I see people in the study group all the time. And I don't really fancy any of the boys in my year in Ravenclaw." She sighed, "But how do we make it fair?"
"They already said they like all of us," Parvati pointed out. "We'll just draw up a rota. That way everyone has an extended trial to see if they're compatible, and we can get people used to swapping so jealousy will be less of an issue."
"I brought graph paper and highlighters!" Hermione realized. "Maybe we can swap out after two months? That would give us eight months of testing and the end of the year to evaluate."
"Luna and Ginny will want to be included, too," Parvati cautioned.
"Month and a half, then," Hermione nodded, already fishing out her supplies. "But that's six girls for four boys." Seamus had finally come out to everyone in their dorm, so he wasn't in consideration. "And we have to account for Ron and Ginny not having a turn together."
Padma shrugged, "Whichever girls are left over can date outside the group."
Hermione nodded, explaining, "We should probably figure this out semi-randomly, so people aren't constantly dating us in the same order…"
This had all happened very quickly, and Harry and Dean had been left speechless. Harry tried to get in a, "But–"
"Go do some martial arts or something," Parvati waved them away. "You boys are not required for this part."
"Well… that didn't go like we wanted," Dean gave a thousand-yard stare as they walked out.
"Did we go from not dating any of our friends to having to date all of them this year?" Harry checked.
"I think so."
Harry sighed, "Tony is never going to shut up about this…"
It was true. Tony couldn't stop laughing. Rhodey laughed. Even Happy almost twitched a smirk. Aunt Pepper patted him on the shoulder consolingly, suggested, "Just try to not be the source of the drama if this goes badly," and she, herself, had to go to her bedroom to laugh.
Tony spent the next week sending him educational links about swinging, polyamory, and harems.
"What did you agree to?" Ron asked, when he, Seamus, and Neville cornered Harry and Dean during the Goblin Market trip. They had been surprisingly deft at luring off the two boys to a quiet corner of the Leaky Cauldron while the girls plotted at their own table. At least Neville had managed to make the trip that year.
"We didn't agree to anything," Harry objected. "We suggested that we shouldn't date inside the study group, and somehow the opposite happened."
Dean nodded, sadly, "So now the four of us," he pointed at everyone but Seamus, "are meant to take turns dating all six of them."
Ron's eyes widened at the thought but then he realized, "I'm not dating Ginny!"
"That they already accounted for," Harry said. "I'm not sure how. They were also talking about them dating outside of the group since it's uneven… but that doesn't really seem fair, since this started out with us talking about dating outside the group."
Seamus shrugged, "Maybe some o' them'll find out they're at least bi and date each other." He considered for a second and said, "My bet's on Ginny an' Hermione hittin' it off."
"Lavender and Padma," Neville grinned slyly. "It would make it very convenient for all three of them."
"As long as you accept being Parvati's husband," Harry grinned. "She's got you picked as her sugar daddy."
Seamus regarded Harry for a second and guessed, "How much o' this is so they can all date ye? Ye're like th'number one sugar daddy."
"Yeah," Harry huffed. "That was one of the possibilities Tony warned me about."
Dean nodded. "Gentlemen. Our mission this year: just figure out how to get by without a drama explosion."
It seemed at least one of the girls agreed. As Luna was following Ginny into the Market proper, she told Harry, dreamily, "This is a terrible plan. I'm very excited to see how it goes! I get to skip the first set, so if it goes very badly no one will be mad at me."
"Wait," Harry checked with Hermione, "did you already come up with the rota? Just now?"
"You'll get your copies of the schedule on the train and not a moment earlier," she smirked, mysteriously. "And, I plan to make a laminated one to post in your room so no one loses track."
"Of course you will," he sighed. "Okay. Can we at least go shopping now?"
"What do we need anyway?" Dean checked, as they wandered out into the Market.
"I have the supply and book lists for the various classes," Hermione waved a paper at them. "But I also thought we might look for holdouts. And my parents said I can get a familiar, this year."
The adults had decided that the thirteen-year-olds were now old enough to wander the Market on their own as long as they didn't stray into the seedier areas and stayed in a group. Most of them just set up an anchor at the centrally-located ice cream shop for the kids to check in. Pepper had seemed bemused to be relegated to "home base," but quickly struck up a conversation about the building project in Harlem with Dean's mother.
The kids were all starting to feel pretty confident about navigating the Goblin Market after two years of prior trips, and managed to knock out their basic supplies pretty quickly while chatting about their summers. Harry only summarized the high points of his adventures before everyone insisted that they'd wait for the train to get more information. Hermione shared what she'd gotten up to in France. Padma and Parvati had taken a short trip to Darjeeling and had the souvenir tea to prove it. Seamus had been to Portugal. Luna had gone on some kind of mountain expedition for mythical creatures with her father. Ron and Ginny claimed that they'd been to Egypt, on Earth, and gotten shown around the secret temple inside one of the pyramids.
The Midgardborn mostly looked on in disbelief but Seamus confirmed that, indeed, Ron had managed to figure out how to call him on the phone from Cairo. It turned out that the eldest Weasley brother, Bill, was basically a consultant that was helping some mystic priests of the old Egyptian gods on a secret project, and he was able to get permission from the Ministry to bring his family through the Goblin Market for a short visit and tour. Hermione had resolved to ask the Masters about why they'd never been told about Egyptian mystics.
Dean was pretty sure it was because there was a ton of stuff they hadn't been told yet. They were only thirteen, after all.
Of perhaps more interest to everyone, even than the Egypt trip, was that Lavender had accompanied her parents on a journey to check on various border villages in Vanaheim, worried about what might happen with Bifrost down. While Harry had guessed that Thor had been to Earth, it sounded like there was more to the story. The widespread rumor was that something had happened that had destroyed the Rainbow Bridge.
The three pillars of Vanaheim's planetary defense were the wizards, the non-functioning of electricity, and that Asgard would teleport in troops to thwart any serious attack. Without Asgard easily able to interfere, there were already worries that small-time feuds might flare up, and offworld powers might try to snatch land and treasure the way that the trolls and jotun had in their first year at Hogwarts.
That really intensified their desire to acquire holdouts. Unfortunately, none of the shops in the Market would sell weapons to thirteen-year-olds. The shops that sold energy weapons wouldn't even sell them with parental permission (not that Pepper would sign off on that; as laissez faire as she was about Harry's safety, she drew the line at arming him with guns, particularly laser pistols). At least in the reputable shops, they took firearms licensing seriously. There were lots of rumors that the dis reputable shops deeper into the Market might make an exception, but also that they might get stabbed on the way there.
At least they managed a few useful things. Harry got what he considered a "bag of holding" that looked like a small belt pouch but had interior space large enough to hold his broom (and plenty else besides). He bought each of his friends an undershirt spelled to work similarly to a bulletproof vest: it worked pretty well as the shopkeeper demonstrated it, but they were cheap enough that Harry had doubts that they'd be extremely effective or long lasting.
Perhaps the biggest purchase Harry made was a language translator implant. He had to get Aunt Pepper to approve it, and confirm that it wouldn't just stop working after coming and going from Vanaheim (though it was electronic and wouldn't work there). After watching the inch-long cylinder get injected into the back of Harry's neck with a wet thunk, everyone else agreed that they'd wait to learn translation spells, thank you very much.
Once she found out that it included the vast majority of Earth languages, was shielded against MRIs and other magnetic interference, and should basically be invisible to current Earth technology, Pepper got one as well. That sounded very useful to the CEO of a multinational corporation. She was vaguely apprehensive that Tony would detect it somehow. It wasn't like he told her every time JARVIS was making scans.
The other high point of the market trip was when Hermione's new familiar basically threw itself at her to be chosen. Well, that was her view of the way she'd acquired the enormous, squash-faced tabby cat named Crookshanks. Ron insisted that it was just trying to murder his poor old rat, Scabbers, and she'd happened to be in the way enough to catch the terrifying ball of orange fluff. It was definitely the biggest cat Harry had ever seen outside of a zoo, and Crookshanks realized it. The shopkeep claimed that, despite its intelligence, the cat was confirmed not to be a Flerken.
None of them knew what a Flerken was, but the vehemence with which the shopkeep denied it was a bit suspicious.
As they were finally finishing up and making their way as a giant parade of around two-dozen, they started to notice black and white pictures of a man hung up along the walls of the main corridor, particularly around the Leaky Cauldron. Who knew that wanted posters were universal? The writing was in several languages, and Harry's eyes itched and watered as his new implant managed to project floating English text over the alien characters. Each set of writing said the same thing:
SIRIUS BLACK. ESCAPED FROM AZKABAN PRISON. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. REWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO CAPTURE. CONTACT THE VANAHEIM MINISTRY.
"Why does that man look so familiar?" Hermione asked, at the back of the queue with the study group and only a couple of adults.
Harry's eyes widened, "Wasn't that the guy that looked up at us when the Ancient One showed us the prison?"
"You've seen Azkaban?" Lavender boggled.
"Through a portal," Parvati confirmed. "I guess it was two-way. Do you think he escaped because he saw us?"
"Why was Sirius Black in prison?" Pepper gasped.
"You know him?" Harry asked.
"He practically lived with us when he was a kid. I think he did basically live with us after I moved out to go to school on Earth," she explained. "He was James' best friend. Best man at his wedding. I think he's probably your godfather." As Harry took all that in, she huffed, "When he never tried to get in touch, I assumed he died in the war."
By that point, the Weasleys had realized the back of the group had stopped to look at the poster and came back. "Oh, no!" Mrs. Weasley said. "It's not safe for poor Harry here, if that man is on the loose."
"What did he do?" Harry asked.
She shared a glance with Mr. Weasley, and seemed to choose her words carefully. "It turned out he had been a spy for You-Know-Who the whole time. They got him for mass murder, right after that night."
"Sirius Black. A spy?" Pepper scoffed. "That boy never thought anything that didn't immediately come out of his mouth."
"His family, though," Mrs. Weasley sighed. "Blood ties run deep. They must have finally convinced him. For sure, his cousin Bellatrix had a higher body count. But the betrayal…"
Pepper frowned, and finally admitted, "Well, I guess I trusted Tony's business partner too far, too…"
Harry's eyes flicked between the two women. On one hand, though his aunt had made that notable mistake with Obie, she was generally pretty good at reading people. She had to be, for her job. She made the case that both she and his father had trusted this man completely. On the other hand, Ron's family had a much more in-depth understanding of what happened on Vanaheim during the war, while Pepper had been receiving only the occasional letter.
"I need to know everything," Harry said, simply.
Mrs. Weasley seemed about to object, obviously thinking that she was protecting Harry from the knowledge, but Pepper simply shook her head and said, "He needs to know. I want to know too."
"Alright, then, if you're sure," she allowed. "Arthur. Can you owl them the news articles on it?"
Ron's father nodded, "It might take a few days to dig them out of the archives, but certainly."
"But please, be careful until you can get to Hogwarts," Mrs. Weasley insisted. "He… he killed Peter Pettigrew." Pepper gasped at that, obviously recognizing the name. "He was probably responsible… for betraying you and your parents' location to You-Know-Who…"
"You think he saw me and decided to finish the job?" Harry's eyes widened.
"He saw you?" she asked. They quickly recounted their field trip, and after they finished she shrugged. "They say you go mad in Azkaban, if you weren't already. You look a lot like your father. Maybe he thought you were James, and had somehow survived."
The revelation of the mass murderer that might be after Harry rather dampened the rest of the day, and they all said their goodbyes, leaving the Market to their separate cities with a frenzy of desperate hugs. "Don't get murdered," Hermione ordered him.
Mr. Weasley did, indeed, manage to find copies of news articles from the time, and sent them along a couple of days before the end of August. The prose was incredibly purple, but between Harry and Pepper they were able to work out the supposed series of events. The Potters had gone into hiding, since James' position as a successful auror and Lily's as a gifted Midgardborn witch had profoundly offended the Death Eaters. Other families had been similarly targeted. Their house made use of a particularly-powerful warding technique known as the Fidelius, where its location was not just invisible, it was unknowable. Even Heimdall wouldn't have been able to see the Potter cottage. Someone chasing them into it would immediately forget what they were doing as soon as the Potters crossed the wards.
But the technique had a flaw: like many magics, it required an escape clause to balance it. The Fidelius required that at least one soul that lived outside of the house be immune to the effect, and able to lead others through the wards. On the plus side, it meant someone that could bring news and supplies to those in hiding. Yet it provided a target: if the secret keeper betrayed the secret or was simply killed, the Fidelius was undone.
The newspaper reported that Peter Pettigrew had been the secret keeper. Pepper confirmed that he was another of Harry's father's good friends from school. They might have used Sirius Black, save that he was an active auror, so in constant danger of death or capture, while Pettigrew was able to stay almost as safe as the Potters. Yet, some time on the afternoon before Dísablót, Pettigrew had been brutally murdered, hit with a blasting curse so strong very little of him survived and everyone in his lodging house was killed as the building exploded.
And the wand that had done it was Sirius Black's, confirmed with magical forensics.
Not long after the events that felled Harry's Parents and Voldemort, Black had turned up, returning to the scene of the crime. The aurors were waiting, still cataloging the gruesome tableau. According to witnesses, Black had drawn his wand, laughed maniacally, and been brought down before he could unleash another such spell. More evidence of his allegiance had turned up at his own home, and he was speedily brought to trial and sent to Azkaban.
The court reporters thought that he was mad already, saying nothing in his own defense and simply repeating, "Never trust a rat."
"I was happier when he'd just died in the war," Pepper admitted, shoving the articles across the kitchen table, as if physical distance would push the knowledge away. "That kid. Honestly, I think he was probably a lot like Tony was at that age. Rich and outgoing and hiding the pain of not getting along with his family." She didn't mention that the constant flirting that Sirius had started with her as soon as he was a teenager was also a lot like Tony, for all that it was much less impressive in the time when a four-year age difference was insurmountable.
"What about Pettigrew?" Harry asked, vaguely remembering that name too from the occasional story Pepper had told about his father. Not that she really knew that much, since she'd moved to Earth for college when James was barely older than Harry was at the moment.
"Kind of like Neville, I guess," she considered. "Quiet kid. Chubby. Always following them around. Seemed nice enough, but didn't really speak up the few times he came over to our house. I don't know much about him or what he was like when he got older." She thought about it for a minute and added, "I think they had some other friend that was part of James' little gang, but I don't know if he ever came by the house. I think he was Midgardborn. Had a weird name."
"Weirder than Sirius Black?" Harry checked.
"All the Blacks are named after stars or constellations. Where do you think Draco Malfoy got his name?"
Harry checked something on his phone and said, "Draco the constellation? Which isn't remotely visible from Vanaheim? Is the star Sirius even visible from Vanaheim?"
"Huh," she agreed. "I never really paid much attention to astronomy in either world. I bet they liked the Latin names from Earth so much they applied them to something else visible from Vanaheim."
Harry nodded, "Yeah. They for sure kept the Latin terms for a ton of other stuff. I should ask Professor Sinistra about it; she doesn't actually focus that much on star names in our astronomy lessons. Anyway…" he remembered what he'd been getting at, "nothing in these articles says Sirius confessed. Sounds like they just had his wand and a bunch of evidence at his house. Maybe he killed Peter Pettigrew. Or maybe someone else did, framed him, and he went crazy because all his best friends died in one day and couldn't convince them he was innocent."
Pepper looked at him for a minute ready to object. Then she reached over and grabbed the articles again and flicked through, looking for something that would counter Harry's point. She didn't find anything, and eventually admitted, "I wish we could ask a real detective or prosecutor about this. Because Vanaheim justice is pretty medieval. I could see that happening, so you might be right…"
"But?" Harry knew that look.
"But he could be what everyone thinks he is. I'm not going to tell you not to try to figure out the truth," she knew that if she tried to, that would just encourage him to go wandering the hills around Hogwarts looking to talk or fight with Sirius Black. "But assume that he wants to kill you and be prepared for that. Bring friends. Bring grownups, just once, maybe? And if you're right, then great. But I don't want you to get hurt if it turns out he really did betray everyone."
Harry nodded. That seemed fair. "Okay. Oh. But you're still going to sign my permission slip to go to Hogsmeade, right?"
She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, and counted to ten, having forgotten that he'd have so much more of an opportunity to go looking for trouble in his third year. Finally, she said, "Yes. But if I hear you got into a spell duel outside the Hogwarts grounds with Sirius Black just you— or just you and a couple of your friends—you're grounded all next summer."
"Alright," Harry agreed, but then wheedled, "But what if he attacks me in the middle of town and it's not my fault?"
Pepper just cradled her face in her hands. That sounded exactly like something that might happen. "Just… try to keep bystanders from getting hit and try to get a teacher or a magical grownup to help as soon as you can?"
"Deal," Harry grinned. He'd also gotten enough experience with his life to know how things went, and was just happy to have at least one scenario pre-approved for no grounding.
It was probably not the best thing in the world that the grounding was the only thing he was truly worried about in all the life or death situations he kept getting into.
Notes:
Yes, the change to the Fidelius logic is deliberate. I figured the different setting gave me space to set up a scenario where Sirius hadn't been thrown in prison with no trial and basically zero evidence. The evidence is still a little thin, as Harry points out here, but if it was a frame job, it was at least a less haphazard one.
Chapter 33: The Strangers on the Train
Chapter Text
Since Harry had been helping with the Iron Man stuff, he had transitioned in Tony's estimation.
Previously, he'd just been a kid that was often around. Tony didn't hate kids, but nor did he really care about most of them one way or the other. When he thought about Harry at all, his feelings were generally positive—the boy was a little nerd that wasn't annoying and liked video games—he just didn't think that much about Harry.
But in the last year or so, Harry had proven to be useful as a research assistant. In addition to the actual help testing, he was a pretty good rubber duck for Tony to talk at while working through design problems, who usually didn't interrupt unless he actually had something to add that regularly turned out to be valid. Perhaps more importantly, he'd saved Tony's life on potentially multiple occasions (definitely against the guy with the knife in his garage, and possibly against Vanko and the Sokovian paintball assassins). And it was easier to dismiss your assistant's kid than your girlfriend's kid, and Harry was functionally Pepper's kid.
It was weird. Tony wasn't ready to be a stepdad, but Harry was technically Pepper's nephew, right? Was he expected to parent? Was she?
All of this resulted in a change in Harry's relationship with Tony that the two of them were still working out, but the salient point for the end of August was that Tony actually suggested that they fly Harry to London in the Stark Industries jet. He obviously hadn't put much thought into how Harry had gotten to England the previous two years, but now he was going to make sure it was in style. There was technically a conference he and Pepper were going to stop at, afterwards, but the point was to prevent Harry from having to fly commuter air.
Consequently, Harry didn't get to engage in his usual, relatively-relaxing trip to school via international teleportation. And he couldn't explain to Tony that taking a private jet would be a downgrade.
"Why does your school start on a Thursday?" Tony asked, toward the end of the flight.
Harry shrugged and fibbed, "Tradition. Train leaves on September 1st most years. But they have some weird thing about it actually being based on when the fall equinox is." This was one of the years that the dates didn't line up as normal, because of the drift in Earth's year until a leap year put it back more or less into sync.
And that was before you got into the drift of the hour of the day. Harry's first year, it had been close to midday on Vanaheim when it was 11 AM in London. His second, the train had left before dawn, Vanaheim time. This year, they'd been warned that the train would basically be leaving in the middle of the night. For some reason the date the convergence formed was based on the Vanaheim side, but the time was usually based on the Earth side.
Hermione had a whole graphed notebook trying to work it out and explain it to everyone else. She was hoping to eventually use it as the basis for an extra credit project in Professor Sinistra's class.
"I should come by this school. It sounds so weird," Tony said.
"No electronics, remember?" Harry told him.
"Even for adults?" Tony checked.
"Very traditional," Harry nodded.
"Fine," Tony relented, before Harry had to come up with an even better excuse. Even if he was cleared to know about Vanaheim, Tony would suffer "heart" failure as soon as he stepped through the convergence. He supposedly had a minute or so before he'd actually pass out from lack of blood flow, hopefully enough to stagger back through, but it was best, for a lot of reasons, not to risk it.
Fortunately, Tony's newfound interest didn't extend to waking up and navigating downtown London on a Thursday morning, so it was just Pepper dropping Harry off at the station after Tony had groggily said goodbye then headed off to bed at 8 AM local time. They got there early, and stepped through the convergence together into Vanaheim, dark sky surrounding a train platform lit primarily by the giant bonfire that the locals used to travel to the Hogwarts Express.
In the middle of the night, it was cool and the air smelled much more clear than it did in London. There was a cacophony of animal noises from the nearby trees, probably angry at the bustling of the platform waking them all up. At the edge of the firelight, a mangy-looking black dog stared at the collection of students and parents for a minute before snuffling off.
Pepper took a deep breath and said, "Wow. This is the first time I've been home since your parents got married."
"Do you miss it?" Harry asked.
"I think you always miss your first home," she shrugged. "But I really like email." It was true. Few people emailed with the intensity and fervor of Pepper Potts. "Are you ready?"
"Yeah, there's Luna and Neville," Harry gestured at his two friends, already there and standing talking with their guardians.
"I think I could do without small talk with Augusta or Xenophilus again so soon," Pepper shuddered, having had to put up with Neville's opinionated grandmother and Luna's strange father during the Market trip. "Have a good year. Remember to try to get an adult."
They hugged and as Pepper was walking out, she passed a man entering with no child and only a backpack for luggage. Harry raised an eyebrow, since he almost looked homeless, as hard-worn as his clothing was. The man glanced around carefully, then immediately boarded the train. Harry shrugged and went over to talk to his friends.
"You said you're not on the first rotation, right?" Harry asked Luna after they'd extricated themselves from the adults and gone to board the train. "Do you know who got picked with who… whom?"
"I'm having second thoughts about this whole thing," Neville confided. "I'm going to mess it up."
"We're all going to mess it up," Harry assured him, as Luna nodded. "Anyway… secrets?"
Luna tilted her head, trying to decide whether it was worth revealing the information before the other girls got to, and whether it would be funnier to make the boys wait. She eventually settled on saying, "Let's just say that the first round is probably not going to work out. Unless the Vanir decide to move to Midgard or vice versa."
Harry mentally matched various people up and said, "So me and Dean with Lavender and Ginny, and Ron and Neville with Hermione, Padma, and Parvati?"
"And not even the combinations that would make the girls happiest," Luna nodded. "That's what they get for drawing paper instead of rolling dice. Or maybe the Norns are getting the bad pairings out of the way. Did I tell you we almost caught a glimpse of a snorkack this summer? Daddy is sure of it."
By the time the Weasleys had tiredly staggered onto the train at the last second before leaving, everyone was impatiently waiting for the pairing assignments. Well, the boys were nervously awaiting their fate (except for Seamus, who wasn't involved and thus very amused) and the girls were anxious to have everyone there to make the announcements.
"It's too early," Ron complained, as they clustered outside of the train compartment. They'd gotten big enough that squeezing eight people into one of the tiny rooms definitely wasn't an option, and, even if it was, they had eleven.
"Honestly, it's not far off from LA time, so I'm pretty over it, too," Harry admitted.
"Everyone's here! Let's announce the matches!" Parvati ordered, having no time for small talk.
Padma pulled out her copy of the list and explained, "Luna and I are neutral parties this time around. This phase will last through the end of Vintage Month. We'll switch about a week before Halloween, er, Dísablót." She waited to make sure everyone was rapt with anticipation, then read off, "Parvati with Ron. Ginny with Dean. Hermione with Neville. Lavender with Harry."
Harry nodded, he'd figured, based on Luna's pronouncement that nobody had gotten who they really wanted, that set of matches was pretty likely. At the very least, it was hard to miss Ginny's crush on him. He tried to figure out how excited Lavender was, and seriously considered how he felt about her as more than a friend. She was sizing him up in the same manner, and finally declared, "Why don't we split into two groups and find compartments? Couples together, and Luna, Padma, and Seamus can go with whoever they want."
Ultimately, Seamus wanted to stay with Ron and Padma wanted to stay with Parvati, so that accounted for four people around the temporary Weasley/Patil power couple. Hermione shrugged and she and Neville stayed with that group (mostly because Hermione wanted to check her homework with Padma on the train ride and make sure Ron, Seamus, and Neville had done theirs). That left Harry to try to find another compartment with his group of Lavender, Dean, Ginny, and Luna.
"Everywhere seems full up except the one with that guy," he said, quietly, gesturing through the glass at the man he'd seen coming through the convergence earlier. The stranger had taken the far corner against the window, pulled a battered Phillies ball cap over his eyes, worn a shabby jacket like a blanket, and gone to sleep.
"Is he a teacher, or a homeless person?" Dean checked.
"He must be the new defense instructor," Luna said, with confidence. "He looks like he's had a hard life. I think he must be teaching us something interesting."
With teenage confidence, the five invaded the compartment and took seats. Harry sat in the middle between the strange man and Lavender, and Ginny wound up in the middle seat on the other side between Luna and Dean.
As the door slid shut and they got their trunks stowed, the awkwardness set in.
After five minutes of sitting in silence, watching the forests of Vanaheim roll by under the waxing moon, carefully not touching and not sure if they should be touching, Luna had enough and demanded, "Tell us about the crazy things you did this summer?"
That was a fair question. The girls in the other compartment had basically heard all of it at Kamar-Taj, and seen parts of it on the news, but the Vanaheim natives had no frame of reference. So Harry thought about it and began, "I told you about how Tony made flying armor? It turned out he'd been basically working as his own one-man private army and our government wasn't happy about it. And, even worse, the son of one of Tony's father's ex-partners had some of his technology and decided he wanted to kill Tony…"
The story took a long time to tell. Dean took over for the parts he'd been around for. The presumed-new-defense-instructor slept through the whole thing, though Harry thought he felt him shift a bit when Dean was describing the battle between the two green titans in Harlem. When the adventure seemed to be over, but they rolled right into describing mercenaries trying to kidnap Harry on his birthday, the girls all seemed very surprised.
Finally finishing up, Harry explained, "...and then we just let SHIELD clean it all up while we got hamburgers."
"Your life is like all the stories!" Ginny exclaimed.
"Well, it really wasn't until right before Hogwarts," Harry demurred. "And most of this is stuff that's happening to Tony. I'm just around for it."
Luna watched the two Gryffindor girls taking it all in like it was a wonderful saga, rather than realizing that dating Harry (and probably Dean) was very likely to get them killed. She opined, "I think that I would like fewer dangerous adventures when we date. Though I guess I am sad I didn't get to see the dragon or the shadow nix your first year." They'd told her that story at some point after she joined the study group. "Fine. Try to keep your adventures to ones that involve interesting creatures while we're dating."
"I'll do my best," Harry agreed, gamely. "When is that, by the way?"
"We've only been dating for two hours and you already want to see who's next?" Lavender pouted.
"Ummm…" Harry stalled, and tried, "No?" Fortunately, a yawn broke through and he said, "Woah. I think I've been up for nearly a whole day. A nap? Anyone want to take a nap like this guy?" He gestured at the unconscious probably-professor.
Lavender relented and they all tried to lean back and get a bit more sleep.
Harry woke up some time later, as the train was shuddering to a stop. He realized he was leaning against someone warm and soft, and groggily opened his eyes to realize that he and Lavender were basically sprawled out together on their corner of the compartment. If the defense instructor weren't to their right, they probably would have wound up stretching out across the whole seat.
"Um, uh, are we at Hogsmeade?" Harry checked, carefully leaning up so as to not accidentally put his hand down on… parts.
Across the way, Dean was already awake and grinning at him. Ginny had basically curled up into a ball with Luna, so he was in a much less compromising position. "I don't think so," he explained. "Should have been past sunrise when we got in, right? I don't think it's quite dawn yet."
"Then why did we stop?" Harry tried to figure out, peering into the darkness outside. It was difficult because the dim magical flames that lit the train compartments weren't something you could just switch off, so it was hard to see outside with the moon already lowering to the horizon but the sun not up yet.
Except then the flames suddenly guttered out, plunging the compartment into darkness.
As his eyes adjusted, he got the impression they were in the scrub foothills, only rolling underbrush and grass spreading away from the train in the dim moonlight. And, outside, a dozen red lights, floating about head height, were making their way onto the stopped train. "I don't think that's good," he said. "Everyone up!"
The girls roused, and even the older man finally stirred, "What's going on?" he asked in a Midwestern American accent.
"Train stopped early," Harry recapped. "I can see red lights outside. The lights in here just went out. And they shouldn't."
"Okay," the man said, sighing and seeming to work himself up to offering, "I'll go check with the conductor. You stay here."
Before he could get fully up from his seat, however, they spotted red light reflecting off the windows on the opposite side of the aisle hallway outside the compartments, as if from something not far down the aisle from them. And Harry suddenly felt a little light-headed. He thumped back into his seat, unable to stand, as ringing sounded in his ears, like tinnitus, slowly resolving into a far-away scream.
He dully comprehended voices in the compartment ordering, "Lock the door," and, "What is that?" As if he was being pulled a million miles away, he spotted a gray-skinned human figure outside the compartment, staring directly at him with one, searing-red, cyclopean eye.
"No. Not Harry!" a woman's voice resolved out of the scream as white fog wrapped around his mind.
And then he passed out.
When he came to, the lights had come back on in the train, sparking a bit as magic never intended to turn off reestablished itself. Dean and Lavender were both sitting next to him, and Dean said, "He's waking up."
"Everybody okay?" Harry checked, putting a hand on his temple. "My head hurts."
"Yeah, the professor scared it off," Dean explained. "I'm not sure how."
"I don't think it liked what it saw in my head," the man admitted.
"Mindless Ones," Luna supplied. "They have no mind of their own, so they draw out the thoughts of others around them. The worst thoughts. I almost passed out, too. I think I heard my mum…"
"Oh," Harry nodded. "Yeah. Me too." He'd been aware that Luna's mother died, but he hadn't known she'd had a memory of it.
"You kids, uh, want some chocolate?" the man asked, rifling through his backpack and producing a couple of candy bars that were a foreign brand Harry hadn't seen before.
"Will that help?" Dean checked.
"Couldn't hurt," the man shrugged, breaking the bars into pieces to divide them evenly around the compartment.
"They must have been looking for Sirius Black," Harry figured. "We saw them guarding the prison."
"Oh, yeah?" the man asked, seeming to recognize the name, which might not have been the case if he was Midgardborn. In the light, Harry could see that he had dark hair and a day or two's worth of stubble, but his age was hard to figure. Given the condition of his clothes, he might have been a fairly young adult that had a hard life, or be fully into middle age. "I better go check and make sure everyone else is okay."
As soon as he was out, the rest of their friends were storming in, and Harry and Luna had to explain how badly they'd responded to the creatures. No one else had that adverse of a reaction, but Ron admitted, "I kind of felt, wrong, you know? Like I'd never be happy again."
"They shouldn't be on the train!" Hermione said, incensed. "They shouldn't even be out of the Dark Dimension."
"Sun's rising," Padma noticed. "Maybe they left because they're like vampires."
"Good thing they didn't catch us earlier in the ride, then," Dean figured.
It was Ginny that finally asked, "Are they smart enough to think that Black might try to ride the train… or would they only show up if he had definitely stowed away?"
That got everyone worried again, and they basically decided to cram into one compartment for the rest of the trip, with brief, guarded outings to use the spare compartment to change into their school robes a couple of people at a time. With the worry about Black and his jailers, they weren't even that concerned about being squished into close proximity of their assigned significant others, though those that sat on the floor of the compartment would have probably gotten sick of it if they'd had more than an hour left before the train finally pulled into Hogsmeade's station as dawn had fully broken.
Harry, Luna, and a few other students that had an especially bad reaction to the Mindless Ones got pulled off of the helhest-driven carriages and given a once-over by Madame Pomfrey, the castle's healer. She didn't think they'd have enduring issues, but advised staying clear of them in the future. By the time she released them to slip into the great hall, the sorting had already finished.
Harry slid into the spot Lavender had saved him just as Dumbledore was standing up for his pre-meal announcements. He noticed Malfoy laughing and pointing at him, so figured the story had already gotten around. The Slytherin table quieted as the star-spangled old wizard began to speak. Harry wondered if he'd actually do something about the Mindless Ones and Sirius Black problems, or treat both of them as wonderful opportunities for Harry to get in mortal danger again.
"Welcome to another year at our wonderful school," Dumbledore began. "I have a few announcements, though I suspect you're unfortunately aware of the most serious one. Er, no pun intended. I shall get them out of the way before full bellies lead to sleepy minds. Also, remember that this is a breakfast feast. On an ordinary year, we'd crack on right into classes. But given the events at the end of last term, we'll have a few days to get everyone reoriented, and make sure you studied up to your grade levels over the summer.
"As you may have surmised, the," he cleared his throat while trying to decide on a polite term, settling on, "wardens of Azkaban have come into Vanaheim uninvited seeking out the escaped prisoner, Sirius Black. I have already written to the Ministry expressing my displeasure in the strongest of terms, but I suspect they will have little recourse, given the pacts made to create the prison. I will be strengthening the school's wards to attempt to limit their ability to intrude upon the grounds, and we shall be on high alert for our Hogsmeade visits.
"But I counsel you all: they are dark creatures from another dimension, and may be quite dangerous to anyone that gets in between them and their quarry. Stay well clear, and do not stray out of bounds into places such as the forest. They do not use typical senses, and may not even be fooled by such things as invisibility." He shot a look at the Gryffindor table, and Harry in particular, who had contrived to go into the mystical wood at least once every year. "If you see them at a distance or start to feel the effects of their presence, retreat back to the castle immediately."
He took a deep breath, while Percy Weasley (who'd been promoted to Head Boy) also looked importantly at the Gryffindors under his charge. Dumbledore changed his tone of voice and said, "On a happier note, I'm pleased to announce that we have two new professors this year. Of course, the first is our new teacher for the defense seminar. Allow me to introduce a former student of our school, Remus Lupin." He gestured at the man from the train, who had changed into secondhand robes that didn't fit well and tried to tame his hair, but hadn't had a chance to shave. He waved awkwardly at the school to polite applause.
"Look at Snape," Ron whispered. Sure enough, when they glanced at the potions professor, he was scowling harder at Lupin than he ever had even at Harry. Harry guessed that they could be around the same age, and maybe went to school together? That was why Snape hated Harry, because of hating his father. Hey, maybe Lupin knew his father?
"Our second appointment," Dumbledore continued, "is our very own Rubeus Hagrid. Mister Hagrid will be taking over our husbandry classes after Mister Kettleburn's well-earned retirement to spend more time with his remaining limbs." A chuckle passed through the room, since the retired professor was well known for having lost most of his appendages to various accidents with dangerous beasts. "We all believe that Hagrid will be able to hit the ground running, as they say, given his long history with wildlife."
The clapping for Hagrid was louder than for Lupin, though unevenly distributed. Slytherin, in particular, featured several faces of students that no longer seemed happy with their selection of the elective. Kettleburn had warned them he was retiring, but the secret that Hagrid was his replacement hadn't seemed to travel far. Maybe the big man had only mentioned it to Harry?
"I believe that's everything of importance for the moment. Let's eat!" Dumbledore ordered, and then heaping stacks of breakfast foods were teleported to the tables.
They'd barely gotten halfway through when McGonagall was walking down the table with their new schedules. "I thought the headmaster said we had a while before classes start?" Ron said, confused.
"But not before makeup exams," she disagreed. "I hope you've all studied. You'll see your schedule on the front. Your practicals with me are this afternoon, and I expect you finished the materials in your book over the summer."
"I'm dead," Ron sighed, his head falling into his crossed arms and almost getting his hair into the eggs still on his plate.
Parvati looked down at her temporary boyfriend with a bit of distaste, patting him awkwardly on the shoulder, "I'm sure you'll do fine, Ron."
Harry shrugged and glanced at the rest of the study group, who all nodded. They weren't worried. Well, maybe Snape would try to mess them up, but at least all the other classes should be easy enough…
Chapter 34: Arts and Crafts
Chapter Text
Ron had not done poorly enough on his tests to be held back a grade, so he was relieved about that. As expected, the study group had had very little problem with the tests, though Snape had tried hard to stump them. He'd placed three antidote mixtures onto the test that they'd first encountered in the third-year texts, so it was good that they'd all read ahead over the summer at Hermione and Padma's insistence.
"Interesting. Those weren't on the Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff test," Padma commented, as they were studying in the library on Sunday evening.
"Probably because he doesn't hate the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs," Neville figured.
"I wonder if the Slytherins in the class had those questions," Harry said.
"They were straightforward enough, if you knew about them," Hermione shrugged. "He probably just told them about it in advance."
"More importantly," Lavender asked, "did Wood cry when you told him you didn't want to play quidditch this year?"
"He might have, but then Ginny stepped up to try out," Harry explained. Both of the youngest Weasleys were still at the initial quidditch practice. "I think she's going to do alright."
"Should we… uh…" Dean asked, looking at Parvati, "should we be going to the practices? Is watching practice for the person you're dating encouraged?"
Harry considered. He was pretty sure the twins were dating Angelina and Alicia, two of the team's chasers, so they'd always be at the practices. He wasn't sure if Oliver Wood or Katie Bell were dating anyone. "Dunno. If I was still on, I wouldn't have expected Lavender to go. But probably show up for matches?"
Dean nodded, "And I guess another set will be up by the time we have our first match."
Harry shrugged, "I think it's the week after Halloween? I basically just have to show up in case they need me as an alternate. Are we going to try to work through the runes material?"
The others thought that was a fine idea (even Luna who wasn't taking it yet but was interested). They still hadn't totally figured out how they'd handle the electives that only a few members of the group were taking, but runes was at least just about everyone.
"I already find it fascinating," Hermione observed. "The text tries to downplay it, but there's a much more significant similarity between the commonly used Vanir and Aesir runes and witch runes than there is with the sigils used in sorcery."
"Witches?" Lavender asked. Over the course of the week, she had been experimenting with sitting closer and closer to Harry during study sessions, but they weren't really cuddling yet.
"A völva, in Vanaheim terms, I think," Padma clarified. "Where the Earth sorcerers are more like seiðr."
"Oh, I get it," Lavender nodded. "Yeah, over here's it's basically whether you go to Hogwarts or not. Völva do a lot more with potions and runes, and don't really have a wand or do much actual spellcasting or transfiguration."
"Witches are trade school, sorcerers are university?" Dean joked.
"Sounds about right," Hermione agreed. "Or like the difference on Earth between midwives and doctors that deliver babies."
"The Masters seemed pretty down on witches?" Harry added, remembering that had come up in some of their discussions over their last summer camp.
"They think they're more likely to make dangerous, freeform bargains with dark powers," Hermione explained. "Where sorcery usually uses much more codified rules for what you have to give principalities to get access to a certain spell."
"There's some of that here, too," Neville added. "Since they don't have wands to more easily use Vanaheim's energy, some have made bargains with outside powers."
"Why don't they just go to Hogwarts?" Harry checked.
"Probably politics," Neville shrugged. "Too poor. From one of the hinterland areas. Different beliefs about how magic should work. Or maybe they just don't test well. I know for me I was barely able to prove I had enough magic to go to school."
"We could ask Preceptor Babbling when we have class tomorrow?" Hermione suggested.
Runes was, in fact, the first elective Harry had on Monday, in the middle of the afternoon. Those with divination or cultural studies had an elective period right after lunch, but having only two electives left Harry with that period free. He actually had quite a few free periods in his schedule, both because he didn't have a third elective and because the second-year load was a bit lighter in general to make space for electives. They were on to only taking two periods of their core classes throughout the week (though the rumor was that homework was increased). That meant they only had to take one double-period of chemistry each week, which was a nice change.
Preceptor Babbling hadn't changed her look much from when they'd met her at the electives day the previous year. Her Persian features still hinted that she had some recent Midgardborn ancestry, for all that her accent was the Vanir-standard (and very similar to the Received Pronunciation of Britain). She talked quickly, as her name suggested.
"This year is really an overview of the subject," she started, once they were all assembled, sitting around at long tables with good light from the windows and magical torches. Draco and a few of the other Slytherins had also chosen the class, and were trying to sit as far as possible from the study group. "We'll be working on a basic reading comprehension of both Latin script, the Elder Futhark, and core Mandarin characters, and you'll have a personal choice of another runic script to investigate. I know that sounds like a lot, but we're not expecting anything like fluency from you, and all tests will be open-book. If you have the memory to learn a whole set of languages, it's a big help, but most runecrafters and curse breakers always have reference books to hand.
"We'll also be trying to develop your, for lack of a better term, penmanship. We'll be working on both getting the runes right in chalk and ink, and also doing a little bit of carving on wood, bone, and clay once you have that down. Nothing we do this year will actually have magic bound into it, but I want to get you used to making beautiful, accurate marks. The dirty secret of runes is that you can make a nearly-illegible scrawl do something, but it takes far more power and concentration than if you scribed it correctly.
"Let's start the day with some primer glyphs, so you can get a feel for the difficulty of rendering them exactly," she finished, as she started passing out pages with example symbols and empty space for the students to ink them in.
While they worked, Harry asked, "How were the classes last period?"
Hermione, the only one of the current set taking cultural studies, gestured for the others who had divination to go first. "It was great," Lavender grinned. "She's so cool. We're starting off with tea leaves, and we got to do a reading first thing!"
"She said Ron was going to die," Neville nodded. "He got the Grim in his cup. Trelawney said she thought it was almost literal, death would be stalking after him like a black dog."
"Huh," Harry had a thought, flipping through the Latin book they had for runes. He found the entry for Sirius, where it mentioned another name for it was the Dog Star. "You all don't think a black dog and "Dog Star" Black are related…?"
"Why would he be after Ron?" Hermione wondered. "I guess the upper years did say that she always predicts someone's death. And that would be a pretty good warm reading guess…"
Parvati stuck her tongue out at Hermione, and quoted, "'Cold and warm reading are tools that are used by prognosticators and forecasters, and have no place in the toolkit of true diviners.'"
"Wow, she said that to you in your first period?" Harry checked. "I guess she really does not like arithmancy. Cultural studies?" he checked.
Hermione made a slightly disappointed face and admitted, "I brought up cell phones and it derailed the class for half the period. She said that Earth's communications relied on massive wires strung across the planet carrying electronic messages. I'm honestly not sure if she meant phone lines or the telegraph. She was simply fascinated by the idea of wireless communication."
Lavender nodded, "That is fascinating. Long range magic is hard. Not a lot of wizards have the power to open a portal to have a conversation. I don't think even Asgard has the kind of communications devices you've been telling us about." She was still profoundly annoyed that she wasn't able to have real-time conversations with Parvati over the summers the way Parvati apparently had with Hermione, Harry, Dean, and even Seamus.
"Preceptor Babbling, are we supposed to be chit chatting?" Draco tattled from across the room, pointing at Harry's table.
Everyone in the study group stared angrily at Draco as Babbling wandered over and looked over their work, "Well it looks like they're well ahead on their scribing," she said approvingly. They'd all been diligently copying the glyphs while they talked. She moved over to the Slytherin group and suggested, "Perhaps you should focus on your own work rather than the conversations of others, Mr. Malfoy. While I agree a silent environment does aid focus, there will be many times in your runemaking careers where you'll need to be able to tune out distractions."
They didn't really get an opportunity to quiz the professor about witches, but the triumphant grins at Malfoy carried them into their next periods, where Dean went to meet Ron and Seamus at husbandry while Hermione followed Harry to arithmancy.
Unlike the brightly-lit runes class, Magistra Vector seemed to be a programmer at heart. She'd chosen a classroom with few external windows, and they had opaque drapes across them to serve as blackout curtains. The room was separated into individual desks, each with its own hooded magical flame basically providing enough light to see by on the desk surface, and minimal lighting in the rest of the classroom.
Besides Harry and Hermione, the only other student in the class was Ernie Macmillan from Hufflepuff. They'd forgotten that they wouldn't have the class with Padma that day: because Ravenclaw and Slytherin had a last-period herbology class, they had to take arithmancy in a different period, at least on Mondays. In theory, the electives would have a rotating collection of students, as each day they'd be assigned to the morning or afternoon class based on what the rest of their schedule looked like. And the professors would have to essentially teach the same lesson twice each day.
Harry thought that the school should just hire more teachers rather than using such an obscure arrangement.
"The Gryffindor/Hufflepuff sections are always sparse," Magistra Vector noted somewhat petulantly in her faint Russian accent. "I hope you're all ready to work."
Hermione nodded, "Yes, ma'am. Harry and I have been keeping up with our maths for the last two years." She looked expectantly at Ernie.
The blond boy nodded, "My mother insisted that I learn, so I could go into spell research if I wanted."
Vector gave a faint smirk and nodded, "Sacred twenty-eight, yes?" she asked, referring to the Macmillans being a renowned pureblood family on Vanaheim. "Though I assume you're not prejudiced against Midgardborn?"
"No, ma'am," Ernie nodded. In the dim light, Harry realized the boy was finally putting on height. He'd been chubbier than Neville their first couple of years. "We don't think like that in Hufflepuff."
"Are you Midgardborn, ma'am?" Hermione asked. "Only, I noticed the Russian accent…"
"I am," the professor nodded, her dark hair unmoving in a stern bun. "And I schooled at Durmstrang." Clearly Harry and Hermione weren't familiar, so she elaborated, "The Masters of the Mystic Arts have a blind spot in Russia and Eastern Europe, and we are lucky if Durmstrang finds us. Anyway, what I was going to say is that this should provide an interesting comparison. Granger, Potter, I understand the two of you are near the top of your year and were both raised on Midgard. I hope you'll be an object lesson that we should be teaching more and earlier maths."
"Yes, ma'am," both of them agreed. Ernie looked uncomfortable at being made an object of Vanir unpreparedness in the face of Midgardian mathematical education.
"Then let's review," Vector nodded, walking over to hand each of them a page of mathematical notation. "You have half an hour to complete this short quiz. The problems grow in complexity from the beginning to the end, though each should be easy if you understand the technique. Begin, now."
Harry checked his paper, and, indeed, the questions started with simple addition and subtraction, moved on to multiplication and division, then started asking about concepts from algebra and geometry. There were even some problems at the end that were probably trigonometry and maybe even calculus that would have been way beyond Harry's grade level even if he'd stayed in school in California.
As the time progressed, he heard Hermione starting to make an unconscious, distressed whine as she hit the harder problems and didn't know how to proceed.
For Harry's part, he just tried to make educated guesses. He knew that sines and cosines had something to do with triangles and maybe circles, but that was all. He felt pretty good about the probability questions, however, since that was the kind of thing that you learned playing D&D. And they had worked ahead to do basic algebra.
"Time," Vector called, and Hermione barely restrained a shriek of anguish at not having finished. The professor walked over and collected the pages, with Hermione fighting her for a moment before releasing the incomplete document. Showing that she was definitely from Earth, the professor produced a red pen and starting marking up the assignments, quickly racing down each of the three tests and making noises of consideration as she went. Hermione was getting increasingly tense throughout the grading process. Finally, Vector finished and announced, "Not bad. Better than most of my morning class. I think we could skip all the way to trigonometry here without too much remedial work." In the dim light she finally realized, "Breathe, Granger. You're already working at a secondary school level, were you still on Earth. Freshman university students probably wouldn't have been able to finish this test."
Hermione finally let out her held breath and wheezed, "Thank you, ma'am."
The professor nodded, and began to explain, "Since I now know you at least have enough geometry to follow me, I'd like to lecture today on why spell forms take predictable geometric patterns…"
Even Harry had to admit the information was fascinating, and Hermione was drinking it in with all her mental prowess. He worried she'd be too full on math to eat any dinner. He made sure she filled her plate before she started gushing to Parvati and Lavender about arithmancy, before asking Dean, "How was husbandry?"
"Pretty chill," Dean nodded. "Just us and the Hufflepuffs this time, so Hagrid had it easy."
"Same," Harry nodded. "Me, Hermione, and Macmillan. We may have to deal with Slytherins on Wednesday, though."
"Yeah," Dean agreed. "Us too, I guess. I think the big man is tense about it. He seemed a little freaked out about the morning class they were in. Hopefully he's not going to mess it up."
Two days later, they'd had another session of their electives (and about half of their core classes; potions, defense, and herbology weren't until Thursday and Friday).
"He messed it up," Dean nodded, sadly.
"What happened?" Harry checked. "Our Slytherins weren't too bad. We just have Nott, Greengrass, and Zabini. They're fine without Malfoy around."
"We had Malfoy," Dean agreed.
"He tried to ride a hippogriff. Without bowing," Ron explained.
"Is that bad?" Harry asked.
"It was the first rule Hagrid told us," Dean said. "Malfoy didn't think it applied to him. Buckbeak—that's the hippogriff—cut Malfoy's arm when he tried to run up at it. He was bellowing about writing to his father."
They all looked over, where Malfoy was cradling a bandaged arm. Parkinson was cutting up his food for him as he clearly milked his injury for all it was worth.
"Aren't hippogriffs a little advanced for the first week?" Hermione checked. Even though she'd been talked out of taking the class, she'd still done some of the reading.
"You know Hagrid," Dean shrugged. "Wanted to start with something cool. Probably thought it would never hurt anything."
"Could have been a dragon," Harry nodded.
"He looks miserable," Lavender noted, glancing up at the staff table. "We should do something for him."
It was still a little weird to Harry that Lavender was always around unless they didn't have class together. Prior to the dating experiment, she'd mostly been Parvati's friend. But, he had to admit, it was nice to have another perspective between his and Dean's very boy method of handling problems and Hermione's very logical one. "Yeah?" he simply asked.
She nodded, "I'll find out when he has a free period. I bet he's pretty full on classes, now. Maybe after dinner tomorrow? He could probably use some friends."
Harry was still not totally sure that he and Hagrid were friends, since the big man was around eighty years old (for all that his Vanir and giant blood made him look younger), but he certainly was the adult on Vanaheim that Harry spent the most time with, socially. "Okay," he agreed.
Before then, however, they finally had their first defense seminar on Thursday afternoon. Snape hadn't been too bad in chemistry that morning (other than a bizarre display of bullying to force Ron to help Draco with the cutting for his lab assignment due to his injured arm, rather than letting one of his housemates help), and it was otherwise a day with few classes for Harry, so he was in a pretty good mood.
The defense classroom was spartan, with even less decoration than Gamora had provided. It made sense, since Lupin had come to the school with only a backpack. Fandral had taken his arsenal (most of which they'd never used) back with him to Asgard. The simple chairs of the previous year had been replaced with group tables, and the windows were open to let in sunlight and airflow. Lupin himself was standing behind a lectern, clearly still uncertain about his position of authority. "This is third years, huh?" the teacher asked.
"What are we learning this year, sir?" Hermione asked, notebook already ready.
"Let me, uh, just get roll real quick," he put her off, checking through the page of names and trying to match them to faces. He passed Harry faster than others, seeming to already recognize him, probably from the train. Finally, he explained, "Miss, uh, Granger, right?" She nodded, so he continued, "I understand your last two years you've basically been taught to fight."
"Nae so much last year," Seamus corrected.
Lupin smirked, "Believe me, I've heard about that, too. But I'm still not really a fighter. I know a bit. Shame all the science teacher positions are full," he scratched the back of his head. "No, what I'm going to teach you this year is escape and evasion."
He left a long pause, until Ernie Macmillan asked, "Escape and evasion, sir?"
"I was hoping for, 'Why'd we want to learn that?'" Lupin gave a wry grin. "It got about half the Slytherin classes so far. But, yeah… basically, how to avoid a fight, get away from people chasing you, and hide until they give up. It's not as flashy as martial arts, but it'll keep you alive for longer."
Lavender raised her hand and, when called on, asked, "Is this just like, if bad guys have trapped you in a bad spot?"
"That's some of it," the teacher nodded. "I know you're all too young to remember the war, but I understand that sometimes the Death Eaters would show up at houses, and there were too many to fight." Harry winced a little at that, and Lupin seemed to notice and nodded sympathetically. "We can always hope that will never happen again, here. But if it does, it's better to have another option than fighting. But, yeah, uh, my real strong point is cross country evasion. What do you do if the bad guys have won and you need to get out of the country? Or you get trapped on another world and need to get somewhere safe to figure out how to get home?"
"Are you on the run on Earth, sir?" Dean checked.
Again, that small, self-deprecating smile, and Lupin admitted, "Let's just say, that when the headmaster contacted me, this sounded like an excellent opportunity to let the heat die down. It beats hiding out in rural Canada. I miss the internet, though."
"We all miss the internet," Harry agreed. The Midgardborn in Hufflepuff nodded along as well.
"Right," Lupin said, "let's start with packing. What do you absolutely need to take with you? What do you need to have packed and ready to go at a moment's notice? What things do you think are essential but you can just buy them wherever you wind up? Where do you put the real essential things so you can grab them on the way out? Mr., uh, Finch-Fletchley, what do you usually pack for a weekend trip?"
"I… I'm not totally sure," the boy admitted. "The staff tends to do my packing for me when we go on holiday, and anything I need that we don't have, we send someone to buy." He looked a little embarrassed to be so wealthy. Harry still wasn't sure if he was just rich, or a British aristocrat of some kind.
"Pretty much same," Harry said. It wasn't really true. For all that she was now CEO of one of the biggest companies on Earth, Pepper had been a secretary for years (if a highly-paid one with a trust fund from her parents), so had never allowed Harry to get spoiled. It was bad enough he got to fly on private planes so often. Really, though, Harry didn't want to make Justin feel like the only out-of-touch rich kid in the class. "But do you mean, like, go-bags?"
"Exactly," Lupin agreed. "But, honestly, being used to buying stuff you don't have works in a lot more situations than you'd expect, if you're hiding in a city. I want everyone to think about what things they actually use on a daily basis. If you're in a hurry, you might grab a lot of things that are easy to replace where you're going, and forget irreplaceable items. It's sentimental, but when you're on the run, pictures of your family wind up meaning a lot more than you'd expect."
They spent most of the class period talking about packing. What did they absolutely need? What might be replaceable in the city, but they'd need to bring in the wilderness? How heavy were some of the things (especially things like bedding), and what could they replace them with that was easier to carry in a backpack? What could magic make for them on Vanaheim with their current skill at transfiguration, but they'd need to bring if they were in another realm? Everyone wound up with interesting lists of what they'd want to throw together if they needed to get out quickly.
"Of course," Lupin eventually began to change the subject, "none of this matters if you panic when you need to get out. That's part of why so many people have the go bags that Mr. Potter mentioned: you keep everything packed and near the door, so you can just grab it and go. It's faster than having to find and pack everything, but it also lets you think through your checklist when you're not in danger. Your worst enemy when you're trying to escape can be fear.
"It's tradition around here to do a lesson with a, um," he had to find a note he'd written to himself, "Kkallakki. That's a lot of Ks. They're this weird bug demon that makes you see your worst fear. The headmaster caught one and locked it in a wardrobe. Like seventy years ago, so I wonder if he's had to replace it in the meantime. Anyway, that seems a little much for any students, to me. Especially third-years. So I'm just going to ask, and only let me know if you feel like it. What are you scared to death of?"
Justin offered, "Giant ghost snakes." Harry hadn't been sure he'd seen the Nidhogg serpent that had paralyzed him, but he must have with that fear.
"Just regular sized snakes," Parvati added. "Particularly cobras. Or maybe mummies." She still had Ron and Ginny's stories about Egyptian tombs on the brain.
"Spiders," Ron shuddered, continuing the theme of venomous animals. It was probably better that he hadn't gone to meet Aragog with Hagrid.
"A banshee!" Seamus yelled from further back in the room.
"Professor Snape," Neville half-joked, but couldn't make the smile reach his eyes. Lupin frowned, and looked like he was making a mental note.
"Loose body parts. Like bloody eyeballs," Susan Bones, from Hufflepuff, said through a disgusted face.
"Rats," her friend Hannah nodded. Ron looked offended so she said, "Not nice pet ones, but wild ones that crawl on you…"
"That crawling claw thing from D&D," Dean remembered based on what Susan and Hannah had said. Off everyone's look he pantomimed his hand moving across the table like a spider and said, "Like, just a human hand that walks at you. The Addams Family movies messed me up, you guys."
There was a lull as everyone contemplated that, into which Harry's quiet comment of, "My parents dying in front of me," landed like a bomb. Horrified looks spread around the room, as the kids remembered that Harry had seen some shit in his short life.
That reminded Hermione, who added, "That troll in first year that was about to kill all of us. Not the troll itself, just knowing that we could be moments from being dead."
Lupin gave an apologetic smile, saying, "Thank you—everyone—but that was what I was trying to get at. Think about how you felt when your life was actually in danger. Do you have the mental capacity to plan? Or are you just going to fight or flee? Maybe just freeze in place? If you're attacked in your home, you might panic and go running barefoot into the night with no supplies, and you're not going to make it very far.
"That's another thing I want to work on in this class: mastering your emotions. If you can get used to staying calm in a crisis, that makes it a lot easier to remember what you need to do to actually get away safely." He scanned the class to make sure everyone was okay with what he'd just said, then suggested, "And I think we can call it there for today. For homework, I just want you to all really think about what scares you, be honest about how you might respond to being in danger, and we'll start talking about how you can control those emotions."
Harry hung back as the Hufflepuffs filed out, and his crew clearly moved out into the hallway but were planning to wait. When it was just him and Lupin he asked, "Was that too much?"
"Your parents dying?" Lupin checked. Harry nodded, so the professor said, "No. Like I said, I was hoping to get some real fears out there. Though, uh, I guess around here, some of those monsters could be a genuine threat that could chase you out of your house. Maybe even more likely than guys with guns pointed at you." He seemed to be remembering something from his own past.
"That wasn't even in my top five for the last year," Harry nodded. Lupin's eyes widened as he realized that Harry had recently had guns pointed at him, so Harry hurriedly explained, "I was really more afraid for my friends, or that I'd have to reveal my magic to get out of it."
"Pretty much," Lupin grudgingly muttered. "I guess… uh… you're on Midgard, then? I'd have assumed you'd be raised here."
"Nope. Squib aunt," Harry shrugged, guessing that maybe the Midgardborn Professor Lupin didn't know as much about him as everyone else on Vanaheim seemed to.
"Oh, right, Virginia," the professor nodded. Realizing he may have revealed more than he'd planned on, he added, "Uh, was there anything else? Next class in a minute."
Harry didn't have time to puzzle over the mention of Aunt Pepper's real name, so just asked, "Are we doing any escapology? Like, getting out of handcuffs? Hermione, Dean, and I learned some of it last winter holiday, and it's really useful."
Lupin nodded consideringly and said, "Then I might have to tap the three of you to help teach some of that. It's not my strong point, but I agree it could be useful." He looked up as Katie Bell and some of the other fourth-years started to enter the class. "But we can talk about that later."
"Okay, thanks Professor," Harry said, rushing out to catch up with his friends.
On the way back to the dorm, he suddenly remembered that his aunt had mentioned another of his dad's friends with a weird name. And Remus Lupin was a pretty weird name, even for Vanaheim…
Chapter 35: The Most Haunted House on Vanaheim
Chapter Text
By the weekend after Halloween, Harry still hadn't figured out how to broach the topic of his father with Remus Lupin. Aunt Pepper had gotten back to him that, indeed, that sounded like the weird name she remembered, but she couldn't be sure whether she'd actually ever met James' other friend. With him being from Midgard, maybe Lupin had just fallen out of touch with his school friends after graduation? It was certainly something the adults in Harry's life had warned him was pretty likely—most people didn't keep in touch with many childhood friends into adulthood.
It was also a little weird that, two months into classes, they hadn't actually seen Lupin do any magic.
It wasn't like Harry didn't have a lot of other things on his mind. Classwork was ramping up so much that he was really glad he hadn't taken three electives (and Hermione seemed to be regretting it). Wood still badgered him to come to quidditch practice more often than he'd like so his skills didn't atrophy. Even as most of the girls in the study group would rather spend their time in other ways, Dean wasn't letting up on making sure they got in plenty of practice for martial arts, fencing, and wandless magic, as well as the cardio exercise to back it all up.
And that was not to discount the whole dating thing.
In their month and a half or so of dating, Harry had really started to appreciate Lavender in a way he hadn't when they'd just been friends. She was funny, brave, and easy to talk to, even if what she wanted to talk about was mostly stuff that wasn't that interesting to him. And—though he'd never admit to anyone (except maybe Dean) that he was crude enough to notice—of all their female friends she was the one that was, well, developing fastest. He hoped he was being more gentlemanly with his hard-won summer experience of not staring at Natasha, but he certainly noticed.
By the end of their allotted dating window (before the girls pulled a Mad Hatter and yelled, "Everybody, switch places!"), they'd remained pretty chaste. Hand holding, leaning into each other at the table, and hugs were pretty much all they'd gotten to, though she'd given him a close-mouthed kiss goodnight on their last evening of dating.
And then he was on to Parvati.
That relationship was a little odd. For all that he'd known her only maybe half a day longer than Lavender, and a few hours longer than Hermione, she and Padma were the first school friends he'd met, during that very first trip to Kamar-Taj. Some part of his brain wanted to prioritize that relationship as if he'd known her since they were little, and consider her more like a sister than a potential romance.
Dean seemed to be having a similar problem with it being his turn to date Hermione.
The dynamic was a bit skewed, with the Midgard-based couples being confused about their brotherly feelings, while the Vanaheim kids had sparks flying. Neville had wound up with Luna for the second sequence, and he already seemed to be far more smitten with her than he'd been with Hermione (who he'd considered not just a sister, but a big sister, after all the mothering she'd given him over their first year). Ron had wound up with Lavender, who seemed to have gotten her confidence from her time with Harry to escalate far more quickly with Ron. Harry was really trying not to be jealous, since the entire point of this was to avoid jealousy.
At one point, when he was particularly annoyed at Lavender sitting in Ron's lap at the study table in the library, Luna glanced from them to Harry and gave him a shrug that clearly indicated, "I told you so."
But this whole thing was Parvati's idea, she was a social force of nature, and she was going to make it work. While in the back of her mind, she was pretty aware that of the Earth girls, Hermione or Padma were both probably a better fit for Harry, she wasn't going to give up. This whole thing was an experiment—her experiment—and her turn with Ron had been no fun, so she was dead set on having a good time with Harry.
And, unlike when he dated Lavender, during her time there was a Hogsmeade Weekend.
Hogwarts didn't really have a concept of field trips like Earth schools had. In addition to it just being overall more dangerous to have a bunch of kids out without much supervision (on Earth, trolls very rarely rampaged through a trip to the aquarium or botanical garden), Hogwarts was difficult to get to and similarly difficult to leave. Unless a convenient convergence happened to have shown up in the school, any student trip needed to make use of the Hogwarts Express to get out of the region of heavy magic that was difficult to teleport into or out of. That was a lot of time to devote, especially with how limited the school's teaching staff was.
But you could have the world come to Hogwarts.
While there was only one actual train on Vanaheim, the couple-hundred miles of smooth and level train tracks presented an interesting opportunity for a world whose transportation technology remained strangely medieval. Making a steam engine was hard, but building wagon wheels that could slot between standard-width rails was easy enough. The difficult part was just training the draft animals to walk on the wooden tracks without breaking an ankle on the ballast. Even with this challenge, quite a few traveling traders spent most of their year working the path between the two train platforms. In the last couple of centuries, villages had even sprung up next to the track just for this access.
A few arbitrary times a year, most of these traders made their way to Hogsmeade, ready to soak up the students' pocket money. A captive audience of two hundred shoppers was hard to pass up.
"This is neat," Parvati observed, as she grabbed Harry's hand when they stepped off the carriages that had brought them from the school to the town. "It's like a little Goblin Market."
Harry tried not to stare as Ron and Lavender skipped off into the town, arm in arm, and agreed, "Yeah. I don't think I've really seen the town in good light before. I wonder if this square is empty most of the year." The permanent buildings of the small village seemed to wrap around a large cobblestoned square which was currently full of dozens of pop-up merchant stalls. Most were basically just brightly-painted canvas tents, but some had managed folding wooden walls and even roofs. At the edges of the square, it looked like a few merchants had stalls built into the surrounding buildings, and it wasn't clear whether they just rented them, or they were permanent businesses in the town.
For the first part of the morning, the study group mostly drifted together, seeing what there was to see. Luna was too young to go, so Neville was flying solo, and Padma was once again without a match. Seamus rounded out the trio of friends without a date to Hogsmeade. Since Parvati was hesitant to just ditch her sister (the way Ron and Lavender had ditched all of them), Harry was able to treat the excursion as pretty much just a normal social outing.
Most of the shops were practical. There were stalls with clothing, book dealers, sellers of writing materials, tool vendors, and even various smiths that could custom-forge brass, bronze, or silver over small anvils and crucibles. At least a quarter of the stalls were various home goods that were of almost zero interest to students—traders that came for the actual citizens of Hogsmeade, but were willing to try their luck with the festival turnout.
What captured the attention of the children were the few stalls that were entirely designed to separate kids from their gold and silver. Mr. Honeyduke imported a vast array of candy. The Spintwitches had quidditch gear. Ms. Dervish and Mr. Banges had boxes full of reasonably-priced enchanted trinkets. And Zonko the Jester offered a panoply of gags, tricks, jokes, and pranks (the Weasley twins seemed to always be near his stall).
The festival square was anchored on either corner with two refreshment venues. One was a large, permanent building that seemed to be the town's regular inn; its signage was of three crossed broomsticks in an asterisk or snowflake pattern. They'd already heard stories of the "buttermead" concoction brewed up for the students (which they'd eventually try and realize was akin to a slightly-alcoholic cream soda; Vanaheim had many fewer restrictions on kids and alcohol than America). The other eatery was an immense tent in pinks and reds, which was rumored to be a fancy tea shop. A romantic, fancy tea shop.
Parvati was wistfully watching Lavender drag Ron into that tent, and Harry had to try something to distract her. "Want to check out the haunted house?" he asked.
"Haunted house?" Parvati asked, successfully intrigued.
"Supposed to be some kind of ruined fortress on the edge of town," he nodded, gesturing with the hand she wasn't holding. "The Roaring Rampart. Wood was telling me it's supposed to be the most haunted building on Vanaheim."
Parvati raised an eyebrow. "We live in a school that is literally full of ghosts. We can talk to them. One teaches our history class. You went to Niflheim last year."
"Right?" Harry nodded. "So if that's just a basic level of haunted, how haunted does this place have to be?"
"Good point," she acquiesced.
Unfortunately, none of the rest of the group was particularly interested in abandoning the shopping opportunities to go look at a ruined building of dubious hauntedness. Hermione and Padma were practically camping at the book seller and Dean couldn't leave his date. Ron and Lavender had already gone to the tea shop. Neville was looking through the trinket store for something that might help him in class. Seamus just grinned and said, "Three's a crowd, innit?" before waving them off.
The path out to the Roaring Rampart was clearly marked with spooky decorations, though it was a bit more of a hike than Harry had expected, the trail switching back and forth over the hills that marked the town's eastern boundary. He was almost certain they were technically pretty close to Hogwarts' northern fence, but the forest and hills were such that they could only occasionally even make out the school's towers through breaks in the treeline. There didn't seem to be too many other students coming out this way, though there were enough couples passing them coming back that it was clearly a pretty obvious day-after-Halloween date spot.
Which made Harry a little tongue tied about what to talk about.
Parvati was the one that broke the awkward silence, suggesting, "This is kind of like the cabin scene in Dead Before Arrival."
"Huh, yeah, I guess it is," Harry nodded, remembering the pre-credits scene from the recent Simon Williams movie. "I didn't realize you'd seen it."
She said, "It finally came out in India the week before school started. You'd mentioned it was good, so we talked Pitaji and Mataji into letting us go. They thought it was a little too scary, but I think Pitaji secretly really liked it."
"What'd you think?" he checked.
She shrugged, "It was intense. Williams is a good actor. He's no Kingo, of course."
"Who's that?"
"Prince of Bollywood," she explained. "He's, like, the latest of a family that's been starring in movies since the beginning. I guess you haven't seen The Shadow Warrior?"
"I don't think I've seen any Bollywood stuff," Harry admitted. "Well, I've seen some clips online. They have crazy superpowers and then have a musical built in, right?"
She nodded, "We like singing. And wire work. They have really good stunts. Kingo does all of his own stunts, and I've seen outtakes where it looks like he came close to dying to get the shot, and was having a really good time about it."
"Maybe he's a secret sorcerer or superhero," Harry joked.
"Right. Like someone with super powers would have nothing better to do than become an actor," she disagreed. "Though I guess maybe some actors could be sorcerers that didn't want to join the Masters."
"Master Mordo would be so mad," Harry grinned. In his teaching sessions, the extremely serious sorcerer inevitably worked in a note about how much responsibility they had, gifted as they were with magic. He realized he should ask Christine Everhart whether she ever got bothered by him, choosing to be a reporter.
Parvati rolled her eyes, "He's honestly part of why I'm thinking about staying here. It's so clear he doesn't think I'm working hard enough. He scares me a little."
"I think he had a hard early life," Harry tried to explain. "A bunch of the Masters seem like they basically found Kamar-Taj after their lives fell apart. That may be why they're the ones that make it to become Masters."
"Anyway," she said, not willing to forgive the creepily-intense sorcerer, "you should see some Kingo films. I bet at least some of them are online."
"Sure," he agreed. "We should probably figure out how to get the group together when we're not at school or Kamar-Taj. Maybe you can stay in London for the first couple days of winter break?"
"Probably," she smiled at the invitation, giving his hand a squeeze. "Oh! There's the ruin."
They'd finally made their way to the top of a hill where they could see the building in question. It seemed like it had once been a garrison fort for Hogwarts, maybe to make it difficult to siege the castle. Clearly made of old stone that had mostly fallen down, the core of the building was the size of a large house and surprisingly intact compared to old castles on Earth. It had a hill of its own with no large trees nearby, and it looked like it would be a steep climb for even adventurous students to get closer than a couple dozen yards.
And it was resolutely refusing to do anything haunted, loud, creepy, or eldritch.
"Maybe it only roars at night?" Parvati figured.
Harry frowned, "If this was on Earth, I'd just guess that it was something about the fallen stones and when the wind blows hard."
"Shame we don't have a broom to check it out closer."
Harry looked around and didn't see any other students currently at the overlook and smiled, pulling his broom from the bag of holding he'd bought at the last Goblin Market trip. "Knew this would come in handy."
"Why Mr. Potts, is that a broom in your pouch or are you just happy to see me?" Parvati smirked.
"Uh," he said, intelligently, before admitting, "I was going to ask if you wanted to ride my broom, but now that sounds wrong."
"Stop overthinking it," she insisted. "Let's fly."
He'd never really tried flying tandem before, especially with a girl that he was technically dating that had her arms tightly wrapped around him. But it was a good broom, he was a good flier, and the navigating gave him enough distraction to keep from focusing on the close contact. They slowly circled the structure, and still didn't see anything creepier than a little graffiti around the back ("F&G" marking the Weasley twins' venture past where most students could reach).
"No doors," Harry noted. "Not even to get out on the roof. I don't see a spot where there would be one." There were periodic arrow loops, so narrow that even a first-year wouldn't be able to squeeze through without shrinking down with magic.
"Maybe they transfigured the doors away to keep kids from going in," she figured. Reaching a hand out, she fluttered her eyes and extended her senses. "I feel a lot of warding magic."
"Yeah?" Harry checked. "I didn't know you were that sensitive. I don't really feel anything this far away."
"Trelawney is helping me work on it," Parvati explained. "I might not be that great at seeing the future, but she says I have a rare gift of being able to feel magic."
"That's really cool," he said, honestly impressed. "Seen enough?"
"Yes. And two people on a broom isn't as comfortable as I'd thought it would be," she agreed.
He set them back down on the overlook, not wanting to risk an adult seeing them fly into town and having a problem with him keeping his broom with him at all times. He didn't think it was definitely against the rules, but someone like Mr. Filch would probably figure out a way for it to be.
A moment of awkwardness set in again after he had the magical conveyance stowed and they weren't sure whether they should head back to town or make use of the secluded spot. Parvati started to say, "Well, I've been having a really good–"
"If it isn't Old Scarhead on a date," Draco Malfoy's voice interrupted as his pale hair and equally-pale face crested into view with his two bodyguards, Crabbe and Goyle. "Guess Brown left you for the Weasel." They stopped at the trailhead, spread out enough that Harry and Parvati couldn't just walk past them to go back to town.
Harry rolled his eyes and said, "We're done here, if you and your boyfriends want to use the makeout spot."
Draco's face flushed at the comment, and he drew his wand. "Big talk without your usual army of blood traitors and mudbloods."
He wasn't prepared for Parvati to yawn. "Are you and Draco going to fight?" she asked, managing to clearly convey that it wouldn't even be a contest.
"I've been trying not to," Harry shrugged. "Draco. How many times do I have to tell you that you're Ron's mean kid? Why don't you go pick on someone your own size?" Harry was really hoping that Parvati wouldn't pass that implied insult back to Ron, but it had seemed funny in the moment.
"I'll show you! I'll show you Potter!" the Malfoy heir snarled, and began flinging bolts of magic from his wand at the two of them. Notably, he was completely disregarding his supposed Hippogriff injury.
Harry was already moving and drawing his own wand. He wasn't actually that worried about fighting Malfoy, even with his bodyguards. Though the third-years were all getting pretty decent at magical firepower using their wands (Dean had blown the head off of a Hammeroid without one), Draco wasn't even at "Sokovian separatists with assault rifles" level of scary. What Harry worried about was simply Parvati getting hit, since she was the least combat-trained of the Midgardborn from the study group.
It helped that Crabbe and Goyle hadn't also drawn their wands. They honestly seemed surprised that Draco had snapped, and had mostly been expecting a bit of physical intimidation. Harry dodged two bolts of energy from Draco as the bookends slowly worked out that they might need to intervene, but noticed that a third bolt was potentially going to clip the also-flat-footed Parvati. (They'd been playing enough D&D that the terminology just slipped in.)
Rather than dodge the third bolt, Harry yelled and put his all into the little bit of defensive magic they'd been trying over the summer, and actually managed a rudimentary magical shield. It was basically a loose circle of orange light bisected by a triangle and maybe a line, compared to the densely-packed geometry of a real shield, and it instantly evaporated as it deflected Draco's bolt, but it worked.
Everyone standing on the overlook seemed duly impressed.
Harry was about to manifest his go-to whip to try to disarm Draco, when Parvati gasped, "It's the Grim!"
While Slytherin seemed like the house that would instruct their students to not fall for the "look out behind you" gambit, Draco and his cronies hadn't gotten the memo. All three turned and looked in the direction that Parvati and now Harry were staring, where an enormous, mangy, coal-black dog was rushing from the treeline, hackles up and growling.
A large dog, even a scary-looking one, shouldn't be any more of a threat to wizards than the snake had been at the dueling club the previous year. But there's the logical realization that your ability to violate physics is more than a match for a domesticated animal, and the emotional belief that angry beasts are dangerous.
The latter won out against the Slytherins, who made unflattering noises as they rushed back down the path toward town.
Parvati had finally thought to get her wand out, but seemed terrified by the very image of the death omen that her favorite teacher had been going on about. Harry wasn't much better off himself, just starting to ride the adrenaline of a spell fight with Malfoy and suddenly having an entirely unexpected threat before him. But he kept his wand level and skidded to a stop in position where he wasn't fouling Parvati's aim but would be able to move in between her and a charging dog.
Strangely, after having snarled and barked to scare off the Slytherins, the dog scrabbled to a stop and, if anything, looked frightened that it was against two children with wands trained on it. In the afternoon light filtering through the trees, they could see that the dog, though enormous, seemed pretty gaunt, and its fur was neither clean nor kempt.
In an eyeblink, it went from aggressive predator to a whining, embarrassed dog.
Harry's brain made some furious calculations. He'd already had the idea that the Grim might represent his godfather. He recalled seeing what might have been the same dog before getting on the train. Before he was consciously aware he'd made the connection, his mouth was asking, "Sirius Black?" and he was lowering his wand.
The dog cocked his head and then, in the same fluid metamorphosis that accompanied Rector McGonagall shifting from cat back to human, there was a tall man standing there instead.
Far from the crazed-but-young man they'd seen through the portal into the Dark Dimension, it seemed like over a decade of time was trying to catch up to Sirius Black all at once. His dark clothing was damaged and unraveling. His black hair and beard were nearly down to his waist and completely unwashed or combed. Inch-long fingernails were cracked, as if there was simply a maximum length they could reach before shattering. And the attempt at a smile he made revealed teeth in sore need of cleaning.
"I found you!" the man barked, beginning to step forward but reconsidering it as Parvati extended her wand further and Harry slightly raised his. "I saved you from those boys. Was that Lucius? Are you James? I… I can't keep track." Before he could get an answer, he madly rambled, "I saw you through a door in the sky. And I realized how much time had passed. So much time. But I'm here! Here now."
Harry nodded. That all tracked with what he'd heard. And he just had one burning question. "Did you kill Peter Pettigrew. And all those people?"
"Of course not!" Sirius snarled, face become a rictus of pain and anger. "Never trust a rat! He took my wand. I didn't notice it was gone until I suddenly remembered where the Potter cottage was! You have to believe me, James. I would have died to protect you."
"I'm Harry," he corrected the madman. "So Peter's the rat? And stole your wand?"
"He must have," Sirius nodded, pacing in agitation but not getting too much closer. Harry glanced back at Parvati, whose eyes were wide at the performance. "I remember I found you alive. You're Harry. You were just a baby. You had that scar, but it was new!" he gestured at Harry's forehead. "Hagrid was going to take you to safety. Your aunt, maybe—Miss Virginia. I saw you with her at the train! I told him where to find Hogun's skiff. I think. Then I went to see if someone had killed Peter. Broken the wards. I went to his house. I found my wand in the grass outside of the wreckage. I'd barely picked it up before the aurors came. The audacity of the prank! I couldn't help but laugh."
"You're saying Peter framed you? He let Voldemort through the wards and faked his death?" Harry tried to sum up, again lowering his wand.
"Exactly. Exactly. He must still be out there. Who knows what he's still up to. You're not safe. I have to keep you safe. I'm your godfather."
"I know," Harry nodded. His faint smile was more than mirrored by Sirius Black, who grinned a mad smile that his godson believed him.
"Someone's coming," Parvati warned, having lowered her own wand at the dramatic reunion. She had heard feet rushing up the trail before either of the boys.
"I'll be around," Sirius nodded. "I have to find Peter. Clear my name. Keep your eyes open!"
Before Harry could protest, Sirius was a dog again and bounding off into the woods.
A few seconds later, Percy Weasley rushed into the clearing, wand drawn, with Penelope Clearwater—the Ravenclaw prefect—not far behind him. The couple had probably been on their own way up to the makeout point and come upon Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle running away. They saw that Harry and Parvati seemed fine, though had wands out but lowered, and Percy asked, "What happened? Malfoy screamed there was some kind of beast."
Harry was about to come up with an excellent story about Draco just spooking a wild animal with his attack, but before he could begin Parvati opened her mouth. "It was Sirius Black! He's an animagus! And he's Harry's godfather! And he's innocent! It was the most amazing thing, because he said that he was framed by a friend of his named Peter, and also Draco was attacking us and that doesn't seem like something he should get away with, but Harry managed a shield and protected me (it was very gallant) and then the dog came rushing in and they ran away, but it wasn't a dog at all!"
As Parvati finally had to take a breath, Harry winced. There were no secrets when it came to Parvati Patil, the biggest gossip at Hogwarts. He'd forgotten that fact in the moment.
All he could actually hope for was that she'd forgotten his crack about Draco needing to go after Ron to fight someone his own size.
He wasn't optimistic.
Chapter 36: Tea and Sympathy
Chapter Text
"Why did you have to tell them everything?" Harry demanded, as he and Parvati were walking toward the great hall, late to dinner.
"They're teachers," she said, confused why it would even be an issue that she'd shared the details of the entire encounter with Dumbledore and McGonagall in the interview they'd just had in the headmaster's office.
"I don't just mean the teachers. You told Percy and Penelope, too. And Lavender, so everyone knows now. The fact he could transform was all he had to let him hide. They're going to hunt him down!" he insisted.
"He says he's innocent, but what if he's not?" she argued. "People need to know that the black dog running around might not be safe. Besides… I don't like keeping secrets."
Harry gaped like a fish at that pronouncement for a moment before reminding her, "You keep that you're a sorcerer a secret from most of the people on Earth!"
"And I hate it!" she agreed. "That's also part of why I'm thinking about living here after school. So I don't have to hide who I am all the time. Isn't it better, here, where you don't have to keep secrets?"
"I keep all kinds of things secret!" he disagreed. "Things that would hurt other people if they got out, for one. Things that could get me killed if the bad guys found out about them! Things that could let the bad guys win!" he finished, thinking about the location of the Soul Stone, which as far as he knew only he, Dumbledore, and Gamora currently knew about.
"That's no way to live. Dishonestly," she said, somewhat self-righteously. If she was being actually truthful with herself, she'd realize that her take might be more nuanced if she didn't enjoy gossiping so much. It felt better to pretend that she was a proponent of radical honesty than that she just loved to spill tea.
"And yet, it's keeping me alive. Maybe not like Sirius," Harry almost snarled. They'd reached the great hall, and he went ahead. Ron was staring daggers at him, so he squeezed in as far away from the redhead as he could, using Dean and Hermione as a buffer. Parvati settled next to Lavender, looking Harry's way, hurt, not understanding why he was clearly mad at her.
Parvati had also recounted to Lavender what Harry had said to Draco about him and Ron, and Ron was clearly upset about it. It was actually impressive how much gossip she'd managed to impart as Percy was walking them through Hogsmeade to go brief the headmaster.
Before Dean and Hermione could bug him for what had happened, Dumbledore and McGonagall took their places at the head table, with the headmaster standing for everyone's attention. The conversation quickly died down, and he began, "I'm sure you've heard the rumors already," Harry quietly huffed at how even Dumbledore knew what a gossip Parvati was, "that Sirius Black was encountered outside of Hogsmeade earlier today. They are true. It is extremely likely that he stowed away on the Hogwarts Express, which explains why the guardians of Azkaban appeared. His continued presence in the area makes a further arrival of these beings likely, so remain on your guard. That said, new evidence has come to light that Mr. Black may have been framed for the crimes for which he was imprisoned. I will be writing to the Ministry to once again examine their case in light of this new information."
If Harry hadn't believed that Sirius and his father were best friends, the look of rage on Snape's face at the idea Sirius might be innocent would have convinced him. Clearly, the chemistry professor had hated his father's entire friend group.
"One thing that he is guilty of, however," Dumbledore continued, "is of being an unregistered animagus." Harry sighed at the reveal, though it obviously wasn't a surprise to most of the school, after Parvati and Lavender had spread it around. "It is my suspicion this is how he was able to escape the prison. He takes the form of a large black dog. If you see either the man or the animal, report it to your prefects or an adult immediately. While he may or may not be guilty of the crimes for which he was imprisoned, it is best to be cautious." He considered for a moment whether there was anything else to add, then said, "If you have further questions, direct them to your head of house. And now, let's eat!"
As the food began to teleport onto the tables, Harry happened to glance over and saw Draco explaining something to his housemates with great gusto: probably selling the idea that he'd retreated from a notorious murderer, rather than run screaming from a dog. He caught Harry's eye and smirked, probably certain that he'd receive no consequences from his own attack on Harry and Parvati. McGonagall had basically indicated as much, when she realized it was Harry and Parvati's word (and maybe Sirius') against Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle.
For all that Parvati was pitching no secrets, Harry was right on the brink of never telling the adults at his school anything ever again. It rarely seemed to work out for him.
Especially since the adults weren't sharing information back. He looked up at Professor Lupin, who didn't seem at all surprised by the revelation that Sirius was an animagus. Why hadn't he mentioned that, if he legitimately thought Sirius was a murderer? And if he was still friends with Sirius, why hadn't he mentioned to Harry that the man was probably innocent?
What else did Lupin know?
He quietly caught the rest of his friends up on the events of the afternoon as he ate, not at all surprised that they already had heard most of it from Lavender (surprisingly, without much embellishment). As the dessert was cleared, he asked Dean to cover for him and slipped away in the crowd, letting his invisibility cloak drape over him as he rushed toward the back hallway where he was pretty sure the teachers exited the great hall. He managed to get there in time to see Lupin heading off with a bit of a quick-step, seemingly hesitant to be interviewed by Dumbledore. Harry caught Snape stage whispering acidly, "You must be thrilled," and swirling his black robes to stalk off toward the dungeons before Lupin could rebut.
Lupin just rolled his eyes and kept trudging toward his room, unaware of the invisible thirteen-year-old following him.
Harry would never have guessed where the professor's bedroom was, so it was good that he'd followed him. It was on the third floor, not far from the forbidden corridor that had held the convergence in Harry's first year, and it seemed like it was on the outer wall of the building. The door opened to Lupin's touch, and Harry could see that the room was small, but featured a large window that overlooked the lake.
Before he could enter and close the door, Harry allowed his cloak to return to its hidden scarf configuration, becoming visible, and saying, "We need to talk."
Lupin didn't jump, but did turn, quickly working out, "Of course you have the cloak. Yeah. Alright. Come in, I guess."
The room was even more spartan than Lupin's classroom. There were no personal effects visible, other than possibly books. He had a small table set up with a potions lab and a standard Earth spiral-bound notebook as if he was experimenting. Several chemistry and potions books from the library were stacked on the edge of the table, as well as a few other borrowed tomes on the bedside table.
Wait, perhaps there was one personal effect. Next to the books was a picture that looked like it was just a color printing on white paper of some kind of article. Harry could make out a bit of black text surrounding the photo of a dark-haired woman in a lab coat, in front of a blackboard full of chalked equations.
"Girlfriend?" Harry asked.
"It's complicated," Lupin said, sitting down on his bed, turning the photo face down, and gesturing at the stool in front of the makeshift potions lab. "I could… make some tea, I guess?" he frowned, looking at a battered teapot at the back of the lab, unsure of the etiquette required when a student invaded his bedroom.
"No thanks," Harry shook his head, taking the stool. "You were friends with Sirius. And my dad."
"Yeah," Lupin nodded. "Hold on. I may need a top up for this conversation." He reached into a robe pocket and pulled out a vial of blue potion, and Harry caught a whiff of peppermint as Lupin opened it and took a swig. His eyes unfocused slightly and he stowed the rest of the potion before saying, "Okay, go on."
"Did you know that Sirius was innocent? Did you know he could turn into a dog? Why didn't you tell anyone?" Harry demanded, a little confused by the potion use.
"Uh, maybe? And yeah. And because I'm not a snitch," Lupin gave a slight grin. "Why don't I just give you the summary? It's been a long time coming, I guess." Harry nodded, so the professor continued, "I went to school here, but I'm not a wizard. I have a… condition… that made this the safest place for me to go to school and try to get it treated."
Harry interrupted, "Do potions work on you if you're from Earth and not magical?"
Lupin nodded, "Not well. Severus has to brew them up extra strong. Anyway, James and Sirius were two of my friends while I was here. When my condition… flares up… I'm not safe to be around people. But it's much less dangerous to animals. Which they figured out, so they became animagi so they could keep me company when I was having a bad day."
"My dad was an animagus?" Harry asked.
Lupin nodded, "Stag. I think they did it as much to see if they could as to help me, though I appreciated it. But I went back to Earth for college and grad school, and I lost touch with them. I think the last letter I got was your birth announcement. Then nothing until Dumbledore contacted me a few months ago to ask me to teach. Guess he mostly wanted me because of Sirius escaping, but I didn't know anything about that. Until now, I guess."
"Why didn't you tell them that he could transform?"
"Like I said… I was half convinced he'd probably been framed or something. Couldn't see him betraying your parents or killing Peter. I figured he'd need that secret to get somewhere safe." Lupin sighed and grumbled, "It was stupid for him to come back here. There were so many places he could have gone that they'd never find him. But I guess I've done dumber stuff." He sent a stray glance back at the face-down photo, probably not even realizing it.
"Yeah," Harry nodded, calming down a little. "I didn't want to tell people about it either, but Parvati told everybody. So you think he's innocent? He says Peter Pettigrew framed him."
That got a raised eyebrow from Lupin, who scoffed, "Peter? That… well, I guess he was always kind of a shifty kid, and Sirius would have known him better as an adult. I'd believe it was him before it was Sirius, for sure." He gave it a beat and admitted, "You'll never find him. He's had over a decade to go into hiding. If nobody's seen him since then, he could be anywhere. On any planet."
"Just like Sirius could have gone anywhere but Hogwarts?"
"Huh. That would be so stupid if they both came here." Lupin sighed. "But I guess maybe none of them would think to leave. Not even Lily would leave. They were convinced that they wouldn't be any safer on Earth, and at least here they'd have their wands. Part of why I'm teaching this defense course is just to try to break you all of the idea that you just have to stand and fight. Most of the time all that does is get more people hurt."
"What could my mom turn into?" Harry checked.
He shook his head, "Unless she figured it out after Hogwarts, nothing. She wasn't part of the group until senior year, though we were friends before then. She didn't really get along with your dad until he grew up a little."
Harry smiled, "I'd like to know more about her? Aunt Pepper really only knows about dad."
"Pepper? Is that Virginia?" Lupin blinked a bit and put that together. "Pepper Potts? James' sister is the CEO of Stark Industries?"
Harry shrugged and looked down a little guiltily. "Yeah. And she's dating Tony now…" he trailed off before pointing out more about his celebrity life on Earth.
"Good for them. I saw that something happened this summer at the Stark Expo, but I was a little distracted." Lupin said, "I'm sorry I never looked you up. If I'd know you were just in, what, LA? I could have come by. Well, at least when you were little. Maybe it would have even changed some things for me."
Harry almost offered that he could come by when he was back on Earth, but didn't really feel that comfortable befriending his parents' estranged schoolmate at this point. In the lull of conversation, he finally remembered the thought he'd had earlier, and asked, "Was Peter an animagus?"
"Yeah," Lupin nodded, catching on that it might be relevant if Peter wasn't actually dead. "A gray rat."
"'Never trust a rat!' That's what Sirius kept saying!" Harry put it together. "That really would make it a lot easier for him to hide, wouldn't it? We'd never find a…"
"What?" Lupin checked, as Harry was making a whole series of faces of surprise, disbelief, consideration, and disgust.
"Scabbers," Harry said, standing up. "Ron has a pet gray rat. I think his family has had it since Percy was little."
"That's a long time for a rat, but why would Peter hide as a pet rat? As the pet of friends of you and Dumbledore?"
"Because my life is dumb?" Harry threw up his hands. "Would you recognize him? We can go get him right now!"
Lupin, especially under whatever potion he'd been drinking, wasn't in the hurry that Harry had hoped. Maybe it was just because he was old. What seemed like an interminable amount of time later waiting for the professor to make it to the seventh floor, they passed into the Gryffindor dorm. "Oh, hey, I'm still on the wards. That's cool," Lupin observed, as he was able to pass through the illusory painting.
The kids still in the common room were surprised to see an excited Harry leading an adult into the dorm. Over in the corner, Oliver Wood and Alexis Marie, the prefect, quickly stopped making out and tried to look like they hadn't been. Lupin pretended not to notice, but had a wan smile for memories of his own youth.
"Where's Scabbers?" Harry demanded of Ron, as he rushed into their room as the other boys were getting ready for bed.
"Finally ready to pick on someone your own size?" Ron asked, snidely.
"It's not like– just– is he in his cage or not?" Harry struggled not to deal with that fight right then.
"You know he likes to get a little exercise before bed," Ron leaned down to look for the rat, not sure why Harry suddenly cared about his pet. "But, actually… I don't think I've seen him since this morning… Oh, no! He's not here! Where is he!" He rushed up into Harry's face just as Lupin was getting to the door and demanded, "What'd you do with my rat?!"
"Rat's suddenly missing," Harry explained to Lupin, turning away from Ron (which didn't make Ron any less angry).
"Could have gotten eaten," Lupin played devil's advocate. "I noticed one of your friends on the train has a big orange cat?"
"Crookshanks ate my rat?!" Ron yelled. "Of course he did. He's been after poor Scabbers for months!"
Harry, still ignoring Ron's breakdown, said, "Scabbers survived Ron's whole life and then conveniently goes missing just before we might start looking for rats?"
"Why are we looking for the rat?" Dean asked.
"Peter Pettigrew could turn into a rat, just like Sirius can turn into a dog," Harry explained. "He might have faked his death."
Neville was the fastest on the uptake and said, "You mean we've been sleeping in the same room as a grown man for two years?"
"Maybe. Probably. I don't know," Harry said.
"Least we don' dress in front o' it," Seamus observed, and Ron went even redder, realizing all the times he'd been naked in his bedroom at home.
"You've never changed in the room when we weren't in here?" Dean countered. "But the rat was just in his cage on Ron's dresser?" Everyone's eyes widened at that.
Lupin pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to calm them all down. "It's probably just a rat. But I'll go talk to the headmaster. Let us know if he turns up." With that, he left the five teens to have their meltdown without him.
With the ups and downs they'd had all day, however, the hormonal teen argument didn't quite catalyze. Everyone just stood and looked at one another for a minute, then Ron declared, "Today was the worst," and went to bed.
Things didn't really get any better over the next week.
Though they noticed a bunch more magical, nonlethal rat trap glyphs set up around the school (runes class had gotten them to the point they could recognize them, if not make them), there was no general announcement about Pettigrew. Harry was getting increasingly frustrated that the chance to catch him and prove Sirius innocent was probably slipping them by: they should have done a massive search of the school, Hogsmeade, and the surrounding area before the rat had time to escape.
Similarly, there was no big announcement that Sirius was innocent. No pardon from the Ministry, admitting that they may have made a mistake. For all Harry knew, Ronan's guard could be furiously tearing up the area looking for Sirius, who'd be a lot easier to catch than a rat. And what little bad experience he'd had with the Minister almost arresting Hagrid to be seen "doing something," Harry was certain enough that there would be Ministry goons as soon as they could be organized to show up.
Socially, things were extremely tense. Neither Parvati nor Harry saw any reason to apologize to one another, Lavender had sided with Ron like she and Harry had never dated, and the rest of the girls of the study group basically felt like they had to remain at least neutral in the conflict (Hermione shared a room with Parvati, Padma was her sister, Ginny was Ron's sister, and Luna claimed she would rather observe the conflict with her journalistic integrity intact). Seamus obviously chose Ron, but thought the whole thing was stupid. At least Dean and Neville seemed basically on Harry's side, but none of the boys wanted to see their bedroom turn into a giant zone of drama so weren't making it into a war or anything.
And then, the week flashing by in a haze of simmering resentment, it was the next weekend and time for the quidditch match.
The first match of the year was usually Gryffindor vs. Slytherin. But Draco, still playing up his hippogriff injury, had gotten it switched around so he could recover. (Not at all surprisingly, he'd completely gotten away with attacking Harry and Parvati the previous weekend.) So on that heavily-overcast Sunday, Gryffindor was up against Hufflepuff. Their new seeker, Prefect Cedric Diggory, seemed like an alright guy, but Wood was worried he was really talented.
Harry wouldn't find out personally, of course, since he was only there as an alternate. This would be Ginny Weasley's first actual match, and Harry had loaned her his Nimbus-made broom so she would have one less worry (the Weasleys weren't able to afford the best brooms). That left Ron and Harry stuck together in the Gryffindor team box, suited up and waiting to see if they were needed but not expecting to do anything but watch.
As the weather got darker and darker, and rain started to drip upon the miserable-looking players and audience, Ron broke first. This was his first access to Harry as a captive audience all week, without friends to interfere. "You don't think much of me, do you?" he asked.
"Look, I'm sorry, okay?" Harry said, having realized that he probably was in the wrong on that one. "It just popped in my head as a funny way to put Draco down, but I didn't mean it."
"You did, though," Ron insisted. "Or it wouldn't have just popped in your head. We were supposed to be the Warriors Five! Maybe the Warriors Eight if you include the girls. And, fine, maybe you're Thor, and we're just your companions?" He waved off Harry's attempt as self-deprecation, saying, "I'm man enough to admit you're more epic than me. But the thing is, you don't even think the rest of us are good enough to even be your—what do you call 'em on Midgard? Sidekicks! Except maybe Dean."
Harry almost popped back with a simple denial, but a rumble of thunder in the sky stopped him long enough to think through and try, "I feel like if I said, 'No, Ron, I definitely think you're my sidekick,' that still wouldn't make you feel better."
"Feels better than being told to go play with Malfoy like we're little kids that are annoying you," Ron grumbled. "You didn't even take me to Niflheim! I would have helped you fight the serpent!"
"We thought you were mind controlled!" Harry insisted. "Neville could have gotten to you at any time, and you took me to the book that time in the bathroom. We didn't know who to trust."
"And if you were sure I hadn't been, you'd have taken me?"
Harry could have easily said that he would. And maybe that would have mollified Ron. But as the rain began to pelt down (the team box wasn't any more covered than anyone else, and they were getting soaked), and somehow all his darkest impulses were bubbling to the surface, he felt like it was a great time for the brutal honesty that Parvati evangelized for. "You know what? No."
Ron had also been expecting to get the simple conciliatory answer and was gobsmacked. All he could think to ask was a slightly pitiful, "Why?" His voice cracked as he asked it.
"You don't practice, Ron!" Harry yelled over the sound of the howling wind of the storm, gesticulating to make his point. "When Dean, Hermione, and I are out every spare moment we get practicing martial arts, swordfighting, and wandless magic, you're inside with Seamus playing chess or cards. You barely even practice magic with your wand."
"I'm out here, practicing quidditch!" Ron insisted.
"I still managed to practice all that stuff when I was primary on the team," Harry scoffed, inadvisably turning that knife. "And how is being good at being keeper going to make you useful in a fight against a giant snake on a planet where your wand doesn't work?"
"Tactics and strategy!" Ron yelled back. "Bet you were just running around without a plan, hoping that your skill would get you through. Total seeker mindset! Maybe you'd do better if you had someone to watch your back and call the plays. It worked against the trolls, right? Both times!"
"Are you going to hang back and call the plays?" Harry said in disbelief. "Or are you going to rush in thinking you're the hero of the story and get someone hurt trying to save you? Or get yourself eaten by a giant snake and then your family is like, 'We hate you Harry. Ron wouldn't have died if you hadn't convinced him to come with you.'"
"That's not up to you!" A particularly-timely lightning strike really underscored Ron's point. "You aren't responsible for everyone else. If I choose to fight for something I believe in, that's my decision. If you spend forever cutting people out because you're afraid you're going to get blamed if they get hurt, then you're going to wind up alone." It was Ron's turn to twist the knife, "Just like you cut out Parvati the first time she did something you didn't like."
Harry opened his mouth to try to rebut, but his head felt fuzzy and he wasn't able to come up with a good counterargument. He made a couple of sounds like he was trying to, but nothing was coming to him other than the faint sound of… a woman begging for his life?
"Can't argue against that, huh?" Ron yelled.
Finally, Harry found enough of his voice to say, "I really want to, but I think we need to worry about them right now."
Ron turned to see what Harry was pointing at. Through the driving rain, they could see dozens of baleful red eyes at head height. The Mindless Ones were marching onto the field.
Chapter 37: The Chase in the Rain
Chapter Text
The immense Romanesque amphitheater that was used as the quidditch arena was far too large for just the few-hundred Hogwarts students. Between the desire to be closer to the action and out of the way of downward-hit bludgers, the students and staff mostly filled out the very top couple of rows, leaving at least a dozen beneath them empty. Well, except for the team alternates—Harry and Ron—who were in a box that was just above the field. This was the same field that was rapidly filling with Mindless Ones that seemed to be entering the stadium from all of the passageways out.
Harry had learned that they were technically called "vomitoriums" which suddenly made a lot of sense—because he wanted to throw up.
In the dark and driving rain, it wasn't clear that everyone above had realized the danger yet, though it couldn't be long before they started to feel the mental effects of so many mind-draining beings. Even if they looked down from the game being played in the air, they might not be able to make out the creatures as more than faint red smears of light far below. But Harry and Ron could clearly make out their baleful gaze, turning in their direction.
"Why are they always looking at me?" Harry complained, his soaked quidditch armor squishing as he moved to try to escape up the stairs toward the rest of the Gryffindor.
"Maybe they think you know where Black is," Ron shouted, argument forgotten as his tactical mind went to work. He splashed along right behind Harry, need for heroism counteracted by realizing he wasn't going to be able to fight a crowd of brain-draining monsters by himself.
"But I don't have any idea where… damnit," Harry said, before spotting something that he probably should have much earlier: a large, soaking-wet, black dog crouched down in a row of seating about a third of the way up, deliberately out of line of sight of most of the rest of the crowd. He must have sneaked in at some point to watch the match.
Even through the dark and rain, Harry was pretty sure he saw a look of doggy chagrin on Sirius' face as he was spotted.
"Well come on!" Harry shouted at his godfather, not breaking stride and thoroughly done with his day.
As the two boys and the big black dog pounded wetly higher and higher up the stairs, that finally drew the attention of most of the rest of the students. First was the wonder what Harry and Ron were doing. Second was noticing the warned-about black dog running along with them. Only then did they notice the glowing red of Mindless One eyes pursuing them up from the ground, and start to feel the malaise of their presence.
The rest of the crowd began to notice when two-dozen students instantly began to unload magical attacks on the pursuing extradimensional entities, a fusillade of orange and teal light drawing the eye even across a stadium and in the rain.
Harry briefly thought they'd be able to stand and fight with their housemates, but his chanced glance back saw the spells merely glancing off of the slick gray skin of the creatures. And each time one was hit, it turned its crimson gaze upon the caster, and another shooter cried out and began to back away. The barrage of Gryffindor spells quickly dwindled, and the boys' reinforcements parted like the Red Sea before them and their pursuers.
Toward the Ravenclaw students, where they were sitting next to Padma and Luna, he could see his friends being shoved back by the retreating crowd no matter how much they might want to help. In the distance in the other direction, he could make out what he thought was Dumbledore's amplified voice shouting, but even if the headmaster could do something, it might be too late.
"Really wish I hadn't loaned Ginny my broom right about now," Harry groaned to himself. He yelled at Sirius, "We're going to have to jump. I think I can handle it."
The slack-jawed look of astonishment on the dog's face quickly turned into grudging resolve as Sirius realized that Harry was right. The Mindless Ones had them cornered against the edge of the stadium, and it might only be seconds before their mental malaise brought both of them down.
"Harry, I have my broom!" Ron shouted a reminder. Harry was honestly surprised the redhead was still with them, rather than having broken off with the rest of the crowd.
"Then try to catch us if this doesn't work!" Harry ordered, not having time to come up with a better plan for how two boys and a dog could ride a broom to safety.
Later, he'd kick himself for not telling Sirius to just transform back into a human, and take the broom. He had basically just decided, "Dogs can't ride brooms," and discarded any plans involving it. It probably had to do with the fact he was barely functional with the growing whine of terrible memories at the back of his head, ready to incapacitate him at any moment. And the plan he did have wasn't awful, just never tested.
"Jump!" Harry ordered Sirius, as the both of them clambered up the back wall of the stadium and looked down at the multi-story drop off the back side. Vanaheim architects hadn't thought much about safety railing.
Right before they leaped, Harry managed to get his wand trained on the ground below and made a complex gesture. Teal light began to lift from the soil, and he bent his will as they fell toward it into making it as robust as possible. He'd had a lot of practice using the cushioning charm to create crash mats on stone floors for their martial arts practice, but he'd never had to do anything like this. He was basically trying to make a full-sized stunt performer airbag that they could land on.
The principle was sound, at least… he was pretty sure.
Fortunately, he also remembered at the last second an online video he'd watched about how stuntpeople landed on said giant airbags, and managed to turn and tuck his head properly so he landed in a way that wouldn't break his legs or his neck. It turned out Sirius was also no stranger to falls, and hit the magical crash pad on his furry back with a bark of shocked excitement. Both of them rolled to the ground and managed to stagger upright. "I think I'm okay," Harry said, quickly checking. Sirius barked an agreement after getting his four feet in order.
"Mate, that was awesome!" Ron said from above them, where he was hovering on his broom.
"It's not over yet!" Harry warned Ron. Looking up at the boy on the broom, he'd seen the red glowing eyes begin to look over the edge of the stadium down at them. "Sirius! Run!"
As they scrambled along the wet turf toward the forest, Harry risked a glance behind and saw the eyes slowly descending, barely making out the gray-skinned figures in the driving rain as they fell at some graceful rate inconsiderate of Vanaheim's gravity. On the plus side, it gave them a bit more of a lead. On the minus, it meant they weren't smashing to pieces on the ground where Harry had canceled his cushioning spell.
"Did you… did you come to see me play quidditch?" Harry asked the dog as they ran.
Sirius barked in agreement, keeping pace with Harry though he could likely go faster.
"That was nice. Stupid. But nice," Harry admitted. He remembered to tell the man/dog, "We think Pettigrew is alive and here. Somewhere. He was pretending to be Ron's pet rat for years. He ran away when knew we were closing in. Maybe."
Sirius growled loudly enough to be heard over their splashing footfalls.
"So you need to catch him if he tries to get off the grounds. And don't kill him," Harry insisted. "You need him to prove you're innocent."
Sirius' ability to emote as a dog while they were running for their lives wasn't sufficient to indicate whether he'd agreed.
"Harry! They're catching you up!" Ron yelled from above. When Harry nearly tripped glancing back, he realized his roommate was right. Despite not looking like they were sprinting, the Mindless Ones were strangely fast.
"You're going to have to sprint!" Harry insisted to Sirius, already feeling dizzy and hearing the echoes of his mother's death at the edge of his hearing. "They want you, not me." Sirius seemed to be hesitating, so Harry screamed, "Go!"
The dog began to pull away, almost to the trees, so Harry slid to a stop and turned, for a moment considering facing down the horde but then thinking better of it. He began to run sideways, flicking bolts of energy toward but not at the spell-resistant creatures, hoping to draw their attention.
As his mother's dying voice started to drown out the sounds of the rain and his feet stopped falling correctly one in front of the other, he realized he had been partially successful. Slipping onto the grass and sliding in the mud, he made out several red eyes looming toward him.
"Not Harry. Not Harry. Please, not Harry!" his mother's voice echoed in his head.
"Stand aside," a man's booming and gruff voice ordered. "I've killed enough of your family today. The child has to die, but you do not."
"Please, no. Take me. Kill me instead," his mother insisted.
The loud voice sighed and agreed, "There is no instead. But very well. Perhaps the three of you will be happy together in the afterlife…"
Through the haze of memory, Harry could barely make out the glowing orbs of the Mindless Ones. Circling him. Far above, Ron's courage seemed to have finally failed him as well as he flew away. Would the Mindless Ones spirit Harry off to the Dark Dimension? Or would they just stand there, forcing him to relive his mother's death until he also went insane?
He wasn't expecting the ghosts of Dumbledore and Snape to appear next to him. The Mindless Ones hadn't expected it either.
As soon as the shining translucent forms of his professors appeared, the extradimensional beings began to stagger backwards, and the pressure on Harry's mind lessened. "You idiot," spectral Snape told him. "Thirty points from Gryffindor for unnecessary heroics!" He then reached a ghostly hand out for the Mindless One nearest, who struggled to avoid it.
Meanwhile, Dumbledore's wraith was pointing the shadow of his wand at them and insisting, "Depart. Or we shall make you depart."
Harry glanced over the way that Sirius had been running and thought he saw other spectral forms blocking the dog's pursuers.
To Harry's amazement, the gray-skinned entities slowly retreated, forming into an enormous group, and then twisted. One by one, blips of purple light heralded each of them returning to the Dark Dimension until there were none of them left.
"Harry. Can you make it back to the arena?" Dumbledore asked, as the wraith of Snape sneered.
"I, uh, think so, sir?" Harry agreed, still unclear what was happening.
"Then we shall await you there," Dumbledore agreed. Then he, Snape, and the others in the distance disappeared in a flicker of light, though Harry thought he saw an afterimage of each snapping back in the direction of the stadium.
He just hoped there weren't any stragglers still chasing Sirius.
"Need a lift?" Ron asked, returning from wherever he'd flown off to as the rain began to relent before Harry had slogged more than a quarter of the way back to the stadium across the sodden ground.
"Uh," Harry grunted. "Sure."
After he'd tiredly clambered up behind Ron and the two of them poked along, an ungainly pair of soaked teens on a secondhand broom, Ron said, "That was crazy."
"The teachers are ghosts, or something," Harry agreed.
"I reckon that was astral projection."
"Oh. Right," Harry nodded. "I wonder why that works on the Mindless Ones."
Ron shrugged.
"I'm… I'm sorry. For stuff," Harry said, too mentally exhausted to renew their argument.
"It's cool. I'm sorry I'm not trying harder to learn to fight," Ron allowed. "I do want to be a hero. Like you already are."
"You didn't go running away like that rest of Gryffindor," Harry gave him. "That's not nothing."
"Huh. You're right," Ron agreed.
By the time they flew over the wall and back onto the stone of the stadium, the crowd was cheering. Above, in the returning sunlight, he could make out Ginny doing a flyby while triumphantly holding the snitch. It actually took their housemates a moment to notice Harry and Ron after the Gryffindor victory, but then there were renewed cheers for the two third-years who'd clearly been chased by Mindless Ones and survived.
Those that had been nearby had also been impressed by Harry's death-defying leap off the back of the amphitheater.
As Harry and Ron tiredly joined the rest of the quidditch team in their changing and shower room beneath the stadium, it turned out most of the team hadn't even noticed the Mindless Ones. "I was just so focused on finding the snitch," Ginny apologized, while handing Harry his broom back.
"We knocked some bludgers their way," one of the twins suggested.
"But the bludgers didn't want any more of them than anyone else did," the second admitted.
"What's important's that we won," Wood said, then, as an afterthought, added, "An' that ye're both okay."
The rest of the study group was waiting for them as they exited, showered and much less sodden. "We were so worried!" Parvati said, still not sure about their relationship, "But we couldn't get to you."
"I know," Harry said. "I saw you on the other side of the crush."
"How'd you escape?" Dean asked as they started walking back to the school.
"A bunch of professors astral projected and forced them off," Harry explained. "I don't know why that worked. I think we need to find out a lot more about Mindless Ones. We might need to be able to do that."
"Yeah, right," Hermione huffed. "None of the Masters think we'll be ready to astrally project until we're adults. It's advanced magic. You have to be very good at meditation."
"I know," Harry shrugged. "But you saw how magic just splashed off of them? If not astral projection, we need to figure out something. I bet that's not the last we've seen of them."
Surprisingly, Harry didn't get called into the headmaster's office over his ill-advised attempt to help a fugitive escape. It seemed that everyone was so mad that the dark spirits had made their way onto Hogwarts grounds that nobody was paying too much attention to the details. He'd probably have been in more trouble if he hadn't done so well escaping. Even the teachers seemed impressed by his quick-thinking and skill at the cushioning charm.
But even with that spellcasting, the teachers didn't have any confidence they could teach him to meditate well enough to astrally project. He asked Flitwick. He asked McGonagall. He asked his elective teachers. He even asked Binns.
He didn't ask Snape. On top of all the existing rancor, the chemistry professor seemed to be quietly seething that they'd helped Sirius escape the Mindless Ones and that he'd been forced to help.
Running out of professors, the afternoon after chemistry class, Harry randomly asked Lupin, "Don't suppose you know anything about meditation, sir?"
"Meditation? Oh, yeah. Uh, a good bit," the defense professor said, as nonplussed by the question as Harry was by his answer.
"Could you… teach me?"
Lupin shrugged, "Sure. Trying to control your emotions so those gray jerks can't get hold of them so easily?"
Harry blinked. "That would probably help with that too, huh? No, I was trying to learn to astrally project."
"That I don't know about," Lupin admitted. "But if you need meditation for it, I'm your guy."
"Great," Harry said. "When?"
"Any evenings, I guess," Lupin shrugged. He didn't seem exactly eager, but it was probably the least he could do for his old friend's kid.
On the way back to the Gryffindor dorms after class, the group was surprised to see Dumbledore walking with the Ancient One down the great staircase, presumably from his office. Well, the kids from Earth were surprised. The ones from Vanaheim were mostly confused about who the bald woman was. "Ma'am!" Hermione said, doing a little half bow that the kids had been taught. The Ancient One didn't really require them to do it all the time, but this seemed like the right circumstance. That really confused the Vanir as to who this was. "Are you here to help with the Mindless Ones?"
"Such that I can, Ms. Granger," the Ancient One said, amused at the confusion of the other children and at Dumbledore stiffening in slight upset. None of the kids ever bowed to him. "I believe that we can improve the wards of the castle itself, but the grounds may prove too much of a challenge."
"Perhaps Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley can come with us?" Dumbledore suggested, not wanting to draw more of a crowd on the third floor landing. "We were going to examine the site of the attack, and your viewpoints may be helpful."
"I'll be around at least until after dinner," the Ancient One said, before any of the others could object to being left out.
"Oh, okay," Hermione allowed. "We can take your bags?" she offered to Ron and Harry, who nodded and handed over their books to be taken back to the dorm, then turned to accompany the two ancient mages out to the grounds.
Ron was frantically trying to figure out who this was from context, but was chuffed to be included.
As they were walking across the grounds, Harry couldn't contain his questions any more and started with, "Why are the Mindless Ones only showing up some times? Is it because Sirius is closer to so many people?"
"Well reasoned," the Ancient One said, before Dumbledore could answer, shooting him a slight smirk. "They do not see the same way as most beings, and can find his mind better when it is close to others. Though if he and those around him become more emotional, that might also make him visible, even if he is not on a packed train or at a sporting match. Darkness also makes it easier for the Dark Dimension to breach into this one."
"He can only come to quidditch matches in the future when it's a nice day, got it," Harry nodded. "Why does astral projection work against them? Is it because they're basically ghosts?"
Dumbledore was quicker to step in and answered, "Partially. It is also to do with their peculiar mental state. When you are in your own body, they can siphon your mind's energy. When you are nothing but mental energy, they have no anchor to draw upon, and no mental defenses of their own."
Ron had a question, asking, "If they prove that Black is innocent and that, well, that Scabbers is a person and betrayed him, will the Mindless Ones stop coming?"
"Perhaps," the Ancient One shrugged. "Azkaban truly is an awful solution, not designed for anyone to ever get out again."
"And we must prove beyond a doubt for the Minister to even try," the headmaster admitted. "I must commend you on your actions last year to keep Hagrid from being taken there, Mr. Potter. It truly was a short sighted attempt at politics."
"He wanted to be seen to be 'doing something,'" Harry basically snarled, still annoyed at Minister Fudge. "How'd that guy get elected, anyway?"
"Vanir politics leans heavily on the voices of the most powerful," Dumbledore explained. "And quite a few families retained their power that probably shouldn't after the war. Ah. Here is the site where they left." They'd reached the space between the forest and the stadium where they'd been chased.
After casting divination spells for a few minutes and asking Harry and Ron questions, the Ancient One said, "Too much time has passed. I can barely detect the breach. This means it's not in danger of reopening, but I cannot use it to determine if there are more protections that could be implemented. Perhaps if I'd gotten here sooner…"
Dumbledore said, "I believe we can at least come up with an item to alert you faster than an owl the next time. Even tie it into the wards so you're immediately alerted if they re-enter the grounds. Travel here from Midgard will remain slow, however, with the difficulty portalling into the region."
They considered and didn't seem to have an answer, so Harry asked, "Do you think you could portal somewhere that connects to the Chamber of Secrets? There were lots of night roads into there."
The Ancient One had heard most of the particulars of Harry's ordeal in the spring, though second- or third-hand from him mentioning it at Kamar-Taj. It was possible that she had even hoped for him to suggest it. She looked to see if the headmaster would shut the suggestion down cold.
"I'm not certain we should rely on a connection that requires Parseltongue to open," he said. "But I admit to being curious."
"I don't think it needed it to get out, just in," Harry shrugged. "Which is kind of a security flaw. But I guess nobody has come in that way for centuries who wasn't able to speak snake…"
"It bears looking into," she agreed. "What do you think, headmaster? Still feeling young enough for an adventure?" Harry had a moment of dissonance realizing that the Ancient One had probably looked the same age over Dumbledore's entire life. He wondered if she'd even known the school's founders.
"We're going to Niflheim?" Ron asked, excited. "I've been wanting to go!"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Weasley," Dumbledore corrected. "But I think that this trip should be limited to fully-trained wizards. Harry, himself, will remain in the school, simply opening the portal."
As much as Harry thought it might be neat to explore night roads with the headmaster and the Ancient One, he sighed in relief at the unexpected break. "As long as nobody throws me through this time," he argued. "You know, since me waiting outside was the plan the last time too."
"Duly noted," the Ancient One smiled her little mysterious smile. "Well, no time like the present?"
"Perhaps after supper," Dumbledore demurred. "In case this takes more than a few minutes."
"I'm never going to get to go on a proper adventure," Ron complained. But at least he was grousing to Harry about it, rather than blaming him for it. That felt like progress.
"I'm sure your time will come, Ron," Harry gave him a pat on the back. He just hoped the boy wouldn't get seriously injured or killed when it did.
Chapter 38: Wax and Wane
Chapter Text
The Ministry finally showed up with the full moon. It had been almost a whole month since the attack at the quidditch match, and was into December back on Earth. And still, Minister Fudge and his entourage came swanning into the great hall at dinnertime like conquering heroes. "Don't worry, children," the pompous man in the ridiculous bowler hat shouted from the dais with barely a by-your-leave from the headmaster, "now that we're here, we'll get Sirius Black arrested and back to prison, and then the wardens will have no further need to intrude."
Harry wanted to shout about Sirius' innocence, but what good would it do? This idiot had almost thrown Hagrid into Azkaban for even worse reasons. At least this time Lucius Malfoy hadn't come with him. Harry hoped Draco's father was still itchy from his last visit.
Lupin looked as annoyed as Harry felt. Managing to catch the defense instructor on the way out of the hall as the both left early, he noticed the man tossing back a huge draught of that glowing blue potion. "I could really use a meditation session tonight, sir," Harry said. They'd been making a lot of progress in the last few weeks, or at least Lupin had said Harry was. He was still having trouble quieting his mind, but he'd stopped falling asleep sitting up.
"Uh, yeah, I… I don't know if I'm going to be good company for that tonight, Harry," Lupin rubbed one hand through his hair while slipping the potion away with the other. His eyes were going slightly glassy, but there still seemed to be a lot of tension in his face. "Why don't you practice on your own and let me know how it goes?"
"Oh… okay," Harry said, a little confused. "See you in class tomorrow."
"Hope so," Lupin shrugged, nodding and wandering off.
Harry tried meditating by himself, but it was a lot harder without the professor's calm, soothing voice talking him through the centering exercises. And, the next morning, Lupin wasn't at breakfast. Fudge had helped himself to the professor's seat, having an animated conversation with Sprout about something that had her casting around for another professor to rescue her.
They had potions first thing on Thursday, and were surprised to find Gemma Farley, the senior Slytherin prefect, overseeing the class in place of Snape. "The professor is covering another class," she explained before they could ask, "but he says he expects everyone to give me the same respect due him. I will be reporting any disruptions." She looked warningly at the Gryffindor students. "I understand that we're doing an experiment with the toxicity of various natural poisons. As always, the antidotes cabinet is available, but I expect you to not kill yourselves on my watch."
For all her bluster, Farley was actually one of the nicer Slytherins, and the Gryffindors were on their best behavior: they'd honestly rather have her than Snape on any day. Even Neville managed to complete the class without any accidents; he was usually stressed enough to make some major mistake in any lab experiment with Snape breathing down his neck. But they were worried about what class Snape was in, if not his own.
They figured it out in the afternoon, when they found Snape in the defense classroom instead of Lupin (who had also missed lunch). "Excuse me, professor. Is Professor Lupin okay?" Susan Bones, the Hufflepuff, asked.
"He's indisposed, but shall likely be returned to you shortly. After all, he can't expect me to cover his classes indefinitely," the sallow-faced professor explained. He'd cast some kind of spell to black out the windows of the usually-calming classroom, making it much more like his preferred dungeons. "Now, third-years, what have you been covering in this class?" Hermione shot her hand up and Snape ignored her. At this point, it felt more like a battle of wills on Hermione's part than any remaining need to show off. She knew that Snape never called on her unless he had absolutely no choice. "Macmillan," he instead called on Ernie, also from Hufflepuff.
The boy explained, "We're on to how to keep our heads in a fight."
"Good enough," Snape said, sliding into his grandiose lecturing mode. "I wonder if anyone can tell me the story of the Midgardian hero, Cú Chulainn?" He seemed disappointed that the only hands up were Hermione's and Harry's. "Very well, Potter?"
"He had the Gae Bolg spear, and was trained by Scathach," Harry asserted. Admittedly, his research was entirely from mild curiosity about the terms in various roleplaying video games.
"Your Gaelic pronunciation is atrocious," Snape deadpanned. "But yes, the Gáe Bulg and Scáthach are both part of the myth." He pronounced them way differently than Harry had. "Anyone else?"
Seamus suddenly spouted out, remembering, "Don' refuse hospitality! Don' eat dog meat!"
"Two points from Gryffindor for speaking out of turn," Snape corrected, but admitted, "and yet, Finnegan is proving that he is at least Irish enough to remember a small part of the myth. The hero's end came at the hands of weaponizing conflicting gaesa," again, he gave the term a Gaelic twist that Harry wouldn't be able to match. "This is something all spellcasters need to be aware of: if you are suffering under mystical compulsions, those who know their limits can turn them against you. In Chulainn's situation, he would break his vows if he ever ate dog meat, or ever refused hospitality. And so when offered a meal of dog meat, he would have to break one or the other and suffer the consequences."
Harry was actually somewhat excited about the way the lecture was going. So far, none of their teachers had talked about that kind of spell, that D&D would term geas/quest : long term magical curses or compulsions.
He was immediately disappointed when Snape explained, "But, no, the key factor that I want to talk about is the ríastrad, a battle frenzy sometimes translated as 'warp spasms.' Perhaps the Vanir in the class have heard of the berserkergang?" He sighed at the hand that had shot into the air, but grudgingly said, "Yes, Brown."
"One of my ancestors was a berserker, sir," she explained. "They were Aesir and Vanir warriors that could summon a ferocious battle rage, giving them the strength of twenty regular warriors. But Odin forbade any more to be trained centuries ago."
"Quite," Snape agreed. "And for a similar reason as in the Ulster myths. When Cú Chulainn entered his battle frenzy, his very visage twisted under the effects of his rage, and he would slaughter any enemies before him… and any allies that didn't clear the area. That is the cautionary tale of relying on rage to help you in battle: you can wind up doing as much harm to your own friends as to your enemies, as the fury clouds your mind. When you are in a true battle, you must remain calm and in control."
What followed was actually a pretty informative lecture. For all that he seemed to hate the Gryffindors and Harry in particular, Snape was a gifted orator when he wanted to be. He seemed to have a wealth of stories from the last war about times that battles had swung one way or the other when someone lost their calm or was goaded into a risky attack. The lecture was littered throughout with barbs to make it clear that he thought that "Gryffindor courage" was just recklessness that got people killed.
As the class was about to be over, Snape added, "While Odin disbanded the berserkers ages ago, the stories do not end there. For homework: a three-page research essay on berserkers and similar rage curses in modern times. Dismissed."
"A three-page research essay?!" Ron complained as they were walking back to the dorm. "Doesn't he care that it's a Hogsmeade Sunday?"
"Well I think it's fascinating," Hermione disagreed. "If I understand correctly, it was a personal magical attainment to become a berserker, but if that kind of magic can then be passed on genetically… I'm heading to the library."
"Might as well. I think Luna and Padma wanted to meet there for our free period anyway," Harry agreed. The entirety of third year had the last period of Thursday free, as did the Ravenclaw second years. Unfortunately for the totality of the study group, Ginny had chemistry in the afternoons.
Which was probably for the best, since it was her month-and-a-half with Harry.
Whatever random method the girls had used to settle on the dating order had resulted in a Hogsmeade weekend that would be light on couples. Ginny had been matched with Harry and Luna with Ron, and both girls were too young to go. Meanwhile, Hermione and Parvati were on one of their breaks. That just left Dean with Lavender and Neville with Padma to actually have a date for the fair.
And that had its own difficulties.
Lavender was proving unhappy about giving up on dating Ron, despite the original agreement. And while Padma liked Neville okay, she didn't seem thrilled with him being her first date off of the bench. Neville was easygoing about it, but had found it really easy to date Luna (especially since there wasn't the pressure of going on an actual date at Hogsmeade). Harry gave the whole situation until Valentine's Day to totally self-destruct. He was still barely talking with Parvati after the mess they'd made.
Though it might not actually implode until the spring. That was when Ron was scheduled to date Hermione. Based on a few things the redhead had said, Harry got the impression he was way more into Hermione than he was into Lavender, despite how much fun he'd had dating her. Lavender might be very upset if, after the grand experiment, Ron wanted to date Hermione rather than her.
Honestly, Harry was starting to dream of the girls that he didn't spend hours every day with, since he could imagine that they'd be highly compatible (those fantasies were a lot easier, not knowing everything about someone). He knew she was in Slytherin and technically the enemy, but Daphne Greengrass in his arithmancy class was beautiful, smart, and not too mean (if a bit aloof). Wong's cousin Cho was gorgeous, and she was also a quidditch seeker (for all that he wasn't that into quidditch). Susan Bones was pretty and nice.
Harry really wasn't sure why he hadn't put his foot down harder about this whole business. Maybe he'd make an argument about it… probably after Christmas, so Ginny wouldn't be heartbroken that he was ditching out early on her turn.
Regardless, the research session before dinner went well enough, Harry dealt with yet another meal with Ginny sitting so close to him on the bench that she was just short of in his lap, and they had a decent fencing session after dinner. One thing about the month-previous blow-up with Ron: he had started to take the martial training seriously, and showed up more often than he didn't. Plus, playing with swords was fun. Harry wasn't actually sure whether his mood was better after a meditation session or a sparring session.
He even included what he thought was an interesting aside about battle, testosterone, and controlled anger in his essay. Which Lupin was there to accept on Friday afternoon.
"Uh, why are you handing me essays?" the professor asked.
"Professor Snape assigned them," Hermione explained. She'd written four pages.
"Is he going to grade them?" Lupin scoffed. "Like I told the other classes he gave homework to, it's not required." As Hermione's face fell and Ron and Seamus high-fived each other at work saved through procrastination, the professor said, "But I guess I'll look at these for extra credit?" Hermione beamed at him. Only Harry, Hermione, and Ernie Macmillan had actually turned one in, though Hermione had gotten Dean, Neville, and Lavender to at least start on theirs. Clearly, the rest of the class was planning to do the homework over the weekend (if at all).
Lupin glanced at the essays as if completely unaware of the topic and then rolled his eyes, placing them aside to grade. Harry figured it must have been yet another way of Snape making fun of Lupin. He resolved to get the professor to actually explain what James Potter and his friends had gotten up to that made Snape hate them all so much.
The next morning, they headed down to Hogsmeade again. Snow had fallen across the picturesque hamlet and surrounding woods, creating a sublime winter scene. It was the one time Harry regretted Colin Creevey not being around to take a picture, but the second-year wasn't able to come on the shopping trip any more than Ginny and Luna were. The pack of Gryffindors and Padma migrated through the stalls for a while before Harry suggested, "Hermione and I are going to go off to look for gifts for the rest of you."
They weren't, really, but the price of Dean and Hermione covering for Harry's morning mission was that Hermione got to come to meet Sirius Black and develop her own opinion. After a brief stop to make a purchase, the two of them managed to break line of sight to the crowds, duck behind a stall, and Harry let down his invisibility cloak and managed to get Hermione under as well.
With all the various dating and hormones in the group, holding her tight so they could both be invisible was a weird experience. Ginny would probably be upset if she found out about the excursion.
Trying to stick to areas where the snow had already been cleared so their tracks wouldn't be a dead giveaway, it took a while to get out of the village and into the treeline. Not seeing anyone else wanting to brave the trail to the Roaring Rampart on the snowy day, he let the cloak return to its mode as a scarf (which was actually quite helpful in the winter chill) and they walked into the woods. Periodically he'd call out, "Sirius? It's Harry," trusting in canine hearing and hoping Sirius had the same plan to meet.
Finally, midway up the trail, he spotted the big black dog bounding through the trees. With one final leap, Sirius transformed back into human form to land on the trail. "Pup! New girlfriend?" he said in greeting, noticing Hermione.
"Uh, not until next month," Harry said, which had Sirius cocking his head in confusion. "It's complicated. This is Hermione. Hermione, Sirius Black."
"Pleased to meet you," she nodded, regarding Sirius warily. He stank, and was still indistinguishable from a hobo. But he looked better than he had when they'd first met. He had less madness in his eyes, and he must have found a knife or something, since his beard and hair were hacked shorter than they'd been previously. He even seemed to have winter-weight clothing rather than the rags he'd had on previously.
Sirius explained, "I think Hagrid's been leaving me supplies out by the helhest pen. And the horsemen don't seem to be looking for me too hard. Guess you convinced the old man I'm innocent?"
Harry nodded, "But the Minister is in town, and he doesn't seem to be willing to believe me. Watch out for his people." Sirius nodded in appreciation of the warning. "Any luck finding the rat?"
The animagus shook his head, dirty hair rasping over his shoulders. "Unless I've forgotten his scent, I don't think he's been anywhere I can get to. Peter was never woods-wise, so I doubt he'd try to flee cross-country. He's probably still in the castle, stealing food from the kitchens. He might try to sneak onto the train when the students leave. Maybe you could search it?"
Hermione shook her head, "It's not like a rat couldn't slip in with the Hogsmeade traders or the Minister's entourage. We can't search everything, even if the Ministry was on our side. We need some kind of tracking spell, but I assume the headmaster already tried that."
"Animagi in their animal forms are notoriously hard to track," Sirius agreed, fidgeting nervously. "Too bad we lost the map…"
"Map?" Harry asked.
"Your father's and my greatest prank," he explained. "As a runes project, we made an enchanted map that showed the school. We managed to slip in and bind it to the school's ward keystone. So it basically used the magic of the school to constantly cast a tracking spell on everyone. Made it really easy to avoid prefects and staff when we were out at night."
"What happened to it?" Harry checked.
"Peter lost it," Sirius' eyes darkened, "Maybe intentionally, if he was a traitor even then. He borrowed it to slip out one night and got caught by Filch. It got confiscated. Maybe destroyed."
"But if we could find it?" Harry checked.
Sirius considered, "I don't know if the enchantment would hold up. Might be hit or miss even if it's still working. And difficult to track an animagus… but it would be a lot easier to watch for his name to pop up than to constantly try to track him and hope you get a hit."
"Even if we can't find it, we could suggest that the headmaster cast something similar," Hermione nodded. "Though I wonder why he hasn't thought of it before?"
Harry rolled his eyes, "Maybe he just figures this is my quest this year, so doesn't want to do it for me." To Sirius' questioning look, he explained, "It's a whole thing. My aunt and I think that he's making sure I have lots of adventures to train me up for something."
That got a nod. "With the war on, we kind of felt the same. The old man seemed to encourage us to get into fights with the baby Death Eaters over in Slytherin. Manipulative old goat. But he's on the right side, at least." Sirius cocked his head and said, "I think someone might be coming."
Harry thrust the bag of food they'd purchased on the way out of town at the man, "Merry Christmas, Sirius. It's just some food. I didn't know that Hagrid was helping you."
He was still tearing up, but limited himself to a manly slap on Harry's shoulder rather than going for the stinky hug. "And I didn't even get you anything. I was going to try to order you a broom, but it didn't seem like you were really playing…"
Harry shrugged, "I did last year. But the training took too much time from all the other stuff. It's fine, you don't need to get me anything."
"I'll think of something. Have a happy Yule," Sirius nodded at both of them, then transformed back into a dog and bounded off into the woods.
Harry once again wrapped himself and Hermione in the cloak as they passed Jake Flinton and Christopher Flack, two of the seventh-year prefects, laughing and holding hands on their way up the trail. "Just in time," Harry whispered about their near miss being caught by the seniors.
"It's about time," Hermione corrected. "I've seen those two on prefect rounds for the last two years."
"You… uh…" Harry said, aware again of the girl he had wrapped in his arms and his cloak, "...you know people probably figure that about us, right?"
"Which is why the invisibility," she agreed, primly, but didn't pull away.
As they once again entered town and were looking for a safe place to become visible, Harry couldn't help but spy Minister Fudge, Lucius Malfoy, and Rector McGonagall entering the Three Broomsticks inn together. "I'm going to see what that's about," he said. He was particularly annoyed that Malfoy had finally shown up, rather than keeping his itchy fingers out of Hogwarts business.
"Be careful," Hermione sighed, as he let go of her and moved off with the cloak, returning her to visibility behind a market stall. With a flicker of the cloak closing back up around him, he was gone.
Inside, Mr. Malfoy was talking to the lady that ran the bar, Madam Rosmerta, about a private room. "I already set up Room Five for you, upstairs," she told him as Harry slipped into earshot. The common room of the inn was packed with students at tables and booths, slugging back buttermead and eating bar snacks. Hurrying ahead, he found the room so labeled up the stairs, and seriously thought about just being invisible in the corner to overhear what they were talking about.
But, he realized, with McGonagall there, he had less to worry about with Malfoy attacking him. He decided it was time to give the Minister a piece of his mind.
Said portly wizard in the green bowler hat was saying as he walked in, "...simply a case of legal precedent, Minerva. Oh! I thought this room was ours."
"So it is, Minister," Harry agreed, gesturing to the table the innkeeper had set up in lieu of beds in the room, where he was already seated and visible.
"Quite. Irregular," Malfoy observed, using his cane to pull out the chair opposite Harry and gracefully take a seat.
"We didn't expect you here, Potter," McGonagall raised an eyebrow while taking her own seat next to him.
"Indeed," the Minister agreed, sitting opposite the rector. "To what do we owe the visit, Harry? May I call you Harry?"
"It depends on what you plan to do about the Sirius Black situation," Harry countered.
"Ah. I believe I've heard that you believe he's innocent," Fudge sighed, clearly politically astute enough to have realized what this meeting was probably about.
"What's easier to believe, sir?" Harry asked, having had barely a minute to put together the exact argument, but having been thinking about it for over a month. "An auror publicly murdered one of his friends and a bunch of civilians then returned to the scene of the crime? Or that friend—a rat animagus—faked his death and framed that auror?"
"You're young yet," Fudge began, "and clearly you wouldn't understand that we did have a trial–"
"Did Sirius speak at the trial?" Harry interrupted. "Or was he traumatized that two of his best friends were dead and another had betrayed him?" It was a good word, traumatized. Harry was thankful for Aunt Pepper for introducing him to it. "Did you interview Rubeus Hagrid? Did he tell you that Sirius found me in the ruins as a baby and handed me over?"
That all, indeed, seemed to be news to Fudge, who unconsciously glanced at Malfoy, who smoothly said, "I'm sure the trial was proper and thorough. Vanir justice can clearly differentiate between those who were coerced or bewitched, and those truly guilty." The implication of himself as an example was obvious, if not the kind of proof he believed it to be. "More importantly, Black's trial can be reviewed once he is back in Azkaban and Mindless Ones are no longer terrorizing Vanaheim. Minister, if I'm not mistaken, there are treaties for having someone released from custody, but not for calling off pursuit of escapees, yes?"
"Ah, yes," Fudge nodded, looking back at Harry. "Lucius has the right of it. Even were we to examine new evidence and commute Black's sentence, he must be in custody. The Mindless Ones are… well… mindless." He seemed to have a thought about a way around that, admitting," Or, I suppose, if you found the true culprit to replace Black with in Azkaban. But, as that's unlikely, if I promised you that the courts would review the case, would you ask Black to turn himself in? You know, if you happen to speak with him?"
It took all of Harry's willpower to not roll his eyes, especially with the smirk Malfoy thought he was keeping off his face but which was twitching the corner of his mouth. Instead, he simply said, "I'll see what I can do, Minister. Thank you for your time. I'll leave you to your meeting?"
"Ah, yes. Well then. Good to meet you in person, Harry," the Minister grated, standing to allow Harry to leave the room.
"Five points," McGonagall mouthed to him with an approving nod as he left the room.
As he caught up to his friends at the candy stall, he informed Hermione, "The Ministry isn't going to help unless we can hand them Pettigrew. We need to find that map…"
Chapter 39: The Truth about Santa
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Phil Coulson had not been expecting a call at six in the evening, December 23rd. While SHIELD wasn't really an organization where you could expect holiday time, and it wasn't like he had family outside of the job, things that time of year were usually at least slow. International threats liked to take it easy around Christmas as much as anyone. He'd been out of the office, heading back to his job-provided apartment, and trying to make up his mind about whether he'd grab takeout or have something delivered.
And then he got the call that the NYPD had picked up something at the New York Public Library that was right up his alley. As he walked past the famous lions on an evening that was just dropping below freezing, he was quietly hoping for ectoplasm on the card catalogs and maybe a full-torso apparition.
"Coulson. SHIELD. I was invited," he showed his badge to the uniform on duty, who peered at it before deciding that it looked sufficiently official. SHIELD still wasn't as well known as the organizations with only three-letter abbreviations, but the rank-and-file was at least vaguely aware of them.
"It's a weird one. You're the ones that do weird, right?" the officer asked. The guy whose name tag said "Saunders" was short and dark haired. He radioed ahead to his supervisor, "Got the guy from SHIELD here." After a return squawk from the radio, he pointed across the lobby and said, "They've got everybody in the exhibition hall."
Coulson nodded and headed across the floor, his way cleared through the interested citizens by several officers controlling access. He could see even more officers spread out inside the big room for exhibits. A uniformed sergeant, stockier, older, and with thinning hair met him at the door. His own tag said "Silva." "What can you tell me, sergeant?" Coulson asked, peering through the door, where he could make out at least half a dozen people in Santa Claus costumes cuffed and seated in a line against the wall, officers warily watching them. It looked like the room had acquired a ton of the historical technology exhibits that should have still been at the Stark Expo, if it hadn't been turned into a disaster area over the summer.
"Some real Home Alone shit," Silva opined. "Santas attacking kids in the underground stacks, and getting knocked out and tied up. By the kids."
"Kids?" Coulson's eyes widened and he stepped far enough in to look at the rest of the room. If the briefings were right about who was in the city for the holidays…
Yep, there was Harry Potts and two of his school friends, off to the side of the hall, not in handcuffs, but clearly also not free to leave. The boy noticed him after a moment, said something to the other two, and they grinned and waved at him.
Coulson was sure he was going to regret not getting dinner before this.
"Have you debriefed them yet?" he asked the sergeant.
"Said they should probably only talk to SHIELD. They're why we thought to call you so early," Silva shrugged. "Sounds like you've run into this group before?"
"Officially, he's not Iron Man's sidekick," Coulson deadpanned, after giving up on trying to succinctly explain their actual relationship. "Yeah. Trouble seems to find him. I'll do the debrief. Thanks, sergeant."
Silva motioned to the officers guarding the kids to pull back as Coulson walked over. They'd been corralled near Howard Stark's early prototype flying car. Coulson grinned slightly to himself about his own, better piece of memorabilia. "Phil!" Harry said as he walked over into earshot. "I'm glad they sent someone I know."
"More of a chance than you'd expect," he nodded. "I handle a lot of the weird stuff."
"Like hammers in the desert," Harry nodded with a shrewd look. Coulson gave nothing away, so the kid continued, "These are my friends Dean and Hermione. Dean lives here—in New York City, not at the library—and Hermione's over with her parents for the holidays."
Coulson nodded at the two kids. He'd gotten a thorough briefing on Dean Thomas from the paintball excursion that Romanoff and Barton had been on. He was less familiar with the girl, though she'd been flagged as a close contact. He was pretty sure her last name was Granger, and that she was a British national. "Should we have a solicitor?" she asked, her accent removing all doubt.
"Only if you're suspects instead of witnesses," he informed her. Besides a quick glance at one another to confirm nobody was planning on saying anything that made them sound like suspects, none of them followed up on that. "Okay, what can you tell me about what happened?"
Again, another of those quick looks, which clearly elected Harry Potts as spokesman for the group. Coulson filed away that the three were tight enough to have that level of silent communication. Harry leaned back against the hover-car and began, "I was a little surprised that we were all going to be in New York for Christmas…"
It had been a pretty tense semester at school. Between rat and relationship problems, Harry was excited to get a few weeks off. Because ground had finally been broken on Stark Tower in Manhattan, Tony and Aunt Pepper were spending a lot more time in New York, so had figured it would be fun to be there for Christmas. And since Dean already lived in town, Harry's aunt had gone ahead and invited his other friends' families.
It was probably better that the Patils hadn't felt comfortable with it. Things were still a little tense with Parvati. It had turned out to be hard, dating the school's biggest gossip…
Granger interrupted, "Harry, I don't think Agent Coulson wants to hear about our relationship drama, no matter how dramatic it's turning out to be."
"I've met teenagers before," Coulson nodded. "So you came to New York with Mr. Thomas, Ms. Granger, and Ms. Granger's parents?"
"How did you…" Potts said, realizing he knew the girl's last name. "Oh, right, SHIELD. Yeah, everyone got to come over on Tony's jet, after we got back to London…"
It turned out Tony had gone ahead and long-term rented the top two floors of one of the hotels right off of Grand Central Station overlooking the Stark Tower construction site behind it. He had basically everyone at the company that was involved in the project and didn't already live in the city put up at the hotel. Tony claimed it was cheaper than arranging a bunch of short-term apartments that were convenient and secure. Harry figured it wasn't actually that cost-effective, but Aunt Pepper wasn't complaining, so they at least must have gotten some deal on it. Regardless, they got to spend the winter break in a swanky hotel with an excellent view and access to a bunch of places. A bunch.
For all that London was at least as dense, Hermione was as much a suburb kid as Harry was. And Dean really hadn't gotten to spend that much time just getting to do what he wanted in central Manhattan. But very quickly the parents had gotten exhausted trying to keep up with them and decided that three teenagers ought to be able to wander around the city on their own recognizance, as long as they were ready to press the panic buttons on their phones.
"I'm assuming you didn't use the panic buttons before dealing with these Santas?" Coulson checked, already mentally drafting his report for both Fury and Ms. Potts.
"Turns out all the stone downstairs plus the metal shelves really messes up cell service," Potts nodded. "We texted them we were okay when we got out. But I'll get there. Anyway…"
They'd spent as much time in the big nearby comics shop as Hermione could stand. They'd been up and down the Chrysler building. They'd been all over Grand Central. They'd even become regulars at the bistro under the Park Avenue Viaduct. But they'd taken until the 23rd to finally devote a day to going to the famous public library.
Hermione was sure that she'd need at least a day.
They'd done the reading room. They'd visited the exhibits. They'd consoled Hermione that she didn't actually have a New York address to get a library card so she could check anything out. Over the course of the day, they'd gradually become suspicious of all the people they saw dressed in Santa Claus costumes funneling through the lobby as the trio passed from one point of interest to another. They were never going upstairs, only down, into the stacks. Hermione had already been informed the public was only allowed into the stacks on special tours, which she'd already missed for the day.
It was Dean that clocked that the Santas all seemed very aware of the security cameras, moving for the staff-only hallway while they'd be in a blindspot of the rotating devices. There was a weird way of loitering and looking, when you were trying to avoid video. Not that Dean had ever done it, of course, but some of his cousins had mentioned how to do it, and it was obvious when you were seeing it. Of course.
But maybe it was a special Santa performance? There was probably no need to bother the library staff telling them wild stories about a team of Jolly Old Saints Nick invading the building. They'd almost certainly be told it was nothing. They were often told that it was nothing. And Hermione was desperate to get a look.
"I wasn't desperate!" Granger insisted. "While, yes, I do consider it slightly unfair that the bulk of the library's collection is only able to be requested, not perused, I understand that this is a logical way of going about it with one of the busiest libraries in the world with one of the most valuable collections. You both manipulated me! I was manipulated. Don't make me out to be the instigator here!" she pouted.
Coulson nodded, "So Ms. Granger was convinced it was okay to investigate by yourselves rather than telling the staff because it would mean getting a look at the book stacks?"
"Uh. Pretty much?" Potts admitted.
Honestly, Coulson was really starting to doubt Romanoff's theory that these kids were at a secret MI-6 school. Thomas was the most composed of the three, but nothing about his background indicated why he'd be invited to such an academy, unless his unknown biological father happened to be a former double-oh. Granger was clearly bookish and brilliant, but even the analysts Coulson had met in most spy organizations were harder to read. And Potts… also had no real tradecraft, but at least seemed to have a handle on his own secrets.
The thing that really rankled the agent was that interviewing the three kids was like dealing with certain highly-skilled operatives. They weren't afraid of him. They weren't afraid of the cops. They were just worried about tipping the authorities off to how much they could do if they needed to escape.
Maybe they'd let something slip if they kept going. "So you did the same trick of waiting for the blind spot on the cameras, and went into the stacks yourselves?" Coulson prompted.
"It really is very interesting down there!" Granger allowed. "You know that they built the stacks out of steel to prevent any chance of organic contamination? You can even see the Carnegie steel impressions on some of the shelves…"
Potts interrupted her before she could get too far on the tangent. "But the Santas weren't there to appreciate the classic engineering…"
They'd managed to catch sight of a flash of red and white as the Santa they'd followed descended into the stacks and followed, occasionally having to drag Hermione along to keep her from stopping to browse. Even Harry and Dean had to admit the dense collection of books was pretty impressive. They'd all seen big libraries, of course, but the enclosed area and metal shelving really made it feel like a secret vault full of all the world's knowledge. And it wound down and down into the bowels of the sub-basements beneath the library.
The lack of actual staff was a curiosity. Surely in order for the whole process to work—putting in book orders up in the reading room and having them delivered—there must be librarians below to find the books and put them in the delightfully-classic book elevators. They were probably short-staffed due to the impending holiday, but the trio wondered if something else was going on to draw off the staff while the increasingly-suspicious Santas descended, little suspecting that three teens were following in their wake.
Or at least, they assumed they were following undetected until they got several floors down and a man's voice echoed along the steel shelving. "If you've brought a great dane, we're in real trouble. You haven't got a dog, have you?"
While they did know a teacher with an extremely large boarhound back at school, they obviously didn't have the dog with them and asked, "Is that… a Scooby Doo reference?"
"I'd say that you're familiar with the classics, at least, but I suppose they keep remaking it," the voice yelled. "Harry Potts, I presume. And friends."
"I'm really not that famous," Harry demurred, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. It wasn't amplified, but the combination of thick steel and dense paper did odd things to the acoustics. He motioned for Dean and Hermione to take different aisles so they wouldn't all get pinned in between the same bookshelves.
The man continued, his voice seeming to move, "And yet, we get periodicals down here. Your look is distinctive. I've hacked the camera feed and saw you in the lobby. With the Stark tower going up down the way, there was a small but non-zero chance that I'd see someone related to that organization cross my path. And I don't imagine Tony Stark has much nostalgia for bound texts." The accent was flat and American, maybe a local.
"This is very creepy," Harry said, reaching the end of his row and seeing a flicker of movement that wasn't red and white several aisles down to his left. "We just wanted to know what was up with the Santa convention in the basement."
"It's funny," the man continued, and Harry was sure that he was the flicker, the voice coming from the same location, "I'd actually built in a small but significant chance that my problem would be 'meddling kids.' But the chance that they'd come with an Iron Man chaser was vanishingly small."
"Why's that funny?" Harry asked, catching sight of Dean as he passed an aisle, who was moving to flank the voice back down the other way.
"Because if it had just been normal meddling kids," the unseen speaker explained, "I'd have a huge number of options. The fact that you can bring Tony Stark down on my impressive head limits the possibility space significantly."
Harry stepped around the corner of the aisle he thought the voice was coming from, and saw Dean move at the other end simultaneously. In the middle of the aisle, relaxing against a steel upright, was a man in jeans and a hoodie. He'd have been an unassuming middle-aged white guy, except for the impressively oversized head.
"Macrocephaly," Granger interjected. "That's the term. Though I suppose what he had was beyond even the normal level of disfigurement."
"I'm familiar with the case," Coulson sighed. Romanoff had just missed Dr. Samuel Sterns after the Hulk incident in Harlem earlier in the year, but had spotted someone with an enlarged cranium fleeing the scene. Their operating theory was that he'd gotten exposed to some of Banner's blood and was experiencing a mutation somewhat less than Banner's or Blonsky's. Persistent rumors of an elephant man in Manhattan had not quite reached the level of triggering a bigger investigation. But it was part of why Coulson was still local. "Go on."
The deformed man flicked a glance behind him but continued monologuing as if unconcerned he was now trapped in the aisle by the two teen boys. "You know I set up here hoping to avoid scrutiny, but I guess no one can plan for bad luck. You'd be amazed at how many of these books I've been able to read in the last few months. If I'd been going through the internet that fast, I'd have tripped some agency's monitoring and drawn SHIELD down on my location. I hope you kids are careful with what you do on the internet, they really are monitoring everything. They got me and a compatriot with one unencrypted email using codewords they'd worked out. It's really criminal."
"So… you're running from the government and hiding in the library because you can't use the internet," Harry summed up.
"Excellent synopsis!" The guy seemed a little goofy, and if he hadn't been intimating that he was a Scooby Doo villain, the kids probably wouldn't have been that bothered by him. "But, yes. It didn't hurt that there would soon be a world-class research facility in the neighborhood that I could sneak into, but at this point they'll be on alert for me so that's scrapped. I guess I'll just have to barter for funds and a way out of the country directly. It would be so much easier to work out your ransom value if you were Stark's son, instead of his girlfriend's nephew, but we do what we can with what we've got."
Harry shot a, "Can you believe this guy?" look at Dean down the aisle and asked, "So you're kidnapping us? You and the Santas?" Harry wasn't an idiot, and he glanced around to make sure he wasn't being pinned in by one or more Fathers Christmas.
"And my elaborate preparation!" the self-implied genius grinned. He leaned a shoulder into a spot on the shelves and suddenly the entire line of steelwork began to twist like a transformer. Books fell to the floor as the shelves to either side of Harry and Dean rotated free to quickly slap together into a pair of metal boxes, anchored by the ends of the rows of shelving.
It was honestly impressively fast. Harry had really good reflexes, and hadn't been able to jump out of the way. Part of it was that he really wasn't expecting that solid steel bookshelves could move like that.
"I did all this with hand tools in the middle of the night!" the man continued explaining, his voice moving to indicate that he must have also built the shelves to allow him free into another row when the ends of that one turned into mantraps. "Now, where are my associates and have they rounded up the girl yet?"
"She's fast," a man's voice sounded from somewhere deep in the stacks. "We've almost got her cornered." He didn't sound particularly jolly.
"Everything myself," their leader complained. "I've been improving them, you know. Locals looking for a leg up, better living through science."
"Why do they have to dress as Santas?" Harry shouted.
"Alpha test problems on the serums," the doctor admitted. "We'll get the facial deformations worked out in the next run. You interrupted them coming in for their checkups."
Huh. So Harry figured they were dealing with some kind of mutants. Maybe this guy had something to do with the Hulk fight, and he was yet another person trying to make super soldiers. He wondered how deformed the Santas were under those beards. He, of course, wasn't just waiting for them to catch Hermione, and assumed that Dean wasn't either. The shelf steel was sturdy, and latched together fairly well, but…
"It's not illegal to know how to pick locks, especially if you're worried you might be kidnapped," Coulson explained, when Potts' story ground to a halt.
"Is it so not illegal that we could get you or Nat to give us some more pointers?" the boy asked, hopefully.
"We'll see. I take it you managed to escape confinement without it being immediately obvious?" he prompted.
The shelf-slats had a weak point where they had been designed to ratchet at the corners, and Harry managed to bow two out enough to slip free into the aisle, and saw Dean had accomplished pretty much the same thing at the other end. They gave each other thumbs ups and slipped off into the stacks through the exit of fallen books that had, indeed, opened in the middle of the aisle.
While the guy that Harry was starting to think of as Dr. Bighead seemed inhumanly smart, there wasn't really any way he could plan for three young teenagers to have a bunch of advanced martial arts training and be better than the average kid at sneakiness. So he didn't seem aware that there were now three kids loose and hunting their hunters through the book stacks. "Don't worry," he was continuing. "I'm not going to subject any of you to the tests, since that would be unethical. Though I do have some thoughts about how the process might have much better uptake rates in adolescents, so if you want to be involved, we can probably work something out."
Harry spotted a red-and-white suit ahead, lifted a particularly hefty tome that would require a trip upstairs on the dumbwaiter rather than the smaller book lift, and managed to clock the guy in the back of the head pretty quietly. Of course, since it was a library, the thud of a book into a head and the thump of a burly man onto the floor seemed extremely loud. Harry hesitated a moment, but Dr. Bighead didn't break his exposition to comment, so he figured he'd somehow gotten away with it. Out of curiosity, he rolled the guy over and pulled down the white beard. Sure enough, in the dim lighting he could make out that the guy's face had gone lumpy enough that he'd have a hard time going out in public without comment. Six Santas would probably draw less notice coming into the library than six Toxic Avengers, even in a city full of folks that would swear they wouldn't discriminate due to disfigurement.
"Maybe two of you should just head down while two of you head up," Dr. Bighead shouted. "If she's bolting, we need to catch her. There's not really anywhere to hide, it's a bunch of shelves."
Harry grinned to himself, managing to do just that, and stepping over another fallen Santa that Dean or Hermione must have laid out. But he spotted another hustling down an aisle that might see the unconscious body soon, though hadn't spotted Harry. He set up and managed to step into the guy's midsection and throw him headfirst into the end of one of the shelving units. Carnegie steel really was built to last, even when having wannabe super soldier mutants cold cocked with it.
Unfortunately, that guy managed to scream in pain before passing out. "Sorry, guys, stealth's up," Harry warned.
"Basically done here anyway," Dean answered from three rows down as there was another Kringleish grunt of pain and then the sound of a ringing shelf.
"I've two tied up already back here!" Hermione shouted from several rows further up.
"I think that's everyone but our host, then," Harry summed up. "What were the odds, 3PO?" he taunted, as he moved toward where he'd last heard the megalomaniacal doctor, eyes peeled for any more parts of the shelving that looked like it had been trapped.
"Extremely small!" the man said as they got into line of sight with him. "Did you three take out all of them? Very quietly, too. Are you tiny ninjas? That's so cool." He glanced around, seeing that he was bracketed in on all three sides by the kids, Dean having cut through an aisle of books to face him while Hermione and Harry blocked him on either side of the row between them. "You know, the downside of learning everything from books is that combat training is hard to come by. And I'm top heavy. So I don't suppose I can talk you into negotiating a place in my plans? No? Pity. Until next time, then!"
With another backwards shove, he leaned into what seemed to be a solid wall around the central book lifts. Like the bookshelf trap, the wall bent out of his way in a mechanical action that was really interesting to look at, and a rigged bookshelf fell over to block any chance they had of following the man through his escape hatch.
"And we figured that he was either hiding somewhere we wouldn't find him, or already escaping the building," Harry summed up. "So we tied up the rest of the Santas and went to call the cops. That's about it."
"Let me go confirm some points of your story?" Coulson asked, and they shrugged in agreement. He went over to Silva and asked, "Any IDs back on the Santas?"
"Bunch of local low-lifes," Silva agreed. "But they aren't nearly that… messed up looking in their mug shots. Third-stringers at best for some of the gangs. I think they're hopped up on something."
"Oh?" Coulson prompted.
"A couple of them mentioned strange lights. Invisible kids. I'm still not sure how three kids beat up six thugs. They must have been high or something," the sergeant explained.
"Stark may have also given the children some self-defense technology, that they didn't understand," Coulson covered, but glanced shrewdly back towards Potts, who smiled innocently as he caught the look. The agent had been pretty sure they were leaving something out of their explanation of how they got the drop on the adults.
Silva shrugged in agreement. "Could be. You want us to take them to the normal cells?"
"We'll probably be by to pick them up as soon as possible, but yes. They might have enhanced strength, so be careful. Also be on the lookout for Samuel Sterns. He has a, uh, extremely large and deformed head. He was doing illegal experiments on the men, and might try to break them out. He reportedly favors surprisingly-complicated schemes."
"Only in New York. Things sure are getting weirder around here, huh?" Silva agreed, not seeming to need comment. He started rounding up the local uniforms to load the Santas up while Coulson went back over to the kids.
"You eat yet?" Potts asked.
"No," Coulson admitted. "I was about to before I got called in."
"Want to go with us to Pershing Square?" the boy offered. "That's the bistro we've been going to. It's right across from Grand Central. They take contactless payments from my phone, so we've been eating there a lot."
"You just want to see if Beth's working," Dean rolled his eyes.
"She's nice!" Harry objected. He explained to Coulson, "She's a waitress there. She plays D&D."
"Should I tell Ginny that you spent all break with a pretty blond waitress that likes D&D?" Hermione checked.
"We really should show Ginny how to play," Dean interjected, before the teen drama got out of control.
"Anyway, you coming, Agent?" Harry asked. "They do breakfast for dinner. Or they have burgers and steaks, if you want. I'm paying."
Coulson considered the professionalism of it, but shrugged as his stomach grumbled. It would give him more time to build his own theory about what was up with the trio's secretive private school. "I could eat."
Notes:
I opted to go with Sterns being more goofy and less green than usual for the Leader, given Tim Blake Nelson's performance in Incredible Hulk and the screenshots I've seen of him post-transformation from the Fury's Big Week comics.
Credit to Dimension 20's second season, The Unsleeping City, for the idea of mutant Santas in NYC.
Saunders, Silva, and Beth are background characters from Avengers.
Chapter 40: Love and War
Chapter Text
Other than losing all privileges to wander Manhattan without an adult, the rest of winter break had gone pretty well. Tony had just shaken his head at the kids getting into some other bit of chaos, had JARVIS update the Stark Industries security profiles to keep an eye out for signs of "Dr. Bighead," and flown out to handle a small armed standoff in Central America. He was back in time for Christmas.
Harry and Dean had flown back to London with the Grangers a couple of days before school started up. Well, Pepper had told Tony that's what was happening and faked it up in the system using the now-familiar process worked out with the Masters, while the five of them just stepped through from the New York sanctum to the London one. Master Kaecilius made a slightly negative comment about allowing parents to just use his sanctum as a highway, but didn't forbid it. Harry was slightly worried that increased SHIELD scrutiny should keep him taking the much slower route, but didn't bring it up if his aunt wasn't worried about it.
The kids honestly assumed that the Masters must have some kind of ongoing magic around traveling via portals that kept it from immediately being electronically flagged. The sorcerers used the internet, after all, and Dr. Bighead had seemed to think the world governments should be on top of that kind of thing. Or maybe his increased intelligence had just come with similarly-increased paranoia.
They picked up the Patils in Kamar-Taj, and spent a bit of time showing off for Master Rama what they'd been practicing. He gave them some pointers on things to improve and what they needed to self-study next. Then they went to the Grangers' to have a friends hangout and movie marathon, where Harry finally got to see the Kingo movies Parvati had been going on about.
Their friendship was still tense, but it was nice to be able to just hang out like old times.
And then they were right back to school in snowy Vanaheim. Harry was thrilled that he didn't have to be out in the winter wonderland doing Wood's constant quidditch practice, but could tell that Ginny was getting frustrated that since she did, it was cutting into her last few weeks of dating Harry before it would become Hermione's turn.
For some reason, most of their friends expected that to be the practical end of the "everyone gets to date Harry" experiment. Harry didn't see it, but was at least pretty happy about the amount of time he got to go about his business without Ginny attached to him like a pilot fish.
Harry's barely-concealed joy at having the quidditch practice time to himself was probably also part of Ginny's frustration. She couldn't even complain too much, because he was still graciously letting her borrow his broom.
The girls had, either accidentally or through some insight into the quidditch schedule, at least set it up so the next date swap was after the big Gryffindor vs. Ravenclaw match. Ginny wouldn't get the Hogsmeade weekend close to Valentine's Day the week after (not that she could even go to Hogsmeade), but at least she'd get Harry cheering for her as her boyfriend for her second quidditch match of the year.
Harry still thought it was a little weird that the teams only played three times a year. It wasn't like there was a ton else going on for entertainment, and the teams were practicing all the time anyway. They probably could have played several matches against each house. If he understood Earth school sports correctly, despite his lack of little league experience, they'd basically play a match every week or so for much of the school year.
For all that it was cold, this quidditch match was a lot nicer to watch than the last one. It wasn't pouring down rain, Ron and Harry were chatting amiably, and he'd done a careful inspection to make sure that Sirius hadn't sneaked in to watch again. Which was why he was surprised to see a group of Mindless Ones entering the field just as Ginny was making a break for the snitch.
Some of them were much burlier than the normally-lanky creatures from the Dark Dimension.
Ron had seen them too and asked, "Slytherin quidditch team?"
Harry nodded, "Slytherin quidditch team."
To the Slytherins' credit, they had actually put in effort on whatever skinlike gray coveralls they were wearing, and had lit their wands the right shade of red as they held them in front of their faces. It would have been a pretty cool convention cosplay group, or set of themed Halloween costumes.
But it wasn't very good for their vision, to be holding lit wands in their faces like that.
Draco almost managed to deflect the body bind spells Ron and Harry were throwing out, as the rest of the Slytherins went down first, wrapped in shimmering teal energy bands. From up above, Lee Jordan announced, "And Ginny Weasley gets the snitch again. Another nail-biter, friends, but Gryffindor wins it! And it looks like a bunch of wannabe Dark Dimension entities are down on the field. I assume Potter and Weasley couldn't tell the difference, because they were just as mindless."
"That's enough, Jordan," McGonagall took over the announcer's podium. "Whoever that is down there is losing points and getting detention. What a poorly-considered prank! Oh, and, yes, congratulations to both teams for a game well-played."
Harry was glad they hadn't been real Mindless Ones. Despite his continuing meditation sessions with Lupin, his astral projection still wasn't succeeding. He could get into a meditative state, quickly and sometimes with Lupin trying to distract him, but he couldn't quite figure out the step to actually project his consciousness from his body. At that stage, all he was really good at was making himself an easier target in a fight, though Lupin had some hope that the focus might make it harder for the thought-draining beings to affect him, maybe even to sense him.
He got done cleaning up faster than the rest of the team, who'd actually been sweating, but waited around at the exit to the stadium to do his duty and walk Ginny back to the dorms. He was surprised when Cho Chang, Ravenclaw's seeker, walked out alone without her own team, and gave him a rueful smile. "I'd thought I'd be better off not havin' to fly against you, this year. But your girlfriend's just as tough."
"She's only my girlfriend until tomorrow," he assured her, with what he hoped was a winning smile. Maybe it was just that she was a year more mature than his close friends, or how cute the hybrid Scottish/Chinese accent was on her, but Harry couldn't help but think that Cho was one of the prettiest girls at the school.
"What?" Cho raised an eyebrow.
"We're doing a whole weird thing where we rotate dates so we each get a chance to date everyone in the study group," he explained, ruffling a hand through his hair in annoyance. "It wasn't my idea."
"So you're not spoken for at Hogsmeade next Sunday?" she asked.
"Not if you want to go with me?" he offered, without thinking.
"Tis a date, Potts," she agreed with a beautiful smile, before breaking off to join a couple members of her team that were walking out.
Harry didn't even realize that the next weekend was supposed to be Hermione's turn with him until he was halfway back to the castle. He'd also been ignoring Ginny the whole walk, though she didn't seem to notice as she happily narrated her game success. He winced and started wondering how he was going to fix it.
He still hadn't figured it out by the time the team's victory party was winding down that evening, and Ginny had somehow finagled them to be sitting in a private location. Well, at least one where everyone else around them was focused on another conversation and not paying much attention. She gave him a pained smile and asked, "It's not going to happen, is it? Us being together?"
"I don't know, Gin," he began, then admitted, "I don't think so." He didn't feel up to articulating that, while he hadn't really figured out who he wanted to date, his second-tier friend's starstruck little sister wasn't it. It didn't help that they'd been raised so differently, and didn't have much in common or even to talk about. He didn't want to give her the false hope that things might change in the future.
"Can I…?"" she asked, leaning in for what was probably her goodbye kiss.
He let her. He didn't know what it was like for her, but for him it wasn't much different than kissing Lavender. It wasn't bad, but it didn't totally realign his feelings about how compatible they were.
She nodded after a moment and got up, taking his hand and leading him over to where Hermione was sitting, trying to work on her Cultural Studies essay while still showing willing to be at the party. "I'll let you two get started early," the young redhead told her, then let go of his hand and walked back over to where the rest of the quidditch team was still carrying on loudly.
"That good, huh?" Hermione asked him, as he took a tentative seat at her study table.
He shrugged. "Everyone seems to think we're… what's the word… inevitable."
"I know…" she glanced down a little shyly before covering with, "I don't know why they think that."
Having missed any meaning to the glance as he agonized over how to explain, he rolled on with, "Right? I was reading something about how kids that meet too early will never work out romantically, because their brains just mark them as siblings, you know?"
"I think that's only kids that were raised together from a very young age," Hermione corrected, having read something similar.
Harry just shrugged again. There was a moment of tense silence against the general backdrop of conversational noise. Upwards of seventy kids in an enclosed room could get loud, even without a good source of party music. He plucked up his Gryffindor courage and just said, "I… uh… I kind of accidentally invited someone else to Hogsmeade next Sunday?"
"Oh?" she asked, shocked by how the conversation had gone. It wasn't even a dangerous exclamation, just a genuinely surprised one.
"Sorry? It just popped up, and I wasn't thinking about schedules or anything." He tried to figure out what she was thinking, but whatever Soul Stone-powered empathy he could occasionally tap into had chosen this moment in particular to let him try to dig his way out of his own hole. Without an immediate reaction, he just said, "We could probably get together to go see Siri… uh, the dog… in the afternoon?"
"Yeah… okay," she said, a little absently. "Maybe so. If your date doesn't run long, or anything." She glanced around and her hands, outside of her conscious control, began to gather her books and supplies. "You know. I think I'm almost done with this essay, but I need somewhere quieter so I'm just going to finish in my room." She was off before he could even register that something was wrong.
He was starting to figure it out when all the girls in the study group seemed quietly, implicitly upset with him over the next few days.
"We tried to warn them," Dean commiserated the morning of the Hogsmeade trip. "We should have told them no instead of letting them push us out of the room."
"At least Ron and Lavender got something out of the deal," Harry nodded. Dean's recent period of "dating" Lavender hadn't put him in a great mood about the whole rotation, since she was still clearly hung up on Ron and only putting in a token investment to the other options.
"Maybe my set with Parvati will go better than yours did," Dean nodded. "I'll run interference. You better go see if you can get in a carriage with Cho?"
"Thanks, man," Harry nodded, as they split up at the school door. While Dean made for the rest of the study group, Harry headed to find the Ravenclaws in their helhest-driven carriages. "Hey, Cho?" he said, casually, finding them without too much trouble. They were in the coach with the giggling as he approached.
"Hi, Harry!" she gave him a beautiful smile that dispelled a lot of his worries from the last week. "These are my friends Marietta and Eddie. I thought we could all share a carriage an' then wander wherever once we get there?"
Harry nodded his agreement, pulling himself up and making polite greetings with the two other Ravenclaw students he'd obviously seen around but had never had an occasion to talk to, since they were a year above him. Eddie Carmichael turned out to be the top of his year, much as Hermione was for Harry's. Marietta Edgecombe was Cho's best friend, whose family worked with the Ministry on something related to transportation.
He didn't have much time to learn about them, but at least it made the small talk a little less awkward shoved in a carriage with two total strangers and one almost-stranger. "Huh. Where are all the shops?" he asked, as they pulled into sight of the town square.
Maybe it was just that winter was a harder time, but there seemed to be fewer than half the stalls they'd had on his previous two trips. Marietta explained, "Marauders. Lots of rumors about bandits and brigands roaming around. The train track is an easy thing for them to follow, too. I think people were probably afraid to travel here, in case they just got robbed."
"Wow. I know one of my friends, Lavender, mentioned that people were worried about that. But already?" Harry asked. "Shouldn't someone be doing something?"
Eddie was the one who shook his head at that and explained, "They're doing their best, but nobody thinks anyone will actually come this way. Hogwarts has more wizards in any one place than anywhere else in the world."
"Except maybe the Ministry," Marietta corrected.
"Probably even the Ministry," Eddie corrected back. "Around forty kids come through here every year. The most trained wizards there could be in the world would be on the order of four thousand. Probably a lot less, with the wars and people that go to Midgard after school. And we've got about three hundred of them. It has to be over ten percent."
"And a lot of the rest work for the Ministry!" Marietta argued back. "Though I guess most of them are pretty spread out working in various places," she relented. "Let's just say that the Ministry might have more wizards than Hogwarts, but Hogwarts has more in one place?"
"Agreed," Eddie nodded. "So, yeah, I'm not worried. You two have fun on your date. Come on, Mar," he said, hopping out of the coach as it had rolled to a stop at the edge of town.
"And now I've the famous Mr. Potts all to myself," Cho smiled. "Honestly, you're doin' me a favor, not havin' t'listen to those two argue all day."
"Are they not together?" Harry asked, remembering to do the gentlemanly thing and offer Cho a hand out of the coach.
"Hah! Even you see it, right?" she laughed. "They claim they're not… but…"
Trying not to be reminded about the pairing that his own friends thought everyone could see but the couple involved, Harry asked, "What do you want to check out first?"
The date through Hogsmeade was pretty sedate. They checked out the few stalls that were there. They tried to stay on the opposite side of the square from Harry's study group to keep it from being weird. They talked about interests.
Cho wasn't a big movie buff, and a lot of what she had seen was Chinese cinema that hadn't made it to the US. He'd maybe seen a couple of the really big productions that got a global release. She was really into soccer, and that was part of why she'd been so interested in playing quidditch, and Harry didn't know a ton about that. Almost at a loss, Harry mentioned video games.
It turned out that Cho was a real-time strategy and multiplayer online battle arena fiend. In addition to several Chinese-developed RTSes and MOBAs that he was vaguely aware of, she'd played several he had tried. By the time they were talking about the Starcraft scene in China, they'd gotten a booth in the tavern and were having an excited conversation with big hand gestures indicating troop movements and resource placement. He hadn't gotten around to trying the newly-released League of Legends the previous summers, but was seriously considering giving it a chance on his next break based on her loving testimonial.
The date seemed to be going pretty well. At least until the screaming started.
Before they could try to figure out what was going on, several of the school's prefects were entering the inn and yelling orders.
Gemma Farley, who they'd had as Snape's substitute, commanded, "Slytherins! Get outside and bring in any valuables from the stalls! Malfoy, get your muscle carrying anything large, right? Marauders incoming. A lot of them. Make it quick!"
Penny Clearwater, Ravenclaw prefect and Percy's girlfriend, separated from the eldest Weasley and ordered, "Apprentice healers form up! Anyone with a good summoning spell get ready to pull back casualties to the healers. Everyone else good at transfiguration, start reinforcing the inn. Oh, and conjurers, start making helmets and armor for the defenders that don't have them."
And Percy, as unclear as anyone how he'd wound up in position to lead an armed defense, simply said, "Everyone that wants to fight, come with me."
"No!" Cho said, as Harry didn't even hesitate to stand. Grabbing his hand she insisted, "The upper-years and professors'll handle it. You'll get yourself killed!"
"Haven't yet," he shrugged, dislodging his hand. "Like Eddie said, we've got the most wizards. If they're attacking here," he chanced a glance out of the window before someone began to transfigure it into solid wall and glimpsed a huge wave of movement outside of town, "they think they have the numbers. You could come?"
She shook her head sadly, and Harry realized the reason she was still playing video games when he was mostly over them probably had a lot to do with not getting that kind of thrill in real life. "I'll help in here," she said, a little lamely.
Nearby, Cedric Diggory, the Hufflepuff seeker, was asking some of his own friends, "Are we going to let Gryffindor go out there alone?" He managed to guilt several of the upper-years from his house into joining the crowd heading out.
One last glance at his date that had been going so well and Harry was out the door with them. Someone conjured a helmet for him, fortunately weaving itself around his glasses. One thing movies and video games didn't really stress was head protection that could conceal actor faces, but he was glad to have it. Though without hair colors to go by, it took him a moment to track down the rest of the study group, similarly adorned in whatever the nearest conjurer thought was an appropriate Vanaheim-style helmet.
"No Cho?" Dean asked, quietly. He'd been assuming, as Harry had, that she was planning to join the Masters after she graduated. She was Master Wong's cousin, after all.
Harry shrugged and just said, "Gryffindor pride."
Hermione, forming into the battle line gave a little smirk and couldn't help but mention, "Padma made it."
Beside her, their captive Ravenclaw said, "You're all going to get me killed."
As the square cleared of students and valuables behind them, the inn being transfigured into a fortress, Harry had to admit she might be right. Rushing down the train tracks toward the town was more people than Harry had seen in one place on Vanaheim. It had to be at least a few hundred brigands: enough to think they might overwhelm so many wizards.
On their own side, they had virtually every member of Gryffindor third year and up. They had the other upperclassmen that Cedric had managed to get to join the line. And they had the nonmagical townsfolk that had hastily armed themselves with shields and spears or swords, nodding in thanks as they received conjured armor and helms. There were maybe a hundred people formed up for battle on their side.
There probably should have been more adult supervision of the trip. None of the professors were in evidence. Harry figured that, certainly, they'd be along any minute except… "Are those the same trolls and jotun from first year?" he boggled, noticing a smaller horde of orange-furred warriors, a blue-skinned giant, and a few-dozen of the more-dangerous-looking brigands split off to run into the castle gate (open for the field trip).
"Guess they're still mad about Dumbledore trapping them in a desert for months," Ron figured.
"Wish we had that chess set," Harry agreed. That group had caused a problem for the whole school in their Halloween assault. Would they have more luck with additional aid and most of the students in the town?
And then the screaming main mass of the marauders was into town. Someone smart had transfigured picket spikes facing out, and small walls for the wizards to mass behind, before falling back into the tavern, which limited how quickly the assailants could come. But there were a lot of them, and many weren't even vaguely human. Who knew what resistances and weird abilities the various aliens had?
Wizarding war was chaos.
In theory, magic was a tremendous force multiplier. But the other side had a tremendous force. The battle was a few dozen half-trained wizards with no real experience in mass combat and a similar number of locals defending their homes versus hundreds of marauders that only had low-tech weapons but had been planning for fighting against magic.
The first marauder lines went down fast. So did the second. But then the third crashed into the impromptu barricades and started to try to flank through the town. Some of the students in the tavern seemed to be shooting at marauders trying to sneak around the back of the square, at least. But the enemy's large kite shields were annoyingly good against magical fire. And they'd brought archers, for all that it was hard for them to get a clear shot through the village at the defenders.
Harry's group was surprisingly effective. They'd been training together for years, after all. Diggory was also a competent field leader, managing his Hufflepuffs' natural tendency to work together. Percy was more of a bureaucrat, but he knew it: as the functional general of the students, Harry could hear him ordering other kids to follow the leads of the two groups that were cohering against the onslaught.
There would be time later to think about whether the enemies they were knocking down with blasts of orange magical light were people they'd killed.
After a few minutes, they thought they might hold out indefinitely. They were managing to knock down anyone that got close. The townsfolk had formed a shield wall to hold back the attackers while their spellcasters rained fire. But then they started to get tired, and defenders started to fall. First it was townsfolk, taking a spear to the shoulder or a felling mace blow to the head. Calls of "Healer!" prompted the downed warriors to get yanked back toward the tavern wrapped in teal light.
But even though they were triaged and likely to be saved by the magical healing, they left a hole in the line.
With their melee line faltering, Harry's group got tunnel vision on shooting hard at anyone that looked like they might knock out another protector, whips of light snagging axes before they could hew shields and polearms before they could reach over. Thus, everyone was surprised when Ron yelled, "On the roof!" and was suddenly diving through the air in front of Parvati, trying to throw up a shield spell against the sniper that had climbed up onto a house and was shooting down at them.
Ron's shield spell still wasn't very good. It shattered. He took the arrow in his chest that might have landed in Parvati's neck. Harry got his own shield up to catch a second arrow that might have hit Hermione and it held. Dean blasted the sniper off of the roof with an overpowered burst of orange.
"Heroes," Ron coughed out with a smile as the light of the summoning spell yanked him back to triage.
Harry wasn't so sure. Now that one of them had fallen, his friends were showing signs of panic. Seamus and Lavender looked like they wanted to break to run and check on Ron. Padma, who barely wanted to be there in the first place, had just seen her sister almost die. Dean was stone-faced at the realization that he'd very likely had to just kill a man to save his friends. Hermione and Parvati were doing pretty well, considering that they'd both nearly been shot with arrows.
Neville was surprisingly solid. "Form back up!" he yelled. "Harry, keep with the shields? Dean, blast any more archers on the roofs."
"You got it, Nev," Harry nodded, impressed. He'd have expected the normally-timid boy to have faltered first, but everyone, it turned out, was in Gryffindor for a reason.
The defenders were being ground down more slowly, now that the fight was real and everyone knew what to look for. They were taking out half a dozen marauders for every student whisked off to the healers. But they were getting tired, morale was flagging, and the mass of fresh attackers seemed infinite from what they could see between the houses.
"Why do they keep coming?" Harry yelled in frustration as he held his shield against the sustained fire from a pair of archers that Dean was trying to blast.
"They must have risked everything for this assault," Percy yelled from somewhere nearby. "They have to take the town and then the castle. If we can thwart them, we can break them!" He was clearly trying an inspiring speech. It wasn't very effective, coupled with the realization that the marauders weren't just going to give up and run away any time soon.
Things continued to deteriorate. Seamus and Parvati had to sit, too exhausted by the constant spellcasting to keep going. One of the Weasley twins would have lost an ear to an arrow if he hadn't been wearing a helmet, instead getting a deep gouge scored across the conjured material as the missile glanced off and dealt Percy a shallow wound as he stood behind his brothers. Cedric's team was fully focused on holding their left flank, where the marauders had finally cleared the transfigured barricades. More and more of the townsfolk were going down, almost beyond their ability to hold the front line.
And, in hindsight, it had only been a few minutes.
"Why don't any of the adults come to Hogsmeade?" Harry complained, rhetorically. It was too late now, to have a combat-capable teacher or two as support. Even if the staff was doing well at the castle, they didn't seem to be doing so well that they'd be able to get to Hogsmeade before it fell.
But, almost as if his annoyance had worked a summoning, Harry heard a loud barking and caught a black blur in his peripheral vision, as an enormous dog tackled an alien marauder with mauve skin that had sneaked far around the flank and was coming for Percy from behind. In moments, Sirius had twisted back into his human form, still shabby-looking but perhaps with only the natural level of madness in his eyes for a former Gryffindor charging an army.
"I need a wand!" the animagus yelled, looking over and sighing with relief when he spotted Harry's distinctive glasses through the press. "Ah, there's one!" he announced, snatching up the focus of one of the kids who'd dropped it before being pulled off to the healers. "I'll give it back after! Not a good match anyway," he continued talking while firing off a few blasts of turquoise energy and not seeming to love the resonance of the device. But it got the job done: two larger attackers who'd been charging the line were suddenly hanging upside down in midair, dangling by one ankle several feet off the ground.
For all that he was probably long out of practice, the addition of a fully-combat-trained adult wizard began to make an immediate difference. In one moment, he was shoring up the barricades and having them sprout nasty transfigured spikes toward the enemies. In the next he was wrapping enemies in chains of magic and using them to obstruct their allies. The ripple of realization that presumed-murderer Sirius Black was on the scene was followed by relief that the maniac seemed to be on their side.
"Nobody told me it would be a proper brawl," he said while walking over to support Harry's team, as if it was the most casual thing in the world. "Good to see you, pup! Nice shielding, you're improving."
"This was probably not what my aunt meant about getting into a spell duel with Sirius Black outside of the school grounds," Harry tossed back. "But I'll take it."
"But what about all these people?" Hermione warned. "If just being at the quidditch match was enough before…"
Sure enough, the fairly bright late winter day was starting to darken. There weren't even clouds, it was just like the light from the sun was dimming. Within a minute, they started to feel more than hear the arrival of the Mindless Ones, twisting into Vanaheim somewhere deeper in the village, and bringing the mental pall of their presence with them. Harry furiously ran through his meditation exercises so he could keep functioning.
"We're barely holding out against the marauders!" Harry warned him. "If they get here…"
"Hah! Marauders? They aren't worthy of the name!" Sirius barked, still all bravado. "Let me tell you about one of your dad and my favorite tactics. We called it, 'Let's you and him fight!'" With that, he went sprinting towards the Mindless Ones that were arriving around the buildings, toward a gap on the right flank where the attackers didn't want to mess with them either. "Hey, you one-eyed assholes! See if you can catch me!"
And with that taunt, he dropped back into dog form and charged right into the mass of the enemy army, dodging confused attackers and getting lost in the loose press of bodies extending out of town. Well, he was lost to physical sight, but the Mindless Ones turned their crimson gaze unerringly toward him, and began to stride forward into the ranks of enemy troops.
The students—who'd dealt with the creatures a couple of times already—fared much better than the unprepared brigands. An entire sea of warriors with the morale to throw themselves against wizards hoping for victory weren't actually prepared for seemingly-invincible creatures of pure dread sinking like a knife into their formation.
With a slow-rolling scream of horror, the marauder army began to break and run back into the foothills from which they'd emerged. All thought of victory was drowned in traumatic memories.
There were a few hardier attackers who didn't break, but they were easy enough to put down that most chose to follow the crowd rather than continue to stand against the now-numerically-superior defenders of Hogsmeade. The twins were sending the runners off with a whole host of embarrassing prank spells latching onto them.
As soon as it was clear that they'd basically won, Harry cautioned everyone, "You might want to sit. The adrenaline crash sucks." He demonstrated by sprawling on the uncomfortable cobbles of the Hogsmeade square.
Quite a few of the students were taking his advice. He watched everyone start to feel the post-combat exhaustion set in. With it, a whole host of thoughts washed across Hermione's face before she finally settled on, "Think you can get back to your date with Cho?"
Harry shrugged, recalling back to five minutes and a lifetime earlier how she had been too afraid to back him up in a fight. "Maybe. I don't know whether that's going to be a thing. We'll see."
"Oh?" she nodded, a weirdly-relieved look settling in as she relaxed a little more. "Yeah, I guess we will." Changing subjects, she said, "I hope Sirius is okay."
"I expect he is," Harry nodded. From their vantage point, they could make out the glow of red eyes still chasing something around the school's walls. "I hope the professors…"
"I think they've got it," Hermione agreed, as they noticed a few orange-furred trolls rushing out of the school gates, pursued by conjured stone golems reminiscent of the chess set that had trapped them in as guardians of the Soul Stone. Finally realizing they were sprawled on cobbles, she announced, "We should have found a more comfortable place to sit."
Coming from out of the tavern supported by Padma, Ron Weasley—torso wrapped in conjured bandages—complained, "Blimey. Is it over already? I was hoping to get some more shots in." That made him realize, "Hey… did anyone see where I dropped my wand?"
Chapter 41: The Map of the Spirit
Chapter Text
Mercifully, none of the students had died, and only a few of the villagers had passed (as they were less magically capable and thus less responsive to magical healing). Harry was privately of the opinion that nobody on their side would have died if more of the Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin students had come out to help. Grudgingly, their work in triage had been important. Maybe part of him was upset that those who'd stayed inside weren't having to grapple with whether they'd killed people—the marauders had left quite a few bodies behind in their flight.
Yet avoiding PTSD was one thing that warrior cultures did surprisingly well. Gryffindor was united by battle in a way the house hadn't been in years, and everyone Harry lived with understood what he'd been through. Even Fred and George lost the will to prank their housemates for a few weeks, and would subsequently never make a joke about someone's experience in the fight. Everyone knew how close they'd come to losing—probably dying—and was helpful in making sure everyone else was okay. That most of the enemies had been aliens and visibly different from the humans and near-humans was a thing that nobody really wanted to point out served to further increase emotional distance. It also helped that none of the students were completely sure whether they'd personally killed anyone: there had been a lot of spells cast, and it was reported that most of the bodies featured lethal wounds from the townsfolk's melee weapons, rather than magical energy.
That might have been a polite fiction that the staff decided on to limit student guilt.
The word was that the small army of marauders had been well and truly scattered into the wilderness. Several of the professors and still-functional upper-years had flown out on brooms to ensure they kept fleeing and didn't have an opportunity to regroup nearby. While Ronan's guard had been deep enough in the forest that they hadn't made it to the battle, they were up to the task of scouting and making sure that another such attack wasn't forthcoming. They were also attempting to determine how an army of that size had managed to get all the way to Hogwarts without warning (fearing that many small villages had been destroyed along the way for supplies and silence).
But, with the numbers that had assembled (even broken into smaller groups), it was a fact that they'd be causing problems across the rest of Vanaheim until Asgard could get Bifrost running again. This was exactly what everyone had feared.
It was hard to get an accurate idea of how the battle had gone inside the castle grounds, since the professors didn't seem as keen as the students to recount their bloody deeds—at least not outside of their own private reminiscences. The younger students and those that just hadn't been in Hogsmeade had all been barricaded in the great hall, so could speculate only a little more factually than those who'd been in the village. That obviously didn't stop Luna, who was certain that Snape had used his vampiric powers to teleport about the field drinking blood, that the headmaster had reanimated the spectral head of the Nidhogg serpent to sever their souls, and that a friendly Jotun that Hagrid was hiding in the forest had emerged to lock in titanic battle with the frost giant for the fate of Hogwarts.
Well, it was never absolutely clear when Luna was making things up to amuse herself, but she claimed to be certain of all of that.
They got confirmation that Sirius had gotten away okay when Ron's wand turned back up at Hagrid's hut the day after the battle. Privately, the redhead had been hoping that Black would keep it so he could talk his parents into getting him a focus that wasn't a hand-me-down. But at least he wouldn't be far behind on classes while he waited for a trip to the Market to get a replacement wand.
It took another couple of weeks for the Ministry to begin to show up. Word was that their resources were spread thin supporting the other nations of Vanaheim against more groups of marauders, though Hogsmeade had, by far, seen the largest. The Ministry brought not a garrison force, but more scouts and skirmishers to try to starve the enemy by trapping them in the deep magical wilderness before they could begin raiding in more populated areas.
Of course, the actual officials of the Ministry set themselves up a comfortable command post in Hogsmeade where they could direct the scouting efforts and meddle in the affairs of Hogwarts. There was already rumor from the town that Minister Fudge was trying to convince everyone that they had not been saved by Sirius Black and his trick with the Mindless Ones, but had instead gotten extremely lucky that the madman hadn't gotten everyone killed by bringing himself and his wardens into the town. Hagrid told them that the townsfolk he'd been drinking with didn't believe it for a moment, but that it meant it still wasn't safe for Sirius to move freely.
It also wasn't safe for Hagrid's hippogriff, Buckbeak. Harry had almost forgotten about Draco's "maiming" earlier in the year, but Hermione, her roommates, and (somewhat surprisingly) Ron had turned out to be spending a lot of hours becoming experts on Vanir law, at least as it regarded animals. Despite their best legal efforts, they hadn't found a way out for the proud beast. Even in situations where a pet had been protecting its master, an animal that might attack a person (especially a wealthy, powerful, and connected person like a Malfoy) would generally be put down. At this point, it was probably only a matter of time before enough decision-makers gathered in Hogsmeade that they'd decide to march into the castle grounds and execute Buckbeak (at least Fudge didn't seem to be motivated enough to push for it by himself, so there was still a bit of time).
"Why don't we just get Sirius to take Buckbeak and fly away?" Hermione asked, the afternoon at Hagrid's house that they'd laid all of that out. It was obvious how frustrated she'd become with Vanaheim's draconian laws that she was suggesting breaking them so flagrantly.
"There's an idea," the big man considered.
"I think he's too obsessed with Pettigrew," Harry frowned. "He could have left months ago, if he wasn't hiding hoping to catch him."
"Pettigrew has to have gotten out by now," Dean figured. "He could have jumped on the train or in somebody's cart."
Hagrid shook his head, "We did a proper search o' the train fer rats. An' warned the traders about 'em bein' a real problem this year. Not that many've been able ter leave with the marauder dangers. Plus, the kitchen staff's sure food's still goin' missin' even after all the rats we caught. Some o' 'em've said they saw a fat gray rat that's too clever by half."
"Okay," Harry nodded. "I guess that means we need to get back on catching Pettigrew. We shove him in Fudge's face. Sirius flies Buckbeak off while they sort out how to call off the Mindless Ones. Just need to find that map." They really hadn't been thinking as much about it as they probably should have: teenage priorities were easily reset by a long holiday and then all the other crises in between.
"I did talk ter Argus," Hagrid nodded. At some point he'd gotten fully read in on their information about Sirius and Pettigrew, rather than just implicitly aware that Sirius wasn't a murderer. Harry assumed the others must have told him while they were doing legal research. "He remembers he took some kind o' parchment off Pettigrew when yer parents were still in school. But he don' know what happened ter it. Says it weren't in his trunk o' confiscated items."
Ginny piped up at that with, "A piece of parchment? Not a map? But, like, a folded blank-looking one?"
"Might've been," Hagrid agreed, clearly not sure why it was relevant.
"I think I know where it might be!" she grinned. "I'll let you know later!" With that, she hopped up and started to head back into the castle.
"Probably saw pixies nesting in it somewhere," Luna nodded. "I'll go with her. Thanks for the tea, Hagrid!" With the unpleasantness of the last two years, they'd all stayed in the habit of making sure everyone had a buddy when going anywhere outside of their dorms.
Dean raised a problem, "Even if we do find Pettigrew, as Scabbers he's tiny. What are we going to do if he just hides under something? It's a whole Tom and Jerry situation." The Vanir looked confused by that, and even the kids from Earth weren't totally clear on the reference to the old cartoon. "Comedy stories about a cat that can't catch a mouse that's really smart."
"I bet Crookshanks could, if we asked him," Hermione noted. "But it doesn't help us if he gets eaten rather than turned over to the Ministry."
"Plus," Harry realized, "he may turn back into a human when he dies, so you don't want to risk him telefragging your cat." Very few people in the room understood that video game term either, but they got the gist of it and made distressed faces at the vision of exploded feline.
"Right," she agreed. "You know… I bet there's a spell to force an animagus back into human form. We'll just ask Rector McGonagall to teach us when we have class on Wednesday."
By the time the rest of them got back to the Gryffindor dorms, Ginny was dragging the twins out of the doorway, Luna amusedly waiting in the hallway. "Let's talk about this somewhere a little more private," Ginny decided, ushering everyone to a section of hallway not far from the dorms that was fairly isolated, just featuring an odd tapestry of dancing trolls.
After checking to make sure they weren't being observed, one of the twins said, "First off, we had no idea we were hanging onto your family heirloom."
The other nodded, "Yeah. We'd have told you right away if we knew."
"I guess you got it from Filch's office?" Harry asked,
"Right," the first twin nodded. "It's been a huge help getting around and avoiding professors and prefects."
"It's a little erratic, though," the other cautioned. "Sometimes doesn't show everyone like it's supposed to."
Harry nodded, "Sirius said the enchantments might have been failing. But we're hoping we can use it to find Peter Pettigrew."
"Name sounds familiar," the first twin realized.
"Used to see him around our dorms, and maybe down in the kitchens lately?" the other recalled. "Assumed he was part of the castle staff."
"Perfect!" Harry said. "Can you show us?"
They nodded, and produced, as expected, what seemed to be blank piece of parchment. "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good," they promised, simultaneously, before one tapped it with his wand. The study group watched as ink spread across the surface, transforming it into a map of the school. Most impressively, names began to appear in tiny handwriting, and many were slowly moving about the surface.
"The secret of our success," the first twin noted.
"You say 'Mischief managed' to revert it," the other explained. With only slight grudgingness, they handed it to Harry.
He nodded, "Thank you. Your return of this heirloom to the house of Potter will not be forgotten." He didn't really have a house anymore, nor intend to reestablish one, but the formality seemed to make them feel better about losing the cool magic item.
"I don't see him on here," Hermione announced, having been peering intently at the map, particularly around the kitchens.
"If it's glitchy, we may have to keep a watch on it for him to pop up," Harry figured.
"I guess we could take turns," Dean suggested. "But we're in class mostly at the same times…"
"And all of our evening stuff. And we have to sleep," Ron noted.
"Even if we saw him, we might not be allowed out of the dorms or into wherever he's hiding," Hermione mused.
"Lupin," Harry decided. "He already knows about the map. Maybe we can get him to watch it for us. He's a professor so he can go running off to the kitchens in the middle of the night if he wants."
"Is he going to want to watch the map all the time?" Dean asked.
"I'll persuade him," Harry shrugged.
That persuasion involved showing up with the map at his meditation session with Professor Lupin that evening. "I haven't seen that thing in a while," the professor noted.
"Fred and George stole it back from Filch," Harry explained. "A while ago. We just figured out today that they had it. We're hoping to use it to locate Pettigrew."
"Huh, yeah. Guess it could do that. I really am surprised Dumbledore hasn't found him yet," Lupin opined.
Harry rolled his eyes, "The way my last few years have gone, I bet he's leaving it up to me as another test."
"Could be," the professor nodded. "Always felt like he was setting us up for that kind of thing too. Hoping we'd do the right thing and become better people, or something. Guess it kind of worked, in a roundabout way, for most of us." He thought about it for a second, "I wonder if he knew that Sirius had sent Snape…" he trailed off.
"What?" Harry asked.
"Nothing," he covered. "Just a prank that went too far when we were in school. Severus could have gotten seriously hurt or died, but your dad managed to stop him in time. Might have actually won us some points with the guy, except it was Sirius that set him up in the first place."
"Meh," Harry shrugged. "Even if someone else had set him up, he'd probably be mad at you for knowing he almost fell for it and having to save him. Guy's got issues."
"Don't we all?" Lupin agreed. "So you're going to keep an eye out on that for Peter?"
"Well… we were kind of hoping that you would? He's probably out from wherever he's hiding mostly at night, so you'd have an easier time going down to the kitchens or wherever to find him." He took a beat, then suggested, "Well, try to catch him. We're hoping to learn a spell to force him back into human form, in case he just hides."
"Can't be too easy to chew mouse holes in stone walls," Lupin figured. "I bet if I bring a cage or something I could at least flush him out, since he can't actually hide. Kitchen staff might be mad if I break a cupboard, but I'm sure they'll… wait, did I agree to this?"
"Sounds like you have a plan, sir," Harry grinned.
"Fine," he sighed. "Give me the stupid thing. You'll have to turn it on for me." Once Harry had, he got to the subject at hand, "Okay, I want to try something else tonight. You're getting good at meditating, but you still can't project. I've been holding off mentioning it, because it seemed kind of woo woo and wasn't useful to me, you know, but might help you. And I found a reference in the library." He handed Harry a book purporting to be a primer on Eastern Midgardian mysticism.
Flipping through it, Harry said, "Oh, yeah, we've done a little bit of this at Kamar-Taj. You want me to try to use this somehow?"
Lupin pointed to a bookmark he'd placed and Harry turned to it to show a map of a human body with lit-up points. "Chakra theory. If I understand it right, when you're not just working on mindfulness, you're supposed to be able to use meditation to open up various nodes in your body. Or on your spirit, maybe? And I'm thinking you might need to, I guess, flip open the whole system to let your spirit out. I'm just spitballing here."
"Worth a shot," Harry agreed. "Yeah, this looks a little complicated. Might be why they didn't want to try to teach us yet."
It really was deep stuff, and it took a couple of weeks and Hermione's help for him to start to figure it out. That help was becoming increasingly tense, as their month and a half of dating wound down without any actual dating. Not that Harry noticed anything other than the slight tension in their interactions. He was basically waiting for Lupin to find Pettigrew, to see what new drama his time with Padma was going to bring, and hoping to have astral projection down before the next time the Mindless Ones showed up.
On the last night he should be dating Hermione, he was instead at another meditation session with Lupin. It was the evening of the spring equinox, and a new moon. Lupin was usually happiest to do the sessions at the middle of the month; he got a little hesitant around the full moon, often suggesting that he wouldn't really be in a meditative mindset.
Harry was busily trying to unlock chakras in a deep meditative state, when he noticed conversation in Lupin's office with them. He tried to focus and block it out, since being too distractible was a problem for meditation, but Snape's voice was grating enough that it broke through.
"You're opening your office up for students to take naps, I see."
"He's learning to meditate," Lupin brushed off the barb. Snape obviously knew what Harry was doing.
"And you're teaching him? I suppose that makes sense," the chemistry professor grudgingly admitted. "Better you than me." He set something on the desk with a thunk, and Harry opened his eyes to see a large decanter of the peppermint-smelling blue potion that Lupin was often drinking.
"Thanks. I was almost out."
"We're reaching the limits of how strong I can make it."
Lupin sighed, "And it's barely taking the edge off, some days."
"Is this going to be a problem?" the black-clad man asked, bravado hiding the fact that he'd taken a half-step back at the revelation. He glanced over at Harry, but didn't seem to notice that he was being watched.
Wait. Harry realized his vantage point was higher than it should be from where he was sitting. He glanced down and saw his own body, eyes still closed. Grinning to himself, he tried to move what must be his astral body, but felt stuck. Still! That was the most success he'd managed yet.
"I'm hanging on," Lupin corrected. "I don't think being back on Vanaheim helps. Something about the moon here bothers… him. Maybe it's all the magic or the electricity thing somehow, since I don't have the problem on Earth, but I've always had it here." He sighed and said, "I'm hoping to make it through the year, and I appreciate all the work you put in on this, but I think it's probably another dead end for me."
Snape, covering for his own lack of decorum, offered, "I reviewed your notes. Whoever 'Mr. Blue' was, he wasn't as clever as he thought. Organic chemistry is unlikely to provide you a cure."
"Yeah, I figured that out from all the tests I've run here with the local ingredients," the defense professor admitted. "He didn't know anything about magic, and I couldn't tell him it wasn't entirely gamma poisoning."
Harry didn't totally follow the conversation, but supposed it had something to do with the "condition" that the professor had alluded to. He must be looking for a cure with Snape's chemistry help. Honestly, based on him not wanting to meet on the full moon and his name, most of the study group was convinced he was a werewolf.
"Well, you can assume that I am second only to yourself in hoping you are successful in finding a cure," Snape said in a way that sounded more accusatory than caring. "If you become a danger to the public, have you considered… another option?"
"Will I kill myself, you mean? I tried it. Didn't take." Harry was shocked by the professor's admission.
"Perhaps you just didn't use a powerful enough means…" Snape suggested, clearly thinking of the various deadly spells he knew.
Lupin sarcastically noted, "Thanks, Severus. The next time I get so depressed I try to take my own life, I'll give you a call. Anything else?"
Realizing that he'd perhaps overstepped, the chemistry professor noted, "Equinox rituals tonight. The staff is meeting in the ritual room near your classroom. Not that you can contribute, but you're expected. I'm heading there now."
"I'll think about it," Lupin nodded, not agreeing.
"Then I shall take my leave," Snape acknowledged and strode out of the room, barely managing to cover his emotions at how the conversation had gone.
Harry thought it was kind of sad. Lupin knew a lot about science, and he suspected the two of them would have more in common than any other professors in the castle, if they didn't hate each other from school.
The distraction removed, the defense professor went back to grading essays and Harry continued trying to figure out how to release his astral self from his physical body. He felt like there was still something locking him in, perhaps a chakra he hadn't fully opened?
It was hard to keep track of time, meditating in the quiet, but he was next disturbed by Lupin going, "Huh." Harry turned his mental vision to the man, who was looking at the map, which he'd spread out at the side of his desk after Snape left. His finger stabbed down on a part of the map that Harry thought was the kitchens. "There you are, you little jerk," he whispered. "Hey Harry. Harry. I see Peter on the map. Woah. You're in deep, huh?"
Harry was slowly retracting himself, but even Lupin shaking him gently by the shoulder only slightly accelerated the process. He couldn't manage to talk from his astral form, but he'd gotten far enough out that getting back in wasn't instantaneous. Lupin scribbled a note on a piece of paper and shoved it in his hand, before hurrying out with the map and a small animal cage he'd had fashioned for the purpose.
What must have only been a couple of minutes later, Harry finally reeled himself all the way in and opened his physical eyes, feeling the note in his hand, which simply confirmed that Lupin had found Peter in the kitchens and was going to try to roust him.
As Harry stretched and stood up to go get his friends to join the chase, he couldn't help but notice the full decanter of potion, still on Lupin's desk. He briefly considered taking it, but it was quite large, and didn't look like it would hold up to being sloshed around the castle at speed. Hopefully it wouldn't be essential.
The hike from the defense office up to Gryffindor dorm had Harry wishing that they had some kind of communicators that worked on Vanaheim. On Earth, he would have just sent his friends a group text. He nearly stumbled jumping through the portrait, gaining the attention of the dozens of students doing homework in the common room. He spotted his friends and waved for them to join him outside the portrait. "Pretty close to curfew," Percy cautioned him. Harry just gave him a thumbs-up of acknowledgement.
As the Gryffindors of the study group piled into the hallway, Harry explained, "Lupin saw Pettigrew in the kitchens. I think he already went down there to get him."
"He won't be able to cast the spell, though. Maybe he'll catch him and bring him up to us?" Hermione figured.
"Probably faster if we go to him," Harry shrugged. "Maybe we'll meet him halfway. At least down is easier than up," he huffed.
Hermione looked hesitantly back at the door, worried about curfew, but saw that everyone else was thrilled about the adventure so nodded, and the eight third-years plus Ginny began moving.
"Should I go get Luna and Padma?" Ginny offered.
"Doesn't seem very Ravenclaw," Parvati shook her head. "And they're way stricter about curfew over there. Padma would just say no, and stop Luna." She rolled her eyes as the rule-following and danger-averseness of her twin.
"Fair," Ginny acknowledged, as they began pounding down the main stairway.
"Why didn't you go with him?" Dean asked when they were halfway to the ground floor. "Not that we mind being included…"
"I was meditating. Almost had it, I think," Harry explained. "I was too deep for him to wake me, so he headed out and left me a note."
They all nodded at that, most of them not understanding that he meant he was partially astrally projecting already, and not just basically unconscious. Half of them thought meditation was more or less sleeping sitting up anyway.
By the time they reached the kitchens, they hadn't run into Lupin. The door was hanging open, and the large room was in disarray. It looked like all of the kitchen staff had already gone home for the evening, but cleaned pots had fallen to the floor, boxes of foodstuffs had been kicked away from the wall, and the whole site really painted a picture of Lupin running around chasing a rat and removing its hiding places.
"I think there's an exit this way," Ron offered, working out the trail of destruction across the kitchen, where a sack of potatoes had been knocked over and rolled in the direction of movement. "He must have chased him out of it onto the lawn!"
The hunt on, nine children rushed down that hallway and found that, indeed, there was a service entrance not far away, spilling out onto the east side of the castle. A well-trod little path led toward the main road into Hogsmeade, and was probably the way the kitchen staff came in every day. It was already fully dark outside, but they saw a moving magical torch not far away. It and their lit wands were able to orient them as they charged across the grass to help Lupin trap what they expected to be a fleeing rat.
They were not expecting to stumble on a loud argument between two grown men. "That's all you have to say for yourself? 'It was them or me?' You're pathetic!" Lupin was shouting at the smaller man, who cowered before him. Lupin had the map clenched in his hand where he'd clearly used it to persuade Pettigrew that he wasn't going to be able to sneak away in the grass, and was managing the torch and the unused rat cage in the other.
"You weren't even here! You don't know! Not all of us could go hide on Midgard, safe from him," the smaller man clapped back, though continued slowly retreating. "I've heard about your defense lessons. Sounds like you've spent years hiding there, too. How are we so different?"
"I didn't murder my friends!" the professor shouted, only vaguely aware of the children running up.
Pettigrew was, though. In fact, he may have only started arguing because he saw them. "I did. I gave them up. I framed Sirius. I blew up a house full of innocents. And I'd do it again. My only regret, old friend, is that you were out of my reach to complete the set."
That admission seemed to have blown through the last of Lupin's self control. His only response was an inarticulate roar as he began to convulse, dropping his magical torch, the cage, and the map on the ground next to him. In the light of their approaching wands and the fallen torch, his skin started to turn green and his robes began to stretch and then rip as he grew. Pettigrew gave them a smug little wave and then promptly transformed even more quickly to a rat, all but disappearing into the grass.
Before they could think to cast the animagus-reversion spell or chase after him, they had to deal with the nearly-jotun-sized wall of green muscle that used to be their professor. The beast in his place was turning, looking for a foe to smite, and there were suddenly nine possible opponents shining lights in his face.
Before all hell broke loose, Harry had a moment to ask, "What the f–"
Chapter 42: Once and Again
Chapter Text
It only took moments for the situation on the lawn to devolve into absolute chaos. Pettigrew had transformed back into a rat and was escaping. Nine kids were surrounding the green titan that used to be defense professor Remus Lupin. While the monstrous shapeshifter in question, in hindsight, wasn't really any bigger than Hagrid, looming over a bunch of surprised children on a moonless night, he seemed, well, hulking.
"Green jotun!" Ron yelled, waving the wandlight in the creature's face.
"He don't look jolly!" Seamus added.
"Green sasquatch," Dean corrected. "I think he's the not-spikey one! Maybe he's nice."
"Snape's berserker report!" Hermione squealed. "He has no other enemies to fight. Run!"
"What happened to Pettigrew?" Harry asked, still task-focused even in the face of his professor turning out to not be a werewolf.
Maybe if the children had encountered the Hulk after he'd already gotten to hit something, shown themselves clearly instead of being little more than shrill voices and bright lights in his face, and presented themselves calmly, it would have gone differently. But still enraged after dealing with an old friend turned traitor, finally free of months of calming draught, and unsure of his surroundings other than that there were little bright threats surrounding him…
The Hulk decided to smash.
The kids had three things going for them that kept them from being instantly turned into bloody smears on the grass.
First, Vanir were nowhere near as tough as Aesir, but they were a little more robust than pure humans. Even the Midgardborn among them received subtle benefits to their health from the magic coursing through their bodies. Thus, rapid slaps of the transformed professor's huge green hands cracked bones and flung Dean, Lavender, and Ginny backwards, but didn't immediately leave them concussed or their organs ruptured.
Second, the kids were strangely familiar with this kind of situation, having initially bonded over a fight with a troll. "Spread out! Try to snag his arms!" Ron yelled, taking tactical control of the situation. It would have been good advice for a troll, but this creature seemed dramatically stronger. Two orange whips of energy wrapped around a green arm, but it was barely slowed, still plowing into Ron and causing him to gasp as his almost-healed arrow injury from the previous month tore back open. Seamus and Neville, who'd produced the whips, stumbled into the ground at the unexpected strength. At least they didn't panic.
Third, they were not actually alone on the grounds, and a bunch of spells spotlighting a roaring green monster was something nobody within a couple hundred yards could miss. As it happened, that included both a detachment of Ministry warriors who had been sent by Fudge to finally deal with Buckbeak while the professors were all otherwise engaged, Sirius Black, and, to Harry's surprise, Severus Snape.
In the initial, shockingly-fast assault, Harry and Hermione had managed to escape unscathed: Harry because he'd held back trying to see the rat in the grass, and Hermione because she had followed her own advice to run. Six children were on the ground with injuries ranging from reopened wounds and broken bones to just being knocked over. That left Parvati as the only one standing and in range, even though shouts of surprise in the distance told her help was on the way.
But it was several seconds out, and the beast might stomp her friends as they rolled on the ground if she didn't do something. She knew magic wasn't her strong point, so she ran. But she ran loud.
"Come get me, you big dumb… melon head!"
Flicking a low-powered bolt of energy at him, she then sprinted as fast as she could toward the shouts.
She only made it about half a dozen yards before the ground shook behind her and a meaty hand sent her flying into the turf. But that was half a dozen yards away from her friends, and closer to the warriors.
"I don't remember him being that big!" Sirius was yelling to Snape as they rushed up. "Or green."
"Circumstances have changed," Snape gritted out. "Potter! Granger! Collect your classmates before they're murdered! Black, distract your monster."
"It's Sirius Black!" one of the warriors realized, coming at them from the opposite direction.
Their sergeant bellowed, "Leave Black for now! Jotun tactics!"
Snape cast something at the Hulk that managed to slow him enough that he didn't quite knock over the warriors like a stack of bowling pins, but it was close. Most of them managed to roll with the attack, taking it on their shields, and tried to use their spears to stab him to death. Enchanted and assigned to them to fight unknown marauder threats, they barely seemed to annoy the Hulk. If anything, the more he was being hit by weapons and spells, the stronger he appeared to be getting.
"Get Parvati," Harry told Hermione, while he went to check on the rest of their classmates that had been downed in the original assault. It was difficult to see as the battle moved away from them with just the fallen and guttering magical torch for light, and he had to relight his wand to see everyone groaning on the ground. Neville and Seamus had just managed to stand back up from where they'd been toppled, and the four that had actually been hit were groaning in pain. "Everyone alive?"
"Can't move my arm," Dean realized.
"I think I broke some ribs," Lavender wheezed.
"I think I may have torn something," Ginny checked herself as she sat up, wincing as she put pressure on her abdomen. "But I can walk."
"Parvati's out, but she's breathing!" Hermione called, from where her roommate had fallen.
"I think I'm bleeding again," Ron said, the pain of it managing to wipe the usual satisfaction of battle from his face.
"Put pressure on the wound," Harry instructed Ron, wadding up the boy's shirt to make it easier to staunch. His first aid training hadn't had much to say about reopened sucking chest wounds with massive blunt trauma, and he was honestly on the verge of freaking out. He was used to being out fighting things, not having his friends bleeding. "We need to get Ron and Parvati to the infirmary, fast. Probably Dean, Ginny, and Lavender, too."
Far too close to their attempts at triage, a surprisingly one-sided battle was going on. Snape was doing everything in his power to weaken the Hulk with magic, only his fierce mental control allowing him to clamp down on the fear from the "incident" when he was a student. Sirius was doing what he could without a wand to throw up shields to deflect massive blows away from the furiously dodging warriors. At this point, even the staunch fighters were reduced to merely trying to ward off attacks.
The Hulk seemed to be trending from anger to having a good time trying to swat his attackers. In hindsight, he could have very easily killed any of them if he'd focused, but almost seemed to be playing a game of changing targets and forcing them to scramble.
And then the mystical despair began to set in, as dozens of red lights began to appear across the grounds.
Harry noticed that the transformed professor began to paw at his head, as if the pall of despair was even affecting him. "Sirius!" he yelled. "Mindless Ones! You have to get out of here."
Sirius nodded at Harry and shouted, "Remus!" He flung an unfocused bolt of orange magic to get his friend's attention. "Come chase me into the forest! Like we used to do."
The Hulk grunted and spotted his old friend, still trying to shake off the mystical malaise as he gave one last swat to a nearby warrior and then bounded off after Sirius, who was already transforming into a dog to outpace him into the forest. Each of the red lights began to turn and swarm in their direction. "You fools!" Snape yelled after them.
Harry couldn't help but agree. There were more Mindless Ones than they'd seen before, and they were spreading out. This time they might actually catch him, especially distracted by the berserk Lupin. "Everyone that can walk, can you help carry Ron and Parvati?" Harry asked his friends. "Anyone else need help moving?"
"I'll make it," Dean grunted. "Sounds like you aren't coming."
"May need to help them with the Mindless Ones," he nodded, letting the invisibility cloak fall over him and finally snatching the map back up where Lupin had dropped it on the ground in his transformation.
"Be careful," his friend nodded, as he began to organize the march.
Meanwhile, Snape was so busy stabilizing the wounded warriors, he didn't notice his least-favorite student wander off. Wouldn't, in fact, notice he was missing until the triage caravan had made it back into the castle.
Following the red lights and feeling of despair was all too easy for Harry, his meditation techniques managing to keep the wail of his dying mother at the edge of his consciousness as he charged after them. He didn't know whether he'd be able to summon up a breakthrough with astral projection in this crisis, but he knew neither of the grown men could manage it. He might have actually asked Snape for help—the professor could definitely astral project—but Harry was convinced the man would have figured out how to justify not helping, and keep him from helping as well.
As the woods loomed up, he quickly dropped his "waypoint" spell down on the ground. He was getting a lot more proficient with it, and was sure he was on the verge of being able to make it mobile soon.
Then it was back into the dark forest. He was becoming all too familiar with running through it at night. Without the moon, it was especially forbidding, but he expected that any beast in the forest that might harm him would have fled the Mindless Ones. Only an idiot like him would go charging after them. He lit his wand just enough to highlight the ground before him, allowing the cloak to roll back up now that he was away from the adults. It probably wouldn't do him any good against the Mindless Ones, and might make it so nobody could find him if he passed out.
He wandered in the dark for quite a few minutes, following the occasional flash of red light and growing feeling of unease. Eventually he heard a warning bark ahead and broke into a sprint as the noise grew increasingly distressed. He exited the treeline into a clearing with a large pond, visible in the reflected starlight. Red lights surrounded the clearing on most sides, and as he increased his wandlight he made out Sirius, in his dog form, barking furiously to try to wake Lupin. The defense professor was swiftly shrinking into the tatters of his robes, passed out on the bank of the lake.
Harry wasn't sure whether Sirius was afraid to leave him to the Mindless Ones, or just figured that he was trapped anyway. "Sirius!" Harry yelled.
The animagus swiftly shifted back to human form, and gasped, "Harry? No! You can't be caught here, too!"
Turning back into human form seemed to fix the targeting of the dark dimension creatures, or maybe they were just waiting for a dramatically-appropriate moment, but the lights began to slowly move closer to the pond, their aura of dread becoming nearly palpable as the water hissed and bubbled with cold vapor.
"I can astrally project!" Harry assured him. "I think!" As he charged up to the two older men, he tossed Sirius his wand and slid into the lotus position next to Lupin. "Do what you can to give me a minute!"
"Mad as your father," Sirius said, half in respect, half disturbed. He set about doing what transfiguration he could manage to try to raise the terrain into obstacles—earthen berms and spikes of ice. Harry already thought Sirius seemed to be flagging under the malaise even as he tried to find his meditative center…
In his trance, Harry only had scraps of what happened next…
"I found 'em!" Hagrid's booming yell roused him from where he'd slumped and almost rolled into the pond. He pried his eyes open to see the big man holding his lantern high. Lupin's unconscious body was still sprawled next to him, but Sirius was nowhere to be seen. His wand was also gone, hopefully still with his godfather. "Yeh alright, Harry?"
"Where's Sirius?" he asked, managed to sit up without rolling the rest of the way into the water.
"If he were with yeh, I reckon them Mindless Ones took 'im back ter Azkaban. Sorry, Harry," Hagrid said. "We ain't seen sign o' him or them in the forest."
"I don't…" Harry tried to put his disjointed memory back together as Fang charged up and began giving him friendly licks to his face. "I think… I think my father's ghost might have saved him? That doesn't make any sense, though, right?"
"I hear those things do bad things ter yer brain," Hagrid shrugged. "Important thing is they didn't take yeh and Remus, too. Can yeh walk while I carry him? He seems well out."
"He's the Hulk," Harry remembered what the news had been calling him the previous summer. "Guess he can only keep that up for so long, and then crashes out."
"Well, he tol' us his condition were worse, 'cause o' somethin' he did ter himself on accident," Hagrid admitted, picking up Lupin and trying to preserve his decency while Harry pulled himself up with some help from Fang. "Back when he were a student, t'was just battle frenzy. He'd get a bit bigger and weird lookin', but nothin' like some o' them were sayin' happened earlier."
They began heading back through the woods and Harry explained, "My aunt thinks it has something to do with government experiments. He fought another one kind of like him last summer, back on Earth. She thinks our country was trying to make super soldiers."
"No folly greater than kingdoms trying to win a war," McGonagall said, primly, after smoothly transforming from a cat to a human as she emerged from the shadows. "Save, perhaps, children trying to protect those that should be protecting them. I expect that the points lost for charging off without an adult will balance those from saving a professor, Potter." She informed Hagrid, "The rest of the search party is heading back in separately."
"Sorry, ma'am," he told her. Harry was never totally sure how mad McGonagall actually was at foolish bravery. She was his head-of-house, after all. "I thought I could astrally project and fend them off. But I guess I didn't have enough time."
"It's a wonder you thought you could accomplish it at all," she agreed. "Especially to add to your other achievements of the evening."
"All I did was get the rest of the group hurt," he demurred. "We thought we could help catch Pettigrew, but Professor Lupin transformed, and the rat got away."
"Perhaps," she said. "But you seemed instrumental in Professor Snape helping, as well as Black, which may have prevented many casualties. And I understand you must have freed a certain unjustly-doomed hippogriff, as well."
"Somebody freed Buckbeak?" Harry's mood brightened. "Did Hermione manage to do it?"
She frowned, "No, Ms. Granger went straight to the infirmary with the others. Perhaps you did it on the way into the forest or in the time you can't remember? We should have Poppy check you over thoroughly."
"Yes, ma'am," he agreed, still confused.
He'd at least made a pretty straight path into the forest, since they hit a game trail leading from the pond almost directly towards his waypoint marker, emptying out in a spot he thought he could find again with Hagrid's hut lit up on his right and one of the castle's back gates dead ahead.
He followed the professors in a bit of a daze into the school and up to the infirmary, where most of his friends and several of the Ministry warriors were taking up beds. "Everyone okay?" he asked, as Hermione rushed up and gave him a hug.
"Thanks to your quick thinking with Mr. Weasley's wound, yes," Madam Pomfrey nodded, "everyone should be fine. Now let me see to you." She effortlessly peeled Hermione off of him and began waving her wands doing scans. "You seem perfectly fine, which is surprising after the night you had."
"I really just ran off and knocked myself out meditating," he assured her, still confused why everyone was acting like he'd done more.
"But you freed Buckbeak!" Hermione insisted. She led him over to the section of the room where his friends were camped out. Padma had shown up to sit with Parvati, who seemed to be conscious but looked slightly concussed. "I thought you were just going to get Sirius?"
Harry glanced back at where Hagrid, McGonagall, and Pomfrey were distracted laying Lupin out in a bed and admitted, "Wait, you think I did that, too? I literally just ran after Sirius and passed out trying to astrally project to save him."
"But you've been gone for nearly three hours," Dean explained. "It's after midnight already. We assumed you were out doing other stuff. We thought you might have managed to catch Pettigrew, too."
Harry shrugged, "I guess I was just passed out for that long. Oh! I don't remember much but I think I saw my dad's ghost? It sounds stupid every time I say it, but maybe he saved Sirius, and they ran off and did all that stuff?"
"Never been a ghost back from Valhalla," Neville said, quietly. "But I guess weirder stuff has happened to you."
Hermione had been frowning since Dean's comment, and said, "I guess if it's after Midnight, it's Monday. So that makes it your turn to date Padma."
"Everybody switch places!" Harry rolled his eyes, still not picking up what she was sad about at him being missing for the end of their dating window.
"Well," Dumbledore announced, entering the infirmary in eye-watering lime green robes with a lemon yellow pattern of suns, "it seems we must leave a few more staff to mind the school during the equinox rites, going forward." He twinkled and said, "Or perhaps not."
They were surprised to see the Ancient One enter the room not far behind the headmaster. "I hardly feel that a Dark Dimension breach of this magnitude is a laughing matter, Albus." She waved off the Midgardborn trying to bow to her, half of them from their beds. To their unspoken question she admitted, "The route through the Chamber of Secrets was faster, but not immediate enough for me to be of active help."
"I think they must have taken Sirius back with them," Harry told her and Dumbledore. "He wasn't around when I woke up."
"Then I shall have to have your Mr. Hagrid show me the site where he found you," she nodded. "Perhaps I can confirm whether they returned to the Dark Dimension there and took him back with them."
"But we can surely go catch Pettigrew, now that we're sure he's still here," Hermione argued. "Won't they swap him for the rat?"
The headmaster admitted, "They may be… overzealous with a recaptured prisoner, especially one that has eluded them for such a long time. But! I don't believe you should worry about this. It's late, and there will be time for troubles in the morning. And perhaps Ms. Granger is right and Peter's capture will put things right. Now. I must go speak with a very sleepy Minister, upset about his warriors that he'd instructed to sneak onto the school grounds while I was unavailable to greet them." He winked and left.
The Ancient One didn't follow him. She narrowed her eyes at the children and asked, "Did anything you cannot explain happen tonight?"
They all thought about it, and it was Ron who realized, "Where did Snape and Black come from? They were there right away."
Harry nodded, "Snape was supposed to be going to the equinox ritual. And Sirius shouldn't have known to hang out just waiting for something to happen. And I didn't free Buckbeak."
She nodded slowly, as if coming to a decision, finally admitting, "I thought I felt the brush of looped time when I arrived. I was hoping I was wrong, for what could compel the risk?" She fixed Harry with her gaze and explained, "This must have gone badly wrong the first time. Who can say how many times we tried again, until a stable loop formed?"
At her significant pause, all eyes of the study group turned to Hermione to translate the Sorcerer Supreme's cryptic statements about time. She said, "So… the things that don't make sense must have been someone going back in time to change things. And maybe if they didn't… Harry, Sirius, and Professor Lupin all got taken by the Mindless Ones. And maybe the Hulk killed people. And Buckbeak got executed." She worked it out and said, "So you went back and fixed it. But now you're basically obligated to, because you already did."
Parvati, slightly drunkenly—either from the concussion or the potions to fix it—argued, "But you can't! It would be like true prophecy! If you knew that it went wrong, you couldn't fix it, because then you wouldn't know to fix it."
The Ancient One nodded, "Usually true. But time is more… pliable, with sufficient power." She pulled out an oblong amulet that had been hanging beneath her robes. Several of them recognized the Eye of Agamotto. "I had thought I only brought this in case I needed its power against the hosts of the Dark Dimension. But it seems it has another use."
Harry thought he'd gotten it and asked, "So it was you that saved us from the Mindless Ones? You just have done it yet."
She gave them as sad smile and said, "Well, Ms. Granger is mostly right. For many reasons, it cannot be me. This world's manifestations of time would not appreciate me traveling back to a previous day where I notably was not on the planet. And that is without the extra scrutiny I would personally receive moving temporally through a juncture with the Dark Dimension."
"One of us has to do it," Hermione nodded like she got it. Internally, she was amassing about half a dozen research topics to try to actually understand what she'd just heard.
"I think, perhaps, because you are young and, well, small, two might be able to travel," the Ancient One smirked.
"Not it," Padma said, quickly.
"Broken arm," Dean gestured with his working hand.
"Punctured lung, or I'd really be interested," Ron sadly demurred.
"Why are we even arguing about this?" Ginny asked, pointing at Harry and Hermione.
Harry wasn't sure, "If it's just about people who were already here, you could send one of the professors. Even Dumbledore. They're fully trained."
The Ancient One chided, "Do not fool yourself that I would let that man lay his hands on my amulet. And none of the others have training at Kamar-Taj. The two of you have been practicing your basic mudras, yes?" Both of them nodded, as did Dean, Parvati, and Padma. Harry thought of them more as somatic components, but the Masters were traditional about terms. "Let's do this before I convince myself it's a terrible idea, or the Norns catch on. Do not give this to anyone but me."
She had Harry and Hermione stand extremely close to each other and placed the cord of the amulet around their necks, allowing it to hang between them. Harry tried, "I don't even have my wand. Shouldn't we bring more stuff? Shouldn't we have a plan?"
She smirked again, "Mr. Potts. I understand that you never have any of that in your adventures on Earth. Why should this be any different? Now," and she began to demonstrate the gestures, "I believe Ms. Granger should lead, and Mr. Potts should hold on unless his precision has eclipsed hers in the last few months? No? Very well, we go from the joined gesture of the three, into a rightfold crossing to open the Eye."
Hermione followed along with her own gestures, and the metal of the amulet suddenly snapped open, revealing a green stone within, emitting light. Harry felt something very familiar in a sound it was making, just outside of hearing, and the scar on his forehead prickled slightly. Hermione asked, "What if I go back too far?"
Dean piped up, "Whatever you do, don't blink!"
"I regret my father talking you into watching new Who," she sniped back.
"Focus, Ms. Granger," the Ancient One chastised with a smile. "The only reason I think you'll even be able to go back as far as you have to, is because you probably already have. Merely give it your all. Now, a forward double reach, turning deosil, to summon the bands." Hermione copied her, circles of glowing green sigils appearing along her forearm. "This is the most difficult part. Turn the palm toward yourself and rotate your other hand widdershins, concentrating on going back in time. Good luck, the both of you."
With enormous effort, Hermione turned her hand as if she was hanging onto a colossal gyroscope until her palm was facing herself and Harry, green light shining in their faces, and used her left arm to begin to trace counterclockwise loops around it, the geometry of the light spinning in time, faster and faster. She made it about three and a half rotations before she couldn't maintain it anymore and had to drop her arm, exhausted, to her side, the Eye snapping shut.
"Um. I think it worked," Harry held onto her as she almost fainted. "Everyone's gone." Indeed, they were now in the empty infirmary, presumably hours earlier.
"I wish she'd given us time to make a plan," Hermione said, rather enjoying Harry hanging onto her, and suddenly realizing that she hadn't missed the end of her dating time with him after all. "What if we run into ourselves? What if we get hurt back here? What if we accidentally change something we're not meant to change?"
Now that he'd committed to the crazy scheme, Harry was back in what was unfortunately his element: flying into danger by the seat of his pants. Quickly answering her questions he said, "Invisibility cloak, and we try to stay where we know we aren't. Stay away from the things we know are dangerous. And if we mess it up, either we always messed it up or the time loop's not as stable as she thinks it is."
"Right," she nodded, feeling a little energy coming back so she was able to stand on her own. "I guess you hang onto this," she slipped the amulet off her neck, leaving it around Harry's, "since she said it was also for fighting the Mindless Ones, and we know you do that."
"What do you mean? I was my… it was an astral projection of me, not my dad… right," he figured it out.
"People do say you look a lot like him," she agreed. "Let's get out of here before Madam Pomfrey has questions we can't answer."
Of course, they'd only stepped about two yards out of the infirmary before they nearly collided with Trelawney. The gothed-up seer was probably on her way to the equinox ritual, but took time to say, "Ah. Harry Potter. Hermione Granger. And I see that you've acquired a new piece of jewelry, which… it cannot be!" she said, unfortunately immediately recognizing the most powerful artifact of time in the Nine Realms.
By reflex, her hand reached out to touch it, and Harry didn't think to stop her. At her caress, green light flared around the amulet, with perhaps some sympathetic orange light leaking from Harry's scar, and her eyes rolled back in her head.
She began to speak, her voice taking on a strange tone, "It will happen tonight." Harry realized that he recognized the reverb: it was very similar to the voices of the Norns that he heard when he had worn the Helm of Sorting. He could almost even see ghostly images of three other women flickering over the professor's face as she continued. "The Dark Lord's great wound is almost healed, and his work can begin again. His treasure was cast to the void, where it was drawn to another. Tonight, before midnight. The betraying brother will be called to him. With this servant's aid, the Dark Lord will reach out his hand to grasp the the heart of the Realms. Tonight… before midnight… the servant… will be called… to attend the Dark Lord."
"But we need to catch Pettigrew!" Hermione said, upset by the implication that Peter, who betrayed his brothers, would be summoned to whoever was pretending to be Voldemort. "That's part of why we're here."
"Looks like one of those things the Ancient One was warning us about," Harry nodded. "We're not just up against the rat and the Mindless Ones anymore. I bet the Norns aren't happy with us messing with time." He said, face resolved, "Looks like we have to beat them all."
"No pressure, or anything," Hermione rolled her eyes.
Meanwhile Trelawney had come back to herself, and no longer seemed to even notice the amulet or remember what she had said. "I say, I'll be late for the rituals! Good luck with whatever you're attempting, you two. Mindful of curfew. Ta."
As she walked off, Harry and Hermione nodded at each other, and headed off toward the grounds as true Gryffindors: willing to fight time itself, if they had to.
Chapter 43: The Nick of Time
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Severus Snape was thinking about things he would change, if he had it all to do again, differently. He was often ruminating on his past, dwelling in his guilt and self-loathing. Through long and hard practice he'd given himself the magical equivalent of hyperthymesia—highly superior autobiographical memory. The ability to completely order his thoughts and memories was essential in his role as a spy against beings with supernatural insight into the sapient mind. But it meant that he never forgot a single thing he'd done wrong. No matter how hidden away from mental intrusion, he could always get to it.
At the moment, he was kicking himself over how mastery of his mind conflicted with that enhanced recall. He was, at once, perfectly able to control his fear response and perfectly able to remember the most terrifying moment of his life, long before he'd developed such shields against fear. He would always be that overconfident teen, finally about to find out what Potter's gang got up to in the Roaring Rampart. He could never forget the twisted and furious berserk form of Remus Lupin about to rend him limb from limb, before James Potter stepped in to save him.
He could never forget nor forgive.
It was there every time he interacted with Lupin, his pulse racing with the fear. The irony was that trying to control that fear was what had driven him so deeply into the study of occlumency, and yet it seemed to be the one thing it didn't allow him to control. Every sight of the man was a battle of his own will against his own unforgettable frailty. He was honestly slightly interested to see the new form that Lupin said he'd accidentally mutated himself into, necessitating the superior calming draughts. Perhaps it would be sufficiently different from the original screaming, warp-spasmed boy that his mind would be able to recategorize it among all the other horrors he'd experienced and compartmentalized as an adult.
What truly rankled was that Lupin was clearly brilliant. If he could put aside his fear and animosity, their collaboration might be magnificent. The man had gone back to Midgard to become its foremost authority on particle physics, and still found time to become expert in various aspects of biology, botany, and pharmacology to try to treat his condition on his own. While they hadn't worked to cure him, the theories that "Mr. Green" and "Mr. Blue" had worked out together in their correspondences were inspired.
Maybe he should track down this Mr. Blue, if he could never collaborate with Mr. Green due to his fear.
That musing was abruptly terminated by a sound that he could also never forget: Sybill Trelawney in the throes of true prophecy. He could barely make out the pieces of what she was saying, since it sounded like she was down the hall toward the infirmary, heading toward the ritual space from a different direction than he had come. But the sound of her voice overlaid with the Norns was unmistakable.
The last time he had heard it, it had begun the worst mistake of his life.
By the time he moved down the hallway to try to determine what new prophetic horrors the woman was going to unleash on the world, he was too late. He saw her toddling off, oblivious, toward the ritual room. And, in the other direction, he glimpsed two students quick-stepping their way to the closest exit to the grounds. Granger's bushy brown hair was easy enough to spot from the back, but he barely countenanced the identity of the boy with her. The unruly Potter hair was also iconic, even from a distance, but he'd just left the boy, seemingly deeply unconscious, in Lupin's office. Was that whole thing a performance? It seemed a long way to go just for him. What were they up to?
Passing unseen was easy enough for him, and he stalked them silently, eager to uncover what follies they were up to. To his great disappointment, James Potter's son rarely got up to mischief that could be punished: so often, his hijinx were fully orchestrated by one Albus Dumbledore and Severus was roundly prevented from stopping them. Or helping. Albus didn't think the boy would grow into the hero they needed without being challenged, and fully believed that the forces of fate would keep him safe enough until the final, ordained confrontation.
Severus disagreed, but could never convince the headmaster otherwise.
He was almost close enough to the two to overhear their quiet planning by the time they exited through the back entrance and onto the dark castle grounds. With a flicker of motion as of falling cloth, Potter disappeared and Snape caught his breath: of course the boy had the hated Potter heirloom that had so often allowed his father and his gang to catch Severus unawares. The girl, however, remained visible and began to stride purposefully toward the edge of the forest.
While it was possible she was also working part of a plan ultimately endorsed by Dumbledore, it would be harder for him to talk her out of punishment for being in the forest at all, much less after curfew. He might also wind up saving her life: she did not enjoy the dubious distinction that she would live long enough to be murdered by the Dark Lord.
Staying far enough behind her that there was no chance of her dim wandlight revealing him in the darkness, he ghosted along, eager to work out her plan. Of course, he should have known. As soon as she got near Hagrid's hut at the forest's edge, she began to shout for the other living person Severus hated most…
Sirius Black was having a pretty complicated relationship with time. He'd been through over a decade of mental torture that had simultaneously felt like forever and no time at all. Within weeks of his stealth escape—waiting for the portal to open and inter another inmate and slipping out as a dog that they'd never designed the wards to restrict—all of his lost time had caught up to him. Each week, another year of frailty had landed upon his body; hair growing, nails cracking, and clothes falling apart around him.
The people that say that your thirties are still the prime of your life haven't been suddenly thrust into them after being used to the health of a 22-year-old.
Living rough wasn't nearly as bad as a dog, even in the winters near Hogwarts. But spending so much time in his animagus form played even further hell with his sense of time. A doggy brain isn't really designed for precise autobiographical memory. He was pretty sure he was improving, after months of freedom, but not nearly as much as if he had been freed into a safe, warm home and the aid of a skilled therapist. Or had never been thrown into a hell dimension for a decade in the first place after one of the most traumatic events anyone could experience.
But he knew his sanity hadn't healed, not totally. Not yet. Maybe not ever. A sane person wouldn't continue to live like a hermit in a dangerous forest, hoping to have a chance at stopping a traitor who might be long gone. Anywhere would be safer for him. It would probably be safer for Harry as well, and everyone else that the Mindless Ones were willing to go through to get to Sirius. But as long as there was hope that he could still catch Peter, he'd wait for the opportunity.
And hadn't his quick thinking potentially also saved Hogsmeade? He was pretty sure the instances of food and warm clothing left out had increased dramatically in the weeks since. Or maybe he'd lost track of time again. He chose to believe he had been a hero, and the townsfolk were grateful.
He had no idea that particular night would give him an opportunity to be one again.
At first, he didn't hear his name being called. When his canine hearing picked it up, he initially decided it was the Ministry's warriors making another attempt to capture him. Ronan's guard had left him alone—even spotted him once and waved—but the blokes from out of town weren't so forgiving. Yet they did not have many that sounded like teen girls. Out of curiosity, he began to move in to check it out, and broke into a run through the dark woods as he realized it must be one of Harry's friends. Was Harry in trouble?
He quickly realized that the girl was in trouble. She didn't seem to be aware of the threat behind her as she stopped calling his name when she heard him pounding out of the forest. But he'd recognize that particular aroma of sweat and chemicals anywhere, even in the dark. "Snivellus!" he threatened, transforming into his human form in mid-leap from the shadows, landing in between his old nemesis and the girl.
"Black," Snape drawled, leveling a wand at him. A slight smirk indicated that the man thought he had Sirius dead to rights without a wand.
"What are you doing to the girl!?" he demanded.
"Possibly giving her detention for being out after curfew and consorting with a known criminal."
The girl—Hermione, if he was remembering a name correctly that was odd in a way uncommon for Vanaheim—said, "We don't have time for this! Professor Lupin found Peter Pettigrew and is chasing him outside. But I think the professor is going to get too angry. And more people are coming! You have to go keep him from hurting anyone."
Sirius locked eyes with Snape. What would the man do? This was all too similar to the nearly-deadly prank Sirius had played on him as a boy, that had turned their often-playful rivalry into one of true hatred. He could see the man's lip moving in the girl's wandlight as he decided, before finally announcing, "Let's go clean up another of your messes. And don't think I've forgotten you're owed detention, Granger!"
They both set off running together in the direction the girl had pointed, Sirius happy to discover that he was able to outpace the other man, even in human form. Sure enough, in the distance they could make out lit wands coming from the castle, casting the silhouette of two other men having a confrontation on the grass around a dim torch. Even over a decade later, he'd recognize the shapes of his two friends. Well, lost friend and false friend. And the girl was right, he could hear Remus raising his voice, which always presaged an episode. He had to keep him from hurting anyone. He had to catch the rat! As the lights reached the figures and cast them all into full color, he could see Harry and his friends in the distance—including, somehow, the girl who they'd just left behind now in front of them. But the tableau only lasted a moment, before, in a blink, suddenly missing was…
Peter Pettigrew was running out of time. The real problem was that he'd spent so long in his rat form that it was hard to set priorities in a human way. When he'd watched the titanic form of the Dark Lord brought low by whatever magic Lily Potter had summoned, he'd fled in panic. He knew there was no longer a protector for him. At least he'd faked his death; he'd been expecting to be taken off-world anyway, but it meant few people should be looking for him. But if anyone saw him… it could ruin everything.
Originally, he'd just inserted himself as Scabbers into the Weasley family to wait for the coast to be clear. He'd had a thought about gathering information, then maybe escaping into the Goblin Market, or even Midgard. But the food was good and life was so easy as a pet rat. Every plan his human mind made, his rat mind decided could be put off until later.
Even when the jig was almost up, and he realized that he needed to flee Hogwarts, he still had a good thing going in the castle kitchens. It was even easier than being a pet. Warm corners and unlimited food. It was easy enough to convince himself that he'd go when Sirius was captured and no longer hunting him. Maybe in the summer, when there would be so many fewer people to notice him? He'd delayed and delayed and delayed.
And then Remus had found him with that damned map. Chased him out of the castle. Been about to catch him, the map more than a match for his ability to hide in the grass. He really hadn't practiced sneaking anywhere but inside buildings in quite some time anyway.
So he tried negotiating, transforming back into a human. Remus had been far away from the worst of the war. And it had been so long. Maybe he could talk his way out. As soon as he was back in human form, his human sense caught up to all the dumb mistakes he'd made in the last decade, and especially the last year. He should have been long gone, and now he was playing for time.
Yet Remus seemed more invested than he'd expected, and not interested in letting him go. He was even getting angry about Peter's betrayal. Didn't he understand that everyone on Vanaheim only had a fifty-fifty chance, and anyone with sense would do whatever they needed to guarantee they'd be in the living half? The arrival of the children, though, that was Odin-sent. If Remus was angry, let him get angry.
Back in rat form and slipping away from the debacle, Peter tried to hold onto the certainty that he needed to get away, not go back to the castle. He heard Sirius shouting and racing up! Harry had been after him for months. He had one night of new moon to get free and clear. No more dumb, rat-brained decisions.
He'd just assured himself that he wouldn't get complacent when he realized he'd forgotten to pay attention to what he was running toward, only away from. "Total Petrification of Gleipnir!" a boy's voice chanted quietly from seemingly nowhere, and then he felt his rat body go stiff in the chains of the body-bind. A hand snatched him up out of the grass and then they were moving off, still away from the roaring and battle behind them. "You didn't think you'd get away, did you?" Harry Potter's voice asked him, presumably rhetorically.
They moved swiftly across the grounds, coming to a stop in the shadow of a building. Peter figured it must be Hagrid's hut—he'd been planning on hiding there for a moment to evaluate his options anyway. He might have had a bit of a snack, found a dark corner to take a nap– No! He had to stop letting rat brain take over.
"I got him," Harry whispered to someone. Peter thought he felt folds of cloth moving—ah, yes, the boy had the invisibility cloak; no wonder he hadn't seen him. Maybe they'd let the binding go long enough for him to negotiate. Harry would be pliable to old Uncle Peter, right? But as a wand lit up, he knew that he'd have a harder time playing on the boy's sympathies, because his partner in this caper was the much-more-logical…
Hermione Granger figured her time had finally come. She was on the big adventure with Harry! Their first year, she'd fought the troll with everybody, but completely dipped out on the trip through the convergence. Their second, she'd gotten tricked into wandering off before he went to Niflheim, and been in France while he had all kinds of interesting things happen over the summer. Sure, she'd fought a couple of mutated low-lifes over winter break, but so had Dean. Really, that was the part that rankled: Dean got to be there for most of the adventures, and even Ron and Neville probably technically had her beaten for involvement.
Did being in Gryffindor create a bizarre effect similar to Stockholm Syndrome that formerly-sensible Hermione Granger had begun seriously assessing her "adventures where we could have died" score as too low?
Well, that wasn't all there was to it. It was pretty clear that all of their friends, family, and even enemies expected Harry and Hermione to wind up together, romantically. And they'd both been fighting it. Hermione, herself, was keenly aware that virtually nobody married the person that they'd dated as a 14-year-old. But they did often maintain useful lifelong friendships with their schoolmates. Just like Harry and Dean had tried to tell them, it was only logical to not risk ruining their friendships with dating. And she hadn't even been that interested until Harry decided to eject from the whole process before she'd even gotten her turn. It was silly, and she realized it.
But, well…
In a lot of ways, it was like going to school with British royalty. Hermione had heard everything about Catherine Middleton over the winter holidays: the woman who would become England's princess because she'd fallen in love with Prince William in school. As much as he would never admit it, Harry was the most eligible bachelor at Hogwarts. He'd been heir to a sizable fortune on Vanaheim and carrying around celebrity there before it started to look like he could wind up as Tony Stark's heir as well. Being swept along with his life would alter her trajectory even more than learning that magic was real and that she could do it.
And, sure, assuming he didn't get himself killed on an adventure, that was already happening, whether or not they dated. She had spent the whole holiday with Tony Stark. She and her parents had been networked. SHIELD probably had her on their radar as someone that was competent (well, or at least as some kind of person of interest). And that was just the non-magical stuff. She was still gobsmacked that the Sorcerer Supreme had trusted her over any of the Hogwarts professors with one of the most powerful relics of Kamar-Taj. She'd been taught how to use it!
But all she could think about, involved in actual time travel, was that she had another shot at ending her dating trial with Harry on a high note.
God ( Gods, she corrected herself), it wasn't like she was even that attracted to Harry. He was a little short for her, honestly. Well, maybe he put in enough effort in their exercise and fighting sessions that he had virtually every other boy at the school his age besides Dean beaten for muscle tone… but she was in charge of her hormones, thank you very much. She'd never let on that she and her roommates stayed up nights objectifying the boys as much as they were probably over in their room objectifying the girls. But, really, she mostly agreed with Lavender that, of all people, the swiftly-growing Ron Weasley might wind up the most fit of the third-year boys.
And if she could just convince herself that it was stupid to try to date her best friend—who she wasn't even that attracted too, damnit—maybe she could let this whole dating thing go and stop feeling like she was being mercenary about the whole situation. But there was just something about getting back an extra shot and making some kind of move before the deadline that wouldn't leave her brain…
"Thanks for letting me borrow your wand," Harry broke her out of her reverie, where she'd been waiting for him behind Hagrid's hut. He'd lit it and handed it over, and she managed to keep it lit as she took it back, their fingers touching with a thrill of passed magic. "I'm not sure it's a great match, but it helped me with the body-bind. You might want to recast it."
"But you got him?" she nodded, relieved, as he held out the gray rat, flickering in a teal glow of magical petrification. "Why don't we make sure we've gotten him?" She'd taken a large stone from around Hagrid's garden, and used her returned wand to transfigure it into a stone jar just big enough for the rat. "Slip him in there," she ordered Harry, and mentioned, "If he somehow breaks the binding, he should turn himself into soup if he tries to transform. And it will crush him if he somehow breaks the transfiguration." She added those last bits for Pettigrew's benefit.
"Nasty," Harry said appreciatively, slipping the rat into the purpose-created container. She waved her wand again to close up the lid, leaving only a hole wide enough for air but not for even a rat to squeeze out of. "Sounds like the fight is about to change. I better get into the woods. Can you go free Buckbeak and bring him?"
"Shouldn't we get the rat into the castle?" she checked.
"We didn't this early before," he shrugged.
"What if something goes wrong?"
"You've got this," he assured her. "Meet you by the lake after, hopefully, this all goes really well."
She smiled and nodded in agreement. If someone else told her to hang onto a murderer currently trapped as a rat in her arms, while freeing a dangerous magical beast to help a crazed but innocent convict, she'd think nobody could pull off such a stunt. But, well, it was…
Harry Potts was finally minutes ahead rather than hours behind in the face of a crisis. The feeling of actually having a plan (even an improvised one) rather than completely winging it in the face of danger was electric. Well, maybe that was the feeling of carrying around another of what he had to assume was a similar capital-S Stone to the orange and yellow ones he'd held the previous two years. He was growing increasingly worried that it was his fate to taste the whole rainbow of these things. And whatever energy from the orange one still lived in him seemed to like the green one only slightly better than the yellow one. At least this one was sealed off in a powerful relic most of the time. But if he needed its help to drive off the Mindless Ones, it might be an issue.
Not that he was getting ahead of himself, or anything.
He was, at least, glad he could rely on Hermione to handle the rat and the hippogriff. Though there was something going on with her that he wasn't sure was just nerves about time travel (13-year-old obliviousness could selectively blot out the sun ). But as long as he didn't get dragged off to the Dark Dimension, he'd have time to figure it out. They had Pettigrew! As long as they didn't get blindsided, they'd turn him in to the Ministry, whatever prophecy Trelawney had spouted would be averted, and Sirius would be on his way to freedom.
Of course, knowing his life as well as he did, he was already musing vaguely, in the back of his head, on what he'd do if something tried to snatch the rat at the last second. Hopefully Hermione could handle it for a few minutes.
He was slightly ahead of his time-doppleganger, but was able to follow the trail Hagrid had shown him toward the lake. Wrapped in his invisibility cloak, the malaise of the Mindless Ones in the forest seemed less, though he still had to begin meditating to handle it. Hopefully he'd have more luck getting into the mindset than he had the first time through. The idea that he'd already done it was very reassuring.
Spotting the clearing with the pond up ahead, and outside the ring of red eyes, he figured there was no time like the present. He even thought he was on the same side he remembered seeing the "ghost" from earlier. He popped down in a clear-looking spot (for as little as he was able to see by the dim lights provided by everyone else). Get situated. Clear his head. Start opening chakras. And free his mind…
Do not get distracted while trying to meditate by old En Vogue songs of the same name and catchy chorus that Aunt Pepper enjoyed playing…
He was most of the way free by the time he could hear Sirius start creating obstacles to defend his past self and Lupin. Ah. There was one more chakra under the belly that he hadn't quite widened enough the last time. And then he was out of his own head.
Being a free-floating spirit was interesting. He'd have to compare notes with the draugr. He looked down at his own shimmering, translucent hand and saw that he was clothed the same. An idle wonder about whether he could control his astral appearance flickered across his thoughts, and he could see it spread like lightning under his skin. Perhaps there was something to existing as pure thought, unencumbered by the body, that was distinctly different and thus dangerous to the Mindless Ones.
In fact, he couldn't even feel their malaise.
"Hey!" he shouted, flying more than charging out of the woods onto the shore of the lake. "I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin, or to the next convenient parallel dimension!" Dean would be so proud at his Ghostbusters quote. Maybe Coulson too, if he could tell him about it. He'd gotten a vibe, having dinner after the New York library incident.
The glowing red eyes turned in his direction. He could see Sirius giving him a brilliant smile, though the adult glanced down at former-Harry, assuming he'd succeeded in astrally projecting. But rather than just immediately departing like the ones at the quidditch match, these Mindless Ones seemed to think they could take him. They began to move toward him, trying to surround him.
"Don't make me have to bring out the big guns!" he threatened, suddenly not sure what the big guns were. But then he glanced down at his spectral chest and saw that the Eye of Agamotto had transferred with him along with everything else he was wearing. "Can't be?" he asked, but then followed the somatic gestures that the Ancient One had shown Hermione. Sure enough, the amulet snapped open.
But the Stone was a physical thing, and was on his actual body several yards behind in the woods. So rather than a glowing green rock, he got a green spotlight. The open amulet on his physical body lanced out of its housing toward its mental copy, and, from there, spread out ahead of him very much like Tony's chest-mounted unibeam. Except rather than focused arc reactor electricity, he was blasting the Mindless Ones with pure time.
It was very effective.
He was sure he heard them wail in pain, for all that it wasn't clear whether they had mouths. As he strafed along the shore to play the emerald beam across them all, he saw timeless skin begin to wrinkle and red eyes start to dim. The two closest to him actually stumbled and began to disintegrate into motes of red dust before the rest of them decided to flee, once again unzipping themselves from physical reality.
In moments, there were just two rapidly-evaporating corpses and the fading sounds of escaping Dark Dimension entities. "She didn't show me how to close…" Harry began, but the Eye snapped shut on its own, dismissing the beam. "Nevermind. You okay?" he asked Sirius, who was wearing a triumphant grin.
"I don't know what you did, pup! But it worked. Get back in your body and let's go get that rat!" his godfather suggested, gesturing down at past-Harry's body.
"Um, this may take some explaining," he said. "Give me a minute." It actually only took a second. Getting back to his body wound up being basically as simple as unflexing a mental muscle and snapping back in. It probably had to do with the strength of the tension of having gotten further out, versus the difficulty he'd had waking up earlier that evening. He checked that he felt alright, and that the amulet was truly closed, before standing up and walking out of the trees. "Don't freak out!" he warned Sirius.
"Time travel?" his godfather realized, shockingly quickly.
"Well… yeah," Harry nodded, lamely, having been preparing a whole explanation.
"Your father and I never could manage to figure out how to pull a prank with time travel. But we always thought it was possible."
"Special circumstances," he gestured at the amulet he was wearing.
"Fair enough. Now about that rat?"
"Hermione's got him," Harry nodded. "In fact, Hermione!" he raised his voice.
"I was just waiting to see if you got them all," she called back, leading a horse with the face and wings of an eagle into the clearing. "Mr. Black. I have your ride." She also gestured at the stone cage she'd made a sling for and wore like a purse at her side, "And also your rat."
"He's in there?" Sirius asked, darkly.
"And we're giving him to the Ministry so you can go free," Harry stepped in between him and his prey. "It just may take a little while, because of dumb laws and the Dark Dimension."
"You've thought of everything, huh?" Sirius nodded, glancing back at the unconscious bodies of Lupin and the other Harry by the water. "You going to be alright over there?"
"I was the first time," he nodded. "Oh! But can I have my wand back?"
"Sure thing," Sirius tossed it to him and then bowed to Buckbeak, who regarded him for a moment and then bowed back. "Guess this is the fine fellow that I heard Hagrid crying over more than once this year?"
Hermione agreed, "The Malfoys convinced the Ministry to put him to death. We figured you and he could both lay low for a while."
"I have some ideas," Sirius agreed. "There are a few Black properties that are far from people, and likely warded enough the Mindless Ones couldn't get in if they tried. Harry, I'd offer to let you join me, but…"
"Yeah," Harry nodded, "my aunt takes good care of me. But maybe once you're cleared, I can visit you. You could visit us, on Earth?"
"I'd like that," Sirius grinned. "Oh, hey, is Miss Virginia still single? We're close enough in age now that I might have a shot?"
Harry smirked, "You missed your shot by less than a year."
"Then maybe I'll show up and make sure her beau treats her right," he nodded, not put off. Hesitantly, to make sure it was okay, he stepped forward and clapped Harry on the shoulder. "Be seeing you."
"Get somewhere safe and write," Harry agreed, turning the clap into a manly one-armed hug. Not a close hug, because Sirius still smelled terrible. "And that has a bath."
"Hah. See you around Harry. Miss." He waved to both of them, mounted Buckbeak, and flew off out of the clearing.
Hermione had been thinking hard since Harry had mentioned Sirius missing his shot, and as they were exiting the trail onto the Hogwarts grounds she suggested, "We probably need to stay out of the way for a couple of hours."
"Oh, right," he nodded. "Can't go back in until it's tomorrow."
"Yeah. And it'll be Padma's turn."
"That's the second time you've mentioned that," he realized. "Do you…?"
"Yes. Maybe. I don't know," she said, barely visible in the starlight, turning to face him. "Can we… we just kind of skipped our whole month."
"I thought you didn't think we should, you know? That we shouldn't let everyone just expect us to be together?"
"Well… but what if they're right?" She asked, looking slightly down at him. He wasn't quite done growing and she almost was, so maybe they'd wind up about even. It was off putting, but she was committed.
"So do you want to?" he asked.
"Can we?"
He nodded, barely visible in the dark mostly by the glimmer of his glasses in the starlight. So she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him.
After an extremely long moment, she pulled away and blinked. "Um. Sorry, that was. Uh," trying to figure out what to say, she finally admitted, "Are you going to be mad if I say… it was kind of like kissing my dad?"
"Like my aunt," Harry nodded, relieved. Things might have been very complicated if she'd really liked it and he hadn't.
"So… um… right," she nodded, glancing embarrassed at the shadowy grounds and realizing she now had a couple of very awkward hours to kill until they could go back inside. "Friends, then?"
"Friends," Harry agreed. "So, why don't we find some place this rat can't get out until we can hand him over. And maybe we can talk about the new spells we saw tonight and how, you know, we're time travelers."
"I'd love to," she grinned, slightly wistfully, as they made their way back across the grounds.
Maybe just being the best friend of the Boy-Who-Lived wasn't so bad after all.
Notes:
Sorry, Harry/Hermione fans. You're welcome, Harry/Hermione non-fans :) . In this fic, it was not to be, but I couldn't resist building toward the Cordelia/Wesley moment.
Chapter 44: Free and Clear
Chapter Text
Between the cloak and the map, it was easy enough for Harry and Hermione to find an empty room near the infirmary to hide and wait for their personal timelines to unloop. They caught each other up on what they'd seen, and then Hermione cast a cushioning charm on the floor and took a power nap: she hadn't gotten a couple of hours of sleep while trying to meditate the way Harry had, the first time through, and their bodies were convinced it was closer to three in the morning than midnight.
Once Harry spotted Dumbledore leave the infirmary and his and Hermione's names vanish, he woke her to head out. "I guess The Ancient One is her name," Harry showed Hermione the map. "Our names kept flickering back and forth while we were in two places."
"It's probably not her actual name," Hermione figured. "It's based off of the wards, so it knows whatever name they know. I wonder how it decides, and what it would do if someone was in disguise." Her sleepy brain filed that supposition away for later consideration.
They came walking into the infirmary maybe thirty seconds after their friends had seen them vanish, to muted cheering from the beds. "I take it you were successful?" the Ancient One asked.
"Thank you for the loan of this relic, ma'am," Harry said, handing the Eye back to her. She nodded and put it back under her robes. "I needed it and astral projection to get the Mindless Ones to leave. I… may have disintegrated a couple? Hopefully that won't make them mad."
"I expect the Dread Dormammu has little consideration for the individual beings in his service," she said. "But I look forward to checking the site and hearing all about it in the morning. You should probably rest. Time travel is strenuous."
Harry glanced down at the map and saw that Albus Dumbledore and Cornelius Fudge were in the headmaster's office. "One more thing to take care of. Hermione, do you want to come?"
"No, I'll stay and catch everyone up," she demurred, not ready to face the Minister and headmaster at the moment. She handed him the container with Pettigrew inside. The petrification had worn off, and he scrabbled in futility at the stone of the makeshift cage. At some point, Hermione had added a silencing charm to the cage so he hadn't been able to overhear them talking about their adventures in time.
"Okay. I'll see you in the morning," Harry told everyone. As soon as he was out in the hallway, he scoped out which course through the castle seemed to avoid prefects, teachers, and Filch and let his cloak cover him as he made the ascent.
Between the cloak and the map, he realized he probably could get away with a lot.
"Excuse me," Harry told the gargoyle guarding the headmaster's office, "but I have something that the headmaster and the Minister will want to see. It's important."
A few moments later, the gargoyle stepped aside and he was able to take the stairs up to the office. Inside, he'd seemingly interrupted an argument. Cornelius Fudge was slightly red faced, while Dumbledore was looking deliberately calm. "How can we help you, Harry?" the headmaster asked. "You should be abed."
"We found him, sir… sirs," Harry said, gesturing to the rat in the cage. "And we have a professor and nine students that heard him confess to framing Sirius. Professor Snape may have seen him, too, but he was running up so I don't know if he heard it."
"Aha, I take it this is our other illegal animagus?" Dumbledore twinkled.
"Or you've just brought me a rat," Fudge huffed.
"I can do the animagus reversion spell if you want proof, sir," Harry shrugged, setting the cage on the floor. He made sure the office door was closed and that there wasn't anything immediately obvious for the rat to crawl under.
"Can you, indeed?" the headmaster asked.
"We all learned it," Harry nodded. Taking that as permission, he flicked his wand to undo the transfiguration creating the cage door. As the rat made a break for some kind of hiding spot, he swiftly incanted, "Morphic Truth of Fylgja!"
Squealing in pain at the unexpected forced transformation, the gray rat swiftly sprawled into Peter Pettigrew. Dumbledore swished his own wand to bind the man in glowing teal chains, trussing him up so he couldn't stand, as well as conjuring a gag for his mouth. "An excellent demonstration of the spell, my boy. Twenty points to Gryffindor for you and your classmates' hard work on a difficult but surprisingly-useful spell."
"Thank you, sir," Harry said. "As you can see, that's Peter Pettigrew. Since he's still alive, that means that he had to willingly give my family up to Voldemort." Fudge twitched at the name. "And you should be able to interrogate him to get him to explain how he framed Sirius for the rest of it."
The Minister frowned at the spectacle on the floor, thinking through his options, and finally said, "As we've discussed before, young man, Sirius Black will have to turn himself in for another trial with this new information."
Harry shook his head, "We can discuss that after Pettigrew is tried and sent to prison. I doubt Sirius wants to risk coming into public right now until he's sure you've gotten the Dark Dimension to call off the Mindless Ones."
"He's still an escaped prisoner and an unregistered animagus."
"And the last heir of the Black family lands. How long until the statute is up on those being claimed by other families?" Harry asked, enjoying watching the Minister realize that he knew. The girls had found some other things about Vanir law while trying to free Buckbeak. "I think we could get some people to speak on the idea that the Ministry shouldn't be imprisoning an entire family line on poor evidence, as a way to redistribute their property."
"Now, now, Harry," Dumbledore chimed in, "I'm sure we all just made an honest mistake, given Peter's conspiratorial framing of the heir of the Black line. And certainly Cornelius would prefer to rectify such a miscarriage before any other landholders got the wrong idea about how politics was being done these days."
"Fine," Fudge admitted, realizing he was beaten for the moment. "But we're wringing an excellent tale from that one and seeing justice done in a full and open althing, so no one will claim anything below board has happened. Yes?"
"As long as Sirius Black can walk free and the man that betrayed my parents suffers a little of what he has, I'm happy," Harry shrugged, nodding in grim satisfaction as Pettigrew twitched at the realization that Harry would never have been as easy to persuade as he'd hoped.
"Excellent," the headmaster twinkled, "I shall work up a more permanent and secure method of transporting the prisoner so he cannot simply turn into a rat and escape. And young minds should be getting to bed."
"Thank you, headmaster. Minister," Harry said. He granted one last wary glance to Pettigrew, worried that he still might escape, but figured it was out of his hands unless he wanted to, himself, drag the guy all the way to… wherever the Ministry actually was. He let himself out, and headed back to the dorms to get some sleep. Only Seamus and Neville were fit enough to leave the infirmary cots, so in their dorm it was a quiet few hours before dawn.
On Mondays, Harry's first period was optional flying time, so he was able to go check his friends in the infirmary first thing, then get breakfast, and plan to go show the Ancient One the pond. Lupin wasn't in either the infirmary or at breakfast, which worried Harry slightly, especially when he heard the first-years at the table talking about how they had their second period free now, since defense was cancelled.
He found Lupin on the map, and saw that he was in his office, rather than just sleeping it off in his bedroom. When he poked his head in, he saw that the professor was carefully packing up what little adornment he'd managed to put into the space over the past months. "Oh, hey," Lupin told him. "I was going to come find you."
"You're leaving? Right now?" Harry asked, shutting the door behind him.
"Yeah. The scary bald lady is going to give me a ride back to Asia. I'd been thinking about bumming around there anyway."
"But you have like three more months of classes?" Harry boggled.
"Eh. I'd kind of already taught you everything I could think of. I was really scraping for more subjects. It'll give you an extra couple of hours a week for homework." Seeing that Harry was about to argue, Lupin explained, "It's not safe for me here. Maybe not anywhere. I could have killed someone last night. Not sure how I didn't."
"You've gotta be safer here than back on Earth, though?" Harry suggested.
"No. It's something about the moon. I'm on edge the whole time I'm here. It's different from Earth's moon, somehow. Really explains the origin of the word 'lunatic,' you know?"
"Yeah… we kind of guessed you were a werewolf."
"That's what Dumbledore wanted. It's why he had me go by 'Remus Lupin' while I was here. Figured if they noticed there was a problem, people would feel safer thinking I was only a danger one night a month than any time I got mad."
"What's your real name? If I can ask?"
"Bruce. Bruce Banner," he admitted. "Using the wrong name wasn't that weird, if that's what you're thinking. It was during the war, so a lot of Midgardborn got an alias, just in case Death Eaters tried to go after them on Earth. I bet your mother's name wasn't really Lily Jones."
"Lily Evans," Harry nodded. "We found that out a few years ago. Aunt Pepper tracked down my mom's sister. She sends us passive-aggressive Christmas cards and obviously wants nothing to do with me." He thought about it for a second and admitted, "Except the one we got this year was really nice. I bet she figured out that I'm rich, or something."
"Yeah. What's it like, being famous instead of infamous?" Lupin… Banner, gave a self-deprecating smile.
"I don't like it. But I guess I'd like people coming after me all the time even less. How'd you…"
"Get big and green? It was stupid. I thought I'd worked out how to combine some of the old Captain America research with gamma radiation so it would keep me alive long enough to basically burn out the part of my brain the… the other guy lives in. Wound up just super charging him. Dumbest thing I've ever done."
"But it also worked on the spiky one?" Harry remembered.
Banner shrugged, "Guess so. My family's descended from berserkers, according to Dumbledore. That guy seemed like a real gung-ho military type, so maybe he is too. It would be an interesting thing to work out if, you know, it wouldn't mean turning a bunch of American soldiers into rage monsters."
"That sucks. So… um, you're basically going to be doing all escape and evasion stuff back on Earth?"
"Yeah. Help what people I can. See if I can figure out another solution for making sure I don't have any more incidents."
"Well," Harry sighed, pulling out a pen and writing a couple of pieces of information on a scrap of paper. "That's my email address and phone number if you need help. Or are just in the neighborhood."
Banner took it, looked it over, and put it in with his stuff. "Thanks. I doubt it will ever be safe, but I'm glad to have it. It's a celebrity phone number." He gave a wan smile. "Don't really expect any contact, though. Last guy I was in touch with, the government intercepted our emails and went after both of us."
Harry chuckled, "We met a crazy guy over Christmas telling us the same thing. I'll ask Tony about working out some better encrypted chat that SHIELD can't even get into."
"You won't know that they can, until they do," Banner shrugged. "But it's so weird that you can just get Tony Stark to make you stuff."
"It's a little weird for me too," Harry agreed. "I better go find the 'scary bald lady' and show her the pond so she can take you home. See you around."
"You too," Banner gave him a wave as he let himself out of the office.
Harry still had plenty of time to meet the Ancient One and have Hagrid lead them out to the pond (he left a student in charge of his upper-year morning class). He explained everything that happened as they went, and she wound up using the Eye to scry back to the night before and add her own observations to his story. "The site is still turbulent, but I think with your godfather gone, they shall not attempt to return until it settles," she finally decided. "Were it not for the government's foolish agreements with the Dread Dormammu, they would not be able to come and go as easily as they do."
"I just hope they figure out how to call them off of Sirius," Harry agreed. "I've been talking to Aunt Pepper. We can hire lawyers."
"Truly a beast more terrifying than those of the deepest dimensions," the Ancient One smirked. "Oh, and that was an excellent astral projection for one so young. We shall attempt to further refine your technique at 'summer camp' this year."
"Sounds good to me, ma'am," Harry agreed. "I'm still not sure I could do it if I didn't have to, you know?"
Harry managed to get to Flitwick's class just in time, and found that most of his housemates were also there—heavily bandaged, but there. Ron told him, "Pomfrey probably isn't going to clear Ginny to fly in time for the last quidditch match, so Wood says you're up."
"Great," Harry sighed. "Just when I thought I was already done with stressful things this year."
"Sure you were, Harry," Padma said, sliding into the seat next to him. He had clearly forgotten both that this was a class with the Ravenclaws and that it was now Padma's turn.
Ron hadn't forgotten that a new dating cycle was dawning. He had happily sat next to Hermione, and Lavender (off the rotation that month) was trying desperately to hide her jealousy. Neville and Parvati had paired off, and mostly seemed nervous that they both often relied on other members of the study group to help them in Flitwick's class. Dean, who was paired with Luna that cycle so didn't have to share classes with his date, just looked smug at Harry across his broken arm.
He basically only saw Padma in classes that week: Wood had somehow captured every bit of free time Harry had to get him back up to the older boy's exacting quidditch standards before the match. Harry was really remembering why he had gone to alternate in the first place. "Are you going to class?" he checked, one day, when Wood was drilling him solo during one of Harry's free periods.
Wood waved him off, "It'll keep. I'm graduatin' anyway. Now, aboot yer dive…"
The other problem of the week was the not-so-subtle attempts to injure him. Malfoy blew up a cauldron as he was passing in chemistry. Crabbe and Goyle tried to knock him down the stairs leaving history. And in the hallways, it seemed like there was always someone in green attempting to trip him when he was somewhere precarious. The rest of his year-mates started walking around him like a team of bodyguards as they moved between classes. This was especially amusing since most of them were still healing from their own injuries achieved in the fight with the Hulk.
"Why have the Slytherins been trying to kill me all week?" he finally asked of his teammates, as they were suiting up in the locker rooms on Sunday morning.
"They've been trying to kill all of us," one of the twins noted.
The other explained, "We're out of alternates, with Ron and Ginny injured."
The first picked up, "They injure one of us, and we're down a member."
"You especially. If you're out, we'd have to field someone untested, and Malfoy controls the game," the other finished.
"And we just have to win?" he checked.
"Pretty much, since then we'd be undefeated," Wood agreed. "But Slytherin's been doin' weel on points, so if ye can wait 'til we're up fifty, t'will be a blowout."
"Don't catch the snitch until we're up fifty, got it," Harry nodded. He was honestly feeling a little pressured to put on a good showing to impress the rest of his house. His adventure that year hadn't really been as glorious as fighting a giant snake. He hadn't even gotten that close to the Hulk, and didn't have any trophies from the Mindless Ones he'd disintegrated.
That was the classic problem with disintegration.
"Ready to lose the house cup for your team, Potter?" Draco asked as soon as they were both flying above the stadium.
"And just when I thought I wasn't going to have to have one of our little talks this year," Harry sighed.
"You've been letting Weaslette do this for you all year. You must be pretty rusty. Like an old door. Might as well just concede now," the nattering continued, no matter how Harry tried to float away from the other boy.
"I don't get it," he finally tried. "You keep coming after me and you keep losing. That's got to be costing you cool points with your house?"
"What's a 'cool point?'"
"Oh, right, you wouldn't know anything about being cool," Harry nodded.
"Stupid mudblood slang," Draco rolled his eyes.
"Wait, maybe it's like game matchmaking. You're so far below me that you don't really lose anything for me beating you, but if you actually got lucky and beat me, your Elo score would go way up. Is that what we're doing?"
"Shut it, Potter," the blond boy snarled, realizing that, yes, that might actually be very close to the truth, even though he didn't know what an Elo was.
"I thought you wanted to chat. Ooh, that looked like a bad hit." Below them, the match was pretty brutal. The Slytherin team had doubled down on mass to go with their faster brooms, and was trying to basically wrecking ball their way through the Gryffindor team. But the girls were more agile, and kept dodging. One of the Slytherin chasers had just collided with their own beater. "How much are we up? I'm supposed to wait until it's a blowout to win."
"I'll show you a blowout!" Draco announced, trying to use the distraction of everyone focused on the scrum beneath to charge Harry and knock him off his broom. To the boy's credit, he was fast.
"Ow, damnit!" Harry said as the slightly-bigger boy collided with him. To Draco's chagrin, Harry managed to hang onto his broom. "What the hell is even wrong with you?" Harry asked, righting his broom and actually warily paying attention to the other boy.
"Nothing," Draco snarled, unable to come up with a way to twist that feed line onto Harry.
"Right," Harry rolled his eyes. "You're daddy's perfect, special little boy, yeah? I'm going to tell you something, Draco," he said, deliberately using the other boy's first name. "You're not special. I've run into dozens of kids like you. Some of them, unlike you, are at least interesting."
"Like you're so interesting!" Draco fired back. "Take away the fame you got for not dying with your parents, and what are you?"
Harry honestly gave it a thought. As much as he reflexively discounted Draco's insults, the boy was coming close to something Harry had asked himself. Even in his friend group, he wasn't the smartest, the best fighter, or best at magic. Back on Earth, he got by on his fame and his aunt's relationship to one of the richest men in the world more than he was comfortable with.
What was he?
He finally came up with, "Overachiever, protector, thrill-seeker, leader." He gave Draco a little nod, "Thanks for the pep talk. Is that the snitch?" And then he dove towards the ground.
"Get back here!" Draco shouted and dove after.
Both of them rocketed through the other players, Draco inadvertently helping Harry with his actual plan: disrupting his own team trying to intercept Angelina before she could make a goal. The bell rang across the stadium signaling them getting the points, and Harry glanced up to the scoreboard to see that they were, indeed, 50 points up. It was a shame he hadn't actually seen the snitch. "My mistake," he yelled, narrowly pulling up before eating turf, as Draco twisted up behind him.
"You're a maniac and a liar!" the other boy shouted after him, as they gained more height.
"Maybe," Harry grinned, actually spotting something glint behind Draco. "Hey. Is that the snitch?"
"You won't fool me again, Potter!" Draco yelled as Harry launched himself past, only then turning to follow his path and seeing the glint himself. "No!"
By the time Draco caught up, it was over. Harry had the tiny little golden ball in his hand. "Think about it, Draco," Harry smiled, letting his broom drift back as the other boy made a half-hearted swipe as if to grab the snitch from his hands. "And maybe figure out what you could do to be more interesting."
Leaving the nearly-apoplectic boy in the air, Harry descended toward the screaming crowd, swarming to congratulate him and the rest of the team. "T'was almost a Wronski Feint!" Wood yelled in excitement. "Ye're showin' that tae Ginny!"
"Sure," Harry said. "Of course there's a name for it."
"Usually with that move you're just trying to take out the other seeker," Angelina explained. "Not use him to save my butt."
"You had it. It was just extra insurance," Harry shrugged. "And trying to make Malfoy look like an idiot."
"Done and done," the twins announced in unison.
From above, Dumbledore amplified his voice and announced, "Another marvelous year of quidditch here at Hogwarts. And with an undefeated streak and, I believe, an unrivaled record of points, it's my pleasure to award this year's quidditch cup to Gryffindor!"
Sure, Harry was pleased to have come up with some things he had free and clear of the fame and wealth he'd gotten through no effort on his part. But with the crowd going wild and the promise of a rollicking party to boot, Harry had to admit: sometimes being a celebrity could be pretty cool, too.
Chapter 45: The Shade of the Tree
Chapter Text
The last three months of the school year were strangely relaxing. Sure, there were finals, including in two brand new classes Harry had never done finals for before. He still had his dating windows with Padma and Luna to get through. And after they all went down in a few seconds against the Hulk, Dean was pushing everyone he could get to show up extra hard at exercise and combat training.
But nobody was actually trying to kill Harry. There were no portentous mysteries to solve. They were even done with quidditch.
"You're clearly bored. Let's go find a monster for you to fight," Luna instructed him, one sunny day after finals as they were all sitting around out on the grounds. After school was let out way early their second year, he'd kind of forgotten how weird it was that the lower classes got done nearly a month before the end of school, to leave time for upper-years to take their certification exams.
"Aren't you worried about the danger?" he asked his current girlfriend. His stint with Padma had gone well enough, but nothing exceptional had come of it. He had the same issues really dating her as Cho: she wasn't likely to really undersign his thrill-seeking lifestyle. Plus, she didn't seem to want to push for much of a relationship, since his time dating her sister had gone so badly. It would probably cause issues between them if Padma had a ton to talk about over the summer, regarding dating Harry, when he and Parvati were still barely managing to be friends.
Luna shrugged and said, "If I die, I'll haunt you. Might be an interesting afterlife."
"But you'll have died in battle," Neville commented, from where he was sitting with Ginny, his current date. It seemed to be going surprisingly well between them, though he was still kind of hung up on Luna.
"On, no, I plan to die fleeing and pleading for my life, if it comes to it," Luna nodded sagely. "I can't imagine Valhalla would have me in such a circumstance, even if I died violently."
"Anyone else coming?" Harry asked the group.
"You two haven't really gotten a chance to go on a date," Hermione decided, after a quick tacit conference with the rest of the group. "Have fun."
Harry nodded, glad enough to get away. Ron, Hermione, and Lavender were all detached that month, so there was tension the girls were trying to negotiate that he was happy to avoid. They were right, though. All the traders had left Hogsmeade as soon as they could after the marauder attack, so there had been no more visits down to the town. He wondered if they'd even come back the next year.
"It's kind of nice in here, in the actual daylight," Harry observed, as they slipped off into the woods. Nobody took the exhortation that it was out of bounds particularly seriously. "I think the earliest I've been in here before, it was already getting dark. Well, maybe I just remember it as dark since Hagrid and I went for the deepest spot last year."
"Oh, yes, it gets quite dark further in," she nodded. "I expect a vampire could wander there quite comfortably, even in the middle of the day."
"But what would it eat?" Harry wondered. "Unicorns are pretty hard to catch. And I can't imagine regular animals are much of a meal."
"You make a good point," she nodded. "I don't imagine a vampire would have much of a life, without humans to feed on. It must be why they focus on the region where the Rotfang Conspiracy is active."
"I wonder if we have stuff like vampires on earth," Harry mused, gentlemanly offering Luna a hand to step over a particularly large fallen tree. "Every time we think we've learned about everything hidden, we find out about something else. Like the Egyptian gods Ron's brother works with."
"Daddy is quite certain that the universe is even stranger than people like to admit," Luna agreed. "The real question is how so many things live in secret. For most known species, you need dozens to breed successfully without problems. If they were all in one place, it would be harder to hide, though, so they must spread out. How do they find each other to have children, then?"
"Supernatural yentas?" Harry joked.
"I've never heard of that kind of creature?" she cocked her head.
"It's not a creature," Harry corrected. "It's just like, a title in one of the Earth languages. I think it's basically an old lady in a group that plays matchmaker."
"I see! Yes, we have those as well, so you're right that it would stand to reason that intelligent but secretive creatures would have their own network of grandmothers to match them up." She abruptly sat down on a comfy-looking hillock next to a tree and announced, "This seems like a good place to wait for pixies."
"Okay," Harry agreed, sitting down next to her. "Something about the terrain, or…"
"No, I just imagine any place is as good as any other to wait for pixies, and this one looked comfortable."
"Fair enough," he nodded. "So… did you decide what electives you're taking next year?"
She frowned, "Despite Hermione's example, I think I have to take three as well. Divination, husbandry, and runes. And I'm sad I can't take the other two."
"Does Hagrid cover enough of the creatures you're interested in to make husbandry worth it?" he checked. "I couldn't figure how much of that was magical beasts and how much was just actual husbandry. Like running a farm?"
"It's a mix. And I suspect farms on Vanaheim are more interesting than ones on Midgard. Though I suppose I might drop it if I'm wrong. I can always get Hagrid to show me the interesting creatures on Sundays."
"I guess… no arithmancy because of your mom?" he checked. In conversations throughout the last couple of years, they'd worked out that her mother had died in some kind of accident trying to create a new spell or ritual.
"No. I'd quite like to someday understand what she was working on. I'm afraid I just don't have the head for maths. I'm more verbally intelligent, like Daddy."
"It's a shame there's not really a writing course here, other than what we do for essays," Harry said. "You'd probably get a kick out of creative writing or journalism classes."
"Yes. Perhaps I'll attend higher education on Midgard. By the time we're old enough, it's not like we'll be a secret to them anymore."
He nodded, "With them already knowing about Thor, it's only a matter of time. I would try to break it to Tony this summer, but my aunt's still freaking out about what he's going to do when he finds out. I'll have to work on convincing her."
"It's not like you can lecture anyone else on secret-keeping, though?" she raised an eyebrow.
He laughed. "You got me. Though I guess Parvati is right that it would be nice to not have to lie about all of this to basically everyone I know on Earth."
"You should have just created a persona of whimsy and persistent fantasy. That way, you can tell people anything, and they'll choose whether or not to believe you." She said it deadpan, as if challenging him to call her on it.
"And if they always choose to believe you?" he pushed back.
"Well, then, Harry Potts, you just have to be more inventive. By the way, I hope you've given thought to what to do if you encountered the shadow nix again." She pointed.
He followed her hand to see that, indeed, she was not making up that there was a one-eyed, midnight-skinned beast lurking in the shadows not far from them. "Aw, man! I was sure they would have caught it by now. Get the tree in between you and it, and give me what cover fire you can," he instructed her. He drew his own wand and stood.
As Luna took cover as directed, the nix decided that maybe it would pursue them after all. Perhaps it still remembered that Harry had once had a delicious Starkphone to feed it. It trundled into view, and Harry was able to get a better look at the creature, but its skin was still so black as to read almost as negative space even in the light. Its oblong eye crackled blue as it hunched over like one of the hellhounds from Ghostbusters and prepared to pounce.
"Lot of references to that movie for me this year," Harry said to himself. "I wonder if someone's going to ask me if I'm a god this summer."
Fortunately, transfiguration didn't usually require much in the way of incantation, so while he was thinking about 80s sci-fi comedies, he was also taking a page from Sirius' book. As he flicked his wand, spikes of earth shot up to keep the beast from charging him. His weren't as wide or tall as the ones Sirius had used against the Mindless Ones, but they were big enough that the nix couldn't just crash through them.
As he was flicking his wand to summon the spiked bollards across the forest floor, he was moving and thinking of what to do next. The shadow nix bellowed and decided to try to leap over the Harry-height spikes.
"Baldur's Blinding Brilliance!" Harry cast, teal light from his wand rapidly turning into a pure and overwhelming spotlight that he shone directly into the thing's one eye. It shrieked, possibly as much from the heat produced when a vantablack skin absorbed a few thousand lumens. It tried to abort its leap as it flailed in pain, and Harry was already moving past where it crashed into the dirt and got hung up on a tree root.
Luna started using her wand to fling a few early-year spells at it, and tittered as they bounced off. "It really is quite magic resistant! You're doing a good job, Harry. Keep it up!"
"Thanks," he told her, stepping back as the creature shook its head to try to clear the blindness and reorient. The spotlight had hurt it, and it seemed to want to stick to the shadows so… maybe it was like the vampires Luna had mentioned living in the dimly lit woods. "Sorry, trees," Harry said, throwing out a long energy whip and putting extra cutting energy down it. They'd finally learned from Seamus to make the whip leak energy so it burned the things it wrapped around. Seamus still hadn't learned how to tone his power down so things he whipped didn't catch fire.
Harry had mostly judged the direction of the sun correctly, and his whip seared off large branches that were currently shading the light. In moments, huge shafts of sunlight were pouring into the clearing, further hedging the directions the nix could go, especially as tree limbs crashed near it. He didn't quite hit it with the light, but he could put a pool of light in between him and the beast. He smacked it with the whip, for all that it didn't do much directly, and tried to goad it into diving after him.
It almost worked, but it had either recovered its vision quickly or had an innate sense of its own danger. It instead turned away from the sun shafts toward where Luna was hiding. "Luna! Run into the light!" Harry yelled.
"Haunt you!" Luna promised, suddenly not having a good time as the nix made a brutal dive for her as she left cover and started to sprint for the shafts of illumination.
It very nearly got her, except Harry managed to tone the energy down in his whip as he wrapped it around Luna and dragged her a yard forward and out of the way. He fell on his butt with the effort, and she barely avoided eating dirt as she got yanked into a sunbeam. "Sorry! Also, ow!" he told her.
The nix's leap had carried it further than it expected, and it was struggling to stand as well, since it had rolled near one of the Harry's conjured spikes. From the ground, the Boy-Who-Lived waved his wand to try to get the spikes to fold down like fingers and trap the creature, which mostly worked, but it was able to groan and struggle enough to get them to snap off (they were just transfigured dirt, after all). Luna had at least used the time to roll to her feet and run over, helping Harry up.
"This may work out as a stalemate," Luna said, sensing at the beast was about to flee back into the darkness now that they'd proven a very difficult meal.
"And how many other kids' cell phones is it going to eat if we let it get away?" Harry asked, leaning down, pointing his wand at the ground behind the nix, and yanking like he was trying to win a tug of war. The dirt at the beast's back resisted for a moment, and then came loose in a tremendous mass, rolling forward like a wave and smacking the creature in the rear, washing it toward the sunlight.
It helplessly grabbed another transfigured spike to try to hang on, but that just came with it in the churning torrent of earth as the nix was plopped into the sunbeam the kids had placed in between them and it. It wailed in pain as its skin began to heat precipitously, limbs akimbo and trying to gain purchase on the loose earth left by the wave. With another twitch of his wand, Harry focused on setting the dirt as hard as rock. The creature almost seemed to smoke, as its ebon skin took the full force of the afternoon sunlight.
"Harry!" Luna was upset. "You've proved your point. Let it go. Please!"
He glanced down at the girl, who, he realized, probably had it almost as bad as Hagrid for thinking that wildlife was cute. "I was just trying to trap it anyway," he acknowledged, a little lamely. "Don't go after any more students!" he yelled, as he released his transfiguration, worried about what he'd do if it didn't actually give up.
He wasn't sure if the thing understood him, but it did seem to snuffle in acknowledgement as it rolled away from the sunlight, dirt falling away from it as it bounded off into the shadows.
"You know it tries to kill unicorns, right?" Harry checked, once it was well away. "And it tried to eat us."
"I know," she nodded, wiping away a tear that had started to form. "And you were very gallant. But it's just a wild animal. I'd have been just as sad if you had to hurt a wolf or a bear."
"Small favors I haven't had to fight any of those yet," he nodded.
"I'm not mad at you, by the way. And I'm going to kiss you now," she nodded, immediately following through. It was nice. She broke it off after a long moment and said, "I think I'm still going to date Neville next year. But you're my second choice!"
"Uh. Thanks?"
"Most of us just wanted to see what dating you was like. Nobody really expected to keep you," she agreed. "Let's head back. I saw a shadow nix, so your dating obligation has been fulfilled."
Bemused, Harry just followed the fey girl back toward the school grounds.
It turned out, said discussion about dating choices was waiting for the last day of school. Parvati presided over the study group in a secluded part of the library and announced, "The experiment is complete. I don't know if it was a success. But we're all still friends, right?" she checked. Everyone nodded, so she pressed on, "Seamus has been sworn to secrecy. I know." She gave Harry a nod, acknowledging the hypocrisy. "But I don't want anyone to know whether they were a second or third choice. Or not a choice at all. Anyway, write your choices in order on these ballots. They already have your name at the top. Then Seamus will go off and compare and see who chose whom. It's like speed dating!"
"What if he makes weird matches just to mess with us?" Dean checked.
"Ye've uncovered me master plan!" Seamus chortled. "But I think ye'd notice pretty fast. Nah. I promise t'do it honestly."
Harry hunched over his ballot like he was writing names, but was really writing, "I'm so over all of this." He passed it to Seamus, who smirked at him. Everyone else agonized over the notes and then turned them in.
"Tough calls here," Seamus eventually summed up. "Ron an' Lav. Nev an' Luna. Dean an' Padma." He gave it a pause and suggested, "Gin, Hermione, and Parv, still time for ye three t'experiment." The girls just rolled their eyes at him. "Harry's still a free agent. An' he'll ne'er know how highly ranked he was." He used his wand to burn the ballots up so nobody else could read them.
He nearly set the library on fire, and only Hermione's hasty spell stopped it.
The three sets that did get paired seemed pretty thrilled, at least, though all three still-single girls looked at Harry wistfully. He doubted he'd been any of their first choices, unless Ginny had written him in just in case he'd had second thoughts since they dated. He was the most surprised by Dean and Padma, but they'd been together on the last rotation and seemed to get along pretty well.
"You didn't put in for Ron?" Harry asked Hermione, when he happened to wind up alone with her in the common room in the fury of everyone piling up their luggage to take to the train. She'd seemed to enjoy her time dating the boy, and he knew that Ron had long held a crush on her.
She shook her head, "Lavender and I have a deal that she gets to try with him first. I'm fine with it. Honestly."
Harry nodded. "Well, maybe you'll meet someone else and that drama bomb won't ever go off."
"What are you going to do, all out of study group mates?" she checked.
"There's still Hufflepuff and Slytherin to check with," he shrugged, acknowledging that he'd written off all of the girls his own age in Gryffindor, and the ones he was most likely to be interested in in Ravenclaw. "Maybe I'll just find some girl in LA or New York and have brief flings over the summers."
"Don't be too much like Tony Stark," she insisted. Changing the subject, she asked, "Any progress on the Pettigrew trial?"
"Yeah," he nodded. "Aunt Pepper and I have been sending Hedwig to some lawyers over here that Sirius knows." Sirius was still being cagey about where he was located, just in case Harry's mail got intercepted, but they'd worked out how to get Hedwig to follow his owl and learn the route so they could stay in touch. "Looks like we're coming back through the Market in a few weeks for the trial."
"Good. I'd heard most of the big trials and government decisions take place in the summer anyway so Headmaster Dumbledore can preside over them."
"Well, I think he sometimes goes in the spring, too, though maybe he stopped doing that with everything that's been going wrong here," Harry remembered Dumbledore's absence his first year. "I guess that's one way to limit how much your government does," he figured. "Can only do any serious business for a few months a year because you need a guy that runs a school in a place you can't teleport to."
Their conversation was cut short as several people came crashing down the stairs with their trunks, and then it was the inevitable sweep toward the train. Since only three sets of friends had coupled up, the car arrangement was a little easier than the last few trips. Lavender, Ron, Dean, Padma, Luna, and Neville in the "makeout compartment," and Harry in with Parvati, Seamus, Hermione, and Ginny.
Which kind of made Harry's compartment the "romantic tension" compartment, but he wasn't going to bring it up if anyone else didn't. At least he was pretty sure that Seamus had never actually been into him. Probably. Regardless, it was a fun enough trip, for all that he was stuck in with the folks that had been left off of the game of relationship musical chairs.
They mostly talked about movies (including describing them for Ginny).
The hugs at the platform were a lot more brotherly than they'd been the last few times, and Harry was pretty glad to see that stress in his life at least reduced. Well, he still wasn't over his hormones telling him that he needed a girlfriend, but he was glad that the drama hadn't, overall, been that bad to get everyone to agree with him that he should date outside of the friend group. Dean hadn't escaped, of course, but he seemed happy to have been caught as he walked out of the portal into Charing Cross station hand-in-hand with Padma.
"Seems busier than usual for this time of day," Hermione observed, as they slipped out of the hidden doorway to Vanaheim and into the large tube station.
"Tony," Harry sighed, spotting the glint of gold and red as Iron Man held court out in front of the building. "You guys better head on if you don't want your lives blown up."
"Maybe it'd be fun t'bask in yer reflected fame, fer a wee while," Seamus grinned, but waved and broke off from the pack.
"I don't think daddy wants us to be on magazine covers with Harry," Parvati figured.
Dean apologized to Padma, "I'm riding back to New York with him."
"Just be sure to write," she replied, giving him one more kiss before heading off with her sister to make their way to the London sanctum in a way that didn't pass the crowd.
Hermione just shrugged and stuck with them, "They already know who I am, after Christmas."
"Maverick!" Tony's voice was amplified by the suit as he spotted the three heading out. "And cohorts! Sorry folks, gotta jet."
Harry waved half-heartedly to the fans who were realizing that Iron Man must have been picking Harry and his friends up. "There's my dad's car," Hermione said, hugging both boys quickly and then rolling her trunk off before the crowd could close in.
"Full armor?" he asked Tony, as they rolled up.
"Happy insisted if I was going to be in public," Tony shrugged, the servos whirring with the action. "Hey, isn't this just a subway station? We can pick you up from wherever the real train drops off, you know."
"Express train," Harry lied. "They don't want us getting mobbed at the transfer." He gestured at the mob, as if that would explain everything.
"Ah, right, bunch of baby lords and ladies in your school," Tony nodded. Harry at some point had mentioned he went to school with Justin Finch-Fletchley who, it turned out, was somewhere in the royal line of succession.
Since Tony had started walking toward the drop-off area, the fans had mostly broken off. Happy got out of the high-end sedan of the week and helped him and Dean get their trunks in the back. "You riding with?"
"Meet you back at the airport," Tony nodded, taking off on his own power once they were safely in the car.
"Does that get easier?" Dean asked, taking shotgun so Harry could sit in the back with Pepper.
"No," she allowed. "Though he used to have a harder time getting away when he was out in public. Tell me about your spring!"
As the car pulled away from the station, a bald Honduran-American man in glasses watched them leave. Once they were out of sight, he moved to a more secluded spot on the sidewalk and reported into a cell phone, "Yeah, they must have come in from platform five or six. Lot of kids coming from that way, but I didn't spot them until they were out. Let's run a search on the trains that just arrived at those platforms. Of course, if Romanoff is right, they probably have some kind of secret outlet, and coming out here is just to throw off tails. If Coulson is right… well that would be interesting. We should get someone here to try to follow them when they go back to school in the fall." He nodded listening to the response from the other end, glanced around to make extra-sure no one was watching or listening, and then signed off by whispering, "Hail Hydra."
Chapter 46: Law and Order
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
About a week before his birthday, Harry and Pepper stepped out of the Goblin Market into the long hall that Harry usually used to get home for winter holidays. It was odd to be using it in the summer. He wasn't even sure where it was on Vanaheim, just that it had both a teleportation bonfire and a wall that could open into the Leaky Cauldron. Physical location didn't really matter that much in a society that had a teleportation network.
Presumably whoever owned the place was used to their lot in life as just another node on Vanaheim's magical highway.
"Potters!" a woman's voice drew their attention. "Wotcher!" She looked like she was only a few years older than Harry, and had blond hair that was quickly and obviously changing to pink as she got their attention. "I'm Tonks," she explained, striding over so quickly she almost tripped over one of the benches around a feasting table nearby. "I'm your escort to the trial."
"Tonks?" Pepper asked. "Like the lawyers."
"Exactly. I'm an auror. But since my parents are working on your trial, I had to recuse myself and I figured I could at least help out by getting you to the althing… and, I'm babbling. Sorry!"
"It's not a problem. Pleased to meet you," Pepper said, extending a hand to shake. Harry shook her hand after Pepper, and noticed that her hair was calming back down to blond, but maybe a different shade than she'd started with.
"Thanks so much for what you're doing for cousin Siri," she said, as she walked them over to the teleportation bonfire. "Mum was convinced that something was hinky, but could never prove anything. Since he should be the head of our family…"
"You're a Black!" Pepper realized. "Oh! Andi Tonks is Andromeda Black. I met her a few times when we were little."
"You got it," Tonks nodded. "She married my dad—who's Midgardborn—and got kicked out of the family. But maybe Cousin Siri can reinstate her. Really rub it in the Malfoys' faces."
Harry grinned, "We are all about rubbing things in Malfoy faces. Uh… but not in a gross way?" He bulled through with, "But why would… oh, yeah. Draco's the heir by default because the rest of the family is disowned or locked up." That had been what Harry had worked out that had inspired his dig at the Minister about the Ministry manipulating family inheritance. "They don't really need to get to gobble up any more money."
"Exactly. I don't even want the Black fortune," Tonks said, "but I don't want them to have it either. Anyway, let me just dial in the right location." She waved her wand at the bonfire and said, "We're ready."
They came out of the fire in a large town square in what had to be one of Vanaheim's biggest population centers. It was on a wide hill, and continuing into the distance he could see the standard wooden buildings that he'd seen in Hogsmeade and the hamlet at the train platform. But closer up, the city center was more built of brick and stone, and even featured houses of several stories. It wouldn't make a list of major cities by Earth reckoning, but might have had space for a few hundred thousand citizens.
The north end of the square was dominated by a large castle. Not Hogwarts size, it still clearly served as the keep for the city. It looked like it had been continuously updated, so was as reminiscent of a city hall or judicial building as it was a fortress. Though it could likely still serve as a strong point in an attack, its primary purpose had become administrative.
"Welcome to Diagonalt," Tonks waved to gesture. "That's the town. The castle is just the Ministry at this point."
"This is basically Switzerland," Pepper explained for Harry's benefit. "The Ministry tries to stay neutral between various nations, so it winds up being a good place for althings."
He mused, "So magical people basically count as Swiss, and answer directly to the Ministry, but for everyone else they're the UN?"
"More like NATO, because they also organize against off-world threats," Tonks interjected. "What? My dad's from Midgard. I know stuff."
They'd been walking and talking, as they followed the crowd that was heading into the castle from both multiple bonfires and just other places in the city. Inside the gates, an immense courtyard was dominated by a golden fountain. It featured the various allied races of the Nine Realms. The goblins were most obvious, and the Aesir, Vanir, Light Elves, and Midgardians were mostly distinct by dress. While the pinnacle of the statue was clearly Odin and Frigga, it was interesting that a robed Vanir wizard was only slightly lower than them, and notably higher than everyone else.
"How's the war against the marauders going, anyway?" Harry asked. He hadn't quite gotten grounded for joining in the battle of Hogsmeade, but he was pretty sure Aunt Pepper had cried a bunch about him having to be in a war when she thought he couldn't hear her.
Tonks frowned and admitted, "They're split up to the point that they're hard to track down, but not so small they're easy for any of our forces to take out. Especially now that it's nice out, they can live in the forests until they raid towns. And we still don't know if more are coming in from various night roads."
"A bunch of them seemed like aliens from way off the Realms," Harry suggested. "They may be dropping in out of orbit. It wouldn't be the first time."
"Huh. Maybe," she allowed, making a mental note. It wasn't like that was really her job, but it might earn her some career points to suggest it. "We go right for the security line for magicals. You have your wand?"
Harry showed it, and they entered an antechamber that seemed set up not that dissimilarly from an Earth airport security check. They walked through a rune-blazed archway and Harry felt his cloak twitch and got the sense it was avoiding detection. "Wands?" the wizard sitting in a warded booth asked, gesturing at a rune-etched marble slab on the counter in front of him.
Harry placed his, and various arithmantic text floated above it, the guard making notes. It was backwards to him, but Harry was pretty sure it was listing both its components and recent spells it had cast.
"Name?"
"Harry Potter," he answered, which actually got the guard's full attention.
"Oh, yeah? Good to meet you! Had a cousin at Hogsmeade for the battle."
Harry retrieved his wand and made yes-I'm-a-celebrity noises until the guard turned to Pepper, who explained, "I'm a squib, just accompanying my nephew. Virginia Potter."
He glanced at Tonks and explained, "Just this once. Since you have an auror escort. But you probably should use the other entrance normally."
"Noted," she gritted out, having been on the planet for a record ten minutes before being reminded she was a second class citizen.
"Thanks, Nigel," Tonks said to the guard, ushering them into the castle proper. "Sorry about that."
"I'm used to it," Pepper admitted. "Just haven't had to be for a long time."
"Right," Tonks nodded, offput by never really having to deal much with the squibs of prominent magical families in her daily life. The Blacks had driven theirs far out of the spotlight even more than the Potters had. It was a little jarring dealing with someone that should have had a seat on the wizards' council, and was clearly used to having political power on Earth, but was a complete nonentity due to accident of genetics. "Anyway, the althing is in the great hall. It's right this way. They don't expect to need you to testify, so we're in the gallery."
They took some stairs up and came out on the right side of an immense room, similarly sized to Hogwarts' great hall but with the galleries and packed seating making room for upwards of a thousand, compared to the few hundred Hogwarts students at each meal. Instead of a professor's table, the raised back section of the room was set up with heavy, padded chairs fit for a few dozen major landholders, themselves facing a small stage at the very apex of the room. On Earth, it would likely have stained glass above it, but they'd gone in for simple plate glass that gave an expensive view of the fields and forests of Vanaheim rolling into the distance.
Before too long, the high seats began to fill up with the clearly-wealthy. Heavily-embroidered fabrics, exotic furs, and bulky jewelry were the order of the day. Harry recognized Neville's grandmother, a few other parents he'd seen on the train platform, and, sadly, Lucius Malfoy. "It's only about a third wizards," Aunt Pepper explained quietly. "Though that's still a lot since wizards make up such a small fraction of the population."
"Could you have made the Potter seat a non-magical one, if you wanted to stay?" Harry asked.
She shook her head, "My father held his seat mostly out of inertia and being good at Ministry politics. We're nowhere near as rich as most of the people up there. Not anymore."
"But Siri could claim a seat," Tonks added. "The Blacks still own a lot, for all that it's been mostly laying idle the last decade."
Dumbledore shuffled in as the crowd seating had mostly filled up. There were still some gaps, even among the high seats, but the room was pretty full. The headmaster was wearing as gaudy a set of robes as ever, though he'd accessorized with some clashing jewelry as well, since it was the done thing. He spoke, his voice magically augmented enough to be easily heard throughout the large room, beginning, "I'd like to thank you all for coming. We will, of course, devote much of today's proceedings to discussions about what can be done to quell the marauding forces throughout the countryside. But first, there is the business of the trial."
"Send in the prisoner!" boomed a middle-aged woman with short, iron-gray hair and a clearly-magical monocle clenched in her right eye socket. Harry had seen her dropping off Susan Bones at the train, and vaguely understood that it was Susan's aunt rather than her mother. So they had that in common, at least, for all that Pepper didn't ever wear a monocle.
Wearing plain, undyed linen clothing with binding runes stitched into it in black thread, Peter Pettigrew was led from a side room to the center of the upper dais by a pair of red-robed aurors. Harry thought most of the runes looked like they were fairly standard enchanting that sapped magic and could be activated to paralyze the wearer, and he wondered if any had been specifically added to keep him from transforming into a rat. Nobody seemed concerned that he would, at least, but Harry wasn't completely confident about that.
The woman that Harry assumed must be called Madam Bones unless she was Susan's maternal aunt recounted, "Peter Pettigrew has been accused of betraying the Potter family, murdering his housemates, faking his death, framing Sirius Black for all these crimes, being an unregistered animagus, and serving as a double-agent for You-Know-Who in the war."
"Very well," Dumbledore agreed. "I understand that there is evidence to be presented, but would anyone like to move for summary judgment?"
Malfoy spoke up, suggesting, "If he's been hiding for the last decade, that means he wasn't bewitched." The "like I claimed to be" remained unspoken: if "Voldemort" had been using the stone Harry had encountered in the book on people he controlled during the war, that wouldn't have persisted a month, much less for years. "I say throw him into Azkaban and let's move on."
Several other thanes dressed in both wizarding and martial styles (the difference was obvious, with them all clustered together) grunted various noises of agreement. "Opposed?" Dumbledore checked.
Madam Longbottom said, "I'd like to hear at least some of the particulars. If he was in hiding for so long, could there be other partisans still waiting for an opportunity to cause unrest? Perhaps providing aid to these marauders?"
That got a renewed round of agreement, from others and even some of the same that had supported Malfoy. Maybe Harry's parents were old news, and Malfoy wanted to keep people from thinking his master was moving again, but the marauders were a clear and current threat. Harry's estimation of Neville's grandmother went up.
"Very well," the headmaster nodded. "I believe that independent speakers have been retained to pursue the topic?"
"We have, chief warlock," a middle-aged man with brown hair agreed, standing from the front rows just before the dais. "Edward Tonks, speaking against the accused." That was clearly Tonks' father, so the darker-haired woman beside him must be her mother.
Vanaheim's tradition of justice turned out to not be as formalized as most of Earth's. They'd at least let go of trial by combat, but justice was still grievance-based rather than the state having the sole right and responsibility to prosecute crimes. Or, essentially, all trials were civil, but civil suits could lead to prison or even death. And the jury and judge was generally the local lord (or, in this case, lords).
It was prone to a different kind of corruption than Earth courts.
Mr. Tonks was a good speaker. He recounted the public knowledge about the deaths leading to Sirius' imprisonment. He described how spying and double-agents had been rampant at the time. He revisited how the only identifiable piece of Pettigrew from the exploded and burned down lodging house he'd lived in was a single index finger, even though the majority of the other bodies had been recovered. He explained how Pettigrew had been completely trusted not just by the Potters, but by Black as well, granting him ample access to Black's residence to steal his wand and plant evidence. He described how the fidelius wards would only drop on the death or betrayal of the secret keeper.
And Pettigrew was clearly still alive. "Please show the lords his hand," Mr. Tonks asked the aurors. With only token resistance, Peter was forced to show his missing finger (where Scabbers had been missing a toe: a piece of evidence from the papers that Harry had largely forgotten since it seemed so random).
"But Black was given a trial!" the Minister finally piped up, from his seat near Dumbledore. "He was judged fairly."
"With the evidence and urgency of the time, perhaps," Mr. Tonks rebutted. "But the records show it was a summary judgment, and Black was not required to speak, due to the seeming preponderance of evidence. He might have been too traumatized to speak."
Dumbledore agreed, "As I recall, we had many to try, so speed was at issue. That emergency althing went for an entire week as it was."
"And this is a trial for Pettigrew," Malfoy interjected. "Again, I see no reason not to throw him into Azkaban and move on."
"If it please your lordships…" Mr. Tonks corrected, "with this new evidence, we would like to revisit the Black trial."
"There it is!" Fudge blustered. Clearly, in front of an audience, Harry couldn't trust him to keep his word in private. Or maybe he was playing up his disagreement, so his allies like Malfoy wouldn't know he'd already agreed to allow a trial? Politicians were annoying. "An escaped convict flouting our laws, without even the courage to present himself."
"I'm inclined to agree with the Minister," Malfoy drawled, though if his tell was the same as his son's, Harry suspected that meant he was anything but calm. "Perhaps if he agreed to present himself…"
"If assured the ability to be heard, he'll be in presently," Mr. Tonks agreed.
That stopped Fudge and Malfoy cold, leaving Dumbledore space to say, "Given that he may only be guilty of the offense of being an unregistered animagus, which alone features much less of a sentence than he's already served, I think it behooves this body to grant safe passage and a new trial."
There was general assent among the lords, and Harry noticed Tonks' mother speaking quietly into a small device in her hand. A few seconds later, a guard at the door announced, "Sirius Black, presenting himself for trial."
"Lead him in," Dumbledore ordered.
And there was Sirius, looking significantly closer to the well-groomed noble he'd been before twelve years landed on him at once. He narrowly restrained himself from waving at Harry when he spotted him, but did grin. It was a grin that turned into a snarl when he spotted Pettigrew, who cowered away and flickered slightly, before a pop of paralytic magic washed over him and he toppled to the floor.
Harry guessed there was a solution to him turning into a rat after all.
"Let the court observe those were the anti-animagus runes on the prisoner," the headmaster explained. "We had previously been unable to prove he was an illegal animagus, as it is a voluntary transformation."
"Mr. Black," Tonks the lawyer asked, "can you please recount your experience of the night of the deaths of James and Lily Potter."
His voice more composed than Harry had experienced yet, Sirius managed, "It was pretty simple. That man," he couldn't bring himself up say Pettigrew's name but did point at his prone form, "came to visit earlier in the evening to celebrate Dísablót. He left me quite drunk. But late that night I suddenly realized I could remember where the Potter residence was. I portalled over, found the place wrecked, and… found James and Lily's bodies…" He had to pause for a moment, clearly remembering the trauma.
In some ways, his pain was more real than Harry's: he had lost parents, yes, but could barely remember them. To Sirius, they had been inseparable for over a decade. Harry choked up a little himself, stuck by the reflected tragedy of someone who had gotten to know them that well. Aunt Pepper gave his hand a squeeze, clearly feeling it herself.
"Baby Harry was alive, though the room around him was wrecked. I picked him up, and by the time I'd gotten him settled and outside, Hagrid had arrived."
"Rubeus Hagrid," Mr. Tonks clarified. "Then keeper of the grounds and keys at Hogwarts. Now also professor of husbandry."
"And also a friend of ours, and of the headmaster," Sirius continued. "He must have remembered the location as well. I handed over Harry, so I could go check on… him. At the time, I assumed he must have been killed."
"I can clarify," Dumbledore announced. "I had also remembered the location of the Potter cottage, but was in the middle of a conflict elsewhere, likely, in hindsight, a distraction. I sent Hagrid through a portal to observe what had happened. He has corroborated his part in Mr. Black's statement. I believe you also told him about a skiff?"
"Right! I wasn't sure how Hagrid was going to get a baby back to… well, I'd assumed Hogwarts. So I told him where I knew an Asgardian skiff was stored. Figured old Hogun wouldn't mind lending it briefly."
Mr. Tonks summed up, "So you and Mr. Hagrid can attest that you had ample opportunity to harm the boy and instead willingly gave him up and provided means to send him to safety."
"I would never harm Harry!" Sirius yelled, a bit of his madness shining through. "He's my godson! James and Lily were all but family." He reined himself in, then said, "Yes. I then portalled to the rat's home. I saw his building destroyed and the aurors, and I thought certainly he'd died… but then I found my own wand in the grass right near where I usually came in. I'd no sooner picked it up than the aurors were blaming me!"
"And you mean us to believe you hadn't noticed your wand missing?" Malfoy pushed.
"I know you've never loved anyone enough to panic that they might be in danger, Lucius," Sirius snapped back, "but I think the arresting officers might recall that I'd barely remembered to put on pants." There was a bit of shocked laughter at that pronouncement. "I assumed that it had rolled under the furniture and there wasn't time to find it."
"I can corroborate the noted lack of proper clothing from the arrest report," Madam Bones said.
Mr. Tonks added, "And can you support that none of the supposed evidence in his home was placed in plain view?"
She nodded, "It all seemed fairly well hidden, which befits evidence of criminal conspiracy."
The lawyer corrected, "Or that it was hidden by a supposed friend while visiting, and not meant to be uncovered by Mr. Black."
"I can't support or deny that statement," she shrugged. "Circumstantial evidence is, by its nature, colored by other circumstances."
"All we've established is that Sirius Black had no interest in killing a baby," Malfoy drawled. "The simplest explanation remains that they both conspired and fell out when the… when You-Know-Who's power was broken. I say, throw them both in Azkaban."
"I was not under the impression that this body was in the habit of throwing its members in prison out of expedience," Dumbledore raised an eyebrow.
"Especially when me going back means his boy stands to inherit," Sirius stressed. "What happens when Lucius finds some way to put himself in the rest of your seats?"
"This body will not stand for that kind of fear mongering," the Minister chided.
"Then let us not give them any reason to believe it," the headmaster shrugged. "I believe we have enough evidence to vote."
It turned out, this involved a lot of shouting, as the landed gentry that had been forced to not hear their own voices for several minutes decided to rectify that. But Madam Longbottom was, it turned out, quite loud, and gradually anchored a decisive sound of agreement on her repeated proposal to free Sirius and have Pettigrew take his place.
Red in the face but without the votes, Malfoy and Fudge eventually gave in.
"Please, take the prisoner away," Dumbledore finally declared, "and we should invite the head of the Black family to take his seat."
Unfortunately, it was not the seat Lucius was in, since the Malfoys were quite rich in their own right. Instead, a minor lord that was apparently just wealthy enough to have a seat was bumped, and Sirius settled in.
And then it was a lot of talking about marauders and how Asgard still had no luck on repairing Bifrost to come help. Hours of it.
Harry was finally able to slip out when they took a short break for snack delivery, with Pepper shooting him a "be careful" look. Then he ran right into one of the last people he'd expected just next to the gallery stairs. "Harry!" the thin blond woman said in excitement, immediately invading his personal space. "Big day for you and your family. Care to comment?"
It took him a moment to place her wearing robes before he finally realized, "Christine Everhart?"
She shushed him. "Remember, I go by Rita Skeeter here."
"Oh. Because of the war. Because," he lowered his voice, "you're Midgardborn."
"Yes. The old man got quite fanciful with his code names by the end," she agreed. "I take it you've met some other Earth students from my class?"
"Maybe. Let's just say that Jones isn't my mother's maiden name." He'd thought for a second about telling her who Remus Lupin really was, but he realized that had more downside than upside. "I thought you just did correspondence reporting?"
She shrugged, "I'm negotiating a new anchor deal, and the local papers had more contacts Earth-side than I expected. And they needed a writer for a… limited engagement this year. So you may be seeing more of me."
"You know, if I was Tony, that would be flirty, but it just came off ominous," he grinned.
She actually cracked a smile back and said, "You don't need to grow up to be Tony Stark. And my readers here wouldn't know what that meant anyway."
"I don't know. You don't want to tell them that the Boy-Who-Lived's aunt is dating the greatest hero of Midgard, whose fortune is so big that it makes the Malfoys look poor by comparison?"
She blinked. "You make a really good point. But right now, do you want to comment on the trial?"
"Justice was done. Eventually," he shrugged. "We're glad to have Sirius no longer getting chased by Mindless Ones. Though they did accidentally help when he heroically showed up at the battle of Hogsmeade."
"You… are just a gold mine of stories, aren't you? What say I buy you and your aunt dinner the next time you're in LA and you let me pick that famous brain."
Harry shrugged, thinking about it. With Aunt Pepper's deal, her coverage of both of them the previous summer had been fair, and she'd even gone a little easy on Tony. "Let me talk to my aunt, but that might work."
"Delightful! I'll email you to set up a time," she said, sliding off with a couple of quotes before Harry changed his mind.
"Careful with that one," a gruff voice told him, as the man that owned it clomped up on a wooden leg. He was dressed more like a warrior than a wizard, but the rapidly-spinning artificial eye was clearly magical, and he had a brace of potions on a bandolier around his chest. "Heard she's a muckraker."
"Thank you, sir, but I've dealt with her before. She likes my stories enough to be fair."
"You think that, but no good ever came talking to the press. Isn't Tonks supposed to be with you?" he demanded.
Harry shot him a look and prepared to bolt if he needed to. "Sounds like something someone trying to kidnap me would ask."
"Hah! Constant Vigilance!" the strange man chortled. "I'm Moody. Auror. I trained the girl. She should know not to leave her charge."
"She's protecting my aunt," he admitted, the guy's story making enough sense to extend some trust. "From boring politics, mostly."
"Maybe, but you should head back up," the man suggested. "Lot more than a reporter around here that would like a piece of you. I don't imagine it will last much longer. The lords start to get sleepy after they've had their snacks."
"Sure," Harry nodded at the creepily-intense man and headed back up to the gallery. "Met your boss, Moody," he whispered to Tonks.
"Oh no!" she told him. "He's a lot, right? I'm kind of going to miss him, though. He's retiring at the end of the month."
"Wait. He's only a few days from retirement?" Harry's eyes widened, and he glanced around, expecting that the universe would use that pronouncement to cause another crisis. The guy had been weird, but Harry didn't want him to die suddenly in a giant battle.
But, contrary to Harry's genre savviness, the althing wound down without any sudden attacks. As Moody had predicted, the shouting grew less as everyone felt the hour and the calories, and eventually Dumbledore called it to resume at a later date. "There's a side room where we can meet Siri and my parents," Tonks informed them, leading them to a different stairway out of the gallery than the one they'd come in on.
The three of them descended into a small room that was set up for side-discussions, with several comfy chairs, a fireplace, and a closed-up antique bar. "Pup!" Sirius announced, already in residence with the elder Tonkses. He hesitated, arms raising for a hug but not knowing if that was allowed.
Harry shrugged and let him. He hadn't had a ton of physical affection in his life, with no extended family and growing up in the Stark Industries offices (tech nerds were not renowned huggers). But it wasn't like he was unfamiliar with the gesture, and it seemed to mean a lot to Sirius. And maybe to him, somewhere deep down and starved for those very familial gestures, if he was honest. "Glad it worked out!"
"All thanks to you," Sirius said, not seeming interested in abandoning the hug immediately, but adding, "and the estimable Tonks clan. And Miss Virginia, for helping organize the whole thing. Oh, this is Andromeda and Edward."
"Andi and Ted," Tonks' mother introduced herself. "And you've already met my daughter, Nymphadora."
"Mother!" Apparently-Nymphadora nearly shrieked. Harry guessed he got why she went by her last name.
"It's bad enough you try to go by your last name in general, but among family it's confusing," Andi smirked, winning a battle in a long war. "Now. Plans?"
"I could come visit?" Sirius asked, slightly anxiously about whether that offer would be accepted.
"Fine with me," he looked at Pepper for confirmation.
"Does he have papers?" she asked Ted. "And do you know how to be on Midgard without being obvious?"
"Sure!" Sirius grinned. "I went to London with James and Lily once! And she used to tell me all about it."
"A ringing endorsement, I'm sure," Ted smirked, well aware of the cultural disconnect with Vanir on Earth. "He does not have an official identity on Earth yet, but at least getting permission to travel should be expedited by taking the Black family seat."
"But that also means that he needs to be here for the next couple of sessions," Andi stressed. "Also, there's the matter of the Dark Dimension."
"They haven't attacked here yet," Harry realized, finally gracefully extricating himself from the hug. "Do you think I scared them off for good?"
Andi shook her head, "More that not even they are fool enough to attack the seat of their contract with this world. We may need to make certain that the exchange of Pettigrew for Siri has been accepted before planning any trips to other populated areas."
"So… give it about a month?" Sirius checked. All three Tonkses nodded that it seemed reasonable to them.
"He could join us in Slovakia!" Harry realized, checking visually with Pepper.
"Just introduce him to Tony first thing?" she widened her eyes, but saw that Harry was excited about it so tacitly relented. "I guess there's not another good time next month before you go back to school."
"What's in Sokovia?" Sirius checked.
"Slovakia," Harry corrected. "Different countries. Next door. Very confusing. Tony would not be going to Sokovia… for reasons. But anyway, there's a European amateur racing championship there about a week and a half before school goes back."
"Car… racing?" Sirius checked. Harry nodded so he grinned, "I always wanted to see racing cars. I was trying to enchant a motorcycle once, but we just couldn't get it working here."
"You are responsible for making sure he won't give the game away instantly," Pepper cautioned Harry.
"I can send Hedwig with letters," he nodded.
"Actually, if Andi's done with it, I might have a better solution," Sirius suggested. His cousin nodded and handed over what she must have been talking into earlier: a small, handheld mirror with intricate runework on the back. "This was another of your father's and my senior runes projects. Works on some of the same principles as the map." He handed it to Harry and said, "Say my name to activate it."
"Sirius Black," Harry checked, and as Sirius withdrew a matching mirror, Harry's resolved into basically a video chat view from the other mirror's viewpoint. "Woah, does this have audio?" There was an echo from Sirius' mirror, so he said, "Guess so. What's the range on these?"
"I guess we'll find out if it's interplanetary," Sirius shrugged. "The runework makes them think they're each other, so it should work at any distance."
"Lavender is going to lose her mind that this is possible," Harry boggled. "She's been jealous of Earth communication tech since she heard about cell phones."
Sirius grinned, pleased that his godson was impressed. "Yeah. We were going to do more work on them but… well… then everything happened. You think people would like them?"
The kid was aghast at the possibilities. "I think you would sell them to everyone at Hogwarts. Probably multiple if you can't make them talk to more than one mirror."
Pepper nodded, "Seems like it could be revolutionary. I take it this is a Potter/Black shared invention?"
"We'll get to work on the ownership contracts, shall we?" Ted grinned.
"After we discuss reinstatement?" Andi raised an eyebrow.
"Right," Sirius nodded. "Does everyone have time for dinner?"
There were general nods from everyone as Harry mentioned, "Oh, right. Aunt Pepper. I told Christine Everhart we'd have dinner with her and let her pick my brain about stuff. She's going to be reporting here this year, so I figured it would help to keep her happy with me?"
Pepper groaned, "I let you out of my sight for ten minutes…"
Notes:
And that's Year 3. Year 4 starts with chapter 47. This is an excellent time to review and let me know what you liked about this year and what plotlines you'd like to see more of.
Year 3 *fought* me. It's kind of amazing how much Prisoner of Azkaban hangs on the three mysteries: how is Black getting in, what's going on with Lupin, and why is Hermione acting all shifty? And those are kind of obvious if you've read the books, so nobody wants to just rehash them as if they're still mysterious. The normal solution is to drastically change what happens in Year 3 if Harry knows Sirius is innocent. But I also knew from the beginning I wanted to end on the time loop, so I couldn't break continuity so much that couldn't happen. Hopefully everyone enjoyed what I came up with.
Year 4 has fewer things that just immediately lose tension if anyone shares information, so I'm hopeful that it will fight me less. I was able to use November to successfully put a NaNoWriMo's worth of words into year 4, so there's 50k words in the buffer... which only actually gets us to the second task, because Goblet of Fire defies being written short. Nonetheless, it's rolling along and... Avengers is coming.
See everyone next week!
Chapter 47: Tied to the Tracks
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"I know I'm walking right into this," Tony explained, half-joking, half-puzzled, "but you can't be serious."
"And yet, I am," Sirius nodded, grinning. "Both spellings."
Tony and Sirius had just been introduced on the Stark Industries jet as they picked up Harry's godfather and the Grangers in London on the way to Slovakia. Unfortunately, Dean was at an art camp, so wasn't able to take off the few days needed to go with them to the race. "Admit it. You had it changed. You wanted to be in a band," Tony insisted, reclined in his favorite seat in the plane's central cabin.
"I mean, I did kind of want to be in a band," Sirius shrugged. "But, no, you can blame my family."
"They go in for star-themed names," Harry explained to Tony from his own seat. "I told you I go to school with a kid named Draco, right?"
"Wait, like the constellation?" Tony checked. "I thought you were saying that with a G. I just assumed his family was Russian. Or really-early Game of Thrones fans."
"That show just came out," Harry cocked his head in confusion. "How would a kid born fourteen years ago be named after Khal Drogo?"
Hermione, scandalized, interjected, "They're based on books that have been coming out since before we were born, Harry."
"Huh," Harry nodded. "Why haven't I read those?"
"They were a little mature for you before you went off to school," Pepper explained.
Thinking back on the episodes of the show that his aunt had grudgingly let him watch over the last month after Tony, Rhodey, and Happy all insisted, Harry had to agree that was probably reasonable. "We should get those to take back to school," he concluded. Most of the kids would probably be way into them. The other Earth fantasy novels the Midgardborn had brought had been big hits for entertainment reading in Gryffindor.
"I think we have a spare set," Hermione figured, and her parents nodded. "Well, we only have the new one in hardback. Hopefully the author gets the last couple of books done before the show catches up."
Tony shook his head. "I've met George at a couple of parties. Nice guy, but I wouldn't put money on his writing speed." He was absently looking at Helen Granger and noted, "By the way, you know you look a lot like Lady Stark from the show?"
"I've been hearing that lately, yes," Hermione's mother admitted.
"Pilot says we're ready to go. Strap in," Rhodey suggested to everyone as he came into the cabin from the front of the plane. Harry was excited he was actually going with them to a race this time. His and Tony's friendship seemed to have been significantly improved from where it had been the previous year.
It had been a pretty good summer, for all that it had only been two months. They'd randomly picked a day the week before his birthday to go to Disneyland, and done the celebrity thing with hats and sunglasses to escape notice. They'd still used Tony's pull to skip a bunch of lines, of course. Nobody had managed to attack Tony at the happiest place on earth, for all that he'd opined afterwards that it would have been a pretty cool place for a brawl.
On the actual day of July 31st, refusing to tempt fate, they'd stayed in and had a small party at Tony's house, with the security staff reinforced and multiple redundancies for calling the cops and SHIELD. But nobody had stormed the place trying to kill Tony after all, so he was now all jokes about having dodged Harry's birthday curse, as if he'd never actually believed in it. But Harry was pretty sure he was relieved.
They'd done their Kamar-Taj summer camp over the first couple weeks of August, and it seemed like the Masters had all been very impressed by how much progress the kids had made. Even Parvati was feeling okay about her wandless casting, and Harry and Dean were doing better with theirs than quite a few of the adult apprentices that had been in training for a long time. Sadly, even if they might be ready for it, they probably weren't going to get to learn magic that didn't use their personal energy until they were legal adults. Master Mordo, in particular, insisted that, if they couldn't sign legal contracts yet, they definitely shouldn't be allowed to make deals with Principalities for magical spells.
And the Masters still weren't ready to hand over sling rings to the teens.
As a consolation, in addition to the promised personal training she was giving Harry to improve his astral projection, the Ancient One had given them some one-on-one time to teach them advanced techniques for things you could do with just personal magical energy. They were a long way away from creating something as complex as the combat fans she could manifest, but were at least having some luck making their conjurations less… well… floppy. Harry and Dean had both managed to make short sticks of orange light that could block weapons and spells, and the taller boy was already planning to emphasize the Kali-like moves Gamora had taught them in their martial arts practice, since those would be good with the energy batons.
The girls hadn't gotten that far, but were doing well with their shields. Honestly, Hermione and Padma were much more interested in Sirius' magic mirrors. It had turned out that, indeed, there was basically no interference in the connection even with Harry on Earth and Sirius on Vanaheim. The implications for faster-than-light communication were massive. It was very likely that Hermione was planning to corner Sirius for an extended period on this trip and work out exactly what he and James Potter had done to use runes to essentially quantum entangle the two mirrors together.
Somewhere over Germany, Tony managed to segue the small talk into more investigation into the new adult man in Harry's life. "So, Jim Morrison," he started, managing to catch Sirius' attention with the nickname. He did have a very Lizard King look, with his full, shoulder-length hair and affected slouch. "How's life outside of bars?"
"I don't know. I still try to visit bars pretty regularly," Sirius fired back, getting a smirk from Tony and earning a point. "But if you mean out of jail, it's great. I don't recommend going to prison."
"Oh, yeah," Rhodey tagged in, "Harry said something about that's why you weren't around until now, despite being his godfather? What happened?"
"Mistaken identity," Sirius summarized. "As soon as Harry found out about it, he and his friends did a lot of research to get the charges dropped." It was technically correct, which was the best kind of correct, Sirius always figured.
"And you didn't know about it?" Tony checked with Pepper.
She shook her head, "We weren't really in touch. He was James' best friend. And he went in right after Harry's parents died, so I was a little distracted. Sorry, Siri." Tony couldn't help but be mollified that his girlfriend hadn't given a spare thought to the rock-star-looking man until Harry had wanted to meet his godfather.
Sirius waved her off, "Your help with the lawyers more than made up for it."
Tony wasn't stupid. He knew there was probably a bunch being left out. But if a man didn't want to talk about over a decade of being in prison for a crime he didn't commit, he wasn't going to make a big deal of it. He wasn't even going to nickname the guy "Dr. Richard Kimble," for all that he'd considered it. But the search he'd quietly had both JARVIS and a private investigator do couldn't contradict anything that he was saying, so as long as the guy didn't seem like trouble, he figured he could let it lie.
The reason neither the finest virtual intelligence on the planet nor a highly-paid London PI had been able to find a problem mostly came down to magic. There was a time coming soon when there would be enough electronic records that creating a new identity on Earth would be a problem for the Vanir. But in 2011 it was still possible to mostly exist off the grid, as long as you had paper documents in enough places that didn't go in for digitizing old files. And if Sirius Black's birth certificate, incarceration records, and miscellaneous details hadn't actually existed until a few weeks earlier, they certainly looked like they'd been yellowing in filing cabinets for the appropriate number of years.
Magic was great at creating that kind of thing. It was how the Potts family paper trail had managed to hold up to SHIELD scrutiny.
"So you're really going with 'Morrison' for him?" Rhodey checked. "With the goatee, I'd have said 'Zappa.'"
"Hah! The Doors and Frank Zappa!" Sirius said, finally getting it and owning the resemblance. "Lily used to play them for us in the dorms. She loved oldies."
"I thought there was a 'no electronics' rule?" Tony checked.
"Harry's mum was brilliant," the longer-haired man (with a less-awesome goatee, in Tony's opinion) clarified. "For a class project she made a mechanical record player that used…" he realized at the last second that he shouldn't say "magic" and turned what was going to be a wand gesture into pantomiming winding up clockwork, "...you know, gears and things? I'm not actually sure how she got it to work."
"Oh! Like an old-style Victrola!" Hermione added, both to sell the deception and because she wondered if she could make something similar. She asked Harry and Pepper, "Do you know if it was in with her things?"
"I think she gave it to McGonagall as a present when we graduated," Sirius shrugged. "But I doubt it would be hard for you to make another one, especially if Minnie would let you have a look?"
Hermione nodded, adding another project to her mental list.
"My mom liked 70s rock?" Harry asked, himself more educated about what bands that entailed than the vast majority of kids his age because of Tony's obsession with early metal and everything conceptually nearby.
"And boy bands," Sirius shuddered. "Fortunately, it was harder to find something called… New Boys in the Neighborhood?... on vinyl. She was always trying to sing it for us, though. Seemed a little trite."
"The fact that you escaped knowing who New Kids on the Block are is a small blessing," Tony opined, warming to the man since it was clear he'd been genuine friends with Harry's mother. Tony was vaguely aware that Pepper hadn't known her sister-in-law well and had never been able to tell the boy much about her, so Harry having access to a school friend of hers was probably huge for him. "But I'm guessing you missed the real classics?"
"Tony is obsessed with AC/DC," Harry explained, since Sirius clearly wasn't sure what Tony meant.
"I love AC/DC!" Sirius corrected Tony, after the clarification. "Back in Black is my personal anthem, obviously. Dog Eat Dog. Dirty Deeds. Love 'em." He gave it a beat, and then explained, "That wasn't one of Lily's, though. Once she got the record player working, a bunch of other kids started bringing their vinyl in."
Tony filed away that Sirius was acting like the only place he could have experienced rock music was at school with his friends bringing in records. Maybe his family just kept him very sheltered? But he couldn't help but grin at the ringing endorsement of his favorite band. "Right on. Sadly, you pretty much just missed their Black Ice tour. They went for two years! Who knows when they'll go again."
"Tony saw that tour in three different cities," Pepper rolled her eyes.
"They don't always play the same songs!" the billionaire argued. "And we were in Vegas anyway for one of them."
"Because you scheduled a conference around when they'd be in Vegas," she fired back.
"Heh. Yeah," Tony admitted, grinning as he remembered the show. At the time, he'd known that the palladium poisoning was increasing, was no closer to a cure, and thought it might be the last time he'd see them.
Tony barely had time to probe the rest of Sirius' musical fandom (and absently plan how to construct a totally-clockwork record player with the part of his brain always devoted to engineering) before they were landing at Bratislava airport. Unloading at the terminal was Harry's first real opportunity to use his translation implant, the Slovak text getting English superimposed over it. Not that it was hard to find their way: airports were pretty much airports, wherever on Earth you went. He did benefit from the translation of the intercom, apologizing for construction. Apparently the main terminal had been demolished earlier in the year and was reopening the next, so they were having to use one of the secondary terminals while the main one was being rebuilt.
"What's a Schengen?" Harry asked.
"Countries in the European Union that get to use the other terminal," Pepper explained, also having translated the announcement. "They're inside the border control zones, so they have to go through less security."
"Not that it really matters," Tony said. "I don't wait in lines."
Sure enough, Happy forged ahead into a security lane you'd probably barely notice if you weren't looking for it, provided a set of documents to the security agent, and they were breezed through with barely a metal-detector wanding. "I swear," Rhodey complained, "I was standing in security lines for an hour the last time I came here. For work."
"Don't hate the player," Tony grinned.
Meanwhile, Harry was glued to Sirius, quietly explaining things so the Vanaheim native didn't give himself away by being overly fascinated by something that would have been obvious to someone from Midgard, even if they'd been in prison since the 90s. He hadn't quite wanted to fight the man with the metal detector wand, but the electronic squeaking had clearly been off-putting. "But if the wand is a magnet, what if I'm carrying non-ferrous contraband?" the head of the Black family asked, understanding the idea of magnetism even if he didn't have much experience with electronics.
"Then you shut up about it so you don't get strip searched," Harry hissed.
"Right," he nodded. "Oh! Look at all the little cafes. It's like one of those shopping malls."
"Overpriced," Hermione inserted herself into the quiet conversation. "My parents never want to pay airport food rates if they don't have to. You're basically a captive audience, so they can charge whatever they want for food that isn't that good."
"Probably better than prison food, at least," Rhodey interjected. They obviously hadn't been as quiet as they thought. "First big time in civilization since you've been out?"
Sirius, who had maybe been through London once on the way to the Midlands to meet Lily's parents in the 90s and had otherwise never seen Midgardian metropolitan engineering, said, "Believe it. Whatever they're selling, I'm sure it's better than what I was eating for years." Which was nothing, in the timeless void of the Dark Dimension, but, again, technically correct…
"We're going right to the hotel so you can have real food in an hour," Pepper piled on. "But if you need to pee, this is the time." She gestured at the signs for the restrooms.
Harry, Sirius, and Hermione shared a look, realizing that they needed to be quieter if they were going to try to keep secrets from Tony, Rhodey, and Happy.
Everyone was willing to hold it until they got to the hotel, so they quickly piled into a limo that Happy had acquired from somewhere and headed into the city. While Sirius was glued to the window taking in the sights, Harry was a little blasé. Bratislava was a growing city, and other than the Slovak signage (which his implant helpfully translated) it could have been any municipality in Europe. Especially with any overheard conversations from locals being instantly translated, it was easy to think of Earth as one big interconnected civilization, so different from that of other Realms.
He probably needed to keep it on the down-low that he could effectively speak Slovak. Unfortunately, he wasn't really sure how to tell his implant to not auto-translate for him.
In a quarter of an hour, they were unloading at one of the city's swankier hotels, named after a sun god. Ultimately, they decided to just have dinner at the hotel, rather than going out: Slovakia wasn't Sokovia but it was next to it, so Happy and Rhodey both wanted to keep Tony's presence in the country as low key as possible, just in case. And for everything else, there was the additional support and security staff that was sharing their floor with them.
Hermione was still getting used to the idea of renting out a whole floor of a hotel.
It included a whole suite designated for hangouts, but most of the crew started to fade quickly after dinner. Happy and Rhodey were both more diligent about trying to adjust to the new time zone. Pepper and Tony left not long after to have some alone time in their own room. Hermione's parents cautioned them not to stay up too late before heading off to bed. That just left Hermione, Sirius, and Harry, free to finally talk in person.
There was a moment of awkwardness before Sirius remembered, "I brought your birthday present, pup! I guess I could have trusted it to Hedwig, but, well…"
Harry took the small box that Sirius had withdrawn from his pocket. Roughly large enough to hold a big phone, and itself made of beautifully polished rosewood, Harry admitted, "Yeah, it might be a little big for her to carry comfortably." He slid off the lid to reveal a large folding pocketknife, with wooden scales that matched the box and a silvery blade that looked incredibly sharp. "Wait, did you bring this through airport security?"
"And their wands didn't find it!" Sirius smiled. "I guess the nondetection charms will hold up against Midgard tech as well as normal searches. Should be a good holdout for someone that gets in as much trouble as I heard you have. It's got various sharpening and preservation runes on it as well, and it should be especially good against locks and bindings."
"Thanks, Sirius," Harry said, giving his godfather a hug.
Having allowed them the moment, Hermione whipped out a notebook and mechanical pencil, "Right. Speaking of runes, I need to know everything about how those mirrors work…"
They left for the race early the next morning, everyone but Happy and Rhodey clearly fighting off lack of sleep from jet lag. Harry's lack of sleep was from the weirdly vivid dreams he'd been having for the last few days. They featured a horde of zombie-aliens being loaded onto spaceships, a vast graveyard, some dark-haired guy being tortured in a featureless room, and a bunch of other things that had him wondering whether bingeing every show and movie he'd missed over the year in a few weeks was great for his brain.
The half-hour drive was mostly down a freeway that had noise barrier walls blocking off any useful views, but the last third was through some interesting countryside and Slovakian villages. It was Sunday, but they'd left early enough to not get bogged down in whatever church traffic there might be. Sirius was clearly holding his questions for later, since, "Is this a pretty common type of architecture on Earth?" would make him seem like the alien he actually was (even if the answer was, "Yeah, city and suburban architecture is shockingly similar, wherever you go.").
Surprisingly minimalist, the Slovakia Ring had exactly the number of facilities that one might expect for a race track so far from the city center: a small hotel for those that wanted to stay overnight, a medical center for accidents during the race, a restaurant that was probably fairly overpriced since you had nowhere else to go, and a big parking lot between them. The stands for the track was a long building with garages beneath, and bleacher seating for over a thousand. The parking lot was becoming packed, and they could hear the sounds of a rapidly-filling audience ready to watch the FIA GT3's penultimate round, before the finale in October.
"Are we… just sitting with the crowd?" Hermione checked, realizing that Tony's usual enhanced security didn't really fit in with sitting on bleachers with hundreds of random guests. Their follow team of additional security was planning to wait outside, keeping an eye on the parking lot for terrorist attackers coming in hot, so wouldn't be much good against someone already hiding in the crowd.
"You're welcome to if you want," Pepper explained, as Happy (laden with the Mark V armor briefcase) was already leading them away from the stands and through a large room currently set up as a kitchen. They could see a covered open area through the glass walls on the other side, where a much smaller crowd had set up table seating. "But we don't really do crowds if we don't have to."
"I guess Justin's not going to be here this time," Harry realized. The last time they'd watched a race, it had been along with Tony's least-favorite billionaire.
"Nope. Hear he's got a nice room in Seagate," Tony grinned, but then glanced at Sirius. "Not that sending anyone to prison is funny, per se."
Sirius shrugged, "I don't know. I'm pretty thrilled about the guy that set me up getting to enjoy it for a while."
Tony raised an eyebrow at that wrinkle of the story that hadn't come out yet, but they were walking out onto the terrace and he had to be friendly with the other racing magnates. "Jean!" he flagged down the new president of FIA and began conversing with the man in French, "Thanks for the extra seats. I've got the whole friends and family range today."
"Your friends are my friends," the man replied, shaking hands with Tony. Harry hovered nearby, amused by his implant letting him follow the French conversation.
Tony continued, "So who should I keep an eye on to hire away from everyone else here?"
"The driver for the Czech team, in the Mercedes," Jean explained, "Though I think he's actually Romanian? Maybe Bulgarian. Kid came out of nowhere and is exactly your kind of crazy. He'll be a pro soon. Get him while you can."
"Thanks, Jean," Tony agreed, moving on to gladhand with the rest of the small crowd.
Harry wandered over to the tables that their party had claimed, overlooking the expansive race track. It was a really good view of the beautiful countryside. The weather was on track to get fairly warm by the afternoon, but the humidity was low and there was a brisk wind to carry away the heat. "Nice day for it," he observed.
"Cars go vroom," Hermione nodded. A racing competition wasn't exactly her, well, wheelhouse, but the Grangers weren't in the habit of passing up a Stark-funded summer vacation. And on the car ride over, Tony had, unprompted, told her that he was going to email her plans for a mechanical phonogram, but that he didn't want her to think he was stealing her project. He'd just had the idea. Tony Stark had done a custom design for her, and apologized in case he was stealing her thunder. What even was her life these days? "Wait… isn't that the actress from Crouching Tiger?!"
"I think she's engaged to the guy who runs the thing," Rhodey grinned. He was long over getting star-struck, with all the time he'd spent around Tony. Now that he'd spent time with both of Harry's best friends across the past two summer vacations, he was pretty pleased at the kid's influences. "You want to go say hey?"
"I couldn't," she insisted. "It's not that I'm afraid, it's just that I don't know any of her other filmography. But I should text Parvati and ask if she wants an autograph…" She began to furiously type on her phone, and Harry assumed that he should plan for the Patils to demand a trip the next summer.
The cars did, indeed, go vroom. Even Hermione wound up getting into it, with the excellent view of the track and how there was clearly more going on in the tight turns and varied high-performance cars compared to American-style racing. Also, the boys were furiously narrating and pointing out interesting things going on the whole time. The fact that this competition was limited to skilled amateurs resulted in a lot of places where someone made a, well, rookie mistake and suddenly the entire order changed.
"Jean was right!" Tony exclaimed, during the second round. "Did the Mercedes just go sideways through that chicane and then manage to overtake? Whoever this kid is, we're hiring him!"
"If he's enough of a maniac, you won't be tempted to take over for him?" Pepper checked, still miffed about Tony's stunt at Monaco the previous summer.
"Well, we'll see," Tony said. "Much harder to drift an F1 car. But I'd pay to see it."
The race finished with the Germans pulling out the win, but the Czech team was extremely close, mostly by virtue of their young driver. If the rest of the team had been as fast as he was, they'd have won by a lot. As the results were announced, their area of the stands was being set up for a banquet: clearly the chance for the drivers to network with the rich fans. Tony had put in word that he definitely wanted to talk to the man of the hour, and as buffet tables of expensive foods were being set out, Jean herded him up to their group.
Tall and probably whip thin under his racing suit, he had crew-cut dark hair, thick eyebrows, and features too blocky and angular to really be considered conventionally handsome, but which gave him an imposing look. He was probably only a few years older than Harry, and moved with a bit of an uneven gait that made him look far less graceful on foot than in a car. "This is the Stark Industries party, including the CEO, Ms. Potts and Tony Stark," the president explained in passable Romanian, which Harry's implant translated (though he assumed he'd have gotten the gist from "Stark Industries" and the names). In English, he introduced, "And this young man is Viktor Krum."
Krum shook hands with Tony and Pepper and was clearly doing his best, despite not having enough grasp of English to keep up with Tony's patter. After a few moments of that, they got to the rest of the introductions, and as soon as Harry was introduced, the bigger boy's eyes flicked to the famous scar and he asked, "You… you are Harry Potter?"
Harry's eyes widened. The last time someone on Earth had recognized him like that, they'd also been magical. "Harry Potts… but yeah," he agreed, trying to make it seem like the language barrier had just caused Krum to mangle his last name. "You want to come sit with me and my friend for lunch?"
As soon as Krum saw Hermione, he nodded in agreement, clearly happier with teen company than with more networking. "I vood love to." Tony gave him a thumbs-up for the excellent salesmanship as they moved to the furthest table they could grab. Harry was just hoping it would be quiet enough that he could get some answers from the taller boy.
Because Harry had obviously never seen him at Hogwarts, or at Kamar-Taj, so if Viktor Krum was magical, where had he learned it?
Notes:
Yes, I've changed Viktor from a quidditch player to a race car driver. It will make more sense as the changes to the other magic schools become apparent over the next few chapters (they don't play quidditch).
Chapter 48: Might and Magic
Chapter Text
"Oh, right. Our arithmancy teacher went to Durmstrang," Harry remembered. Even at the farthest table at lunch, they hadn't really been able to talk openly, with so many interested wealthy people nearby. Instead, they'd learned a lot about each others' Earth-bound lives. It wasn't until they met up late in the evening that Viktor had been able to explain what school he went to.
"Is it somewhere hidden around Eastern Europe?" Hermione asked. Magistra Vector hadn't really told them much about the school. The three were clustered in a corner table in a very cool underground pub in Bratislava's city center. Only Viktor was old enough to get beer (and just barely eighteen at that), but the bar food was good and the ambience was neat. Harry had just been happy to find part of the city that didn't look like any other place on the planet. The city's shopping district was winding and a very interesting mix of old architecture and new construction.
"No, Svartalfheim. It is…" Viktor struggled to find the words in English then looked apologetically at Hermione before turning to Harry and firing off in Bulgarian, "It is in an old dark elf fortress, buried on the dark world." He understood Hermione's English well enough with only the more complex words needing translation, but was having trouble answering her questions with his limited vocabulary. Which was clearly frustrating to him, having to use Harry as an intermediary.
After Harry rephrased that in English, Hermione nodded, but asked, "So did the dark elves have a magical tradition? We've talked about Svartalfheim a bit in cosmology, but it's assumed it's a dead world after the war with the elves."
Again translated by Harry, Viktor explained, "No, we learn Earth and Vanir traditions of magic. But the dark world is in a spot where some things are easier to learn and practice. And some students there try to learn the strange technologies of the elves."
Hermione nodded at that, finishing her glass of Coke (diet, of course, because her dentist parents would throw a fit, or at least give her a hard look, if she drank sugary soda) and announced, "I have more questions. But I have to go to the loo first. Back in a minute."
"She really will have a lot more questions when she gets back," Harry warned the older boy.
"I don't mind," he said. After a moment he said, "And you're sure the two of you aren't together?"
"We tried dating earlier this year. Realized we weren't compatible." Harry briefly summed up the whole "let's date everyone" plan from the previous year and grinned, "So this year, I'm a free agent."
"Then there may be many girls from the other schools that would like a turn. Don't get bound too quickly," Viktor smiled.
"Wait. Other schools?" Harry was confused.
"You don't know about the tournament?" When it was clear Harry didn't, Viktor explained, "With the Grand Convergence coming up in a couple of years, there should be lesser convergences. Whenever enough realms converge, our schools compete in a tournament, since it is much easier to come and go. I understand Hogwarts is hosting it this time."
"Huh. Cool. So you'll be around. That's why you're asking about Hermione?"
Viktor shrugged, "Guilty. She seems nice. I would like to get to know her better while I'm on Vanaheim."
"I'll let you know if she's interested," Harry agreed with a shrug, since they hadn't gotten a bad vibe off of the older boy. And he wasn't so much older that it was completely weird that he might be into a nearly-15-year-old. Viktor probably had even more problems finding people on Earth that he could date without keeping a ton of secrets from than Harry did. "We're going to have a much harder time talking there, though. My translator doesn't work on Vanaheim."
"I vill vork on English," Viktor agreed, switching back from Bulgarian and showing off how much work he needed.
"Everyone okay over here?" Sirius strolled over to their table and checked in. He was "chaperoning" the three teens for the evening, which mostly meant letting them chat while he sat at the bar flirting. This late, however, the place had emptied out a lot so it was basically down to a bartender and a couple of other late-night patrons in another corner.
"Great," Harry told him. "You have any luck?"
He shrugged and admitted, "Not sure this is really a singles bar, but I got some sets of numbers… which I assume are a communication method?"
Both boys showed him their phones and nodded, and Harry said, "At least they didn't try to get you to add them on your social media account. The hotel has a phone you can use."
"Midgard technology," Sirius looked pleasantly baffled. "I'd like to try–"
What he'd like to do with Earth technology would remain unanswered, as he was interrupted by the door of the bar crashing in, followed by a half-dozen figures dressed in black and wielding automatic rifles.
"They're after me!" Sirius said, momentarily assuming it was more Mindless Ones and used to being the one strange figures were chasing.
"They're after me," Harry assumed, since this wasn't the first time people had come after him pointing guns.
"It's me they're after," Viktor insisted, though his reasons were his own.
"They're probably looking for Mr. Stark," Hermione explained, just getting back from the bathroom.
Regardless of who was right, the four sorcerers, blasé in the face of armed attackers, quickly drew their notice since they were the only ones of the few people still in the bar not screaming and diving behind cover. Neither were they just standing in the open, of course, but were moving into defensive positions. Everyone had taken a look at the situation and come to the same conclusion: they might have to risk magic or get shot. Harry and Hermione at least had on their theoretically-bulletproof enchanted undershirts (Pepper and the Grangers had insisted), but it was better not to risk the strength of the year-old runework.
The two Hogwarts students had trained together the most, and Hermione dropped against the back wall behind Harry's left shoulder, ready for him to shield them both if necessary while she worked more complicated magic. Viktor was quick enough on the uptake to see this plan, and take his own position to Harry's left, so Hermione was bracketed between them. Sirius, with actual auror experience (though perhaps not totally sure how dangerous the firearms were), went low as soon as he realized his mistake about the Mindless Ones, trying to flank right with the pub's wall at his back and tables and chairs for potential cover.
"Kill the boy, shoot anyone that gets in the way," the apparent leader of the men yelled as they charged into the room.
"Guess that solves it," Harry said.
"Solves what?" Hermione asked. "It sounded like Shiväisith. They must be elves." Given their black tactical gear and balaclava masks, that was hard to confirm.
"Huh," Harry had time to be confused by his translator implant making everything just seem like English. He didn't have much more time to consider it, since that was when they opened fire.
Vaguely clocking that the few other denizens of the pub were ducked behind the bar or crouching in a corner at the gunfire, Harry hoped it was safe for them to make magical shields. It was either that or hope they all shot him in the chest and that the enchantment would work. Harry's shield held against the automatic gunfire, but barely, never having an opportunity to test against that kind of impact.
Next to him, he was able to spare a moment to pay attention to Viktor's shield, where the geometric orange light was woven through by tendrils of purple. The bullets that hit his shield seemed to explode into puffs of metallic dust.
"They're all wizards!" one of the maybe-elves announced. "Ready the grenades."
"Grenades sound bad! No grenades," Harry warned the others, assuming they wouldn't understand the language. "Let's get out of here." The automatic gunfire was already shockingly loud in the smallish underground brick room, even with vaulted ceilings.
"There's a back door near the toilets!" Hermione yelled. From where he'd been skulking, Sirius managed some kind of transfiguration or related spell that shattered all the glassware on the bar, flinging a cloud of glass fragments and beer toward the assailants so they'd have to cover their faces. Using the distraction to make a break for the rear exit, the teens hit the steps up to the rear alley just ahead of the large black dog that was Sirius catching up to them. Shouts in the bar made it clear the elves weren't far behind.
"I don't know why they finally tried to come after me," Harry complained, as they were rushing into what turned out to be less of an alley and more of a narrow courtyard with extra cafe tables for the other businesses that backed onto the space. It was late enough on a Sunday night that nobody was out there, all the businesses that used it closed. "I thought they were keeping me alive for some prophecy or something!"
"I don't know, but we either stand here or try to outrun them," Sirius announced, shifting back into human form and making a professional assessment of the alley. "What are grenades?"
Before Harry or Hermione could explain the general concept, though they didn't have any idea of the specifics, Viktor volunteered, "Very bad. Dark elf use gravity bombs. Suck everything nearby into black hole."
"Right," Sirius frowned. "Running is out. Stay close enough to them that they can't risk using it." Harry was impressed by his godfather's on-the-fly tactical command, presumably remembered from the few years he spent as an auror in the war. Pepper probably would not be impressed that he was managing his teenaged charges like a strike team rather than trying to get them to safety. "Two on each side of the doorway. Hit them as soon as they try to come out."
He'd explained all that quickly and quietly enough that they were able to lurk to either side of the steps down to the egress before the attackers began to charge after them. Sirius had gestured for Harry and Viktor to take the right, toward the way out of the alley, and pulled Hermione behind him on the left. To their credit, the elves were working as a team and seemed to have a decent sense of tactics for moving through a doorway and covering all their angles. But they must have had less practice against magic, particularly used by a bunch of Gryffindor maniacs.
The first elf through the door got catapulted all the way up the stairs as Sirius transfigured the brickwork next to the doorway into a crude giant fistlike protrusion, stone rippling out far faster than stone should move (which is, of course, easy to do since stone doesn't normally flow at room temperature). Hermione wrapped the second elf in a magical whip, binding his gun and the arms holding it, and yanked him into the stone of the landing, throwing all her weight down so her elevated leverage would magnify the impact. While Harry was smashing the one Sirius launched with a magical eskrima stick, Viktor was once again manifesting his purple-and-orange shield to catch the bullets of the third and fourth elves still in the doorway.
"Transfigure the guns! You just have to ruin the barrels," Harry yelled at Sirius while he continued to put strikes into the battered elf, suddenly realizing that the adult probably had no experience with firearms to know that trick.
"Really? They're not magicked?" Sirius asked, focusing his magical will and waving his arms to enact another transfiguration. The rattle of bullets immediately ceased. Harry glanced over and saw that he'd gone farther than simply fouling the rifle barrels: each of the guns looked like it had basically been in one of those experiments where an aluminum can full of steam was dropped into cold water: Sirius had simply caused the guns to implode into their empty space.
In the silence, his opponent knocked senseless, Hermione still tangling up another elf with her whole body weight braced against the railing along the steps, and Viktor dropping his shield to prepare an attack, Harry tried yelling, "Those who would welcome the curse," the meaning of "Dahvee" sprawling in his head as his implant switched him to Shiväisith, "we have captives against your grenades. I thought you needed me alive! Why are you trying to kill me?"
"Who are you, that speaks our tongue?" one of them asked.
Baffled that his assassins didn't know, he answered, "Uh… Harry Potter."
That got a moment of stunned silence before the elves admitted, "There has been a mistake. We did not realize that our target would share your fellowship, Harry Potter."
"Oh… were you trying to kill Viktor?" he asked.
"Such was our contract. Return our captives and we shall attempt it at a later night."
Harry explained, in English, "They were after Viktor. They say if we give them these two back they'll try to kill him later."
"Do those sirens mean police?" Sirius asked, referring to noises that currently only he seemed to be able to hear with whatever hearing benefits his animagus abilities gave him in human form. He was clearly weighing whether they could defeat the elves directly before more locals showed up. Off of everyone's nods that there was law enforcement incoming, he decided, "I say let them go. We might be revealed already, but we'll definitely be if we keep fighting."
Viktor seemed inclined to press the attack, realizing that they'd been after him the whole time and might have killed him if he hadn't made such good new friends. But he also didn't want to be the one that revealed magic to Earth and grunted his assent. Hermione dropped her magical whips and Harry stepped back so they could grab their unconscious teammate. "You should stop taking contracts on Midgard," Harry suggested in Shiväisith, wondering how many successful assassinations the dark elves had enacted on Earth that he hadn't been caught up in.
"We shall consider your words, Harry Potter," the leader said as they carefully collected their unconscious teammate and began to rush down the alley before they got into a fight with the Bratislava police. It was honestly entirely possible that they didn't do much work on Earth and were very intimidated by how thoroughly Harry had been thwarting their attempts.
Purple light flashed along Viktor's arm as he clearly considered unleashing something nasty at the fleeing elves, but he suppressed the instinct and turned, frowning. "Thank you for the help," he said in English. "I know not vhy they try to kill me."
"Also important, why did they stop when they knew Harry was here?" Sirius asked.
Harry shrugged, explaining, "They have some kind of prophecy that I'll find something they lost, so they're trying to keep me alive? I think someone tried to pay them to kill me a couple years ago and they decided to just try to kill Tony and frame me so I couldn't go back to school." He gave it a beat, "They kind of suck, but unless there's another prophecy that Viktor would do something they don't want, they probably got paid to assassinate him? They said there's a contract."
"I vill be more careful until I am back at school," the older boy acknowledged, still confused as to why he rated an elven hit team.
"Should we… stay for the police?" Hermione asked.
"And tell them what?" Sirius shrugged.
"We should probably see how much the people in the bar saw, at least," Harry suggested. "Oh, and warn Kamar-Taj that we had to use magic in public."
"I'm emailing them already," Hermione acknowledged, typing away on her phone.
That urge to make sure they hadn't outed themselves did take them back inside to check on the bartender and remaining patrons, and had them wait around for the police to show up. They stuck to a few true but misleading facts: the attackers had been speaking a language that sounded a lot like a guy that had attacked Tony Stark two years earlier, they seemed to be gunning for Viktor Krum (up-and-coming race-car-driving phenomenon) but nobody was sure why, they'd fled the attack and hid in the alley, and the attackers had run out the other side.
It seemed like the people in the bar had been looking away from the pieces of magic they'd done in public, and the place didn't run cameras in the space during business hours. The Bratislava police department might have asked questions about why there were no bullet holes in the walls despite the report of automatic fire but… well… it turned out Slovakian police were not that into opening a huge investigation into foreign nationals attacking each other, especially when nobody actually died and Sirius had a strangely-keen insight into which officers to pass his spare drinking money to with a note that the wealthy celebrity group would like to leave and go to bed. Hermione managed to contain her disgust at the flagrant bribery.
As they cleared out onto the winding streets of the city center to begin walking back to their hotels, a shadow detached itself from a building across the street. "I take it your discretion was sufficient?" came the Danish-accented voice of Master Kaecilius. He had shed his robes for street clothes, but was wearing several pieces of jewelry that probably meant he was still ready for action.
"I was just about to send another email, sir!" Hermione agreed. She checked to make sure there weren't cops or bar patrons exiting right behind her, but still lowered her voice. "We were careful, and we don't think anyone saw anything."
"Then perhaps we will not need to rely upon more sorcery to undo what was done," he shrugged with a friendly smirk. Honestly, the guy was so hard for the kids to read. He liked to joke, but half of his jokes sounded like sarcastic complaints. Considering Sirius and Viktor he said, "I admit, I don't know your friends."
Harry explained, "This is my godfather, from, you know, near school. And a new friend who goes to Durmstrang."
Kaecilius' smirk only grew at the understanding that names didn't need to be shared, particularly in public, and he said, "Then I am pleased you had allies that were able to help in a crisis." He looked particularly at Viktor for a moment, admitting, "My life might have gone very differently had I been found by Durmstrang as a child. And yet, it would have meant I could not have gone to Kamar-Taj." He shrugged as if the trade might have been worth it. "Very well. Get back to safety, and be wary."
As the master sorcerer moved back into hiding, presumably to open a portal back to New York, the quartet walked away and made it to the main road, turning back toward their hotel. Convinced there weren't any listening ears, Hermione asked, "What did he mean, that you can't go to Kamar-Taj? Is it… because of the way your magic is?"
Viktor thought for a moment, then explained, "My headmaster say masters of magic are too traditional. They fear experiment and forbid much magic." He shrugged as if to say that he wasn't sure if he agreed, but admitted, "By time they tell me of Kamar-Taj, I have already made… deals."
"You're doing witchcraft!" Hermione realized. "Is the purple energy dark magic?"
"Is strong power," he sighed, "but I have seen Star Wars. I try to keep deals small. Finite. It still taint my magic, maybe forever. Others I go to school vith… they care less."
"How many of the dark wizards the Masters have to fight went to school at Durmstrang?" Harry wondered.
"Let us just say… not many alumni come to reunions," Viktor frowned. He noticed the wary look in Hermione's eyes and his frown deepened. "I am careful. I ignore the voices vith promise of more power. But I do hear the voices."
"Are there… dark wizard rivalries?" Harry wondered. "Could one of them have sent elves after you?"
Viktor just shrugged again. "I am top of my class, so maybe? But dark elves hate us for using their home. I think they vould not vork for a schoolmate."
"Maybe not on purpose," Harry shrugged. "It's just a theory. I've been figuring the Malfoys sent them after me two years ago."
"Vell, this is my hotel," Viktor gestured to a place that wasn't as nice as where they were staying.
"You should stay with us!" Hermione realized. "You aren't safe."
He shook his head, a little mollified that she was worried about him, and said, "They vill be honest about giving me a day. And they do not like the light. I vill be far from here by tomorrow night, and they vill not find me until I am back at school. Please know that I owe you for saving my life."
"Don't worry about it, man," Harry said, shaking his hand. "We'll see you at Hogwarts."
As the older boy walked off, Hermione asked, "Wait… what do you mean we'll see him at Hogwarts?"
"He mentioned there's some convergence tournament this year that he was going to be around for," Harry summed up.
"The Tri-Worlds Tournament is this year?" Sirius asked. "That seems like something they should have mentioned at the althing!"
"You've only been on it for like a week," Harry shrugged. "Maybe they mentioned it at an earlier session. But, yeah, we didn't know about it earlier. Why is it tri-worlds and not nine realms?"
Sirius explained, "The last one was a long time ago, but I think only Hogwarts, Durmstrang, and Beauxbatons really participate. Asgard doesn't think it would be fair, or they're afraid about what would happen politically if they lost. The other realms don't really do magic."
"What's Beauxbatons?" Hermione asked.
At the same time Harry said, "Earth does magic!"
Stopping to wait for cars to clear so they could cross the road to their hotel, Sirius explained, "Beauxbatons is the light elf school on Alfheim. And I don't know why Midgard never joins in. Maybe it's just because they send all their school-age kids to Hogwarts."
"Or let them get snapped up by Durmstrang and become witches," Hermione grumbled, clearly mentally composing a rant that she probably wouldn't quite yell at the Masters about but would definitely give in force to Harry. "Wait, are we going to meet light elves!? That could be fascinating."
"Wouldn't their 'kids' be hundreds of years old?" Harry figured. "That doesn't seem fair."
"They don't work like Aesir. Or like D&D elves," Hermione corrected from her cultural studies class. "Whatever they did to them when they stopped being dark elves, they made them so they could have kids at about the same time humans or Vanir can. If they took over a century to become sexually mature, they probably wouldn't have a whole planetary population in five-thousand years."
Showing that he wasn't quite over being a hormone-soaked teen boy, Harry almost tripped on the curb as she said "sexually mature."
Drifting off into silence as they all considered the realities of a bunch of basically-witches and elves at the school, they didn't really have a game plan for when they got up to their floor of the hotel to be confronted by Pepper in her pajamas and bathrobe demanding, "Why is Phil Coulson calling me to ask if we know anything about terrorists with assault rifles downtown!?"
Harry's eyes widened as he realized they'd contacted Kamar-Taj but forgot to warn his family. He began the explanation with a lame, "It wasn't even me they were after this time…"
Chapter 49: Meanwhile on Vanaheim
Chapter Text
Just short of eleven in the morning, Jasper Sitwell was quietly enjoying a cup of tea from a vendor while keeping an eye on the platforms at Charing Cross station. The kids with way too much luggage for a subway stop had started showing up at around nine in the morning, and he was gradually narrowing down where they were going. He was certain there was some kind of secret door behind the magazine racks they must be using, since he'd followed a couple and didn't see them actually hit a turnstile into the platform proper.
"If we're doing it, we should do it now," a gruff voice interrupted Sitwell's planning to do just that.
"Rumlow," the bald agent acknowledged his taller and more hirsute counterpart. He did a slight double-take when he realized that the combat specialist was dressed like he was going on a backpacking trip, which likely meant he was armed for bear. "Please tell me you aren't going to cause an incident," he insisted, straightening his own nondescript suit and walking away from the shop counter for a slightly-more-private conversation.
Brock Rumlow shrugged, the backpack flexing heavily with the hardware within, explaining, "Better to have it and not need it…"
"And if we get arrested with guns in England?"
"SHIELD security detail making sure nobody else goes after Potts," he answered easily. "The Secretary will cover it." He added, "And that's if you think Romanoff is right about what we're going into. If Coulson is closer, you're going to be underdressed."
"Beam me up, Scotty," Sitwell rolled his eyes, clearly more in favor of the idea that the kids were sneaking off to spy school than Coulson's more-fanciful ideas. "They're going in over here. I guess if there's some kind of glowing platform, I'll own Phil ten bucks."
"It's just wall," Rumlow insisted, his eyes watering as they didn't quite want to look at where his counterpart was leading.
"Huh," Sitwell agreed, fighting the visual itch himself. "Optical illusion, maybe. Some kind of tech to keep commuters from blundering in." He tapped his ear to open a channel to their handler on his hidden earpiece, explaining, "Some kind of hidden door next to Platform 6. Sitwell and Rumlow going in. I'm leaving this channel open."
As soon as he received the "Copy" notification from their man in the van, he put out a hand and marshaled his willpower to overcome whatever psychological countermeasures were filling him with the need to walk in the opposite direction. He was expecting to find a concealed door. He was not expecting to just stroll through a hologram with no physical resistance.
Rumlow was right behind him, as they stepped out on stonework in a much different climate. The sun had jumped to the point that it seemed to be late in the afternoon. Their first impression was that they'd stepped into a Renaissance festival, the red locomotive and the train track it was on the only remotely modern thing in the forest (itself not right for really anywhere on Earth; Sitwell was a hobbyist naturalist). And the platform was covered in adults in robes. Robes.
"This was not what I was expecting," he said, both for Rumlow's benefit and for their handler. "We're in a train platform in a forest. Not sure if this is some kind of strange set, or if we've been transported. Do you copy?"
There was no response. "I'm checking GPS," Rumlow decided, pulling out his high-end phone surreptitiously. "It's dead."
They were both shocked as the bonfire at the other end of the platform ahead of them suddenly flared green and a whole family of redheads came stumbling out of it, dragging luggage and racing to get on the train. As it started to belch steam, the adults on the platform waved at various windows full of schoolchildren, and Sitwell and Rumlow joined in to limit how much they were standing out. "What is this?" Sitwell asked, mostly rhetorically and only loud enough for his counterpart to hear.
"Let's interview people and find out?" the bigger man shrugged. This was definitely into his bailiwick more than the besuited agent's.
They started with a middle-aged couple that weren't wearing robes, and the wife crooned, "Oh! Nontraditional parents? First time sending yours off? It's a lot to adjust to, right? I'm sure your child will do fine! We've got to be getting on!" As the agents saw them easily leave back through the wall they'd emerged from, they lowered their guard a bit. Clearly, getting out was as easy as getting in.
Sitwell was very skilled at subtle interviewing, and it wasn't hard to figure out which parents looked like they'd be willing to talk. In particular, the two redheads who'd rushed in with the huge family were thrilled to answer any questions and volunteer information of their own, with only a token exchange of Rumlow explaining the weight-distribution mechanism on his backpack. As the parents started to disappear into the green-flaring bonfire, Sitwell insisted to Rumlow, "We need to report this. This has to be related to the New Mexico incident."
"Was them casually swearing to Odin your first clue?" Rumlow smirked. He led the way as the two men strolled back to the wall. "Either Fury doesn't know about this, or he's keeping it nailed down. Either way, I think the Secretary is going to want to know about this personally. Could be a real asset."
"Agreed," Sitwell said, eyes flicking to make sure nobody was going to stop them walking right back out with their new intel.
Or, as the case was, right into the solid wall that they'd seen people exiting not ten minutes earlier.
After whatever surreptitious tests they could make to the now-impenetrable edifice, and facing being stuck indefinitely on what very well might be an alien planet, Rumlow gave a grim smirk. "Told you, you'd be happy that I brought the backpack…"
As the unlikely duo were just starting to realize their predicament, safely ensconced on the Hogwarts Express and in motion toward the school, Harry was asking his friends, "So why did you all miss the Goblin Market trip?" It had just been the kids from Earth who'd made the excursion the week after the race day. The market as a whole had seemed somewhat subdued.
"Because of what happened at the Quidditch World Cup," Ron explained, to the compartment of boys. For the start of the trip, they'd shoved all five into one, while the six girls took another nearby. "Mate, you all should've been there instead of whatever you had going on…"
The Quidditch World Cup happened every year, and was basically the final championship match for all the various quidditch matches across Vanaheim. That year, it had come down to the Kestrels against the Gargoyles—not that the team names really meant anything to Harry and Dean. While Ron was sad that his beloved Cannons were once again far out of even the top sixteen, so hadn't gotten to play in any stage of the semifinals, it was still expected to be a solid match.
More importantly, Mr. Weasley had snagged several tickets to sit in the Minister's box for the match. In addition to the seven younger Weasleys (including both Bill and Charlie, who Harry had never met), they had Lavender and Seamus along. Seamus had made the trip over because he was actually related to one of the players on the Kestrels, for all that he didn't normally follow quidditch.
"You didn't get to go, Nev?" Harry checked.
The day-older boy shook his head and shrugged, "Gran didn't trust me around the Minister, in case he tried to lobby me or something. Turned out for the best, really, with what happened."
"I'm getting there!" Ron insisted, picking his story back up.
They'd collected Lavender and Seamus the day before, and then they'd tromped over to a field between their village and a few others to catch the portkey. Portkeys were magic items enchanted to open a portal by themselves: non-magical Vanir could use them, unlike the bonfires. They could go to more places too, and it wasn't like every wizard on Vanaheim rated a sling ring. Anyway, there they'd met up with the Diggorys and a few other travelers from nearby towns, just in time for the portal to open.
"I didn't know you lived near Cedric," Harry interrupted, remembering the older Hufflepuff boy as a big help at the battle in Hogsmeade earlier that year. "I knew you lived near Luna. Did she go?"
"She and her father were on an expedition," Neville fielded that question, since he was dating the girl. "Gran almost let me go on that, but Mr. Lovegood couldn't actually explain to her satisfaction where we'd be going or what the safety precautions would be."
"Classic Lovegoods," Ron rolled his eyes, but not as hard as he might have once, since they'd all learned to appreciate—or at least tolerate—Luna's eccentricities. "And, yeah, Cedric and his dad live a village over, so we met them. They were in the box with us too, since Mr. Diggory's a big noise over in the animal management department."
The match took place in a giant clearing in the wilds of Vanaheim. The Weasley crew had managed one of the more convenient portkeys, but some people had gotten an earlier one or even needed to hike in cross country, so had been camping for days. Fortunately, there hadn't been much rumor of marauder activity in that region, which was probably part of why they'd chosen to use that particular stadium. So when they dumped out, there must have been thousands of people camped out and ready for the match. You didn't technically need to be magical to play quidditch if you could get a broom made, and everyone seemed to enjoy it, so most of the world's wizards and a significant fraction of its non-magical citizens had shown up.
Sadly, the excitement about getting the top box died a bit when they realized they were sharing it with the Malfoys. They tried to use the Diggorys as a buffer, and Percy was excited to sit near his new boss, Mr. Crouch, who was part of the department that organized magical games and sports, so had a big hand in the World Cup. In addition to the Minister and a few other highly-placed Ministry officials, the big surprise was the delegation from Alfheim. One of the highly-ranked elves of the Seelie court had brought his family to see the match, and also seemed to be discussing something with Mr. Crouch.
"Probably the tournament," Harry interjected.
"Tournament?" everyone basically asked, simultaneously.
He nodded, "I heard about it a couple of weeks ago. Something about convergences letting us do some kind of three-school tournament with Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. That last one is the light elf magic school, so I'd bet the elves were there to talk about it, if this Crouch guy is in charge of that kind of thing."
"Wonder if his oldest daughter is comin' for that?" Seamus waggled his eyebrows.
"You're going to get me in trouble with Lav!" Ron insisted. "You could barely stop staring at her either, and you're gay."
"Somethin' 'bout her," the Irish boy agreed with a wistful look.
"Glamour," Harry explained, having done the research. Well, he'd listened when Hermione explained the research she'd done after finding they'd have light elves at their school all year. "It's one of the most common elf magics. Kind of like Aesir illusions. They can change what they look like, and often they try to look like what everyone around them thinks is the most attractive."
"Hah! Not my fault! I was bewitched," Ron declared.
Harry shook his head, "Probably not as strong as that. But she might have kind of pulled an idea out of your head about what you'd think was beautiful and looked more like that." He thought about it for a second and admitted, "We weren't able to figure out whether they look different for everyone that sees them, or if they kind of split the difference when they're in a group of people."
"Or maybe she was after Ron in particular," Dean ribbed him. "Would you say she looked more like Lavender or…"
"You're all going to get me in trouble!" Ron nearly yelled, turning a little red. His denial made them believe that she probably hadn't used glamour to look like his current girlfriend. "Anyway, yes, there were also elves in the box, and I thought it was interesting. And I can't be held responsible for being bewitched. If you'll let me get back to the story…"
It was a good match, but the Kestrels were starting to run away with it by a couple of hours in. The seeker for the Gargoyles wound up just catching the snitch as soon as he saw it, probably to make the point bleeding stop. Everyone headed out after the conclusion, so they were halfway down the stairs from the box when the trouble started.
The attackers must have been lurking just off the stairway, waiting for their targets. Ron liked to think that he'd had an inkling something was wrong due to all of his warrior training. For sure the older elf girl had sensed something: it must have been whatever mind magic she used to choose her glamour, but she suddenly went from a beautiful young woman to a terrifying sight.
"Banshee," Seamus nodded. "Has t'be where the legends come from."
"I thought it looked more like a harpy," Ron shrugged. "We talked about them in husbandry. Her hair stuck up and kind of looked like feathers, and I almost swore she grew wings. That was when everyone else realized something was wrong…"
What they weren't prepared for were the loud bangs, as their attackers started firing at them with Midgardian guns. The Weasleys got shields up fast, and nobody was injured in their group. Percy tackled Crouch down and probably won himself a ton of points back at the office for maybe saving his boss. The Minister had still been hanging back in the box talking with a few other officials. And the Malfoys had kind of suspiciously been the first ones out…
But that left the Diggorys and the elves. To his credit, Cedric jumped into the line of fire to try to protect his dad and the elves. He even got a shield up after being hit a couple of times, but then it went right back down again the bullets were coming so fast. The elves, especially the oldest daughter, caught a few bullets in the attack, and might have been hit worse if Cedric hadn't gotten in the way.
As scary as it was, it wasn't like they hadn't had worse just at Hogwarts. The Weasleys and their friends started to fire spells back. The older elf girl was literally throwing fire. Even full of bullets, Cedric was helping. Sadly, Mr. Weasley was really the only parent that hadn't frozen in panic, but they had a dozen wands going on offense within a few seconds, and more people realizing help was needed by the moment.
The assassins, also maybe a dozen of them, took off, leaping down from the edge of the stadium and slowing their fall into the night. The light elves seemed sure the attackers were talking to each other in the language of the dark elves. Maybe they'd just been there to assassinate the light elves?
Harry shook his head, "That sounds exactly like the Dahvee hit squad that came after Viktor! Probably a different set because it was happening at around the same time, but the same tactics. Were they dressed all in black with cloth masks over their faces?"
"Exactly. Wait, did you have another adventure, too? Of course you did," Ron said, not having heard about Harry and Hermione's encounter because they hadn't made it to the Goblin Market. "You think these were the same guys that were messing with you, second year?"
"Yeah. And the ones attacking us stopped when they realized I was there. They were going after Viktor—this guy we met that goes to Durmstrang. It was him that told me about the tournament."
"Wait, did they kill Cedric?" Dean checked.
Ron and Seamus shrugged, and Ron explained, "He got hit pretty bad and had to be portaled to St. Mungo's. But magical healing is pretty good and he was still alive when he left."
"I saw him on the train," Neville said. "He was bandaged up worse than you all were after the Hulk, but he seems okay."
"They probably saved the elves, too," Ron nodded. "They weren't as bad off as Cedric. I'm glad they didn't seem to be aiming at us. Those firelegs were loud and looked like they hurt."
"Fire arms," Harry corrected. "I think they're named that because it's like arms and armor, that look like they shoot fire." Neville and Ron got looks of understanding. He continued, "But you said there were thousands of people. How did the dark elves get away?"
Ron sighed, "Well that was the other problem…"
No sooner had everyone comprehended that they'd just been set upon by a team of assassins with Midgardian weapons than there were screams from ground level. Nobody had the presence of mind to stop the fleeing dark elves because they were all fleeing from dark magic. Blasts of purple light were being loosed haphazardly into the crowd. Looking out from the stairway above, they could make out gleaming silver face masks atop pitch-black robes and under heavy cowls: the costume of the Death Eaters.
You-Know-Who's servants had chosen their position well. With so few wizards in the crowd, the press of non-magical warriors kept anybody with a wand from getting there fast. The people nearby were mostly not carrying weapons to a sporting event that never saw much worse than some drunken brawling, and even if they'd been inclined to try to charge the enemy, the purple fire seemed to be going everywhere and nowhere in particular. Before enough people could charge, so many had fled that running at the Death Eaters with no way to make a magic shield would be suicide.
And that seemed to be what one old man with a bad leg was willing to try, since he was the only wizard close enough to make a difference. Maybe the Death Eaters had chosen to go after him in particular, since he certainly knew how to fight them. There must have been twenty bad guys, and the man was holding his own, mostly with shields but throwing out some nasty hexes as well. By the time he went down, the crowd had opened up enough that the aurors were able to charge in, and the Death Eaters scattered, and then disappeared into the weird witchcraft smoke teleportation that they'd been known for during the war.
When the man that had been fighting them fell, Ron had been sure he'd seen a whirling magical eye even from as far away as he'd been watching. It was hard to forget that kind of thing.
"I think that was Tonks' mentor!" Harry realized. "I met him at the althing. I knew he wasn't safe, being so close to retirement!" He realized how callous that sounded and added, "I hope he's okay."
Again, the boys who'd been there shrugged, clearly not having any idea of whether the bravely crazy old man had been seen to or died of his wounds.
"So, yeah," Ron concluded, "they didn't actually come back, but everyone figured there was no reason they couldn't. And I don't know how many people died. I think at least people got trampled really bad. Mum wasn't letting us back out again once we got home. She was worried they'd attack at the Market."
"Barely let me go home," Seamus agreed. "Mrs. Weasley's a fierce woman."
"Does that kind of thing happen regularly?" Harry asked.
"Not since the war," Neville said. "Nobody knows what it means that they decided to attack now. The Minister's saying it was just a bunch of drunk people who were mad their team lost. But you can't really fake the mark of dark magic."
"Right. It's purple," Harry agreed. He said that with such assurance everyone looked at him and he had to explain, "They teach it at Durmstrang. Viktor was using it a little. He says he didn't know any better and is trying not to use any more… but I'm kind of surprised that the former Death Eaters can cast magic without it showing up, if Viktor can't."
"Probably a reason the Malfoys don't cast much magic in public," Ron scoffed.
Neville mused, "Or they'll just claim that You-Know-Who made them do witchcraft, and they can't lose the mark now."
"But, yeah, that's pretty much it," Ron finished. "Sad we didn't get to meet you at the Market. Mum went on her own to get our stuff. She got me the worst set of dress robes. We have something we need them for this year."
Harry nodded, having spotted that on the supply list as well. He wasn't sure whether to point out that he'd had dress robes professionally tailored at the Market, and chipped in to get the other Midgardborn some nice ones as well. He probably would have helped Ron, had he known. "I wonder if it's something to do with the tournament. Maybe you only need to wear them if you win an award?" That didn't seem to mollify Ron, so he added, "And surely not everyone will win the award, so you can just borrow a set from someone who didn't win, if you did?"
"Maybe," Ron nodded, still worried that it would be something where there wouldn't be a spare set of robes for him, so he'd have to wear the archaic maroon monstrosities his mother had picked. "So tell us about what happened to you?"
Harry started to explain, "So I don't know what you and Nev know about cars, but…"
Chapter 50: Dark and Moody
Chapter Text
"So glad that the Mindless Ones stopped showing up," Harry complained, trying to figure out a drying spell as they waited at the Gryffindor table for the sorting. "They'd have loved this weather."
The train had pulled into Hogsmeade around midnight, since the ever-shifting timetable between Earth and Vanaheim had got them started off late in the afternoon, local time. By the time they'd been halfway to the school the rain had started, and it had been pouring buckets by the time they got there. The boys had made a furious dash for the helhest-driven carriages, getting partially soaked even in the few yards from the train platform. Then they'd glanced back and seen the girls doing the smart thing and erecting shield spells facing upwards to serve as umbrellas. It had at least made getting from the carriages to the school dryer.
It hadn't mattered. Peeves the poltergeist had been lurking just inside with water balloons to fling at everyone on their way in. The disgusting thing was that he didn't really have access to balloons made of rubber, so had made due with sausage casings stolen from the kitchens.
"Maybe they could drag Peeves to Azkaban," Lavender observed, making a face as she peeled a bit of sheep's intestine from her hair. "All the things Loki's supposed to be guilty of, creating Peeves is probably the worst."
"Even more than trying to take over Asgard and destroy Jotunheim?" Neville asked. Word had eventually gotten around about the events of the previous summer that had wound up shutting down Bifrost. While Vanaheim's government could still send owl mail to Asgard, and take night roads to get there, Aesir warriors couldn't really "fit" through the other way. Even the ones that could squeeze couldn't drop in to foil a marauder attack like they'd have been able to if Bifrost could land them exactly where they needed to go.
"Ask me again when I don't have offal in my hair," she said.
"Ha! It really is awful," Seamus chortled.
"You're never going to get a boyfriend with puns that bad," Parvati needled him.
"Boys appreciate puns more'n girls," he insisted.
"Oh, good, the new kids are coming in," Ron noticed. "Let's get them sorted and eat."
"Didn't you eat before getting on the train?" Dean checked.
"And now I want to eat again," the redhead shrugged.
"My brother, the bottomless pit," Ginny said. "I just hope we don't have classes in the morning."
"Ginny needs her beauty sleep," Ron riposted.
"I know, I know, you could sleep for a thousand years and not be attractive, so you don't get why others do it," she fired back.
Ron tried to come up with a return insult and couldn't find one, mouth working for a few seconds with no words coming out, and everyone nodded, awarding Ginny the point in the ongoing Weasley duel for smack-talking superiority.
"Odin save me, there's another one," Harry groaned. One of the new first-years was waving at Colin Creevey and mouthing, "I fell in the lake!" From the resemblance, he could only be the annoying photographer's little brother, though he was even more dripping wet than the older Creevey.
"A lot of siblings are very different people?" Hermione tried to make him feel better, pointing out Ron and Ginny as an example, but clearly not believing it. They all vaguely remembered Colin assuring them how awesome his little brother was. After the respite of the boy being paralyzed by a Nidhogg Serpent for half of his first year, Colin had never stopped trying to network with Harry. And now there were two Creeveys.
And, early in the alphabet, the boy they discovered was named Dennis was sorted into Gryffindor. Immediately, his brother was clapping him on the back and pointing down the table at, "There he is. That's Harry Potts."
"Is it too late to ask the Dahvee to shoot me?" Harry groaned, forehead thudding against the table.
Eventually, they got through the new set of students (through the grace of the Norns, basically evenly distributed through the four houses). Dumbledore stood up and said, "Thank you all for waiting. I know it's late. You'll be pleased to note that classes don't start until after lunch tomorrow. I'll save my remarks for after we're done eating. For now, tuck in!"
Food was teleported to the tables, and the students began a possibly-ill-advised attempt to see how many calories they could consume at one in the morning. The Vanir kids were going to crash and crash hard. The internal clocks of the Earth kids were so messed up it was anyone's guess whether they'd be able to sleep. Harry had adjusted back to an LA schedule just in time to go to London and then to Vanaheim. He was pretty sure his body thought it was about lunchtime and that he'd been up since midnight. Even if he got to sleep, the weird dreams hadn't drastically diminished, so he had that to look forward to.
His first period was going to be a lot to pay attention to.
He was starting to feel the jet lag as rich pot pies and a dessert he'd discovered he liked that was basically congealed sugar sat heavy on his stomach, when Cedric Diggory hobbled his way over from the Hufflepuff table. The handsome sixth-year asked him, "Hey, Harry. Rumor is you ran into some dark elves on Midgard?" It was hard to tell under his robes how extensive his wounds were, but his left arm was still in a sling, a few bandages were poking out under his collar, and he was using a cane to keep weight off of one of his legs.
"Yeah," Harry nodded to the Hufflepuff team seeker. He gestured to himself and Hermione and explained, "We met a guy from Durmstrang and they said they had a contract to kill him. I wonder if the same kind of thing was going on with the light elves."
"Maybe," Cedric agreed. "But I couldn't help but wonder if they might have been going after me, too? I was happy to jump in front of the elves, but I think they were aiming at me anyway. Was hoping you had some insight."
"I'm sure we'll be investigating," Harry nodded. "We'll let you know if we figure it out."
"Thanks, Potter," the older boy smiled, and then headed back to the Hufflepuff table.
Not long after, the food began to teleport away and Dumbledore stood up, the hall gradually quieting over a few seconds as they awaited his announcements and their beds.
"Welcome once again to another fine year at Hogwarts," the old man began. "I will try to keep this brief, as I know it's late. Mr. Filch would like me to remind you that the forest is out of bounds without adult accompaniment, and that a listing of contraband items can be perused at your leisure posted next to his office." Most of the Gryffindors chuckled quietly at both of these concepts. "That is, of course, common information, but a new development this year is the cancellation of the regular quidditch season."
There were cries of shocked outrage from many of the students, though Harry's was more of a sigh of relief. As Dumbledore raised his hand to try to explain, the door to the great hall crashed open and a thoroughly-drenched Auror Moody stomped in.
The man looked even worse than he had when Harry had met him at Sirius' trial, sporting new facial scars and leaning heavily on a cane that he hadn't needed before, even with his prosthetic leg. It was very likely that, barely two weeks after being barraged into the dirt by dark magic, he was moving purely from willpower. "Train's clear to my satisfaction," he announced, as if that explained his late and dramatic entrance.
Harry realized that there wasn't already a new professor at the table, so he whispered to his friends, "That's Moody. Must be the new defense professor."
"Yeah, that's the guy we saw fighting the Death Eaters for sure," Ron agreed. "Can't believe he's not still in hospital."
"Thank you, Alastor," Dumbledore said to him. "Though I'm afraid you've missed the feast."
"It's fine. Don't eat anything I haven't seen prepared myself," the man insisted, taking a pull from a silver flask he'd withdrawn from his dripping coat. "Good advice. Might be a quiz on it this week!" He chuckled at the idea, finally clomping up to lean against the wall near the staff table rather than taking a seat.
The headmaster took the eccentricity in stride and explained, "Alastor Moody will be teaching the defense seminar this year. He has recently retired after many distinguished years as an auror, and will certainly impart great wisdom on those that choose to listen." Glancing at the old auror to make sure there were no further interjections, Dumbledore continued, "However, moving on to the matter of quidditch… while we will not have a regular season, we may have opportunities for it, as well as other games and sports as part of the Tri-Worlds Tournament…"
Harry took a look around the room as the headmaster paused dramatically. Quite a few students, like him, seemed prepared for the information. Others didn't know it was happening but had heard of it, and there were gasps of surprise from a few. The majority didn't know it was happening and also didn't know what it was.
"It has been some centuries since the last time there has been a convergence of this kind," Dumbledore continued. "As those who've paid attention in cosmology class know, once every five thousand years there is a grand convergence, when all nine realms briefly connect. That is still two years out. But the movement of the branches of Yggdrasil can create lesser convergences. Some are stable, like the one that occurs every year at this time to admit our students from Midgard. Others are irregular, but affect multiple worlds, such as the one beginning soon.
"When Vanaheim comes into alignment with other worlds in this way, it is traditional for the magical schools of the affected realms to engage in a friendly competition, and renew our bonds of fellowship. Normally, a member of the the royalty of Asgard oversees the tournament, but with that realm unlikely to be connected this year and Bifrost being repaired, we shall have to make due. Our very own Ministry has offered to host and administer the process.
"We shall be hosting students from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, and I encourage each of you to research these schools, their students, and their traditions. At certain points of the year, portals will open to dangerous locations that we will use as trials. A challenger from each school—each realm—will compete to win the trial. The challenger that wins the final trial, with advantages for doing well in the prior ones, will be declared the Tri-Worlds Champion. This comes with eternal glory… and a not-insignificant cash prize."
He had to pause for a minute as everyone began to mutter about wanting to enter, or being afraid to. It being the Gryffindor table, just about everyone around Harry was keenly interested in how they would become the Hogwarts challenger. Even young Dennis Creevey was ready to jump in on the act.
"There are some stipulations," Dumbledore cautioned, regaining the room's attention. "As the trials can occur on any world, it is likely that your wands will not avail you. Only those sufficiently skilled in wandless magic should consider entering. Physical fitness is important as well! The school's challenger will be selected by an impartial judge but…" he paused for effect, as quite a few students still seemed to think they would be able to qualify, "...the Ministry, having already received quite a few letters about the potential danger, have asked that we limit the competition to those that will be at least seventeen years of age by the time of the drawing, on Dísablót."
"Not fair!" one of the Weasley twins yelled.
"We're almost seventeen!" the other added.
"A point included in your mother's missive to Mr. Crouch, as I understand it," the old man twinkled, heavily implying that the restriction was specifically to keep any of the Weasley children from risking their lives. More seriously, he explained, "I must reiterate: this competition is dangerous. While we will do our utmost to make a fair and safe playing ground where our challengers can show off the best of their schools and worlds, students have died in prior tournaments. Only enter if you are willing to take the risk." Noting that nobody in Gryffindor seemed that willing to back down, though that pronouncement had notably cooled the other house tables, he finished, "And you can ask your professors for more information, or research it in the library.
"As I mentioned, we will have some games and sports between Hogwarts and the other schools, including quidditch, for excitement between the tournament tasks. Additionally, we will be having a Yule Ball this year, which is why you were all encouraged to purchase dress robes. Don't forget to proffer your invitation to that special someone, or to learn to dance!
"As noted, your first classes will begin after lunch. A light breakfast service will be held for those that rise in but a few hours. With that, I bid you all a good night."
Harry was not one of the kids that made it to breakfast the next morning. Most of Gryffindor had been buzzing about the tournament until something like four in the morning. They had all kind of gotten used to Percy Weasley being their curfew and bedtime dad; after his graduation, Harry wasn't even sure he knew who the new seventh-year prefects even were. Percy had been handling virtually all of the prefect duties for the house for Harry's entire time there. The new first-years had at least made it to the dorm, so presumably someone was still in charge.
McGonagall tut-tutted at all the sleep-deprived faces of her house as she handed out class schedules around the lunch table, but refrained from any serious chastisement about how late they'd clearly all stayed up. Since he'd missed his morning classes for Monday, Harry had a pretty light day. He could go to the free flying period in the afternoon if he wanted, and then had Runes before dinner, and Cosmology late. "I'm going to take a nap," he declared.
There were nods all around, as the rest of his friends also realized they had the after-lunch period on Mondays free. "Hey, Harry, did you say you know Rita Skeeter?" Lavender asked, flipping through the newspaper.
"Yeah. She didn't say anything mean about me, did she?" he checked. He and his aunt had eventually had a tense but productive dinner with Tony's ex-one-night-stand, and he thought that she'd agreed to treat him favorably or not at all in exchange for her being his first reporter for interviews when relevant.
"No, but she's really laying into tournament security," she explained, showing off a second-page article with Rita Skeeter as the byline. "I used to read her articles in Witch Weekly. I didn't know she was an investigative reporter."
"That's what she does on Earth," Harry shrugged. "She used to be on Tony's case a lot."
"Looks like she knows about the Tri-Worlds Tournament," Lavender continued, pointing at the last paragraph. "She talks about how she'll be making sure that security for it is better managed than at the world cup."
"Oh!" Harry realized. "That must be why she said she'd be around more this year. She must be the main reporter covering it."
"Isn't she pretty hot?" Dean asked, nudging Neville and Ron.
"I guess so. But she's old. Well… I guess she said she was only a few years older than my parents. So… late thirties if I'm counting that right. But still." As he came to that realization, the kids all had a weird existential moment where they comprehended that, as 14-year-olds themselves, maybe being in your thirties was no longer impossibly ancient.
Harry got his nap and started the slow process of reacclimating to the weird timetable of Vanaheim. His classes that week were all somewhat focused on the tournament. In cosmology class that evening, Professor Sinistra did a whole review of how convergences worked and what they could expect from the Grand Convergence in two years. Professor Binns actually deviated a bit from his normal history syllabus to gruesomely describe some of the "recent" tournaments over the last few centuries: it turned out challengers had died a lot. Even Sprout, Flitwick, and McGonagall got in on the act, framing the things they were going to learn that year around plants, spells, and transfigurations that had a memorable role in previous tournaments.
Arithmancy seemed like it was going to be neat (in a way that only math nerds could appreciate): they were going to learn advanced algebra and geometry, and use that to experiment with optimizing their shields and other energy forms. Meanwhile, in Runes, they were finally going to get to try some basic enchanting… after learning half a dozen new alphabets.
But the real excitement of the first week of school was always getting to find out what they'd be learning in the defense seminar. They didn't have their first period until Thursday afternoon, but Padma and Luna had both had classes with Moody on Tuesday (and several other years of Gryffindor had by then as well), so they'd heard that everyone agreed that "Mad-Eye" was a well-earned nickname, beyond the whirling prosthetic on his face. The guy seemed crazy. Interesting, but crazy.
Moody's defense classroom was almost as spartan as it had been their previous year under Lupin—er, Banner—though it was set up similarly to Fandral's: no tables, with chairs ready to move out of the way for dueling. As they and the Ravenclaws found seats, it became evident that the main "decorations" were actually enchanted items with odd shapes. "I think these are all dark magic detectors," Ron opined. He gestured at an intimidating conical device under a bell jar, explaining, "That one over there looks like a bigger version of a sneakoscope I saw down at Hogsmeade."
Before they could inspect them in more detail, the recognizable clomping of their professor had them looking toward the door, where the man himself was still using the short cane topped probably with some kind of other detection device in a gemstone to lever his way across the floor. "Good attention. Risky," Moody announced. "Easy to lull you into a false sense of security. Get you used to the noises I make. Then set up a fake source and surprise you sneaking in from another direction."
"Or just be hiding under an invisibility cloak," Harry volunteered.
"Hah, right!" the man acknowledged. "There's a man who's had to deal with a sneak attack before. Potter, right?"
Cocking his head in slight confusion that Moody was acting like they hadn't met, Harry agreed, "Yes sir. Glad to see you made it through your sneak attack." He'd given up on trying to get Vanir to call him Potts.
"Take more than a few layabout rich witches to do for me," he scoffed, moving the rest of the way to the front of the classroom, which contained a table as basically the only such surface in the room, probably to display what few aids and documents he thought he might need. One of those was the class roll, which he quickly went through. His natural eye tracked the sheet while his roving prosthetic fixed on faces as students answered. "But speaking of witches," he continued, as if that thought hadn't been broken by taking roll, he said, "that's what we're talking about this year: how to defend against dark magic. Obviously, it's a useful skill to have, if cowards in masks are going to be about again."
"The Ministry says it's just an isolated incident, though?" Mandy Brocklehurst suggested.
"They'd certainly like to think so," Moody allowed, with a facial twitch across his healing scars that showed he barely believed it. "And maybe it was just a bunch of washed-up hooligans having themselves an anniversary party for when they used to be relevant. Or maybe they know something we don't know, huh? Regardless, if they get you from surprise once, that's unfortunate. If they get you the same way twice, it's because you're an idiot. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!"
Making himself comfortable leaning against his table, the burly old wizard took a long moment to regard the classroom, natural and magical eye barely related in who they observed, except when they would sometimes snap to the same target for a moment. It was deeply uncomfortable, especially as the silence drew out.
Finally, as Hermione was about to snap and pour words into the silent void, he began lecturing, "Witchcraft is dark magic. Dark magic is witchcraft. It's usually color-coded for your convenience. Spells aren't dark because they're dangerous to the target. Nearly any spell can be dangerous to a target. Dark magic is dark because it's dangerous to the caster. Granger!" She jumped at the sudden and loud attention. "I can see you're eager to show me what you know. On Midgard, spells draw on powers outside the user. What's the difference between that and dark magic?"
Quickly getting over the surprise, Hermione explained, "Spells acquired through traditional, formal bargains with the Principalities have a fixed and established cost. Witches form a customized bargain with certain powers, which often has ongoing effects, such as adding a 'dark mark' of purple energy to even spells that should only use personal energy."
"Right," the professor nodded. "Some of the deals with these Principalities aren't that great either. But at least they've been standardized. You know what you're giving and what you're getting. The types of deals that witches make… they get more than they bargained for, and owe more than they realize." He levered himself off the table and began pacing with his clomping rhythm. "Some of the Principalities that will give you spells will also let you become a witch with them. Never assume beings of that power have your best interests in mind!
"But the worst offenders are the ones that go looking for new suckers. Hoggoth and Watoomb aren't going to try to trick you into giving away your eternal allegiance, but Dormammu, Cthon, and some others I don't even want to mention definitely will. And once they get their hooks in you, they're hard to get out. Like Granger said, you don't just get the power that you asked for. You get a little even on things where you don't need it. And you're paying for it eventually. Potter!" he called on Harry, who'd had his hand up.
"Is this a Dark Side thing?" he asked, since Viktor had used that very analogy. "I mean, does that added dark magic energy make them more powerful than a wizard with the same skill that didn't make a deal?"
"Not always," Moody grinned ferally. "Some people make terrible deals, and lose more than they expected. The connection goes both ways, and sometimes what you're paying would be useful for your spellcasting. But… yes… in general, witches are going to be more dangerous than they should be. Dark magic is really good at pain and damage. It dissolves. It feels like getting hit with a cloud of hot razor blades." He gestured at his own scarred face for emphasis. "But it won't help them do other things, like creating anything. Hard to conjure in a fight when your own dark magic's trying to eat the thing you made.
"In fact, there's three things it's really good at, which most right-thinking people consider unforgivable. Who knows what they are? You. Weasley."
Ron had surprised himself to raise his hand and answered, "Bewitching. Mind control."
"That's one," Moody agreed. "It's the least dramatic, but the biggest problem for the Ministry. Mind control is a lot more effective way of sowing discord among your enemies than just killing them. You don't know who to trust. You can make allies betray one another." He considered for a moment before revealing, "But it's hard to get right. If you're strong-willed, you can fight it off."
"You can't always, though," Neville said, louder than he'd expected.
Moody's magical eye snapped to Neville, and his natural one squinted in concern. Harry wasn't sure who all knew about his friend's months under the thrall of the black diary. But maybe Moody did, because he admitted, "Yes. There were rumors that You-Know-Who had some kind of artifact that let him bewitch so fully that even the strongest wills couldn't break it. That's why so many of the Death Eaters got off, claiming to be under its thrall." He absently caressed the gem atop his cane as if reassuring himself of its ability to warn him of such threats. "Let's hope the hooligans at the world cup don't still have that, eh?"
Harry was sure the roving eye lingered a long moment on him. Had Dumbledore told Moody that he'd disposed of the yellow Stone? Had someone else? He didn't volunteer the information, and the eye moved on.
"What's another unforgivable use of dark magic?" the retired auror asked. For a moment Neville seemed like he was going to raise his hand, but he was already upset about the discussion of mind control. "Brown!"
Lavender lowered her hand and volunteered, "I heard from my parents that a lot of people went away for using magic to torture?"
Moody agreed, "Right. Like I said, it dissolves. Feels like burning knives. Those who specialize in that kind of thing can hit you with just enough power that it feels like they're burning you apart, but keep it up for a long time without leaving much of an actual injury. In a fight, it's incapacitating. If they have the time to torture you for real… you either say whatever they want to make it stop, or you go insane."
Near Harry, Neville, seemingly still withdrawn over the question of mind control let out a little gasp.
Moody seemed to notice Neville's discomfort, so simply said, "Moving on. Last one? Granger."
Hermione had raised her hand the whole time, but she was the only one left and said, "Killing curses. Which I don't really understand since, as you said, you can kill with many spells. The books I've read didn't really want to explain why it was bad."
"They wouldn't," Moody agreed. "There's a lot of superstition about it. People used to think being killed with dark magic stole your soul. Or made the caster more powerful, so more people might try to do it." He shrugged, and winced a bit at the movement as it seemed to pull something that was hurt under his robes. "Best theory I've heard is that whatever entity provided the power gets power when someone is killed with it. Sacrificial magic kind of thing. Maybe they kick some of that back to the witch. Maybe it just gives them the energy to cause trouble somewhere else without even a thank you to their minion.
"Whether or not all of that's true, it's a fact that dark magic is meant for murder. Unless you cut off someone's head or crush it into a pulp, most ways of killing are a lot slower than you'd expect. Time to make your peace. Maybe time to say goodbye. If you're really lucky, time to get healed. Not with dark spells. The strongest ones just turn you off like blowing out a candle. You don't even have time to realize what happened.
"It's scary. And it's horrifying. Maybe more than it should be." He leaned back against the table and said, "Now, the real problem with fighting dark magic is that it's hard to give a practical example. Not like I'm a witch, right? I asked your chemistry professor, but he seemed offended about the idea of giving a demonstration. Shame. So for the rest of the class period, we're going to work on our shield spells. And I'll warn you now: dark magic is also extremely hard to block…"
While they were excited to get to do practical magic in the class, none of the kids missed the implication that Snape was a user of dark magic. And if Moody had mentioned it, maybe it was because he had his own suspicions about the dour chemistry professor, and whether he might have been involved in the attack at the World Cup…
Chapter 51: Names in the Flames
Chapter Text
"I'm so bored," Harry complained. Almost whined.
"Nobody's tried to kill you in months, huh?" Dean observed, where he was quietly drawing in a sketchbook on one of their slow afternoons toward the end of October, in comfy chairs in the common room. Seamus and Ron were across the room playing chess, Hermione had talked Neville into helping her in the library with her investigation into recreating Sirius' mirrors, and the rest of the girls were in a corner giggling over teen magazines from both Earth and Vanaheim.
Harry had been trying to work on his D&D campaign, but he was getting bored drawing rooms on graph paper and figuring out how to make the fights in each different and interesting while still making some level of sense for the haunted abbey aesthetic he was going for. "No. Well, maybe. It's just weird that it's almost Halloween and, well, not much has happened."
"You could have had a girlfriend," his best friend chided. "Really takes your mind off of the lack of ghost snakes or shapeshifting murderers in the castle."
Harry shrugged. "I've talked to Susan Bones a few times. But since we haven't had a Hogsmeade day yet, seems like inviting her too early would make it awkward. We'd just be in class every day like, 'Yep. That date's going to be cool. Anyway, can you pass me a trowel?'" He realized that he was complaining too much and asked, "You and Padma doing okay?"
Dean nodded, still focused on the sketch, saying, "It's hard to find time to do much, other than what you see just hanging out with everyone. But I think it's going well. Looking forward to Hogsmeade. I wonder if anyone will show up."
"Sirius says he's heard they're at least keeping troops patrolling the train tracks. So maybe this will be the only place traders want to come this year."
"So no chance of you getting to leave a bad date to fight a bunch of marauders again."
"Hey, it was a good date until the marauders," Harry argued. "And maybe I'd be able to talk Susan into helping so I'd know we'd have that in common."
"You know, if you haven't asked her, she might have already been asked by someone else."
"Really? Crap," he realized his friend was right. "I guess there's always elves or witches from the other schools as a fallback."
Dean actually looked up from his pad to joke, "Sexy Eastern European singles are in your area. Warning: there's a small chance that they've already sold their soul to Dorammu." They both took a beat to imagine, before he asked, "Shouldn't they have been here already?"
It was, in fact, not until the day before Halloween that the first of the schools were set to show up. Dumbledore announced it at lunch that Friday. "I've just received word that Beauxbatons should be arriving in time for dinner this evening. The convergence that opened between Vanaheim and Alfheim was quite some distance away, and they've been traveling by carriage for several days. I trust that we will make them feel welcome when they arrive, and understand that they may be suffering road weariness… well, sky weariness." He glanced down the table at Trelawney, currently at medium-goth level so she could ramp her outfit up hard for Halloween. "I'm assured the omens are good for Durmstrang to receive a more convenient connection that will have them here in time for the selection of challengers."
The school was having a hard time focusing on afternoon classes, so it was not entirely ideal that Harry had two periods of Snape after lunch and then had a last period of defense. Snape had viciously kept everyone on task, and Moody had snarled, "Yes, elves are very exciting," to cut through their gossip as he stomped into the room. "Very exciting for them to get into your mind."
"Bewitched! I was bewitched!" Ron attested. "At the World Cup. Elven glamour! I was bewitched!"
Lavender made a face and looked like she was considering giving her boyfriend a punch, but Moody nodded, "Yes. Glamour. A kind word for a power that would be unforgivable if a witch did it. With so many elves about to be in the castle, and with our lessons about dark magic, Dumbledore thought it might be a good idea to train you to resist mental influences. So, today, we're starting out small and seeing whether you can resist some low-powered compulsions."
As he was setting up a device on the table, Hermione asked, "But… is there any magic you can do to us that wouldn't, itself, be unforgivable?" Moody didn't actually care about raising of hands as long as he wasn't interrupted unduly, which was really saving her a workout in his class.
"In a courtroom, probably. In Hogwarts, which really kind of has its own laws, hard to say," Moody shrugged. He'd been healing up over the last several weeks and didn't even wince when he did that anymore. His face was also a less raw pink, new scars fading into the rest of his skin tone. He still seemed to need the cane, however. "There are also a number of non-dark charms that affect the mind, if not as strongly. But for maximum legality, today we'll be using an enchanted item. Lot of loopholes on that."
He stood back and opened a large jewelry box displaying a bluish, palm-sized triangular stone with rounded corners, and some kind of face etched into it that reminded Harry of the demon dogs from Ghostbusters. "I'm not touching any mind-controlling stones," Neville declared.
"Huh. Fair," Moody allowed. Harry was becoming increasingly certain he'd gotten the story at some point. "Anyone that wants to, this is the Charm Stone. Old piece of trickery that's apparently been in the school vaults for centuries. Gets into your head when you touch it, and traps you in a daydream. Nothing too serious. If you're up for it, I want to see if you can touch it and break free on your own. If you're not out in a minute, we'll pull you off. Any takers?"
"Someone with dark eyes should go first," Harry suggested, wary of any kind of stones that might control someone's mind. "For reasons."
Moody shot him a grin at the precaution, and pointed at Hermione, "What about it, Granger?"
On the spot, she whispered to Harry, "Double-check I'm still me after," before heading up. At Moody's direction, she lightly put her hand on the stone in the box and then just stood in place, swaying slightly. The professor had turned over a small sandglass to count out the minute as she touched it, and when all the sand finished falling, he lightly grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away. "Oh. Can I try again?"
"After the rest of the class has had a go," he told her. "See, you can't just be smart enough to think your way out of this kind of magic. You have to be sure about what's your mind, and what's coming from outside. Constant vigilance. Next!"
"It really did just seem like a nice daydream," she explained as she sat down among her friends. Harry gave her a good sharp look, but realized that unless it actually turned her eyes blue, or made her act in an obviously unusual manner, he'd have no way of knowing if she was still under its control.
About half the class had gone before Harry decided to try his luck, and so far everyone had needed to be freed after a minute. "Huh. Figured someone would have broken out by now," Moody frowned. "Give it a go, Potter."
Almost as wary as Neville after his own run-in with the yellow Stone, Harry touched the new object gingerly. There was no immediate sense of a universally powerful construct attempting to reach in and reprogram his brain, so that was a relief. Instead, it was just a subtle caress, trying to make him imagine what it was going to be like to meet a bunch of elves in a little while. It might be neat, to see some actual elves that weren't trying to kill someone he liked, as part of some weird conspiracy or prophecy. Would they be like the elves in Lord of the Rings or D&D?
Before he could get too deep, there was a flicker of pain in his scar (much less than when it had been defending him from the other Stone), and his vision went slightly orange. It was enough to remind him what he was supposed to be doing, and he let go of the stone and took a step back.
"Not bad!" Moody congratulated him. "Only about ten seconds. See, Potter can do it. Next!"
"You might try it, Nev, if you want to show off," Harry suggested, quietly. "It's not nearly as powerful as… the other one. You might have built up a resistance."
"Thanks, Harry, but I'd just as soon not risk it," Neville disagreed.
A few other people in class were also not planning to risk it, so after fifteen had gone, there was time in the period for another round. That time through, most of them managed to escape on their own, used to the compulsion. Most of them still took nearly the whole minute. Harry, for his part, wasn't even caught his second time.
"And now you see the trick of it," Moody explained, packing up the box toward the end of the class period. "It's hard to prepare for something that's never been done to you before. Your enemies will try to get you with things they know you haven't seen. And you should do the same to them! The Midgardians have a saying, though: Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me. If someone gets you, it's up to you to figure out how they won't get you again the same way." He thought about it for a second and said, "But when you're really ready for trouble, they don't even get you once.
"Homework for next week is to pay attention to what you're feeling when you meet an elf, and figure out how you might block it out. And, unless I'm mistaken, you'll have a chance to start in just a few minutes. Dismissed!"
They tried to get the students to stand together in front of the main entry gate by houses, all formed-up and proper for the incoming guests. That lasted about ten minutes, and then the neatly-separated four groups began to mingle, and the prefects gave up on keeping order (though Percy might have held it together through sheer Weasley stubbornness). In the waning light of the chilly afternoon, they especially weren't going to stop girlfriends hugging onto their boyfriends for warmth, which was how they reacquired Padma and Luna in the center of the Gryffindor clump.
Harry figured they'd gathered them a little too early, and that some kind of showmanship was at play to have the elves arrive out of the sunset just before dinner. Cold and increasingly-hungry voices suddenly raised up as various people with keen and roving gazes noted a speck appearing above the horizon in the west. It swiftly grew, and questions were asked. Neither Hermione nor any of the Vanaheim natives had expected a flying craft. "Maybe it's an Asgardian skiff?" Harry mused, Hagrid having eventually told him how he'd been delivered to his Aunt's house as a baby.
Nobody was expecting them to be riding in an actual fairytale castle being towed by pegasi. As the incoming "aircraft" just got larger and larger, Harry was sure he noticed the edges of its gravity-defying towers flicker against the waning sunlight, and figured it was mostly an impressive illusion around a smaller core. But still, floating any kind of building well enough to be towed by flying horses was pretty impressive. By the time its apparent size began to visually rival Hogwarts, it finally seemed to be already there and coming in for a landing: the perspective had been very hard to figure out.
The snow-white aerial equines casually landed in a large area of flat, empty grass not far from the road into Hogsmeade (and not quite in whomping distance of the willow that guarded the secret passage to the Roaring Rampart that Sirius had eventually told him about). Landed and stopped, the new "castle" was the kind of thing that would make perfect sense on the cover of an old fantasy novel, with spindle-thin towers rising without buttresses and delicate stonework curving in ways that defied normal expectations about gravity and shearing forces. If it was actual stone being held together with magic instead of illusion, Harry was ready to be really impressed. The core structure, that he expected to be the true building, was still at least as big as his home in Encino.
As a warmly-clad and presumably-elven footman got down and unhitched the pegasi to lodge them in the stables attached to the building they'd been pulling, another such individual in dark blue exited from the structure's high doorway, bowing as the students from Beauxbatons filed out behind him. Well, they were preceded by the largest woman Harry had ever seen, since all the frost giants and dwarves he'd encountered were men. A little taller even than Hagrid, she was richly dressed like a Vanir society maven made at the wrong scale, high-heeled traveling boots somehow not sinking their six-inch length into the soil.
"I wonder if she's half-jotun, like Hagrid," Hermione mused, attempting to puzzle out her features.
"Can fire giants crossbreed, or are they actually elemental?" Harry mused. "Or maybe her father was a dwarf?"
"She could be a flora colossus under a glamour," Luna figured, snuggled into Neville's robes for warmth. "Daddy always thought the survivors might have hidden on Alfheim. They have trouble communicating with people that don't know their language, though, so I guess we'll find out."
She didn't seem to have more trouble communicating than a thick French accent, calling out to "Dumbly-dorr!" as she strode onto the road and toward the gathering. Behind her, a dozen students in pale blue robes followed, each looking to be in their late teens. "I 'ope we find you and your school well."
"Which one did you meet?" Hermione asked, scoping out the elves.
Seamus shrugged and Ron admitted, "Hard to say. Could be any of the girls, I guess, since they look different all the time?"
"The tall one with the silvery-blond hair," Lavender pointed out while rolling her eyes. "Boys."
"Guess they only brought the students they thought might make challenger," Dean observed of the older-looking elves. He still had one arm around Padma who was at least trying to stand back up and look like she was being polite for the new arrivals. "Sorry, Harry. Guess there aren't any our age."
He shrugged and said, "Unless some of them are our age and are using illusions to look older. I guess that means sexy witches are out too."
"Awww," Seamus groused. "I'd really been bankin' on sexy boy witches. Warlocks?"
"No, that's a Vanir government term for wizards," Lavender corrected.
Speaking of the students of Durmstrang, the giant woman who was seemingly named Madame Maxime had barely asked whether they'd arrived yet before there were gasps as people noticed some kind of cataclysm down the grounds in the lake. A large whirlpool had formed in the center and was turning the entire body of water into a churning cauldron. "I hope the fish and the giant squid are okay," Luna observed. In moments, the spin cycle suddenly ended, and the lake spat a huge object up into the air as it returned to level.
It looked like the head of a particularly-vicious black battleaxe, made on a scale even bigger than Madame Maxime. As it oriented sideways and glided to the ground at the edge of the lake, it became clear that the "blade" was a giant wing and the small "butt" was the craft itself, still likely large enough to serve as a small house if properly-appointed and if Durmstrang had brought about as many people as Beauxbatons. The craft itself didn't really seem to be able to fly under its own power, if only because they'd tried to bring a spaceship into Vanaheim where electrical devices didn't work. "I wonder if they're going to be able to get it out," Harry mused. As it settled onto the shore, in the last of the day's light Harry thought it looked less smooth than he'd expect from such a sleek craft, like it had been heavily patched and repaired over the centuries. "Huh. I wonder if that's some old dark elf ship and they can only get it to move with magic."
They did, indeed, have a similar number of students as the elven school, each seeming to be some flavor of Slavic under their bulky dark robes. Harry and Hermione waved at Viktor, when they spotted him near the front of the pack, and he gave a thin smile that didn't show his teeth and raised a hand to them before the man leading hissed something, probably about appearances. Viktor resumed a properly-dour look but nodded in their direction.
The presumed-headmaster who'd cautioned Viktor was normal-human-sized unlike his counterpart, and looked like he was straight out of central casting for "evil grand vizier corrupting the king." Dean couldn't resist muttering, "And your beard is so… twisted." Everyone nearby that had seen Aladdin chuckled.
Either the Ministry or the Norns having conspired to get both of the rival schools to Hogwarts in time for dinner, the entire student body plus their guests headed into the great hall. Each of the house tables had been extended so there was room for another school, with two extra places (one oversized) set at the staff table. The Slytherin table was looking intently at Durmstrang with its selection of dark magic users, as if expecting them to budge in with them, but Viktor Krum spotted Hermione and Harry and headed after them, his classmates shrugging and following him over to the Gryffindor table.
"Is okay?" he asked, gesturing to his classmates.
"Yeah, we told everyone you were cool," Harry nodded. The rest of Gryffindor gave brief consideration to whether they wanted a bunch of witches associating with them. But then they saw that their rivals in Slytherin were pissed that they were getting ignored. Between that and Harry's endorsement, they all spread out and made space.
It wasn't clear why the elves chose Ravenclaw. Maybe it was just Luna's extremely-interested expression.
"How've you been?" Harry asked Viktor, as he settled in and the food appeared for dinner.
"No dark elves. Can't complain," their friend nodded. He had casually slid onto the bench next to Hermione, and she gave a slight smile but then concentrated on her food. "Here?"
"Really boring. No dark elves—at least since we got to school. Though we should tell you about the World Cup," Harry explained. He then introduced all of his friends and anyone else around to Viktor. Viktor haphazardly introduced another four of his own classmates that were in gesturing distance at the table.
It turned out that, in Durmstrang, Viktor was toward the lower end of English competence but the higher end of avoidance of dark magic. Mostly, the discrepancies evened themselves out. The worst offender for dark magic use was also a very-personable Russian named Vasily who spoke perfect English, which got him a lot of leeway as he was interrogated by the Gryffindor upper-years. The worst at English was a very cute Finnish girl named Oona that could communicate just well enough to assure people that she hadn't made any witchcraft deals. She'd wound up surrounded by lower-years and was getting aggressively taught English by the Creeveys, who had found out she had relatives that worked at Nokia and wanted to know if she was interested in promoting their father's task management application to her family to pitch to the cell phone company.
A boy named Havel Poliakoff was precisely at the wrong spot for both ease of communication and interest in the dark arts—he spoke just enough English to make it clear he'd made too many witchcraft pacts—and resolved to sit with the Slytherins for subsequent meals where he'd feel less judged. Even Cormac McLaggen wound up vocally disapproving of his life choices.
The Ravenclaw table seemed to be having a distraction issue. Up close, the elves were, indeed, perfect. About the only thing stopping them from rating tens was that their glamours were struggling to keep up with a whole room full of horny teenagers: it turned out that the trick to being truly beautiful was minor and well-placed flaws. An intense amalgam of what everyone around you found attractive caused too much of an averaging effect. It was honestly hard to tell the elves apart, save by height and rough coloration, since they were each a flawless and symmetrical average of the desires of everyone around them.
They did have pointy ears, though, so that was neat.
The girl from the world cup that Lavender had pointed out seemed to be the standout. She'd inserted herself among the Ravenclaw upper-years, and both Robert Hawking and Roger Davies were intensely interested in everything she had to say. "The other elves. They're jealous of her," Parvati observed, as they were finishing their dinner.
Before anyone could examine that further, the lights in the room dimmed dramatically and Dumbledore stood. "I think we're ready. Bring it in, if you would, please."
The doors into the hall opened, and Filch came in pushing a large rolling cart bearing a huge chest of old wood and bronze banding. To either side of it, two officious-looking men walked. One was tall and had obsessively-parted graying hair and a thick mustache almost like toothbrush bristles. The other had graying blond hair and looked like the very stereotype of someone that had peaked as captain of the high school sports team. "Barty Crouch and Ludo Bagman" Ron quietly explained to his friends. "Crouch is the games guy, and Bagman owes the twins a bunch of money from their bet at the world cup."
"Thank you for coming, Bartemius and Ludovic," the headmaster confirmed, as they reached the front of the room. "Argus, if you could set up the relic?" A small but sturdy plinth had been placed right in front of Dumbledore below the teachers' table, and Filch opened the chest to remove a large goblet that seemed to have been rough-hewn from the heartwood of some ancient tree. As soon as he set the unadorned grail atop the plinth, blue flames erupted from its mouth and reached five feet before settling down to a dull rush of heat. "Thank you, Argus. Everyone, this is the Goblet of Fire. An ancient vessel carved from a discarded branch of Yggdrasil, it can make choices that bear the will of the Norns.
"I have warded this area with an age line to prevent those too young from approaching. Anyone else is free to consign a paper with your name signed upon it to the flames. Please take care that your handwriting is legible, and include the realm for which you are competing: Vanaheim, Svartalfheim, or Alfheim. You have through the Dísablót feast to enter; at that time, the Goblet will select the three challengers.
"I, once again, wish to impress the danger of this challenge. If you enter, you are committing yourself to seeing it through, no matter the risk. Good luck to all of you!"
"An age line!" one of the Weasley twins snarled.
"We'll figure out a way," the other insisted.
"I must enter name, and then back to ship," Viktor announced. Mostly to Hermione, he said, "But then, see you tomorrow?"
"Good luck!" she agreed.
As Viktor scribbled his name on a scrap of paper and strode over to the Goblet to toss it in, he wasn't alone. Nearly everyone age 17 or older in Gryffindor was heading over, as well as quite a few of the upper-years of the other houses. "Tough luck, Harry?" Cedric asked, as he hobbled by. He'd mostly healed from his gunshot wounds, but still seemed to need to use his cane for full mobility.
"I may have a plan," Harry grinned at the Hufflepuff boy, who nodded bemusedly and then went to put his own name in. He was just behind the elf girl that had been at the World Cup, and had a quiet, friendly conversation with her while they waited their turn for the goblet.
"How?" Ron insisted. "I want a chance, too!"
Seeing that he had half the lower-years' attention, Harry admitted, "I think I can get names in. Hermione, if it's connected to the Norns, it's not going to pick one of us if we're not the best choice for the school, right?"
"I suppose," she said, half-distractedly, still watching Viktor with his slightly-ungainly walk leaving the great hall. She suddenly caught up to the conversation and said, "Wait. What? Harry, there's an age line for a reason. Don't get yourself killed. Don't get anyone killed."
"Look," Harry gestured to the people in line but was speaking to everyone paying attention, which was perhaps twenty people, "it's probably going to be Angelina. Or Cedric. Maybe Bole or Derrick." There were hisses at the last two Slytherin names. "But I may have a way through the age line. Only give me your name if you actually think you might qualify, and you're sure that you won't die." He nodded to Hermione as if that solved everything. She made a sour face.
That night, over a dozen scraps of parchment with underaged Gryffindor names in hand, Harry slipped back into the great hall, wrapped in his invisibility cloak. He'd used his father and godfather's magical map to make sure that the coast was clear. The age wards were a sullen teal light, chalked in a ten foot radius around the goblet. "He'd have put a guard if he didn't want me to enter," Harry insisted to himself. His aunt was going to be so mad that he'd played into one of Dumbledore's schemes, but this seemed to be the most interesting thing going on for the year and he was bored.
Wrapped in the fully-magically-bonded Potter cloak, the age line didn't detect him any more than mortal eyes could. A handful of names was consigned to the fire, which hungrily consumed them in a gout of blue.
Chapter 52: Terms and Conditions
Chapter Text
"What is it?" the elf girl, whose name turned out to be Fleur, asked as Harry entered the small lounge. It was the evening after he'd put his and his housemate's names into the Goblet, and things had gone weird. "Do zey want us back in ze hall?" She was standing near the room's fireplace with Viktor and Cedric to either side of her.
"Or are you another challenger?" Cedric asked with an amused grin. He'd been around, he knew how Harry's life worked. Honestly, Harry wasn't sure how the older boy was going to be Vanaheim's challenger, with how his injuries from the World Cup still pained him. He seemed to be having a bad day, sticking close to the fire and leaning on his cane, since the room lacked seating.
"Reporting to represent Midgard, that's me!" Harry agreed. The school had been surprised when a fourth name popped out of the flames after theoretically all the challengers had been selected. But then Dumbledore had read Harry's name out, and the surprise turned to annoyed resignation.
"Congrats!" Viktor told him, with a nod, taking a step forward to shake his hand. Harry realized that the boy must have been uncomfortable in the room with two other students he didn't really know… especially since Fleur's hair had gone up into curls not at all unlike Hermione's as she gave Viktor her attention.
"But you are too young, non?" she asked. Harry still wasn't totally sure why Alfheim seemed to come with a French accent. But he guessed it made as much sense as Vanaheim coming with an English one.
As she focused on him, he noticed that her hair started to redden. For a moment, he figured that she was picking up on his interest in Susan Bones, but then he realized that her facial features were changing to subtly reflect Natasha. Thankful for Moody's earlier lesson, he tried to clamp down mentally on whatever she was reading off of him. His scar prickled a bit, and she gasped slightly as her empathic insight into his mind was suddenly cut off. Her eyes narrowed in newfound appreciation that he might be competition after all.
"This is Harry Potter," Cedric told her. "He's probably fought more than most people twice his age. Even if he didn't have to face dark elf assassins like we did."
"But ve did," Viktor cautioned. "They come for me too, vhen Harry is there. He and his friends are only reason I survived."
Suddenly Harry's eyes widened as it all clicked. "You were the most likely challengers from your schools! Someone hired the dark elves to kill or maim you so you couldn't compete in the tournament."
"Because we might beat you?" Fleur asked, noticing that Viktor hadn't said Harry had been a target as well.
"How would they have known Harry would be included, since he's too young?" Cedric argued, not discounting the idea. "Maybe someone second place wanted to get in, and eliminate the strongest competition while they were at it. I'd bet one of the Slytherins."
"Or one of my schoolmates," Viktor figured. "Vasily, perhaps."
"My year-mates would never," Fleur argued, but then shrugged, "at least not to 'ire dark elves."
Before they could pick at the mystery any further, the door opened again and as many adults as would fit in the small lounge pushed their way in. To be fair, Madame Maxime filled up a solid quarter of the room herself.
"Four challengers!" Bagman said merrily. "It's going to be one for the history books, folks!"
"But 'ogwarts cannot have two challengers!" Maxime argued. "It's unfair!"
"I concur," Karkaroff—Durmstrang's sketchy-looking headmaster—added, clamping a hand on Viktor's shoulder. The boy barely concealed a grimace of distaste at the fatherly contact.
"I believe that we'll find that Hogwarts does not," Crouch said. "The challengers represent realms, not schools. It's true that Midgard has not competed previously, but that's only because they have traditionally waited to train wizards as full adults. I understand that Potter has talked Kamar-Taj into making an exception for him and his friends?"
"Summer school, and sometimes during winter break," Harry agreed. "I guess I should write the Ancient One and let her know…"
Dumbledore looked at him shrewdly and asked, "Did you put your name into the Goblet of Fire, Harry?"
"I did," Harry admitted, trying to convey his certainty that the headmaster wanted him to. "But for Vanaheim. It didn't actually occur to me to put in for Midgard. I guess the Norns decided it would be funnier this way?"
"See, Potter wants to compete!" Bagman agreed. "It's all above board. I'm sure the Norns know what they're doing. What an exciting update. Should we call it the Four-Worlds Tournament in the marketing?"
"It would be Quad-Worlds, or maybe Quadra-Worlds," Crouch disagreed, since he was absolutely that guy.
"Doesn't roll off the tongue as well," Bagman shrugged.
"Wasn't there supposed to be an age ward?" Karkaroff asked, acidly. "I think Dumbledore just wants two bites of the apple."
"Or someone's trying to kill the boy," Moody interjected. Harry hadn't even noticed him in the crowd, with Maxime in the way. "Seems to me that two of them had assassins trying to keep them out of the tournament." He fixed Karkaroff with both of his eyes and suggested, "Clearing the competition for your boy with your dark elf friends?"
"We were just talking about that before you came in, sir, and they also went after Krum," Cedric countered, before whatever beef the two men had could flare up. "And if someone was after Potter, how could whoever hired the assassins have known that the Norns would let him into the tournament?"
"If they even did," Moody argued. "Seems to me that it would be a lot easier to trick a magic item than the Norns themselves." He had the singed slip of paper with Harry's name on it that Dumbledore had caught from the cup and showed it to Harry. "That the slip you submitted?"
He peered at it and said, "Yeah, except, like I said, I wrote Vanaheim, not Midgard. That part's not really my handwriting, but maybe the cup changed it?" He was kind of with Moody that the whole thing was hinky, so he suggested, "Honestly, I could forfeit if people are worried about it. It just seemed like it would be fun. I don't need the prize or glory or anything, and I like all these guys." Well, he liked Viktor and Cedric and was willing to assume that Fleur was cool, too.
"I'm afraid you can't," Dumbledore said. "Even if Alastor is correct that the Goblet was tampered with to change your realm and ensure you a spot, it is still an ancient device of fortune and you did willingly enter. Unless we are certain that the Norns' will has been thwarted, attempting to abandon the tournament could have dire repercussions."
Crouch nodded, "I believe I recall a story of a challenger that attempted to flee after the first task, and only found himself stumbling into the second task through a series of accidents and without any preparation."
"Got it. Compete or get Final Destination ed into competing anyway," Harry shrugged. He gave it a beat and said, "I was going to get stuck in this tournament no matter what, right? It was just this year's dangerous thing. Maybe we should just all concentrate on who hired the dark elves and try to have a good time?"
"I agree," Viktor said, as Karkaroff was about to object again.
Madame Maxime was going to object herself, but Fleur shrugged and said, "It is interesting. I also am fine wiz it." The mystery of the assassins and Harry's ability to resist her empathic abilities had drawn her in.
"Excellent! Perfect, even!" Bagman said. "That's all the objections? Great. Let's just get the details out about the first task. Those details are… we don't really know exactly when or what it will be.
"The first task is traditionally about testing your daring. The auguries are good that a convergence should open nearby in the next few weeks. Once it is, we'll nip in there, figure out how to use the environment it opens to for a good, challenging task. Then we'll call you up, send you in, and see who comes out ahead. Did I forget anything?"
Crouch added, "Yes. You can take no enchanted or technological items into the first task: just your personal skill at magic and athleticism. A panel of judges made up of myself, Mr. Bagman, and the headmasters will award your score."
"I need to get a headmaster, then?" Harry checked. "I was going to write to Kamar-Taj anyway, or do you want to?"
Dumbledore frowned but allowed, "I shall contact the Ancient One, and ask her to come or send another of her Masters in her stead."
"Great! Fabulous!" Bagman said. "Meet everyone down at the Three Broomsticks for drinks?"
As the adults left, trying to work out who would be going down to the pub, and their headmasters ushered Viktor and Fleur back toward their lodgings on the grounds, Harry was left to wander back in the direction of their dorms with Cedric. The great hall had emptied of students while they'd been inside the lounge, and was dimly lit still from when the room's torches had been lowered to enhance the spectacle of names being spat out by the Goblet. "So… tell me…" Cedric asked. "How did you get your name in?"
"Trade secret," Harry grinned, not willing to give up intelligence about his cloak to a competitor— especially now that he knew it was powerful enough to let him through at least some kinds of wards. Figuring that he had to explain something, he suggested, "Let's just say that both my father and godfather were pranksters worse than the Weasley twins. Now that Sirius is back, he's been teaching me some tricks."
"Regular Loki-worshippers, huh?"
"You don't know the half of it. They even made friends with Peeves." Harry thought about it fondly, and then realized, "I guess I should tell Sirius that I'm a challenger. Oh no. I also have to tell my aunt."
"My father's going to be thrilled," Cedric said, with some faint bitterness. Ron had passed on that Mr. Diggory was a little too little-league-dad, so maybe the boy didn't like the idea of his father gushing.
"Are you going to be up for it," Harry asked, gesturing at how Cedric was leaning hard on his cane as they walked out.
"I should hopefully be fine in another month. St. Mungo's didn't really know how to heal that kind of wound, so that set me back. It's not actually that bad. Worst case, I can take a pain potion for the task and pay for it later."
"Guess we've got no choice, huh?" Harry asked. "If the Norns won't let me forfeit, they're not going to let you out because you're injured. Man. Did we all just sign up to get killed?"
"I'm sure it's not as bad as that," Cedric disagreed. "I don't think anyone's died in this for centuries."
"Small statistical sample size," Harry argued. "They haven't had many of these in centuries. One death every three tournaments is still over ten percent."
"Well if you're going to do arithmancy about it," Hufflepuff's golden boy gave him a genuine, if pained smile. They exited the great hall and Harry turned to the stairs while Cedric moved to go down to the Hufflepuff dorms. "Night, Harry."
"Night, Cedric."
When Harry stepped through the portrait into the Gryffindor common room, it was to raucous applause. There was already a party ongoing, with music in the background courtesy of Hermione's clockwork record player (she'd assembled the prototype off of Tony's designs, and was still working on using magic to make it self-winding and increase the volume, but it was much more music than they'd had ). "It it wasn't me, at least it was someone from Gryffindor!" Angelina yelled, handing him a glass of buttermead.
"I wonder if it would have been Oliver if he'd still been here," one of the twins figured.
"Since we're in on the Midgard technicality," the other explained.
"Harry might have beaten Cedric, if he'd put in for Vanaheim," Ginny insisted.
"I did, though," Harry assured them. "We don't know why I got picked for Earth. Moody thinks someone manipulated the Goblet trying to kill me or something."
"Someone's always trying to kill you," Dean figured. "We'll see how well it turns out this time."
"You did put in all of our names?" Katie Bell asked.
"Me and everyone else in one big handful," Harry agreed.
"Then the Norns think Harry and Gryffindor have got it!" Alicia Spinnet said, raising her own glass of buttermead to toast and getting the whole house to join in.
Harry collapsed into bed way too late after the party. While it was clear that basically everyone wished they had been chosen, most of them were pretty sure that Harry's combination of experience fighting monsters, skill with wandless magic, and overall chosen one status wasn't something they could challenge. Well, Cormac McLaggen wouldn't shut up about how he should have been challenger, but basically nobody listened to Cormac. Harry had even been nice enough to include his name in those put in the Goblet; he probably wished he could pretend that he'd have been chosen if not for the age wards.
"This tournament is bilgesnipe dung," Ron tiredly complained as the boys were drifting off to sleep. "The one time in over a century, and I'm up against Harry. Of course I didn't get picked."
"Just think if you just graduated," Dean figured. "Bet Percy and Oliver are going to be pissed they might have been picked if they'd had it last year."
"I bet Percy already knows," Ron said. "He works for Crouch. I could tell he was keeping something from all of us this summer."
"Honestly," Harry said, already half-unconscious, "if it weren't based on the convergences and the Norns, I'd just think it was Dumbledore throwing something else at me. Huh. Maybe I've been blaming him all this time, but it's mostly the Norns that have been messing with me."
"Why not both?" Dean said, his own voice trailing off as he fell asleep.
"Bilgesnipe dung," Ron grumbled his way to unconsciousness.
Harry dreamed. His strangely-vivid sci-fi nightmares had been waning since school started, but he was suddenly again on one of the spaceships crawling with alien zombies. A creepy, robed sci-fi necromancer with a gold facemask rasped, "It is done. The plan can proceed. Our ally will make sure he is in place when the time comes." Another alien, tall, thin, gray-skinned, and missing a nose nodded in acknowledgement and said in a high-pitched voice, "I will be ready to resume the charade." The dream dissolved into less vivid fare with only that simple conversation.
The reality of what he'd signed up for began to catch up with Harry by the next morning, and he figured he better fess up to his aunt before she found out from someone else. He got a quick letter penned to her and sent with Hedwig right after breakfast. In his free period after lunch, he mirror-called Sirius.
"That's amazing, pup!" his godfather told him. "Your father and I were always hoping there'd be a tournament while we were in school, but the realms didn't line up for it."
"You're not worried I'll die? Or that elf assassins got sent after the other challengers?"
"I'm sure it'll be fine. Think of it! This is your chance to write your own legend. I know you don't like being the Boy-Who-Lived." Harry had forgotten he'd complained about that to Sirius. "Just start thinking about something spectacular you can do, and we'll get you a new nickname based on that!"
"I don't guess they told you what the first task is going to be?" Harry asked, hopefully.
His godfather shook his head, "The Ministry's been keeping it under their hats, if they even know. Though if you're right that Molly Weasley knew about the tournament and didn't share… I'll ask around to see what the rumor mill has. And I guess I'll poke people about the hunt for those assassins. You're probably not wrong that it's related. But whether it was just some jerk trying to get their own kid a slot or some greater conspiracy around you, I don't know."
"I don't think I'd ever lose money betting it was some conspiracy about me."
Sirius chided, "Don't let your head get too big! Sometimes it's just a conspiracy that you bump into and thwart, right?"
"Fair. I guess I'll hope it was just Vasily trying to bump off Viktor and I already did my part helping save his life. Oh, I think I'm supposed to meet the study group to check our homework before runes class. Talk to you later!"
Pepper's response came back within two days, which was fast for her.
Dear Harry,
You're obviously grounded. We'll figure out for how long once we find out how dangerous of a situation you got yourself into this time. Honestly, it's like you're trying to get yourself killed. I'd feel better if grounding actually convinced you to stop it with these stunts.
Also… I told Tony. Not everything, but enough. After meeting Sirius, he was getting suspicious, and I figured that I should tell him before he figured it out on his own. He's pretty mad and we're not really talking right now. I think you might want to stay with Sirius for the winter holidays, just to give Tony enough time to cool off and accept it. Sorry.
Love,
Pepper
"Well that's great!" Hermione said, when Harry informed them about Tony. "Or it's terrible, if he goes and tells more people. Wait. Do you think he knows it's all of us? What if SHIELD comes for my parents!?"
Harry hadn't gotten to that question as quickly as Hermione and thought about it. He mused, "I think Aunt Pepper would have warned them if that seemed like a thing Tony would do. If he's not talking to her, he's probably being quietly mad. I don't think he'd run off and tell SHIELD. Maybe Rhodey. She should have told him as soon as they started dating."
"Yeah," Dean nodded. "That's some 80s sci-fi/comedy shenanigans. My Stepmother is an Alien, or something. Shame she doesn't have any powers. They're probably doing a whole arc where he needs her to save his life in some weird way before he accepts her."
"Or they do separate dances, that turn into one big dance number as they come to terms with each other," Parvati suggested.
Hermione rolled her eyes, but was, herself, genre-aware enough to realize that if she protested that they weren't characters in a movie, someone would point out all the adventures they'd been on that would seem to prove otherwise.
Despite the fact that the challengers were all basically friends and, in their limited interactions, were willing to treat the tournament as a friendly rivalry, the rest of the students weren't. Perhaps it had something to do with the sign-up sheets for the promised non-task competitions that appeared toward the end of the week after the challengers were chosen. Someone had the bright idea that it would be more fair to the visiting schools if the Midgardborn were pulled into their own faction, along with Harry representing Earth. This limited Hogwarts' numbers advantage, but cut faultlines through the student body.
Slytherin was basically totally unsplit, having no admitted Midgardborn among its current numbers, and wound up allying themselves fully behind Cedric and Hogwarts. Meanwhile, Gryffindor still mostly supported Harry, but their Vanir natives were very excited to compete in any sports and games available. Hufflepuff was torn: it had, perhaps, the most Midgardborn of any house, who all were unsure of whether they were supposed to work against their own fellows and challenger. Ravenclaw was the least affected, though suffered some strange rifts when it was discovered that the competitions included academic ones.
Rumors started to fly that Harry had put his name in for Midgard specifically to so divide the school and cause drama. It was probably good that he was generally pretty popular, or the drama might have made him a veritable pariah. As it was, things were weirdly tense, especially when the Vanir students started wearing pins that said, "Support Cedric Diggory, the REAL Hogwarts challenger."
With a Hogsmeade weekend coming up, Harry finally decided to make a move, and managed to catch Susan Bones after defense class. "Hey, Susan," he said, catching up to the Hufflepuffs when she wasn't completely surrounded by her housemates at the end of the queue heading to drop off their bags before dinner. "I was just wondering if you wanted to go to Hogsmeade with me."
"Ummm, wow," she slowed enough to walk next to him, but didn't stop, and her friends Hannah Abbot and Megan Jones slowed down a little, clearly giving her a bit of space but ready to jump in if she needed it. "I didn't know you were… and I'd go but…" and she folded over the lapel of her robe to show that she had one of the pins. She gave an apologetic look and said, "Maybe after this is all settled?"
"Maybe," Harry said, disappointed that she'd be wearing one of the pins. He let her continue, falling back to his own friends.
"Wow," Dean said. "And she was hiding that so you wouldn't see it. Classy."
"Eh," Harry shrugged, trying to hide how much it had hurt that she'd blown him off over some dumb rivalry. And that he was worried he'd done it to himself by entering. "At least I didn't wait so long she already had a date?"
By the time they were leaving dinner, he'd convinced himself that Susan was a bad choice anyway. He'd thought she was pretty, but maybe he just thought that because she reminded him of Natasha, especially with her red hair. He'd liked that she was nice, but what she'd done wasn't that nice. And maybe, "We both live with our aunts," wasn't enough to build a relationship on. Yeah. Maybe it was good that he'd gotten that over with relatively painlessly. She hadn't even really said she didn't like him, just that she cared too much about the stupid school rivalry.
His mood was on the way up before Draco shouted over, "Really running out of dating options huh, Potter? I heard Bones shot you down! Did she show you the secret message?" With a wave of his wand, his pin and those of everyone nearby that was wearing one switched from the message supporting Cedric to a simple, "Potter stinks," in glowing green letters.
With a beat to consider that he hadn't seen the secret message, and how that made everyone walking around with the pins even more obnoxious, Harry fired back,"Ah, you were the one who got into button-making. What a neat little hobby. Did your mother help you with that, or did you have to pay someone to have them made?" He let that sink in and congratulated, "Either way, good job, Draco. Having a fun craft business does make you a bit more interesting."
Fortunately, Harry had been getting good at hanging onto his emotions with all the elves around. It was the closest that Malfoy had yet come to landing a hit on his confidence. The nearby Slytherins giggled anyway, as if Draco had won the exchange, but Harry was bolstered by the anger in his wannabe rival's eyes that a huge marketing campaign and a well-timed jab had been mostly brushed off.
Before Draco could decide whether to turn it into a full on diss-battle in the middle of the entry hall, McGonagall called out, "Ah. Potter. Excellent. Can you please go get the other three challengers and come over here?" She was poking her head out of the little side room near the front doors that the new first-years were kept in before the sorting. Harry thought he could make out "Rita Skeeter" inside.
"Yes, ma'am," he told her, passing on to his friends, "I'll catch up to you later," and completely ignoring Draco and his cronies as he wended his way back into the great hall. He managed to flag down the other three quickly enough, though each of them was followed by their own school or housemates. "They want the challengers in the room out in the entry hall," he explained. "I think it's a newspaper interview or something."
Extricating themselves from their own entourages, the other three followed him through the thinning crowd back out and into the room, where, indeed, Christine Everhart and a photographer were there to write a story about them. She arranged them for pictures. She asked them questions that seemed to be half general interest and half for Witch Weekly. While Christine was positively-disposed toward him enough that she wouldn't try any real"gotchas," that particular batch of questions ended on questions about dating.
Cedric admitted that he was starting something up with Cho Chang, which surprised Harry a little (not that he'd really still held designs on the girl after their failed date). Viktor deflected that he had someone in mind but didn't want to talk about it (but Harry knew that he and Hermione had spent several evenings in the library together already). Somewhat surprisingly, Fleur shrugged and said that she was still waiting for the right suitor (he'd seen any number of boys, and some girls, had already asked her out that week).
"And what about you, Harry? There are rumors that you've been seen dating several girls over the last year. Ready to settle on anyone in particular?" the reporter asked him.
Still stinging a little from Susan's rejection and Malfoy's joy at it, Harry knew that he wasn't going to admit that he'd just been brushed off by the girl he'd been thinking about for months. And Fleur had used up the, "I'm weighing my options," line. The worst thing that could happen would be Christine asking around and finding out about the rumor that he'd been rejected just an hour and a half earlier. He knew that Tony would often go with something funny and grandiose if he wanted to control the narrative.
Without really having time to think through whether there were any downsides he wasn't seeing, Harry said, "I'm kind of in the same boat as Ms. Delacour, you know. You only get so many chances to date here, and you really only talk to people outside your house in classes. I'd offer to take her to Hogsmeade, just so neither of us has to worry about it." He laughed in a way that he hoped would come off as genuine and joking.
He expected her to say something about not dating younger men, if she deigned to answer at all. He expected that everyone would laugh, Christine would write something about a little ladykiller like Tony, and that would be the end of it. He did not expect what actually happened.
Fleur looked at him with consideration. He felt her probe him again with her elvish empathy and he casually brushed it aside without even thinking about it. She nodded and said, "Zat would work for me. It's a date."
Chapter 53: Flower of the Court
Chapter Text
Hogsmeade was surprisingly packed. After the marauder attack half a year earlier, there hadn't been much hope that the first field trip of Harry's fourth year would have many options. Yet the town square was brimming with stalls and people visiting them. In fact, any piece of flat ground along the road from the school gates seemed to have a tent set up. And they could see the Hogwarts Express parked at the train platform, which was unusual for during the school year.
"All these people must be here to see the first task," Parvati mused. Word had gotten out that the exact time was uncertain, but it would be early in Holy-Month, and the field trip was on the last day of Autumn-Month. So, within a week or two. Presumably some of the people that had come in on the Express were Ministry officials to help set up the challenge.
"I heard the traders were more willing to come, because they could travel in numbers," Ginny added. With regular patrols along the train route anyway, and all the extra guests, this could be a huge money-making opportunity for merchants usually vying for nothing more than student pocket money.
"What? Oh, yeah," Harry asked, not having been paying much attention as the carriage delivered him to his date. Hermione was in a similar state next to him. The heads of the other schools had wanted to to take their students into town and orient them, so riding in with their dates hadn't been an option. Consequently, Harry, Hermione, Parvati, Ginny, and Seamus were in the "singles" carriage, while their friends traveled in as couples. Harry, focusing his attention back on his friends, caught that Seamus looked just as distracted and nervous as he was; maybe the other single boy was meeting a date as well? Rather than asking about it, he just told Ginny, "Glad you're getting a real field trip for your first one."
"Parvati's going to show me the cool stalls," the redhead agreed. Harry briefly reflected on how much the social dynamic had changed over the last year, from Hogsmeade being mostly the study group traveling together to everyone splitting up to go on dates. Not that they wouldn't bump into each other again and again: the town wasn't very big.
"Oh, there's Viktor," Hermione announced, spotting the Bulgarian waiting patiently right by where the carriages were pulling up. "See you all around." Not really even waiting for a goodbye, and barely waiting for the carriage to stop moving, she slid out and walked away with her date.
"We should all be so lucky," Parvati sighed.
"Uh uh!" Ginny grinned. "Girls' day!" She dragged the older Gryffindor off with her into the crowd.
"Good luck," Harry told Seamus.
"You too," he nodded, eyes flicking around and almost skulking off to look for his presumed date.
The previous few trips to Hogsmeade, Harry's celebrity hadn't been that big a deal. The other students obviously already saw him every day, if only at meals for kids of different ages. Some of the shopkeeps and citizens of Hogsmeade had been initially keen to meet him, but were more interested in his spending money than his fame. Suddenly, though, with dozens of out-of-towners there for the tournament, Harry was wading through a sea of handshakes.
"Oh, yeah, good to meet you. Hi, yep, that's me. Sorry, I need to get moving on. A whole hug, huh, okay, um. I don't really do pictures." The walk through the crowd to where he was meeting Fleur near the inn took minutes, even though it was only a few dozen yards.
When he finally spotted his date, it seemed like she was being mobbed as well, trying to politely brush off both Hogwarts students that hadn't had time to corner her yet, and much older townsfolk. He wondered if she was famous like he was on Alfheim, or if her polite but closed-off body language was entirely an adaptation to being used to being propositioned by strangers. Had she just agreed to go with him as some kind of cover?
Honestly, that would take a load off of his mind, since he had no idea how he was going to date a supermodel who was three years older.
"Hey, Fleur, sorry, got held up," he managed to insert himself into her bubble of hangers-on.
"Sorry, everyone," she said, a look of relief lighting up her face as Harry appeared. "I 'ave to go."
The crowd was at least polite enough to realize that they shouldn't continue to mob two kids on a date and went back to shopping. "You think the other challengers are getting that?" he asked, quietly, once they had some space to themselves in the hubbub.
"We should ask zem later," she agreed, but clearly didn't believe it. "Into ze inn?"
Harry glanced through the Three Broomsticks' door as it banged open to let another group of students out, and could tell that it was packed inside. "If you're starving, sure," he said, "but… we could take a walk and try to get away from the crowd?" He had been there less than five minutes and was already kind of done.
"Gladly," she smiled beautifully, and he almost lost control of the mental muscle he was flexing to keep her from reading his mind. Honestly, it was pretty similar to the walking meditation he'd been doing to fight Mindless Ones, once he figured out the trick. "Your mind is… very strong," she observed, smile fading as she felt him block the connection as soon as it almost formed.
"Sorry," he told her. "I figure you're not really doing it on purpose? But I don't know if I want everyone seeing what you find in my head." Malfoy, in particular, would probably love to know what Harry's ideal woman looked like. That it was probably Natasha opened up a world of insults if he could find out who she was, or just by speculating about the redheads in Harry's life.
They were walking along the outer edge of the square, Harry unconsciously leading toward the trail to the Roaring Rampart. Side by side but not holding hands, he was aware that she was taller than him. Honestly, that was probably his lot in life. It wasn't like it was even that unusual: Pepper had taken to going shoeless in private, since even barefoot she was as tall as Tony with his shoes on. Being shorter meant less chance of heart problems later in life, Rhodey assured him.
"Most people like it when I'm zeir fantasy," she said, as they cleared the square and started walking along the grass toward the treeline and trailhead into the hills.
"I don't think you should have to change yourself to be what other people want," he shrugged. It wasn't even a line, it was just what he actually thought, so he didn't get why she gave him another look and intrigued smile as soon as she said it.
"Where are we going?" she asked, instead.
"There's an old fort up in the hills," he gestured. "The overlook is a good private space to talk. Lots of kids go up there on dates, and the tourists probably don't know about it. Or they think it's haunted."
She blinked, unknowingly repeating what Parvati had said about a year earlier in the same spot, "Ze castle is already full of ghosts."
He chuckled, "Yeah. And there aren't any in the Roaring Rampart. It's where a student used to go when he was having a berserker fit so he wouldn't hurt anyone. Guess him yelling is scarier than an actual haunted house. The ghosts at Hogwarts are fairly quiet."
"Except zat awful Peeves," she argued.
"He's not technically a ghost. He's something that Loki made when he was a student and they've never been able to get rid of."
"Ah. Ze fallen prince learned 'ere? We 'ear Asgard curses 'im and mourns 'im."
Harry nodded, letting her lead as they turned on a tight switchback of the trail, her robes brushing against his arm. "That's what they say. Him going to school here, I mean. I'd heard about Asgard, too. You know Thor came to Earth… er, Midgard last summer? The problems with Bifrost and all of that probably have to do with that."
"Zis I had not 'eard," she said, intrigued. "Zough we 'ear tales of new 'eros on Midgard. A man in iron?"
"Iron Man, yeah," Harry said, then realized he better get it over with, if she'd heard of Tony. "He's my aunt's boyfriend. Well, hopefully he still is. She just told him about being from Vanaheim, and I guess he didn't take it well."
Fleur nodded, "We also must be careful, sharing wiz friends on Midgard."
"Do you get to go?" he asked, interested. "I knew you spoke French, but I wasn't sure…"
"Oui. Zere are still connections between Alfheim and ze old Celtic lands, especially ze parts of Gaul zat became France. Our people came and went for zousands of years from your world. Until ze Jotun wars, when Odin forbade open contact."
"That makes sense. Lot of old fairy tales that could be elves," Harry agreed. "Do you take magical French kids to Beauxbatons the way Hogwarts and Durmstrang find them?"
"Only rarely. Ze ones wiz elf blood. Hogwarts seems to find ze ozzers."
"Probably because France is pretty close to the London sanctum," he figured. "Wait, you can breed with humans?"
"Of course," she said. "Zis is why we do not live as long as ze Aesir, and 'ow we can go in ze daylight."
"You're all dark elf/human crossbreeds!" Harry realized. "Everyone always said it was some kind of Asgardian medical magic or something that changed you from the dark elves."
"Maybe in ze beginning," she shrugged. "It was five-zousand years ago. Or maybe ze dark elves could do so if zey cared to, and just refuse?"
"Yeah, those guys are intense," he agreed.
"You've met dark elves?"
They were coming up onto the overlook over the Roaring Rampart, which was empty of other kids on dates on the chilly afternoon. "Yeah. They, uh, have some dumb prophecy thing that they need to keep me alive for, so they keep stopping short of killing me. They think I'm going to find something they want."
"You should not do zis!" she cautioned, turning to face him, eyes blazing. "Zere is nozzing zey could want zat is not a weapon to use against ze ozzer realms!"
"I kind of figured," he put his hands up to acknowledge and agree. "We're not exactly friends."
"Of course," she absently took one of his hands out of the air in her own. "I did not mean to accuse you. My family expects me to be a diplomat, warning ozzers of ze dangers of our counterparts."
Accidentally holding hands with someone who, admittedly through illusion, was more gorgeous than anyone he'd ever met through Tony, Harry momentarily lost control of his mental defenses. Part of him worried that she'd done it to break through them. But even if she had, the sudden connection went both ways.
The edges of his vision fading into orange and his scar prickling, Harry got a jolt of the Soul-Stone-powered empathy that was sometimes granted to him.
Harry didn't get feelings, so much as an intuitive understanding of feelings. Without knowing how he knew, he understood her: a deep insecurity leading to a need to prove herself, conflicted devotion to the expectations of family and nation, and the loneliness of someone frequently looked at but so rarely seen. Honestly, he could relate to a lot of that. She was gifted with an empathy that inevitably told her that anyone looking at her didn't care about her, but simply who she could pretend to be for them.
But before he could really process that, he realized that hers weren't the only thoughts he was understanding. Hers were clearly from in front of him, but there was someone else watching. Someone else in contact with him, and eagerly observing what could lead to a magical moment of romance in the woods. Someone… sitting on his left shoulder?
He glanced down and stared at the thumb-sized beetle riding along with him in the pre-winter cold where no such beetles should be, and felt it think, "Oh, shit."
"That beetle's an animagus!" Harry yelled, his hand sliding from Fleur's as the disguised wizard attempted to fly away. "We're literally being bugged."
"Spys!" Fleur shouted, her illusion snapping into the strangely feral and birdlike form that Ron had mentioned. Maybe that was what light elves actually looked like? At least her avian rage was directed at the beetle, clearly believing Harry about it.
To give credit where it was due, the animagus had reacted quickly and had the power of flight. Escape only required making the treeline without getting set alight by the fire Fleur had conjured in her hands. But the transformed wizard hadn't really considered that Harry had spent most of the last year figuring out how to deal with animagus problems. "Morphic Truth of Fylgja!" he incanted, having drawn and aimed his wand in one smooth motion.
The beetle was caught in the shotgun blast of teal light, the spell designed to catch even an agile animagus at short range. As the cloud of blue-green sparks whirled around the ones that had actually collided with the target, the animagus' form rapidly expanded from around an inch in size to a full-sized human woman. She barely managed to get her arms and legs under her to break her fall, and was fortunate that she hadn't yet gotten much higher than Harry's shoulder. She still rolled to a painful-looking stop on the cold dirt of the overlook clearing.
"Chri… Rita?" Harry gasped, catching himself and using her pseudonym just in time.
"Ze reporter!?" Fleur yelled. "Is zis 'ow you get your stories?"
"I can explain!" Christine Everhart yelled, putting her hands up to protect her face. That phrase lilted up in urgency at the end, as she got a look at exactly how much fire Fleur was wielding.
"I thought we had a deal," Harry told her, his own wand lowering since Christine didn't have one in hand and because she had admitted she wasn't very dangerous even with one. Obviously she hadn't revealed that she must have spent her time at Hogwarts learning to be an animagus. He raised his wand slightly again as he realized that might mean that she was better at transfiguration that she let on.
"We do! We do! I was going to let you proof the story!" she insisted. "It was just so cute! You were a cute couple! Please don't light me on fire."
Harry glanced at Fleur, who was mastering her surprise and anger as the threat seemed to be under control. As flames licked up her arms without burning her robes, a cloak of golden feathers spilled off of her shoulder blades, and her silvery hair stood into a veritable crown of sharp plumage… Harry still thought she was extremely gorgeous. Maybe it wouldn't be the same if that rage was directed at him, but it was a really cool look. Whatever her own empathy read off of Christine, Fleur quietly snarled, "You will never spy on eizzer of us again. And if you write anyzing negative, I will ensure your secret is known."
"You could have just asked me for an interview about my date," Harry agreed.
"Sorry. Sorry," Christine said, picking herself up, contriteness vanishing into calculation as she stood and dusted herself off. "It was just so romantic. You've heard the phrase, 'I wish I could be a fly on the wall?' Can you blame me?" As Fleur's handful of flame flared again, she said, "I agree to your terms, Ms. Delacour." She waited for the flames to extinguish before asking, "So… can I get that interview?"
She deftly dodged the two gouts of hurled flame as she sprinted off the overlook and back to the trail, running down toward Hogsmeade.
Once they were sure Christine was out of earshot and Fleur was once again calming down—flames extinguishing and feathers receding back within her normal seeming—Harry said, "That was really cool. Can I ask… is that what you really look like under the glamour?"
Fleur glanced at him and he lowered his shield against her empathy enough for her to tell that he wasn't horrified, but honestly intrigued. Almost fully back in her normal form of a supermodel with silver-blond hair rather than using the opportunity to try to bend to his desires, she gave a shake of her head and explained, "No. It's a magical gift of ze Seelie court. For when we are in danger."
"A battle form! That's so cool," Harry grinned, and it was infectious, her own mouth twitching in a smile.
"Few 'ave said so. I 'ave been called 'arpy or banshee."
"Meh," Harry shrugged. "Do that in a bodysuit and you're basically a comic book hero from Earth. It's very Hawkgirl." Now he was picturing it, and he had to clamp back down on his shields before she picked up that particular teen fantasy.
"You're kind for saying so," she said.
"So if that's not what you look like…" Harry asked, remembering what he had wanted to know before they were so rudely interrupted. "Can I ask what you look like under the glamour? To see you?"
Maybe it wasn't fair that his own empathy had made him aware that particular verb would land, but it broke through her reflexive rejection. Fixing him with a piercing gaze she asked, "You really want to know? You won't tell ozzers?" He nodded, letting his shields relax again so she could hopefully read his earnestness and powerful curiosity. "Very well."
For a moment he wasn't clear exactly what had changed. It was obvious that some kind of illusion had faded, but so much was still the same. He realized that part of it was just an illusory "makeup" as the literal loss of glamour left her fresh-faced. But it wasn't like she was less attractive. The illusion hadn't been hiding deformity or even just an average appearance. It took a long moment for him to recognize most of what she was hiding was just a subtle softness to her features that wasn't present in the angular and adult mien she usually wore.
"You don't actually look seventeen," he realized, then quickly followed it up with, "You stop aging at puberty!"
"It slows, yes," she nodded, barely looking more than a year older than him even with their three-year age difference. "It will take several years before I look a full adult, and it will slow more after zat. I wanted to be taken seriously here."
"And you couldn't if you don't look grown up," he nodded, remembering they'd speculated on that very thing when the elves had arrived. "Believe me, as the kid in over his head on this whole thing, I get it."
"I no longer believe you are in over your head," she said, regarding him with that piercing, considering gaze. She let the illusion wrap back around her, once again a precisely-made-up adult, and said, "Walk me back to town?"
"Yeah, guess Rita ruined the moment," he nodded.
"Ruin is a strong word," Fleur said, bumping him affectionately with a shoulder as they began to walk back toward town. "But I 'ave much to consider."
They walked in companionable silence down the trail. As a gesture of good faith, Harry left his shields down. Reciprocating, she didn't change her glamour from its "default" form of an aged-up and made-up vision of her true appearance. Harry, thinking about it, realized that his meditation probably had a lot to do with getting over his natural teen response to a beautiful girl. He quietly quashed a thought that maybe she was playing him, and had gotten him to lower his defenses. They were competitors after all.
"But are we?" she replied to that thought as they stepped off the trail and back into the outskirts of town, making him wonder if her empathy extended into full telepathy, or if she'd just made a really good guess. "Zank you for ze walk, 'arry," she told him with a pretty smile, before stepping over to join a trio of elves she saw at a shop on the edge of the square.
Before he had time to overthink that interaction, Ginny came running up, Parvati not far behind. Parvati clearly wanted to ask what had happened, but knew from their own date a year previous in the same spot that he would never tell her if she asked. Before that drama had time to unspool in both of their minds, Ginny announced, "Harry! Charlie is in town. My brother!"
He blinked, not having expected that. "Great! You should get some family time?"
She huffed as if Harry was not making the obvious connection she had. "My brother Charlie. Who works with dragons. Is in town. I think he has his coworkers with him. I don't think they had much advance warning they'd need to be here."
"Oh, and Hagrid mentioned something about inviting you to bring your cloak and join him when he goes and takes a walk in the forest before dinner tonight," Parvati remembered.
Harry glanced up at the sky and realized that his date had actually taken longer than he'd thought. "Cool. Thanks. Dragons, huh? You two seen all the shops yet? I guess I should buy Christmas presents and then go see what Hagrid is trying to show me."
Showing up to Hagrid's hut around sunset and knocking, the big man greeted him wearing a very formal "military" coat that was adorned with furs and had a couple of the ornamental braids that Harry had realized were Vanaheim medals. "Did you fight in a war… oh, right, Voldemort. Somehow I didn't think it would count."
"Aye," Hagrid nodded. "Even wi' Dumbledore as my lord, I earned these braids. They tell yeh I got somethin' ter show yeh? Good. Yer just in time. Get under yer cloak an' follow me."
Harry bemusedly let his cloak conceal him and followed after Hagrid as he walked to the Beauxbatons castle and picked up Madame Maxime. Luna had sadly relented on the idea that she might be an ent under an illusion, since her vocabulary was apparently much more expansive than expected for a flora colossus. But at least Hagrid had another presumably-half-jotun to date.
It seemed like Maxime knew something was up, but not exactly what, and Harry followed after them as they strolled into the forest. The trail they were following had been widened and looked to have brackets set up for torches that weren't yet placed, as if it was being turned into an avenue from the castle. Maybe the task was taking place in the woods for some reason, so attendees would need to walk. Harry just hoped that the shadow nix had moved on, and any other forest hazards were being scared off.
"Now, yeh won't tell anyone, right?" Hagrid asked his date, who demurred (in a way that Harry thought totally meant she was going to tell Fleur). "It's right up ahead."
They came upon a clearing that was really more of a wasteland. In a multi-acre swath, the forest had been burned back, and charred trunks of trees had been knocked over and moved to the edges of the space. Serious-looking people in armor were walking with purpose around the space, but they seemed to be spending less time setting it up and more patrolling. Floating in the center was a wavering, twenty-foot-diameter hole in space. The clearing was mostly lit by the sullen red glow coming from the convergence. Even from a distance, Harry felt like he was looking into a full-on hellmouth.
Suddenly, there were cries of, "One's coming. Form up!" The wizards and warriors guarding the convergence arranged themselves and started casting as the glow from the egress began to flicker madly, as if something very large was moving toward it very fast. The strangest thing was that sound didn't seem to penetrate as far, so he didn't hear the roar until the immense beast—so much larger than the baby that Hagrid had hatched in Harry's first year—shoved its head and neck through and began to blast fire across the glade.
The dragon handlers erected angled shields of magic, causing the gout to spill away from them and further blacken the earth. Those at the front stabbed with magical spears and the wizards not shielding cast fierce-looking turquoise spells to force the beast back and cause it to bellow in anger and pain as it was thwarted from crossing the portal. As it was forced back and sent to flee from crossing into Vanaheim, Harry realized that even with the shielding, several people had been burned and were being tended to by healers.
Oh. It hadn't really sunk in when Ginny suggested it. He was going to have to fight dragons.
Chapter 54: Hammer and Tongs
Chapter Text
Fortunately, they had already done a lot of research on dragons their first year, when Hagrid acquired the egg that eventually became Norbert. But Sunday evening and most of Monday was spent furiously reviewing that information. It probably wasn't a secret to the judges that everyone in Gryffindor knew what the task was, as Harry enlisted his friends' help.
It was almost certainly well-known to the other challengers as well, unless Madame Maxime wanted to keep it a secret from Fleur. Harry thought he'd spotted Karkaroff skulking about in the forest, so Viktor presumably knew. He wasn't sure about Cedric. Had anyone told Cedric?
"Cedric, dragons," Harry told the older boy, catching him on the way out of the great hall after breakfast.
"What about them?" he asked, distracted from whatever conversation he was having with his year mates.
Harry quickly summed up, not caring if the other sixth-year Hufflepuffs heard, "The convergence for the task opens to Muspelheim. There was at least one dragon. I don't know if we're supposed to fight it or if it's just going to be there. But, you know, dragons."
Cedric's eyes widened, almost seeming to shade from blue to green in his surprise. "You're sure?"
"We're not supposed to have seen it in advance, so I can't tell you that I did. But… check with Fleur or Viktor if you don't believe me."
"I believe you. Thanks, Harry," he said, shaking his head and continuing off with his friends.
Harry managed to confirm in passing that both Fleur and Viktor had definitely heard from their headmasters, so now it was just down to how he would survive—maybe even fight—a dragon.
How was he going to fight a dragon?!
He still didn't have a great idea by lunchtime. On the way out, a gruff voice called, "Potter!" He turned to find Moody clomping over to him, having left the staff table early and seemingly waited for him outside the doors. "Walk with me. You can catch up to your friends."
Nonplussed but used to the teacher's abrupt manner, he waved to the others as they cautiously left him to walk with the teacher. "Yes, sir?"
Moody waited until they were around a corner and clear of earshot before asking, "You questioning your enthusiasm to be in this tournament, yet?"
"A little," he admitted.
"Good. Shows you're not stupid or crazy. Got a plan?"
"Not if I have to kill one," Harry sighed. "If I could put up a shield that could at least block a lot of fire, I might be alright. But I can't do what the dragon handlers could, and even they got burned a little."
"Good enough. Let's teach you," Moody said, gesturing him into his office.
"Don't you have class, sir?"
"Seventh-years. They know to practice dueling themselves. Better use of my time to keep you from becoming the Boy-Who-Became-Charcoal."
Not exactly knowing why he rated such attention, Harry was nonetheless glad for it. Moody showed him how to reinforce and angle his shield so it was stronger against dispersed energy attacks like fire, and then started casting fire spells at him, slowly ramping them up in intensity as he proved he could take it. They had to open a window in the office eventually, it was getting so hot inside: Moody's fire spells were strong. He didn't declare Harry ready until there were scorch marks on his desk, several feet away from where he'd been casting.
"Right. On you get. Don't get eaten. And…?"
Harry nodded, "Constant vigilance. Thank you, sir."
After spending Monday researching and practicing, and still feeling overwhelmed, Harry certainly didn't expect to be woken before dawn on Tuesday with the message, "Harry. It's happening. You have to get up and get ready." He wasn't sure how Colin Creevey had gotten tapped to deliver that rude awakening, but Harry was grudgingly impressed at how well the boy dodged his still-mostly-asleep energy whip.
It was probably good that Harry never had much of an appetite before a big test or other challenge, because he didn't have time to go to breakfast. As soon as he stumbled down to the common room in the uniform robes the tournament organizers had provided him (with his name emblazoned on the back), McGonagall was waiting to escort him out of the castle and into the forest. "You don't seem to have any questions about where we're going," she noted dryly.
"Why would they keep this a secret?" Harry fired back. "We're all going to die even with a day of preparation."
"Well… try not to," she didn't entirely disagree. After a long moment's consideration, she noted, "The organizers have done their best to make it not automatically fatal. You were warned this was for the oldest students."
"They're freaking out too," he assured her.
She led him to a large canvas pavilion tent that had been erected at the edge of what Harry knew to be the "clearing" with the convergence, but blocking his view of anything but temporary bleachers that had been set up around the space. The tent itself was done up in colors he'd seen at the Ministry. "Seriously, Potter, be careful," she told him, before leaving him to enter the tent on his own.
Inside, there was a small buffet table set with the breakfast foods that he hadn't had time to get. Fleur and Viktor were already there, as were their headmasters. It was good it was such a large tent, since Madame Maxime was able to stand (in the middle at least) without stooping, talking quietly with Karkaroff. His two fellow challengers had similar robes in black-accented orange that he didn't think was for stealth against the terrain of Muspelheim, unless it was a lot more fiery than he expected. "Is there an audience? Are they going to watch us somehow?" he asked the room.
"Big projection screen, just inside the portal," Viktor gestured vaguely into the clearing with a fork heaping with sausages, obviously himself not afraid to eat before a big activity. "Oona figured out old dark elf camera technology. Works on other worlds."
"You should eat, 'arry," Fleur gave him a kind smile, over her own plate full of fruit. "It might be…"
"Our last meal, got it," he nodded a bit grimly, and grabbed a couple of pieces of toast. Since it was about the only breakfast food his aunt could cook, he'd learned to eat it no matter how sick he was feeling.
Moments later, the tent opened again and Dumbledore entered, leading both Cedric and the Ancient One. Harry gave her a genuine smile of welcome, glad she'd been able to make it, and managed a bow over his toast. She nodded back, but conveyed without a word that she disapproved of him risking his life for a simple competition. Instead, she noticed Durmstrang's headmaster and said, "Ah. Igor. We had wondered where you'd gotten to."
The middle-aged man rolled his dark eyes and nearly snarled, "I haven't broken our deal. My feet have not touched Midgard since we agreed."
"And yet your hands still seem to fall upon the children of Earth," she said, looking significantly at Viktor.
"If you will not expand your search to the entire planet, what would you want done instead? Would you have them discover their gifts without training? Perhaps dig themselves into a hole only allegiance to Kamar-Taj can save them from?"
"So instead you offer them allegiance to any entity willing to proffer power," she sighed. Seeing that Viktor was finishing his mouthful of breakfast meats somewhat angrily, she said, "I apologize, Mr. Krum. Master Kaecilius spoke well of your meeting. Please remember that you have other options, should your fate remain in your own hands."
"Durmstrang is good education," he managed, after swallowing both his food and his angry retort. "I just want to race cars."
"Who's that lady? The headmaster didn't introduce her," Cedric asked, looking a little wild-eyed as he carefully selected only the nicest-looking items from the breakfast tray.
"I 'ad wondered, as well," Fleur added. The four challengers had found their own quiet side of the tent to talk while the headmasters verbally sparred on the other end.
"The Ancient One, Earth's Sorcerer Supreme," Harry explained. Fleur nodded, recognizing the name, and Cedric just looked a little more surprised. "You okay, Cedric?"
He finished a pristine strawberry and asked, "Why wouldn't I be? We're just going to go fight a dragon!" He reigned himself in and admitted, "Sorry, I'm on a pain potion to get through this. So I actually feel the best I have in a while. But it's a lot."
They managed to mostly finish their breakfasts before the crowd noise outside ramped up and Bagman and Crouch ("The old firm?" Harry wondered to himself) entered through the front of the tent. Behind them, Harry caught a glimpse of what must be the whole school (plus everyone that had come to Hogsmeade for the event) filling the bleachers, and the wavering form of the convergence in the light of the rising sun.
"Right! Everyone about ready?" Bagman asked. "We were going to do this one at a time, but I hear that we might not have time for that before the convergence closes. So instead, we just won't have a team in there to wrangle the other one. That should make it fair with four of you."
"You're speaking as if they know what they are doing," the Ancient One said with some distaste. "At least I see you've provided them with fireproof clothing." Harry glanced down at his tournament robes and appreciated that they did seem to have some runes woven in and he could feel a bit of magic in them. He regretted that he'd had to leave his cloak, pouch of tricks, and wand back in his room. Not that most of them would have proved a help. Maybe the broom.
He was beginning to realize that the problem with an invisibility cloak was that it wasn't useful as often as it should be if you didn't want everyone to know you had an invisibility cloak.
"Good point!" Bagman was saying. "Let's sum up quickly. Convergence out there goes to a valley in Muspelheim. There's a brooding mother dragon in a shallow cave at the end. We've put some golden eggs in with hers. Get one of the eggs and get back. How is up to you."
"Ze other one?" Fleur asked.
"Did you know dragons mate for life?" Bagman grinned. "Fascinating stuff. Males are a little smaller, or at least this one is. What am I forgetting?"
"The photography devices and scoring," Crouch stepped in. Rather than waiting for Bagman, he curtly explained, "The shiny black oblong orbs spaced along the valley are visually recording your actions, so we can observe from behind. At the end, you shall each receive a score based on your daring, good tactics, and magical proficiency. Since we are letting you go at once, you are not to deliberately interfere with or sabotage one another."
"Can we work together?" Harry asked after a moment. He had been waiting for Cedric to voice the question, as the resident Hufflepuff, but he was polishing off a shiny black plum as if he'd never seen one before. Hopefully whatever the pain potion was doing to give him the munchies wasn't going to throw him off enough to get killed.
The two Ministry officials looked surprised at the question, clearly expecting them to try to assassinate each other on the field rather than hug it out. "I… suppose so," Crouch admitted after Bagman shrugged. "Your scores will still be individual, so take care to let us see your best efforts rather than letting teamwork carry you."
Harry glanced over and got nods of agreement and relief from the other three, especially Cedric, who didn't seem to have expected a Gryffindor celebrity to make the Hufflepuff suggestion.
"If our judges could finish their breakfasts and head to their box, we'll call you four out in a moment," Bagman said, leading the adults out of the tent into the roar of the crowd.
They could hear his amplified voice playing to the crowd as Harry glanced at Cedric to see if he was going to take strategic control, as he had at the battle in Hogsmeade. Cedric, still loopy from his pain meds, had found a perfect pancake and was scarfing it down. Shrugging Harry stated, "Okay. Two dragons, mated pair. They can't fly and breathe fire at the same time. They will try to eat you. We need to get the mother from the nest long enough to snatch the eggs. I don't trust the fireproofing charms against a full blast, but hopefully it will keep us safe from spillover. I can do a shield that protects against fire, and I can probably snag the eggs with a whip if we get close. What can the rest of you do?"
"I vas planning to blind one," Viktor offered.
"Distractions," Cedric said through a mouthful of pancake. "I thought about transfiguring a dog?"
"I zink I should be all but immune to fire in zese robes," Fleur said. "I was going to try to put one to sleep."
Harry nodded, furiously calculating what he had to work with. He barely knew what magic Viktor and Fleur were capable of other than the little he'd seen them use. Cedric was Vanir, so there was no telling what wandless magic he'd mastered. After a few seconds he suggested, "What if Viktor and Cedric try to distract the father, while Fleur and I go in for the eggs? Hopefully Fleur can calm the mother enough for me to snatch the golden eggs from her nest. I doubt she'll actually care, since they're not really hers."
Since he'd folded in what they had planned anyway, nobody objected. And that plan was just in time, since Bagman's amplified voice was saying, "...and I present, our challengers!"
The four of them walked out of the tent and Harry finally got a look at the full tableau in the daylight. He wasn't sure whether the convergence had arrived explosively, a fire had spread and finally been extinguished, or dragon sallies at the portal had had detrimental effects, but the forest was cleared back over a dozen yards from the hole between worlds. Bagman hadn't been wrong: the gap they were counting on to get to Muspelheim and back was visibly smaller than it had been on Sunday evening. Through the ripple in space he could make out what seemed to be the surface of a dormant volcano: gray, jagged rocks and smoky, yellow sky.
And then there were the several-hundred people waiting to watch him hopefully not get eaten or burned to death, who began to thunderously cheer and applaud as the four of them exited the tent. It was a good thing he'd come to terms with his celebrity. It was a lot.
The stands were oriented facing them and the tent, backs to the unburned forest, so Harry assumed that the portal must be bi-directional, and that whatever kind of Svartalf-tech digital projector they'd set up was facing the crowd from the opposite side of the convergence. He generally preferred portals that were fixed to a vertical surface, so you didn't have to wrap your head around what it meant for one to just be floating in midair. Master Wong had showed them some teleportation tricks that summer, and he was starting to understand why they didn't trust sling rings to teens. It was very confusing.
"And… go!" Bagman's amplified voice ordered once they all got within ten feet of the portal, and Harry could vaguely spot him standing with Crouch and the four headmasters in a box opposite them with a good view of the projected screen.
"Catchphrase!" Harry joke-shouted, charging ahead, at least happy that this convergence clearly showed the other side so he knew he wasn't running directly at a dragon.
The other three were close behind him, and they all leaped through the tear in reality into a furnace. Just seeing it wasn't the same as experiencing it. The entire surface of Muspelheim really was like being in the caldera of a volcano that was just shy of erupting. Since his face and his hands registered a temperature greater than the rest of him, Harry had to assume the fire-protection charms were working. Without magic, just being in a place hotter than any reasonable location on Earth or Vanaheim probably would have exhausted them before long.
Harry ducked down to look underneath the corresponding hole in reality, and did think he saw the bottom of a pretty standard film-projection screen. Hopefully the stands were getting a good show. He glanced around and spotted the cameras—foot-long black lozenges hovering with dark elf technology and orienting to focus on them. They seemed to be spaced out to get a good look at anything that happened. The floating was cool. He absently considered asking Oona and Viktor if he could steal one to give to Tony. That would probably show the benefits of dating an alien.
The ground was fairly even, if coated with a thick carpet of lightweight volcanic dust. It didn't seem to affect his footing, jagged enough on a molecular level to provide traction. There was no easy way to tell where the sun was, since the sky was just one big yellowish cloud of dust that scattered any possible shadows. Mountains rose to either side, newly-forged of dark rock and strangely fragile-looking in their sharp spines.
Cosmology class had suggested that Muspelheim was a major source of Earth's conception of Hell, and he could believe it.
"Eyes up for big daddy," Harry suggested. "They must have pointed us at the right end, yeah?" As he got used to the cyclopean landscape, it was clear the distance ahead was greater than the space before either side started to rise into jagged escarpments.
"You're sure you're only fourteen?" Fleur asked.
"This isn't my first rodeo," Harry grinned, more at ease in the hellscape than was reasonable. "Shall we?" It was weird how actually being in a terrifying and life-threatening situation eased his nerves compared to the anticipation.
Following his lead for lack of plans of their own, Viktor and Cedric flanked left and right, their heavy feet leaving deep prints in the volcanic dust as the lighter Harry and Fleur headed straight at the diminishing end of the valley. The fact that they couldn't actually see the dragon yet began to play on nerves. Even with the strange footing it was an easy walk. There might not have been time for them each to go individually, and that was probably because of the distance. Harry was sure they'd been going for fifteen minutes, cautiously proceeding nearly a mile through the sulfuric haze. The hovering cameras paced them as they strode.
"I feel bad about the second date," Harry said, just to break the tension. "I really should have looked at the reviews before suggesting this place."
"Novelty is well and good," she joked back, "but I zink zis might not be ze right season."
"There was supposed to be a cool restaurant. Breakfast all day."
"Anybody can serve eggs. Ze real key is ze wine list."
"Dragon!" Harry realized, before he could continue the banter. They were coming up on where the flatland of the valley narrowed into a claw of a mountain trying to stab the sky. As promised, but slightly to their right, a rocky overhang protected an immense creature glowing with her own red-orange light. Was there any actual weather on Muspelheim, or did even mostly-elemental creatures still prefer protection from the sky? An immense, serpentine neck lifted as she glared at them. They were still at least a football field away, and stealth didn't really seem possible.
The dragons of Muspelheim, like all of its denizens that they'd been educated about, were a strange intersection of living creature and an elemental formed of fire and rock. While they knew from cosmology class and their studies of dragons in specific that there was some kind of biology within, on casual inspection the mother dragon was a titanic statue of black basalt lit from numerous points by seething flame.
And she was just spoiling for a fight.
With a roar of challenge, she uncurled herself from the cavelet that was her nest and planted one mighty foot after the other. At least the ground was solid enough that they couldn't actually feel the massive impacts, though they could hear them and see puffs of dust erupt from each step. "Close the distance!" Harry yelled, breaking into a run and hoping the others were following his lead. "We're sitting ducks for a fireball out here!"
Sure enough, a hellish light began to accompany the dragon's roar, and a burning flume pitched forth. It fortunately only had several yards of reach, but she swept it across the ground between them as if to mark territory, fusing the dust on the ground into hot glass. Cedric was rushing further right to take up position in the uneven wall of the valley, likely seeking materials to transfigure. Viktor, the most exposed on their left, began to gesture and form his magic, orange laced with purple, to weave the dust around him into some kind of obscured firing position. Harry and Fleur charged, banking a bit right to hopefully, like Cedric, have some of the valley wall to hide behind when the dragon started to attack for real.
Seeing the tiny beings weren't intimidated by her flaming display, the dragon stepped further out so she could get all four legs on the ground and ready to move. "Sleepytime?" Harry suggested to Fleur.
"I really 'oped we'd 'ave gotten closer!" she argued, beginning to move her hands through the air as they ran, gossamer trails of glamour streaming through her fingers as she wove some kind of spell.
And then an answering roar echoed across the valley, along with the rocketlike sound of a dragon in flight. They'd seen the baby dragon Norbert attempt it some years earlier, but a fully-grown dragon was significantly louder. Harry chanced a look above, and saw the father incoming from behind and to his left. Muspelheim dragons didn't really have wings, they simply manifested their internal fire along their backs, allowing them to soar like reptilian missiles. It made as much sense as anything about their physiology.
A lot of things happened at once.
With Harry and Fleur at a dead sprint, it only took them a dozen seconds to get close enough to the mother dragon to be in danger of her fire breath. Meanwhile, the father was streaking down and distracted from flanking them with his mate by Viktor flinging bolts of orange-and-purple energy at him. Meanwhile, Cedric was… somewhere, presumably working his transfiguration.
Harry and Fleur's dragon sucked up air like a bellows, the patches of flame on her exterior dimming as she moved all of her heat internally. Really hoping he was able to make his training with Moody count, Harry quickly wove perhaps the largest magical shield he'd done wandlessly before to protect him and Fleur, slightly behind.
They also dove behind an obsidian outcrop that was helpful cover near the wall of the valley.
The cone of flame was extremely akin to the blast of a space shuttle taking off, but Harry's shield held: the trick that Moody had taught him was that it was difficult to impart a ton of force to fire, so it was more important to layer the shield to make it work as a strong insulator. Still, without the resistance built into their robes, even the heat that washed around the shield would have been overwhelming.
They heard the father crash to the ground behind them. While he held his own shield against the torrent of fire and gave Fleur time to charge her enchantment, Harry was able to glance back to make sure the other side of the fight was under control.
The dragon looked like he was having trouble spotting who had been shooting at him, Viktor's cloud of dust seeming at a distance like just one more black boulder on the terrain. Before the dragon could make the distinction, a trio of baying, human-sized hounds forged of the local stone came bounding after it. Somehow, Cedric had even managed to get their eyes and mouths to glow like the Muspelheim natives as they ran to menace the dragon.
Tail whipping and claws raking at the constructed attackers, the dragon seemed to lose interest in Viktor for long enough to let him charge another shot.
In front of them, the mother's breath weapon petered out, leaving their rock cover glowing with heat and now just one more piece of obsidian slag in a veritable pond of the stuff. "Hot ground," Harry warned Fleur, probably needlessly: even if she didn't consider it, she was much more resistant than he was.
He broke left around the seared patch, away from the wall. He didn't think the dragon could breathe again immediately, so he was trusting in his ability to dodge in the open if she charged him rather than getting hung up on the terrain.
Behind, hair starting to become birdlike in her battle form, Fleur had managed to craft a mandala of illusory light. Unlike the precise arithmantic geometry of the magic taught at Hogwarts and Kamar-Taj, Fleur's spell was more like a piece of calligraphic art scribed with a scintillating rainbow. As the mother dragon's head began to track Harry charging obliquely toward her, Fleur unleashed her spell.
The magic didn't blast so much as unravel, flowing through the air and caressing the dragon across the face that was trying to figure out how to make a mouthful of Harry. That head cocked to the side and shook, as if trying to wake itself up, but the dragon listed to the side, its weight suddenly more than it could bear. It stumbled as if exhausted or drunk, making a choking grunt of confusion.
Harry didn't pass up the distraction. Ready to shield just in case it wasn't fully out, he sprinted around the dragon's bulk and scrambled for the nest. Sure enough, as soon as he bounded up the scree leading to the shallow cave, he spotted glimmers of gold amidst the oblong black orbs that were the actual eggs.
The mother was still shaking her head as if to clear it, but had sunk down to her knees. One baleful eye tried to focus on the threat to her eggs, and Harry saw Fleur weave her arms to tighten the effects of the spell. Not imminently in danger of getting burned to death, Harry threw out a magic whip, one-by-one fishing out the golden prizes and letting them fall to the dust next to him.
With the last one free, he almost reached down to just grab one, but then had a moment of realization: dragon eggs needed a lot of heat to hatch, and mama dragon butts were presumably skin-searingly hot. Testing gingerly, he confirmed the immense warmth still radiating from the gold (probably an alloy, honestly, since pure gold might deform under that much incubation).
They hadn't given them gloves. Each egg was roughly the size of a football. He could maybe wrap one in his robes and not burn himself, but getting everyone's… "I don't know 'ow much longer I can 'old it!" Fleur shouted at him.
"Sorry. Hot eggs!" he yelled back, working out a solution. While he'd been practicing to make his magical constructs sturdier—a whip into a solid pole—could he do the opposite? He carefully sketched a simple shield facing down and touching the ground, and tried to get its magical threads to relax. Gingerly kicking all four eggs onto the platform, when he pulled up, it sagged into a holographic bag. For a moment he was worried he was going to lose it, but he focused and it held. "Got it. Coming to you!"
As he ran back around the staggering mother dragon, he had a clear view of Viktor and Cedric tangling with the father. The smaller dragon was flailing about, purple light swarming over his blinded eyes. His tail whipped and he let loose gouts of fire, but both boys were moving. Only one of Cedric's dog constructs had survived, but it was letting loose frantic barks to try to draw the dragon off, and Viktor's peculiar purple-and-orange shield rose to catch a stray blast of flame.
"How long will mom stay out?" Harry asked, as Fleur began to run slightly-sideways, keeping it in view.
"I've never used zis on a dragon?" she shrugged, right hand still tracing mystical commands in the air to try to reinforce her spell as much as possible as they ran.
Viktor and Cedric could hardly miss them returning, especially with the enhanced silhouette of four large metal eggs clanking together in Harry's makeshift conjured bag. As they were getting close, Cedric made one forceful gesture to command his remaining hound to bay loudly and then sprint up the edge of the valley, barking the whole way. The father turned and tried to blindly give chase, clearing a path. The older boys joined in the run as Harry and Fleur got within range.
"Are ve done? Is a vin?" Viktor asked.
"Depends on how long they're out," Harry huffed, grateful to Dean for forcing him to do so much cardio. "I'm not going to assume it's safe to walk, though."
Harry was impressed at Cedric's pain potion, as the still-healing boy managed to pull ahead during the run back. Harry thought he might have won, if he weren't encumbered by the golden eggs and maintaining the spell to keep them in a bundle; at least it was easier than holding a rigid shield against gunfire. As it was, both Fleur and Viktor were out ahead of him, the clanking of the eggs pulling up the rear.
They were within easy sight of the convergence when the roars of anger came from behind them. Around them, the dark globes of the floating cameras were pacing along, withdrawing from their positions throughout the valley. "They weren't kidding about not having a lot of time!" Harry yelled, realizing that the hole between worlds was markedly smaller than it had started. "Go! Go! Go!"
With one last burst of speed, the four of them made the sprint and came piling back into Vanaheim, cameras clanking to the ground behind them as their power failed within a few moments of traveling into the electricity-proof world. On the other side of the hole, someone summoned the viewscreen through the rapidly-dwindling egress.
A very-angry mother dragon dropped out of the sky and roared, but after her hasty flight could not immediately charge another massive breath. By the time she had, the dragon handlers had coated the remaining convergence in shields.
"A wonderful showing from all of our challengers!" Bagman's voice rang out over the cheering stands. "Should we start awarding points?"
Harry was just enjoying the cool air and soft ground as he let his magical bag expire. He wasn't especially concerned with the points, but he would really appreciate a nap.
Chapter 55: Lord of the Dance
Chapter Text
Ultimately, the scoring for the first task was pretty even. Harry wasn't sure what he was expecting, and Bagman had indicated that they'd originally planned to just rate everyone on an arbitrary ten-point scale like in the Olympics. But the audience had seen the Ancient One having a profound conversation with Crouch about how that would allow bad actors (read: Igor Karkaroff) to make a farce of the scoring. So Bagman and Crouch rated each contestant from best to worst in their opinion, and the headmasters did the same, but didn't get to include their own student. That theoretically meant the highest possible score was 17, with three or four points for top marks.
In practice, it was kind of a farce anyway.
Bagman and Crouch had both given the "local" boys their top ratings, discounting Fleur and Viktor. Conversely, Dumbledore and the Ancient One were most impressed by Fleur's ability to bewitch a whole dragon. Maxime and Dumbledore had also given Harry high marks for leadership and the ability to shield against dragonflame. Cedric had received overall low ratings because it hadn't been entirely visible what he had done, hidden as he was in the rocks of the valley wall. Most of the headmasters ranked Viktor somewhat low, since he didn't really seem to have had a backup plan if his dark magic blinding spell hadn't worked.
Then Karkaroff had done the math and arbitrarily rated Fleur highest and Harry lowest to try to level out the scores of Viktor's rivals.
The final total for the first task was basically a dead heat with Harry at 13, Fleur at 12, Cedric at 11, and Viktor at 8. Karkaroff could have bent the scores even more in his student's favor if the Ministry officials hadn't rated Krum so low. But at least it still seemed like it was anyone's game to win. And Dumbledore had praised all of their teamwork, in the grand spirit of cooperation between realms.
Gryffindor was still thrilled that Harry had won, though.
Unfortunately for Gryffindor's desire to throw another rager and Harry's deep desire for a nap, only morning classes wound up being cancelled. McGonagall ushered them all out to lunch and their afternoon work, which was runes class for most of them. While he worked on tracing elder Futhark, Harry was absently using his other hand to mess with the golden egg he'd kept of the four. Bagman had claimed it was a clue to the next task, and Harry could tell that the surface was subtly faceted, though not to the extent of dragon eggs in a certain popular television series.
The dull murmur of pens scratching and quiet conversation was broken by a ratcheting click as Harry's exploration of the egg's surface caused it to suddenly rotate like a Rubik's Cube. "Oh, man," Dean said, quickly figuring out what had happened from where he was sitting immediately to Harry's left, "if Pinhead shows up I don't know you."
"It's a puzzle box!" Hermione barely managed to control the volume of her voice in her enthusiasm. Her fingers twitched with the urge to try.
"Later," Harry told them both, slipping the egg into his bag before the Slytherins in class noticed what was going on and figured out how to sabotage him.
Later became after dinner in the Gryffindor common room, as a small party befitting a school night was held for Harry's victory. "It was intense!" Dean was enthusiastic about it. "I mean, obviously you were there, but we should get the video so you can see what was going on from our point of view. And I want to just see it again in better lighting than trying to watch a projection screen through a portal in the middle of the morning."
Colin shook his head sadly, having been hovering near Harry as usual. "There's no recording," he explained. "We already asked Oona at dinner. She figured out enough of the tech to get the camera drones to fly around and broadcast, but the dark elves that made them didn't seem to have thought of playback."
"Huh," Harry realized, "they really are just getting ancient dark elf tech working over there, yeah? I guess those were, what, old combat recon drones? And she got those working on her own? Do you think Oona wants to work at Stark Industries?"
"I think Nokia would offer her a bunch of money if they knew what she could do, but Stark probably has cooler toys to play with," Colin figured. "But if you're hooking people up with Stark internships…"
"Got it!" Hermione announced, the egg suddenly snapping open as she manipulated one last ring of the puzzle. It was hollow inside, and Trelawney's Norn-augmented prophecy voice began to emanate, reciting a poem…
Which they could barely hear over the crowd noise or the frantic attempts to shush everyone. The room finally quieted down just in time to hear the final rhyme.
Your time is short within their court to save what they have taken
"Run it again," Harry suggested.
Hermione pushed the egg back together, twisted the puzzle the opposite way to lock it back into shape, then undid it again. The container splayed back open, but the poem didn't play again.
"Well crap," Dean said. "I think I heard something about Jotunheim."
"War with Asgard, definitely," Colin remembered.
"I think it was a poem about something beneath Jotunheim. And collections, somehow," Hermione frowned.
"If that was my clue for what to prepare for the next task, am I screwed?" Harry asked.
"I'll just ask Viktor not to open his yet," Hermione figured.
"Oh. Duh, right," Harry nodded. "I'll ask Fleur and Cedric. We can just do it as a group."
That didn't actually happen until before lunchtime on Sunday. Hermione had a quiz competition to get to after lunch, so was thrilled to be able to fit it in. The Midgardborn weren't going to be able to field much of a quidditch team, but they felt good about their chances at the academic challenges. Harry wasn't allowed to participate, as a tournament challenger: the little competitions throughout the year were to give everyone else a chance to compete at something.
Hermione, Harry, and the other three challengers posted up in a back corner of the library, having told their various entourages to let them work on their eggs in private: after the others were warned about the one shot to hear it and how it had been screwed up by the Gryffindor party, none were willing to risk any interruptions.
"It was easier the second time," Hermione admitted, having quickly solved Viktor's puzzle egg. "Ready?"
Everyone nodded, hunched with writing implements ready to copy down the poem. "Go for it," Harry told her, and she made the final twist to open the egg. Again, the magical recording of one of Trelawney's prophecies spilled out (how often did she even make them?).
Cold Jotunheim of frost and rime was once not quite so frozen
Beneath cold waves in ancient days a sunken void was chosen
Within installed a secret vault by the great Collector
And housed within through thick and thin an army of protectors
That world was sealed in icy shield upon the war with Asgard
A thousand years these volunteers entombed inside a graveyard
Yet live they still with endless will to guard their master's prizes
An open gate and it's too late the Fomor horde arises
They'll venture forth for things of worth to add to the collection
And you'll object as they select your prizes for protection
Please tarry not with second thoughts of treasure long forsaken
Your time is short within their court to save what they have taken
As the last sentence died out, Hermione nodded and said, "I'm pretty sure that was the same as Harry's egg. Everyone got it? Do we need to open the other two so we can be sure?"
They wound up opening Fleur's egg as well, just so they could make sure they'd recorded the prophecy correctly. When it confirmed that they'd gotten it, they saved Cedric's as a backup, unopened. "What's a Fomor?" Harry wondered.
"Our ancient enemies," Fleur frowned. "Zey were all supposed to be dead in ze Jotun wars. Sounds like some lived. I zink zey were supposed to be like Jotuns, only aquatic."
"Ve have heard of Collector at Durmstrang," Viktor nodded. "Powerful alien lord. He, vell, collects all kinds of things."
Harry nodded. "Guess he's been at it for a long time, then, if he had a collection on Jotunheim from before the war. How long ago was that?"
Cedric, seeming less happy about going to Jotunheim than Muspelheim, said, "Over a millennia. When the princes of Asgard were still babes."
"So there's a bunch of fish-giants that have been trapped in a vault for centuries," Harry frowned. "I guess we can assume they're not actually going to be rational and just let us negotiate for our stuff back. I wonder what they're going to steal? I guess keep your valuable magic items on you."
"Hopefully they come to Hogwarts, where we can protect things," Hermione figured. "If they can get to Earth, they'll probably steal the Iron Man armor or something."
"Tony would be so mad," Harry rolled his eyes. "I gotta figure it won't be that. If anything really important goes missing, they're not going to leave it up to us four to get back. I hope."
"Ve should prepare for cold. Underwater. Fighting giants," Viktor summed up.
"I really am curious what zey 'ave zere," Fleur said. "I know ze second-last line says we should not try to take ozzer zings… but perhaps zey simply 'ave old treasures stolen from our peoples zat we would want to recover?"
"It doesn't really give us a good idea of when this is going to happen," Harry frowned. "Do you three want to start coming to our practices? We do exercise, wandless magic, martial arts, that kind of thing. We could probably start adding swimming in the lake. The really cold lake." He shivered at the thought of the training they'd be doing.
There were vague noncommittal statements from all three. Viktor seemed the most likely to show, just so he could spend more time with Hermione. Harry hadn't asked how their dating was going, but she seemed quietly happy. Fleur was more standoffish about it. Harry wasn't sure what that relationship was, but wasn't really stressing about it: even his teen hormones knew that getting hung up on an older girl that lived on a different planet wasn't really likely to work, long-term. Cedric had a lot going on with his own friends and house, so even if he wanted to hang out with a bunch of younger Gryffindors, he'd be dragging an entourage.
That afternoon, Hermione and Padma put in an amazing academic performance, but they and the other brainy Midgardborn just weren't a match for the deep bench of upper-years that Ravenclaw was able to field for the Vanir team. The first quidditch match was upcoming the next weekend, and it might actually be more interesting: since nearly all of the members of the house quidditch teams were Vanir, nobody could agree on which students would represent Hogwarts. If they couldn't agree on an "all-star" lineup, they might wind up giving the win to one of the other teams (made up of everyone with the slightest ability to ride a broom).
McGonagall, Snape, and Flitwick were mediating a multi-way argument about who was the best possible seeker for the team between Ginny, Draco, and Cho as Harry was getting ready to leave the great hall to let the staff get dinner set up after the academic match. Before he could head out, McGonagall spotted him and left the argument. Without preamble, she asked, "Potter! I almost forgot. Who's your date for the Yule Ball?"
He shrugged and admitted, "I was just going to go stag and see how it went. Maybe hang out." Sirius had been telling him a bunch of "going stag" jokes involving his father, and it just kind of sunk into his vocabulary.
She corrected, "Oh, no, you'll be seated at the high table with your date. And the challengers have to lead the first dance." Seeing his eyes widen, she asked, "You do know how to dance?"
"Uh. Maybe? This is… Vanaheim dancing?"
She closed her eyes to hang onto her emotional control, lips moving slightly as she counted to ten, then opened them and said, "Very well. I'll have to teach a class for those that don't know how to dance. I don't know why Albus didn't think of that. Get a date."
"Fleur, want to go to the Yule Ball with me?" Harry asked, before McGonagall could stride off. The elf had very good timing, having been walking out of the great hall at just that moment.
She considered for a moment before saying, "I accept." She gave Harry a faint smile then continued on with barely a delay in wherever she'd been going.
"Very well," McGonagall nodded. "At least that will save us two places at the high table…"
And before anyone was really ready, Yule was upon them.
On top of his actual classes and normal extracurricular activities, Harry had spent the month learning to dance and to swim in freezing water. Vanir dancing was different enough from Earth's ballroom styles that it would have tripped him up if he'd had any actual dancing training. Instead, he'd probably wind up doing something really wrong if he ever had to go to a formal dance on Earth, now that he'd been trained in the Vanir style. Once he started treating it like a video game and let it sink into his muscle memory, he got a lot better at it.
The cold-water swimming was harder. They'd worked out some personal warming magic that should work off of Vanaheim, but it did little more than take the edge off. At least it seemed like the water on Jotunheim didn't get some special power to be colder than ice on Earth or Vanaheim, so it wouldn't be dramatically worse than the nearly-frozen water of winter in Hogwarts' lake. It was still really easy to cramp up, and problematic to fight in. Their Kali-like martial arts style did not translate to trying to swing through water, where thrusting attacks had to displace less material.
Fleur, Viktor, and Cedric did come to the exercises a few times, but the entire study group admitted later that the frigid temperatures took a lot of the salaciousness out of seeing the attractive older students in swimwear.
Eventually, a few weeks and a few more underwhelming realm vs. realm competitions later, it was time for the Yule Ball.
Harry had to admit, he looked kind of sharp. Vanaheim "dress robes" had resisted being informed by the strange evolution of men's formalwear on Earth, so were basically dailywear robes in much nicer materials and brighter colors, with a slightly unusual cut to them following some fashion that Harry trusted Madame Malkin to navigate for him. He'd gone with Christmas colors: primarily red robes with green accents to match his eyes, and gold embroidery to give the red a Gryffindor vibe. They were snazzy.
They were perhaps not as snazzy as Ron's strange foray into what looked like purple drapes, but it wasn't like he had a sense of Vanir fashion. Ron didn't seem thrilled, however, but he'd also been pretty reticent to learn to dance. It took Harry a weirdly long time to remember that Ron had been worried about the robes his mother had gotten him. Strangely, none of the other Weasleys had it as bad.
"See you both at the dance? Do you get to hang with us at all?" Dean asked, as he headed out of the Gryffindor dorms with Hermione and Harry, Neville slightly behind since he'd been having trouble lacing up his robes correctly. The other two boys were meeting Padma and Luna at the Ravenclaw dorms, while Ron and Seamus waited for the other girls to get ready (Seamus was taking Ginny as a friend, and Parvati was slightly-grudgingly going with Cormac McLaggen).
"Hopefully after the dinner and first dance?" Harry shrugged. He wasn't totally thrilled that this formal obligation had been sprung on him. As he and Hermione descended the stairs, he mentioned, "You look really nice, by the way."
While dress robes for men were very different from tuxedos, the robes for women were much more comparable to women's gowns from Earth. Hermione had gone with a close-fitting backless dress in periwinkle blue that showed off how slender she was. She hadn't quite been brave enough to try high heels, knowing she'd have to travel many flights of steps. "Thanks!" she grinned. "You clean up well, yourself."
"Hopefully I fastened it up right," he nodded in acknowledgement.
They saw Viktor waiting at the foot of the stairs as it exited to the main floor, so Harry hung back to give them a moment and avoid the other students milling in the entry hall assuming he and Hermione were together. Viktor gave him a nod as he took Hermione's hand and walked her off. The Bulgarian didn't look bad himself in an actual tuxedo: the Durmstrang boys had evidently decided that Earth formalwear would be sufficiently exotic, and it wasn't like they inherited fashion choices from Svartalfheim.
Speaking of elven fashion choices, Harry managed to get to the doors just as the Beauxbatons contingent entered. Like their temporary residence, they'd all leaned heavily on the power of illusion to transcend what was possible with real cloth. Harry was going to find a lot of similarities to Panem upper-class outfits when he finally got around to seeing The Hunger Games the next summer. If they weren't all impossibly gorgeous, there'd be no way they could pull it off. It was like one of those high-concept fashion shows.
Except Fleur. Catching annoyed looks from her classmates, she'd gone deliberately minimalist, wearing a simple and slinky silver-gray sheathe dress. Well, up close, there was an impossible intricacy to the subtle patterning of the fabric, catching the light almost as if the entire thing was an intricate braid of metallic threads. But she'd have fit in at any party or club in the galaxy.
Harry remembered his conversation with Coulson, where he'd said something similar about Natasha.
"Wow," Harry said, knowing that his mental shields were down as he took it all in, and not at all sure what she was picking up from him, but idly noting that her dress shifted from silvery to gold to match his own robes as he approached. He barely remembered to offer his arm for her to take.
As she took it, the connection again went both ways, and he could pick up on the delicious thrill Fleur was feeling managing to get more attention than her schoolmates without their extravagance. But there was also a nervousness about being seen in such a formal situation with a human, particularly one as notable as Harry. But she did seem to think he also looked nice. "Zank you," she said. "Shall we join ze ozzers?"
They moved over to meet Hermione and Viktor by the door, and Cedric showed up with Cho Chang a minute later. She also looked lovely, and Cedric extremely handsome, though he still didn't seem to be completely over his wounds as he used the cane for balance and had a tiredness behind his eyes. Harry wasn't going to ask whether he was going to be able to dance; the guy must have been really injured if he was still hurting months later. Maybe nerve damage? Harry wasn't sure how to bring up that if magical healing didn't know how to fix it, there were specialists on Earth that might be able to. Instead, he simply said, "Cedric. Cho. You ready?"
"You'd all better be," McGonagall said, sweeping out in her own matronly dress with a pattern to it that seemed based on Scottish tartans. "We're opening the doors. You'll enter once everyone else is seated and take your seats at the high table."
They were precisely positioned just off the doorway where they thought they'd be going in first, but instead got to be rubbernecked at by everyone entering. Harry got a lot of jealous looks that he was with Fleur. But he was surprised that she got a similar number of jealous looks, presumably due to being with him. He probably had written off more of the school for dating than made sense. Maybe he'd rectify that in fifth year.
The flood of hundreds of students finally finished, and they were able to enter the winter-themed wonderland that the great hall had been turned into. Somehow they'd packed enough tables in for everyone, even though they'd replaced the normal long tables with smaller round ones that could seat maybe eight at a time. Harry waved as he spotted his friends taking up a table on the left side of the room, as close as possible to the usual Gryffindor seating. He crossed to the high table, which had also been adjusted into a V shape to make space for several more seats. In addition to the challengers and their dates, and spots for Karkaroff and Maxime, Bagman was present with some pretty woman who was too young for him, Percy Weasley and Penny Clearwater instead of Crouch, and…
"Master Wong?" Harry said, surprised to see the man, apparently there instead of the Ancient One. He was busily catching up with Professor Sprout.
"Harry," Wong nodded. "The Ancient One… doesn't really do parties."
"Makes sense. Glad you could make it." They moved down a couple of spots and wound up sitting next to the graduated former prefects. "Percy! Penny! Good to see you both. No Mr. Crouch?"
"He was not feeling up to it, so was kind enough to give us his spot," Percy explained. Somewhat conspiratorially, he added, "His son passed some years ago, and his wife did not last much longer, so he does not like to celebrate the season these days."
"Hah. Passed," Karkaroff chuckled, overhearing. "That's a kind word for it."
Percy frowned, but said, "Died in Azkaban, then. Mr. Crouch is a great man. Few others would have had the fortitude to see justice done to their own son, when his crimes were discovered."
"Can you die in Azkaban?" Harry checked. "Aren't you just frozen in time?"
Karkaroff gave a yellow-toothed grin and elaborated, "If you piss off the jailers enough, yes. Barty Junior always had a way with people."
"Igor, please," Dumbledore cautioned from the apex of the table. "Perhaps these shocking revelations are an after dinner topic?"
The dinner was excellent, the Dumbledore-approved small-talk less so. Harry would have much preferred to be sitting with his friends, rather than squeezed among the adults. How did the teachers deal with this seating arrangement every day? If it wasn't already awkward enough to talk to a bunch of his teachers, he was having to face out over the entire student body and crane his neck awkwardly to talk to people down the table in either direction.
As they finished up, he was interested to ask Karkaroff to spill some more tea, but the meal went directly to the dancing portion. "If everyone could please step over to the edges of the room while we clean up?" Dumbledore suggested. As soon as the middle of the room was clear, the teachers began flicking their wands to clear the space down to the stone, tables evaporating as their conjurations ended and their place settings whisked off into an antechamber. McGonagall did something complicated to conjure a smooth surface as a dance floor atop it. "Let's make some space for the band," the headmaster suggested to the people on the high table, and then caused it to fold up out of the way. A half-dozen musicians began to levitate instruments out into the space.
McGonagall was looking at them as the musicians took their position, and, swallowing down his worries that he'd screw this up (and entering a level of waking meditation to hopefully protect him from being overwhelmed by being in closer contact with Fleur during the dance), he asked her, as gallantly as he could, "Miss Delacour, may I have this dance?"
"Mais oui," she agreed, letting him take her hand and lead her to the dance floor. His mental shields held with the help of focusing on his dance moves. Hermione and Viktor followed his initiative, with Cedric and Cho not far behind. The rector nodded approvingly.
The music started, and they danced.
It wasn't nearly as difficult as Harry had expected. It was similar enough to ballroom dancing that he had a basic idea, but the Vanir styles were so distinct from dances he'd seen on TV that he wasn't fighting his own wrong mental impression of what to do. Rather than the most common Earth ballroom dances where they would hang onto one another and move as a couple, there was a lot of moving together, touching, twirling, stepping away, and circling. Harry wasn't sure if his meditation would hold if he just had to grab Fleur and waltz around the floor, but this was doable. And it was kind of fun: being a video game kid, he'd obviously taken some time at dance and other rhythm games, and if he just visualized points and combos stacking up as he put his feet in the right spots, it more or less worked.
The three couples only had to be alone on the floor for about half a song, before the adults started motioning others to join in and fill up the floor. "Band's pretty good," Harry commented to Fleur. They were playing very folk-style melodies, rather than the classical music he'd been assuming. And they had a full Earth-made drum kit, as well as acoustic instruments mostly of a modern Earth style (albeit amplified magically).
"Zis is interesting," she agreed as she twirled and moved toward him. "Alfheim music is… experimental."
"Like prog rock experimental, or theremin experimental?" Harry checked, having one weird musical education from Tony.
"We do 'ave zeremins, oui," she agreed, both of them surprised that the other one used the term.
"Huh. I guess you would have electricity," Harry realized as he spun her. "I'd been taking for granted that all the other realms were high fantasy."
"We do not use it as much as Midgard," she confirmed, "but we 'ave it in our 'omes. Mostly 'ydropower."
They had more interesting small talk about their realms in fits and snatches as they danced, and made it for three more songs before Harry asked, "Punch?"
"Please," she nodded, walking off of the dance floor with him before another song started. "Per'aps outside? It is getting very warm in 'ere."
"I think they set up the flower garden near the entrance as a hangout space?" Harry said. "Meet you out there?"
Harry didn't spend a ton of time thinking about the garden in front of the castle, which was nestled into the corner of one of the wings and had footpaths between, and benches for sitting. But it did seem a lovely date spot, especially since the herbology classes spent a lot of time cycling out the various types of flowers, and there were currently quite a few that bloomed in the winter. Most were species native to Vanaheim, and useful in potions, but they still flowered nicely.
Fleur was admiring a particularly-intensely-blue tulip-style flower with a bit of peppermint smell that was a key component of the calming draughts that Banner had been taking the previous year (Harry had eventually worked it out). She'd produced a shawl from somewhere that matched her dress, so she wasn't completely underdressed for being outside at the beginning of winter. And some kind soul had put magical warming spells throughout the garden that kept it well above freezing for the moment.
Harry handed her a glass of punch and they started to stroll. After a few moments of silence, rather than continuing their conversation about Alfheim technology, he asked the thing that he was really curious about and hadn't wanted to talk about where they could be overheard. "So… do the other elves dislike you because you mess with them, or do you mess with them because they don't like you?" There was probably a more politic way to ask the question, but it just popped out.
Eyes widening in slight shock at the audacity of the question, she admitted, "Ze latter. Zey are never going to be my friends, so why not tweak zeir noses?"
"Is there something about elf social relationships I don't get?" he wondered. "I mean, you seem pretty cool. It's hard to believe you have a hard time making friends."
That drew a small smile and she explained, "You said you are famous at 'ome, no? What if you went to a school wiz people zat wanted ze same fame, but could not 'ave it?"
"I mean, I'm friends with Ron," it just slipped out. He was trying to be a lot nicer about Ron. They had been getting along pretty well all year. Fortunately, he didn't think that Fleur would tattle on him like Parvati had. She did suppress a giggle, obviously having picked up something of the social dynamic in Gryffindor. "But, yeah, I guess Draco is kind of after me because he wants to be the most famous, bestest boy in the school."
"Right. I do 'ave friends, of a sort, back at Beauxbatons. But ze students zat came are ze… most competitive." She took a moment to smell a red winter rose used in certain healing poultices. "I guess you don't know who I am?"
"We haven't really spent a lot of time on Alfheim in cosmology class," he apologized, not really having done a deep dive on elf politics when he was learning about them from Hermione. "They probably talk about it in cultural studies, but I'm not taking that elective."
She nodded, and sadly explained, "You 'ave been calling me Fleur, because it is a convenient translation of my name into French."
Harry didn't really have enough French without his implant to be certain, but he'd heard enough of it and knew enough Latin to guess, "Um… fleur I think is flower… Delacour is of the… core… court?"
"Oui," she nodded. "At a certain level of royalty, we 'ave only titles. I will be called by a different name when I marry, and am no longer ze 'flower' of ze Seelie court."
"Wow. I thought it was bad that nobody around here calls me Harry Potts," he boggled, following her along. "Do you… have a name you'd rather be called?"
That got a genuine smile, morning breaking on a winter's night. "I do not, but zank you for asking." She considered and admitted, "I would not, per'aps, reject a nom de guerre I 'ave earned."
"We'll work on it," he said. "So you're… are you an elf princess?"
"Not quite so 'igh. My parents are in ze royal line, but it would take many deaths for me to ascend ze Seelie zrone."
"So… does your court rule for half the year, and then the Unseelie take over for the winter?" Harry asked. It had been bugging him.
"No. Ze Seelie court 'as been practically ze only court for many centuries now. Ze Unseelie is just a… political movement, zese days. Zey became linked wiz ze dark elves, and zat cost zem long-term power."
"Got it. So you're basically a duchess. You only have a title, not a real name. And it's hard to make friends with all the elves that… what, wish they were in line for the throne?"
"A reasonable summary," she allowed, settling to a stone bench under an arbor near the end of the garden.
He sat next to her and said, "And I thought I had it rough. Wait, did you only agree to date me because I'm a celebrity and might get it?"
"It was a factor, I admit. I 'ave not actually asked. It's 'ard for you?"
"I've kind of come to terms with it," Harry shrugged. "It probably helps that my friends don't really care. Well… I feel pretty weird that my aunt and her boyfriend are so much richer than my friends' parents. But they've been cool about it. Mostly it's just…" he tried to figure out how to explain it, settling on, "...the expectations, you know?"
"What do zey expect of you?"
"All kinds of things. Tony's had me making friends with Viktor to try to recruit him. And he's basically got me suited up for armor as soon as I finish growing. That's if I don't join the air force like Rhodey wants. And they're really going to be mad when the Ancient One explains that, no, what she has planned for me is totally different. Plus, I don't even know what kind of nonsense Dumbledore is preparing me for, because he won't tell me."
"What do you want to do?" she asked. He barely noticed that she was sitting closer to him. It was probably for warmth, anyway, right?
"Like… what if I decided I wanted to make video games? Or be an extreme sports star? Or manage Dean's art business? Or Hermione and I go to Oxford and become English professors or something?"
"I don't know what most of zat means, but… what would your guardians say?"
"Well… uh, my aunt would be overjoyed I was doing stuff that wasn't as dangerous as what I do here, even if it was extreme sports. And Tony would think most of that was pretty cool, probably. And Rhodey would be a little disappointed if I didn't join the Air Force, but I think he's going to have to be disappointed about that anyway. Who knows what the Ancient One thinks? She'll probably just smile mysteriously and say, 'I expected nothing less.' And who knows what Dumbledore wants, really?"
"It sounds like you 'ave more options zan you zought."
"Huh. Yeah. Maybe. And I'm probably going to do one of the things they expect, but because I want to, damnit." He realized he'd been pretty loud, succumbing to teen angst. Worse, he'd forgotten that he was trying to make her feel better. "You… uh… no chance you're in the same boat, huh? That your parents would be okay if you decided you wanted to… work at a bank, or something?"
She shook her head sadly, explaining, "Ze flower of ze court must be… pollinated." She made a disgusted face. "You see, I am not too closely related to ze heirs."
"No!" Harry gasped, quietly. "You have to marry back into the core royal bloodline? So you could become a princess?"
"Ze royal consort 'as… less power zan a princess. But, oui, zat is what my parents 'ope."
"Are you already engaged… er… betrothed? Have you met the princes? Do they… are they cool?"
"I am not, yet, but zat is not for lack of my fazzer's planning. I ' ave met zem. Zey… 'ow do you say… suck."
"But you're so awesome!" Harry told her, mad on her behalf. For all that he was the Boy-Who-Lived and Tony Stark's potential heir if he and Pepper didn't manage to self-destruct, nobody had ever intimated that they wanted to pick Harry's girlfriend for him. "Is that why you joined the tournament? So they'd see you?"
"I am afraid… zat my parents will never see me," she admitted. "I joined ze tournament for myself. So I would know zat I 'ave more worth zan as ze court's flower."
At some point, they'd started holding hands without even realizing it, leaning into each other. The empathic channel was open, and all the little bits he'd been learning about her feelings piled together. He'd unconsciously been drifting into teen resentment of his privileged life, but she had it so much worse. He'd talked to her less than he'd liked, but he knew that she was smart, funny, talented, and deserved so much more than a political marriage for her pretty face. "I see you," he said, quietly and simply. Because he did.
"And I, you, 'arry Potts," she smiled. Had her face always been that close to his? Had he even been shielding at all the last few minutes? Was it weird that, with him completely open to her, she just looked like her actual self: the age-slowed elf girl that was seventeen but looked closer to fifteen?
Of course, what was, in hindsight, two seconds away from a passionate kiss was interrupted by two gruff voices coming down the aisle.
"This has 'trap' written all over it!" Karkaroff's voice sounded.
"Then don't go," Snape's silky baritone chided.
"Are you going to go?" the Durmstrang headmaster asked.
"I have already written that I would certainly attend, but my presence at Hogwarts prevents me from quickly responding to an invitation with such short notice."
"Damnit. If the summons comes soon, I have the same excuse… but should it come after the tournament…"
"You're going to do what you see as best. Why are you involving me?" Snape wondered, having stopped directly in front of them.
Karkaroff, looking slightly crazed, explained, "You always had his favor, but we must be in the same ship, now? Both traitors? If I go… is it only to my death?"
"We are not in the same ship," Snape raised a pitying eyebrow. "I was not the one that named names."
Karkaroff made a sour face, remembering, "Yes. You had Albus to speak for you. Would you have made the same choice as I, without his patronage?"
"That is, fortunately, one of the few memories I don't have to replay hoping for a better result."
"Will it be this summer? Have you gotten anything other than the letter?"
Snape shook his head, "I cannot share other intelligence, but I think you have seen the same things I have. The letter will reveal the location only in time for you to scramble to attend. Do or do not. I cannot make your decision for you, Igor."
"I thought we were on the same side, thrilled to be done with it all," Karkaroff snarled, stalking away. "I should know better than to ask the opinion of a spy."
"You should," Snape said, quietly. He cast a suspicious glance toward the bench, then slunk off down a different path out of the gardens.
"We are… invisible?" Fleur asked, as soon as Snape was out of earshot.
"Sorry. I… uh… I have a cloak?" Harry admitted, realizing that he'd reflexively wrapped himself and Fleur in the folds of his family heirloom rather than be discovered. Wrapped her tightly, as the case turned out to be. His arm was fully around her, pulling her close enough that the cloak was able to fall to cover them both.
"It would 'ave been very 'elpful wiz ze dragons," she smiled. He could feel it, rather than see it, since her face was clutched right next to his. As the thrill of spying on Snape ended, he realized that he was in closer contact to her than he'd ever been before, but he wasn't being assailed by their empathic connection. Maybe they'd just figured out everything they needed to know about one another. "It is warm under zis cloak. Perhaps… too warm."
He hastily withdrew his arm, allowing the cloak to retract and hide itself. The cold of Yule bit more, suddenly losing the captured body heat of another person. "Sorry…"
"Do not apologize. I did not mind. But… well… you understand why we cannot tryst?"
"Totally," he agreed. They were still very close together, even though he'd dropped his arm. "I mean I'm… I'm not trying to start anything. I think you're cool. But you're from another planet, and I know you have other things to deal with, and…" He was rambling. Why was he rambling?
"I'm glad we understand each ozzer," she interrupted him. And then she was giving him a quick, soft, mindblowing kiss. "I zink I'm going back to my room for ze night. See you after ze 'olidays, 'arry."
"You too," he agreed, in a daze, as she left him in the gardens.
Chapter 56: Fast and Furious
Chapter Text
"What was the deal with the band?" Harry asked as they took the train the morning after the Yule Ball. "I thought they were just kind of, like, folk performers, but when I came back in they were doing Metallica and Rolling Stones covers." With the magical amplification and full drum kit, they'd even managed to capture a lot of the rock sound as opposed to what Harry expected from a purely acoustic session.
"They're the Weird Sisters," Neville explained. "I guess those are Midgard bands? The Weird Sisters are all Midgardborn. My gran thinks they're too nontraditional, but the real conservatives hate them so she let me go see them once at a festival."
"Your granny is an interesting lady," Dean grinned. "So how'd it go with Fleur?" Harry had hung out for a half an hour after coming back in from the gardens, but hadn't really had much time to talk with everyone before they crashed out to bed.
"I thought this was the dude compartment," he countered. It was just the five boys from their dorm room packed in while all the girls from the study group were next door. "The girls talk about their dates last night, we talk about… football or something."
"So, good, huh. Got it," Dean nodded, and Harry blushed a little. "What about you, Seamus?"
"What?" the Irish boy nearly squeaked. "I was just hangin'. Ye all saw me."
"You did kind of go for punch for a long time after Harry got back and told us where he'd been," Neville observed. "You didn't happen to go on a walk in the gardens with someone yourself, did you?"
"No comment," Seamus said, realizing he'd been made. "If I was, it would be wi' someone who's still in the closet, right?"
"Got it," Dean nodded with a grin. "We're just happy you found someone, man."
"It's early, yet. If anythin' happened. Which it didn't."
Ron had been quiet and, in the lull of conversation he asked, "Harry. You know Krum best, right? Do you… think he's taking advantage of Hermione? He's so much older."
"About the same age gap as me and Fleur," Harry shrugged. Viktor had just turned 18 late in the summer, and Hermione had her birthday early in the school year so they were only slightly more than three years apart. Similarly, Fleur would be 17 until sometime in the spring, which seemed about appropriate for her name. Or title, as the case may be.
"But that's like… you're the bloke, right?" Ron shrugged.
"Aren't you the one scared of her mind control powers?" Dean ribbed him. "Shouldn't you be worried she's bewitched poor Harry with her elf magic?"
"Ah, double standards," Seamus piled on. "None o' ye asked if I was wi' an upperclassman. Maybe I'm gettin' taken advantage of?"
"You've never been taken advantage of in your whole life," Neville told him. Seamus just grinned at the complement.
"But no," Harry got back to the question Ron had originally asked, "I don't think Viktor would do anything with Hermione that she wasn't totally comfortable with. And, if he did, Parvati and Lavender would tell us about five minutes after they found out. If they didn't run off to kill him themselves."
"Right. Right," Ron glanced at the wall that separated them from the girls, who were discussing their night. "It's just… he's a dark wizard. What kind of future can they have?"
"One where he lives on Earth," Harry shrugged. "At least she's not dating elf royalty that has to marry a prince or something on another planet." He shook his head as if to remind himself he wasn't looking for a long-term relationship. "Guys. Chances are that none of us are going to marry anyone we date in school. You gotta let everyone figure this dating thing out."
"And you're with Lavender," Neville reminded Ron quietly.
"Yeah," Ron sighed. As an afterthought, without much enthusiasm, he added, "And she's great."
The other boys shared a worried look. They'd thought they'd dodged the Ron/Lavender/Hermione drama for a good long while after the "permanent" pairings were chosen at the end of the previous year. Already uncomfortable enough with the limited sharing they'd already done, and not feeling like trying to counsel Ron on his relationship difficulties, the boys just kind of tacitly agreed to change the subject. Harry asked, "So… were Snape and Karkaraoff Death Eaters?"
"Probably?" Ron nodded. "Would explain why Snape's such a git."
"And why the Ancient One doesn't like Karkaroff, maybe," Harry remembered.
"Why?" Dean asked.
Harry explained, "I heard them talking about getting an invitation that they were worried was a trap. Sounded like maybe the same group that attacked the World Cup."
"I'll ask my gran," Neville volunteered.
"Huh. Yeah. Sirius might know, too," Harry realized.
"I'm not sure," his godfather admitted, when Harry asked that question as they were leaving the train station, a few hours later. "I mean, probably. But I missed the other trials after the war, for obvious reasons. Maybe Andi and Ted will know."
"Oh, yeah? Are they coming?" he asked as they walked up to the green-flaring bonfire. This year, he was following a different crowd than his usual path with the Midgardborn that ultimately led to the Goblin Market and back out into London. Nearby, a bald, glasses-wearing man with darker skin was gawking at him, standing next to a burly, pale, and dark-haired man. He tried to ignore the celebrity attention. Now that he was more used to his status, he was oddly more cognizant of how many people watched him when he was out in public.
"Yeah, they're coming by for Christmas day. Watch your step," Sirius explained as they stepped into the fire and spun through the flaming void for a moment before Harry barely avoided sprawling on the flagstones in Diagonalt. "And Tonks the younger is living with me now, since I had the space and there was no point in her renting lodgings in town."
"Oh, yeah, I think you mentioned that," Harry agreed, collecting himself and beginning to roll his luggage after Sirius. He hadn't seen much of the city when they'd been there for the trial, but it looked like they weren't going too far from the Ministry.
The interesting thing about a city where transportation was mostly walking-based was how packed together everything was. Even the nicer houses were basically townhomes, shoved together without much in the way of a yard. Sirius led him up to a house that nonetheless took up a wide swath of the row it was on, black facade looming implacably across the street. "Welcome to number 12, Grimmauld Place," Sirius introduced him to the building, and Harry could feel the wards relaxing so he could safely enter.
"Is this where you were hiding out?" he asked as they entered the front door into a tight corridor with multiple rooms off of it and a spiral staircase visible at the end.
"Nah. Too close to people, and it wasn't safe. I was just glad after the trial I could hire professionals to clean this up. My mother… made some choices before she passed. Involving curses and booby traps."
"Ew. Wait, so your mother was a witch?" Harry asked, leaving his trunk in the small foyer and taking in that this was what the house looked like after it had been cleaned up.
"Well… kind of?" Sirius shrugged. "There's a line between being able to call up dark entities sometimes and actually binding yourself to them. My family's usually been careful to walk right up to that line."
"And it's only after you bind yourself that your magic gets purple in it?"
"Or if you've used a lot of dark spells," Sirius agreed. "Worried about Viktor?"
"Ron is. But he's nice and he's making Hermione happy, so I'm trying not to be hardcore about it or anything."
Sirius frowned and admitted, "I'm usually one to say any hint of purple in your magic is a sign someone's a terrible person… but, yeah, he seems like a good kid, and it would suck if you have to put him down someday. Anyway! Let me give you the tour…"
The house was huge and mazelike, built as if someone had barely heard of hallways and resented them. The tour was mostly a running litany of the things Sirius had removed : lots of grotesque taxidermy, curio cabinets full of cursed magic items, and furnishings that matched the black decor only because they'd never been cleaned. One thing he'd kept was an immense tapestry that showed the vast family tree… and how few living members it had left.
"Took me a while to find someone who could repair it," Sirius explained. "My mother had taken to burning off the names of anyone she disapproved of, including Andi and me."
"Because you went to prison?"
"Because I didn't join the Death Eaters. She probably liked that I went to prison. She wasn't a good person. It's why I basically lived with your grandparents for most of my years at Hogwarts."
"That sucks," Harry said, browsing the tapestry. He found the bottom corner where the living family appeared. There was Sirius, the Tonkses, Draco and his mother, the crazy cousin Bellatrix, and… "Hey. I'm on here!" He traced the branch up and said, "Oh, right, great grandma Dorea." Pepper had told him about her grandmother, who'd married in from the Blacks.
"Yeah. Mother burned her off as soon as I started associating with James."
Harry picked up what he was leaving off and asked, "But you made sure to add her and us back?"
"Good catch. I was going to wait to mention it until later but… I registered you as an heir. In case I don't manage to have kids of my own, I wanted to make sure the Malfoys don't inherit. You're after Dora."
"We're calling her that instead of Tonks?" Harry asked, trying to process being in line for another massive inheritance.
"Andi and Ted are around enough that calling her Tonks got confusing, so we compromised. Is this too much?"
He considered it and shrugged. "It's a lot. And it would have been if she wasn't first in line. I don't plan to move back here and join the Wizengamot."
"You'd be able to set up a proxy," Sirius dismissed that concern. "Besides! I plan to live another century and have a bunch of kids of my own. This is just insurance."
"How's that going, by the way?" Harry asked, mollified.
"Well I haven't met any elf princesses, but I've been getting around…"
As they finished looking at the house and catching up on their respective love lives, Sirius saved the kitchen for last and Harry was surprised to almost stumble over a stooped, wizened old man with an insane tuft of white hair and a patchy beard, wearing a frayed black housecoat. "Ah! The Potter brat! Another pretend heir! Probably wants his tea all special."
"That won't be necessary, Kreacher," Sirius interjected as Harry stood uncertain what to do about the unexpected resident. "I thought I told you to stay in your suite."
"Did you?" the old man asked, a picture of disobedience masked by senility. "My mistake. Good night, usurpers!" He took another evil look at Harry before shuffling off out the back of the room.
They waited a moment for him to be out of earshot before Harry asked, "Your butler's name is Creature?"
"Not spelled the way you're thinking," Sirius corrected. "Don't ever let him cook for you. He might poison you. Maybe unintentionally."
"So… you just have an old man who hates you living here?"
He shrugged helplessly, "He's worked here literally his whole life. I think it would kill him if I forced him out. He cleans… a little. Plus, if he's here I know he's not out plotting with Lucius how to kill everyone in between Draco and the inheritance."
"That doesn't really sound like a good reason," Harry insisted, not thrilled to be spending the holidays with a murderous manservant.
"I know. He wasn't this bad when I was little. He loved my brother. Sadly, he went crazy in the same way as my mother after being left alone here with her, and then without her. He has a portrait of her in his room that he talks to."
Harry hadn't really thought of Sirius as being soft in that way, but behind his dismissive words he picked up a sense that the old butler was the last piece of the Black heir's lost childhood that he had. "Okay. But I'm putting locking spells on my bedroom when I sleep."
Most of Vanaheim didn't celebrate Christmas, but Ted Tonks had kept it up with his family and Sirius had heard about it from his Midgardborn friends and was thrilled by the idea. He'd gone a bit overboard decorating the living room and very overboard on presents. At least he'd spoiled the three Tonkses as much as Harry. He'd also somehow managed to rendezvous with Pepper, or have a service do it, and Harry had his presents from Earth to open as well. He took that Tony had included something as a good sign.
That it was a really nice hardbound set of sci-fi novels featuring aliens let Harry know that Tony was not just going to let it go.
Of course, when he thought they'd finally climbed through the mountain of presents, Sirius said, "I have two more! Wait here."
He came back in a moment with two brooms that had bows on them. Well, calling them brooms was like calling high-end Japanese racing motorcycles "bikes" in that it was both correct and very inadequate. The wood was jet black, they seemed to have their bristles precisely oriented for aerodynamics, and they featured actual seats and footrests that seemed articulated so they could fold up tight and the broom could still fit into his pouch of holding.
"What in the world?" Andromeda asked.
Sirius grinned, "Special order. I worked with a little known broom crafter named Spudmore of all things. We call them Firebolts. Now, Harry, I know you don't really play quidditch much, and obviously Dora doesn't but these… well, actually, they'd probably be really good sport brooms. Old Hooch might ban them because they go too fast and turn too tightly. But they're meant for combat."
Harry had taken the one Sirius had handed him. With it in hand and Tonks admiring hers right next to him, he could tell they were subtly different from each other. Had Sirius somehow gotten them precisely calibrated for their individual builds (and was Harry going to be offended that Sirius had assumed—probably rightly—that he was basically done growing)? "Do they have lasers?" he checked.
"Hah! No, that one we couldn't really figure out. But they've got force fields! Well, technically, they have deflection charms. If there's a way for an attack to miss, it will, particularly if you're in motion. And they should self repair if they do get hit. Like, if a shot misses you but hits the bristles."
"Wild," Harry said. "Thanks so much, Sirius!"
"Yeah. Wow," Tonks said, cradling the broom. "And if you spend the whole Black fortune on presents, Harry and I don't even have to worry about inheriting."
"They really are extravagant gifts," Andromeda said with a bit of disapproval. "But if they keep the two alive with all the trouble they get into…"
"Hey!" both Harry and Tonks said simultaneously, and laughed.
Both of them were eager to try out the brooms, but Sirius had also learned the tradition of a big Christmas breakfast after presents. Fortunately, he'd hired a local restaurant to cater, rather than relying on Kreacher or one of them to cook. While they were enjoying the meal, Harry remembered to ask, "Sirius didn't know… do any of you know if Snape and Karkaroff were Death Eaters?"
"Absolutely," Andromeda answered without any hesitation. "Unlike some that claimed they were mind controlled, both were confirmed. They only went free from extenuating circumstances."
"Spying," Tonks clarified.
"Well," Andromeda corrected, "Severus Snape was spying for Dumbledore. Igor Karkaroff simply gave evidence for secret Death Eaters that had previously avoided prosecution."
"How did they stay secret?" Harry wondered.
"Sadly, it's not like they got matching tattoos on their faces or anything," Tonks chuckled. "We've been discussing it after the attack at the World Cup. They were in a cell structure. Wore masks to big meetings so nobody could be certain of who everyone else was. Only the people in charge knew the whole roster, and used a lot of different communication methods to coordinate."
"Like invitations spelled to only give the location of the meeting when it's about to happen?" Harry checked.
Her eyes widened, "That's why you're asking about Snape and Karkaroff! They got invitations? Have you seen them?"
Harry shook his head and admitted, "I just overheard them talking about it. Karkaroff seemed to think it might be a trap. I guess because he gave up those names, and Snape was a spy."
"Not enough to get Bones to sign off on going through their stuff," Tonks frowned. "But can I pass along that something is happening?"
"Sure," Harry shrugged. "You think the others got their own invitations and they're planning for another attack like the World Cup."
She nodded but sighed, "Well, that's what we figure in the auror department. But Fudge thinks it was just a bad prank that someone set up to cover for the dark elves escaping. He's convinced that the Death Eaters are over as a political entity and that You-Know-Who is dead."
"Well…" Harry said, drawing all the eyes in the room so he elaborated, "Tom Riddle is dead. Like, double dead, since his draugr got eaten by a giant snake. But he was only Lord Voldemort in the beginning. Someone killed him and took over his Death Eaters like sixty years ago. The guy that killed my family was an alien, I think, just using the wizards for some reason I haven't figured out yet." Jaws were hanging open as if that wasn't common knowledge. He thought back to Trelawney's prophecy from the previous year and added, "And I don't think he's dead. Just got seriously injured or something so he's been taking it easy for most of my life. But he may be close to ready to start back up again."
Tonks thought about it for a second and then suggested, "We might be able to sell the Ministry on preparing for alien attacks pretending to be Death Eaters for the fear factor."
Sirius beamed at his cousin, "Fudge can't protect his pureblood friends if it's aliens just using an old political group as cover. Brilliant!"
"Especially because it is aliens using an old group as cover," Andromeda nodded. "Harry, you're certain that there's some kind of alien behind all this?"
"Well, I'm pretty sure people like the Malfoys are also involved," Harry shrugged. "But, yeah, 'Mistress Morgan' wasn't a hag, she was a green-skinned alien lady that was trying to steal the… uh, the thing that Dumbledore had in the school… for a guy that she thought of as her father. Huh… and, the book that was controlling people my second year was working for a 'Father' too…"
"This is all very cool, and has given me a lot to think about…" Tonks interrupted. "And there will be plenty of time to pick your brain about it so I know what to tell Bonesy and Siri can tell the Wizengamot and mum and dad can prepare a court case about it, but…" She stuffed the last bit of her muffin in her mouth and finished her tea before announcing, "It's time to ride brooms! I can get dressed faster than you!"
"Honestly, you wouldn't know she's twenty-one," Andromeda said, fondly, as her daughter was suddenly racing Harry out of the kitchen.
The two third-cousins were warmly dressed and up in the air over Diagonalt within ten minutes, and in another ten they were far out into the countryside. "These things can move!" Harry shouted.
"Whaaaaat?" Tonks shouted back, and then abruptly pulled up to hover in midair.
Harry managed to do a high-G turn and stop just short of Tonks. "I said they can really move. Looks like they can really stop, too."
"These are too much!" she grinned, shaking out her hair which obediently fixed itself from its windblown state to a much more coiffed set of spikes reminiscent of Madam Hooch's hairdo. Only Tonks' was neon green in her excitement.
"I've been meaning to ask," Harry said, "what's up with your hair?"
"Oh!" she said, leaning back and enjoying the rolling vista of the winter farmland beneath them. It took quite a few miles of carefully-tended farms to feed a pre-industrial city, even one as small as Diagonalt and with the use of magic. "I'm a metamorph. The hair is the easiest thing to switch, but with some effort…" she crossed her eyes in concentration and her face shifted to a pretty good approximation of Harry's, her hair settling into his dark mop, even matching how crazy it looked after racing through the air at over a hundred miles an hour. "I'm Harry Potts!" she said in his voice.
She hadn't bothered to change the rest of her body, so that was a weird thing that was going to haunt his dreams for a while.
Relaxing, her face settled back to her own and her hair once again became green spikes. "And that's not a glamour?" Harry asked.
"Nope. Shapeshifting," she agreed. "Really good for undercover work."
"I bet," he agreed. "Did you learn how to do that, or cast a ritual, or…"
"Genetic, sorry. Nobody's really sure how I got it, but now there's a pretty good chance my kids will have it. It probably came from my dad's side, since nobody else on the Black side had it… at least that they ever admitted."
"I bet it would come in handy to keep a secret, like being able to turn invisible," he shared, letting his cloak fall over him. It even mostly managed to cover the broom.
"Wow! Nice! I still don't have any relics like that," she agreed. "You're sure you don't want to join the aurors after Hogwarts? We could use you."
Letting his cloak once again withdraw, Harry shrugged, "I'm still trying to figure out what I actually want to do. Seems like everyone has something they expect me to do. I feel like the Masters got there first, though, you know?"
Tonks frowned, explaining, "Not a lot of life expectancy with Kamar-Taj. It's one of the reasons dad stayed here. Auror isn't half as dangerous. They lose something like ten percent of their numbers every year, on average, to all the things that they fight."
"That's what I keep hearing," he shrugged. "But I think part of that is that most of their apprentices don't really have enough training." He'd had years of summer camps to observe, after all. "From what I hear they mostly don't see any real fights until something scary breaks out of another dimension. All of us Hogwarts kids have way more combat experience than most of the apprentices." He kind of gave an expansive shrug indicating his deep belief in his own combat training and youthful invulnerability.
From what she'd heard, Harry wasn't necessarily wrong, but she still kind of thought he was underestimating the threat of horrors from beyond compared to the much more defined monsters he had fought. But before she could come up with another point, she noticed the owl swooping directly at her. "That's an auror messenger owl," she recognized the red jesses. As it got closer, she also thought she read annoyance in its eyes at having to chase them this far out of town. "Must have left just after we did," she announced, letting it perch on her broomstick and taking one of the messages attached. It had several others, and immediately set off as if to deliver the rest. Tonks unrolled it and said, "Marauder attack. I know this town, it's near the train platform! They must be going after the rail line again. Can you make it back home?"
"Or I could come with you," he shrugged.
Most adults would have laughed at the idea, but he had been telling her how much combat experience he had, and she believed him. Rather than dithering or trying to persuade him she sighed and ordered, "Follow my commands when we're there. Don't get hurt, or you'll get me fired." At his nod of agreement, she fished her sling ring out of a pocket and spun open a portal in midair big enough for them on their brooms. "You first, I'm right behind."
Harry came flying out of the portal above a melee that was like the battle of Hogsmeade in setting and combatants, but going way worse for the village than it had the previous time he'd fought marauders. Instead of orderly lines of shields and spears with ranged attackers behind, the marauders had clearly come upon the village unawares.
Strange-hued and garbed aliens were rushing through the small neighborhood, chasing fleeing townsfolk trying to escape to a pocket of resistance. From above, it was easy enough to see clusters of armed Vanir congealing at high points, but the marauders were busily ransacking homes at the other end of the small village while their fellows harassed the scattered defenders. This was a raid for supplies, which could leave the villagers bereft of goods for the just-arrived winter.
And on Christmas, no less.
There was at least one set of spells being cast near a defending group, so Tonks probably wasn't the first auror on the scene. "Let's try to screw up the ones raiding the houses," she ordered as she flew in behind him, letting the portal close at her back.
"On it," Harry agreed, entering a steep dive on his Firebolt toward a trio of marauders that were making off with a whole skinned and drying cow clearly carried from someone's basement. While there was probably a whole social conversation to be had about whether it was fair to attack people stealing to try to feed themselves, that they were doing it as part of an armed raiding party didn't speak well for them. "Total Petrification of Gleipnir," Harry incanted, binding the man in the lead and causing him to crash to the ground, the purloined meat landing next to him as the rest of his friends realized what was going on.
"Wizards in the air!" one shouted. Obviously having trained for that, not far away four marauders on guard pointed bows at Harry and Tonks before loosing arrows.
As he was beginning to cast a shield, Harry felt the broom wanting to turn on its own, and he went with it. The shaft twisted just far enough that both arrows coming his way managed to swish by, narrowly but completely missing. Harry chanced a glance next to him and saw that Tonk's broom had accomplished something similar, though she'd also gotten up a shield just in case. "Guess that's the deflection charms!" Harry told her.
Unused, she flicked her wand to send the shield spinning like a discus into one of the archers' bow, cutting the string. "Nice. Don't rely on it too much, though," she cautioned.
He nodded and launched a whip to disarm another of the archers, the man unable to hang onto the bow as Harry moved past at interstate speeds. As he bowled along at about ten feet in the air, he sent the whip back and forth along the road, forcing otherwise-engaged marauders to dive to avoid it. He blinked a little as he noticed he'd taken pressure off of the same pair of men that had been watching him when he got off the train—the bald one with glasses and the paler, dark-bearded one—who managed to take out the two left confronting them with brutally effective martial arts.
"More wizards incoming!" another marauder yelled, as Harry spotted more sling ring portals appearing at various spots around the town as the rest of the auror relief began to arrive. Someone sounded a loud horn, and all of the raiders that were still mobile began to make a retreat to the nearby treeline.
"Why are we having so much trouble with these guys?" Harry asked Tonks as he flew back up next to her. "We've got portals."
"Rare that we get warning. Someone must have gotten an owl off as soon as they spotted them," she explained. "Come on. Bet we can stun a few more before they get into dense woods."
As Harry and Tonks rocketed off to pursue fleeing marauders, back in the town Jasper Sitwell and Brock Rumlow had a hushed conversation. "Where did those… wizards—it still kills me to say it—come from," Sitwell asked.
"Who knows," Rumlow shrugged, straightening the medieval-style outfit he'd stolen off of an honest-to-fashion-gods clothesline. "Every time I think I understand how it works, I'm wrong. I hate this place."
"Think Harald made it out?" Sitwell asked, trying to scope out which marauders were down around them. If their contact with the raiders had been taken out, they'd have to start making inroads again, almost from zero. They'd had such a good plan of putting up a good showing against the gang to gain the appreciation of the townsfolk, while still not preventing the raid.
"Who knows. We really need to meet a higher class of insurgent," Rumlow grumbled. "And was that Harry Potts?"
That last bit had been overheard by a passing villager, "Harry Potter, yes! We think so! The Boy-Who-Lived helped save us. Not that we missed your contributions! Come feast with us tonight, that we survived!"
"We'd love to," Sitwell nodded to the friendly villager. After all, as far as the locals were concerned, the two of them were traders who'd lost everything to marauders months earlier, and had been doing odd jobs around the area to survive. And would keep that cover until they could figure out why the portal between worlds at the train platform hadn't opened back up three days earlier. But now that they knew that their original suspect was famous here… "And while we do, you can tell us stories of the Boy-Who-Lived."
Chapter 57: Things of Worth
Chapter Text
The first day back from winter break, Harry was out at the quidditch pitch with his friends giving them each turns on his Firebolt. Gryffindor and Ravenclaw fourth-years had a free flying period after lunch. The other Ravenclaws that weren't Padma seemed pretty jealous.
"We're never going to win against Gryffindor now," Terry Boot complained.
Harry shrugged, overhearing, admitting, "I'm not actually sure it's quidditch-legal. I was going to let Ginny keep using my Nimbus."
"I'd have to concur," Madam Hooch agreed, overseeing the children trying out the meteor-fast broom. "I can't even tell half of the charms running on that thing."
"Would… you like a turn, ma'am?" Harry offered.
She blinked her hawklike eyes and eventually nodded, "I wouldn't say no."
While Hooch was taking her turn, moving at a frankly insane clip that she'd cautioned the students not to emulate, Harry was surprised to see an adult man he didn't recognize bearing across the pitch toward him. Indeterminately-middle-aged, slightly-stocky, and wearing hair the color of rich wood in a ponytail, Harry would have been inclined to compare him to Elrond even before spotting the ears. He was wearing a thick set of robes against the cold of the winter afternoon.
"Harry Potter, if I might trouble you for a word?" he asked, when he was within earshot.
"Probably Fleur's dad," Harry said quietly to Dean. They'd heard that several of the parents of students at Beauxbatons and Durmstrang had chosen to spend some of the holidays in Hogsmeade, rather than figure out how to get their children back home for two weeks. They were supposedly heading back on the Hogwarts Express to a part of Vanaheim where they could teleport later that evening.
"We'll keep an eye out if he tries to kill you," his best friend nodded.
"I don't think that will be necessary," the elf gave a faint smile, obviously his pointed ears good for hearing. His accent was less pronounced than Fleur's or Madame Maxime's.
Harry walked towards him, and they began to stroll along the pitch, Harry's friends keeping watch but not moving closer. "Sorry, sir, you're Fleur's father?" Harry asked.
"Well deduced. You may call me Maréchal," the man agreed.
"I'm guessing that's also your title," Harry nodded. "You're a war-leader?"
"Something of the sort," Maréchal shrugged. "Fortunately, life has been peaceful for many years. And hopefully it will remain so."
"You haven't been getting marauders?"
"A few. The physical location of Alfheim remains a secret to most, and our night roads fewer than Vanaheim. The ones that do make it, however, are able to rely upon their technology unlike those that come here."
Harry nodded, "Fleur mentioned that you use technology. I guess I hadn't thought that it would be a liability."
"You have spoken to my daughter often?" Maréchal asked pointedly.
"We've been cooperating to plan for the challenges, sir," Harry agreed. "Nobody wants any of us to get injured or die."
"Wise. It was my hope that she would not participate in this deathtrap, for all that it does raise her standing in the eyes of the court. Why did you enter, young as you are?"
"Honestly, sir, I expected that if I didn't enter myself, I'd wind up entered somehow anyway," Harry admitted. "Plus, I kind of wanted the world to give me credit for something I did when I wasn't a baby."
"Ah, yes. This is, presumably, also why you accompany the aurors to save troubled villages on your holidays?" the man asked.
"Well, that one was just because I was out with my cousin, who's an auror, and it was easier for me to help than to leave her to go alone." Harry was wondering where this conversation was going. "I guess that made the papers?"
"It is not the only thing that made them. I shall come to the point: what are your intentions toward my daughter?"
Ah, right. Harry had been vaguely aware that Christine, under her pen name, had been reporting on Harry's involvement with Fleur. She was being extremely generous, but they were public figures that her readers would want to know about. Nothing in the articles was secrets she'd spied on them for, at least, but everyone had seen them at the ball. "She explained her situation to me, sir. I'm not trying to mess up her chance to marry royalty." He was also shielding heavily, just in case her father's empathy was even better than hers.
Maréchal nodded, a bit sadly. "Then I shall not have to warn you away, simply reiterate the warning already provided. Famous though you may be… I have much higher hopes for my daughter. And my world's safety may depend on a good match."
"That's a lot to put on someone, sir," Harry said, his willingness to be deferential to a parent only going so far. "Er, respectfully."
"On demandera beaucoup à qui l'on a beaucoup donné," the man quoted. "A saying from your dominant Midgard religion: 'Those who have been given the most, are asked the most.'"
"Some of us were never actually asked," Harry disagreed. "But it's not my place to get in her way. I have all my own stuff that people want me to do."
"Then I believe we understand one another, and I shall bid you adieu and good luck on your own responsibilities," Maréchal concluded. He gave a slight bow and broke off from Harry, strolling away from the pitch.
"What did he want?" Hermione asked, as Harry walked back over.
"To tell me to stay the hell away from his daughter. Politely."
"Tough break," Dean said. "Who you going to ask to Hogsmeade in two weeks?"
"Fleur," Harry shrugged. Everyone was staring at him in shock and he explained, "If she doesn't want to go with me because it will upset him, then fine, I get it. But he's not my dad. He doesn't tell me what to do."
He didn't actually have a chance to talk to Fleur until the challengers got together for swimming practice that weekend: nobody was particularly keen on trying to do it in the evenings of the week after the sun had gone down. Of the study group, only Hermione and Dean made it. For Hermione, it was a chance to spend time with Viktor. For Dean, it was just because he was kind of a crazy person, when it came to exercise.
"What is zat?" Fleur asked, as Harry pulled out his breathing apparatus. She had acquired the elvish equivalent of a dry suit over the vacation, and the form-fitting, intricately-stitched gray fabric was very distracting as she gingerly walked into the water to get acclimated.
"Looks like snorkel?" Viktor said, somehow standing in the frigid lake in just black swimming trunks and a tank top. "But ve may go too deep for too long for that to help? If it is full SCUBA system, you are missing the oxygen."
"I have tanks, too," Harry explained. His own tight-fitting wetsuit was in Gryffindor red. "But Sirius helped me enchant the regulator so it doesn't need them. Well… I helped Sirius. A little."
The SCUBA system had been one of Harry's presents from his aunt, but Sirius had figured it was silly to rely on the giant air tanks. Harry had just enough runes knowledge to almost follow what Sirius had been doing, and to hand him the tools while he worked.
"Oh!" Hermione realized, in a nice one-piece swimsuit that she could only tolerate because of warming magic and because Viktor couldn't keep his eyes off of it. "Is it using something like the mirror to connect to air somewhere else that it can portal from?"
"Nah," Harry shook his head. "It's a perpetual motion problem. If you enchanted something to permanently send air underwater, you could just, like, put it underwater and let the air bubbles turn a generator or something. That energy has to come from somewhere."
"But… sling ring portals can make stuff fall through them," Dean said, grasping the problem with potential energy imbalances as he splashed around in his own swim trunks and long-sleeved shirt, not being much more warmly dressed than Viktor or Hermione.
"And portals are short-lived, and use your own energy to open and maintain," Hermione realized. "If you tried to, say, put a portal above and below a waterwheel, you'd be using more of your personal energy to keep it open than you'd get from the wheel being turned. It's just physics."
"Right," Harry nodded. Sirius had explained all of that to him, but now he got to sound like the expert, at least until he realized, "Magically splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is… well, I'm not sure how it's easier, honestly. Probably because it's just making enough for me to breathe, and it isn't always on."
"Vanishing cabinets," Viktor volunteered. When they all looked at him curious about the seeming non-sequitur, he elaborated, "Have seen one in shop in Goblin Market. They are entangled. Close something in one, it appears in the other. May even bypass limitations on portals. They are rare though. Shop owner doesn't know how they vork, or vhere the other one of his is."
Hermione started thinking, "If you actually have to close and open the doors, it at least doesn't let you make a permanently falling waterfall or something, so that might account for some of it…" Viktor gave her a fond look as she started talking to herself to try to work through the magical physics.
"So what are you guys using to breathe?" Harry checked. They'd all planned to work it out over the break.
Fleur waved her hands around her head and a weird globe of distortion appeared, then quickly collapsed. "I still need to work on it. I basically convince ze world zat zere is air around my 'ead. It's a complicated glamour, mixed wiz manipulation of forces." For all that they had some shared blood with humans, none of the elves of Beauxbatons seemed to be able to manifest the orange personal energy constructs that were common for Vanir and Midgardian wizards. Instead, their workings were supposedly more similar to the Svartalves and the Aesir.
Cedric had been quiet up until then, slowly acclimating to the water in the barely-streamlined linen robes that passed as a Vanir swimsuit. He shrugged and explained, "I was thinking about trying something like that, but Sprout told me about a potion you can make with a plant called gillyweed that lets you breathe water, so I'm probably going to try to brew that."
"You're all sure you can bring items this time?" Dean checked, based on Harry's SCUBA system and Cedric's potion plan.
"We checked, yeah," Harry nodded. "I'm trying to convince them that they should give us all bags of holding to take in case we can snatch more artifacts while we're going."
"There's a thought," Cedric grinned.
"What about you, Viktor?" Harry asked.
The Bulgarian boy grimaced, knowing they weren't going to like his answer, and admitted, "Karkaroff knows of gods called the Akua that may be villing to cut a deal for magic to transform into something that can breathe vater."
Hermione, snapped out of her planning, said, "Viktor! I thought you weren't going to do any more witchcraft!"
"Unless I had to," he corrected. "And I may have to."
While Hermione began to half-berate, half-strategize with Viktor over what he could do rather than using dark magic pacts to mutate into a shark man or something, Harry swam out a bit where Fleur was practicing diving. "So… Hogsmeade next weekend?" he asked, as she surfaced.
"Didn't my fazzer speak to you?" she asked, looking slightly cornered.
"He did," Harry managed a shrug while treading water. "Are you saying you don't want to? Or just that he doesn't want you to?"
"Ze latter is more important zan ze former," she said, sadly.
"I've got an invisibility cloak? We could slip off and nobody would ever know."
"Tempting," she admitted. "But it was one zing when 'e 'ad not said anyzing. Now zat 'e 'as said we cannot date… If 'e did find out, it would be trouble. Especially since 'e and my family are coming for ze second task. So 'e might find out very quickly."
"Fine," Harry grimaced. "I guess do whatever makes your dad happy." It was a little petulant, he had to admit, but he'd genuinely thought that she'd think sneaking around was a good compromise. And he wasn't ready to admit to himself how much he liked dating her.
His shields must have slipped, letting her get an empathic read, or maybe it was just clear from his tone of voice. She said, "I'm sorry, 'arry. It is what it is."
"Right," Harry said, blinking and trying to put his shields back up. "I'm going to go see how Cedric's getting on. Can't be easy to swim in that much fabric."
"Looks like that didn't go too well?" the Hufflepuff asked as Harry swam over to him.
"Daddy issues," Harry explained.
"I can relate," Cedric gave a self-deprecating grin. "I could talk to Susan Bones for you? I heard that she turned you down for the last weekend."
"Thanks, but I don't know that I want someone telling her that she's allowed to date me," Harry demurred. "That's kind of my problem. Girls not making that decision for themselves."
"We're all of us following a script others have given us. Even when we think we've broken free of one, there's another right underneath," Cedric cautioned.
"Maybe. But if you notice you're following a script and you don't like it, don't you at least need to ask yourself whether you can change it?" It was a weird conversation to be having treading water in an ice-cold lake.
"Says the Boy-Who-Lived, who the Norns have contrived to place in mortal danger every year in what should be one of the safest places in the Nine Realms?"
Harry realized he wasn't wrong. "Huh. Maybe. Do the Norns live somewhere? Can I go there and make a complaint?"
"That, I don't know. I think I do know how to swim, at least, if you want to go have fun with your friends."
"Sorry, it was just an excuse to leave a conversation. I know you know how to swim," Harry grinned, but headed over to practice diving with his regulator nearer to Dean.
By the time of the Hogsmeade weekend, Harry still didn't have a date. He hadn't really tried to get one. The study group was planning to try to do a big friend hangout, rather than breaking up to go on individual dates. But then Ron asked whether Viktor would be there, Hermione asked why he wouldn't be invited, Ron couldn't explain why he was mad about it, Lavender realized why Ron might be mad about it, and things got tense. Then Ginny and Parvati revealed they both had gotten dates for the trip. And Seamus still wouldn't tell them who he was slipping off to see.
Consequently, Harry was basically a fifth wheel since Dean, Padma, Luna, and Neville were the two couples that decided to hang out with him, after all.
Hogsmeade was bustling again. The weekend had been scheduled so early because of all the traders that had showed up post-holidays, but they were just some of the renewed visitors to the small town. It seemed that everyone expected the second task to occur very soon. There was honestly some disappointment that it hadn't already happened from the super-fans that had been camped out since after the holidays. Unlike the previous trip, the visitor tents were clustered closer together for warmth, roofs joined with additional tarps to try to keep in the heat and keep off the weather.
As they rode up, they saw Percy Weasley directing new arrivals to set up their tents in a particular block.
"Still no Mr. Crouch?" Harry asked him, as the quintet strolled up.
"He hopes to make it for the actual event," the former head boy explained. "But with all his responsibilities, he cannot just stay here for weeks in case the task occurs suddenly."
"So you get to judge if he can't make it?" Harry asked, and Percy nodded, wondering if he was about to get lobbied. "Good. I felt like Mr. Crouch was a little too generous to me and Cedric, you know? I know you won't be at all biased, and will be very fair to everyone, even though we've been friends for four years."
Harry grinned as he left, since Percy still didn't know whether he was being buttered up or not.
"And there's the Boy-Who-Lived himself!" Bagman's voice boomed out, as the friends entered the inn. He was holding court with a bunch of visitors over on one side. Harry guessed that, unlike Crouch, the former-quidditch-star turned sports-officiator didn't have so many responsibilities at the Ministry that he couldn't wait around for the task to occur. "What do you think, Harry? Are the four of you going to make it competitive this time?"
"I guess it depends on the situation?" Harry responded, all eyes on him. "It would be silly to split up if we're in danger, rather than using teamwork, right?"
Bagman shook his head and explained, "I'm sure the Norns wouldn't set you a test you couldn't pass. It's not meant to be a group exercise."
"If you can tell me where to find them, I have some things I need to tell the Norns anyway about all the stuff that keeps happening to me, so I can ask their opinion about the tournament." The crowd laughed at Harry's rejoinder, and Bagman played along but the humor didn't reach his eyes. Harry wasn't sure the man wanted them to stop working as a team just to make it easier to score.
They were browsing the Spintwitches' quidditch supply stall when he had his next adult run-in. Professor Moody, clomping through the aisles on his prosthetic leg and cane was peering at all the shopkeepers to see what they were up to. They'd learned that his magic eye could see through most illusions and maybe even walls—he hadn't admitted that, but most of the girls in the castle were worried it could see through clothes—and there was no telling what he was looking for. Though, in this case, it seemed to be Harry.
"Potter," the man nodded, mad eye still whirling to watch all around him as the natural one peered his way. "I've seen you all practicing in the lake. Got your plan for the task?"
"At least for the water and cold, sir," Harry agreed. "Not so sure about the opposition."
Moody grimaced and nodded, explaining, "It's a lot to ask children to go up against enemies. Maybe they'll just let you past with a beating. But if they're wielding weapons and an intent to kill, then, well, you need to be ready to kill 'em back."
Padma looked a little scandalized by the permission to end a sentient life, but Luna looked less concerned than Harry had expected. Catching his look, she shrugged, "While I'm sure they're a vibrant and interesting culture, it's not likely that they're innocent. And Vanir and jotuns have been killing one another for thousands of years, so who am I to say it's time to stop?"
"Hah," Moody barked a laugh. "Lovegood will certainly keep you on your toes. But she's right. Maybe they have a right to live a peaceful life, but nobody from Jotunheim's ever been willing to try that. They point a weapon or even a sharp icicle at you, you need to do for them first."
"I'll keep that in mind. Thanks, sir," Harry said. Intellectually, he knew the man was right, but emotionally, he wasn't sure he was ready to straight up kill someone that he could talk to, unless there was absolutely no other choice. He wasn't sure if he wanted to be someone ready to do that.
The rest of the Hogsmeade trip was a study in trying to avoid adults. Fans wanted to meet him. Christine was angling for an interview that he really didn't feel like giving about his relationship with Fleur. Hagrid and Madame Maxime were the giant poles of massive drama as Christine's previous article outed them both as half-jotuns (which, for some reason, Maxime thought that nobody noticed). But at least there were a lot of shops to choose from (and Harry even remembered to get a birthday present to send to his aunt).
And then, after the trip, the waiting began.
Weeks passed with everyone sure that the convergence for the task would begin at any moment. Practicing for it became stressful. Thinking about it became stressful. It was just a giant other shoe waiting an interminable amount of time to drop. January and February (or Winter-Month and Horning) sailed by in a blur of worry that any moment could be the time that aquatic giants could sneak up from the lake and steal their treasures.
It took long enough that they let down their guard.
"Harry. Harry!" Neville was shaking him awake, early on a random Wednesday morning at the end of February or the beginning of Spring-Month. "It's time. McGonagall says. Get your task gear on."
"What'd… what'd they take?" Harry asked.
"I don't know," Neville said, "but she sounded worried. Wouldn't look me in the eye."
Harry struggled into his wetsuit, gathering up his stuff. None of his possessions were missing. He rushed through brushing his teeth and trying to comb his hair, and forced himself to put in his hated contact lenses since glasses didn't really work with a SCUBA mask. He handed off his magical pouch to Dean to look after, after grabbing his knife and a few other things he planned to take: he wasn't exactly sure the expanded space would hold up to being underwater.
By the time they got downstairs, most of Gryffindor had gathered. And someone was missing.
"Where's Hermione?" Harry realized, especially with her roommates' worried faces.
"She was visiting Viktor last night," Parvati said. "And she didn't come back to the room."
"I'll kill him!" Ron snarled, without thinking, making Lavender get a sad look in her eyes.
As they exited from the dorm, Padma was waiting for them. She clutched Neville's hand, and explained, "Cho and Luna didn't come back last night! Luna left her bag by the lake and Cho was escorting her to go get it."
"Our prizes," Harry realized, getting angry. "They stole our friends… And the Norns probably bent fate so it would happen." Quietly seething, he led a crowd toward the lake, not sure if he was angrier at the fomor or the weavers of fate themselves.
Chapter 58: Lost and Found
Chapter Text
The mood at the lake was tense. Bleachers had been hastily arranged around the shore, filling with guests and students to watch the task. Well, what they were mostly watching was the headmasters getting shouted at by Fleur's father.
"You will send your teachers down there and they will retrieve my daughter!" Maréchal was yelling, loud enough to be audible even to the Gryffindors walking up. Harry hadn't even known that he was back at the school. But wait, his daughter?
He managed to find Fleur quickly enough, suited up and looking distraught under a hastily-erected pavilion tent. They hadn't even gotten them breakfast this time, the event had been thrown together in such a rush. "My little sister! Zey took Gabby!" She said as soon as Harry was within earshot. Only a glance across the beach at her clearly-incensed father checked her step toward Harry for comfort.
He nodded grimly, his friends having left him to stand with the other challengers as they found seats. "Our friends, too. Hermione, Luna, and Cho. One hostage for each of us."
"Hermione did not make it back?!" Viktor said, walking up in his own swimwear. Cedric was right behind, face drawn as if he'd already heard.
"The Norns," Harry repeated. "They must have arranged things so they'd all be walking near enough to the lake to get snatched."
They all looked as the white viewscreen levitating over the lake suddenly lit up with an underwater scene. Oona had been working on getting the dark elf cameras to project across a convergence, assuming that nobody would be able to see anything if the screen was underwater. It looked like she'd figured it out. Which also meant that the portal to Jotunheim must be right below where the screen was hovering. On the overcast winter day, it would probably even be easy to see from the stands.
Fleur's father stomped away from Dumbledore toward them and said, "The headmaster assures me that the Norns would interfere with any attempts for adults to intervene." A whole series of emotions flitted across his face, and Fleur took a step back as if slapped—Harry assumed that somewhere in there was anger that Fleur's entry into the competition against his wishes had put her sister in danger as well. "Bring Brindille back," he ordered her, gave a curt nod to the other three, and stomped off.
"Brindille?" Harry asked.
Fleur wiped away a tear before explaining, with a bit of distaste, "French for 'twig'. Not even budded yet. I call her 'Gabby' since she is so talkative."
"We'll get her back. We're going to get them all back," Harry assured her. Nods of assent came from the other two boys.
"What about air?" Cedric realized. "How are we going to bring them back from underwater?"
"How much of that gillyweed potion did you brew?" Harry asked.
Cedric nodded in realization. "Hopefully enough. Good idea." He patted a belt he was wearing, as if to show where the other bottles of potion were. It was a little odd that he didn't immediately pass it out to all of them, but maybe he had it in only a couple of vials that they'd need to portion out.
"Challengers!" Dumbledore's voice boomed out from the judge's podium in front of the stands. Harry looked over and saw that, indeed, Percy had wound up subbing in for Crouch, who presumably had been too far away to make it. The Ancient One was missing as well, probably not able to travel all the way from Earth on such short notice. "Time is wasting and we need you to begin. I trust you all understand what is at stake?" Grim nods from the quartet were his answer, so he proceeded, "Then, begin."
They rushed down to the shore of the lake, each preparing their methods of underwater survival. Harry pulled on his diving mask. Fleur began to coalesce her glamour around her head to fool the universe into thinking she had air to breathe. Viktor did something similar, conjuring a sphere of orange personal energy around his head and turning on the oxygen tanks Harry had loaned him—Hermione had worked with him to basically create a shield against water as a diving bell, rather than making a deal to transform himself. Finally, as they reached the water, Cedric took a swig of greenish potion, gills immediately forming along his bare neck and sending him gasping to breathe water instead of air.
Following the refracted light of the video projection, the convergence wasn't far beneath the surface. Which meant that it must not be far beneath Jotunheim's surface, either, lest the pressure differential have just created a waterspout that they couldn't hope to cross.
Sure enough, as soon as they swam through the portal the water dropped in temperature to as near-freezing as it could get without becoming ice, but the pressure stayed consistent. Clearing the iris of the convergence, Harry glanced up and saw it was basically flat against an ice sheet that couldn't possibly be that thick, but was certainly dense enough that they shouldn't expect to try to blast through it as an escape. An unbroken expanse of softly-glowing white as it diffused the sunlight above, Harry momentarily became disoriented about which way was up.
"The enemy gate is down," he told himself, focusing on finding where the fomor must have taken his friends.
While the adults didn't seem to think they could mount the rescue in place of the challengers, they'd at least done what they could. Someone had cast spells to make brightly-glowing orange balls of energy form a line into the darkening water ahead and down. And the cameras were already spaced out ahead, moving through the water almost as easily as they had the air on Muspelheim.
Harry checked the three around him, pointed, and they all got to swimming.
The trek was cold, oppressive, and silent. They were in deep enough water to not even see sea floor, and if there were any kind of fish on Jotunheim, they were at least staying away from the lights. Which meant just a long, undifferentiated swim with nothing much to look at except the markers of conjured light ahead in the blackness.
As they passed each light, Harry glanced at the others. Cedric seemed oddly unbothered, looking around bemusedly, as if he never thought he'd wind up in such a place. Viktor's face was tense within his bubble of air, spoiling for something to fight. Fleur's lips were pinched in concentration, and Harry worried for her; she'd never really been completely confident in her spell. For his part, the enchanted face mask seemed to be working well, though the cold was beginning to sap through even the warming runes he'd put in his suit.
Nothing attacked them on their long swim through the void. Harry could only assume that the fomor hadn't bothered to leave guards in their path, after centuries of never having to worry about attack from outside of their frozen redoubt below the ice. Finally, their eyes began to resolve a deeper blackness ahead, but it was unclear whether it was an underwater mountain or a fully-constructed megastructure in the deeps. The trail of magical lamps led them to a large hole in the side of the structure, too perfectly circular to be anything but manufactured.
Once they were inside, that's when the guards noticed.
The interior of the structure was lit, if faintly, which was almost like a spotlight as their eyes had adjusted to the sunless depths. More surprisingly, it didn't appear to be completely underwater, as there was a definite shimmer of water surface above them that their assailants dived into. One second, it was the four challengers swimming into the submerged room, the next there were two large forms splashing in.
Keyed up and spoiling for a fight, the battle was confusing but quick. Harry lashed out with an energy whip. Viktor launched a cutting spell of orange light edged with purple. Cedric managed some kind of lance of power that was almost invisible in the water.
Fleur attempted to help, but then desperately began swimming for the surface above them.
The fomor tried to fight back, but they somehow hadn't prepared for the energy brought against them. And while they were natural swimmers, the ice conjurations that jotun-kind could manage were actually more effective in the air. Viktor took a grazing blow from a conjured ice spear, and that was the worst their team suffered. Harry tried not to think too hard about it as the bodies of the fomor stilled, bluish blood leaking into the previously-clear arctic water.
They pulled themselves to the platform Fleur had already climbed atop, where she was hacking up a lungful of seawater. "You okay?" Harry asked, removing his mask and ready to make use of his first aid training if she couldn't clear her airways on her own.
"I cannot manage ze breazing spell and do anyzing else," she admitted, coughing out the last of the near-drowning. "I 'ope ze rest of zis place 'as air."
"I don't know," Harry said, finally getting a good look at the room. It was basically straight out of the water base level for any "near future" first-person shooter. Indeterminately-sci-fi materials were showing their wear from centuries of maintenance. All of the construction was just alien enough that it clearly wasn't made in any era or culture of Earth. The illumination came from light strips embedded in the architecture, which in this room was basically just an oblong moon pool surrounded by a two-yard-wide lip of some kind of probably-plastic running into walls of a similar material up to a ceiling too short for a full-height jotun to be comfortable.
As they looked at the bodies of the fomor bobbing to the surface of the pool, it was apparent that they were not full-height jotun. They weren't even as tall as Hagrid. Pasty-skinned and twisted, they reminded Harry of nothing so much as an upscaled Gollum from Lord of the Rings, albeit with slightly froggier facial features. Jotun lived long enough that there shouldn't have been enough generations in the last thousand years to inbreed that heavily, but maybe they'd had a dwindling gene pool for long before Odin defeated Jotunheim and this place was cut off?
The important thing for Fleur's concern was that the door out of the room seemed pretty low to the floor. Harry got the sense that the amphibious guardians wouldn't think much about setting the place up as a bunch of pockets of air linked by water. He was honestly curious what kind of alien tech was making the air pressure involved manageable. "Might dip back down into the water at points," he shrugged.
"Well, I'll go as far as I can. I 'ave to rescue my sister!" That statement was fully framed in one of the cameras that had risen to follow them into the room.
"Go ahead without me," Cedric told them, still bobbing with only his face out of the water. "I'll be right behind you when my potion wears off. I'd been hoping the whole thing was underwater."
"You think there's svitch?" Viktor asked, striding over to the doorway and trying to figure out how to make it work. It was clearly some kind of high-tech pressure door, but lacked the iconic center-mounted ring handle, for all that the door itself was also circular and slightly convex for a better seal against the pressure differentials involved.
Harry turned his Stark-trained eye on the situation and thought aloud, "It's held up for centuries in these conditions. Won't have a lot of moving parts. They wouldn't really need keys if they're the only ones down here, but maybe they have some kind of implants that tell the door to open?" He definitely didn't see any switches or buttons, as Viktor had noticed, so they had to be automatic in some way. Then, with a shrug he said, "Let's hope magic works."
He'd spotted a line running vertically down the door and folded out the knife Sirius had given him, which was supposed to have unlocking enchantments in it. Feeling along the seam with the knife and extending his own personal energy long practiced at picking locks, he felt something catch inside and pushed. With a hiss and a heavy clunk, the door folded up and into the sides of the doorway, revealing the path beyond.
Even a lavish base created by one of the wealthiest aliens in the universe wasn't going to waste a ton of space on hallways if it didn't have to. The door opened directly to a larger chamber, also round, perhaps a dozen yards in diameter. Ramps along the walls led both up to a gridded metal catwalk and down into water, presumably to other underwater areas. The floor was covered in puddles of water, like they were having trouble keeping the pressure regulated to keep the sea level from rising, so the room regularly flooded.
The light in the room was from the both the same strips and the twinkling of tons of multicolored indicator LEDs (or the alien equivalent). As their eyes resolved the distance, it was clear that an insane array of small, glass-fronted boxes were mounted to all of the walls, the colored lights some kind of indicators about the status of the contents. None of them seemed to be big enough contain their missing friends, but there was no telling what kind of smaller treasures were within.
Also, there were a half-dozen fomor, so it wasn't like they had the time to browse.
They hadn't noticed in the water, but the inbred jotuns didn't really wear clothes other than some briefs for modesty. So the oncoming wall of pale, clammy skin was almost as intimidating as the battle roar of the giants attacking the first invaders they'd had in over a thousand years.
"Fleur, cover fire?" Harry half-suggested, half-ordered as he moved to stop the two rushing down from the upstairs. He conjured a shield in his left hand and a "blade" of orange energy in his right: after a lot of practice, he'd managed a construct that worked more like a saber than a club.
"Got it!" she agreed, whipping out streamers of glamour that disoriented and slowed the oncoming fomor. Meanwhile, Viktor had decided to tank the other four, loosing blasts of purple-tinged magic and then forming a larger shield to block their charge from the middle of the room.
Harry lost situational awareness after that, dueling on a slippery metal stairway with two larger foes. He blocked ice daggers with his shield. He slashed with his sword. He tried to use the closer one to block the further, the stair not really wide enough for both. He appreciated that Fleur's magical attacks kept them from being able to land effective hits.
Realistically, three teens should have been crushed by twice as many giants. But the fomor had seemingly not put in the effort with their combat skills after a millennium guarding a vault that nobody wanted to rob. They were already clumsy before Fleur used her magic on them, relying on brute force. Meanwhile, Harry had been training obsessively for years. His footing started to get even more precarious as jotun blood coated the stairs from the slashes he was dealing.
The fomor higher up the stairs started to consider retreating as Harry staggered his companion, the closer enemy clearly about to keel over from pain and blood loss. But then it gave a froggy look of triumph at something it saw behind him just as Fleur shouted, "'arry!"
Harry spun around, realizing that a seventh fomor had slipped in behind him, probably from one of the ramps leading down into the water, and was already swiping down at him with an ice dagger the size of his arm. From that angle, there wouldn't be much he could do but hope to deflect it and open himself to the fomor above him on the stairs.
Then the attacker grunted in surprise and keeled over, missing Harry and tumbling off the stair railing onto the floor below. Revealed behind it, Cedric gave him a nod and said, "Alright, Harry?" His arm and a surprisingly-large dagger were coated in blue blood from where he'd stabbed the giant in the back.
"Thanks, Cedric," Harry agreed, managing to duck a pained swing from the closest remaining fomor and thrusting to hamstring him. The one above was already stumbling up the stairs to flee, seeing the odds so thoroughly evened. "Guess the potion wore off?"
"Just in time, it looks like," Cedric agreed, moving beside Harry to menace the guards.
Within a few more moments, there were three dead Fomor at various places around the room and four fleeing back into the station. "Everybody okay?" Harry checked, realizing he was bleeding a little from a couple of cuts on his upper right arm that he hadn't fully deflected.
"I'll heal," Viktor shrugged, more cut up than he had been before entering the room, and applying pressure to a couple of the wounds.
Fleur and Cedric hadn't taken any hits, though Cedric was a mess until he dipped down into the water tunnel to clean off the fomor blood. That drew Harry's eye to the signs in alien language, his implant kicking back on and superimposing the meaning. "It figures," he told everyone as he pointed, "that one says 'Living Subjects.' Bet they put them through a water tunnel to make it harder to escape."
"I'm not sure if I can…" Fleur said, clearly still shaken by her near-drowning.
"My potion's not great if it's just a little while under the water," Cedric admitted.
"Ve vill retrieve them," Viktor nodded.
"Yeah, just guard the room so they don't get behind us," Harry agreed. He glanced at the distance from the dip down underwater to the lip of the moon pool and figured it would be a lot easier to charge across it holding your breath (holding your gills?) than potentially swimming through the tunnel. "Cedric? The potions for the girls?"
"Right," the Hufflepuff boy nodded, putting the second knife he'd drawn under an armpit to hand over a couple of vials of the green potion. Harry hadn't been aware the boy was a knife fighter, but he seemed prepared to fend off an army of fomor. Fleur had, herself, produced a smaller, silvery blade in case they got up on her without Harry and Viktor to block. "Good luck."
"You too," Harry told him, lowering his mask and following Viktor into the underwater tunnel.
Like everything else, the tunnel was lit by small strips of lighting at the corners, and bent around through multiple twists. Harry wasn't sure if it was a deliberate attempt to be disorienting for escapees, or just a consequence of it wrapping around other rooms. Conservation of space seemingly went out of the window when the tunnel was defensive: it was easily a hundred yards long. It took just long enough to traverse that a normal person would struggle to hold their breath all the way through, particularly if they weren't confident about the route and were moving slowly. A few false tunnels even junctioned in at points, taking time for Harry and Viktor to make sure fomor weren't lying in wait. They would further confound someone holding their breath to try to make a swimming escape to the main chamber.
The room they eventually surfaced in was similarly laid out to the one they'd left, a big spherical habitat with the walls covered in displays. These were larger—some were much larger—fit for housing people and creatures.
And for most, the status lights were off and there was nothing inside but mummified dead bodies of captives that had long-died after lives as bugs in a jar. It was dire.
A single fomor was still in the room, turning as they emerged from where he'd been keeping an eye on the wall of containers. Harry spotted movement, and hoped it was his friends, but had to focus on the charging guardian. "You sure you want to do this?" he asked, hoping he was getting translated. "We've already beaten your friends."
The giant shouted something to him that didn't make a lot of sense. "Kvok prot hart clan vazer clektion!" He was sure his implant should have Jotun, so maybe whatever dialect they were using had drifted?
By the time Harry and Viktor had defeated the giant—only maybe twenty seconds, with the ability to flank and having learned how they fought—Hermione and Luna were already out of their compartments and moving to free Cho and Gabby. "We would have been out earlier but they kept watching us," Hermione informed the boys.
"Happy to be a distraction," Harry shrugged for the cameras.
"I suppose we should have learned one of your water traversal spells," Luna observed, leading the small elf that must be Fleur's sister over to the edge of the room. She looked maybe eight years old, her elven beauty manifesting as doll-like features under her own golden hair.
"We have potions. It's going to be a sprint to the exit only able to breathe water, though," he told them, producing Cedric's gillyweed draught. "How'd they even get you in here?"
"A rather clever hollow ice conjuration," Luna explained.
Viktor hugged Hermione once she walked over with Cho, who asked, "Where's Cedric?"
"Where's my sister?" Gabby asked, maybe in French and his implant was translating it.
"Outer chamber," Harry explained, passing Hermione and Cho the other vial of potion. "We're going to have to swim for a couple of minutes, then you'll need to run across the room to get back in the water. Because you'll only be able to breathe water. Make sense? Let's go!"
The girls all shared a swig of the potion, and Harry hoped it would be enough to get everyone to the surface. He seriously considered smashing a container and taking a skeleton as a souvenir, but that seemed almost as ghoulish as leaving them on display. Plus, he wasn't really sure which ones were important, historically.
No fomor had managed to get around behind them in the tunnel, and in a couple of minutes Harry and Viktor preceded the girls into the main room just in case, finding Cedric and Fleur in a running battle with a slowly-increasing number of fomor that had gathered reinforcements and come back to the room. It was fortunate that they'd only been gone for five minutes. "That way! Go! Go! Go!" Harry gestured at the girls currently only able to breathe water as he joined in to cover the escape.
Fleur was clearly relieved as she spotted her baby sister in the crowd of thoroughly-soaked young women dashing toward the moon pool. "Fighting retreat?" Cedric suggested. "Or do you have a cunning ploy?"
"I'm not really the cunning ploy guy," Harry answered, firing off some bolts of magic. "Let's just get out of here."
Fleur ducked on the way out of the door to retrieve a small pile of stuff she and Cedric had apparently smash-and-grabbed before the Fomor came back in, and they all retreated through the doorway. "How ve close it?" Viktor asked.
Harry hadn't actually thought of that, but said, "Where there's a whip, there's a way?" He cast his energy whip into the mechanism and yanked down, which seemed to be enough to reassert the door's desire to close off the rooms. As it thunked closed between them and the fomor, he asked, "Think you can… spot weld it?"
"Maybe?" Viktor agreed, weaving his arms to summon a jet of his own personal energy to try to burn the seam closed, the purple of the dark magic succeeding in amplifying his intention to melt. "Good enough?"
"It'll have to be, let's go!" Harry said, not actually thinking it was a good weld but hoping it would hold long enough for them to get ahead.
Fleur and Cedric had already dropped into the moon pool ahead of them, Fleur hopefully able to maintain her breathing glamour all the way to the surface. Harry pulled his mask back down and jumped in, with Viktor right beside him and the remaining cameras diving behind.
The swim to escape was less sedate than the one in. They had four more people to manage, who had not dressed for the swim. Fortunately, the gillyweed potion was supposed to provide some level of adaptation to cold water on top of the gills, or the girls might have suffered hypothermia on the way out. They probably were all going to suffer the bends, as fast as they were swimming to stay ahead of any pursuers, but they'd confirmed weeks previous that it was something that Madam Pomfrey could fix.
There was nothing to do but swim like crazy, and hope there weren't fomor on their heels ready for payback and much better at maneuvering in the water.
They weren't going to make it. Seeing the glittering light of the projector above them, Harry glanced down and made out nearly a dozen pale forms gaining on them from below, illuminated by the magical lights that had led them to the base. Gabby, in particular, wasn't a strong swimmer, and was slowing down Fleur and Luna trying to help her. There was nothing for it. Harry turned and managed to manifest his shield and energy sword, at least hoping to delay the pursuers enough to let everyone else get to the surface.
So he was surprised to see a shimmer in the water and then all of the giants simply disappear a half-dozen yards away from him.
As he turned in confusion to continue his swim up, he spotted saffron-robes off to the side, the Ancient One sitting lotus-position in a pale bubble of air. In the time they'd been below, she must have managed to get there after all. She winked at him, floating along after. He realized that she must have shunted the fomor into the Mirror Dimension, nodding and continuing his way to the surface.
He really needed a sling ring.
Chapter 59: Reading between the Lines
Chapter Text
They'd barely been levitated into the pavilion tent, which Madam Pomfrey had set up with infirmary cots, and begun receiving treatment for their wounds and the decompression sickness before Fleur's father was storming in. His illusory seeming was flickering with his worry, and only stabilized as he saw both his daughters alive and basically unharmed. Harry caught a look of relief before the elf steeled his features back to a stern political mask.
"Papa!" Gabby cried in happiness at seeing him. Her bed was next to Fleur's and the two hadn't stopped holding hands since they came out of the water.
Maréchal strode over to the beds, walking right past Pomfrey's frown of annoyance at him invading the infirmary. He began a torrent of conversation with the girls in French. Even if Harry's translation implant was functioning, he wasn't sure he'd totally be able to follow it with the speed of the discussion, and their attempt to keep it fairly low just in case. With the cheering of the crowd outside as the judges deliberated, Harry was lucky to pick up tone of voice and cadence.
Not surprisingly, Maréchal seemed angry, only barely hanging onto his temper in front of his younger daughter. Fleur was contrite and yet didn't seem to be giving ground entirely, occasionally glancing past her father over to Harry as if either mentioning him or just looking to him for the strength to stand up for herself. The vibe Harry was getting was pretty similar to the times he'd had it out with his aunt: it was a lot harder for a parental figure to fully punish your bad decisions if you'd managed to make them work out with no real harm done.
Gabby, living up to her nickname, kept interjecting in an excited stream, gesturing at Harry, Viktor, and her co-hostages. Maybe she didn't yet have her empathy developed to understand the tension between her sister and father. Even through the language barrier, it was clear she'd just had the first adventure in her life and thought it was great, actually.
Finally, showing that despite his overbearing political outlook there was still a dad in there that had been scared because he loved his daughters, the argument wound down, he gave them both a fatherly pat on their shoulders, and he turned to Harry. Moving closer to the bed he said, in English, "Thank you for helping to make sure my daughters didn't come to harm." He moved his eyes over all the assembled, as everyone had played a part, but it was clear he was mostly talking to Harry.
"It was my pleasure, sir," he responded, getting the impression that he was being given tacit permission to at least hang out with Fleur. Though he doubted the man's long-term plans had changed.
As he left, the judges began to announce the scores. While Dumbledore had given Fleur his first pick, he was the only judge to realize what a disadvantage she'd been at in the frostbitten world of the Jotuns. Harry wasn't even sure she'd been able to manifest her battle form and flame while there, relying entirely on glamour magic. Conversely, Viktor had gotten the highest ratings from Percy and the Ancient One. Overall, the total scores weren't that different from the first round, with Harry pulling solid first or second rankings from most of the judges for his leadership and fighting skill.
The scores after two tasks were Harry at 26, Fleur at 23, Cedric at 21, and Viktor at 18.
"And I suppose you're curious what those scores mean," Bagman suggested as he and Percy entered the tent to observe the challengers and hostages, still letting the potions work through their systems. "They will represent the order of entry into the final challenge, which we envision as a race to completion. No more teamwork for this one, I'm afraid! We're putting you in separately, and only the first one to the cup will be the champion of the tournament. Make sense?"
"Do ve know vhat the terrain is yet?" Viktor asked.
"I'll be sure to clue you in once the auguries are clearer," Bagman shrugged. "Right now all we can say for sure is that it should be in the spring. Keep up your fitness and casting, and I'm sure you'll be ready for anything!"
After he left, Harry gave his best Rowan Atkinson impression to the rest of the tent. "It's a race!" Nobody seemed to get it. Maybe they hadn't had Rat Race lovingly shown to them by someone like Rhodey when he was trying to make a point about the ludicrous rich-people shenanigans Tony got up to in Las Vegas. "I'm winning." More blank looks. Dean would have gotten it.
"If things are fair," Hermione ignored him (she'd gotten very good at ignoring him and Dean when they were obviously doing a bit from some obscure movie), "the race will be on Niflheim, Nidavellir, or Asgard. That way the most realms will be represented and nobody will have the home realm advantage."
"'ow often 'ave zese been zat fair?" Fleur asked, having come to respect Hermione's research acumen.
"Never," she admitted. "It's honestly a little unusual that none of your home realms have come up in the first two tasks. Simple statistics says it's likely to be a duplicate. The only one we know it won't be is Vanaheim, since I'm pretty sure you can't have a convergence to a different place in the same realm."
"There's never been one on Asgard, either," Cedric volunteered from his cot. "It will be the final realm connected in the Grand Convergence."
"So we've narrowed it down to… anywhere that might be interesting for a footrace across half a dozen planets?" Harry checked and neither of them disagreed. "In that case, I'm hoping we just pop into the middle of American Ninja Warrior."
"I can at least look up how race tasks have played out in the past," Hermione pouted.
By the time they were all cleared by Pomfrey to return to their dorms, the party in Gryffindor was in full swing. The abruptness of the tournament and kidnapping of multiple students had gotten them to cancel the rest of Wednesday's classes. (There was also the rumor that the real reason for classes being canceled was because the staff wanted to spend the afternoon raiding the underwater collection themselves before the convergence closed.) Hermione got rare spotlight time at the party, since she actually had the most secret knowledge: everyone had seen all the stuff that Harry had done on the big screen.
Even though her answers were mostly, "We sat in those jars looking at frog people for a few hours and then figured the rescue was happening when they started rushing off in a hurry," she still had to tell the story over and over.
And then things settled back in. Spring-Month was, confusingly, the last month of winter, covering the end of February and March through the equinox. That gave them several weeks before they had to worry about getting dumped through another convergence. The various school teams competed for lower-stakes trophies. The study group did their best to remember that they still needed to pass their classes. Dean spent more effort on running in their practice sessions, especially as it got nicer outside, and Fleur, Viktor, and Cedric joined in fairly often.
Seeing the older kids in running gear out in the warming air turned out to be better for teen libidos than in the freezing cold of the lake. Fleur was obviously supernaturally attractive, but Viktor and Cedric weren't at all bad to look at either. The girls (and Seamus) insisted it was true.
"Should I ask you to go to Hogsmeade?" Harry questioned Fleur after one of their runs, right after the spring field trip had been announced. He mostly held her eyes while he asked, though the shimmer of her sweat getting wicked into the edges of whatever blue-gray fantasy material her sports bra was made of was distracting to his peripheral vision.
"I would like zat, but…" she looked at the rest of the group, who'd spread out to grab their towels and water bottles. Viktor was playfully helping Hermione with her towel while she mock-insisted she could dry her own hair without actually moving out of range. Dean and Padma were heavily flirting about what a slave-driver he was making her run so far. The group members that weren't that obviously flirting were still paired off with their significant others. "...per'aps we could all go as a group?"
"Because it can't be a date?"
"If it got back to my fazzer, it is just easier if I went wiz friends."
She must have realized he was still not understanding her careful language, and walked close enough to him to "accidentally" brush her leg against his. He'd basically stopped shielding around her, so he got a quick empathic hit. It was enough to understand that she wanted to spend time with him, and was just trying to prevent her father from feeling the need to step in again to stop it.
"Okay, got it," he smiled, worries dismissed. "Hey, guys," he asked everyone. "Can we do a group hangout at Hogsmeade this time? And maybe have it work out better than last time?"
The third Hogsmeade trip of the year was less packed than the previous two had been. Despite it warming up outside and getting well into Spring, the auguries evidently still placed the final task well out. Presumably most of the die-hard fans had used up all their vacation time hanging around in the dead of winter waiting for the second task, and couldn't spend weeks more to be in place for the third.
That suited Harry fine. The study group entourage needed a lot of space as it wended through the village like a small society of its own. In addition to their usual suspects, they'd wound up with a few of the Durmstrang kids, so the Creeveys and their friends had tagged on as Oona's crew. Fleur didn't really have any elves she actually wanted to spend much time with, but she'd become friendly with enough Ravenclaws that a few had joined in between her, Padma, Luna, and Cho. And then there was the long tail of Cedric's Hufflepuff friends, where he served as a strange hinge between their group and his.
He honestly seemed as baffled by it as anyone, having meant to just tag along with Cho.
Harry was surprised to notice they'd even picked up a Slytherin. "It's cool, right?" Theodore Nott asked. "This is a big friends day and if anyone asks it's because I need Viktor to teach me something?" Despite his assertions, Harry couldn't help but notice that the lanky pureblood was standing very close to Seamus, who hadn't sneaked off on his own.
"Yeah, man, it's cool," Harry smiled and went back to talking to Fleur.
"A snake, though?" Ron couldn't help but whisper, for all that he was also glad to see their roommate find someone with the limited options he had at the school.
Their crowd was two-dozen strong at least, maybe more at certain points of the day, and they didn't browse the stalls so much as engulf them. It honestly screwed up foot traffic around the rest of the town, when they'd cluster around a shop all at once, blocking the aisles. They bought candy and other treats. They browsed quidditch supplies. They stocked up on dwindling school supplies.
That was all surface.
They showed off their tastes and knowledge. They probed interests. They casually brushed against one another. They invited each other to try a bite of the food they'd purchased.
Somehow, even for the couples that had been together for nearly a year, flirting in a group while out in the world was a new experience.
By the time they took over a whole wall of the Three Broomsticks for a late lunch, an onlooker could almost smell the cloud of teen hormones floating along with the group. Madame Rosmerta, the inn's owner, certainly could, bustling out and pushing the buttermead and cheese plates. She was curious whether she could get them to buy through her stock.
It was interesting how a dense enough, loud enough group could almost become privacy the other way around. While there was cross-chatter, it was easy to focus on the person adjacent, to have to almost shout to be overheard. Harry and Fleur were just one of several sets of kids trying to bridge the public to get into the private.
"Is Alfheim big on cheeses?" Harry asked, gesturing with a strip of one of the interesting cheddars that came from Vanir cattle.
"Oui," she agreed, spreading a soft cheese on a cracker. "Zough we import much from France. We don't keep livestock in ze same way, not enough to 'ave a large production."
"So does that mean your father would or wouldn't be impressed with a herd of cows?" Vanir dowry traditions had actually come up a fair amount, and, though he was joking, Harry was pretty sure Tony would help him buy out some kind of fancy herd if it would help him date an elven princess. Or maybe Sirius could get some of the massive Vanir cattle…
Wait, Sirius. Why was Sirius in the inn?
"Sorry to interrupt. Can I borrow my godson for a few minutes?" he asked, having shown up at the edge of the packed study group table.
Harry glanced at Fleur and brushed her hand with his own, trying to convey that he didn't expect the interruption. She smiled and he caught her own feelings that it was fine, with an undercurrent of curiosity about what Sirius wanted. As he was standing up and extricating himself from the booth, he mused that he enjoyed dating the hottest girl on the planet, but that empathic communication was really going to be hard to beat with anyone else.
"I was asking about dowries, man," Harry hissed at his godfather, as Sirius led him toward the private rooms upstairs.
"Hah!" he barked, ushering Harry into what was probably the same room he'd ambushed the minister in the previous year. "Sorry, pup. I'm sure it was top shelf material."
"Yeah," Harry agreed, slumping into a chair as Sirius shut the door and placed a package on the table. "I don't even know what I'm doing. Her dad is barely letting me hang out with her, and only because I saved her little sister. She still has to marry an elf king or something. I'm just wasting my time."
Sirius ruffled his hair and smirked, "That girl was not looking at you like you were wasting your time." He took the chair across the table from Harry and waited to see if more teen angst was about to pour out. Seeing that his statement had neatly punctured the pity balloon, he said, "Sorry I missed you rescuing the little sister. And the previous task. I've been busy."
"With this?" Harry asked, poking at the package, which was obviously some kind of flat-packed cloth bundle wrapped in brown paper.
"And working with Dora to track down rumors. But, yeah, it took me a little while to work out the enchantments on that undershirt and copy them. You weren't wrong: it wouldn't have held up for too much longer." Harry had left Sirius the "bulletproof" undershirt he'd gotten at the Goblin Market after the winter holidays. "Hopefully this one will. You can open it."
Harry grinned and ripped open the package, which revealed a dark red suit of glove leather, closely embroidered with runes in golden thread. "Wow. You didn't have to!"
"I kind of did," his godfather shook his head, face falling slightly even after seeing how thrilled Harry was. "Dora's been digging. Mentioning the theory about aliens. She's gotten a little bit of purchase, and I've been helping as much as I can with the other members of the Althing. But the Death Eaters are still moving, too. And there's still too much chance that you're about to get dropped into whatever they're plotting."
"What's it do?" Harry asked, trying to figure out what he could understand of the runes while he unfolded the outfit. It seemed like it would fit him closely enough that it could either serve as outerwear or be concealed under baggy clothing. "Also, Tony's going to be so pissed if he finds out you got me armor before he could."
That did turn Sirius' frown upside-down, and he explained, "Mostly armoring runes throughout. I'm not encouraging you to not try to dodge, but it should be a lot better than clothes against pretty much anything I could figure out how to protect against. I also added a couple of expanded pouches," he demonstrated that there were pockets concealed in seams, as deep as Harry's bag. "I worry that people will go for your bag. If you keep everything in here, maybe they'll waste time trying to grab the wrong thing."
"Makes sense," he agreed. "By 'people' you mean Death Eaters, right?"
"Don't tell the other challengers either," Sirius said, and then immediately bulled on with, "I know you like them, and you're probably right that you've won them over and they're good kids. But they do still want to win. And they might think they can safely make you lose by taking your stuff, and then the Death Eaters show up. It's better that nobody knows you've got an advantage until you need it."
"I guess so," Harry grudgingly agreed. "Only Fleur knows about my cloak, so I guess it's just one more secret." It wasn't like he wasn't used to keeping them, even from his close friends. "Are you sticking around to the task?"
Sirius nodded, "Not that you'll really be able to visit, but, yeah. There's an old Black property in town I'm using. I don't know if I'll be able to help if something happens on another world, but I'll be as close as I can."
"Maybe I can sneak out. I'm pretty sure the twins know some secret passages. Oh, hey, we could meet in the Roaring Rampart if that tunnel is still there."
"Not that I mind seeing you, pup, but what do you need to meet up with me for?" Sirius asked, amused by the barrage of potential rules breaking.
"Learning to be an animagus?" Harry suggested. "I realized that would be another useful trick."
Sirius sighed, "Takes years, unfortunately. I don't think you're going to pull it off in the next month or two. And, honestly, with Loki no longer in Asgard, I'm not sure it's even possible to learn…"
"Wait, what?"
He nodded and explained, "It's basically following his path as far as Vanir are able. We can only get one alternate form, but it's said he can turn into several animals, and even flawlessly shift to look like other people."
"I thought that was just Aesir illusion magic?" Harry said, remembering Hermione going on about the potion she wanted to brew in second-year.
"For simple stuff, maybe. The Aesir royals are basically gods, though, and so are plenty of folks they went up against. You think he tricked the most powerful entities in the nine realms for centuries with only illusions? But, anyway, the last part of the animagus ritual involves praying to Loki. And it really felt like he heard us and shared his power in some minor way. I'm just glad my powers didn't stop working when he died."
"Huh. Almost sounds like a witchcraft investment, just with someone the Ministry has to be nice about," Harry figured.
Sirius admitted, "You're not wrong. That's another reason not many people become animagi. Or talk about it."
"Can I get investments from the other Aesir royals?" Harry wondered.
"I don't know. Loki left behind some notes that got passed around Hogwarts. And Peeves was a big help sorting out the process. Created his own little mystery cult as a prank. I doubt Thor would even know where to tell you to start, even if he was willing."
"Wait! Does that mean McGonagall is a Loki-worshipper?"
Sirius smirked, "We worked that out too. I don't know what got her laced up so tight, but I'm pretty sure Minnie was a wildcat when she was young." He changed the subject back to the original topic, remembering, "What nobody seems to be able to figure out is how you got into the tournament in the first place. It may have been someone good enough to tamper with the Goblet and then hide from the Norns themselves. And if someone like that was in Hogwarts, I can't tell why they wouldn't just take you out whenever they wanted."
"They need me in the tournament for some reason," Harry reached the obvious conclusion.
"Yeah. Either because they expected you to die in a way that's easier to explain as an accident than cursing you in the hallways… or because they want you to do well for some reason."
Harry checked, "Could it just be someone's a fan and isn't actually out to get me?"
"That would be nice, right? But I figure at this point, either they underestimated how well you'd do against monsters from other worlds… or whatever's going to happen will happen when you win."
"Make sure someone else wins, got it," Harry agreed. "I really kind of want Fleur to win, anyway. She needs it the most."
"Let me tell you, pup… never let the girl think you let her win. That won't count as a dowry."
By the time Harry made it back down to the main room, the flirty mood had diminished somewhat by the room filling up with other students, including Malfoy being shitty to Nott about hanging out with them. At least Draco apparently hadn't reached the conclusion about why he was hanging out (or maybe he had and just only cared about fraternizing with Gryffindors, not that Harry was willing to give Draco points for being progressive). Thus, he got to join the exodus from the inn and to do one more loop around town before heading back to school for dinner. Fleur at least seemed to think his armor looked cool.
A few days later, at the end of Eoster-Month (basically late April), the challengers got called out of class to meet with Bagman, who led the four of them on a walk-and-talk around the Hogwarts grounds as he explained, "I told you we'd tell you as soon as we knew, and we finally got a solid prediction. It should be sometime in the next few weeks. There's going to be a maze. Creatures. The race is to get the trophy at the center."
"What realm is it?" Harry checked.
"Too soon to be sure," Bagman shrugged. "How are all of you with tracking magic, though? Our plan is to give each of you a metal plate you can put your tracking spell on as close to before the challenge as possible. Then we'll put those near the cup when we place it. Don't want to leave you completely lost."
Harry felt fairly confident with that setup, glancing at the others to see if anyone looked like they might need practice. Nobody said they couldn't, but Viktor asked, "Ve don't know the realm. So 'creatures' doesn't give us anything to go on."
"That's what makes it a challenge," Bagman grinned. "You're supposed to evade them anyway. Get to the center of the maze. Get the cup. Win the tournament. Easy."
"At least we already fought dragons?" Harry took a step back so nobody would hit him as he sarcastically added, "So it's not like they could be worse, right?"
Fleur still managed to hit him.
Chapter 60: Backward and Forward
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"The army stands ready, lord," the sci-fi necromancer with the art deco gold face mask announced in his raspy voice. Harry had lost track of the number of times the weirdo had popped up in his dreams over the last year. "They await the gateway, but the ships could begin moving toward the objective through real space…"
"No. Nova would detect travel on that scale," a much deeper voice disagreed from the shadows of the strange cavernlike room. It almost felt like Harry was floating on an asteroid in deep space, which was about par for the course for a dream. But that voice haunted him, for all that he was having trouble placing it. "It's too early for them to interfere."
"Ah, yes, I speak to the Accuser, soon, to turn the Kree against them," the necromancer almost cackled. "Ebony Maw is in position to land and renew the charade. We could seize both Earth and Vanaheim at the same time!"
"Don't overcommit," the bass voice cautioned, still shrouded. Harry got the impression that the necromancer was looking up at the speaker, as if gazing upon a throne. "The wizards would be very useful to me, but the Stones are what matter. Are you sure he'll give them up?"
"Our 'ally' still fights the scepter, but it's had cycles to work on him. He will do what is best for you despite his own ambitions. Perhaps he will regret the throne we have earned him once we take them back, but he will rule atop our own apparatus and have no choice but to continue. Asgard will have to fight him for one of their precious realms, just as they will try to retake Vanaheim."
"And with Asgard and Nova distracted, the rest of the work can begin," the voice from the shadows pronounced. "Perhaps we can even draw out Odin himself and, with his death, unmake an old injustice…"
Harry woke as that dream faded. It was interesting that his weird sci-fi zombie dreams were starting to mention Asgard and Vanaheim. He figured he was just anxious over the realm-hopping. It was the day of the final task, after all.
They'd gotten the warning the night before, and thought that the convergence would be stable long enough to wait until the next evening, to let as many fans as possible make their way in on the train. So Harry had the day to "prepare," for all that it wasn't useful because they still hadn't given away much about the maze they were going to visit. At least it was Friday and he had classes, so he wouldn't have nothing to do but stress out all day. It was Pasture-Month 11, which worked out to basically the beginning of May back on Earth. What were the odds that something else crazy would happen to him in May?
He had to admit to himself that they were pretty damn good.
"How much have you let your guard down with those other kids?" Moody asked him as he was leaving defense class at the end of the afternoon.
Harry's head had increasingly been in the impending task, so the question brought him up short. "Uh… a lot, if I'm honest."
"Good that you're honest," the salty old auror nodded. "There's something off about all of them, and you need to be ready for them to play for keeps out there. Maybe they can be friends you can trust some day, but tonight they're all going for that cup. And you still don't know who wanted you in the tournament in the first place or why."
His reflex was to say, "We are friends," but he knew the paranoid old man well enough at this point to know that would get the man's catchphrase yelled in his face. This was a man that had checked himself out of the hospital with fresh curse wounds because he didn't feel safe asleep around healers. So instead he admitted, "I'm okay if they win. I don't think any of them would really try to hurt me to do it."
"Going to be a lot of chaos in there. You've gotten by working together in the last couple tasks so you're not used to how dangerous it would be if you actually tried to work against each other. What if the elf throws a fireball? The witch hits you with whatever dark magic he can't keep out of his spells? It would be very easy to get seriously hurt. Constant vigilance, Potter. You need to get out of this unmaimed." He tapped his prosthetics one after the other, "Don't want to be all chewed up like me before you're even an adult."
"Thanks for the warning, sir," Harry agreed, teen bravado at least a little undercut by the demonstration. He supposed that magical healing really would have a hard time with burns or dark magic wounds.
It was easy to forget by the time he was queued up in the pavilion tent with the other three a couple hours later. He'd spent so much time with his fellow challengers over the year he'd honestly been neglecting some of his other relationships. Cedric was the cool older kid that he'd kind of known around Hogwarts for years but was finally getting to hang out with, and he had another whole year at Hogwarts. Viktor and Hermione still seemed to be doing well, romantically, and he was still set on joining Tony's racing team so Harry was sure they'd be friends after the tournament. And Fleur… well, Harry still was trying to convince himself he was okay that they'd just had a weird thing and he'd have to get used to not seeing her all the time when she was back on Alfheim.
He was not going to be okay. He had it bad and had been studiously compartmentalizing about it since the Yule Ball.
"We're not really going to try to kill each other out there, are we?" he asked them, shifting uncomfortably in his tournament robes. He'd managed to fit the fireproofed orange outfit on over his enchanted armor, and it was a little much. At least the runes were keeping him from overheating with so much clothing on in the warm spring evening. He'd put in his contacts for the final task, just as he'd used them for the second one. No sense risking a monster knocking his glasses off, just to be a little more comfortable.
"Not like you need to worry about it, you're going to be miles ahead of the rest of us," Cedric joked, tapping his cane a little nervously. He was also wearing his robes from the first task, but had strapped a belt of pouches around his waist and hung a potions bandolier across his shoulder.
"I need to win," Fleur said simply. She hadn't bothered wearing the first-task robes, instead bringing a set of formidable-looking silvery armor of her own. It flickered in a way that made it clear that it would probably enhance her illusions, maybe letting her turn almost as invisible as Harry could. Plus it was quite form-fitting and distracting. Her half-joking comment of, "Just don't make me go zrough you," was enough for Harry's eyes to snap from her curves to her piercingly-blue eyes in shock.
Maybe Moody had been right. She had a lot staked on this. A lot more than he did. And he would be trusting a lot that whatever their thing was, it would be more important to her than winning.
"I vill try not to hurt any of you," Viktor was the one person who tried to mollify Harry. "Though it is hard enough that I am in last place and not as fast as the rest of you." He'd also foregone the orange robes for a basic black set of fatigues that seemed like Eastern European military surplus. Harry could make out runes stitched in metallic black thread, and the Bulgarian had a dark web belt with multiple canvas pouches. Of all of them, Harry wouldn't put it past him to have brought some dark elf tech this time.
"I just want to make sure we're all still friends after this," Harry explained, a little lamely.
"It shouldn't be a problem," Cedric shrugged. "I can date my quidditch rival. We can be friends even if we do what we need to while we're trying to win."
"I guess so," Harry agreed, but didn't like the look in the boy's blue eyes. He was probably just psyching himself out, after his second year. He'd kicked that Stone into the void between worlds. At least Viktor's gaze was a reassuring brown.
Bagman didn't give them too much more time to dwell, stepping into the tent a moment later. "Everyone ready? Convergence is just outside. Harry through first when we sound the gong, then Fleur, then Cedric, then Viktor on each successive gong. First one to touch the trophy is the winner! Questions?"
"Monsters?" Viktor asked.
"Right! That's all sorted out with the natives. They're sort of intelligent? Try not to seriously injure them if you don't have to. Might cause an international incident."
"Are they going to be trying to seriously injure us?" Cedric checked.
"Just slow you down and make it interesting, I'm sure."
"So, hypothetically, if I had a broom…" Harry checked.
Bagman shook his head. "I wouldn't try it. We're having to fly the drones well above the maze so they don't get swatted out of the sky. I doubt you'd fare any better."
"And if ve get injured?"
"We'll have people on standby. And send up some sparks or something if you get overwhelmed and need help. Safety concerns have been addressed! Well, got to get to it. Harry at the first gong!" With that, he let himself out before they could ask any more questions.
"Okay, well… good luck, everyone," Harry said, trying to fend off the sudden impression that everything was about to go very wrong. He tried to catch Fleur's eye again, but she was withdrawn, psyching herself up for her own preparation. Cedric gave him a distracted nod and Viktor, who had the most time to get ready, a grim, close-mouthed smile.
Then the gong rang and he was out of the tent.
The convergence had done everyone the favor of opening up in the middle of the quidditch stadium, the amphitheater's seating more full than he'd ever seen it. An almost palpable roar shook him as he ran out onto the pitch, the excitement of the fans hitting him from all angles. He saw the judges set up across from him, for all that actual judgment wouldn't be needed since the winner was whoever got to the cup first. Crouch was back instead of Percy, and Harry was surprised that the event had rated the Minister making his way out. They must have figured out how to use magic to duplicate the projected image from the camera drones, as several white sheets levitated around the stadium, projecting a dark forest scene barely visible in the dwindling evening light on Vanaheim. They'd see more as the sun fully set.
Harry spotted the same scene ahead of him as he plunged headlong through the rip between planets. In a moment he went from the slightly-chilly, piney smell of an evening on Vanaheim to somewhere warmer, more like a jungle. He smelled the sea, almost swore he could hear it somewhere not too far away, but was charging headlong into a wall of trees.
No, wait, it was bamboo, denser and higher than anything he'd ever seen.
Harry glanced up and spotted the slight flicker of the elven cameras as they lifted above the canopy. Against the stars of the night sky, he'd probably miss the spy drones if he hadn't been looking for them. Wait. Were those stars familiar? The gibbous moon definitely was. Did the convergence take him to Earth?
He kicked himself for not packing his phone, assuming he'd go to some other fantasy planet. The GPS might have actually given him an edge. Grumbling about Bagman not providing the full heads-up, he began to run forward, vaguely sensing the tracking charm ahead that he'd given the organizers to place with the cup.
Ahead of him there was only one path into the bamboo jungle, and he charged down it, footfalls loud in the otherwise quiet night. It seemed like it was late enough that even the bugs had gone to sleep, or maybe he just wasn't familiar with the sounds that a bamboo forest should make. His eyes slowly adjusted, the moonlight bright enough that he didn't feel like he needed to risk a magical light to spotlight himself for any protectors right away. But it was weird that they'd specified that this was a maze, when what he could make out in the dim light was a laser-straight path, wide enough for a car, that seemed to plunge basically in the right direction. He could maybe squeeze or chop through the bamboo to either side, but with a path taking him where he needed to go…
What was the trick? Was there going to eventually be some Henson-puppet caterpillar to tell him he was taking things for granted?
He got maybe a hundred yards—and thought he heard the second gong even through the convergence behind him setting Fleur loose—before the trick became apparent. Almost as if the gong had upset it, the bamboo began to audibly rustle, a tangible susurration of leaves rubbing against nearby stalks. And an approaching clacking from behind. Harry glanced back to see the trail closing up behind him, the path he was standing on zipping closed, massive bamboo poles whacking against each other like a forest-scale xylophone.
He sped up. The clacking sped up. He slowed to a walk. It seemed to slow but not stop. It was catching up to him, gradually and implacably. And the looming shadow of the bamboo forest ahead wasn't exactly closing, but he realized he was seeing a corner, finally. A very precisely right-angled corner.
"I take the maze with me. And have to keep up with the hole. Got it," Harry mused, picking up his speed. He suddenly wished he'd worn fewer layers. Hopefully there was something in the armor to deal with puddles of sweat leaking out.
Sprinting and trying to keep a sense of his tracking spell proved to be an actual challenge. Very rarely, a corner would be a T-intersection where he'd have to choose a direction. And he was considering whether it might start to make sense to try to cut through the bamboo as he was no longer getting anything like a straight shot to the cup. But the clacking from behind was intimidating, and getting ever-closer. He definitely felt like the forest was deliberately closing up exactly fast enough to stress him out.
"This is dumb," he finally said to himself between heavy breaths, realizing that the maze was actually herding him fully off course, and hearing the pounding of surf against cliffs distressingly nearby. Was the maze just a way to try to shove him into the ocean? "Screw this." Summoning a sword of energy and putting some extra magic into it so it would burn like one of Seamus' whips, he hacked to his right and entered the hole he'd made just as the maze pocket washed closed behind him.
Tony was going to be super jealous that Harry could basically make a lightsaber now. The tech genius hadn't even figured out how to make anything viably close to a lightsaber.
"Off the path," was quieter, the clacking of bamboo receding into the distance as if it had never been trying to keep up with him to begin with. It was also a lot darker, with no clear path to the moonlight. Harry wondered if the spy drones were able to keep up with him. His light came mostly from his glowing orange sword. He tried to slide between the plants more than simply hacking at them, unless he absolutely couldn't fit through otherwise: both because it seemed slower, and because the forest seemed intelligent enough that it might resent him doing a ton of damage.
He shoved and cut his way through the thick growth for what felt like half an hour. Had he lost whatever lead he'd started with, or were the others similarly slowed? Was hacking through directly toward the tracker faster than trying to outsprint the pocket and hope it led him in the right direction? What if he pulled out his broom? Could he stay ahead of the forest closing behind him, or would it even speed up to gain on him at Firebolt speeds?
Almost surprised, he eventually found another pocket, stepping free into the "clearing" that was anything but. Coming out in the middle, he wasn't even sure which direction it was opening and which direction it was closing. Neither direction seemed appreciably pointed toward where he was tracking, so he resigned himself to just taking a quick breather as he crossed the temporary trail before hacking his way in at the other side.
He'd barely hit the middle of the path when the stampede caught him. Charging from his left down the path, a quartet of massive bodies thundered toward him. No matter how much training Harry had in a crisis, the human brain is wired to run from that kind of onslaught: it's what made cavalry so effective for thousands of years. And these things didn't look nearly as delicate as horses. In the moonlight, Harry caught scales, horns, and other strange deviations from what was otherwise a giant horse. The name "ki-rin" popped into his head, from one of the older D&D monster books, but he had no idea if that's what these really were.
Ah, they were herding him the wrong way. He finally spotted the forest closing ahead of him as the beasts closed in from behind. Would it hurt more to get shoved into the bamboo when it was actually smashing together? Clearly the ki-rin didn't think that it would close on their faces, or for some reason had gotten locked on chasing him. What if he could turn this into an advantage?
Trying to time it correctly, he waited for the bamboo to start moving in front of him, hooked a moving shaft with an energy whip, and leaped to allow its sideways momentum to give him an assist gaining height. He had been practicing brachiation some since the paintball debacle, so he only got slightly bruised being slammed into bamboo closing on the other side (fortunately all the layers of clothing and armor helped).
Importantly, he landed square on the back of one of the ki-rin as he came down. He grabbed its oddly-fluffy mane and held on as best he could. It seemed surprised at what he'd done as it rushed headlong into the closing bamboo wall… which opened up just enough to allow it and the other dragon-horses through. Bamboo whipping impossibly close to either side, Harry said, "Sorry for hitching a ride. I'll get out of your hair in a second, but if you could…" he leaned his weight against the mane to try to tilt his unwilling mount back in the direction of the cup.
It actually seemed to be working. The stamping of the beasts was muffled in the dense bamboo and he couldn't really see the other three as the bamboo parted just enough to allow them to continue to charge through. He thought he was bending the arc of their rush toward where he needed to go. And in the press of the forest, the other ones couldn't help the one he was riding knock him off.
But they weren't the only creatures out there.
Just as he thought he was making some real progress, Harry felt something heavy and furry thump into his side and send him sprawling. Fortunately, the bamboo seemed inclined to get out of his way as he fell from the ki-rin, and he managed to roll as he hit the loamy ground. The ki-rin herd continued to charge away, leaving him in a tiny clearing that the bamboo had seemingly created for his confrontation with whatever had knocked him off.
Looking at it, he still wasn't really sure what he was fighting, and it wasn't just the bad lighting.
It was some kind of strange cross between an eagle, a bear, and a… footstool? It didn't seem to have a head, and wasn't even as big as he was. But it arched its back for a fight and flapped its wings dramatically. Oh, wait, it had two pairs of wings and they were rainbow colored. And six legs? It was… oddly cute. Luna would almost certainly want one. Harry settled into a fighting stance but wasn't sure if the thing was going to keep after him. He'd feel really bad about beating it up, but not half as bad as he'd feel if it kicked his ass.
"You, uh, have to fight me, or can we just call it a draw?" he asked.
The little thing trilled. It made a high-pitched growl. He had no idea where the sounds were even coming from, but they were adorable. Finally, it flapped its two pairs of wings once more as if deciding to claim a victory and then strode off into the bamboo, the forest opening and closing behind it. Harry might have pursued to make use of the seeming desire of the forest to allow the creatures to roam freely, but it was headed in the wrong direction. And he'd feel pretty awful just trying to pick it up and carry it in the right direction… for all that doing so would probably be very cuddly.
Reorienting himself after his strange encounter, he started to squeeze through the bamboo toward his objective. He wondered if the tournament organizers had expected more racing down the trails and fighting with the defending creatures, and less trailblazing in the dark.
It felt like another hour of hacking through the bamboo, for all that it was probably less, before he had another encounter. He'd made it across one more temporary path through the forest without getting stampeded again, and as he saw another one open up in front of him, he heard fighting down the clearing. In the glow of their magic, he could make out Fleur and Viktor both moving basically toward him to keep ahead of the closing path as they fought… one another?
"'arry!" she called, spotting him. "Viktor's gone crazy!" She narrowly caught a blast of magical orange-and-purple light on her own shimmering shield. She was in full battle form, hair standing up into feathers, and she flung a globe of flame at Viktor.
For his own part, Viktor managed to dodge the flame but said nothing, merely making a snarling face in the moonlight and charging up another attack. His fatigues looked like they'd taken a beating in the forest, loose threads of black cloth giving him a hazy silhouette in the gloom.
Harry didn't even think. His friends were fighting, but the girl he liked was making a plausible case, and Viktor wasn't disagreeing. Maybe she'd just played hardball and he'd gotten pissed off after already being injured, or maybe something had gotten to him. Regardless, Harry had seen what that dark magic suffusing Viktor's magic could do to objects, and didn't want to see it used on Fleur. He got a shield up and slid in between the two of them, deflecting Viktor's next attack. With the reprieve, Fleur managed to nail him with the same blast of knockout magic she'd used on the dragon in the first task, and the big Bulgarian slumped to the turf, unconscious.
"Why was he–" Harry began, but noticed that the shimmer of Fleur's magic that washed off of Viktor as he fell was still present around his mouth: as if she'd already nailed him with a spell that would silence him. It seemed an odd choice for a dueling spell, unless she'd assumed he needed to use an incantation for some of his attacks that he might use against her…
"Zank you for ze 'elp, 'arry," she said, and he felt the cold silver of one of her knives appear under his chin, as she wrapped him in the mockery of a lover's embrace from behind. Her hand brushed his face in the process, but, instead of opening the empathic connection between them to explain what she was doing, all he got was the impression of a sullen yellow light.
"Who got you with that stupid book?" he sighed, wishing he'd listened to his gut about her too-blue eyes. If he'd just touched her in the tent to open the connection… but, no, she'd been deliberately standing far enough away to stay out of his reach.
"I don't know about a book?" she said. The most terrible thing about the yellow Stone was that the people it corrupted were still themselves, just twisted to its ends. "I'm genuinely sorry, 'arry. But you 'ave to die, and, as champion, I can 'elp take over Alfheim for Fazzer."
"Probably not talking about Maréchal, are you? I'd say, 'Fleur, fight it,' but I don't think you can." He was trying to figure out how to get loose, but her knife was very sharp and he'd walked right into a really good throat-slitting position for her. That extra bit of height she had on him really limited his leverage options to throw her off before she could open up his windpipe.
With nobody moving, the wall of bamboo was only closing slowly, inevitably, but she'd probably go through with it before it got there to potentially shove them apart. For all that he'd said he didn't think she could fight it, there was a hesitation there. The yellow wall he was getting from his empathy pulsed in time with her heartbeat, which he could basically feel with her wrapped around him. It wasn't as sexy a way to go as it would probably sound if he got out of it. Not that a way was presenting itself. But then…
"What in Niflheim?!" Cedric's voice shouted, and then there was a blast of magic and Fleur's arm went limp, the knife bouncing off of his armor and only doing some light damage to the front of his robes as it fell to the ground. It really was very sharp. Harry spun around and was able to settle her carefully to the ground as he saw the Hufflepuff seeker emerging from the bamboo. A faint blue glow of the magic he'd manifested from his cane was just fading, and he looked shocked. "Was she trying to cut your throat?"
"The Death Eaters got to her," Harry said, pleased to note that he could still feel her, so whatever Cedric had cast had just been to stun. And he thought he could even feel the yellow fading now that she was unconscious, just as it had for those that had been controlled in his second year. He regarded Cedric warily as he lowered her to rest on the ground. "Mind control." He said it portentously, searching the other boy's blue eyes for signs that he'd also been compromised.
"Wow. Tough luck," Cedric said, seemingly more baffled than Harry. "Well, wall's coming!" With that, the older boy just sprinted away, down the open pathway, quickly leaving Harry's range.
It was oncoming. And as much as he'd like to wake Fleur and Viktor up, he wasn't sure they wouldn't be a liability if there were more real threats in the maze. Maybe Fleur was the attempt to kill him. But he didn't have time to sit there all night and game out the chances. Besides, if Cedric was also mind controlled, who knew what his victory might mean? Harry shot up magical sparks to catch the hosts' attention over Fleur and Viktor's bodies, squeezed her hand, and set back off into the forest.
He wasn't trying to be too trusting that she'd wake up sane, though. He grabbed her knife and took it with him.
The next time Harry hit a clearing he was surprised that it was real, not just a temporary dirt path shifted open by the animate bamboo. There were boulders. There was a pond. There was a huge tree with a beautiful crown of red blossoms that he could make out in the rosy light of dawn. But he still didn't feel like he was right on top of his tracking mark, despite the appropriateness of the surroundings.
There was also a dark-haired woman in simple yellow robes waiting for him. In the twilight at ground level, he thought she kind of looked like the actress he'd met at the race back in August. "Um, hi?" he checked, entering the clearing warily.
"Harry Potts," the woman gave a smile of recognition. "I'd hoped to get to meet you. I am Ying Nan." He blinked as her lip movements didn't really match up, before realizing that his translator must have kicked in, and she was speaking… Mandarin, maybe? Belying her greeting, she was moving into a martial arts stance.
"I didn't realize I was famous in… China?" he hazarded, mirroring her stance as much as he was able. He might have been able to go ahead and use a magic attack on her, but that seemed really rude to do to a nice older lady who maybe just wanted to spar?
"We only agreed to participate in this foolish trial because an old friend asked us," she enigmatically pronounced. "And I could not miss a chance to test her student."
"The Ancient One talked to you. Got it," Harry said, pacing around the glade as he tried to get a sense of what she was about to do to him, martial-arts wise. Probably kick his ass, if he was any judge of confident older Kung Fu folks. At least she didn't really seem to have any height on him, so he wouldn't be horribly out of his weight class like he would against most adults. "I'm kind of in a rush, though?"
"What is coming is inevitable, according to my friend," she explained, "so there is time to see what you've learned."
"Man, not another absolute point in time," Harry whined. "She could have at least warned me."
"Seers are frustrating," Ying Nan agreed, then suddenly rushed forward in a cloud of flying leaves.
What she was doing was unlike any martial art Harry had seen before, hard strikes couched in a soft style. He tried to block and it was like the strike had never been thrown. He tried to counter-attack, and she wasn't there. Simply gliding out of the way, each step was an economy of motion he could never hope to master. It was almost like she was the air itself. If he didn't see her, he'd think he was shadow boxing.
"You're amazing," he complimented her, when she finally made a moment's contact to brush a leg against his own and send him sprawling to the ground.
"You could be better," she said, with an earnestness that kept it from sounding like trash talk, giving him the time to get back to his feet before coming in with another flurry of blows and leaves.
"I haven't had a chance to learn any styles like this," he explained, barely staying ahead of her strikes and keenly aware that she was probably moving at only a fraction of the speed she could if this wasn't just a test. "I'm small enough that the hard styles aren't going to be as good for me."
"It requires you to be in touch with what your opponent is doing. To anticipate and understand." The dance that they were doing was strange, and Harry suddenly realized that she was both deflecting his strikes and actually repositioning his stance as she did it. Making his movements more in line with her own. Guiding him to move like she did. "You may have the ability."
"Can they teach me this at Kamar-Taj?" he asked, going for what looked like a spot she'd left open only to be flipped through the air and fall flat on the ground, just shy of braining himself on a boulder.
"I will talk to my friend," she seemingly agreed. "Your passage is opening. It was good to meet you, Harry Potts."
"You as well, Ying Nan," Harry said, getting back to his feet and bowing, before rushing off into the corridor that had opened from the clearing, seeming to head straight to where his tracking spell was registering the cup.
In the growing light of the morning, Harry could make out camera drones floating above. He wondered if they'd given the crowd good footage of him getting his butt kicked by a nice lady. And the new corridor in the bamboo was perfectly straight as all of them were, a T-intersection a hundred yards away and to his left that seemed to go to where the tracking spell was leading him, with the corridor continuing even further ahead. And from the opposite branch, he saw Cedric pelting forward, closer to the turn and making a mad dash for the cup.
Harry redoubled his effort, hoping he had some gas in the tank, but really just wanting to put on a good show at this point. He knew that Cedric was faster on foot, and had a head start. Hopefully nothing would go wrong from the boy winning, because there wasn't really a way that Harry could beat him. He wouldn't even have time to pull out his Firebolt, with his armor pockets challenging to access under his fireproof robes. While Harry still had yards to go, Cedric turned down the corridor that Harry was sure led to the cup. Sure enough, when he finally made it, the older boy's lead still growing, he could clearly see a golden trophy cup sitting on a boulder in a small clearing.
And then the weirdest thing happened. A dog-lion the size of a bison came leaping out of the bamboo and tackled Cedric into the dirt only a few feet from the cup. It looked like one of the mythical guardian figures Harry had really only seen as decorations at Chinese restaurants.
Harry glanced back and forth as he ran, checking to make sure he wasn't about to get his own monster as a final challenge, but it seemed like it was just going after Cedric. Not believing his good fortune, Harry poured on the speed. He could just run past while…
While the guy that had saved his life barely an hour earlier looked like he was being very savaged by the lion-dog. Cedric was sprawled out, his cane had gotten knocked out of his hand, and it looked like the guardian creature was actually trying to eat his face as the boy did what he could to fend off its immense jaws. Nothing else had been that violent, but maybe this was a different kind of monster? Maybe someone had mind controlled it? Could Harry risk Cedric getting mauled to death?
"Hey!" Harry shouted, flipping out an energy whip and getting the creature around a tusk, throwing his whole weight against the line to pull its head clear of Cedric. The beast roared in confusion, not expecting the sudden attack, and toppled sideways completely off. Harry actually tweaked his ankle putting so much force into the attack.
No idiot, Cedric slid free immediately, grabbing up his cane and swinging it at the dog-lion, releasing a burst of blue light as it connected with the side of the face that Harry was putting his weight against. Groaning, the creature seemed stunned at least for the moment, and Cedric scrambled to his feet and said, "Thanks, Harry."
"Don't mention it," Harry said, releasing his energy whip and trying to get to his feet, his ankle protesting. Cedric was right there, and Harry had another half-dozen yards to clear, not counting going around the monster. He sighed and gave in to the inevitable, "Take it, then. You're right there."
The older boy clearly looked at the cup, and back at Harry who was gingerly walking forward, testing how much weight he could put on his ankle. It didn't feel sprained. He'd probably be okay again in a little while, but he couldn't run at the moment. "Seems wrong to win with you injuring yourself to help me."
Harry shrugged, "You got Fleur. We're even."
That almost seemed to persuade Cedric, but he said, "Even. Yeah. You said you originally put in for Vanaheim, not Midgard, right?"
"Yeah?" Harry was around the lion-dog, which was shaking the magic out of its head and contemplating getting back up.
"Then why don't we both take it? Either way, it's a Hogwarts win."
"You're such a Hufflepuff," Harry chuckled.
"Thanks. You're basically an honorary one yourself. We did this whole thing together. Let's win it together?"
"If you're sure," Harry shrugged. He was almost there anyway. He waved up to the camera drone floating in the sunlight above the clearing. "On three? One, two, three…"
As their hands touched the handles of the ornate goblet, Harry was not expecting his stomach to suddenly lurch as the ground dropped out from underneath him. He'd never taken a portkey before, but it seemingly let gravity do a lot of the work with the portal it opened straight below.
Harry sprawled to his butt when he landed, going ahead and rolling to take the fall rather than trying to catch himself on his twisted ankle. He nearly brained himself on a gravestone for the trouble. Cedric landed more gracefully next to him, still hanging onto the cup. Wherever they were was dark, as if they'd crossed enough distance west to outrun the sunrise. "Where the hell are we?"
"Looks like a cemetery," Cedric opined, reaching down to help him up. Harry was waiting for his night vision to come back after the morning light where they'd been. "I guess we're still on… wherever we were."
"Earth, I'm pretty sure," Harry agreed. He was able to make out the grave markers and they seemed to be in Chinese pictograms, his implant superimposing English translations on top of them listing names and locations that weren't especially familiar to him. "I think we're still in China. We probably didn't go more than an hour west."
"I'll take your word for it. Is this another part of the task?" Cedric asked looking around.
"Shouldn't be. We got the cup. Maybe it tried to teleport us back to the convergence and we screwed it up because there were two of us."
"Well that's embarrassing," Cedric agreed, slightly relieved. "You're from here, though? So if we find civilization, you can contact someone?"
"I should have brought my phone," Harry agreed, realizing that he definitely could see hints of the sun catching them back up to the east. "Hopefully we don't cause an international incident. If there's a village that has internet, we can email Kamar-Taj for a pickup. That would probably be safest." If all else failed, he could use his hand mirror to contact Sirius to tell him what had happened, but since that line of communication seemed to be unique, he was trying to keep it from becoming common knowledge.
"Oh, wow, check this out," Cedric seemed to have found something interesting at the back of an ancient-looking ornate tomb. Harry carefully walked over and saw that there was a shadow at the back of the building that looked deeper than it had any right to be. In glimmering magical letters, someone had written HOGWARTS and an arrow pointing toward the shadow. "I think it's a night road. We must have been meant to go this way."
It had been a long night. Harry's ankle hurt. Cedric was persuasive in his enthusiasm. He shrugged and said, "Fine, okay. Stupid overcomplicated wizard bullshit." Then he stepped through.
Similarly to the time he'd been to Niflheim and back, space was linked but not folded. He felt himself slithering down the minor root of the world tree, before falling out… still in a graveyard. This one was much bigger, and in full night. He could tell he was at least definitely back on Vanaheim, having grown accustomed to the subtle change to electricity and presence of magic, plus the nearly-full moon was distinctive. But unless Hogwarts had a massive graveyard that nobody had mentioned to him, they were not back at the school.
"Ow. Surtur's tits. I forgot how much those hurt," Cedric said, being ejected from the night road behind him.
Harry blinked. That was a weird thing to say. The last person he'd known to complain about travel through a night road was Fandral, because Asgardians were too powerful to travel through them unscathed. But why was Cedric complaining?
He'd barely turned around to start to ask when Cedric's cane was hitting him in the face, the blue gem at the pommel flaring with light that blasted Harry into unconsciousness.
Notes:
This wasn't quite long enough that I felt good about breaking it in half, so enjoy the monster chapter with only one cliffhanger instead of another one at the Fleur scene. Next chapter is the graveyard and then we're into Avengers. Are you all excited? I'm excited.
Chapter 61: Present under Duress
Chapter Text
When Harry came to, he didn't think he'd been out for long because the moon wasn't much further across the sky. It was a little hard to tell for sure because his vision was wonky and he worried he had a concussion. But then a few blinks re-seated his contact lens and it cleared up. His head was a little sore, and his ankle still pained him, but he seemed to be otherwise whole.
Well, he was tied up and strapped to what was probably an immense grave marker, but at least nobody had stabbed him while he was out.
Once his eyes fully adjusted after his unwilling nap, he took in the space in the moonlight. The necropolis went on for what seemed like miles. Everything looked very weathered, at least near where he was, as if it was hundreds or even thousands of years old. He vaguely recalled a mention of a vast graveyard for the brave Vanir who'd died in the Jotun wars, and assumed this was it.
"I chose a nice tomb for you," a man's voice told him. It was a little plummier than Cedric's, even more British than what seemed common for Vanaheim. But when Harry glanced toward it, his head only having so much play as he was lashed, spread-armed against the wall, he was looking at Cedric. Well, he was looking at the last remnants of Cedric. His brownish hair was growing out into a dark black, he was putting on a couple of inches of height that strained against his tournament robes, and his face was shifting into something more angular. "You know, I think I actually went to school with one of his grandchildren."
"Loki," Harry gasped. Even without taking cultural studies, he knew what the wizard-prince of Asgard looked like. Hogwarts was full of art of the time royalty attended the school. "Everyone thinks you're dead."
The prince gave him a slightly-mad grin and half-bow, like a performer having amazed an audience. As the last of the semblance of Cedric faded away, Harry couldn't help but notice that he looked far less healthy than a member of the Aesir should. His face was drawn, bags under his eyes, a sense of profound exhaustion about him that Harry realized had been present even when he was pretending to be Cedric. "Don't worry, everyone shall know how wrong they were soon enough."
"It was you? You put me in the tournament. You controlled Fleur!" Harry realized.
"You were starting to figure it out. Or, worse, you were going to be a good suitor and let her win. Fear not. All I gave her was a script to give you the right impression. I don't wish her harm. I know what it's like to have a father like hers." Harry had been mentally kicking himself for getting tricked into "winning" the tournament anyway, for all that he'd been very distracted, but he guessed if the God of Mischief had been manipulating him, he could give himself credit for doing as well as he had. Loki paced idly, the cane tapping along as he talked. He glanced everywhere but Harry's direction, including the sky. "Where are they?"
"There had to be easier ways to kidnap me."
Loki smirked his way, and Harry was sure he caught a glimmer of the same blue that had been in Fleur's eyes. In Fandral's and Neville's. "The Boy-Who-Lived goes missing randomly, it's a tragedy. He disappears in the middle of winning an intergalactic tournament, and it focuses the minds of the populace. I admit, it was convoluted, but it worked out beautifully."
"Wait, you never made a shield or anything," Harry realized. Had nobody noticed? Only humans (and Vanir—who were close enough) could manage the orange personal-energy constructs. "How did you transfigure those dogs in the first task?"
"Illusion is a prodigious talent, particularly when no one thinks to test for it," he gave a wan grin.
As Loki paced and monologued, Harry noticed his bag of holding placed on a headstone far enough away it would be a challenge for him to get to it. He was really feeling glad that Sirius had talked him out of explaining his armor to his "friends." Presumably, his expanded pockets still held his stuff. The bag had been basically empty except for snacks and some "adventuring gear" like rope. Actually, he was probably tied up in that rope. "What happened to Cedric? You replaced him at the hospital after the World Cup?"
"We were going to replace the old auror, but he checked himself out too early. I would have enjoyed screaming CONSTANT VIGILANCE at the students. But Cedric played his part. I sort of liked being Cedric, these months. Easy enough to portray. So like my brother. Not an ounce of guile in anyone in that house." He frowned, admitting, "I haven't heard anything about him from his jailors in some time, since we stopped needing to wring details from him for my portrayal. I imagine he's dead."
"You killed my friend!" Harry realized. He'd been hoping that Cedric was just a captive somewhere, ready to be rescued.
"You barely knew the real Cedric!" Loki gave him his full attention, seemingly offended, standing stock still. "Was I not the friend you cherished?"
Nonplussed by the statement, Harry asked, "Were we friends?"
"No… of course, no…" Loki broke eye contact, suddenly afraid of the human connection. "A ruler doesn't have friends, merely allies of convenience."
"Doesn't your brother have friends?" Harry needled back, still reeling enough from the revelations about Cedric that he gave no thought to lipping off to a god. "Fandral had a lot of stories."
"Speak to me not of those lickspittles!" Loki was shouting, suddenly up in his face. "For centuries I tried to…" he trailed off, before admitting that he wanted to have friends.
"Fandral was going to apologize to you," Harry remembered. The blond swordsman had been very biased against mages, but Harry had brought him around.
"Well he didn't."
As close up as Loki had gotten, and with the clues he'd put together, he could almost feel the Stone hidden in the pommel of his cane. "Have you been sleeping at all this year?"
"What?" Loki stepped back, as if Harry had landed a hit with that comment.
"Feel an urge to tell me about Father? Damnit, the only time you looked happy all year was the first task, when you couldn't bring that with you!" Harry realized. "You're just as mind controlled as Fandral was."
"Lesser minds," the godling sneered, unwilling to admit the possibility that the Stone had gotten its hooks into him. "This doesn't control me, though it would like to." He waved the cane in Harry's face. "I understand it can't control you either, so we have that in common. It would have been much easier were you vulnerable."
"How'd you even get it? I kicked it into the void!"
"I was also dropped into Ginnungagap. I suppose we found each other, and then we were retrieved together." He shuddered almost unwittingly, recalling a bad experience. Harry couldn't tell if it was floating in the void or what happened to him after he was retrieved.
Something tickled the back of Harry's mind. "His treasure was cast to the void, where it was drawn to another. Tonight, before midnight. The betraying brother will be called to him." They'd thought Peter was the betraying brother, but if it was Loki…
"Betraying brother? Me!? I was the one betrayed." Loki was shouting, but he'd backed away from Harry as if worried, unable to truly argue the point. The kid was landing some telling blows on his confidence.
Before either of them could continue the argument, there was a pop of displaced air as a black-robed figure in a silver mask appeared in a ripple of dark magic, like smoke. Wand out, the new arrival regarded the two of them then sheathed it into his walking stick when he saw there was no immediate threat, making a half-bow and saying, "My prince."
Even echoing in the metal mask, Harry would guess that the Death Eater who'd arrived was Lucius Malfoy. He even had the same pretentious wand cane. "Evening, Mr. Malfoy," he said. If they were going to kill him, he was going to mouth off like crazy until they did. What did he have to lose? "Did you send the rest of the invitations out? I was surprised I didn't see you at the task, but I guess you had other plans." He realized that the absence of the man looming over the Minister's shoulder had been something he'd half-noticed as he was running into the convergence earlier.
"What have you been–" Malfoy began accusing the God of Mischief.
Loki cut him off, "The boy is perceptive. Do you have my things?"
"Of course, my prince," he handed over a bundle that Loki took and then moved behind the mausoleum, presumably to change.
"Guess since they got the Stone back, you still get to be chief minion?" Harry asked.
Malfoy was clearly about to retort, but simply sniffed and turned away, patently ignoring Harry. That lack of attention was what he had been hoping would happen sooner or later, and he started working on escaping his bonds.
When Loki returned a few minutes later, he'd replaced the orange tournament robes with a set of black-and-green leather armor with a robelike cut and metal adornments that looked Asgardian. He'd swapped his cane for an oversized bladed scepter, with the blue gem wrapped in the blade. Or maybe it had always been that weapon, and he'd just glamoured it. "Where is our guest?" Loki asked.
"Should be arriving presently," Malfoy explained, looking to the sky. Harry followed his gaze and thought he saw a shooting star, but it was coming straight for them. Before long, it grew into a fireball, still moving faster than the speed of sound so it was only light approaching. Harry assumed it must be the same way other aliens had landed on Vanaheim: dropped from space on a trajectory that compensated for the electronics failing.
When it was almost on top of them, it suddenly slowed to a crawl, the roar of the fireball washing over them as it dropped below Mach 1 perhaps a hundred yards above. With no obvious source of propulsion, the craft dropped into an empty space too close to Harry for comfort, merely yards away. It was an escape pod in some black metal, barely big enough for a person, hissing as the heat of reentry turned the moist night air to vapor. In the fog of its own arrival, the nearly-spherical ship looked like a huge cauldron.
A few moments after hitting the ground, there was a cracking of locks, and the top of the pod opened. A tall, slender humanoid figure lifted itself free and floated into the air. "I have arrived," he said in a high-pitched voice from Harry's dreams. Shadowed as he was above the moonlit graveyard, Harry couldn't be sure, but he expected gray skin and no nose. Had his dreams been somehow accurate all year? "Robe me."
"Of course, my lord," Malfoy said, hurrying forward with another bundle. The figure descended and allowed himself to be cloaked in a fantastically-expensive black velvet robe. He took a golden mask from Malfoy and covered his face before turning to Harry.
"Excellent. Everything present. Where are the others?"
"Arriving at the stroke of midnight, lord," Malfoy confirmed. Harry guessed that meant it had only actually been a few hours since he'd started the task. Had they started looking for him and "Cedric" yet? Wait, would the other Death Eaters show up in a graveyard, see their supposed leader and what could be a cauldron, and just assume that he'd been resurrected in some necromantic ritual rather than having dropped in from space? That had to be the reason for the ambience, right? Not that any of them would likely believe Harry that their dark lord was just some alien with no nose.
"The ritual?"
"I personally performed the rites at sunset to initiate the connection. We will be ready to open the way soon."
"And you are prepared?" the alien pretending to be Voldemort asked Loki.
"I have been prepared for a year," the prince of Asgard insisted, clearly not intimidated by the figure.
"Your patience will be rewarded. As you claim your Midgard, we will conquer Vanaheim. Should Asgard be able to intervene at all, their forces will be split."
"Yes, yes. I understand the plan. The 'glorious purpose' you've burdened me with," Loki's face was becoming feverish. Harry almost sensed the Stone in the scepter working its programming on Loki, now that it was almost time for it to act. To conquer Earth? How?
Were the dreams about an army of sci-fi zombies also real?
More pops of air suddenly filled the space as other Death Eaters arrived via dark magic teleportation. Harry had to admit, that wasn't the worst possible choice, if you were going to make witchcraft deals. As usual, he bemoaned not having a sling ring. Huh. He guessed becoming an animagus was probably out, if Loki was alive, hostile, and about to try to conquer Earth.
As the Death Eaters noticed the gold-masked figure standing in front of what could be a smoking cauldron, they took a knee, bowing deeply to what they assumed was their returned master. Maybe he even was : Harry didn't think he was the Father that everyone had talked about, and who probably killed the Potters, but this noseless alien could have been "Voldemort" for the most part for years. What had the aliens in his dream referred to him as? Anthony Mauve? That didn't sound exactly right.
"Friends," the alien began speaking as the arrivals seemed to have finally stopped, "it is so good to see you all here once again. The call was made and it was answered. Soon, those that did not arrive on this night will bemoan their lack of place by my side. With the body of their Boy-Who-Lived, we will show them the need to capitulate.
"Such a fragile thing, this child champion," he cooed, finally paying attention to Harry. He waved his hand, and Harry felt an immense telekinetic force squeezing his whole body. Wait, no, it was grabbing the ropes around him and pressing down on those. A lot of movement spells had trouble grabbing a living being directly. Could whatever alien powers he had suffer the same limitation? That would be helpful.
It still hurt like crazy, and Harry couldn't help but gasp in pain. As soon as he had, his assailant relented.
"I am not the only lord returned this evening," he picked up the monologue, gesturing at Loki. "The prince of Asgard himself is part of our movement! Soon, he will go forth to Midgard, to conquer. From these worlds, we will claim the Nine Realms themselves!"
That elicited cheers. It seemed that, in the dark, most of them hadn't realized who the unmasked figure was standing near Harry. "Your acclaim is unnecessary," Loki sneered.
"Of course," the alien continued, "I wonder whether, in my absence, you have abandoned the mission. Is this world ripe for us to seize, or have you hidden and frittered away the advantage I brought you? How many of your fellows rot in the Dark Dimension?" Several people began to mouth objections, and their leader screamed, "Silence!" With a wave of his hand he forced them all down, prostrate on the ground. Harry wondered whether something about their robes allowed him an easier time grabbing onto them. "You all have so much to prove. I will not hand this world to you on a plate. I expect loyal service and initiative in my cause!"
While the guy pretending to be Voldemort (was it easier to just think of him as Voldemort?) terrorized his minions to show he meant business, Harry tried to plan. The guy was probably building to killing him dramatically. It was honestly weird he hadn't just done it, but all of these assholes seemed to want to grandstand where his life was concerned.
Once he got loose, what were his options? He wasn't sure how far Loki had moved him from where they'd come in, and even if he could find the night road again, he knew from cosmology class that they might not always be open: like, say, if the sun had finished rising on the other side. That left trying to get out of the graveyard, playing cat and mouse long enough to call Sirius and hopefully get some help. But Sirius was at Hogwarts, where nobody could teleport, so there was a logistical issue with getting aurors sent to him quickly. He had his cloak, but did a couple dozen dark wizards have some way to track him down anyway? Hell, was the alien's telekinesis good enough that he could basically "feel" for an invisible person nearby?
At least planning his escape was keeping him from having to process Cedric's death. It wasn't even like the boy had died in front of him: he'd probably died, tortured, in some Death Eater dungeon. Harry hadn't actually even seen Cedric since the previous school year: all his memories of his new "friend" were just Loki playing a role. Oh, gods, how was Cho going to feel?
"Lord, we have control over the marauders," one Death Eater was insisting, to try to break out of the barrage of abuse. "They stand ready to move with you as their leader… or to continue to make strikes so that you may lead Vanaheim's kingdoms against them. We have deniability either way!"
"And you've had little success with them so far, I understand," their leader said, snidely. "Defeated at every turn, often by this child." Harry wasn't thrilled to have his attention again.
"They simply lack leadership and organization, lord, we didn't want to make a strong move before you had returned," the man argued. "Also! The groups near Hogwarts have reported a possible alliance. They've made contacts within a secret organization on Midgard. Perhaps they could help in the conquest there!"
That was interesting news to Harry. Maybe some cabal of witches on Earth? It seemed a little weird that the marauders would be able to contact people there, but he guessed if they'd gotten hold of a post owl, coordination between realms wasn't that hard.
"Interesting. Likely too late and unnecessary once the prince here has taken power, but make contact and find out," the alien ordered.
For his part, Loki hadn't said anything for several minutes. Harry glanced over and watched him sweat. His hand was clenched in a death grip on the scepter, perhaps in some contest of wills. The very fact that he hadn't abandoned it when he'd had nearly an hour of freedom on another planet during the first task made Harry worry it had its hooks in deep. With a whole year of constant contact, it was probably going to take more than knocking him out to free him of its influence, especially if he didn't realize that it was winning. He might go along with the plan on his own without ever questioning his motivations, if the programming was subtle enough.
"My lord," Malfoy cautiously interjected, "the conditions are right to begin the ritual to send the prince to Midgard."
"Excellent. Forge a convergence for me. I shall… entertain our guest while you work."
Malfoy nodded and then began organizing the other Death Eaters to lay out a hexagon on a patch of ground that he'd left clear. "Voldemort" floated over to Harry, lowering his voice to have a private conversation. "This is the part where I offer you a chance to live."
"Left hand of death?" Harry asked, remembering the voice of the Norns from that long-ago sorting. "You going to try to sell me on 'Father's' righteous cause?"
The alien's golden mask shifted enough that Harry could feel the smirk, but he answered, "Left hand is a bit presumptuous, with the troubles you've caused in your young life. But perhaps if you were to reveal the location of the Soul Stone, it would go a long way towards that goal. And the cause is righteous. We are saving the entire universe."
"You're going to save the universe with these assholes?" Harry quipped, not having realized until then what leverage it gave him to know about the Soul Stone's location. Of course they'd still want it. "Let me guess, somehow killing a whole bunch of innocent people makes that happen?"
"Half the universe, chosen as fairly as possible, yes," the alien shrugged. "Surely even a child as young as you understands the constraints of resources? Would not your planet benefit from fewer mouths to feed?"
"Fairly includes letting Lucius Malfoy kill everyone he doesn't like?" Harry asked. That number—half—suddenly reminded him of Gamora mentioning that he only had a fifty-fifty shot. These guys were actually going to try to murder half of the entire universe?
"In the early phases, some concessions must be made," he waved off. "So, make your decision. Living ally or dead symbol of our power."
"One last question," Harry stalled. He could see that the ritual was getting close to completion, and had a dumb plan. "I guess 'Father' is the guy who actually killed my parents. Bigger than you, deep voice? But who's the 'Mistress' that he's working with?"
That actually got a head tilt, confusion evident behind the mask. "We have no mistress."
"Might have swords all over her head, if the sculpture was literal?" Harry pushed. "In charge of the Nidhogg serpents down in Niflheim? Really seemed like they thought your boss was working with her." Honestly, maybe Harry had just made some incorrect guesses about the crazy things the giant snake was saying, but if he could keep the conversation going…
"There is no such being. Frankly, I barely believe there is a whole planet full of the dead. It's some Vanir myth."
"Yeah, it's weird. Our cosmology teacher isn't willing to totally undersign that either. But the real Voldemort was down there. He wasn't happy about you stealing his political movement just to kill a bunch of people. Guy was a dick, but he really just wanted to be Minister, or something."
The alien's eyes narrowed behind the slits in the mask, small and beady, before he snarled, "Clearly, you've discovered enough to be dangerous. I appreciate your use of leverage, and perhaps I can show you my own." He clenched his fist and Harry suddenly felt like he was about to explode, pressed back by the telekinetic shove against the tomb. "Make. Your. Decision. It shouldn't be that hard."
"My Lord! My Prince!" Malfoy called. "The ritual is ready. The portal is opening!" Harry glanced over and saw misty blue light congealing in the hexagon as the Death Eaters chanted around it.
Immediately forgotten, Harry was allowed to slump against his bonds, and had to scramble to keep his arms up to make it seem like they were still held in place. "Very well! We send our ally onward, to conquer! First Midgard, then Vanaheim, then the Nine Realms!" his tormentor played to the audience. "Prince of Asgard. Go forth and become King of Midgard!"
Shaking himself out of his war with the scepter, face still red and drawn from the battle, eyes crazed, Loki gave a manic grin and strode forward. "Gentlemen! Like me, you are burdened with glorious purpose!" He looked like he might actually give a whole speech, but the alien gave a subtle shove, telekinetically pushing the prince into the manufactured convergence. In a blaze of blue light, he was gone.
"And now! Perhaps we shall dispel any misapprehensions about the power of the Boy-Who-Lived to defeat the great Lord Voldem…" Ebony Maw began grandstanding, only to notice the pile of cut ropes at the base of the empty mausoleum. "Where is he!? He can't have gotten far! After the boy! We must have a recognizable corpse!" The Death Eaters began casting detection spells and spreading throughout the graveyard to hunt the escapee.
Nobody had noticed the second flare of blue light right after Loki went through, as an invisible Harry Potts dived in behind him.
Chapter 62: Frying Pans and Fires
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Harry's fourth teleportation (and his third jaunt across the entire galaxy) in the last few hours was different by far than the others. Stepping through a convergence was like entering a room. The portkey had been surprising but would have been much like crossing the convergence if he'd expected it. Taking a night road was always a bit like riding through a trans-dimensional water slide.
And he'd had other forms of travel to compare to, as well. The Bifrost had been like a better class of roller-coaster, all extreme speed and motion blur. The bonfire travel on Vanaheim was like the worse class of roller coaster, possibly an indoor one with too much of a light show. Going to the Goblin Market was just walking down a corridor where you didn't want to look too far ahead or you'd go cross eyed from the liberties taken with space. And sling ring travel was so mild you might not even notice it.
Whatever ritual he'd dived into was different. It had to be more like a Star Trek transporter. He felt like he'd been unmade and then reformed somewhere else, the transit seeming to take both an instant and an infinite amount of time. He didn't like it.
Perhaps he'd have liked it better if he'd come back to himself somewhere calm, rather than in a room where all hell was breaking loose.
At least still being wrapped in his cloak gave him a few moments of nobody noticing him to try to get his bearings. He was in some kind of big, windowless concrete space with NASA banners on the far walls. It wasn't brightly lit but was full of technology. He'd landed on a platform surrounded by red-hot reflectors of some kind, and blue plasma emitted by his entry was swirling up to the open, rounded ceiling above. Halfway across the main space, between him and most of the computers and science equipment, a complex metal armature was pointed his way, a glowing blue brick locked in the center of it.
And past that, Loki was killing a lot of guys.
Honestly, Harry hadn't been that far behind him, unless somehow he'd been slowed in transit. But he rather suspected that Loki had landed on the platform and more or less immediately started fighting the people in the room. And he could move. It explained a lot about how easily "Cedric" had beaten him out in foot races when he was really just an Asgardian royal in disguise. Actually going all out, it was pretty clear Harry better not get in a fistfight with the godling. He might not have a chance of survival even if he could learn that crazy martial arts style that Ying Nan was using.
Was Loki shrugging off getting hit by automatic gunfire?
As he was getting to his feet, Harry realized that there might not be much he could do if a half-dozen soldiers were going down in seconds. He didn't know where he was or who these people were, but he still had a twisted ankle and a headache, so wasn't at the top of his fighting form. And he'd need to be to even escape throwing down with an armored, crazed Asgardian wielding a Stone-powered melee weapon/energy blaster. Maybe the better part of valor would be getting out quietly and trying to call in help.
But then he recognized one of the "soldiers" as Natasha's friend Clint, and realized that he must be in a SHIELD base. Loki had killed everyone else obvious to Harry and looked like he was about to stab the man through the heart with the bladed spearpoint on his scepter. Harry had to do something.
"Loki!" Harry shouted, cloak whisking out of the way as he sprinted left so he had a direct line of attack that wouldn't be fouled up by the structure with the magic cube. What little plan he had was using an energy whip to grab the scepter and pull it away before it could stab Clint. Would it be as ineffective as trying to use his own strength to move industrial machinery? Maybe.
And yet, that put a pause on the rest of the room. Clint left his sidearm half-drawn, only a few feet from Loki. Loki stopped and turned Harry's way in surprise. Behind the demigod, another SHIELD agent was standing up, and a middle-aged man in a plaid blue shirt also stood from checking a downed colleague. That man asked, in a Norwegian accent, "Loki? Brother of Thor?"
A voice that Harry wasn't expecting piped up from Harry's right, where he'd been hidden by the armature. "We have no quarrel with your people," Nick Fury announced. Harry glanced over and could partially make out the man he'd met in a donut shop two years earlier.
Loki just smugly explained, "An ant has no quarrel with a boot." He was still watching Harry while he stepped closer to Fury, surprised at the boy's arrival and possibly worried about it. While Harry assumed there wasn't much he could do to Loki, maybe Loki thought otherwise? Harry could hopefully use that.
Fury was multitasking, and Harry saw the glowing block slip free of the machinery as if the SHIELD director had withdrawn it. He stalled by engaging, asking, "You planning to step on us?" With Harry on his left and behind, the man with the eyepatch probably didn't even have a really good idea of who else had just entered the room.
Clint was watching him for sure, though. Harry was slowly moving further into the open, closer to Clint and Loki, and gave the agent a head nod that he hoped conveyed his advice to run as soon as he could. Was a trained sniper going to take combat advice from a teenager that he'd played paintball with once? Probably not. But was he going to stay in stabbing range of a profound physical threat that had already no-sold machine gun fire? Probably not that either.
Loki seemed to get that they weren't going to try shooting him again for the moment, and that dispatching the remaining agents might open up a shot for Harry, so kept bantering with Fury, slowly moving away from Clint and the other agent, while keeping his footing and sightlines so he could attack them again if something changed. "I come with glad tidings, of a world made free."
Having apparently slipped the brick into a briefcase, Fury asked, "Free from what?"
"Freedom." Loki took a very serious pause, like he'd just said something profound, but winced as Harry pulled a disbelieving face and mouthed, "Free from freedom?" Barreling on, Loki explained, "Freedom is life's great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart…"
They hadn't noticed that he'd been wandering into melee range of the Norwegian scientist, and he suddenly spun and placed the speartip on the man's chest with surprising gentleness. Black and blue lines raced up his face as he hunched away from the contact, his eyes going black and then fading back to the intense blue of mind control.
"You will know peace," Loki finished.
Clint, no idiot, used the moment of Loki's distraction to start running to open up some distance, and Harry started to follow him to the door he was running toward. Fury was right behind them, armored briefcase swinging at the end of his arm as he tried to escape the room.
He was too close, so it was futile. Loki leaped and tackled the aging SHIELD director to the floor. The other remaining agent's shots went wide, and then the mind-controlled scientist clocked him in the arm with a piece of equipment to disarm him. Clint was spinning, about to try to save his boss with what little a sidearm could do, but Harry tackled him back through a doorway as a searing blast of blue energy from the scepter nearly obliterated the agent where he'd been standing.
As they hit the stone floor of the hallway, Harry heard Loki announce, "Are you important?" followed by the faint hum of the Stone controlling another victim.
The scientist's voice yelled, "Loki! The portal is collapsing in on itself. You got maybe two minutes before this goes critical."
"We have to move," Clint said, having realized what Harry did, that there was no chance of beating Loki at the moment. He rolled to his feet, Harry already also standing, and began to sprint up the narrow industrial corridor. "What did he do to them? And where did you come from?"
"Mind control. And it's a long story," Harry told the man, assuming he was running toward safety. He didn't like the sound of two minutes until critical. His ankle was going to hurt a lot, if they made it. "Crap. It's bad that he mind controlled Fury, right? Really bad?"
"We may all get buried under here, regardless," Clint said, not slowing down. Then his hand went up toward his ear as if something just came over his communicator and he relayed, "But he just told everyone that I've been compromised, so, yeah, it's bad."
They were running through an open concrete area full of cooling pipes, and then the last standing agent from the portal room came sprinting to catch up with them. Harry was about to attack him, assuming he'd been whammied, but he yelled out, "Barton! What the hell happened in there? Why is the Director saying you've been compromised?"
"Mind control," Clint told him. "Gonna need you to back me up on that."
"First we have to get out!" Harry added, the new agent hardly having registered that there was a teen boy in bulky orange-and-black robes who'd inserted himself into the debacle. He'd probably need to ditch the outfit before someone assumed he was an escaped inmate.
"Elevator," the new agent gestured at a steel-fronted service door in the direction they were running. "The director took Selvig and the intruder through the garage."
The three of them crashed into the industrial lift and Clint slammed the button for the ground floor. They were several levels down, based on the buttons, and the entire building shook as they started to rise. "Should we have taken the stairs?" Harry checked.
"It's a lot of stairs," Clint huffed.
"Who's the kid?" the other agent asked.
"Stark's CEO's nephew, Harry," Clint summed up. "Not sure why he's here."
"Loki kidnapped me. I jumped through the portal behind him," Harry explained. It was true. It was woefully incomplete, but it was true.
"Why didn't he use the stick on you?" Clint checked.
"Someone else tried a couple of years ago and it didn't work. There's a lot, and I'm not sure how much you're going to believe."
The elevator dinged open before they could ask follow-up, and the three of them sprinted across a lobby where a sign read Joint Dark Energy Mission. Outside, Harry could see several buildings along a nicely-appointed concrete road, and he tasted desert air as they exited into the night. The entire complex was shaking. Outside, Harry spotted another familiar agent insisting to several people trying to pick up boxes off of some stairs to, "Leave it. Go!" Phil Coulson spotted them charging forward and yelled, "Barton! Stand down!" He had his sidearm drawn and aimed at them fast enough that Harry was seriously impressed. Two of the other agents that had been trying to shift boxes also drew.
"No time! Have to go!" Clint yelled, charging forward.
While Coulson hesitated, the other two agents were on edge, and took that as an attack and fired. Clint seemed shocked that he'd actually been shot at. Or maybe he was just surprised by the energy shield Harry had thrown up to keep him from getting several bullets in the torso. That gave everyone pause, the shooting agents' mouths hanging open.
"Phil!" Harry yelled. "Fury's been compromised."
"It's true, sir," the still-unintroduced agent they'd picked up shouted. "Some guy with a mind control stick."
"I have… so many questions," Coulson said, not lowering the handgun but not shooting either. He stared probingly at the two agents and one teen that was definitely not supposed to be there. The complex rumbled again. "Let's go. You two," he ordered the agents that had shot at them, "go with the truck. I'll take them."
"I have a lot of questions too," Clint deadpanned, still moving.
"I told you I'm not sure how much you'd believe," Harry said, wincing as his ankle reported that it was almost done as he pounded down the stairs.
Coulson was waving off the last of the scientists into a covered truck yelling, "Go!" He turned to the rest of them, glanced at the helipad where a sleek vehicle was waiting. Pointing its way he said, "I've always wanted to say this: get to the chopper."
The four men piled into the black helicopter and Coulson slammed the door, tapped the pilot, and pointed up, and they were airborne in moments. Harry fell back to buckle himself into one of the seats, his ankle throbbing. Coulson regarded the other three of them warily, not holstering his pistol yet, but buckling in and putting on a headset. As Harry and the other two were getting their own on, so they could talk over the sound of the vehicle, there was a massive rumble and the entire complex began to fall into an enormous sinkhole. Harry wasn't sure if there had just been that much subterranean space that had been imploded, or if the portal energy had shunted it off somewhere else.
He was half-hoping that the Death Eaters at the graveyard were getting hundreds of tons of desert and underground structure dropped on them.
"How many were still in there?" Coulson asked, his voice coming in through the headset.
"Loki killed all the scientists in the room except Selvig," Clint explained, looking sad more at his own failure than at the deaths. "Killed six agents in under thirty seconds. Amos and I just happened to dodge, and the kid distracted him before he could finish us. Then he used a device to control Selvig and Fury. They have the object."
The other agent, presumably Amos, was just nodding along to all of that, adding, "He was so fast. Shooting lasers, throwing knives. Said we were ants and he was the boot."
"Loki. Thor's brother," Coulson recognized the name. "Are we at war with Asgard?"
Harry shook his head and explained, "He found some other aliens to work for after Thor kicked him out. But the machine that the Asgardians use to travel to Earth is broken, so I don't think they can get here to help. Loki's trying to bring in an army of aliens and take over the planet. I guess by using that brick to teleport them here? Oh, and the mind control stick is working on him too, so he's probably not totally responsible for his actions, but I don't know how easy it will be to fix him."
"There's a way to remove the control?" Coulson drilled in, clearly worried about Fury.
"Knock them out," Harry agreed. "While they're controlled, they won't really sleep."
"And that thing you did didn't look like Starktech," the agent continued.
Harry sighed and explained, "I… don't go to school on Earth. I go to the same school Loki did when he was a kid."
Coulson nodded, taking that in, finally just saying, "Romanoff owes me ten bucks."
"Where to?" the pilot's voice broke in over the headsets.
Coulson looked down into the giant void where the NASA installation used to be and then glanced into the night below. "Take us over to that convoy of trucks heading west," he decided, finally holstering his firearm.
A minute later, they were setting down on the road ahead of the lead truck to get it to stop, and Coulson got out to talk to the driver. There seemed to be some slight argument, but eventually the driver nodded and Coulson returned.
"Take her up," Coulson instructed once he was buckled back in. "I activated Havana protocols," he explained to everyone. "This isn't the first time we've had a director compromised. Told them to go dark for a few days. At least we can keep Phase 2 out of Loki's hands."
"What's Phase 2?" Harry asked.
"Classified," the senior agent deadpanned.
"First thing Fury would do would be to also get Hill," Clint had been thinking. "She was probably in the garage."
"Damn," Coulson agreed. "As soon as they realize I'm improvising, they'll cut me out." He asked the pilot, "How much range do we have?"
"Not a lot," the pilot admitted. "We could get to Vegas. Fort Mojave. Barstow. Not LA."
"Let's go to Vegas," Coulson ordered. "Then I need to make some calls."
In the high-tech SHIELD chopper, the flight took barely any time, the moon above still approaching full and lighting the Mojave Desert below. It was hard to conceive that it was the same moon that Harry had just been seeing the tail end of in the bamboo forest, skipping from dawn in China to not that late at night in California. He had almost wanted to tell them to try for LA anyway, let him just go home. But he knew he had a lot to do, and the world might fall if he decided to just go hide in his room.
Coulson didn't seem to be too keen to further debrief him on the flight, as if he was trying to keep the information partitioned; spying was ingrained deeply, even in such a crisis. As soon as the chopper landed, the agent (who Harry was beginning to realize was quite senior) ordered the pilot, "Smith, refuel and then fly to a random military base and go dark. I need to keep my travel secret for as long as possible." The pilot nodded, clearly not liking the orders but understanding what Havana protocols meant. "Amos, same thing. You can go with Smith or make your own way. Go to ground. Quietly contact your chain of command and tell them what you saw. Fury will be after you until we get this problem solved." The agent gulped and nodded, heading off. "You two. Hotel room. I need to debrief and think," he told Harry and Clint.
"Do you have any clothes that don't make you look like you escaped from prison?" Clint asked Harry.
"They're fireproof?" Harry apologized. "And no." He hesitated but decided that they would probably learn eventually and he needed to extend some trust and prove he could be useful. "But I can turn invisible." He let his cloak fall over him.
"That works," Coulson deadpanned.
They walked past slot machines and out of the building, just two armed agents and an invisible teenager. Harry honestly wouldn't have been the weirdest-dressed of the travelers in the Las Vegas airport. A quick street crossing and they were getting a motel room. It wasn't exactly staying at a casino hotel, but it had faster access to escape if they wound up needing it.
As soon as they were safely in the room Coulson said, "Fury's next move is to shut down the Avengers Initiative. They're the biggest threat right now."
"Call Natasha?" Clint suggested.
"And get her to pick up Banner," Coulson agreed.
"Bruce Banner?" Harry asked, surprised. "I can help with that. I don't think he's going to want to talk to you."
"How do you know Doctor Banner?" Coulson asked. "Nevermind. Will he recognize you on the phone if we put you on with him?"
"I can do better, I think," Harry shrugged, thinking. "I need to make some calls, too. Oh, and send email. Is there a smartphone I can use?"
"After I get off the phone with Romanoff," Coulson decided.
While he went over to the side of the room to break to the Black Widow that her Luchkov interrogation that evening would need to be canceled, Harry shrugged out of his robes down to his leather armor, which Clint raised an eyebrow at. "Looks like Stark picked the colors, but not the material," he suggested.
"It's a whole color scheme, thing," he shrugged, not ready to unpack the Gryffindor colors connection. He reached into one of the expanded pockets and felt around, enjoying Clint's widened eyes as his whole forearm seemed to disappear into his torso. Finally, he came back out with the palm-sized communication mirror. "Sirius Black," he ordered it.
"Pup! Thank Odin! Where in Niflheim are you?" Sirius' face appeared. Harry thought he saw the decorations from Dumbledore's office, and the old man's face appeared behind Sirius' so he could tell he was on the magical equivalent of speakerphone.
Harry tried to sum up quickly, explaining, "Cedric was Loki of Asgard all year. They replaced him after the World Cup. They probably tortured the real Cedric for information, then killed him. Loki's working with a tall, noseless telekinetic alien pretending to be Voldemort. Loki came to Earth to try to start an alien invasion and conquer the planet. The Death Eaters said they were going to start attacking in Vanaheim, maybe using the marauders. But I think they wanted my dead body as a symbol? They took me to a giant graveyard, and I escaped into the portal Loki took to Earth."
"I'll start sending owls," Dumbledore nodded, clearly believing him. "I'm glad that you seem to be okay, Harry."
"It was pretty close," he agreed. "Loki has the Stone from two years ago mounted in a scepter. He came here to steal some big glowy blue brick and whammied the scientist that was working on it and the head of the biggest intelligence service here. So we're kind of on the run with a few guys that believe me. Is the Ancient One still there?"
"Alas, she went back to Midgard before the convergence closed," the old man admitted.
"Fleur and Viktor?" Harry asked.
"We got them," Sirius explained. "The girl says she's really sorry. We saw on the video that it looked like she was trying to kill you. I guess that's why Dumbledore buys mind control."
"Indeed," the headmaster agreed, having left the mirror's feed to start writing letters.
"Are you safe?" Sirius asked.
"For now. We got ahead of them and got a hotel room," Harry told him.
"Don't do anything too crazy. If they're attacking here, too, I don't know if I can get to Midgard to help."
"My next call is Tony," Harry agreed. "Good luck."
"You too, pup," Sirius said, signing off.
"You have an interplanetary video conference system?" Clint asked, as soon as he was done.
"It's a prototype," Harry shrugged.
Coulson had caught a lot of his summary to Sirius and Dumbledore, and tossed Harry his smartphone. "I don't know if Stark will take a call from my number. Especially since it's early morning in New York."
"I'll email him. This thing isn't keylogging me, is it?"
"It's clean," Coulson agreed.
Harry nodded and opened the web browser, attempting to log into his Starkmail account. A prompt suggested that authentication had been enabled for the unrecognized device, and he was about to bemoan not bringing his own phone again when JARVIS' voice came out, "You are attempting to access a Stark email account from Nevada, when the owner should not be in that location."
"JARVIS, it's Harry!" he insisted. "It's an emergency. I'm with Agent Coulson. I need to talk to Tony and Pepper. Oh, and get into my email account, since I need to email some people, too."
"Voiceprint confirmed, Mr. Potts. Connecting you to Mr. Stark," the AI placidly informed him.
"Maverick? What the hell? You're not supposed to have phones in… your school," Tony answered, groggily. Had he actually gotten to bed before two in the morning?
"Harry? Why is Harry on the phone?" Pepper was asking in the background, presumably from the same bed. Her own grogginess was shading to panic.
"You're on speaker," Tony informed him, the tone changing slightly as switched the phone over. "What's going on?"
"I'm okay," Harry prefaced, to quell Pepper's panic. "I'm with Phil Coulson and Clint Barton." He then launched into basically the same quick summary he'd given Sirius—with fewer proper Vanaheim names—plus mentioning that Loki had mind controlled Fury and probably other people in SHIELD.
"God, of course this happened," Pepper huffed after his short summary. "Wait. Did you have to fight your way out of a SHIELD base?"
"Maybe," Harry hedged. "But the important thing is that you might not be safe! Phil thinks that Fury would go after anyone in that thing Tony was consulting on… that we weren't supposed to know about," he finished lamely, as Phil raised an eyebrow.
"A team of SHIELD agents do appear to be about to infiltrate the tower," JARVIS cut in.
"Let's show them that we don't like uninvited guests," Tony said, matter-of-factly. "This a good number to get back to you on?" he asked.
"Yeah. I need to call the Grangers, Thomases, and Patils too, and warn them."
"We'll get back to you once I've taken out the trash and Pepper's safe," Tony signed off.
"Be careful, Harry," Pepper cut in, realizing that he probably wasn't as safe as he was pretending.
"You too," he told them, already hearing the sound of Tony rushing off to armor up as the call was ended. "What now?" he asked the two agents.
Coulson said, "You contact the rest of your people, then we plan our next moves…"
Notes:
I was prepared to have Harry just play tourist through most of Avengers, arguing with Fury for a chance to be involved as a minor. But when I rewatched the movie, I was like, "Why didn't Loki just whammy Fury, too?" And then I realized that doing so in this case really would give Loki an advantage to compensate for Harry being present and knowing more about what he was up to. Plus, it gives Harry much more to do. We'll still be hitting a lot of the same beats as the movie, but with Harry driving more of the action. Hopefully everyone enjoys the changes enacted by Harry showing up and saving Barton from mind control.
Chapter 63: Opposite Sides of the World
Chapter Text
Before he started sending out emails, Harry had to be convinced by Coulson and Barton (it was easier to think of them both using last names than alternating between "Coulson" and "Clint") that Fury wouldn't immediately be able to intercept them. According to them, that level of security dragnet wasn't something even the director of SHIELD could do casually. Coulson also grudgingly admitted that Tony had quietly beefed up Starkmail encryption after Harry passed along Doctor Bighead's warning, and SHIELD was having trouble scraping it even with a court order.
Thus, he'd quickly snapped off emails to Kamar-Taj, the Grangers, the Thomases, and the Patils to give a very high-level overview of the situation. It would hopefully be enough to make everyone understand the danger without giving too much away if his email wasn't as secure as they thought.
Someone replied quickly from the Kamar-Taj account that they'd be picking up his friends' parents and bringing them to safety, and regretted that was all they'd be able to do. Harry read between the lines that he was still somewhere in the Ancient One's absolute point in time and she was holding back aid lest she make things even worse somehow, probably by making SHIELD aware of Earth's sorcerers. Which maybe also meant that Loki wouldn't bother to mention it to Fury for some reason? It was honestly possible that he didn't even know how many sorcerers there were on Earth, beyond Hogwarts graduates lying low and the Ancient One.
Regardless, even if Harry understood the logic on an intellectual level, he was petulantly annoyed about it, as only a teenager being told to handle a problem himself by adults could be. He'd really hoped at the very least he'd get a teleporting global taxi service out of it. Maybe just a sling ring of his own. How many times would he need to save the world before he'd get one? In the back of his head, he figured he'd still be ready to talk them into a portal here and there if it made sense.
He'd also gotten a message back from Tony pretty quickly that they'd managed to run off the SHIELD agents trying to sneak into the tower and were locking the building down, with fallback plans in case Fury tried something more overt. He was considering calling a press conference about the issue, particularly since he had already been planning to finally turn on the building's arc reactor in the evening and push Stark Industries' green energy technology.
Coulson and Barton had decided to use the motel room as a command post for a few hours while they put things into motion and gathered resources. They were of the opinion that they'd be able to travel more quietly if they weren't trying to organize a plane in the middle of the night. And they didn't even have a plan of where to go yet. Periodically, one of them would slip out into the night to go talk to someone or acquire gear: the beauty of hiding out in Vegas being that the city didn't really fully shut down, even at four in the morning.
Not that Harry witnessed much of it, since he took the opportunity to catch a nap. After everything, he was exhausted enough to get right to sleep.
"So we aren't just trying to put Banner on the phone with you when Romanoff gets there?" Coulson asked after they woke him up a little after sunrise. Natasha had checked in that she was close to Banner's location.
"No. Fancier than that," Harry grinned. "But I need to know exactly where I'm going. On a map."
Coulson nodded and produced a laptop that they'd picked up. Harry thought both men had managed a couple of hours of sleep while he'd gotten four or five. The mild-mannered agent brought up a satellite map of Asia and drilled down to India, centered on Kolkata. Before he could zoom in further, Harry stopped him for a moment to get a sense of where everything was relative to Kathmandu. It was honestly close enough that it might be within range to detect magical kids: the Patils lived in between the two locations. Then they zoomed all the way into the city as Harry tried to get a sense of the broad landmarks. He was about to try to figure this out "from the air" and was at least glad that they'd sent Natasha out early enough that there would still be a little daylight left to orient by rather than trying to find his way around an unfamiliar city in the dark.
"This is the area we've tracked Banner to," Coulson zoomed all the way into what looked like a slum on the edge of the city. "Romanoff should be getting off her plane in a few minutes."
"Show me where that will be. And then I need to meditate. Don't let anybody shoot me. I'll be dead to the world until we're done," Harry explained.
"You aren't doing what I think you're doing?" Barton asked.
"Maaaagic school," Harry winked.
"The world was so normal before Stark put on that suit," the sniper complained.
"You only think so because you missed the 1995 incident," Coulson disagreed.
Harry situated himself on a blanket leaning against one of the beds, expecting that he might be in his meditation pose for long enough that he should be comfortable. After a year of walking meditation to protect against elf empathy, it wasn't hard at all to slide into the routine he'd practiced with Banner and perfected at the previous year's summer camp. In only a minute, he was hovering astrally above his body.
Neither agent seemed to notice, so he exerted himself a bit to make sure he could make himself seen. "Hey, guys," he said.
Barton just sighed, shook his head, and passed a five dollar bill to Coulson. For his part, the senior agent said, "That's terrifying. We have no defense against anything like that. And it kind of reminds me of some 80s movies."
"Everything reminds you of Ghostbusters," Harry objected. "Anyway, I'm on my way."
Letting himself lapse back into his normal level of astral visibility (which theoretically meant only other sorcerers and certain highly-sensitive individuals would notice him), he started to fly. Well, it wasn't really flying. It was more like snapping himself from one place to another location that he had an emotional connection with, and then hovering around. He covered the distance to Kamar-Taj in moments.
He figured he should probably use this power more often. Being a sorcerer was about having a ton of capabilities that were overkill in most situations and then frequently forgotten about during a crisis. It was a real problem.
First, he landed in the streets of Kathmandu, having chosen a point he'd been several times over the summers that wasn't in Kamar-Taj proper just in case he'd bounce off the wards. He had half a mind to go in there and try to argue with someone, but he knew he'd just get some apologetic-sounding denials if the Ancient One had decided he needed to handle this himself. From there he hovered into the air, figured out which direction was southeast, and began to zip across the landscape at the speed of thought. With only a few course corrections once he started to spot landmarks, he covered four-hundred miles in only a few minutes. It took him longer to find the tiny commuter airport that Natasha was using in the busy cityscape than it took to get to the city proper.
But as he willed himself to the ground, he knew he was in the right place. For one, he was able to drift vaguely in the direction of people he knew once he got close enough, so began to feel a tug towards Natasha about a hundred yards over the airport. For two, there were a bunch of locals crowding around the high-tech VTOL airplane that she'd managed to commandeer to get from northwest Russia to southeast India in only a few hours.
He found her talking to the plane's pilot, already changed into an outfit appropriate to the area, for all that a beautiful redheaded white woman wasn't likely to move through the slums of Kolkata unnoticed with just an outfit change. "Refuel and then relocate," she was telling the man. "Meet me back here in an hour and a half."
"Yes, ma'am," the pilot told her. Harry vaguely wondered how often SHIELD agents had to go dark to avoid different elements of their own organization. Tony's complaints about dealing with spies seemed apt.
The other thing that Harry noticed after the first time seeing his crush in nearly two years was that he wasn't reacting the way he'd expected. Maybe it was that he was basically nothing but pure mental energy at the moment, or maybe it was that he'd transferred that crush to a certain elf… his mind flinched away from introspecting on that thought too hard.
As Natasha moved off from the airport toward the road, she had a brief moment of privacy. Harry glanced around to be sure and used the opportunity to make himself visible. "Hey, Nat," he said.
Blinking once but otherwise using her years of training to avoid visibly reacting in surprise, she simply asked, "Harry… why are you a hologram?" Coulson had at least told her that Harry was helping, so she'd been expecting him in some sense.
"Astral projection. I'll explain later," he shrugged, not sure how much he'd explain later. "But I'm here following you, and I can talk to Bruce when we get there. Speak up if you need something."
"Has Coulson already pitched you about joining SHIELD?" she deadpanned, clearly seeing the immense spying benefits that astral projection provided.
"He's got to get in line," Harry smirked, fading back into invisibility before anyone in the neighborhood noticed that she was talking to a ghost.
She got into a cab and Harry wondered if Natasha's instructions to the pilot to return for her in an hour and a half were overly optimistic as she hit evening traffic in Kolkata. At least the little tuk tuk she was in could fit through gaps that a full-sized sedan would have struggled with. Terrifying, tiny gaps. Harry was glad he was there as an immaterial spirit rather than riding along. Even as a thrill-seeker, that seemed like it would be more nerve-wracking than he could handle.
The most interesting thing about the trip was that Harry's translation implant was working. Whatever someone might believe about astral projection sending his immortal spirit free from his corporeal body, he was clearly still using said meat to process everything he was seeing and hearing. Even astrally, the implant figured out how to translate the local spoken language and plaster English text over billboards and other writing.
Finally, Natasha stepped out of the cab in a densely-packed part of the city. As he'd expected, she didn't blend, immediately getting looks from the passing locals in the twilight. The area didn't seem to have much in the way of streetlights at least. "Hopefully he hasn't already left for the evening," she said, for Harry's benefit. She checked her phone and it managed to create a wireframe of the local buildings with a dot that presumably indicated where Banner was residing. Harry expected that they hadn't managed to get a tracker in him, and it was just a fancy address locator.
They were near enough that his familiarity with Banner—not, perhaps, as intense as his connection to Natasha, but much deeper after months in the man's classroom and after-class meditation sessions—kicked in and let him confirm that the former professor was close by. Harry drifted toward where he felt him, which seemed like it was probably also the address on Natasha's phone.
Sure enough, Harry found Banner in a tiny apartment that didn't really look like it had a private bathroom, but at least seemed to have a small kitchenette with running water. Bruce was sorting through medical supplies and packing them into a brown satchel. He'd donned a similarly-brown suit and looked rougher than he had the last time Harry'd seen him over a year earlier. "Remu… er… Bruce!" he announced himself, becoming visible inside the room.
"Gah!" Bruce flinched, and Harry realized that he probably shouldn't surprise the man. Fortunately, there didn't appear to be any sudden flickers of green. "Harry! What the hell? Shouldn't you still be at school?" At least he was more familiar with the idea that Harry could astral project, for all that he'd left before the kid had a chance to really master it.
"Long story," Harry said, having gotten the spiel down to, "Loki was hiding at Hogwarts all year. Kidnapped me and tried to leave me with the alien running the Death Eaters. But I followed him here. He has that mind control gem that got Neville my second year. And he took control of the director of SHIELD. He stole some other powerful Stone that he's going to use to teleport an army of zombie aliens here to try to take over the planet."
"Loki. Like from Asgard?" Bruce raised an eyebrow. "Wait. I thought I heard he died?"
"That's what everyone thought. Instead he fell into the void and bad aliens pulled him out. I think? I'm realizing that maybe I shouldn't take everything the god of trickery said as totally true."
"And you're here because you want me to try to help fight an alien army? I don't think that's going to work out as well as you hope…" Bruce frowned, finishing packing things into his doctor's satchel and going ahead and grabbing another bag for spare clothes. At least he realized he would probably be moving on regardless.
"Hopefully we'll stop them before they get the portal open?" Harry shrugged. "No, I'm here because SHIELD has you on a list and we're worried they'll send people after you."
Natasha's voice sounded from outside the door, "And we could use your expertise in gamma energy. The object they've taken has a distinct signature you might be able to track."
"Who's that?" Bruce zipped up his backpack, looking warily at the door.
"One of my friends from SHIELD," Harry explained. "We're trying to tell as many as possible their boss is mind controlled."
"Can I come in?" she asked. "We might not have much time." She didn't really wait for approval, stepping through the door and closing it behind her. The lock, such as there was, wouldn't have slowed Harry down, so he wasn't surprised she'd picked it quietly.
Bruce looked a little annoyed at the presumption, and Harry thought he actually saw the unflappable Natasha flinch slightly. Oh, right, SHIELD basically knew Bruce as an engine of mass destruction that could go off in an instant if he got angry. Maybe Harry should be more worried about that, now that the man wasn't on calming potion all the time?
"Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner," Harry made the introductions.
"You know, for a man who's supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked a hell of a place to settle," she observed, trying to regain her composure under snark. She was probably considering the harrowing ride to his apartment.
"Avoiding stress isn't the secret," Bruce shrugged, trying to get a read on her. Harry was curious how Bruce would react to the beautiful agent. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it off his face in a way that Harry had probably failed at. "How did you even find me?"
"We never lost you, doctor," she explained.
"That doesn't seem totally true," Harry chuckled. "Unless they thought you were still in Canada all last year."
"So… you were at Harry's school while you were off our radar," Natasha figured out and Harry blinked, realizing that he'd probably only kept his secret for as long as he had because he hadn't spent as much time with her as he would have liked. And because the idea he might be learning magic on another planet wasn't something she'd even consider. He'd need to be very careful about even hinting about Kamar-Taj and the Earth-based sorcerers whenever he was around her. "We need to move. I think your apartment is being watched."
"Watched by whom?" Bruce asked, his bags shouldered and giving the place once last, experienced once-over before abandoning it forever.
Harry had been poking his head out into the hallway ( through the door) as Natasha noted the threat and quickly pulled back in and announced, "Mercenary-looking types. With guns." He was pretty sure he'd dropped his visibility so they hadn't seen a ghost head poking out of the wall. Mostly pretty sure.
"Window," Natasha and Bruce said simultaneously.
"It's clear for now!" Harry confirmed, after floating at the speed of thought out onto the roof of the tenement below. "Go! I'll distract them. Somehow!"
The mercenaries (or maybe just SHIELD agents under faulty orders?) had been slowly creeping toward the door up the rickety stairway, but started rushing as they heard the sounds of exfiltration. "They're on the move," Harry overheard.
"Go hide in the closet! They're coming!" Harry yelled from the opposite side of the room from where the window was. The room didn't actually have a closet, but he was hoping it might work. As he faded back to invisibility again, the door was kicked open and, sure enough, he saw the lead mercenary orient toward the side of the room he'd yelled from. Limited success! "I bought you a couple of seconds!" he told Bruce and Natasha as he flickered through the walls to their position, in the middle of a bounding run over rooftops in the slum.
It looked kind of fun, honestly. Harry was beginning to be sad that he wasn't here physically.
"How's your control?" Natasha asked the man with the anger issues.
"Probably okay as long as nobody shoots me," Bruce answered, leaping across a narrow alley. Natasha looked grudgingly impressed that the seemingly-sedentary man was managing the athletic flight. Harry was impressed that she was doing it in what seemed like a pretty tight skirt, with no obvious difficulty.
"Then don't turn left," Harry yelled back, having rushed ahead to check their route. "More guys coming up that way." He was pretty sure the guy climbing up the roof in front did spot his ghostly body in the neighborhood's twilight. At least he had enough trigger discipline to just look surprised, rather than firing at the spectral boy. It wouldn't have hurt Harry, but it was a populated neighborhood with thin walls.
"Bus!" Natasha called as she juked right to the edge of the building next to the road below.
"Really!?" Bruce asked, but obligingly followed after her.
While the evening in the neighborhood was slow, they'd crossed the rooftops to a relatively major roadway. And there was, indeed, a large bus passing pretty close to the rooftop. The left-side-drive of the nation meant it was driving away from the agents chasing them.
Both Natasha and Bruce jumped. She effortlessly landed in a spread-out pose low to the roof. Bruce slid and had trouble managing his two bags, rolling toward the back of the bus as it continued in motion. Harry floated there helpless to keep him from falling right off. If he hit the ground, would the injury be enough to trigger the Hulk?
Fortunately, Natasha was able to rush forward and grab Bruce's trailing medical satchel, putting enough of her weight into it to give Bruce a second to spread himself out and plant a foot against a seam of the back of the vehicle and gain a moment of purchase. "Um. Ow," he grumbled, but Harry didn't glimpse any signs of turning green in the dark.
Planted a couple of feet from his face, her blending-in-clothes probably ruined from the grime at the top of the bus, Natasha's face lost the momentary rictus of panic—she'd had the same worry as Harry—and settled back into her putting-people-at-ease look. "Stay low and we'll hopefully be safe," she consoled him, spotting the agents on the roof fading into the distance as the emptying streets allowed their bus to proceed at its nominal speed rather than immediately stopping in traffic. "We'll get a cab at the next stop."
"Not one of those little ones that takes corners really fast," Harry suggested, flickering momentarily into visibility. "I'll stick with you both until you get back to the airport."
Well, what he actually did first was float invisibly back to the roof to spy. "No good. He got away," one of the men was speaking over his radio. "Looked like he was with Romanoff?"
"Fury should have mentioned she was involved. What's even going on?" the hand-held device squawked back, presumably from their man in the van. "Clear out."
He managed to flicker back to the two of them before he lost the sense of where they were, and followed along as they made their way back to the airport. Natasha put on a bunch of patter for the driver like they were a tourist couple, and Bruce looked vaguely uncomfortable at having a beautiful spy trying to convince people they were romantically involved.
Harry also suspected that she was getting more out of Bruce than he thought, since part of her patter involved talking about other places they'd been on vacation, and prompting him to invent stories. If nothing else, she was figuring out what locations he'd genuinely been to by the accuracy of his fabrications. She was so good at it that, by the end of the half-hour cab ride, Bruce had lost a lot of his wariness in playing along, and seemed to have grown pretty comfortable with Natasha. Harry reminded himself that he should probably be extra-careful around her now that she knew the right kinds of questions to ask to figure out more of his secrets.
They did manage to get back just as her fancy jet was landing to pick them up, so Harry also had to give her more credit for timing. "Okay, I have to go back. Meet you both when we get where we're going?" Harry asked, flickering into visibility as they walked from the road into the airport. He was assuming Coulson had told her where that was, because he wasn't sure.
"Be careful," she nodded.
"Good luck," Bruce told him.
With that, he allowed himself to relax, the great distance from his body having created a massive tension that he'd been fighting for the entire hour and a half he'd been there. Snapping across the planet on a spiritual rubber band, the collision back into his body was enough to make him very glad he'd chosen a well-braced spot.
He might have spasmed a bit and flopped to the floor.
"Potts!" Coulson said, with a moment of worry.
"I'm okay," he insisted, figuring out how to use his physical limbs again. "Snapped back to my body faster than I expected. Bruce and Nat are fine. Left them getting on their jet. Some agents tried to stop them and they had to run. Said Fury sent them, but didn't expect her to be there or know why they got the orders."
"Hmm. She might have been able to talk them out of it," the senior agent figured. "But that would have taken time."
"And they had guns out," Harry volunteered. "Maybe he told them to shoot Bruce so he'd Hulk out and wreck the city?"
"Yeah. That would have been bad," Coulson undersold. "Get dressed, and we'll get on our own plane."
As part of their efforts over the evening, they'd acquired clothes that would stand out less than Barton's fatigues, Coulson's men-in-black suit, and Harry's tournament robes or armor. They'd gone for very relaxed t-shirts and jeans for Harry and Barton, and a slightly more buttoned-down look for Coulson, but they would potentially pass as family on a trip. The rest of their gear was stuffed into backpacks, and Harry hoped he wouldn't need quick access to anything. "Are we going to be able to get through security with your guns?" he checked, noting that both of the men had left their sidearms in the packs.
"We'll show our badges quietly and hope that it doesn't make it to Fury before we land," Coulson shrugged.
"I'm an air marshal," Barton grinned.
"Yeah. I should have been an air marshal," the senior agent shrugged. "Let's get moving."
It was easy to blend into the bustle of people leaving Vegas, even though it was still before dawn. The airport certainly never slept. But the Wednesday morning crowd was light enough that they got through quickly, especially when the agents quietly flashed their badges to get diverted into the ultra-fast line, where they only received a cursory wanding and were passed through. Harry wasn't really sure that kind of privilege wouldn't make it into the computers faster than Coulson hoped.
He remained bemused by the slot machines right next to the boarding gates. He'd never gotten to go to Vegas with Tony, and it was enough of a difference from all the other airports he'd been in to think that maybe every one of them on Earth wasn't basically the same after all.
They'd grabbed coach seats on a commuter flight direct to JFK airport, letting Harry know where they were going, finally. Maybe they were just planning to reconvene with Tony and figure out their next play? Regardless, the three of them settled in and tried to get a little more sleep on their five hour flight.
Well, Coulson had connected his phone to the plane's wifi and was trying to stay in touch with the world. Or at least maybe Natasha? When Harry woke up as the plane started to descend, he looked a little worried. "We should move quickly as soon as we land," he explained.
"We're made?" Barton asked.
"Potentially. Fury cut my and Romanoff's logins, but I'm seeing chatter from other sources. Don't want to get in a firefight in the middle of JFK at lunchtime."
"Guess we aren't stopping to eat, then?" Harry asked, his teen stomach awakened by the reminder that they were landing in a time-zone where a meal could be had.
"We'll grab something offsite," Coulson promised.
That promise seemed on the verge of being broken as both agents went on high alert the moment they got off the plane, eyes flicking around as they spotted individuals they recognized. "STRIKE. I see Rollins, but where's Rumlow?" Barton asked, quietly, worried. Harry didn't know what STRIKE was, but it sounded like it wasn't scrubs.
"On some assignment for the Secretary for months," Coulson confided, trying to nonchalantly plan an exit. The number of travelers seemed lower than expected for a busy New York concourse: it was mostly just the people leaving their plane. Harry didn't even see any gate agents.
"Well, that's something," Barton said, stretching his left arm to limber up and then putting his hand into his bag to have his gun ready. Whoever Rumlow was, not facing him seemed to at least improve their odds?
"Just let me know what we're doing," Harry told them, moving his own backpack in front of him so the armor inside might stop a bullet shot at his chest and so it wouldn't be in the way of his cloak falling to cover him.
"Huh. Maybe we're talking," Coulson said, with some surprise, as the man that they'd glanced at when Barton said "Rollins" walked toward them.
A skinny blond guy with slicked-back hair off of a large forehead, Rollins was sporting prominent facial scars and full tactical gear. "Coulson. Barton. Potts? We need you to come with us," he suggested. Up close, Harry could see that his eyes were brown. So at least he hadn't been mind controlled?
"Asking, or insisting? Coulson asked, his own hand free to grab his gun but currently not plunged into the bag. He probably didn't like his odds.
"Fury's orders were to insist," the man shrugged, wary of Barton more than any of them. He seemed to disregard Harry as much of a threat, so maybe Loki hadn't fully briefed Fury, or Fury hadn't passed it on.
"And if we told you that Fury's been compromised?" Coulson asked, hand getting closer to his bag.
Rollins smirked and admitted, "In that case, the Secretary is worried about the orders Fury's been giving this morning and wants to hear your side of it. We can take you to him."
Coulson flicked a glance to Barton, who shrugged. Moving his hand free of his bag, the senior agent said, "Lead the way."
Chapter 64: Movers and Shakers
Chapter Text
"This is a mess, Coulson," the Secretary began. They'd been brought to a large conference suite in a hotel near the airport. Grudgingly giving up their backpacks to the STRIKE escort who formed up in the corners of the room, they hadn't had to wait very long for their host to arrive. Tall and thin, in an expensive, gray, three-piece suit, the man's reddish hair was graying, and he wore bespoke glasses. His blue eyes were dark enough behind them that Harry was optimistic that he wasn't whammied.
"I agree, sir," Phil agreed. He looked uncomfortable. Harry got the impression that he was normally not the one that had to report to this man. By his bearing, "Secretary" probably meant a highly-placed political leader rather than just the administrative assistant to someone even more powerful.
They'd been given chairs around the suite's large table, Harry and his two agent allies along one side. The Secretary, however, chose to stand. The grandfatherly man checked himself before starting up, realizing that he hadn't been introduced. "Mr. Potts. I'm Alexander Pierce. I apologize that we had to meet under these circumstances."
"Under circumstances like these is how I seem to meet most people, sir," Harry responded.
"You're our expert on the situation?" the much-older man asked. "Or should we wait on Stark to arrive?"
"Um, no sir," Harry shrugged. "I can get you up to speed?" He glanced at Coulson for permission, and the agent nodded. "You know about Asgard? From when Thor showed up?"
The Secretary said, "I'm familiar with that, yes." The STRIKE team's eyes widened, suddenly realizing how bad this could be.
"Did he mention that he was going back to fight his brother, Loki?"
"Coulson would know for sure?" Pierce prompted.
Phil shook his head, "We debriefed the people he talked to on Earth, and it seemed unclear. There had been some information from his, er, entourage that some kind of dynastic coup was happening on their homeworld. But we didn't receive any further information after he returned to Asgard."
Harry summed up, "What I heard was, basically, Loki tried to take over, they fought, and, in the process, they broke the machine they use to travel between worlds. They thought Loki had died, but it turned out that he was rescued by another alien. Who I guess is also a really bad guy and might be trying to kill half the people that exist? It's not really clear."
"So Loki is here to wipe out half the planet?" the Secretary summed up.
Harry shrugged, "Maybe eventually. I'm not really sure he knows what he's doing. They gave him this scepter thing that lets him mind control people he touches with it. It also shoots lasers. But I think it's controlling him almost as much as he's controlling everyone else. Anyway, he used it on Fury and they took the blue brick. I think they're trying to use it to open a portal to bring an army of aliens from the other side of the galaxy."
Pierce rested his hands on the back of one of the chairs around the table. Harry thought he had a very Dumbledore vibe, trying to remain in control and acting like he wasn't completely floored by this new information. "And you know all of this because…?"
"I go to school on one of the other planets in the group that Asgard calls the Nine Realms?" Harry admitted. "It's the same school Loki went to centuries ago. And the people there kind of think of the rulers of Asgard as their gods." He anticipated the next question of how he'd gotten involved by explaining, "When I was a baby, my parents died saving me from the big alien guy that rescued Loki? And everyone thinks he died, but he was probably just badly injured. Anyway, that means I'm kind of a symbol of being able to beat that guy. So their people kidnapped me to kill me to prove it was a fluke or something. And I managed to escape and follow Loki through the portal."
The Secretary had been looking increasingly grim throughout that explanation. If even half of what the kid was telling him was true, things were bad enough that there were very few angles available to him. A mind-controlled alien overlord representing an unknown outer space threat bent on galactic genocide wasn't good for anyone on Earth, no matter their political aims. This unknown alien probably wasn't going to show up and negotiate in good faith for which half of the world got killed. Pierce pondered all of this for a moment, and said, "So if I can sum up? A banished royal from a group of powerful aliens, working for another group of powerful aliens, is trying to bring an army to attack Earth, using the Tesseract. He has some kind of weapon that lets him suborn anyone he can touch with it. And the first person he got with it was the director of the organization designed to protect the planet from things like this."
Harry, Coulson, and Barton nodded.
"How big of a threat is this guy, personally?" Pierce asked. "Coulson's report had Thor smashing through buildings and giant robots."
Musing, Harry figured, "He's probably not quite as strong as Thor, but he killed most of the agents in the room when he came in, and they were shooting at him." Barton nodded his agreement, so Harry continued, "Even without the scepter, he can create really convincing illusions. Change his appearance. Turn invisible. Make holograms of himself while he's sneaking up to stab you?" Harry was just guessing a bit based on what he'd seen Loki do as "Cedric" and what he remembered Fandral complaining about in his stories. "He can probably do a bunch of other weird tricks like that." Harry wasn't sure what other kind of magic Loki could manage. It had been interesting all the things that "Cedric"hadn't been able to do.
"Could Stark beat him?"
"If he was ready for his tricks, probably," Harry figured. He doubted Loki would shrug off a repulsor or micro-missile as easily as small arms fire.
Pierce regarded them for a long moment, taking in the earnest faces of his "guests" and the disbelieving ones of his bodyguards. He eventually said, "It sounds far-fetched, but with Fury and Hill cutting off communications as soon as I started questioning their orders of the last few hours, I'm inclined to believe that something has gone badly wrong. They've managed to take the entire helicarrier dark, and I didn't know that was even possible." Coulson and Barton looked worried about that revelation, though Harry had no idea what a helicarrier was. "Fury had Rogers picked up and brought to him this morning, and, I understand, ordered an assault on Stark Tower that Iron Man had to rebuff. And I also understand that Romanoff picked up Banner in India a few hours ago, out from under another team with orders to bring him in by any means necessary."
"We're in communication with Romanoff," Coulson volunteered. "We worried that Fury would go after the Avengers Initiative list. The Hulk triggered in a dense area…"
"That's good news, at least," the Secretary agreed. He decided on a course of action that would give him maximum flexibility toward freeing up his own agents, and ordered, "Phil Coulson, as the highest-ranking agent that so far seems uncompromised and read-in on the situation, I'm giving you operational control." As Pierce made that decision, the STRIKE bodyguards seemed to subtly relax, though they still had an eye on Harry as a potential issue in a room that was otherwise spies getting along. "So do we have a plan?"
Coulson frowned at the new, if temporary, promotion, but explained, "The Tesseract emits a gamma signature. It's possible Banner could use his expertise to track it. And if it's on the helicarrier, we can find that too." He volunteered Harry's intel, explaining, "In theory, victims controlled by this weapon will have bright blue eyes and can be freed by knocking them unconscious."
The Secretary nodded, seeming to like the idea that there was a way to recover his people and guard against further infiltration. "This is a mess," he reiterated. "I need to go brief the security council. I'm sending orders to the New York office that you're in charge for now. Make sure we don't lose the planet, Coulson."
"Yes, sir," he agreed.
Pierce looked at Harry like he had a lot more questions, but then decided to wait to read the reports on what the rest of his agents figured out. Asking the boy if he'd seen Sitwell and Rumlow would tip his hand too far, but hopefully the kid would mention something later. He nodded and left the room, a couple of the STRIKE agents staying with him as bodyguards, but Rollins and one other staying behind. Fortunately, it was the one holding their bags, and he turned them over. "That went better than expected," Coulson said. "You guys have a car?"
"We can drive you," Rollins nodded.
"Then let's get to the office before traffic gets worse…"
"The office" turned out to be a high-rise building about a quarter mile from Times Square and less than a mile's walk down 47th Street from Stark Tower. Harry wasn't sure how they afforded the real-estate, taking up several floors of a building that was otherwise the offices of a multinational investment firm. It was probably great cover for people in suits coming and going at all hours.
Inside, the space was very clean and open. Off-white marble tile floors and walls overlooked the open windows out over the neighboring streets. Harry idly wondered if the army of janitors it would take to keep clean were also high-security-clearance spies.
Harry was deposited in an office and then Coulson and Barton went to have meetings with the confused agents in the building who were suddenly reporting to a different boss late in the work day on a Wednesday. Harry's room was basically a hot-desking space for agents that came and went: a comfy enough chair, an empty desk, and nothing else of consequence. It was probably bugged. Harry could have just astrally projected to eavesdrop on whatever it was that he wasn't invited to, but he figured it was just Coulson having to give the same briefing he was fully aware of over and over.
They could have at least left him with a laptop, but at least they hadn't tried to steal his backpack. With a bit of mental concentration, he found two trackers that someone (presumably the STRIKE agents) had slipped into the bag's lining and where the listening devices were in the room. Magical electronic counter surveillance hadn't been particularly useful on Vanaheim, but Master Mordo had been insistent that all the kids at summer camp learn it. Harry felt a little guilty over frying the listening devices, and hoped they weren't ruinously expensive.
Feeling relatively more private, he fished out his mirror and called Sirius. "Pup!" his godfather answered within a few seconds. The background behind him was clearly one of the cars in the Hogwarts Express. "Are you safe?"
"Yeah. Turns out SHIELD is pretty good at dealing with their leaders getting compromised?" Harry explained, leaning back in the chair. "I'm at their office in New York, right down the street from Tony's building. I helped get Remus out from being attacked in the middle of a city this morning, and we're waiting for him to show up. You're on the train?"
"Glad to hear about Remus. But he probably shouldn't be hiding out in a city with his condition. Yeah, it took longer than I hoped for us to get moving. Should be getting to the station soon. And then it's an emergency Althing. There were already owls about renewed attacks, but nobody's saying anything about You-Know-Who. Maybe he decided to sit this out?"
"Or is just waiting to hit where you least expect? Or until Loki fully distracts Earth and Asgard? Be careful, he's got a whole Manchester Black thing going on." Harry guessed Bruce and his mother hadn't really brought comics for Sirius to read and elaborated, "That's a comic character. Massive telekinetic powers. The alien guy may not be able to lift living things directly, but just the force he was putting on the ropes around me was a lot. Might be able to disarm everyone near him. Throw boulders at people. That kind of thing."
"Noted. Yeah, Dumbledore said powerful levitation was common going up against You-Know-Who in the past, so maybe it's the same guy?"
"I think it must have been at least two guys," Harry shrugged. "The one that killed my parents has a deeper voice, and I think he's the 'Father' that's really in charge."
"Just when we thought that a dark lord was the worst thing we could face," Sirius frowned. "We're pulling into the station. Thanks for checking in, pup. Call if you think there's something we can help with over here."
"Will do. You be careful," Harry signed off.
He'd barely been off the call five minutes, sorting through his stuff and figuring out whether there was anything useful he should keep to hand, before a young agent watching the office door knocked and poked his head in, saying, "Um, Mr. Potts? Apparently Mr. Stark is here to talk to you, and is insisting on it now."
"Hah," Harry grinned, slinging his backpack back on. "Let's go."
They actually went up a couple of floors. SHIELD seemed like it filled some unknown block of the lower-level part of the building, with its own private set of elevators. Presumably the bankers on the top floors didn't even realize the base of their building was a government installation. He figured out why they'd been going up when they exited into an open space that looked out onto a partial roof access: the building had some tiered stair-step blocks of floors before shooting up straight into the sky. Tony had clearly landed on this HVAC jungle/large balcony, having flown over in the Iron Man armor rather than traveling unarmored down 47th.
At least he had his helmet off, to indicate he wasn't going to start shooting agents yet.
"Maverick!" Tony said, as soon as Harry was escorted off the elevator. "You're not getting vivisected!"
"Why would I be… oh," Harry said, realizing that Tony was referencing the idea of him being alien-autopsied by SHIELD. He couldn't quite tell if that was sarcasm, since worry about that was probably what Pepper explained for not revealing their secret to Tony earlier. He shrugged, "If I wasn't the only one that knew what's going on, and Coulson wasn't in charge, maybe they would have tried?" In hindsight, he hadn't gotten a great vibe off of the STRIKE agents, and the Secretary reminded him unconsciously of Obadiah Stane.
"Agent's in charge?" Tony asked. "I really thought he was, like, middle management at best? How many superiors got mind controlled if he's who's left?"
Harry shrugged again. His agent babysitter had the good grace to pretend to not be listening, staying by the elevator as Harry walked into the open space to talk with Tony. "He's at least high enough that being up-to-speed counted for a lot? We talked to Secretary Pierce, and he put Coulson in charge."
"They haven't even let me talk to Pierce," Tony pouted. "So do they have you doing spy stuff?"
"No. Shut me in an office without a phone or a laptop until you showed up. It was comfy, at least. I don't think they know what to do with me."
"I don't know what to do with you," Tony agreed. "Pepper wants me to fly you back to the Tower right now and start your grounding. Well, she half wants me to."
"She's okay?" Harry checked.
"Yeah. I scared off the agents last night and we flew her out to a secure location this morning. I guess she could come back, since they sent me a big apology thirty minutes ago? Which was good, because I was halfway to calling a press conference about government overreach. No apology fruit basket yet, though. But anyway, you ready for your grounding?"
Harry sighed, "As much as I would love to go hide, I think they're going to need me to help. How's the Tower coming along, by the way?"
"I was supposed to hook up the arc reactor so it's self-sufficient today, but instead I'm here. May do that anyway. Nice subject change, by the way. So you're refusing your grounding?"
"Aunt Pepper can ground me after the world is saved?"
Tony regarded him for a moment for teen histrionics and didn't seem to detect any. "Really that bad, huh?"
"Army of space zombies or something, just waiting to show up if we don't get back the thing that Loki stole," Harry agreed.
"JARVIS, look into loading the Mark VII for 'space zombies,'" Tony ordered. Presumably the AI responded in his earpiece with something droll, because he smirked.
Before he could say anything else, the elevator opened again and Coulson stepped off with a veritable entourage of agents, though Barton seemed to have better things to do than shadow the acting Director for the day because he wasn't present. "Mr. Stark," Coulson nodded.
"Agent," Tony responded.
Coulson produced a tablet and held it out towards Tony. "Glad you're here. We need you to look this over. Soon as possible."
"I don't like being handed things," Tony responded, deciding to be difficult.
Harry rolled his eyes and grabbed the tablet, opening it up. It wasn't like Tony could safely use a touchpad in his armor without syncing it with JARVIS anyway. "Is this stuff about the Tesseract?" Harry asked, scrolling through. "And the Avengers Initiative?" Tony was willing to shoulder-surf as Harry scrolled. The agent entourage looked positively scandalized by an un-NDAed minor going through so much classified material, but Coulson didn't seem bothered so they held their tongues.
Tony said, "The Avengers Initiative was scrapped, I thought. And I didn't even qualify." Harry glanced his way with a questioning look, since Tony hadn't really mentioned that in the casual bragging he'd been doing about his consulting with Fury. "Apparently I'm volatile. Self-obsessed. Don't play well with others." Harry snorted in amusement at the apt description.
Coulson just explained, "This isn't about personality profiles anymore. Banner is en route but not interested in combat. Thor is apparently out of reach. Rogers is missing and, we have to assume, compromised. Commander Rhodes is on assignment overseas, and the Air Force isn't cooperating. We need your help. Right now, you basically are the Avengers Initiative."
"Well, plus Nat and Clint," Harry noted, having scrolled further down the file menu. "But as 'support' agents. Wait, why is my name on here?"
"I guess Fury assumed you'd be in position to help in a few years," Coulson shrugged. "That file will probably need updating."
"Who's Danvers?" he asked, pulling open a file that just had a redacted Air Force record for a female test pilot.
"Last ditch possibility," Coulson explained. "I don't have a way to contact her. And if she's even still alive, she's probably not available quickly."
"Okay, so it's just me and the kid. Well, and the agents," Tony figured, managing to take the tablet from Harry without crushing it in his gauntlets. "I'll read up on this. I'm going to courier over a phone, and you better give it to him. Honestly, not giving a kid a phone to play on. Have Maverick call me if there's a crisis, or I may not pick up."
"Thanks," Coulson nodded, and Tony seemed a little nonplussed that the situation was bad enough for such a simple statement. Tony put his helmet back on, walked back onto the roof, and blasted off. "I didn't know they'd left you without a phone," Coulson half-apologized to Harry.
"I may have burned out your bugs in the office they stuck me in," Harry half-apologized back.
"Why are there bugs in our office?" the Acting-Director turned to his entourage, who all tried to look totally innocent of the routine espionage. "I'll set you up with your own copy of the tablet, since you've already seen it. Hopefully we can get Ms. Potts to agree to an NDA for you."
"No protocol for minors?" Harry asked.
"No protocol for minors," Coulson agreed.
Within an hour, Harry had both a tablet and a phone. He'd had to go down to the lobby to accept hand-delivery from a Stark Industries courier, who seemed to have no idea why he was running a sealed package right down the street to the CEO's nephew, but was chuffed about the whole situation.
Inside the package was a new Starkphone, a low-profile set of earbuds, and a trio of fingertip-sized hexagonal metal discs. "See if you can attach those to unlocked, networked computers," Tony's message on the phone suggested. "SHIELD. Bad guys. Whatever." Harry was kind of impressed with how miniaturized Tony had gotten what were clearly automated hacking devices.
The tablet was not networked. But it did, indeed, seem to contain basically the same material that had been on Tony's tablet. It came with a post-it note from Coulson saying, "Please review this information and let us know what's wrong. Ms. Potts agreed to the NDA. And says to call."
Figuring he better face the music, he had JARVIS connect him to Pepper. She picked up instantly, asking, "Harry! Why am I approving SHIELD NDAs for you? Why didn't you go back to the Tower with Tony?"
"Unless Asgard figures out how to get here, I think I'm it," he told her.
"You shouldn't have to be it," she insisted. "Phil's in charge of SHIELD? Why can't he handle it?"
"Loki killed half a dozen armed agents in less than a minute," Harry told her. "It was crazy. I was honestly starting to think that six-second combat rounds were too short."
"I don't know what that means! Did one of the princes of Asgard kill a bunch of people right in front of you?" Pepper was getting upset. "Harry! Is there anything I can do to get you to come to me and hide?"
"I'm sorry," he sighed, again realizing that it would be really nice to just go to wherever his aunt was and watch all of this play out without him. But, on the other hand, a small part of him craved the chance to step up and show everyone that he could do something important. He was almost 15. He was probably technically the Tri-Worlds champion! "I'm the one that spent the year with Loki, even though I didn't know it until yesterday. I'm maybe the only person he can't mind control. Nobody else has a real idea of what he can do. I'm going to be as careful as I can, but… who else is there?"
"You can't fight a god!" she insisted. "They're basically gods!"
"And you want Tony to fight him alone?"
"I don't want either of you to fight him!" she yelled into the phone. "Harry! I don't want you to die." She'd left unsaid the part about, "Not like your father." That part was unsaid a lot between them in the past few years.
"I don't want to die!" he told her, almost yelling back. He was glad of the bug-destroyed office for his fraught conversation. "But if I don't fight. If Tony doesn't fight… Aunt Pepper, I think they're trying to kill half the universe. If we lose, there's a fifty-fifty chance everyone we know dies anyway."
He could hear her stifle a sob on the other end of the call. Marshal her thoughts. Make a decision. "And you think you have better than a fifty-percent chance?"
"Aunt Pepper… I think we're going to show a bunch of aliens why you don't mess with the Nine Realms, whether or not Asgard can help at the moment."
"Okay," she huffed, voice still full of unshed tears. "Okay. Harry. You aren't allowed to die. You aren't allowed to let Tony die. I'm counting on you both to come back."
"Sure," he told her. "After all, I still have a grounding to serve."
That got a broken chuckle out of her. "I love you, Harry."
"I love you too, Aunt Pepper."
It was after eight in the evening before Nat and Bruce showed up. Harry had spent the afternoon reviewing the tablet. Well, he'd spent a couple of hours reviewing the tablet, boggled at how little they knew, and then spent the rest of the evening using his phone to catch up on the year's pop culture that he'd missed. They'd ordered dinner for him. He was getting sick of the empty office and was thrilled when Nat popped her head in. "We're back. Meeting upstairs."
"Nat! Hey," Harry quickly shoved his phone into a pocket like he hadn't been watching clips from The Hunger Games. "R… er, Bruce is here? You're both okay?"
"Other than the traffic from the airport, yeah. Thanks for providing overwatch," she said, with that friendly half-smirk. Harry must have made a face reminding himself that the engaging smile couldn't be trusted, because she shifted her own expression into a sad frown. "Don't forget the tablet. Someone gets assigned to a base in the arctic if you forget the tablet." He hastily shoved it into the backpack, put it on, and followed her.
Outside, his door guard had cleared out and it was basically just him and Natasha walking the windowed marble hallway. He was a little surprised to find the sun had gone down and Manhattan was lighting up outside the windows, after spending hours in an interior office. It really was a nice view, even though they weren't far up. And he was a little surprised that he was appreciating the view of the city rather than the view of Natasha, back in her form-fitting SHIELD catsuit/uniform. Maybe it wasn't just being in astral form when he'd been around her earlier. "You, uh, get some sleep on the plane?" he asked, a little lamely.
"Enough. And I don't think I'm going to have a long night. Banner, probably," she explained, leading him to the elevator.
"I didn't get to mention it in India, but sorry about Fury," he told her, getting onto the elevator. He remembered that she and the mind-controlled director had seemed weirdly close. "We're going to try to get him back."
"It's not the worst thing that's happened around here," she allowed. "But it's not fair just making people give up their secrets and do what you want. It's going to put me out of a job," she mock-pouted. Pushing the button for three floors up, she asked, "How was school? Other than getting kidnapped by a Norse god?"
He shrugged, already fully put at ease by the agent despite his wariness. "Fine. Loki put me in a tournament where I could have died. But everything else was okay." Maybe it was her ineffable interrogation method, or maybe it was just bravado, but he mentioned, "I'm kind of dating one of the other people in the tournament."
"Kind of?" Natasha asked, nonchalantly leaning against the wall of the elevator.
"Well, she's a little older. And her dad already has plans for who she's going to marry and it's not me," he admitted.
"But you're Harry Potts," she smiled at him. It wasn't even sultry. It was just an acknowledgement that this skilled, beautiful agent was sure that he was a catch.
"Thanks, Nat," he told her, having completely forgotten his wariness around her. Natasha Romanoff was very good at her job. "Not that I'll even see her again, since she lives on a different planet." He barely even realized he hadn't meant to give that detail up.
"You'll make it work out, if it's important to you," she insisted. The elevator dinged and she just led the way to the conference room without further comment.
They'd picked a nice one. It was probably big enough for two-dozen people around a big table, with large monitors on the wall for audio-visual elements. Tony had seemingly decided that his physical comfort was more important than his safety, since he was just in jeans and an AC/DC t-shirt. He was clearly in the middle of an animated nerd-out with Bruce, who was somehow still wearing the mud-brown suit. Barton was posted up on the far side of the table, watching the others, changed back into his black fatigues. And Coulson had returned to his suit, as if it was genuinely a comfortable look for him halfway to bedtime.
"It's just the six of us?" Harry asked, taking a seat at the table next to Tony.
"As much as I love having confidential meetings with dozens of agents standing around…" Coulson deadpanned.
"Personally, I have other things to do," Tony suggested. "So if we could speed this up?"
"I, uh, want to know how long I'm staying," Bruce suggested.
"Once you can safely move on, we'll let you," Coulson told him. "But in the meantime, we're hoping for your help tracking the Tesseract. We're sweeping every wirelessly-accessible camera on the planet. Cellphones. Laptops. If it's connected to a satellite, it's eyes and ears for us."
Harry and Tony shared a look at the blatant illegality of that, but Bruce just asked, "You have to narrow the field. How many spectrometers do you have access to?"
"As many as you need?" Coulson shrugged.
Seemingly excited about playing with SHIELD's dubious authority over every science organization in the world, Bruce insisted, "Call every lab you know. Tell them to put the spectrometers on the roof and calibrate them for gamma rays. I'll rough out a tracking algorithm based on cluster recognition. At least we could rule out a few places." He grudgingly realized, "Do you have somewhere for me to work?"
Tony, who'd apparently already become science-bros with Bruce before Harry got to the room, offered, "You can come down to the Tower. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'll love it. It's Candyland. Maverick, too," he turned to Harry. "I bet this place doesn't have bedrooms."
"Well, we have some," Coulson allowed. "But if you can be ready for a problem, and Stark Tower has better facilities for Banner…" Less of a control freak than Fury, Coulson shrugged. "Just be ready for a call. Things could move quickly. And keep us informed."
Tony already had a car waiting to take them down the street to the Tower, and Bruce looked out at the late evening in Manhattan with a bit of trepidation. "Last time I was here, I kind of broke… Harlem."
"It's fine," Harry assured him. "That was like a week after Tony broke Queens."
"True, and besides," Tony grinned, "I promise a stress-free environment. No tension. No surprises. BOO!" He suddenly leaned forward and yelled in Bruce's face. Bruce just sighed. "Nothing? You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?"
"We tried 'huge bag of weed' last year," Harry informed him.
"It was medicinal!" Bruce objected.
"Last year?" Tony put together. "Wait, were you at 'no electronics' school, too?"
"For a while," Bruce admitted. "They were trying to help me manage my problem, and get my help with a problem they were having."
"He went to school with my dad and Sirius," Harry explained. If he was done with keeping secrets from Tony, then he was going to make use of that freedom.
"You met Sirius?" Bruce checked, wondering how Tony would react to his old friend.
"Yeah. Good times. We bonded over rock music."
"Lily's records!" Bruce remembered. "I'd forgotten about those. Bunch of people used to basically-medieval technology singing along to the Stones. It was hilarious."
"Did everyone but me know about how easy it is to go to space?" Tony checked with Harry.
Harry just gave a helpless shrug, "It surprised me, too, that he was the Hulk. After this year… I kind of blame the Norns for messing with probabilities and stuff."
"Yeah?" Bruce asked. "I assumed the Norns were just Vanaheim superstition."
"After the shit that happened at the tournament, I don't know," he grimaced. "I kind of want to go find them and yell at them to give me a break."
Even in Manhattan traffic, the ride to the tower was quick, so they were soon unloading into the parking garage and taking Tony's private elevator up through the tower. "I got the reactor hooked up earlier, so we're totally self-sufficient," he bragged. "Even if someone tried to cut power to the place and siege us or something, we'd be able to keep going."
"What if they smash in through the windows?" Harry asked.
"Science floors are reinforced," Tony shrugged, but frowned at the reminder that enemies might just damage his beautiful new building. "And here they are."
It really was like Candyland for scientists. Bruce couldn't help the grin that spread across his face as he took in the pristine, high-tech equipment and spacious labs. "I can work with this," he said. "Give me a few hours to rough out an algorithm."
"JARVIS, assist Bruce on that," Tony ordered.
"Of course, sir," the synthetic voice echoed through the room. "Doctor Banner, I'd suggest using terminal three…"
"Is that an AI?" Bruce boggled. "There were rumors, but, wow, natural language recognition and dynamic assistance. I'm impressed."
Harry and Tony hovered in the lab as Bruce worked out his algorithm. Tony was alternately offering suggestions for the tracking algorithm and puttering around with his own work on another terminal, asking questions of Harry and trying to optimize his next set of armor for whatever might be coming and to design other countermeasures. Most of what both of them were doing was well over Harry's head, but he was happy to see his old professor actually in his element, rather than in an electricity-free castle. He also made use of the facilities and JARVIS' help to print a few things he was lacking: like a mask for his armor.
"There. I sent it to the SHIELD servers. May take hours and hours to run," Bruce announced around midnight. "And I'm beat. I think my body thinks it's like ten in the morning and I've been up all night."
"I… have no idea what time my body thinks it is. I guess I should sleep, too," Harry agreed.
"Rooms down a few floors. JARVIS can direct you. I'm going to be up a while longer," Tony told them.
Harry was surprised to see that the room JARVIS directed him to was actually his room. It had clearly been set up similarly to his bedroom back in LA, rather than just being a generic hotel-style space. And it had lots of clothing in his sizes and styles already in the dressers and wardrobe. Even though he and Tony had been basically cool all day, seeing that he'd been given a permanent space in Stark Tower really made it hit home that he wasn't going to be thrown away because of his secrets.
He slept pretty well. It seemed like even Tony had gotten enough sleep, as the three of them met late in the morning around a well-appointed kitchen table with an amazing view of the city, and a whole breakfast spread that had been brought up. Though Harry was only halfway through a bagel when JARVIS announced, "Agent Coulson, calling."
Tony sighed over his coffee and said, "Put him through."
"Problem," the acting Director announced without preamble. "The agents I sent off with some of the key material from PEGASUS just reported in."
"The guys you told to do the Havana thing?" Harry asked.
"Right. They think their location is compromised. If Team Loki gets their hands on that equipment, we could have a real issue."
"You think they're going to send Loki to try to get it?" Tony asked.
"They'd basically have to. The equipment would be… a big help against any regular attack. The problem is, it's in north LA, and Fury has most of the quinjets. We only have the one Romanoff used, and it will take at least half an hour to get to from here. Romanoff and Barton are on the way, but we're maybe two hours out."
"I can get there in just over an hour," Tony suggested. "Send me the exact address. I'm on my way." He slurped down the rest of his coffee as he was already moving to the elevator.
"Can he fight Loki on his own?" Bruce asked Harry.
Harry frowned. "Probably. But Loki and whoever else he has with him?"
"And how did they find out they were compromised?" Bruce agreed.
"Trap?" Harry asked.
"Trap," Bruce agreed.
"You know I'm still on the line?" Coulson asked over the room's speakers.
"Same," Tony agreed.
"I may be able to get out there in under an hour, too…" Harry realized. "And I may be the only backup Tony has. Send me the address?"
"How are you going to get across the country in an hour?" Coulson asked.
Harry just grinned and told him, "Maaaagic."
Chapter 65: Princes of Asgard
Chapter Text
It only took a few minutes for Harry to run back to his room and get dressed. As part of his manufacturing from the night before, he'd had JARVIS make an undergarment similar to the one that Tony wore under his armor when he had the time to change out of his street clothes. It was basically a form-fitting set of black footie pajamas. In addition to being a sweat-wicking synthetic, the outfit was also laced with tech for JARVIS to monitor the wearer's vitals. Harry's version of it had a secure pocket on his chest to hold his phone, where it could connect to the suit. It was tight-fitting enough that his armor slid over it without difficulty.
After one last, cursory sweep for SHIELD bugs, he set off toward Bleecker Street. He thought about turning off his phone for the trip, but figured that Tony had already figured out that the London sanctum was related to his school, and it wouldn't hurt for him to know there was another "alumni association" in Manhattan. He got his broom out and wrapped his cloak around it as best he could, shooting from the upper balcony of Stark Tower toward the New York sanctum.
Since he'd called ahead to Dean's mother, who was a guest at the sanctum, there was already a grumbling Lucian Aster on the sanctum's roof, cup of coffee in one hand and sling ring in the other. "I'm not a taxi service!" the dark-bearded near-master yelled, spinning open a portal to send Harry to LA. He was sure he'd hear some passive aggressive complaining from Kaecilius, too. And he'd be ready with his arguments about if they'd just give him a sling ring…
He hadn't actually been clear to Mrs. Thomas to pass along to Luc where he exactly needed to go, so he popped out in his backyard in Encino, the last place that the sorcerer had picked him up from in the city. Tempted to just stop for a moment and appreciate being home, he realized he had no idea how far behind Tony he was, or how far he had left to go. Wrapping his cloak back around him, he shot up and then said, "JARVIS. Do you have me on GPS? Where am I going?"
"Updating your position, Mister Potts," The AI's voice came through the earpiece he'd had built into his mask. "You've changed location quite dramatically."
It was going to take him some time to get used to wearing a high-tech balaclava all the time, but none of them wanted him to make the news as a not-quite-15-year-old involved in dangerous combat. He'd considered making the eyepieces reminiscent of his glasses, or putting a lightning-bolt design on the mask, but figured that people were already going to assume the smaller person in red and gold armor alongside Iron Man was Harry Potts, and didn't need to make that more obvious. So he'd gone with low-profile tinted lenses and a full mouth covering that contained a respirator to help with high-speed flying. The whole thing was in the same dark red as his armor, with a bit of gold piping for style.
"The address provided by Agent Coulson is a warehouse in the north of San Bernardino, approximately sixty-six miles due east of your current position," the synthetic voice recounted a few moments later.
"Ugh. I guess if we get in a fight over there, nobody will even notice," Harry mused, with an Encino native's cultivated bias against the eastern side of the LA metroplex. He urged his Firebolt in that direction. "How far out is Tony?"
"He should arrive at the location in approximately forty-five minutes."
"Okay, so I don't need to go there as fast as I could," Harry did some math in his head. "I need to be going at a little under ninety miles per hour to meet him there at the same time, right? Let me know when I get up to that speed." Then he leaned forward and put some of his magic into the broom, really enjoying the thrill of blasting across LA at faster-than-interstate speeds.
"Sixty. Seventy. Eighty. Eighty-Eight. This speed should be sufficient if you maintain it," JARVIS informed him. Harry was probably just imagining that the unflappable AI sounded slightly impressed. He could go way faster on the broom, but he might be a little worn out when he got there and his cloak was already having trouble wrapping him and the broom at nearly 100 miles per hour.
He was in the air for forty minutes before he heard from anyone else.
"I think you were right about the trap," Tony's voice informed him, while he was flying somewhere over the Cucamonga Wilderness—mountains to his left, and tract housing to his right. "Show him the video feed," he ordered JARVIS.
The lenses on Harry's mask were small shards of the same material that Tony used for his own heads-up display and his fancy glass-only Starkphone. Sadly, the technology used expensive-enough materials that even economies of scale couldn't currently make it viable for general consumers, and Tony wasn't interested in wasting time making fancy screens for other billionaires. So Harry was now one of the few people on the planet with his own HUD, and was trying not to think about the thousands-of-dollars-worth of tech in his mask alone.
It was very useful, however, in allowing JARVIS to pop up an augmented-reality TV screen in the corner of Harry's vision, letting him watch without obscuring his view of where he was going. What it showed was a live feed from a 24-hour news network, filming what had to be the warehouse they were flying toward, showing the same overcast early-morning California sky. The audio was piped through his earpieces, "...coming over to speak with us now. The Captain America."
That didn't sound good. Harry had been as surprised as anyone reading the Avengers files that Steve Rogers—the country's first known superhero—had somehow survived in suspended animation since his supposed death at the end of the second World War. He wondered how Fury had convinced the press it wasn't just someone in a similar suit.
Wearing the full red-white-and-blue costume, the man in question walked deliberately up to the reporters, and began speaking with authority, "We're here today to inform you that you've been lied to. I'm sad to reveal that the son of Howard Stark, my friend, has not been as committed to peace as he's led you to believe. I'm here to help seize a stockpile of extremely dangerous weapons that Tony Stark has been illegally producing. We don't yet know what they're for, but we believe that they're based on the same technology that was used by Hydra in the war. And, I understand, they were specifically banned in the Geneva Conventions… a little after my time."
"I guess they put that whammy on the Captain," Tony grumbled. "Can I sue an American icon for slander?"
"JARVIS, can you zoom in on his eyes?" Harry asked. As his inset news feed enhanced Rogers' face, Harry hummed in uncertainty. "It's hard with people that already have blue eyes. I can't be sure. They might have just lied to him. But we should knock him out to be sure."
"Got it. Cycling forward the night-night missiles," Tony confirmed. He'd been pretty pleased about successfully producing—on short notice—a load of munitions that should explode in a small cloud of knockout gas. And that wasn't even counting the rubber bullets he'd also loaded, for if he just needed to risk giving someone a concussion by shooting them in the head.
"There's Loki, over in the background," Harry explained, having spotted the Aesir prince with a team of SHIELD agents attempting to breach the front of the warehouse. The God of Mischief had changed his outfit to a SHIELD windbreaker and suit (at least via illusion), but he was taller than the agents around him and his long, dark hair wasn't exactly government-regulation grooming.
While they'd been talking, Rogers had been answering the reporters' questions, mostly about how he'd come to be there. He was charming, personable, and trustworthy; if Loki's play was to discredit the other people on the Avengers Initiative list, they probably couldn't have found a better spokesman to hold a press conference. Harry paid attention again as he explained, "Now, I need to go over there, because we think there are mercenaries inside that might come out shooting. Please, stay back for your own safety."
Harry was just coming in over the location, JARVIS having helpfully placed an AR waypoint on it as he got close. He was flying over the hills next to a large, dirt-track raceway and a huge washed-out flood plain that probably hadn't seen an actual flood in a long time. The warehouse in question was large, but much smaller than the massive distribution hubs that surrounded it in the scrub landscape. Harry didn't feel great about all the semi trucks coming and going on the surface streets, or the large tanks of what was probably trucking fuel in the lot right next door, dangerously close to the news crew whose van he could see as he got close. At least the warehouse seemed pretty isolated from its neighbors by the wide industrial streets.
"I'll go in quietly and help if you need it?" Harry checked.
Showing that he was worried enough by the possible capabilities of a demigod and a super soldier to not refuse the backup, Tony ordered, "If Pepper asks, I suggested that. Be careful." Even if JARVIS hadn't helpfully noted his location on Harry's HUD, the noise of the rapidly-decelerating Iron Man armor would have allowed him to track the red-and-gold figure streaking out of the sky to the east.
Harry slowed as well, letting the cloak wrap around his broom completely so he could land unnoticed. As much as he wanted the air superiority if this came to a fight, he was a lot more confident in what kinds of things he could do on the ground. Without being able to use his wand, his magic-summoning gestures were a lot easier if he could put his whole body into them. He hid behind the western corner of the warehouse while he stowed his broom in its magical pocket, then slipped around the building, fully invisible in what looked like it was going to be an overcast and slightly-chilly morning.
"He's earlier than expected," Harry overheard Loki ordering the agents at the front of the warehouse, which faced east over a parking lot. "Go in now while we hold him here." As he turned the corner, he saw the agents smashing into the warehouse as Loki turned to the incoming Iron Man. Inside, there were immediately shouts and gunfire.
Loki didn't have the scepter on him. Was he concealing it? Why wouldn't he have the scepter if he was planning on a fight?
"I'm going in after the agents," Harry whispered over the comms, slipping into the building.
Meanwhile, Iron Man had landed in the parking lot, some distance away from Captain America and Loki, but in view of the news crews. "Excuse me," he announced, his voice amplified by the suit, "but I'm being slandered and I'd like to rebut. Wait, is it libel if it's in the news, or is that literally only for print?"
"Tony Stark!" the star-spangled man yelled. "Tell your employees to stand down, step out of the armor, and come in for questioning!"
"See, that's the problem, they're not my employees. This is the first I've heard of this place," Tony answered honestly, still grandstanding a bit. "Also, who's taking me in for questioning exactly? The US Army from the 1940s?"
Meanwhile, inside, rather than the firefight Harry was expecting, he saw the invading agents basically firing into the air and yelling cliches. There were already guys inside wearing black fatigues casually finishing their inspection of oversized sci-fi guns they were wielding. Harry recognized some of them from the truck that Coulson had sent away. They hadn't all had blue eyes then.
He slipped back out the door and whispered, "It's a full trap. They already whammied all the warehouse guys. They probably already did before they called us!"
Tony was trying to listen to that and Captain America explaining, "I'm working under the authority of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division." He was moving closer to Tony as he spoke, but warily.
"You're really not," Iron Man announced. "Your leadership has been compromised." He stuck his armored hand out to point at Loki, saying, "And that man is a space invader."
"He's not cooperating, take him, Captain," Loki announced, the British-sounding Asgardian accent really proving he was not an American government agent.
Harry came out of the front of the building and thought he saw a moment of hesitation from Rogers, who nonetheless flung his shield at Tony while rushing forward. It clanged off of the Iron Man armor with no obvious change other than a slight shift in position, then bounced off a tree at the eastern side of the parking lot and back into the Captain's hand. Harry resolved to never play pool against the guy, with that level of skill at practical geometry.
As Tony was trying to figure out the right response to someone who threw a giant frisbee at him, Harry noticed Loki's form flicker and disappear, reappearing right behind Tony with some kind of oversized hockey puck that he slammed like a shaped charge on the back of the armor. There was a high-pitched whine and, even a dozen yards away, Harry's HUD briefly flickered as the small EMP device went off. Within a second, Captain America was slamming into Tony, trying to knock down the presumably-disabled armor while Loki backed away.
Rogers was clearly not expecting to barely stagger Iron Man with the collision, and then get backhanded past the trees and into the chain link fence between the parking lot and the street. "Please. All my tech is shielded," Tony announced, still amplified. He was starting to sound angry, though. Harry assumed he'd at least had the same worrying flicker in his systems, despite the shielding. "Night night, Captain," he said, uncovering the missile pack on his shoulder and launching a small salvo of micro-missiles that started homing in on both Rogers and Loki.
Bouncing back surprisingly quickly, the Captain managed to swat the missiles away with his shield, causing them to explode into puffs of knockout gas too far from his face to matter. The ones that exploded in Loki's face didn't seem to do anything but make the illusion he'd left flicker. The demigod had clearly already turned invisible and moved somewhere else.
Harry saw Rogers rushing back in to try to fight Iron Man in melee, but couldn't pay much attention as the mind-controlled agents inside were starting to move out of the building, toting their oversized weapons. The man in the front had some huge black ray gun, straight out of a sci-fi video game. The barrel of the man-portable cannon was glowing orange, and Harry didn't feel great about that.
"They're bringing out the ray guns," Harry warned Tony, as he fell back to the south border of the parking lot.
He assumed they were going to shoot at Iron Man, but was surprised when the guy in the lead started aiming toward the reporters. Oh, right, this was all to try to make people think the Avengers Initiative list weren't heroes.
"Look out!" Harry yelled at the news crew, finally becoming visible to get their attention. The reporters on the southeast corner of the lot were so focused on the brawl between Iron Man and Captain America that they'd barely started to notice new people entering the fight.
He'd drifted to the edge of the parking lot to try to keep an eye on where Loki might pop up next, and didn't have a good angle to try to whip the gun off target. At best, he'd drag a stray shot into the gas vessels in the lot behind him, to the south of the building. If he didn't want a reporter to get incinerated by some kind of energy cannon, he'd have to do the dumb thing.
As the weapon hummed while it cycled up to discharge, he flung up a magical shield. Like fighting a dragon, he assumed that an energy weapon meant multiple layers would work better.
The beam from the cannon, indeed, hit like a packet of condensed dragonfire. Or like the BFG from Doom. With an audible whine, the ball of condensed plasma hit Harry's shield, flames of ignited air spreading around it. What Harry wasn't expecting was the orange energy of the cannon to react to his own energy in a way that pure fire wouldn't: both constructs canceled each other out into an explosion of pure force.
Harry was flung across the lot and dented the side of the news van as he crashed into it, barely missing the cameraman. Fortunately, his armor took a lot of the impact, but it certainly hurt. "Ow," he managed, sliding to the ground.
"Who are you!?" the reporter asked, wild-eyed at realizing they'd gotten way too close to a firefight. "Are they shooting at us?"
"Yes, get down!" Harry ordered, getting back to his feet. "Iron Man, watch out for the big gun!" he shouted as, indeed, the agent had apparently been discomfited by Harry's presence and started to turn toward Tony. "I'm with Iron Man," he hastily told the news crew. "The guy with the long hair is an alien who's mind controlling the agents and probably Captain America. I need to get back in there." With a bunch of energy cannons entering the fight, Tony was outgunned.
A lot of things were suddenly happening at once.
Iron Man had been having a surprisingly hard time in his fight with Captain America. Rogers had clearly studied him, and was doing a good job of staying close and throwing Tony off balance with hand-to-hand attacks. For all that Tony had started studying martial arts and boxing, this was the first time that anyone had actually been stupid enough to go toe-to-toe with him in the armor. And he wasn't prepared for the speed at which the super soldier could move. Plus, he wasn't willing to just unload on the poor guy. The fight had only been going for a few seconds, anyway, so he was still working out his strategy.
Loki could be anywhere on the battlefield, but almost certainly wasn't where it looked like he was, standing nonchalantly a few yards behind Tony to the northwest. Harry didn't like fighting someone else who could turn invisible.
Harry had started sprinting in the general direction of the brawl, not really planning on joining in but hoping to get in a place where he could actually energy whip without just pointing the guns at reporters or gas tanks.
As Tony realized that he could just get out of melee range by flying, the lead guy with the black cannon took that as a skeet being launched, and managed to nail the armor with a glancing hit. The fiery explosion of plasma flung Tony several yards further up into the air and away. He struggled to regain control of his flight as his legs were almost knocked out from under him. "Suit integrity at 87%," JARVIS included Harry on the damage report.
Rogers had to hide under his shield to protect himself from the explosion, and the last few seconds of situational awareness seemed to catch up to him as he realized that the gunner had shot at reporters that had barely been saved by a new combatant, and then had shot at Tony. "Whose side are they on?" he shouted at Loki.
"Stay focused on Stark," Loki ordered. "I'll go after the others!" The probably-illusory Loki began to hustle south, in the direction of the agents, but Harry, now very close to the super soldier, thought he saw a tell-tale ripple in the air right behind him.
"Captain, behind you!" he yelled, manifesting his energy whip and actually managing to snare Loki's arm as it came into visibility, oversized dagger plunging toward Rogers' back. Perhaps the super-soldier had outlived his usefulness.
To give Captain America credit, that's all the help he needed, already spinning to interpose his shield and slam the attack away. Which was good, because the Aesir prince was so strong all Harry had been able to do was slow his downward strike. Rogers then tumbled backward to avoid Loki's left hand, which was bringing the other dagger up toward his stomach.
Loki negligently twisted his right-hand dagger around under Harry's energy whip and managed to cut through it, causing the construct to unravel into motes of light. They were magical daggers, then, Harry figured. He still didn't know why Loki wasn't fighting with the scepter.
As Tony finished righting himself in the air after the energy cannon hit, Rogers rolled backwards to a fighting crouch, and Harry turned to reduce his profile against a counterattack from the demigod. Loki simply backed off of the scrum with a smug smile. "You really should have stayed focused on Stark," he said, with an affected, dagger-brandishing shrug. "We might have kept you around longer, Captain."
"I knew something was off," Rogers insisted.
"You're not mind controlled?" Harry asked, slightly incredulous.
"Just used to taking orders?" Tony figured, dismissive of the Captain's military service.
There were now half a dozen agents armed with a variety of energy weapons spreading out along the front of the warehouse, flanking the group to the west while Loki distracted them from the other side of the lot. Annoyingly, the warehouse had a "porch" area supported by brick columns that gave the men some cover. But they were holding off on attacking, for some reason, rather than spraying the assembly with plasma.
Almost as if making sure the retreating news crew had taken up a new position and focused on him, Loki took a few slow steps back as the illusion of his SHIELD outfit disappeared and his bridandine was augmented with new golden armor plates and an ostentatiously -horned helmet. "Defenders of Midgard," he announced, pompously, "I bring you glad tidings!"
"You already did that speech," Harry yelled back at him.
His moment stepped on, Loki scowled at Harry and conjured a dozen illusory duplicates of himself around the parking lot, all of them falling into fighting stance. "Show them what is coming!" he ordered the mind-controlled agents.
And then the lightshow started. Iron Man furiously maneuvered in the air to not take another hit. Captain America turtled behind his shield and was still flung across the parking lot by a blast. A tree caught fire behind Harry as he sprinted between it and the fenceline to try to get closer to Loki and away from the shooters. Tony's micro missiles tried to target various enemies on the battlefield. One of the gas tanks in the lot next door managed to explode even though nobody should have been firing toward it.
It was also raining, which, despite being overcast, was surprising for a chilly May morning in east LA.
Harry manifested a sword and swung it toward the Loki he thought wasn't illusory, and it turned out that he had chosen correctly. The God of Mischief got a dagger up to interpose, swinging the other one at Harry as he dodged backward. Oh, right, Harry hadn't really considered what would happen if he caught the demigod. Furiously giving ground, Harry tried to keep situational awareness of the rest of the fight while he conjured an off-hand stick to help with the dual-weapon battle. He had been practicing knife fighting for years, but never against anyone with superstrength and nearly a foot of height on him.
At least he'd managed to distract Loki enough that the illusory duplicates were starting to fade or just mindlessly pantomime the fight that the actual Loki was engaging in. And the shooters probably wouldn't try to fire at a melee with their leader?
"I had hoped you'd stay out of this, Harry," the prince told him, between dagger flourishes.
"Stayed home and let your friends martyr me?" Harry asked, hoping he had enough parking lot behind him to the south to keep evading backward. He absently wondered if even a few exchanges with Ying Nan had taught him a little more about evasive fighting. But his footing was getting uncertain in the suddenly-driving rain. Was that thunder? Surely JARVIS would have mentioned if there was expected to be a thunderstorm? Or he'd have seen the darker clouds while he was flying in?
"They aren't my friends, simply allies of convenience," Loki explained, haughtily. "And that was… unfortunate."
"You aren't holding that stupid stick," Harry argued, spotting the flaming wreck of the tree to his right as he fell back across the parking lot. "You can snap out of it! It's controlling you as much as those agents!"
"It's not!" the prince roared in negation, though Harry thought he almost saw a flicker of doubt through the sheets of rain between them. "I will rule this world!"
"You'll be their puppet!" Harry insisted. To his left, northwest, Iron Man and Captain America seemed to have begun to coordinate to try to get to the agents, but the sheets of water and cover in their way was making it difficult. Huge gouts of steam were left behind as the energy weapon blasts lanced through the raindrops.
Whatever Loki's next argument was, it was cut off by the crack of thunder as a lightning bolt landed directly in the middle of the parking lot, in between everyone. Somehow, it wasn't quite as deafening as Harry would have expected from a strike a few yards away, or maybe it was just his high-tech ear pieces managing to compensate. He at least wasn't electrocuted in the inch of rainwater he was standing in.
As his vision adjusted back after the sudden blinding flash, there was also a giant blond man standing where the lightning bolt had hit… so that was a little concerning.
Chapter 66: Hearts and Minds
Chapter Text
Harry didn't get more than a second to react to the arrival of what had to be Thor, since Loki was obviously used to his entrances and used the distraction to try to stab Harry unawares before his brother waded in. The Boy-Who-Lived very narrowly avoided losing that title, managing to deflect Loki's stab toward his midsection. Well, "deflect" was a strong word: Harry was able to shove himself away with his energy blades as if the knife was some kind of fixed object. Fighting Aesir royalty was like sparring with a tractor, or doing parkour on a windmill.
And Thor was supposed to be much stronger.
"Loki!" the god of thunder called, electricity still crackling off of his massive hammer. "Cease this ignoble conflict!"
"Well? Shoot him!" Loki yelled to the agents, finally slacking off on his attack on Harry and beginning to back away. Like the idiot Gryffindor he was, Harry stopped retreating, put some more magic into his conjured sword to give it additional length, and pressed the attack. He didn't want the master of illusions in front of him to have a chance to displace himself again.
Thor almost negligently caught a blast from one of the blue-beamed weapons on his hammer, deflecting it away and causing another gas tank to explode in the neighboring yard to the south. Harry didn't have a chance to check whether the news crew had decided their safety was more important than what was probably the story of their year. There were multiple agents with ray guns, though, and a blast from the orange one caught Thor in the chest, plasma converting instantly to flame and force as it flung the demigod away with an upset roar.
But a new target was all the respite Iron Man and Captain America needed to finally make progress. Another salvo of night-night missiles managed to explode in a few agent faces and the famous shield bounced between two of the cannons, making them spark. Thor managed a partial recovery from being blasted across the parking lot, landing near enough to Harry and Loki to launch himself through the air and tackle the god of mischief against one of the still-standing trees between the lot and the road to the east.
The poor plant shuddered and cracked a bit at the impact, as Thor slammed his brother against it two more times, until Loki dropped his daggers and allowed the illusion of his horned helmet and additional armor to fade back to his original armored outfit.
His implacable opponent so easily contained, Harry turned to make sure that the rest of the agents were being taken care of, but Tony and Rogers had it well in hand. The last of the attackers fell to the Captain's punch to the head. Harry finally had a chance to glance back at the news crew, who'd cowered behind their van but were still clearly recording. They might even have gotten good footage as the rain slackened after Thor's landing. The flood spillway to the west was doing its job for probably the first time in years.
"Where is the Tesseract!?" Thor demanded of his brother.
"And the scepter!" Harry tossed in, still the closest to the brotherly confrontation. Thor glanced his way in confusion and he explained, "He has a scepter with another Stone in it."
"Who are you, that speaks of Stones?" Thor asked warily, somehow inferring the capital-S, and suddenly realizing that he was surrounded by costumed warriors of uncertain disposition.
Weirdly, Loki helped, disgustedly explaining, "The boy that Fandral wouldn't cease gushing about before your failed coronation."
"Truly?" Thor grinned, absently rapping Loki against the tree again when he tried to escape Thor's grip with the revelation. "Harry of the Potters?"
"That's me," Harry gave a respectful half-bow, letting his conjured weapons fade. He gestured at his mask and the news crew. "But I'm trying to keep that identity secret from most of the people on Midgard." Based on the angle Thor was facing, Harry didn't think the news crew had picked up his name unless they had a really good shotgun microphone.
The big man considered for a moment but nodded, "Understood. Fandral will be pleased that you practiced his lessons. I saw you swordfighting with my brother."
"Nice entrance, Point Break," Tony announced, walking over warily. He must have taken another hit from one of the energy weapons, because his armor was scorched, the durable red paint fully missing in a few places. Somewhat abrasively, he declared, "We kind of need that guy to answer some questions."
Harry caught the tone. Tony had a bad habit of trying to overawe anyone he felt even slightly threatened by. It hadn't made him a ton of friends among other tech CEOs. Before he could get into a dick swinging contest with a god, Harry translated. "He used the scepter to mind control some of the world's most important… er… military generals, I guess?" He wasn't sure if Asgard had much concept of an intelligence agency. "And they could use the Tesseract to open the portal without him and let in his army."
"The Chitauri yes," Thor agreed, putting a name to the space zombies. "So?" he demanded, turning his attention back to his brother. "Where have you hidden these devices? Give them up and come home."
Across the lot, Rogers was doing the cleanup work of making sure all the agents were out and that the weapons were out of their reach. Interestingly, he looked at most of them with disgust and smashed them against the brick pillars to render them useless.
Loki made a clearly-fake apologetic face, shrugged, and said, "My new friend Nicholas has introduced me to a concept named 'compartmentalization.' I don't have them. You need the cube to bring me home, but I've sent it off, I know not where."
Harry blinked, realizing, "You knew you'd lose here. You didn't want us to get the scepter."
"It was a sad possibility," Loki agreed. "The chance of taking a few of your pieces off the board was worth the risk, however. Nicholas had something he called a 'strategic matrix' and convinced me that he should hold onto the scepter for the time being. I admit, now, it would not have turned the tide of battle."
"And how do you feel without it?" Harry asked. Thor shot him a curious glance, and Harry explained, "He's been holding onto it all year. It tries to mind control anyone it touches. He thinks he resisted it, but I think it's been forcing him to do all this."
"But this is excellent!" Thor exclaimed, jostling his brother. "We can explain it to our father!"
"Your father!?" Loki snarled, his facade of amused nonchalance shattered, as usual, by the implication that he'd been brainwashed. "Trust the boy not. I am the master of my own mind! I've seen worlds you've never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile! I have seen the true power of the Tesseract, and when I wield it, I will be king!"
"Okay, nighty-night," Tony said, launching his remaining knockout missiles to explode in Loki's face and cut him off mid-tirade.
"What have you done?!" Thor demanded, his brother slumping in his grasp as he turned angrily to the armored billionaire.
"It was a boring conversation anyway," Tony quoted, but did take a half step back in the face of the imposing and angry demigod. "Reindeer Games wasn't going to give up anything else, and we're on TV."
"He just put him to sleep! Sleeping helps remove the scepter's control," Harry interjected, and Thor subsided slightly. The teen turned to Tony and asked, "Reindeer Games? Did anybody even see that movie?"
"I did," Tony admitted, a little sheepishly. "And, you know, the horns. Plus, he's basically like Rudolph, because none of the other reindeer would let him play…" He subsided as both of the others were staring at him, and even Rogers, walking over, seemed confused. "Fine, I'll workshop it."
"Point Break was good, though," Harry threw him a bone. "He's got the surfer look."
"You sure you don't need a nap, too, Rogers?" Tony asked the approaching super-soldier.
Captain America frowned, "I overheard a little. Mind control? From that bladed staff with the blue gem? Is there any way to be sure I'm not compromised?"
"Turns your eyes blue," Harry shrugged. "Better test for some people than others."
The super-soldier nodded, "That was one of the things I was suspicious about with Fury." He sighed and said, "They didn't use it on me. I guess they just lied to me about what was going on. But I don't know if I can prove it. Sorry for trying to arrest you, Mr. Stark?"
Deciding to be gracious, at least in front of the kid, Tony allowed, "Happens more than you'd think. Where's that jet?"
JARVIS answered in Harry and Tony's ears, "Agent Coulson reports that they are still approximately forty-five minutes from arrival, but have dispatched a trustworthy set of local agents to secure the area."
"Folks!" Tony ramped up the volume on the suit again to yell at the news crew. "We're going to take this inside, and there are real feds coming so you might want to clear out. I'll do a press conference about this later, but we're still in the middle of a crisis."
"Really should have known it was hinky when they had you invite the news," Harry chided Rogers.
"Yeah," the man agreed. Unlike Loki's feigned apology, Rogers had a very expressive face that indicated he really was sorry for the mix up and trying to make up for it. It was easy to believe that kind of charisma had maintained his heroic legend for over half a century.
They dragged Loki, the unconscious agents, and the weapons back into the warehouse to be out of sight of the news crew while they waited for the jet and other agents to arrive. Well, Thor sort of bemusedly followed, the unconscious Loki slung over a shoulder. Harry finally explained to him, "I think they're trying to discredit the heroes of Midgard so they can't help when the… what'd you call them, the Centauri?"
"Chitauri," the godling corrected.
"Right, when they attack," Harry finished. "But we have a scientist tracking the Tesseract's energy signature, so hopefully we'll find it before that happens."
"You should contact Jane Foster and Erik Selvig!" Thor said, enthusiastic about knowing two scientists. "They are friends."
"Um, older guy with an accent?" Harry said. "I think he was the scientist already working on the Tesseract. Loki mind-controlled him, too. Is, um… is Dr. Foster blond?"
"No, she has dark hair," Thor said, worried.
"I only saw one woman in the room when Loki attacked and she was blond," Harry said, relieved. He tried not to think about how Loki had murdered her and they'd left her body at the bottom of the crater in the desert.
Leaning against a wall, Rogers pulled his cowl off, and Tony took off his helmet. Harry followed suit and pulled off his mask. "You're just a kid!" the Captain said, in shock.
"I don't love it, either," Tony chimed in. "But he's pretty much the only one that knows what's going on."
"He's your kid!" the Captain realized. "Your girlfriend's nephew, right?" They must have given him access to files since he'd been out of the ice. "How can you let–"
"I'm almost fifteen!" Harry interjected—slightly petulantly—at immediately not being taken seriously. At least Thor wasn't looking at him like a disappointed grownup.
"And slew a Nidhogg Serpent all by himself even younger!" Thor gave him a hearty pat on the back. Used to hanging around with Hagrid, Harry was able to roll with the super-strength clap of affection. He'd still have probably had a bruise if he wasn't wearing his armor.
"You slew a what?" Tony checked.
Harry gritted his teeth and admitted, "You remember the 'gas leak' a couple years ago? I… um… there was a giant ghost snake attacking the school?"
"And the same thing that happened to Fandral happened to my brother?" Thor finally realized, expression darkening.
"Basically," Harry explained. "The Stone was in a book that year, and I think it fully controlled Fandral. But he snapped out of it when I knocked him out and kicked it into the void. But this 'Father' must have pulled it and Loki out. I don't know, though… there were a few times Loki didn't have the scepter on him, even when he was on a different world, and he didn't snap out of it, so it might have its hooks in deeper than it did for Fandral."
"When I can return him to Asgard, my mother will see to his mind," Thor said, with confidence.
"This is all a lot for me," Rogers admitted. "Ghost snakes. Mind controlling rocks. I know about the Tesseract, but everything else…"
Harry summed up, "There are lots of planets with intelligent life. Some of them are in spots around the universe that have weird laws of physics that you can think of as magic. Nine of them are kind of linked together fourth-dimensionally so it's easier to basically fold space to step between them. I go to school on one of them. Thor is the prince of Asgard, which protects the others. But their teleporter is broken so they haven't been able to help the way they usually do."
"Our fault," Thor admitted, gesturing at himself and his unconscious brother on the floor next to him.
"That… pretty much makes sense, thanks," the man-out-of-time nodded, looking at Harry consideringly.
"See. Only one that knows what's going on," Tony agreed. "What I want to know is why these are here," he gestured at the pile of mostly-smashed weapons.
"So do I," the Captain agreed, scowling. "These are Hydra weapons. A lot of my friends were killed with these back in the War."
"Coulson called it Phase 2, I think," Harry explained. "They were taking them out of the base where the Tesseract was being studied. He didn't want Loki or anyone he'd controlled to get his hands on them."
"They told me Stark was making Hydra weapons when it was SHIELD the whole time?"
Thor gestured at the BFG and noted, "That one shoots like the Destroyer—an Asgardian weapon that Loki sent after me when I met the son of Coul. They must have taken the remains."
"Great," Tony's scowl was starting to match the Captain's. "So they have an illegal weapons division reverse engineering Nazi and alien tech. And they didn't even give me the chance to turn down helping." He wasn't actually that surprised, since he already knew SHIELD was working on weapons tech. While Harry hadn't managed to plant one of his hacking discs, the knockout missiles had been based on SHIELD designs that they had shared with him.
The genius billionaire couldn't help himself: he wandered over and started disassembling the weapons to see how they were made, and Rogers followed to look over his shoulder. The two men seemed to be bonding, so Harry began to sum up the rest of the information that he thought Thor would like to know.
After getting the debrief, the big man admitted, "We could not find out who this 'Father' might be after Fandral recounted his tale." He was only a little taller than Loki and Rogers, and nowhere near as big as Hagrid, but his sheer bulk and presence made him seem huge to Harry, especially right next to him. "But perhaps with this additional information my father will remember something."
"And there's some lady with a big bladed headdress or maybe weird antlers, that the Nidhogg Serpent seemed to think was his mistress," Harry explained. "The guy pretending to be Voldemort didn't even seem to know about her, but I think she may be working with the alien that killed my parents."
Thor frowned, the description tickling some distant memory of a fresco covered over and other portraits taken away when he was still a small child. "I know not who that is, either. That the serpents even have a leader is chilling. I thought them simple beasts."
"So did Tom Riddle," Harry agreed. "The draugr of the man they replaced to take over the Death Eaters. He thought he was controlling it, then it ate him."
Not long after their discussion, new agents began to show up at the building. Coulson called ahead through JARVIS to confirm that they were friendlies.
"We broke your illegal ray guns," Tony enjoyed informing the mild-mannered acting-Director.
"Not my circus," Coulson deflected, over the phone. "Take it up with Fury and Pierce."
"I plan to," the rich philanthropist agreed, at least willing to give the agent he'd known the longest a bit of a pass.
"My brother stays with me," Thor informed one of the incoming agents, who looked like he wanted to take Loki into custody. "Though I know not where we are taking him. I doubt this realm has a prison capable of holding him."
"I agree," Harry said, when it looked like Tony was going to suggest some high-tech solution. "He probably can't teleport, but I bet he can open pretty much any locks and restraints you can think of. And he can turn invisible and look like he's somewhere other than where he is."
"Can we just keep him unconscious?" Rogers suggested, cutting to the simplest solution. "You said sleep might help him snap out of it anyway?"
"Glad I'm not a medical doctor. I don't want to be on the hook to design the anesthesia protocol to induce a coma in an Asgardian," possibly the smartest man on the planet joked.
"You have coma missiles, Tony," Harry gestured at all the unconscious agents that were being carried out by the other agents.
"I may have borrowed the basic tech… and the name… from some SHIELD scientists whose notes were in the nonlethal weapons files they did let me see. Hopefully they understand tranquilization better than I do."
"Quinjet incoming," the lead local agent informed them, then went back to organizing the cleanup of the mess Tony and Rogers had made of the Phase 2 weapons. "Still press outside," he warned.
The four men (and Loki over Thor's shoulder) walked out to see the sleek VTOL landing in the wide street outside, to the east. Not only had the news crew not cleared off, they'd been joined by other stations, so Harry was glad of the warning so he already had his mask back on. At least they were all behind a cordon of government vehicles, but the reporters shouted questions that none of them could make out over the sound of a jet landing. As the bay opened, they saw a fairly large cargo area in the back of the plane, and Natasha in her Black Widow gear was waiting for them. Harry thought he glimpsed Barton in the pilot's seat.
"I need to go back to the house to swap to a clean suit," Tony gestured at his damaged armor. "I'll meet you back at the Tower. No house parties while I'm out."
"But what about my new friends?" Harry joked, gesturing at Thor and Rogers.
"Fine," Tony allowed, "but only since I've met them. And there better not be any drinking or other shenanigans!" With that he blasted off, heading back west toward Malibu.
"I guess the gang's all here," Natasha observed, as they walked aboard and she closed the ramp behind them. Like Harry, she seemed a little surprised by just how tall Captain America and Thor were up close. "Glad we brought the jet with the extra legroom."
"Have you met them yet?" Harry asked Rogers, as he realized he was probably the only one that knew everyone. At the star-spangled man's head shake, he did introductions while they took seats, "Thor, Prince of Asgard: God of Thunder and protector of the Nine Realms. Captain America, Steve Rogers: Earth's first known superhero. Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff: infiltration and interrogation expert. Hawkeye, Clint Barton: possibly Earth's best marksman." He was really glad of the Avengers Initiative tablet for having filled him in more on Nat and Clint. "You all met Iron Man, Tony Stark. He's flying back home to get replacement armor. And I'm Harry Potts. I don't have a code name yet."
"We should probably come up with one," Natasha agreed, with a genuine smile that Harry had given her an introduction that wouldn't have the two newcomers assuming she was a personal assistant or something. "You're the only one that still has a secret identity to hold onto."
"Should I also have one of these coded names?" Thor wondered, managing to figure out how to strap Loki into one of the plane's seats. "Oh, I had forgotten, I already have a secret mortal identity in this realm! Though I think I misplaced my Donald Blake identity card."
"We can probably get you a more secure mundane name if you want one," Natasha offered. "I understand that Donald Blake is an actual person that Dr. Foster knew who… does not look like you."
"A former paramour of hers, yes," the demigod agreed. "Are you aware of her disposition?"
She nodded, "Coulson got her to a safe location. He can tell you the details when we get back to New York."
"Excellent," he said, looking relieved. "It's bad enough that Selvig has been caught by this curse of the mind. I would not have known what to do if Jane had also been involved…"
"We should get you an owl," Harry suggested. Natasha and Rogers looked at him like that was a strange non-sequitur. Apparently not even SHIELD had really noticed that he had a pet owl and that it might be relevant. "Vanaheim owls," he explained, "can be enchanted to be able to carry letters between worlds."
"I sought one, but my mother forbade it as too unusual for Midgard," Thor sighed. "I think, in truth, she disapproves of my interest in a woman of your realm."
"Life span differences," Harry nodded. It was another potential barrier between him and Fleur. She was older than him, but she'd still be young-looking even if he made it to Dumbledore's age.
"And she's had her heart set on my marriage to someone else since I was young," the Aesir prince agreed. "Despite Sif and myself only being good friends."
"Everyone thought my friend Hermione and I were going to get together, too," Harry agreed.
"The only woman I ever really liked is ninety-one now," Rogers sighed. "I missed most of her life while I was frozen. We never even got to go on a real date." He pulled himself together and explained, "Even if you think you'll have all the time in the world together, it can go wrong. You shouldn't wait, if you really care about her."
Given how close he kept coming to getting killed, Harry had to nod. Even Thor gave a considering look to the advice of the man-out-of-time. Natasha just concealed a smirk at three of the most powerful warriors on the planet bonding over their relationship struggles. She shot a glance to the front of the plane, where Clint clearly wanted to weigh in, but wasn't going to compromise his own family's safety unnecessarily. She was a little surprised to glance back and see their gazes turning in her direction, as if offering her a chance to bond as well. "I've always been too busy to date," she deflected. "No big tragic romance for me."
The three superheroes clearly started to think about advice they could offer her, then thought better of it with someone that was probably far more adept at relationships than they were and lapsed into silence.
Nearing New York, Rogers asked about Loki, "Should he have woken up by now?"
Harry had been wondering the same thing, since Aesir physiology should likely shake off knockout drugs faster than a human. "He could be faking," he shrugged. "But I also don't think he's really gotten to sleep in a year, so maybe his body's forcing him to while it has the chance."
"We have secure containment at the SHIELD offices," Natasha offered. "If Thor can make sure he gets there, Coulson says they called an anesthesiologist to keep him sedated."
"I selfishly hope he wakes before you give him more drugs," Thor admitted. "I would have more words with my brother, even if his mind is too twisted to answer truly. We mourned him for over a year."
As they disembarked from the plane and organized cars through the Thursday afternoon traffic, Harry just worried that they might have more people to mourn before this was all over.
Chapter 67: Wolves among Sheep
Chapter Text
Nick Fury sat at his desk on the helicarrier, absently clutching the scepter and trying to plan. His head was full of yellow static, harder and harder to think through. It had gotten worse and worse the more of his staff he'd had to use the weapon on. In the beginning, they'd kept the circle as small as possible, but SHIELD agents were trained to notice discrepancies in behavior. Even the technicians took classes on it at the academy. Past a certain tipping point, none of them could miss the growing collection of blue-eyed leaders and strange orders.
He thought he had it under control now, but the weight of so many minds was more than the scepter had been designed to carry, dumping cognitive dissonance onto its wielder rather than letting the control fail. Fury regretted that he'd allowed Loki to leave him with the device. It had been essential, he knew that—they'd have lost the helicarrier by now without it—but he was worried the stress of maintaining it was keeping him from making the best decisions.
Deep inside the yellow fog, the small part of Fury that was still free waited for an opportunity.
Reports scrolled across his screen. Hill had managed to acquire enough iridium seemingly without anyone noticing. The leadership at the research universities she'd commandeered a supply from would probably complain to someone soon, but hadn't yet. And their fake NDAs and flimsy story only needed to hold up for a few more hours before it wouldn't matter. Selvig's team was in the bowels of the helicarrier installing it already. Loki had balked at keeping the most essential team within the flying battle station, lest they lose everything at once, but the mobility and facilities were a huge advantage. And there were no signs that anyone had found the enormous vehicle.
Not that they hadn't tried. He hadn't accounted for Alexander Pierce putting the pieces together so fast. And he'd hoped to have multiple Avengers Initiative candidates causing havoc across the world to draw off additional SHIELD resources and give him justification for unusual actions. Instead, until he'd instituted a total communications blackout and co-opted anyone that could hack through it, people throughout the station had been quietly communicating with the Secretary. They'd had to go dark much earlier than anyone had hoped.
The part of Fury deep inside that wasn't obsessed with the Mission involving the Tesseract had noted how odd it was that there seemed to be a collection of individuals onboard with a line to Secretary Pierce that didn't pass through him. The messages were most intense when he'd invented the story of Tony Stark trying to revive Hydra, to sell Rogers on the doomed assault. Almost as if that idea becoming public made them suspiciously anxious.
While his information was woefully incomplete, as his sources on the ground were contacted and subjected to the Havana protocols that he, himself, had instituted, he had a name for his problems: Harry Potts. Their VIP had been strangely reticent to share intel about the boy that had appeared behind him in the Tesseract lab. Fury could have forced the issue now, given the boy's demonstrated powers at the fight in San Bernardino, but he didn't have Loki to force it with. Before that, there had only been the suspicion that it was unusual how quickly Coulson and Romanoff had turned, how Barton had escaped, and how his dragnets for both Stark and Banner were so easily foiled. If his head weren't so full of golden wool, he might begin determining what possible connections they all had.
The thing he had noticed was the pictures on the news of Thor himself seeming to instantly take to the boy. The masked outfit wasn't fooling anyone in SHIELD, for all that Fury didn't see a current advantage outing the boy to the public: the spy core of him would die before casually giving away a secret identity just because it might cause Stark a bit of trouble in the media. The young teen had managed to assist in the fight at the warehouse, at least distract Loki, and quell any conflict that could have surged at the meeting of the three headstrong and mistrustful men that were at the top of his list.
Perhaps Loki had been right, that the scepter being on the scene could have served to get the men fighting. But if it hadn't, he'd had to admit that the boy would have argued to bury it in the deepest pit they had available. And then where would they have been?
It was still salvageable. They just needed to pull any defenders away from the juncture point long enough for Selvig to install the machine. And if they could recover the VIP at the same time… well, even if they couldn't, the scepter was starting to wonder if Nicholas Fury might not make a more level-headed administrator for a conquered Earth.
The part that was still fully Fury was horrified at the idea of being installed as a planetary dictator. Public leadership was a trap for other people…
Not as far from the helicarrier as they thought, Alexander Pierce and Gideon Malick of the World Security Council were having a private conversation. With the levels of security and anti-eavesdropping involved, it was perhaps the most private conversation on the planet. And once anyone involved actually got around to writing up eyes-only reports about Potts' "astral projection" that allowed him to invisibly spy on anyone in the world, they'd have to improve their methods yet again.
"This is a problem, Alex," Malick insisted in his gravelly voice, absently swirling the glass of expensive scotch that was de rigueur for clandestine meetings of wealthy older men. The imposing gray-haired man was the very picture of old money.
"It's a mess, is what it is," Pierce agreed. It was a testament to his respect for the other man that he'd managed to sit in one of the overstuffed armchairs rather than pacing for the conversation. His own scotch was untouched. "I'm just hoping it could become an opportunity."
"We're at least five years out from Insight. If we'd had it today, we could have just waltzed into control as heroes."
The Secretary shrugged, "If Stark survives, we might convince him to help with the designs, so nothing like this happens again. His repulsor tech alone would make staying airborne so much easier. I think we could move up the timetable to two years with his assistance."
"If he survives?" Malick raised an eyebrow.
"It was always going to be in our interests to wipe the Avengers Initiative list out before we made any moves. None of their profiles suggest they'd be amenable to working with us. They're finally all in one spot. If they stop this alien invasion cold, fine. Party at Stark tower. Unfortunate explosion. Blamed on sabotage by the aliens. If they don't, and we have to fight for the planet, I think we let them contain the opposition and then, well, clear all our problems with one nuclear explosion."
"It's the only way to be sure?" the Councilman chuckled. "I think I could sell the rest of them on the nuclear option if this goes tits-up. But it could be in a major city…"
"Gideon, if it would take Fury, his people, and the Avengers Initiative candidates off the board, I'd give up New York City or LA. DC is a harder sell, but if we can get the important parts of government into bunkers, that might be another opportunity."
"Rather America-centric of you. It could be London, Berlin, Paris, Beijing, Moscow…"
"Even better. Just make sure it's a world decision, rather than perceived as a strike from the United States. We'd have likely needed to nuke one of them eventually, anyway, with how many fewer people we have in those governments. But, realistically, it's going to be here. It's always here."
"What about the magic boy?"
Pierce sighed and admitted, "Still even further out of our understanding than Thor. I think he's too connected to the other people on the list… Stark, in particular, obviously. But he has at least four friends that almost certainly go to the same school. And they might be easier to persuade. I just wish that we were in touch with Sitwell and Rumlow. They must have gotten onto this planet, Vanaheim, last year. Are they prisoners there? Are they gathering intelligence and waiting for an opportunity to get back? Are they in touch with the same forces trying to attack us, and able to broker a deal?"
"We have to assume they're inaccessible for the duration and proceed as if they're dead," Malick suggested, to his friend's nod. "I'll start working on the rest of the Council about the nukes. You make sure to have your people ready to get anything we recover to Strucker and List. No more of this ethical research under the control of Fury."
"Agreed. I don't know how much Nick has figured out, anyway, and how much he'll remember if he gets freed of mind control. I think, either way, he may have finally outlived his usefulness."
Both men, course agreed upon, closed their meeting with a simultaneous, "Hail Hydra."
Impossibly far away save for the folded space of the World Tree, another member of Hydra the two men had been discussing was twenty minutes into a conversation in the dusk of a forest on Vanaheim. Jasper Sitwell had made up his mind two of those minutes in, but he figured he'd get as much information as he could from the man in the black robes and silver face mask that had come to meet him.
The problem with Death Eaters was that they weren't fanatics. Sitwell was a fanatic, if he was honest with himself. Most of Hydra was. If the Death Eaters had been fanatics, he'd have had more faith that they'd push their agenda through to the last wizard standing, and make the government of Vanaheim bend before their beliefs. But he was already aware that they'd simply rolled over and gone back to their lives when they'd lost a dozen years or so earlier. One figurehead was defeated and the movement was over. They lacked conviction. At best they were rich men hoping for a bigger piece of their government. At worst they were sycophants.
They weren't fanatics, but they were racists. It was a weird thing to be mad about, working for an organization that had come out of Nazi Germany, but the modern Hydra had a reasonable amount of diversity. The story they told themselves was that Schmidt's Hydra had just been doing to the Nazi party what the current one was doing to SHIELD: if they'd succeeded in taking over the world back then, it wouldn't have been under Hitler's ideology for long. As a Honduran-American who would never pass as the Aryan ideal, it was a story that Sitwell needed to believe, and so he did. And the Death Eater he was talking to clearly thought anyone from Earth was barely sentient. It was at least a new condescension that Sitwell had never experienced before. But it didn't seem like Hydra would ever be equal partners with these people.
He'd also read the whole CIA playbook on rebellions, insurrection, and regime change. Hell, he'd been involved in a few conflicts in Central and South America, in his early days as a spy. Ideally, you'd help a revolution if you either thought it had a good chance to succeed and would have the new government indebted to you, or if you just thought that any chaos in the country was good for you compared to the status quo. But after months learning about Vanaheim's current government, he wasn't sure. It seemed to mostly be a stable aristocracy that wouldn't care one way or another if Hydra took over Earth, as long as their secret former-nationals living there weren't harmed. If portals could be set up, they might even be interested in trade.
Working on admittedly-limited knowledge from the local peasants, his intuition was that the Death Eaters might manage a coup, but they had no real grassroots support. The best they could hope for was a regime change that wound up looking more or less the same to the common people, but which would not enjoy the protection of Asgard (Sitwell had met Thor—or at least watched him defeat the giant robot that had burned through a SHIELD cordon—he was under no illusions that the gods of Vanaheim were simply myth). Most likely, the cult might seize political power briefly, and then be soon ousted by a true insurgency with the support of their gods.
He'd have loved to get approval from the Secretary, but sometimes you were the most senior agent on the ground, cut off from your superiors, and had to use your best judgment. "I think we can come to a mutually-beneficial arrangement," he lied to the Death Eater, who'd tailed off on some topic that wasn't very interesting. "But I can't deal with a man in a mask. My name is Jasper Sitwell, and I'm a level six agent of SHIELD. Can I know who I'm speaking with?"
Sitwell was good at rapport, and for all that the Death Eater thought he was little more than an animal, he couldn't see the harm; it wasn't like a Midgardian's word against him would matter in Vanir courts. He was a little more worried about the marauder who'd brokered the meeting—a nonmagical Vanir named Albert who'd been a common highwayman before the arrival of alien warriors—but trusted the wretch enough. "Very well," he lowered his cowl and removed the silver mask, "I am Xavier Goyle, and I am of the second circl–"
His pronouncement was cut off by the loud bang from the dark treeline to his left and the sudden explosion of his brains out of the hole in his skull.
To give Albert credit, the bandit understood they were under attack, and even picked the right direction of attack to try to crouch behind his center-grip shield against. He was probably very surprised when Sitwell, to his side in the direction he wasn't defending, calmly drew a sidearm and put two bullets into his torso and one in his head.
After a few moments to make sure there didn't appear to be any other backup they hadn't spotted, Rumlow emerged from the shadows, the compact rifle he'd managed to bring to Vanaheim lowered but ready. "Told you I'd get him to take the mask off," Sitwell gloated.
"Good thing," his companion nodded, inspecting the mask that had fallen from Goyle's hand. "Who knows what kind of bullshit magic armor is on it."
"It was a good shot. Looks like the robes stayed clean. Let's strip him and see if he has anything else useful. We can probably hide the robes and mask and use them if nobody manages to magically track them down in the next few days."
"You do that while I bury the kid. I'll be back for that guy," Rumlow agreed to the plan, letting his rifle fall fully on its strap so he could drag Albert's body out of the clearing and toward the shallow graves they'd already dug. There had been a chance that they wouldn't have needed them.
"Hopefully Black is still in town," Sitwell mused. They'd recognized the man that had visited Harry Potts the previous summer on Earth when he returned on the train and started organizing the local defenses against the marauders. "He'd probably love our help riding out to clean up the rest of Albert's camp…"
If there wasn't much benefit to destabilizing a government, you could still win points by helping to stabilize it.
Harry was blissfully unaware of all the plotting that was going on. Whatever the trigger for the visions that sometimes came to him was, it was not present as he snatched a few hours of sleep in his bed in Stark Tower. Tony had gotten back to the Tower before them in his backup armor. They'd hung out for a few hours with Natasha, Clint, Bruce, and Steve (who insisted on not being "Rogers" if everyone else was on a first-name basis). Thor had been sad to miss a party, but refused to leave Loki where he was sedated over at the SHIELD offices. By nearly midnight, no new crisis had popped up and Bruce thought his search for the Tesseract was still a few hours from any results (though he felt like he'd at least narrowed it down to within a few hundred miles of them). So they all went to bed. Steve had even turned in early: while everyone basically trusted his word, he knew he wouldn't be completely trusted until he'd slept off any potential mind control. Even Tony had gone to bed by one in the morning after putting in the last adjustments to the Mark VII armor and starting its production within the automated machine shops within the Tower.
They woke to the sound of explosions.
Late-night in Manhattan wasn't exactly quiet, and the bedrooms at Stark Tower were well away from street level and pretty soundproofed because of this, but missile impacts were shockingly loud even blocks away. Harry was probably slightly less hypervigilant than most of the adults, but still managed to find himself free of bed, mostly awake, and staring out his window in time to see a fourth missile strike the SHIELD offices. Rapidly reaching full crisis-mode consciousness (and realizing he'd accidentally gone to sleep in his contact lenses because of how well he was seeing), he even thought he could make a quinjet-shaped shadow out against the other lights of New York where it was bombarding Coulson's headquarters.
"Agent Coulson is requesting assistance at the SHIELD office," JARVIS' voice understated through his room's speaker system. Harry assumed everyone else was getting the message as well.
If they were under attack with missiles, Harry wasn't going to rush out half-dressed. He wasn't the only one, and had some experience in hasty-armoring for early morning quidditch practice, so by the time he hit the hallways with all his armor mostly-correctly donned and buttoned up, he was joining a parade of Tower guests in similar sleepy near-perfection.
"I knew we should have stayed at the office," Natasha groused, her hair somehow looking sexily-disheveled compared to Harry's bird's nest.
"I can fly one person," Tony's voice sounded over the speakers in the floor's breakfast nook. He was presumably already upstairs, where his armor-donning machinery lived.
"On my way," Steve announced, sprinting for the elevators. Somehow, woken up in the middle of the night, he looked perfectly rested and barely-tousled.
"Uh, probably me too, if they're not too big," Harry realized. Even if Thor had been around, their tandem flight capabilities didn't extend to the whole team. "You need to make everyone rocket boots or something, Tony."
"Noted," the billionaire's voice sounded over the intercom.
"You're not too big," Clint noted to Natasha. "Banner and I take the streets?"
"I… uh… I'd only make it worse," Bruce objected. Unlike everyone else, he'd barely gotten dressed.
"But they're playing your song," Harry told his former professor. He gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder as he raced by, pulling his mask on, brain half-fritzed by the idea that he'd be riding with Natasha on the back of his broom. "I think the Hulk knows what he's doing more than you think? JARVIS, is there a faster way out than Tony's office?"
"Opening the breakfast nook window," the AI confirmed, as the seemingly-fixed oversized plate window near them shuddered free of its brackets and began to hinge inward, immediately exposing the room to the winds above Manhattan.
Harry pulled his Firebolt free of the armor's hidden pocket, glanced at Natasha who just smirked and left the joke implied, and got on. The cat-suited spy obligingly slid on behind. "I'll get there when I can!" Clint announced, running for the elevator, as Harry and Natasha rocketed out of the window.
He caught himself imagining that it was Fleur riding with him about halfway across the skyline, and was really fortunate that he spotted Thor erupting out of the building on a bolt of lightning to distract him from that weird thought. "Follow Thor or go to the building?" he asked, over the comms. It wasn't like Natasha would be able to hear him over the thunder and wind anyway.
Iron Man, somewhat awkwardly carrying Captain America, was right above him, and Steve suggested, "Building. If you want to go after them after dropping us off, we can help with search and rescue."
"Yeah, I didn't design the armor for couples dogfighting," Tony confirmed.
It seemed elementary, anyway. By the time they'd covered a half mile and were just having to weave through the skyscrapers on 47th and 6th, there was an explosion as Thor caught up to the quinjet and smashed out a wing with his hammer. The God of Thunder at least had the decency to shove the jet down into a rapidly-clearing Broadway rather than letting it crash into one of the other buildings nearby.
"Did they just send one jet?" Harry asked. "Even with the missiles…"
"Is Thor on comms?" Coulson's voice broke in. "I've lost cameras on Loki. And injured on floors two, three, and five."
"I didn't get him an earbud, no," Tony confirmed. "But four of us incoming."
It was chaos in the SHIELD building when Harry landed, Natasha rapidly dismounting. They'd landed inside the third floor, the east side of the building only so much exploded debris that let him fly right in and land in the middle of a destroyed office. Tony and Steve landed higher, on the fifth floor. "How many people were still here?" Harry asked the comms, at least not seeing any immediate bodies in the room they'd landed in. But a significant amount of square footage was just missing in the vertical crater made by the missile. At least it wasn't actively on fire.
"I'm checking the duty roster," Coulson's voice said over Harry's earpieces. "Wait. None of those people were supposed to be here tonight. A dozen agents just badged in a few minutes ago…"
"Last registered on the helicarrier?" Natasha asked. She'd moved cautiously into the hallway, looking for enemy agents or injured. Sirens were starting to be audible nearby, as New York dealt with its first late-night explosions in at least a couple of years.
"So a flashmob from the helicarrier, Loki's cameras going dark, and a very loud distraction…" Tony figured. Harry could hear the whine of his repulsors cycling as he cut through debris two floors above.
"And a motorcycle on the street," Harry realized, not having yet followed Natasha into the corridor. If the traffic on Broadway hadn't been stopped by the jet Thor brought down, he probably wouldn't have even noticed it. But as soon as he was looking at it… a trio of figures rushed out of the building carrying a third, unconscious form. "They're taking Loki! Wait, did we leave him in his armor for some reason? Whatever. I'm after him!"
Leaping back onto his broom, Harry was dropping to the second floor when the motorcycle driver gunned it, Loki's body slumped across the bike. The other two agents opened fire, and his deflection enchantments kicked in, causing the broom to spin to avoid the attacks. He really hoped someone in a building on the other side of 48th wasn't having a really bad morning from stray bullets.
The agent on the motorcycle was racing south into Times Square, the souped-up bike managing an impressive off-the-line speed even compared to Harry's ludicrously-fast broom. He was still catching it up quickly, but then he realized, "Did nobody notice another jet parked right in the Square!?" The black plane was honestly a little hard to notice, even in the well-lit center of Times Square: it was late enough that there really wasn't any foot traffic, and, at a glance, it was just an odd shadow.
Well, it was more visible because it was beginning to lift off as the agent on the motorcycle managed to wipe out in a way that threw himself and Loki up the quickly-closing ramp and into the back of the jet. Harry probably could have made it into the cargo compartment of the plane, but thought he spotted multiple other agents waiting inside and wasn't that confident in his close-in combat skills. He hooked his Firebolt sideways to brake as the quinjet loudly launched itself from the middle of Manhattan's most famous tourist spot and made a dash for the sky.
"Loki's in a quinjet!" he told everyone on comms. "I'm following. Iron Man, you might need to catch me up if they're going supersonic."
They weren't. He had to push his broom to its limit, but he was able to keep up with the jet as it rose into the night sky over the city… and then was suddenly angling as if it was about to land. As Harry reached the same level, he realized that what he hadn't been seeing was the camouflaged bottom of an immense vehicle floating in the air above New York City. But he could now make out the runways, buildings, and lights on top of it.
"Guys… I think I found that helicarrier everyone's been talking about."
Chapter 68: Above and Beyond
Chapter Text
Aircraft carriers are big. They have to be, for what they do. But the common visual for them is against the vastness of the ocean. It's hard for the mind to grasp the scale involved.
When one is hovering over Manhattan, it's a lot easier to put it into context.
Harry frantically let his cloak fall to cover him as he crested over the behemoth in the skies, which very quickly eclipsed the lights of the city below. They weren't high enough that he was having trouble breathing, but the winds above the tallest skyscrapers were still intense and required him to hunker close to the broom and slow to remain hidden. "It's humongous," he relayed over the comms. "I think I see the jet they took Loki on." There were quite a few airplanes lashed to the carrier, but only one that looked like it had just taxied to a stop near the prominent control tower on the side of the immense platform.
JARVIS advised, "I'm detecting interference. They are likely jamming common frequencies. You may lose contact if you land on that ship."
Tony's voice ordered, "Not going to say not to go, but be quiet and careful. We're getting Thor an earbud, then I'm on my way. JARVIS, work on finding us a frequency that will at least let us talk while we're up there."
"I'll try to go in a back way," Harry promised, then flew low to the deck. He gave a thought to sabotaging the planes on the way, but didn't think he could do so without risking being noticed. However, he did see a few hatches with vent coverings that looked like they might go down into the ship. It was safer than trying to go in the door on the control tower.
As he landed on the deck, the AR readout on his lenses advised that there was no signal. He was on his own for the moment. It wasn't an unfamiliar situation.
Landing on the deck was its own kind of strange. Despite the helicarrier's size, the turbulence above the city was at least as frenetic as the ocean currents, so the surface subtly pitched and rolled. It wasn't nearly as dramatic as being on heavy waves, but even lost across the immense platform, there was no question that he wasn't on solid ground. He crouched against the hatch he'd chosen, checked for cameras, and then put his broom away. There wasn't a way to shove a conveyance that was over a yard long into a pocket without it briefly escaping the folds of his invisibility cloak, but he didn't think he'd been spotted.
The grate itself was barely a challenge. Whispers of magical energy severed bolts to allow him to pry the thin sheet of vented metal up enough to slip in (after checking that it seemed to go somewhere solid and inside). It wasn't extremely secure: he probably could have just kicked it in if he wasn't worried about someone noticing his ingress. He landed in what was clearly a maintenance tunnel, rather than airducts; the walls were covered in pipes and the flooring was gridded steel. He registered that he really didn't know much about the realities of ship architecture, whether or not they could fly. Maybe it was normally so difficult to get to the deck of an aircraft carrier undetected that nobody was worried about how easy it was to break in after that point.
It was probably something he should keep in mind for a lot of places that had no security protocol for people that could fly and turn invisible.
Where did he even need to go? Probably to find the Tesseract, right? If it was onboard, he could potentially slip in and snatch it, and it would be game over for the big plan. At the very least, maybe he could find the scepter and get it away from the place, removing the chance of any more allies getting turned into enemies. It was a reason to get moving and scout.
His big problem was navigation, which was a reality he became very aware of about a minute into walking down the oddly-spacious maintenance tunnels. It wasn't obvious which direction of the ship was the front, he'd gotten turned around anyway, and it wasn't like he had any guesses where important locations would be on the stadium-sized aircraft. He could make a guess that nothing super important would be higher up, to give a couple of floors of defense against attacks from above. He let himself out into a hallway as soon as he found a pressure door out of the tunnels, and started looking for a way downstairs.
The halls of the ship proper had the same kind of profligate decorating strategy as the SHIELD offices in Manhattan. It was much more sleek and high-tech than Harry expected from an aircraft carrier. Spacious hallways, clean gray walls, and bright track lighting in the ceiling provided easy avenues throughout the vessel. He had real physics concerns about why something that needed to not just fly but hover for extended periods made such a wasteful use of interior space. It was impressive, more than efficient.
What the interior decorators hadn't done was add essential signage. While there were plenty of wall panels with obscure codes on them, he wasn't finding anything like a "This way to the bridge" hanging plaque. He probably should have asked Coulson for schematics earlier, since, in hindsight, it was inevitable that they'd have to get onto the helicarrier. He did his best and started skulking invisibly in search of a stairwell.
From what he could tell, the upper floor was mostly barracks, storage, and a large central area that was probably a giant elevator to shuttle planes to the deck from internal hangars and workshops. The barracks were empty, when he glanced in. Had they whammied the entire ship, so they couldn't sleep? That had to mean there would be half again as many people running around the ship as usual, right? But it at least meant, while he had the element of surprise, the barracks level didn't have very many people at all.
After what seemed like forever, but was actually only a couple of minutes, Harry finally found a "You are here" map next to an elevator. It looked like, unlike a normal carrier, a lot of important stuff was on the lower floors. Did this thing ever actually land in water? It couldn't possibly land on the ground without collapsing, could it? How hard was it to ensure the seals on the lower levels held up against water from all sides? From the map it looked like there were spaces on the lowest level that could just exit directly into the air rather than having to go up to the top deck. He was starting to think that SHIELD had too much money, causing them to deal with any kind of technical problem with overdesign. Harry had been privy to enough Stark Industries discussions about miniaturization and economy of space that all of this waste was almost physically painful.
Regardless, he figured out how to take a picture with his AR lenses so he'd have the map, determined that one of the doors near the elevator was stairs down, and started looking for his objectives.
He was only two floors down before he felt the stairs shudder. Alarm klaxons started playing and the overheads switched to red emergency lighting. "–hear me?" Tony's voice asked over the comms.
"Just the last part," Harry said. "Did you bring the explosions?"
"I took out one of their engines to try to get them to land. But I may need your help to be sure they try to go down into the bay."
"By… taking control of the bridge?" Harry checked.
"You still have those little hacking discs?" Tony checked, heavily implying that they'd somehow be able to take control if Harry placed them somewhere important. "Uh oh. They got jets into the air faster than I thought they would."
Harry slipped out of the stairwell on the floor that supposedly contained the bridge. The high-tech hallways were an absolute chaos of SHIELD agents running to and fro. "Do we have heavy machine guns on board?" Fury's voice was yelling sarcastically from nearby. "Then get our best marksmen on the deck and start firing!"
He followed the sound into what had to be the control center of the airship. A huge pit of computer terminals faced mostly toward a hemisphere of viewing windows out the front of the ship. In the middle, Fury stood on a platform among a collection of monitors, not far from a comfy-looking conference table at the back of the room. It honestly felt more like an orchestra pit than a ship's bridge. Outside, Harry could make out the Iron Man armor blasting by, pursued by a fighter jet. Tony was probably handicapped by unwillingness to shoot a jet down over Manhattan.
But hopefully he would be okay, since Harry had his own stealth mission to complete. He had fished the little dime-sized discs out of his pocket, and tried to eye the flow of traffic in the room and pick out significant-looking computers. He was counting on Tony's ingenuity, since most of the computers seemed to use some kind of proprietary hexagonal port rather than simple USB. He timed the rushing-around of agents and slipped into the walkway between terminals. One disc on the ports of a workstation where the guy was distracted by furtively playing Galaga. One on a significant-looking bank of three monitors while the agent manning them was looking away. And the next one needed to go on Fury's console, right?
The mind-controlled Director himself was standing at basically parade rest on the platform, scepter clutched behind his back in a firm enough grip that Harry didn't fancy his luck trying to snatch it away before alerting the entire room. His bank of monitors was made of the same material as Harry's lenses, so had to be several thousand-dollars'-worth of Starktech each. It seemed another crazy expense to have transparent screens, but it made sense in light of the sheer amount of money put into the helicarrier. "He's more maneuverable than you are!" Fury complained. "I need you to coordinate. Get him in between you so you can fire in a way that won't hit us."
"We're at least keeping him off the other engines," Maria Hill informed him from her position to his right. Harry recognized the slender brunette from his briefings. She was one of the people that was hard to gauge mind control on, since she'd always had light blue eyes, but it seemed pretty damned likely.
"He's not the only one we need to worry about," the Director replied. "Watch out for lightning."
By that point, Harry had slipped invisibly onto the platform through one of the handrails around it, and snapped a hacking disc onto the back of the monitor array. Apparently he wasn't quite stealthy enough, though, as Hill, already looking towards Fury, yelled, "Infiltrator!" and dived at him.
She was taller than Harry, but came at him from a weird angle, so her strike wasn't too bad. He was fortunate that he was in between her and technicians on the opposite edge of the pit, or she probably would have just taken the shot with her handgun. But even her thin frame had enough mass to upset his precarious balance and knock him over the railing and to the floor of the pit, crashing against the chair of a redheaded woman that was controlling an array of monitors to Fury's left.
Worse, his cloak unfurled as he hit the ground, making it even more obvious what was going on. "It's Potts!" Hill announced. "Get him!"
"Discs planted," Harry whispered into his comm as he rolled to his feet. Agents around the room were already turning their unnaturally-blue eyes in his direction, and he wasn't sure he could get out even if he re-cloaked, so he let it hang loose to give him some cover by disguising his silhouette and summoned a pair of energy sticks. "And I'm… distracting them."
"Don't die," Tony ordered. "Thor's on his way. JARVIS, get me control of those terminals."
Harry was pretty sure the only thing he had going for him was that the layout of the room meant that nobody was willing to just shoot him. Just like Hill hadn't tried, there was too much risk of hitting another technician or some important computer system. But a couple-dozen trained SHIELD agents were definitely starting to rush him. And he wasn't sure whether he could stand up to even one trained SHIELD agent, let alone a whole room full of them.
What Harry didn't realize was the dirty little secret of Vanir genetics. Namely, that there weren't any.
No scientist on Earth would be able to determine a meaningful difference between the DNA of a person from Earth and one from Vanaheim. Sure, they might note that there were uncommon haplogroups and an unusual combination of heritages, some of which didn't show up often on mail-in-test candidates. With enough sample size, those could be used to make a reasonable guess about which samples were from offworld subjects due to the specifics of lineage. But there wasn't a Vanir gene. There was no genetic reason that the natives of Vanaheim lived longer than those of Midgard.
Instead, the physiological differences had everything to do with magic. Truly native Vanir might have some slight advantage, but adolescent intake was key. Hogwarts started just before puberty to maximize the access of young wizards to the dense magical field the castle dwelled within. The difference in magical suffusion between, say, Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy was negligible, since they'd both been at the school since they were eleven. Nonmagical Vanir that never went to school got the benefit of the planet's overall magical field, of course. But even the Midgardborn students, barring danger and disease, would, on average, outlive native-born Vanir who didn't get to go to Hogwarts.
Sure, the Masters of the Mystic Arts wanted Hogwarts graduates because they'd had years of magical instruction from a young age. But what they really wanted was kids who'd drunk from the well of Vanaheim's intense magical field until their cells were bursting with it. No apprentice trained on Earth could match that advantage, even in Kamar-Taj. They could maybe get close by bonding with magical relics, but Harry Potts had one of those, too.
And the benefit of mystical physiological enhancement wasn't just limited to an increased lifespan.
It had been a while since Harry had fought purely-human adversaries. He'd marveled at Loki's ability to burn through half a dozen agents in under a minute, but he'd been underestimating his own prowess. The first agent down was the woman he'd fallen near: one magical stick to the head knocked her out. He turned as two more jumped down into the pit, taking one out at the knees with his right arm while stabbing the one on his left in the windpipe. He rapped the first one in the head while the second choked, diving basically through him with a shoulder check to send the man ass over teakettle into the agents that had been jumping into the pit behind.
Three agents basically down in ten seconds. A whole bunch more to go.
Harry wasn't exactly going to stand in the pit and let them swarm him. An agent behind him missed as he ran up the stairs onto the outer ring of the room at Fury's 9:00, the swing going wide as, from behind, the kid was little more than a head and arms around an invisible void of the hanging cloak. The technicians standing up from their terminals on that side both had their legs swept out from under them by magical escrima sticks as Harry tried to plan. Juking right would take him all the way around the room from Fury, but leaping left would put him into the conference area with fewer reasons behind to not just start shooting. He opted right.
Maybe if some of the elite operatives like Rumlow, Romanoff, or Barton were on the bridge, Harry wouldn't have been able to go through the place like a bowling ball. But, for all that they were required to maintain a minimum combat proficiency, most of the agents on the bridge were analysts, pilots, and logisticians. They weren't really prepared to be attacked by a half-invisible dervish who'd been spending most of his free time on martial arts and athletics for the past four years.
Two more got pitched into the pit by strikes from his sticks. A guy that looked like he was going to try shooting anyway had a moment to marvel as Harry flung the right stick at him, and it turned into a burst of painfully stinging light as it hit. The Boy-Who-Lived didn't even notice how smoothly he spun his left-hand stick into a shield to deflect a knife strike from the next person ahead, slamming her attack into her computer screens and giving her a punch to the side of the head that would hopefully knock her out.
Harry had basically cleared through the outer edge of the pit until he was back at another set of stairs down onto a big standing area in front of the viewing glass. Agents were starting to charge across at him so he just leaped off the platform and managed to stick his landing onto one's face and shield-check the next person in line as he fell. With a recovery roll that probably looked more impressive than Harry had actually planned, he came to a crouch in the middle of the floor, staring directly up at a mystified Fury and Hill. To Harry's right, nearly a dozen agents were at least put on their asses by his charge around the room. A few were fully unconscious.
He wasn't sure what he was going to do about the other half of the room, or the security officers that were surely on their way to the bridge, but the shock on the Director's mind-controlled face at how well he'd done would remain a cherished memory for a long time.
"Kid's been sandbagging," Fury announced after taking a moment to gawk. "Shoot him."
Wincing as he realized he really had put himself in a position where it was safer to shoot, Harry hunkered down and put as much magic into his shield as he could, trying to turtle behind it as another dozen agents to his front and left began to empty their sidearms into him. At least he'd mostly handled the ones that could easily flank him from the right. It was still loud, and his shield flickered from all the impacts. A few got through, slowed by the deteriorating shield but painfully impacting into his armor.
At least the barrage was chaotic enough that nobody seemed to notice him sliding back to the lip of the viewing platform. There was a railing to keep anyone from falling over into where the windows curled under the room, but that was exactly the space Harry wanted to fall into. When the shield suddenly winked out, there was no body left behind it. "Where did he go, sir?" Hill asked.
"He's still in here somewhere," the one-eyed man growled. Harry felt fortunate that Fury hadn't taken a shot with the scepter, likely owing to the risk of it blowing out the viewing window with a miss.
Harry, wrapped in his cloak again, slunk carefully along the edge of the windows, resolving for the future to lean harder on being sneaky rather than fighting a room full of armed individuals. He could tell he was bruised from the spots of pain where bullets had hit, but Sirius did good enchanting work. He was pretty sure he wasn't bleeding. The AR readout from JARVIS was supposed to tell him if he was bleeding (though it was unclear whether he needed a full data connection to the AI for that to work).
"Sir, systems are going haywire!" one of the technicians that stayed at his console announced. Harry grinned, assuming that meant that the hacking discs were finally working.
"We're losing engine power!" Hill yelled. "Can someone get control of the helm?" There was a notable sense of slightly-reduced gravity as the massive structure began to descend, along with a kick from the back as it maneuvered. "It's going to put us down in the bay!"
"We've got bigger problems," Fury growled, noticing lightning arcing up from the Empire State Building. "The rest of you try to get back control and find the kid. I'm going to wake up our VIP." With that, he turned and left.
Harry managed to twist past the few agents trying to find him and pursue the Director.
"Fury's going after Loki with the scepter, I'm following," he said quietly as he sneaked down the hallway. He was just able to finish whispering that and slide into the elevator after the man, hoping the invisibility would hold up in tight quarters. Up close, he almost felt like the Director was having some kind of mental episode. His head twitched and he didn't spare any awareness for whether an invisible assailant had followed him inside.
Harry gave half a thought to whether he might be able to actually beat Fury, but the elevator ride only took a few seconds, and the door opened to another corridor with two agents standing guard on a door. "Did you manage to wake the VIP?" the man asked the first person in a lab coat he came across.
"We've given him drugs to try to counter the anesthesia, sir," the auburn-haired young woman explained in an English accent. "But we can't rouse him."
"Let's give him a kick," Fury decided, brandishing the scepter and striding directly into a small medical room with a peculiarly-gridded dividing wall. Through the viewing window, Harry could see Loki in a cot, unconscious.
Harry couldn't risk Loki getting tagged back in. His resolution to just stay invisible failed within a minute, as he launched a bolt of magic into the guard that was on the far side of the door, shoulder-checked the one closer to him into the woman in the lab coat, and yelled, "Fury. Stop! It's over." His whip of orange energy wrapped around the man's scepter-holding arm, keeping him from making contact with Loki.
He didn't manage to actually drag the Director out of the room, as the agent he'd knocked over swept Harry's legs out from under him. He grunted as he hit the floor. The agent huffed with the effort. Fury snarled as his arm was yanked by the energy whip. There were a lot of pained noises in a very short time frame.
In a ground fight with a much bigger individual was exactly where Harry didn't want to be. The agent was already going in for a wrestling hold, and Harry had to roll backwards to escape, but felt himself come up short as the man managed to grab the trailing edge of his cloak. "Rude," the Boy-Who-Was-Being-Strangled gasped, managing to manifest a magical club and whack the guy in the arm to get free. His cloak with an almost-affronted snap wound itself safely back around his neck.
Harry was in a tight spot. His back against the elevator, there were two security agents recovering from his initial attack, Fury in the room with the scepter, and no telling whether Loki was about to wake up. At least the scientist had rolled clear and didn't seem to be interested in trying to fight him. But he spotted that, inside the room, Fury wasn't actually holding the scepter: he was massaging his wrist as if Harry's whip had managed to disarm him.
"Fury! You have to fight it!" he tried, while summoning a shield in his left hand and preparing to go hand-to-hand with the agents in the hallway.
It was unclear whether it was his last plea or the shudder in the airship that likely came from Tony or Thor blowing something up above, but Fury blinked and his eye started to lose the blue haze. "Stand down, agents!" he ordered, somewhat hesitantly. Both men that Harry was facing glanced their Director's way for confirmation, the blue in their own eyes seeming to weaken (or maybe Harry was just being optimistic). "We need to… assess our actual objectives here."
"You're the shield that protects the Earth," Harry entreated. "You've been working to install a puppet leader for an alien that wants to kill half of everyone in the universe!"
"That's… why would…" Fury started to work it out, his own long-buried indomitable will starting to throw off the control with no hand on the scepter any longer. His one eye increasingly shaded back to brown as he, with growing confidence, decided, "Agents. We've been misled… before Selvig can start it, we need to get Iron Man down to the–"
His announcement was cut off by the blade of the scepter emerging out of the front of his chest.
As the Director of SHIELD slumped to the floor, Harry could finally see the newly-woken Loki standing behind him, hands on the weapon that had been stabbed into his back. For a moment, it looked like the Aesir prince was confused about what he'd done, but after a few seconds of holding onto the scepter his affected smirk returned. Almost gently, he used his left hand to shove Fury forward off of the scepter, and asked, "Did you miss me?"
Any thoughts Harry had about convincing Loki to throw off the mind control were dashed by the swirling blue within the scepter's gem, matching a renewed blue in the demigod's eyes. "Loki's awake, the scepter has him again, and he just stabbed Fury!" Harry narrated into his comms. "I need Thor in here, now!"
"As much as I'd love to try this on my dear brother," Loki mused, "perhaps this is a good time to make my exit. I hope you enjoyed the distractions." With that worrying pronouncement, he blasted out the wall behind him with a gout of blue plasma and dashed through the hole.
"Distractions?" Harry wondered.
"The Tesseract…" Fury managed to whisper, where he was rapidly losing blood onto the once-pristine floor. "Already in place. The portal is opening soon."
"Uh. Guys?" Bruce's voice came over Harry's comms, apparently the jamming finally having been turned off. "I found out where the Tesseract is… it's on the roof of Stark Tower."
It took Harry several seconds to sprint to a room that had an exterior window. From a helicarrier rapidly descending into the New York Harbor, it was immediately obvious where Stark Tower was on the Manhattan skyline…
It was being highlighted by a needle-thin beam of blue light bisecting the predawn sky.
Chapter 69: The Battle of New York
Chapter Text
In hindsight, the battle against the Chitauri took about twenty minutes.
While it was happening, Harry felt like it took forever. He had to check with JARVIS later for the timestamps. There was so much going on, but the AI had been keeping track. He could never think about combat rounds in D&D the same afterwards. Of course you could do a lot with six seconds, if the fate of the planet was at stake.
Later, he was never totally sure how he got up to the deck of the helicarrier so fast. He had vague memories of the scientist that had been trying to revive Loki doing everything in her power to save Fury's life. Either the mind control had broken with Fury, or it hadn't kept the whammied agents from trying to help their Director. All over the aircraft, the agents fighting Tony and Thor had stopped. "Loki stabbed Fury and then ran," Harry explained to them, over the comms, but they didn't have time to try to chase him down or to wait to see if the Director could be stabilized.
An army was beginning to fall from the sky.
It was a little over six miles to Stark Tower from where they abandoned the helicarrier as it was dropping into the upper bay. Harry made it in less than three minutes, pushing his broom to its limits. Tony had raced ahead, nearly fracturing the sound barrier to make it in under a minute. The rest of the team had basically been right there.
The United States national guard was minutes away. And that was forever when hundreds of aliens were flying out of a giant portal, intent on inflicting the maximum civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure. Unknown to them at the time, there was a mothership coming, slowly but surely. The first waves of Chitauri sent were just to shock and awe the civilian populace. It was unclear whether the aliens behind the Death Eaters truly understood much about Earth, but they at least knew how to stage a beating for the media. If Manhattan fell on live television, overrun by superior and terrifying infantry from outer space, the morale of the planet would take a substantial hit. They weren't just playing for the lives of the populace of one of the most densely-inhabited cities on the planet, but for the faith of the entire world.
It was New York City. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.
A lot happened while Harry was streaking across the skyline while keeping pace with Thor. The literal prince of Asgard was only a few yards away from him, having basically flung himself through the air by hanging onto a magical hammer. They were on a team together. Harry wasn't sure the kids back at Hogwarts were going to believe it because he barely believed it. In the minutes they were both in the air, the other Avengers were narrating their own trials over the comms.
"I think Harry was right about them being some kind of alien cyberzombies," Bruce described. "These guys are ugly. A bunch of them on some kind of flying… chariots, I guess. I can see them out the Tower windows."
"Everyone with rifles get to the roof of the SHIELD building," Steve ordered. "We need to start trying to take them out of the air."
"I don't think that's going to be high enough," Clint opined.
"Or close enough," the Captain agreed. "But it's what we can do for now. I'm on the move to get to the Tower."
"I'm snagging a bike. We're right behind you," Natasha confirmed.
"Almost there, but they're already hitting the early morning commuters," Tony announced. "At least the streets are mostly clear." At a few minutes before six in the morning, he wasn't wrong: it could have been a lot worse if the attack had happened any later in the day. "Oh, man, they're hitting that cafe you like in front of Grand Central, Maverick."
Harry blanched under his mask and put even more of his magic into the broom, urging it to go faster. He knew that cafe opened pretty early. "Bruce, I know you don't want to do it. But we need him," he urged his former professor.
"I'll just make it worse," the man with extreme anger management issues argued.
"I don't know if it can get worse," Harry told him, finally moving around the Empire State Building and getting a real look at the problem. Above the Tower, armed, flying monsters were pouring from a hole in the sky. There were so many of them that, even from just a mile away, it looked like rain. "Thor and I are thirty seconds out."
"About the same," Steve huffed, clearly running. Had he covered the half-mile from the SHIELD building in barely a minute on foot? "Widow and Hawkeye are right behind me."
"Good, I need the backup," Tony told them, and Harry could track his position both by the AR-augmented waypoint on his lenses and the explosions in midair as he shot down everything he could. Harry winced as he got close enough to see a barrage that the man wasn't able to fully dodge. "Argh! And I'm going to need you to keep them off me for a minute so I can switch armor. This set was already damaged and my thrusters aren't working right."
"So be it, Man of Iron," Thor announced, having finally adapted to the chatter from his earbud. "Rearm yourself, and I shall guard the skies."
Matching actions to words, the God of Thunder began to surge with electricity as he covered the final few blocks to the battlespace, crashing through the enemy front and sending arcs of chain lightning all around him. A dozen Chitauri sleds exploded and rained to the ground, but there were many more that turned on the new aerial threat.
"I'm on scene. We need containment," Steve ordered. "They're targeting civilians and infrastructure. We can't let them spread out across the city. Thor, see if you can keep them focused on you up there. We'll try to get their attention on the ground."
"I'm here, what about me?" Harry asked, the chaos of the battle more intense than even he'd experienced before. There were too many enemies to track. Lasers. Explosions. It was basically a shoot-em'-up video game, but far more intense than on a screen. His Firebolt absently prompted him to wheel out of the way of a stray energy beam, and the Chitauri weren't even really aware of him yet.
"Get to the roof and see if you can shut down the portal?" the Captain suggested.
"First thing I tried," Tony corrected. "It's got a force field. Self-sustaining. But maybe with your magic… I don't know. Give it a shot. I'm switching armors."
As Harry flew in over the Tower, he saw the Iron Man armor descend through a gap that Thor had made and land on the platform outside the building's penthouse. Landing on the miniature roof at the very top, Harry could see the machine that Loki's puppets had made: the Tesseract whirling within a large clot of technology, blasting its energy upwards and glimmering with the telltale signs of a globe of force around it. The older scientist that Loki had first suborned, Selvig, was groaning on the ground nearby, seemingly knocked out by the earlier attempt on the device.
But Harry didn't have too much time to deal with that, since the slowness of Tony's armor machine was about to get him killed. As armatures rose and fell from the walkway below, each one stripping another piece of armor, a few Chitauri seemed to notice and wheeled away from Thor to try to take shots at the currently-vulnerable engineer. "Iron Man!" Harry warned, then had to drop his broom to send bolts of magic at the banking undead soldiers. Neither hit the rapidly-moving warriors on sky-sleds, but it did get their attention. "Crap!"
Furiously shielding against the energy weapons being turned on him, Harry scrambled across the gravel "rooftop" at the apex of Stark Tower. It really was only a few square yards of space, most of which was taken up by the spinning and glowing Tesseract machine. He caught a couple of the alien plasma bolts on his shield and was pleased to discover that they didn't hit nearly as hard as Phase 2 weapons. But a stray blast clipped the radius of the machine's energy field, and the resonance emitted a wave of force that shoved him off the edge of the uppermost roof and sent him crashing down to the next tier below. It was only about a three yard fall, and he managed to land well enough. It still knocked the air out of him.
It caught the approaching Chitauri as well, flinging their sleds off into the distance, so that was nice.
"I'm clear, thanks kid," Tony said over the comms. "You okay?"
"I don't like this gravel, the roof should have foam rubber or something," Harry replied, scraping himself up and letting his cloak fall as he climbed back up the maintenance ladder to the top level. He saw that Selvig was still unconscious but looked like he'd been far enough from the edge of the machine that he hadn't been injured by the force eruption. "Checking out the machine now."
No new Chitauri seemed to be focused on the roof, assuming he must have been knocked well away, so he was able to risk letting his hands out of the cloak to feel at the edges of the force field. It was loud and chaotic, but he thought he felt the machine respond as he reached out. His scar prickled, and he detected turbulence along the shimmer delimiting the protected space as his hands got closer.
Any conclusions he could draw from that were shoved out of his brain by Steve's announcement in his ear of, "Banner. It can't get worse. We need you down here."
Looking up to see what the Captain was talking about, Harry's eyes widened behind his mask as a massive creature, somewhere between a whale and a giant snake, swam out of the portal. It was hard to judge the scale, but then Harry's seeker's eyes spotted the Chitauri infantry clinging to the sides—dozens of them. "Of course they have living spaceships," he complained. "Well, maybe unliving."
"I'm on it," Tony announced, blasting out of the top floor of the Tower in shiny new Mark VII armor.
"We could use some more support down here," Steve added. "Too many civilian targets. We need to hold their attention. Try to keep the fight near the Tower. Thor, Arcane, we could use you both if you can spare the time."
"Wait, is 'Arcane' me?" Harry asked, checking his broom to make sure it was undamaged, and then manifesting an energy sword before hopping on.
"We workshopped it," Natasha explained. "Means both magic and being mysterious."
As Tony chased after the leviathan, Harry flew toward the elevated part of Park Avenue in front of Grand Central where his HUD indicated the others were forming up. "I'm going to bring a few more down to us," he said, blasting his broom toward a nearby sky-sled and hacking at the bottom to try to disable it or at least get its attention.
"A worthy objective," Thor agreed, diving from the rooftop he'd been using as a platform and smashing through three other sleds on his way to the ground.
It was chaos on the ground. Steve, Natasha, and Clint had been using the edges of the raised road and stopped cars as cover from the incoming Chitauri troops. It was interesting that they were so willing to enter the middle ranges where those three were most effective, though perhaps they'd discovered that hanging back with their laser rifles didn't work since Clint was a better shot. Harry did a Wronski Feint to cause the Chitauri chasing right behind him to hurriedly pull to a stop where Steve's shield bounced between rider and driver and send them careening into three other foot-based troops. That gave Harry enough time to land and shove his broom back into a pocket. "That's still so weird to watch," Clint commented, loosing an explosive arrow into the center of a group of sleds following Thor.
"And yet, I desperately want magic pockets for all my clothes now," Natasha quipped as she parkoured by, doing a full-body taser-fisted takedown on a Chitauri warrior that had been trying to sneak up behind them.
"Bruce down there yet?" Tony asked, over the comms. "My missiles aren't able to get through this thing's armor."
"I'm coming, I'm coming," the scientist complained, and they saw him hustling on foot along Park around Grand Central, wearing bright purple sweatpants and an I Heart NYC t-shirt. "Had to raid the lost-and-found on the way out for clothes I could ruin."
"Good. Suit up. I'm bringing the party to you," Tony instructed.
"I don't see how that's a party…" Natasha mused, getting her first good look at the incoming leviathan as it chased after the Iron Man armor.
Steve paused from where he was smashing a warrior and suggested, "Dr. Banner. Now might be a really good time for you to get angry."
Harry could hear the smirk in Bruce's voice as he explained, "That's my secret, Captain. I'm always angry." With that, he turned and began to expand. The last time Harry had seen it, it had been dark out and the whole thing was unexpected, so he hadn't really gotten a great look. In the daylight, it was as impressive as any transfiguration he'd seen at Hogwarts. Where was the extra mass coming from? One moment, there was an adult man who was a little on the smaller size, especially compared to Steve and Thor. The next, there was a green titan that was even bigger than Hagrid.
And one overhand punch from the Hulk was enough to stop the leviathan cold, the biological spacecraft crumpling on itself like a slow-motion train derailment. The berserker barely budged backwards.
Tony took the opportunity to launch missiles into gaps that appeared in the armor as the leviathan moved in ways its designers had never intended, putting it down for good. Harry and Steve put up magical and physical shields to protect themselves and their teammates from the explosion of gore and crashing space whale, Natasha and Clint hunkering down behind them as Thor simply put an arm over his head. The undead warriors lining the street displayed some level of emotion that was a surprise to Harry: they briefly took off their face armor to roar in anger.
It was barely six in the morning. Harry had been on the scene for a little over five minutes.
From above, they spotted a sled that was coming from the south, Loki clearly visible aboard his taxi-from-outer-space because he'd recreated his illusory giant-horned helmet and was wielding the scepter. He was close enough that Harry could make out the sneer of anger as the demigod regarded the seven Avengers all arrayed in a circle below him. Doing his best lip reading, Harry thought the God of Mischief said, "Send the rest."
Two more leviathans immediately snaked their way from the portal in the sky, concealing who knew how many more sled-based Chitauri. Clint and Natasha were already getting low on ammo. Tony's missiles weren't unlimited, even so close to the Tower. And Harry had already worn himself out a fair bit in the preceding festivities. Could they bring down two more leviathans? Maybe. But what if there were hundreds more?
"Call it, Captain," Tony suggested as the seven of them regarded the new arrivals.
Steve's plan was quick and to the point. Clint was placed up high figuring out the big picture. Tony was called on to try to maintain a perimeter that kept the fight around the Tower. Thor was to try to destroy as much as possible as soon as it came through the portal. Steve and Natasha would try to draw the ground troops to where they already were: it couldn't get much more wrecked. Harry was on duty trying to protect civilians while they fled.
"And Hulk: Smash." As the green giant grinned at that final pronouncement, setting off to destroy the alien invaders, Harry felt some thrill at being right. There was a reason the Irish still considered Cú Chulainn a hero, despite the danger of his ríastrad. Given enough enemies to slake the battle-lust, having berserkers on your side could be really useful.
"JARVIS, do we have street cameras? Can you show me where the people are?" Harry asked.
"Requesting access from SHIELD," the AI responded. Harry was still on foot at the moment, a flickering patch of limbs as his flaring invisibility cloak moved around and disguised his silhouette. He made a mental note to practice more wandless casting on the broom, so he'd be more useful in the air off of Vanaheim. The Masters didn't exactly have the freedom to fly around on brooms on Earth, so hadn't emphasized those techniques at all. As he looked for a good place to go, he used his whip to disarm a few of the rifle-wielding soldiers: he wasn't sure what the regimental difference was between ones with skinny staff weapons and ones with a giant gun basically built around their arms. The former were easier to disarm. "Access obtained. Attempting to create a battlespace mockup. Note that not all hostiles may appear."
"Just do your best," Harry agreed, knowing that the AI trying to create a full tactical map of the chaotic area just from whatever traffic cams he could access was already asking a lot. But little red and blue arrows began to appear on his lenses, giving him much better insight on where he would be useful. "Are there a bunch of people over in that bank?" he checked, not liking the cloud of blue arrows being surrounded by red.
"Most of the civilians on the nearby street went that way," JARVIS explained. "A door was opened by energy fire."
"And it seemed like it would be safe, because it's a bank," Harry got it. "But they're probably trapped in there. I'm on my way."
42nd and Madison was only about a block out from the center of the fight, and Harry had been arbitrarily running that way anyway. As he got closer, he saw the entering footsoldiers with his eyes as well as with his HUD, and wasn't sure if he'd bitten off more than he could chew. He vaguely remembered having gone in the bank during their Christmas in the city over a year earlier: Hermione had been interested that there was a classic multi-tiered bank with balcony levels inside the footprint of an otherwise-modern, glass-fronted high rise.
With his cloak on, Harry managed to find a second-floor window that the Chitauri had blown open but weren't watching, and used an energy whip to pull himself up. It seemed less risky than going in the front door. From inside the dimly-lit bank, he could see that the main floor was partially full. Most of the trapped civilians were in jogging clothes. A few had angrily-barking dogs that they'd been out that early walking. The few that were in professional attire, having already been at or on the way to work, drew his eye—including one blonde in waitress' attire, who started slinging coffee early.
Harry was never going to let even a bunch of strangers get slaughtered, but he'd met Beth. She liked D&D. She called WiFi "wireless" in an endearingly-wrong way. If she got hurt, it would be personal. And one of the alien technozombies was readying some kind of rectangular beeping device that was probably a grenade, to treat the huddled civilians like fish in a barrel.
"Hey assholes!" he said, probably in Chitauri if his translator had that language, as he let his cloak retract. "It's pretty funny that your boss talks about randomly removing half the universe, but it seems to always be innocent people you're actually killing." They cocked their heads at him, as if they understood and were confused that they understood. But they didn't seem to have the capacity to meaningfully respond. Well, at least with words. After a moment, the two with staff weapons started shooting at him and the one with the grenade went to lob it down at the crowd.
Right. This wasn't even the worst odds Harry had faced in the last half hour. For longarms, run closer. Nobody with a rifle expects a charge. He dove below the stray shots while he summoned up his energy whip. Good old energy whip. With object-catching instincts that his quidditch team would be thrilled about, he managed to snag the grenade as it was leaving the Chitauri's hand, wrapping it in orange strands of energy and yanking it back away from the center of the room. He meant to fully fling it back out the window into the street, but it hit the wall and bounced to a stop just short, still inside. Harry groaned in annoyance as the blue lights and beeping sped up, with no clue what the blast radius was.
Also, there were now three pissed off aliens looming over him. The one that had thrown the grenade had one of those hard-to-disarm blasters. Well, Harry still had a whip conjured. A couple of solid kicks into his midsection hurt a lot, the nearest Chitauri putting a boot in. But they couldn't really aim at him with their staff weapons while he was right at their feet and moving erratically. He caught the grenade-thrower's leg with the whip and managed some kind of reverse-somersault that hopefully didn't pull a hamstring as he kicked himself over the ornamental balcony railing from prone.
The snagged soldier getting pulled off his feet and into an ally really helped to slow Harry's descent to the floor below.
He'd barely reached the ground and released the whip before the grenade went off upstairs. The radius turned out to be dangerous to the entire balcony area, as a blue-and-white energy explosion all but incinerated the struggling soldiers, but left the ground floor untouched save for having to dodge a bit of damaged railing.
"Everybody okay?" he asked, looking up at the soot-streaked and panicked civilians. "Six-second combat rounds, am I right?" he asked Beth, getting a baffled look from the bubbly waitress. Oh well, she'd get the reference later, when she had time to think about it. Hopefully it didn't blow his secret identity. At least he'd had a modulator built into his mask that lowered and disguised his voice. "Nice dog," he told a guy with a black lab that reminded him a little of Sirius. He took another second and then rolled to his feet, "Okay, let's get going. I think there are cops coming." JARVIS had helpfully put little badge symbols on the blue arrows that were moving down 42nd outside.
"Arcane, are you free?" Natasha asked, from wherever she'd wound up.
"Yeah. Civilians saved. Aliens exploded," he confirmed. "What's next?"
"I'm on the Tower. Selvig says that he designed a failsafe. The Tesseract can't protect against itself, and he thinks that the scepter should be able to get through the barrier since it's made of the cube."
"But it's not, though. It's its own Stone," Harry disagreed, exiting the building and waving the crowd into the line of cops that was forming up to try to hold the area. A couple of people did a double-take as he withdrew his broom from seemingly nowhere. To New Yorkers, alien technozombies and space whales were one thing, but a really good magic trick was impressive.
"Yeah. And Thor is currently fighting Loki five blocks away and I don't think we can even get it. So I'm out of ideas," she confirmed.
"I may have a bad one," Harry said, finally thinking back to the wobble in the force field when he reached toward it. If any other Stone could get through, did he somehow count? "I'm on my way. But Thor, if you can get that scepter from Loki, it would be a good backup."
"Understood," Thor agreed, his comm staying open as he yelled, "Loki! Look at this! Look around you! You think this madness will end with your rule? Give us the scepter and cease this misery!"
JARVIS cut whatever the rest of the conversation with Loki was, explaining, "Call from Acting-Director Coulson."
Harry was weaving through sky-sleds on as direct a route as possible to the top of the Tower when Coulson explained, "We all just received orders from all the way at the top to go into the bunker under the SHIELD building. I think UN diplomats received the same command. Not just to shelter in place inside the building. To get to any actual bomb shelters they have under their embassies. Immediately."
With that many words from Agent, Harry knew it was serious. It was Natasha, ever the student of realpolitik, who got it, explaining, "They're going to nuke the city if we can't contain this."
By then, Harry was landing on the roof where she and Dr. Selvig were regarding the glowing Tesseract device. "Then let's contain it," he said, setting down his broom and moving over to the edge of the field.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Something dumb. Stand back," he suggested. And, with that, he began to lean against the sphere of force. For the first time consciously, he tried to feel whatever energy of the Soul Stone was still coursing through his body. His scar ached, and his vision shaded orange as he pushed. It felt like trying to reach into a running garbage disposal, unlimited energy whipping past his arm at infinite speeds, but it just failed to flense the flesh from his arm. It didn't even rip away his armor, for all that it felt like it should. A subtle orange glow coated his body. "I… I think I can close it. If I can knock the cube loose, I can shut the portal down."
"Do it!" Steve ordered over the comms. He sounded exhausted. Things didn't seem to be going well on the ground.
"No, wait!" Tony countermanded. "That nuke's already coming in. I can see it. It's gonna blow when it gets where it's going. And I know just where to put it."
Harry, fully charged with Soul Stone energy, could effortlessly see Tony in his mind's eye.
Catching up to the missile. Latching himself to it and bodily dragging it upwards into the portal instead of toward the top of the Tower. Starting a call to Pepper, that she was too distracted watching both of her boys on the news to pick up.
Harry had promised her that he'd get himself and Tony home alive. And there was nothing he could do to keep that promise. "Stark, you know that's a one-way trip?" Steve confirmed Harry's worry.
"Be ready to close it. He's going to get out," Natasha tried to console Harry.
As he summoned up a stick of energy so he wouldn't be shoving his hand into the center of the machine, Selvig was looking at his laptop and noted, "This is truly amazing."
Tony shot on an arc into the sky, dragging a nuclear missile up through the portal. The damned thing had come from the south, almost certainly launched straight from the helicarrier. If only they'd kept them from reactivating their communications, maybe they could have avoided it all. If only he'd tried to breach the field minutes earlier. As Harry's physical eyes saw his arm straining to put the energy stick into place within the armature, he was still mentally with Tony.
The failed phone call. The armor blacking out in the void with electrical systems untested in space beginning to fail. The horror of the vast armada ready to come through and take over the entire Earth behind their Asgardian puppet leader. And, somehow, the missile continuing to streak through space, unexpected and unstopped. The mothership exploding in a slow-motion nuclear inferno.
"Come on, Stark," Natasha urged, without much hope.
The fireball began to expand enough to threaten flame and fallout over the city if they left the portal open, and Steve reluctantly ordered again, "Close it."
"I'm sorry, Tony. I'm sorry, Aunt Pepper," Harry breathed. He'd lost the vision of space, and had no idea whether Iron Man was stuck moments from incineration, or had somehow passed back through the portal, but there was just no more time. With a final yell of pain, he took another step forward and jammed his conjured weapon into the heart of the portal machine. He was a little surprised when it didn't explode. It just suddenly cut out, the beam into the sky stopping and the portal beginning to collapse like fog in the sunlight.
And, in the suddenly clear dawn sky, there was a tiny red-and-gold speck, dropping back toward the city.
"Son of a gun," Steve breathed over the comms.
"His systems cut out!" Harry realized before the others noticed that Tony was in freefall. He didn't even have a chance to see what had happened to the rest of the machine as he crossed the roof back to his broom and kicked it into his hand, rocketing for the sky in one practiced motion.
This was going to be the most important snitch catch of his quidditch career.
"Tony!" he tried. "JARVIS. You have to reboot the armor." Tony had been falling for long enough that he was probably already going over a hundred miles per hour. With the armor's mass, Harry didn't look forward to trying a direct impact. Powered down, the lack of inertia dampening in the suit might make it just as bad for Tony as for Harry.
"I'm afraid I've lost contact with remote onboard systems," the AI apologized. "Still attempting."
The reverse of the Wronski Feint was easier: he got nearly up to Tony and then flipped around, allowing gravity to pull him back down as he struggled to regain speed. By the time he caught back up to the falling armor, they were both going nearly two-hundred miles per hour, and the ground was coming up fast. "I may… need some help if this doesn't work," he told the others as he held the broom with his legs and wrapped both arms around his seemingly-unconscious father-figure and then tried to pull up and cut speed.
It was almost working. Even with four-hundred pounds of extra weight, he wasn't asking the broom to do much more than go slower. To arc up and give him a few more seconds to shed speed. Iron Man on his broom was certainly far more weight than trying to ride with Natasha, but it wasn't an impossible amount.
The problem was skyscrapers. They were too close to the ground. Even as he started to pull level, they were still going far too fast to dodge the rapidly-looming bulk of the Lincoln Building. Harry had to chuckle to himself that he'd been worried about a hundred-mile-per-hour crash into the armor, and now he was going to flatten both of them into a skyscraper at that speed. Moments away, Harry was just trying to aim for a window and hope that it would hurt less than a wall.
And then his whole world was green.
It took a few painful moments to realize that they'd been caught out of the air by the Hulk. And somehow the impact hadn't killed him. The monstrous Avenger had turned his seemingly-unlimited strength into a momentum-defying redirect, bounced off of the Bloomberg building's roof, made a facade-destroying slide down the opposite high-rise, and gave one final kick to land shockingly close to the others on the raised section of Park Avenue. They skidded to a stop, Hulk having wrapped both Harry and Tony in his arms and used his back to absorb the final impact, seemingly none-the-worse for wear.
Harry shook the cobwebs out of his head and staggered off of the giant green airbag, absently confirming that his broom hadn't been crushed. But Tony just flopped to the road with a clank, like a broken toy. "Is he breathing?" Steve demanded, rushing up. Negligently, he tore off Tony's faceplate to regard the unconscious billionaire. He put an ear to Tony's mouth and didn't seem to hear any signs of life.
"His arc reactor should have kept his heart going even without suit power," Harry mumbled, trying to figure out what was wrong. Had Tony's purely-human body not taken the impacts as well as he had? Had he lost enough pressure in space to suffocate, or, worse, rupture his lungs? What kind of CPR could they even do to someone with so much machinery in his chest that it would–
Hulk roared in frustration and Tony suddenly startled awake with a gasp. "What the hell?" He glanced around at the surprised collection of fellow Avengers demanding, "What just happened? Please tell me nobody kissed me?"
Harry fell back into a destroyed car in relief that he wouldn't have to tell Pepper that Tony was gone. He absently noted that there were no more Chitauri running around. Had they all just shut off when the mothership blew up? That seemed like a real design flaw for technozombies. Steve just summed up, "We won."
Tony continued to ramble, as nonplussed by his survival as Harry was. "Alright. Yay! Hurray.. Good job, guys. Just… let's just not come in tomorrow. Let's just take a day." He glanced at Harry and asked, "Have you ever tried shawarma? There's a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don't know what it is, but I wanna try it."
"Yeah, it's like… meat and sauce and stuff. It's good," Harry explained. The Grangers had taken him to have some during one of their visits.
Thor, a bit of downer, glanced up to where he'd apparently left Loki on another rooftop. "We're not finished yet."
Tony nodded as much as he could in the damaged and still-rebooting suit, agreeing but insisting, "And then shawarma after."
Chapter 70: Odds and Ends
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Harry perched disconsolately on the roof of Rockefeller Center. It was where they'd apprehended Loki. Thor and his brother had fought to the inescapable conclusion while Harry had been on his way to close the portal, and Loki had fallen, disarmed. Thor was sure he'd seen the scepter bounce toward 49th Street. It should have been a simple matter of collecting the concealed Stone. A powerful artifact like that didn't just fall into a hole and go missing, like a dropped phone or keyring might atop the skyscraper.
But it was gone.
"I sensed you needed me," an English-accented woman's voice said, from his right, and Harry glanced up to see the astral form of the Ancient One hovering next to him. She was translucent enough that he suspected that anyone without magic wouldn't be able to perceive her.
"It's gone. The Stone in the scepter. We all looked, and then I looked for another hour. I missed the fancy donuts Tony got when he realized the shawarma place wouldn't be open until lunchtime," he complained. "Tony's sure it'll turn up but… he doesn't have the problems with it that I do."
"Curious," she agreed. "It should be around here?"
"It's where Thor and Loki fought," he agreed, looking down at the immense drop to the street with the confidence of a wizard with a broom easily to hand. "We missed you," he couldn't help but dig.
The Sorcerer Supreme's translucent face gave a bit of a smirk and explained, "Perhaps the recordings of the battle will fail to explain why so many enemies disappeared heading south, around Bleecker Street. We were not idle, though our secrecy remains important. For a time you may be the only one of us that can act openly."
"Yeah? Can I have a sling ring?" he asked, slightly mollified that they'd at least been taking magical potshots from the sanctum's roof.
She regarded him, eyes somehow even more piercing when only present as a spiritual projection. Finally, she shrugged, "If you can prove competent this summer, then yes. I agree that it may be time."
"Really?! I mean… I won't disappoint you, ma'am."
"Now, let us consider the problem you currently have. I have not foreseen any issues regarding the scepter directly past this point, but perhaps something more subtle has happened."
As she looked over the rooftop, Harry asked, "Was this… could I have stopped it? I just keep thinking back to the moment I left the roof, but I could have closed the portal early. Or what if we'd found it even earlier? Kept the portal from ever opening. What if I could have saved Fury?"
They'd received word while they cleaned up that Director Fury hadn't survived the hasty surgery from the wound Loki had given him. Natasha and Clint, in particular, seemed distraught, and it was unclear who would take over for the implacable leader.
"It may ease your mind to know that there were very few futures without the portal opening. It was close to an Absolute Point, and the timelines that did not include it were altogether darker, as Earth was unaware of the threats that might face it from the stars." She paused her inspection to validate Harry, explaining, "You changed things, and people died. I'd advise looking into the Trolley Problem, if you are unfamiliar. Had you not intervened, others might have died. I have not weighed the particular differences, and you should not either. While I'm certain some of the other Masters would disagree, it has been my experience that good people remaining inactive in a crisis is almost never better than the alternative, unless you have specific warning about the consequences of your choices."
"You're saying if Fury had lived, someone else might have died," Harry nodded, getting it. "But I still wish I could have saved everyone."
"It is the curse of the protector to feel so," she agreed, sadly. Turning back to inspect the rooftop, she looked frustrated, and opened the Eye of Agamotto hanging spectrally around her neck. A thin green beam of light hit her torso from the south, where the real Stone was hanging around the neck of her physical body. She wheeled her arms around, though Harry didn't see anything change, and figured she must be using the Time Stone to rewind to the moment Loki was disarmed and follow the path of the scepter. "Fascinating… and worrying," was her final pronouncement, as she let the amulet close and the green light stopped.
"Bad?"
She floated over to a particular place at the edge of the building and commanded, "Stand here and extend your senses."
Harry obliged. She wasn't going to tell him what she'd sensed until he proved whether he might be able to figure it out. Though he wasn't nearly as sensitive to magical energy as Parvati, he'd learned a little bit. "Something here feels… wrong. Itchy. Red. There shouldn't be any magic here at all, should there?"
She nodded, at least pleased that he'd detected it. "In my postcognition, the weapon reached this point and then vanished. It is no small feat to conceal the recent past from the Eye. An entity whose name I shall not speak is meddling, though he should be long dormant. Why, I do not yet know."
"Some big dimensional bad guy has the scepter?" Harry asked, worried.
She shook her head, clarifying, "It was a momentary intervention. Concealment upon the path of destiny. Wherever the Mind Stone landed, it could prove useful to him if we do not secure it. This entity makes grand plans. Perhaps we will recover the scepter in an hour, it having already knocked over another domino, or perhaps it will be used more directly. Leave this to me. Of course, if you find it, acquire it. But there are forces moving beyond you, at this time."
Harry huffed in annoyance, guessing, "We save the world from aliens, and some Principality is using that chaos to get something?"
"A more adequate summary than even you are aware. But do not let being thwarted on this deter you. You were a hero today. The world knows it. The leeway that performance will give you should not be underestimated."
"Because you're giving me a sling ring," he grinned, not letting her forget about that.
"If for no other reason then, yes, that," she agreed, with a smile. "Return to your new friends. I shall alert you should I find the weapon. Or your aunt, to pass along the information, should you already be back at school."
"Oh, right, I should call Sirius!" he realized, glad at least that finding the scepter wasn't his sole responsibility. "Thank you, ma'am," he said, doing the bow that she didn't really like and then leaping on his broom to fly off.
Stark Tower was pretty wrecked, at least cosmetically. Only the A was left of Tony's last name that had been blazoned in giant letters across the top of the building, and that had given him the idea of rebranding it to Avengers Tower. After all, it had been the locus point of the attack and the news was already calling them all heroes. It still remained to be seen how deep the damage was and how long it would take to fix (especially with all the contractors that could get to the city having all the work they could handle fixing the rest of Manhattan).
At least the automatic window on the floor that Harry's room was on still seemed to work, and JARVIS helpfully opened it to let him fly in. None of the windows on the level even seemed to be smashed in, on casual inspection, so hopefully Harry's room was okay. Was it weird to have already accepted it as his room? Harry happily pulled off the mask and shoved it into a pocket as soon as he was sure he was out of sight of the street. The kitchen table still had an array of donuts left over, though the dozen boxes had clearly been attacked with a gusto.
Only Bruce was in evidence, puttering around the coffee machine. "Everyone else had things to help with," he gestured vaguely. He'd at least been able to switch back to undestroyed clothes after reverting from being the Hulk. Before Harry could try to make him feel better about not being able to help, he asked, "Find the stick?"
Harry frowned and shook his head, choosing his words carefully since Bruce knew about the Ancient One but he was supposed to be keeping that secret from anyone that didn't, he explained, "You know that lady that gave you a ride that time?" Bruce nodded. "She can't find it either. We think something big is meddling. But she's on it."
Bruce huffed in frustration, "Be easier if we had that to throw in a pit. But at least Thor kept SHIELD from taking the blue brick."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I think they were mad they couldn't take it or Loki. But that Coulson guy is still in charge and backed him up. Oh, right, he says he's waiting for his dad to send him some kind of device so he can get back to Asgard, and that he can drop you on Vanaheim if you want."
"Huh, yeah, that'll make things easier. Wasn't sure how I was going to go other than sneaking through the Goblin Market," Harry shrugged. "I was about to call Sirius and make sure things are okay there. You want on the call?"
"Sure," Bruce nodded, pulling a couple of chairs closer together so they could both look into the mirror at the same time.
Harry grabbed a donut and sat down, fishing out his communication mirror with his other hand. "I wonder what time it is in Vanaheim," he mused, realizing it wasn't even eight in the morning in New York. He did some quick mental math about time zones and what time it had been when he'd left not even three full days earlier (had it really been under 60 hours?), and figured that even with the longer Vanaheim days it was still probably morning there as well. "Sirius Black," he told the mirror.
Within a few seconds, Sirius' face appeared on the small pane of glass. It would be very easy for onlookers to just think that it was a video call on a super-thin Starkphone. "Pup! Remus!" he said, excited to see both of them, for all that he looked like he hadn't gotten any sleep. The background looked like his kitchen in the Black manor house in Diagonalt. "Has Loki made a move yet?"
"Yeah. We won. Manhattan took a beating, though," he explained, then between Harry and Bruce they managed to quickly sum up the events that Sirius didn't know about yet.
"I'm glad you're both alive!" Sirius said, having only interjected with various barks of incredulity and worry as they'd been talking. "Makes what we've been dealing with here seem tame by comparison. We've been portaling around trying to take out various pockets of the so-called marauders. Some of them have had Death Eaters backing them up, but nobody's spotted You-Know-Who."
"Were you up all night fighting?" Bruce asked.
"No. Emergency althing," Sirius explained. "Well, so I guess I was fighting. But only other jerk landowners. With words. I'd have preferred if it was still aliens. Malfoy was right there, too, acting like he hadn't spent the previous day trying to kill aurors."
"They're still in the government!?" Harry boggled.
"Same problem we had in the war," Sirius grumbled. "Unless you physically catch them and unmask them at the scene, it's basically impossible to prove it was them. And they all just do that stupid smoke teleport if it looks like they're going to lose. When they pick the battlefield, it's hard to set up wards to prevent that ahead of time."
"So I'm guessing that you can't really get anything done with the bad guys sitting in the meeting making the decisions," Bruce figured.
"Exactly. They even tried to blame Harry." At Harry's shocked and indignant face, his godfather explained, "We found Cedric's body in the graveyard. They'd cleaned out everything else and staged it. Fleur's knife that you took off her in his back, his hands clutching your belt pouch and the trophy."
Madder about it than he'd expected, Harry gritted out, "Did they make it look like he wrote H-A-R-R-Y in his own blood too?" Of course those assholes would try to frame him.
"Hah," Sirius barked. "Not that complete of a frame up, no. But fortunately Dora and aurors that she trusts were first on the scene, since I gave them the tip. Maybe someone else would have jumped to the conclusion that they wanted, but she made sure they did the forensics right. No actual blood from the wound, nothing to indicate that he'd died in that position, and signs of dark magic and preservation. They're going over the body with a fine-toothed comb, now, but I was able to argue that he'd been dead for months and of course the Death Eaters wanted to ruin your name."
"So I'm not going to be arrested if I come back?" Harry checked, slightly mollified that they'd done the police work, though upset about the proof that Cedric was definitely dead and had been for a long time.
"No. Are you coming through the Market?" he asked. "When are you coming?"
"Thor thinks he can drop me off," Harry explained. "I don't know when. Maybe today or tomorrow?"
"Blows my mind that you two are friends with Thor."
"Us too," Harry agreed. Bruce just shrugged, never having bought that far into the literal Asgard-worship.
"Oh! I met a couple of SHIELD agents," Sirius remembered. "They helped lead us to a bad guy camp near the train platform. They said they were your undercover protection detail, and they got stuck over here when you went to school last year."
That didn't make sense to Harry, then a couple of memories surfaced and he asked, "Bald guy with glasses and a big, dark-haired guy?"
"That's them. Sitwell and Rumlow."
"I wonder why they didn't say anything when I saw them last Christmas?"
"Spying," Bruce figured. "They weren't supposed to follow you, and didn't want to admit they screwed up and got stuck."
Harry nodded, realizing how much that could have screwed up for him earlier, but shrugged. "Well, Vanaheim's kind of out of the bag now, I guess. They helped, at least?"
"Yeah, we probably wouldn't have found the camp without them," Sirius agreed, but had looked thoughtful at Bruce's suggestion. "You're probably right that they're a little dodgy."
"I'll see if Coulson wants them back," Harry figured. "And maybe talk to other people about whether they need to have their memories erased."
"We can't really send them back until the convergence opens anyway, so we've got time," Sirius agreed. "They're talking like they want to be ambassadors to SHIELD, so hopefully everyone's on the up-and-up. Anyway, I'll send a letter to the school that you might be back soon. Or are you coming here?"
"Not sure. I'll let you know when I know," Harry told him. They said a few more small-talk goodbyes and signed off.
The rest of the day was hectic.
Most of that was the debriefs, where they all tried to reconstruct everything that had happened in a very short timeframe. It ultimately worked out to under an hour between when they woke to the SHIELD building being attacked and when the portal closed. Harry had basically forgotten about the time he'd battered his way through a dozen adult agents, and started trying to assume he'd misremembered it. Then Coulson turned up the video from the Helicarrier's bridge and even Harry was duly impressed with himself.
Then there was a bit of time to shower, take a brief nap, and get a late lunch of the promised shawarma (sadly from a different place than the one that Tony had noticed, since that one wasn't fit to start working for the day, amidst the rubble). But by the afternoon, Thor had received the device from Asgard that would let them leave, and seemed keen to exit before SHIELD made another play for the Tesseract or his brother (who was conscious again, but securely manacled and gagged in purpose-built Aesir bondage gear, just in case). Pepper had wound up flying to the west coast, so wasn't able to get back in time to see them off, but was exchanging texts with Harry right up until he was ready to leave the planet.
For whatever reasons of cosmic resonance, Thor thought they needed to leave from Central Park, rather than Stark Tower, which left Harry the only one having to keep his mask on as everyone else switched to street clothes to send them off. He supposed it helped keep up the idea in the minds of the public that Arcane wasn't Harry Potts, but some mysterious mage from wherever Thor and Loki came from. There had been plenty of people taking photos, and keeping a polite but interested distance back as they stepped onto a large metal grate at Bethesda Terrace. "We should try to get together when I'm back in July!" Harry insisted, as he put his hands on both the handles of the large vacuum tube that housed the Tesseract in the middle, while Thor and Loki both held one.
"I can try to swing back later in the summer," Bruce shrugged. He still wasn't comfortable hanging around. The whole group seemed like they might go their separate ways rather than sticking together, having arrived via separate transports. But if Harry got his sling ring, it wasn't like anyone on Earth was far.
"Do well on your exams," Tony ordered him in farewell, as Thor turned his handle and the three disappeared into a flare of blue light.
The only Gryffindor students that had a sixth period class on Tuesdays happened to be the seventh-years in advanced potions (so, hardly anyone). And that turned out to be the time back on Vanaheim when Harry and the princes of Asgard appeared right in the middle of the common room among a few dozen students just counting down until dinnertime.
"That was better than the first time, but not by much," Harry complained, still hating the disassembled-and-reforged feeling of using the Tesseract to travel. It took him a moment to realize that most of his dorm-mates were surrounding them, some having gone into battle stance as the seemingly-impossible happened and someone teleported right into Hogwarts. He pulled his mask off and said, "Oh. Hey everybody. I really thought we'd have gotten shunted off to Hogsmeade or something. Noted. This thing doesn't care about wards." He had visualized the room for the transport, but hadn't thought it would work.
"Is that…?" Hermione was the first to get some words out, but still, even with all her experience with Harry, wasn't quite prepared for him to show up out of nowhere in the common room with two Asgardian gods (one in manacles and a gag) and an obviously-powerful glowing blue cube-in-a-tube.
Loki, though his mouth was covered, clearly conveyed his amusement as he completely understood where he was, and might not have ever managed to sneak into the Gryffindor dorm (though, despite theoretically being a consummate Slytherin, nobody had ever actually asked what house he'd been in). Thor simply smiled and waved his hammer, but said, "Greetings! Apologies that we dare not tarry longer." He knew that he was about two seconds from getting mobbed, and that would delay him until professors started trying to talk to him. "Farewell, Harry. Students of the Lion!" The room was dead silent, except for the subtle click of an SLR camera at the back.
With another twist of the glass tube once Harry had stepped away, Thor and Loki once again disappeared, hopefully emerging next in Asgard itself.
"Was that Thor!? And Loki?" Hermione finally finished her thought.
"Yeah, it's a long story. But I should tell adults I'm back first?" Harry covered, exhausted. "I really didn't expect that I'd actually make it right here."
And that was the last sentence he got out before the cacophony of questions began. Colin Creevey very quietly stowed his camera. He'd finally learned Harry didn't like getting his photo taken, but hadn't been able to resist taking the shot. When was he ever going to get another chance for a photo like that?
There was no actual way that Harry was going to get out of the room without telling at least some of what he'd been up to since they'd seen him heading into the convergence three days earlier (it still felt weird that it had only been three days). The only reason they let him leave at all was to run upstairs to go change out of his armor because the Weasley twins convinced everyone it would be funniest if he just showed up to dinner like nothing had happened. Under an hour after he'd reappeared, he was, indeed, just sitting at his normal spot at the Gryffindor table like he did every night.
It took the hall about ten minutes before the people that noticed quickly convinced everyone else, and the whispers turned into an uproar.
"Yes, he's back," Dumbledore announced over the hubbub. It was unclear whether he'd known that Harry had made it into the school, though he'd probably heard from Sirius that it was the plan. "I'm sure Mister Potter will explain his adventures over the next few days." He met Harry's eyes and tilted his pointy hat just enough to indicate that Harry was expected to debrief him immediately after dinner.
Those debriefs became as much a part of Harry's next few weeks as his exams were. In fact, it was only Hermione's force of personality that gave him any peace from recounting his deeds, as she insisted that study time was sacred. Sadly, the other schools had already cleared out after the final task, so Harry didn't get to speak to Fleur or Viktor in person, though he sent letters. The Minister and his staff had likewise returned to deal with marauder attacks and politics, so it wasn't even totally clear whether Harry was considered the winner of the tournament. He would have been inclined to demand it posthumously go to Cedric, except that Cedric had never actually participated in the events.
He managed to find a moment to quietly explain it to Cho and she was as shattered as he'd been afraid of. She'd already heard that Cedric had died, but to be informed that she'd been dating an imposter all year. That it was Loki, simply playing a role while, himself, mind controlled… it was so much to shoulder. Hufflepuff mostly got the story secondhand, as he didn't have any close friends in the house, and it was unclear whether most of them believed him.
Slytherin didn't, or at least pretended not to. Their parents had clearly told them to push the narrative that Harry had killed Cedric, despite what the forensics said. Ravenclaw, with Padma, Luna, and Cho all believing, leaned toward accepting Harry's stories. The Midgardborn in all the houses had sent letters home, and had confirmed at least that their world was now a very different place; one that knew about Asgard and aliens.
Gryffindor had obviously seen Harry arrive in a flash of blue light with Thor and Loki, and didn't understand why so many students in other houses thought they might be making that up.
Eventually, over a month after the tournament and in the middle of exams, a formal letter arrived for Harry from the Ministry, designating him the victor and noting that the prize money had been deposited to his account at Gringotts. It seemed very grudging. At least Christine's article about it in the newspaper was glowing, and it mitigated a little of the tension at the school. The secondhand stories of Harry's adventures on Midgard had filtered around the school, and the urge to bask in his reflected celebrity seemed to be winning over the urge to treat it as notoriety among most of the student body.
Harry wasn't really thrilled with either outcome, though at least it was for things he'd done beyond surviving the attack on his parents.
He'd received a couple of letters from Fleur, mostly apologizing about getting mind controlled and trying to kill him. She mentioned a few things about her summer plans. He vastly undersold his adventures. There didn't seem to be much hope of seeing her over the summer, but at least they were writing (though pen-pals sending written letters wasn't the preferred written communication method for a kid raised on real-time texting). Meanwhile, he mostly talked to Viktor secondhand through Hermione, and they were working out how to hang out over the summer. Harry was trying not to be a little jealous, realizing that Hermione still had three more years where she'd only have letters for the vast majority of the time. Assuming things worked out at all, which was the thing all of them had to worry about at their age.
Which was driven home by Dean and Padma admitting they hadn't really been together for a while, but were pretending for the group. They were talking about seeing other people the next year. Lavender was also at a maximum level of trying to make it work with Ron (who seemed more or less oblivious to the growing tension in his relationship). And it was kind of hard to tell what was going on with Neville and Luna from the outside.
As much as he enjoyed learning and spending time with his friends, Harry was increasingly looking forward to the summer. He had promises of unique martial arts training and a sling ring. He wanted to make sure that the Avengers didn't totally fall apart after one outing. He was pretty sure that Aunt Pepper wasn't serious about grounding him anymore.
When the train finally rolled away from Hogwarts, it was with a bittersweet feeling that he was growing up, and the school was increasingly becoming his past rather than a home. He was nearly 15, and adulthood had basically already been thrust upon him in many ways. Could he continue to find time to enjoy the last years of his teens, before responsibility truly fell upon him? Or was having to spend so much of the year away at school going to become an increasing imposition on his newfound role as one of Earth's mightiest heroes?
Only time would tell, but he was at least committed to enjoying his summer. Maybe it would be an uneventful one?
Notes:
Please enjoy this chapter as my gift to you for the holidays. I'm hoping to start posting again regularly soon, but my buffer still isn't where I want it to be.
Chapter 71: Guy in the Chair
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"Well I guess I'm glad we didn't wind up nuking Harry Potts," Secretary Pierce mused, after Sitwell and Rumlow finished their report. "And you've obtained one of these… they really send mail with interdimensional owls?"
"Yes, sir," Sitwell confirmed. While the information was urgent, the Secretary hadn't been immediately available when they finally were able to follow the schoolchildren off the train platform and back into London. He'd gotten time to shower in a modern bathroom, put on a tailored suit, have a meal made with food that had to follow safety standards, and pretty much rejoin the modern world. Just getting to sit in a padded chair with proper lumbar support while he debriefed was a little slice of heaven. "We have an owl and we were able to make several contacts in the Ministry, and even with some of the more powerful non-wizard landholders."
"I'm going to leave you on point for this, then, since I'll need time to wrap my head around the political situation. I look forward to reading your detailed reports. I'll let you know when we've decided on a strategy."
"Thank you, sir. Who do we… officially report to now?" They'd received a short explanation of what had happened to Fury, but hadn't gotten a full breakdown of the new hierarchy.
Pierce explained, "We've moved to a more distributed model of authority. Officially, it's so there's not a single point of failure for the Earth's defenses anymore. Obviously, it should give us more room to work. We confirmed Maria was no longer being mind controlled and basically made her the official liaison between facilities, and she reports to me and the council. But she doesn't have the authority Nick had. I left Phil in charge of New York for now, but he's requesting the West Coast. Apparently there's a girlfriend in Portland. Robert, Victoria, and Anne are taking on new administrative responsibilities. I'm going to task you two, Felix, and John with posts as well." He considered and then summed up, "Which is to say that you'll technically report to Maria Hill, but have a lot more latitude than you did under Nick. She's still drawing up areas of authority and staff reporting trees so we don't wind up tripping over one another. But we should be able to get all that to you after you settle back in."
Sitwell was feeling a little imposter syndrome at suddenly being thrust into a serious management role rather than just being a high-level field officer, but Rumlow seemed thrilled at the promotion. "It'll be great to not have to run everything through the one-eyed bottleneck," he opined.
Pierce nodded, "You may get orders before Jasper does. Maria doesn't have the same contacts through the organization as Nick did, and is less likely to notice if a few potential roadblocks get removed. Tony Stark has already complained about how disappointed he was in the helicarrier's technology, so we think we can massage him into getting Insight operational faster than expected. We're going to have to be fast, nimble, and situationally aware, but we're closer than we've ever been…
"Hail Hydra."
Not far from the London SHIELD office where Hydra was debriefing, Harry was getting a bit of a debrief of his own with the Ancient One. She'd come to the London sanctum and filled a room with the sanctum heads—Masters Sol Rama, Tina Minoru, and Kaecilius—as well as Mordo and Wong. She'd booked two hours for Harry to just explain everything that was going on with both Vanaheim and the Avengers.
As he finally wound down, she explained to the Masters, "Now that you've heard the challenges he's been facing, you'll all understand why I've promised Mr. Potts some additional privileges. Notably, a sling ring."
Harry grinned at that pronouncement and then hastily steeled his expression into one of wise adulthood. Kaecilius and Wong clocked it, but he was pretty sure he'd looked solemn again before Mordo glanced his way. That well-known stickler among the group simply regarded him impassively for a moment but then relented with a nod. "I fear we need more eyes upon the situation in Vanaheim, however," was all he said.
The Ancient One gave a broad smile at the suggestion, admitting, "And that is why I've suggested to the headmaster that he accept one of our own as a teacher for their defense seminar this year. He seemed to be having trouble finding a qualified candidate anyway, and feared that his political opponents might insist on one of their own agents."
"So we'll insert our agent, instead?" Kaecilius smirked.
She returned the smirk, obviously the thought having occurred to her. "If a new war is starting over there, it will help to have someone that the Ministry cannot object to being present to protect our interests. Which, of course, includes students from Earth that might wish to continue their magical studies here."
"Yeah," Harry added, "it couldn't hurt to have someone actually explain what you do here. A lot of the kids at school are afraid they'll just get killed by Lovecraftian horrors on their first day on the job if they sign up."
"Volunteers?" the Sorcerer Supreme glanced around the table. As everyone started trying to marshal their arguments for not being it, she relented. "We'll look into responsibilities and make a decision in a month. Meanwhile, I shall endeavor to ensure that Mr. Potts is proficient with portals before we send him on his way."
Another hour later of private instruction, and she seemed satisfied that Harry wasn't going to cut his own arm off in a portal, and could basically get around. "At school, they call that 'splinching' yourself," he revealed.
"What a lovely Vanir talent for understatement. Consider that it happens often enough there's a word for it." She thought for another moment and then revealed, "Your services may also be required in the next couple of days. There is a potential student in New York City that we had been inclined to not reveal the existence of Hogwarts to, but the situation may have changed."
"Parents in SHIELD or something?" Harry guessed.
"No, completely free of political entanglements. However, my previous auguries had indicated that he might accomplish something important by remaining in his normal life and school. Recently, however, I believe that the course of things can be preserved… but for some reason only if you and Mr. Thomas are there to introduce the boy to our world. The child's name is Edward Leeds…"
Having gotten back from Vanaheim on the weekend of the beginning of July, Harry didn't actually have a chance to fulfill this new recruitment mission until the Fourth of July, which landed on a Wednesday that year. He'd spent the rest of the weekend and Monday and Tuesday settling into the largely-repaired Stark/Avengers Tower. From that vantage, it was amazing what they'd managed to do with cleaning up the borough in just two months, but there was still a lot left to do. Tony mentioned that he was working with Coulson to get SHIELD's Damage Control division spun up into a full agency with the resources to quickly repair that kind of catastrophic property damage from superpowered and high-tech events.
Nobody who was honest thought that the Battle of New York would be the last time a city's infrastructure would suffer sudden destruction from powered individuals clashing. They just hoped it would be on a smaller scale.
Despite the holiday, the fireworks laws in the city meant that the afternoon of the fourth was relatively quiet in the neighborhood of single-family homes that Harry, Dean, and Master Drumm visited looking for the Leeds residence. Well, perhaps the quiet was also because the city had seen enough explosions in the past few years that even delinquents were hesitant to risk terrifying their neighbors. The house they'd identified was in a majority-immigrant neighborhood, primarily Pacific Islanders from the people they saw wandering around in the July heat, but the trio only seemed to get a second look because Master Drumm was so buff. Harry, of course, had donned a hat and sunglasses to avoid notice.
The two-story house was well-maintained, and showed evidence of an 11-year-old in residence, if only in the two under-sized boys' bikes chained to the front porch railing and damage to the bark of the yard's tree as if it had been climbed repeatedly. Lacy curtains shrouded the bay window, but silhouettes of flowers and picture frames sat inside. The mat on the front door said "Welcome" in both English and some language that Harry's implant helpfully translated to another instance of "Welcome."
"Do we just knock?" he checked.
"I called ahead. I… think we're expected," Drumm explained. "The woman I spoke to didn't seem to speak much English. Tagalog, maybe? Not my specialty."
"I can probably translate," Harry said, tapping the back of his neck vaguely where his implant was.
To their knock, the door was opened by an imposing but friendly-looking older woman with short, graying black hair wearing a knit housecoat over a floral-patterned dress. "You from the school?" she asked. When they nodded, she began shouting up the stairs, her mouth movements not quite syncing with what Harry heard so he assumed she'd switched languages. "Ned! The man from the school I told you about is here. Come down!" She peered back at the three of them and started sizing them up for threats, but then got an interested look on her face. "My Ned is special, yes?"
"Yes, ma'am," Drumm nodded, seriously.
"Come in. Sit down. I'll get lemonade. NED!" she said, allowing them to enter the sitting room past a set of wooden stairs on their right. The room was dominated by a large dining table with rolling chairs upholstered in an interesting shade of green. The entire decorating scheme seemed very mid-century, with the wallpaper of flowering vines, a variety of religious or grandmotherly wall art, and the plastic-coated brown floral couch.
She'd barely had them sit at the table and given them a moment to appreciate the blown-glass floor lamps and mounted plaque full of interestingly-shaped knives before the stairs were suddenly pounding with the arrival of two pre-adolescent boys, descending from the upper floor with haste. The child in the lead (it was weird to think that Harry had thought of himself as much older when he'd started Hogwarts at the same age, four years and a lifetime earlier) was stout and dark-haired, even bigger than Malfoy's goons had been at that age.
The much slimmer, much whiter kid behind him seemed oddly familiar to Harry, but he couldn't quite place him until the boy's eyes got really big and he said, "Dean? Harry?"
"Wait, you know the guys from this school?" Must-be-Ned asked his friend.
"Yeah! Remember I told you about the Stark Expo?" he explained, and Harry suddenly flashed back to the tiny child in the Iron Man mask that they'd saved from Hammeroids.
Dean, seeming just as surprised as Harry to run into the kid, nonetheless remembered his name, pointing out, "Peter! Weird running into you here."
Peter Parker shrugged, explaining, "Ned's my best friend. Is this a private school? I didn't know you'd applied to a private school, Ned."
"I don't think I did?" the larger boy said, easily sliding into a seat at the table, not bothered by the three strangers in the room, especially since Peter knew the older boys.
Drumm seemed slightly thrown by having to do his pitch in front of a non -magical child, particularly one that Dean and Harry were already acquainted with. He somewhat lamely covered with, "We actively search for students at a particular intersection of talent and means." His deep voice gave the thin story a little more gravitas than Harry could have managed.
"Peter's family's poor, too," Ned argued, in a way that Harry thought felt very Hufflepuff in his loyalty to his friend. "I don't think he shouldn't get a shot just because he's white."
"That's not what it's for," his probably-grandmother explained in Tagalog, such that only Ned and Harry seemed to be following. "I told you that you had the magic in you! I'm just happy somebody that could teach you noticed."
"Lola!" the boy argued, in English. "That's Harry Potts. This is probably a Stark magnet school for technology." He'd obviously remembered Peter's story and recognized Harry, especially since he'd politely removed his hat and switched back to his regular glasses inside the house.
Looking slightly helpless by not understanding Ned's Lola and still not sure what he could say in front of an unrelated minor that wouldn't involve a memory spell later, Drumm considered his options. Thinking on his feet, Harry offered, "Not exactly. It's a little private, though. Peter, you want to go talk with me about your school outside?"
"Sure, okay," the boy said, picking up that something wasn't quite right and starting to get a little defensive about it.
"Take your lemonades," Lola ordered, passing them both glasses. Well, they were large plastic tumblers with an air gap between the inner and outer walls to keep drinks cold, and a kitschy spray of sunflowers painted inside the translucent housing.
They were glad to have the lemonades as they went outside and sat on the small front stoop, trying to stick to the shade in the afternoon that was already 90 degrees. "You still making stuff?" Harry asked, vaguely remembering that the kid had been excited that he'd made his Iron Man costume from a kit.
"Yeah," Peter nodded. "We were just upstairs working on a radio." He trailed off and shot Harry a look, covering his trembling lip with a sip of the lemonade.
"Ned's your best friend?" Harry got it, realizing how he might feel if someone showed up offering Dean or Hermione a more prestigious school that he wasn't invited to follow them to. That moment of natural empathy seemed to kick off a connection to his barely-understood power, and his scar itched. He could tell that the boys were misfits that didn't really have any other friends besides each other, and Ned was Peter's rock of socialization. They had grand dreams of the two of them spending the rest of school together. Harry wasn't sure if he was getting a premonition of the future or just Peter's hopes for it, but he saw them both, teenaged, together in a high school for the scientifically gifted.
"Woah!" Peter's mouth gaped, and he was in danger of dropping his lemonade in his excitement. "Your eyes just turned orange!"
Well crap. Harry hadn't actually realized that happened when he had those flashes of empathy.
Before he could come up with an explanation, the little genius' mind was assembling facts. With Soul Stone powers running, Harry could almost watch the synapses firing as Peter re-evaluated his encounter with the older boys at the Expo two years prior. Even then, he hadn't truly believed his toy repulsor had worked to blow up the giant robot, but didn't have a better explanation. He remembered that Harry had used some kind of energy whip that he'd assumed was based on the guy who'd destroyed the Monaco race, but, in hindsight, didn't look like it had any wires inside to define the plasma field. And then, at the Battle of New York, a mysterious, masked Avenger that might have been about Harry's size used the same orange whips in some of the cell phone video from the people Arcane had saved in the bank.
Harry was kicking himself. Eight words into trying to keep Peter from overhearing about magic and Hogwarts and he'd given the kid a key into possibly an even bigger set of secrets.
"You're an Avenger!" Peter whispered excitedly, not even noticing that his lemonade was sloshing out of the cup and onto the concrete of the stoop. "Is Ned going to be an Avenger? If he is, can I be his support guy? Is Dean your guy in the chair?"
Sighing, Harry realized that he wasn't going to convince the kid of a lie without the Runes of Kof-Kol. Instead, he asked, "Can you keep a secret? I'm not supposed to tell you any of this. My life is ruined if the world finds out about this. I'm too young for this. Tony would get in trouble."
Peter straightened to attention in a fairly adorable way for a skinny pre-teen, finally remembering his lemonade and setting it down on the ground. He brought the hand up as if he was going to salute, but then just clasped his hands together in front of his chest as if pleading, "I can! You can trust me! This is the coolest thing ever. And especially if Ned already knows, who'm I gonna tell?"
Still empathically connected, Harry believed him. And something about his enthusiasm made Harry think that Peter might have been the reason that the Ancient One had considered leaving Ned unaware of Hogwarts. His tie to the Soul Stone didn't give Harry prescience, the way the Time Stone could have, but he could tell that the kid had a mountain of inner potential. "Ned's probably not going to be an Avenger. And Dean's not my… guy in the chair." If anything, that might wind up being Hermione or Padma, honestly. "There are more people that can do things like I can do. Most of them don't live on Earth, but sometimes people on Earth have the ability to be trained. So we go to school to learn how to use our powers."
Peter thought back and explained, "Weird stuff happens around Ned sometimes. We just thought it was because he was clumsy or forgot. But he's magic." Harry had been hoping to avoid the M-word, but he just shrugged and nodded. "And I'm not?"
"No. But I think you might have potential in a different way."
"Iron Man isn't magic!" Peter grinned, realizing.
"Or Black Widow or Hawkeye," Harry added. "Or Hulk, really, but you shouldn't science yourself into a big green monster." He wasn't going to explain that Bruce was a little magic, with the berzerker heritage.
"I'm going to be really good at science! I'm already best in my school. They let me and Ned enter the middle school science fair last year and we won. I already have ideas for things I could do with chemistry that I could use to fight bad guys. Like Mr. Stark does!"
There was no boast in Peter's voice, and Harry considered. "You're having to go up grades to work at your own level?" He'd known a few kids that had gone to his elementary school not because their parents were rich tech sector employees, but because they'd needed the challenge over normal public school.
"Ned and I were planning to get into Midtown Technical High School," he admitted, a little sadly, realizing that he was losing his partner in that goal. "But, yeah, I don't think there are any magnet middle schools I can get into."
"Give me a minute," Harry told the kid, setting his lemonade on the stoop and pulling out his phone. Peter sipped his own drink bemusedly.
Aunt Pepper
Do we have any scholarships. For like, smart
pre-teens that are really into STEM?
We do college scholarships. Why?
No, like, for kids to go to magnet schools.
Remember that kid that nearly got killed
by the Hammeroids? We're kind of taking
his best friend away to my school. And he
seems really smart but not rich. He can't go
with us, but he needs more than public
middle school, you know?
Does his aunt work at FEAST? Happy
has been going over there a lot since
the Expo.
Maybe?
We probably SHOULD do something
for the city like that. Yeah. I'll put Grace
on it. I have more questions when you
get home, but sure.
"Does your aunt work… at a feast?" Harry checked.
"FEAST. All caps. It's a homeless shelter," Peter nodded.
"Okay, cool. Give me your contact information. We're going to make sure you have a better option than whatever local public school. I miss my best friends from elementary school, but I made a bunch of really good new friends at my new school. It helps when you have a lot in common with everyone."
"Really?!" Peter said, excited. "I don't want special treatment or anything," he said, realizing that he'd basically guilted a rich kid into getting him a scholarship.
"My aunt said we were going to do something like this for the city anyway, I just reminded her," Harry fibbed.
"That's awesome. You won't regret it. I'm going to learn so much!"
Harry nodded, glad that little crisis was solved and hoping the Ancient One would think he figured out the best solution for the kid. Now he just needed to figure out how to explain to the other Masters that he'd taken the boy outside to try to keep him from learning about Hogwarts, and accidentally told him even more than he might have learned sitting in on the conversation.
While Harry Potts and Peter Parker were sitting on a porch in Queens drinking lemonade, 700 miles away, a man thought dead was drinking his own glass. Suburban Atlanta wasn't really the first place that Nick Fury would choose to spend a sweltering July, but he remembered how to stay cool from growing up one state over. There were too many other major cities where he ran the risk of getting recognized by an old ally or enemy. Most other places that had the kind of medical rehab he needed, a black man would at least get a second look. And he didn't want anyone to even take a first one.
The facility he'd chosen featured an honest-to-God veranda for the patients to spend time on, sipping lemonade and looking out at the forested grounds. They'd wrapped a high-tech medical facility in Southern charm, and the spy in him liked the deception.
He didn't like that he was having to sit, basically helplessly, in a wheelchair while he took in the view. He could walk if he had to, but he'd probably tear open some important internal sutures. It could have been worse. Fortunately, even through the scepter-induced brain fog, Dr. Fine had remembered the plan. Tetrodotoxin B, to slow his heart enough to make it possible to fix him before he bled out, and make it look like he'd died on the operating table.
With any luck, he could count the number of people that knew he'd survived on one hand.
One of them was walking up for the meeting. He had no clue what name the man had signed in under, or what face, but the facility prided itself on not spying on private conversations between its patients and their guests. As he caught the wounded spy's one eye, he shifted into his resting form: still former SHIELD director Robert Keller.
Robert had died quietly, from cancer, a few years after he retired. They'd kept that fact secret so the identity could still be used in a pinch. Talos seemed to have grown very comfortable in it.
The skrull leader dragged over a rocking chair and sat next to the wheelchair, commenting, "I love these things. Kind of feels like sitting on a ship with a broken grav system." Pleasantries out of the way, he opined, "You look like shit, Fury,"
"You would, too, if someone put a spear through your back. Lost a kidney. May never get full lung function back. Just glad it missed my spine and my heart." He still didn't know how much the missing kidney was going to affect sampling his favorite whiskey. The doctors were very adamant he wasn't allowed to even try to find out for a long time yet. "No Soren?"
"Giah's hitting that phase where she knows better than both of us," Talos explained, about his daughter and wife. "Thought she needed some quality time with her mother after the last few months."
"No luck?"
He shook his head grimly. "Everywhere's still full of refugees from the Kree-Nova war, even after the armistice they just signed. Nobody's willing to take skrulls."
"Where are they refugees from? Can't your people live in places that have been nuked?"
"Your nukes, sure. The ones the kree use? Even we can't live on a planet they've sterilized. That's sort of why they made them. Though, there's a chance we'll negotiate getting Tarnax IV in the reparations. My cousin Dro'ge is already styling himself emperor."
Changing topics from a sore subject, Fury asked, "You heard anything from Danvers?"
"Not recently. She was too busy hitting the kree where she could. Doubt they'd have given up on a war going that long if she hadn't made it too costly. You need her?"
"We might have used her a couple of months ago. But, no, what I can use right now is you. I need some confirmation about a theory I have, about the loyalty of some of the members of SHIELD. It seems like exactly the kind of problem your people can help me get to the bottom of…"
Notes:
Note that the events of The Marvels seem to contradict a couple of major lore pieces from Secret Invasion, and I'm erring on the side of The Marvels where necessary. I'm also having to make the timeline make sense between The Marvels and Guardians 1, regarding the Kree-Nova war.
Chapter 72: Bonnie and Clyde
Chapter Text
Harry had most of the next week free before his back-to-back summer camps started. In addition to his regular full-tilt attempt to catch back up on all the media he'd missed over the year, he sat down and built a pair of magic glasses. It wasn't that exciting. But he finally had enough runes knowledge to put some minor effects on his eyewear, and access to Tony's micro-engravers to get them small enough to fit on his frames.
Reinforcement runes would make them much harder to break. A couple of runes on the earpieces would prevent them being dislodged from his head if he didn't want them to come off. He worked in a tinting scheme that would beat out the best transitions lenses for speed of going from clear to sunglasses. And then there was the newly-important one: making his eyes always look normal, even if they suddenly turned orange.
He really needed to talk to someone about that issue.
Then on the 10th, he was following his instructions to bring a week of clothes and portal over to where he'd met Ying Nan in the bamboo forest during the third task. Harry, like any nearly-15-year-old, had been trying to be cool about his sudden freedom to travel. He obviously knew better than to use his sling ring in public. But in private… he'd gotten a little too comfortable opening portals for his friends to come over and watch TV. And when he felt like popping over to the Encino house to get some private time. He'd even made one to reach into the kitchen for snacks a couple of times.
Basically, he was getting a lot of practice at making portals and that's what he'd insist to anyone from Kamar-Taj that acted like he wasn't taking it seriously enough.
He'd left late enough in the evening, New York time, to get to China around sunrise, much as he had during the task. If anything, the glade was even more beautiful at the height of summer than it had been in mid-spring. But that was barely a taste of what he was about to see. The enigmatic martial artist met him there, made him swear so many oaths about keeping secret the place she was about to show him, and then led him through a waterfall and into a parallel world.
Harry couldn't tell anyone specifics about the Asian fantasy kingdom that he visited, but his D&D games were going to have some rich cultural foundations for a while.
It felt like longer than a week, and it was hard to tell whether it was because the place had a different flow of time or just that everything was so interesting. Harry spent most of his time in the promised intense martial arts training with Ying Nan, but he also got to spend some time on spear and archery fighting, armor manufacture, and Ta Lo storytelling (he was glad they spoke Chinese, which his implant translated). And he got to meet an honest-to-Odin protector dragon. It was a lot better than his last dragon encounter on Muspelheim.
By the end of the week, he didn't seem to have worn out his welcome, though he hadn't quite done well enough that the locals felt like loading him down with gifts. They seemed to think that the shed dragonscales that they used in most of their weapons and armors might be too risky to release into Earth, and he hadn't pressed the issue. He was taking away an immense amount of unique knowledge, after all, and he'd just have to content himself at being better at martial arts but not having an awesome set of armor or weapons.
"You have to tell me all about it!" Hermione insisted, when he met back up with his friends at Kamar-Taj, his first week of summer camp blending immediately into a second.
"Can't. Classified," he shrugged. Relenting a little, he explained, "I can teach you the martial arts I learned? It's like the soft style. My teacher could basically do air bending. I may never get good enough to do that, but just learning how to flow out of the way of attacks was huge."
The girls were interested in a special fighting style that didn't rely on muscle mass, and Dean was keen to learn any martial art in principle. For their part, the Masters were thrilled that Harry was so ready to spend camp teaching his friends: they'd honestly run out of obvious subjects for the precocious teens. They were still too young to make deals with Principalities, and were scraping up on the edge of what even very-trained apprentices could do with their personal magic. There was a lot more theory to learn, of course, but other than getting the rest of them to Harry's level with astral projection, there wasn't too much practical to teach them until they turned 18.
So the Ancient One was thrilled to help Harry learn to be a better teacher. It was an excellent way to improve one's personal skills, anyway. If it took some of the expectations off of the Masters, so much the better.
During one of those one-on-one sessions, Harry finally got a chance to explain the situation with his eyes turning orange. "What do you think is happening?" the Ancient One challenged him, from where they were having a very comfortable morning discussion on the ramparts of Kamar-Taj.
Harry had obviously had a couple of weeks to really think about it, so didn't take long to start explaining, "I don't know if it started when I actually touched the Soul Stone, or maybe all the way back when my mom saved me with it as a baby. There have been a few times I could just, like, understand people, you know?" He paused for a minute, and revealed, "Also, I had a bunch of weird dreams that were probably me seeing what was going on with Loki and the aliens all year."
"And they turn your eyes orange?"
"According to Peter. He's the first one that told me. It makes my scar itch, too," he shrugged.
"I will not pretend I have all the answers in this instance, like some others might…" she began.
"Like Dumbledore?"
She smirked, not denying the old man's tendency to act omniscient. Instead, she continued, "The Time Stone has failed to give me innate powers, despite how long I've spent with it. And it is the only one of the Stones I'm familiar with: the others are rumor, being moved about the universe, and hidden again as quickly as they are discovered. But I get glimpses. A little over two decades ago, I felt a surge of energy I did not feel again until the events of two months ago, and I believe someone on Earth gained powers."
"An air force pilot!" Harry agreed, putting together the redacted information about Carol Danvers he'd read in the Avengers Initiative tablet. "I think she was flying a ship that used the Tesseract as a power source, and it blew up. She can fly, shoot energy beams, and blow up kree spaceships."
The Ancient One mentally filed that piece of intelligence away in case it was ever relevant, and continued, "The other Stones have less verifiable histories, but the legends of many worlds speak of those that gained powers from them. Their favor seems arbitrary, even whimsical. An enhanced sight seems far less powerful than being able to destroy spaceships, but it could be very valuable as a method of gaining knowledge, if you learned to control it."
"So you don't think it's dangerous?"
"Every single thing we've taught you over the last four years could be dangerous. But, no, I think this is just another power you must master, not some kind of liability, for all that it may seem dangerous that you can't predict when it will work." She considered for another moment and then suggested, "Orange eyes are a rare enough color that you might question anyone else you find with them to see if it might be related."
That conversation was on the 20th of July, and that evening, late on a Friday evening in Kathmandu, his phone started to ring. It was weird for any teen's phone to ring : he pretty exclusively texted with his friends, and, anyway, nearly all his same-aged friends with phones were in the building. Dean shared the same Kamar-Taj bedroom. "Your ringtone is 70s rock?" his best friend asked, groggily.
"Jailbreak, by AC/DC. Tony must have set it. I don't think anybody's called me since I got this phone, so I didn't think about it," Harry explained. He was still using the phone Tony had sent him during the events in New York, since it was newer and better than the one he'd originally left on Vanaheim. He'd struggled out of the spartan-but-comfortable bed and checked the caller ID. "It's Nat."
"Oooh, Natasha," Dean chuckled from bed.
"It's not like that. Anymore," Harry argued, then accepted the call. "Hey." Maybe he put a little more smoothness into that syllable than he would have for his other friends. Or any of the other Avengers.
"Harry!" Natasha's voice sounded over the line. "Are you in a secure location? Pepper said you're at summer camp?"
"Basically," he agreed, "since it's just me and Dean."
"Can you come help with some Avengers stuff? Should only take a few hours. Hopefully."
"Uh, it's kind of late here," he said, asking Dean, "You think I can leave for a few hours to do Avengers stuff?"
"I'll tell anyone that asks," Dean agreed, sleepily.
"Yeah. Meet you at the Tower?" he checked.
"Actually, can you get to Chicago, or do we need to send a jet?"
"Maybe," he considered, having at least been there on a layover a couple of times. "Is Tony there? Want me to grab him when I get my armor?"
"He probably is, but don't grab him. This is more covert. I'll explain when you get here. I'll send you the coordinates," she signed off.
"Hopefully back before anyone's up," Harry informed Dean, who made a noncommittal noise like he'd already gotten most of the way back to sleep. Hoping he wasn't going to get in trouble, the Boy-Who-Lived spun open a portal to his room at the Tower and stepped through.
Ten minutes later (putting on armor correctly was surprisingly complicated, and it was harder to rush when missiles weren't blowing up buildings right down the street), Arcane was stepping out of another portal on one of the runways at O'Hare. He shrugged and put his finger in front of his masked lips to the guy driving the baggage truck that had swerved off course as he stepped out, then climbed onto his broom and took off into the sky.
Presumably just the rumor he was in town wouldn't blow the "more covert" thing Natasha had mentioned.
It only took him about fifteen minutes to cross the distance from the airport to the location she'd given him. He could have made it there faster, but he was trying to be fully concealed and leave his cloak mostly covering him as he flew toward Lake Michigan. As he came in for a landing, he dodged skyscrapers and touched down on the Rookery building, where he could see he was not far west of a large, lakefront park. "I'm on the roof," he texted Nat, as he stowed his broom and went looking for a way down into the building.
"That was fast. Up in a minute," she replied.
When she met him, she was wearing a brunette wig and a fairly conservative skirt suit. She would never exactly blend, but if he hadn't been looking for her, he didn't think he'd have been like, "That's Natasha!" Presumably it was enough of a change that people that had just seen footage of her at the Battle of New York wouldn't make the connection. "Cloak up and follow me," she suggested.
They took the elevator back down and entered a room on the west edge of the building, where Clint and Steve were also set up, seemingly doing a stakeout of the large bank building across the street. As he let his cloak retract when the door closed behind him, Clint wearily asked, "Magic?"
"Magic," the wizard agreed. Seeing they were alone in the room, he peeled the mask off and asked, "What's going on?"
Clint was dressed as some kind of utility worker in coveralls, and blended as well as Harry had assumed he would into any blue collar job. Steve was wearing an oversized pair of jeans and t-shirt that didn't do much to hide how physically fit he was. He had a large artist's portfolio that bulged from hiding his shield but at least disguised the contours of it. "Bank robbery," the Captain said, all business, despite his relaxed attire. "They have a Chitauri rifle from New York. They've hit a dozen banks already. And SHIELD's analysts predict this one is next. Somehow."
"Escalation," Natasha explained. "For the first couple of weeks after New York, they were strictly smash and grab. SHIELD probably should have rolled them up pretty quickly, but all our field officers were busy."
"And nobody asked us," Clint rolled his eyes.
"They made it down to Florida and then turned around and started back north instead of leaving the country. They've been hitting bigger and bigger banks up through the midwest. Not just money. They've started looting safe deposit boxes, and the connection is banks for former Roxxon Oil executives. Their CEO keeps a box here, and we put out chatter that he's moving his private holdings across the country tonight."
"So we think they're going to rob this one and we need to stop them. Got it," Harry summed up.
"Hopefully in a low-key way," Steve cautioned. "They've been doing a lot of property damage with that thing to keep any guards from trying to respond. Maybe we can talk them down. But number one priority is keeping them from hurting civilians."
Harry offered, "I think I've worked out how to hit an object with a tracking spell, so if I can get the rifle or their car with that, we can let them think they got away and follow them. I don't think I can just break the gun." Whatever alien metals the Chitauri weapons were made of had resisted Harry's attempts to use transfiguration on them during the Battle of New York.
"Sounds good," Steve nodded and laid out a plan, "Romanoff and I will be inside. Barton's on overwatch. You go invisible and keep where you need to, whether that's to look for an opening behind them or mark their vehicle if it's safer to let them run."
Within twenty minutes, they were following through. Black Widow was inserted behind the tellers as if she was a manager. Captain America was over on the other side of the floor pretending to wait for a meeting with a broker. There wasn't a convenient utility pole in the dense business heart of Chicago, but Hawkeye had arranged a scaffold to be set up on the building across the street and was pretending to patch some brick on the facade. And Arcane was loitering invisibly just inside the bank lobby near the door but out of the way of foot traffic.
Then the waiting began.
It was an hour and a half of sitting quietly propped in a corner, invisible, and getting sleepier and sleepier before something happened. Hawkeye, who had the worst of it having to be outside in the afternoon heat the whole time, explained over the comms, "This looks like a probable. White Sprinter van pulling up illegally. Yeah, here they come. Same black and pink ski masks. And you can't miss the gun."
Moments later, the promised bank robbers came piling in through the brass revolving door, barely managing to make it through with the oversized pulse rifle. The man in the lead wielded the gun, and the woman in the pink mask behind him started yelling, "This is a robbery! Nobody move and nobody gets hurt!" The man fired a shot that was meant to blow up an unoccupied table in the middle of the lobby, and seemed very surprised to have the blast evaporate off of the famous shield of Captain America, who'd dived in the way.
Before Arcane could decide whether to jump in, Hawkeye added, "There's still a driver in the van. Better tag it before I take a shot at the tire, just in case."
"On it," he confirmed, quietly, slipping out the non-revolving door closest to him and spotting the large white van parked over the curb and halfway onto the sidewalk, facing the wrong way on the street. The windows were slightly tinted, but as his cloak fell away so he could do the complex gestures to brand the vehicle with a glyph of his personal energy that he could track, he caught a glimpse of the face of the driver, and the oversized "turban" he was wearing. "The driver's Doctor Bighead!" he warned.
Unfortunately, the gamma-enhanced genius, Stearns, saw him as well, looked annoyed but not surprised, and floored the van back into traffic, somehow avoiding an accident with the cars already on the road. Hawkeye's arrow hit the back passenger-side tire, but somehow just bounced off. "That's new," he said, never having seen such a robust wheel. "Assume the vehicle is armored."
"He likes to build stuff," Arcane confirmed.
"Keep up with him," we've got it handled in here, the Captain ordered. While scrappy enough that they might have given a SHIELD field officer like Sitwell some difficulty, the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde weren't remotely a match for Captain America and Black Widow, even with an energy cannon. "Send us a location when he stops."
"I can do you one better," the team's mage explained, pulling his broom out of his armor pocket and waving to the pedestrians and drivers that had realized what they were seeing. "When you're done, meet up where Cap was sitting. I'll portal you in. But I'm going to try to stop him before he can get into a hideout. Who knows what kind of traps he'll have."
"Be careful," the team's combat leader cautioned.
Rather than what Arcane expected, and making for some parking garage where he could ditch the van and enter a lair, Stearns seemed to be heading east at maximum speed for the busy Friday afternoon streets, honking and weaving between cars, getting nearly up to interstate speeds over a couple blocks down State Street, before pulling a real Grand Theft Auto and weaving between cars going the wrong way up Madison. He'd certainly made improvements to the van.
Clearing the buildings to get a view of the vehicle as it wove through cars blaring their horns across Michigan Avenue, he warned the team, "He's going into the park. I can see that shiny sculpture thing on my left."
"The Bean," Hawkeye said, just as the Captain said, "The Cloud Gate."
"He's ramping up into the tourist area around it. Patio? Pavilion? Whatever. I'm going in before he runs somebody over." As he raced his broom down toward the plaza, dozens of people were, indeed, running out of the way of the inexplicable van bearing down the pedestrian walkway, smashing handrails as it drove up the stairs, and wheeling left as if Stearns thought the Cloud Gate was an actual portal that would get him out of there.
The van pulled a bootlegger's turn just in front of the large, mirrored sculpture and faced the descending sorcerer, revving the engine a couple of times. Arcane landed and quickly stowed the broom, falling into a casting stance about thirty yards from the vehicle. Even if he couldn't manifest any magical constructs that could stop the souped-up van, he was hoping he could trick Stearns into crashing into the trees or stone guardrails behind him.
But instead, the megalomaniacal nerd's voice issued from a loudspeaker, insisting, "I guess you were really sandbagging in the library, huh?" It was a solid implication that he'd used his intellect to work out Arcane's secret identity. At least he wasn't shouting it into the crowd. "But this time, I'm prepared." Suddenly, the van began to break apart and reshape, the cab lifting into the center of what quickly became a 20-foot-tall humanoid battlemech.
"You built a transformer?" Arcane asked, aghast, not even sure he was loud enough to be heard across the plaza.
"I built a transformer!" Stearns agreed, with manic glee.
"Did this turn into a fight instead of a covert operation?" Iron Man's voice butted into the comms. "I can be out there in twenty minutes."
"Get on your balcony and you can be here as soon as we need you," Arcane suggested back, boggling at the giant robot.
"Oh, right, we're thinking with portals now," the billionaire agreed. "I'll be in position."
Unfortunately, finding a safe moment to open a portal was turning out to be a challenge. Clearly, the plasma cannon the bank robbers had been using wasn't the only one Stearns had come across, his genius had been enough to get them working where nobody else seemed to be able to, and he'd incorporated two of them into his transforming power armor. "It turns out you don't need a miniature arc reactor with some of the alien batteries," he was explaining, as if teaching a class, as he blew up the plaza stone at Arcane's frantically dodging feet.
"Guys, bringing you in hot," he said into the comms, expecting it would be easier to get the nearer Avengers. The mech suit didn't seem to be able to move fast and he was able to break line of sight behind a tree long enough to get under his cloak, reposition, and find a spot he could hopefully start opening a portal without immediately being blasted.
"That's some good invisibility!" Stearns complimented, ceasing his blasts. "Scanners are getting nothing. Is 'magic' something anyone can learn, or is it a genetic mutation? Anyway, I appreciate you picking up the clues. I thought I'd have to drag those kids around half the country before SHIELD figured out the pattern, and then I thought I'd have to put down between two and five agents before they sent the Avengers in. Oh, is that a portal? The cake really is a lie!"
Arcane barely got the magical doorway to close in front of a plasma blast that would have gone into the bank lobby, and narrowly avoided splinching Hawkeye's foot as he dove through last. Fortunately all three teammates were going fast enough to be out of the explosion radius as it instead hit a tree some distance back, sending burning splinters everywhere. "That's a big robot," the Captain noted. "I'll get its attention, Widow, flank and look for weak spots, Hawkeye, I hope you brought explosive arrows."
"Never leave home without them," the archer agreed, moving to find a safe vantage.
"So do you want to know my plan?" the villain asked, sending a stray blast that the Captain deflected while trundling the suit forward. "You make a lot of people nervous. People that will pay to see you taken down. And then pay the guy who invented the weapons that could do it."
"This is all your audition as a weapons dealer?" the super soldier demanded, moving into range to test the robot's armor while staying inside the gun's minimum effective range.
"For a start. Also, did you know Chicago has a bunch of organized criminals that want some of the glory?"
With that call to tag in, several of the "tourists" that had sheltered in place rather than running popped up with balaclava masks on and a wide range of Earth-made firearms. Captain America was immediately back on the defensive since they seemed to know the van was bulletproof but the hero wasn't.
Arcane hadn't been idle, having once again moved even further out to have enough time to open a portal to the Tower balcony. Iron Man rocketed through the moment it looked stable, narrowly missing the Bean as he misjudged his angle and because his sensors were confused by the reflective sculpture. He certainly started drawing fire from the gang members, taking some pressure off the others.
"Okay. I really would have planned for instant adds if I'd known you could make portals. It's new. It's unfair. But I respect the hustle," Stearns continued to monologue as he began to focus on Iron Man in a power armor fight.
Across the plaza from Arcane, Black Widow was a dervish, using a balletic series of moves to foul aim and functionally dodge bullets by moving in a way even several gunmen couldn't cover. She was still in her bank outfit, but had ditched the wig and managed to pick up her "Widow's Sting" bracers, several of her thrown taser nodes, and was scooping up handguns as she took their wielders down.
Hawkeye hadn't found any useful high ground, so was moving and firing, impaling the gun arm of anyone he saw getting close to a clear shot on himself or the others. In a moment of freedom from targeting, he managed to land an arrow into the mech's right knee, triggering a fizzing thermite payload to begin melting through the components.
Captain America's tactical awareness remained unmatched, his shield bouncing between opponents and yet back in his hand to deflect bullets as soon as someone was taking a shot at him.
"Regular guns I can mess with," Arcane said, mostly for dramatic effect. He dropped out of invisibility behind a quartet of gangsters with honest-to-Odin uzis that were giving the others a hard time and made a sweeping set of gestures. Sirius had shown him the trick of what he'd done against the dark elves the previous year: rather than just subtly fouling the gun barrels, they audibly clanked as all empty space within imploded.
Iron Man was having a surprisingly hard time with Stearns, since the super-genius had been able to study his attack style from video recordings. The armor on the mech was optimized to deflect repulsors and micro-missiles. "Oh, come on," the villain complained, "you're almost through the gang already? I gave them a much higher chance of shooting at least one of you." He did not yet sound like he was actually worried about losing.
Seeing that the others were about to finish off the gang, Arcane tried something. He still wasn't able to do much with wildly-different portal directions, with his attempts tending to orient both the opening and closing portals in the same way. But he could, for example, make a portal facing the ground several feet above his head and on the ground right behind the robot's left leg.
Iron Man and Hawkeye saw the magical hole open and shot with missiles and explosive arrows to drive the villain back just enough. Meanwhile, Arcane was sprinting out from under his own portal as a robot leg fell through, hanging awkwardly in thin air once Stearns caught himself on the plaza pavestones. Before he could figure out how to pull free, the portal irised closed, alien-alloyed armor plating no match for splinching. The severed leg clanked to the ground and the mech was suddenly having a hard time protecting its back from attacks seeking gaps in the armor.
"Fish biscuits!" Stearns cursed, the robot's PA system still operational. "Next time, I'll plan for portals."
"Assuming there's going to be a next time?" Iron Man dismissed, with his own suit-amplified voice.
"For sure. Get 'em, Bean!"
The Cloud Gate sculpture began to emit a disturbing hum, and the reflections of sunlight off its mirrored surface started to flicker as if the entire skin was vibrating. "What did you do?" Iron Man demanded, landing so he could use his cutting lasers to try to pry Stearns out of the mostly-immobilized robot.
"Someone set us up the bomb!" the genius cackled, wondering, "Is your armor shielded against gamma radiation? What about your friends? I'm pretty sure it'll just make me stronger. Not sure what it will do to regular people, but it should be neat."
"You're actually insane!" Arcane realized, moving over to try to get a look at the device. The sculpture was something like 20 yards across at its longest side. Had he turned the whole thing into an emitter or was there a bomb just hidden inside? "You could kill thousands of people!" And that was assuming any energy it released got blocked by the high rises around the park. If it kept going, it could be far more.
"Insanity would be allowing SHIELD to maintain its super-powered enforcement wing!" Stearns countered, still seemingly safe in a metal womb within the van as Iron Man tried to dig him out. "You're all just agents of an increasingly-fascistic government! I need to stop this before every nation in the world has its own set of jackbooted thugs with laser beams!"
"Stark, can you move it?" Black Widow asked, over their comms. She was still restraining the downed gangbangers while looking in horror at the device.
JARVIS supplied, "The Cloud Gate sculpture weighs an approximate one-hundred tons. It is far outside the Mark Six's lifting capacity."
"And I can't even cut it open, without risking my lasers reflecting who knows where," Iron Man groaned. "Give me a minute. Maybe he has a shutdown inside the armor."
JARVIS countered, "Based on the frequency, I estimate you have thirty seconds."
"I'm going to try something," Arcane said, having rushed around the Bean and gotten a good idea of its dimensions. It was huge, yes, but it was stationary and nobody was shooting at him anymore. He was going to have to try a couple of new tricks, but Wong had at least shown him the theory…
Spinning his right hand above his head in ever-larger circles, a fiery portal began to open directly above the mirrored sculpture, making it look like it was covered in falling sparks reflected in the curved surface. Grimacing under his mask with the effort and basically whipping his arm around like he was doing an impression of a helicopter, he coaxed the portal larger and larger still. He thought he'd reached his limit at not quite good enough, but another intensification of the vibrations within the improvised nuke gave him the energy to rip the sky open to just big enough.
Basically falling over with the gesture, he dropped his hands and forced the portal 20 yards straight down, engulfing the entire sculpture in a way that made it look like it was being erased by a cheap 2D video effect. By the time the immense, sparking ring hit the pavers, it appeared to be a magical swimming pool, showing dark, churning waters beneath.
With a negating gesture, the portal closed like a camera shutter, leaving nothing but an empty plaza and the sheared-off anchor points for the sculpture. One lone powerboater on Lake Michigan over a mile to the east had a hell of a day, watching the Bean appear out of a wheel of fire over the lake and then suddenly drop into the water. He was safely away as the bomb finally went off several seconds later, nothing but a sullen green light making it out of the depths to which the heavy sculpture quickly sank (well, sullen light and, perhaps, some soon-to-be-mutated fish).
"Got him," Iron Man announced, tearing open the mech's cockpit and dragging Stearns out into the air.
With a look as sullen as the waterlogged gamma light, Stearns declared, "Magic is bullshit."
Chapter 73: Tendency to Bite
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Every year, it seemed like Harry's trip to the Goblin Market became more and more of a circus, but 2012 topped them all. Combining a joint birthday trip for him and Neville at the end of July, everyone going for their school shopping, and Tony insisting on finally seeing the one part of the Hogwarts experience that wouldn't shut off his heart, it seemed like everyone was present. Basically all of his friends from school had come, along with their families (including the Weasley parents and each of their kids still at Hogwarts). Sirius had shown up with the Tonkses. Viktor had managed to make it. And then there was basically every member of the Avengers, plus Rhodey, all totally gobsmacked by the interplanetary bazaar. They had a crowd of nearly three-dozen.
The only ones that hadn't made it were Thor and Fleur, both of them apologizing by mail about their commitments at their respective courts (or maybe the same court; it was unclear from the letters).
Pepper had made sure to order Tony, Natasha, Clint, and Steve appropriate clothing to blend in among the fantastic flea market, and Bruce was already aware of the right method of dress. The slightly baggy robes were stuffed with various weapons and defenses, at least on Tony and Clint's parts, and Steve had simply put a leather cover over the famous shield. Natasha's weapons were always concealed, and Bruce basically was a weapon.
"This seems like cheating. Is it cheating if I buy a bunch of alien tech to look at?" Tony asked, as soon as he reached the first booths that weren't just pre-industrial Vanir handicrafts.
"You have an entire government division harvesting Chitauri technology for you," Natasha shrugged. "What I'm interested in is where I can get some of those magic pockets Harry has."
"I made those!" Sirius interjected. "I can add them to whatever you like?" He'd gotten infatuated with Natasha almost as hard as Harry had on first meeting her, and with even less chill about it. Harry was surprised at his own lack of jealousy, but did find it interesting that he was picking some up from Bruce.
Showing a Black family tendency toward crushing on Avengers, Tonks seemed to be similarly infatuated with Steve, but was at least a little more circumspect about it (though she seemed to always be within a few feet of him).
"Why don't we see what we can get off the rack, first?" Pepper suggested, clearly surprised that the teenagers in the group were stably paired or otherwise in control of themselves but the adults were flaring with hormones. "Check with me to make sure the prices seem reasonable, but we've got plenty of galleons to spend."
"Which I'm going to pay you back for," Tony told her. He'd been planning to walk in with a few bars of gold, or perhaps some krugerrands, but she insisted that they could just buy things using her personal bank account (which still had a pretty big backlog to try to launder into Earth currency).
"I can't believe we missed another adventure," Dean complained. "Doctor Bighead is our group nemesis!"
"And Mordo may have been less annoyed if I'd taken everyone," Harry agreed, having been surprised that the self-serious Master had actually had him do extra cleaning work with the other apprentices as punishment for disappearing without telling anyone.
"What happened to Stearns, anyway?" Hermione asked.
"Wait, Sam Stearns?" Bruce overheard the conversation. "He's the guy you've been talking about?"
Natasha explained, "I'll get you the files. After he helped power up Blonsky into the Abomination, he either intentionally or accidentally injected himself with your blood. It resulted in encephalitis and increased intelligence."
"And made him crazy," Harry added.
"Megalomania is very correlated with great intelligence," Luna piped in, blithely. Harry caught her staring at Hermione and at Tony to see if she could get a rise out of them with that comment.
"It's only megalomania if you're wrong about how awesome you are," the billionaire corrected, winking at the girl. He'd gotten her figured out pretty quickly.
"Point to Stark," Neville whispered to his girlfriend, and she shrugged and nodded.
"They have universal translators," Clint noticed, looking into the surgically-clean shop midway down the main drag.
"Oh, yeah, I got one, it's great," Harry agreed. "Except it doesn't work on Vanaheim."
"Now that does seem like cheating," Tony opined, proud of the foreign languages he'd learned.
"And it's pretty gross. Like the biggest shot ever. Right into the back of your neck," Parvati frowned.
"I don't know," Viktor mused, thinking about all the trouble he had communicating with Hermione. "Could be good to have."
"You're almost there," she squeezed his hand. "We could barely talk last year. I and, with pleasure, am Bulgarian learning." That last bit was in the Bulgarian that she'd learned, helpfully translated by Harry's implant. Viktor managed to smile and nod as if she'd gotten it right, but Harry must have winced. "What!?"
"You sure you don't want translators?" he asked.
"Aside from the pain," Dean explained, "they're a thousand galleons."
"Those are the gold coins," Bruce explained for the other Avengers. "Worth a little under ten bucks each." Needless to say, even the small coins weren't really pure gold, or they'd be vastly more valuable on Earth where $10 would buy less than a gram of the precious metal.
"Well I'm getting one," Tony decided, having had the last several seconds of conversation to realize that he would be a huge hypocrite if he avoided a technological upgrade out of some weird luddite urge to learn languages himself. And there were potentially a ton of alien languages he might need to know in the coming years. "And any of you that want one, I'll cover it. Well, Pepper will. And I'll pay her back."
With Stark Industries footing the bill and with the same realization that speaking every language might be worth the discomfort, all of the Earth-based kids got one. As did half their parents when they realized Tony's offer included them. Ron also got one, for all that it was unlikely to be useful to him in many circumstances: it was a free thousand-galleon item, after all. Natasha and Clint were more reticent, until Pepper explained that she'd tested it and it really did seem to be undetectable to Earth machinery (Sirius explained that they probably had the same charms he'd put on Harry's knife). And Steve was unlikely to have any ethical qualms about accepting permanent technological enhancement to his body.
Bruce just said, "Yeah, no. That sounds really useful, but… even if the pain didn't set me off, it would probably be ejected the next time I transformed." Everyone got an appropriately-disturbed look as they visualized the bullet-sized device getting shot out of the Hulk's neck.
"Why don't the rest of us go look around while everyone gets theirs?" Pepper suggested, after quietly authorizing the shop to charge the equivalent of around a sixth of a million dollars to her Gringotts account.
"It's probably a good time to try to get a meal at the Leaky Cauldron?" Molly Weasley suggested, trying not to show how thrown she was by even a Potter dropping that kind of cash on a whim. When she'd heard a few years earlier that Tony Stark was richer than the Malfoys, she'd only half believed it. "I'm not sure they have enough tables for all of us, so it might help to eat in shifts."
As it was, they still had 14 people in their crowd—the Weasleys other than Ron, the Lovegoods, the Longbottoms, the elder Tonkses, and Bruce, Pepper, and Harry. At least they'd jettisoned the members most likely to gawk like tourists, so they made it to the pub with a minimum of stops. Honestly, they'd seen it all before and didn't even have the new school equipment lists to assemble yet. They could go ahead and get the common things, and might after lunch, but there would need to be another trip later in the summer.
"Any idea about the new defense class?" Neville made conversation as they waited for their food.
"I think it's going to be Master Mordo," Harry revealed. "He seemed extra annoyed at the end of camp, like he drew the short straw."
"One of the Midgard sorcerers?" Mr. Weasley checked. When Harry nodded he sighed, "That's probably better than the alternative."
"Than young 'Madam Umbrage' you mean?" Neville's grandmother checked. When he nodded but everyone else looked blank, she explained, "We convinced enough of the members of the althing that there could be Death Eaters among them that they decided to turn to an 'objective outsider' for counsel."
"The Accuser!" Ted Tonks realized.
"You'll, of course, not tell anyone the pet name we use for her," Augusta declared, fixing Mr. Lovegood with a cowing stare from beneath the hat made of the stuffed vulture, Jimothy. Once he nodded to agree that this was off the record, she elaborated, "but she does seem to take umbrage about everything anyone says. Used to being a law unto herself, it seems."
"Where is she even from?" the lawyer asked. "I couldn't get a straight answer other than someone saying that at least she wasn't blue."
"Accusers! Kree!" Mr. Lovegood realized. "An empire that spans a galaxy guided by an immortal mind that drove all before them. But then a woman made of flame and starlight fell upon their capital city and smote it to ruin some few years ago. They began to lose more and more planets, until they could not win their centuries-old war against the Lords of the New Corpse." He took a pause and explained, "We ran a story last year. They look pretty much like Vanir, but some of them are blue."
"I believe it's the 'Nova Corps' rather than what you said," the elder Longbottom corrected. "But, yes, their judges are widely regarded as scrupulously, perhaps fastidiously, unbiased and incorruptible. It was decided that they would be impartial toward our circumstances, and thus dogged in pursuit of corrupting influences. And they were available, due to the recent armistice."
"But why did you think she was teaching defense?" Bruce pulled them back to the original point.
"Because no one can stand her," Augusta shrugged. "But she agreed to stay on Vanaheim for a whole year, and won't leave until then. People were talking about giving her a role at Hogwarts so she'd stop constantly getting in the way of the government." She once again leveled her gaze at the Lovegoods to make sure they weren't going to print anything she'd just said.
"Anyway, no, it's a Master. Probably Mordo," Harry reminded them, glad that they wouldn't have to put up with what seemed like a thoroughly annoying teacher of what was often his favorite class. "He's kind of uptight, but he's a good teacher."
"You don't see that every day," Bruce opined as a non sequitur, staring across the bar. While the Goblin Market was a melting pot of Nine Realms humanoids, the majority of people you saw were still primarily humans from Vanaheim or Midgard, or light elves that looked human enough, with a distant second being the goblins that called the place home. Those truly alien races that had figured out how to get into the interplanetary bazaar tended to wear concealing garb, and be built on a basically-human scale anyway.
They weren't, for example, a tree-man nearly as big as Hagrid accompanied by a bipedal racoon in an orange jumpsuit. The two drew a second look.
The raccoon was carrying a transparent slate similar to one of Tony's high-end screens, and staring through the digital readout at their table. "That's him," the diminutive beast-man told the ent he was traveling with. He had almost a New York accent, which was a change of pace in the strongly British-inflected accents common around the Realms. Other than Pepper, no one at the table seemed to understand, however, so whatever language he spoke was being live-translated by the implants.
"I am groot?" the ent asked, and that wasn't translated by the implant.
Harry caught enough of the tone to realize it wasn't an introduction, but Mr. Weasley started to take charge of the strange meeting and respond, "And I'm Arthur, how can we help you?"
Meanwhile, Luna's protuberant eyes had widened basically to the size of dinner plates, a look of joyful realization spreading across her face.
Before she could comment, however, the racoon responded to his companion, "So put him in the bag? It doesn't matter that he's at a dinner party."
The tree-man shrugged and produced a large gray sack with some minimal embroidery on it, then simply reached over and picked up Harry, fingers extending into vines to wrap around him. He hadn't even thought to try to get out of the way, because the tableau was so strange. He had also been bracketed between Neville and Ginny at the packed table, so hadn't had anywhere to go.
"What are you doing with my nephew?!" Pepper demanded, outraged, as Harry was bemusedly lifted through the air and plopped into the sack.
"There's a bounty, lady. You can try to bail him back out or get him a lawyer once he gets delivered," the raccoon shrugged, clearly not caring that he'd just taken a child from his guardian. Relenting only slightly, he explained, "Galactic Bounty Code 79-BD-09-J, for your records."
"Hold on!" Mrs. Weasley piped up, the bounty hunter having shifted into English to talk to Pepper. "You can't just file alien bounties here in the Goblin Market! Arthur, tell him!"
"Well, in most cases, no, but depending on the treaties involved…" Mr. Weasley vacillated. The sack Harry was in was at least comfortable enough. Since it was held by a tree man, it was a lot like being in a hammock.
"I am groot, I am Groot, I… am groot?" Luna asked, though with some hesitation as if she wasn't sure she got the grammar correct.
"He understands language, he just don't speak it good," the racoon told her. "C'mon, Groot."
"I am Groot," the tree, who was apparently called Groot, said apologetically to Luna.
"We're not seriously letting these guys kidnap Harry?" George wondered.
"Yeah, Professor Lupin could smash them both to pieces!" Fred added.
"And the bar. And the Market," Bruce winced. "Bad day to not have cell coverage." The densely-wired stone walls of the Market had proven to interfere with their comms pretty badly, and they obviously weren't on a phone network. Tony had plans to fix the radios for the next time, but they couldn't call back to the Avengers getting implanted across the cavern.
The pub was just busy enough that they would have had trouble finding seating for everyone, but it wasn't so full that their interaction was immediately obvious to the other patrons. At least until Neville extracted himself from his seat and declared, loudly, "We won't let you kidnap Harry Potter!" That got the attention of the room, that had been turning a blind eye to the strangeness of animate flora and fauna.
"Oy, how'd you even get in here?" Tom, the old bartender shouted across the room.
"Got a tip the mark would be here today. Knew a guy that could get us in," the racoon shrugged. He waved the tablet at the room, "All official. Bounty hunting." He had started moving across the room toward one of the corridors that led back to other planets.
"You're not going anywhere," Neville doubled down. He hadn't kept up with the combat practice as much as the Earth kids, but he was further along on wandless casting than most of the rest of the school. With some effort, he manifested an energy sword and leveled it at the duo. If it flickered more than Harry's did, you wouldn't know it from his steely expression. Behind him, his grandmother's eyes widened beneath the vulture, but she seemed inclined to let her ward play hero.
"I am groot?" the animate tree asked.
"I know you don't want to hurt them. So just toss 'em around a bit," the raccoon ordered, unslinging a gun nearly as big as he was from his back and barely acknowledging Neville as he told the rest of the room, "Listen up you superstitious numbskulls. This gun says I get to walk out of here."
"It's 'primitive screwheads' and 'this is my boomstick,'" Harry yelled from inside the bag, probably not taking this encounter seriously enough but just amused by the situation. He was being abducted by a tree man that could only say three words and a sarcastic woodland creature. "Dean's going to be so mad he's not here."
"Huh— boomstick—I like it," the uplifted mammal mused, still trying to slowly move out of the room through sheer force of will. "Right. I've got a boomstick. Don't try anything dumber than your faces already look."
It was a weird standoff. Despite the weapons on sale in the market, it was pretty rare for there to be a fight there: a ban by the goblins could mean a lifetime of lost access to the primary shopping district for several of the Realms. Most of the Vanir in the crowd didn't have any skill at wandless casting, their market trips being the only time they were without their magic. Those few that had the skill or holdout weapons weren't willing to just jump the strangers, in case they were fulfilling a legitimate bounty. What if the goblins kicked them out for starting a fight?
"I said no!" Neville said, having hoped that the room would back him up but not willing to just let them carry his friend off. He charged forward with his stuttering blade of energy and managed to put a slash at the top of the bag being carried by Groot before the flora colossus used his available hand to wrap the boy in a surprisingly gentle net of vines and hold him off the ground.
"That's my boyfriend!" Luna told him, half in warning and half out of pride.
"I am groot," he assured her that he wouldn't hurt Neville.
"Don't even think about it," the raccoon commanded, leveling his boomstick at Fred and George, who'd been trying to sneak around and pulling out prank items to throw at him.
Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were having a quiet argument about what to do, Arthur clearly reigning in her mothering instinct with legalities; perhaps if Harry had spent more time with her family, he wouldn't have been able to stop her, but the boy was still mostly a stranger to them. Bruce was just trying to keep himself calm; while he was growing more trusting of the Hulk, in this kind of enclosed space it really would be dangerous. The rest of the adults present were not Gryffindors, and had no intention of charging the unknown capabilities of the two bounty hunters.
"Appreciate the opening, Nev," Harry called out, doing that same math and realizing that it was time to save himself. The sack made it hard to do his spellcasting mudras, but he'd freed the knife that Sirius gave him and finished the cut that his friend had made on the bag, causing it to flop down to the floor. But as the bag collapsed as if the contents were rolling free, nobody could actually see anyone leaving the opening. Harry managed to flick the knife closed in a smooth movement as he let his cloak cover him while he tumbled under a bar table.
"What kind of dumb trick is this?" the raccoon demanded.
"I am groot?"
"I know he was in the bag. Now he's not. Where'd he go?"
"I am Groot," his partner began sending crawling vines out along the floor from the hand that wasn't holding Neville.
"Invisible? That is a pretty good trick. Hey, kid, give me your invisibility gadget and we'll call it even. I been needing me one of them."
"I am groot," the giant corrected, vines covering a good several yard radius around them where they'd gotten halfway across to the exit.
"Now they've got you talking about magic," the shorter partner sneered.
"It is, though, sorry," Harry agreed, cloak whipping away and back to visibility as he summoned a blazing sword and shield where he was standing back near his friends. "I don't think I've actually done anything illegal in outer space, so I'm going to have to reject your invitation to go visit."
While the patrons of the bar weren't sure they were going to risk helping, they were definitely enjoying the show. As the famous Harry Potter reappeared and brandished his summoned weapons, they cheered and clapped.
"Magic this," the raccoon sighed, pulling the trigger on his gun and launching a coruscating bolt of blue ball lightning that looked like it would basically be a full-body taser if it connected.
That kind of energy attack was exactly the thing that Hogwarts kids got a lot of practice on, and Harry caught it on his shield with a bit of a duck to make sure it grounded into the floor and not into him. That brought him low enough to the stone to hack at the vines that were now surging toward his legs, reminding him of the jungle planet through the portal right past the giant wolf in their first year.
Another shot from the gun went wide as the Boy-Who-Lived dived out of the way, sending a cascade of lightning trails across the floor. He realized almost too late that he was being herded, a pair of vines shooting through the air to try to catch him, and he barely knocked them free with his sword as he threw the shield toward the shooter, collapsing it into a bolt of orange energy as the raccoon dodged the return fire.
The crowd was starting to fall back, now that projectiles were flying in earnest, and Groot hesitantly dropped Neville near the bar to free up another hand. Not wanting to be left out, Luna managed to summon a bolt of orange energy to fling at the raccoon, while the twins finally lobbed their prank items at him. Surprisingly fast, he made his own roll beneath a table and launched a third burst of electricity to send the redheads diving out of the way. The way the thrown items hissed alarmingly where they landed meant the bounty hunter didn't want them anywhere near him.
"Stop playing around and get him!"
"I am GROOT," the flora colossus shouted back, annoyed, as he was directing both hands of vines at Harry, but feeling them getting hacked off by the burning blade of a magical sword turned up to lightsaber settings.
"It's one kid. You can't catch one kid?" the more talkative partner complained, laying down suppressive bolts of incapacitating energy from beneath the table to try to prevent the rest of the kids from helping.
"I am groot," he grumbled, clearly arguing that it was five kids, and he was keenly aware that their parents were about to join in. Nonetheless, he swept a hand of vines behind him to put Neville on his butt as he was charging in to help with another glowing sword, and then managed to knock a table into the twins on the backswing. He just nodded at Luna, however, who grinned back at him before firing another energy bolt at his partner.
To their credit, they were keeping Harry too busy to think with portals, and his other tricks didn't seem to work well on their alien gear. He landed an energy whip around the gun, but the raccoon flipped a switch on it that somehow made the magical construct discorporate in the electrical feedback. No matter how many vines he hacked away, the tree man was able to make more. The Weasley parents were distracted by checking on Fred and George. Unless something changed, the resourceful duo might actually manage to confine him again.
Fortunately, it had only been a matter of time before the cavalry arrived.
Led in by a winded Ginny, who'd gone to get them as soon as Harry was grabbed, everyone that hadn't still been in the chair getting minor brain surgery came pouring in from the Market. Clint had a portable bow expanded and nocked, Steve had his shield brandished, Natasha had a pair of pistols drawn backed up by Rhodey with his service weapon, the study group and Sirius had their own magical constructs manifested, and Tony had a portable repulsor gun clipped onto his arc reactor.
They all paused for a moment to appreciate how well Harry seemed to be doing on his own, before Tony ordered, "Hey! Trash Panda! Put the gun down or we'll make you put it down."
"I am groot," the tree man chided.
"I know the briefing didn't say he'd have this many friends!" the raccoon acknowledged, unsure about how insulted he should feel about the trash panda reference. He genuinely considered taking on the whole group, but then frowned distastefully and admitted. "Fine. Just hope you know the next bounty hunters won't be all nice like us. Let's get out of here."
"I am Groot!" the flora colossus waved at Luna as he retracted his vines and fell back after his partner into the exit corridor.
Before anyone could light into him about never leaving him alone again, Harry told Tony, "At least nobody was trying to kill you for my birthday this year."
Notes:
I got the big MCU timeline book. It's pretty, but I was very disappointed that they had no interest in picking a date more specific than the season and the year for nearly every event in the book. But what it WAS willing to do was confirm that, in canon, Thor 2, Iron Man 3, Captain America 2, and Guardians 1 all take place in the 2013-2014 school year, leaving ZERO movies to happen 2012-2013. And since it ALSO broke my canon-adherence by knocking Iron Man 1 back a year from where I'm pretty sure the wiki had originally placed it when I started this fic, I don't feel that bad about moving a couple of films up a year so I won't have none to do in year 5 and four to make work in year 6. I bet you can start to guess, based on the references in this chapter, which movies got moved up.
Chapter 74: Trials and Tribulations
Chapter Text
It was good that Harry hadn't been kidnapped by intergalactic bounty hunters, because he had a court date coming up. Despite all the work that Sirius had been doing to shield him from the investigation into Cedric's death, they wanted him there at the actual trial. The Tonkses had no worry that he was in particular legal danger (and had worked out being able to represent him even though their daughter had been on the investigation), but the althing had to be appeased.
That had been part of the reason they'd met him at the Market, since the plan was for him to spend a few days after his birthday with Sirius before going to the trial. Assuming they didn't try to throw him in jail, he'd have plenty of time to get back to Earth before the "you can't permanently change Realms through the Goblin Market" clause kicked in. Which would have been another reason that getting kidnapped from there would have been bad.
They never even figured out where he was being bounty hunted to. The adults had finally gotten confirmation from the goblin authorities that Groot and his furry friend hadn't actually registered as bounty hunters in the market, and if they had they probably would have been turned away without very compelling evidence. The Market was open to aliens from beyond the Realms, but they didn't want to risk their business by Vanir citizens feeling unsafe there.
Regardless, Harry got to spend a pretty relaxing couple of days hanging out with his Black cousins, as well as his Vanaheim-based friends. Diagonalt was a pretty interesting town in the summer, for all that they didn't have air conditioning. The climate was such that it didn't get too hot, and it was easy enough to cool off swimming in a lake or flying at a hundred miles an hour on brooms. The casual ability to show off magic was certainly a perk of being there instead of Earth.
Expecting a fairly relaxing morning before his afternoon court date, Harry was surprised to be shaken awake by Sirius when it was still dark out. "Get up and get dressed. Trial got moved to dawn. Someone's screwing around. Fortunately, Dumbledore warned us."
Harry had acquired a replacement bag of holding at the Market (the original one still evidence for the trial, since they'd staged Cedric's body clutching it), so at least he only had to get into his best robes, give up on trying to fix his hair, and go. Sirius' house wasn't far from the Ministry fortress, but the walk through the pre-dawn streets felt long and surreal. At least the city had enough magical citizens that there were magical "gaslights" set up along the streets, rather than the pitch dark of a normal medieval town. The full moon was also on its downswing, lighting up the sky.
Much like his visit for Sirius' trial, he got scanned in via his wand at the security post, and they were met by a frazzled-looking Ted Tonks, backed by Andromeda (who looked perfectly awake and put together, despite the hour). "You'll come with us," he told Harry. "You have to sit on the floor level, rather than up in the gallery."
"And I'll be on the platform," Sirius agreed, checking to make sure his own robes weren't done up incorrectly. "Let Ted and Andi do all the talking unless you specifically have to speak, then only say what they tell you."
"Don't pull a Tony, got it," Harry agreed, having eventually seen the recording of the man pissing off an entire Senate subcommittee.
The view from the floor was weirdly different than the one from up in the stands: this close, the drowsy landholders filing in were more immediate, real… and fragrant. They'd clearly been called in too early to shower, or just didn't have access to magical heated water in the first place, so were doused with a disturbing array of strong colognes. Like Sirius, most of them had barely managed to get dressed correctly, and there were a number of missed buttons and toggles on their clothing.
But for all those sartorial choices, nothing drew Harry's eye like the woman that walked in after the landholders had sat, but before Fudge and Dumbledore. Bright pink clothing would do that to someone, even in the relatively-colorful court. Her robes weren't exactly in the Vanir style, and they were precisely the color of a certain cellular provider's magenta logo, with piping in a more salmony pink. It took a moment to realize that the woman wearing them could have passed on Earth as a relatively unassuming, if tall, black woman if not for the robes and how she was effortlessly carrying a massive, long-handled warhammer with a head not much smaller than Thor's weapon, Mjolnir.
Andromeda leaned over and whispered to Harry, "That's the kree we were talking about."
"Is the pink cultural, or…" he wondered.
She shrugged, but said, "The rumor is that kree clothing has electronic tactical camouflage, and can change to any color. But hers got randomly stuck on pink when she got here and the power stopped working."
"Guess that high-tech hammer doesn't work either," he figured. "But I still don't want to get hit by it." It had to be several pounds of metal if it wasn't hollow.
As if she could tell he was talking about her, "Madam Umbrage'' took her seat at the edge of the dais next to where the Minister and Chief Warlock would sit, and turned to stare directly at Harry. She looked like she'd accidentally swallowed a fly, and was trying not to show it. He calmly met her eyes, and she gave up the staring contest once Dumbledore and Fudge swept across her eyeline. The headmaster gave Harry an apologetic look, and the Minister a calculating one as they passed.
"I call this session of the althing to order," Dumbledore said, shortly after taking his seat. "Apologies to everyone for the early gathering… the Minister realized that there was additional business to discuss after the trial and decided we needed the morning, as well." He shot Fudge a glance, but the Minister didn't have the grace to look apologetic himself. He simply looked annoyed that Harry was present with his lawyers.
That turned out to be the thrust of the next hour: trying to railroad Harry Potter. The Minister let the kree Accuser do what she did best, and accuse. It turned out her actual name was Dar-Benn, and she seemed interested in weaving the story that Harry, working with a pair of SHIELD agents, had killed Cedric and invented the whole idea of a returned Lord Voldemort in order to allow Earth to intrude upon the politics of Vanaheim.
It honestly wasn't a bad pitch. Harry had represented Midgard in the tournament, and seemed more loyal to the Masters of the Mystic Arts than to the Ministry. The attackers that had gone after the other champions in the first place had used Earth firearms. Sitwell and Rumlow's presence on Vanaheim was kind of suspicious, even to Harry. And the thing about Death Eaters was that anybody could be wearing the mask and cloak.
Then it was Harry's turn, Ted starting with, "Cedric Diggory was dead for two months before he was found in the graveyard. His body showed signs of healed torture over a long period, which the coroner estimates started last fall. This calculation makes it most likely that he was abducted and replaced at the hospital after the incident at the quidditch cup. Neither Harry Potter nor the SHIELD agents were even on Vanaheim until the convergence opened weeks later.
"Harry had no contact with either of the men from SHIELD, save for seeing them at a distance a few times at or near the train platform. His accuser can't prove any communication in person or by mail, as it didn't happen.
"The portkey that was meant to return the tournament champion to the convergence and, instead, transported Harry to another night road entrance on Midgard, was tampered with by a powerful, adult spellcaster. The trophy was recovered, and forensics doesn't show any sign of Harry's magical aura, even if he did have the power to alter it. Neither he nor the non-magical men from Earth could have redirected the portal, or even been aware of it.
"All actual evidence, rather than supposition, points to the truth of my client's story. Those of you that follow events on Midgard know that shortly after the tournament, the previously-missing Prince Loki attempted to conquer that planet. He would have had the ability to impersonate Cedric for a year and to alter the portkey, all with a goal of kidnapping Harry Potter at the right moment. I frankly don't understand why the esteemed Accuser would suggest anything else." With that, Ted finally sat back down, temporarily resting his case.
"How convenient, then, that Terra cannot produce the fallen prince," Dar-Benn sneered, the gold accents on her teeth flashing. "Who can attest he was involved at all other than a conspiracy of terrans?"
As if Heimdall was just waiting for that straight line, there was a sudden flash of blue light and Thor was standing in a clear space just off the platform for the landowners. "Ah! Hail, gentlefolk of Vanaheim. Do you have… yes," he spotted Harry and strode over to him. "Might I borrow the attendance of young Harry of the Potters? Asgard requires him as a witness for the trial of my brother, Loki."
"Prince Thor, are we to understand that your brother is in custody on Asgard?" Dumbledore asked. "After kidnapping Harry and making an attempt to conquer Midgard?"
"Of course, after a long ruse where he portrayed a student at the school, I understand," the God of Thunder shrugged, as if that was obvious. "Speaking of which, are the parents of the student here? I can bring them to demand wergild for my brother's part in the loss of their son."
Mr. and Mrs. Diggory were, indeed, in attendance, and had been looking darkly at Harry as Dar-Benn's case proceeded, mostly convinced he had been at least involved with Cedric's death. But the word of the crown prince of Asgard seemed to be good enough for them. It seemed like enough for the entire collection of landowners.
"I move to dismiss any charges against my client," Ted called out, "on the honor of the prince."
Looking like she was going to object, and possibly start a fight with one of their gods, Fudge waved down Dar-Benn and agreed, "This body is not in the habit of questioning the word of the Aesir." For all of his flaws, the Minister knew better than to piss off the royal family.
"Then I consider this trial adjourned, and Harry Potter may travel to be a witness for Asgard," Dumbledore intoned. "Please do return him as soon as you can."
"Of course!" Thor agreed, grinning infectiously. "It shall be almost as if he never left. Parents of the deceased?" The Diggorys had a quick, hushed conversation and then Mr. Diggory strode forward, while his wife remained. "Excellent! Heimdall! We are ready!"
And as soon as they were all touching, once again Harry felt himself being torn apart and reassembled elsewhere by the Tesseract. It really was becoming his least favorite way to travel.
They appeared in a stone gazebo on the edge of a vast lake. To Harry's left, a bridge of multicolored crystal extended for some distance across the water. At what seemed to be the "horizon" line but might just be where it dropped off into space, he could barely make out scores of engineers working to repair the machine at the end: Bifrost. To his right, viking-style houses swept upwards from the banks of the lake into sculpted stone megastructures, a many-towered golden palace centered on the city and backed by mountains.
In the gazebo, Heimdall, the towering dark-skinned guardian of the gate, rested one hand on the Tesseract, locked in a magitech apparatus that rose from the floor, and had his other on the immense sword that had previously been the key to Bifrost. "Welcome back, Odinson," he intoned, formally. "And guests."
"Gone for but a moment. I'm sure I was missed!" Thor joked. "You have briefly met Harry of the Potters, and this is… I apologize."
"Amos Diggory," Cedric's father nodded, clearly overwhelmed to be suddenly in the city of his people's gods.
Harry thought it was very cool, but was just a normal level of whelmed, having been to plenty of large cities. The long-lived care put into the architecture was very neat, and there was something about the air that was shockingly pure and refreshing for a large city, especially since it was much cooler there than in a Vanaheim summer. He could feel a subtle magic to the place that was different from the region of Vanaheim where Hogwarts was situated, but no less potent.
"Well met, Vanir travelers," Heimdall greeted them. The last time, Harry had been in a mass of students some distance from the man. Up close, he couldn't help but notice his dramatic, orange-irised eyes. "Your father awaits you in the western throne room."
"A dark room for trials and punishment. I would that we could perform this in the eastern room. It's much lighter," Thor complained. "Very well, do you both ride?" He gestured at the stable of beautiful warhorses that had been set up next to the temporary teleportation structure.
"No, but I have my broom," Harry told him. "Actually… can I talk to Heimdall for a minute. Is that okay?"
The large guardian nodded at Thor, who told Harry, "Very well. But only a minute. We must make haste." He was aware enough of privacy to lead Amos Diggory down the stairs and out of earshot to get ready to ride.
"I just… you can see other places, right?" he asked. "Were your… were your eyes always orange?" He pulled down his glasses and tried to see the bigger man, thinking that he did indeed start to feel something of a connection. He wasn't sure if his own eyes were turning orange.
Heimdall's mouth twitched in the ghost of a smile and he admitted, "You have also touched the Soul Stone. I am forbidden from revealing the circumstances in which I came across it, many centuries ago. It took me years to master the powers it bestowed upon me. Perhaps you will learn faster than I did."
"Can you give me any tips?" Harry asked, not liking the sound of how long it took a person that could live for thousands of years to figure it out.
Considering it for a long moment, Heimdall said, "Allow yourself to truly know other people. It is much easier for me to direct the Sight to those I understand fully." Realizing that being that enigmatic wasn't the best for a young half-Vanir, he relented and explained, "I doubt you have the time to take my tutelage, even if I had it to give. Even my own son struggles with controlling the power."
"Wait, you passed it to your kid? Am I going to do that if I have kids?"
"None but the Norns can say."
"Ugh, Norns," Harry sighed. "Okay. Thanks, though. I'm glad I'm not going crazy, at least." He had a lot to think about. He pulled his broom out of his bag, and managed to match pace with Thor and Diggory as they rode the magnificent horses toward the immense golden palace.
Asgard was surprisingly compact despite its grandeur, so it didn't take long at all to reach the palace. Thor and Mr. Diggory handed off their horses to valets at the front gate, Harry stowed his broom, and then they headed into the building. It was perhaps the most immense architecture he'd been in, and that was including private airplane hangars. Some of Earth's skyscrapers might have beaten it on sheer height, but the building was nearly pyramidal and didn't need to worry about rent per square foot. Every room Harry passed through was simply massive.
None of them was as big as the throne room. It was clearly what the similar rooms he'd seen on TV and movies wanted to be when they grew up. If there weren't so many massive octagonal pillars running its length, it would have been ideal, if a little roomy, for a game of quidditch. Thor was right, though, it was dimly lit, the shadowed ceiling granting an even greater looming sense to the space. The distance from the entrance to the massive, golden-winged throne at the other end was a whole trek.
Near the throne, an audience was gathered in the shadows toward the edges of the room, to the left and right of the pillars that defined the main entry path. Various courtiers and other interested parties had clearly been admitted to attend the trial. To his left, Harry could make out a chained Loki surrounded by Aesir warriors. The man… the god sitting upon the throne carved in intricate knotwork was white-haired and bearded, one eye sealed by a metal patch as he regarded the assembly with the other.
You didn't need to go to school on Vanaheim to recognize Odin, but it helped.
As they walked up, Harry thought he heard a small gasp of recognition from the courtiers to the right, but was distracted by a majordomo speaking loudly enough for the crowd as soon as they were within a few yards of the throne. "Prince Thor returns, escorting the witness, Harry, son of James, scion of the line of Peverell through the family Potter, child of Midgard and Vanaheim, the Boy-Who-Lived, Quadra-Worlds Champion, Avenging Protector of Midgard. Accompanying them, Amos of the line of Diggory, Minister of Beasts for Vanaheim, Father of Cedric, the aggrieved."
Odin began to speak, summing up the case that seemingly had been ongoing for some time when Harry arrived. "Loki, Prince of Asgard, stands accused of conspiracy to admit jotun into Asgard for purposes of deceit against both sides, assault upon the protectors of Asgard to further his schemes, and attempted destruction of Jotunheim. On these points, he has admitted his guilt, and the healers believe he was free of mental influence.
"Subsequently he is accused of complicity with hostile powers, involvement in the abduction, torture, and murder of a Vanir youth, spying upon Vanaheim in the guise of said young man, manipulation of the Tri-Worlds tournament and its challengers, abduction and attempted murder of the Boy-Who-Lived, dozens of personal murders of Midgardians, mass mind control of others, and bringing the Chitauri to that realm where they rampaged across one of its largest cities causing destruction and death. Had he not been stopped by Thor and his companions, he might have subjugated the entire realm, unjustly claiming it for his own rule.
"On these latter charges, however, there is some question of whether he was manipulated and controlled."
"I was not," Loki butted in. He looked a lot better than he had when Harry had last seen him two months earlier, so at least had probably been getting enough sleep. "I am ever in control of the thoughts in my own head. Strike it from my body, if you must, for my crimes."
Harry boggled openly at Loki, who seemed to still be holding to his self-deception even two months later. He caught a frisson of tension between the God of Mischief and his adoptive father, Odin frowning at the audacity and seemingly being goaded to pronounce a judgment. But his one eye flicked to Harry and he simply stated, "Our witness thinks differently?"
Gulping at suddenly having so many eyes on him, Harry tried to think what he was going to say. He needed to thank Aunt Pepper for throwing him to the Boy Scouts a couple of years before, since without that public speaking experience he might have totally frozen. He still focused on Loki to try to forget the rest of the crowd when he explained, "My second year at school… uh… starting about three years ago, there was a book. It had a yellow gem in it. It controlled Fandral the Dashing and one of my housemates, basically the whole year. You wouldn't have known it if you didn't notice their eyes turned blue and they didn't sleep. The whole year!
"I kicked it into Ginnungagap. You told me you found it there. That the person that sent it into my school—the one who killed my parents—he pulled you and it out of the void. Then he put the gem in your hands, in a scepter. Your eyes turned blue and you didn't sleep. You had it the whole school year. I don't know how long you had it before then. Why do you keep insisting it wasn't controlling you!?"
Not even really noticing he was doing it, Harry had drifted almost within arms length of Loki during his speech, eyes locked on the prince's green ones. At his question, the young god tried to surge forward, to take control and make Harry stop advancing, but only managed a handbreadth before the guards pulled tight on his chains. Grimacing, he yelled, "Because I am a prince of Asgard! I am a master mage! My mind is sacrosanct and inviolable! To pretend that I was suborned by such a simple ruse…"
"Would mean that you were a victim?" Harry realized. He figured his own eyes were probably changing color behind the camouflage on his glasses. His scar itched. The emotional ties running from Loki to the other royals in the room were pulsing, wounded bonds of deep, thousand-year love upset and unseated by the revelation of his own parentage. "You'd rather die than look weak in front of your family?"
Loki began to object, "They're not–"
"We are," a woman that Harry had barely noticed in all the other spectacle walked forward from the courtiers behind Loki. But the most vibrant of Loki's ties went to her, and the stately beauty could only be Frigga, queen of Asgard. She put a hand on his shoulder, a look at her husband daring him to object, while his return look warned her to remain appropriate for court. Loki almost flinched away, but she held tight and said, "We chose you, Loki. Perhaps we should have told you long ago, but we didn't want to make you feel less than if I had borne you. My son!" she let her voice drop, so only Harry and those as close could hear her explain, "We wouldn't think less of you for losing a fight to an Infinity Stone!"
"Harry can resist it," Loki said, revealing some of the core of his unwillingness to admit that he could be controlled.
"Only because I have another one that got there first," he whispered back. "I bet Heimdall could resist for the exact same reason."
That got a raised eyebrow from Frigga, who seemed to catch a glimpse of his current eye color over the rim of his glasses. Instead of commenting, she simply said, "Loki. My son. You are already in enough trouble for the tantrum you threw when you learned of your blood parentage. Let circumstances absolve you of the greater crime."
A whole parade of emotions flickered over the prince's face, not least of which was his inability to convince himself to snatch his shoulder away from his mother's touch. Finally, he seemed to get himself under control, reach a decision, and settle his expression back into the smug disdain that was his normal mask. Turning to Odin he said, "Very well, I am willing to put the blame for my illegal actions on an evil space rock if you are, Allfather."
Odin huffed at the insolence, but before he could make a pronouncement, Amos Diggory could no longer hold it in and yelled, "My boy! My Cedric! You ate at our table pretending to be him, but you were his murderer! He was being tortured to death far from home while his mother fed you!"
Loki's mask slipped again, his face pulling back in a horrified look that he'd probably meant to be a disarming smile. He'd clearly been trying to forget that Mr. Diggory was there. "I… that is…"
Before he could figure out an easy explanation that pissed everyone off Harry whispered, "Just apologize."
Looking at Harry as if the very suggestion was like drinking something vile, Loki nonetheless allowed his face to fall into a serious look and he said, "I am sorry, Amos. What happened to your son was not of my choosing, but I regret any pain I caused."
Harry rolled his eyes at Loki's glance back at him, as if seeking a top score for his acting, but at least he apologized, no matter how disingenuous. It wasn't Harry that he should have been looking to for a score anyway. Odin, who had started to look irate at Loki's early flippancy, had settled into a considering look at the interaction with Amos Diggory. He wasn't taken in by the half-feigned apology. What Odin saw was that his adopted son seemed to actually value the opinion of the Boy-Who-Lived, at least enough to take his advice.
And that was something he could build upon.
"Does anyone else wish to speak for or against the accused?" Odin asked. Mr. Diggory considered saying something else, but realized how far he'd overstepped by speaking out of turn, and just shook his head. Harry stepped back next to Thor, who had already said everything he needed to in private. Frigga had not taken her hand from Loki's shoulder, but held silent, regarding her husband with a slight challenging look. Harry thought he saw a twitch of a smile as the Allfather pronounced, "Loki of Asgard. You will stand house arrest, here, until the healers deem you fully fit and coherent. And then you will begin to pay recompense for the crime you admitted to. War has come to the Realms, and we were unable to intervene due to the loss of Bifrost. Once it is repaired, you will travel with your brother to work to put them back to rights. Once the marauding threats are defeated, we shall decide if you still owe… I believe on Midgard they call it community service."
One more slip of the mask as Loki realized his punishment was simply to go on the same kind of adventures with Thor that he would have before everything had gone wrong. Harry could feel that it was almost a worse punishment for the prideful god than imprisonment or execution, not allowed to separate himself and play the villain. But the rational part of his mind kicked in suddenly and he realized demanding to go into the jails or the gallows would make him look like a lunatic. "Very well, Allfather," was what he finally bit out.
"And, Amos of the line of Diggory," Odin finally turned to the grieving man. "Though we have not punished Loki for the acts that contributed to the death of your son, likely as they were to be out of his control and intentions, Asgard will pay wergild to your family. It is a terrible thing… to lose a child." That last statement was obviously as much for his own family as for Diggory, but the man nodded in thanks nonetheless.
No blood money would make up for the loss of his only son, but the acknowledgement of the debt by his god was worth something.
"Return the prince to his quarters," Odin commanded the warriors. "This court is adjourned."
As Loki was led out and the courtiers began to exit, Thor gave Harry a shoulder-clap that he only barely managed to prepare for. "You continue to work miracles, my young friend," he congratulated. "Destroying all the Chitauri on Midgard is not half so great a challenge as convincing my brother to admit that he is wrong."
They turned and started walking out of the room, joining the flow of courtiers leaving along the sides. Amos Diggory was following them, not totally certain of where he was meant to be after all of that. "You've met Tony, right?" Harry joked. "I grew up with him, and in the tournament for not admitting when you're wrong, he's probably still the reigning champion."
Any follow up comments were lost as Harry suddenly realized where the gasp of recognition he'd heard earlier had come from: the side of the room that had been behind him while he'd been confronting Loki. That was where the light elves had gathered for attendance.
Right. Thor and Fleur were both stuck at court on his birthday.
She'd pulled ahead of her father, who seemed nonplussed by Harry chatting with the crown prince of Asgard as if they were very well acquainted. Fleur was wearing her best court finery, her hair immaculately coiffed, and the beauty that Harry had done without for weeks left him speechless.
With a quick look to judge the politics, she put a hand on his arm in a friendly greeting. "'arry, I did not expect to see you 'ere." There was no need to say anything more, because their empathic bond flared back open and the subtext was super obvious.
Carried along near-telepathically was the accusation: You didn't tell me you were friends with Thor!
Chapter 75: Obscurity of the Subject
Chapter Text
Asgard was a feasting society. It was the feasting society. It turned out that the second prince receiving light punishment was sufficient to justify a night of giant parties across the city. Rather than hosting everyone in Odin's palace, the royal entourage fell upon the city's… clubbing district? Enormous-but-dimly-lit rooms flickered with firelight and roared with noise, as the gods of Asgard mingled with their people.
Thor was mobbed by Aesir, so Harry found himself directed to a spot that seemed to be the Vanir contingent. Hogun the Grim was heading up the oblong table, Harry was seated next to Mr. Diggory and two others that he hadn't expected to be present: Amelia Bones, the aunt of Harry's former crush in Hufflepuff, and a dark-skinned auror that Harry might have seen in passing before, whose name was Shacklebolt.
Over the giant pile of roasts and other delicious-but-heavy foods, the whip-thin, iron-haired older woman apologized, "Mr. Potter, I wish I had been able to be present at your trial today, but we were needed here. How did it go?"
He shrugged, "Fortunately Thor showed up to say I'd been telling the truth. The kree lady was dead set on convincing everyone that I was running some giant plot to help Midgard take over, or something."
Mr. Diggory nodded, and he said, "She had me half-convinced."
"Blast it to Niflheim," Bones swore. "I need to find her something else to do than grind her axe against Midgard."
"She doesn't like us?" Harry checked.
"She claims to be perfectly objective," Shacklebolt said, sarcastically, clearly not a fan either.
"Hopefully we can convince Asgard to direct their warriors to assist us, and her presence will not be required for much longer," Bones agreed, turning her attention on Hogun.
The Vanir member of the Warriors Three merely said, in his more Mongolian-inflected accent (common to the Vanaheim regions that had closer ties to Asia), "I do what I can. But many worlds have no protections. The Allfather may send us to help others, first." He didn't seem particularly pleased by this, but it was clear he was not powerful enough politically to shift Odin's prioritization of the defense of the Nine Realms. "But, I have been away from home for so long. Perhaps if you told me stories, I could share them…"
Thus, most of dinner was spent telling tales of battles and other events on Vanaheim. Harry told a couple of his own, such as the fight near the train platform the previous winter. But he was distracted: he could see the table the Alfheim delegation was sitting at across the festhall, and kept catching glimpses of Fleur through the throngs of servers and other guests moving around.
They hadn't really gotten to talk on the way out of Odin's hall, other than brief pleasantries. And several elves of various stations seemed keen on monopolizing her attention through dinner, for all that she was glancing Harry's way just as often as he was looking hers. Eventually, at a break in one of Shacklebolt's stories, Hogun nodded his head toward one side of the building and said, "Porch over there is nice."
Slightly confused by that statement, Harry noticed Thor moving to sit with the elf delegation, somehow contriving to get Fleur to give up her seat for him. Her kinsmen distracted, she started to drift into the sea of partying Aesir, and caught Harry's eye. They both managed to weave their way out the door Hogun had indicated.
It was a nice porch. A well-made wooden railing looked over the city. It wasn't far to the street below, but the sweep of the buildings down toward the lake made it an excellent view nonetheless. In Asgard it was already getting on toward winter, so the air outside was crisp in the late evening. All of the lights were low to the ground and simple flame rather than the electrical light pollution of Earth cities, so, above, the view of the night sky was amazing.
"Are they right on the edge of a nebula, or is this just some kind of magic?" Harry wondered, the railing at the perfect height for leaning.
She put her hands against the wood just a foot away and stared up, "I believe zis world ees at ze center of a galaxy, ze space above slowly dropping into ze void." She turned her face back to him, the more adult glamour she usually wore falling away to her natural, youthful beauty as she did. "Eet's very pretty."
"Only because it's currently the background for you," he told her, awarding himself a point for smoothness as she smiled at the compliment. "I did tell you I knew Thor, I thought? I wrote to you that I helped stop Loki with a bunch of people including his brother."
"I zink you must 'ave understated zat on purpose," she allowed, admitting that he might have written something similar.
"You know me," he shrugged, since she was aware he didn't like to make a big deal about his fame. "You here like Bones is, to try to lobby Asgard to send troops?"
"Oui. My fazzer ees trying to teach me realpolitik. So far, zere 'as been a lot of standing around being nice. I zink right zis moment ees ze first time fazzer 'as actually gotten to talk to a royal, and only because ze Prince ees, 'ow you say, your man wiz wings?"
Harry had a moment thinking about her deliberate avoidance of saying "Thor" with her accent before his brain caught up and he explained, "Wingman. It's a term for a teammate that flies beside you to keep any enemy flyers off or something. But, yeah. Thor's a good guy."
"So, 'ow many ozzer battles 'ave you been in since zen you didn't tell me about?" she asked, jokingly.
"Well, did I ever tell you about Doctor Bighead? He built a giant robot armor and an exploding sculpture. And then a raccoon and a tree tried to kidnap me at the Market…" he trailed off as her look of amusement at what she thought was a joke turned exasperated as she realized he was serious. "So, have you been up to anything but politics? You said you got to fight marauders, too?"
Letting Harry's crazy exploits alone for a moment, she agreed, "Oui. We call zem Violateurs." Arbitrary French words in English sentences didn't always get caught by his implant. "I helped when zey got bold and attacked our capital. We 'ope for Asgard's aid soon." She thought for a moment and mentioned, "I 'ave also completed Lord of ze Rings." Harry had loaned her one of the Gryffindor copies of the fantasy epic back in the spring.
"What did you think?"
"I liked eet. I'm not sure, zough, zat I agree zat zis Elrond is very like my fazzer."
"You need to see the movies. I guess the guy that played him did it a little differently than in the book." He risked it and asked, "Any chance you could make it to Earth for a movie marathon at some point?"
She considered, "Per'aps I could find a day to slip zrough ze Market, eef Asgard agrees to 'elp soon. 'ow long until you 'ave school?"
"Ugh, only like three weeks," he realized. "Are you going to do that apprenticeship you talked about?"
"Oui. God's Burden ees one of our best battle-casters and agreed to train me for at least a season." Harry's implant had cut in on the man's name and substituted the English for the French title.
"Nice. Oh, yeah, I got a week earlier this summer to practice with the lady who kicked my ass in the third challenge. I should try to show you what she taught me at some point."
Before she could agree or disagree, a man's voice he hadn't heard in a while butted in, suggesting, "I'm also interested in seeing what you've learned!"
As they finally noticed Fandral striding onto the porch, Harry and Fleur let go of one another's hands, barely aware they'd gotten closer and let them overlap on the railing as they'd been talking.
The warrior had an entourage of drunk Aesir behind him, and had somewhere obtained a pair of blunted dueling rapiers. "What say you, young Potter: ready to show your old teacher what you've learned in the last two years?"
"Out here?" Harry asked, eyeing the porch. It was a fairly tight fit for a duel, only a couple yards wide and maybe four times that long if onlookers didn't crowd them. Though he guessed it wasn't too much smaller than a sport fencing pitch on Earth. "Okay," he shrugged out of his over-robes down to just his shirt and trousers, the chill of the night a little more biting as he freed himself up to move.
"Good man!" Fandral grinned his rakish smile, tossing Harry one of the rapiers.
"For your honor, my lady?" Harry bowed to Fleur, as she took his shed robes.
"Fight well, my champion," she gave a genial smile, though slightly crazed as she realized that, yes, one of the Warriors Three might pop up for a duel and that was just Harry's life.
Harry was barely in position, onlookers still exiting onto the porch or crowding the windows, when Fandral led off with some simple strikes. Harry easily parried them, using the novice forms his opponent had taught him. Seeing that he remembered the basics, Fandral smiled and worked through the higher-skill forms, gradually moving faster and faster but not really doing anything to throw him off, simply testing him for base competence.
"You've been practicing?" Fandral checked.
"Dean worked it into our daily routine," Harry confirmed, deflecting a thrust. Though that routine had moved on to mostly doing it with conjured blades.
"It shows. Rare is the young warrior that can maintain fighting form without prompting." Though he was still dueling, Fandral lapsed into a slower pattern while he explained, "Why, just a few decades ago I took on a new squire named Wulfric who…"
"Are we fighting or storytelling?" Harry made an aggressive slash to force his teacher's attention back to the fight.
Managing to parry, Fandral smirked, "Still full of cheek. Very well." He then doubled his speed again, making a fusillade of strikes that Harry was hard pressed to keep his blade ahead of. Almost too fast to follow, the Aesir warrior made a switchover while Harry's blade was offline to his right.
The crowd gasped as, instead of hitting an unguarded shoulder, it slid off of Harry's newly-manifested magical buckler. The orange geometric disc cast new light into the otherwise dimly-lit porch. "Of course, we don't just practice swords." The shield might not have worked on Fandral's magic-deflecting main sword, Fimbuldraugr, but the practice blades didn't seem to have the same powers.
"Well, perhaps it's cheating, but learning to cheat is a practical fighting skill." Fandral was having difficulty getting anything else through, with Harry's offhand protection. But he was just waiting until his superior reach paid off. Using his longer arms, he managed to get Harry to overextend and tapped him on the right shoulder. "Like so. I receive the point, but one hard-earned."
The crowd clapped at the show. Fandral settled back to see if Harry wanted to take a second run. Thinking about it and dismissing the shield, he tried an usual stance and then moved forward.
"You're leaving yourself wide open…" the Aesir insisted, but was surprised when his target for an easy thrust suddenly wasn't there. He barely parried the return swing, because he was so surprised at how deftly Harry seemed to flow out of the way. "I didn't teach you that," he accused.
"Been learning to account for being smaller," the young sorcerer explained. He had only done a couple of tests with Dean and Hermione to see if the Ta Lo style would work with weapons, but so far it seemed to mesh. The Kali-like style Gamora originally taught them provided a strong basis for adapting the same moves between armed and unarmed. Fandral was struggling to adjust to his strikes missing Harry by inches or barely skating off of his blade.
Finally, himself off balance, Fandral felt a hit to his belly. Nonplussed, he stepped back to the silence of the crowd as they realized the man had taken an honest hit from a student. "One point each," he acknowledged, then his goatee bristled as he announced, "Final point!"
The crowd was utterly silent at the speed that was suddenly in evidence. That shock rippled further into the building as more heads popped up to get a look at what spectacle was occurring on the porch.
Fandral was faster than even Harry could match, but the boy had the better reflexes for surprises. The older man made up for much of that with skill, able to instinctively parry strikes that would have worked against a lesser swordsman, but he was having trouble adjusting to Harry's ability to dodge.
To the crowd, it was just a flashing web of fire-lit steel in a cloud around the two duelists. There was no speech, only the sound of metal sliding against metal: Fandral had to concentrate enough on the fight that he actually shut his mouth completely.
Finally, worried at losing face, he tried a strike that he'd never use outside of practice, because it left him too open, and managed to touch Harry on the side. The teen checked his own return strike dead to the torso as soon as he felt the hit, just barely.
"And two points, hard earned," Fandral announced, all smiles again since he'd won. The crowd went nuts. Realizing that he'd have actually lost if that had been a fight with live steel, or at least taken the worse hit, he graciously announced, "I promised the Boy-Who-Lived an Asgardian blade should he account himself well when next we met, and he's exceeded even my lofty expectations! I'll see that he has a sword fit for the defender of Vanaheim and Midgard!"
Harry simply bowed in thanks, hoping to get back to Fleur, but the excited crowd dragged him into the festhall.
There were at least three hours of furious partying after that, where Harry barely got two minutes to talk to Fleur alone amidst all the Aesir who'd suddenly figured out that he was the Boy-Who-Lived, who had slain a Nidhogg serpent with Fandral two years prior. He got his over-robes back, at least… eventually. He may have had some of what he thought was buttermead but turned out to be actual mead. He was pretty sure that Volstagg was prevented from challenging him to a drinking contest. He met the lady Sif, who managed to corner him in a semi-private conversation where he had to apologize that no, he'd never met Jane Foster and didn't know much about her. He at least remembered Thor talking about his relationship drama and didn't point out that all he knew was that the prince was really in love with the astrophysicist.
He got pulled into being the center of attention at some table where Fleur prompted him to boast about Doctor Bighead and his run-in with the bounty hunters. Thor wandered by near the end of that story and the two of them shared the tale of the Battle of New York.
He didn't hate it, being the center of attention for things he'd actually done. And even though he didn't have a chance to talk with her privately, Fleur was there more often than she wasn't.
A few hours in, he wasn't sure how he'd wandered into a private room while switching tables, the noise of the hall suddenly quieter. The small dining room was nicely appointed, and the queen was sitting calmly drinking a flagon of something light-colored.
"Oh, sorry, ma'am. Your grace? I must have…"
"No, sit, Harry Potter," Frigga insisted, and he realized he must have been deliberately maneuvered to have this conversation. After he slid into a very comfortable chair opposite her, she noted, "It's rare for both of my sons to share a friend. Rare for Loki to have any at all."
"I would have thought he'd have his own Warriors Three or something. Hogwarts friends. Or did he outlive them all?"
"Perhaps. That was so long ago he must have, but I don't know that he kept in contact with many. He's always kept himself separate from and above others, truly," she explained.
"Yeah. I don't know if he thinks I'm his friend. Said we weren't, actually."
"With those so practiced in the arts of deception, what they say is often less important than what they do."
"My friend Nat said the same thing. She's one of the other Avengers. A spy. I wasn't sure how I could trust her… but I guess I do," he realized.
"My younger son doesn't like to admit to being either weak or wrong. And yet you seem to be able to get him closer to either than I've ever seen."
"I caught him at a vulnerable moment?" Harry shrugged.
"And that might be all there is to it," she agreed. "But if he seeks to maintain a friendship… will you?"
"I guess for being over a thousand years old he's not much more emotionally mature than the rest of my friends that are my age, huh? I mean, uh… your grace." Maybe he'd had a couple cups of mead and should try to be less familiar with royalty.
"You are not wrong," she agreed, letting him get away with the joke.
"But, uh, yeah. If Loki needs a friend, I can try to do that. Is it going to be bad if I'm friends with Thor, too? He doesn't seem to really get along with the Warriors Three?"
"He has had centuries to ruin their opinion of him. I believe he does that deliberately. But, no, I will not ask you to forswear friendship with my eldest. He, also, can use friends among the other realms that he will someday rule."
"But not girlfriends?" Harry probed, like any teen talking a mile where he'd been given an inch. If he was allowed to be forward…
"The stargazer? He knew her but for a few days. And she'll live but years. Love is not built on such fragile foundations."
"And maybe they'll break up in a year when they realize that. Or maybe they'll stay together and he'll learn something important about, you know, better to have loved and lost and all that. But if you tell him he can't… that he has to marry someone he doesn't love…" Clearly, Harry was projecting a bit about Fleur's situation. "All you'll get is him resenting it."
She regarded him for nearly thirty seconds, eventually admitting, "Heimdall counseled us similarly. Perhaps both of your eyes see further, given their gifts."
"I guess the Soul Stone went through here at some point too? Was that after the three brothers stole it from Death?" He'd eventually heard several versions of the story that involved his ancestors, the Peverells.
She frowned, parting only with, "I'm curious what you know about the truth of that story?"
On the spot, not loving the probing look, he explained, "I think it might have something to do with the Mistress of the Nidhogg serpent. He said I had her cloak. So maybe she was 'Death' and there's also a wand out there, too. She might have a headdress of antlers or blades or something, based on the carving in Niflheim. Fandral was supposed to ask about it? I tried to get the alien pretending to be Voldemort to tell me if his boss was working with her, but he didn't seem to know anything."
She sighed and explained, "You are at the edges of the dark history of the Realms that my husband declared secret. He claims it was so none seek to emulate or free her. Perhaps he also has some shame that he did not solve the problem earlier. But if her minions are moving and she is somehow in contact with the being behind the events of recent years…
"Do you know they claim that even I fear Voldemort?" she changed topics suddenly.
"The telekinetic with the high voice, or the other one?" he checked.
"Perhaps both. Along with a whole Black Order that serves fanatically. When we would make direct attempts to stop the Death Eaters over a decade ago, usually they would flee so we had only shadows to strike at, not even Heimdall able to see their fortresses, only where they were attacking, and then too late.
"But sometimes, only sometimes, we would encounter this Order. And they would slaughter whole squads of Aesir warriors. Once, they were led by an immense man with a two-bladed sword, and he nearly slew me, so mighty a fighter was he. He told me to stay out of his business, and that he might not be on Vanaheim for much longer to trouble me.
"This was, I believe, shortly before you got that scar. Long enough to start the rumor that I feared him, rather than that I had retreated to wait for my sons, who had been off on another quest. Would that they had returned home earlier, and that we could have stopped him before he took your parents, but though we were ready to assault him the next time he appeared, he had quietly slipped into your home and been, we thought, destroyed.
"Do you know that some sorcerers may learn to open a channel to the royals of Asgard for magical gifts?" she once again asked something seemingly-unrelated.
"I know that it's possible to connect to Loki, to learn to transform into an animal," Harry agreed, reeling from the idea that the man that killed his parents had nearly killed Frigga. How powerful was he?
"I am called upon to bestow a gift more rarely, for mine are boons that can be given to wives and mothers, for the protection of the home and children…"
Harry got it, "My mom called on you that night?"
"Just so. She needed extra power to forge a connection across the stars to summon protection for her child. Little did I know, even so forged, the artifact she sought required sacrifice to release. In striking her down, our enemy completed the requirements. The Stone came to you, and she had marked you to channel its power. I believe he tried to take it, like a sweet from a babe, and was brought low for his impudence. For your mother's sacrifice and the magic she had worked with my aid compelled it to serve in only your defense."
"But it didn't kill him, just hurt him," Harry nodded.
"And now he moves once more. He tortured and mind controlled my own son. And, again, even I was powerless to stop it. I fear that he wields power far beyond what we have seen in the Realms, and that his goals are dark indeed."
"He plans to kill half the universe. All his minions keep mentioning it."
She nodded, tiredly, "I had feared it would be something so vast. And even we, godlike as we are, are but small seawalls against such an ill tide. Should so many souls be washed into the afterlife at once, I fear what power others might harvest from the waves."
He put it together, "Like a Mistress of Death, that the monsters of Niflheim serve?"
"Exactly."
"And you can't tell me anything else about her?"
She shrugged and said, "It is forbidden. I shall entreat my husband to reveal what he can. He will likely say that the knowledge of it will only increase the risk. Do you understand the evil of a person, that the only solution is to strike their very existence from history, lest their name become an oath on the tongues of those that would threaten the Realms?"
They'd been talking enough that his natural empathy had been slightly augmented by the Soul Stone powers he was only beginning to understand, so he blurted out, "She was someone important to you, before she turned to evil."
"I thank you for your efforts in helping us redeem my youngest," she said, in a way that seemed like a non sequitur but was anything but. "While young men are not my usual purview, you may call upon me at need should you have a working that falls within my domain." She produced a slim folio and slid it across the table to him. "These are the instructions for doing so, should your mother not have left them for you to find."
Still trying to put together the pieces of what she'd danced around telling him, he accepted the book and just said, "Thank you, ma'am. I mean, your grace."
She tilted her head and said, "Now, I believe you are needed outside. I fear something else has changed."
Reeling from the abrupt dismissal, he walked out into the room that, indeed, seemed to be a more anxious chaos than the previous few hours. "Potter!" Amelia Bones said, dragging Diggory and Shacklebolt with her through the crowd where they'd been looking for him. "Good, we suggest you come with us back to Vanaheim."
"What's going on?" he asked, trying to catch sight of Fleur in what looked like it would be a hasty exit.
"I've just received an owl. The Dark Dimension has forsaken its oaths to us. Azkaban has been emptied. The worst of the Death Eaters are free, and the Mindless Ones are our enemies."
Chapter 76: Rank and File
Chapter Text
Harry hadn't managed to do more than wave at Fleur across the room as he was bundled out of the festhall and down to the travel point where Heimdall was set up. He'd at least gotten a moment to contact Sirius on his mirror, and confirm that it was true, and he'd be waiting for them when they arrived. They'd appeared in the Ministry courtyard, still lit by the lowering sun: in late summer, the sun stayed out long enough to make it harder to notice that he'd been on Asgard for basically half a day after leaving early that morning.
The worst part of the Azkaban breakout was that it didn't have an immediate effect. Those that had escaped had gone to ground, and Mindless Ones failed to appear and start attacking. But everyone realized it was only a matter of time: they'd rather have fought them immediately than waiting to be surprised at a later date.
Harry and Sirius thought that the timing probably meant that the Death Eaters had been waiting to make their move until they learned how Harry's trial went that morning. If he'd been blamed, maybe they wouldn't have moved at all. Or if he'd somehow lost the trial so badly that he had been sent to Azkaban, they'd have been able to take him immediately along with all the other prisoners.
Dormammu was no longer accepting communications from the Ministry, so none could say exactly what he'd been promised to break his oaths to Vanaheim. But over on Earth, the Ancient One was almost certainly giving them a big "I told you so" about relying on the Dark Dimension for housing prisoners.
With Vanaheim locking down in case of impending attack, there wasn't much reason for Harry to stay the rest of the week. Sirius and Tonks guarded him back through the Goblin Market, and told him to be especially careful at home until it was time to go back to Hogwarts. After all, the forces behind the Death Eaters had just displayed a willingness to attack Earth a few months earlier, for all that they'd seemed to need the Tesseract to do it.
And then he was back in Los Angeles. While the Tower was receiving final repairs and being refitted, Tony and Pepper thought that they should work out of the main Stark offices on the West Coast. They had kind of been neglecting them with all the time they'd spent in Manhattan, and one of the members of the C-suite had commissioned major renovations and landscaping changes to the LA campus without Pepper's approval. Plus, Harry thought he caught a vibe off of Tony that he didn't like being reminded of the Battle of New York, and wanted a change of scenery to less-charged surroundings.
It wasn't like it really mattered where Harry was sleeping, since he had a sling ring.
Sirius had sent an owl to Pepper to explain what was up, even if Harry had been inclined to keep it secret, so she did insist that he carry a JARVIS-connected phone at all times and be ready to go invisible and portal away at the first sign of trouble. He was also to keep his presence outside of safe areas as low key as possible. The Ancient One didn't think that the Mindless Ones would be able to track him like they had Sirius, and scrying for targets wasn't really a competency that sorcery provided, especially across-Realms. As long as he didn't visit a well-known location at a time an enemy could predict he'd be there, he should be relatively safe.
Everyone left it unsaid that relatively might be as safe as he'd ever be again, given the enemies he was making on top of those he'd inherited.
Harry wasn't too worried about it. He'd been bathing in Vanaheim's particular flavor of Norse fatalism for years, and basically figured that the Norns were going to throw problems at him whenever they wanted, and over-planning for a crisis would just result in a different one. If he was due to be attacked, he assumed it would happen even if he tried to bunker down and play it safe, so he might as well enjoy the last three weeks or so of summer. Especially since he was the only 15-year-old with the ability to internationally teleport.
He and Dean went to an 80s-sci-fi-movie film festival in Austin, Texas. He took Hermione to watch one of Viktor's last amateur races before he signed onto the Stark team, and then the three of them visited the town in Bulgaria the teen driver was from and met his parents (who were thrilled that their son's friends spoke such perfect Bulgarian). He brought Parvati and Seamus over to LA and went to a celebrity party that Tony had gotten some extra plus ones to, where they got to meet a few actors. He took Padma and Hermione around to various university campuses around the world (it was never too early to start thinking about college!).
And Fleur actually got to come over one day for the promised Lord of the Rings marathon. She'd been sent with two severe (if beautiful, like basically all elves) chaperones, so it wasn't exactly the romantic excursion that he'd hoped. But he got to spend a whole afternoon and evening in Tony's movie room on an extended date. Pepper and Tony made a very casual point of meeting her.
Happy—who'd driven them from the Market exit rather than having Harry try to lead three elves across LA while looking for a private place to make a portal—spent the next week making "elf princess" comments. And Rhodey was devastated that he hadn't had a chance to meet her.
What Harry didn't get to do was spend any more time with his Vanir friends. Things were so tense on Vanaheim that nobody wanted to risk their kids going too far afield (they didn't even have a cell phone equivalent, for all that Sirius was slowly working on a consumer version of the communication mirrors). It was good that they'd gotten most of their basic school supplies at the Market on Harry's birthday, since the expected follow-up trip never materialized. Mrs. Weasley just sent out letters coordinating what supplies everyone had left to buy, and had them boxed up and delivered to the train.
While owl mail was flying fast and furious, Harry was slightly surprised to receive an extremely large, regal-looking owl with a letter from Thor.
My mother has finally consented and provided me with a letter owl, so that I might use it for correspondence. I understand that you convinced her, and you have my deep thanks. Might I trouble you to acquire Jane Foster's current rough location, and perhaps explain to her the use of owl post?
So that was a fun email chain with Coulson, asking where Thor's girlfriend was so her boyfriend could send her letters via bird.
Inevitably, though, the summer vacation ended. He hadn't even had any chance to spend time with the other Avengers after his birthday. Nat, Clint, and Steve were all off on various SHIELD operations, and Bruce was in the wind, again, still not wanting to make a regular home on the grid where he could have an accident or any of his old enemies could try to set him off on purpose.
Honestly, Harry barely spent much time with Tony, despite basically living in the Malibu mansion. The owner of the house was spending all of his time in the garage, brain firing with ideas for a ton of new armors. Harry went down to check on him a few times, but the genius billionaire was so focused he barely even noticed anyone else was around. The mechanical fabricators below the mansion were running 24/7, and when Harry asked where the new suits were going, Tony simply reminded him, "Remember that missile silo under the house I was going to keep the Jerichos in?"
Between Tony being distracted and it being an open secret that Harry could teleport among all the agencies that might notice a discrepancy in his travel, his trip to school on the Saturday of the first of September was just him telling Pepper and Tony goodnight and that he'd see them at the holidays. He left LA just after midnight and wandered out of a ring of fire into the back garden of the London sanctum a moment later, after eight in the morning, local time.
"I suppose, let's get this show on the road," Master Mordo said, his own rolling luggage set up in the front lobby, as Harry joined the rest of the Hogwarts students that traveled through the sanctums.
"They didn't let you go ahead to the school?" he checked.
"The convergence remains the safest crossing," the strict sorcerer observed, and then started rolling his way toward Charing Cross, trusting the kids to follow him. In addition to Harry, Dean, Hermione, Padma, Parvati, and Cho, they had several other students including the Creevey brothers and little Ned Leeds, who Dean had guided over from the New York sanctum. It was a veritable parade of rolling trunks, with Master Rama strolling along at the end to watch for any slips or dangers.
"It's going to be weird, losing three people to the prefect car," Dean complained, as they walked. Hermione and Padma were at the head of the line, just behind Mordo, comparing their shiny badges. "Weird you didn't get it."
"I told McGonagall I didn't want it. Not that I know for sure they would have given it to me if I hadn't taken myself out of the running," Harry shrugged. He'd seen how much work being a prefect was for Percy and the others, and didn't really have any interest in it. It hurt to give up what felt like some kind of major high school achievement, but he had a lot of other things going for him. And it would have really cut into his training and study time. "Hopefully they took my advice and gave it to Nev."
"Yeah, I guess I don't want that much responsibility, either, and Neville's the next best pick after us," Dean mused. "Man, if it's Ron, though…"
It was Neville. "Guys! Why didn't one of you get this!?" the self-conscious Longbottom heir asked, having been waiting for them on the train platform, where the time of day on Vanaheim had synced back up to close to the time in London. He seemed ready to hand over the shiny prefect badge on the spot.
"You'll do a way better job than we would've, Nev," Harry assured him, while taking in the increased auror presence to guard the area from any attacks. Tonks gave him a wave from where she was posted up by the bonfire, and he'd shared a nod with Shacklebolt as they entered from Earth.
Luna, standing by her boyfriend, suggested, "And it will help if anyone is unkind to you about the prison escape. You can just dock them points."
"Why would anyone bother you about the prisoners?" Dean asked.
"I, uh… I don't know if I want to explain it to everyone. But you can, Luna," he told them. "I'm going to go to the prefect car, I guess."
Padma and Hermione also told them that they'd be by later on rounds as they accompanied their friend into the front car, while everyone else staked out a set of compartments in the middle after finding another spot for the first-years from Earth. Three members of the group down, they just needed room for the six remaining Gryffindor fifth-years, plus Ginny and Luna. Four to a compartment was a much roomier fit than their usual arrangements.
"So what was Neville talking about?" Dean asked Luna, while they waited for the Weasleys, Seamus, and Lavender to arrive.
"His parents," she said, succinctly.
"Oh, no!" Harry thought he got it. "Did they die in the war? Did some of the prisoners kill them?"
"Worse. They lived, but their minds broke under torture. And the people that did it were part of the escape."
"Why hasn't he ever said anything?" Dean asked.
Parvati realized, "Harry barely talks about his parents, either. We just know all about them from the stories. We didn't ask Neville, so he didn't bring it up."
"Huh, I guess so," Dean agreed. "Guess not knowing who my dad is isn't as bad as it could be."
"It's weird that your mom won't tell you," Harry pointed out.
"She doesn't really know," he shrugged. "Someone she hooked up with in Europe on a college trip who was probably also there on vacation. Didn't even get his last name or enough information to track him down when she found out she was pregnant."
"Guess it's too much to ask the Ancient One to use the Eye to scry back on their one night stand, huh?" Parvati figured.
"'Ma'am, would you please watch my mother having sex about sixteen years ago and then follow the guy home?'" Dean joked. "Can you imagine?"
Eventually the rest of their friends showed up and the train started moving. Ron was a little sour about not getting the prefect position, but when he realized Harry didn't either, he was nonplussed enough to just be happy for Neville. Of course, some of that jealousy came back when he found out that Harry had gotten to party on Asgard. They had to rearrange so Harry could answer questions about that experience to his Vanir friends (Dean, Parvati, and Seamus already knew all about it from their times hanging out in August).
They'd barely gotten back situated with Harry, Dean, Ginny, and Luna in one compartment and Ron, Lavender, Seamus, and Parvati in the one next door when their least-favorite Slytherin decided to check in. Bolstered by the badge on his chest, Draco didn't even seem to think he needed his brute squad as backup. "Well, well, Potter. Not even skilled enough to make prefect. Such an embarrassment that Longbottom is the best of you. I can't even fault the administration's pick."
Totally ignoring the attempt to pick a fight, Harry tried a different tactic than usual. "Well congrats, Draco! You really earned it. I'm glad they were paying attention when you were the go-to in our year for organizing the other Slytherins that time Hogsmeade got attacked. I doubt there was a better person for keeping your lower-years safe and on-task!"
Harry thought he was putting on an expression of guileless honesty while Draco just stood there at a total loss for words. Luna was always difficult to read, and nodded along. Ginny was keeping it together.
It was Dean that broke first. "Plus, that badge really brings out your eyes."
That finally got Ginny giggling, and Luna followed suit. Dean was laughing along. Harry managed to keep from joining in, but his grin had probably gone mocking, or at the very least sarcastic.
"Just you wait! I'm going to take so many points off of all of you!" Draco gave them his foiled again speech and then stormed off down the train.
"Does… anyone in our dorm care about points?" Ginny checked, getting her giggle fit under control.
"Hermione does…" Harry considered. "Do you think we can get her to take points off of us as punishment for losing too many points?"
"Don't you dare, Harry Potts!" the girl in question shouted, clearly having been only a minute behind Draco. She thrust her head into the compartment, "We are going to have a lovely year where we all behave ourselves and don't give the Slytherins any chance to take points in a way that can't be disputed." She regarded the compartment of her friends who were looking at her like she was crazy. "And if that doesn't work, you're going to help me and Neville catch the snakes at just as much as they get us for, so it evens out."
"That's our Hermione," Dean agreed to the terms.
"I have to do an hour of rounds, then I can hang out. Neville and Padma should be here in a minute, then they'll have rounds later," she informed them, before striding off to try to catch up to Draco and put a check on his newfound powers.
The rest of the train ride was basically sedate. They caught up on everyone else's summers. Harry tried to work out when people wanted to do D&D sessions given new responsibilities (they now had three prefects in the group, and Ron would also be full-time on the quidditch team). Dean wanted him to do more teaching, especially of the Ta Lo martial arts style, and Harry wanted to spend some time practicing wandless casting on a broom. And that wasn't even accounting for whether he'd have to spend more time with people outside of his year group, given his recently-intensified celebrity. Nearly all the Midgardborn took a moment to wave at him as they passed, clearly explaining things about him to their Vanir friends.
He just really hoped none of them had been quick enough to acquire any of the Avengers merchandise that had started to appear at the end of the summer.
The train pulled into the station while it was still light out, though dropping into evening, and they were all ready to take the helhest-pulled carriages to the great hall to eat. "Huh, no Hagrid," Ron observed, as the first-years were met by Usher Burbage instead of the half-giant.
They didn't see the big man at the staff table either, his place filled by a middle-aged woman that they eventually placed as being in charge of the stables at Hogsmeade. Mordo had taken a seat at the head table as well, actually seeming to get along with Snape the most of those sitting near him. But the real shocker was the magenta-decked Accuser sitting at the end of the table. "That's the kree woman that was trying to railroad me," Harry explained to everyone nearby. "I guess they stuck us with her to get her out of Diagonalt."
Answers wouldn't be forthcoming until after the sorting and food. They were mildly surprised that young Ned Leeds wound up in Ravenclaw: despite meeting him as Peter Parker's science friend, and thus knowing he was probably brilliant, he'd really felt like a Hufflepuff to Harry and Dean. Padma already knew who he was from that morning, plus the boys talking about meeting him over the summer, and he gratefully slid into the space she and Luna opened next to them at the Ravenclaw table to make sure he made friends around the house.
The food finally arrived as Ron was on the verge of shouting that he was starving, and Harry caught up with the rest of Gryffindor over the meal. It was clear they all wanted to hear the new stories he'd accumulated over the summer, and weren't sure whether they wanted to hear about Asgard, fighting a transforming battlemech, or the scuffle in the Leaky Cauldron first.
As soon as they were finished eating, Dumbledore stood and began the normal greetings, rules, and warnings, leading into, "You may notice a few new faces at the table. First, please welcome Madam Grubbly-Plank, who will be handling Mr. Hagrid's duties for the first few weeks of our year." He didn't elaborate on where Hagrid was. "Our defense seminar this year will be handled by Master Mordo, of Midgard, who has a great deal of experience in dealing with threats from other dimensions, which has proven to be timely, indeed.
"As most of you know by now, I'm sure, Azkaban prison in the Dark Dimension has rejected its oaths, and the prisoners are believed to be at large. Hogwarts remains well-defended, and Ronan's guard on alert for any signs of attack here. Additionally, the Ministry has assigned us the help of Accuser Dar-Benn, our third new face, to keep watch for external threats." He even managed to sound like she was welcome, rather than being stuck with her.
He clearly wasn't expecting her to stand and take over his speech. "Thank you, headmaster," she began, not seeming to shout but managing to carry across the whole hall even without magical amplification. She was trained in addressing legions, after all. "I have enjoyed the company of your fine people for some time now, and would like to take the opportunity to talk about these external threats. I have noted a tendency for you to put your fears onto a single individual: a dark lord that embodies all of your problems.
"My people also have such a boo-gee-man," she frowned as she realized she got the word wrong from the expressions of the crowd. Honestly, it was impressive that she was managing English so well without her translator implant working. Bulling on, she explained, "We call her the Annihilator, and her betrayal began the many cycles of troubles faced by my people. But, even should she be destroyed, as I hope to see some day, we would still have external threats. One figurehead can inspire your enemies, but they will not stop being your enemies when that threat is defeated.
"Constant wariness!" she raised her voice to emphasize, and frowned again at the titters that swept through the crowd as she almost copied Moody's catchphrase from the previous year. Again, pushing ahead she finally got to her point, "Vanaheim has more threats than it knows, and may not even truly understand the enemies facing it, hiding behind a masked figure that claims to be one long thought dead. And external threats can pretend to be members of your people, just as the Annihilator was once thought to be a loyal kree.
"I am here to root out these external threats, and see your people free to chart their own destiny once again. This I have sworn. Thank you, all." She finished speaking and held for applause that never came, though some of the students did seem to be considering her rhetoric. Waiting just long enough that it became awkward, she finally sat.
"Very well," Dumbledore resumed. "I encourage all of you to take advantage of this resource among us, who is interested in teaching about kree history. Perhaps some of the upper-years might consider the culture for your cosmology or cultural studies theses. And, I think that is enough hearing from us this evening. Off to bed. Classes in the morning!"
"I wonder if we can meet this Annihilator," Dean said, as they were walking to the Gryffindor dorm. "Probably awesome, if that lady's any indication."
"I hope Dumbledore can keep her in check," Ron opined. "That's 'Madam Umbrage,' right? My dad can't stand her."
"You heard the way she was stressing words?" Lavender asked, ever tuned into the nuances of conversation. "How much do you want to bet that she's going to suggest Midgard is external? Maybe Asgard, too?"
"No bet," Harry frowned. "I'm with Ron. Maybe Dumbledore will handle her."
But he knew what his life was like, and didn't believe it would be that easy. She'd already come after him hard at his trial, and she didn't seem like the type to just give up. He'd hoped that maybe he'd have one relaxing year…
Chapter 77: Red Sky at Morning
Chapter Text
"I know Vanaheim doesn't really have much in the way of libel laws, but can I challenge this guy to single combat or something?" Harry asked, over breakfast the next morning. The Daily Prophet had come in, and its editor, Barnabas Cuffe, was taking a heavy hand with his "editorials" that were right below the fold on the first page. He didn't care for Harry, it seemed.
"Sirius might be able to, but you're not old enough," Ron answered, in between mouthfuls of breakfast sausage. He'd managed to retain a lot of the legal research they'd done to try to save Buckbeak a couple of years prior.
"He'd have to claim Sirius as his guardian, which probably means he couldn't live on Earth," Hermione corrected. "Pepper might be able to challenge, and appoint a champion? I'd have to look it up."
"What's he even saying?" Dean checked, leaning over to read the paper. Harry just passed it to him. "Oh. Everything Snape's been accusing you of for years. Fame-seeking. Recklessness. Too bad what's-her-face got that job as anchor at WHiH. She liked you."
"Yeah, and she's been bugging me all summer to get the Avengers on her show," Harry groaned. Christine Everhart aka Rita Skeeter really had held up her end of the bargain on positive press the previous year, but it had always been temporary while she tried to get on a major cable news network on Earth.
"Sturgis Podmore," Dean chuckled, having flipped to the next page in the paper. "Man, some of these Vanir names."
"That's one of mum's friends!" Ron recognized the name. "What's he in the paper for?"
"Arrested breaking into a Ministry secure records room," Dean summarized. "Couple weeks ago. Paper says it's where they keep maps to all the Night Roads they know about."
"Why would that information be secret?" Harry wondered.
Hermione explained, "Probably because they can't really put wards on all the Night Roads, at least on ones that don't have any good places to anchor them. They don't want random Vanir just wandering onto other planets, and maybe leading marauders here."
"Time for classes," Neville warned them, trying to stay on task as a prefect. "First years! Follow me to herbology class. Hermione will lead you to your next period after that."
For each of their first few classes, the goal of their professors was to instill in them that they'd be having major tests at the end of the year. The results of these exams would determine whether they were allowed to continue taking the subjects their last two years, where each class would become much more open-ended. By sixth year, anyone still in a subject was expected to have all the standardized knowledge, and be ready to do more self-directed work. Dumbledore offering Dar-Benn for use as a resource wasn't unusual: there were going to be a lot of independent research papers in their futures.
The defense seminar was the outlier. Since it changed teachers every year, a student could theoretically fail all their fifth-year exams and at least keep taking defense. Though apparently some of the defense teachers liked to give more open-ended work to the upper-years, if their specific application had enough depth.
Mordo's definitely did, and he figured even fifth-years were ready for that kind of lesson. When they had class with him on Monday afternoon, he was quick to confirm, "I do not have enough time to explain all of the threats of the universe to you. I could speak to you all day, every day, for the entire year and barely scratch the surface. In the grand scheme of things, the horrors of the Dark Dimension are quaint. And I don't think simply telling you will result in understanding. Clearly, your best and brightest thought that they could come out ahead in a complex deal with the Dread Dormammu, as if he, in his timeless realm, didn't simply foresee getting a better offer.
"I do not know what information your school library holds, though I'm assured it is vast. Thus, I will provide you with subjects to learn, and you will report back with what you have found. We will then practice what there is to practice that might save you from the hosts of the beyond. Or at least buy you a moment to flee.
"I am here, in part, to try to 'sell you' on considering joining the sorcerers of Earth upon graduation. We do need trained hands to shield the planet, which is a nexus that draws the worst attention from beyond. You may consider it far away from your concerns, if you are Vanir. But should Earth fall, how long do you think it would be before whatever conquered it began to slide through the Night Roads into the other Realms?
"However, I am, personally, here to convince you to stay in Vanaheim. Already, I have seen so much wasted magic. This world is so ripe with energy that you use it profligately. Such excess on Earth would weaken the walls of reality and steal resources that could be used to much greater purpose. I am here to observe you all and determine whether you can be judicious in your spellcasting. My planet does not need more thirsty mouths to drink at the well of magic. Unless you are an asset, I will not recommend you to Kamar-Taj.
"Now, since it seems most potentially relevant, let us begin with enough primer on the Dark Dimension to give you room to research before the next class…"
It was an intense period. He called on all the Earth students that had been going to "summer camps" the most, often even if their hands hadn't been raised, putting them on the spot. Harry got more questions than anyone, and had to admit not knowing the answer a few times. When the period finally ended, Mordo motioned for Harry to stay behind for a moment.
"Do you understand why I'm putting you on the spot, Potts?" he asked.
"I've had the most time to learn this stuff, and I'm the most likely to need it?" Harry figured.
"Partly. But also because you, more than any of them, have received privileges at a young age. The youngest sorcerer to receive a sling ring. Given license to use magic in front of any cameras the public can turn upon you. So much rides upon your shoulders, to make certain that sorcery, if it must be revealed, does so to acclaim rather than fear and hatred.
"So it is my intention to push you as hard as I can within the relative safety of this school to make sure you don't, in the real world, break."
Harry didn't love it. This kind of attitude was why Mordo was Parvati's least favorite Master of the Mystic Arts. But he got it. "To whom much is given, much is required," he echoed Fleur's father, from earlier that year.
"Precisely. Now, on your way," Mordo dismissed him.
Not much else happened for the next few weeks, other than getting back into the swing of classes and giving Hedwig a workout. With friends across four worlds, Harry was sending letters like never before. It was easy enough to send letters directly to Fleur and Thor, and he even sent a couple of short letters to Loki and Fandral to see if they wanted to be in touch.
The mail to Earth was a little more complicated. He'd worked with Tony before leaving for the year to train JARVIS on his handwriting, and set up a simple set of rules for his email account. He'd send a packet of letters to Aunt Pepper, she'd pass them under a camera, and they'd automatically get converted to text and emailed to the correct recipients. It was a lot easier than worrying that various Avengers would have to explain why a snowy white owl kept showing up wherever they happened to be. When she was ready to send return mail, Pepper could just run a routine to print out any emails from his preferred contacts and add them to the stack.
There was a high variability in responsiveness.
Fleur matched him letter for letter, though she might take a day or two to send a response; her combat magic apprenticeship was time-intensive. Thor was really enjoying having pen-pals, so was also fast to respond, though he cautioned that soon he would begin his campaigns across the Realms and might be out of touch for weeks at a time. Fandral, despite being a talker, was not much of a writer, and merely sent short responses, mostly with updates on the forging of Harry's sword. Loki seemed to be fighting his urge to appear too cool to write. His first responses were on the order of, "Thank you for your letter. I appreciate the effort expended in writing it," but as the house arrest wore on him, he began to actually respond to pointed questions with florid descriptions of his boredom.
Pepper was the most used to communicating with him by irregular letters, and continued her usual style of asking him about classes and probing for whatever the new crisis was. Tony mostly didn't reply (maybe hadn't even read any mail that wasn't time-critical), still head down on his armor-designing obsession. Rhodey's emails were intermittent, with vague things like, "Weather was surprisingly nice in Libya," that made it clear he was all over the world doing the peacekeeping that Tony wasn't since becoming an Avenger. Happy sent him a bunch of ideas he was considering, in his new role of head of security for Stark Industries. Bruce was barely checking his secure email box. Of the Avengers on SHIELD assignments, Steve was the most verbose, glad to have someone interested in long-form mail responses of the sort he was used to. Clint wasn't very responsive, and Natasha was mostly interested in providing advice on his conversations with Fleur.
And he could easily just talk to Sirius on the magic mirror.
"It's still a mess out here, pup," his godfather explained, his background a beautiful mountainous region of the planet with looming stone sculptures behind a small village. "We haven't actually seen any Death Eaters on the field recently, but they must be helping the… attackers." He still hated calling them marauders, since that was the nickname for his and Harry's father's gang at school. "Portals don't really provide much of an advantage in response speed when both sides have them."
"Guess you're not mass producing these mirrors any time soon?"
"It's more of an art than anything. I've been trying to show other people how to do it, but even I can't get them to work most of the time. James and I got lucky getting these two to work as well as we did, and we had several failures on the way. The few I've gotten working, I've given to Dumbledore… for business I'm not really supposed to tell you about."
"Really?" Harry looked disbelieving through the mirror.
"Compartmentalization, or something," Sirius shrugged, not seeming to like it any more than Harry. "Secret stuff that he's trying to keep to as few people as possible, so the Death Eaters don't find out what he's up to. It's the kind of thing he handled during the last war."
"Ugh, so much spy stuff. Most of the people I talk to on Earth can't tell me much of what they're up to because it's also spy stuff."
"Yeah? You're talking to all of them? Natasha? Did she ask about me?"
"Don't you need to find a nice Vanir woman to carry on the line of Black so Tonks and I don't have to do it?" Harry fired back.
"That wasn't a no," Sirius waggled his eyebrows.
"Fine, yes, she did mention you. In passing."
"I've still got it! Oh, hey, since you know the Lady Sif, now, maybe you could put in a word for your old dogfather with her, too?"
"It probably would help Thor if she was into someone else," Harry rolled his eyes. "She's kind of intense though, the little I talked to her. And, you know, the whole Aesir/Vanir lifespan thing. Also… why am I your dating service?"
"I've been too busy to meet anyone, and pretty much anyone available in my social circles is too young, damaged goods for some reason, or could be a secret Death Eater sympathizer."
"Oh no! He's an old maid by thirty-five!"
"An old mister, thank you!" Sirius joked back. He glanced off of the mirror and said, "Looks like we're moving out, soon. Not really sure how I got tapped as a war leader, but I guess someone has to open the portals. Before I go, you're sure you're not having any trouble with Madam Umbrage?"
"No. She's been around, but seems to just be lurking and watching so far. Hasn't bothered me. I have to meet everyone in the library, anyway, so I'll let you go. Bye!"
It turned out Harry spoke exactly too soon.
It had been over two years since the Nidhogg serpent attacks, and they were gradually getting out of the habit of going everywhere with at least one friend. Harry had stayed back to talk to Sirius while the rest of the study group went to the library, so he was on his own as he made the trek downstairs to meet with them. And that was how Dar-Benn managed to catch him alone and corner him for a conversation on the way.
He wasn't sure if it was just luck on her part, or if she'd somehow planned it.
"Harry Potter," she said, sliding up next to him as he stepped off the stairs onto the floor that housed the entrance to the library. She towered over him in a way that was unsettling, given how small she looked at a distance in her big pink combat robes. She was probably taller than Pepper before adding the stompy kree Accuser boots. "Might I have a moment of your time?"
It was phrased as a question, but she'd somehow used her height and casually-wielded warhammer to herd him into an empty classroom almost before he realized he was in danger. Fully dodge-rolling under her arm would have been just rude enough in what didn't seem like an active combat situation that he'd missed his chance.
"We got off on, as I believe is the expression, the wrong foot. A dancing aphorism, perhaps? Could we, instead, restart our conversational dance?" She'd managed to stand just far enough inside the doorway to make it feel like she wasn't blocking it but was definitely blocking it.
"You trying to get me sent to prison was a dancing mistake?" he asked. "Er. Ma'am."
"I am an Accuser. Our job is to present the strongest possible case for justice. It wasn't personal."
"Even if that case means ignoring facts and speculating?"
She gave a predatory smile, likely trying to look like a friendly one, but it stayed far from her eyes. "I understand that the planet on which you were raised has a quaint idea that goes 'innocent until proven guilty,' while my people found such a statement led to many criminals running free. A simple cultural difference. The Nine Realms seem more accepting of false negatives than false positives. But, surely, there are men walking free at the highest levels of your government that would have been punished under my system? We must agree on that."
"I guess you did meet Malfoy," he admitted. It was probably safe to throw a little shade, as long as he didn't formally accuse the man who still got away with being an openly-secret Death Eater. And maybe she hadn't figured it out and could bother him.
"You might be surprised how many in this world's leadership don a mask and thus escape even accusation for their actions," she agreed. "I'm glad we understand each other. Now! I'm tasked with security for this school, and I think it is clear that you are the most likely to be… taken away with no warning."
"Happens just about every year," he nodded.
"I have been working with your runes professor to make devices that could alert us quickly if a student leaves the premises. It can be activated by you, as well, if you feel that you are in danger."
"Panic button. Makes sense, I guess." He didn't love the idea of carrying around a device that let administration know where he was at all times, but it wasn't like he was regularly out of bounds or anything. And it probably wouldn't work through his cloak. Honestly, he probably should give Dumbledore a chance to examine and replicate the Map at some point.
"Excellent. With your cooperation, I'm sure other students will be pleased to join." She fished a small, rune-etched copper necklace from a bag and handed it to him. "Now, if you could simply sign that you've consented to tracking."
He took the form she'd presented on a large clipboard, plenty of spaces for him and other students to sign. The text at the top seemed like he was just accepting delivery, but he had enough recent legal experience to wonder if it wasn't the tail end of a contract that he wasn't reading. Also, "I'm not supposed to sign anything without my lawyers. And I'd need a guardian to countersign anyway."
"This is no more than signing up for clubs, which I understand you do with regularity," she waved off, thrusting a brass pen into his hand.
Already wary, he noticed that he felt a short bit of pain from the pen hitting his hand that seemed excessive for even the slap of metal into a palm. He touched the nib to the back of his thumb while looking like he was about to sign, and wasn't at all surprised to see a blood-colored dot of "ink" appear.
"Pretty sure blood magic is definitely illegal in most situations," he quipped, already tumbling low to get past her, evidence in hand.
"You can't take that!" she insisted, baring her gold-accented teeth in anger at her ruse being so immediately seen through. She was very fast, which Harry made a mental note of, but even carrying a bookbag, a blood magic pen, and a contract clipboard, he was faster. And just far enough into the door to not look like she was blocking it was far enough that a small teen with enough incentive could dive past.
By the time she'd spun around and chased him into the hallway, he was gone.
Harry watched with relief as she charged around the corner that made the most sense to her to have lost him so quickly. She hadn't even thought to check for invisibility. He moved carefully for several seconds just in case she came back and listened for footsteps, then made for the nearest secret passage that went upstairs.
She hadn't beaten him to Dumbledore's office, or hadn't guessed that would be where he'd go. Which was amusing, since he was carrying the tracking necklace, but she'd probably need help to find it. Maybe she'd gone back to her office to attempt that. "I need to speak to the headmaster. It's not really an emergency, but I might have to fight a kree in a minute," he told the gargoyle. Fortunately, the man seemed to be in residence, as the stone guardian moved aside a moment later.
"I assume this isn't histrionics?" Dumbledore asked, as Harry exited the stairs into his tower room. He, as Sirius had pointed out, definitely had a few hand mirrors sitting across his desk that were similar to Harry's communication device. He looked as if he'd been in the midst of coordinating with his spies.
"Sorry, sir, but I figured I shouldn't give my blood and signature to a lady that's already come after me once." Harry proffered the pen, tracking necklace, and clipboard to the headmaster.
"Oh, dear," he said, inspecting each in turn. "I gave permission for Bathsheda to help with these charms, but they were simply to be handed out, not signed for in blood. These pens are only legal in very particular contract situations, and you are correct to be wary of it. The pen retains enough blood even after signing that magic could be performed with it. That's why most that sign such contracts often enough to require blood signatures provide and retain their own pens. And I strongly suspect that there is a missing cover to this page that grants permission to the holder for use of the blood. My, my, my."
"About what I figured," Harry agreed. And he jumped to the conclusion, "She'd need a blood mage to help her, right? So she probably has one in mind."
"Or, charitably, thinks that specialty is more common than it is and expected to be able to convince one to help," the headmaster agreed. "I shall, of course, dispose of this." He took a small golden bowl from a shelf, disassembled the pen, poured Harry's blood into the bowl, casually ignited the fluid with a flick of his wand, then cast a powerful cleaning charm into the body of the device. "There, at least now one avenue for attacking you is handled."
"And Dar-Benn?"
"Will likely plead unfamiliarity with our culture, as is her way. I would eject her, but the Ministry has asked in no uncertain terms that I keep her here and give her some small measure of authority to keep her from once again becoming their problem. You handled this well enough. Continue to avoid her as you are able and be wary of any additional schemes. For some reason, she seems fixated on you, despite having no reason for it."
Harry sighed, "You sure you don't want to give me a less frustrating quest for the year, sir?"
The old man made a "who, me?" face, but admitted, "This is not the challenge I expect you to have to face this year, though more experience dealing with adult foes that must be outmaneuvered politically rather than fought in battle is a valuable lesson."
"Can you tell me about the real challenge? Does it have anything to do with all those communication mirrors?"
"Well spotted, though perhaps a certain Black gave you enough clues?" The headmaster considered for a moment and then agreed, "I think I can perhaps provide the framework of what I suspect, though, at this point, it is scant. You might have noticed, as I have, that you have a certain tendency regarding Infinity Stones."
"That the Norns make sure I lay hands on one every year?"
"Quite. I have also come to the conclusion that the shadowy figure behind Voldemort and the Death Eaters must be trying to obtain them. Perhaps all of them."
Harry nodded along, realizing that made sense. "He already had the yellow one, but keeps losing it. He's after the orange one, but seems to have given up for now. And he tried to get the Tesseract a couple of months ago. I guess he either doesn't know where the green one is, or doesn't think he can get it. How many even are there?"
"Six, if the legends are to be believed. Therefore, I have been trying to get ahead on the two whose whereabouts remain unknown. I believe I have traced the legends of another to an ancient temple on a planet with a most unusual hydrology. It becomes flooded for centuries, and then, owing to some complex geological properties, experiences a brief period where the waters recede. And that process is beginning. Sometime in the next few months, it will likely become possible to search the planet's surface for the stone hidden there.
"I have been establishing a route to the planet, staffing it with observers, and researching what I can to narrow down the search. Once it is possible, we can keep it out of his hands."
"No faith in the Norns that it'll just fall into my hands in the spring as usual?" Harry joked.
"Fate helps those that help themselves. I would much rather we simply walk away with it long before there is any opposition than to have to fight through enemy forces to obtain it."
"Respectfully, that's not how my life works, sir. But thanks for trying. Do you have any idea why I have to touch all of these things?"
"The whims of the Norns, I'm afraid," the old man hedged. Harry's scar itched, now having enough experience with Dumbledore for his supernatural empathy to kick in. He was hiding something. Clearly noticing Harry come to that realization, the headmaster explained, "I do have some information, but please allow me to hold onto it for the time being. It is a secret I have kept closely since before your birth. Know that I shall tell you once I believe it is more useful to you than the risk entailed by our enemy somehow learning it."
"Fine," Harry huffed. "But can you tell me where you're staking out? And who's watching it right now? I might be able to… you know… tune my whole Heimdall sight thing to have an extra set of eyes on it. And give me an idea of where I'll inevitably be going."
"Your… Heimdall sight thing?"
"Oh! Did I not tell you? Heimdall touched the Soul Stone too, a long, long time ago. He gave me a little advice on how I might figure out seeing across the universe like he can." Harry kept his face blank, allowing the old man to pick up how it wasn't fun to learn important stuff late.
"Astonishing," Dumbledore nodded, clearly believing him. "Of course, do not share the details, but I suspect our enemy will learn the location regardless of how secret it is kept, and, you are correct, that kind of vision would be a profound advantage. Very well, the planet's name is Morag, and, tonight, Arthur Weasley is on duty."
"Thank you, sir. Hopefully I can get it to work."
The Norns seemed to be willing to throw Harry a bone every now and again (or were worried about his campaign to show up and yell at them). That night, he dreamed of Arthur Weasley sitting on a shore that was at the crest of a slowly-emerging mountain, a vast world of water spreading away in every direction, and dense clouds bleeding into a permanent red sunrise at the horizon.
His year's challenge was slowly rising from the depths.
Chapter 78: Coming and Going
Chapter Text
"Man, we're running out of places to hide," Dean groaned, spotting Dar-Benn observing them across the grounds. They were trying to do a practice session on their Wednesday afternoon free period. They'd even gotten most of the study group to show up and train. And then she'd shown up. Again.
"And nobody brought their tracking necklaces?" Padma checked, annoyed that she'd gone to the trouble of changing into sweats and walked all the way out to the far edge of the lake, and the kree woman had still managed to interrupt their workout.
Everyone shook their heads no, and Harry grumbled, "We even made sure she was on the opposite side of the school on the Map before we left." He was turned so she couldn't see him, in case she could read lips or something. She was proving surprisingly good at finding them.
So far they'd had to cut short five practice sessions, unwilling to give the enemy in their midst intelligence on what they were all capable of beyond what they demonstrated in classes (which she also showed up to observe, on the regular). Dumbledore had not, in fact, been able to make anything stick with the trick she'd tried to play on Harry over a week earlier.
"We could find a place inside? It's starting to get too cold to practice outside anyway," Parvati suggested.
"She'd just listen at the doors and we wouldn't know," Ron figured.
"We could if we used the Map," Hermione countered. "But it's still not ideal."
"I hate to suggest it," Neville began, "but we could go into the Chamber of Secrets." He remained the only other one in the group that had been to Niflheim.
Harry shook his head and explained, "Even Dumbledore and the Ancient One go through there ready for a fight in case more Nidhogg serpents or even worse find it. I doubt they'd be happy if we were just down there a few hours every week."
"And someone might talk about all of you boys disappearing into the girls' loo," Lavender laughed.
"We should find the Come and Go room," Luna suggested.
Everyone looked at her blankly, waiting to see if she'd elaborate. They'd gotten out of the habit of writing off things she said that sounded like nonsense. Sometimes they were, but they'd eventually realized that was usually when she was messing with them. In this case, she was suggesting a legitimate solution to a problem and just failing to provide enough context. It was Hermione that realized what she meant first, agreeing, "The Room of Requirement! You're right, Luna! If that really exists, it could be perfect."
Everyone just sat and waited for one of the two brainy girls to explain.
Luna eventually deigned to do so. "Hogwarts is at the center of Vanaheim's wildspace, where no one can make portals."
"Except the Tesseract and Bifrost," Harry couldn't help but interject.
"True. Where no magic can make portals," she agreed. "At the center of the castle, there's a room that flips that. At the heart of not being able to make any portals, there's a room that can make a portal to anywhere."
Before the more logic-minded students could point out all the problems with something like that (such as why the school didn't use it, and how much of a security hole it would be), Hermione elaborated, "That's a popular theory about why it might work. But the more common story in the history of the school is that there's a room hidden in the castle that is both very hard to find and can basically be any room you need. I doubt anyone's sure it's fully teleporting you to a matching room somewhere else. It might just be a very clever old enchantment."
"So we just need to solve an ancient mystery to find a place to practice?" Dean checked, rolling his eyes. "I guess everyone should think about it, but we can also at least get a run in. She can't learn much about us from running."
Most of the group liked basic cardio the least of their practice, but they fell in behind him anyway. Perhaps they'd get lucky and jog somewhere that Dar-Benn didn't feel like following them. "Maybe the ghosts know," Ginny said, a few minutes into the run. She was working hard to stay at the front of the pack, next to Dean. Everyone else was just waiting on the two of them to admit they were going to Hogsmeade together in a couple of weeks.
"I could… ask the… Gray Lady," Luna huffed out, at the back of the pack. It showed how much she liked being included that she was even willing to go running with them.
It took a couple of days for Luna to get a chance to talk to the Ravenclaw ghost, and she wouldn't explain what she'd used to barter for the information, but on Saturday they knew the location of the Room. It was conveniently located in the upper hallway of the school that connected the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw dorms. "I must have passed by here a hundred times and never thought about it," Padma mused, staring at the blank patch of wall.
"That's because it should just be the outside of the building," Harry said, Map open to compare to the proposed location. "If it's here, my dad and Sirius never found it, either. I guess it's weird that there's no windows here. I could fly up here later and see if maybe the wall's thicker than you'd expect."
"It really isn't exactly the heart of the castle," Luna agreed, having, herself, expected something hidden under the great hall.
"Where's Madam Umbrage?" Ron checked. "Fred and George said they could only confirm they could lead her off for a little while." He also wasn't explaining what he'd promised his brothers for the distraction.
"Still down in the dungeons," Harry said, flipping over to that part of the map and finding her marker. "But still, no time like the present. What do we need to do, Luna?"
"Pace three times while declaring what kind of room you need, go through the door that appears, and complete the challenge to prove that you're worthy."
"Ron's finally going to get to wrestle a troll!" Ginny joked, though everyone was suddenly a little wary of what the challenge might entail.
Dean took charge, since practice was his domain, and walked up and down the corridor explaining, "We need a room where we can practice combat magic, physical fighting, and get general exercise. That only the people we want can get into."
On the third pass, there was suddenly a passageway there. Or they were finally seeing a passageway that had always been there. Like the portal into the Leaky Cauldron, if you took a picture you wouldn't be able to see it. But while moving or with depth perception, you could subtly see the back of the passage shift against the bricks at the edge of the hole. Maybe it was always there, and the only magic trick was keeping people from paying enough attention to notice.
"Freaky. Okay, I guess let's go in. Wands ready, and whatever," Dean ordered, then led from the front.
The portal was only big enough for one of them at a time. Dean stepped out of the hallway and turned right, and then was gone from view. Harry was right behind him, making the same turn and only seeing a pitch-black tunnel ahead. No Dean. By the time he'd lit his wand as he stepped forward, he couldn't see anything ahead or behind. No exit or others behind him. No Dean ahead. Just a few feet of stone brick tunnel leading both directions, rapidly reclaimed by darkness as his light faded.
"Well, crap," he figured. Surely someone would have warned about this more strenuously if the challenge could get you killed, but he didn't feel great about each of his friends having to handle it alone. Or maybe the rest of them were all together and he'd just been singled out? Either way would make about as much sense. "Guess forward it is," he told himself, assuming that immediately turning around and trying to leave would be a very fast way to lose the challenge.
He walked an indeterminate amount of time through the shadows, then finally saw a corner coming up to his left. As soon as he turned, he was walking out into a sci-fi bedroom. He'd have already assumed it was on a spaceship of some kind before he spotted a porthole showing stars over an alien planet to his left where he was coming out of… a bathroom? The room was built on the same kind of profligate scale as the SHIELD helicarrier, but it was still a bedroom with only one obvious door out (as well as a spartan bed, small writing desk, and a large metal box that was probably a wardrobe).
And there was a very large man getting up from the desk, having spotted him entering. "Who are you? A Nova assassin?" the blue-skinned kree demanded. Harry made the connection since he had robes in the same style as Dar-Benn's (though black instead of hot pink), and was picking up a very similar hammer. His was glowing. He quickly got into position blocking the door and said, "Very well. Do your best."
Harry had a moment of thinking back to Luna's theory that the Room could teleport them anywhere, and he'd somehow just been thrown against one of Dar-Benn's fellow Accusers for real. But then he realized that his wand was still lit.
"Hermione was right. This is probably a really cool simulation?" Harry said, more to himself than the Accuser in front of him. "Girding Wings of Lofn-Odr!" he cast, trying to levitate the warhammer out of the way.
"This Universal Weapon is my badge of office," the man insisted, hanging onto it by main strength and slowly winning over the levitation, especially as the weapon began to glow with power.
But that was just Harry's opening move, and he was already forming an energy sword after passing his wand to his off hand to maintain the levitation. His opponent swept out a kick that looked like it would be very dangerous if it hit him, since he was pretty sure kree had enhanced strength and this guy was even bigger than Dar-Benn. Even bigger than Thor, especially with the thick-soled Accuser boots.
That height gave him a hell of a long kick, even trying to drag his hammer out of the air, but Harry was already bounding over the kick and aiming a sword strike at the man's unprotected torso. To give the massive justiciar credit, he used the momentum from the kick to roll out of the way of the incoming attack, and the heated-up blade skated off the Accuser robes, leaving little more than a scorch.
Harry landed next to him, just as the hammer (or Universal Weapon, apparently) ripped free of its telekinetic moorings and the haft of it came slamming across toward the teen. Harry let his Ta Lo training kick in, made his sword demanifest, and brush-blocked the downward strike with his hand in a way that didn't move the Accuser, but did shove Harry back through his actual goal: the door.
The spaceship door helpfully slid open automatically before he could slam into it, and he fell out into what should have been a ship corridor.
Instead, Harry tumbled backward into a large, sunlit basement. Three oversized windows divided into smaller panes sat atop a concrete brick wall on one side. He'd rolled out of a cement archway across from a blue-lit science apparatus on a raised platform next to the windows. In addition to normal mansion basement detritus like old crates and ladders, several stations with powerful-looking computers were set up. There were also a lot of flowers, for some reason.
The way out seemed to be up some built-in stairs, to a level that exited into the house. And there were two women in casual exercise clothes that were just coming into the room from that way, as if they were heading through the room to go for a run out in the yard. Both were pretty, though the redhead had some obvious burn scars on her face, and Harry could tell they moved more like soldiers than trophy wives.
"Ellen, who's the kid?" the blond woman asked.
"Isn't that Stark's girlfriend's boy? Harry Potts?" the redhead recognized him. "Let's grab him!"
Harry had rolled to his feet and wasn't particularly worried about even two well-trained human women until both of their eyes started to glow red, as did their veins through their exposed skin, heat shimmer immediately appearing around their arms. "If I told you you had a hot body would you not hold it against me?" he asked.
He was a little surprised when Dean suddenly came running out of the same archway he'd entered through a few seconds earlier, dressed as he'd been when they entered the Room. "Woah. Harry. What's going on?"
"Bad girls. Very warm. Trying to get me," Harry summed up.
"I just had an obstacle course for my first challenge!" Dean complained, forming a shield and moving to block the blonde, who was jumping down from the upper level.
"We have to get past them, I think. I had to fight a kree guy last time," Harry explained, moving up to the science apparatus level and sighting his wand at the redhead. "Laufey's Glacial Frost!" he summoned up a blast of frigid air and ice. Actually having access to Vanaheim magic in a combat situation was really helpful.
"Wands work?" Dean hadn't realized. He was mixing it up with the blonde, managing to fend off her overheated fists with his shield while using kicks to keep her off balance and from getting too close to him.
"Our own personal holodeck, man. If we pass the challenges," Harry told him. The redhead, Ellen, had fallen back under the frost, but was now coming at him in a cloud of steam as she powered through it. Harry already had an energy whip manifested, and managed to snag her leg and yank her off the level and onto the floor below. She seemed stronger than a normal human, but nothing like a kree. "Hey, cooling them off didn't work…"
"So let's heat them up!" Dean got it. He'd managed to sweep the leg on the blonde just as the redhead crashed to the floor next to her, and had no worries about stomping up the computer desk to join Harry on the upper level, drawing his wand as he landed.
"Surtur's Burning Incendiary!" both teens yelled, unleashing a torrent of flames on the women. The women turned a much more intense shade of red and started writhing.
"Shit. They're going to blow up, aren't they?" Dean realized, and he shoved Harry forward to get them both sprinting up the stairs toward the exit.
They fell through into the next room just as both of their assailants went off like mini nuclear bombs behind them, the wash of heat fading as they ran into… an immense gothic dining room.
The room was not remotely similar to the Earth mansion basement they'd just come out of, instead favoring Vanir architectural styles. Plus, the Malfoy crest on the backs of the overbuilt dining chairs was a clue, as was Lucius Malfoy himself seated at the head of the table way across from them. He was wearing Death Eater robes, though the silver mask was resting on the table next to him.
He appeared to be having drinks with three other individuals seated at his end of the comically-long table. All three of them looked like Sirius had when Harry had met him outside of Hogsmeade: the years in Azkaban catching up to them at a very accelerated rate. There was a woman that looked a lot like Andromeda and Dora Tonks: dark haired, beautiful, and crazy. They'd seen the pictures of Bellatrix Lestrange, so the two scraggly-bearded men were likely the Lestrange brothers. "Harry Potter!" Malfoy realized.
Across the room, from another door, Neville and Luna exited more sedately than Harry and Dean had, but then Neville's face filled with a mix of horror and rage as he spotted the people that had tortured his parents into insanity. "And widdle Wongbottom!" Bellatrix singsonged in a cutesy, mad voice.
"Wands work!" Dean shouted at their friends, already moving and incanting, "Reduction of Mjolnir's Smiting!" as he cast the blasting curse at the other end of the table. Even flat-footed, Bellatrix managed to get her wand in the way of the surge of coruscating teal energy and knock it into a pair of chairs halfway down the table, creating shrapnel.
What she wasn't prepared for was Harry's spell right behind Dean's, transfiguring the table itself to expand into sharp splinters like a porcupine. It was a variation on the bollard transfiguration he'd used to fight the Shadow Nix his third year, which he would probably never use against someone he didn't want to risk killing. But they were Death Eaters and almost certainly holograms anyway.
Malfoy managed to dodge backwards away from his suddenly-hostile furniture, but both Lestrange brothers caught a few inches of wooden thorns across their chests, stapling them to their chairs. Bellatrix almost rolled away, but took several bloody gouges down her non-wand arm.
"LESTRANGE!" Neville was already shouting, flinging bolt after bolt of energy toward all three of the members of the family that seemed to finish off the brothers, since they couldn't dodge. Bellatrix managed to get another shield up but didn't have a chance to attack back before the Longbottom heir was on her, having summoned a massive saber with his wand as the hilt: when using his spellcasting focus, his magical constructs were much more solid.
Luna had been taking her time figuring out the situation and slipping left along the room, where no one paid much attention to her amongst the Gryffindor boys furiously flinging spells. It was a mistake. While Harry and Dean were sending bolts at Malfoy, forcing him to dodge and shield, he didn't pay any attention as her own blasting curse suddenly flew behind Bellatrix, who let it pass as an easy dodge, only for it to find its real mark: the head of the table. Already extended into sharp shrapnel, the shards of table were like a flechette shotgun blast across the platinum-haired Death Eater's flank. He cried in pain as he was hit, and wasn't able to defend against the blasts from the boys, taking him out.
Meanwhile, Neville was mixing it up with Bellatrix in melee. She moved in a way that suggested she'd be a terror to fight when she was fully recovered, but was still figuring out her newly age-advanced limitations. She was able to keep ahead of Neville's sword with dodging and her own shield constructs, but he was angry enough to continue pressing her too much to go on the offense. In a normal circumstance, she'd be goading him into a mistake, but as Malfoy fell, she was suddenly outnumbered four-to-one and surrounded. "I surrender?" she shrugged, trusting in the fair play of Gryffindors.
Neville used the moment to decapitate her.
"This is fake, right?" he asked, barely pausing to go cut off the heads of the Lestrange brothers.
"Probably," Harry agreed, a little taken aback by the boy's bloodlust, but not about to tell him it was too much.
"Shame. Cathartic, though," he sighed.
"Did you have fights before?" Dean asked.
Calming down, Neville said, "No, I had to get past that tentacle plant from first year, and then Luna and I had to figure out how to calm down an enraged herd of helhests when we met up."
"I had to distract a swarm of nargles in my first room," Luna agreed. "Did you both have fights?"
"All three," Harry shrugged. "Dean got an obstacle course for his first one?"
"We should probably assume the next one will be a big battle with Harry with us," Luna chided.
"The Room has your number, man," Dean agreed.
"I might have liked to do an obstacle course," Harry complained. "Anyway, everyone okay? Ready?"
They, indeed, exited the dining room into a massive battle.
The immense room was dimly lit, with a ceiling disappearing into the darkness. A wide metal walkway was covered almost in flagstones with crosshatched grids and ran between massive churning engines to either side. Something about the architecture reminded Harry of the first room he'd been in, and techniques of kree design that people doing the reports with Dar-Benn as a source had mentioned.
They had a quidditch pitch length to cover to get to the other side of the room, where a horde of warriors was already engaged with the rest of their friends.
"What is happening!?" Hermione was yelling, holding one side of the line against several burly humanoids in dark armor and blacked-out masks.
"I dinnae, but it's kinda awesome!" Seamus figured, launching gouts of flame into the center of the mob. The opponents were wearing some kind of plate armor that looked more like chitin than alien tech.
"Gin, help Hermione! Parv and Padma, keep shielding right. Lav, with me on center!" Ron was taking control of the tactics.
"Oh, thank Odin, it's the rest of the boys!" Lavender said, having summoned an energy spear and preparing to try to tank the middle. "And Luna."
"Go, go, go!" Dean yelled, and the four late-arrivers charged out to shore up the field. With Harry's shield, Hermione was able to fall back and start weaving a more complicated attack spell. Neville's sword joining the center started pushing the enemies back. And Dean and Luna backing up the Patil sisters was enough synergy to begin flinging the enemy flank into the churning machines.
For all that they seemed tough and armored, the enemies weren't prepared for magic, and didn't have ranged weapons in evidence. Hermione finished her spell and transmuted one of Seamus' fireballs into lances of searing light that punched through several masked faces. Ron was hanging back and using jinxes and energy whips to drag attackers right into the conjured weapons of several teammates. Dean was basically wrapped in magical protectives, allowing him to wade in and brawl with the soldiers without taking a scratch.
Harry just took it a little easy. He didn't need to pull off some massive attack, since he had so many friends backing him up. Holding the line was good enough.
There were so many of the soldiers, but they were basically charging into a magical meat grinder. In a couple of minutes, there was nothing left moving in the sci-fi corridor but the study group. "How was this fair?!" Hermione demanded. "We basically just had puzzles with some mobility requirements before this!"
"Harry," Dean shrugged. "All of his were fights."
"Of course they were," she frowned.
"Hey! We better get on to the next room before any more of those show up?" Harry suggested, before somehow this became his fault.
They gingerly moved past the several-ranks-deep spread of bodies, and got through the massive door on the other side without further incident. When they stepped across the threshold, they found themselves back in something that resembled Hogwarts. No further enemies were in immediate evidence. There was simply a large stone room with bright lighting coming from somewhere hidden in the vaulted ceiling. At the edges, mats were set up for martial arts practice and there was a track that looped around the room for jogging. It looked like there might even be showers through doors to either side.
"Well this is cool," Harry nodded, taking in the practice room the challenges had gotten them. "...But do you think it will give us more simulated real enemies if we need it to?"
"Harry, no!" most of the girls yelled at him, adrenaline-crashing from the fights they'd had.
But the boys looked like they were about ready for another go.
Chapter 79: One for All
Chapter Text
The Room of Requirement could, in fact, provide further holodeck features as needed. It never again manifested anything that felt quite as prophetic as the fight in the Malfoy dining room (and Harry started to wonder if the other fights had been somehow relevant, rather than just because he'd had kree on his mind), but it did a good job of providing Death Eaters and marauders to fight.
They eventually learned that they'd gotten pretty lucky in the challenge fights, or maybe it was taking it a little easy on them: they started getting hit. And the Room was good at simulating damage. Wounds that would be painful but not incapacitating hurt just as much as they would have, glowing with a red fog to indicate where the wound was. If the harm should be enough to disable a limb, that arm or leg would be paralyzed with that same red fog pulsing along its length. Killing attacks would result in a full-body cocoon of the energy, freezing the victim on the floor until the simulation ended.
But, hey, it was still loads better than having to learn to deal with getting hit for real the first time, Harry figured. The girls didn't really see it that way, of course, and redoubled their efforts to let the boys tank the hits while they served as artillery.
They also quickly discovered that they could bring other people in without having to do another bout of challenges, as long as they entered with someone else. They'd sent Colin Creevey in ahead of them the first time, and he'd come running back out almost immediately rather than face the Nidhogg serpent the Room had thrown at him solo. It seemed he still had some trauma from his first year.
"We should probably invite more people than just the Gryffindors we like," Parvati opined, a couple of days before the Hogsmeade weekend at the end of Vintage Month (around October 20th, back on Earth).
"How many people already know about it?" Harry checked. He tried to keep his tone neutral, but with Parvati and Lavender involved, he'd realized it wouldn't stay a secret for long.
"Mostly just Gryffindor!" she retorted, picking up on the subtext. "...and a couple of Hufflepuffs who are cool. Cho, over in Ravenclaw. No Slytherins!"
"I told Theo," Seamus admitted, contradicting her assertion.
"We need to put a lid on it before the professors find out," suggested Hermione. Everyone looked at her like she'd been replaced by her goatee-wearing doppelganger. "What? They'd want us to have adult supervision and Dar-Benn would figure out how to make that her, defeating the whole purpose. I'd show it to Master Mordo, but no telling what he'd say about it, and I don't want to risk it."
"'This is an abhorrent and wasteful use of magic and I want no part of it! Who knows what kind of dimensions this calls upon, or how it weakens the walls of reality!?'" Parvati mimicked the dour sorcerer. She still was not his biggest fan. "And, yes, I know what 'abhorrent' means! I study."
"Why don't we make a club? And get people to sign a pledge that they won't tell anyone outside of the club?" Lavender suggested.
"I could make it a binding magical contract!" Hermione agreed, having been researching them since Dar-Benn tried to trick Harry with the blood pen. "Also, yeah, we should pitch it as a way to practice against marauders and Death Eaters. We can't be the only ones that need to know that."
That's how they found themselves staking out a seedy pub on the side of Hogsmeade that students didn't usually frequent. The place was opposite the main square and away from the train tracks, a little ways away from the main mass of town. Most kids mistook it for a farmhouse, with the goat pens in the back. But it was a cheaper drinking hole for locals, and, it turned out, didn't actually mind a bit of coin from students.
That was being sorely tested with the sheer number of them.
The main benefit of the establishment was enough distance from the rest of town that their lookouts would see a set of magenta robes coming from far enough away to cease the intended business and pretend that it was a normal social gathering. Parvati and Lavender had put out the word about what was happening to those they trusted, and the others had hit up a few people in the various other houses that they knew. Consequently, the place had filled up with over a third of the students that were at Hogsmeade that weekend.
Virtually all of Gryffindor had turned out, a dozen Ravenclaws, half a dozen Hufflepuffs, and Theodore Nott from Slytherin (he said he'd clue them in on which of the other snakes were cool, if this seemed worth his while).
"Okay, everyone!" Lavender called out to get their attention. "We realized that some of the rest of you might like to have extra practice for how to fight marauders and Death Eaters. We found the Room of Requirement, so we can do some excellent simulations. Harry's fought a bunch of bad guys already, and can teach us. A lot of other Gryffindors have practical experience, too."
"Is this just a dueling club, like a couple years ago?" Finch-Fletchley asked. He hadn't had the best experience there, or the evening after.
"No. Team battle practice," Dean answered. "We're mostly going to work on what it's like to fight against groups of warriors who might have dark wizards backing them up. How to use teamwork to protect each other."
"Do the rest of us get to show off our expertise, or is this just the Harry Potter show?" McLaggen asked.
"Only if you can prove yours works, Cormac," Ginny insisted.
"The news says you're basically full of it, Potter," one of the Hufflepuffs in the year behind them, Smith, tagged in. "Why should we learn from you? If it's just marauders, we can wait for Asgard to finish this up."
Harry shrugged, and explained, "There are already way more people here than I expected. If you don't want in, then that's one less person I have to train. It's not just marauders, though. They definitely have wizard support. If you don't want to believe they're the real Death Eaters from the last war, that's fine. They're still assholes that are trying to use force to take your stuff."
"I have a sign-up sheet here," Hermione cut the discussion short. "If you want in, you're agreeing to not tell anyone how to get to the Room of Requirement, including teachers. But especially Dar-Benn. We don't trust her, or want her to know what we can do."
"And if you don't like the instruction, you don't have to keep wasting your time," Harry tagged in. "All we ask is that you keep the Room a secret, even if you quit."
"First meeting will be next Sunday, the day after Dísablót, if it matters for your decision," Lavender remembered.
Ultimately, about forty students signed up, not counting the study group, so they had around a fifth of the entire student body. No doubt a lot of them were just there for Harry's fame, either to spend time with the celebrity or to prove to themselves that he was no big deal. But maybe they'd learn something.
First, they needed to make it through Halloween, where something bad often happened at the school.
Harry actually went to the feast that year. It wasn't his favorite day ever, but, oddly, all the weird things that had happened to him on Halloween over the last few years had softened the association it had with his parents' death. It was still a day where he waited for something to go wrong (even more than on his birthday), but he was anxious rather than sad. And that, strangely, counted for a lot.
Plus he was a teenaged boy with a functionally-bottomless stomach and had always been sad to miss one of the better food events of the year.
There was no troll attack. No petrified cat. No flaming goblet. Not even the weirdness of starting up a dating test with his friends. Things were basically just food with a spooky atmosphere. Without Hagrid around to grow giant pumpkins, even the jack-o'-lanterns were normal-sized. Some were even small.
That much normalcy was clearly too much for the students, who had all kind of gotten used to something exciting happening on Dísablót. There was a tension in the air, just waiting to earth itself. So when Fred and George quietly started putting the word out toward the end of the meal that they'd pay two galleons to anyone that would hit a Slytherin, preferably Malfoy, in the head with a treacle tart ( five, if they'd hit Dar-Benn), the room was poised to erupt. One perfect slice of sticky pie onto Draco's well-gelled platinum coif from an enthusiastic second-year Gryffindor, and it was on. The room erupted into flung deserts.
The first few people to initiate the food fight are the ones that need to have bad risk-assessment: if nobody else joins in, they're getting the full brunt of punishment. But each additional flung plate of food reduces the overall burden. By the time everyone is food fighting, who are the teachers going to punish, really?
It didn't hurt that Ginny, eager to keep her brothers' money in the family, used the distraction of the first few volleys to levitate a tart over onto Dar-Benn. And then the rest of the teachers were so amused they were less inclined to put a sudden halt to the fun. By the time ten deserts had flown, there were no longer going to be repercussions. Watched from the outside, the ramp into full sugary war would have been a fragile crescendo.
Harry and Dean took turns with one shielding while the other flung handfuls of cake at no particular target. Ron got the first-year Gryffindors organized and throwing pumpkin pudding at targets that were distracted in the neighboring tables. Luna produced a set of gravity-defying plums from somewhere and got them to hover over and drop on her roommates. Hermione, Neville, and Padma had enough sense for their prefect status to just hide under the tables but not try to stop anyone. Lavender and Parvati were sauntering over to various tables and pieing people directly in their faces. Seamus figured out how to make a flambé out of illusory fire, throw it, and make some Slytherin that was mean to Nott squeal in fear and dive out of the way.
Little Ned Leeds kind of stole the show, having jumped onto the Ravenclaw table and started hucking whole jack-o'-lanterns at kids that had been mean to him. It was a good time.
Eventually, even with the massive spread, there was no more food to throw, and the fight wound down. The teachers had seemingly all been able to shield themselves, remaining pristine. It was strange that they hadn't tried to shield Dar-Benn. They'd protected Madam Grubbly-Plank, who also couldn't shield herself. It was a mystery. "What an exciting end to our festivities," Dumbledore announced, five seconds after Colin Creevey had flung a whole cookie like a frisbee as the last piece of available ammunition. "Your heads and prefects will nominate four enterprising individuals from each house to stay behind and practice your cleaning charms, lest we leave a sticky mess for the staff, or encourage the castle's equally-enterprising ants. Once those have been chosen, the rest of you are free to return to your dormitories and hope that our hot water lasts."
It was weird how quickly McGonagall chose the entire Weasley clan in residence as Gryffindor's four who had to remain and clean.
A very satisfying shower later, Harry was in bed and dreaming. He hadn't had too many dreams of Morag in the previous weeks, but that night was one of them. His vision flickered over the slowly-emerging mountain island, revealed a Vanir woman in a green shawl sitting in the spot he'd originally seen Arthur Weasley, and then began to descend. The watery depths of the planet were as alien as the ocean of any other world. What differed was the franticness of the marine life. Creatures that were not quite fish seemed keenly aware of the lowering surface above their heads, trying to get enough to eat and then disappear into the heart of the planet that remained watery.
At a depth still great enough to endanger the unprotected and murky enough to make it virtually impossible to search for an Infinity Stone, Harry's vision roamed. Once, this entire place had been a city, and the Stone had been interred somewhere as part of its religion. Ruined buildings loomed out of the silt, impressive in that they'd survived multiple cycles of the waters rising and lowering. They were the lucky ones, the rest of the space barely providing evidence that a society had ever existed there.
How many more cycles would the holdouts last? When the Stone was taken, would fate let the remainder be torn apart by the waves?
The next day was time for the meeting of the new club for which they were still workshopping the name. Hermione had written "Defense Association" on the signup contract because nobody had really had a better idea, but it lacked some kind of pizazz. Maybe somebody would have a brainwave later. At breakfast, the study group managed a "pass it on" campaign to tell the various members who'd signed up (and who they should tell) to meet near one of the classrooms on the fifth floor in about half an hour.
Importantly, the spot they picked was away from any professors' offices and fairly close to a secret passage up to the seventh floor. With the twins (still a little worn out from all the cleaning of the previous night) watching the Map for adult interference, Harry met up with everyone to show them the passageway (ready to turn invisible at warning from his lookouts), and the rest of the study group took turns escorting people into the Room as they reached the seventh floor.
At least for the first meeting, Dar-Benn seemed to have no idea. The twins reported she'd stayed put in her office the whole time. It was also weird, they opined, the way the students in the Room weren't anywhere on the Map.
"Everybody!" Harry announced as he led the twins into the Room after theoretically everyone who was coming had gone in. As the assembly went quiet he said, "Thanks for coming. A lot of you have probably seen our crew doing various workouts on the grounds. Probably a lot of you would also benefit from cardio. Today, we're going to start off by seeing how you'd actually do in a fight. Try not to hit any other students with anything, okay? Otherwise, anything you can cast, goes. With me? Great! Room? DEATH EATERS."
It was absolute chaos. Simulated enemies in black cloaks and silver masks began smoke-teleporting into the midst of the students present. About half of the kids screamed and tried to find cover. Another quarter gamely tried to fight but didn't work together, and were sporting the room's red incapacitation smoke within ten seconds of the fight starting. The rest managed to actually do something productive, assisting the study group, who were pretty good at working together by that point.
The whole fight was over in about a minute. Some of the kids who'd hidden had been found and tagged by simulated bad guys. But being out didn't mean you couldn't watch. Harry led the study group and about six other kids that'd gotten through without serious injury to sweep the remainder into defeat, not afraid to let loose with some seriously painful spells.
When the last Death Eater evaporated back into red mist, and the kids that had been incapacitated got back to their feet, Harry started talking again. "In a game several of us like to play, combat is measured in rounds of six seconds. It's a dumb, arbitrary number. A lot of the time, you'll take a few rounds to try to get in position and not be noticed by your enemies. You can spend minutes just running in between fights. But when you actually get in a life-or-death battle, it's so fast. Look at that clock." He gestured to a large clock that had been placed on one wall and started ticking when he started the fight. "All of that took sixty-six seconds. Dozens of friends and enemies. Everyone was dead who was going to die that fast.
"I'm not here to tell you that you should have done something differently. I'm here to show you ways to work together and keep it together so at the end of that minute or whatever, you're one of the people still standing."
Even Zacharias Smith and Cormac McLaggen had to admit that Harry Potter had been damned effective. They mentally consoled themselves that he was in control and had stacked the deck so he could look effective, but they hadn't done anywhere near as well. And none of his friends had gone down either.
"Everybody with me?" Harry continued, seeing that he finally had real buy in. "Let's talk about the Holy Trinity: tanker, nuker, healer…"
The rest of the first meeting went well. They set up a schedule of a few more before the winter holidays, and largely expected everyone to return. Of course, the study group still planned to use the room more often than once every couple of weeks, but they felt good about so many other students getting more comfortable protecting themselves and their friends.
Before the next meeting, it was the Gryffindor versus Slytherin quidditch match. Harry was still alternate for seeker, and the house team was now 57% Weasley. With the twins dating Angelina and Alicia, that left Katie Bell as the only member that wasn't even Weasley-adjacent. Lavender did not enjoy the jokes about Ron dating her to fix that, nor did Dean like the jokes about Ginny dating her instead.
"She's going to stay on Vanaheim, dude," Harry reminded Dean, as he was complaining about it the morning before the match. "It's not like it's going to last past graduation anyway."
"Yeah, but I'm enjoying dating her now," his best friend argued. "She barely even still seems hung up on you."
"Good. I don't know how she'd do it between worlds, but Fleur would kill me if I even thought about dating Ginny."
"The long distance thing is still going okay?"
"I mean… it's still not technically even a thing," Harry admitted. "But the last time I took a day longer than usual to write back, she got a little mad. Or worried. Or worried and mad. So I figure it's kind of a thing, right?"
"Your not-girlfriend is on another planet and engaged to an elf prince, but Ginny staying on Vanaheim when we graduate is an impossible obstacle?"
"Touche."
The Gryffindor team was a well-oiled machine. They'd lost Oliver Wood, but Ron had been practicing to replace him for years. The rest of them had been on the team since Ginny had replaced Harry as seeker. Meanwhile, Slytherin had lost their original captain, Marcus Flint, and a couple of other upper-classmen. In true Slytherin style, the boys who'd graduated had kept the high-end brooms the Malfoys had bought for them, rather than leave them for their replacements, so the team didn't even have an overwhelming equipment advantage.
It seemed like Malfoy had bigger concerns out in the world than helping his son cheat at school sports.
Harry had mentioned to Dumbledore and Sirius that it was possible the Lestranges were hiding out at Malfoy manor (not really pointing out to the headmaster that the idea was founded on a scenario created by the Room of Requirement). Unfortunately, until the man himself was revealed (or at least strongly suspected) to be a Death Eater, there was no legal cause to search his holdings. They'd really just need to catch him in the act, as soon as possible.
Regardless of the inability to catch him harboring fugitives, at least they were able to embarrass his son on the field. Slytherin lost again, and lost badly.
Perhaps more interestingly, the day after the match, Hagrid was back to teaching husbandry classes. He looked like he'd taken some damage and been living rough for months, but he didn't elaborate on where he'd been. He did mention his time with Maxime—the other half-giant from Beauxbatons—a couple of times over the next week, so most of the school just wrote it off as him going on some long romantic getaway (his wounds inspiring them to not ask any more questions).
But the study group wasn't like most of the school.
"On some trip for Dumbledore. Probably on Jotunheim, if the frostbite he has on his left pinkie is any indication," Hermione figured.
"I'll ask Fleur if she's heard anything about Maxime," Harry agreed.
"There have been some jotuns in the marauder groups," Lavender offered, their finger on the pulse of Vanaheim news. "Maybe he was trying to get them to stay home."
"I wonder if it worked," Neville worried.
Before they could make any headway convincing the big man to accidentally reveal what he'd been up to and satisfy their curiosity, it was on to more DA meetings and end-of-term papers. There was a lot of progress in both. Weirdly, there was even synergy. Teens that normally wouldn't really have much to say to their peers in other dorms mentioned homework in lulls between combat scenarios. Harry had been deliberately grouping teams cross-house as much as possible, after all, to try to prevent obvious cliques from forming. For all his bluster, Zacharias Smith was an actual resource on several topics, as were several of the Ravenclaws.
The last of their tests and essays out of the way before winter break, they had time for one last DA meeting. It was getting a little harder to get everyone into the Room, as some of the professors had noticed how quiet the school was on those days, and Dar-Benn had started patrolling the hallways, likely trying to find them. They all hoped the adults would forget about it over the break. Harry re-ran the initial scenario, of Death Eaters teleporting in, and it went much better. Only 42 seconds to victory, and many fewer casualties among the students. Everyone was able to head to the break with a strong sense of accomplishment.
That night, Harry dreamed another vision of Morag. Dumbledore's watchers had needed to move from their original lookout spot further down the mountain, lest they just be staring down over a hundred yards to the water. Unfortunately, the new space wasn't as sheltered. And someone was taking advantage of that.
In Harry's sight, Arthur Weasley was once again on duty, a small fire at his feet keeping him warm as he sat in a camp chair clearly obtained from Earth. But the vision rolled back, and Harry realized he could see the fire from a ways down the "beach" that was the temporary waterline. And, suddenly, it was eclipsed by a truly massive form. A hulking, scaled humanoid with horns or crests on his face and chin was moving down the beach with surprising stealth for such a behemoth. He wore armor that made it clear he wasn't just some local wildlife, and he was heading straight for Mr. Weasley, dragging a high-tech scythe like he meant to use it.
Harry managed to wake himself up from the vision and started yelling at his roommates, "Everyone, up! Up!" he fumbled for his bag of holding and managed to grasp his hand mirror as the four other boys started to groggily wonder what he was yelling about. "Sirius Black!" he activated the mirror, hoping his godfather would pick up.
"Harry? Wha?" Neville was the first up.
"Go get McGonagall. Dumbledore if you can," he told them just as Sirius' equally-groggy face appeared on the mirror. Before the adult could also make questioning syllables, Harry explained, "Mr. Weasley is on lookout, right? There's some kind of giant lizard man coming after him. Right now! Can you get in touch with him? Can you get someone over there to help?"
Ron had picked up on his father's name even through his stupor, and was already sprinting out of the room to look for a teacher that might be able to help, Neville not far behind him. Sirius, equally instantly awake, said, "I'm on it. Tell Albus." Then he cut the connection, hopefully to make other calls.
And then the waiting game began.
After being up for an hour in the dark with no word, Harry started to worry that Sirius had run to help and had also been overcome by the enemy. But finally, Neville came back and told him, "Headmaster wants to talk to you. I also woke up Fred, George, and Ginny to get their stuff and go with us. We're supposed to take Ron's stuff, and get yours as well. Everything you were going to take home for the hols."
The walk across the castle was tense. Harry just told the other Weasleys, "I saw a vision of your dad about to get attacked and tried to send him help. I don't know what happened." Even the twins weren't able to joke about something like that.
Dumbledore had thrown on a star-spangled dressing gown and hadn't even put on a hat when he let them into his office. Ron bolted out of his chair to hug his siblings, not even able to marshal the general teen standoffishness around family. "He's going to be okay!"
"It was near thing," the headmaster elaborated. "If Harry had been a minute later, it might not have been. As it was, Sirius, Arthur, and a few of our other allies were seriously injured, and will be some time recovering. But they managed to hold the enemy off long enough to escape."
"Not beat him, sir?" Harry questioned.
"I believe Hagrid never described to you exactly from whom he got the dragon egg in your first year?" the old man asked.
"Some guy in the market?" Harry vaguely remembered. "No, wait… it was a dragon, so it kind of made sense that he got it from a… a lizard man!?"
"Of the same description as the one we just fought," he agreed, sadly. "I believe this to not just be any marauder, but a key operative for our true foe. Against even five wizards without access to the power of their wands… it was good that they walked away with injuries from which they will recover. And that Arthur wasn't taken away to be interrogated, or even worse."
"You saved Mr. Weasley," Neville realized, tearing up a little as he wished that someone with Harry's powers had been in time to save his own parents from a similar fate.
"He did," Dumbledore agreed. And suddenly Harry and Neville were both being pulled into the Weasley group hug.
While he would have preferred if Mr. Weasley, Sirius, and an unknown set of the headmaster's spies hadn't been hurt right before the holidays, or that they'd managed to defeat their brutish opponent, nevertheless, he'd take the win.
It would have been a pretty terrible Christmas if someone he knew got killed.
Chapter 80: Guise and Dolls
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
After Neville was sent back to the dorm to explain what was going on, Dumbledore had gotten Harry to open the Chamber of Secrets. The headmaster led Harry and the Weasleys through the Night Road into Niflheim, and then through another entrance that let out somewhere else on Vanaheim. The trip through the land of the dead was a bit sobering after how close people they loved had come to dying.
Harry made careful note of the passage out (and confirmed that the passage back to Hogwarts still seemed to be the one he'd used in his second year). Who knew when he'd need a quick exit to somewhere he could open a portal?
Dumbledore transported them to the courtyard of a large hospital in late-night Diagonalt, where they were shown through security of similar seriousness as in the Ministry before being let in. The rooms were fairly packed, housing warriors with a wide variety of battle injuries, though the hospital was quiet in the dark of the early morning. The activity was around the suite they traveled toward, where Arthur, Sirius, and three other individuals that Harry recognized from various late-night visions were in various states of injury. Well, he recognized Shacklebolt from Asgard as well as his visions.
Mr. Weasley looked the worst of them all, heavily bruised, splinted, and bandaged. Sirius just had his arm in a sling and a facial bruise. "Pup! You didn't have to come all this way for me," he said, when Harry moved over to his bed for a semi-private conversation. "Healers say I don't have any major trauma so I'll be okay tomorrow."
Harry shrugged, conveying in a teen way that just going back to bed would have seemed heartless. What he said was, "Make sure you get out as soon as you can. This is probably the hospital where they kidnapped and replaced Cedric."
Sirius nodded, but explained, "There's been a lot more security put in since then. And Moody will validate us a ton of different ways once we're out."
"The lizard guy got away?"
"Well, we got away from him. He was about as big as Remus when he's transformed, and nearly as strong. And he used some giant weapon. I haven't seen him on the field, before."
Harry explained, "Dumbledore thinks he's the guy that tried to help steal the thing my first year. Which means he works for Voldemort's boss directly."
"This bloke could be running a set of Death Eaters of his own, huh? That about figures. We might have taken him if our wands worked, but there's only so much we know how to do without them."
"Better set up practices. We are."
Sirius chuckled, "I bet you are. Tell me about it, unless you need to get some sleep?"
"Nah, I can sleep while the train is running and still meet everyone tomorrow afternoon."
Being back in a place where teleportation wasn't blocked, meeting his friends was almost as easily done as it was said. Around the time the train was supposed to be getting in, Harry stepped out of the fire from Diagonalt into the longhall that everyone used to go through the Leaky Cauldron back to Earth and waited for everyone else. He was only a little early, and caught them up on the basic details of what had happened as all the Midgardborn shuffled through to Charing Cross.
"I would have thought you would travel lighter, Harry," Master Mordo observed, as the kids going to the London sanctum followed him out of the train station. He had gestured to the unwieldy duffel bag that Harry had been lugging around since the night before.
"Runes project, sir," he explained.
"I get to see if it works, right?" Dean asked. It was interesting to juxtapose Mordo's look of interested skepticism next to Dean's grin of excitement. It was almost a comedy/tragedy mask pair.
"Yeah, I'm just going to set it up at the Tower. I can drop you at home after?"
"Awesome."
Hermione just shot them both a be careful look as she walked over to meet her parents, who waved at the rest of her friends. "Happy Christmas!" was all she actually said.
"Merry Christmas, Hermione!" they said, back, and then wandered through Kamar-Taj, proceeding to New York with many fewer kids.
"If you're… uh… I mean, can I get a ride, too?" Ned Leeds asked, realizing he was deep in Manhattan and probably a long trek from home.
"Your grandma's house?" Harry checked. "You want to call ahead and make sure there's nobody over that doesn't expect you to step out of a portal?"
"A portal!? I thought you had, like, a car. That's way more rad. Yeah, I'll call!" the boy said. He produced a fairly basic flip-phone, powered it on, and called home. "Nobody's home but my family," he confirmed.
Harry visualized the living room he'd been to the last year and spun open a portal, "There you go. See you in a couple weeks, Ned."
After months in a fantasy kingdom, the kid still seemed pretty excited just to walk through a portal to save a bus trip to Queens.
"Next stop, Avengers Tower," Harry told Dean, connecting his own phone to JARVIS. "I'm entering the Tower through my room, with Dean Thomas coming with me."
"Security measures deactivated. Welcome home, Mr. Potts," the synthetic voice told him.
"Thanks JARVIS," Harry said, to the building as a whole as he stepped out of a portal right into his bedroom. "Did Tony set up a room for me to keep my suit?"
"Yes. There is a secure closet on the second science level. I can guide you."
"And the communicator?"
The AI confirmed, "It is in the secure closet, with a new base layer."
"Great!" Harry grabbed his armor and mask from his bedroom closet. He'd not loved being without the armor all semester, but he wasn't about to shove it, with its pockets of holding, into another bag of holding. Weird things could happen. They were getting far enough on runes that they'd soon be making some almost-as-good armor for class anyway. But that wasn't the project he'd brought home. "You can leave your stuff here for a minute," he suggested to Dean, and then both of them wandered out to the elevators.
Avengers Tower was weirdly quiet. Tony and Pepper hadn't been in residence since the summer, and none of the other Avengers had really been back since May. It was probably overkill for the whole place to be rebranded as the headquarters for a team that wasn't working together that often. But Aunt Pepper swore there was a big tax benefit she'd gotten from the rebranding.
In another minute they were up on the science level, following the one bit of corridor that JARVIS had lit for them. "The secure area is hidden behind the janitor's closet in front of you," the AI informed him, once he stopped at an unassuming door.
"Sneaky," Dean said, appreciatively.
As soon as they'd opened it, a false wall at the back of the small room full of cleaning supplies opened into a slightly-larger room. It was dimly lit by recessed lighting and had matte gray walls. Other than a small bundle of black fabric, the only structures of note in the room were some hooks on the ceiling and what seemed like sci-fi ray gun barrels on opposite sides of the room, at about chest height for Harry.
"Is that to kill you if you turn evil?" his best friend checked.
"Inductive chargers. Powerful ones. So I don't actually have to plug in the phone. Communicator. Thing."
"Ooh, yeah. Wires bad for this, huh?"
"Very. Want to help me set it up?" Harry asked, unhooking the toggles on the Vanir-made oilcloth bag.
All that was inside was something that seemed very much like an oversized wooden marionette, even including the strings, though only connected to the back of the neck. As both teens unfolded the humanoid puppet, it was apparent that the red-rune-etched holly wood was almost exactly the same height and build as Harry. And would stay that way, due to the blood magic connecting it to him.
They got it to hang from the ceiling hooks in a basic T-pose like a glitching video game character model, feet barely off the floor and "heart" centered in between the inductive charging nodes. "You might want to step out of the room for this one," Harry cautioned his friend.
"Why? Oh! Right. Naked. Guess this is easier than trying to dress it like a dolly," Dean agreed, walking out into the janitor's closet and turning his back on the room.
"Here goes," Harry said, and then made a fairly-complex gesture with his arms, particularly the hand wearing the sling ring. Instead of opening a normal portal, a ring of sparks rushed down his entire body. As it passed, his clothes disappeared. By the time the sparks hit the floor, he was naked except for his sling ring and his invisibility cloak.
And his mannequin, which had experienced a similar shower of sparks, was dressed in the clothes he'd just lost.
"First step worked!" he said, excitedly. He was sure he'd made the runes correctly, but couldn't actually test it in no-teleportation Hogwarts. The mechanism was well-documented, and only slightly advanced, though used some blood magic. He'd had to take blood from his chakra points to scribe the runes, and had basically created a full-scale voodoo doll of himself. Hence the secure closet, lest anyone think about grabbing it. Hermione had found the process when she'd been looking up information about what forms of blood magic were legal, after his run-in with Dar-Benn. "Just give me a second to get on my onesie."
The replacement black undergarments had been specially fitted for him based on use data from the basic ones he'd worn in the fights in New York and Chicago. And they had a "phone" built into the chestpiece, rather than his own phone just getting shoved in a pocket. It was much closer to the internal comms that Tony used in the Iron Man suit, since it didn't really need a screen of its own while he was wearing his mask. The communicator was armored to better withstand any hits he might take to the chest, and the garment included a few other pieces of armor at key points (including integrated groin protection).
"You can look," Harry said, once he'd struggled into the outfit semi-blindly (his glasses having gone to the mannequin). It was a lot easier to finish getting dressed once he'd pulled on the mask (which, later in the summer, he'd finally gotten around to adjusting to have internal lenses with his prescription, rather than relying on contacts while he was in costume). The rest of the armor went on without much difficulty.
"And the cloak and ring didn't go?" Dean confirmed.
"Yeah. I specifically excluded neckwear, even though I bet it wouldn't go anyway unless it wanted to. But it was probably safer to not risk it screwing the magic up if it tried to take it."
"It's weird the way that mask changes your voice. But you should get some lifts on the boots if you really want people to think you're not Harry Potts."
"Laugh it up, fuzzball," he grumbled. Dean was still growing like a weed and had already crossed six feet, though he'd probably always be slender. Meanwhile, Harry was just hoping for another inch or two and didn't think it was too likely. "Alright, step back and I'll switch again."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Arcane, sir!"
"No respect. Even in Avengers Tower in my supersuit, I get no respect." Harry sighed and then made the requisite gesture again. Once more, a portal descended that only switched his clothing. When it was done, he was back in his street clothes and the Arcane costume was on the mannequin.
"That was really cool," Dean informed him. "You could barely see a seam between one set of clothes and the other. How does it feel?"
"Exactly like I'm going through a portal that's only taking my clothes. It's weird. But convenient! And now my clothes feel minty fresh. Glad Hermione suggested I put some cleaning runes on that thing." He checked himself over to make sure that he had everything he meant to still be wearing and then announced, "JARVIS, everything is in place. Please start security and charging."
"Active," the virtual assistant agreed, as they stepped out of the room and the hidden door slid shut behind them.
"I'd say let's run around in this haunted science mansion for a while," Dean suggested, closing the janitor closet behind them, "but I guess I should go see my family."
"Sure. Let's grab stuff from my room and we can head over."
A little more blasé about people in the know, Dean didn't bother calling before they left. His mother knew to expect him. He just had Harry open a portal into his room and both boys walked out. "Mom! I'm home!"
"And he just sneaked through the house!" Grace Thomas' voice said, seeming like she was inventing an explanation on the spot as cover for an unplanned guest.
"It's okay, Ms. T," Peter Parker's voice said from the living room. "I know Harry can teleport."
Sure enough, they stepped out of the bedroom and saw the young science prodigy grinning at them from the couch. He and Olivia, the older of Dean's two sisters, were set up with serious-looking textbooks strewn across the coffee table doing homework.
"I guess they are about the same age," Harry realized. "But how…"
Dean's mother bustled out from the kitchen, hugging Dean while explaining, "Pepper had me set up the requirements for the Stark Science School… I may have made sure that they'd work for my girls?"
"It's okay. I'm also benefiting from nepotism," Peter grinned at Olivia.
"I think like half the kids at the school are," she agreed.
"It's a trial class," Ms. Thomas shrugged helplessly. "And a bunch of donors had family they wanted included. Anyway, Harry, supper's about ready if you can stay?"
"I could eat," Harry agreed, realizing that he hadn't actually had anything since the leaving feast, and that had been probably most of a day earlier.
Over a delicious meal, Harry suggested, "If we'd known you'd be here, Peter, we could have just brought Ned with us, too."
"Oh, right, Ned's back!" Peter agreed. "I haven't been able to talk to him all semester, and it's weird."
"Guess he didn't buy an owl," Olivia rolled her eyes at the absurdity of Vanir communication with all the sour grapes of a near-teen that had to settle for Iron Man magnet school rather than learning to cast spells.
"I'll add you to my email list," Harry offered. "Hopefully JARVIS can read Ned's handwriting to transcribe any letters he sends you."
"Your… secretary?" Peter asked.
"Tony Stark's artificial intelligence," Dean corrected. "Guy basically builds SkyNet and Harry just uses it to check his email while he's at school."
"He does a bunch of other stuff!" Harry disagreed. "But, yeah, it's weird when you realize he's an AI, since you can just ask him and he can do so much stuff. It's a lot of trickery, though. Pretty much everything he can do is variations on things Tony set up specifically for his tech. He's far from a general AI."
"So he's not going to try to nuke the planet and make Terminators?" Peter confirmed.
"Well… I think Tony was working on teaching him how to remote control the Iron Man armors, so let's not rule that out," Harry admitted. It really was weird to rely so heavily on an AI, in a world that didn't have anything else of the sort. "But JARVIS doesn't really ever take initiative on anything, just responds to requests and follows rules people have set up. So we're probably fine. Anyway! I better get going. Thanks so much for the meal, Ms. Thomas."
"We'll see you for Christmas?" she checked.
"I don't know what Aunt Pepper has planned, but I'll try to stop by. Or bring you guys to Malibu. Portals are really convenient. Later!" he said, proving the utility by opening a sparking hole in space and stepping through directly to his bedroom in Encino.
As soon as he got there, he wasn't sure why he hadn't gone directly to the Malibu mansion. There was nothing of immediate use to him in the bedroom, not even any clothes that still fit. He hadn't really lived in the house in over four years, and had barely spent any time there in the last few. Neither had Pepper, clearly. Everything outside of Harry's room was a mess of opened cabinets and missing items as she'd clearly just stopped by to grab something she needed to take to Tony's house, returning home less and less. At what point in their relationship would she finally sell the old home and admit they lived with Tony full time?
How would Harry feel to lose that last piece of his childhood? Where even was his home?
He spent nearly ten months of the year sleeping in the dorm room at Hogwarts, but it was already becoming clear that the school wasn't really where his head was at any longer, as he was well over halfway through his time there. He'd bonded pretty quickly to his room in the Tower, but it was weird that nobody was there when he'd just stopped by. Tony had decided to move back to his mansion, and it didn't seem like the Avengers were ever really going to call the Tower their home. At the moment, it was just an extremely expensive secondary place to sleep for all of them.
Did he even have a room at the Malibu mansion? He'd stayed in the guest rooms enough, but before he'd left for school there still wasn't really a permanent space for him. Was the next place that was really going to feel like home somewhere that he picked out when he was finally an adult?
Without really doing it consciously, he'd gotten some paper and a pen out of his bag and sat down at the old kitchen table to write a letter to Fleur.
Got back to Earth safe. Here for two weeks. Do you get any time off for winter? Can I see you?
He wasn't even sure how he was going to send the letter, but when he walked out to the backyard, there was Hedwig in her tree. She'd known he'd wind up back in Encino, somehow. "It's weird being back during the winter, huh, girl?" he asked. Especially after coming through London and New York, the sunny California Christmas was a bit jarring. He'd spent the last few in places with snow, or at least cold. It was 60 degrees in the yard on what was mid-afternoon, LA time, Friday, December 21st. Hedwig didn't seem that bothered by the temperature change. "Can you take this to Fleur? You can come back here if you like it best. I'll check in on you."
As she flew away, quickly disappearing into one of the the aerial Night Roads only post owls seemed to know how to use, Harry sighed and went back inside to lock up. He didn't even have house keys anymore. Why would he need them? With another portal, he stepped through into the Malibu mansion.
The enormous house was warm and sunlit, but empty. There was a highly-vetted cleaning crew that came through on the regular. All the damage from back when Tony and Rhodey fought had long-since been repaired to the point you'd never notice it, even though they'd smashed through walls. "JARVIS, is anyone home?"
"Mr. Stark is in the garage. Ms. Potts and Mr. Hogan are still at the Stark offices," the AI answered.
"Which room am I in?"
"The usual one, sir."
"Got it," Harry agreed, and started walking to that end of the house. While he wouldn't trade the hard-earned sling ring for it by a long shot, maybe the problem was that he missed being picked up from school. He'd hit enough adulthood that his parental figures no longer even needed to make sure he was in the right place. He could go anywhere.
Where he went was the guest room he'd stayed in the past few times he'd been at the mansion. They hadn't really taken the effort to do it up like his room, as they had in the Tower. It was fine. It had a nice computer and TV with multiple game consoles. He had privacy at the opposite end of the house from Tony and Pepper (though Happy, who did have semi-permanent use of a spare room in the mansion, it turned out, was across the hall). But it was mostly a place to sleep.
He unloaded more clothing than looked like it would fit in the bag and put it in the drawers and closets, then went looking for Tony.
The garage was kind of a mess. DUM-E, the robot arm, was wearing a dunce cap and trying to wield a broom to clean up the space. Harry was never sure why Tony never upgraded his first attempt at a virtual intelligence, yet still treated it like an idiot. A therapist would probably have a field day. The robotic arm couldn't even really be counted on to sweep. In addition to scattered electronics detritus and snacks on the floor, pieces of Iron Man armor were scattered on various tables around the room.
"Maverick!" Tony greeted, as Harry let himself into the secure space. "I thought you weren't back until Friday?"
"It is Friday?"
"JARVIS, how long have I been awake?"
"Seventy hours, sir," the AI informed him.
"That'd do it. Friday. Huh," the sleep-deprived billionaire observed, "that'd be a good name for an AI." Harry realized he'd stripped down to an athletic t-shirt and his boxer shorts, a pair of blue jeans across a table nearby, and was using some kind of jet injector gun to shoot himself in various places along his thighs, wincing every time he did.
"Tony. Are you having a psychotic break?"
"What? No! Mark forty-two. Subdermal positional transponders for the armor pieces to attach to. Very scientific."
"Okay, I guess so. I had to do something like that for my suit frame," Harry admitted, weirdly captivated by his de facto father figure repeatedly shooting himself with medical implants that his armor could use as tracking beacons.
"Right! You mentioned that. Why you needed the secure locker. Is that done? Let's see it." It was a little jarring to suddenly have Tony Stark's full attention when he'd been totally distracted a moment earlier.
Harry nodded, moved into a clear area of the room, and repeated his mudra. He could tell the energy drain was significantly higher across the country compared to in the same room, but as a once-a-fight cast, it hopefully wouldn't be a big deal. Once again, he had the weird feeling of his clothes changing along a line running down his body, and in a moment he was in the Arcane costume.
"That was rad," Tony agreed. "I feel like I've been wasting my time here. JARVIS, did you get any of that? Can we figure out portals?"
"The sensor data is subtle and irrational, sir, but I will continue analyzing."
"That's me, subtle and irrational," Harry made a so-mysterious gesture, waving his hands in front of his face. It was interesting that the AR lenses in his mask automatically displayed little wireframe tags on each of Tony's medical transponders. Honestly, a ton of stuff in the garage had little metadata flags in his goggles. It was probably good to walk around in it for a moment and get used to the new undersuit, with its protection in… sensitive areas. "So you're almost done with the forty-two?"
"Yeah. Actually, getting these things into my hard-to-reach areas will go a lot faster with you helping. Tell me about your semester while you shoot microchips into my back."
Harry nodded and then summoned another quick-change portal, going back to his clothes. "Well, do you want to hear about the mean alien lady stuck in hot pink robes first, or that we found a holodeck hidden in the school…"
By Harry's third sunset of the day, they'd finished getting Tony fully tagged, and experimented with summoning the armor. It had some hiccups, as pieces tended to fly in various directions and smash objects while they were trying to orient. Harry refused to point out that Tony's armor-activating gestures looked like he was doing a magical girl transformation, because he didn't want pushback on what his somatic components looked like.
Nursing a bloody lip but carrying a feeling of success, Tony grudgingly agreed to wander upstairs and see if Pepper would be back, soon. He had JARVIS put on the six-o'-clock news on the big screen upstairs while they waited. The biggest story seemed to be a holiday family film festival at the Chinese Theater the next day, so they weren't expecting the show to suddenly cut to a paramilitary recruitment trailer with the production value of the video from The Ring.
Over the disjointed footage, a man's voice with an obviously-fake Americana accent narrated, "Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher. America... Ready for another lesson?
"In 1864, in Sand Creek, Colorado," the skinny, dark-bearded white man explained, "the US military waited 'til the friendly Cheyenne braves had all gone hunting. Waited to attack and slaughter the families left behind… and claim their land. Thirty-nine hours ago the Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait was attacked. I… I… I did that.
"A quaint military church filled with wives and children, of course. The soldiers were out on maneuvers. The braves were away. President Ellis."
"Oh, did Ellis get reelected?" Harry wondered, not really sure what movie the trailer was for and having missed the year's presidential election. Tony shushed him, weirdly engrossed.
The showy terrorist continued, "You continue to resist my attempts to educate you, sir. And now you've missed me again. You know who I am. You don't know where I am. And you'll never see me coming."
With that, a logo that was familiar to Harry appeared on screen, before returning to the newscasters, who seemed confused that they'd regained control of their broadcast.
"Who's that guy?" Harry asked, having obviously missed any news that might explain it.
"Terrorist leader. Several bombings the last few months. Blew up an air force base on Wednesday, like he said. Has the tech to take over all the TV broadcasts in the country, I guess," Tony seemed fascinated by this last point if nothing else. But then he mentioned his real issue, "That logo. It's what the people that kidnapped me used."
"The Ten Rings, yeah. I remember you looking into it."
"Yeah. Yeah. If that guy's behind them… I owe him. He calls himself the Mandarin."
Harry blinked. He'd gotten the basic warning about anything to do with the Ten Rings from Kamar-Taj, and learned more from Ying Nan about the story of Wenwu, the immortal warlord who had sought out Ta Lo and left with her sister as his wife. That guy was the number one person he'd sworn to never tell about the way into the hidden kingdom. And, well, from the descriptions he'd been given, Harry was sure about one thing…
"That guy is not the Mandarin."
Notes:
I really gave serious thought about having MJ being Dean's little sister (different father, different last name), but that seemed like just one coincidence too far. So who knows what Peter's friendship with Olivia Thomas will mean for his later relationships? Stay tuned!
Chapter 81: New Genius on the Throne
Chapter Text
"It tested well with focus groups, alright?" Rhodey explained the next day at Neptune's Net over lunch. The place had okay seafood, overpriced beer, and a big patio full of Malibu beachgoers. Importantly, it was only ten miles from the mansion and saw enough celebrities that Tony could eat there in relative peace.
"I am Iron Patriot," the billionaire mocked, doing a gravelly voice. "It sucks!"
"Listen! 'War Machine' was a little too aggressive, alright? This sends a better message."
"Is this like the New Coke, thing?" Harry checked. Like many kids, he was fascinated by why Coke was called Coca-Cola Classic, and had looked it up. "You know, the sweeter formula tested well in small doses with focus groups, but nobody wanted to drink a whole can?"
"See! The kid gets it," Tony waved as if that was his victory point. "I'm not saying that War Machine was perfect, but at least it had some style. And you let another bunch of idiots touch the suit again!"
"You're not a government arms contractor anymore!" Rhodey argued, and then backpedaled, "Which is fine. But I legally can't give you the suit to work on."
"It's my suit. I'm just loaning it to you. I could work on my suit."
"I think Aunt Pepper technically lost that case," Harry corrected. She'd worked on the lawsuit for a while after the incident with Hammer, but even a company as big as Stark Industries couldn't win against the federal government when they really wanted to own an Iron Man suit.
Rhodey continued, "And we had a third party do diagnostics to make sure there aren't any backdoors, like with Hammer. I can seal the damned thing like I'm a ninja turtle."
"Hey! That would be a better name than Iron Patriot," Tony figured. "Give it a coat of green paint. I bet whoever owns the ninja turtles would pay you for that product placement."
"It would probably test better with millennials," Harry agreed.
"Yeah," the Air Force captain sighed, realizing he probably would rather be Ninja Turtle than Iron Patriot. "I'm not a ninja, though."
"Speaking of which, you know who is? The real Mandarin," Tony got to the point he'd invited Rhodey out to make. "The guy on TV is some kind of fake."
"So fake he's done nine bombings?" Rhodey revealed, then covered, "That's classified, by the way. Public only knows about three. Covered under SHIELD NDAs, or whatever, for both of you."
"He's taken credit for nine bombings," Harry argued. "Did he ever send any warnings in advance? Riddler clues that make sense afterwards?"
"What kind of idiot would paint a target the size of the US military on their back if they weren't really doing it?" the pilot asked, not saying no. "I mean, sure, sometimes you get multiple terrorist groups trying to claim bombings, and you have to figure out which one really did it. But nobody else is claiming this."
"Did you actually ask the Ten Rings?" Tony suggested. "Bet they're pretty pissed this white guy is pretending to be them."
"Do you have a phone number for them?" The question was asked of both Avengers.
"I might be able to find out," Harry admitted. "But I don't want to get on their radar at all. Their boss is bad news on the magic side of things. But he's not the guy on the TV."
"I can run that up the flagpole and see if it changes anything," Rhodey relented. "But even if he's blaming someone else, he's still got a sophisticated operation. We can't even find bomb casings for these devices."
"Could it be someone else with Chitauri tech?" Harry wondered. "Like Doctor Bighead was using?"
"Wrong energy signature," Tony admitted, having done a little research since the previous night. "Even if they blew the tech into atoms, there'd be all kinds of exotic particles. These are basically pure thermal."
"Not even any known accelerants or other bomb chemicals," the pilot agreed.
"Do you mind signing my drawing?" a small girl with long brown hair interrupted. She was with a smaller blond boy in rectangular glasses that was probably her brother. A whole bar full of adults that knew not to bother the celebrities, but it was always the kids.
The picture was a pretty basic crayon drawing of Iron Man taking the missile into the wormhole at New York. Maybe Harry was a little too dismissive, since Dean had been turning in much better work when he was the girl's age. Harry probably couldn't do any better. "I don't mind," Tony agreed charmingly, drawing on years of being famous in public. "What's your name?"
"Erin."
Tony started signing the drawing, finally noticing the boy. Before he say what he was thinking about the kid's appearance, Harry checked him with, "You're going to make a Christmas Story joke, right?"
"Fine, I'll get newer references," Tony chuckled, though it felt a little forced with the sudden disruption to his planned conversation.
Rhodey clearly wasn't done with his point, and said, "Especially if this guy is just a fraud, it's something the government can handle. Wants to handle. After last May… aliens… come on, guys, we need to look strong. We can't just call the Avengers for every domestic problem."
"I get it," Tony said, and Harry felt his scar crawl. His eyes snapped up to Tony's face, where he suddenly looked ill. There were too many people. He shouldn't have risked such a packed location. The drawing wasn't great, but it was good enough to make him think about New York. About the missile and outer space. He was taking too long to sign, his signature scrawling. "I… I broke the crayon," he apologized, hand on his face.
"Are you okay, Mr. Stark?" Erin asked.
At the same time her little brother was leaning forward, asking, "How did you get out of the wormhole?"
Tony gasped and staggered up from the table, rushing out of the front of the restaurant as Rhodey yelled after him and gave chase. "The bomb took out the alien mothership, and then Arcane and the Hulk caught him," Harry summed up for the little kid who'd just catalyzed what was clearly a panic attack. "Sorry, we have to go."
By the time he got out front, Tony was in his armor, pushing his best friend back to clear space, and launching into the air. "Well shit," Rhodey said as Harry walked up. "What was that?"
They picked up the conversation in Rhodey's car as he drove Harry back toward the mansion, after they'd paid the tab. "Panic attack, I think," Harry said.
"PTSD," the military man sighed. "We gotta get him to see a psychiatrist. Your aunt says he's sleeping even less than usual."
"Or talk to somebody," Harry agreed. "Guess he hasn't sat you down for war stories?"
"No. That's how they handle it in D&D land?"
"It's better if you talk to people that were there with you, but just telling the story over and over seems to help. I think that's half the reason they make everyone do it. I've told my part of New York a bunch of times. Some of them were at a big party with Thor up in Asgard."
"I bet that dude throws a rager," Rhodey joked, though was a little sad that he hadn't gotten to talk to Thor or Captain America yet.
"I, uh, might have had some mead and been a little snarky with the queen."
"I won't tell. What happens on Asgard, stays on Asgard. Was the girl there?"
"Yeah," he didn't realize he had a wistful grin, but Rhodey glanced over and clocked it, Harry's face framed by the horizon as they drove east along the Pacific Coast Highway. "We only got to talk a little, but Thor was trying to wingman for me. I wrote to see if she can get away to do anything while I'm back."
"Long distance is tough. Part of why I've never managed a long term relationship. But it's good that you're trying."
"Yeah, I guess I don't remember you ever being with anyone. You don't really spend much time at a house or anything, either? How do you manage it?"
"The lack of roots?" the older man asked. "I guess you find a mission that can be your roots, wherever you are. Mine's the Air Force."
Harry nodded, thinking about that as they completed the drive back to the Malibu mansion. "Thanks for the ride. I guess I'll go talk to Aunt Pepper and see if she can get Tony into therapy."
"Good luck. I'll start asking around about whether the CIA actually validated that the Ten Rings is involved. Maybe it will at least give the spooks some better ideas of where to send me."
"Be careful, Rhodey," he said, stepping out of the car. "This may not be Avengers stuff… but since New York, I bet a lot of people with weird tech and powers don't think they have to be extra careful to stay hidden anymore. I definitely don't."
"Heard. You stay safe, too. Maybe you can be your honest self with us, now, but you're still the only Avenger with a secret identity."
"And that's why I waited until we got home to open a portal," Harry grinned and waved, as he walked into the house to do just that.
While Stark Industries was focusing so much on the Tower in Manhattan, the LA office had also been going through a lot of changes. And not all of them were the greatest ideas ever. While Pepper and Tony were so focused on the other side of the country, a well-meaning C-suite executive had the bright idea that Stark's green energy could be promoted by greening up the Stark LA campus while the building itself was given a facelift.
Thus, in an ongoing West Coast drought, the facility that once featured only a few bits of lawn and roadside trees had been transformed into a lushly-forested expanse, like office parks in parts of the country that had regular rainfall. The trees were mature and not even native. The water consumption was atrocious. Fortunately, Tony had come up with a pretty clever water-reclamation system to hydrate the greenery so the company wasn't completely obliterated by the press, but the person behind the initiative had been turbo-fired.
It was a pretty cool little park in a set of otherwise-mostly-barren industrial blocks in Long Beach.
Harry got a good look at it from Pepper's old office, which was Tony's current office again, and was, therefore, a pretty safe place to portal into while Tony was flying off his panic attack somewhere over the city. From the upper-floor windows, he could easily see that the treeline was just thick enough to hide the rest of the city if you were on ground level. That was probably why Aunt Pepper had moved her office down to the bottom floor, where she could look out on the grassy courtyard.
No longer the focal point of the building, Harry wandered through the former executive suite that had been converted into design space for the company's engineers. On the Saturday before Christmas, the level was basically empty. Only workaholics like Harry's aunt were trying hard to finish up on a weekend so close to the holidays.
He absently checked every computer that still seemed to be on to see if it was unlocked, rifled through a few desk drawers for unshredded documents, and flailed obviously at a senior developer's door while one of the few employees in the office walked by. Not confronted, he wandered to the elevators and took them down to the first floor, and wandered into Happy's new office as head of security.
"Probably a fail on the penetration test," he informed the former bodyguard as he sat in the chair across from his desk. The security office wasn't far from the CEO's, but didn't have as nice of a view, just one window showing the parking lot.
"Anybody ask to see your badge?" Happy checked.
"Nope. Not even when I was trying to get into a locked office. And I found two unlocked computers, and three desks with papers in them that probably ought to be locked up. And you still don't have shapeshifter protocols."
"Do you really think we need shapeshifter protocols?"
Harry shrugged, "Fleur can change her appearance. So could Loki. And Nat mentioned that SHIELD is working on some kind of holographic disguise mask or something."
"I think the fact you're dating kills me more than any of the other weird stuff. And that it's not the Granger girl."
"We're not really dating. And Hermione's like a sister to me. Anyway, yeah. Stark isn't stopping regular people wandering in looking for stuff. Anyone with powers or stealth tech would be in here no problem. I guess I did cheat and come in through Tony's office. And the guy that let me wander around maybe just recognized me."
"I was thinking about getting Tony to copy DUM-E or U's programs to make janitor bots. You think people could sneak in as janitors?" Happy was enjoying having someone back him up on his quest for tighter security.
"For sure. But I doubt either of them would do a very good job. Have you seen how gross the garage is right now? DUM-E just pushes the trash around."
"JARVIS?"
"He runs security on the Tower, so I don't know why he's not already hooked up here. If people wear their badges maybe he could have an easier time tracking anyone that doesn't have one. And periodic password or code phrase checks on even people with badges?" Harry had spent a lot of time learning from Mad-Eye Moody, and thinking about how Constant Vigilance could be applied to Earth security.
"I'm having a hard enough time pitching badges to your aunt."
"I'll push her. You want to go bother her now?"
"Yeah. Hopefully she's not in a meeting. I'm not a tech genius like the rest of you." Happy helplessly gestured at the calendar system on his desktop. "I have to get one of my guys to help me check out conference rooms."
"Don't forget to lock your computer."
"Right. Thanks. Badge."
Harry took the visitor's pass that Happy handed him, and the two of them walked out into the main drag of the new executive suite. As was the Stark way, assistants still sat outside of massive offices in thoroughly-imposing desks of their own. "We should train the secretaries in self defense," Harry mused, thinking of them as the last line of protection between badgeless invaders and helpless upper managers. He spent a lot of time thinking about teaching people martial arts.
"Badge?" Happy was yelling at various people he saw on the floor who didn't have their badges prominently displayed. "Badge? Hey, badge? Good."
"Does Aunt Pepper have a few minutes?" Harry checked with Bambi, still hanging onto the top of the ladder for Stark LA executive assistants.
"If you can remind her to eat lunch," she agreed, pushing over the CEO's delivery bag for the boys to take in. Having solidified her position of relative power, Bambi was less inclined to make a fuss about Harry skating in without an appointment. The risk of trying to bar the CEO's kid wasn't worth it for the joy of exercising her limited authority.
She gave Happy a stern look, though, considering whether his newness to the position of head of security might give her a window to establish dominance. In the game of office politics at a Fortune 500 company, you won or you got fired.
"Harry, are we having lunch?" Pepper asked as they walked in with the bag. "I thought you were having lunch with Tony and Rhodey?"
"I did. And now you have to eat," he agreed, putting the bag on her desk and taking a seat.
She finally looked at a clock and admitted, "Sorry. This was supposed to be a light day. But I got caught up and I think I still have two more meetings." Opening her meal, she promised, "I'll be present for the rest of the week, though. I'll try to be."
"One of the meetings was with me, if you want to hear it while you eat?" Happy checked.
"Shapeshifter protocols," Harry made jazz hands, trying to prepare his aunt for the conversation.
Happy's pitch was a little all over the place, but Harry helped reign him in. Pepper was about to come in hot about a 300% rise in staff complaints until Harry pointed out the results of his ad hoc penetration test. She finally decided, "I'll talk to Tony about integrating JARVIS. And I think we have a training department; Happy, can you get them to write a mandatory security course? We shouldn't be doing that badly." She sighed and asked, "And you really think we need to worry about corporate espionage from shapeshifters?"
"Or other magic or high-tech disguises, yes ma'am," Happy agreed, thrilled his pitch had gone so well. "It's getting weird out there."
"It's always been weird," she disagreed, "it's just now the weird is less worried about people finding out."
"Tony's fault. And mine," Harry shrugged. "Well, and Thor and Loki's, probably."
They chatted for a while longer about other things, before Bambi poked her head in and said, "It's almost time for your four-o'-clock."
"Did you clear this with me?" Happy asked.
"Believe me, I kind of wish you had the power to save me from this very annoying thing," she told him, standing to usher Happy and Harry out of her office.
"How so?"
"I used to work with him, and he used to ask me out all the time, so it's a little awkward."
"Wait, is this the AIM guy?" Harry checked, having heard the stories about Pepper's job between college and Stark Industries.
"Yes, it's… Killian?" she asked, spotting the guy outside her office that looked like a pro surfer who'd gone into tech—slender, handsome, and well-tanned.
"Pepper. You look great. You look really great," the man said, as Pepper led him back inside, the glass doors closing behind Harry and Happy.
"I don't like that," the head of security complained.
"Why? I mean, I guess he's better looking than she said in her stories, but…"
Happy led him over to one side of the executive waiting lounge, and admitted, "You haven't been around, but things have been a little tense. Tony barely leaves the garage. Now some handsome other rich guy shows up when they're having problems. Your aunt's the best thing that ever happened to Tony."
"Oh, right. I need to talk to her about getting him into therapy," Harry shrugged, not that worried about it. Killian might be handsome, but he'd gotten a skeezy vibe from the guy, of a different but similar type as from other schmoozing, second-rate tech entrepreneurs like Justin Hammer. "I'm sure Aunt Pepper won't be that into it."
They both glanced inside, where the man in question was very in Pepper's personal space and she wasn't using her desk to block him. Displacing his annoyance, Happy turned to the guy in the skinny suit with a buzzcut that had probably come with Killian as his driver and raised his voice. "Hey, guy." He tapped his badge authoritatively once he had the man's attention.
The guy, in the douchiest way possible, reached behind him to pick up the guest pass without sitting up or looking at it and waved it at them. "Merry Christmas," he said, insouciantly.
Happy had pulled out a tablet and was busily swiping around, having managed to make it into the guest database. "I think we met this guy, at some point," he narrated, quietly, while Harry shoulder surfed. Aldrich Killian had checked in with his guest, Eric Savin, for a meeting about a possible partnership between Stark Industries and Advanced Idea Mechanics. "Some science conference back in 99. New Year's eve, maybe. But he used a cane. Bad hair. Hippy."
"Makes sense from when she complained about him," Harry agreed. "Look, Happy, you're overthinking it, you don't need to–"
He was interrupted by Tony calling, Happy absently accepting the call and the screen being replaced by video of Tony, back in the garage. "Is this fore-head of security?" he joked. Harry could see from the inset picture that Happy was holding the tablet in a way that just showed off the upper part of his face.
"Feeling better?" the youngest of the three asked before Happy could rant about Killian.
"Maverick? Yeah. Sorry about busting out of there. Rhodey drove you home?"
"He did. Been helping Happy talk to Aunt Pepper about security stuff. We need JARVIS set up here, like at the Tower."
"I thought I already did that. JARVIS, make a note."
"Yes, sir," the AI agreed.
"So the head of security thing is working out? Not just harassing interns?" Tony checked.
"Back when I would tell people I was Iron Man's bodyguard, they would laugh in my face," Happy said, not thinking it was funny. "I had to leave while I still had a shred of dignity. Now I have a real job. Watching Pepper. Keeping supervillains and Harry's girlfriend from stealing company secrets."
"Shapeshifter protocols," Harry agreed, still off camera.
"That's why I try not to keep anything too important at the office," Tony shrugged. "You're both watching Pepper?" he asked, recognizing the background of her waiting room and realizing it was weird they were out there but not in the office. "What's going on? Fill me in."
Harry tuned out the conversation as he was unable to stop Happy from recounting Killian's presence to Tony. He did help the man flip his camera to show off Pepper's office, where the AIM founder was using a very cool compact hologram projector to flirt and show off a projection of what was probably his brain. Maybe he was pitching hologram and real-time MRI technology? Regardless, it was embarrassing how much Eric Savin was probably overhearing the conversation, as loud and demonstrative as Happy was being not very far across the room.
After indicating his intention to follow Killian (at least a little more quietly) and Tony making a joke to get off the phone call that he'd made, Happy asked Harry, "Want to help me follow this guy?"
"Isn't that stalking?"
"It's proactive security. I'm taking initiative to reduce risks to Stark Industries."
"Fine. But it's just to keep you from getting in trouble," Harry agreed. It was also because he didn't want to be at the mansion while his aunt argued with Tony about therapy. "I just need to talk to her before we leave."
"I'll get her car ready. And get that guy's plates. Wait, can you do anything… weird, to follow them?"
"Only if I stood behind his car waving my arms around. He might notice."
"Honest police work it is," Happy decided, then got up since it looked like Pepper was about done with her meeting.
Killian was still flirting with Pepper on the way out of the building, and Harry saw him kiss her on the cheek. She then talked to Happy for a moment and walked back toward Harry, flustered. "Almost forgot to take you home," she told him, walking back into her office to get her stuff.
"I think Happy wants to take me to see a movie or something," Harry told her. "You should talk to Tony when you get home, though. About therapy. He's got PTSD."
"PTSD? Tony?" she said, derailed from whatever she'd been thinking about as she put her things into her bag. Her brain caught up and she admitted, "That… might make sense. He'll never go to therapy, though."
"He needs to talk to somebody," Harry shrugged. "Also, Killian is sketchy as hell."
"Yeah," she huffed. "He wanted us to invest in something that sounds like more super soldier research. Weaponizable."
"See if he'll license us the hologram and MRI stuff."
"Huh. That was pretty good. I'm so used to Tony's tech, I forget what's crazy. I'll email him about it after the holidays," she decided, walking back out of her office. "And I guess I'll try to talk to Tony, tonight. Did something happen at lunch?"
"Yeah, but get him to tell you," Harry said, having done as much as any teenager wanted to do playing go-between with his parental figures.
"Okay. Have fun at the movies, you two. Nothing too gory," she said as she walked back out and passed Happy.
"Yes, ma'am," the head of security agreed. As she walked out of earshot he asked, "Movies?"
A few hours later and a call for a BOLO to a cop that owed Happy a favor, they were following Savin, who'd dropped Killian off at LAX but kept his car and started driving around the city.
"Did you know we'd wind up at the movies?" Happy wondered. The AIM bodyguard had finally parked and left the car at the Chinese Theater, carrying a somewhat-suspicious briefcase in a way that looked like he was on a mission.
"Maybe just saying it convinced the Norns to make it happen. My life is strange," Harry shrugged as he and Happy tried to shadow Savin along the Walk of Fame up Hollywood Boulevard. They'd barely avoided getting spotted by him in the parking lot down the street from the theater they'd followed him into. Fortunately, there were a ton of people out, and lots of pop-up stalls to try to sell last-minute Christmas presents to people out for the film festival.
They'd have had no chance of following in the daylight with a less-packed street. The guy moved like he was military-trained, and that was nagging at something in Harry's memory.
In the dark of the late LA evening, Harry clocked a couple dozen people milling in the three-walled courtyard that served as the main entrance into the theater. There were Christmas trees in each corner, vendors for Hollywood kitsch, a food shop doing brisk business, and even a guy doing the living statue bit in silver paint. They watched Savin make a hard turn right into the courtyard, spot someone, and head toward the back corner.
"I'm gonna teach you some tradecraft," Happy insisted, moving over to one of the stalls that had a sunglasses rack. He started trying them on while watching their mark in the mirror.
Harry, who'd had a mountain of tradecraft advice from the likes of Mordo, Bruce, and Natasha, much-less-obviously moved to the other side of the stall where he could watch them through the middle while being mostly obscured.
What they saw was Killian's driver meet with another white man, who was sitting on a bench in the back right. Savin and the new man had a short conversation, with the briefcase handed over. Harry thought they definitely knew each other. The new guy looked a little strung out. "Maybe he's paying off someone for his boss?" Harry suggested.
"I'll just find out," Happy declared, turning and walking boldly into the courtyard. Harry's better vantage left him unable to stop the former boxer, who was soon shoulder-checking the new man and sending the briefcase sprawling. It wasn't money that fell out, but several high-tech silver vials.
Harry had been in enough fights that he was growing accustomed to the moment that things were about to go wrong. Somewhere in the back of his head he noticed the flare of glowing red in the man's face as Happy helped him pick up the fallen items. And to his right, he saw Savin turning and noticing Happy, ready to come back in. "Roll for initiative," Harry whispered to himself.
Unfortunately, he wasn't in costume and there was a big enough crowd that any use of magic would get witnessed. If this was going to turn into some kind of brawl, he needed to clear the place out, both for the safety of the bystanders and for his own secret identity. Especially since Savin had noticed him as he moved around the stall. Harry heard the man posturing to Happy, "What are you doin', buddy? You out with the kid? A little Stark family outing? Getting the snacks for your boss?"
"Yeah, but the snack I picked up means the party's over for you and your junkie girlfriend," Happy tried to quip back, showing off the silver vial that he'd palmed from the briefcase.
Harry just shook his head. Why was Happy showing the probable bad guy that he had evidence easy to hand. As Savin made the obvious attempt to grab it back, Harry started moving to tell the people in the area, "Hey! Iron Man-related fight! Everyone needs to get out of here! For your own safety!"
Out of the corner of his eye, moving through the courtyard, Harry could see that Happy actually landed a punch on Savin's face… which glowed red and immediately healed. Nobody was really listening to Harry's warnings until the seemingly-powered man managed to grab Happy and bodily flung him a few body lengths through the air and into the stall where he'd been browsing sunglasses.
"Mandarin attack!" Harry yelled, as people started to scream realizing there really was a big fight. He'd unconsciously put it together, with what the Room of Requirement had shown him about ex-military people that turned glowing red. "Everyone get out!" He even put a little magical boost on his voice. That managed to get the crowd moving. Maybe he'd be able to take on two of the augmented soldiers if everyone cleared out?
"Savin!" the second man was yelling, before Harry could plan a strategy. He'd seemingly been unable to resist getting his fix, and had decided to huff one of the bigger vials during the short fight.
"What?" the bodyguard turned and asked, having been stalking to further assault Happy.
"Help! Help me!" was all the stranger said, glowing redder and redder, just like the simulated enemies that Harry and Dean had lit on fire. The ones that had exploded. Savin's eyes widened and he started to run.
Harry had at least convinced the bystanders to flee. Maybe they were all clear of the blast? His sling ring was in his pouch, so, even if he'd wanted to risk his identity, he didn't have time to make the man blow up elsewhere, like he had with the Bean. He started to sprint for the theater entrance as Happy rolled behind the stall. With Harry's speed, he probably could have made it safely inside.
But there was a family of four exiting unawares.
He couldn't get through the doors and pull them with him in what felt like the split second remaining. "Get down!" he yelled at them instead, then turned and spun up the biggest dragonfire-absorbing shield he'd made yet. Hopefully nobody would notice it in the chaos as he interposed a circular wall of layered magic in between five people and an oncoming inferno.
It definitely caught the heat of the blast, ablating it like it was made for, keeping them all from being instantly turned into black soot on the wall. But a moment behind the worst of the heat was the pressure wave it created by flash-frying the air. And there was an open doorway for the pressure differential to launch them all into.
Harry crashed through the mullion in the middle of the double doors head first and knew nothing more, instantly unconscious.
Chapter 82: Rack and Ruin
Chapter Text
He woke up in a dimly lit room, windows shuttered against the morning sun. It was warm and he was laying on something soft, for all that he felt numbed. There was a vague ache in his right arm, and the back of his head. Maybe some of his ribs. Calm beeping noises and the faint whir of machinery were the only sounds nearby, but there was a bustle of movement not far away.
Ah, a hospital room, he realized as he managed to peel his eyes open. Even without his glasses, he could tell that much. He tried to move his head but it appeared to be locked into place. "Ugh," was all he managed to get out of his question about where he was.
"Harry!" Aunt Pepper's voice said, and in a second she swam into blurry view above him, from where she'd been sitting at the side of the room.
"Everybody live?" he managed to ask, hopefully.
She got that face like she was protecting him from information, and said, "They think you saved at least twenty people by getting them to run." His rough guess had been more people than that were in the courtyard, so what she wasn't telling him was which ones didn't get out.
"The family? In the door?"
"Injured, but alive. They think you used some kind of Stark personal safety device. They didn't really see what it was, but they're grateful." She thought about that for a minute, and realized, "We really should make something like that."
"Happy?" he worried that the man wasn't standing up, even though he clearly got the sense that he was in the room.
"Still unconscious. He's right there," Pepper gestured to Harry's left, confirming his feelings. She teared up a little, "He's on a ventilator." Ah, that was the machinery noise. "They aren't sure when he'll wake up." The "or if" was implied. "Harry. What happened? Did they set off a bomb to target you and Happy? That's what the media thinks. That's why…"
"No. We followed Killian's driver. That Savin guy. He gave another guy a drug that made him explode. Was this supposed to be a Mandarin bombing? Maybe they're all guys that explode." While she was reeling from that, he asked, "That's why what?"
"Tony thought they targeted his family," she smiled a little, at the thought of their weird collection of people somehow becoming one. "He was here until a little while ago, but the press ambushed him on the way out. He invited the Mandarin to fight. He gave out the address of the mansion."
"I think they're all military guys with super-powers," Harry groaned. "They're going to blow up the house!" He was just thinking about if one of the soldiers went off like a bomb during a fight with Iron Man, honestly, but it was a strangely prophetic thought. "We need to tell SHIELD. Rhodey can't just let the military do this themselves anymore."
"We don't need to do anything!" she insisted, nonetheless reaching for her phone. "You went through that thing between the theater doors, Harry! It's called a mullion and I didn't even know that until they told me you went through it. Your arm is broken in multiple places, you have cracked ribs, a cracked skull, and they're saying it's a miracle you didn't break your back!"
Oh, right. She'd known intellectually how much danger he got himself into, but this was the first time she'd seen the aftermath. It sucked that it was the worst he'd been hurt, maybe ever. No way to ease into it.
"But the family lived," he told her, patting her on the arm with his working left one.
She was fighting to not openly weep, and she nodded, "Yeah. You saved a lot of people. And you're going to keep getting hurt saving people, aren't you?"
"I must have learned it from someone," he grinned.
"Probably Tony," she managed to give a teary smile.
"Do you have my bag?" he asked, a bit of a non-sequitur. She found it and brought it over, and he fished inside until he came out with two potions. They hadn't had much use for them, but Harry and his friends had never stopped brewing holdouts. "Probably tell SHIELD to come up with an excuse for why I'm not in the hospital anymore."
"Are you allowed to carry around and administer medical potions without a healer to prescribe them?"
He just gave a one-shouldered shrug and downed them with a grimace. The bone-healing potion (affectionately called "skele-gro" by the kids at school) tasted like liquid chalk, and the general healing potion he chased it with was sickeningly sweet to cover what it really tasted like. "I don't know how long this will take. Hopefully less than it takes Tony to get in a fight at the house."
The potions started working immediately, and he hoped they'd take less time than they had when he'd basically smashed his arm to powder playing quidditch under the influence of Fandral's Asgardian alcohol. Pepper put on the news while she made phone calls, and it was non-stop footage from all the helicopters circling the mansion, just waiting for something interesting to happen. "I think Happy's probably going to be okay," he mentioned at one point, while they waited. He felt like he'd be able to tell with his Soul Stone empathy if the man was never going wake up.
He probably had the Norns to thank that something interesting waited to happen until just as he'd managed to climb out of bed (Pepper having grudgingly undone the brace keeping his head from moving) and remove the IVs, rather than while he was still in traction. Glad to have his glasses back (perfectly intact thanks to his rune-work), he was able to see the video feed turn to take in what looked like… "Did they shoot a missile at the house?"
"A missile!?" Pepper turned, face showing how offended she was that someone would shoot a missile at her house. Well, Tony's house. But maybe eventually her house. Practically her house.
"Can't wait any longer," Harry said, wishing he'd had more time to recover. He was probably mostly fine, but his magic was a little low from spending the better part of an hour healing him up. He'd already grabbed his sling ring and managed to do the mudra to switch into his armor one-handed, the cast going with his hospital gown and glasses to the secure room in New York, while his armor appeared around him. "Go with SHIELD when they get here," Arcane ordered her, pulling his broom free of the bag of holding and then handing it to her to keep safe. "If they're shooting missiles at the house…"
"Yeah. Be careful," she ordered, meaning that for both him and Iron Man. "Go!"
He tiredly opened a portal that appeared in the air above the house and jumped through, straddling the Firebolt as he began to fall.
It was chaos when he arrived. The missile had already collided with the living room, a fireball blossoming outwards over the cliff. The news choppers were pulling back, and reporters that had showed up in vans out by the driveway were retreating out of the yard while their camera-people tried to find an angle that left them safe but with visibility on the attack. A dark-haired woman that Arcane didn't recognize was fleeing out of the front of the house and toward a car. "Adding you to the battlespace," JARVIS' voice sounded in his ears, as his comms booted up.
An AR box showed up inside the house to designate where Iron Man was, clearly dangerously close to the explosion. "Maverick! You're okay?"
"Tired but mostly healed," he agreed. "You invited them to the house?"
"I didn't expect them to bring assault choppers. My flight is still booting, by the way. What've you got?"
Three helicopters were coming in over the water from the south, and he could make out panels extending from the sides, which were probably guns and missiles. "Let's keep them from shooting more rockets into the house?" Arcane fed a little magic into the broom to try to meet them before they got into easy aiming range, feeling how low his personal reserves were from the strain. "Don't you have like forty more suits under the house? Can JARVIS run them?"
"Thirty-four that are autonomous. Good thinking in a crisis, kid. JARVIS, boot up the Iron Legion. House Party Protocol." Iron Man's marker was moving through the house, clearly trying to figure out an angle of attack before his flight controls came online.
"Full readiness in ten minutes," the AI suggested.
"It's going to need to be faster," the billionaire corrected. The house shifted slightly, as if already unsteady on its pylons that overhung the cliff. "Skip all tests. Get them in the air."
"Understood, sir."
Arcane had made it to the helicopters as the argument was ongoing, and one of them was turning to try to track him, beginning to spray bullets in an arc that couldn't keep up with his altitude or his speed. He was coming in from their left, so they were hopefully spraying them high enough that they'd miss the residences in the hills and land harmlessly in the state park. Now he just needed to figure out what he could do to fight an attack chopper from a broom while almost magically exhausted.
One of the two vehicles not focused on the young wizard scored another missile hit on the living room.
"I don't know if the house will take another one of those," Arcane worried, not liking the cracks running up the back of the building.
"I really didn't rate it for missile impacts," Iron Man admitted. "Ironic, considering it has a missile silo." He launched the baby grand piano out of the window with a repulsor blast, forcing the nearest helicopter to pull up violently to avoid the collision. "Damn, almost had him."
Managing to get above the chopper that had been firing on him, Arcane had a moment to consider what he could do. He'd been practicing more mudras on the broom, but he wasn't sure he could make a portal from up there. But there was something that was probably more effective on good-old military surplus vehicles that wouldn't work on alien alloys. Giving a moment of thought to the realization that everyone on board was trying to kill Tony, and now him, he made the gesture.
Helicopters, it turned out, failed violently when the steel components in their rotors were suddenly transfigured into softer metals.
"One down. Good job," Iron Man congratulated as the blades went flying off of the top of what was now a metal coffin accelerating at the full speed of gravity into the water below. "I think you got their attention."
The other two had realized that Arcane was the bigger threat at the moment, and were both turning to shoot his way, including launching a missile each. Fortunately, they headed out over the water, and didn't seem to be able to track a fast-moving, human-sized target. It was a hell of a scare to see them bearing down, though.
"I'll just throw the stupid thing," the tech hero grumbled, seemingly mad at his prototype armor for not cooperating. "Get the Legion moving," he reminded JARVIS.
"Momentarily, sir."
There was a sudden explosion behind the chopper closest to the house, where Iron Man had, indeed, flung a mini-missile and ignited it with a repulsor blast. "Uh oh," was all Arcane heard over the comms as the flaming helicopter wound up crashing into the house.
"Tony!" the sorcerer yelled, diving under the last helicopter's firing arc and rushing to make sure his father-figure was okay. The blast seemed to have taken out something structural in the wall of the garage, and the entire facade of the house was sloughing off into the water below. He could see Iron Man's tracking marker descending down the house.
"Really. Would be good. To have flight power," the billionaire's voice complained, seeming stressed.
"Iron Legion deploying," JARVIS gave him instead, as the marker descended with a couple of sports cars and a big chunk of the back of the house into the surf below.
"Send them to catch Tony!" Arcane ordered the AI. "Well, and if any can shore up the house."
"Yeah, follow the kid's orders," the inventor insisted, over the comms, ending with a grunt as the suit hit the water and went under.
Arcane hadn't forgotten about the last helicopter, which didn't seem to be sure that it had completed the job. It had tracked his flight and launched another missile, aiming at the base of the foundation that supported the garage over the cliffs. But the boy wizard had landed on a currently-solid part of the floor, the fires in the room distant enough to not be an immediate worry, and hissed with the exertion of spinning open a portal in front of himself.
He'd placed the other end correctly, and he could see the missile's target through his side of the portal. Which meant the missile went into the other side and came out toward the chopper as if "shoot missile" was a new spell he'd learned.
His targeting wasn't exact, however, and the missiles had enough programming in them to avoid locking onto their owner. But the pilot of the chopper saw its own missile redirected back toward it, noticed several Iron Man armors starting to launch from the other side of the garage where they were exiting the hidden silo, and decided to cut his losses. The vehicle suddenly pulled up and started flying away as fast as it could.
Arcane didn't want to let it get away, but he was going to need everything he had left. "First armors find Tony. Next few start shoring up the house. If there are any left that can follow the chopper and bring it down, do it."
"Understood. I have lost contact with the Mark Forty-Two," JARVIS informed him, two suits diving in after Tony while the remainder started to hover around the house before bracing the foundation and causing the rapid collapse of the building to at least halt. "However, it is unlikely that power to the Iron Legion will last until a repair crew can arrive. I am modeling significant metal fatigue from heat and force."
"Highlight the worst parts and show me how I can get to them," Arcane ordered, putting Tony out of his mind for the moment. He didn't have his underwater breather from the tournament task under Jotunheim quick to hand, or the magic to do anything useful if the Iron Man armor was trapped under tons of brick. But, looking at DUM-E frantically catching U with his servo arm as the two robots were still slowly sliding out of the house, he felt like he could at least save the mansion.
He wasn't sure where home was going to ultimately be, but this was one of the main options.
His visor lit up with red squares highlighting broken foundation supports and blue paths for how he could get to them through the damaged building. Favoring an arm that was still healing, and feeling a pounding headache where the back of his skull was doing the same, he nonetheless began doing the work, broom hooked onto a shoulder where he'd installed a catch that didn't require him to fully stow it in a pocket, but left his hands free. And he set to work transfiguring hot, failing steel back into something much more stable.
The Vanir thought of it as a "repair spell," because it was permanent, unlike most other forms of transfiguration. Transforming an element into another one basically had to be impermanent, unless you really put a lot of power into it. Actually changing atomic structures like that would risk children having the power to create nuclear blasts on a whim. But transforming a material back into itself had fewer conceptual hurdles. Depending on the material lost, it would never be as strong, but it wouldn't just suddenly dissolve into its broken state when the magic ran out the way other transfiguration would.
As he repaired more and more beams and bits of flooring, the ground shifted less and less. It probably also had to do with the increasing number of Iron Legion suits shoring up the house, including one super-chunky suit that had found a key point and latched into place, bracing the whole structure. "Repairing these last two locations should leave the building structurally sound," JARVIS informed him, an unknown amount of time having passed.
"Good, because that's about all I have left," Arcane huffed, hoping that a bed had survived upstairs for him to lay down in. "Did you find Tony?"
"There was evidence that he cut himself free, and his transponder was moving east."
"Why didn't he check in? Did someone manage to capture him?"
The AI admitted, "The Mark Forty-Two contains its own onboard computers, and an instance of my programming. It became desynced from my main network during the attack. If Mr. Stark was unconscious, it would have executed its own attempts to save him."
"So he should just be somewhere on the bluffs? Over in LA?"
"It has limited processing power, and may have been damaged in the impacts. Based on its trajectory, it was likely executing a flight plan I created for Mr. Stark immediately prior to the attack."
"Which was?" Arcane asked, finding it weird that the AI could basically choose to beat around the bush because it had made a mistake. He finished repairing the last highlighted support and slumped to lay on the finally-level floor. DUM-E had managed to move U back away from the hole in the wall where a couple of very-expensive cars had once parked, picked up his broom, and was uselessly moving rubble around on the floor with it.
"Rose Hill, Tennessee. He went to investigate the Mandarin bombings."
"Sure. Great. I think I'd know if he was dying, so he's probably okay. Please tell Aunt Pepper that we're okay."
"Yes, sir," JARVIS agreed, happily. "I regret to inform you that that the third helicopter escaped pursuit. Are you interested in the house guest?"
"The dark-haired lady? Who was she?"
"I do not know, but I have her license plate number. She was most insistent that she be allowed to see Mr. Stark, five minutes before the attack."
"Right. Suspicious. Have the armors check the house over to make sure all the fires are out and we didn't miss anything that needs to be fixed, then start putting them back in the silo." He'd only been out of bed for maybe fifteen minutes, and he was already ready to go back to sleep. "Give me a minute to sit, and then I'll talk to SHIELD."
It was actually more like five minutes. And the only thing that got him moving again with the bone-tiredness of having used so much magic was worry about the rest of the house that he hadn't seen. The glass wall between the garage and the stairs up had shattered, so he didn't have to worry about whether the door worked. The living room was a ruin, with only a narrow path to the rest of the house. It was just fortunate that the fire-suppression systems Pepper had gotten installed after Tony and Rhodey's birthday fight had shut off the gas and kept anything flammable from burning.
Plus, the explosions had probably cleared out anything too flammable anyway.
The interior rooms were remarkably unexploded, though would require major fixes to their walls and ceilings. The room he'd been staying in had a shattered door, with the door frame more of a parallelogram than a rectangle, but his clothing survived. That was good: he'd need something other than a hospital gown when he switched back out of the armor.
Seeing the reporters still milling around outside, he asked, "JARVIS, have you put all the armors away, yet? Is there one that looks the closest to the Mark Forty-Two you can have pretend to be Iron Man and follow me out onto the lawn and through a portal?"
He hoped he was up to another portal.
The ruse seemed to work. Arcane and an Iron Man armor that would probably be assumed to contain Tony Stark walked out of the front of the house where the press could make them out. Arcane gave a tired wave, and JARVIS even managed to have the armor look over the cracks in the house visible from the front and shake its head. Before anyone could think to run up to them and ask questions, the sorcerer waved open a portal and both he and the armor stepped through quickly, letting it close behind them.
He'd placed it so it wasn't obvious that it just went back down into the garage. That was about the distance he'd felt up to.
"Wait, is Tony with you?" Aunt Pepper asked, her icon popping up on his visor and connecting immediately as she joined the JARVIS chat. She must have seen the news. "He's not picking up my calls."
"No, that was an armor JARVIS was controlling," he explained, sneaking back up into the house invisibly, just in case of passing news choppers, and collapsing on his bed. "Tony's probably unconscious and his armor's taking him to Tennessee. But we think he's fine."
"Why would he go to Tennessee?!"
"Some lead he wanted to follow about the bombings, I think?" JARVIS had given him the basics while he'd been sitting. "Are you safe?"
"I'm at the SHIELD office in LA," she explained. "I'm going to send security over to keep the reporters out of the house and see if I can get any contractors out this close to Christmas. They blew up the house! Is anything okay? Are you okay?"
"I'm okay, just exhausted. I think your room is mostly fine. Living room is exploded. There's some giant stuffed bunny that didn't survive? Lost part of the garage and a few cars. Everything is cracked, but I repaired what I could so it hopefully won't just fall apart later."
"Harry! You were just in traction thirty minutes ago. Lay down and finish healing."
He admitted a nap would be about what he needed. "That sounds like a good idea. But tell someone I need to talk to Coulson or somebody. Track the car that was here. JARVIS can send you the license plate. It might be a clue. JARVIS, wake me up in an hour or something…"
He didn't even remember to take off his mask or "hang up," simply passing out on the bed. So the next thing he heard was the AI's voice telling him, "It has been one hour."
It was weird to wake up from a power nap wearing armor and a face mask, but he nonetheless groggily declared, "I'm up." He didn't seem to have collapsed into the Pacific while he slept, so that was a plus. "Any word from Tony?"
"I estimate that the Mark Forty-Two is still in transit. It is unlikely to be using its top speed without Mr. Stark's piloting."
"Right. Lead foot, even in a flying suit." He sat up and collected his thoughts. He felt better, both in pain levels and in tiredness. Hopefully he'd finished healing and recovered a little magically. "Can you connect me to SHIELD?"
"Arcane," a younger woman's voice sounded as JARVIS connected him. He didn't recognize it. "This is Agent 13. Coulson and Hill are monitoring other events, so I'll be your handler for today."
JARVIS helpfully broke into the SHIELD database and popped up a headshot of a twenty-something blond woman, with a note that the connection and voice print matched the agent. "You can't have actually been the thirteenth agent," he figured, based on her apparent age.
"Nobody seemed to want that number, for some reason," she joked. "I've tracked your license plate. It's a rental car, rented to Maya Hansen. Flew into San Diego for a genetics conference two days ago, then canceled her flight back to Miami tonight at approximately the same time Stark was on the news this morning. The car was booked in San Diego so she probably drove up the coast to get to Malibu. Timeline just works out for the drive. She's currently waiting on her rescheduled red eye flight back to Miami from LAX."
"Genetics. Old friend of Tony's?" he asked.
"I can't place them as having any known associations, except they both attended a conference in Bern at the end of 1999."
That clicked with what Happy had mentioned about Killian, so he asked, "What about connections to Aldrich Killian?"
"She's employed by AIM in an unspecified but highly-paid role, for over a decade."
"Extra suspicious. Did Au… er… Ms. Potts catch you up on how Killian is involved?"
There was a slight humor in her voice, clearly having detected his almost-slip, as she explained, "That a man working for AIM was behind the Chinese Theater bombing, by causing another man to explode, and that he seemed to have some kind of super powers."
"Right. I think these guys can heal really fast. Heat themselves up to burn other people. Probably super strong, since one flung Happy through the air pretty far. And if they get too hot, they seem to explode. Genetics. Want to bet that AIM is making them?"
"My first Avengers bet," she joked. "Standard five bucks?"
"I'll even go for ten, if that's not too much for a sure thing," he told her. "I feel like they all move and fight like they're military. And there were attack helicopters. How many ex-soldiers does AIM pay?"
"They're a military contractor with preferred hiring for discharged personnel," she explained. "So… I'm finding fifteen that are in their official books. They might have freelancers. They also hire disabled veterans. Most of these people were on medical discharge."
"Can we get more information on those freelancers?"
"Maybe. Part of the reason the higher-ups are staying out of this is it's political. We can help you as an Avenger, but if we start poking into a US military contractor without enough proof…"
"So I'll get proof," he nodded, even though she couldn't see it. "Which, I guess, means talking to Maya Hansen.
"Since this is Avengers business, can you get me Black Widow?"
Chapter 83: Possible Point of Origin
Chapter Text
"Housekeeping!" Black Widow announced, from outside the room that Maya Hansen had rented at one of the mid-tier hotels right outside of LAX. She clearly had money to get a short-term hotel room just to rest in before her late-night flight, but not enough to blow on one of the more expensive hotels closest to the airport.
The Russian super-spy didn't wait for the door to be answered. She was already badging into the room with a gadget that easily overpowered the consumer-grade lock's encryption. Barely bothering with a dark wig just in case Hansen looked out of the peephole, she was otherwise wearing her SHIELD uniform. With the Avenger redirected from another active op, there wasn't time for a long con.
Arcane was invisible behind her, ready to step in if needed, but otherwise letting the master work.
"I don't need hou–" the dark-haired geneticist said, clearly having been woken up from a nap on the room's single bed. She hadn't even turned down the covers or undressed, just taken her shoes off and laid down on top, with all the signs of someone exhausted by their last few days. It took her a groggy moment to realize that the woman entering her room was wearing a form-fitting black uniform rather than housekeeping scrubs. "Damnit." She didn't even try to get up to run, just laid back down and put her hands up.
"Not expecting SHIELD," Black Widow observed, rather than asked. She professionally scoped the room for surprises and didn't seem to think there were any. There was one carry-on-sized suitcase in the corner of the room, gray and white tennis shoes on the floor, and a thin black jacket draped over the desk chair. Hansen, herself, was wearing a blue-striped sundress with a grass pattern on it that would only be appropriate for someone spending December in California and Florida.
"He said you wouldn't get involved," she shrugged. Since she wasn't immediately being handcuffed or beaten up, she put her hands down carefully and moved into a sitting position on the bed.
The interrogation expert leaned casually against the dresser, far enough from the few personal effects in the room to not get caught in any explosions or other booby traps that wouldn't also get Hansen, and ready to pounce across the short distance to the bed if necessary. But she showed all signs of being totally relaxed. "Killian has someone highly placed that he thought could ensure it."
Arcane had no idea how she was making those inferences so fast, but it was neat to watch her work.
"I don't know who he's bought, or maybe the Mandarin has blackmail on somebody, but he probably didn't count on the Avengers connection," Hansen agreed. "I guess it was stupid to go try to warn Tony he was in danger."
"But you don't have romantic feelings for him. So you need him for something."
She winced, clearly having hoped to play the former-lover card. "I didn't want to see him get hurt," she tried, but realized that wasn't working and admitted, "and I really need his help on my formula."
"Because it's not supposed to make people blow up."
"Did you already know all of this or am I really giving that much up?" Hansen asked, impressed. "Because if you're just cold reading me, that's amazing."
Black Widow continued her party trick and explained, "You're in over your head. You were just in it for the science, but got stuck with the terrorism."
Honestly, with as calm as Hansen seemed, Arcane thought she might have been okay with the terrorism, too, but maybe the interrogator was throwing her a rope that she could use to climb out on. Or hang herself.
"Killian was in it for the science, too, in the beginning. I shouldn't have let him take Extremis. Exploding isn't the only side effect. I didn't realize until later that the parts of the brain that control the powers are the ones used for things like empathy."
"It makes you into a sociopath? Instantly?"
Hansen shook her head, "It takes weeks. I think. Killian hasn't really been interested in letting me study it to be sure. Doesn't think it's a problem. But I think as you learn to control the heat, it utilizes more of your brain."
"And you didn't take it yourself?"
"I didn't have enough wrong with me to make the risk worth it. Not like Killian, or the test subjects."
"How many sociopathic powered mercenaries does AIM have now?" Black Widow checked.
"Too many. And then, after the Mandarin got involved… I think he's compartmentalized, once we got the basic process down, and doesn't always tell me when he's adding new 'employees.' At least two dozen. Maybe more. I don't know how many… failed to survive the procedure."
"And he's making more, even without fixing the side effects?"
The geneticist frowned, clearly upset about him not taking her recommendations. It wasn't clear whether she thought she was really working for the Mandarin, as well, or suspected that was just a front. "He doesn't really care. We've gotten it down to 'acceptable losses' and the disabled vets are still lining up for the process. He'd rather sell it now than wait for me to perfect it. That's why I need Tony. He gave me a breakthrough twelve years ago to get it as safe as it is."
"The breakthrough that let you go straight to human trials, where people died."
"Killian persuaded me that we'd gotten it safe enough that he was willing to risk it. That he needed it. And after it worked on him… it was easy enough to do it again on the vets. They were severely injured. Most of them were really good people, before…"
"Before you made them sociopaths that can explode and kill bystanders," Black Widow showed that the rope really was for hanging.
"I'm close! Perfect regeneration. So many diseases! So many wounds and handicaps, just gone! Imagine the lives that could be saved in emergency rooms! I have to make it all worth the losses."
"But will it be in ERs, or just used to make powered soldiers and terrorists?" Black Widow asked, and Arcane caught a blip of concealed pain from her, using his own super-powered empathy. Honestly, he might be the only person the super spy interacted with with any chance of truly reading her. Maybe that's why he was no longer particularly worried about her ferreting out his own secrets.
"It could be both. It has to be both," Hansen sounded defeated, the Avenger's master spy calmly cutting through a decade of rationalizations with a few sentences. She'd unconsciously moved her limbs in on the bed, as if to protect herself from what she'd been a party to.
"We're going to bring you into protective custody. Expect this whole conspiracy to be taken apart, and you want to be on the side that made a deal. They'll ask you for everything you know. If there's any chance your life's work gets used for what you want, it's if you get yourself as legally far from Killian and the Mandarin as you can."
The woman thought it through, and she was smart enough to realize that if SHIELD was onto Killian, it didn't matter who the man had in his pocket. Their only hope had been not picking a fight with the Avengers, which was part of why she was so annoyed he went after Stark. "Okay," she finally allowed.
"Pleasure talking with you. You can come in," Black Widow signaled to the other two agents that had accompanied them in case they wound up taking her into custody. Or in case they needed cleanup.
As the two men escorted Hansen out of the room, Arcane let his cloak unfold, reappearing. "You… uh… if Tony does help fix this procedure…"
Black Widow pulled the dark wig off, finally, shaking her natural red hair out. She gave the kid a sad smile, figuring out that he'd noticed something. "I have a lot of scars. Perfect regeneration is… attractive." He didn't think she just meant blemishes on her skin. "But if there weren't any side effects, it really would just be used to make more super soldiers. There's no chance it would be available in every hospital in the world."
"Just because it wouldn't be fair, doesn't mean you can't ask to get special treatment," he told her. "Tony has scars too. If he fixes it for himself…"
"Huh. Maybe," she shrugged, not willing to open herself to the possibility. "What next?"
"Wait. Am I suddenly in charge for some reason?"
"This has to be an Avengers op. She wasn't wrong that someone's putting pressure on the US government to keep SHIELD out of it. And with Stark still out of contact, you're the one who started the show. Plus, I really need to get back on the other op soon. We're working to stop a pretty major arms deal."
Trying not to make it too obvious how surprised he was that he was getting to take the lead, Arcane leaned back against one of the walls of the hotel room and thought out loud. "Can we just go get them? Hansen has to know where their base is, right?"
She explained, "Maybe. She at least will know the obvious one that she works at. We already got from Agent 13 that Killian has a big mansion in Miami that's probably also a research hub from the power it draws and the number of vehicles that go in. We aren't sure Killian is there right now. Maybe the Mandarin broadcasts are from there. But if we go in and everyone's not there…"
"Then we don't know if they've fallen back to another place that she doesn't know about," he agreed, frustrated. "And then they're onto us and have a couple dozen bad guys with fire powers and nothing else to lose."
Widow considered the problem, her spy brain making connections, and eventually offered, "They're building to something. Some of these explosions were probably accidents. Extremis soldiers going off unexpectedly. The terrorism started as cover, so the government wouldn't realize what they had in common. But last night was deliberate, from what you told me. They told the man to meet at the theater, then gave him drugs that would set him off. The videos are phrased as 'lessons,' trying to educate President Ellis. If I was running this, I'd be working up to one big battle where I could have my people defeat the terrorists."
"Proving that the US can have its own super soldiers and doesn't need SHIELD or the Avengers," he nodded, following her logic. "So we need to figure out what the grand finale is."
"And where."
"But he knows that the Avengers are coming after him. He'll have to do the finale in a way that we won't get involved. Somewhere we can't get to before it's over."
"Hostages. It's in line with being a terrorist, so nobody would question it," she mused. "He'd go after someone that Stark would be afraid to lose. Someone he'd hold the rest of us back about."
"And they might take the hostages where they're doing the finale, or at least might give up a clue about where it is. Do you have that hologram mask thing working? Could you be Pepper Potts?" He was pretty thrilled with himself he hadn't almost called her Aunt Pepper.
She shook her head, "Maybe at a distance. They'd figure it out if they took me hostage, even if they didn't notice the mask up close. She's a lot taller than I am."
"Right, well since we're obviously not going to put the actual Pepper in danger, I can think of someone else we could use as bait…"
And that's how Harry Potts wound up standing in approximately the same place outside the hospital that Tony had been ambushed by paparazzi earlier, a little while before sunset on the same Sunday. Out of deference to the ambulances, he'd made sure to move his press conference out of the main driveway and over onto the grass, turning so the photographers couldn't easily block traffic if they wanted to see his face. He'd switched back into his cast and hospital gown, putting the Arcane costume back in the secure closet in New York, but at least put on a pair of jeans. With the expert help of Natasha, he had on makeup that made him look like he was lucky to have survived. He wasn't sure if he'd actually looked like that when he woke up, but when he'd looked in the mirror he'd believed that he'd suffered a massive head injury.
Natasha herself had managed to pick up one of the prototype hologram masks and was currently pretending to be Aunt Pepper not far behind him. She'd been right: even with the perfect recreation of his aunt's face and a pair of heels, she was still obviously too short, at least to someone that knew Pepper as well as Harry did. Hopefully having her back and up a slight hill would make it less obvious to anyone else for as long as the ruse had to last. If they managed to grab her, all bets would be off.
They'd given an hour's warning about the press conference to be sure that someone would try to grab them.
"Uh, thanks for coming out," Harry said, a little lamely. While he'd gotten a lot more comfortable with public speaking over the last couple of years, facing a lawn full of national news cameras was very different than a Boy Scouts party or an assemblage of Aesir and Vanir. He wasn't really sure who he was supposed to look at, or how loud he needed to be. "I just wanted to set the record straight about what I saw last night. I heard that while I was, er, knocked out, everyone kind of assumed the Mandarin attacked me and Happy… I mean, Harold Hogan… specifically."
The crowd was weirdly quiet. There would probably be a barrage of specific questions as soon as he came to a full stop, but he'd cut straight to the information that they were interested in and the press was hanging on his every word. He suddenly had a better idea of why Tony was like that. A lifetime of having that kind of power would probably warp how you interacted with people. Of course, he wasn't so distracted by his new level of fame that he missed the dangerous-looking trio of men shoving their way through the edges of the crowd to get a line of attack on him and "Pepper."
"We were actually following someone," he said. Natasha had come up with a basic script. It had just enough filler to give the bad guys time to act if they were going to, but was getting to the point fast enough that they couldn't wait to see what he was going to say. If they didn't want him to explain that Killian's bodyguard had been behind it, they'd need to move. "At the time, we just thought he was kind of suspicious, we didn't know he was going to try to blow up the theater. I'm glad we were there, because I don't know how many people would have been close to the explosion if I hadn't told everyone to run. And Happy—we call him Happy, he's head of Stark security and Tony's former bodyguard, back when he needed a bodyguard—tried to stop it entirely and got in a fight because of it. Because what we actually saw was–"
That did it. The presumed Extremis soldiers started charging, pulling on ski masks in smooth motions and probably hoping no cameras had been pointed at them before they were disguised and moving. "Harry!" Natasha yelled, doing a pretty decent impression of Pepper, as she ran back toward the hospital. Harry widened his own eyes and started to run, faking a slip and fall on the hill, as if he wasn't up to much exertion yet. He caught himself on his left arm, like he was trying to avoid hitting the cast. As the bad guys closed in on Natasha, it became obvious that she'd chosen the a path where they couldn't quite catch her, even with her in heels and them with powers.
"Pepper Potts" managed to get to safety in the hospital, crying out, "Harry? Harry!" as the assailants scooped him up and threw him into the unmarked van that tore up into the convenient loading area right behind where he'd been standing.
They probably thought they were very smart for figuring out how to grab him in broad daylight.
What he wasn't expecting was the van's other occupant. Before someone in the back threw a black bag over his head, he spotted Happy's comatose body taking up most of the space inside. They'd gotten some extra insurance by sneaking another of Tony's friends right out of the hospital. That was really going to complicate things for Harry. At least the bad guys had somehow managed to pack the equipment that was keeping Happy alive as well.
It was better to be an intended hostage than an assassination victim, all things considered.
He was manhandled and quickly secured in the back, the kidnappers trained in how to bind someone, though they had a little trouble with his cast. He felt them lift the phone from his pocket and heard it get flung out of a window so it couldn't be tracked. "C'mon!" he complained, through the bag, "that's not even a year old yet!" He heard one of them chuckle. It was a misdirect anyway, since they'd gotten him a dummy phone expecting it to get seized. If they'd tried to plug it into a computer to hack it, they would have regretted it.
The real tracking device was wrapped in his cloak and pulled tight around his neck, along with his sling ring and a couple of other holdouts. With the bag over his head, they probably wouldn't even bother feeling his neck and potentially noticing his invisible scarf.
Other than complaining about the phone, Harry avoided making conversation. While the urge to quip was deep-seated, realistically he should be scared. His captors might realize something weird was going on if he was making jokes. Between their military training and lack of empathy, nobody in the back of the van seemed to want to talk to him either. So it was a pretty quiet ride, though bumpy: they were pulling out every trick in the book to avoid expected pursuers in LA.
They must have lost whatever cops they noticed following them, and convinced themselves that nothing unmarked was after them, either, because eventually they slowed to a sedate pace and Harry could sense everyone in the van relax. Within a half an hour, they were pulling to a stop, and quickly hustling him out of the van. His feet hit tarmac, and he got a vague sense of being in an extremely large room. He was familiar enough with hangars to figure he was being slipped aboard a private plane.
It really was probably too easy to kidnap people across state lines if you had private plane money.
Sure enough, he was half-shoved, half-assisted up a few rubber-coated steps and into the thinly carpeted interior of what had to be a plane cabin. Behind, there was grunting as they figured out how to get Happy on board as well. Harry got pushed down into a reclined seat and handcuffed by his non-cast-wearing wrist. A man's voice suggested, "Don't try to leave the seat. We're watching you. It's a long flight. You should sleep if you can."
Honestly, with the day he'd had, Harry could use the additional rest. As soon as he felt the plane take off, he started to comply, letting his body recover from all the things he'd put it through in under 24 hours.
And he dreamed.
Across the country, Tony Stark was in a snowy street, the darkness lit with small town streetlights. And he'd already gotten himself into a fight without his armor. Killian's driver, Savin, and a redhead that Harry recognized from the Room of Requirement were doing their best to kill Tony, and he was managing surprisingly well without his tech. It was a good thing he'd continued to practice his martial arts. With a lot of luck and quick thinking, the billionaire managed to take out both Extremis-powered assailants, though it looked like they'd done tremendous damage to Rose Hill: shooting sheriffs, blowing up buildings, crashing through powerlines, and knocking over water towers. And Tony "Harry's too young to be my sidekick" Stark had enlisted the help of an even younger boy to survive.
As Tony stole Savin's car, told the new kid to keep him informed about the armor, and peeled out, Harry woke up. At the top of his mind was wondering why Tony hadn't sent for one of his other suits or Avengers backup in general. Maybe he wasn't thinking totally clearly after the attack on the mansion. Or maybe he hadn't expected there to be bad guys in the town and thought he was just doing an investigation.
Before Harry could plan out how to rectify Tony's resources problem, he realized that the kidnappers were talking quietly among themselves not far away. They thought (between him looking like he was asleep and the plane noise) they couldn't be overheard, but young ears were good at listening to things adults didn't expect.
"I wish I'd gotten to go to Pakistan," one of the men was complaining. "Kidnapping Rhodes is probably more interesting than these two."
"I don't think you'd blend at the sweatshop the way Becca will," another man argued.
"She's just going to be under a burka, so he doesn't spot that blond hair. I could wear a burka," the first fired back. "Fine. I could be in Tennessee instead of Ellen."
"All she's doing is overwatch for Savin. Boring."
"But she gets to pretend to be a federal marshal."
Another guy opined, "I don't even see why they needed two people to get a file from some old lady."
"Just in case Iron Man or SHIELD or somebody made a connection," one of them explained. "The Master wanted to make sure it was covered."
It was interesting that they didn't appear to have heard yet that the Rose Hill operation had gone bad even with two soldiers. But Harry didn't like the idea that there was another plan in play to capture Rhodey. After the two's chatter turned to something less relevant to his interests, Harry relaxed again and found the right meditative spot to astrally project.
He'd never left his body while on a jet before. No sooner was he projected than he found himself floating in midair somewhere in the middle of the after-dark US, the small private plane rapidly dwindling into the night sky. He could still feel the tie to his body, so finding it again shouldn't be an issue. The problem was finding Rhodey somewhere in Pakistan.
Fortunately, he had people for that.
"Hey!" Harry said, becoming visible, albeit translucent, in Aunt Pepper's safehouse living room. With all of her boys missing, she obviously wasn't likely to get any sleep herself. And it was relatively early in the evening in LA still, regardless. She'd put the news on the TV while obsessively checking her laptop.
"Harry!" she said, face in shock as she momentarily thought he was a ghost but then settling into relief as she remembered he could astrally project. "Are you okay? Happy is missing!"
"He's with me. We're on a plane. I think it's going east. And Tony's fine, too. Well, he got in a fight in Rose Hill, but he won."
"That was on the news!" she realized, looking at the TV as if the story should come back on just because it was relevant. "But it didn't say anything about Iron Man. Just some kind of powered fight that took out a water tower."
"Yeah… he didn't have his armor on. But he's fine!" Before she could start obsessing over Tony nearly getting himself killed going after supervillains without his armor, he asked, "Can you get on the phone with Agent Thirteen? I need her to figure out where Rhodey is. They're going after him too, and I need to warn him."
The process of getting that information took a while, including pulling up a map to give Harry (who'd never been to Pakistan) an idea of the terrain so he could potentially find Iron Patriot from the air. SHIELD wasn't supposed to be keeping track of where he was on foreign soil, but spies were going to spy. By late in the evening, LA time, Harry was flying invisibly over the morning over Pakistan. He was just glad he'd been to Dubai before, briefly, on one of Aunt Pepper's business trips, so he could quickly get there rather than starting out at Kamar-Taj. The wonders of Google Earth were helping him pick out the landmarks they'd seen near where Rhodey was supposed to be.
For all that the Iron Patriot paint job was silly, it was at least easy to tell apart from a drone as it streaked through the air, and once Harry got close enough he could latch on to Rhodey empathically. His timing wound up being perfect: the government hero was touching down in a bustling suburb of Karachi as Harry descended after him.
He caught up as a bunch of women in a sweatshop were looking scared and confused at facing down the Iron Patriot, weapons aimed. "Support Blue-Zero: Unless the guy pretending to be the Mandarin's next attack on the U.S. involves cheaply-made sportswear, I think you messed up again," Rhodey was complaining to his handler.
Judging the situation to be dangerous enough to risk someone spotting him, Harry made himself visible to Iron Man's best friend and a bunch of confused Pakistani women who were now seeing a ghost. "Ninja Turtle!" he said, to try to get Rhodey's attention as quickly as possible. "One of them is a bad guy in disguise. Super powers!"
That warning was enough for the Extremis soldier to realize she was about to lose the element of surprise and the advantage of close quarters, and she charged. "I told you something was wrong with the white lady!" one of the real workers noted as everyone cleared a path, Harry's implant helpfully translating. The black clothing she was wearing began to burn free as she leaped over sewing machines to try to grapple the Iron Patriot armor.
"Nuh uh!" Rhodey said, his own urge to quip failing him due to surprise, but Harry's warning was enough for him to get a repulsor in line. With the weapon's distinctive whine, the red hot woman was knocked out of the air by a blast of charged particles.
She recovered quickly, almost inhumanly, flipping over in the air and not caring that she crashed painfully into a sewing table. Harry's eyes widened at the heat she was giving off and he yelled, "This place is a firetrap and she heals fast. Fly!"
The older man's urge to argue that he could handle it was suppressed by seeing the civilians still stuck in the room, and he nodded and activated his flight systems. He managed to crash though the ceiling just as the blonde almost managed to lay a burning hand on his leg. She screamed in frustration.
"Now we just wait for her to come out," Rhodey said, hovering and trying to aim his variety of armor-mounted weapons at all the places she might exit the building.
Harry was flying right beside him, and explained, "Tony fought a couple of these guys and nearly burned down a Tennessee town in winter. If you fight her, she might burn down the whole city. Her name's Becca, and she works for AIM. You can probably pick her up later, somewhere safer. Now that you're out of the trap."
"AIM?! Is everyone who works on this armor going to try to hack it?"
"You really should just let Tony work on it," Harry shrugged. "Lots of bad guys in the military industrial complex. Killian has a formula to make super soldiers, only it makes them sociopaths. Anyway, I'm also currently kidnapped so I better get back to that. Don't let them get you!"
"What do you mean you're also kidnapped!?" Rhodey yelled, but Harry was already letting himself snap back.
He managed to stop just shy of crashing into his body, over a jet that was clearly descending towards its final destination. Hopefully, Harry would get a clear idea of where their ultimate base was located, so he could share it with everyone else. From the air he could see a wide expanse of water to the east, a huge swath of dark wilderness to the west, and a several-miles-wide swath of bright city lights extending up and down the coast in either direction. It took him a minute to figure it out, but he had drilled with Natasha on landmarks earlier. And what he realized made the entire getting-kidnapped plan seem like kind of a waste.
"Oh come on! We really are just going to Miami?"
Chapter 84: Crash and Burn
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"Why are you throwing together a bunch of Home Depot junk?" Harry asked, floating translucently in the motel room he'd found Tony in before dawn in Atlanta. The process of tracking him down had been both easier and more boring than justified repeating.
"Making stuff," Tony shrugged, barely jumping in surprise at the appearance of the teen apparition. "A kid in Rose Hill reminded me I'm a mechanic. Suit wasn't working, but I don't need the suit. I had way less to go on than a big box store when I made it in the first place."
"How did you even find a store that was open this early on Christmas Eve?"
"It's amazing what business hours you can find in a big enough city."
Harry shrugged, ceding him the point, but finally getting to his own point. "You know that Killian kidnapped me and Happy like ten hours ago, right?"
"I… did not know that, no."
"So you were driving nine-hundred miles in the middle of the night to his mansion because…"
"It's the site of the Mandarin broadcasts," Tony explained, finally distracted enough from his focus on the gadgets he was making from consumer home improvement items to give Harry his full attention.
"Huh. I guess I'll go see if I can find that guy when I break out in a minute. Were you going to actually sleep or just get driving again when you made your stuff? Either way, isn't it going to take hours? Where's the Mark Forty-Two?"
"It's having issues charging off of the power in Rose Hill."
Harry boggled, "Tony. You have an arc reactor in your chest. The main reason you have it is to charge the suit!"
"I was trying something new with the capacitor distribution so each piece could fly autonomously," the billionaire argued, embarrassed. "And I didn't let JARVIS finish the tests. And I may not have gotten much sleep in… months. So it has charging issues, okay?"
"Just… stay here. I'll portal you and a working suit over to Killian's mansion in a few minutes."
Harry let himself snap back to his body before Tony could get the last word in. And it was a good thing he did. He was still shackled to a metal frame in the masonry pool house that was Aldrich Killian's lab (probably designed less for cleanliness and more for not taking out the main house if an Extremis patient exploded). An ex-soldier in a lab coat was looming over him with a syringe, and while he'd been looking for Tony, he'd apparently missed the injection given to Happy, still unconscious on the neighboring frame. The ex-boxer was starting to redden with the biological processes going on. Maybe Harry should thank the Norns he wasn't astral projecting long enough to get injected without being able to do anything about it.
"I have to pee!" he announced. "Really bad."
"We'll cath you," the grizzled man shrugged, barely pausing while looking for a vein. Did Maya Hansen even know that the whole medical part of the science had skipped from Hippocratic Oath-following doctors to sociopathic Extremis soldiers willing to inject hostages at their boss' orders?
"What are you injecting me with? Why!?" Harry asked, hoping he was seeming properly scared while he stalled, left hand furiously working. Getting out of restraints with his right arm in a cast was harder than he'd expected.
"Let's just say, if you're lucky, that arm isn't going to be hurting you anymore. And if you're unlucky, it's incentive for Stark to help fix the formula." The man actually leered. Harry wasn't used to getting leered at. It was unsettling. The soldier brandished the syringe and said, "Now hold still."
"Actually, I'm feeling kind of lucky already. Since these cuffs came off." The man was so surprised at being shown the detached cuffs that he didn't even notice the rest of the bindings coming off. They'd worked hard at figuring out a strap to restrain the arm in the cast. "Yoink," Harry said, plucking the syringe from the nonplussed man's hand.
To his credit, the man was an Extremis-powered soldier, with strength and reflexes that might have even put him closer to Steve Rogers than to a normal human. To his detriment, nobody expects a small, injured teen to go from unconscious and fully restrained to doing his best Bugs Bunny impression in a few seconds. By the time the man started trying to grab Harry, he was already halfway out the door of the room.
He'd have to retrieve Happy in a minute. Doing so probably wouldn't leave time to go ahead and find the "Mandarin."
The early morning in south Florida was strangely pleasant: just under 60 degrees Fahrenheit and only a little muggy out. And the compound wasn't well lit enough that he couldn't go from the pool house to shadow in moments. He had already scouted the place astrally, so made for a direction that would let him clear down a couple of stone-walled terraces and break line of sight without going through any of the patrols of the late night guards. There was a powered soldier only a couple of seconds behind him, he had an arm in a cast, he was barely dressed, and his glasses were fogging up a little bit from leaving the air conditioned lab room into the early Miami morning. He was drawing on all his defense seminar training from Bruce to escape and evade.
Yes, he could have turned invisible whenever he wanted, but he was trying to make the bad guys think he'd escaped like a normal person.
"The kid! Stop the kid!" the soldier in the lab coat shouted into the night, drawing the attention of the patrols. Enough people spotted the bits of white cast, skin, and hospital gown that they totally believed that Harry Potts was a fleeing teen that they could just box in and re-capture. "Peters, go right! Sanchez, left." The man started bounding down the stone steps toward the pool, certain that the kid would have nowhere to go in the elaborate mansion gardens that wouldn't trap him against wall or water.
Which was why it was so alarming when they lost him somewhere in the shadows.
Invisibly, Harry doubled back as soon as the place went up like an angry anthill, non-Extremis security guards breaking out the high-powered lights for a proper grid search. Once he was back in the lab, it was easy enough to disable the cameras (which were meant for remote monitoring of subjects and, probably, showing off the hostages to Tony). By the time security noticed the electronics were down, Harry had already portaled himself and Happy across the country.
He'd left his tracker in one of the nearby garden pots just to make it easier for SHIELD to find the place.
"I need doctors!" Harry yelled, as soon as the portal deposited them on the floor of the Los Angeles SHIELD office. He'd tried to pick a part of the building that wouldn't incinerate the whole facility if Happy went off like a bomb, but he was really holding out hope that wouldn't happen. It wasn't long after midnight, Pacific time, so the place was pretty clear of bystanders anyway.
"Potts!" a blonde that matched the picture JARVIS had sent him of Agent 13 said, rushing out of an office with some other scrambling late-night agents. "What's wrong with Hogan?"
"They injected him with Extremis while I was out," he explained, embarrassed. "The bad guys are going to realize something's wrong in a minute. I'm going to grab Iron Man and whoever else I can and go back in. Oh, here's what they put into him." He handed her the syringe he'd swiped from the soldier. "Maybe Tony can fix the formula, like Hansen said. Or at least neutralize it for Happy."
"On it," she said, all business. He didn't know Sharon Carter well enough yet for his empathy to detect the emotions she felt on being handed a source of unstable super powers.
If nothing else, the long sleep on his fight had basically recharged his magical batteries and finished his healing, so it wasn't much effort to create a portal again immediately, especially since he was just going into the Malibu garage. "JARVIS!" he said. "What Iron Man suit can you have ready fastest that's fully tested? Heat resistant, if you've got one. I need to take it to Tony. The Mark Forty-Two's not recharging. Do it as fast as possible, please. Skip the tests unless it was damaged earlier."
"The Mark Thirty-Three will be available in ninety seconds," the AI told him.
"Thanks," Harry nodded, taking a breath and being glad his repairs to the garage hadn't failed and caused it to fall into the bay. "Can you call the Avengers that are still around and have them give me their location?"
"Patching you through."
It actually only took 87 seconds for the triangular-profiled red armor with silver accents to decant from the silo and walk into the garage, which was enough time for Harry to gather up Natasha, Steve, and Clint. "Let's make this fast," she said, clearly a little tired having been portaled across the continent twice in one day. "We're on the arms deal in three hours." They were all in pajamas, with their gear in bags, but had come through the portal from the safehouse where Harry had retrieved Natasha earlier. She must have just gotten back there the normal way after he'd been kidnapped.
"Just have to pick up Tony," Harry agreed, sad that Bruce was still off grid and that sending Thor an owl would take too long. He'd been close to getting the whole band back together. "And I'll brief you about the location on the way…"
A minute later, as they all stepped out into Tony's motel room, Clint wryly observed, "Is that a TASER mitten?" The space was suddenly cramped with five Avengers and a JARVIS-piloted suit of armor.
"I was improvising," Tony said, tossing away the gadget he'd been soldering together. He nodded at the armor that Harry had picked out, "Silver Centurion. Not bad."
Steve took command before it turned into a snark fest, "Harry will brief us. Everyone suit up."
They attacked at dawn. Killian's mansion had an impressive view east over the water, which meant anyone with a gun would be firing at silhouettes as the Avengers appeared out of a portal at the water's edge. As noted the previous summer, adding Iron Man to the mage and the SHIELD agents turned it from a stealth mission to something a lot more loud. But that just meant that the quieter members could get into position while the mansion's guards were squinting at the red-and-chrome armor flying out of the sun.
It worked out better than expected. There were so many shouts of "Iron Man is here!" that the goons barely seemed to notice anyone else until they were taken out, one by one.
Black Widow had effortlessly scaled the back of a terrace wall and started laying out unenhanced security guards. She managed to use the stone railings to disguise her silhouette against the dawn, each running man with a gun not noticing the moving shadows until a wrist-mounted taser was knocking him unconscious.
Hawkeye had asked for a secondary portal, and Arcane had dropped him right on the red tiled roof of the stucco house itself, giving him a commanding view of the grounds. He'd quietly taken out the guards who also thought that was a great vantage point, and was lying in overwatch. If anyone else on the team somehow got overwhelmed, he was ready to snipe.
Captain America didn't blend much more than Iron Man, for all that he at least wasn't powered by jet engines. He'd made for the helipad northeast of the house, on what had been a lovely stone dock until Killian had redecorated it. A large military transport helicopter was waiting there, and it seemed the most likely escape route for the men in charge. After easily taking out a couple of unpowered guards, he'd found himself in a wild brawl with Savin, whose heat and rapid regeneration was currently evening out the Captain's physical advantages while he figured out how to fight the man without getting burned.
Iron Man was unleashing a lot of pent-up frustration about his last couple of days on the goons heading his way. With the armor on, he had nothing to fear from small arms fire (for all that the security guards kept trying), and the exterior of the mansion mean his flight was a huge advantage against soldiers whose super powers maybe meant they could jump a little higher. A red-glowing warrior had sprinted his way and promptly found himself decapitated by the Mark 33's extendable swords.
They'd decided as a group that taking Extremis soldiers alive wasn't safe or likely. Given the expectation they could take out Iron Patriot, what Stark had seen in Rose Hill, and the possibility they'd explode in a firestorm if they got too worked up, putting them down fast and hard was the Captain's reluctant order. If Hansen was right, they might be too far gone mentally to ever be rehabilitated.
While everyone else was working their way through the guards, Arcane had already invisibly infiltrated the house. The mansion was huge, but the majority of the people in it were outside fighting Iron Man. The mage's empathic sense was leading him almost subconsciously toward the two places where there still seemed to be people. The first room he found was a large office on the ground floor. Killian's shouting coming out of it probably also had something to do with locating it so quickly.
"I needed you to do two things! Keep SHIELD off my back and get Rhodes into place for the plan!" The AIM founder was barely keeping from getting hot enough to melt the cell phone he was holding as he yelled, pacing around the elaborately appointed room. It was full of expensive Asian bric-a-brac: scroll paintings on the walls, jade carvings and elaborate vases, and, of course, various Chinese swords.
"JARVIS, are we recording?" Arcane whispered, as he moved invisibly to take in the conversation.
The AI agreed, "I'm flagging the last thirty seconds of video and audio for retention and recording until told otherwise."
"Might as well save my feed, too," Iron Man agreed, over the party comms. "We'll see if we want to post any of it on social media. Do it for the clout."
"And whose fault is it that he was tipped off?" Killian was continuing, having heard the argument from the other side. "Iron Man is at my house! I'm going to have to take care of that. You do your job, if you really want to be the first Puerto Rican president. That job is to keep anyone else from interfering." A pause for further excuses then, "I don't care that your family is at your house for Christmas Eve! Tell you what. Send Rhodes here. I can still make this work. Just keep anyone else from coming. Maybe we'll have both the Iron Man and Iron Patriot armors to use."
With that, Killian hung up and set down the phone, carefully stripping out of his expensive shirt to reveal that he was an even bigger white-guy-too-into-Asian-culture than the room's decor would indicate: he had massive Chinese dragon tattoos across his chest and shoulders. With the way he was heating up as he readied for a fight, it was a wonder the ink survived. Did he get them after he had Extremis regeneration? What kind of tech had he invented just to get culturally-appropriative tattoos?
"Have to do everything myself," he grumbled, striding out of the room as Arcane moved out of the way.
"You all get that?" the invisible mage asked, moving deeper into the house to the other location he felt was important.
"He was talking to the Vice President," Hawkeye figured. "Rodriguez is Puerto Rican."
"They're planning to assassinate the President!?" Captain America said, offended.
"Probably with some big performance. It's why they needed Rhodes' armor to get close to him," Black Widow agreed. "And here comes Killian."
"You all have this?" Arcane checked, having slipped into what appeared to be a recording studio. "I think I found where they're making the Mandarin broadcasts."
"I finished with my guy," the Captain agreed, not having bothered to learn the name of Killian's most elite bodyguard. "Catch that terrorist leader if you can."
An entire wing of the house seemed to be dedicated to the phony Mandarin. Surprising to Arcane was that the entry to the area included a blonde in a turquoise sequined dress passed out on a couch, as if she'd had a long night of partying. The area otherwise looked like a bodyguard station, but whoever was on duty must have left to go deal with the fighting outside. He considered waking the woman, but he didn't get the impression she was a threat.
Through a set of double doors, an enormous room had been turned into a cobbled-together film studio, with video monitors, boxes of equipment, set backdrops, and makeup tables haphazardly arranged. How many of the "on location" shots for the Mandarin videos had just been video editing, while the man himself was in front of a large piece of painted plywood, or a green screen?
One corner of the room had an enormous and elaborate bed installed, along with a dresser and lamps, indicating that it was functioning as a bedroom. With the mansion to use, did the country's most wanted terrorist just sleep in the back of his film studio? Was it to reduce the risk of anyone coming to the house noticing anything was amiss? Given the two other women passed out under the burgundy duvet, it seemed like there wasn't a lot of operational security.
How deep were these women in on it that they hadn't gone to the cops about who they were sleeping with? Or were they just that checked out, and maybe unaware of the kind of reward that would come with revealing a terrorist on United States soil?
The "Mandarin" himself, wearing a black t-shirt and red satin pajama pants, was sprawled across the women in a way that was probably only tolerable because all three had basically just blacked out in an intoxicated stupor a couple of hours earlier. Arcane really considered waking them up. Getting answers. But the whole setup seemed a little lame to him. Maybe this guy was just an actor? A real co-conspirator wouldn't be drugged out of his mind with a couple of party girls while so much was going on, would he? If he'd been important, why hadn't Killian sent anyone to wake him up when Iron Man attacked?
Arcane just carefully and quietly took the time to create a large portal and let it slide over the bed, depositing all three unawares into a SHIELD holding cell.
"We could actually use a little help up here, Arcane," Black Widow announced over the comms. "Reinforcements."
"Plus Killian is giving Iron Man a hell of a fight," Hawkeye snarked.
"This suit hasn't been combat tested. I'm having to figure it out as I go!" the billionaire argued, not too overwhelmed to snipe back at his teammates.
Rather than sprint back outside, Arcane just created a quick portal to jump to the once-nice grounds of the mansion. The antique stonework had been taken apart from bullets, missiles, and just flying goon bodies, and patches were on fire where someone with Extremis heat had bumped into vegetation. There were another dozen or more of the powered soldiers mixing it up on the grounds. A couple of speedboats drifting away from the mansion's dock suggested that they'd come in a hurry from somewhere nearby on the water. The sun had risen enough to cast long morning shadows across the grounds, and begin the area's rise to being too warm for how humid it was.
It was interesting to watch the Avengers work, in the few moments Arcane had to assess the battlefield before he joined in. Iron Man really was tied up with Killian, who was glowing red hot and leaping off of walls and other garden structures to keep the flying hero on the defensive. If the armored billionaire just backed off well into the air, the fiery mastermind might go after the others.
For the most part, Captain America and Black Widow were holding their own against a larger number of powered foes. Even as ex-military, none of them had skills approaching either Avenger, but they had numbers, were dangerous to get hit by, and were very hard to casually take out due to their regeneration. Hawkeye was helping where he could, but a couple had the parkour skills to have chased him onto the roof, and he was fighting his own battle retreating over the terra cotta while trying to maintain overwatch.
"Hands off the lady," Arcane announced, finally revealing his presence, as he threw an energy whip and caught the arm of a goon who was swinging a burning hand in a way that looked like it might catch Black Widow unaware. The man was stronger than the teen mage, but surprised, and the magical energy whips had extra force to them if you knew how to use your willpower to help with the leverage. He had more luck than they'd had with the troll in first year, and yanked the man over backwards into a fountain, where the bit of water left in there for the winter erupted in a blast of steam.
"Thanks," she said, realizing that she'd almost been tagged from behind. She repositioned to fight the other two she was brawling with. "Go help the Captain."
The star spangled man with a plan himself was, indeed, close to getting overwhelmed by the seven soldiers that had chosen him as the biggest ground-based threat. It was impressive to watch him still doing well for himself. There were enough stone walls, trees, and other adornments on the mansion grounds that he was able to duck and weave to keep from getting fully surrounded, his shield bouncing off of goons and terrain and yet back in his hand in time to block any searing Extremis punches. Honestly, he might be able to pull out a win except the temperature was getting to him: even the attacks that he blocked heated the metal of his shield and the air near him, so he was functionally fighting in a sauna.
Time to even the odds a little. "Captain. On your left," Arcane told him over the comms, spinning open a portal that he could see the morning sky through behind one of the more overheated men attacking the first Avenger. The hero in blue wasted no time kicking his assailant through the portal, and actually managed a shield throw that knocked a second man into position to be kicked through a second later.
A quarter mile up and out over the water, both men were suddenly falling. If terminal velocity into the ocean didn't overwhelm their Extremis regeneration, at least they'd have to swim back to the fight and would probably not be able to explode dramatically.
Not liking the sudden change in odds, one of the remaining five fighting the Captain turned on Arcane, while the man he'd whipped into the fountain recovered and joined in as well. Both larger men came at him hard and fast, their military training at least enough to keep them from trying to talk at him. They were all business: the mage broke the rules they knew about fighting, so they needed to keep him from continuing to even the odds.
But other than their ability to generate heat, Arcane had dealt with this kind of fight before. It seemed like every few months he was having to deal with multiple large bruisers with beyond-human strength and speed. And these guys were over-reliant on their super power. If they'd remembered to bring guns, they might have been a problem. The Avengers' mage didn't even bother with a shield spell, instead manifesting an energy sword in each hand, turning up their cutting power, and extending them long enough to have a reach advantage.
It turned out that whatever heat protection Extremis gave you, it didn't make you immune to what was basically a lightsaber. And when you'd lost your arms suddenly and were waiting for them to regenerate back, your neck was an easier target. Arcane would need a lot of storytelling in his future to get over the four men he'd killed by sword or portal in thirty seconds, and he was just hoping that Hansen was right that they were basically unredeemable, due to what Extremis had done to their brains.
The fight having so quickly dropped from thirteen-on-four to nine-on-five, the other Avengers were handling their own goons. Black Widow had figured out a combination of gadgets and nerve strikes that was allowing her to knock her foes unconscious. Without having to concentrate on helping the others on the ground, Hawkeye had found a few particularly lethal arrows and acted as a deadly cupid, shooting directly through his opponents' hearts. Captain America had reluctantly decapitated a couple of his own foes with the edge of his shield, and managed to smash the other two into unconsciousness against the stonework of the garden.
Iron Man still seemed to be having a little trouble with Killian, who had managed to melt crucial parts of the armor so its maneuverability was compromised. The Avenger barely managed to fly above the cone of fire that the AIM founder was breathing like an actual dragon, before shouting, "It was always me, Tony. Right from the start. I am the Mandarin!"
"You're really not," Arcane noted, simply, from behind the man, whose tunnel-vision trying to kill Iron Man had left him blind to how the fight was going against his henchmen. As he spun around to face the new target behind him, the red-and-chrome armor finally lost flight power and the billionaire inventor turned the several-yard fall into an advantage. He extended one of the suit's arm swords and wound up bisecting Killian basically in half down the middle.
"I meant to do that," Iron Man said, as he desperately staggered to keep from falling over completely on the garden's cobblestones.
It was suddenly quiet, except for the sizzling corpse halves of Aldrich Killian. There were a few Extremis soldiers that were simply unconscious, and two that might need to be fished out of the ocean if they'd survived their fall, but most were headless or heartless and cooling across the grounds. Most of the non-powered thugs had been easily incapacitated and also needed to be arrested. Singed and tired, the Avengers regarded the area, wondering if there was anything else they needed to handle before three of them had to go back to stop an arms deal.
The calm was broken by the sound of jet engines as Iron Patriot blasted in from the north. JARVIS finally linking him into their comms, Rhodey announced, "I'm coming in hot, where do you need me? I'll drop in on… you're done already, aren't you?"
Notes:
And that's Iron Man 3, except for a bit of denouement that will mix with some additional winter break stuff.
This one fought me. Killian's plan only seems to work in the movie because he's read the script and knows that Iron Man has a set of armor that doesn't work right (and that the director has forgotten that charging the suit is the one thing the arc reactor does) and won't call in SHIELD or the other Avengers. Also Pepper goes to hide at a hotel with some random woman rather than hiring a security detail (or also going to SHIELD). So putting Harry's fingers on it and not collapsing it immediately was a challenge. And that's not even mentioning the head scratchers like North Carolina shooting that had them recreate a Malibu bar but just use Epic Games as Stark Industries (on its fully-forested campus with Raleigh-area trees). From dialogue, I think the finale fight at the ship facility with the Norco is supposed to take place 10-20 miles offshore of Miami on some kind of artificial island/oil rig? Where was Air Force One flying from and to that would take it OVER Miami when Savin attacks?
I must have rewatched the movie enough times to give Disney+'s algorithm fits trying to figure out a way of making it consistent enough for a story that changes things.
Which is basically all to say that I barely got THIS chapter done before it was due to be posted, and my buffer for my other fic is also becoming precarious. So I'm going to have to take a (hopefully short) hiatus on this fic while I finish that one and then try to build my buffer back up for Infinity Stones. Then we'll be back with the rest of winter break and back to Hogwarts.
This is a great time to comment with what you hope to see in the back half of Year 5!
Chapter 85: Place in the Vanguard
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"I almost had super powers! I could have joined the Avengers!" Happy complained from his hospital bed. He wasn't unconscious on a ventilator, but they were keeping him for observation at a SHIELD medical facility. He'd only just woken up that morning, after being sedated for a week while Tony developed a cure for Extremis.
"And maybe exploded," Harry explained, calmly, from where he'd come to visit the man before he headed back to Vanaheim.
"Doctors say I probably wouldn't have done that. Danger area was the first twenty-four hours, they told me."
"Like the guy who blew up and put you in the coma in the first place? He had Extremis for more than a day."
"I figure he was a junkie or something. Wouldn't have seen me huffing silver mystery vials," the former boxer insisted.
"Even if it had worked perfectly, it turns you into a sociopath. Through brain damage."
"What, really? Fine. I think I should have still gotten the choice. I could have been a villain, at least!"
Harry just sighed and leaned back in the chair. Pepper had warned him that Happy would probably complain to him. He'd complained to everyone so far. He was bored and sad to have missed the holidays. "You wouldn't have lasted long. Most of the other soldiers went out really fast against us."
"But I know your secrets. I'd be more effective," the burly man contended. He waited a minute and said, "Okay. But the next time there are actual super powers that don't make you evil, it's my turn! I do feel great, at least. You know my shoulder was never quite right after that Monaco thing?"
"When you drove the car into a wall to hit Vanko?"
"Right, that. And now it's better. See?" He rolled his arm around his right shoulder in a way that Harry couldn't prove he hadn't been able to do a week and a half earlier. "Are they at least giving this out to people? The powers then the cure, just enough to fix people?"
Harry frowned, thinking about Natasha arguing with Hansen back in that hotel room. He shook his head, "Nobody can trust that someone wouldn't keep it to make more Extremis soldiers if it went out to hospitals. And we don't know if some people might blow up really fast. Tony kept all the samples we could find and wiped the instructions."
"Nobody else can just make it again?"
"The lady that invented it went missing." SHIELD hadn't really wanted to admit that, but they'd had to when Tony insisted on talking to Hansen. "So we may wind up with more Extremis out in the world anyway if someone bad got her… Nat thinks that they may have quietly killed her or put her in a black site because she was too dangerous. She's pissed."
Happy thought about it for a minute then admitted, "Well that's scary."
"We'll handle it when we have to. I told you things were getting weird."
"I'll come up with some super soldier protocols for Stark security when I get back to the office."
"I think Tony's going to use it at least, before he destroys the rest of the samples. Extremis, I mean. Try to fix his heart." Harry had convinced the billionaire it was worth it. He was pretty sure he'd convinced Natasha, too, under the guise of being the guinea pig. Tony was trying to get some world class surgeons involved, so it wasn't going to happen before Harry was back at school.
"Hey, that's good," Happy agreed. "Oh! I saw on the news that Arcane saved me and you. And maybe I'm confused but…"
"Trick editing," Harry interrupted. "All the footage from the fight at Killian's house came from the cameras that Tony and I have in our suits. It was Nat's idea that we use that to help protect my secret identity. I changed clothes between takes. You were unconscious, so it was easy for JARVIS to cut you in."
"Huh. Smart. I still don't like her."
"Are you upset about her flipping you in the ring that time?"
"She didn't tell me she was a super spy! I'd have used different moves if I'd known she was a super spy!" the former boxer argued. "Anyway, I missed all of Christmas. Tell me what happened?"
"A lot actually, though Christmas itself was…" Harry tailed off and then glanced around. They were in an infirmary room in a SHIELD base, and it had only been about half a year since he was last at a SHIELD facility. He did his spell to detect bugs and found three. "You want to talk about this somewhere else?"
"You kidding? I've been here a week." Not that he'd been conscious for most of it. "I'd love to see anywhere else."
"I'm not blowing up your bugs, but I could have. I'll bring Happy back later," the only 15-year-old with a sling ring informed whoever was listening, then spun open a portal. He and Happy stepped through once the older man had grabbed his things.
One of the bugs was totally benign. It was only listening for calls for help or sounds of danger, and immediately deleting anything that didn't throw such an alert. Every room in the SHIELD infirmary had one of those.
The second was Agent 13's. She didn't have time to actively monitor it, but Sharon Carter checked the recording later and updated her personal notes with a few more details about Harry Potts, including that he could detect recording devices somehow.
The third was a live feed to Jasper Sitwell. He cursed as he learned the same fact about Potts' ability to tell he was being surveilled, and dutifully recorded it for his superiors. He'd at least confirmed that Tony Stark had collected the rest of the Extremis samples and research. With Coulson agreeing to destroy the material the teen had turned over to SHIELD (half a syringe full of the substance), and Dr. Hansen disappearing from custody, Hydra had really needed a win. He posted a secure voice message to Strucker, "Subject seven-sixteen confirmed that Subject one-nineteen has all samples of Extremis. Seven-sixteen has the ability to detect surveillance." Nobody in the organization was going to be too happy about that. The mental side-effects of sociopathy were barely a concern for Hydra, just the risk of making their best agents explode. But they had several contingency plans. The things they could have done with their own Extremis soldiers…
Meanwhile, Harry and Happy were walking out of a sparking hole in the world into the latter's office at the Stark Campus. "I need to add portals to the list," the head of security grumbled. "How many people can do that?"
Harry let the portal close then did the bug search again, finding only the Stark security camera facing the door. It wasn't even wired for sound; Tony had been too busy to get JARVIS installed, yet. The only way to be overheard was his own phone, which he went ahead and powered off, just in case. "More than you want to know. But I think if we set up teleportation wards on the building, we might get more people showing up wondering why. Witches and such."
"Like, girls in black lipstick might think the building was a cool place to do a love spell?" Happy asked, slightly distracted as he slid with a grunt of appreciation into his lumbar-supportive chair and started checking his email. Whatever Extremis had done for his shoulder, it didn't seem to be able to fix genuine age deterioration on the spine.
"No. Like centuries-old scary ladies who've made deals with entities pretty close to the Devil might think there was something here they could steal to get more powerful."
That got the adult's attention, making him glance up from his couple-dozen missed meeting notifications. "Remember when Tony fighting Obie while both of them were in power armor was the weirdest thing in the whole world? That was only a few years ago."
"It was the weirdest thing that people knew about. There are like a dozen different groups that probably would have loved to have gotten to Tony and told him to keep his armor a secret before he was on Al Jazeera blowing up tanks."
"Right. Well, there's nothing here too important. What did I miss at Christmas?"
"You were pretty much there," Harry explained, finally settling down into one of the guest chairs across the desk. "Aunt Pepper made me grab Tony from tearing apart Killian's mansion for secrets long enough to come make sure you were okay. We opened presents. You seemed to come up from sedation for a little while. Sang White Christmas."
"I… thought I'd hallucinated that."
"No. You were really bad. But it made Aunt Pepper cry. She decided it meant you were going to be okay. So Tony doubled down on figuring out a cure. I guess I could have spent the week with her. We went to Dean's house on Boxing Day. But…"
One of his several surrogate fathers looked at the teen and shrewdly observed, "But you heard from the girl?"
"Yeah…"
Hedwig found him when he and Pepper had driven by the Malibu house to check on the repairs. It was slow going over the holidays, but she was willing to pay generously for people to work around Christmas. By the afternoon of the 26th, the place was still wrecked, but no longer in any danger of falling into the ocean. Scaffolding bloomed along the cliffs like some kind of industrial winter flower. The foreman had given the Pottses hard hats and an escort to get clothes and keepsakes from their bedrooms. When they were walking back to the car, Harry had spotted his snowy white owl sitting in a sycamore on the lawn.
"Missed you at Christmas, girl," he apologized, checking that none of the construction crew was watching before handing her the owl treats he'd been keeping in his bag of holding.
The messenger bird gratefully bolted the handful down, precisely avoiding her master's fingers in the process, then presented her leg where a message was attached.
"Thanks!" he said, retrieving and then reading the letter from Fleur. His eyes widened. "I… uh… I'm not sure where you should hang out for the rest of the holiday, girl. Hold on." The dark-haired teen scampered over to the car, not aware of how keyed up he'd suddenly become. "Uh. Aunt Pepper?"
Pepper Potts had a million things whirling through her mind after the latest crisis. She barely saw her nephew these days to learn his tells. But that kind of movement when clutching a letter was something he didn't realize that she'd come to recognize. "Do you think she can come to New York? I don't think we can host anyone here at the moment."
"She? What? How? Uh… she can't come here. But I can visit her at her house?"
His aunt's eyes narrowed. Her nephew was too anxious, even for a first date at the girl's house. "And do what?"
"Maybefightsomemarauders," the Boy-Who-Gave-His-Aunt-Gray-Hairs muttered.
"What?"
"Maybe fight some marauders?" he repeated, with more enunciation, each word falling like a leaden admission. "Asgard is finally showing up on Alfheim soon. And they've probably got it. But she said her dad said I could come and…"
"...and if you help Thor fight a bunch of maniacs her father might like you better?"
Visions of the Elrond look-alike eating his words from the year prior filling his mind, Harry allowed, "Yeah?"
"You're bringing your armor. And you're telling me everything you're going to do to keep you and Fleur safe," Pepper declared, having already skipped several plans to ground her ward for the rest of the holidays. "Let's talk about it in the car. If I like your plan, then I'll drop you near the door to the Market."
He wasn't sure how he'd done it, but he'd managed to wow her. By sunset of the 26th in LA, he was stepping through the Goblin Market into Alfheim.
It was not winter in Alfheim, at least at the exit closest to Fleur's house. Castle, really. Harry stepped into the riot of blossoms on trees that had never been seen on Earth and considered that he was probably only going to spend a few hours of his winter break anywhere it was below freezing. Was it spring near her family estates, or did Alfheim just have flowering throughout the year? Hermione would know. Regardless, it was pleasantly warm, the sun that beat down was a little too large and a little off-color, and the landscape was extremely majestic. He'd walked out of a building wall that was situated atop a massive cliff, from which he could see hundreds of mountains, waterfalls pouring into valleys and producing the hydropower that Fleur had told him was a major source of electricity on her planet.
He was vaguely aware that the planet had flatlands, but why would the ruling class live at sea level?
"Um, hey. I'm looking for Fleur Delacour. Or Maréchal?" he asked the first blindingly-beautiful elf that passed him in the morning light.
Regarding the dark-haired, glasses-wearing human in red-and-gold leather armor, the golden-haired man explained, "I don't understand most of your language, young one. You are looking for the flower of the court and the marshal?"
"Sorry, I don't think my translator was ready for French," Harry, admitted, embarrassed at probably spewing a nonsense of English at the passerby. "Yes. I'm looking for the home of the local Seelie?" He was pretty sure he'd picked the right exit from the Goblin Market.
"Yes. I understand you now. The Marshal and his family live there."
The elf was pointing even further uphill, where the storybook village surrounded a palace that was going to feature pretty heavily in Harry's D&D planning. Somehow he was willing to bet that it wasn't nearly as illusory as the Alfheim lodgings at the tournament the previous year. It was huge. "Thank you very much," he told the bystander, then started for the dwelling.
He realized he probably could have just looked for a castle and went there. Did his not-girlfriend really live in a palace that might have similar square footage to Stark Tower? Was it weird that he was intimidated even though he arguably lived in Stark Tower?
A human in brightly-colored armor drew looks from the populace. Gawking himself, Harry felt like he was in one of the many fantasy RPGs that didn't bother to make any NPC models that weren't very attractive, or like he was in a Hollywood production of a medieval village. Even the meanest of elf had enough illusory magic to improve themselves cosmetically. It was like walking through a historical area of Paris during fashion week. The least attractive member of the peasantry would have still been a 9 in LA. But Harry was too nervous to be self-conscious about being the ugliest person for miles.
He was nervous because Fleur hadn't been totally clear in her letter whether her parents knew he was coming.
It didn't take that long to get to the guardhouse at the gates to the castle. The town was very walkable. "Hi. Uh, I'm Harry. The Flower of the Court invited me?"
The supermodel guard looked at the teen in front of him with an appraising eye and then picked up a device that was almost certainly a radio. Had they evolved the tech differently, or just stolen it from Earth and changed the aesthetic? "Gatehouse One. I have a young man here. Black hair. Glasses. Lightning-bolt scar. Red-and-gold armor. Says his name is Harry and he's expected."
"Send him in," the radio squawked back, after several worrying seconds.
"Thanks," he nodded at the guard as the gates parted enough for him to pass through.
Did it make sense to have a hundred-yard driveway in a fantasy society? To be fair, Harry was pretty sure that Alfheim had technology higher than that of Vanaheim and different than Asgard. He hadn't seen any automobiles in the town, but maybe some people had them? Even having lived in it for the past five years, it was hard to truly expectations-set in the Nine Realms. Maybe he should have taken the cultural studies class. But it was a little weird walking unaccompanied up a drive at what could have been a take on Versailles if it had been a functional castle into the modern era.
The topiaries of fantastic beasts bordering the brickwork driveway were well-sculpted.
"'arry!" Fleur called out, skipping out from one of the castle doors into the courtyard. Even in her silvery battle mail ( especially in it, if he was being honest) she was one of the hottest people he'd ever seen. It had been a few months since they'd last been together, and it had been in the darkened halls of Asgard. It was easy to forget how radiant she was. Her armor and white-golden hair shining in the mountain sunlight of her homeworld, she was like something out of a particularly tasteful Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo painting: all smooth curves, saturated colors, and specular highlights. "I'm so glad you could make it!"
As she glomped him in a surprisingly-forward hug, he believed it. Their empathic connection had gotten powerful enough that it was working even through two sets of magical armor, or maybe just due to the sudden proximity of their faces, cerulean eyes gazing deep into viridian ones. She wasn't just glad that he'd made it, she was thrilled, and had missed him the months apart. All he could do was grin stupidly and assume that she was getting the same from him. She mirrored his dumb smile, though it looked beautiful on her.
The moment was spoiled by the sound of someone else opening the door she'd exited, and Fleur quickly pulled away, putting her arms demurely behind her back and standing to something like attention, but not moving too far from Harry. An elven man that he didn't recognize had exited. Wearing something like a wild mullet not too dissimilar from Jareth in Labyrinth, and pulling it off just as well, the blond man's elven armor was crafted to resemble leaves, and enameled in a variety of greens that likely served as forest camouflage. He toted an elegantly-sculpted longbow that likely had a tremendous draw weight. "Ah, Flower. This is the Boy-Who-Lived?"
"Yes, God's Burden," Fleur said, and Harry finally realized they were both still speaking the Alfheim variant of French, his implant translating and adding the consonants Fleur usually dropped in English. Somewhere in the back of his head, he realized that the man's name was actually Faradei, but he was getting the translation just as he was hearing her name as "Flower." She finished, "He came at my request to help with the marauders."
"Excellent," her battle teacher nodded, and had nocked an arrow and loosed it at Harry's chest before he'd finished the final syllable of the word.
Eyes widening, Harry had already been moving as soon as the man's hand went for his quiver, and managed to narrowly dodge the arrow, letting it skate past his left shoulder and into the turf of the courtyard as he formed an energy whip with his right hand. Possibly never having seen Midgardian magic before, Faradei didn't manage to move his bow out of the way before it was wrapped in orange light and Harry was yanking it out of his hands. The wizard was already planning out his next step, not sure whether the archer would switch to a knife or use magic.
But the elf merely gave a grim smile and stood back at ease, nodding. "I see the Flower has not oversold your competence. I will allow you to join our unit. We leave to join the Aesir soon. My bow?"
Bemusedly, Harry tossed the weapon back to him and he motioned for them to follow back into the castle. "This guy and Moody would love each other," Harry whispered to Fleur.
She laughed, recovering from her own annoyed surprise that her mentor had attacked her not-boyfriend so brazenly, and agreed, "I fear for the Nine Realms should they meet. He's started demanding 'constant vigilance' ever since I said it to him sarcastically during one of our training sessions."
Harry didn't have much time to take in the palace, simply noting that it featured the same decoration he'd seen in the Beauxbatons dwelling during the tournament: a decadent, multicolored, gravity-defying style that was only available to a race of illusionists. Fluted columns, webs of crystal, and winding spirals of luminous glass traced throughout the furnishings. The sign of wealth and taste was not having the extravagance, but making it impossibly intricate and yet still aesthetically unified.
They passed quickly into a large internal courtyard, clearly set up for martial training but currently so packed with elven warriors that any melee would be chaotic in the extreme. There wasn't enough square footage for every fighter to have their D&D-mandated five-by-five area of control. Fleur's father, dressed much like armored Elrond from the Lord of the Rings prologue, clearly flicked his eyes with slight disapproval between his daughter and Harry as they exited. But all he said was, "Be welcome in the House of War, Scion of the Potters. I regret that we cannot offer you refreshment, as you have arrived just in time to depart with us." Was there a jab in there about him being late? Should he use the Gandalf line about wizards and tardiness? "I understand you have the Midgardian skill with portals?"
He'd never really thought about how much of an advantage sling rings were even among other magical worlds. The Vanir could only use them due to the close kinship with the humans of Earth. Harry hoped he was up to the stress of holding a portal long enough for a whole echelon of armored knights with their kit. At least they weren't cavalry, expecting him to bring a bunch of horses. "If you can show me where I'm going," he said.
"Of course," Maréchal agreed, gesturing at the war table he'd been showing to his senior officers as they'd walked in. As Harry walked over, he realized that the elven skill at illusion was a huge advantage for this kind of thing, as their miniatures-scale map of the terrain was even better than Tony's holograms. A highly-realistic bird's eye view of the terrain showed where they were atop a mountain pass and where they were trying to go, at the base of the mountain. "They got close," he murmured, seeing the indicators of enemy troop positions and realizing some of them were within only about 30 miles of the stronghold.
"Indeed. Asgard assures us that they left us this long because other realms had direr need." It was clear that the man thought that if they'd left them even a few days longer, he might have been overrun.
"Right. Can I zoom in?" Harry tried spreading his fingers over the destination like he would on a map on his phone, to a few chuckles of confusion at the seemingly-magic gesture, before a senior aide demonstrated the actual gesture the elves used. That got a good enough close up of the dug-in camp where they were going that Harry could visualize it. He took a few seconds to work out the direction from where he was standing and then spun open a portal that, if he was honest, was slightly bigger than was strictly necessary.
Maybe he needed to impress Fleur's family just a little.
Fortunately, even in a brand new landscape, a portal trip of a couple-dozen miles wasn't much of a challenge after all the experience he'd had skipping between New York and LA. Confirming that the clearing looked correct, and their allies were on the other side waiting, the knights wasted no time forming up and proceeding through with haste. Harry was only going a little crosseyed with the effort of holding a portal for the time it took all of them to make it through, but was very glad to step after the last elf and let the hole in space zip closed behind him.
"Harry!" Thor's booming voice welcomed him. "Excellent! You've saved us a use of Bifrost to bring more elves." Emerging from a grand tent, the young god looked about the same as he had when Harry had seen him last in Asgard, but seemed much happier. Harry guessed it had to do with being back in his element, on campaign with his friends.
"Happy to help," the young wizard grinned, accepting Thor's armclasp and rolling with the force as the man's left hand clapped him heavily on the back. "We were sorry you couldn't make it last week. Exploding super soldiers. Their boss could breathe fire."
"Hah! You must tell me all about it, and we will tell you of the campaigns on Nornheim and Ria. We still wait for another contingent of einherjar in the morning, and scouts to confirm where the enemy is hiding, so now, we feast! Loki! Harry is here. And the elves."
"I am aware," the dark-haired prince sneered, leaning with affected nonchalance against one of the magnificent silver-barked trees that grew amidst the war camp and coming into view as they moved around Thor's tent. He had changed up his own armor to a set that wasn't quite as recognizable as what he'd worn when attacking New York: basic blacks with subtle dark greens. He looked much better than he had at his Asgardian trial, and Harry got the sense that only some of that was an illusion. "Fleur Delacour and Harry Potts. Finally, someone to talk to with more between their ears than muscles."
Despite phrasing it as a dig at Thor, his statement rang very true to Harry's empathy. "Glad you're up and about. You look well."
Fleur, however, had tensed a little at being greeted so familiarly by the god of mischief. "I'd forgotten that he was…"
"I shan't offer to take on Cedric's face to make our greeting easier," Loki said, probably glad that she'd never known the real Cedric to be sad at his death. But then he remembered what had happened between them the last time he'd worn the dead Hufflepuff's face. "I… er… I am sorry for…"
"For stealing my free will and forcing me to try to kill 'arry?"
Seeing the real harm he'd wrought in her anguish, his attempt at a disarming smile turned into a death's grimace as he said, "I never would have let you go through with it. And I wasn't in my right mind either?"
"Legally, I must accept that," she said, the confusion rolling off of her as she tried to align the knowledge that he had also been a victim with the violation he had wrought upon her mind and not even considered apologizing for in the time since. "I think I wish to speak with the Lady Sif, if she is amenable. My lord Thor, could I trouble you for an introduction?"
As she and his golden-haired brother walked off, Loki said to Harry, "It seems there are still many to whom I must make amends."
"That's like step eight of twelve, at least?" the Boy-Who-Lived offered, very familiar with the program for all the times Pepper had recommended it to Tony. "And there's some admitting-to-god stuff in there that you probably had a really easy time with. If you mean it, she'll come around."
"Did she?" Happy interrupted the story. He'd found some chips in his desk and had been happily snacking away for most of the tale.
"At least part of the way," Harry told him, thinking about it. "We were all pretty close together for five days. I don't think I should have him in the wedding party or anything, but they could at least be in the same command tent without her freaking out."
"Wedding party, huh? Things must have gone well."
"Exaggeration for effect?" Harry blushed a little, getting that Happy wasn't buying it. "I mean… we did have most of a week with her family's gods kind of treating me like their kid brother, and the vibe really shifted after the last day…"
Unlike the electricity-free planet of Vanaheim, Alfheim didn't have an insurmountable defense against technology from across the universe. What they had was illusion. The beautiful multicolored nebula that stretched across the night sky made it hard to find the planet at all, a deeply-worked set of illusions across the atmosphere disguised it as uninhabitable, and then localized illusions hid anything that invaders might want to take, be it strongholds or natural resources. But with a sufficient ground force and enough motivation, the marauders on Alfheim could start taking territory.
And, unlike on Vanaheim, they could bring their spaceships and ray guns.
It was fortunate that Thor and Harry had recent experience fighting such a horde, and Loki had up-to-date intelligence on how their leaders decided on their tactics. But it was asymmetrical warfare at its most lopsided. A loose consortium of aliens being guided by a few disaffected locals were straight out of classic sci-fi. But many of the elves had similar battle forms to Fleur that allowed them to grow wings and fly, their illusions and understanding of the terrain were a huge advantage, and even an armored gunship was just a fat target for Thor.
Nonetheless, their inevitable roll through the reinforced camps of the enemy now that they had an Aesir vanguard was a five-day slog. And with every battle they won, many of the survivors fled to regroup. By the end of December of Earth (for all that it was a lovely Spring day in Alfheim), they'd found the final redoubt they needed to crack. The aliens had dug deep into a mountain in what the elves recognized as an ancient mine, placed many emplacements of weapons, and managed to ward it against teleportation and astral projection. Something about the composition of the mountain and the magical wards even prevented Bifrost from transporting them inside.
"I don't have time for a siege," Harry complained, after returning from another astral scout around the exterior of the wards where he'd found no easy way to sneak in. "School starts back up in a few days."
"I, also, would end this quickly," Thor agreed. "Other worlds also feel the threat of marauders. But I will not leave such a fortress unconquered to spread once again."
"One entrance, unknown number of foes, but if we could get a few people inside to cause chaos…" Loki offered. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Thor lit up, "I love Delivering Prisoners!"
"Sadly," the dark-haired prince added, "the last time we used that gambit, I could carry and hide that oversized chunk of rock you so prefer. They would certainly notice you carrying such a weapon."
Maréchal, who had come by his position honestly due to his strategic acumen, frowned. "Besides Lord Thor, I would not gamble on any small group of pretend prisoners having the strength to disable the defenses from within."
Fleur glanced Harry's way, empathically recognizing that he was hesitating to speak. "'arry has an idea."
Everyone's eyes on him, he admitted, "Seems like the kind of thing that the Hulk would be great at. But I don't know where he is right now."
Thor grinned broadly again as Loki groaned, and the crown prince shouted, "Heimdall! Please send us Bruce of the Banners as soon as you can without causing an incident on Midgard."
It turned out that Asgard's gatekeeper could do that very quickly. Only a minute later, the clouds swirled to herald the beam of Bifrost. Standing very perplexed and slightly-greenish amidst the knotwork burn pattern left by the transporter on the nearby grass was Bruce Banner. He'd been in the middle of hitchhiking across some low-population area, snatched off the side of a desolate highway.
"Rem– er, Bruce!" Harry yelled and waved to both get his attention and calm him down before he got any greener at the sudden alien abduction. "Sorry we couldn't call ahead first, but we need your help!"
Staring around at the dozens of impossibly beautiful elven warriors and the goddess Sif herself, Bruce chuckled to hide his annoyance and offered, "I'm guessing you need the big guy to punch somebody?"
"He's going to love it," Harry promised, leading him over to explain the plan.
"Was there still a mountain standing?" Happy asked.
"Mostly," Harry grinned. "It went off exactly like we planned. Loki disguised himself as one of the aliens, brought Bruce in as a prisoner, and I went in with them, invisible. Er. Don't tell Aunt Pepper about that?"
"That you went into an alien dungeon with the guy that tried to take over the world seven months ago and a giant green rage monster?"
"Yeah. She's weird about that kind of thing. Anyway, I stayed out of harm's way! While Hulk was smashing I just sneaked around finding the wardstones that were keeping me from making a portal, then let the rest of the army in to clean up."
Happy was a little unconvinced. "You really stopped a whole alien invasion in a week?"
"I think there were stragglers and stuff. But we got most of their spaceships and main camps. The elves can take care of whoever's left. And hopefully anyone that still has a working spaceship will go home and tell their friends Asgard is back and they can't just try to grab anything they want on the protected worlds anymore."
"So you just got back from that? Missed New Years? I missed New Years. I was unconscious and stuck in that room you just rescued me from."
"Uh… no, we got done just in time for New Year's. Tony had a little thing for the Stark racing team over at the Avengers Tower. They let me and my friends come since there were enough chaperones, and Hermione wanted to see Viktor."
"So just you, Thomas, and Granger?"
"And Seamus and the Patils…"
"And?" Happy could tell the teen couldn't wait to spill.
"Fleur's father may have asked what I wanted for my aid on Alfheim. Elves don't like having a debt just hanging out there. And I may have suggested that his daughter's company for a New Year's celebration would be enough payment."
"Smooth. I take it that worked out?"
Harry sighed and admitted, "Yeah. I don't even think Maréchal was that mad about it. Thor had been working on him all week. Plus, Fleur was glad to get to see Viktor and everyone again."
"I bet she was. Totally just friends getting back together for a party. Where there's a bunch of European motorheads that aren't really paying that much attention to alcohol. And where you're supposed to kiss at midnight."
"I wouldn't know anything about that," Harry lied, baldly, the obviousness of the fib plain on his face.
"Good night?"
"Great night."
"Going to be able to go back to the long distance thing?"
"Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"No," Harry sighed. "But we'll figure it out. We're still not technically dating!"
"Sure you're not."
"Elves have whole ceremonies for that kind of thing. I'd know if we were officially dating. It would probably come on a gilded piece of parchment."
Happy just rolled his eyes. "Well just know that I want a gilded piece of parchment for my wedding invitation. If Loki's not in the wedding party, maybe I've got a shot."
"Um, how many groomsmen is too many?" Harry asked, suddenly counting up all his male friends. "That's forever away, anyway. Even if anything like that was going to happen. Which it isn't. We're not technically dating!"
"But the kiss was good."
"So good. I mean… what kiss? Anyway! I have to get back to Vanaheim. I'm planning to meet back with my Vanir friends and check on Mr. Weasley in the hospital before the train. Do you want to go back to your room at SHIELD?"
"Nah. I have like a hundred more emails to check up on. And I'm not going to explode. Thanks for letting me out, and catching me up on your week. It's not quite getting to keep my superpowers."
"Maybe the next time. See you!"
Harry didn't actually go straight back to Vanaheim. Between packing up, saying goodbye to Tony and Pepper, and doing some final debriefs with SHIELD about the events around Killian and Extremis, it was January 3rd on Earth before he could make his way back through the Goblin Market to get to the hospital in Diagonalt. Tom the barman was getting used to seeing him pass through: he'd had to come back after Alfheim, even though Thor had offered to let him use Bifrost, because he wasn't sure what that would do to whatever world the Market considered him "anchored" to.
Loki had laughed and promised to tell him about some of the better night roads off of Vanaheim that would keep him from being so reliant on whatever tricks the goblins had used to allow everyone to pass between realms.
Sirius, basically fully healed after his run-in with the giant lizard man, met Harry at the Market exit and guided him through the bonfire to Diagonalt. "Sorry you can't stay for more than a few hours, pup," he said as they were walking up to the hospital near the city center.
"Yeah. I need another vacation for my vacation. I barely have time to tell you about Alfheim."
"Word did get back here about that. Most important question: did you mention your old dogfather to the Lady Sif?"
Harry smirked, "No. But Nat might have mentioned you in passing. Should I tell her you've moved on to Aesir nobility?"
"Oh! I don't want to hear about Alfheim. I want to hear everything about what you were doing when Natasha mentioned me."
"Maybe after we've made sure Mr. Weasley is okay. Oh, hey, Nev. Lady Longbottom. You here to check on Mr. Weasley, too?" He'd noticed Neville and his grandmother in the hospital anteroom. With that hat, you couldn't miss the old matriarch.
"Uh, I guess we could do that," Neville hedged. "But we're here to see someone else." Harry didn't need his supernatural empathy to tell that his friend didn't feel comfortable talking about it.
"Neville Longbottom," Augusta snapped, "there's nothing to be ashamed of. Tell Harry why we're here."
"I think I worked it out, ma'am," Harry told her. He knew that his friend's parents had been tortured into insanity in the war, he just hadn't worked out that meant they were confined to a hospital until just then. And while he considered Neville one of his best friends, he got the vibe he'd be imposing to offer to go see them.
Sirius had not gotten that vibe. "Frank and Alice are here? I thought you'd keep them at the estate."
The old woman explained, "We tried for a time, but the healers recommended they'd have an easier time here, where they could receive constant support. And sometimes they'd be upset by familiar things at home that they couldn't operate the way they had once."
"Have you, uh," Harry asked, against his better judgment, "tried anything but magical healing? Thor mentioned that they have some Asgardian technology in their houses of healing. And Earth is developing new science all the time. Just last week, even, though it was experimental and dangerous. I don't want to get your hopes up or anything."
Augusta regarded Harry shrewdly, realizing that the Boy-Who-Lived likely had resources even she did not. She could tell that Neville was excited about the prospect, enough to bypass her own distaste at asking for favors from the Aesir or risking inexplicable Midgardian technology. "We can consider it," she allowed. "Perhaps over the summer, we can examine our options. Come, now, Neville. Visiting hours have begun. We'll check in on the Weasleys after."
"Yeah, see you there, Nev," Harry agreed, then walked off with Sirius to join his other friends.
The woman on Earth most likely to come up with some kind of miracle cure for the Longbottoms was, at that moment, waking up in a shipping container, bare except for a cot and some supplies, dimly lit by a battery-powered lamp. It wasn't the SHIELD cell that Maya Hansen had gone to sleep in, an unknown number of days earlier. She felt long-term sedation wearing off, and took a moment to realize that a man's shadow lurked at the other end of the metal-walled room.
"Too dangerous to leave alive, or am I going to be forced to make more Extremis?" she guessed.
"Option C," the man's voice chided, his tones tinged with a bit of the American South. "The first two are what would have happened if I left you where you were. Too many people in SHIELD can't be trusted. Think of me as your way out of the hole you'd dug yourself into. I can cut you loose, if you're going to keep your head down. Or you can help me and do science for the good guys for once."
He stepped into the dim glow of the lamp enough to make out his bald head, goatee, and badly-damaged left eye.
"You see, I'm putting together a little bit of an initiative…"
Notes:
We are not off of hiatus just yet. At this point, it may not be until I get a bunch of wordcount in the buffer during November before I go back to regular posting. But we'll see how October goes, as far as maybe starting back up a little early.
No, this one is just a little bit of a present in the hopes that you'll all check out my backerkit for Shadow City Mysteries, the tabletop RPG. We're about to go into the final weekend and are fully funded, but would love to hit more stretch goals. If you're on the fence, there's a free 56-page quickstart that I did most of the writing for, and it's full of really awesome art. Even if you miss the deadline, I think it just turns into a preorder situation after the campaign ends. You can also wishlist the video game on Steam, which also helps us out!
Chapter 86: Kiss and Tell
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"You kissed Padma?!" Ginny screamed across the Gryffindor common room at Dean.
Blindsided from updating his D&D character with Harry over by the fireplace, he answered, "Uh…" As his girlfriend stormed over to him, he explained more fully, "Just as friends! I kissed Parvati, too!"
"Just as friends? Did Harry kiss them just as friends?" the fiery redhead demanded.
"He was kissing Fleur?" Dean tried not to glance Harry's way for help, since he knew that would get him in even more trouble.
"Seamus was there. What about you?"
"Theo woulda killed me," the Irish boy answered, from where he and Ron were playing chess and trying to keep out of the argument.
"See! Seamus gets it!"
"I mean… they were sad that Harry and Hermione both had someone to kiss… and I just thought…" Dean trailed off, realizing he was only digging himself in deeper.
"But you didn't. You didn't think!" Ginny insisted, stared at him for a moment, realized he wasn't going to have a better answer, then growled a little and stomped out of the room.
"Better go catch her, dude," Harry told him, shrugging like that was all the help he knew how to give. "I'll put your stuff up."
Dean sighed, "Thanks," then levered himself out of his comfy chair and went rushing after his girlfriend as the other three-dozen Gryffindors present hanging out inside on the cold winter day went back to what they'd been doing, show over.
It honestly said something about how interesting Harry's stories about the winter break had been that notorious gossip Parvati Patil hadn't gotten around to describing her New Year's kiss with Dean until they'd been back a week. Which Dean would hopefully realize before the argument got too much further, since neither of the Patil sisters considered it particularly important and that might make Ginny feel better. Harry hadn't really known about it himself until just then, for all that they'd been a couple of yards away from him while it went down. He'd been too distracted by his own midnight kiss to pay attention to who his friends were kissing.
"Hey, put on that Smashing Pumpkins album," someone suggested, breaking Harry from his reverie, and he dutifully went over to load up the clockwork-powered record player with one of his new Christmas presents. He'd never expected to be a vinyl guy, but Hermione's kitbashed device (based on Tony and Lily Potter's designs) was one of the few sources of entertainment on lazy Sundays in the dorms. He'd started coming back from holidays with several pounds of the discs. It turned out to be a great time for the resurgence of the medium, at least as far as the Gryffindors were concerned. Everything from the classics to the most modern albums were getting released on vinyl.
Of all the albums he'd gotten, he'd been surprised to have one of the classics flagged as contraband on the way into Hogwarts. The Ancient One had warned Mordo that there was a copy of the album by Lorna Wu and the Coral Shore, and the dour master-turned-professor had confronted Harry to grab it before he'd even gotten it upstairs. "Please tell me you haven't sung along to this?" he'd said. When they admitted they hadn't gotten to even listen to it, yet, he said, "Small victories, I suppose. Lorna Wu was a witch, and her songs are spells meant to corrupt her audience. It regrettably resists the Runes of Kof-Kol, and the Sorcerer Supreme has mentioned the Streisand Effect should we try harder to remove it from the parlance. At least she died before she could become even more popular."
He still muttered something about "additional education" as he wandered off to dispose of the record.
Harry wasn't bothered, really (though now they were all a little curious about whether the fundamentalists of the 20th century hadn't been completely wrong about "the Devil's music"), because the slightly-reduced stack of vinyl wasn't his prized Christmas present. That role went to the Asgard-forged saber that Fandral had finally delivered to him when they met up on Alfheim. The single-edged blade was only slightly curved, just enough to make it more effective than a rapier would have been in Harry's tendency to get in fights mounted on a broom. Somehow the smith that made it had figured out how to balance it perfectly for his height and fighting style, and he could swing the thing almost as fast as he could his conjured blades.
Not especially flashy-looking from a distance, the mostly-dark blade was pattern welded and shot through with silver lines that resembled lightning bolts. Like Fandral's own sword, or Loki's knives, it could deflect magical attacks and cut magic constructs. But the runework in the low-profile handguard was done in the same metal as the blade, and theoretically would let Harry channel magic into the sword, once he figured out the trick of it. Fandral told him that Frigga herself had helped with the design. A few of the runes seemed similar enough to those on the knife Sirius had gotten him that Harry figured it would be much easier to conceal than its bulk suggested. Once he had a spare minute, he was planning to do some in-depth research on what kind of mystical technology he was wielding.
He hadn't expected to be a sword guy any more than he had a vinyl guy, but it was what it was.
Figuring his RPG campaign planning was shot for the day, researching more about his sword seemed like a lovely use of his Sunday. After dropping their books in the dorm room and grabbing his gear, he was on the way down to the library when Parvati fell in beside him. "I really thought she would be more mad at me," she said without preamble.
"Why?" Harry asked. His question was partially in reply and partially wondering why she was following him. But he remembered seeing Lavender settling in next to Ron in the common room, so she must have figured he'd be more interesting to hang out with.
"Because of the Justin thing."
"Finch-Fletchley?"
"Obviously… because we broke up over the holidays… and then I made out with Dean…" she was growing increasingly exasperated as Harry continued to glance at her blankly out of the corner of his eye while they descended the stairs. "Harry! I complained about it to you three times at least!"
"Oh? Oh, right! He didn't want you to meet his parents for Christmas." Harry had gotten very good at tuning out the Parvati and Lavender gossip hour. Perhaps too good.
"He didn't want to say it was because he couldn't bring an Indian girl home to mumsy, but I'm pretty sure that was it."
"Is he going to join the Masters after school? Will they take it any better if he's off fighting horrors from beyond with a bunch of Asians?"
They hit a landing as she complained, "If he does, he'll probably angle for the London sanctum. I honestly think they think the magic thing is just a lark and they're only entertaining it because it's skills that none of their peers have, and the Masters promised to get him into Oxford or somewhere else respectable if he went to Hogwarts instead of a proper school for proper English boys."
Impressed she hadn't had to take a breath through any of that, he tried to console her. "Sorry it didn't work out. Hogwarts relationships are just training wheels for people you'll meet as an adult anyway."
"Says the guy who's probably going to marry an elf princess. And I talked to the rest of Viktor's racing team, and they were shocked how devoted he is to Hermione. They swear he just ignores all the race groupies. Maybe I should have worked harder to meet a nice witch or elf while we had the chance last year. But I'm so over it! I was just saying I'm glad Ginny isn't mad at me."
Refraining from pointing out that Ginny was mad because of her, he just shrugged and said, "Guess none of us really ever knew why Dean and Padma broke up, so it feels like there's no reason for them not to get back together."
"You don't actually want me to tell you."
As they stepped off the stairs and into the hall that led to the library, Harry was grudgingly impressed that her sister's dirty laundry was something that would get Parvati to at least pretend she was going to keep a secret. Clearly, all he had to say was that he did want to know and he'd get the dirt. But he resisted the urge, and thought he would have even if one of the people in question hadn't been coming down the hall the other way. "Oh, hey, there's Dean."
He looked exhausted walking over to them after what had to have only been a ten minute conversation. "She's not happy, but we didn't break up," he summarized, a little warily, knowing anything he told Parvati would beat him back to the Gryffindor common room.
"Cool," Harry nodded. "I was going to the library to look up runes."
"Or… we could figure out why Hagrid is acting as weird as he did that time with the dragon," Dean suggested, watching the oversized groundskeeper and professor surreptitiously exit the library like he was afraid of getting caught.
"Yay! Do I get to be Hermione on this adventure?" Parvati asked, chuffed she'd lucked out.
"We can't do crimes with her anymore, since she became a prefect," Harry agreed, but amended, "and we can't take you if you're going to let everyone know Hagrid's business. He barely got away with the dragon." She'd found out and spread the rumor about the first year secret long after the big man could get in trouble for it.
She regarded Harry and Dean's hard stares for a minute, seriously considering, then nodded. "I don't do it to be malicious. I'm not a Slytherin, you know. I'll keep it on the DL."
Figuring that was the best they were going to get out of her, and with the long-legged keeper of the keys building up his head start, the boys nodded and all three started to move off toward the outside. Unfortunately for them, there were Slytherins on hand. "They're up to something," Draco told Crabbe and Goyle as they exited the library themselves and spotted the Gryffindors moving away, recognizing their "about to do something sneaky" tells as much as they recognized Hagrid's. "This time, we'll catch them at it. Maybe Dar-Benn will want to know. The two of you just… try to blend."
"He's not going back to his house," Parvati observed. They'd followed Hagrid out of the side door closest to his residence, but in the wan afternoon light, he was clearly just taking the straightest path across the grounds into the forest.
"May just be going to see… er… one of his friends who lives in the forest. In Ronan's Guard," Harry figured, catching himself at the last moment before revealing Aragog to Parvati.
Dean, who was read in on the buglike alien that lived in the forest shook his head and said, "He's not stopping to get Fang. It's something that he's actually worried will be dangerous for the dog."
"And he thinks a dragon is like a kitten," she added.
"We're going to need warming charms," Harry decided, none of them really having dressed to go into the forest in the Vanaheim winter. He had his bag of holding, but his coat was bulky enough he didn't usually bother trying to stuff it in.
"And your tracking charm to get back," Dean agreed, as they started casting while following the half-giant into the Forbidden Forest.
"Got them," Draco grinned, as he spotted Harry and his crew crossing the treeline. "Shame Granger isn't with them. Be funnier to catch a Gryffindor prefect. You two keep a lookout to see if they leave. I'll go find Dar-Benn."
Whatever Hagrid was going to get, it was at least a mile into the forest, and it took far longer than the quarter of an hour such a distance would take on a road at an easy walk for the athletic teens, as they had to both be somewhat stealthy and navigate around trees and over hills. They'd divided up duties of keeping track of the half-giant, watching for other threats, and figuring out where they actually were so they could get back out. It wasn't like Harry was great at recognizing landmarks in the dense wood, but he didn't think they were going to see Aragog.
"Is it getting colder?" Parvati asked.
"Stands to reason. Sun will be going down soon," Dean assumed.
"No. I… think it's a magical cold," she disagreed. The boys glanced at each other and nodded, realizing that Parvati was the most magically sensitive of the three of them.
Harry and Dean felt it too, after a few more minutes. It wasn't even something a thermometer would notice, but that the cold bit more. Every faint gust of wind that made it through the trees seemed like it was trying to unravel their warming charms and cut through any gaps in their clothes to chill them to the bone.
It had been a while since they'd actually spotted Hagrid, instead following the tracks he'd left: despite being woods-wise, he was huge and couldn't help but crash through low branches and crush even frozen-solid ground cover with his feet. But as they started to consider whether they could risk the mystical winter any further, they heard his distinctive voice echoing faintly from up ahead, as if he was talking…
Or, as the case actually was, reading a story. "This 'ere one's from Midgard, I reckon. They put Loki an' Thor in everythin', even if it happened way too long ago fer that. But it's about the giants what built the walls o' Asgard, it is. I guess the Midgardians don't know the feller's name, but I'd bet it was Idi. Huh. Funny thing—Midgardians got Loki bein' the father of Odin's horse, what with how he lured away Idi's horse so the bloke couldn't finish the job proper. But that's the point I been tryin' ta make, ain't it? Our folks used to build things, we did…" There was a sudden crash of what sounded like a bunch of metal, that interrupted, and Hagrid chided, "I'll tell it proper, I promise, jus' givin' yer the background."
The teens had gotten close enough to spot who Hagrid was talking to: an immense humanoid figure that had pulled two mighty steel chains taught, both wrapped around her neck and anchored to strong, old trees on either side of a clearing. Frost giant women weren't as different-looking from their men as humans, but they'd had enough classes that mentioned the jotuns to know what they were looking at even through the trees.
She probably had only a few yards of freedom within the center of the clearing, one chain pulling taut before she could try to untangle the binding from the opposite tree. But she wasn't trying to free herself so much as testing how close she could get to Hagrid. He'd sat down not far from one of the anchor trees, and had a small pile of books from the library that he was using to, from all evidence, tell stories.
Parvati couldn't help herself, exclaiming, "Hagrid! What about Madam Maxime?!" She was also concerned about him seemingly kidnapping and chaining up a giantess against her will, but she'd been trying to get "Maxgrid" to catch on as a term for their romantic pairing for a year, so she was invested.
"Wha'? Parvati? Harry and Dean?" Hagrid noticed the three of them lurking in the shadows of the trees. "Yer not s'posed ter be out here!"
"Guessing you aren't either?" Dean asked, as they walked up, eyeing the giant warily.
For her part, she'd ceased straining against the chains and was giving them a calculating look. Up close, they could tell that she looked young, perhaps the jotun version of a teen. Given that giants aged similarly to Aesir, she could be several decades old.
"And she's too young for you! Did something happen between you and Maxime on your trip?" Parvati was still trying to piece out the mystery of what was happening.
"Well, er, we captured Greip here…" It took another few moments for the big man's brain to pick up on what the girl was implying, before he explained, "Who's my sister. Hal'-sister, really. Same mum."
The sister in question snarled out something in Jotun that they couldn't parse, and Harry was sad again that his translator didn't work on Vanaheim.
"She basically understands, jus' doesn't wanna speak English," Hagrid said, "but she says mum's dead and I weren't there."
Harry asked the really obvious question, "Uh, why do you have your sister chained up in the forest?"
Caught out, the half-giant summarized, "Olympe and I went ter find the jotuns what were marauding over the summer. Try ter talk 'em outta it. Didn't work much. But we heard 'bout Greip 'ere runnin' a big band. An' I couldn' bring meself ter kill 'er, so we took 'er captive. Turns out she were makin' such a nuisance of 'erself 'cause of mum."
She again growled something accusatory in Jotun. They could make out "Thor," "Asgard," and something that sounded like it meant death.
"Yeah, er, mum musta gotten killed fightin' the princes a couple years ago, when they went ter Jotunheim. Greip took it real personal. She were tryin' ter get together a big enough warband ter get Thor ter come fight 'er."
Harry regarded the enormous young woman with understanding. Everyone was someone's family. The concept of wergild was pretty much designed to keep killings from erupting into feuds that could wipe out whole bloodlines. Thor and Fandral's stories about their trip to Jotunheim admitted it was a bad idea, but still mostly described the jotuns as aggressors. Barely treated them as more than clever monsters, honestly.
"Thor would win," Harry told her, sadly, not enjoying the idea of even a seemingly-murderous giantess dying for nothing. She was Hagrid's family. "But I can talk to him about paying wergild?"
Greip yelled out something angry and tested her chains again.
"Yeah. She's not really acceptin' any ideas that don' lead ter somebody's glorious death. But I been workin' on it. Tryin' ter tell her about how jotuns used ter be civilized."
"Does she just… sit out here in the woods?" Parvati asked. She was starting to seem fascinated more than concerned. This was the first time she'd ever really encountered a jotun this close up, and didn't grow up hating them like many Vanir did, but she'd heard Lavender's stories of their attacks for years. So she was torn between the initial impression that this was a kidnapped woman and the idea that this was a captive prisoner.
"Full-blooded jotuns don' need ter eat much, and, well, it's not like the cold is gonna matter much to 'er. Dumbledore put runes on the chains so she can't break 'em or really use 'er ice powers."
Greip punctuated that with another angry pull against the bindings. She seemed disinclined to actually put her hands on them to try to break them, so she must have learned the hard way that was a bad idea. Harry thought he could spot various runes he recognized that might serve as basically a vacuum for her powers, which was stronger if she touched them directly.
It might be a good thing for him to figure out how to make, honestly, if Earth was going to have more and more villains with powers to incarcerate. And he was already planning to spend a lot of his semester researching runes anyway.
While Harry was mentally spinning off on magical crafting ideas, Dean eyed Parvati and suggested, "So Dumbledore approved it, and it's not something we need to spread around?"
"The other professors don' know 'bout it, no," Hagrid nodded, also realizing that the gossip's presence might be a big problem for him. He was pretty bad at keeping a secret himself, and game recognized game. "An' it would be dangerous ter the students, comin' out, lookin' fer her. We'd've kept 'er in the dungeons, but what if she got out?"
Harry nodded, "Guess she doesn't know exactly how to get to the school from here, and she'd probably just try to escape deeper into the forest anyway. But if she got loose near the school, she might hurt someone just because they were there."
Greip didn't confirm or deny, but had a wicked grin just thinking about it.
Parvati regarded the three boys waiting for her reaction and finally sighed and said, "Fine. I'll try not to tell everyone about your secret prison. But I make no promises about letting people know that you have a full giant sister that wants to kill Thor because he killed your mother. That's juicy."
"Guess I'll haveta take it," the big man agreed, clearly wishing that they hadn't brought Parvati. "Well, kin yer all get back alright? I'd jus' got started with terday's storytime."
Even with the giantess' reduced powers, they finally realized that they were freezing, and nodded at each other. Harry said, "Bye Hagrid. Bye Greip. Seriously, you don't have to die gloriously. We can work it out. If you want."
Her snarl in response was half-hearted. She'd honestly kind of been interested in the first interactions she'd had with anyone other than her half-brother for months, and was sad for it to end.
As they picked up the pace trying to make it back to the school grounds before sunset, the combination of distance from Greip and the physical activity allowed the teens to warm back up. Parvati was a whole stream of conversation by herself, trying to get all her thoughts out about the situation so she'd have less need to share with the uninformed as soon as she got back in the castle. She thought Hagrid really needed to work on how creepy his decisions could come off, thought it was oddly noble what he was doing for his sister even though she clearly wanted to kill him, was interested in whether Greip actually could be turned into a rational member of society, and was newly interested in what jotun teens were like.
As a consequence of this running mostly-monologue, they teens were pretty easy to hear coming and paying less attention than they should have been to any school staff waiting to catch them out of bounds.
"Well, well, well… Potter, Thomas, and Patil," Dar-Benn announced, her vividly-pink robes obvious in the fading sunlight when she stepped out from behind Hagrid's hut as they exited the treeline. "Seems the three of you have been out of bounds. Without your safety runes, as well! Whatever shall we do?"
Harry groaned. He didn't think they were going to like her suggestions.
Notes:
And we're back. The good news is that I think I'm going to get to the end of year 5 before stopping again. The bad news is that between lots of social commitments and the general malaise of the US election, I'm having the worst writing November since I started doing NaNoWriMo. I hoped to get 50k words and am currently closer to 13k, with only a week and change left. Hence, I'll probably need a longer hiatus after completing year 5. I don't like it any more than y'all do. But enjoy the forthcoming chapters!
Chapter 87: Window to the Soul
Chapter Text
The important thing was that Dar-Benn was not allowed to assign punishments. She had tried a few times, earlier in the year, and been shot down by the administration every time. Lacking any truly official role in the school, she had no recourse.
What she could do was report students and demand that they be punished to the full extent of the rules. And, despite many of the school's students contriving to wander into the woods at least once per year, and basically never being punished for it previously, it was, technically, forbidden. And they weren't going to explain that they'd been out there with Hagrid. They might have explained it if it was just the headmaster, but Dar-Benn wasn't leaving his office until she got closure on the infraction she'd uncovered, even if it was dinner time and she was preventing herself, him, and McGonagall (present as their head of house) all from eating.
"I suppose," Dumbledore decided, regarding the Accuser wearily across his desk, "that you are correct that transgressing in this case deserves a serious punishment. I believe two nights a week of detention with Master Mordo for the rest of the term…"
"A terran that already has ties with them? Potter, in particular, would love that. They should serve the detention with me!"
"You don't have a role in the school that can host detentions," McGonagall informed her, crisply.
"Alas, Minerva is correct," he continued, obviously not actually sad about it. "However, you did not allow me to finish! For Mr. Thomas and Ms. Patil, who are first-time offenders, the detention with Mordo. For Mr. Potter, who is largely a model student but has gotten carried away with teen hijinx a few times in the past, perhaps a stronger sentence to remind him to stay in bounds. I believe that Severus has complained about his rule breaking in the past, and might be inclined to host his detention and take it seriously."
Dar-Benn squinted at them, trying to figure out if she was being outmaneuvered, but had heard about Snape's harsh treatment of Gryffindors. Pursing her lips, she eventually smirked and noted, "Acceptable."
"Excellent. Shall we adjourn for our evening meal, then?" As the kree woman turned away from him, Dumbledore shot Harry a wink.
Honestly, beyond his first few months after starting at Hogwarts, Harry hadn't had that much problem with his father's old rival. The man was overly vindictive, still, and prone to judging harshly, but Harry's chemistry work was hard to find fault with. He still received lower grades than Slytherins, like Draco and Theo, who turned in slightly worse efforts, but remained among the top students in class. And, over the years, Harry had basically worked out that Snape was probably some kind of Death Eater spy for Dumbledore that had to act like he hated Gryffindors. It was the only thing that made sense based on the various encounters with him they'd had during tense situations, and how much the headmaster obviously trusted him. Plus, while he was hard to read, even with Soul Stone empathy, Harry had never picked up any actual malevolence from the guy, even at his meanest.
Would they prefer that he be replaced with a professor that wasn't out to get them, Harry in particular? Definitely. Did they basically understand that it might be a useful ploy for the old man? Grudgingly. Was Harry looking forward to spending two nights a week with the guy for whatever reason Dumbledore had assigned the detention? Not any more than Snape likely was.
"Potter," the professor drawled, making that distaste obvious when Harry walked in for his first session a couple of evenings later. The chemistry classroom had the magical torches reduced even more than usual, leaving it extremely dim, and the smell of bleach abounded. His session was later than the normal after-dinner detention, so maybe it was already done and he wasn't going to get assigned cleaning. "Regretting your adventure, yet?"
"Yes, sir," Harry agreed, politely. He usually tried to start off as polite as possible. Snape would often needle him just to provoke backtalk, that he could assign punishment for. Or just come up with a clever counter-retort that made him look smart in front of the Slytherins. Perhaps he'd save those theatrics when they were one-on-one.
"Sit." Snape gestured at a comfortable-enough wooden chair that he'd clearly dragged from his office to put near his teaching desk. He was sitting in one of his own, his dark eyes unusually visible as he'd pulled his greasy black hair into a ponytail. The normal seating in the classroom was stools, which weren't very comfortable to sit on but made it a lot easier to escape a chemical accident on the lab tables. Once Harry was seated, he explained, "Albus has been trying to arrange this for months…"
Harry just waited, rather than asking what Dumbledore had arranged. It was always a gamble whether Snape was waiting for a question to prompt him to continue, or an opportunity to reprimand for talking out of turn. It was easier just to wait unless he asked a specific question, clearly directed for Harry to answer.
Realizing the boy wasn't going to ask, the Slytherin head of house continued, "I remember from two years ago that you were working on meditation, so you could astrally project. And I understand from Albus and Karl that you have become proficient in it." It took Harry a moment to remember that Karl was Mordo's first name. "Am I correct that… Lupin… never included the discipline of occlumency?"
"No, sir. Er, he did not." Harry considered leaving it at that, but figured he'd been asked a direct question and some kind of elaboration wouldn't be snapped at, and it seemed like straightforward Latin. "The art of concealing the mind, sir?"
That actually got a quickly-hidden twitch of a smile of approval from the man, who elaborated, "That is its core function, yes. Exercises to organize and protect your thoughts. While there is little that is proof against the yellow Stone, there are other magics to divine thoughts and control the mind. Or simple psychology to look for tells. Occlumency makes it possible to resist such intrusions.
"This is not why Albus asked me to teach you the art. He has not seen fit to elaborate on exactly why you might require it, but a side effect of occlumency is improved memory and lucid dreaming. He implied there is something in your dreams that it might be useful to have better control of. Perhaps some insight into the Dark Lord? Hidden memories from a child confronted by him?"
Did Dumbledore truly trust Snape as much as he seemed to, if the man was fishing for information? Or maybe the headmaster just hoarded his secrets out of reflex. Considering for a moment, Harry decided to throw him a bone, if they were going to be working together on it. "I've been having visions in my dreams. Mostly of stuff he's up to. It let me warn the headmaster in time to save Mr. Weasley. Maybe Dumbledore thinks I could get more information if I could control it better."
"What an interesting gift."
Harry paused for a moment, thinking about whether to respond to that snide tone, but realized he might have another option other than ignoring or responding to the snark. He offered, "I think it's part of what my mom did to save me from him. She used magic from Queen Frigga to protect me."
That had the tactical benefit he had hoped. The amount of sadness and grief Snape still felt over Lily Potter broke through what, Harry realized, must be occlumency barriers to his empathy. He could finally tell for sure what he'd only previously heard in rumors from Sirius and Bruce: Severus Snape had been a good friend of his mother, and deeply regretted her passing. Before the protective walls went back up, Harry could basically feel the man resolve to teach him occlumency as a way to improve the benefits of the last spell cast by his dead best friend.
"Very well," was all the verbal indication the professor gave of his decision to truly help, rather than making a token effort and hoping his student self-sabotaged so he could get out of the frequent one-on-one sessions with the boy that reminded him of his own childhood enemy. His perfect memory made it so hard to ignore the years of conflicts with such a similar face, despite the eyes of his best friend staring out of it. Perhaps it was even worse because of the eyes. "Enter your meditation state, but do not go so deeply that you leave your body or lose your ability to hear. I will give you instructions on what to visualize once you are ready…"
An hour later he was back in the common room, not sure if he was actually making progress but at least Snape had realized that verbal abuse wouldn't help a meditative state so they'd mostly sat quietly with periodic commands to envision a castle, a storage room, a wall, a dungeon, or other elements of security and protection. Harry wasn't sure how his success was to be tested, but the exercises were at least reasonable.
"How'd yours go?" he asked Dean and Parvati as they walked into the common room not far behind him. It was mostly empty, as the rest of Gryffindor was getting ready for bed.
"It was great!" Dean answered. "He did a bunch of tests of our martial arts and wandless casting and seemed impressed with what we could do."
"Even me, I guess," Parvati agreed, but with a roll of her eyes. "Honestly, though, I don't know if I'm going to survive this twice a week with you and Mordo goobing about kung fu together. It's like getting it in stereo."
Harry smiled, "Remember when you thought you couldn't hack it? You'll be ninja kicking Cthulhu monsters like it's nothing just like the rest of us."
"I… still don't really want to do that," she argued. "What'd Snape have you do?"
"He's teaching me to control my mind better. I guess Dumbledore thinks it might help with my visions."
"I mean, good luck," Dean said. "Guy has it in for all of us, you in particular. Can't imagine one-on-one sessions are going to get you very far, very fast."
"Yeah," Parvati agreed. "As much as I don't like his style, I way prefer Mordo over Snape."
"It's not that bad…" Harry told them.
A couple of days later, he had cause to doubt his own assessment.
"You've had the time to build your mental defenses, so let us test them," the vampire-like professor sneered, moments after Harry sat for his next session. "We'll start with a spell that would be illegal if it weren't so useful in ferreting out guilt. A shame so few in the Aurors are willing to make the bargain with Zarathos that allows its casting. Visualize some trouble fresh on your mind. Some nonsense you are embarrassed of from your winter holidays, perhaps? Envision it, then construct your mental walls."
He gave Harry a long look, and the teen realized this wasn't a time for questions. He tried to slip into his walking meditation that he'd used to prevent Fleur from reading his mind, hoping that was a key step in what he needed to do, and began to erect defenses as he'd visualized in the last session.
But he only had a couple of seconds, and had barely begun his efforts before Snape stared deeply into his eyes and incanted, "Legacy of Penance!"
Harry's hasty defenses were part memory, part construct. Thinking about what he'd done over the holidays put him in mind of the places he'd been during the holidays. Somewhere he'd considered memories he didn't care if Snape saw to try to distract him, but wasn't totally sure how to do that after one lesson. Tony's mansion bled into the Chinese Theater and Killian's estate, each flitting with things that had happened there before Christmas.
It wasn't helpful to their use as fortifications that all of those places had been pretty damaged in the memories he was using.
He'd rejected using Avengers tower, since the secrets there weren't his to share and he didn't want anyone to know about his secret storage closet for his armor, and felt good about that as his memories flitted about. He could tell Snape was successfully invading his mind as he was abruptly snapped from thought to thought in an unnatural way, and he didn't seem to have much power to visualize something innocuous. Failing to save more people at the theater. Losing Iron Man below the water as he struggled to save the house. Not doing more in Miami before having to call in the Avengers.
"You aren't guilty about any of this," Snape's voice drawled, half-heard, half-thought. "I don't believe that your most embarrassing memories are that you weren't heroic enough."
With another act of will, the chemistry professor shoved fully through the hodgepodge conglomeration of buildings and Harry found himself standing out in the open, on a bright morning atop a hill overlooking a beautiful forest on Alfheim.
It had been the worst moment of his trip.
"Ah, Wizard Potter," a young man's voice called, surprising Harry where he'd come up to look out over the next day's ride and astral project to scout ahead. He'd only just returned to his body and didn't know how long his unknown visitor had been waiting for him to start moving again. "Back among us?"
He stood from the cushion he'd brought atop the hill and turned to regard the speaker. Relaxed, leaning nonchalantly against a tree, was everything a teen boy secretly hoped he'd grow into. Tall and slender, but clearly athletic beneath his gilded scale armor, the elf looked only a few years older than Harry. His dark hair was styled in a way that it would take a Hollywood barber hours to achieve, showing off pointed ears and eyes so blue they were almost purple. A thin woven circlet of platinum, gold, and iridescent gems crossed the top of his forehead, mostly hidden by his perfect hair.
"Do they… need me?" Harry asked, trying to figure out why they hadn't sent one of the usual scouts to get him.
"Ah, no, sorry. I was just visiting the camp and wanted to meet you before you left. I hear you are a good friend of my betrothed, and she was able to convince you to lend your magic to our cause."
"Oh, you're…"
"River towards Summer, yes. That is I," the crown prince of the Seelie court smiled a thousand-watt smile. "It's so rare I'm unrecognized, I forgot to introduce myself. But, of course, you've only heard of me."
"I'm… I was actually wondering if I'd see you on the campaign," Harry managed to formulate a response, feeling weirdly cornered despite all the directions he could leave the apex of the hill.
"Believe me, I've argued incessantly with my parents to be here. But they're not lead-from-the-front types. I believe they're quite cross with the Marshal that he's allowing my Flower to risk herself here."
"She's been a big help."
Rivière smiled fondly. "Yes, testing herself will be of great value. How many kings of Alfheim have had a battle-hardened queen at their sides, ready to defend them? Like unto Odin and Frigga, shall we be."
"I think Bors let Odin test himself as well."
"By and by, so will I. I still have centuries to hone my skills, and much more learning to do. It wouldn't do to get myself hurt going off with my training incomplete. Many rely on me, after all…"
Harry really wasn't sure what was on his face, and he was hoping his shields against elven empathy were holding. The elf prince wasn't giving anything away, himself, other than friendliness and cool, and it wasn't like they'd known each other long enough for anything more to come to the Boy-Who-Lived. "Sounds like a lot of responsibility."
"Heavy is the head," Rivière agreed. "Anyway, I've tarried here long enough. I just wanted to thank you again for all you are doing in friendship for my Flower, and for my realm. I shall make sure Vanaheim knows how much we appreciate it. Farewell, Wizard Potter."
"Farewell, River towards Summer," he managed to answer as the young elf gracefully made his way back down the hill toward camp.
And then Harry was back, sitting in the dungeon, staring at Severus Snape. "There's no way you're that good," the professor said, flatly, probing his student's eyes for deception.
"What do you mean?" he asked, a little upset that the man had seen such a private moment. "I didn't want you to see that! I wasn't even thinking about it."
"And you just happened to find a memory of another boy standing in between you and Fleur Delacour to show me?"
"Uh, yes… sir?" Harry said, baffled.
"You… have no idea. You have no idea what James Potter did to me, do you?"
"I know he bullied you, sir. Sirius admitted that much. Well, he thinks you were basically just rivals, but the stories he tells… he doesn't come off as well as he thinks."
"Four against one will tip the scales, yes," Snape sneered. "But I could forgive the bullying. Almost forgive the time they nearly killed me. But for…"
Snape had forgotten to put his own occlumency back up after invading Harry's mind. Some wisp of the magical recreation of the Penance Stare still connected them as the teen's eyes flared orange behind the camouflage of his glasses. Fragmented images and sounds accompanied what was normally just empathy, as the older man's mind dwelled on his own similar moment of embarrassment.
"She doesn't want to even talk to you anymore, Snivellus," a man's voice said, in the basically-British Vanir accent. It could have been Harry's own face staring at him, in the memory, though with different eyes and no scar. "Not after what you said. Get it through your head. She only ever thought of you as a friend. And now, you've ruined that. Go spend your time with your own kind."
Snape hissed in surprise and slammed his defenses into place. "What was that?"
"The visions, sir," Harry explained, eyes wide and what he'd realized. "I can get empathy, sometimes, but I guess your spell… I… my mother? I knew you were friends but…"
"Didn't know that I was your father's rival? Why would you? I often wonder if she even knew." He tried to say it dismissively, but there was nearly twenty years of regret in the still-turbulent waters of his mind.
Harry reeled. Had there been a chance that he never would have been born? That whatever existence he had could have been as the child of Severus and Lily Snape? Sirius and Bruce knew that they'd been chemistry partners, and seemed to know each other from before Hogwarts, but hadn't given much thought to how deeply that bond ran. And neither of them knew much about Lily other than her time at school, and what she was like after she started dating James Potter. Harry had grown up with Pepper's stories about his father but she'd barely even met Lily.
"Professor… can you… can you tell me about my mother?"
Another long moment, where the man considered whether he was being set up. But there was nothing behind those eyes other than the same intense need to know that he'd seen hundreds of times before on another face.
"Your mother and I met in a park near our homes when we were just nine years old…"
Chapter 88: Dine and Dash
Chapter Text
Winter became spring as time passed quickly at Hogwarts. Exams were ever-looming, runecrafting magic items became an overwhelming use of free time, that time was limited by two nights each week spent learning occlumency and about his mother, and more than a few Sundays were spent teaching the rest of the students to defend themselves from Death Eaters in the Room of Requirement. More and more nights per week, Harry dreamed of Morag, where buildings were beginning to emerge from beneath the waters and Dumbledore's people played cat and mouse with Voldemort's to figure out when the time would be right to search for the next Stone.
With all those distractions, Harry barely kept on top of his correspondence with Earth.
Tony had gotten the machinery taken out of his chest, and was readjusting to a heart of flesh and blood (and considering a trip to Vanaheim, now that the loss of electricity wouldn't kill him). Natasha had served as guinea pig for the on/off Extremis treatment (perhaps the only human other than Tony and Happy that would get to experience it), and her short letters were somehow lighter. Even Steve noticed it, though he didn't seem to be sure exactly why she was a lot easier to go on SHIELD missions with.
Nobody was telling Harry specifics about the SHIELD missions, obviously, but there was an undercurrent of missing the certainty that Nick Fury lent to the proceedings. Even Clint's terse letters mentioned hoping that, when Harry was back for the summer, the Avengers could do something inarguably good for the world. Natasha, Steve, Clint, and even Sharon each seemed to miss the clarity of SHIELD under Nick Fury.
Harry wasn't totally sure how Sharon Carter had added herself to his JARVIS-moderated email list, but Agent 13 had been a value-add over the winter and he was happy to have her as a pen pal.
There was a reassuring stability to the letters from Aunt Pepper, Happy, and Rhodey.
After his operation, Tony had briefly considered just scrapping the armors that had been his Battle of New York trauma project, but had realized that they were extremely valuable Stark Industries assets. As long as he wasn't remote-piloting them while he refused to sleep, Pepper was thrilled to have the autonomous tech getting the company good press. JARVIS-controlled Iron Man armors showing up to lend humanitarian aid was staying just inside the world's tolerance for artificial intelligence. They weren't attacking anyone—they were shoring up failing dams, finding earthquake victims, and rescuing flood survivors from rooftops.
Rhodey kind of wished that Stark would license the US the tech to use them as weapons, but he understood why that wasn't happening.
Happy seemed to be recovering from his missing-Christmas funk. He'd come up with no fewer than seven different shapeshifter protocols, and his plan to teach every member of Stark Industries a different complicated card trick that JARVIS could validate was as genius as it was likely to crash and burn. He clearly missed being in New York. Harry still wasn't sure whether Peter Parker's aunt was single, but he could read between the lines that Happy wished she was.
Bruce had stayed with Thor and Loki after Alfheim, so the letters from the anti-marauder campaigns were as layered as those from Harry's pen pals at SHIELD.
There was so much talk of the "Nine Realms" that it was easy to forget just how many worlds Asgard protected. From Arbenth to Zaar, the royals of Asgard and the Hulk had been driving away marauders that had seen the destruction of Bifrost as an opportunity. Each world was in a worse state than Vanaheim, so took precedence. Most of the campaigns were just a bug hunt: find invaders and then drive off invaders. But some featured foes that had dug in even more than they had on Alfheim. Thor and Loki were still optimistic that they'd make it to the home of the Vanir by summer. It was unclear whether they meant Vanaheim and Earth's summer, or Asgard's.
From what Harry could tell from the three men he was talking to, the most amusing thing about the entire ongoing campaign was how Thor was basically throwing Lady Sif at Bruce. The rage-infected physicist was incredibly bemused. The crown prince of Asgard felt like it was going to free him up to reconnect with his own physicist on Earth. And Loki was, with Harry's urging, waiting for the inevitable catastrophe rather than instigating it. Would Sif survive a rendezvous with a Bruce Banner who suddenly turned large and green? She had a better chance than any Earth woman. No matter how it turned out, Loki was clearly going to be amused.
Fandral wrote Harry letters with advice on training with his new sword, and seemed completely oblivious to the pairing that Loki was referring to as Sulk. Parvati was thrilled that Harry had taught Loki about pairings.
The relationships at Hogwarts had remained dubiously stable since the winter break. It was probably fortunate that Parvati was the Patil sister doing evening trainings with Dean. Somehow, Ginny wasn't at all worried about Parvati the way she was Padma. As far as Harry knew, both sisters were still single (though, admittedly, he tried not to find out who they were dating, as long as it wasn't someone that would screw up his life if a breakup happened). Lavender and Ron continued to hang onto each other, possibly simply by virtue of how happy Hermione clearly was with Viktor, but their fights were becoming as much drama as Harry could stand within the friend group.
Thank Frigga for the islands of stability that were Neville/Luna and Seamus/Theo. Harry could comfortably hang out with any or all of them (plus Hermione) without worrying about hearing about their relationship issues or mediating a fight.
His own issues remained back-burner. Despite the rawness of the memory that Snape had unearthed of his encounter with Rivière Vers l'Été, Harry wasn't worried about Fleur being into the elf prince. She couldn't stand him, no matter how handsome and cool he was. What concerned Harry was simply the inevitability of them marrying despite how Fleur felt. Before he'd met the young elflord, he could hope that Fleur's father's plan to marry her off was entirely a Delacour affair. That Rivière clearly thought of Fleur as his betrothed and had shown up seemingly to warn the Boy-Who-Lived away from her spoke volumes that Harry wasn't interested in reading.
He was just holding out hope that being friends with Thor and Loki would win out in the end. It wasn't like he could do anything about it until he was out of school anyway.
Other than his overwhelming schedule and the drama in his friends group, the biggest problem at Hogwarts was the quislings. Somehow, Dar-Benn, as unlikable as she was, had begun to accumulate a whisper network across the school. They'd eventually worked out that it had been Draco that told her about their foray into the Forbidden Forest, and he had only been the first to avail himself of the ability to inflict the pink menace on his foes. Dar-Benn was an Accuser—she specialized in getting people in trouble.
She also specialized in soft power, it turned out. It had just taken her half a year to really start to figure out what made Vanir teens tick. For some, it was inconveniencing their rivals. For others, it was her ability to selectively ignore infractions (i.e., blackmail)—the famous incorruptibility of the kree's judiciars didn't extend to rules they didn't have control over, so she was willing to let mischief go at school if it suited her. But, overwhelmingly, there was her growing insinuation about the value of an alliance, no matter how limited, with the kree.
A non-trivial portion of the student body suspected their parents were wearing masks and fighting the government, and realized they might need all the powerful allies they could get.
She'd gotten her hooks into fully half of Slytherin, a wide mix of Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, and even, it was rumored, a few Gryffindors. Nobody could prove anything, but Hermione was feeling really good about using a blood magic contract to protect the Room of Requirement. Even if some of the members of their practice sessions were connected to Dar-Benn, they (so far) feared the punishment clause that would fall upon them for giving everyone else up. Hermione hadn't even told them what that punishment would be, just hinted it would be bad.
It wasn't like they would be punished for using the Room. They'd checked. There were no rules against it—the place was considered a myth, so there was no reason to make any bylaws about its use. The Accuser might try to do something, but having failed to befriend the other professors, and with a strong Dumbledore in power, there wasn't anything she could do officially without a huge reach. But it wasn't like she had responsibilities. She could almost certainly take the room over herself, locking it up and denying it to the students out of spite. The same lack of rules to punish student use would make it challenging for Dumbledore to say she had to leave it alone for the students to use. And what if she bent her mind to doing something with it that enhanced her powers somehow?
Really, these were all stories they told each other to hide the very real chance that even the legitimate school staff would take the room away from them, if revealed. It would be so useful for so many educational ends that it would be hard to schedule it for any time at all as an unofficial club. The study group had more than a little secret guilt that they weren't sharing it with the staff.
But just the sheer utility of it to study for exams was making it worthwhile.
"I don't think anyone is going to have a problem on the practicals for Flitwick's class," Harry told the assembly of three-dozen students that had shown up for the last big meeting before exams. "I can't help you that much on the written, but that was some great casting today, everyone." They'd run the original Death Eater simulation from the first meeting with nobody even getting seriously injured.
"Remember that Mordo really cares about clean martial arts," Dean chimed in.
"Not that defense seminar really counts for exams," Theo countered.
"McGonagall throws in stuff from there, sometimes," Cho argued. She was a sixth-year, and had taken her big exams the year before. "At least Moody's class really helped us for her. And on Flitwick's."
Harry concluded, "Right! Anyway, everyone, good job. Good luck on the written. I don't think you need it on the practicals. See you all around. We'll decide after the break if we need this kind of practice next year."
The core study group was eager to get done with the demonstration and back to their own essays and studying. None of them had even gone home for the spring holidays a few weeks earlier, deciding to stay and work. In their private time, the Room had been ideal for practice with potions brewing and astronomy, in addition to practical casting, but it couldn't help them get through Binns' history exams or arithmantic diagrams.
"Everyone at least got your armor done?" Harry checked, before they left the Room to go to the library.
"Not us, mate," Ron grinned, gesturing to himself and Seamus, who were the two fifth-years in the group that weren't in runes class.
"But we gotta make kit for a helhest," the Irish boy groaned.
"I had to do both," Dean grumbled, the only one in both runes and husbandry. "Runes did make it easier to get a bridle that would work on one of them."
"Is working on two big projects why you haven't made us go running for three weeks?" Parvati asked.
"You haven't been going running?!" he boggled.
"When would I have the time? Do you have the time?"
"Of course."
She gasped, "When? We're together basically every moment of every day!"
"Before breakfast. You just have to get up at a reasonable hour."
"Is everyone else getting their cardio?"
There was a lot of looking away and mumbled excuses. Dean frowned and insisted, "We better get back on it as soon as exams are over. You'll lose it faster than you think if you don't keep it up!"
"All this time with Mordo is really rubbing off on him," Parvati told her sister, quietly.
"No, he's always been like this," Padma disagreed. As his ex-girlfriend, she would know.
A few days later and Dean was true to his promise to return them to heart health.
"Why?" Luna wheezed to Neville at the back of the pack, jogging around the grounds the Sunday afternoon after exams. "Pretend I said something whimsical and upsetting that let us stop running."
"I know," he agreed. "I thought, after exams, I'd have some time to get back to combat practice."
"How much combat practice have you even been getting, Nev?" Lavender asked from the next row up.
"Considering the kind of people that are out there," he said, thinking about the Lestranges, "not enough." It was hard to say things with dark conviction while a couple of miles into a brisk run, but he tried.
Closer to the front, but behind Dean and Ginny leading the pack, Hermione explained between breaths, "I'm worried I didn't put in enough context for the fire-and-frost war. I remembered just now that there was a whole conspiracy from the jotuns to steal Surtur's crown!"
"Isn't it basically nailed to his head and that conspiracy didn't actually go anywhere?" Harry asked. "I'm sure it's fine, Hermione."
"What did you get for the fourth arithmancy question?"
"Eighty-three degrees over the apex," he said.
She almost stopped running as she was surprised by how quickly he'd answered. "That's what I put, too. But how did you…"
"Remember what question four was? Same way I remembered the answer. Regurgitation is easy when you have a mind palace." While Snape was still able to get past his defenses, it was a lot harder than it had been early in the semester, and he was starting to gain the memory benefits of occlumency. He didn't think the chemistry professor would ever really get over looking at him and seeing his father, but they were managing to get along well enough that Snape would actually teach him. He'd even offered some constructive corrections on Harry's classwork that had probably helped him in his exams.
Not that the dour professor wasn't still hard on Harry and all the Gryffindors in class. He had to keep up appearances for his job as a spy, and that meant making the Slytherin students think he was fully on their parents' side.
Speaking of Slytherin students, they were surprised when Theo waved them down as their run took them back near the castle. While he'd become more and more part of the group the longer he dated Seamus, the tall, dark-haired boy had never had any interest in the more physical side of their studies. "Did we have a date on, t'day?" Seamus huffed, surprised as any of the rest of them to see his boyfriend.
"No. And you're all sweaty," Theo waved off the Irish teen coming in for a kiss. "Just thought you lot might want to know that Malfoy, Parkinson, and Grimmet left our common room with Dar-Benn about an hour ago. They were saying something about a jotun at the school. I think they might have actually gone into the forest, which seems pretty ironic, considering."
"Maybe special rules for prefects?" Hermione considered, since Nicholas Grimmet was the Slytherin prefect in sixth-year.
"If they left an hour ago, they could be there already!" Parvati realized. She had actually managed to keep most of the details about the giant in the forest secret, surprising everyone, but she'd dropped a lot of hints.
"On brooms we could catch them!" Ron figured, feeling a twinge that an adventure was in the offing and he could be part of it.
"I don't think you want to try to fly through all those trees," Dean disagreed.
"Just have Harry astral project," Luna half-wheezed, matter-of-factly, thrilled that they'd all stopped running and she was able to catch her breath.
A bunch of heads turned toward Harry, who nodded and found a place to sit on one of the low stone walls around the castle. "Everybody keep my body safe, obviously."
It wasn't exactly harder to meditate after that much physical exertion, just different. The endorphins and tiredness compensated for the elevated heart rate. It only took a couple of minutes for him to release his astral body from his corporeal one and start racing in the direction where they'd found Greip earlier in the year. Fortunately, the wards on the school boundaries weren't designed like those on Kamar-Taj, and he was able to slide through and fix on the minds of the students and kree woman. Within seconds of leaving, he was close enough to the clearing (still showing signs of frost even in the Vanaheim spring) to witness what was happening.
Dar-Benn was standing by one of the trees that anchored the giantess' chains, declaiming, "So we are agreed? In exchange for your life and freedom, you will take word of the Kree Empire to the rest of your kind? By the time you have done so, I should be free of this assignment and able to be embassy to the alliance of our peoples!"
"Wasn't she supposed to get the jotuns to help us?" Draco wondered, quietly, to Pansy, from where the three prefects were hanging a little ways back, wands out but lowered.
"We're also going to ally with the kree, so they will," his girlfriend explained, thoroughly taken in by the Accuser's professed schemes.
Greip narrowed her eyes like she was considering, then gave a half-bow in seeming agreement, chains rattling as she moved. It didn't look to Harry like she was enthusiastic about the plan, but presumably Dar-Benn was offering it instead of killing her in her chains. She turned the bow into a crouch, getting as close as she could and tilting her head so there was a clear path to the collar around her neck.
"Very well!" the kree woman decided, then smashed her massive hammer into the restraint.
"No! Don't!" Harry said, a moment too late. Dar-Benn wasn't even magical enough to see him, but the three wizards startled at his shout from astral form. Whatever power the universal weapon lost on Vanaheim, it still retained enough heft that it and kree strength were sufficient to shatter the frost-weakened magical collar in one blow.
Faster than anyone would expect, Greip rose to standing, her right hand surging with frozen might and forming a boxing glove of foot-thick ice, which she used to deliver an uppercut that took Dar-Benn in the torso and sent her flying back into the tree with the chain anchored to it. Harry didn't have time to even be pleased at the Accuser being incapacitated with one sucker punch, since Greip was already moving toward the prefects.
To give Draco his due, the sixteen-year-old managed to get a couple of spells off to try to stop her. Neither Parkinson nor Grimmett did as well, simply screaming and freezing as the towering, blue-skinned woman rushed them. The jotun deflected the spells with her ice-covered hand, and then was among them. "No! Duck! Scatter!" Harry was shouting at them, but they weren't paying attention. An attacking giant right in their midst was something they'd never planned for, but they had heard enough stories to terrify them into uselessness.
It barely took six seconds for her to have knocked all three kids out. She did it almost gently. Magical enough herself to spot the astral interloper, she gave a wry grin and managed enough English to explain. "Harry Potter. No follow. Hostages. Hagrid… tell sorry."
She didn't actually look that sorry as she gingerly picked up her chain so she could lash Dar-Benn to the tree with it, then scooped up the three unconscious Slytherins under one arm, their wands fallen to the ground. As if she'd been planning it for months, she didn't even need to study her heading, confidently striding off into the forest, away from the school.
"Dar-Benn freed Greip!" Harry announced, as soon as he'd snapped back to his body. "Greip knocked them all out and kidnapped the prefects as hostages. She's running away!"
"I'll tell Snape!" Theo said, apparently having figured out who Greip was while Harry was projecting.
"I'll warn Hagrid!" Parvati offered, probably the one that had told Theo who the giant was and worried that Snape would hurt Hagrid's sister.
"And I'll get Dumbledore," Dean said, already running off to try to keep the other two professors from making different bad decisions without the headmaster's involvement.
At dinner, fully half the high table was missing, the headmaster having taken Hagrid, Snape, Flitwick, McGonagall, and even Mordo on the rescue mission into the Forest. Professor Sprout, as the last remaining head of house, announced, "Some students accompanied Dar-Benn into the Forest today and have not returned. I'm sure they will be recovered safely soon. Hopefully we have all learned a valuable lesson about why the forest is off limits to students!"
Harry wasn't so sure they'd be back quickly. Greip had a big lead on the professors through the dense forest, and much longer legs. They couldn't use portals within dozens of miles of Hogwarts, and would have trouble pursuing on brooms for the same reason that Dean had kept Ron from trying it. Even if they could track her perfectly, she might have to hit open terrain outside the Forest before they could start catching up to her. Best case, they'd be at it all night.
And he had a sense that crises like this at the end of the year didn't just leave him out of it.
Sure enough, as dinner was ending, Seer Trelawney approached the Gryffindor table with the walk that she thought looked like she was floating impressively but mostly just looked like she wasn't fully committed to a Naruto run. "Harry Potter! I come to you with tidings! My tea! The tea in my dinner cup! So distinct the lightning bolt within—the Sowilo mark upon your brow!" She fumbled a handful of bone dice from one of the pockets of her very gothy black dress, her many rings awkwardly catching on the fabric, shook them once, then slapped them down on the table in front of the Boy-Who-Lived. She squinted and arranged them into some kind of pattern that made sense to her. "Students? What do my bones suggest?"
Neville and Parvati were the closest ones that took divination class, and Parvati ventured, "Something long lost?"
"The need to move quickly," Neville added.
"Of course it would be tonight," Harry sighed in resignation.
"You really should have taken my class, young one," Trelawney smiled, magical torchlight flaring in her oversized glasses. "I would have loved to do a practical study on the Norns' investment in your life." With another nod of approval at her students, she swept up her bones and left the dining hall without another word to them.
Harry made a mental note to call Sirius, but with half the heavy-hitters from Dumbledore's crew out chasing down a giantess, he didn't much like the chances of the others on Morag. The lizard man alone had easily defeated three of them. It was probably a sad thing that the study group had more practical wandless casting and martial arts experience than any of the adult Vanir available. He looked at the expectant faces of his friends and made his decision.
"You can say no. But who wants to go with me to another planet to stop the Death Eaters from getting an artifact?"
Chapter 89: Steal from Everybody
Chapter Text
Everyone wanted to go. Even Padma and Luna were willing to help, on top of the eight fifth-year Gryffindors and Ginny. Their prefects figured it was important enough to risk, especially with Dar-Benn having likely worn out her ability to suggest punishments. They almost invited some of the others that had been coming to the club in the Room of Requirement, but figured all of those kids had been training to fight Death Eaters on Vanaheim. Very few of them were any good at wandless casting. Those that were, like Cho, were the least likely to want to go on an unsupervised trip off-campus and off-world.
Ron had some grand plan to make use of the helhest bridles they'd made for Hagrid's class to ride the spectral horses out of the teleportation dead zone. Ginny pointed out that it wasn't like anyone had confiscated their brooms, so they could just fly. Harry waited a moment until they both realized that they'd already been through the Chamber of Secrets to go visit their father in the hospital.
They did bring their brooms, as well as a bunch of other holdouts and runes projects, in case they needed them.
Fortunately, Niflheim remained free of enemies as they passed through the death world. Harry had deliberately memorized the way they'd used to get out over the holidays, so would have been able to pick it out even without his newly-augmented recall from his occlumency lessons. They exited in a random graveyard somewhere in Vanaheim, and then it was a sling ring portal from there to the Black manor in Diagonalt.
The hardest part was just convincing the adults to let them leave that house.
"Absolutely not!" Molly Weasley insisted. "Arthur almost died fighting that… thing."
"Actually, we located a likely name for him," a white-haired, pox-scarred old wizard who'd identified himself as Mr. Doge began. He probably wasn't quite as old as Dumbledore, and his name was destined to become abruptly hilarious to the teens as the relevant meme spread across the internet later in the year. The old man had his own research sources to identify the giant lizardman that worked with Voldemort. "We think he's called Cull Obsidian."
"Like some edgelord in an online chat," Parvati joked with Padma, just loud enough for everyone in the Grimmauld Place sitting room to hear.
"Yes. Him," Ron and Ginny's mother bulled on, giving both of her children a cowing look before they chimed in on their friend's comment. "And they may have all of the Death Eaters with them! Maybe even You-Know-Who himself! Albus was supposed to lead us to stop them."
"He's hours out, ma'am!" Harry said, frustrated. "And we're losing whatever time Trelawney's divination earned us."
By the time they'd reached the manor, Sirius had gotten in touch with the headmaster by mirror, and confirmed that he was so far away from the school it made sense for him to try to fly out of the magical interference and teleport rather than going back. Especially since he couldn't use the Chamber himself, without Harry to open it. And that was taking for granted they'd be able to stop Greip and rescue the Slytherins soon.
"He has a point, Molly," a woman with graying dark hair wearing a green shawl (who had identified herself as Ms. Vance) allowed. She didn't seem young enough to go on a combat mission. The middle-aged Weasley parents were about the median for Dumbledore's forces in the room. Only Sirius, Shacklebolt, and Tonks looked like they were still young enough to do anything strenuous without some serious stretching first.
"I don't like it, either, but they're some of the best fighters I've ever trained," Moody finally interjected, himself on the upper end of the age range in the room. He fixed everyone with his roving mad eye and insisted, "All of you are. You think your kids could stand it if they found out you both died because you made them stay home?"
"I… uh… signed on as reconnaissance and support," Arthur stammered, physically recovered but still carrying the trauma of nearly being murdered by a member of the Black Order. "Obviously I'll fight, I'm a Gryffindor, but…"
"But you haven't been actively training for it," Sirius said. As he laid a hand on Harry's shoulder, the Soul Stone empathy activated and the teen felt the complicated mix of pride, fear, and trauma-exacerbated Black madness that informed his godfather's statement. "Not like they've been. I think we probably all know a few tricks that would surprise them, but in a straight fight, I'd gamble on any one of them over any of us. Certainly over any Death Eater. The pup's right. We're wasting time."
Everyone against her, the aging redhead wiped away a tear and fixed each of the teens with her motherly gaze. "None of you are allowed to go to Valhalla today. Do you understand me? If we're losing, we run. We'll survive to fight another day."
"Yes, mum," her children said, and the other kids made similar sounds of assent. For most of them, it was genuine. But for a few of them—Neville, Ron, and Lavender in particular—the Vanir fatalism ran deep. They weren't going to hold anything back. It was win or die for them.
Harry had the same fatalism, it was just that he didn't expect to die that day.
From Diagonalt, it was a short trip by portal to a strange stone arch—the bounding edges of the night road—overlooking the pounding surf on a moonlit Vanaheim cliffside. The wilderness of the planet had many odd geographic formations, which might have been Vanir- or Aesir-made in ancient times or might have been some odd result of erosion and plate tectonics.
It turned out Vanaheim and Morag had that in common, which became apparent after the slide through the root of the World Tree and between galaxies. Harry had seen the planet in his dreams, and most of the adults had done sessions observing the place in the last few months. But the other teens were blindsided by the alien world.
The planetary ocean had almost completely receded. Far below, recurring geysers and small roiling lakes left in unsplit hollows of what had been the seabed were the only signs that the world was, until recently, submerged. Tall mountains that were usually small islands touched one another through immense arches of irregular stone. Above, dark clouds made it seem like a perpetual thunderstorm sunset, though the red sky was lit from both sides by the planet's binary suns.
"No sign of Obsidian up here," Arthur observed, assured he'd never miss the towering humanoid reptile again, after getting surprise-attacked over the winter.
"I think I see buildings," Ginny announced, peering down the mountain with her seeker's eyes.
"They were just rooftops last week," Tonks agreed, her hair a worried, stealthy black at her first real combat mission with civilians, ten of them younger than her. Of the inauspicious prime number of 17 wizards present, only she, Moody, Shacklebolt, and her cousin Sirius had any legitimate auror training. At least Doge had decided to stay on the Vanaheim side of the night road and wait for Dumbledore. He was so frail he might simply break.
They were all quietly hoping they wouldn't regret leaving anyone, even an old man.
"Like we discussed. Element of surprise if we can get it," Moody ordered, easily slipping into the role of combat leader in the headmaster's absence. He'd trained all of them in various formalities over the years, so if they were going to defer to anyone, it would be him. "Tonks. Potter. Let's go." He swung a cloak over himself that wasn't nearly the match of Harry's: it might make him close to invisible when still, but flickered worse than the light-bending shield from Predator. Still, for the stealth team, it was what they had.
Tonks cast some kind of charm that disguised her silhouette almost as well, and Harry let his cloak, the legendary Tarnkappe, give him almost perfect invisibility as they followed the one-eyed retired auror through his portal, leaving the other adults to work out leadership and tactics for the visible groups of fighters.
Ground level was a slow-moving chaos. A high mist rolled over the valley, lukewarm and salty with strange-tasting alien minerals. Crevasses spiderwebbed along the terrain, often yards across, with immense reptilian sea creatures sometimes splashing free of the water table that was far below the surface now. Every footstep was on uneven, muddy stone, oddly free of silt, but large puddles of foaming surf from the loud geysers sought out an escape into the cracks down inside Morag. Harry wondered if they'd seal back up when the water returned—was the centuries-long cycle caused by tectonic expansion making space for the waters of the planet to recede beneath its surface?
Vicious amphibian-yet-ratlike creatures scuttled through the area, a small but persistent threat atop whatever enemies were lurking.
Not much of the planet's civilization had survived the millennia since the oceans had reclaimed this world. But there were enough shells of buildings to anchor a perception of a city. With each particularly-durable facade came the ability to imagine the rest. The wet and cracked terrain that they invisibly trod was likely once a major roadway. What hubris had caused the denizens of a hydrologically-unstable planet to build an important city at their lowest point? Why hadn't they chosen the mountains? Or was this once a high point brought low, the mountains erupting after the calamity as another consequence of whatever tectonic doom had come to the planet?
What was left of the infrastructure looked like the remnants of a nuclear bomb followed by a tidal wave.
"Not seeing anyone hiding in the small buildings," Moody informed them, his wall-piercing magical eye itself hidden in the hood of the cloak. "I can't see far into the big structure."
Most of the buildings were, indeed, so small and mostly-fallen that it would be hard to set up an ambush in them, if the Death Eaters even knew anyone was coming. They'd probably been just-as-quickly searched and discarded as hiding places for the Stone. But dominating the landscape was what seemed like an alien shopping mall—an immense box of minimally-adorned stone. Perhaps as the cataclysm slowly came to the world, they'd tried to consolidate their society into the thick-walled structure.
It hadn't saved them. Even from outside, Harry could make out the many huge cracks in the walls and ceiling.
"Stay close as you can. Eyes and ears open," Moody ordered as they made for the most obvious entrance, where large stone blocks rose out of the silt and defined a doorway coated so thickly in alien barnacles it was hard to tell at a distance that it was originally a squared-off ingress.
Within the structure, dimly lit through the many holes in the ceiling, the walls were clearly defined by ancient pillars but the floor had just become so much more uneven seabed. Odd undersea plants, like cacti, somehow stayed vertical in some places rather than falling over with lack of water around them.
And lights were moving through the structure in the distance, flickering in and out as they moved between columns and other barriers.
Moody's team moved quietly to the closest set, and overheard Vanir-accented men's voices talking as if they had no thoughts of stealth. "This place makes no sense. All this wasted space."
"Probably the interior walls eroded," the other explained. "Should make it easier. They'd have designed the hiding place to last." They were absently moving through the space with no obvious plans for their search. They seemed like they were paying more attention to the rat creatures running around than looking for secret vaults.
"We need to find it before Ronan's people," the first reminded the second, and Harry was struck for a moment by wondering if Ronan's Guard was going to be involved, having left the Forbidden Forest.
"Agreed. Stupid kree. I don't like being in competition with aliens for the master's favor." Or maybe Ronan was a kree, Harry figured. It wasn't that uncommon of a name.
Now that they were close up on them, in the reddish light from breaks in the clouds overhead, they could make out that the two men were in black robes but had taken their silver masks off. One looked familiar, and might have been a Lestrange brother that Harry had seen in the Room's simulation of Malfoy Manor. The other had a similar suddenly-aged look, so was likely another Dark Dimension escapee.
Moody dropped a hand from his cloak and was about to signal for them to try to take the two out quietly when there was a soft, "Oh crap!" as Tonks, distracted, tried to avoid putting her foot in a deep puddle and wound up stepping on a rat creature she hadn't seen, which shrieked in pain.
And then it was on.
Surprised and surrounded, even with Tonks' clumsiness, the two Death Eaters weren't able to do much against three combat-trained wizards. But they were able to shout, "Attackers!" before going down, and that was enough. Their allies came running, or simply smoke-teleported over. Harry's allies flew in on brooms or stepped out of their own portals, and it turned into a whole confusing melee.
Wizard-on-wizard battles off Vanaheim were oddly quiet, in the grand scheme of things. Some insanely-brave combat journalist filming the fight might have layered in a rousing soundtrack in the edit, but actually being there was less dramatic. Water splashed. Rat aliens squealed and fled as people got close. Manifested energy constructs emitted a faint hum as they vibrated in the wet air. Major transfigurations made a loud noise as walls were created or shifted. And people sometimes shouted an invested spell or directions to their allies. But they were all without wands or access to the spells that used verbal components back home. The main sound was grunts of avoidance, thunks of spells into shields, or cries of pain as blows landed home.
Harry was a dervish. He probably had the most recent and real experience with this kind of fight. Even in the marauder battles, all the wizards had mostly hung back on either side providing support and artillery. The Boy-Who-Lived had been fighting alongside the Avengers in several major fights over the last year. And he had a sword that could cut through magical shields. He was only less effective because every opponent started to focus fire on him, identifying him as their biggest threat.
They were herding him towards Cull Obsidian, who was trundling toward the fight and might be proof against the spell-cutting saber.
The rest of the study group weren't that far behind Harry, competence-wise. They'd been doing very realistic simulations of almost this exact fight for months. But they'd often used their wands, assuming the battles would be on Vanaheim. Several of the teens still weren't perfect with their constructs, and were having to rely on martial arts and youthful stamina. Shortly before getting close to the giant lizardman, Harry spotted a nearby friend's manifested blade flickering worryingly as he fought two Death Eaters. "Nev!" he said, tossing the day-older boy his saber.
It probably wasn't going to be of much use against the Black Order's giant, reptilian tank, anyway, so better for his friend to have it.
The fight had moved to a central area of the massive alien building, where the ornamental pillars of the structure converged into one central, freestanding arch in front of a wide crevasse into the earth. It was raised atop a dais and wide enough for multiple people to walk through shoulder-to-shoulder. It was hard to tell whether it had been the entrance to a room whose walls had fallen or some kind of performance space. Walking through the archway would mean a quick death falling into the cracks behind it and the hungry ocean monsters below.
It at least let Harry worry less about his own back as he faced off with Cull Obsidian, since he could keep the chasm behind him.
The huge humanoid reptile was at least as big as Hagrid, and effortlessly wielded a weapon that looked like a high-tech cross between a scythe, a warhammer, and a piece of structural steel. The weapon easily out-massed Harry, and he was sure getting hit with it would feel like being run over by a truck. He'd seen Arthur's injuries over the holidays.
Harry couldn't waste time paying much attention to the spellfire and fight around him: there was only the walking slaughter eclipsing the red sunlight coming in through the collapsed ceiling. "The Boy-Who-Lived. I'll leave you barely alive for Father," Obsidian growled out, probably in some language the translator was helping with. And then he swung a half ton of metal in a truly worrying arc along the ground.
Some part of Harry clocked that the head of the weapon looked like it could detach or at least pivot to become longer, and trying to dodge backwards might be just what his enemy wanted. Fortunately, the entire study group had been doing way too much cardio, so over was also an option. Managing a freestanding jump that would have ruined the older wizards' hamstrings for months, Harry got his conjured shield beneath him and let the edge of the technological mattock clip it hard enough to launch him even further into the air.
He sailed further up than he'd planned.
For as strong as Cull Obsidian was, he couldn't perfectly stop the inertia of his weapon, and he'd put his whole torso into the swing. Harry flipped through the air and saw the bestial warrior's broad, less-dangerous back, with a convenient shoulder pad to latch onto. With reflexes honed since childhood, the Boy-Who-Lived managed to land on the giant's shoulder and hook one arm around his massive neck, with the other hand on the shoulder pad.
He didn't fancy his chances in trying to pull off the Westley/Fezzik fight from Princess Bride, but it would at least be a safer attack position. The flight had lost him his concentration on his conjured shield, and he was frantically trying to summon an energy sword. Maybe he could stick it up the monster's pug nose and into his brain from up here.
From his vantage point, he could see the chaos of the fight beneath, and it at least got a portion of the attention of everyone else. "Harry!" Sirius exclaimed, bounding backwards from the Death Eater he'd been fighting onto the dais with the arch, bringing him almost to eye level with both of them. Watching the brute swinging up to rip Harry from his back, Sirius began to spin his hand.
Obsidian's weapon-bearing arm that had been coming around to try to smash Harry against his back disappeared into one portal and out of a lower one near his feet, kneecapping himself. As the beast toppled forward, his arm clipped the fiery plane of the portal and cut cleanly off, flopping to the ground beneath him.
"I've been getting a lot of practice with those!" Sirius grinned, having mastered combat use of portals in a way that Harry hadn't. The teen still couldn't even figure out how to get them to not match each others' orientation, much less make them that precisely around an enemy. "Bet none of them can do better than that!"
As Harry jumped free of the literally disarmed warrior who might not be out of the fight entirely, a woman's voice echoed from a Death Eater mask nearby. "Oh cousin Siri," she tittered, launching a virulently purple lance of dark magic at the man's unprotected flank. Standing atop the dais, he'd made himself a bigger target than Harry, and the only real direction for him to dodge was back and through the archway, which would send him into the crevasse behind.
Time almost seemed to slow down as Harry tried to figure out whether he could cover the few yards between them in the second it would take for the blast to cross the distance. Sirius had slowly turned at the sound, but was so pleased with himself about taking down Cull Obsidian that his hands were all out of line to raise a shield. And a shield might not even work against the cutting, hate-fueled magic.
Roll to the ground. A foot down on uncertain terrain. Step. Step. There was no way Harry was faster than magic, at least at this range. He wasn't going to make it.
"No!" another boy's voice cried, as Neville broke free from the crowd, leaped off the lowest step, and managed to swing Harry's saber through the oncoming spell, shattering it into hissing motes of red and violet. "Bellatrix Lestrange!" he shouted, spinning toward where the blast had come from, having recognized the attacker's voice.
He should. He'd been fighting her over and over in the Room of Requirement for months.
The woman's singsong echoed across the battlefield, "Well if it isn't widdle baby Long– oh crap!" She was clearly surprised with the way he barreled through the crowd at her, spell-cutting sword menacing and long legs striding. The blade wasn't really balanced for Neville, but you'd never notice from the reach advantage his longer arms gave it. Bellatrix barely teleported away in a puff of black smoke before the sword separated her head from her body.
Over and over. For months.
With Obsidian on the ground trying to staunch his bleeding arm and Bellatrix having teleported off in obvious fear of the young man whose parents she'd tortured into insanity, there was a momentum shift to the fight. It was hard to count exactly how many Death Eaters had come running (or teleporting), black robes and silver masks making them a challenge to tally when they weren't standing still, but there were 17 people opposed to a force that had lost two of its heaviest hitters.
There was just enough time for Sirius to say, "Close one, eh, James? I mean Harry!" and bound down the steps to rejoin the fight before the momentum shifted again.
From out of the sky, a thin triangular blue beam hit the empty floor across the chasm. Perhaps it wasn't even triangular, just coming from so high up that its width vanished into the distance. Harry thought he could make out the rounded hull of some immense spaceship hiding in the clouds above. Moments after the beam emerged it faded, leaving another figure in black robes standing to observe the assembled masses.
"Honestly. I have to do everything myself," the high voice of the alien who everyone assumed was Voldemort said from behind his golden mask.
Relatively safe from across the chasm, the leader of the Death Eaters began to float, one hand behind his back as he negligently waved the other to begin telekinetically ripping free stones from all over the area and flinging them at Harry's friends. How could the dark wizards not see how weird his fingers were?
Harry and Sirius were on the defensive, having to fall back behind cover that could turn into a weapon at any moment. The Death Eaters that were still standing began to smoke teleport out of harm's way, leaving their leader to barrage their opponents with mangled stone and begin to take pot shots from several yards away.
Far behind all of them, Harry thought he could make out a human-looking man in a red coat and… headphones?… shuffle in from the left, see the battle, stop dancing, and hustle off to the right.
The only thing saving them was that the alien psychokinetic could only really manage one target at a time, and there were 17 of them to try to bludgeon to death. One advantage of bringing old-timers was that Moody and Vance had been in scraps where he'd shown up in the last war and had plans. While the green-shawl-wearing woman quietly helped without being told, the mad-eyed field leader barked, "Shack, duck. Black, transfigure that boulder into something soft. Arthur, shields. Potter, whip that!"
"Harry Potter! Oh, excellent," the gold-masked demagogue sneered in an unintentional Mr. Burns impression as Harry used an energy whip to drag a spear of stone to collide with another column before it lanced into Mrs. Weasley. "We'd been hoping you'd show up here. Perhaps these idiots couldn't find what we're after until you get near. Why don't you stay put for a moment while we kill your friends?"
The abrupt barrage of sea-damp debris coming in from all around him as the "dark lord" clenched his fist looked like it was so encompassing that there was nothing that he could do. There was nowhere to dodge, and it was going to hit hard enough to knock him out as it locked him into place for the Death Eaters. Maybe he could get two shields up and that might be enough to…
He didn't have to put the plan into motion as the shattered rock abruptly dissolved into sand, which quickly lost momentum as it fell through the telekinetic "hand" that had been guiding it.
"It was foolish to come here tonight, Ebony Maw," Dumbledore said, having emerged from a portal nearby with perfect timing to transfigure the incoming stones to dust. "We had no idea where you were hiding, and now we have you."
"Or perhaps I have you, old man!" the alien, who might have actually been called Ebony Maw to go with the giant lizardman's edgelord naming scheme, shouted, removing his other hand from behind his back and using both to raise up shards of the terrain and rip them into spikes that he launched across the chasm, mostly the headmaster's way.
A geyser of water from the chasm neatly absorbed all of the shards and stayed coherent rather than exploding into mist. Instead, it began to turn into an immense serpent of water that looked like one of the alien sea creatures below. Dumbledore was weaving his hands with surprising gentleness to work the complicated magical effect.
Behind them, McGonagall, Flitwick, and Mordo were moving into position to help out against the surrounding Death Eaters. The cat animagus raised up bollards of stone to block attacks that then transformed into chess pieces and began to rush outward. The half-goblin spellcasting professor spun with unexpected speed as he traced orange light in his fingers that formed a giant ring and then expanded outwards as anti-teleportation wards. The dour Master of the Mystic Arts walked on the air itself, vaulting over the other professors' defenses and whipping out the Staff of the Living Tribunal, orange sparks linking the magical flail as he crested over the enemy line to cut off their ability to run.
Both sides were in tacit agreement, however, to only give the fight about three-quarters of their attention, since everyone wanted to see what was going on in the fight between their leaders. Ebony Maw was all overwhelming force and sharp edges, using his telekinesis to launch attacks from every direction and block or cut incoming attacks. Dumbledore was about slow and impressive conjurations and negligent transfigurations against incoming materials. Flitwick and Vance had fallen back to help shield him from the other Death Eaters' pot shots so he could focus.
The water serpent got cut into pieces that became harrying rat monsters disguising an incoming dust devil and lances of coruscating orange light bigger than any Harry could conjure.
The Boy-Who-Lived wasn't particularly idle. Dean had yelled "Phase Three!" at them as the enemy started to fall back to stay out of the teleportation ward, and multiple groups of teens began to sprint off at speeds the adults couldn't match to keep them off balance. They'd quickly noticed the simulated Death Eaters had trouble regrouping when their initial attack broke, and developed tactics to match. They hadn't done this fight in a waterlogged stone building before, but they'd done something broadly similar a dozen times.
At some point during the fight, a dark-skinned bald cyborg and some guys in sci-fi armor showed up, took a couple shots with their ray guns, had basically zero effect, decided they didn't know what was going on, and left as unceremoniously as they'd come.
By the time the headmaster was dropping an actual sea monster teleported up from the chasm on his opponent, the enemy side had had enough. "This is not over!" Maw announced, "As you also shall not get what you came for! It was stolen from all of us while we fought. Death Eaters, escape if you can!"
That triangular blue beam came back down and swept up Maw and Obsidian (who'd managed to mostly stop bleeding but had carried his weapon quietly off to the side). Those Death Eaters still mobile and outside of the wards twisted and disappeared in smoke, while the few still standing within the bounds of Flitwick's spell made a run for it.
They were brought down by the teens before they'd made it more than a few yards. "See!" Dean announced to the others. "This is why I have you do so much cardio!" He was right. It had been a several-minute battle with lots of running and they were barely winded.
"Secure the fallen and healing potions for our side," Moody ordered. "Tonks, Potter, go see if you can find out if they were lying about the target being missing. Portal back if there's a problem."
That didn't take long. Working off a hunch, Harry led them in the direction he'd seen the man in red and the alien soldiers go. A large stone door that, while closed, might have looked like decoration to the Death Eaters that didn't know what they were looking for was open. A significant-looking, high-tech column with an empty energy field was all that was in the room except the body of one of the alien soldiers. And the back wall was blown open as if it was the quickest escape with whatever was stored there.
"How many people were looking for this?" Harry wondered.
By the time they got back and reported, their side was mostly tended. At some point during the fight, Ron had tripped into a deep puddle that was hiding aggressive alien crabs with weird shells that kind of made them look like human brains, and safely detaching them was their side's biggest medical challenge other than some spell burns, Lavender's the worst since she'd gone full Gryffindor at some point during the battle.
The same wasn't true of the enemy side. A few, including a very-frustrated-looking Lucius Malfoy, were unmasked and bound under Shacklebolt's guard. But several laid where they'd fallen in the fight. How many had died to the adults and how many to the teens (who'd gotten used to realistic simulated Death Eaters basically being video game characters—to be taken out as fast and hard as possible)? Dumbledore likely wouldn't tell them to preserve their chances of believing they had never killed.
Harry spotted what he thought was Tonks giving some kind of Vanir last rites, crouched over one of the bodies. But then he realized it was someone else, since the young Auror was still talking to Dumbledore. The old man was theorizing to her and a few of the other adults, "If the object has already been taken on a star ship, we may not have an immediate opportunity to obtain it. I did worry that more factions knew about the chance for treasure and might intervene, I just believed we had speed on our side. Perhaps we at least kept the Death Eaters from stopping the third party. Better in unknown hands than our enemy's…"
But if the dark-haired woman walking away wasn't Tonks, and clearly was an adult, so… "Is that Bellatrix?" he checked with Neville. His friend had glanced that way, and surely wouldn't ignore his nemesis?
"Where?" the Longbottom scion asked, following Harry's pointing finger but then glancing around wildly.
"You don't see that woman?"
"I see her, Harry," Luna said, walking up to them. "But I don't know if we're meant to."
Feeling almost as if he was in a dream, and figuring the danger had passed, he began to walk after the woman, who seemed to be in no particular hurry, but was heading away from them. Neville and Luna bemusedly followed, and Dean and Hermione trailed after to see what was up. The other teens were checking on Ron and Lavender's injuries, and the adults were in deep conversation with the headmaster about next steps.
There was probably also some kind of liminal space being created as they followed the woman that didn't seem to exist, keeping their allies from noticing them wandering away.
They were still in sight of the rest of the group when the woman passed behind a column and suddenly became visible to the other three teens, as evidenced by their gasps. She leaned against the stone, looking up at the sky through the enormous hole in the ceiling where they were. Her demeanor made it clear she was waiting for them to catch up if they were going to keep following.
Closer, she was clearly a different woman than Tonks. She looked like she was probably in her thirties and perhaps Latin in heritage. It wasn't really the most common ethnicity on Vanaheim. Giving them an amused half-smile she said, "You caught me. Now what?"
"We just wanted to know what you were doing," Harry told her. "Uh. Ma'am." It didn't hurt to be polite to powerful and mysterious women.
"Just collecting. I doubt these will be the last witches you leave for me, Harry Potts."
He made a guess. "Are you a Norn? Skuld, maybe?"
"No. But not the worst guess. You can call me Rio. Might as well be on a first name basis with you able to see me when I'm working and everything." She glanced up again and smirked. "Guess we'll have to talk more the next time. Your ride's here."
Before they could ask what she meant, another space ship that had been hiding in the clouds poked its nose through so it could project a swirling column of red and green particles around the teens.
Rio gave a little sarcastic wave as she and their surroundings were replaced by a large, high-tech room.
Standing in front of them was a blue-skinned man with a plastic-looking ridge across his bald head, flanked by several rough-looking men who were various kinds of humanlike alien. In a vaguely southern American accent the blue man ordered someone, "They're here. Take us up before their daddies get moving.
"And you kids… someone better tell me what all of y'all did with my orb."
Chapter 90: Everywhere and Knowhere
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The entourage of space pirates in red coats seemed a little nonplussed at how nonchalant the five teenagers were in the face of their unwashed and ungroomed appearances, as their leader continued his question about the missing Stone. Which he thought was an orb. "Whoever answers first, we won't eat."
"You're a centaurian, aren't you, sir?" Hermione checked. She was the only one present who took cultural studies, and was able to tell the blue-skinned pirate leader apart from kree by his teeth and eyes. "I didn't think your culture had much of a history of eating other sapient species."
"Well I ain't exactly normal for my kind, am I? Raised a battle slave by the kree, I learned to do things. And that wasn't an answer. Maybe I'll eat you first, girlie."
"I don't think kree arena masters would allow cannibalism, either," Luna mused, having blithely wandered over to inspect some of the crew members more closely. "Too much chance of passing diseases. Are you acheronian?"
"Achernonian," the skinny, bald, violet-skinned reptilian man answered. Most of the rest of the crew were so human-looking there was no way to tell what kind of alien species they were.
"Are you really?" Hermione was suddenly interested. "Can you become immaterial? I know you have double-joined limbs, so I assume the immateriality is just a rumor because you can escape from prisons no one would expect."
"Oh. Those guys," Harry recalled. "What's your planet like?" He'd associated them in his brain with an outer plane, Acheron, from D&D.
"Do I gotta kill the chubby one to get your attention?" the leader asked, frustrated, looking at Neville and throwing back his coat to show a metal arrow as if that was a major threat.
To be honest, the Longbottom heir was barely chubby anymore, but he still frowned sadly at the insult. He had Harry's saber tucked under one arm, but maybe the runes were keeping them from really noticing it. Seeing he was thinking about using it, Harry answered, "I don't think that would go the way you want. But anyway, don't you have this… orb, I guess? A guy in the same coat is probably the one that got it. Guess I don't see him here."
"Pale pink skin like you? Fuzzy red hair?" the pirate lord groaned.
"Yeah. I think he had on headphones and was dancing?"
There was a collective murmur of annoyance among the pirates and a couple of them mentioned "Quill" to each other.
"Brahl, Kraglin. Keep an eye on these kids while I make a call."
The achernonian and the tall, dark-haired human-looking pirate that were left in the cargo hold watching the overly-confident teens did not look as confident as their prisoners. "So you guys don't have it?" Harry checked.
"Uh. We know the guy that took it. Yondu will sort it out," probably-Kraglin (the taller pirate) answered.
"Cool. You're going to get it back from him? Great. I need to make a call too," he said, fishing in his pouch for the mirror.
"So we're from Earth and Vanaheim," Dean said, interrupting the men before they thought to stop Harry. "What's your deal?"
"Uh. Xandar. You're from dirt?"
"Earth," Dean repeated, confused.
"Translator issue," Hermione realized. "It has problems with synonyms in Bulgarian, too. Dar-Benn is always calling it Terra, instead."
"Oh, Terra!" Kraglin nodded. "I been there…"
Meanwhile, across the room, Sirius answered Harry's call immediately. "Pup! Thank Frigga!" He was still clearly on Morag. Several faces crowded behind him as they realized who he was talking to.
"Bunch of pirates looking for the thing picked us up to ask what happened. I think one of their own double-crossed them and took it. So if we stick with them, we've got a better shot at finding it. They said it was an orb," Harry summed up.
Dumbledore explained, "It's likely this one is contained in a protective sphere, because it would be very dangerous for it to touch organic matter. It could be deadly to anyone that contacted it. There are legends of it destroying whole planets if placed on the surface." He gave it a beat and added, "It's purple."
"We probably don't want pirates to get it, huh? Honestly, though, I didn't get a bad vibe off of them. They threatened to eat us, but Hermione figures they're bluffing."
"I guess they won't just bring you back to get the rest of us?" Sirius checked.
"Doubt it. I think they grabbed us because we're kids and they aren't scared of us." Harry glanced over and said, "Looks like Dean's comparing martial arts already. If we can't make friends, we'll figure out something."
"And how will you get home?" Mrs. Weasley demanded.
"One guy says he's already been to Earth. If we can't get a ride home on a spaceship, I have some other ideas. Oops. Looks like their boss—Yondu, blue-skinned centaurian—is coming back. I'll keep you updated!"
He stowed the mirror as the pirate captain with his entourage yelled, "While we go see if we can't stop the kid from selling my score to my buyer, why don't you kids explain why you were after it…"
A few hours later, Harry felt like he'd gotten more information than he'd given. The occlumency training was paying off, and his friends were happy to follow his lead on what to divulge. They were generally so naturally curious about everything they were seeing that it wasn't hard to forget to answer questions themselves. Most of the pirates were thrilled by teens honestly-and-openly taking an interest.
The pirates were called Ravagers, and this large ship was part of a loose collective. They did the kinds of things you'd expect of space pirates. The guy who'd taken the orb (he'd admitted it when Yondu called him, just refused to split it with his crew) was an Earth human they'd abducted as a kid and raised among the crew while constantly telling him they might eat him.
He probably harbored a bit of resentment.
Interestingly, they seemed familiar with the runes they saw on the teens' outfits, and some careful digging unearthed that one of the other Ravager crews had a member that could work some form of sorcery. Hermione and Luna were both very excited to go home and research why no one had ever mentioned the Lem to them.
Yondu quietly put it together and began to consider what use he might have for teens that had the same capabilities as his old "buddy" Krugarr.
Recognizing this useful resource was probably why he dragged Harry along once they landed on the planet Xandar, keeping the other four as "hostages" on the ship. "You give me any trouble, my crew will cut yours up for tonight's dinner," he threatened, without any heat to it. Harry didn't know him well enough for Soul Stone empathy to kick in, but it felt like a lot of his threats were to keep his status up with his crew, rather than out of any real malice.
The capital city of Xandar was clearly heavily designed. Angular peninsulas were visible from the air to form a giant logo for the Nova Corps. On the ground it was all perfectly maintained white concrete walkways on multiple levels overlooking fountains and plazas. Hundreds of healthy, attractive people in a variety of skin colors, some of them never seen on Earth, strolled across or stopped to talk.
He was accompanying Yondu and Kraglin, and it was clear the two Ravagers knew exactly where they were going, leading Harry to a small shop on one of the upper levels of a plaza. The dimly-lit place looked like a high-end jewelry shop with just a few small glass cases with a handful of displayed rarities.
Yondu seemed fascinated by a small jeweled frog (or perhaps an alien that looked similar when rendered fancifully). He asked the broker, "Do you got any other cute little buggers like this one? I like to stick 'em all in a row on my control console."
The elderly, birdlike man answered, "I can't tell if you're joking or not."
"He's being fully serious," Kraglin explained.
The broker began to say, "In that case, I can show you–"
Yondu cut him off with a laugh. "But first, you gonna tell me why you underbid me on that orb and whether you bought it off Quill."
"Ah, yes, Mr. Yondu," the man finally recognized the pirate he'd hired online. "I, of course, told your associate my deal was with you. I had suspected he might be double-crossing you and I wanted no part of it."
Harry's empathy wasn't exactly firing but Snape had taught him about tells. "That's not why he didn't buy it," he told the Ravagers.
The man pursed his lips and said, "I admit I also didn't expect him to mention that Ronan was after it."
"Who is Ronan?" Harry asked. "The guys we were fighting were trying to get the orb before he got there."
Kraglin shrugged and said, "One of them kree Accusers. Went rogue. Still fighting the war."
"Call him what he really is," the broker said with some heat, "a fanatic, who will not rest until Xandarian culture, our culture, is wiped from existence!"
"Yeah, Accusers suck," Harry nodded. "We've got Dar-Benn being a problem at my school." He remembered the encounter in the Room and added, "Is Ronan really tall, with blue skin?
"That's him," Kraglin agreed.
"Rumor is that he's working for the Mad Titan," the broker gossiped. "And I want even less to do with that one."
"Thanos is a myth," Kraglin disagreed.
"He ain't," Yondu said, finally speaking up after quietly listening to the information being revealed. "Buncha folks I know got half their people killed by him."
"He's trying to murder half the universe," Harry said, it all slotting together for him. "That's what he needs the orb for."
Yondu absorbed that detail, and it wasn't clear whether it had triggered his better nature or his greed. He told the broker, "Then we need to know who else Quill might try to sell it to."
Clearly worried by visions of half or more of Xandar dying, the man put up a token objection of, "Sir, the high-end community is…" he saw that Yondu was about to get in his face and said, "...at the whim of one particularly high-end Collector."
"Is that guy still around?" Harry asked, remembering that was whose base on Jotunheim he'd raided the previous year. "Named Tivan or something?"
Shooting Kraglin a look like "who is this kid?" Yondu actually said, "I hearda that guy. Guess we're off to the middle of Knowhere…"
By the time they'd taken the smaller attack ship back up to the huge Ravager vessel in orbit, the other four teens had broken all pretense of being captives. Hermione was learning to use the astrogation computer from one of the helmsmen. Dean was picking up space martial arts moves from a couple of the burlier pirates. Luna was dutifully recording stories from some of the more talkative crewmen in her notebook, for later use in her father's newspaper. Even Neville had found an audience for his tale of the fight on Morag where he'd saved Harry's godfather and almost killed his family's nemesis.
"Am I runnin' a daycare up here?" Yondu complained, but waved everyone off when they acted like they were going to throw the teens back in the cargo bay. "Get us ready to go to Knowhere."
It was a long trip, even with faster-than-light engines. Trading on their success making friends with the crew earlier, the teens wound up passing the time playing card games most of the way. After scraping up enough trinkets they'd be willing to part with to get staked in, they were soon running the table on their disbelieving new sort-of-allies.
At Hogwarts, card games were one of the main forms of entertainment.
After five years of playing together in various team-based, turn-taking games, the teens were able to coordinate wordlessly. They'd all gotten good at picking up new games quickly. And Hermione and Harry both had a couple years of statistics from arithmancy class. Occlumency also made it really easy to count cards.
By the time they were getting to their destination, they'd each amassed a non-trivial pile of what they were told were intergalactic credit units. Additionally, Luna had accepted a small energy pistol, Neville had a pretty wicked-looking knife, and Hermione was sporting her own red Ravager jacket (that had been wagered because it was too small to fit anyone on the crew).
They'd been chatting about what Knowhere was, but seeing the space station built into the head of a long-dead Celestial out of a ship window was still awe inspiring. "I'm so glad I got to go on this adventure," Luna breathed, shoving her notebook at Dean so he could sketch the city-sized skull floating in a nebula.
Inside the head, it was some odd combination of a many-leveled construction site and the Goblin Market turned up to 11. "I'm gonna let you kids come with us because it'll be educational. And 'cause that's more eyes to spot Quill," Yondu told them. "Don't stray far… or double cross us…"
"Or you'll eat us?" Harry checked.
"Nah. I'll just leave ya. You'll wish we'd eaten ya."
It really was a rough crowd in the lawless mining concern/pirate haven. Even rolling with a dozen Ravagers, there were plenty of stares like some of the sketchy aliens might make a grab for the clean and healthy-looking teens if they could figure out how to get away into the crowds with them. "It's like the Foot Clan hideout in Ninja Turtles," Dean opined.
"Or Pleasure Island from Pinocchio," Harry added.
"Y'all really do talk like Quill," Kraglin scoffed. "That guy won't shut up about his Terra stories."
"We have to wait," Dean informed them. "Hermione and Neville found a shop."
"What ya tryin' to buy Celestial bits for, girl?" Yondu demanded, as the line of pirates stopped and turned to where the Gryffindor prefects were haggling with a semi-humanoid slug at a booth with stacks of metal bottles and other containers. "That's just used in weird research crap."
"Extra credit in chemistry class," she explained, handing Harry the few jugs she'd purchased to put in his bag of holding. "I don't know what Celestial tissue will do in a potion, but I doubt it's nothing."
"I got Cotati seeds," Neville said, pocketing his own purchase. "And I want to see if I can get them to grow."
"Crazy kids," the Centaurian huffed. "Got any more shopping to do or can we get on with finding my orb? I doubt we're gonna get in to see Tivan with nothin' to sell, but if we set up nearby maybe we can catch them before they go in… in this crowd, though, I don't know how we can be sure–"
He was interrupted by a huge explosion nearby that shook the entire station.
"Enough power to destroy Xandar," Hermione put it together first. "I hope it's not going to spread!"
"It came from Tivan's," Yondu agreed. "Trust that idiot to blow up his buyer! C'mon!"
A short sprint against the flow of fleeing people and they indeed saw what seemed like the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. A large building's front was completely blown out.
And there was a small flight of dark, rounded ships coming in on them as well that seemed like they weren't search and rescue, but were more competition for the orb. They spotted the human man Harry had seen back on Morag through the crowd, and Yondu shouted, "Quill! Don't you move, boy!"
The guy saw them, clocked the landing ships, and bolted. Running with him was… was that green woman Harry's first defense teacher, Gamora? Were they both with the raccoon and tree that had tried to kidnap/bounty hunt him over the summer?
"Small universe," Harry muttered.
A huge, gray-skinned bald man with intricate red scar tattoos and a pair of knives was marching towards the landing ships yelling, "Ronan the Accuser!" And, sure enough, the Accuser that Harry had seen simulated in the Room had stepped out. He had some really weird black gunk on his face that he didn't have before, but it was hard to mistake that towering height. The guy was closer to Hagrid in height than to Harry.
"We gotta get Quill!" Yondu ordered.
"But if we kill Ronan now…" Harry suggested.
"Then we'll lose Quill and he'll sell to somebody else!" the Ravager leader insisted, already hustling off vaguely in the direction he'd seen his rogue pirate headed.
They missed what Ronan was saying quietly to the scarred man, who screamed, "You killed my wife. You killed my daughter!"
A bald, blue woman told Ronan, "It is Gamora. She is escaping with the orb." She turned to get back on her ship and the Accuser looked to be about to as well.
"No!" the knife-wielding widower shouted, racing up to stop Ronan from leaving.
"We should help that guy," Neville decided, the revenge angle inspiring him even more than the chance to take out a bad guy that hadn't yet hurt him personally.
And it looked like it was needed. Ronan casually dodged the first knife swing and told his adjutant, "Nebula. Retrieve the orb."
Ronan didn't even keep any of his soldiers around, confident that he could handle his attacker and any other threats by himself. And that confidence didn't seem to be misplaced. The man with the knives attacked quickly and with a power that would easily kill any of the teens, but he couldn't lay a hand on the Accuser. Moving stiffly but with great speed and precision, the fighting style the kree employed wouldn't be possible without superhuman control of his own body. As soon as the attacker made a wild swing, Ronan unleashed a short palm-shove that knocked his massive opponent back more than a body length.
"Don't let him hit you," Dean cautioned, the teens taking the time to size up the opponent. The Ravagers had run off, so the Hogwarts students were committed to the attack. "I don't think our armor would hold up for long. Distracting attacks. Harry, wait to put a portal behind him, and we'll knock him into it."
"On it," Harry agreed. He yelled at the scarred man, "Can we join in and help you, or is this a solo vengeance thing?" With the wildness of the fighter, there was every chance he might come after them for kill-stealing.
It was a testament to how frustrated and worried Drax the Destroyer was becoming—since he couldn't lay a solid blow on his nemesis—that he took a moment and said, "If you also want revenge, we can be allies, small children."
"And what slight have I done to you?" Ronan asked, the depth of his voice almost covering the sarcasm as he sized up the new antagonists.
"Well, we didn't get revenge on Accuser Dar-Benn, directly, so you'll have to do," Harry joked, trying to draw attention while his friends spread out. The area had mostly cleared from the explosion and kree ships arriving, but people were starting to come back in at the fringes with the entertainment on offer. "And we can't let you get the orb for Thanos."
"Ah, the embassy to Vanaheim," the towering judiciar intoned, suddenly adapting his style to Dean and Neville rushing in to attack from his flanks while their temporary ally made another charge from the front. He at least had to exert more effort, moving in a way that let him shoulder-check Neville while hitting the big man with his warhammer and forcing Dean to fall back ahead of a massive kick. "You're far from home."
As the boys fell back, Luna managed to get her blaster to work and Ronan interposed his weapon to block the shots while shoving a returning Neville into Dean. Hermione tried to grab the hammer in her magical whip, but couldn't seem to get purchase on its energized haft. The bald man was still struggling to his feet after the direct hit.
Honestly, Ronan's fighting style reminded Harry of Equilibrium 's gun kata. Somehow, with a total efficiency of movement, the kree was able to stand at the center of the storm of attacks, making his assailants more of a danger to their allies than to himself. Presumably this was the reason for his confidence, and the fear that Xandar had of him.
But what if he was surprised by a portal?
Waiting for his moment, Harry let the Accuser ignore him and then spun open a portal on the ground behind him, the other opening as far up as he thought the artificial gravity might still catch. If the fall didn't kill him, hopefully it would at least knock him prone.
Well, it should have been a surprise. "Lem tricks," Ronan said, somehow transferring all his weight to the foot that was not about to step through the portal. Leaning forward to headbutt the big man out of the way, he let the Universal Weapon hit the edge of the portal, instantly making it collapse and giving Harry a sudden, splitting headache. "I am done with this farce."
Slamming the head of the hammer into the charging widower, he sent out a shockwave that threw him back insensate into a wall, knocked the boys to the ground, and even upset the girls' footing.
"When he wakes, tell him I don't remember killing his family. Enjoy the reprieve of knowing none of you are worth my time to kill today." And then he just ignored them and strode away, speaking aloud to his communicator, "Bring it to my ship. I will be there soon." That probably meant that his people had retrieved the orb.
Harry just let him go. Maybe with the rest of the Avengers, or just if the five of them had more versatile spells off Vanaheim, they could have done something to stop him. Disappointed, Hermione complained, "Everything here is some weird material or alloy. I couldn't transfigure anything. And I forgot about my holdouts."
"At least nobody got seriously hurt," Harry sighed. "Anything we threw at him might have hit one of us."
"I have to learn that style," Dean said, rubbing his chest where he'd taken a glancing hit.
Neville grimaced, regarding his new knife that had gotten smashed in the fight. He'd have broken the arm if he'd tried to save it. "I doubt Dar-Benn will teach you."
"He's alive," Luna was checking the fallen man. "I wonder what species he is."
"I am Groot."
"Oh, kylosian, that makes sense… Groot!" Luna said, suddenly realizing the tree man had wandered up. She threw herself around one of his tall legs in a hug. "I am groot, I am Groot, I am Groot?"
"I am Groot," he agreed, patting her on the head.
"And I am Drax," the big man came to and finally introduced himself. "You are strong warrior children, though as useless as I was against Ronan."
"Harry," he introduced himself and his friends, "Dean, Hermione, Neville, Luna. How did Ronan catch up to you?"
"I am Groot."
"Calling them here probably wasn't a very good idea," Luna agreed.
"I see that now," Drax shrugged, still winded from the impact.
Before anyone else could pile on for the idiocy of calling a genocidal maniac to the world-killing item he wanted in hopes of revenge, one of the mining pods they'd seen flying around crashed, already damaged, to the ground near them. Groot's raccoon partner opened the hatch and stumbled out. "Blasted idiot. They're all idiots! Quill just got himself captured!" Somehow already in tune with what they'd been talking about he screamed at Drax, "None of this ever would have happened if you didn't try to single-handedly take on a frickin' army!"
The big man said contritely, "You're right. I was a fool. All the anger, all the rage, was just to cover my loss."
"Oh, boo-hoo-hoo," the bounty hunter started to spin himself up into a rant then noticed everyone else. "When did these kids get here? This that Potter kid? That bounty isn't even good anymore!"
"I am Groot."
"Huh. Fighting Ronan? Maybe that's why that Accuser lady put it out on him, if he's trying to kill her buddy."
Harry interrupted, "Wait, Dar-Benn hired you to kidnap me last year?"
The small cyborg mammal waved a paw in a universal "kind of" gesture. "She put out a bounty. Guess nobody else was as clever as us to nearly get you. Anyway. It don't matter. Come on, Groot. Ronan has the stone. The only chance we got is to get to the other side of the universe as fast as we can and maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to live full lives before that whack-job ever gets there."
"I am Groot."
"Save them? How?"
"I am Groot."
"I know they're the only friends that we ever had, but there's an army of Ravagers around them. And you said just Ronan already beat all these yoyos."
"We weren't really ready for him," Harry argued. "And he's probably better against martial arts than, I don't know, explosions. Plus, I might be able to call in some extra help if we can find out where he's going."
"What help?" the trash panda asked, suspiciously.
"Probably the Ravagers. And maybe some other people if I can get a call through."
"Those pirate idiots that got Quill and Gamora? They're going to kill them!"
"I seriously doubt it," Harry shrugged and the other teens nodded. "The crew figured he's basically like Yondu's adopted son."
"So we got five magic babies, this big moron, and a bunch of dumb pirates to stop a guy with a battleship and an Infinity Stone?"
"I am groot."
"Well obviously I was including us, too. Because I guess I got brain damage now. Fine. Let's go be…"
"Big damned heroes?" Harry said in his best Malcolm Reynolds drawl.
"Yeah," the raccoon sighed. He still hadn't introduced himself. "Let's go get Quill's ship and see if that idiot is still alive…"
Notes:
This chapter wound up being more tourism for Harry than I've done with previous movies. There were enough coincidences in Guardians 1 that were needed to get the group together that Quill not staying one step ahead would result in huge changes to his story (at bare minimum, Drax would never join the team if they never made it to the Kyln). And if the Guardians don't form, that's probably it for the universe when Ego finally gets hold of Quill. Consider it Norns meddling, if you like. The real changes can start now that the Guardians are together.
Also, rewatching the Ronan scenes in Guardians, that dude is a beast. Drax seems to be one of the most terrifying melee fighters in the MCU, and Ronan no-sells him, even before getting the Power Stone. Like many of the MCU villains in this phase, it's a shame they didn't really give him enough screen time or stuff to do. This observation is just expectations-setting for how combat encounters with him aren't going to be a walk-over, even with extra protagonists involved.
Chapter 91: Twelve Percent of a Plan
Chapter Text
"Is Kevin Bacon still the greatest actor of all time?" Quill asked, standing in one of the cramped metal corridors of Yondu's ship. He'd gotten a little sidetracked from explaining the plan to stop Ronan from destroying Xandar after he found out the teens were from his home planet. Well, it had also taken a minute to explain that to him, since he'd uncritically spent the last few decades thinking that he was from the planet Missouri.
It was weird the blind spots people could have when they were abducted by aliens as a kid. Harry was being generous and assuming it might also have to do with the Earth/dirt translator error. "He's still working, but I don't know about 'greatest'…"
Dean saw the grown man's face fall, some crucial piece of his childhood identity attacked, and threw him the bone of, "He is the guy everyone uses to rate their stardom by."
"Oh, right, Bacon number," Harry agreed. Seeing Quill's confusion he explained, "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon. He's in so many movies that you can figure out whether you've made it as an actor based on whether you've been in a movie with him, or a movie with someone that's been in a movie with him, and so on."
"Neat! See, I told you!" he insisted to Kraglin, who he'd come to meet, along with the boys, to pitch his plan for their seeming suicide run to try to save Xandar.
"Yeah," the skinny pirate sighed, explaining to the teens, "Pete's been telling me about the man named for salted meat strips for years."
"Greatest Eighties actors, though," Dean continued, leaning against the wall in deep contemplation. "I might have to go Schwarzenegger, for sheer staying power."
"I almost forgot about Schwarzenegger!" Quill beamed. "I worried he'd peaked at Terminator."
"Oh, man. You left before Terminator 2 came out," Dean said, "and True Lies!"
Harry added, "Yeah, he had a lot of stuff in the 90s. Probably would have done even more, but he retired to be governor of California until, like, last year."
"No!"
Suddenly realizing that there were now three of exactly the same kind of terran nerd that he had to wrangle, Kraglin insisted, "Yondu needs to know we're not just gonna get killed on Xandar."
Brain still on all the pop culture updates he could pry out of the teens, the guy that was really trying to make "Star-Lord" happen visibly reined himself in and got back to his business face. "It's simple. Ronan's a prima donna jerk. He could sneak down to the ground on Xandar, or just drop the Stone in a missile or something, but we're pretty sure he wants to land there in his dumb giant ship. We just need to stop him."
"Wasn't he going to give the Stone to Thanos?" Harry asked. "I thought we needed to figure out how to stop that handoff"
Quill shook his head, "Gamora says she's sure he's going to double-cross her dad. Overheard him already planning it."
"Can this ship stop his?" Dean checked.
"We need to slow it down enough that we can get in and kill him. And I'm going to call Nova. I think they'll help. It's their planet."
"I called some people too," Harry said. "Not sure they can get to Xandar, but it was worth a shot."
Quill nodded, not really happy to acknowledge that someone else might add something to the plan, and continued, "But, yeah. Gamora knows how to shut down the defenses inside the ship. We'll just slip in, fight to the control room, kill Ronan, take the orb, get out clean. Easy."
Harry was sure he was overselling his confidence, but before he could point that out, Yondu walked around a corner and insisted, "And then you give that orb to me."
"That is what we agreed to," the terran that was basically his adopted son said, but didn't love it.
Grinning with his pointed teeth, the Ravager leader patted the man on the shoulder and said, "We're a bit out. Work out with them wizards what they can add to the plan then come brief us."
"They're wizards?"
While Quill boggled at the idea of wizard teens, Harry went past him into the cargo room the rest of his motley crew was hanging out in, which had been the same place the teens had been held prisoner earlier. The other three Hogwarts students had already found their way in. Groot was bemusedly being inspected by the plant-obsessed Neville while Luna translated. Hermione seemed to already be working out a plan with the raccoon (who, they'd eventually found out, was named Rocket).
Was he actually a raccoon, or just an alien that looked like one? Had Hermione already asked him about it? Did it not occur to her because raccoons weren't common in Britain and unheard of on Vanaheim? Would it be rude of Harry to ask, in case she hadn't?
He was fortunately interrupted from that thought process by the green woman that approached as soon as he entered the room. "Harry," Gamora said, honestly seeming pleased to see him, but she was all business, "the orb we are seeking is another of the Stones. I don't know if you've…"
"I've seen most of them, ma'am," he interrupted. "The Norns are trying to get me to see… maybe touch?... all of them for some reason. I only have one left after this one."
Her eyes widened. "My fath… Thanos… has only ever held one. But he desires them all."
"So he can use them to kill half the universe."
That got a bewildered smirk out of her. "That old headmaster has figured it all out?"
"Well, I put a lot of it together and he filled in the details," Harry shrugged. "You don't happen to know about some woman—big antler headdress, power over the dead, Aesir bogeyman—that he's working with, do you?"
That stopped her for a moment as she considered. "He has never taken a wife or mistress, and there are rumors among his followers. As much as we are allowed to joke, I have heard many times the idea of him trying to 'court death' and it seems to have dual meanings."
Drax leaned in and stage-whispered, "Metaphor." He had been holding so still they had barely noticed he was a couple of yards away, listening to their conversation.
"Double entendre," I think, Harry disagreed. Maybe he should continue to take history with Binns for his last two years, even though he didn't have to, now that he'd finished the exams. It had been a surprisingly reasonable education in English. "You think Thanos might be in love with this… person? Goddess?"
She scoffed, "He's never loved anything other than himself. But if he's been secretly working with an entity with powers over the dead, his plan makes a lot more sense. He claims that it's about saving the resources of the universe from overpopulation."
"Really?" He thought about that for a minute and said, "That's dumb. I think Earth's population has doubled in, like, the last forty or fifty years, and we'd do it again even if you killed half of us. But Vanaheim's population has been basically stable for centuries and they're doing okay. And there's already so few wizards that inbreeding is a problem, so killing half of them would be bad. Plus! With all the Stones couldn't he just make more resources for everyone?"
"He likes to kill," the big gray-skinned kylosian shrugged. "It is stupid to pretend you are killing for some noble goal, if you just like to kill. It is okay to like to kill. It's fun. The galaxy would be safer if leaders admitted they just like to kill."
Both Harry and Gamora were both about to object, but then realized that neither had much of a leg to stand on. She, if she was being honest, really did like to kill. Harry was pretty sure he didn't, but would definitely prefer if his leaders were honest that they did.
Before they could discuss the reasonableness of killing for a cause, or a death goddess, or your own whims, Hermione interrupted from the other side of the room, where Quill had joined her conversation with Rocket. "Harry! The new plan might hinge on whether you can make portals onto the Dark Aster. That's Ronan's ship."
"I'll practice. Not sure how well it will work when the portal ends are moving at high speeds in different directions," Harry considered. "But Ronan was able to break a portal with his hammer thing. Called it 'Lem tricks.' They might have some kind of tech built into the ship that acts like wards."
"So we may have to open holes to unseal the ship and bridge before portals are viable," she explained to the human and the raccoon.
"Holes… we can make," Rocket nodded.
That's how they found themselves a few hours later in an aerial chaos straight out of a shoot-'em-up video game. Even the Battle of New York hadn't been so hectic. The Ravagers had come with a bunch of small ships. The Dark Aster had launched a bunch of small ships. There were ships everywhere, all shooting at each other.
"Team Yondu: Now!" Rocket announced over the comms they were all fitted with. The teens had opted out of Ravager coats, since their rune-armored clothing was plenty of defense (and because they wanted to make Hermione feel special for the coat she'd won at cards), but they'd accepted some other tech to help coordinate. They could see the explosion from the side of the Dark Aster. Ronan's giant ship was a massive near-cylinder of symmetrical, independently-rotating ring habitats.
"I need to see inside," Harry said, clinging onto the back of Yondu's pilot seat as the centaurian wove through the fray. The cockpit of the smaller, jet-like spacecraft was packed with the other four Hogwarts students, Quill, Gamora, Drax, and Groot. The Ravager leader flipped a switch that made the center of the canopy zoom in to display a magnification of the hole, and Harry could see enemy soldiers rushing about within the exposed interior. "Okay. Keep it steady and lined up on the ship!" he insisted.
He hadn't solved the portal problem, yet. There hadn't been time to really figure out how to make two moving anchors for both ends of a portal, especially at interstellar speeds. He'd been taking for granted how easy it was to make portals on a planet, where no matter how far apart the ends were, they were more or less stable relative to each other. But if he could get their ship to stay in the same position and distance from the destination…
"Ready! You're going into a fight. And there's a drop! Go, go, go!" he yelled at everyone, the portal stabilizing on their ship's bridge and showing him the interior of the enemy cargo bay. Fortunately, it was a big space, because the other end of the portal was at least a yard off the floor and waving around. Yondu couldn't sync his ship perfectly. "I'm right behind you!"
The other four teens were first through, already conjuring shields so they could protect against any enemies that reacted quickly. Shortly behind were Gamora, Quill, and Drax. Groot, taking up the most space, had to duck and step carefully through the portal, which barely fit him in the small cockpit.
"We got company!" Yondu announced, a moment before a blast hit the ship. They had been holding far back, but had been noticed.
The ship began to spin, Harry lost the portal as the other end smashed into the floor of the Dark Aster, Groot got a foot splinched off as it collapsed, and Harry was still on the wrong side in a crashing ship, desperately trying to buckle himself into a seat.
The salty pirate captain narrated as he tried to control his and Harry's descent to the surface of Xandar. "Aw, hell! We're going down, Quill! No more games with me, boy! I'll see you at the end of this!"
Before they crash landed, they at least heard over their comms that the Nova Corps had joined the dogfight. Quill thought it was because he'd sent them a dick message, but there was no time to unpack that.
Banged up but alive when Yondu managed a survivable impact in a field somewhere on the planet's surface, Harry had a moment to appreciate the impressive lattice of Nova ships in the air above. They meant "blockade" more literally than normal fleets. Each of the small, star-shaped ships was connected on beams of golden force to its neighbors, making a massive aerial net that the Dark Aster was wrapped in, trying to keep it from reaching the ground through sheer oppositional force.
He only had that one moment to look, however, since enemy ships had tracked them to the ground and spread out sakaaran soldiers around them. As they staggered out into the air, one of the armored aliens pulled off his mask, revealing a buglike face. Harry had worked out that most of Ronan's soldiers were basically cousins of Aragog, the spiderlike alien that lived in the Forbidden Forest. "Yondu Udonta, order your men to turn on the Nova Corps!" the leader bellowed.
Yondu's face twitched. He reached to move his coat off his leg, where his weird arrow device was holstered. Harry rolled his eyes and asked, "Do we need to fight these guys?"
"Guess not…" the blue-skinned man shot him a look.
"Cool." Harry spun open a portal and jumped through before the aliens could even react, the pirate right behind him. They emerged in the main plaza of the Nova city where they'd met the Broker the previous day. The battle was right overhead, and citizens were fleeing in terror.
Opening portals between two stable points on a planet was way easier.
"I don't like the look of that!" Harry told his unexpected partner, the ground already littered with pieces of ships that had crashed into the area. There were dozens of people trying to escape the debris, and the plaza was mostly open and far on foot from any kind of legitimate protection. "Everyone's a sitting duck down here! Or fish in a barrel."
"Used'ta ship barrels of fish on the regular. Lotsa things you can hide in there," Yondu absently said, observing their predicament. He gestured about a mile across town, at a large defensive tower with a giant star emblem on the side. "Safer over near the Nova building."
"On it," Harry said, having to guess where to place the other end of the portal since he'd never been there specifically, but had a pretty good line of sight to the location. He could see the building through it, though the egress was a bit off the ground. "Everybody!" he shouted to the fleeing citizens, putting a little magic into his voice to amplify it. "Come this way to get to safety! Watch your step!"
They might have normally not been inclined to follow the advice of a random teen standing next to a guy in Ravager uniform, but Yondu went through the portal like his ass was on fire as soon as another sakaaran ship crashed about a dozen yards away and exploded, so the nearby citizens got the message and fled after.
Harry would have rather been on the flagship, fighting, but realized he might just have a bigger impact saving civilians on the ground.
The communicators were spotty with his friends within the hull of the ship and him on the ground, or maybe they were just tied up and forgetting to use them since everyone else was present. Hermione eventually remembered to share, "Gamora is fighting her sister while I try to get these doors open. Everyone else went to fight to the control room."
"It's just like that last big fight when we opened the Room," Dean acknowledged, from where he and the rest of the team were fighting. "Lots of guys."
"I'm in the city getting civilians to safety," Harry told them.
"Good. They're going to dive bomb," Rocket broke in. "I told Nova to stay put. We're coming down."
Sure enough, Harry looked up and saw dozens of enemy necrocraft orienting themselves toward the ground, abandoning the dogfight and leaving nothing in the air but the Dark Aster slowly growing larger as the blockade couldn't fully hold it, only partially countering its engines. "Go! Go! Go!" he yelled at the last few citizens that were rushing his way. He'd had almost a minute, so had basically cleared out everyone within a hundred yards that could see him. The feather-headed Broker was one of the last people through, lugging an overfull satchel that presumably carried his most expensive goods and shooting a worried look at his shop and all the treasures he'd had to leave behind.
Harry let the portal close after the last person stepped through and took a deep breath. Opening a portal across town wasn't exactly strenuous, but holding it for a minute while a few dozen people used it wasn't nothing.
He shouted at the sky, "Hey! If you're going to be able to make it, now's the time. No pressure, but it would be appreciated!"
Then he limbered up, sighted at the enemy ship trying to crash into him as the only person left in the empty plaza, and spun open the biggest portal he could. The practice he had over the winter with redirecting missiles paid off, and he managed to send the ship that was coming right for him directly into another ship that was still a ways off of the ground, both of them erupting into a massive explosion as they collided. "Wizard boy!" Yondu yelled at him over the comms. "I thought you was right behind all them people! Ravagers! Shoot those bugs afore they hit the ground and protect that dumb kid!"
Harry had certainly made himself an obvious target for the other ships, which at least clustered the attacks on the center of the plaza. For all that Rocket and the other Ravager ships, hovering over the nearby river, were doing a good job shooting most of the necrocraft before they could hit the ground, the exploded pieces of them raining down weren't exactly safe. Harry was having to put portals over his head just to catch falling debris, rather than dive-bombing ships.
He felt like he'd been at the center of a storm for hours, though it had probably only been a minute, when there was a huge beam of rainbow light that punched a hole through the rain of sakaaran necrocraft and traced a knotwork searmark on the white Xandarian pavement. When the flash of light cleared, there were a dozen figures visible, some astride an Aesir flying boat.
"Apologies for our lateness, Harry," Thor said. "This is progressing faster than we expected." With a wink, the God of Thunder whirled his hammer and flung himself up and through an incoming ship.
Loki told him, "You're responsible for the diplomatic incident this might cause with Xandar," and then lifted off in the Aesir craft, the Warriors Three, Sif, and a few einherjar manning the weapons stations on the oddly anachronistic aircraft.
"It's… raining men?" Bruce observed, and then started running toward an undefended part of the plaza, turning big and green as he went. The purple-and-silver Aesir-woven robes he'd been talked into wearing on the campaign against the marauders cleverly shifted into a pair of shorts and vest as he grew, rather than tearing apart. The Hulk leapt into the air, managing to snatch a necrocraft before it hit the ground and hammer toss it into another one nearby.
"What the hell is that!?" Yondu demanded, over the comms.
"The friends I called," Harry said, simply.
The next minute or so was a weird throwback to the Battle of New York, only Loki was on their side in the ballet of aerial explosions. With the Aesir vanguard in play, well-trained in this kind of fight after months of driving other aliens off protected worlds, the sakaaran necrocraft barrage was pushed further and further back. By the time Hermione mentioned over the comms, "I think that did it! The door should be unlocked. Sorry. I had to figure it out while Gamora was beating up her sister," there was mostly clear sky above.
"Loki!" Harry managed to catch the God of Mischief's attention as he piloted the sky skiff by, getting him to descend low enough that the teen wizard could use a conjured whip to grapple up and swing onto the deck. "Can you basically match speeds with the bad guy ship?"
"Your portals still need to be fixed to each other, eh?" the younger of the two princes teased him. "I think I can manage."
"We're going in," Quill said over the comms, as Harry was waiting to get in position to open a portal. "The Hadron Enforcer is loaded!"
"Right behind you," Gamora announced, a little out of breath.
"You did it!" Drax said, after Harry thought he spotted the flare of an explosion on the Dark Aster's bridge that was visible even thousands of yards away and through the yellow light of the Nova blockade. Harry wondered if he would even need to portal up, if the plan had gone so smoothly.
"He didn't do it!" Hermione near-shrieked moments later.
"They're in trouble!" the Boy-Who-Lived announced to Loki, starting to spin open a portal. "Tell Thor!"
Instead of his friends and allies on the comms, the next thing he heard was Ronan's voice, seemingly broadcasting on every channel. "Xandar, you stand accused! Your guardians of the galaxy: what fruit have they wrought? Only that my father and his father shall finally know vengeance."
Hoping against hope that everyone wasn't dead, Harry semi-blindly targeted his portal using the same empathic sense that he'd use to find loved ones when he was in astral form. As he leaped through onto the explosion-wrecked bridge of the Dark Aster, he saw the Accuser standing triumphantly against the detritus, universal weapon held aloft with the purple light of the Power Stone gleaming from where it was affixed to the side of the hammer's head.
Drax was sprawled near him, insensate or unconscious, and the other seven seemed to have been blasted into various corners of the room. Some were struggling to get up but others lay still. Harry thought that his empathy would let him know if any of his friends were dead, but they'd obviously taken a beating, possibly from just one wave of overwhelming force from the Power Stone. Was that same power protecting Ronan even from massive explosions?
The kree looked like he was charging up the energy within the Stone for something else, maybe to destroy all the Nova ships still blockading his flagship, and Harry tried to figure out a way to distract him. Glancing at Dean and Quill struggling to get up, all he could think about was 80s movies.
"Ronan the Accuser! Good evening! As a self-appointed representative of the planet, nation, and city of Xandar, I order you to cease any and all superpowered activity and return forthwith to your planet of origin or to the nearest convenient neutral region!"
Almost to his feet, Dean yelled the next part of the quote, "That ought to do it. Thanks very much, Harry."
As Ronan turned to Harry, head tilted in confusion, Quill explained to the genocidal alien, "You're supposed to ask him if he's a god."
"Are you a god?" the Accuser obliged, completely nonplussed by this whole exchange.
"No…" Harry admitted, turning his head slightly to glance out of the corner of his eye and make sure his timing was right. "But he is."
From the still-open portal behind him, the other end near Loki's skyship, Thor had landed on the deck, whirled Mjolnir, and launched the smaller hammer through and straight at Ronan. While the Power Stone was, perhaps, invulnerable to being smashed by the uru-forged artifact, the universal weapon it was stuck to was significantly less sturdy. The hammer of Thor slowed very little as it shattered the hammer of the kree, rocketing past and smashing out the front canopy of the Dark Aster's bridge.
Everything seemed to go into slow motion.
In the purple surge of energy, even more of the front of the ship exploded outward, following the path of Mjolnir. The alien pilots in the room, barely having endured the first explosion, lost consciousness, and the ship began to tilt forward.
The Power Stone hovered in the air, a dark purple star. But with the Nova blockade still slowing the warship, gravity began to pull it down. It would only be moments before it hit the floor, sloping away, and risked skipping toward the front of the ship.
If it fell toward the ground, would the blockade stop it? Or would the tiny stone slip unhindered, making its way to the planet's surface, eradicating all life below?
"No!" Harry and Quill realized simultaneously. The teen's reflexes were faster, but Quill was closer. Both of them got a hand on the Power Stone on its first bounce off the deck of the ship.
Ronan, an actual adult, had taken a full step back, long past the juvenile reflex to try to catch a dropped, dangerous object and risk injuring himself.
For Harry, it was like thrusting his hand into an electrical socket that was also a wood chipper and a pool of strong sulfuric acid. It was a full-body pain greater than anything he'd experienced before. Everything around him seemed to fade away into roaring purple smoke. All he could see was Quill, who was starting to look as bad as Harry felt, skin melting away into black dust. This was probably what it felt like to get hit with dark magic: coruscating and disintegrating. Was this the torture that Neville's parents had survived?
Death should have been instantaneous, rather than this ongoing pain. A faint orange glow surrounded Harry, the Soul Stone power within him doing what it could to delay the inevitable. There was no telling why Quill wasn't instantly disintegrated. He and the teen shared a look of hurt and embarrassment that they'd wound up choosing such a stupid way to die. And then, over the man's shoulder, Gamora's face and arm swam out of the storm of power. "Peter! Take my hand!"
The phrase sent a jolt through the Ravager's heart. In full contact and Soul Stone powers flaring, Harry couldn't help but share the memory. As Quill turned to look at her, Gamora was overlaid with a bald, dying woman. Like Harry, Peter Quill had to watch his mother die right in front of him. Cancer wasn't fast, like Lily Potter's death had been, and he hadn't been a toddler so he was old enough to remember it. Old enough to run from it. Nearly three decades later, maybe he was finally ready to stop running from people that might love him. The man who called himself Star-Lord reached out into the storm, grasping the hand that shifted back to Gamora's as he took it and shared some of the burden.
Dean and Hermione didn't bother asking. While he'd been watching Quill, Harry's friends had forced their way in and laid their own hands on his arm.
With each of their friends piling in, sharing the slow disintegration, the storm pushed back a bit. Groot got a branch around both of them, Luna and Neville held onto the flora colossus, and Drax put a hand on Quill's shoulder. The pain was still immense, but it was shared. Still only a long stride away, Ronan stood dumbfounded, demanding, "You're mortal? How?!"
Star-Lord quipped, "You said it yourself, bitch. We're the Guardians of the Galaxy."
"Also, the Avengers!" Harry noted.
Timed well, again, on that team-boosting statement, having finally caught Mjolnir and flown himself up the long way, Thor emerged out of the storm and dealt Ronan a mighty blow to the back of the head, felling the Accuser in one stroke.
Hermione fished out one of the replacement orbs that Rocket had fabricated back on the ship, and dropped it where Harry and Quill could shove the Power Stone in.
As soon as the small metal ball snapped closed around the node of pure destruction, the storm ceased. Somehow, despite looking like they were high-energy mummies a moment earlier, none of them were the worse for wear. It was just nine exhausted people looking up at a grinning God of Thunder, the villain of the piece unconscious and slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and the giant warship bobbing drunkenly on the net of Nova Corps ships.
"Do they have shawarma on Xandar?" Thor asked. "I still haven't gotten to try it…"
Down on the ground, Yondu was racing on foot toward one of the Ravager ships, announcing over comms, "You get that orb? Remember the deal we made!"
From seemingly out of nowhere, a tall, slender, dark-haired man that he'd never met stepped in front of him. "Apologies," Loki said, "but Asgard insists on seeing that Stone safely contained. However… I'm quite impressed with your fleet. Have you ever considered… privateering?"
Chapter 92: Past and Present
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
They'd finally gotten some sleep after the battle. So many things had been happening that they'd barely noticed that they'd started their latest adventure after dinner and had probably been gone most of a day before the Nova Corps carefully lowered the Dark Aster to a stretch of empty fields near their shipyards and let the teens and the Guardians disembark. Yondu had already taken the rest of his people and left the planet before the ship touched down, not willing to test the largess of the Nova Corps toward a bunch of pirates, even if they had just saved their city and possibly their planet.
The hotel they put the remaining heroes up in was nice. It was also an interesting insight into the convergent evolution of the entire universe. With so many worlds full of people that were basically shaped exactly like humans, the spaces they found comfortable were shockingly similar. The Xandarian style was heavy on sliding paper doors, bleached wood, and spartan decoration, such that you could probably drop an average American in one, tell them they were in Japan, and they'd have little cause to argue about it. At least until they looked out the window at the city or bumped into another hotel guest with skin as bright magenta as Dar-Benn's robes.
They'd tried to get Thor to take them home immediately, but Loki reminded Harry he needed to play diplomat. Asgard showing up on war footing in Nova space uninvited could have been an intergalactic incident.
It didn't turn out that way. "And I want to thank you so much for your aid to Xandar," Nova Prime was telling Harry and his friends, as they stood around the white-walled and many-windowed hangar-like space that was the Nova Corps control room. Hermione and Dean were only half paying attention as they focused on the holographic war table set up nearby. Harry figured Tony's tech was better, so was able to nod as the white-haired woman continued, "If not for your quick thinking and ability to call upon the royals of Asgard, we may have lost many more Xandarian lives."
"And you got my dick message," Quill couldn't help but bring up, from where he and his team were standing nearby. He seemed a little jealous of how the rest of the Guardians weren't paying attention not because of the cool tech, but because they were ogling the Aesir. Thor and his party were to the other side of Harry and his friends, all of them except Bruce long-practiced at diplomatic standing around.
Well, Volstagg kept trying and failing to be covert about how he was checking all over to see if they were about to bring out a feast.
Nova Prime said, "We did, at that. We also appreciate the effort you made to protect our planet. Your criminal records have been expunged, and we've repaired and refitted your ship. We aren't certain what else we can do for these brave young people, or Asgard's vanguard, however."
As Loki took over to mouth the careful platitudes that asked for nothing specific now, knowing that Xandar was in Asgard's debt and that favor might be called in later, Dean leaned over to Harry, nodded at some of the Xandarians in the background, and whispered, "We should ask for their phone numbers."
Harry chuckled. Nova Prime's assistants were all young and very attractive. "We've got girlfriends, man," he whispered back.
"Oh, Fleur's a girlfriend now, huh?" Hermione also leaned in, smirking at her friend's discomfiture. "Anyway, I think we should ask them for tech. We keep some as holdouts, and let Tony study the spares?"
"Works for me," he told her, just in time. Loki had finished up and they were all looking at him. "Any of your technical manuals you can share with us, and examples of various kinds of tech. Particularly any energy weapons you have, would be a big help, uh, ma'am."
"It is forbidden by intergalactic law to share advanced technology with Terra," she said, a little sadly. "I believe Asgard is the primary force behind that agreement."
All three of the teens from Earth shot doe eyes at Thor, who laughed and agreed, "Fortunately, these young warriors are not acting as emissaries of Midgard, or Terra as you call it, at the moment. I believe that they can be trusted with the information."
Bruce muttered, "That law probably needs to be renegotiated, as much tech as we already have," and Loki gave him a nod that he was on it.
"Very well, I shall have my assistant gather the relevant materials. The rest of you can follow Corpsman Dey out to Star-Lord's ship." Quill beamed as she called him by his preferred code name.
"I'll stay here and help carry it," Dean offered, scooting off after the near-supermodel tasked to get their stuff.
"Girlfriend, man," Harry hissed at him.
"Why is Dean like that?" Hermione asked Luna quietly as they followed Rhomann Dey. "Harry and Neville aren't like that."
"They come from stably-paired families?" the lighter-haired girl imagined. "Like father, like son. And Dean's didn't stick around."
"My dad didn't stick around, and I turned out fine," Quill argued, having come close enough to overhear. It was unclear whether he was as much of a counter-example as he thought.
Rather than acknowledge that statement, as they exited into the bright daylight, Hermione moved off to talk with Rocket, Neville and Luna walked off with Groot, and Harry was left searching for a response that didn't offend the man. Fortunately Gamora helped by interrupting and informing Quill, "Harry was one of my students."
"I didn't know you were a teacher!" he responded, happy to have another tidbit to talk about in his courtship of the woman.
"It was a spy mission for Thanos," she shrugged. "Fortunately, Harry helped me realize I could work against him."
"We met the Red Skull," the Boy-Who-Lived added.
"No way! Like from Captain America times? I thought he blew up or something."
"He did. But then a wizard summoned his soul to be a guardian for the thing Gamora was after. I found that out later."
"The man did have a very red skull," Gamora nodded, not having any context for Earth's early heroes and villains.
"Oh, also Captain America didn't die. He just got frozen in the ice for sixty-something years. He's on my team, now."
Quill only had about half a million other questions, and by the time Harry had barely started on the surface of them, Dean was back, toting a large black matte case that presumably was full of tech. "We going back to Earth on a spaceship?" he asked.
"No, I think Thor's giving us a ride," Harry explained. Bruce had wandered over to join the pop culture discussion and nodded. "But we should meet up with them this summer."
"I don't know how well spaceships flying in unannounced would be after New York," the mild-mannered scientist said.
"What happened to New York?" Quill asked.
"The Chitauri," Harry and Gamora answered at the same time. She nodded for Harry to explain, and he said, "Thanos sent an army through a portal. We stopped them. It's a lot better than it could have been. Our side didn't nuke the city to stop the invasion, for one."
"It was a near thing," Bruce grumbled.
"We're meeting them at the Market this summer," Hermione said, walking up. "Rocket and Groot can get everyone in there. We may have to talk to the goblins and make sure they're not banned after trying to kidnap you."
"Bounty hunt, not kidnap!" Rocket yelled across the large outdoor space at her.
"Do we send them an owl to set it up?" Harry checked.
"They gave us a booster for the communicators that should work if we set it up in the right place."
"I will write down information that you can use about Thanos, and have it ready then," Gamora nodded.
"Okay, cool. See you guys this summer." Harry told Quill, "We'll bring you a music player loaded up with a bunch of stuff. And a laptop with movies on it."
"Great. Great," the man nodded.
"Why store films on a lap?" Gamora asked him quietly as they walked away. Having left long before portable computers were in widespread use, he was scrambling furiously for an answer to avoid saying he didn't know.
"Everyone ready to go?" Thor asked, his contingent walking over and starting them moving toward the Aesir skyship that was floating on the rooftop landing pad not far from Quill's vessel.
"I'm definitely ready" Neville smiled. "I need to get some stuff into pots back at school fast."
"Those seeds you bought at Knowhere?" Hermione asked.
"Among other things," he said, gently cradling a small plant cutting that he'd gotten somewhere and wrapped carefully at the base. It was almost like a swaddled baby, especially with how close Luna was hovering to him as he held it.
"I am groot!" she yelled across the way, as the flora colossus was boarding the Milano.
"We are groot," he boomed back, waving and then getting onto the ship.
"Huh. I thought there were only three words in Flora Colossus?" Harry asked.
"With some variations," she said, keeping the answer mysterious.
Thor glanced at the seedling with a raised eyebrow, seemingly understanding the language, but shrugged and ordered, "All aboard!" As the magitech viking longship hovered out into the open over the city, he announced, "Heimdall!"
Traveling through Bifrost on a ship was an interesting experience. Harry felt like he was stuck to the deck with normal gravity but still being rocketed up along the drilled corridor through the folds of space. Maybe it was just pulling the ship slightly faster than it was pulling him.
Unlike his previous trips along the rainbow bridge, there was a moment of weightlessness after a few seconds, and then he was being shoved back down. By the time he was about to yell and ask if something had gone wrong, they were being ejected over the grounds of Hogwarts.
Maybe Bifrost had always had the power to go between two points without stopping in the control room, or maybe it was a new feature they'd added with the power of the Tesseract?
They'd spent long enough on other worlds to have left Friday night and return Monday just before lunch. It was a nice late spring day during the last week of school, in which the seventh-years took exams and everyone else just hung out. Consequently, the dozens of students outside on the school grounds immediately spotted the arrival of an Aesir skyship on the column of light that was unmistakably the rainbow bridge. Unless they wanted to shove the teens out of the craft, they'd have to land, and, thus, deal with a growing crowd of adoring Vanir fans.
Loki seriously considered shoving the kids out so they could escape the mob.
"Yes! Yes! Greetings, students of Hogwarts!" Thor announced as the ship landed near the quidditch stadium. "We have had new adventures, and return your peers that they might boast of them to thee!"
"Professor Lupin! Professor the Dashing!" several kids shouted, more out of surprise than out of being more interested in seeing them than Thor, but they had been pretty well-liked defense professors.
Between the general fannish acclaim and the reunion with former students, the Aesir couldn't make an excuse to escape before most of the rest of the school had heard the news and shown up. Thor was signing autographs. The former professors were hearing about how their instruction had gotten used in the past couple of years. Some Hufflepuff with a good head on their shoulders had brought a whole trencher of roast beef from the kitchens for Volstagg. Hogun turned out to have quite a few relatives at the school that were eager to catch up with him. Sif got cornered against the side of the ship by Parvati and a still-healing-but-ambulatory Lavender so they could probe about her intentions toward their dear Professor Lupin.
Loki seemingly stayed on board the ship, waving politely but aloofly to the students, but Harry sensed a flare of emotions from nearby and spotted Cho Chang next to a tree with a very nondescript-looking young man dressed as a student, having a clearly emotional conversation. He managed to extricate himself from his own throng of students eager to hear what he'd been doing for the last day and a half just in time to see presumably-Loki give a respectful bow to the crying Chinese seeker and step away. "I have offered to make what amends I can," he whispered in the prince's voice as he passed Harry and immediately blended into the crowd.
"Are you okay?" Harry asked Cho, walking up slowly to give her time to compose herself.
"I think I will be," she said. "I don't want to forgive him, but… I don't think he really wants me to either. How do you hate someone that hates himself that much?" She thought about it for a moment. "He's the God of Trickery. Is that just something he's doing? A little reverse psychology?"
He sighed and explained, "No. I think you're right that he hates himself. That doesn't mean you have to forgive him, though."
"Wong says I need to let it go. Not for him, but for me."
"Master Wong may be one of the only masters able to practice what he preaches on that front." Harry had spent enough time around them that his super-powered empathy made it abundantly clear that most of the Masters of the Mystic Arts had enough issues to properly count as volumes, and potentially rival the size of their private library.
"Not wrong, though. Thanks, Harry. I've got a lot to think about."
Harry and his friends had most of lunch to give the highlights of their adventures to the rest of Gryffindor (and Luna, presumably, to Ravenclaw), mostly filling in what had happened after they'd been abducted. Their friends that had been left behind had already had all of Sunday to share the parts of the adventure to Morag that Dumbledore hadn't insisted they keep secret. Honestly, with Lavender and Parvati there, he had mostly just told them not to give up any of his Order's operational secrets that they'd witnessed.
The headmaster, himself, shot Harry a serious look toward the end of the meal, flicking his eyes up to his office. The Boy-Who-Lived nodded, and managed to extricate himself from the boasting session that was clearly going to continue well into the afternoon, instead waiting for the old man (quite a bit slower at climbing up all those stairs) by his door.
Inside was much as it had been every other time he'd visited, still cluttered with magical tchotchkes and with Fjalar the mythic crimson cockerel perched on his roost. Dumbledore settled himself in, waited for Harry to take a seat across from him, and said, "Another grand adventure. I'm pleased that you were able to see it to its conclusion. I think events might have unfolded similarly, even had I been present at the moment of Sybill's vision, rather than hunting down our rogue Accuser."
"What will happen to Dar-Benn?"
"Shipped back to her empire as a cautionary tale for other members of the council that think that aliens will provide any fair judgement, rather than working their own agendas. What of the Accuser you faced?"
Harry grinned, "After he woke up from the concussion Thor gave him, he was already in the deepest on-planet dungeon they have. He basically destroyed the prison they had in space, even if they'd wanted to risk him in gen pop. I doubt they're trading him back to the kree." He realized, "What happened with Hagrid's sister?"
"Alas. With time being pressing, recapture without risk to the hostages was not an option. We traded her freedom for the students, though they may not think so with the detentions they will be serving for their actions, and left Severus to shadow her to her eventual destination while Hagrid returned the children to Hogwarts and the rest of us made haste to Morag."
He left it hanging whether Snape's orders were simply to spy on the giantess, or to assassinate her at the first opportunity. The headmaster might not even know, maintaining the plausible deniability he'd need to continue to look Hagrid in the eye.
The thought of death reminded Harry, "I think we might have seen a valkyrie. Said she wasn't a Norn, but was close. Only Luna and I could see her until she let everyone else see her. That's how we wound up away from everyone when we got picked up by the Ravagers. She said she was collecting witches I'd left for her, and her name was Rio."
"There are no more valkyries, I'm afraid, and have not been in centuries, though their legends persist. They were more warriors than choosers of the slain, even when they were a vital force from Asgard. No, if there was a woman on the battlefield that you could see but I could not, calling herself a river… I would need more information to begin to trouble you with my suspicions. But you may have opportunity to converse with her again. Just be more mindful of your surroundings the next time."
"Yeah… getting abducted did wind up working out, though."
"Yes. Things do have a way of working out. But, please take it from the top and apprise me of everything that happened between when you were lured off by a strange woman and returned down Bifrost with the royals of Asgard…"
Harry probably didn't tell the headmaster everything, but he made a pretty solid summary. In particular, the old man was pleased that his errant defense teacher that he'd known as Mistress Morgan had escaped her service to their foe and transitioned into being a hero. And he only seemed slightly surprised at that foe's identity.
"I worried our true enemy might be the Mad Titan I had heard distant rumors of," Dumbledore explained as Harry finished his story. "He has not openly assaulted the Nine Realms before now, only having the capabilities to lay waste to unprotected worlds. I assume that Professor Binns has explained to you the concept of decimation, as practiced by ancient cultures in Midgard?"
"It was a Roman punishment, for soldiers, but it's not as bad as most people mean when they say something was decimated. I've heard people act like it means almost totally destroyed, but it's only ten percent killed."
"And, yet, it has entered the parlance as a woeful fate for a group of people because even one out of ten is a shocking and terrible loss. Almost everyone has at least ten loved ones, and so a random tenth spreads that trauma of loss—of the kind that you know well—across the entire society so afflicted. And to think that killing off half of a culture could be regarded as mercy rather than madness. Those worlds that Thanos has visited collapse in upon themselves in grief, struggling for generations to recover from the breaking of so many bonds."
Harry argued, "But if he's doing it to power up this death goddess that Odin has tried to keep secret all these years…"
"Then even having half of all societies murdered might only be the beginning of the terror wrought by an evil that our gods worked so hard to lock away." Eyes half-lidded behind his spectacles, the headmaster considered and then nodded. "You have shown good judgement, and Severus tells me that your occlumency defenses are more than casual protection, so I feel that it may be time to entrust you with a particularly vital piece of information. If I do so, you may not share it with anyone else, for you will be the only one other that myself to know it fully."
"This is why you had me learn occlumency, sir? So nobody could steal this information from my mind?"
"This and the many other secrets you've accumulated, yes. I admit that I wish the friends that you bring along on so many excursions could also be trained to keep their secrets close, but Ms. Patil and Ms. Brown have their own roles to play in all of this, I'm sure. But, for yourself, I have your word that you will keep this information secret until and unless it proves vital to share it?"
Harry considered. Sometimes the old man kept secrets out of habit. But if he was finally ready to start extending his confidence… "You have it."
"Then let me explain to you that the Norns have been interested in your life from before it began. You see, when I was interviewing Seer Trelawney for her position at this school, some short time before your birth, she uttered a prophecy. The first part of that prophecy was overheard by an agent of our enemy, and I believe that is precisely why he worked so hard to try to kill you as an infant. But the latter part, only I currently know."
"Because Trelawney doesn't hear her own prophecies."
"Exactly. When the Norns speak through her, her words are for those they are delivered to, not herself. Perhaps it is a mercy granted to seers to prevent them being hounded for the secrets they keep. Regardless, you, now will share in that secret. Prepare to commit this to your memory, for I shall not risk repeating it."
With a careful series of wand gestures, Dumbledore swept the room for all forms of eavesdropping, erected a susurrating field of white noise around them for extra protection, and then conjured up a hologram in silvery light of a decade-and-a-half younger Trelawney. With the same Norn-augmented resonance in her voice as the time she'd prophesied for Harry at the end of his third year, the illusion began to speak.
The path to the jewel of Niflheim approaches…
A child of Warriors of Fjalar thrice defiant,
Born before the Harvest Moon…
But the Dark Lord will suffer from its arrival,
And create a bane upon his quest…
Both will have the opportunity to touch the Stones, but only one of the two may grasp them all…
The one with the power to halt the Dark Lord's ambition will be born before the Harvest Moon…
"The full moon on Harvest Month is right after my birthday," Harry nodded, when the prophecy ended and the headmaster dismissed his illusion. "And I guess my parents were pretty defiant?"
"They won three major victories against the Death Eaters, yes."
"Guess we're figuring the Soul Stone is from Niflheim, huh? So Thanos basically knew that I could lead him to it. He must have only heard the first three lines?"
Dumbledore explained, "I detected and scared away the eavesdropper at that point. I was fortunate to be able to split my focus and hear the rest. But staying meant I wasn't able to stop the information from reaching his master."
"And this is why you think I'm going to catch 'em all. Because if I don't get to them first, he wins. If I do, universe is safe. Or, at least, he has to kill half of everyone the long way."
"By my count, only one remains."
"I for sure touched the last one," Harry winced, remembering the feeling of being melted by the Power Stone. "Most of them were in containers of some kind, though. A book, an amulet, a cube. Do you think those count? Should I go ask people if I can touch their Stones directly to be sure?"
"I… doubt it matters, but should you have the opportunity, I wouldn't pass it by. Unfortunately, the last is proving the most elusive. I believe that it may be the same as an artifact of great power taken five millennia ago by Odin's father and hidden, after wresting it from the dark elves."
He groaned, realizing why the old man was pursuing that idea. "And the Dahvee are keeping me alive because they somehow have their own prophecy that I'm going to come in contact with that artifact?"
"It would stand to reason, yes."
"Guess I should plan on their sudden yet inevitable betrayal next year, huh? I wonder if the Room can let us practice against dark elves…"
He'd said the last as an afterthought to himself, but Dumbledore asked, shrewdly, "The Room? Might I assume that the mystery of where you and your peers have been disappearing to all year is the legendary Room of Requirement?"
"Uh…" Sighing that the jig was up and that he was going to be so embarrassed to admit to Parvati and Lavender that it was him that slipped, he explained, "Yeah. It's been really useful for practicing against Death Eaters. So can we keep using it? Please?"
"Perhaps I should retract my statement about your good judgement, but, should I inspect it and find it safe, then I see no reason not to allow you to continue using it. I, myself, may find it of use over the summer, if it does half the things it is rumored to do. I may even have a guess as to its approximate location. I never did find that mysterious lavatory again that I once found when I was at dire need…"
He released Harry not long after to return to his housemates, already deep into recounting their adventures. The rest of their week at Hogwarts was a mix of retelling their new stories and getting last minute training in within the Room. If it was accurate with what it was presenting for the likely threats when fighting dark elves, they might have some real trouble. Periodically, it would throw a mutated brute of an elf at them that seemed basically immune to every attack they tried.
Hermione thought they were called Kursed, and was going to do some more research for possible weaknesses over the summer.
Everyone seemed in basically good spirits throughout their storytelling and training, though relationships had shifted subtly after the time on Morag and in space. Ron and Lavender's romance seemed stronger than it had been all year, after both getting injured fighting Death Eaters. Luna and Neville kept sneaking off to the greenhouses, distracted by Cotati seeds and whatever other secret planting project they'd been talking to Groot about. Dean and Ginny seemed about normal in the Room, but Harry's empathy was telling him that maybe his best friend was just waiting to break up with her once they were gone for the summer. And who knew how that might impact their social group the next year?
If he was going to do it, Dean hadn't seemed to pull the trigger by the time they got off the train. Maybe he was going to do it by letter, which didn't seem wise. Keeping his plan close to his chest, he offloaded with Harry and Hermione to meet their families.
Tony was very excited to get to see a bit of Vanaheim now that his heart wasn't electricity-powered.
"I… don't know enough about trees to be sure this isn't just some forest in Europe or something," he observed as the teens walked up to him, Pepper, the Grangers, and Grace Thomas. Tony had included Dean's mother on the trip to London, but she'd left her daughters home with Peter Parker's aunt as a babysitter.
"I'm not sure you get air this clean basically anywhere on Earth," Pepper explained. "But, yes, most of the non-magical plants spread back and forth between worlds, so they're pretty similar."
"The differences are subtle, but they can affect potions if you don't account for them…" Hermione began to warm up her explanation.
"What's in the case?" Harry asked Tony, interrupting what could be a ten minute explanation of floral genetic drift that might have them miss the convergence out.
The billionaire held up the black plastic object that was the size of about three briefcases stuck together. "Experiments! Lots of little mechanical and electrochemical contraptions that all started when we crossed over. I have a control case back on the other side that started at the same time. Maybe I'll be able to account for whatever makes electricity not work over here."
"Oooh," Hermione marveled. "I would love to hear all about the results. None of the Vanir sources are too interested in experimenting, and Aesir technology can compensate but they're not willing to share. Also, we have technology for you, too!"
Dean held up the case he'd brought from Xandar, "Nova Corps tech, courtesy of saving their planet."
"Please let's sit down before you tell me how close you came to dying this time," Pepper insisted, starting them walking back toward the convergence into London.
They were almost all the way out when Mordo caught up to them, having ridden the train back and done one last inspection as he got off, dragging his own luggage behind. "Ah, Potts, Granger, Thomas. These must be your families. I of course recognize Mr. Stark and Ms. Potts, but these must be…"
"Karl?!" Dean's mother asked, surprised, before the sorcerer could identify her or Hermione's parents.
"Why yes, that is indeed…" It took him a moment before he realized, "Grace? I haven't seen you since that night… it must have been, what, almost… seventeen… years… ago?"
He and Dean were staring at each other in shocked realization, their features almost a mirror of one another. Almost exactly a mirror of one another, now that Harry and Hermione thought about it. If there was any doubt, the Soul Stone empathy began to trace the bond between all three of them now that he could see them each in one place.
"I suppose we must have even more to talk about once we find a place to sit down," Pepper dropped into the silence, and then began dragging Tony and Harry toward the exit before they could get trapped in Vanaheim discussing the summer's sudden new drama.
Notes:
And that's Year 5! As noted previously, this begins a hiatus of uncertain length. I hope to get some writing done over the rest of the year, but there's so much going on that I'm not certain what my writing schedule is going to be like (not the least of which, I'm getting married this summer). I also have some other ideas for some secondary stories, since I've found I have an easier time when I have two fics to swap between when I get blocked on one. So follow me directly if you want notifications when/if any of those post. You can also track down the Shadow City Mysteries tabletop RPG over on backer kit; I THINK preordering will get you access our monthly updates with chapter previews, if you would like to get a regular dose of my writing in the hiatus.
As usual for these breaks, now is an excellent time to leave comments, particularly with your speculations and any plot threads you want to make sure I haven't forgotten about.
Chapter 93: Obsessing about You-Know-Who
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"I swear, the hardest thing about organizing these trips is the timing," Pepper opined, up earlier than she wanted on the Wednesday morning that Harry's birthday happened to fall on that year. She was mostly dressed, already in the Vanir-style robes that would keep her from standing out as she looked out over the Pacific at dawn from the mansion's new breakfast nook.
"Be easier if you were in New York," Dean responded, half-jokingly, well awake since he was three hours ahead of Malibu, and Harry had just portaled him over. Despite knowing Harry for years, he was still a little floored by the casual opulence around him, with all the food on the table for a half-dozen people looking like those "part of a complete breakfast" cereal commercials from years earlier.
The boy had finally topped six feet and still likely had some growing to do despite being on his way to seventeen. All skinny height with deceptively-trained muscle, he seemed to overflow any chair he sat in, particularly the small seating around the breakfast spread.
"Or London," Hermione smirked, knowing that wasn't on the table, and that Dean and Harry were quietly angling for Tony and Pepper to move back to Avengers Tower now that the billionaire was theoretically over the mental crisis that'd had him avoiding New York. For her, this extravagant breakfast was a midafternoon snack, with London time having moved back around to being similar enough to the time on Vanaheim that she would be the least confused when they met up at the Market and had dinner in a few hours. She honestly could have just met them at the Market, but Harry was portaling over Dean and invited her for breakfast, too.
The closest of the trio of kids to 17, she was probably done growing, and on to the process of figuring out her "adult" look. Her parents had finally relented and let her even out her teeth, she'd discovered a number of ways to tame hair that had been almost as wild as Harry's when they'd met, and she dressed with the confidence of a young person with a stable and supportive friend group and a steady boyfriend (not that she saw Viktor nearly enough during the school year). She'd started wearing the red, armored synthleather jacket she'd won off the Ravagers in a game of cards as a statement piece whenever she could get away with it.
"It's fine. I haven't gone to sleep yet," Tony shrugged, his plate loaded up with mostly donuts to go with his oversized mug of industrial-strength coffee. Pepper absently spooned some berries over so he'd at least get some actual nutrients. Despite assuring everyone that he was over the various neuroses that had kept him obsessively in the garage designing armors the previous summer, he still had terrible sleep hygiene. They still hadn't convinced him to go to a real therapist, but Pepper thought she was making progress.
"For some of us, this is a normal time to wake up," Happy said, already dressed in his business suit and just grabbing a cinnamon crunch bagel and a yogurt from the spread as he walked by. He moved across the refurbished mansion space easily, his brief time on Extremis eight months earlier still paying off in how it had repaired some old scars.
"You're not coming to the Market?" Harry asked, over his own plate of mostly-carbs-and-sugar. He'd stubbornly refused to have one last growth spurt, so was starting 16 at what he assumed was his forever height. He'd gotten accustomed to it, at least, and sometimes beat Dean at sparring based purely on the taller boy still not having a good sense of his ever-changing reach.
"CEO and owner both out of the office on a Wednesday?" the head of Stark security shrugged. "Primetime for shenanigans if nobody's on watch."
Using his growing empathic powers, Harry was sure Happy was using business needs to cover the fact that he was actually more comfortable without really seeing the weird stuff. He liked fantasy in his entertainment, but not in his life. The young man shrugged, not pushing. Of all of his father figures, Happy was the one that most needed some form of normalcy to keep his world together.
"Well we'll miss you," Pepper told him as he nodded and made his way down to the garage, heading out. She turned and judged the time was right to indulge her curiosity from a month before. "So, Dean… your mother tells me you've been spending time with your father?"
Dean sat up straighter, unconsciously, as he thought about Master Mordo, admitting, "Yeah. He's been staying at the New York, uh, alumni association this month so we can do things around the city."
"I worked out that there have to be a lot of wizards on Earth, thanks," Tony rolled his eyes.
"Fewer than you'd think," Harry argued. "But, uh, don't out them? Please. They're kinda banking on me making magic look good before they go public."
"Sure, but when I suggest using you as the face of a youth marketing campaign, it's illegal," the billionaire joked. Harry could tell it was to cover the slight feeling of dismay that they were still keeping secrets from him, but also the thrill that he'd figured it out himself.
Pepper told him, "No, I just didn't give consent, because you wanted him to reenact some old Nintendo power glove advertisement that nobody would even get to sell missiles."
"It's so bad," Tony quoted, still thinking that the commercial may have only had a small audience, but they'd have really appreciated the reference.
"Is that from the movie with Fred Savage?" Dean nodded, exactly the 80s-movie nerd that would have gotten it. A shame he didn't have purchasing authority for the Department of Defense. "Anyway, yeah, we've been taking it slow. I don't think he ever expected to be a dad, especially for somebody he'd already known as a teacher for so long."
"Ice cream and baseball games?" Pepper checked.
"We saw the All Star Game a couple weeks ago," he agreed. "I… um… don't really follow baseball?"
"Well I'm glad he's trying," she nodded, stopping herself from asking the million extra follow-up questions she had, realizing how fragile the new relationship was. "How are your parents?" she asked Hermione.
"Good. They're a little sad I haven't been around much this month, but they get it." She'd spent the last few weeks at an internship at Stark Industries, helping engineers doing research on next generation arc-reactor powered engines… which just happened to be on-site with the racing team so she could see Viktor.
Word that had gotten back to Pepper was that the head engineer had initially been annoyed with her and Tony for saddling him with a 16-year-old WAG of one of the racing team members, and then pretty quickly shocked at how fast she started providing small but valuable contributions to the discussions about torque, electrical wiring, and track physics. "Dmitri hopes you're going to get your engineering degree and come back to work for him," the CEO told her.
"He's sweet. Cranky, but sweet," Hermione said, the old engineer just the latest in her conquests of academic excellence. Still completely scattered over which of her many interests she wanted to commit to as a career, she explained, "It might be interesting to see if learning more about engineering could let me figure out why Asgardian tech works on Vanaheim."
"It's something quantum, and it's really annoying," Tony told her, suddenly very interested in the conversation beyond just the coffee kicking in. "If you hadn't told me that their tech does work, I'd have given up. As it is, I have a bunch of experiments to send back to school with you. I bet Thor doesn't know. Maybe he can put me in touch with one of his scientists. Do they even have scientists? I bet they call them something fantasy like High Arcanists or something. Is he even going to be here today?" The coffee had definitely kicked in.
"Supposed to be," Harry nodded. "We finished off the last group of marauders last week. Ahead of schedule. They'd taken over a village way out in the boonies. Really pretty countryside, but there were like three roundhouses. Very big rock guy. Thor smashed him to bits and the rest of them surrendered. Hulk seemed annoyed."
"And that's it? We don't need to expect you'll get called up to be the figurehead of the Ministry again anytime soon?" Pepper checked. She'd only grudgingly let him go see the end of the campaign because Sirius assured her it was politically important. "Did they get the rest of the Death Eaters?"
"No," Harry grumbled. "As soon as Asgard showed up they stopped helping the marauders. Sirius is worried they're just waiting for Odin to be distracted by something else before they start moving again."
"We did get a lot of them on Morag," Hermione argued. "Maybe they just gave up?"
"Doubt it. Assassins almost got Susan Bones' aunt. They did send Ms. Vance to the hospital. Maybe would have killed them both if Sirius hadn't brought on Moody as a security consultant for the Ministry. As much as they liked to think it was over, he wouldn't let them let their guard down."
"Constant Vigilance!" both Dean and Hermione chorused, to Tony and Pepper's bemusement.
Harry chuckled but continued explaining, "If Asgard wasn't ahead of schedule cleaning up, and Sirius hadn't been able to yell at the althing until they all took things, well, seriously, who knows how bad things would be right now?"
"When's the coronation?" Pepper checked. "Wasn't Thor supposed to take over once everything got put back to Odin's satisfaction?"
"How's he going to be an Avenger if he's king of Asgard?" Tony boggled, not having realized that he wasn't getting the thunder-powered demigod back on the team soon.
"I haven't heard anything about that, but we can ask him," Harry shrugged. "I wonder if Odin decided not to retire once he realized what was going on with Thanos, and that it maybe had something to do with an old Asgardian enemy, too." He was annoyed that the one-eyed old god had never seen fit to clue him in on the secret of the "mistress" of the Nidhogg serpents.
"Hopefully Gamora's team will have some answers," Dean figured…
They met the Guardians at an upscale restaurant that Harry hadn't even known about down the alley anchored by Ollivander's, appointed in a way that wouldn't have been too out of place in many eateries on Earth that prided themselves on tasteful, historical style. Mrs. Weasley had mentioned it when she heard Thor was coming, since it had private dining rooms rather than risking him getting mobbed in the Leaky Cauldron. She'd planned to have her brood eat separately, unable to afford the lavish establishment, until Pepper somehow convinced the proud woman that Pepper and Tony paying for dinner wasn't charity.
Dean might have wished the Weasleys had eaten at the Leaky Cauldron, since Ginny not talking to him was a silence that cut across the whole table. He'd admitted to Harry that he'd finally gotten around to breaking up with her by letter. It was only that nobody wanted to ruin Harry's birthday (or look bad in front of Thor) that the drama wasn't loud.
"You should probably keep an eye on the twins, though," Harry warned his best friend.
Fred and George were, indeed, looking at their sister's ex calculatingly, but they also had their own bit of celebration. From their dining room's windows, everyone could make out the brightly-lit building at the other end of the alley from Ollivander's—prime real estate on a corner—that they'd established for their new business, Weasleys' Watchful Wards. It turned out the twins' experience with magical pranks had been transferable to other forms of enchantment, and Sirius had wound up spotting them some funding if they'd build their business around protective items that were affordable to the less fortunate. Especially with their eldest brother, Bill, consulting, they had more business than they'd expected in a time where everyone was worried about Death Eater assassins.
And it was an open secret that they had a whole selection of prank items in the back that they'd sell if you solemnly swore to them that you were up to no good.
In addition to the Weasleys, the rest of the study group had made it to the party, most of them considered old enough to travel in on their own as long as there were a few adults there to chaperone: for better or worse, things hadn't gotten so bad yet that even Augusta Longbottom was too worried about their children being specific assassination targets. Harry, sure, but not the others.
Sirius was worried about being an assassination target, and Dora Tonks was there as his security detail (and also to see her cousin, Harry, on his birthday). She was a little disappointed that Steve hadn't made it that year. He and Clint were both off on a SHIELD mission and sent their regrets. It was a little surprising that Natasha had made it; she'd been nonchalantly waiting for Harry's crew next to the LA new age store they used to access the Market as they walked up.
"Your godfather still owes me magic pockets," she'd shrugged in explanation for why she'd worked so hard to make the trip.
Sirius was happily showing off said runecrafting work to the redheaded superspy, almost unaware of the rest of the room. "...this one's just a basic belt so it should work with anything, this isn't really a bodice but it does cover your abdomen so there was a lot more room for pockets, and I added in some armoring charms."
"And it's black," she gave that little half-smile.
"Suits both of us," the old dog flirted. He had a moment of worry he was going too far, but then presented the third item. "And Harry mentioned you often have to get into parties, so, um, I thought this might help. It's got the same armoring charms, the pockets should be basically undetectable to anyone that doesn't know what they're looking for. I didn't have your exact measurements, so I put some resizing runes on it that should also let you adjust the style a little bit…" he trailed off.
"Did you make me a magical little black dress?" she asked, honestly more touched by the gesture than she'd expected. Well, maybe touched was the wrong emotion. Harry wrenched his attention back to his friends before he picked up any more of what was going on between his godfather and his former crush.
"Where are your space friends anyway?" Ron asked. They'd been at the restaurant for twenty minutes, and he was clearly ready to start ordering food (not that he hadn't already contributed heavily to demolishing the table bread closest to him and an order of appetizers).
As if he'd summoned them, Quill, Gamora, and Drax were just then shown in by the host. The big kylosian had adamantly refused to wear a shirt, so had likely gotten a few stares in the Market. Gamora still remembered how to dress for the region, for all that she'd foregone her "Mistress Morgan" hag makeup. Star-Lord was dressed like a teen unleashed with a fistful of cash at his first ren fest, all mismatched garb, much of which he'd probably purchased in the Market and immediately added to his ensemble.
"I bought a sword!" he announced, showing off an oversized and poorly-balanced gladius he'd purchased at one of the stalls set up for offworlders and young Vanir that didn't know any better.
Gamora just sighed the sigh of someone that definitely knew better, could have gotten her boyfriend a much better sword if she'd known he was interested before he spent his money, and nonetheless found his childlike enthusiasm charming and infectious.
"Where's the… uh…" Tony had been briefed that Rocket didn't like being called a racoon and definitely wouldn't appreciate being reminded about the "trash panda" crack the inventor had made the previous year. His chair creaked slightly ominously as he turned to observe the new arrivals, since he'd put on voluminous robes over his Iron Man armor, taking assassination risks on Harry's birthday very seriously (and no longer having a built-in arc reactor to power holdouts). "Your tech guy."
"And Groot?" Luna asked.
"Banned," Gamora shrugged. "As Granger surmised. Fortunately we were able to get in."
"Oh," Luna turned and had a quick, quiet conversation with Neville, before saying, "Can we give you a message to take to him? He'd want to know how our gardening project is going."
"Of course," the Zehoberei assassin agreed easily as she slid a small tablet over to Harry. "The information I promised. It has been difficult to determine what my Fa– Thanos has been up to since the failures he was dealt, but this contains what details we could find, as well as what background I have."
"Thank you, ma'am," he told her, taking the tablet. Most of the adults at the table were clearly very interested in the intelligence, and sizing up the newcomers.
"I am Drax," the burly alien introduced himself, totally lacking in social anxiety as he shoved in among the study group. "I understand that you are all young warrior-wizards that fight alongside the ones I have met. What are your favorite weapons? Mine are knives."
"Did you bring me the thing?" Quill asked Harry and Dean, starting a second table for himself and Gamora where he could talk to the teens rather than sitting at the far end of the large table everyone else was at.
"Of course," Harry mimicked Gamora from a moment earlier with a grin as he stretched the edges of his bag of holding to their limit to slide out the slim laptop he'd packed. "This has as many movies and shows as we could fit on the hard drive. We spent a while arguing over what should make the cut. Weirdly, Captain America had opinions. He's been making his own list of pop culture to catch up on. Oh," and he fished out the iPod Classic they'd managed to find for him. "That's loaded with so much music. We basically just filled it up with everything we could torrent."
"Harry! We could have just bought the music," Pepper said, slightly shocked at her nephew's casual talk of IP violations.
"Aunt Pepper, they're literally pirates. I don't think the RIAA is going to be able to go after them anyway."
"I hope you can figure out how to recharge them," Hermione interjected to head off the argument. "Only, I'm not totally sure how you were able to power the Earth technology you already had."
"Power adapter shop," Quill shrugged. "It would be way harder out there if folks couldn't figure out how to make different planets' tech work with each other. But this is so great!" He'd already forgotten about his sword with the two devices containing over twenty years of media he'd missed. He was thinking about how to inflict movie nights on his crew. "Are we waiting for someone else, or can we order food?"
Harry said, "They'll be here in a second," before he was consciously aware of why he knew that. But, sure enough, a crowd of four was shown into the private dining room a few seconds later. Despite the enormous bulk of Volstagg (who didn't know Harry well but wasn't going to be left out of a dinner party), the imposing presence of Thor, and the commanding countenance of Maréchal the elven war leader, he barely noticed any of them. Fleur had made it. Her father's lips tightened in some kind of resignation as he saw the two teens' faces light up upon spotting one another.
It was even more significant than the look on Drax's face upon realizing that Thor had shown up.
Harry missed most of the round of extended introductions as Fleur slid into the seat that Dean had vacated for her next to Harry as he moved over to talk to Quill about the laptop and Gamora about martial arts. Conscious of the propriety of her father nearby, but barely noticing that he was deliberately meeting Pepper and Tony, Harry let his knee bump Fleur's under the table to fully establish their empathic connection as they chatted quietly about their last few weeks.
"Now can we order food?" Ron asked, and Quill pointed at him in support of that thought.
"No Loki?" Tony asked Thor.
"Once again confined to his rooms," the prince shrugged, "now that the campaigns are over. But he sends his regrets."
"Then who are you waiting for?" Pepper checked, having noticed him still looking at the door.
"I had hoped… perhaps 'twas a vain hope."
"We're definitely still waiting on Viktor," Hermione noted. "Hopefully he didn't have any trouble with the pickup…"
Ron rolled his eyes, but had learned not to express his displeasure about Viktor Krum out loud, especially in front of Lavender. Fortunately, before the young keeper could figure out a comment that wouldn't get him in trouble, the Bulgarian racing phenom/reluctant witch appeared in the door, waving.
"Apologies," he said, his English now flawless due to both practice and the translator implant, "it took a while to get away because it seemed like everyone in the West End recognized me."
"Except me," the slight dark-haired woman following behind him said. "I expected more of an accent from what Hermione told me."
"Jane!" Thor yelled, his expression very similar to Harry's from a few minutes earlier as he stood up and crossed the room. "Everyone! This is Jane Foster."
The introductions to Thor's astrophysicist (who Hermione had managed to meet in London and coordinate with for coming to the dinner) didn't take long, food was finally ordered, and the room packed with nearly 30 people grew full of noise and good cheer. "You've brought togezzer ze entire universe," Fleur told Harry, particularly interested in the full aliens excitedly bonding with luminaries from four of the nine realms.
"Whatever it takes to get to see you," he smiled. Despite knowing how dangerous it still was out there, he had a moment of pure contentment, surrounded by his friends and family. All the problems of the realms seemed so far away.
Naturally, that was when the front of the oldest shop in the Market exploded.
"Ollivander's!" Tonks yelled, all of them having a perfect view straight down the street from their second-floor window.
It was Ron who reacted first, declaring, "Artillery team, form up and protect the noncombatants!" before any of the adults could start making bad decisions like trying to talk a bunch of teenagers from diving into battle. "Harry, can you portal us down to the street?"
"On it! Sirius can get these windows opened but reinforced," the Boy-Who-Lived agreed, fishing his sling ring out of his pocket and already spinning open a short-range connection down to ground level.
"This could be a trap!" Hermione warned, moving with her roommates, Seamus, the twins, and the Ravenclaws to try to find firing positions. Fred and George barely even realized that they were taking orders from their little brother since it just made sense.
Tonks, somehow thinking that she should have taken control of the situation before a 16-year-old did, yelled, "Don't fire on anyone until I confirm they're enemies!" and dived through the portal. Drax and Gamora were right behind her.
"Glad I wore the suit," Tony said, ditching his robes. "Stay safe," he told Pepper, his helmet flipping up and into place as he headed out.
"You stay safe," she said, frustrated that they couldn't even have one nice night, but secretly a little thrilled to actually get a chance to see her family in a fight for once.
With an apologetic shrug to Jane, Thor was the next out, his entourage behind him, Maréchal producing a sword from somewhere and Volstagg an axe. Molly Weasley didn't manage to grab Ginny before she was through the portal next to Neville and Dean, relationship drama forgotten in the moment of crisis. Nat and Quill both produced pistols and joined Sirius and the study group at the windows.
"Ze entire universe," Fleur told Harry again, fondly, having resigned herself to the chaos that was his life, slipping into her avian battle form as she entered the portal. Nobody else seeming like they were heading down, Harry went through and let it close behind him, pulling his Asgardian saber from his bag as he moved.
The entire process of getting into position had only taken as long as it took their opposition to come racing out of the destroyed front of the wand shop, a dozen figures in black robes and silver masks towing the immense form of Ollivander between them, levitating horizontally and bound in glowing chains of orange and purple light. The ancient dwarf struggled, still alive and prisoner. The tittering laugh of Bellatrix Lestrange echoed from a mask on one of the few cultists with a feminine silhouette, clearly aiming to strike fear into the hearts of any others in the Market. It cut off with a choke as they spotted the forces arrayed against them.
A dozen witches should have been more than enough even if the goblin guards had intended to get involved, since few of the typical patrons or shopkeepers practiced wandless casting, regularly got into fights, or had dark magic investments to augment them. The invaders had charms to protect them against holdouts and a plan of vicious reprisal against anyone that attempted to fight back. If the alley had its normal array of workers and shoppers, it would have been a walkover that left the entire Market shaken for weeks to come.
"They're Death Eaters! Anything is authorized," Tonks shouted, then put up a large shield. She'd realized that her role wouldn't be offense, but just protecting the rest of her allies on the street. She had no idea how well technology would hold up to dark magic blasts.
And, to their credit, the enemy did immediately start firing, quickly, accurately, and indiscriminately. But, once again, the study group had spent most of the last year fighting simulations of the Death Eaters and had ready counters for their tactics. Five more shields joined Tonks', and Harry's spell-deflecting saber besides, screening the initial fusillade of spellfire.
It was long enough for the melee contingent to hit the front lines, Drax and Gamora surprising the witches on one side while Volstagg and Maréchal hit the opposite side of the alley. Thor went right down the middle, making a lightning-assisted leap through the air to rescue the captive dwarf while Iron Man's repulsor blasts and Fleur's fireballs screened his approach.
From above and inside the restaurant, the back ranks of the enemy took their own bombardment of magical bolts, crowd control, and shots from guns firing both bullets and plasma.
The fight was over in under a dozen seconds due to the vast mismatch in numbers. Half the Death Eaters were down (the ones that encountered the Guardians probably permanently) and the rest teleported off, leaving their captive behind. There were cheers from the civilians in the alley, who hadn't had time to be frightened of the magical terrorists, since they'd 'd barely had time to look and see what had caused the explosion only to see it so quickly handled.
"Alright Norns," Harry glanced vaguely skyward as he talked, "we're still not even, but I'll take it."
Notes:
And we're back. Happy holidays everyone!
It turned out that I was a little ambitious thinking I'd have enough time to write this year with everything else going on, but I had a better November than last year, have most of Year 6 in the buffer, and a plan to finish it well before it needs posting. We're still on an every-other-week schedule, on alternate Fridays.
Of the everything else going on, the wedding was obviously the most important, and that completed successfully. I also produced somewhere around a hundred thousand words of text for the Shadow City Mysteries RPG. It's still available for preorder on backerkit at the time of posting, but we're locking it soon. We also have an actual play run by our creative director that streams on twitch and youtube, if you want more information about the game and setting before buying.
The less exciting thing about the year was some surprise major medical issues, which remain ongoing. I can't promise there won't be another big hiatus at the end of Year 6 until I have a better idea of how much of a distraction those will be in 2026.
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