Chapter Text
The first conscious breath of the morning is always the worst.
Harry’s lungs shrink to the size of walnuts, rib-cage cracking inward like stepped-on ice, and the January night rushes in - cold, sharp, tasting of diesel and hot-dog steam and the copper penny smell that lingers in the back of every London alley.
He lands on his knees in an alley behind a Times Square liquor store, ten years old again, cartilage popping like cheap plastic. No wand. No Horcrux. Just the echoing, bone-deep ache of forty-three years of living and fucking up pressed into a body that still has baby teeth in the back of his mouth.
He keeps his eyes open because closing them means seeing the future: Ginny’s face when she signed the parchment that severed his last claim to the kids. James’ disgust, Albus’ flinch, Lily’s silence. The vial of Calming Draught that turned into three, then seven, then a cabinet full of empties that clinked like wind chimes every time he opened the kitchen cupboard. The mirror that showed ribs instead of skin, the toilet bowl that knew the shape of his uvula better than his own tongue.
Harry presses his forehead to the filthy brick and counts heartbeats until the nausea passes. One - Dudley’s fist. Two - Uncle Vernon’s belt buckle. Three - Aunt Petunia’s voice: “You’re so filthy I can’t stand to look at you.” The memories fit better in this body; they haven’t been stretched by decades of pretending they’re small enough to ignore.
He had a plan. It had arrived the night Tony Stark - his biological father, allegedly - died in the original timeline, seventy-two years old and still smirking at mortality as though it were a bad investment. A Gringotts courier owl had borne the news: pursuant to the terms of the Potter Estate Contingency Trust, established by Lily and James Potter, all funds, correspondence, and personal records pertaining to their son were to have been transferred into the custodianship of Anthony Edward Stark in the event of their deaths. And after his death, to Harry’s.
A designated vault - No. 491-C, sealed under goblin oath and fiduciary enchantment - had remained untouched since the date of its creation. The Gringotts verification charms confirmed that Stark had never presented the key, nor acknowledged receipt of the accompanying notice of inheritance. Whether through interference, negligence, or the chaotic entropy that dogged both their worlds, the vault had remained sealed and forgotten.
Harry had stood in the back of the church, sober for the first time in six months, and felt the last scrap of possibility burn out inside his chest. The next day he broke into the Department of Mysteries, stole a prototype year-reversal chain, and wrapped the braided gold round his wrist like a shackle. One twist backward, irreversible. Or perhaps it was three bottles of wine, followed by a noose, in the cupboard under the stairs at Grimmauld. Deep breaths in the dark, nobody alive to stop him. Whichever it was, Harry took a one-way ticket to be parented by a man who never knew he existed.
The first thing Harry feels in 1990 is the cold. Not the sharp, honest chill of a winter night, but the grinding, wet cold that lives in the marrow of London stone and never quite leaves the skin. It is 3:12 a.m. on Privet Drive, Some time in October 1990, and the ten-year-old body he’s wearing is already too light for the soul inside it. He sits up on the camp-bed, spine creaking like an old door, and counts the beats of a heart that hasn’t yet been broken by war, or amphetamine-cut Pepper-Up, or the sound of Lily Luna asking why Daddy’s hands shake at breakfast. Are you cold, Daddy? I have a blanket.
He counts to ninety. Then he kneels next to the cot and folds the blanket into a perfect square, because the future has taught him that neatness is the only thing that keeps people from looking too closely at a disaster.
The second thing he feels in 1990 is the itch. It starts behind the eyes - the place where the Horcrux haunts again - and spreads outward like a bruise. The itch is memory: Ginny’s mouth thin with disgust; James’s Quidditch cup shattering against the kitchen wall; Albus’s small fingers trying to prise the vial from his fist. The itch is the knowledge that with the shard of Tom Riddle occupying the hollows behind his eyes, he once again must die in order to survive. Dying is allowed. It’s forgivable. They’ll be grateful, even.
He claws the itch open with his fingernails until blood beads in the creases of his palms. Then he wipes them on Dudley’s second-best-ex-jeans, because ten-year-olds are supposed to bleed from scraped knees, not from trying to excavate their own minds. He leaves before dawn. No note. No belongings. Just the blanket folded, the cupboard door shut with a soft click, and the Dursleys snoring through dreams of bacon, video games and cruelty.
He walks to the motorway with shoes already falling to pieces. Every step is a calculation: left foot, regret; right foot, relapse; left foot, retry.
The airport is easier than he remembers - maybe because airports in 1990 are far more susceptible to the confundus charm than they are 30 years later. He buys a ticket with a handful of receipt papers from the bin and an illusion charm, passes through security following behind a school group off to go skiing, and he is still afraid enough to read the airport signs like omens, ducks at every announcement over the speakers, twists his ankles together so he doesn’t confound his way into the duty free alcohol.
He throws up twice on the plane. The second time, the stewardess brings him a paper cup of 7-Up and a pat on the head that feels like care. He keeps the cup. When it’s empty he folds the rim inward until the plastic splits and the edges bite his fingertips. He needs the pain to stay quiet; the future has taught him that silence is expensive - the debt comes later.
New York is a roar of heat and colour that makes his teeth ache. He has no plan except a name and an address: Anthony Edward Stark, Avengers Tower, 200 Park Avenue.
He rehearses the words in the immigration line: I think I’m your son. I’m sorry to be a bother. Please.
They taste like copper. He counts heartbeats until the panic ebbs - one, two, twenty-three - same as he used to count bottles of calming draught on the bedside table while Lily Luna cried through the baby-monitor and Ginny’s side of the mattress stayed arctic.
The memories haven’t shrunk in the wash of years; they press on his soft palate, sour as the draught itself. When the immigration officer asks him his name, the answer hurts to admit. Wherever you go, there you are.
Avengers Tower rises three blocks away, all glass and arrogant light. He has forgotten how bright the world was without a veil of sedation; neon pizza signs stabbing straight through to the back of his skull. Every colour carries a warning. He walks anyway.
The sidewalk burns his toes with winter salt; each step stitches glass into his soles, but the pain is clean, honest. Icy rain soaks through Dudley’s old jumper; it clings to him like wet paper, printing the skyline against his shoulder-blades in cold ink. He focuses on it so he doesn’t think about how tiny his wrists look below the cuffs - too short in the arms, too wide everywhere else, smelling faintly of mothballs, New York rain and spoiled milk.
The Avengers’ helipad juts above 59th like a lit cigarette. Security checkpoints funnel petitioners into a cattle-pen of plexiglass; the line began at dawn and will pause for an hour at lunchtime. Harry joins it because the horizon behind him is a closed door with Vernon’s fist on the other side.
He keeps his chin tucked so the scar stays hidden - an old reflex - and his right hand clenching around the emptiness where his wand is supposed to be. Without it his magic is distant - behind fogged glass. He feels evacuated, a chocolate Easter rabbit hollowed by a hot knife.
The lobby is a cathedral of chrome. He crosses it with the timid precision of someone who has learned that floors can open into snake tunnels and staircases can bite. Security cameras pivot to follow him like owl heads. Harry’s voice cracks when he tells the receptionist - blonde, bored, chewing cinnamon gum - that he wants a paternity test.
She doesn’t laugh, which is worse. She slides over a clipboard thick as a textbook and a plastic pen that smells of sterilising alcohol. The form wants everything: Last school attended (none). Guardian contact (please don’t). Medical history (all of it). Allergies (dark wizards, dark cupboards, bad memories, loud voices).
He leaves blanks like open graves and writes, block letters that shake: Mother: Lily Evans Potter – DECEASED Father: Anthony E. Stark. The ink bleeds a little where his hand trembles.
They make him wait on a chrome bench designed for people who don’t have tailbones. Metal slats, no back, positioned so the air-conditioning can knife him from three directions. An hour becomes three. His stomach gnaws at itself, a trapped rat chewing through the floorboards. He hasn’t eaten since the aeroplane seven-up - sugar water and chewing the inside of his cheek until it tore off in delicate sheets.
A man in navy tactical finally appears - nameless, jaw like a shovel. “Follow me.” They walk corridors that smell of ozone and fear. An office the colour of surgical steel. “Sit.”
The chair is higher than his knees; he swings his legs like a toddler on a cliff-edge. Needle time. The man ties latex around his bicep, slaps the crook of his elbow looking for a vein that isn’t hiding. Three hours of air conditioning, October chill and cupboard dehydration have shrunk them to threads. Jab - miss. Jab - hit, but collapses. A purple bubble blooms under skin. Third time the needle lingers, digging, fishing. Harry bites the inside of his cheek until copper blooms. He doesn’t cry. He watches it go - red ribbon into vacuum tube - thinking: that’s the only part of me they ever want.
Afterward they herd him to a second bench, this one outside a lab door labelled “Genomic Verification – Level Omega.” A technician in lavender gloves takes the sample, slots it into a vacuum tube, and tells him results take “four to six weeks, give or take.”
Harry’s tongue feels glued to his teeth. “Where’m I s’posed to go?”
The technician shrugs. “Not my department.”
Harry hears: You are still nobody.
The receptionist tells him results will be delivered by mail. He doesn't have an address. Or a phone number. She says to come back in six weeks and he can collect the letter from reception. Hands over a receipt without touching Harry’s shaking fingers.
“Thank you for visiting Stark Tower today. Failure to leave the premises will result in trespass charges.”
She smiles while she says it; the smile stays when he hesitates.
He leaves the tower with a cottony space where hope used to be. The lobby doors sigh open for him, then hiss shut, frowning like a mouth that’s already forgotten the taste of him.
Outside, the city is loud enough to drown thought. He walks until the buildings stop having names he recognises. Seventy-Second and Broadway, then down into the 50s, then the 30s, every step leaving watery half-moons on the pavement. The October wind peels the skin off his face, whips tears away into the gutter. He has seven British pounds and a trickle of magic he can’t use in sight of CCTV.
He sleeps the first night under the pedestrian walkway by the Hudson. Rats scrabble over his legs; he lies rigid, remembering Ron’s first year jokes about Scabbers in his bed - how they’d dried up after third year, and laughs until the sound fractures. The next morning, he finds a half-empty bottle of cooking wine.
He drinks it so fast it comes back up streaked red. He wipes his mouth with his London-New York boarding pass; the ink smears into a black butterfly.
At some point he finds a steaming dumpster behind a Korean grocery and climbs inside, burrowing between boxes of rotting bok choy and tofu expired since last spring. The cardboard is damp but warm; he folds into himself, knees to chin, and waits for the shakes to start.
They come at dusk - tiny earthquakes that start in his marrow and erupt through his skin.
He counts them like he used to count hours of insomnia in the tent during the war: one for every Death Eater mask, two for every dead Weasley brother, three for the way he’d held an old muggle newspaper up to his own face in the mirror, looking for a resemblance. When the counting stops working he bites his tongue until blood pools, copper-sweet, and spits onto the tofu container so he can see the colour of his pain.
Night one bleeds into night four. He learns the rhythm of trash trucks, the hours bodegas throw out day-old bread, the alleys where dealers sell to kids who look younger than his borrowed body. He keeps thinking about the vial of Draught he left on the counter in 2025 - how it caught the morning light like liquid starlight - and his stomach folds in on itself, origami of craving.
Food tastes like sawdust; he throws up most of it anyway, fingers down his throat behind a Starbucks, wiping bile on Dudley’s sleeve. It’s for the habit, the dizziness, every retch makes new room to stuff more sweetness inside. The first time he does it, he whispers “Sorry, Gin,” to the brick wall. The second time he doesn’t say anything.
By week three the city has scraped him raw. Cheeks hollow, eyes bruised, hair matted with stinking grease. He steals a hoodie from a church donation bin - Navy, Stark Industries logo faded to grey across the back - and wears it like camouflage.
People stop seeing him; he becomes another smudge in the corner of their eye. At night he walks past Avengers Tower just to look at the lights, counting floors until he finds the one that must be Tony’s penthouse. It blinks like a star that might one day fall and grant his wish. Then, in the early hours, it goes out.
October curdles into November. He learns the city the way he once learned the castle: which dumpsters unlock, which church steps are swept early, which parks have taps that still run. At night he curls under the Manhattan Bridge and listens to the trains pass overhead like low-flying dragons.
The itch comes back. He scratches it with whatever’s sharp: a cracked CD case, the jagged end of a stolen spoon, the edge of the plastic cup from the plane. The skin on his forearms ladders open. He licks the blood away, because the future has taught him that evidence is dangerous.
One November dawn, temperature plummeting to single digits, he wakes with icicles in his eyelashes and realises he can’t feel his toes. The dumpster has been emptied; he’s lying on bare metal that glues itself to the skin of his cheek. He rolls out, lands on knees that sound like gravel, and limps toward the subway grate across the street. Steam rises in ghost-columns; he stands over it, arms out, letting the damp heat thaw the ice in his lungs. A businessman in a Burberry coat detours two feet to avoid him. Harry watches the man’s reflection in a puddle - sees a scarecrow wrapped in Stark merch, cheeks sunken, collarbone sharp as a Snitch wing - and feels something inside him snap like a frostbitten twig.
He finds a half-full bottle of cough syrup rolling under a bench. The label promises drowsiness, peace. He drinks it in three swallows, then sits on the kerb and waits for the world to soften. When the high comes it is muddy, nothing like the crystalline hush of Dreamless Sleep, but it smothers the memories of Ginny packing miniature Quidditch robes into cardboard boxes. The sweetness feels like nourishment. He wakes at dawn with a long tear in the front of his hoodie, and the side of his face glued to the metal grille of a drain, syrup dried brown on his chin like dried blood. The bruise of withdrawal already pulses behind his eyes; he needs more. He will always need more.
Hunger is a different animal. It gnaws the inside of his ribs until they feel like piano strings. He steals when he has to, always from chains that light up the night like neon tumors. Once, a bodega owner catches him slipping a packet of instant noodles inside his shirt. The man grabs the back of his neck, fingers digging for purchase on bird-thin bones. Harry dissociates so hard he sees double: the bodega becomes the cupboard, the man becomes Uncle Vernon, the sound of his own breathing becomes the sea in a shell.
He wakes in an alley behind a strip club, lip split, noodles gone. There is a twenty-dollar bill tucked in his pocket that he doesn’t remember stealing. He uses it to buy a bottle of cough syrup because the dextromethorphan makes the itch quiet for whole hours at a time.
In the dark he hears Ginny’s voice, older than memory: “You can’t save anyone if you keep drowning yourself, Harry.” He wants to answer that he’s not drowning, just floating face-down so nobody can see him cry. But the dark folds him up, small as a letter that never got delivered, and New York swallows him whole.
The first snow tastes of iron. Harry’s sneakers have split along the soles; slush soaking through, numbing toes until they feel like they belong to someone else. That is a mercy.
He limps toward Avengers Tower anyway, drawn by the same instinct that once made him chase the silver doe through a frozen forest. The security guards try to wave him away with the bored kindness reserved for stray dogs. But he has a receipt - crumpled, but letterheaded. They let him in.
When he reaches the desk the receptionist peels the receipt from his grimy fingers, holds it by a corner as though it smells. “Still processing,” she says. Backlog, shortage, don’t hold your breath. He nods, because ten-year-olds are supposed to be patient.
By the end of November he is a ghost of bones and bruises. The cough syrup no longer works; he switches to stolen Benadryl, then to anything in a blister pack. He gets offers - his body for five capsules of blissful escape. Want me to teach you how to spike velvet into your veins, kid? I can make the cold go away. He considers, counts the days until he dares to check back with the tower, says no. The itch tunnels so deep he dreams of reaching down his own throat and pulling out a snake of scarlet thread.
Every thirty days he returns. Each time the guards recognise the hoodie first, then the scar. They let him stand in line with the other petitioners - men claiming to be secret sons, women clutching newborns wrapped in flag-patterned blankets. The second month the receptionist tells him, “You’re wasting your own time, kid.” The third month she doesn’t speak at all; she just flicks two fingers - go - like he’s a stray niffler. He leaves faster each time, shoulders folding in increments he can measure in vertebrae.
By the end of December he is expert at vanishing. He learns which roadside gutters stay warm from vented subway air, which bodega owners will trade a sweep of the floor for a boiled egg. He learns the exact angle to tilt his hips so the hunger pain feels less like a scream and more like a bruise. Bruises heal with time, but hunger -
He learns the shelters won’t take him without an adult - ”Runaway services” means foster care, and foster care means he can’t come back to Stark Tower to collect his results. He chooses the streets.
The rituals creep back in. He hoards loose pills: xanax, oxycodone, anything oblong and anonymous. He swallows them dry, then kneels in alley gravel waiting for the world to go dark and gentle.
.
When it doesn’t, he tries to vomit and can’t; his stomach has forgotten how to reverse time. He stands in front of darkened shop windows, studies the reflection: shoulder blades wings wide enough to lift him off the ground, eyes older than both of his lifetimes combined.
The lobby glass is bullet-proof, but it still trembles when the January wind beats against it. He doesn’t register the sting; the cold has already numbed the skin over the metacarpals to wax. Inside, the atrium is still dressed for Christmas: a tree spiralling toward the mezzanine, cheery lights flickering like Unforgivables.
Harry is bleeding steadily from a head wound. He counts the seconds between heartbeats the way other kids count Mississippis. One-Mississippi - pulse - two-Mississippi - pulse - Each thud is a reminder that the everyone he has ever loved is gone and the cavity they left still whistles when he breathes.
Security moves first - black gloves, ear-pieces that glow alien blue. They know his face by now; the scar is a brand even under the grime. He watches their shoulders settle into the shape of men who have decided he is a stray, not a threat. Strays get the sole of a boot; threats get the muzzle of a gun. Harry wonders which would hurt less.
“Results aren’t in,” the senior guard says before Harry’s mouth opens. The man’s pupils dilate a millimetre - disgust, not fear. Harry’s tongue finds the hole where a baby tooth used to be; he pushed it out last week with a thumbnail because the ache gave him somewhere to aim the noise in his head. He swallows rust and tries the script anyway.
“I’m - ” The name sticks like wet paper to the roof of his mouth. He used to be able to say “Harry Potter” as armour. Now the syllables feel borrowed, oversized, the way Dudley’s old sweaters hung off his shoulders when Aunt Petunia made him wear them to school.
He tries again. “My sample’s three months old. You said four weeks.” The guard’s hand hovers over the stun setting on his taser. Behind the tactical glass, the receptionist - different face, same lipstick the colour of fresh bruise - never looks up. Harry’s reflection blinks back at him: cheekbones like coat-hanger wire, eyes older than the man who donated them.
He thinks: I used to be taller. He thinks: I used to be someone’s father. The sliding door behind security hisses shut.
On the one hundred and twentieth day the wind tastes of copper and snow. Fourth time. Four months since the first dismissal, the first dumpster supper, the first night the Hudson wind bit the insides of his ears until the world sounded underwater. One hundred and twenty nights of telling himself the backlog would clear, that the lab wasn’t lying, that the universe still owed him one miracle even if he’d burnt the last one in Grimmauld place with a spoon and a lighter.
He queues outside the Tower at dawn, shoes sodden, toes blue, nails gone. The security staff have started calling him “Red-Stamp” in low voices; he pretends not to hear. He keeps his eyes on the marble floor; reflections warp him into a squat, headless figure.
Inside, the reception area is crowded with people in suits that cost more than the Dursleys’ house. Harry’s trainers - soles peeled half-off, laces knotted where they’d snapped - whisper against the polish. Every step leaves a faint grey comma of street on the stone; he watches them appear and vanish, appear and vanish, like breath on glass.
The reception desk has been redesigned - black glass now, sharp enough to cut reflections. Behind it, the blonde receptionist is gone; instead there is a boy barely older than he is - intern, freckles, Stark Industries badge crooked. That should mean nothing to Harry; shift work happens. But his pulse still stutters, because the old one used to smirk with one side of her mouth while she pointed towards the security button under the counter, like shooing a raccoon.
The boy looks up, past him, at the rain outside, shivers. Puts on the jacket draped over the back of his chair. Harry thinks: New face, same uniform. His shoulders fold inward until the bones creak. He keeps his hands visible - palms open, fingers spread - because invisible hands make strangers nervous, and nervous people call guards.
His new hoodie swallows him to the knees; the cuffs have been chewed into fibrous fringes. He’s lost two more teeth since December - baby teeth, technically, but the gaps in his gums ache, and there are no new teeth to fill the gap.
When his turn comes the receptionist’s nails are painted metallic gold. He scans the barcode, frowns. “Huh,” he says. Nothing else.
“I, uh…” His voice sounds distant. “DNA results. Harry Potter. Submission date October twenty-second.”
He picks up a phone. Harry waits, heartbeat punching at his sternum. He covers the receiver. “Take a seat.”
He doesn’t; he squats against the wall, knees to chin, arms wrapped to keep the shaking in. Minutes stretch like taffy. A janitor passes, mop swiping so close the chemical stench scorches the inside of Harry’s nose. He gags, swallows, counts - one Mississippi, two Mississippi - until the nausea retreats.
Harry’s ears prick with danger. A rising commotion: elevators dinging, voices rising, the sudden vacuum that forms when a celebrity enters the room. He doesn’t look. He is counting heartbeats again - ninety to die if he holds his breath right now, maybe fewer. A man steps out mid-conversation with himself - “ - tell them if they can’t run a gel without bubbling they can kiss my - ” and stops.
Tony Stark looks like someone has taken all the colour out of him and put it all in his eyes. Grey hair, grey skin, five o’clock shadow, hoodie under a blazer, trainers that probably cost more than the yearly income of the laundromat Harry slept in last night. He is holding a tablet loose in his left hand; the right twitches once, then buries itself in his pocket like it has touched something hot. Harry’s father whispers, “Jesus Christ,” like a prayer, or a cruciatus directed at himself.
Harry stands up, tries to smile. The future has taught him how to greet inevitability: He knows that face from old newsreels in shop windows, from Hermione’s angry shouty rants about billionaires who built swords and called them ploughshares. But the photographs hadn’t shown the way Stark’s gaze flicks - forehead, mouth, arms, shoes - cataloguing, calculating, the way Harry catalogues exits.
“Hey, kid.” The voice is mid-range, California vowels stretched over New York consonants. “Look at me.” Harry’s neck obeys before the rest of him agrees. Stark’s eyes are film-blue and ringed with sleepless purple. The mouth is familiar from magazines and nightmares alike. His throat bobs. “You’re Harry Potter?”
Harry’s tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. He nods at the air, then remembers eye contact is polite, then forgets how long is too long and stares at Stark’s left ear instead.
“Okay.” Stark’s voice drops, soft the way people speak in churches or hospitals. “Okay. J, hold the elevators. Nobody comes down to lobby four except Happy, copy?”
The ceiling answers in a crisp British accent. “Yes, boss.”
The billionaire’s right hand lifts towards Harry - slow, telegraphed, the way you approach a dog that’s been kicked into the shape of teeth. Harry flinches before the fingers get halfway. Stark notices; the hand hovers, then curls into a loose fist and drops to his side. The reactor light pulses once, twice, as though it’s breathing through the fabric. “Everyone, out.”
The security guard freezes mid-step. The receptionist’s mouth forms a small O. He is saying, “Sir, legal is still drafting - ” but Stark doesn’t turn. Jerks his head at him - gone - and he goes, heels skittering like startled mice.
Harry’s heart tries to tunnel out through his spine. He’d cleared the floor. Got rid of the witnesses. Last time that happened, two cops wrestled him into a van and drove him across the bridge where no one could hear the screaming. He braces against the wall - ready to push off, flee.
“Hey.” Stark lifts both hands, palms forward. The reactor in his chest glows through cotton like a tiny blue sun. “No one’s touching you. Deep breaths. You’re safe.”
Safe is a word Harry’s mouth can’t shape anymore. He takes one sideways step towards the door. The damp floor squeaks.
Stark’s eyes do another sweep - scabbed knuckles, bruise flowering under the left sleeve, the way the layers of sweaters are full of tears, repairs, bloodstains. Something in his shoulders sags, then locks tighter.
“My lab says you and I share thirty-one-point-six percent of a genome,” he says, conversational, like discussing baseball scores. “That’s father-son territory, in case biology isn’t your thing. So I’ve been looking for you for four weeks. And I know you’ve been waiting even longer. You kept coming here and - ” His jaw flexes. “ - and they kept turning you away. That’s on me. I fixed it. You don’t have to leave again.”
Harry’s breath saws. The ceiling lights blur; he realises he is crying, silently, the way he used to at Privet Drive when noise meant Dudley’s fists. He swipes with a sleeve that only smears the wet.
Stark watches the sleeve instead of the tears. “I’ve got a kitchen upstairs. Pancakes, real maple, none of that corn-syrup crap. You can eat standing up if you want. Or wrap one in a napkin and eat it in the bathroom. No rules. We talk, or we don’t. Up to you.”
Food in the kitchen means knives, forks, clatter. But pancakes can be torn by hand. Harry’s stomach gnaws on itself; last night he’d licked ketchup packets for calories.
He manages a nod so small it is mostly eyelash.
Stark doesn’t smile - Harry suspects the man could, but is choosing not to, like switching off a light. Instead he sidesteps, clearing a wide aisle to the private elevator. “After you.”
Harry moves forward, giving the reactor a berth wide enough for another person. Stark notices, mouth tightening, but stays quiet. Inside the lift, Harry presses his spine to the corner where two mirrors meet, eliminating the reflection of his back. Stark keys a code, then stands front-center, blocking the doors, human shield against anything that might burst in.
The ascent is soundless. Harry counts heartbeats - thirty-three to the penthouse. His fingers worry the hem of his jumper until threads pull free. He winds them around the tip of one finger, watches the purple bloom, unwinds, rewinds. Self-soothing, a therapist had called it once, before the money ran out and the potions took over.
Ding. The doors slide into walls.
The living room beyond is all glass and sunset, city bleeding gold and rust. Harry hesitates on the threshold; open spaces feel like falling upward. Stark walks three paces, stops, lets the silence settle.
“You want the lights lower?”
Harry shrugs one shoulder. Stark dims them anyway; Manhattan’s glow keeps everything visible but less like an interrogation.
A kitchen island spans the far end. Stark rounds it slowly, no sudden moves, and pulls a stool to the near side - close enough for company, far enough for flight. “I’m going to start batter. You can sit, stand, roam, whatever. If you need the bathroom, door’s past the fridge on the left. Lock works.”
Harry’s bladder went numb sometime around week two, but the information nests anyway. He stays standing.
Stark measures flour by eye, cracking eggs one-handed. The whisk clinks against steel at a tempo that isn't quite random - three short, two long, repeat - like a code. Harry finds his own breathing syncing to it.
When the first pancake hisses on the griddle, the smell punches hunger so hard his vision speckles. He locks his elbows on the counter edge, letting the granite prop him upright.
Stark flips. “Syrup’s warming. Butter’s real, or there’s fresh fruit in the fridge. No pressure.” He slides the inaugural cake onto a plate, nudges it across. Steam curls between them like incense.
Harry’s hands shake too badly to lift the fork lying ready. He waits until Stark turns back to the griddle, then tears a wedge with his fingers. It burns; he doesn’t care. Syrup drips down his wrist; he licks it before it can reach the sleeve, before it is wasted.
Two bites in, the sugar hits. His knees buckle. He catches himself on the stool, perches on the edge, spine bowing over the plate like a gargoyle.
Stark keeps his gaze on the spatula. “More?”
Harry nods into the empty plate. Stark slides a second, larger pancake onto it, then a third. He doesn’t ask questions, and doesn't watch while Harry eats. Just cooks, the way some people pace.
By the fourth cake, the tremor eases from earthquake to ripple. Harry’s thoughts unjam enough to notice details: Stark’s left thumbnail is split, a thin scab across the knuckle - recent, maybe today. The reactor’s glow pulses faintly with his heartbeat. There is a smear of engine grease on the inside cuff of the blazer, as if he’d yanked clothes over hands that hadn’t quite finished building something.
Stark kills the burner, wipes the griddle, sets the cloth down aligned with the counter edge. Only then does he face Harry fully.
“I don’t know what you need,” he says, voice low. “I know what I want - to keep you fed, housed, alive. But you’ve been surviving longer than you should’ve had to, so you call the shots. Stay in here, if you want, or take any of the bedrooms on this floor. Any floor. Doctor, no doctor. Talk, silence. Just… stay. Let me try.”
Harry’s eyes burn. He wants to say yes, but the word hits a wall of thorns in his throat and comes out shredded. “I-I take, erm, drugs. A lot. When it’s bad. So I steal people’s things. This place is- I’m - You shouldn’t let me-”
Stark’s eyelids flicker, the only sign the sentence landed. “I keep a thousand dollars cash in the kitchen drawer. Small bills. You take whatever you need, no receipts, no explanation. If you trust me to help you find something safer, we’ll figure out something else. Deal?”
Stark pulls the drawer open two inches - no farther - and steps back, palms visible. Inside, crisp ones and fives sit in a neat brick, paper-banded like bank strapping but the bands are plain white: no logos, no dates.
Harry’s cheeks burn. He thinks of the tin under his old bed at Grimmauld Place - Sickles converted to Muggle coins, emergency stash for nights Ginny hid the Floo powder and raised the wards so he couldn’t apparate to a dealer. He’d lied about that tin, lied about the withdrawals, lied until the marriage became one long forged signature.
Stark nudges the drawer closed with his hip - deliberate, unhurried, no clang. “You decide what you need. I decide to trust you. That’s the whole contract.” The sentence lands like a warming charm under Harry’s ribs, frightening in its simplicity. He realises good fatherhood might just be this: leaving space instead of verdict, offering trust the way other men offer ultimatums.
Harry stares at the drawer pull. The offer is too big; it doesn’t fit inside his skull. He manages another microscopic nod.
Stark exhales through his nose, shoulders dropping a fraction. “Okay. It’s eleven-thirty. You tired?”
Tired for two lifetimes. He nods again.
“Guest room’s down the hall, second on the right. Sheets are clean. No one’ll come in. I swear on the arc reactor, which is dramatic but sincere.”
Harry slides off the stool. His legs feel borrowed. He hesitates, then folds the plate and fork and two bites of pancake into a napkin, clutching the bundle. Waste not.
Stark watches the bundle, jaw muscle jumping, but stays quiet.
At the doorway Harry pauses. “The… tests. You’re really - ”
“Your blood matched mine at thirty-one loci,” Stark said. “That’s not a coincidence, kid. That’s you and me.”
Harry’s chest spasms. He turns before the tears can restart, pads down the hall. His toes brush the soft, deep carpet. His footsteps grey, grimy marks on the white.
Inside the guest room, he closes the door with two fingers, tests the lock - quiet snick - then climbs onto the bed without removing clothes. The mattress is too soft; he lays on top of the duvet, knees to chin, pancake bundle tucked against his chest.
Harry is still awake when the tower’s night-mode hum shifts. Floorboards outside his door creak once - Stark’s weight, barefoot. Harry tenses, all of his skin suddenly taut with goosebumps.
A pause. Then the soft slide of something being laid on carpet. Footsteps retreat.
Harry waits ten breaths, cracks the door. A pair of thick socks (dark grey, no logos) and a granola bar lie side by side, equidistant, aligned like the earlier tea towel. He picks them up, closes the door, sits on the bed with the bar unopened on his knee. He pictures Stark in the kitchen earlier: same precision when plating the pancakes - flip, centre, quarter-turn so the golden face showed. The gift - close enough to the door to be seen, but not tripped over.
He thinks about Christmas Eve, two years post-divorce. The Burrow’s kitchen smelled of cinnamon and Molly’s perpetual stewing tea. Ginny’s back was to him, shoulders sharp enough under her old Cannons jumper that Harry’s heart climbed his throat.
He set the parcel on the table like a cease-fire flag. Brown paper, twine, the knot double-looped so it wouldn’t unravel in her hand - he’d practised on the train up. “For James,” he said. Too loud. “Custom Comet 260. Lightest broomstick wood in the world. Thought… thought he might like lessons. With me.”
Ginny turned. Her eyes flicked from the package to his face, cataloguing tremor, bloodshot, the way his collar gaped half an inch because he’d lost weight again. “You can’t buy your way back into this family, Harry.”
The sentence landed flat, no accusation, just fact. She didn’t touch the broom.
He pushed it closer. “It’s not - I’m not buying. I’m asking.” His pulse banged against the inside of his ears. Take it, take it, take it - the same rhythm he used to count galleons into a dealer’s palm.
Ginny’s eyebrows rose, then dropped. “He’s scared of heights since you fell off your broom on his birthday and broke your arm. He still has nightmares about it.” Silence stretched until it snapped. Harry’s fingers worried the twine, re-twisting, un-twisting. The paper corners frayed.
He talked to her turned back. He’ll start slowly. They can just train throwing and catching. They can sell the broom and buy him a puppy. At that, Ginny turned to look at him with scorn. Harry apologised, walked backward to the hearth, floo powder in his fist, waiting for her to call him back. She didn’t. Green flames swallowed him while the broom sat there - an unaccepted apology, price-tag still dangling like a noose.
Harry’s thumb traces the straight edge of Stark’s granola-bar wrapper. No desperation. No bargaining. Just two objects placed at perfect right-angles, invitation without a price-tag. The difference between careful and desperate is the space you leave for the other person to say no.
The socks go on - too big, heel half-way up his calf. He folds the cuff once, twice, until it fits.Then he tucks the granola bar into his sock instead of eating, because his stomach won’t tell the difference and the gesture feels safer.