Unseen Possibilities

A/N: Thanks to all readers, favourite-markers and followers and the reviewers: twilliams1797 (who caught a rather horrendous typo which MS Word didn't), stars90, and THE BLACK PRINCE OF DARKNESS.

Please read this A/N.

There is slight Harmony, as hinted in the previous chapter, but it is certainly not the focus of the story. It is because I see the two as having a relation somewhere between Steve Rodgers/Peggy Carter and Tony/Pepper. So bear with it, even if you detest it. If it troubles you too much, assume any other character that you want there. It won't make a lick of a difference to the crossover part of the story. So a clarification:

Did I kill Ron to facilitate Harmony? No. Captain America has Bucky Barnes. Iron Man has Colonel Rhodes, the War Machine. The Master of Death has Ron. Make of that what you will.

Is Dumbledore to be bashed? No. Harry regards the man as his mentor, and accepts him with his decisions, his success and failures and lies and truth and understands that sometimes hard things have to be done, even that which is wrong in every way, if only to facilitate a greater success, much like Nick Fury and the Captain America cards. Indeed, he understands the need to emulate him if need be. Sirius and Remus, and many of Harry's closer friends are ambivalent about the man. Hermione despises him. Gienah has grudging respect. However, he is the cause of the problem, his truly good intentions and a very human failing of sentiment and attachment notwithstanding.

Will there be any slash? No. Most definitely not.

Unless my muse manages to surprise me, I hope this will be the last Author's Note.

"This is a joke, right?" Sirius asked as he stared – or rather, glared – at the offending ball of what looked like glass.

"It most assuredly is not," the Unspeakable who accompanied them sniffed in annoyance. "We among the Unspeakables believe that the Prophecy never was related only to Mr. Potter, or Lord Voldemort, for that matter. We were vindicated in our beliefs when we found the Prophesy already reformed by the time we cleared the mess you made fighting over it."

"What do you mean only to me and Riddle?"

"The prophesy orbs record prophesies that may be true for any being of any species across the Universe – we, as our muggle counterparts believe there may be alien life-forms and since this may eventually affect you, given the people that SHIELD associates with, I break no confidences when I say that we have been trying to reach out to aliens ourselves. Prophesies can be simultaneously true for many, many possibilities. In fact, I would advise you against attempting to touch that orb at all. The results may be disastrous for you."

"Why did you not tell us all this before?" demanded Harry angrily.

"Lord Voldemort – for after his resurrection, even though he shared the same soul as Tom Riddle, we ceased to consider him the same person..."

The Unspeakable was bodily lifted off the ground by Sirius with his metallic arm. "Who died then?" he asked in a dangerously low voice. "Who actually died? Why have you lot listed things as you have? Is Lord Voldemort dead? You will get me the confirmation, right now. Otherwise, I will unleash untold terrors here. Do not forget, the Blacks have contributed to this Department a lot, but you don't know everything I do, and all that is mine by magic."

"Really, Black?" a snide female voice startled them all, as they were all suspended in a localised anti-gravity field. "Are you really attacking my people in my department?"

"Corvus," spat Sirius. "Used any more unwitting teenagers to end wars lately, especially such wars that you should have been stopping given what we found out about his methods?"

"What do you mean?" asked Hermione fearfully.

"What I mean is that they could have stopped the War with many of the magics they hide in the bowels of the Ministry. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually turned out to be helping Voldemort."

They fell to the ground painfully and suddenly as gravity asserted again. Then Corvus crouched at Sirius' face and lowered the cowl. She was a woman. And not just any woman; she was most clearly a Black. "How many of my family members are going to accuse me of working for the other side, nephew?"

"Your neutrality, and that of your precious department has always been dubious, Aunt Gienah."

"That is because none of you, for all your pitiful attempts at cunning, have ever mastered the art of asking the right questions. Indeed, in spite of never swearing by Slytherin and cunning and ambition and all that rot that my dear parents and brother swore by – as if it were some symbol of the ultimate truth and not just a school house which never means anything beyond it – you had come closest to gaining fruitful knowledge from me."

"Your Aunt is the Head of the Unspeakables?"

"Yes. That's a woman who wouldn't be bothered to help me when I was put in jail, in spite of her extra-judiciary dispensations, which she could have used to simply get me a trial."

"When it got me such a wonderful person to experiment on?" Gienah asked innocently, "How could I?"

"That's it! How could you?" asked Hermione indignantly. She was after all, not a stranger to the moral ambiguity that some nations indulged in by using criminals in medical trials. That the people in question were related to such a great degree irked her even more. Family was supposed to look out for each other!

"That's not the right question," Gienah cackled gleefully, reminding everyone that she was related to Bellatrix too.

She was, however, still under scrutiny from Harry.

"I am no Ravenclaw, but I think that the correct questions would be what experiments did you conduct, why, and what effects they would have on Sirius."

Gienah stared at Harry through her grey eyes and then cracked another grin. "Even distant though you are, you got something good from the Black Side, boy."

She waved her hand at them, and suddenly they realised that they were too firmly under Gravity's effect that their efforts to get up had hurt too.

"Come," she ordered, while also ordering the Minion who had been chaperoning them to the records department. "We have a lot to discuss, nephew, and you to Great Saviour," she added with a rather salacious wink and tone, one that made all three of her visitors go green. It offended the woman. "Now, do not go around thinking that my age has dulled my needs! All I would need is some de-aging potion, or some Polyjuice, and you, Mr. Potter, are one delicious man."

"I suppose I should thank you for the offer, but you are too closely related, your entrancing beauty notwithstanding."

Gienah cackled again.

Presently, the minion returned, this time with a sheet which he presented to his boss. "Hmmm... let's see. Tom Marvolo Riddle, disembodied on 31st October, 1981, possessed one Terry Forks, aged three months, killed by Harry Potter on the 2nd of May, 1998. No remainder of the soul exists on the mortal plane. You are in the clear," she declared. "Are you happy now?"

"As much as we can dare to be," Harry allowed. "With our world in dire straits as it is now, do you not see how that would terrify us? Even you must see that we cannot survive another of these Dark Lords, and I am not going to destroy a child's life over something that has plagued mine."

Gienah's demeanour became decidedly sober. "You are right, Harry – may I call you that?" At his nod, she continued, "So you must see why we had to be seen as neutral."

"Interesting," Harry immediately remarked. "You said you had to be seen as neutral. You didn't say you had to be neutral."

The woman was a real switch. She seemed to flip moods and expressions in the blink of an eye, as she went from sober to beaming at Harry. "That's right, boy. Wayward ministers don't assassinate themselves. Random fatal explosions when the Dark Lord's servants are experimenting don't organise themselves." Then she scowled. "There are many areas of research we work on, Harry. One of the ways to ensure that Voldemort never got his hands on them was to root out all his people here, and then enforce Vows and neutrality. We had to pretend that some things never existed, that we hadn't even thought of those avenues of research. One doesn't always fight despots head on. Information control is just as important."

"I understand," Harry allowed. "So, let's get back to another important matter. What did you do to Sirius?"

"You don't think being an animagus alone could have saved you, Siri?" Gienah asked softly. "You were dying, and people were content to let that be. We are considered all sorts of things. Letting us use you was something they found great joy in. Your constitution is different as compared to a normal magical now, Sirius. Bellatrix's curse should have killed you."

"Oh."

There was a pregnant silence in the room, which Hermione finally broke. "Why are you volunteering information? I would think that you face such fairly rudimentary questions often enough."

Gienah beamed at the girl. "You recently ran into one very interesting individual. Natasha Romanoff, I believe."

"How'd you know?" Sirius blurted out. The woman ignored him.

"Tesseract," Hermione guessed correctly. "You already knew of the Tesseract."

"Very good," Gienah commended. "Those fools are harbouring something that shall destroy our very planet. We know for sure that it was one of the things that one of Hitler's associates, whom we shall keep unnamed for the time being as he is of no real consequence, was part of, and the leader of the organisation known as the HYDRA. We had recorded a streak of very high energy, including thaumatic energy streaking across the sky towards the end of the Grindelwald war. We had chosen to leave things be for the time being, but that idiot Howard Stark recovered it."

"Why would you leave it?"

"It is dangerous – and not only because we don't know enough about it. Think, Sirius, why would we want something that opened a portal so similar to the Veil of Death, but active and far more powerful, out where everyone could find it and accidentally trigger it? That those Americans haven't is pure luck, no matter how much they boast about their technology – muggle technology, that eventually has become inadequate to handle the thaumatic surges."

"But you should have recovered it first," argued Hermione.

"It was a miscalculation," Gienah admitted. "My predecessor's predecessor, the one in charge then, admitted as much. Thereafter we could hardly steal it from them."

"You said it has become thaumatically unstable," Sirius noted.

"It must have. You see, we recorded the same signature that was recorded then, at the precise moment of Harry's defeat of Voldemort. It is a simple matter of extrapolation, thereafter, along with two more in-phase pulses. Why else would they send Romanoff here but to investigate?"

"You mean, I am related to that thing, somehow?"

"It is the most logical inference."

"And when does the shoe drop, then?"

"Right now," she answered and waited. When nothing happened, she added for dramatic effect with arms spread wide, "Or never." Pinned by three glares which she could easily dismiss like a three-year-old's temper tantrum, she wearily pointed out, "That's what I told you about the Prophecy. You simply cannot know for sure. The best you can do is to ensure that you do not fit any of the conditions – neither the Dark Lord nor the saviour."

Harry gruffly nodded. "What would that mean doing, though?"

"At the moment, that would mean rehabilitating our part of the world. It's not just charity, but also caution and vigilance which begin at home."

"We are working on that. It's the external threats that worry us now."

"SHIELD will make another overture," she assured them. "It may not be immediate, but we will need both researchers and field agents. We need to have a similar agency."

"You'd liaise with the muggles?"

"If need be, we shall."

"You said you recorded two pulses," Hermione spoke up, drawing attention to something that Gienah had said. "What's the other one?"

"Sure you are not a Black, girl?" the old witch asked. "Finding what the other pulse was is precisely one of our objectives, for which we need a SHIELD-like agency." She observed Hermione speculatively for long enough to make her uncomfortable, when Sirius cleared his throat. "But now that you are here, I need to find out what exactly happened when you defeated Riddle and you became the Master of Death."

Hermione and Sirius stood up with their wands drawn and were summarily frozen in place with nary a glance by Gienah. It took Harry several deep breaths and moments to control his anger at that and his panic (that she had known of) to control a similar reaction. He was in her power here.

"You are certainly more sensible than them, I will give you that."

"You have already shown us that we are in your power. I can hardly trust you, but I cannot do anything about it either," Harry tightly replied.

"No you can't," agreed Gienah simply.

"Would you be so kind as to release them?"

"Should I?"

"What could they do to you?"

"What indeed..."

The two were not even given a second glance as they staggered upon being freed.

Harry told her the story as perfunctorily as he could, giving her the barest essentials, enough to not provoke further questions, but also not enough to have all of any of those that she did have answered. The objective was to get out of this place as fast as possible. He had to be answerable to the Order? Hah! The true centre of magical power stood here, letting everyone else delude themselves otherwise.

"So becoming the Master of Death was the trigger, the acquisition of the wand itself, that is. We did try to ensure that it would pass on undefeated."

That stunned Harry.

"You did?"

"Yes. Think of it Harry," Gienah seriously pointed out, "it was a myth, and even in the magical world, some myths are supposed to remain just that – myths. Nobody, nobody, is meant to wield the kind of power that this implies. Can we know for sure what it will do to you? Or where it truly originated from? Or what it will force you to do? What its true meaning is? We wanted this power broken altogether. And in spite of our best efforts, we never knew where these things were." She peered at him closely; her face taking on a look more suited to a Veela's other form. "You have only begun to imagine what we can do and what we might know, and how dangerous we might be. What does it tell you that our concerted efforts to force this particular myth to remain one failed?"

Harry could do no more than curse his luck as he realised that he was, once again, in dire straits. And he could only know there lurked a danger, but not know what it was.