WARNINGS: Canonical Violence of Avengers Movies, References to Rape/Non-con of OC(s), References to Child Abuse, Dubious Consent.

A/N: Just a few things. I know next to nothing about the Avengers, I am a fan but I don't remember much about the movies, so if I get something wrong don't blame me. I do believe that transgender is a real thing, but Ariana is not transgender, she is traumatised and only believes herself to be safe as a boy. Thanks for reading! :) I do try my best. Also, like many of my fics, Harry does not have glasses, for actually no reason whatsoever (I think I'm an 'anti-glasses Harry Potter' supporter). No!Glasses!Harry

A/N: Also, sorry for chickening out and deleting the fic earlier (for those old souls of Mimosas and Muscles), as I am kinda bad at self esteem lol.

Prologue.

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A little over two years ago, when Harry had applied for a job at the Department of Mysteries, he never would have guessed they would have accepted him. It had seemed too good to be true, especially with the public on the tipping point of turning on him and the expectations of him becoming an Auror whispered in his ear by every sycophant. Harry should have guessed that they'd use him as a test subject and not as an equal. Hadn't that been how it always was?

In a way that shouldn't have surprised him, his Potter Luck flared up again like an old army injury. Harry had foolishly assumed that because Dumbledore and Voldemort were dead he'd finally be free of the constant curse that kissed at his robes: the curse of his Potter Luck, his Potter Lips, his Potter Promises. Harry had allowed that because Halloween (fingers crossed it continues to be that way) no longer held any bad omens—the bad luck that occurred every Hallows Eve starting with his parent's death—Harry would no longer hold them either.

Should he have been more shocked when they told him to drink a potion and then shoved him through the Veil? Fortunately his Potter Luck caught him and, like always, he had the bad luck to get into a bad situation and the good luck to survive it. What a tedious balance it was. Harry met Death... or he thought he did. He couldn't quite remember the meeting, or what was said, or even what Death looked like. Only that Death was real, Harry was scorned for being its Master, and he was sentenced to an eternity in something called the 'Marvel' universe.

Harry didn't like the sound of that.

The first thing he'd recognised when he opened his eyes was the smell of smoke and the crackle of an open fire. A few moments later he realised the burning feeling on his back was his own clothes on fire, along with his wand. Everything was burnt to a crisp and he distinctly recalled the warm haunting cackle of his bestest friend Death sounding eerily, and perhaps purposely, similar to Voldemort.

It had been night and bitingly cold. Even in a strange place, Harry could recognise the middle of winter. Snow fell softly, consolingly, as if the magnificence of the weather event could compensate for the cold that ate mercilessly at his naked skin. His body had burned with the scratching wind and his fingers had tingled in the beginnings of numbness. Harry had looked around at a city he had never seen before, a city in ruins. The streets were empty, a faint sound of someone crying or screaming in the distance, and Harry was surrounded by overturned cars, large grey towers and complexes with shattered windows, and a small fire he could see in the distance, smoke tunnelling upwards almost tauntingly.

He had been homeless, with no name, no money, and no clue where he was. But Harry had always been an adaptive boy and he was no stranger to poverty or even sleeping on park benches and alcoves (thanks to his numerous attempts at running away from the Dursleys). Perhaps now was slightly worse, with no clothes and no identification, but Harry made do. For the first couple of weeks he slept on benches, visited shelters for the homeless, started to navigate his way around the Muggle world, and thanked Death (however begrudgingly) that the country spoke English. Harry hadn't had an identity and he knew that was a dangerous thing. As a child he hadn't learned much about America, didn't even know if they had a Prime Minister, so was slightly lost in this new world.

It didn't take Harry long to realise he was in a different universe. The main clue was that the year was no longer 1999, but 2012, and that some of the things in this place were different. The first time Harry had read about the alien attack that had just occurred in New York he had almost jumped out of his seat, skimming the text on a late Sunday night in the library, and finding it reserved the next day. A whole war had occurred, with lives lost, and people who had never existed to him dying before he even knew about them. It made him feel so small. After that he went around town, tasting things, drinking a variety of flavoured teas, trying to see if these were different also, to see if this world had lost something it could never return. There was a distinct possibility that Death placed him into a dangerous universe on purpose, set on revenge against his master. The most concerning change of all was that his favourite brand of tea tasted like sulphur, a stark difference from the soothing temperament of the previous world's one. Perhaps Harry was an optimist, but he liked to think the people here were different—maybe less prejudiced than those from his last world—and after a few weeks of moping, he couldn't help but wonder if this place could be a fresh start for him.

Sure, he missed Ginny and his best friends, and it would be quite impossible to find someone similar to Luna, but in his old world he had stagnated and become complacent. Maybe a new place and a new challenge would be good for him. It took Harry just over a month of visiting libraries and finding suitable people to ask about the new world, but he eventually realised the gist of what he needed to do. He needed a green card. And he needed a citizenship.

It had been a relief when Harry found a way to use his magic once more, without his wand. He had been stumbling about drunk after having stolen some poor sod's grog and had come across a fight in an alleyway. Harry's saviour complex had flared like a bad allergic reaction and, on instinct and with no hesitation offered by his inebriated system, he stunned both people with his hands raised in a shocking feat of wandless magic. After that, Harry just believed it was possible and somehow...it worked. He didn't question it—didn't try to—because he didn't want it to stop and for him to return to a magicless existence.

With the return of his abilities, he had Confounded a low level member of the government, managing to finagle a citizenship under the name of 'Harry Evans'. Harry never would have picked the name in his old world since it could be so easily tracked back to his mother's maiden name, but chose to do it here since he—and his past—did not exist here. It helped him remember and recognise his mother's memory, something he cherished in his heart.

He managed to acquire a job at a local cafe as a 'waitress'; Harry had insisted on the proper form of address 'waiter' as he was not a girl, but his boss would simply laugh in her cryptic way and continue on. His boss sometimes said that Harry just had a 'pushover' type of vibe, and that's why she said the things she did. Harry wished she could have seen him kill Voldemort, even if it still haunted him, since then she would see he wasn't as harmless as she assumed.

He wasn't a girl. No. He was all man, but apparently inter-dimensional travel—or whatever crazy antics had occurred—had slightly altered his facial features and bodily aesthetics. Instead of the sharp and steady jaw of James Potter and the Anglican cheekbones of an aristocrat lending the ability to trace a long dynasty of purebloods in his features, Harry was left with the soft, girlish, gentle features of his mother and a more ovular shaped face. His lips were fuller, lusher—apparently like "a ripe berry ready to be picked" in his boss Jamie's godly opinion—and his nose was smaller and softer. Harry's hips were curved in a womanly way, which forced him to wear looser clothing so no one would see, but that were most definitely male so as to soothe his injured self image. His skin was, thankfully, still the olive tone of his father and his eyes were the same icy green of his mother. Harry's hair was still raven black and fell in spikes like it ought to, but the one time he had lengthened it, just to see how it looked, it had fallen straight and, dare he say it, beautifully to his untrained eye. Harry was so... effeminate in his looks now and it worried and embarrassed him more than he could articulate.

The universe transformation had thankfully not changed any other parts of himself, except Harry often internally complained that his arms were too thin, but he knew that was because he did no other exercise than walks from his small rented place to Jamie's Café, not because of this cursed body. Harry was still awfully suspicious as to why his body had morphed in such a way, but could find no way to contact Death and as such had no way to reverse the change, so eventually he just filed it in the folder in his mind labelled 'things I will never know'. It was a larger folder than he would have wanted by a long shot. Most of it was filled with Hermione's long winded explanations that had gone in one ear and out the other, relegated to a section called 'Hermione's attempts to explain the unexplainable'.

Unexplainable to Harry anyway.

Harry lived a pretty simple life—a life he had always wanted. He had a job—a nice simple job—of remembering orders and bringing out plates for people, sometimes giving compliments to the chef on the behalf of someone grateful or polite. He washed dishes part-time when their dishwashers were busy or at school, the job almost muscle memory now, resurrecting long afternoons at the Dursley's. He spent his afternoons in parks or museums, seeing sights of the muggle world he had never seen before, going out to the ocean for the first time, seeing movies with money he could scrounge together, eating caramel popcorn and becoming addicted to it. Harry tried to learn math and basic science, read books with saved up money he had spare from the rent or bills, trying to catch up on what he missed in his education when he was ensconced in the magical world and separated from the muggle one. Every Sunday, his only day off, he would practice his wandless magic; his imagination being the only limit as he slowly learnt that his magic was like a muscle and got stronger if he worked on it.

Harry's one friend, Michael, was an Asian guy with brown hair and aqua eyes, legs spindly like a spider's, and was almost two heads taller than Harry. He ran a bowling alley by day and disco rink by night... how that worked still confounded Harry to this day. Mike had originally thought Harry was a girl—like every other bloody citizen of America—but at least, unlike Jamie, he had apologised afterwards.

Michael failed to teach Harry how to bowl and Harry failed to teach Michael and himself how to draw (a new hobby he had taken up once he moved into his flat). They sometimes went to the pub together, drank until they both forgot the things they needed to, and walked home together on weak legs, both following each other and most likely getting lost. Harry knew about Michael's psycho ex: an abusive girl who'd spun him under her spell and left him once he was broken with an empty house, broken arm and four thousand dollars missing out of his bank account. Michael knew about Harry's childhood: the small boy who lived under the stairs, about his life as a homeless man for a few months, and how he was uneducated in the ways of the world, something his good friend thankfully left alone as it was a touchy topic. They were good friends—not best friends, but close. He hoped they were close. Harry knew Michael had other friends, but he liked to think some days that Michael liked him best, and he wished he could not feel guilty for thinking that. Some days he liked to simply focus on today and forget all the madness that had already engulfed his life, amusing himself thinking about petty things like how he's Michael's favourite friend. Some days Harry liked to delude himself that he could be normal.

Harry worked for his crappy apartment: a place with a fold out bed, view of a brick wall, kitchen/dining with paint peelings sometimes dropping into food, a half-broken toilet, and shower that sometimes went cold for no apparent reason. It was enough to live upon and, even if it wasn't as fancy as Potter Manor, Harry loved it because it was home and because he had earned the place with his own efforts, completely independent from others. Harry decorated the place with scrawled hand-made drawings of people he used to know, which were frankly terrible because he was no artist. But no one but Michael ever visited and he never commented anyway, so they didn't have to be brilliant. Harry had a life philosophy of staying out of the way of trouble, doing things because he liked to do them not because people expected him to, and (he did try this, but didn't succeed as often as he'd like) to never judge a book by his cover (he'd had enough of that in his childhood).

Harry was happy with the way his life was, happy to be of no real importance, where his biggest stresses were trying to figure out how bank accounts worked and how he blushed when a girl winked at him in his waitress uniform. Damn, it always annoyed him how 98% of them were lesbians with a maid kink.