Author's note: We apologise in advance for any inaccuracies in this chapter concerning MCU canon. I did my best.

Chapter Seven: Winter in New York

It was a good thing that he would see his mother again at the end of April, because he had little to look forward to. His dreams turned progressively uglier, tensions strained the once close-knit family, he at the epicentre.

Does he not understand what he is doing? Harry wondered. How his jealousy is tearing his own family apart?

But Thor continued to be reckless, and Loki continued to defend him, and beneath the surface, surely, trouble was brewing, and even Odin would not overlook his son's rashness forever.

The coronation approached, and Loki held out some last hope that Thor would finally take responsibility.

Instead, he led an unauthorised expedition/invasion to Jotunheim, and needed to be rescued by his father, who finally had enough. Loki tried to save Thor from his inevitable punishment (that was, honestly, a long time coming), but Odin, for once, would have none of it. He cast Thor aside, to Earth, and Loki followed, as he must.

Things only got worse, from there, with the creeping slowness of the most insidious poisons.

The Warriors Three followed Thor to Earth, and then came the battle in which Thor proved himself worthy, having finally, finally, finally learnt restraint and sacrifice. He'd been remade, the impurities smelted from him by dint of his stint on Midgard, but there was no time for celebration; Loki had other plans.

Harry at last discovered his ability to distance himself from his dreams when they brought him to The Bridge. Somewhere deep, deep down, set into his bones, was the knowledge that he didn't have the stamina, the fortitude, the strength, to witness this from Loki's point-of-view.

Somehow, just this once, he managed to detach himself from that identity, and watch the dream from without, governed and guided by his forewarning of impending disaster.

Of course, he wasn't completely detached from the princehe still had to suffer the same emotions, and the occasional thought also filtered through. In the scene that lay before himcurrently frozen, with the two princes (gods) fighting atop the Rainbow Bridge. Where was Heimdall? Nowhere to be seen.

Grace of Harry's bond with the younger prince, he knew that said prince was still distraught over recent revelations. For some reason, he seemed to believe that genocide (of the race of his birth, no less) was the solution. Prove your utter loyalty to your avowed home by ridding it of any other contenders? Wasn't that something he'd seen on one of the movies he'd snuck into the living room to watch while the Dursleys were out with Dudley on an extended vacation? (Mrs. Figg had slept right through, none the wiser, and he'd been sure to rewind the videocassette before removing it from the VCR, so there was no evidence.)

He'd never seen a self-imposed test of loyalty before, however.

The air was taut as a drawn bowstring when the scene finally began to unfold before Harry's eyes. He stood back and watched, knowing that he was helpless to do anythingfor good, or for ill.

Thor managed to damage the Rainbow Bridgedestroying his means of returning to the woman he loved, back on Midgard, to prevent Loki from annihilating a race he'd tried to slaughter himself only days before. Yep. That was character development for you, as his literature class would put it.

Harry was very glad not to feel the physical pain of blows from Thor's hammer, Mjölnir-but that did nothing to bar the emotional pain of the situation. And then came the moment that Harry might have sensed was coming all along, when Loki was flung off the bridge, and was falling...falling...

Only to be caught by his father, Odin, who had recovered from his bout of frostbite-cum-Odinsleep in time to save the younger prince.

So much might have been different, had Loki not been so full of a deep-seated bitterness, anger, shame, the shock of betrayal. Perhaps they might have discussed things, and Odin would explain why genocide was wrong, that he'd done the best he could as a father, but hadn't always succeeded as much as he would have liked, but we're still your family, and we love you, Loki. You don't have to be our child from birth to be our son. Along with any other clichés and heartwarming reconciliations you might want.

As it was, Loki dangled precariously into the abyss, one hand holding all his weight, one hand keeping him out of its depths.

Harry knew that it was calling him, a lure. His fate, all along, had been just this, and when Loki let go, fell, with a silent scream, into the void below, Harry just frowned, and sighed, and pretended he didn't feel the fear, despair, resignation, anger, that did not diminish as Loki fell.

The scene cut out, perforce, soon thereafter, because even had Harry remained as an incorporeal ghost upon the broken bridge, he nevertheless was limited to Loki's knowledge. He understood that. He was sure that, even had he been given free rein to wander the castle with furnishings intact, he would never have found the castle underbelly, for Loki had never found it.

And now, Loki was out of sight of those on the bridgeor rather, they were out of his sight, and the vision ended there.

Harry jerked awake, and although the night was only half-gone, sleep eluded him for the rest.


The next night was April Thirtieth. Never had he been as relieved to see the cabin before him. So weary that he could barely place one foot in front of the other, he braced himself against the door before slowly turning the handle, relying upon his weight, slight as it was, to push the door open. He staggered through, as if the injuries of the night before had, because he had foregone feeling them at the time, merely been held aside for him for distribution later (i.e.: tonight).

He was unaware of any obstacles in his path, had never before seen the rug he tripped on near the doorway (or had never noticed it). He crashed to the floor, but couldn't summon the energy to stand.

His mother came rushing over, rolling him onto his side, and then, with inhuman strength, lifting him to his feet. She guided him to the living room, and he followed her lead. She laid him down on the sofa, and sat on its edge, stroking the side of his face.

"Harry?" Lily asked. "What happened? Are you okay?"

No resonance. Harry groaned, and managed to sit up. He peered across at Lily, in her forest green dress and red cape. Some part of him desperately wanted to make a sarcastic comment about her choice of attire, but he hadn't the strength.

"The dreams..." he murmured. This was a dream, too, of course, but she knew that. He didn't have to explain that. But it occurred to him that, as a character in his dreams, she deserved to know that she had been being watched, as he had thought in that long ago time (surely it had been a few centuries, at least) before he'd gone to the library to research.

"What dreams, Harry?" she asked. He just gave her a blank, empty stare, that made her shiver at the unHarryness of it. A corpse should have that look, but not a living child.

"Mother," he said, the word chosen deliberately to invoke Frigga. He licked his lips, gathering whatever of courage he'd built up. "I told you before that I'd seen, I'd heard names and the like, in my dreams?"

She reached out to take his hand, with a regretful sigh. A half-glow, almost a halo, appeared about her. "I remember," she said, very quietly. "Then, are you willing to speak of them now, my son?"

He knew the tricks of invocation, apparently. He'd needed to speak with Loki's mother, after all, and he'd drawn her out.

"The dreams are the stuff of madness, and yet you would have me believe that they are real. Shall I tell you what I have witnessed, and see if it matches your own knowledge?"

As a mother, she understood the unspoken message: I need to talk to someone about this, and I have no one else to turn to. Her expression wilted, the corners of her mouth dragged the corners of her eyes down with them.

"If you wish to speak of it, I will listen," she promised. There were other matters of which she needed to speak with him—his godfather, the traitor Pettigrew, James's third friend, Remus Lupin, the Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore, Hogwarts.

She shoved them aside, for the second time. Her son's sanity was the more pressing concern, at the moment.

Harry took a deep breath, and began with the beginning. "It started the night after I turned ten..."


His next few dreams were oddly fragmented and vague. He suspected, at first, that they were merely the sign of a descent into madness, and dismissed their irregularity. He realised that they'd skipped ahead (missing time, they called it), but that wasn't even the oddest part of all this.

His dreams were fragmented, broken, and fluctuated in and out of focus, as a badly-tuned radio or television. Words, scenes, images, people, faded in and out of his awareness. There were discrepancies between what he meant to do, and what he did, even when the dream was "in focus".

Madness, then? No, something else. Whatever connected before to after. A being, he thought, but a forgotten being; as if his subconscious knew that he wasn't ready to remember, it had skipped those memories entirely.

And the broken, distorted, fun-house mirror memories were, likewise, a byproduct of someone else messing with his mind.

He didn't know why he was sure of this, but he was. It was the same as all of the other things that he didn't know how he did.

A scene (part of a scene) in Germany (how he knew that was as much a mystery as the rest of his dream-knowledge). Harry-Loki versus a man dressed in red, white, and blue. The "star-spangled man". The "man out of time".

"I'm not the one out of time," the man said. Then, the red-and-gold robot appeared. The red-and-gold flying robot. But Harry was serving as a distraction for...someone else, and he had more than enough power and experience even to fight both of them at once.

The battle wavered in-and-out of focus. Harry knew that he ended up surrendering himself as a prisoner, but the knowledge of why, the motivation, lay outside his reach. It couldn't be because he was outmatched. For all that these two individuals were tough, Loki was a god. Something else was in play.

Whispers of the unknown being, perhaps? Harry wasn't sure.

It didn't matter. The next partial scene starred him, and, of all unexpected individuals, Thor, his brother. It began with the ominous warning of thunder rolling overhead, with the man within the robot suit—a scraggly bearded, black-haired man—sitting across from him, and the walking American flag took a jab at him.

"What's the matter? Scared of a little lightning?"

"I'm not overly fond of what follows," Loki said—a striking difference to his old viewpoint

The moment of sharpest clarity—he might almost have broken the hold of whomever the unknown being was pulling his strings as if he were a puppet—came when Thor said.

"We thought you dead," and Harry replied, in a rather mocking tone,

"Did you mourn?"

As if he expected a "no" after that previous statement. Instead, of course, Thor said,

"We all did." The moment cast itself into sharp relief. Thor was no longer the unpredictable, reckless one, seeking out senseless conflict. Surely, he would recognise the strangeness, the hypocrisy, in his brother waging war on the entire world (apparently).

But he didn't seem to, and the scene faded back into a muted muddle soon thereafter.

That was the last scene of the night, and it lingered with Harry, more vibrant through its contrast with the other dreams. Waking-Harry (the real Harry, as Harry considered himself) had heard of the man in his dreams wearing the American flag—his name was "Captain America", and he was a renowned hero from World War II, who had fought the Nazis with abilities bolstered by a mysterious substance known as the "super serum". An entire day of class had been dedicated just to him.

They'd learnt in the next class that he'd been lost in the ice, his body never recovered. That was one point against the dreams, although the man could have survived the fifty years since his disappearance—who knew how such an experimental substance might have affected his biochemistry?

The man in the red-and-gold suit was called Iron Man, but his real name was Tony Stark, the Tony Stark, renowned genius and weapons manufacturer. That two such famous individuals also appeared in his dreams was definitely evidence against them, Harry decided, as he awoke at his normal time to prepare breakfast for the day before school.

The next night continued the strange tale of Captain America and Iron Man (and Thor), and their battle against Loki, joined by a redheaded woman (nothing similar to Lily; her hair was blood red and curly, to Lily's straight, fiery-hued hair), and her debrainwashed friend, a former minion (what?) of Loki's, who for some reason wielded a bow.

And a peaceful, amiable man, quiet and contemplative, who could turn into a giant green...thing.

Oh, and it took place in New York. Modern New York, which shouldn't have been surprising, given the robot suit, but somehow was, nonetheless, when Harry awoke.

Except it wasn't even modern New York, was it? Not with ads for Stark's clean energy project, and Stark Tower (powered by one of his arc reactors, it would sustain itself, electricity-wise). Stark was still in the weapons trade, as far as he knew. A quick glance at a newspaper on the following day confirmed it.

Did these dreams pretend to be visions of the future, then? Impossible. Ten points, at least, against their reality. Harry almost sagged with relief. They couldn't possibly be true, and he wasn't going mad. It was just the overactive imagination Vernon Dursley had done his utmost to stamp out of him. Perhaps he was justified, if this was the sort of madness it led to.

Following a battle with greenish humanoid aliens, the Avengers cornered him in Stark Tower, and the Hulk made short work of him, by flinging him into the floor, and then added insult to injury by saying, "Puny god," (a direct response to Loki's calling that he was "a god, you pathetic creature," which made his actions perhaps more forgivable, if no less painful).

Staring down the weapons of all the Avengers, wondering with sudden clarity of mind just what the hell he'd been doing attacking New York in the first place, Loki surrendered, for real, this time, and the dream ended with him being returned to Asgard alongside the relic known as the Tesseract.

The dreams ended there. Not just for that night, either. They were no longer to reliably haunt his nocturnal hours ever again. Occasionally, one would assail himnot always at night, either—in the future, but it was usually prompted by something. Triggered. When he slept the next night, it was to the old, boring dreams, of singing rhododendrons, cats who turned into women, and Dudley playing rugby with an ostrich and a llama among his teammates.

Harry didn't know whether or not to be disappointed. What happened next? What had become of Loki?

They're just dreams, he told himself firmly. They aren't real, so it doesn't matter. But somehow, he had a hard time believing that, himself.

And he missed them, whether he admitted it or not. Thor, and Frigga, and Odin. Even the Warriors Three, and the surprisingly reasonable Lady Sif. He wanted them to be real. It was only the narrative he wished to change. His role. But why dwell on what couldn't be helped? He had a life to be living, after all.

Even if he seemed to be spending most of it in his cupboard, of late.

Whenever he went to the library, his inevitable sentence was over a week without food, spent in his cupboard, followed by a further week of close supervision, spent performing his chores. The incident with the snake in the zoo earned him his longest ever punishment of a month in his cupboard, with the usual ten days without food, followed by a more severe ten days on short commons.

Harry wondered how they could possibly get away with this. But the librarians, at least, believed him when he finally confessed the truth. They promised him that something would be done... but nothing was. And when he returned to the library in mid-May, neither of the librarians were to be found. When he asked, he was told that they had decided—each independently—to move for better prospects to London. Both of them. Independently. After promising to help him.

It sounded like something from a sci-fi movie. One of the ones he'd once managed to sneak in watching whilst the Dursleys were out. He could count the number of moviesnot educational videos, but movies—he had seen on his fingers, with digits to spare. But this sure sounded like the plot of one of them. He wondered if they'd been "disposed of", and shuddered, reconsidering all the others he had asked for help, and what might truly have become of them.

Perhaps it was better if he fended for himself. He didn't want anyone to die, trying to help him. The Dursleys had yet to push him to starvation, after all. He'd emerged from his cupboard, shaking and weak, but alive.

Perhaps the same could not be said of those to whom he'd turned for help.

His penultimate visit to the library (there was no point in going, he decided, with the helpful, knowledgeable librarians gone), was swift followed by Dudley's nightmare birthday. He'd only just begun to recover his strength, when a talking snake, and a disappearing glass barricade, sentenced him to an even greater stay in his cupboard.

He was surprised at his own stamina, that he could still stumble out of his cupboard, frail and drawn. It felt almost...familiar.

As if he'd been through something even more severe...or Loki had.

He pushed that explanation aside with the greatest violence his preoccupied mind could muster.

But it was June, now, and the summer holidays had begun, and he had something to look forward to: the knowledge that, come September, he would be going to the local public school, Stonewall High, and would at last be free of Dudley, who had been accepted to Uncle Vernon's old school of Smeltings.

The outfit was ludicrous, but the walking stick was an additional weapon to Dudley's arsenal, one with greater reach than what Dudley usually used. He spent the next few days with no option but to do his best dodging Dudley's cane. On the one hand, he had Loki's training as guidance. On the other, the world was still spinning and fading in and out due to his recent stint in the cupboard. His mind was more than a bit foggy.

But he persevered, and just kept working, wondering as he did, quite pointlessly, how the Dursleys had managed to elude notice when he'd missed half of the second semester, including the last month of term. It seemed impossible. But it had happened, which meant that it wasn't.

His mind was still muddled when the letter addressed to him came, but he had the presence of mind, despite it all, to slip it under his baggy hand-me-down shirt, belting Dudley's old jeans carefully over the envelope, and hoping that it wasn't anything too sensitive to creasing or breakage. It was just an envelope, a letter, but it was a letter to him, and he had no experience with the post. The letter was special, memorable...almost sacred.

He hid it successfully from the Dursleys, and then waited for them to go to bed, and to be locked into the cupboard for the night, before opening the letter, and reading by the light of his magic.

A school for "Witchcraft and Wizardry", called "Hogwarts"? Who names a school that? But the magic part of it...well, he knew that magic had to be real. Did Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon know? Had they known all along? Had that been what they'd been trying to stamp out of him?

A chance to go to a boarding school, far removed from the Dursleys...it was a dream come true. And yet...

We await your owl by no later than July Thirty-First. That was what the letter read. He had to reply, clearly, by no later than (midnight of?) his birthday. But...there was one problem. He had no means of contacting them. Either "owl" referred to the bird—likely, as it was lowercase—or it was a special, wizard way of contacting people. Either way, he had no chance of obeying the instructions.

He set the letter aside, hidden under his threadbare mattress, and pondered what to do. He didn't even sleep, that night.

Letters continued to come, when he failed to respond. They came one at a time, at first, and then in an ever-mounting torrent, as if the floodgates of the post had burst open, and a tsunami of letters poured out, all of them identical, with that familiar green ink, and the disturbingly specific address.

The Dursleys tried everything they could think of to stop the letters—boarding up all entrances and exits (which was ridiculous; eventually they'd have to open them up, for Vernon to go to work, or to get groceries, or else they'd starve to death); giving him Dudley's second bedroom; and then leaving the house, driving across the country until they reached the sea, and rowing out to a small, dilapidated shack on the middle of a desolate island.

That was where Hagrid found him, of course, and then everything was alright. Finally, he had answers to some of his questions. And he at last knew what his mother had meant by "James's world". The wizarding world. Hogwarts. Where, perhaps, his true destiny awaited, and his life would truly begin.