Harry, John, Cortana, Hermione and Ron sat in the armchairs in front of the fire. Everyone else had long since gone to bed, but they just couldn't get over John's newfound power.
"Go on," Ron urged, "lift something again!"
John glanced at him.
"There's something else as well," he began, standing and pacing to the middle of the common room. He held his hand in front of his chest, palm inwards, reversing the magic he had cast in Dumbledore's office. The others stared, amazed, as his robes slowly turned into the green suit of armor.
Harry gasped.
"That's the same suit of armor I've seen in my dreams!" John looked at him quickly.
"Well, almost. The one from my dreams had a helmet." John raised an eyebrow.
"Like this?" he asked as the helmet reassembled itself around his head. Harry nodded mutely.

"They let me pick. Did I ever tell you that? Choose any Spartan I wanted. You know me. I did my research, watched as you became the soldier we needed you to be. Like the others, you were strong, and swift, and brave. But you had something they didn't. Something no-one saw but me."

"Can you guess?"

"Luck."

John woke with a start. He sat up, peering around the darkened dormitory. He was the only one awake.
Pushing the covers aside, he crept down the stairs and into the common room. He was surprised to find Cortana sitting in one of the armchairs, staring into the flames. She looked over at him when he sat in the armchair next to her.

"Do you ever wonder why Harry has a scar and we don't?" she asked. John had never actually thought about it before. When they thought their parents were killed in a car crash, they had always assumed harry had been sitting in the middle and had been hit by some glass. Now that they knew what had really happened, that explanation just didn't fit. Harry had told them he could remember something of the "car crash" if he concentrated. Mostly just a big flash of green light. John, however, couldn't remember that at all. If anything, all he could remember was most likely a figment of his imagination - a giant ring in space, followed by a flash of white light.

"I remember something different to what Harry remembers," Cortana said suddenly. John glanced at her.
"It sounds crazy, though."
"Probably not as crazy as what I remember," John replied. Cortana sighed.
"I remember being in this immense ship - well, the back half of it, anyway - out in space. We were drifting... and it was just you and me, John, and I wasn't even a person, I was a computer program! You were frozen in some kind of preserving tube thing, until we drifted into orbit around earth. Then I woke you up and you flew some kind of space-plane thing down... and then you jumped out with me... and it all went black when you slammed into the ground. No... not black... everything went white..."
"Wow," John replied, "That's a lot different to what I remember, but at the same time, it isn't. I remember a big spaceship too - but it wasn't half a ship, it was whole. There was this massive ring in space - massive as in, things were living on it - and then there was this flash of white light."
"I remember something else, too," Harry's voice came to their ears from the dormitory stairs.
"I remember being at the Dursleys, aged about five, and it was just me. I didn't have siblings. Then, next thing you know, CRASH!" he mimed something hitting the ground hard.
"I remember going outside, and there was this big crater in the front yard - you know that hole that appeared overnight, the one Uncle Vernon got really angry about? It looked just like that - and at the bottom of the crater there was this huge person, like, seven feet tall, wearing armor like yours."

John was suddenly struck with a thought.
"This suit of armor," he began, restoring it from his pyjamas, "it's pretty high-tech."
"So?" Harry asked. Cortana, however, gasped.
"It might have a camera in it!" John nodded, grinning. The helmet reassembled itself, and he spoke a command into the small microphone nested in front of his mouth.
"Activate."

A surge of yellow energy immediately began to run up the exterior of the suit, beginning at John's feet. The inside of the visor lit up, and three holographic displays appeared on it. He focused first on the round one in the bottom left corner. As he turned his head, it turned in sync. Harry shifted uncomfortably, and John immediately saw a yellow dot appear on the display.
"This thing has a radar!" He exclaimed, "but it can only see things that are moving."
"A motion tracker," Cortana corrected. The surge reached the helmet, and John noticed the bar filling up at the top of the visor.
"The energy surge has some kind of... meter," he told them. Cortana stood up as the surge reached the peak of the helmet and faded, before the entire suit flashed gold.
"I wonder..." she said, reaching toward John. Her hand curled into a fist and struck out toward his chest in a blur of motion.
When her hand reached roughly an inch away from the chestplate, the suit flashed gold again, the flash lingering this time, and Cortana was flung halfway across the room, landing in a heap. John immediately ran over to her, closely followed by Harry.
"Deactivate," he muttered, causing the golden light to seem to burst with some kind of electrical sound, the visor readouts to disappear, and the helmet to collapse back into the chestplate. He sank to his knees by Cortana's limp body, quickly turning his armor back into his pyjamas. Harry placed his fingers on her wrist.
"She's still alive," he announced, sighing with relief. John immediately picked her up, striding toward the portrait hole.
"Where are you going?" Harry asked.
"Hospital wing."
"We can't go wandering around at night!"
"No-one will see us."
"How do you know?" John immediately vanished.
"Wandless magic, bro."

Madam Pomfrey was not used to being woken up at one o'clock in the morning by a tall first-year cradling his twin sister in his arms, but nevertheless she took it in her stride, leading John to the nearest bed and having him set Cortana down on it. She waved her wand over her a few times, before muttering a few things under her breath as she retrieved some things from a shelf and quickly mixed them into a small phial.
"You'll want to stay with her, I'd guess?" she asked.
"If it's not a hassle-" he began before Madam Pomfrey cut him off.
"Nonsense, Stay as long as you need. When she wakes, make sure she drinks that. She seems to have had a nasty shock - something like a lightning strike, though where that might have happened, I have no idea. She has some broken bones as well, but I'd rather she be awake when I mend them." John simply nodded, looking down at Cortana's sleeping face.
"Would you like a drink of something? Something to eat? A chair?" John simply shook his head, and Madam Pomfrey shrugged, returning to bed and snuffing out the lamps, plunging the room into darkness. John restored his armor before taking it off and assembling it as it had been in Dumbledore's office. He stood in front of it, clad in his pyjamas (which he had summoned from the dormitory), cupping his hand with his palm upward in front of him. It was easier than breathing to create a fireball hovering above his hand, and almost as simple to dip his right forefinger into the flame and draw it out glowing. He pressed his fingertip onto the middle of the chestplate, seeing a red spot appear on the green metal. A shape came to mind, and he drew it on the metal plate. As soon as he finished the shape, he knew what to do with it.
John breathed life into the magical glyph, and it immediately ignited, before dying down to a red glow. A bed nearby spontaneously caught fire, and he quickly removed the air from around it to put it out. He still couldn't control that!
Then he looked at the glyph. It seemed at first to simply be some kind of strange shape, but then he knew what it said without actually reading it or hearing it.
"Reclaimer..." he muttered. Cortana stirred, her eyes moving rapidly beneath her eyelids, but John didn't notice. He was to caught in memories which had seemingly sprung into existence out of nowhere as soon as he had uttered the word.
The Pillar of Autumn, the Gravemind, the Flood, the Covenant, the Arbiter, the Ark and the Dawn. Everything he had fought against or fought for. Then Dr. Halsey, ONI, the UNSC, and his training. Everything which had led him to that life. Sgt. Johnson and Cortana. His two friends in a lonely, warriors life of constant fighting.

He was Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, SPARTAN of the UNSC. And yet, he was also John Potter, brother to Cortana and Harry.
But did he have any say in which life was his?