Title: Gen 13 3/4

Author: Joshua

Disclaimer: JK Rowling has Harry, and whoever else from the books show up in these plots. Gen13 and all associated characters and events were created by Jim Lee and J. Scott Campbell, and the original comics/events this story covers distributed by Image Comics, though are now owned by DC Comics. I don't own either and I'm not making any money from all this, so don't bother suing me. No actual spoilers in this one, just character stea—borrowing and rewriting.

Summary: At the moment, a 'What If' transitional piece between the story "Harry Potter and Project Genesis" and whatever may yet come. Overview is as follows; bit of a rewrite of Gen13 Issue 1/2 and Issue 0, only with Harry there, and considering a significant career change. Gang still splits, still runs into trouble, and still comes back together. Where they gather, now that is the question!

Story:

Harry Potter sneered down at his adversary. This was, without a doubt in his mind, the most arduous, annoying, and outright pathetic challenge he had ever faced. To be perfectly honest, he wouldn't even be bothering if it wasn't necessary, which made it all the more annoying and sneer-worthy. He feared that if he were to look in a mirror, he'd see a bit more of Severus Snape in his expression than James Potter. Good thing there were no mirrors around.

Shooting off one last sneer to show his utter contempt, Harry finally deigned to finish his adversary off and get this over with. He had better things to do today after all.

Dipping his quill into the ink pot, the 18-nearly-19-year-old wizard wrapped up his answer to the essay question for the written portion of the ICW Hit-Wizard Certification exam. He'd already passed the practical and the oral presentations earlier that day. Supposedly this was supposed to be to 'Defense Against The Dark Arts' what a Potions Mastery Exam was to the Potions NEWT. Unfortunately he'd never taken his NEWTs, so he had nothing but his OWLs to compare it to and honestly he didn't see what the big deal was. It was easy.

Double-checking his work and feeling satisfied with all his answers, Harry capped his ink pot, put down the quill and turned in his testing paper.

The ICW Examiner accepted the parchment and put it with the rest of his test results into a magical folder, which remained paper-thin despite being filled with hundreds of pages of documents. Made it easier to carry around and file things, he supposed.

Bureaucracy, while both necessary and terrible, loved its paperwork, but at least magic made it slightly less messy to deal with. Between shrinking spells, expansion charms, and being able to summon the required document without having to leave your desk certainly made things simpler, and it cut down on the need to 'properly' organize things into filing cabinets in the first place. Just 'banish' it back to wherever you'd initially summoned it from.

"Your results will be sent to you in two to three weeks," the ICW Examiner informed him, before marching out of the room.

Harry sighed. Not even magic could make bureaucracy go any faster though.

He nodded to the empty room and exited via the door he'd entered through rather than the same one the Examiner had used. Stepping outside... actually took him outside.

"Huh," he grunted and shrugged. He was pretty sure there was supposed to be an office on the other side of the door, not the lawn surrounding the monument known the world over as the Statue of Liberty. He distinctly recalled having entered the exam room via an office waiting room. Magic, go figure.

Stepping outside, he noticed the door vanish behind him as soon as it closed, and nobody was looking twice at him despite there being quite a few tourists around. Looking down, he noticed the subtle ward line where a Notice-Me-Not Charm had no doubt been laid. Clever. Hiding in plain sight. Still didn't explain why the American Wizards basically kicked him out of the local ICW office the moment his business was concluded.

Shrugging the whole thing off, Harry stepped over the ward line and walked out into the public, just another tourist visiting a national monument. Taking the time to look up at the copper statue, he smiled and appreciated the sight before making his way down to the waterfront and took a seat on one of the available benches there, looking across the bay at New York City.

Sitting there, he sighed once again and closed his eyes. He allowed a small amount of the tension that had been building within him to release and flow away with his breath. It had been quite a journey so far. And it promised to become far more very soon now.

It all started with the Final Battle at Hogwarts.

Decades long conflict, a civil war within the Wizarding World, all propagated by one man; the Dark Lord Voldemort, aka Tom Marvolo Riddle. And all stopped by one boy; the Boy-Who-Lived. Although, it wasn't really stopped per se so much as a ceasefire was called. Things picked up right where they'd left off the moment Voldemort got his body back.

Harry and his friends spent months hunting down the means to put Riddle in the ground for good, and what progress they made was minimal at best. That is until they finally decided to stop running and went to Hogwarts, to put an end to things. Within twenty-four hours of their arrival, the war was decidedly over. Voldemort was dead and nothing of him remained to bring back, and his army basically ran at the sight of a 'dead' Harry Potter jumping out of Hagrid's arms, alive and well. People were still dead, and there was a lot of damage, but the fighting was over, and the good guys won.

That was the beginning of his journey; the greatest triumph of his life, when Harry Potter saved the world and defeated the Dark Lord who had killed his parents and so many others. Thing is, nobody ever puts much thought in what happens to the hero after he's no longer needed. Such was the case with Harry, as they all forgot that he essentially had no home to return to, no job, and no family. Not any that cared whether he lived or died at any rate.

Harry quickly abolished that line of thought before he could actually care where or what the Dursleys were up to these days.

And so when the students were packed onto the train at the end of the school year to return home, nobody batted an eye about packing the hero of the hour on with them, and then leaving him alone at King's Cross Station. It was understandable; they were all busy with the clean-up and dealing with the aftermath of such a major social upheaval. The Order of the Phoenix was basically rebuilding the Ministry of Magic from the ground up, and his friends all had their own consequences to deal with.

Hermione had to find her parents from wherever she'd sent them for their protection. Ron… Ron had to bury a brother. Neville Longbottom, another friend, also had to bury his grandmother, and take the reins of the Longbottom family. Luna Lovegood had been in much the same boat he was, but her father was still alive so she did have family to return to. Ginny…

Harry sat up and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees as he held his head in his hands.

Ginny Weasley. His best friend's younger sister. He'd first noticed her in his Fifth Year, during the DA, but he'd been rather infatuated with Cho Chang at the time and couldn't see anything beyond his crush at the time. Over the summer, Ginny… well to turn a phrase, she blossomed.

He might have been concerned that he'd been spiked with some kind of love potion, only he happened to have an opportunity to witness the effects of such a potion first hand. From everything he knew about the subject, and he'd read up after Ron's bout of multiple poisonings in one night, a love potion's effect was instant and temporary. Even the subtler variations that weren't as obvious as what Romilda Vane had used on those chocolates, the moment the potion was in their system the victim could think of nothing, feel nothing but their love for the object of the potion. And then the moment, the very moment the potion was no longer in their system, in other words the moment they stopped being dosed, the thoughts and feelings faded as though they never existed.

Real feelings were more complicated than that. It was what convinced him that his feelings for Ginny were true. He'd fallen in love with her, though they'd hardly gone on any dates. But now… after more than a year apart and only seeing each other for moments, days at a time, and most recently on very bad days, he felt things had changed.

He still felt love for her. And from his memories he definitely remembered the lust from seeing her body and kissing her lips. But… he didn't feel like he was in love with her anymore. Perhaps they had just spent too much time apart. Perhaps he had feelings for another. Perhaps he only needed to see her again—with his own eyes—to feel the passion he'd once felt for her. Perhaps he would see only a good friend and a 'sister' and she would feel the same about him. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!

His sigh was more like a growl as he leaned back on the bench, frustrated with the path his thoughts had taken. He turned them back towards his more recent past.

A couple weeks on the streets in London had taught him a lot, in particular how to hide and how to figure out when he was being followed. Agents that he now knew worked for IO—International Operations—had been tracking him pretty much since the day after he'd left King's Cross Station, and he'd successfully evaded them at every turn. When he finally confronted them, the next day they sent Nicole Callahan after him. She'd confronted him in turn and came at him with some sob story about getting to know a side of his mother's family that he'd never before had an opportunity to. She'd also spun an interesting tale of uncovering a conspiracy of abuse and corruption from within Project Genesis and using him as a mole.

She almost had him convinced, but then as she'd been leaving she brushed her hand through his hair and he felt a distinct Veela-like pull towards her, one that he pushed past just as he had her attempts at psychic intrusion. That was all he needed to know she was playing him. But, he reasoned, there was no need to let her know that he knew that.

And so he'd gone along, joined Project Genesis, and grouped together with a bunch of other teens chosen for various reasons. Over the course of several months, they trained all of the kids that were part of the Project in the basics that was everything between the CIA, NSA, MI6, KGB and every Special Forces Group of every military in the world taught all their recruits. He began to suspect they were being trained as soldiers, but what kind he didn't have a clue about until their last night there. The night his teammate and friend Caitlin Fairchild manifested her super powers!

They called it the Gen Factor, and anyone with the Gen Factor was a GenActive. Harry and his teammates from Project Genesis were all GenActives. They were now Gen13. Supposedly there had been twelve other generations of GenActives before them, Gen12 actually being the parents of half the people on the team. Frankly, Harry didn't give a damn about the past, he was more concerned with the future by this point.

Project Genesis had very specific protocols in place for when the 'students' ultimately manifested their abilities. Protocols that basically involved gassing them, and then cryogenically freezing them until they could be properly brainwashed into loyal, obedient and controllable SPBs (Super Powered Beings). Needless to say, they did not agree to this and fought like hell to get away. Things got quite bloody, especially after another IO operative, one Colonel John Lynch, came with his own private army and tried to "rescue" them.

Nicole and her brother Mathew, aka Bliss and Threshold certainly didn't make their escape any easier. The only good thing to come out of it was that each of them manifested their powers when faced with the threat of the other two GenActives.

Caitlin Fairchild, a year older than him, and originally just as skinny, but with red hair and green eyes of her own, when they'd first met he'd thought for a moment that he'd just discovered his long lost sister, given the similarity of their appearance and her red hair. She was as smart as Hermione, possibly smarter, and as kind and friendly as he was. And then she manifested and her body went from a 5'3" waif to a 6'4" amazon! Literally, in addition to an augmentation to her appearance, her strength, speed, and durability were through the roof! As she proved before the night was over, she was tough enough to survive a grenade to the face, and strong enough to rip a tank to shreds!

Robert Lane, aka Burnout, though they called him Bobby most often, also manifested on his own. Unlike Kat, who gained physical might to rival every heavy hitter in the world, he underwent what has commonly been referred to as the Human Torch Phenomenon. Basically, he can generate plasma from every pore of his skin, which when exposed to air ignites as flames. At first he was more than a little hotheaded and wanted to basically burn away all the bad guys. When everyone on the team except for Kat was captured and pretty much tortured by Threshold, he quickly got a handle on his ego and fell in line.

Sarah Rainmaker was a Native American activist and descendant of Geronimo. She even lived on a Reservation and everything. And apparently, though none of them had a way to either verify or doubt her, she said she'd had her powers to control and influence the weather since she was a child. Powers which included conjuring up windstorms, shooting lightning from her hands, and even start a storm, though very localized.

Roxanne 'Roxy' Spaulding, aka Freefall had actually been the last to manifest her powers, but she arguably had the coolest of them all. They'd been trying to get away in a stolen helicopter when Threshold had caught up to them and stopped their escape in its tracks. Roxy lost it for a bit and didn't even notice at first as their free fall from the crashed helicopter had come to a virtual halt. She could control gravity, or at least influence gravitational fields, making things really heavy, or lighter than air, enabling her to pretty much fly and defy gravity and have a form of telekinesis and all that jazz. Now if she could only quit smoking.

Edmund 'Grunge' Chang was an easy person to understand. That was because he was a very simple minded individual. Not that he cared. What he did apparently care about, (besides women, food and surfing), was when Threshold was choking the life out of Roxy and he manifested right there, saving them from who knows what further horrors. His powers were a form of tactile metamorphosis, where he could take on the attributes or even atomic structure of any material he was in direct physical contact with. This also gave him a limited form of invulnerability, as they'd discovered when he'd been shot during their escape and his body had just—absorbed—the bullets and he'd spat them back out.

Then there was him, Harry Potter. Despite being GenActive, he still had his magic and as far as he was able to tell, his powers were not affected by the other in the slightest, neither hindering nor enhancing his ability to use them at all. So in addition to being able to Apparate, a practiced Occlumens, a burgeoning Legilimens, and casting spells with both the wand he'd held since he was eleven years old and the Elder Wand of legend at the same time, he could now also bend the fabric of time, allowing him to move at speeds that boggle the mind and also freeze or age into dust at his whim everything around him. He was still working on the subtleties, but the broad strokes were that he now had a form of super speed and a 'paralyzing touch'.

Since escaping the destruction of the Genesis Compound out in Death Valley, Nevada, the team had sort of broken apart. Although to be fair, it was more like they were taking a break, decompressing from the extreme stress of having basically been through a war. For Harry though, it was just one more battle in the ongoing war that was his life.

So while Caitlin went back to her home town, intending on visiting and getting caught up with her Aunt and Uncle who had raised her and her cousin who had been like her big sister growing up, and Sarah returned to her own family on the Reservation in Arizona, the other half of Gen13 decided to actually do something with their vacation. Roxy and Grunge were heading for Las Vegas. Bobby was road tripping it, driving in the van they had come across. Harry had no trouble spending some of the black bag funds he'd appropriated from IO, and neither did the rest of the team.

As for himself, Harry considered what had happened to him over the past few months. If he'd known half the things he knew now when he and his friends had started their Horcrux hunt, things might have turned out different. No, he silently realized, they would still have turned out the same it just would have been resolved sooner and hopefully with less casualties in the end. That ultimately had helped in his decision to use this time of relative peace to prepare for the next battle rather than waste it on frivolous pursuits. And so he'd spent about a week hunting down the American version of Diagon Alley and the Ministry of Magic, finding out what it took to be an ICW Certified Hit-Wizard, the only occupation that was like being an Auror (which is what he'd planned on doing after graduating school) but less restrictive and international, and then studying up for the test. And now here he was, still a few days before he was due to meet up with the gang in Vegas, and he had nothing to do.

Maybe he could Apparate over to Vegas early, settle in at a hotel, lose a few coins at a casino or two, and wait for his Hit-Wizard License to arrive. That he passed was not in doubt, and while he by no means had gotten a perfect score, he had aced the practical, stunned his questioners during the oral (not literally of course), and probably gone a bit overboard on some of his answers in the written. He was just waiting for the piece of parchment stating it for others acknowledgment, but in his own mind, Harry was now a Hit-Wizard.

He needed a job.

Looking at the city across the water in a whole new light, Harry stood to his feet and spun around slowly, making sure no one was looking, before spinning a bit faster and Disapparating from Liberty Island with a soft crack.

To Be Continued...