The Eye of the Phoenix

by GrandSpaceWizard

Three years after the Battle of Hogwarts, a foolish Dark Wizard attempted to summon the power of an extradimensional entity without understanding the consequences, and the entire world paid the price. Desperate to save himself and his godson, Harry makes a bargain with a being of incredible power and escapes to another Earth, one with a fighting chance. Will he save it, or doom it?

7. 7: Unstoppable Rage

I do not own any of the source material for this story. Reviews and constructive criticism are greatly appreciated.

...

Greenwich Village, NYC, New York, United States, July of 2003

A tall young man strode down a New York sidewalk, alone save for the little boy who clutched his hand, jabbering merrily to his indulgent smile. With an athletic yet lean body and features that struck a perfect balance between roguish and aristocratic, the man was undeniably handsome, but any semblance of dignity or grace was ruined by his determination to keep pace with his comparatively tiny companion, as he was forced to shorten his strides to half their usual length or risk leaving the child behind. The child didn't seem to notice. Indeed, he behaved as if his guardian was walking too slowly and was trying to urge him to go faster. They would have made an almost comically adorable sight had anyone been paying them any attention.

The odd thing was that every person they passed didn't seem to notice their presence. Everyone who glimpsed them at a distance a them so completely one might have thought they were invisible, and no one who passed within arm's reach ever paid the pair more attention than was required to avoid a collision. Stranger still, no one seemed even remotely aware of the old-fashioned mansion that was their destination, for all that its elaborate stonework and ornate windows looked distinctly out of place in cosmopolitan Manhattan. People's gazes slid over it, as if it were no more interesting than the tree leaves soaking up the strong summer sunshine.

Harry Potter didn't bother knocking on the doors to the New York Sanctum. They swung open for him at his approach, and he led a completely unfazed Teddy over the threshold. The little boy glanced around as the doors shut behind them, and he broke into a delighted grin as he spotted someone approaching from the staircase directly opposite him. "Hi, uncle Mordo!" he all but yelled, streaking forward.

Harry's face shifted into a small, knowing smile. Karl Mordo was one of the most rigid and uncompromising men he had ever met, with a troubled past and, as a result, rather black and white views on how magic should be used. Despite that, the man had a giant soft spot for children and all but melted when he spent time with Teddy. That was the chief reason Harry trusted the man to look after him on occasions such as this. The other reason was altogether more pragmatic; Mordo was, as the Ancient One's second, one of the most powerful and skilled Masters of the Mystic Arts alive, easily the equal of any one of the Sanctum Masters, which meant that he was more than capable of shredding anything that so much as contemplated an attempt on Teddy's life.

"Hello, little one," Mordo said affectionately, ruffling Teddy's hair as he returned the boy's hug. He straightened, putting a hand on the five-year-old's shoulder as Harry approached. They exchanged a brief, one-armed embrace. "You're early," Mordo said, his tone slightly questioning.

Harry raised an eyebrow. "Any reason I shouldn't be?"

Mordo shrugged as they turned and headed up the stairs to the inner chambers of the sanctum. "I suppose not. Eager to get it over with?"

"Something like that."

Mordo considered it, then said "The calm before the storm is always worse than the storm itself. Is that it?"

"Exactly." Harry glanced around. "Where is Drumm?"

"At Kamar Taj."

The trio made their way through the halls of the Sanctum to a set of double doors, twice as tall as Harry and elegantly constructed of a strange black material that was neither wood nor metal nor stone. The symbol of the New York Sanctum was emblazoned across the center. Harry stopped Teddy from approaching and knelt next to him, but Mordo moved ahead, deliberately giving them some privacy. For all that he'd been Teddy's most frequent caregiver when Harry was on missions, he wasn't an interdimensional refugee. Each was all the other had from back home, and while Teddy was still too young to understand what that meant, Harry had developed a habit of saying his goodbyes as though each could be his last. Mordo understood this and dared not intrude, his status as an adopted uncle notwithstanding.

"Promise me you won't give your uncle Mordo too much trouble," Harry said, gripping Teddy's shoulders gently.

Teddy smiled mischievously. "I promise. Can we go on a vacation when you come back?"

"We could. Where do you want to go?"

"Scotland!"

Harry blinked in genuine surprise. "Why Scotland? I thought you wanted to do Disney World."

Teddy shook his head firmly. "You went to school in Scotland, didn't you? And rides at Disney World have age res - res."

"Age restrictions?" Harry offered.

"Yeah, age restrictions. I don't wanna go there until I'm old enough to do all the rides."

Harry smiled, remembering with some amusement then-eight year old Dudley's tantrum when he was prohibited from boarding a carnival ride on account of his lack of height and Vernon's impudent rage when Petunia had refused to help him bully the attendant into letting the boy on anyway. "That's very forward thinking of you, Teddy. But you don't want to grow up too fast, yeah? Trust me, adulthood sucks."

Teddy frowned pensively, but before he could speak to it Harry interrupted his train of thought by ruffling his hair affectionately. He was a remarkable child; highly intelligent, curious, mature for his age, well-spoken, and astonishingly perceptive for a five-year-old. Harry had no doubt that Teddy was going to do incredible things when he grew up, but a part of him selfishly wanted Teddy to stay young and carefree for as long as possible.

Abruptly, Teddy pulled him into a hug. Harry wrapped his arms fully around the child as the latter buried his face in his shoulder. "Be safe, Dad," he said in a muffled voice.

A fist seemed to clench around Harry's heart, and he tightened his embrace ever so slightly, blinking back sudden tears. On the one hand, the knowledge that Teddy saw him as his true father made him feel happier than he had been in years, as though every terrible thing he'd seen and done had been worth it just to hear those words. On the other hand, graduating from godfather to father brought a hammer blow of grief, as though the truth of Remus and Tonks's deaths had until that moment been nothing more than a horrible rumor being spread by gossip mongers that was now being confirmed by the one person who would never say it if it wasn't true. The phoenix inside him sang a low, keening note of lament, and Harry forced himself back to the present.

"I'll be fine, Ted, I promise."

Teddy gave a shallow nod into his shoulder before leaning away and saying the words before he could. "Love you, Dad."

Harry kissed the top of his godson - no his son's - forehead. "Love you too, Ted."

Then he was gently disentangling himself and getting to his feet. He forced his legs to carry him forward, past an approaching Mordo, and looked back for only a moment before opening the large doors with a flick of his finger. The room beyond was distorted by the presence of a faint, golden haze that hung across the threshold like a veil. The last thing he saw of the New York Sanctum was Mordo guiding a forlorn Teddy away from the doors.

The portal rippled in Harry's wake, and he felt as if he were passing through a paper-thin curtain of water. A moment later he found himself standing in a darkened stone chamber with a high, domed ceiling decorated in dark navy blues and dotted with glittering white dots, forming a titillating replica of the night sky.

At the center of the room rose a stone plinth, the Eye of Agamotto perched in a metal cradle at the top. Floating directly above the plinth and its deceptively innocent-looking contents was the true centerpiece of the chamber: a great stone orb large enough to engulf a man, fashioned into an exact replica of the Earth, dotted with miniscule lights, protrusions, and indentations representing cities, rivers, forests, mountain ranges, and other details. Sparsely scattered across the giant globe were the occasional red dots, indicating trouble spots that the sorcerers would have to deal with. Even as he watched, two of the red dots flared and vanished.

The chamber wasn't empty. The three Sanctum Masters, Drumm, Rama, and Minoru, stood in front of the doors to each of the Sanctums under their watch, while the Ancient One herself stood before an archway that led into the Kamar Taj library. The Sanctum Masters were all staring at the Ancient One with varying degrees of trepidation on their faces, as though she had told them she was planning to summon a demon from Mephisto's realm for a cup of tea. Seeing him, the Ancient One, who was dressed in black robes today, immediately dismissed her audience with a wordless gesture of her head.

Harry frowned as he stepped aside to let Daniel Drumm pass. The old sorceress was up to something, and the other Masters didn't like it. That wasn't surprising. Barely a day went by when someone didn't question the Ancient One's strange choices, never mind how successful she had been in defending the world for the last seven centuries. Then again, given her reputation and the things she learned from her visions when she used the Eye of Agamotto, it was no wonder. As the Sorcerer Supreme and the wielder of the Time Stone, the Ancient One measured the consequences of her actions not in years but in lifetimes and made strategic moves so complex that her peers wouldn't understand what she was up to or what her ultimate goal was until long after the fact. She played cosmic chess with eldritch abominations, demons, and dark gods for a living, and she could not afford to become predictable.

The Sanctum doors closed behind the retreating Masters with a softness that belied their great size and weight, and Harry descended the small step down into the chamber. The Ancient One was gazing past him, her eyes unfocused, as if her thoughts had taken her somewhere far away. He didn't bother trying to get her attention. Her ruminations and the actions that sprung from them had global or even galactic consequences, and if she deemed her current train of thought more important than speaking to him, then it almost certainly was. She would speak to him when she was ready; no sooner, no later. Fortunately, the Ancient One didn't keep him waiting for long, shaking her head like a wet dog.

"How have you been?" she asked.

As always, Harry appreciated her politeness and her sincerity. He hadn't seen her in person in over three months, and it would have been rather off putting to get down to business right off the bat. "I've been alright. The shop is scheduled to open in two weeks, and Teddy's managed to convince all his friends to drag their parents to the grand opening."

The Ancient One quirked a smile that was somehow interrogative. "You still haven't told me what sort of shop it is. The suspense is killing me."

Harry almost rolled his eyes at the tiny inside joke. Ever since the revelation that her days were numbered, the Ancient One had taken to jesting about her own impending demise when Harry was present. Many of the sorcerers had assumed this meant she'd foreseen that Harry would save her life and extend her reign as Sorcerer Supreme by another few centuries, and it had taken a great deal of self-control on his part to refrain from correcting them. "Are you really telling me that you haven't caught it in a vision?"

The Ancient One shrugged. "Maybe I have and simply didn't recognize it." She tilted her head in apparent contemplation. "Or perhaps I'm simply pulling your leg by pretending not to know so that you won't have to lie to Teddy and he can claim it as a surprise when I stop by."

Harry did roll his eyes then. He had a suspicion that was exactly what she was doing, but he knew better than to think she would ever confirm or deny it. "Right, that's enough of me trying to figure out how much you actually know. Your message was a bit urgent."

The Ancient One nodded and gestured at the Orb of Agamotto floating above. As Harry watched, she turned a series of concealed dials built into the altar underneath, her eyes fixed on a peculiar green dot on the shores of a lake in eastern Canada that came into view as the stone globe rotated in response. Harry had on a few occasions used the Orb himself and knew immediately that something was different. While green dots were not in themselves unusual, this one seemed to pulse on and off like an object being pinged by radar. That was most definitely not normal. "What is that?" he asked, because he could sense he was meant to.

The Ancient One looked rather grim. "That is what, or rather who, you need to track down. How familiar are you with the Culver University incident?"

Harry took a moment to gather his thoughts. Just under two months earlier, several news outlets had reported a major accident occurring in the labs at Culver University in Willowdale, Virginia. Initial reports had described a "green sasquatch" that was supposedly created by a radiation experiment gone awry before going on a destructive rampage and vanishing. Almost immediately, however, all reports of a monster being responsible for considerable damage done to the university's largest research lab and surrounding areas were retracted. The new story held that the damage was in fact caused by a series of chemical explosions, complete with fumes that caused hallucinations in those who inhaled them. Almost immediately Harry had suspected a government cover up, a sentiment shared by virtually everyone who commented on the story, but he'd decided to refrain from investigating or interfering. The entire debacle was most certainly non-magical in nature, and he was following the Ancient One's advice to avoid interfering in mundane affairs until it became absolutely necessary. Clearly, this incident was more significant than he'd realized if she was going back on that advice now.

When Harry recounted all of this, the Ancient One glanced at the Eye of Agamotto. "Well, you're right that it's a non-magical issue," she said, "and while it doesn't affect us now, this green giant is going to play a major role in events that determine the fate of the world in the next few years. That was inevitable even before your arrival."

"So, this is one of those things that was going to happen anyway that I accelerated?" Harry asked.

"Yes, but now we have an opportunity to communicate with him we wouldn't have had in the timelines where you weren't present. Or rather, we have you to do the communication for us."

Harry frowned. "Why me, specifically?"

The Ancient One smiled knowingly. "Because you and he have something in common."

If she had said that before he'd bonded with the Phoenix Force and been forced to master his emotions, Harry would have gaped at her. Instead he simply blinked and said "What."

"The Culver University accident somehow turned this man," the Ancient One conjured a one-quarter life size image of an unassuming, mild-featured man with dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and the pale skin tone of someone who didn't get enough sunlight, "into this creature." The man's image was replaced by that of a large, green-skinned humanoid that reminded Harry of a forest troll, with gigantic, unnaturally developed muscles, greenish black hair, and luminous green eyes. A pair of severely stretched pants barely preserved his decency, and his face was set in an expression of primal fury. The creature could not have looked more different from the almost wispy-looking scientist, and not for the first time Harry wondered whether the universe had its own strange, slightly twisted sense of humor.

"Surely he doesn't look like that all the time," he said. "He would have been all over the news wherever he went."

The Ancient One nodded. "It's not permanent in the sense that he is still usually his regular human self. But if he gets angry or distraught, he transforms into a beast of truly tremendous strength and childlike intelligence, fueled almost entirely by primal rage. You can imagine how dangerous he is when that happens."

"What's his name?"

"Dr. Robert Bruce Banner, though he prefers to go by Bruce or Dr. Banner. He thinks himself a monster now. Part of his ongoing struggle will be learning to reconcile with and control his alter ego. He has the potential to be a force for great good."

"He transforms when he gets angry…" Harry muttered. "So, he has to learn emotional control techniques. Like how I have to meditate to control the Phoenix?"

"Precisely."

"You want me to play meditation instructor to a man who'll turn into the jolly green giant's evil twin the second he loses his temper?"

"Essentially, yes. You have to admit, your situations are quite similar. The biggest difference is that it takes a lot more to make you lose control than it would to draw out the Hulk, but the Hulk, while exceptionally dangerous in his own right, pales in comparison to a Dark Phoenix."

"The Hulk?" Harry interjected mildly.

The Ancient One chuckled. "It's what the media will most likely end up calling him. A bit silly, perhaps, but appropriate."

Studying the illusory image of the creature, Harry had to agree. "Anything special I need to know before I set out?"

The Ancient One looked thoughtful. "Dr. Banner hates his alter ego. His mental health will deteriorate the more he struggles with it, but he is a shy, kind man and a scientist at heart. Your Phoenix powers are still developing, and in your current state you just barely surpass him, so he'll be a formidable opponent if it comes to that. If you can knock him unconscious, he'll revert back into Banner, but that is exceptionally difficult. The more you fight back the more frustrated he gets, and the angrier he gets, the stronger he becomes. The Hulk is virtually immune to all forms of conventional attack, and only certain forms of magic will affect him. Telepathic attacks are… inadvisable, but if successfully executed they are highly effective. You have a special advantage there, but it's a double-edged sword. If his anger bleeds into your mind…"

Harry nodded sharply, in full understanding of the risk she implied. "I don't think I'm taking that route."

"You won't cause him enough stress to induce a transformation, but he already has enemies," the Ancient One warned, "and they are as reckless as they are ruthless."

"Wonderful," Harry grumbled. "I have to negotiate with a were-troll who will transform the instant a bunch of faceless, trigger happy government soldiers show up to cart him off. Anything else?"

"No, I don't think so." The Ancient One sounded highly amused. "You can use the Orb to track him down. Good luck."

Harry sighed. "This is going to be so much fun."

The Ancient One cackled.

Michipicoten Park, Ontario, near the Canadian shore of Lake Superior, July of 2003

Bruce Banner was having a very bad day. He had hitch hiked along the road for days, but his most recent ride had turned out to belong to a serial killer who feigned engine trouble as an excuse to strand him in the middle of nowhere and tried to stab him, only to get the Other Guy's fist to the face for his trouble. Bruce had ended up reverting several miles north.

Now he was alone, wearing nothing but tattered pants that barely preserved his decency, walking barefoot along a Canadian interprovincial highway. He was a fugitive from his own country, responsible for several deaths courtesy of the Other Guy, and the military wanted to use him as a weapon of mass destruction. He was covered in itching welts from insect bites, he was sweating bullets, thirsty, tired, and a headache was building in his forehead.

Trees covered in deep green leaves grew on either side of the road, which reminded Bruce uncomfortably of his violent alter ego. The day was bright and clear, the sky cloudless. Birds chirped to one another, puncturing the silence. As his aching feet carried him past a particularly tall pine tree, the trees to his left fell away to reveal the glittering waters of a glacier-carved lake. It obviously wasn't one of the Great Lakes, for he could see the trees on the other shore quite well.

Bruce all but stumbled towards it and collapsed to his knees, thrusting his hands into the cool water, and splashing his face. His headache faltered somewhat, and his thoughts cleared. As Bruce shook his head and rubbed water out of his eyes, he heard a faint pop behind him and bit back a groan of frustration. What now? he thought. Very slowly he straightened from his crouch, turned around, and felt his jaw drop. A figure was standing in the middle of the road ten feet from him, dressed in clothes unlike anything Bruce had ever seen.

The figure was about six feet tall, well proportioned, and, judging from the broad shoulders and narrow waist, male. Bruce couldn't be completely certain, though, because the figure's face was concealed by the unnaturally long shadow created by the cowl of his outfit, which looked like something straight out of a renaissance festival. Made from dark green cloth, it consisted of a long sleeve tunic, trousers, soft black boots, and a cloak that fell to the ankles. Its shirt and black leather belt were decorated with gold accents, and a gold pendant in the shape of a long-tailed bird with its wings stretched to either side hung from a chain around its neck.

"Sorry if I startled you, Dr. Banner," the figure said. It had a masculine voice. A man, then. "I considered leaving a trail of clues for you to follow, but in your current state I doubt you'd appreciate any sort of deception or mystery, no matter how benign. You look like you're having a really bad day."

Bruce scowled. "Gee, what gave it away? The insect bites, the ripped pants, or the lack of shoes? And what's it to you? Who are you?" Bruce realized he was getting angry. He could hear the Other Guy stirring in the back of his head, and he forced himself to calm down. Whoever this weirdo was, he hadn't actually done anything to him yet, and the idea of being responsible for another death today, no matter the reason, made Bruce feel sick to his stomach.

The cloaked stranger waited until it was clear Bruce wasn't going to say anything else before he responded. "What I am is… complicated. And knowing who I am can be dangerous for you, hence the getup."

Bruce snorted derisively. "I didn't get seven PhDs by being stupid. You're here because of the Other Guy. I'm already in plenty of danger right now, never mind knowing your secret identity. If you're some hotshot secret agent who thinks they can get the drop on me, think again. I'm sure you saw what happened to the last person who tried."

"You're not the only one around here who gets dangerous when they're angry, Dr. Banner," the cloaked man said quietly.

To Bruce, the words sounded like an iceberg; they gave away just enough to be a warning, but their true importance was far deeper and more complex than he could possibly imagine. "Alright," he said cautiously, "let's say I believe you. Why are you here? What do you want from me?"

The stranger moved, sat down by the edge of the lake, and motioned for Bruce to join him. After a moment Bruce did so, sighing. The stranger did nothing for a long moment. Then, very slowly, he reached up with both hands and removed his cowl. Bruce felt himself relax, and he took a moment to study the man's expressionless face. He was young, probably no more than twenty, with light skin, messy black hair that stuck up in all directions, and emerald green eyes. On his forehead, just above his right eyebrow, the stranger's skin was marred by an odd scar that resembled a lightning bolt. The scar was pure white and very thin, which suggested the injury was incredibly old. It was also too neatly shaped to be a battle wound, which in turn likely meant that someone very skilled had carved it deliberately into the man's skin, and Bruce wondered what sort of sick bastard would do that to a child. "I came here because I understand in part what you're going through, and I want to help you," the stranger said, after a moment.

Bruce knit his eyebrows. With the man's face visible, it was as if a veil had been lifted from Bruce's mind and he could detect a pronounced British accent that hadn't been there before. "You want to help me, or did somebody send you to help me?"

The stranger's lip twitched. "A bit of both, I think. When I see a situation deteriorate, I can't stop myself from jumping in and doing whatever I can to help. My friend called it my saving people thing. Even if I hadn't been told about your situation and instructed to offer you help, I would have found out on my own and done it myself at some point."

"Someone knew to send you to me? How? The only sign of my presence is a smashed car a few miles back, and this is the Canadian wilderness. No one should be able to find it for a long while."

"If you accept the offer, I'll show you," The stranger said. His voice was soft and barely inflected, as though there was almost no emotion behind his words. Bruce recalled the man's warning that he was dangerous when he got angry, and he wondered how horrible it would have to be that the man spoke so tonelessly. Would it be bad enough to give the Other Guy a run for his money? Bruce realized he wasn't sure, and that frightened him more than he'd expected.

Bruce hated the Other Guy, but he had to admit he had started to become accustomed to the feeling of physical invincibility that it provided. In some sense he had found twisted comfort in the fact that nothing out there could hurt him anymore, at least not physically. His fear was of the source of that invincibility and what it could do if it were unleashed. He really was a monster.

"I need some assurance that you aren't pulling my leg," Bruce said. "How about this. Be honest with me and I'll give you a chance. If you don't want to tell me something just say it, and don't dance around the truth. Easy enough?"

The stranger nodded. "Of course." His blank face became thoughtful, and he leaned back, bracing himself against the ground with his hands. "I was… different from regular people ever since the day I was born. I inherited certain abilities from my parents, and I spent many years learning to master them. My powers could be dangerous, but they were neither good nor bad, and with a bit of training they became downright convenient to have. They were a blessing, really." He reached up with one hand and held it out in front of him. A few leaves tore themselves free from the branches of the nearest tree and whirled around above his open palm, forming patterns that were far too intricate and synchronized to be natural, spinning and flipping and dancing until at last they organized themselves into a v formation and soared away like a flock of birds.

Bruce felt his eyes widen. Telekinesis? Was this man responsible for saving that doomed passenger jet in Nepal two years ago? As the thought crossed Bruce's mind, he realized that the stranger wasn't actually sitting on the ground. Instead, he sat in midair an inch or two above the pebbled shore of the lake, legs crossed like a child, his cloak fluttering softly around him.

"When I was twenty, something very bad happened," the cloaked man went on. "I was no stranger to loss, never have been, but that day stands out as probably the worst of my life. In less than a minute everyone I knew or cared about was dead save for one, and the only reason the two of us survived was because of something that fundamentally changed the nature of my powers. We barely escaped with our lives and our sanity, but everything was different after that day. My powers became orders of magnitude stronger than before. I can do things now that I shouldn't be able to do for another ten years, or do things that should be impossible altogether, even for others like me, and I can exert those abilities on a scale that my peers could only dream of. But there's a cost.

"My powers are extremely volatile now. They've taken on a life of their own, and they don't react well to strong emotions. The more I feel, the more energy I unleash. And the more energy I release that way, the stronger the emotion gets. It's a vicious cycle of power and feelings that feed on each other, and if I let myself get caught up in it I could transform into a monster that makes your big green alter ego look like a four year old throwing a tantrum in comparison."

Bruce considered the words, weighed them against the demonstration with the leaves and the passenger jet incident, and found himself nodding in agreement. "Has that ever happened? "he asked carefully. "Have you ever lost control?"

The stranger shook his head. "I've come close, dangerously close, but no. Trust me, if I lost control, you'd know it no matter how far away you are, and we'd all be lucky if whatever country I'm in at the time is the only one wiped off the map before I'm put down. Assuming that I'm stopped before I get too powerful to be put down, of course." The green-eyed stranger looked directly at Bruce, and his eyes seemed to glow. "That's the biggest difference between our situations, you know. If you lose control, you can still change back, and you would leave survivors. In the same position, I can do neither."

Bruce felt a chill creep its way up his back, reminiscent of the feelings of awe and terror he'd gotten when he saw a volcano erupt, and he shivered. "How do you manage it?"

"I have a... teacher. She's the one that sent me to you. If anyone can help you, she can." The man spoke with utter conviction. As Bruce considered it, he found himself doing some quick mental math. The man's powers had changed two years ago…

"The incident that changed you, does it have anything to do with the Event?"

The stranger blinked. "You could say that. The Event, as you call it, was a side effect."

Bruce was silent for several minutes. The man had told his story as honestly as he could without revealing any personal details, and Bruce could see the similarities between their situations. There were several glaring differences, of course, but the spark of kinship had been lit, and he could not quench it. So, he opened his mouth and began to speak.

"I wasn't born with special abilities, except for my big brain. I specialize in nuclear physics, but I still got myself seven PhDs because I thought, well, why not? The more you know, and all that. Looking back, I think I let my smarts make me arrogant. When a decorated general in the US army approached me about creating a serum that would give humans resistance to diseases and immunity to radiation poisoning, I thought sure, bring it on. I never stopped to think, never questioned that there was something deeper, that something less altruistic was going on behind the scenes. General Ross didn't approach me because he wanted to create some kind of radiation vaccine. He was hoping to replicate the super soldier serum that created Captain America."

Bruce laughed mirthlessly, ignoring his companion's raised eyebrows. "I never would have agreed to work for him if I knew the truth," he went on. "I've read the reports of how far people were willing to go to recreate that damned serum, and I swore to never go down that road. But there I was, duped into it by my own arrogance. Ross went to me because he was convinced that I could replicate that magic combination of chemicals and radiation, and I was so caught up in the discoveries I was making that I got carried away. I figured that gamma radiation was the key, and I prepared a primer formula based on the theory. Everything was almost ready for the final stages of testing. Then I got a memo from Ross saying that funding for the project had run dry, and since I couldn't produce any concrete results, he wasn't going to do anything about it.

"I got mad. More than a year of hard work getting tossed down the drain without so much as a by your leave by the very man who'd gotten me into it. I wanted to prove him wrong. More than that, though, I wanted to impress him. So, I subjected myself to the procedure. Took the primer and tried to test it with a modified x-ray machine. Something went wrong, I don't know what, and next thing I knew I was being drenched in enough gamma rays to make a nuclear bomb look like a day at the beach. And the Other Guy was born. He tore up the university and hurt more people than I can remember, including my sort-of-girlfriend, and Ross loved it. He told me everything, and then he informed me that I was going to be the United States' newest weapon of mass destruction. I took exception to that and, well, you seem to know the rest." Bruce realized he had tears in his eyes, and he put his head in his hands.

The two men sat in silence after that, each digesting what the other had said.

"Harry," the cloaked man said.

Bruce looked up. "What?"

"That's my name. Harry-" the words were cut off by the sounds of an approaching car engine that made them both jump. Bruce looked down the road and felt his blood run cold.

A group of camouflage patterned all-terrain vehicles was approaching at speeds that would give a police officer heart palpitations, machine guns mounted on top and piloted by men in dark green and brown uniforms.

Ross had found him. Found both of them.

…

Harry was on his feet and had his face covered by the cowl of his cloak almost before he knew it. The cowl and the shadow it cast were both illusions and utterly insubstantial, ensuring that they hid his identity without obstructing his sight. Reaching out with senses he hadn't had before merging with the Phoenix he felt the approach of two dozen vehicles on the ground, four choppers a kilometer out, and more than a hundred soldiers, all of them men.

One of the presences in the helicopters stirred something up inside him. It was a surge of instant, almost primal dislike. With a tingle of alarm, he realized the distaste came not from him, but from the Phoenix itself.

That was a first.

As a general rule Harry avoided peeking into other people's minds unless it was absolutely necessary to his or Teddy's health and safety, but in a potentially dangerous situation involving shady soldiers and a twitchy scientist who was liable to tear everyone present limb from limb if pressed, all bets were off. What he found made him clench his fist until his knuckles whitened.

The Phoenix had every reason to feel disdainful of Brigadier General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross.

The man's thoughts reminded Harry simultaneously of Rufus Scrimgeour and John Dawlish; an old military man hardened and honed by the things he had seen in the line of duty, but in all of the wrong ways. Where war had taught Harry the value of life and given him a greater appreciation for such things as loyalty, love, trust, and courage, Ross had emerged from his campaigns overseas with a superiority complex that led him to believe he was much smarter than he actually was, an almost fanatical devotion to upholding the military might of the United States no matter the cost, a disregard for the opinions of those who disagreed with him, an obsession with superhumans, and a subconscious craving for power and personal glory that had long since overridden any moral or ethical considerations.

Ross was a political time bomb. Worse, he had the connections to get away with just about anything, up to and including the wide-ranging collateral damage he was all too willing to cause in his pursuit of Dr. Banner.

Harry widened his mental probe out into a net, scanning every mind in the vicinity. He had to ascertain the mental states of Ross's soldiers and determine whether or not there were civilians nearby. He widened his mental net until it was so large that no normal Legilimens would have been able to replicate it, but when he brushed the thoughts of Dr. Banner he recoiled.

Banner's mind was awash in conflict. On the surface the good doctor struggled to maintain calm equilibrium, but deep down lay an emerald green storm of anger and fear that gnawed doggedly at the man's self-control. The tempest seemed to have a voice of its own, a voice that was shouting and clawing at the remainder of Banner's consciousness, yearning to rise from the depths and assume control. It wanted to fight, to flee, to escape, to do so many things, and it couldn't decide which course of action to take because its host was forcing it to remain trapped and restricted. Banner's mind was already a battlefield, and Harry reflexively withdrew his telepathic probes, unwilling to bring the Phoenix into prolonged contact with the rising storm of negative emotion. Even so, his head pounded with the aftershocks of touching that maelstrom, and he wondered how Banner was still sane. Harry knew he could quickly overpower the mental storm if he was standing in front of the man and concentrating with all his might on that one task, but attempting it in this situation bordered on suicidal.

The choppers came to hover fifty feet above, mimicking the semicircular formation of the armored Humvees on the ground. Wary of trigger-happy soldiers who might open fire against orders, Harry set up a shield in front of Banner that would block anything short of a bunker buster missile.

"Get on the ground and put your hands on your heads, now, or you will be fired upon!" the megaphone amplified voice of Thaddeus Ross rang out. "You are under arrest for acts of sedition against the United States of America. You have the right to-"

"Oh, shut up!" Harry snapped, a nonverbal Sonorus charm amplifying his voice to such a volume he drowned out the megaphone and made several of those nearest him, including Bruce, wince and cover their ears. It occurred to him that Bruce was barely decent in his torn and stretched pants, but Harry did not dare conjure new clothes for him where Ross could see him. He was already putting a target on his back with his telekinetic abilities, and he wanted to keep the existence of his various other powers a secret for as long as possible. At the same time, Harry felt certain that he'd forgotten something important, but what? "This is Canada, as you very well know," he continued, setting aside his concern. "You Americans have no right to arrest anyone here, and even if you did, why are you arresting me? What have I done to you? I'm a complete unknown in this situation, and you're not even giving me a chance to so much as back away from the suspect. What if I was a diplomat?"

Ross was so shocked at this outburst that it took him a moment to close his mouth. "Don't bother with the slippery lawyer talk, freak, you'll just embarrass yourself with your own ignorance," he shot back at last. "This is the real world, not some safe little bubble of pen pushers and fancy word play. You will be placed under arrest along with your friend Banner and interrogated about why you're consorting with a known fugitive. Then you're going to prison, where you and all of your ilk belong."

Harry felt something snap inside him. Nothing and no one had ever tested his temper like this since his classes with Umbridge, and anger such as he hadn't felt in years was making its presence known, helped along by the fact that he was still smarting from his foray into Banner's mind. He wrestled with the emotion, refusing to let it feed the burning Phoenix even as he let it bleed into his next words.

"You dishonor your position and your country General Ross," he said in a voice cold enough to freeze the Sahara at high noon. An exertion of telekinesis made the air swirl around him like a pale imitation of a tornado. Harry rose into the sky until he was level with the choppers and looked Ross directly in the eye. "Listen well, all of you. You have no right, none at all, to be here or to detain me, and if you truly believe you can subdue Dr. Banner then you're kidding yourselves. Regardless, he is under my protection, and if you attempt to harm or detain him, I will stop you with whatever amount of force I see fit. Leave now, or you will be made to leave."

Jaws dropped and eyes widened all around. Ross gaped for a moment, then raised his megaphone again. "I don't take orders from you, and you're a fool to defend Banner." He paused for breath, probably preparing more threats, but Harry had no interest in hearing him prattle on as Umbridge had to the centaurs so many years earlier. A swift motion of his left hand made the device fling itself out of Ross's hands and shatter, raining pieces of plastic and broken metal down onto the road without actually injuring anyone. At the same time, a trio of waterspouts as thick around as shipping containers erupted from the lake, growing until they towered high over the scene.

"That was a warning," Harry said calmly, ignoring the shouts of alarm elicited by his display of power. The odd feeling that he'd forgotten something persisted. Ross was looking at him as if he were a bear that had devoured his Christmas turkey; furious, but too terrified to act on it. "None of us are going to like what will happen if you insist on starting a fight you can't win, but it will doubtlessly end worse for you than it would for us. Leave. Now."

For a long, tense moment, no one moved. Harry allowed his waterspouts to sink back down into the lake, sending giant ripples across its surface. He stared impassively at Ross and his soldiers.

Ross looked from Harry to Banner, to his soldiers, then to Banner again, and finally back to Harry, his face utterly blank. He pulled a corded walkie talkie from his belt. He thumbed the activation button and opened his mouth to speak. For a moment, it seemed he might actually listen to reason. Then he adopted a truly murderous expression and said something into the device that Harry could not hear.

And shots rang out.

At that moment, Harry belatedly realized what important detail he'd forgotten. Banner didn't know about the shield protecting him, and there was no Silencing Charm to muffle the sound of gunshots, which meant that the soldier's shots would stress him badly enough to induce a transformation regardless of whether they actually struck. Sure enough, Bruce jumped nearly three feet into the air, stumbled on landing, and gave a horrible groan. Harry tried to send him a telepathic command to sleep, but the primal fury rising up inside the scientist refused to be silenced so easily, and Harry let out a weak grunt as if he had been physically struck, involuntarily ending the mental contact.

A witch or wizard from Harry's old world might have thought Banner had drunk a bad Polyjuice potion.

As Harry watched in mounting horror, the scientist's skin began to turn green. His veins darkened until they stood out like an infestation of worms, his muscles bulged and warped, his bones popped and cracked, and his pants stretched until the only thing stopping them from being torn apart and completely exposing the creature's body was a quick application of a Stretching Charm. In seconds Bruce Banner's almost painfully ordinary form was replaced by a nine-foot tall caricature of a bodybuilder. Its skin was the color of freshly mown grass, stretched by unnervingly large slabs of muscle, yet the overall shape was humanoid, and its face was almost identical to Bruce's but for the odd color and the feral look in its eyes.

The similarity to a werewolf transformation wasn't lost on Harry, and he realized with a pang that Remus and the doctor would have gotten along famously in both of their forms. As he wrapped himself in a Shield Charm, Banner's alter ego gave a deafening roar, and Harry was fairly certain he was the only person present who didn't flinch.

Next second, the green giant had leaped into the formation of Humvees, crashing through the shield Harry had set up earlier as if it were made of paper, and lashing out with his giant fists and feet to smash everything in reach, sending armored vehicles, along with their unfortunate occupants, flying through the air.

When Harry reached out with telekinesis, his goal was to protect, rather than attack. The soldiers' yells of pain and terror became squeals of surprise as they, and the vehicles that were milliseconds away from becoming their tombs, flew into the air. The loud cracks of gunfire filled the air, but Banner's monstrous form ignored the shots, which failed to so much as draw blood, and continued its rampage.

The chopper containing Ross turned its attention to Harry, spraying his invisible shield with bullets as long as his own feet, but the drain on the shield's energy was so negligible that Harry barely noticed. Instead Harry focused on moving the soldiers out of Banner's reach, a task that was growing increasingly difficult. The beast wasn't just strong; he was fast. Harry himself was no slouch in the speed department even by magical standards, but Banner was moving quickly enough to leave a Firebolt in the dust.

Realizing that adrenaline was clouding his thoughts, Harry forced himself to focus and adjusted his tactics. He scanned for and took control of the Humvees themselves, all two dozen of them, and pulled them into the sky out of Banner's reach. It was a distinctly odd sight, armored vehicles hanging in midair as if suspended by invisible strings, flying in precise patterns that prevented them from colliding with each other or the helicopters. Harry set them down on an empty spot two miles down the road. A loud growl brought his attention back to the nearer stretch of roadway.

With the space around him suddenly empty of victims, Banner's troll-like form had turned his glare on the helicopters and on Harry himself. Wary of the potential jumping power of those leg muscles, Harry took hold of the choppers and began dragging them to the far side of the lake. Unfortunately, he was interrupted when Banner leaped into the air, aiming for the one containing Ross himself.

The green giant collided with the bottom of the chopper. As they twisted and tumbled through the air in a harrowing descent for the lake, time seemed to come to a standstill, and Harry was gripped by indecision. On the one hand, the things he'd glimpsed in Thaddeus Ross's mind were vile enough that he would like nothing more than to let the were-troll turn the old war monger into jelly. On the other hand, Harry had a feeling Dr. Banner would feel incredibly guilty about any deaths he caused while transformed. Even if Banner didn't care either way, the soldiers aboard that chopper didn't deserve to die because of their fool of a commanding officer.

Ignoring the Phoenix's urging to let Ross crash and drown, Harry yanked the distressed helicopter out of the Hulk's grip, tearing off the landing skids in the process, and sent it to a gentle landing on the far side of the lake. At the same time, he blasted Banner with a wave of telekinetic force. It sent him hurtling through the air for over a mile before he finally slammed into the forest, smashing a furrow through the trees until he skidded to a stop at the shore of another small lake.

Two of the remaining three choppers flew after Banner. To Harry's astonishment (and irritation), the last one immediately opened fire on him. Bullets and tiny rockets smashed uselessly into his shield, filling the air with smoke and a deafening cacophony of cracks and booms. Harry supposed he could understand the soldier's panic, but he was trying to save them from their own stupidity, and it irked him that this was how they responded. He was reminded uncomfortably of the wizarding world, of its fickle opinion of him throughout his school years.

Harry forced himself to refocus on the present. He felt his way through the stream of deadly projectiles and made a telekinetic grab for his attacker. The chopper groaned as its propeller motors crushed themselves into powder. Only Harry's will ensured that it set down safely at the edge of the road.

Harry recalled the Ancient One's warnings as he soared off in Banner's direction.

At this stage, Harry just barely surpassed the Hulk in terms of raw power, and the latter's ability to grow stronger the angrier he became made that difference even smaller. There was no way he could defeat Banner's troll-like firm with telekinesis alone while simultaneously protecting bystanders, but the situation wasn't dire enough to warrant the risk of using more complex magic. Somehow, he had to get himself and Banner away from here. As this thought crossed his mind, Harry found himself hovering two hundred feet above the forest canopy, looking down at the increasingly one-sided battle between the last of Ross's choppers and Banner's enraged form.

The green man ripped a tree outside of the ground and threw it at one of the choppers with surprising accuracy, but Harry cut it in half before it could smash the cockpit. Then he made a sharp gesture with his right arm that dragged both of the flying vehicles sideways through the air. Before Harry could send them more than a quarter mile away, however, he was interrupted by a second tree that was hurtling at his face like a spear. Caught by surprise, Harry let go of the helicopters in his haste to redirect the tree so that it sailed past him harmlessly.

As the tree arced through the sky and began falling back to earth, the green giant tensed his legs for a leap. No, Harry thought. Surely, he can't! But the green man could. The sheer force of his legs propelling him upward pulverized the ground beneath his feet as he shot up toward Harry like the cork of a well-shaken champagne bottle.

Harry didn't bother with a shield. Instead he made a shoving motion with both hands, and an invisible force caught the Hulk in midair, momentarily freezing him in place with inches to spare. Harry gritted his teeth with the effort of fighting the Hulk's titanic strength, but in the air the latter had no leverage, which gave Harry the advantage. In seconds, the green giant was sent slamming back into the ground with twice the force he'd used to take off, kicking up a great cloud of dust. Harry panted from the effort, and he decided to conserve energy by descending to a spot twenty meters from where his opponent hit the ground.

As Harry descended, he saw something that momentarily replaced his mounting irritation with guilty amusement. Banner's head and shoulders were trapped in the ground while the rest of him stuck out, and he was struggling to pull himself free despite the lack of leverage, so that he looked like a character from one of the cartoons Teddy liked to watch.

In his troll-like form, however, Banner's muscles were orders of magnitude stronger than the world's largest excavation machines. In seconds he'd pulverized the dirt in which he was buried just by thrashing, and he planted his palms on the ground to leverage his head free.

Harry's faint amusement evaporated. "Banner, calm down!" he shouted, though he doubted it would work. "I am not your enemy, but I can't let you hurt anyone else. You need to control yourself."

"No puny Banner!" The creature that would one day be called the Hulk bellowed, looking even angrier than before. Harry stared at him in genuine astonishment. Was the beast a separate identity sharing a body with Dr. Banner? If so, how was he already self-aware? According to the Ancient One the Hulk's mind was a childlike and emotionally unstable offshoot of its host, hardly capable of abstract thought. Then again, most of what she knew about Banner and the Hulk would have come from possible futures glimpsed via the Time Stone, so it made sense that she didn't know everything about him, just as she hadn't known everything about Harry when she scanned for his future before meeting him for the first time.

Harry's musings were interrupted by the second uprooted pine tree the Hulk sent hurtling toward him at breakneck speed. As before he motioned to one side with his right hand, and the tree veered away from him to slam into the branches of those behind. If the Hulk was unnerved or intimidated by the repeated displays of weird power, he showed no evidence of it, for he yanked yet another tree from the Earth and held it cradled in his arms like a lance. With a roar he charged.

Unwilling to cause needless additional damage to the forest, Harry opted not to summon any trees of his own. Instead he took hold of the Hulk's leafy lance and twisted it in his grip, pulling the creature off balance so that he tripped and fell on his face. The tree flew into the air and came to rest above Harry's head, floating parallel to the ground. Harry let the Hulk scramble to his feet before slamming it into his neck.

The Hulk's angry bellow was cut off and he scrabbled at the tree as it shoved him backward. His feet made gouges in the dirt as they struggled uselessly to anchor him to the ground until, at last, he managed to get a grip on the tree trunk and promptly ripped it in half like a sheet of paper. He threw each piece at Harry, one after the other, but Harry diverted them to either side of himself.

Ascending, Harry imagined a pair of manacles wrapping themselves around the Hulk's ankles being yanked backward by chains. Caught by surprise, the Hulk was upended from his spot and landed on his back. Harry wasted not a moment. Twisting through the air until he hovered directly above the Hulk, he took a deep breath and thrust out with both hands, palms parallel to the ground.

Instantly the green man was pinned under an invisible wall of energy as heavy as a mountain, slowly forcing him deep into the ground and cratering it around him. The Hulk's cries of protest were muffled by the telekinetic barrier, which was thickening the air until it was as dense as granite. The creature's colossal strength made the task much more difficult than it ought to have been, as though Harry were attempting to force a balloon full of helium to stay underwater with one hand. Unconsciously Harry descended, devoting all of his energy to containing the Hulk. He raised his hand, the incantation of a Full Body Bind Curse forming in his mind.

It should have ended there. In an ideal world, Harry would have bound the Hulk with his immobilization spell, forced him to revert back into Banner, and gotten him to the safety of Kamar Taj, leaving Ross in the dust. Unfortunately, Harry's infamously fickle 'luck' had other ideas. He was concentrating so hard on his task that he barely had enough spare energy to curse the Hulk, leaving none with which to shield himself or watch for other enemies. Naturally, he paid a painful price for his inattention. His spell was only a syllable away from completion when everything went wrong.

Something hard struck Harry in the back and exploded, sending him tumbling to the ground. Ears ringing, gripped by agony, Harry crashed through the forest's understory until he hit the earth with what would have been bone-breaking force for a normal person. As he spat foliage out of his mouth, Harry was devoutly thankful he'd had the foresight to imbue his entire outfit with protective charms in imitation of Fred and George's shield cloaks and hats, because he was certain that without them he'd have been killed, or at least forced into a healing coma. As it was, he'd be covered in bruises for the next few days. Getting to his feet with a groan, he rubbed his ears without touching them until they stopped ringing and glanced around.

To one side Harry saw the Hulk charging him like an angry bull elephant. To the other he saw military Humvees slogging through the dense underbrush. Clearly, they hadn't stayed where Harry had set them down earlier, and they had standing orders to fight, orders they had no choice but to obey, whether they wanted to or not. Above, the last two helicopters approached with weapons blazing. Harry cursed Thaddeus Ross in Sanskrit as he raised his arms and summoned a shield. A split second later the world around him exploded. Rockets, bullets, and grenades peppered his defenses, kicking up clouds of dust and smoke, but the barrier didn't waver until the Hulk's gigantic green fist slammed into it.

Harry felt his patience wearing thin. He had had to disappoint Teddy by canceling a trip to Central Park, been sent to befriend a complete stranger whose situation barely paralleled his own, scanned the mind of a war monger who would gladly dissect Teddy in search of the secret to his metamorphosing abilities, been forced to protect said war monger and his minions from their own idiocy when they attacked Banner, gotten shot at for his trouble, and was nursing a headache from the aftershocks of a failed telepathic communication with Banner. As the Hulk's fists pummeled his shield, his frustration turned to anger, and just for a moment that anger touched the Phoenix.

The Phoenix screeched, and Harry's mind burned.

Magic exploded from his body as an invisible shockwave of unstoppable force. The Hulk was blasted into the sky and out of sight. Every tree within 200 feet was flattened into splinters. Humvees crumpled in on themselves, producing sickening noises as their unfortunate occupants were crushed. The helicopters careened through the air, their fuselages warped and propeller blades bent, before they crashed into the forest a quarter mile away and exploded. A few miles away, the residents of a small town were disturbed by the thunderous sound of the heatless explosion.

Harry staggered, the Phoenix inside him still crying out in fury, urging him to summon the primal fires of creation, to rain hell down on the forest until there was nothing left but blackened rubble, to turn his enemies to smoldering ash. How dare these self-righteous fools attack him when he was risking his life to protect them from their own idiocy? They did not understand the role he played, how much was riding on his success, what responsibilities he bore. They were not worth saving. They would BURN!

No, he told it. Killing these people in anger will only turn me into a monster worse than they could ever be. That's not why I'm here. That's not why I accepted your power! Harry struggled to contain the Phoenix fire in his mind, smothering it with icy focus. Then he fed his anger to a new flame, a calm, welcoming speck of warm light like a candle in a meditation sanctuary, burning away the frustration and horror of battle until his mind was clear. His thoughts ordered themselves with mechanical precision.

The Phoenix fell silent.

The sudden shift from enraged to virtually emotionless made Harry feel hollow, like a machine. He took in the devastation he had caused with a clinical, almost calculating eye. He wanted to search for survivors, but a distant roar told him he had bigger problems. Something large and green shot up out of the trees, bounding away from the epicenter of the destruction.

Oh no you don't.

In echo of the Hulk's super jumps, Harry launched himself into the sky, smoothing the air in his path to reduce wind resistance. He flew until he was right on top of his quarry, who was descending from the top of the arc of his most recent leap. Taking advantage of the Hulk's vulnerable position, Harry grabbed him without touching him and whirled him about, twisting the creature through the air until he was dizzy before finally shooting him over the landscape. The Hulk flew for miles, bellowing in impudent rage. He landed with a colossal splash in Lake Superior, Harry flying behind him and visible only as a dark green blur.

Harry hovered four meters above the surface of the great lake, watching as Banner's alter ego struggled to float a stone's throw away. Out here there was no one to witness their battle, which meant Harry no longer had to restrict himself to basic telekinesis.

The Hulk thrashed and roared in frustration, clearly unused to the water, and Harry prepared to open a gateway to the Mirror Dimension. He extended his right arm in front of him, opening his palm wide and undulating his fingers slightly even as he concentrated on inverting reality. Harry's natural magical powers already gave him a much greater degree of control over the Mirror Dimension than regular sorcerers, and the addition of the Phoenix Force amplified that talent to the extreme so that reality was like clay to his touch there, but he had never practiced summoning it in the middle of a combat situation, and that oversight cost him.

A deep bellow, a burst of water, and Harry felt something large, heavy, and smelling strongly of stale sweat collide with him, breaking his spell before it was halfway completed and driving the breath from him. His shield buckled and vanished, and it was only an instinctive surge of magic that kept the Hulk's hostile embrace from overwhelming the charms on his clothes and crushing him to jelly as they fell into the lake. Harry thrashed and flailed, still unconsciously augmenting himself. The Hulk was evidently shocked to finally encounter someone as strong as he was, let alone someone a third of his size, because he let go almost instantly.

Too disoriented to apparate, Harry shot away like a torpedo before redirecting his energies to expel the water from his mouth and nose. Nostrils stinging, he made an intricate gesture with the fingers of his left hand and thought Capit Bulo! A bubble of fresh air materialized over his face, and he took deep gulps of the self-recycling oxygen. He glanced back the way he'd come and telekinetically pulled himself four meters to the right. The Hulk surged past him, narrowly missing with his massive fist, and Harry stretched out with psychic senses until at last he had rediscovered which way was up. Immediately he flew (was it still flying if he was underwater?) to the surface. The Hulk was close behind, propelling himself at an incredible speed by lashing out with his powerful limbs.

Harry broke the surface of the lake and was a meter out of the water when he felt the Hulk's fist close around his left ankle. Only a quick telekinetic burst ensured the grip was too light to tear off his foot, but the pain told Harry there would be a bruise. Pivoting in midair, Harry pointed a finger down into the lake and shouted "Glacius!" All of the water in an area ten square meters across instantly froze. Just as quickly the Hulk tore himself free, scrambling out of the newly created iceberg and leaping at Harry. At this distance, there was no chance of avoiding him.

As the Hulk's fist closed around his torso, time came to a standstill, and Harry's mind was consumed with the certainty that he had to get away. He needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else, and the Phoenix responded. It did not offer him direction, as it had in times past. Instead, it filled Harry with a disconcerting sensation, as though it were enveloping him from the inside out, and he burst into flames.

Together Harry and the Hulk vanished in a flash of fire that collapsed in itself like a singularity.

From Harry's perspective it looked as if the world had flared with colorless light before vanishing into pitch blackness. He felt a tingling sensation in his stomach, as if he were on a broomstick that had gone into a vertical dive, but he felt no wind whip at him in the dark. The Hulk seemed to have frozen, for his grip on Harry did not shift in the slightest. What felt to Harry like a long moment but was in reality only a millisecond later, the sensation of falling vanished and the darkness was replaced by flares of color that instantly resolved into a new, unfamiliar landscape.

More trees, smaller and more widely spaced than the ones in Canada, spread across mountainous terrain like a vast, irregular green carpet. A sky filled with ominous gray clouds. A few small creeks cut through the landscape like silvery ribbons. Harry noted all of this absently, since he had much more immediate problems than the new landscape. Namely, the fact that he and the Hulk had appeared a mile or two above the ground and were falling like stones.

Harry didn't waste time wondering how he had accidentally transported himself and the Hulk to a place he had never been to before, much less the method of transportation. Instead, he unleashed a telekinetic pulse that blasted the Hulk down into the tree-filled valley below. At once flocks of birds appeared, fleeing the trees in which they had been resting in favor of escaping the clash of the titans. Harry didn't blame them.

As Harry descended, he muttered "Homenum Revelio." Under normal circumstances he would have used a simple telepathic scan, but he didn't want to risk another potentially disastrous brush with the Hulk's mind. He was certain that most of the animals in the area were hastening to various escape routes, but the mountainous terrain was unlikely to contain humans. He was therefore surprised and a little alarmed to detect a single human presence not five feet away from the Hulk's landing site. Unable to get a good read on the location, Harry dived.

The urgency of the situation seemed to slow Harry's perception of time, and he found himself noticing details that he would have normally ignored. Flying with magical telekinesis was very different than flying on a broomstick; the lack of firm wood beneath him made Harry feel as if he were falling rather than diving, which took away much of the thrill he'd once gotten from pulling off such maneuvers, a feeling exacerbated by urgency. He landed softly on the forest floor and found himself facing what appeared to be the remains of a smashed log cabin. The Hulk stumbled out of the ruins, his expression fearsome.

Concentrating, Harry snapped his fingers and cried "Incarcerous!" Golden light flashed from Harry's hand, and suddenly his opponent was wrapped in dozens of black ropes as thick as Harry's leg. He stumbled and fell to one side, thrashing and bellowing in mounting outrage. Knowing he had only bought himself a few seconds, Harry hastened to remove the crushing weight of smashed wood from the spot where he'd detected the human presence. Even as the Hulk managed to bite through the ropes nearest his head Harry's quarry became visible among the splinters.

Soon the green giant had torn himself free from the ropes, which fell to the ground and dissolved, and Harry was summoning the unconscious and bleeding form of what appeared to be a teenaged boy to his feet. Harry floated away from the wreckage of the cabin, levitating the teenager beside him, and came to rest a hundred feet away, on the shore of a creek. All thoughts of administering first aid, however, were driven from his head before they even formed when the Hulk roared and charged him once more. As the beast approached, Harry pointed at him once more, this time making a strange gesture with his right hand, like a finger gun with two fingers and his thumb parallel to the ground. With that he shouted "Confringo!"

When cast by a normal wizard, this spell produced a jet of fiery orange light that caused whatever it struck to explode, which meant it was possible to dodge it. With the Phoenix warping and amplifying Harry's magic, however, that limitation was a thing of the past. There was no avoidable blast of energy; Harry simply aimed, and everything on the spot blew up.

BANG!

The explosion was so powerful that Harry staggered despite being well out of range. Flames erupted from the spot, sending a cloud of dirt and black smoke billowing into the sky. It left a crater the size of a swimming pool, set dozens of nearby trees ablaze, and sent the Hulk flying back the way he'd come, landing in a heap twenty meters beyond the ruins of the cabin. Seizing his chance, Harry apparated to a spot beside the ruined cabin and began conjuring a gateway to the Mirror Dimension.

The Hulk got groggily to his feet, his greenish black hair singed, and caught sight of Harry standing there, seemingly frozen. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth he charged, his massive fists bared. That was his final mistake. Exhaustion from fighting with Harry made him too slow, and Harry had both distance and a head start.

The air between them was disturbed by a strange apparition. Reality itself seemed to crack into a perfectly symmetrical prism, fashioning itself into a wall of crystalline fractals. An observer on Harry's side would appear to be looking through a distorted window. The Hulk, standing opposite, saw himself and his surroundings reflected as if by a mirror. The gateway expanded, twisted, and enveloped them both.

Harry was still far out of reach when the Mirror Dimension materialized. At first glance everything appeared normal, but if one looked closer they would see strange, crystalline distortions in the air, as though the area had been encased in a giant construct of symmetrically cut glass or diamond.

Harry's next hand gesture set this strange new reality spinning in a way contrary to what nature had intended. The earth shifted and warped, flipped in on and out of itself like a particularly psychedelic optical illusion, but this was no illusion.

The landscape itself folded, and the Hulk found himself falling backwards, parallel to the ground, which was now bent into an impossible square. The unnatural shift in reality was beyond anything the Hulk's enhanced strength could hope to overcome, and he flailed helplessly as the mountains around him twisted and warped, folding and bending and self-replicating until he was in a three-sided vertical tunnel fashioned from the mirrored mountain landscape, falling into a void so deep it was impossible to see what lay at the bottom, assuming there even was a bottom to perceive.

Harry floated along at a leisurely pace. Almost absently he conjured a whizzing portal back to the real world, summoned the injured teenager through it, and closed it up before warping the Mirror Dimension further. Chunks of rock erupted from the landscape. They grew and cut themselves into perfectly symmetrical fractal shapes that flew towards Harry, assembling like Legos into a circular island four meters across. Harry laid the kid out on it like a hospital bed, adding a Cushioning Charm for good measure. The Mirror Dimension would not snap back into position unless he willed it to do so, and he had folded space in this region of it with such complexity that it was impossible for an outside force to enter it, even if they conjured a gateway from the exact same location in the real world. Put together, it meant that the Hulk would not stop falling until Harry decided otherwise, and no one would be able to stop him from tending to the kid.

Soon, however, Harry was dismayed to realize that it would not be that easy. The kid was bleeding internally and sporting several broken bones. Worse, he was sporting a severe head injury; so severe in fact that it would likely affect his memories. Harry guessed that while the Hulk had not landed directly on the part of the cabin where the kid had been standing or sitting, the creature still clipped the unfortunate boy's head with a fist on his way through the roof. As Harry worked, he realized that his initial presumption that this was a kid may not have been entirely correct. According to his diagnostic spells, the bloke was more like a young adult, old enough to be in his first year of university.

Harry decided not to dwell on his patient's age. He repaired the contusions, set the broken bones back into place, cast a spell to encourage them to heal more quickly and robustly, and used a telepathic suggestion to induce a coma. Unfortunately, it was all triage by his standards. The bloke would need at least two weeks in Kamar Taj to recover from the physical injuries, but the brain damage could take much longer to repair.

When Harry finished patching up the worst of the boy's wounds, he glanced down over the edge of the platform. The Hulk would have been falling for more than ten minutes now, and he lacked the ability to warp the Mirror Dimension to negate the effects of gravity, which meant he had surely reached terminal velocity by now. Harry warped the surroundings and watched in morbid fascination as the tunnel of mirrored landscape shifted upward (or was Harry shifting himself downward?) until he found himself level with the Hulk, who was, sure enough, still falling.

Harry summoned another platform, identical to the first save for the fact that it was ten meters thick. The Hulk slammed into it with the force of a bomb dropped from the stratosphere, pulverizing the top layers and generating a tremendous crashing sound.

Harry cleared the debris and peered down. The Hulk lay face down in a crater shaped roughly like his own body, stirring feebly. For a moment Harry was too shocked to react. Not even that had been enough to knock out the beast, but how?! In desperation he made a sharp gesture of his right hand and yelled "Stupefy!"

There was a flash of fiery red light, and finally the Hulk lay still. Then, slowly but steadily, he began to shrink, like a deflating balloon. The vast muscles disappeared, his skin faded to pink, and his bones rearranged themselves. In a few seconds he was gone, and the unconscious Bruce Banner lay in his place. A gesture of Harry's hand sent the twisted landscape spinning once again, slowly returning to its original shape.

Gingerly Harry lifted Banner towards him, pulling the kid along with him, and conjured a gateway back to the real world. As they emerged in the forest Harry realized that the trees were still on fire, and he hastily extinguished them with a flick of his fingers.

Glancing down at the younger of his two… charges?... he wondered how the boy had ended up alone in a cabin in the woods. A second Human Presence-Revealing spell confirmed there was no one around for well over a hundred miles. What was a young adult doing alone out here in the middle of nowhere during the summer holidays? Was he hiding from something, or had someone hidden him there? If so, for what purpose? In this day and age, no one who hid in the middle of nowhere did so without a very good reason, and such reasons were often far from innocent.

Then again, Harry thought, I'm hardly one to talk on that score. Perhaps the cabin was a family safehouse of some sort, in which case Harry was effectively kidnapping the kid from a place where he was perfectly safe, but his instincts told him that wasn't the case. Frowning, Harry decided he'd return and investigate after he'd gotten his charges to the safety of Kamar Taj. To do that, he had to ascertain where he was.

The spell he cast was a modified version of the Tempus charm that showed latitude and longitude rather than the date and time, and Harry committed the numbers to memory. As an afterthought, he covered the entire valley in a Muggle-Repelling charm; he didn't want the wrong people to discover what happened here. Satisfied, he conjured a gateway to the courtyard where he'd spent so many hours training in hand to hand combat, darkened by the night on that side of the planet, and stepped through, levitating his charges in front of him.

Aboard the Helicarrier, North Atlantic Ocean, July of 2003

Nick Fury sat behind a reflective desk in his office aboard the Helicarrier, sipping a large mug of grayish cafeteria coffee, and let his thoughts unwind as he gazed through his tiny windows into the clear afternoon sky. Squinting at the horizon, he thought he could see clouds forming. A storm, perhaps? That made him think of rain, and soon he was, for the umpteenth time, remembering the first contact with Phoenix.

Just thinking about Phoenix made the one-eyed spymaster scowl. The telekinetic was as mysterious as he was powerful. Fury disliked mysteries, especially when they concerned people with extraordinary powers. Not once had he called the number Phoenix provided during the first contact incident. With the possible exception of an incident involving a dam in Bolivia, none of the crises that occurred since he received it were so dangerous or out of control that SHIELD couldn't handle them on its own, and Fury was under pressure from the World Security Council not to call upon Phoenix in any case.

However, it was clear that Phoenix had his own means of gathering information and traveling rapidly from one corner of the globe to another, for his actions seemed unrestricted by such trivial obstacles as international travel laws. Phoenix's extremely fine level of control and precision with his powers was well documented, as was his ability to fly, leading some to theorize that he had learned to manipulate air pressure and wind around himself to such a degree he could accelerate to flight speeds hundreds of times faster than sound.

Really, half the theories that Research and Development came up with about Phoenix and his powers were downright wacky. The most recent went so far as to call his powers actual magic. The thought of it made Fury want to snort. There was no such thing as magic. Granted, there were powerful forces out there that were poorly understood by modern science, but there was always a logical, if astonishing, explanation for the things that went bump in the night. Magic was just plain fantasy, and that was that.

More plausible was the theory that connected Phoenix to the so-called Event of 2001; a massive geomagnetic phenomenon that had disrupted the entire planet for a few short moments and nearly knocked the Helicarrier out of the sky. Fury would have dismissed that as more nonsense pulled from a drunk scientist's ass, but a study of internet forums frequented by those who had witnessed the strange golden auroras that accompanied the Event revealed that thousands of people had dreamed for weeks afterward of a giant bird constructed entirely of fire at the heart of a maelstrom of floating objects. In the mythologies of various cultures in the vicinity of the Eastern Mediterranean, phoenixes were always strongly associated with fire.

Coincidence? Fury doubted it. The prevailing theory was that the Event had been a byproduct of whatever had given Phoenix his powers, but it didn't explain why people dreamed about it. On the other hand, telekinesis itself should also be impossible, so that detail alone wasn't enough to disqualify the theory.

If Phoenix knew or cared what SHIELD thought of him, he gave no sign. Considering the fact that many of the organization's less scrupulous scientists and commanding officers were highly interested in the possibility of capturing and experimenting on him in hopes of reproducing his powers, that was probably for the best.

Fury's intercom chimed, and he pressed a button on the nondescript office phone at the corner of his desk. "Fury here,"

"Sir," said the voice of his female secretary, "we just received intelligence from our contacts in the army that general Ross found Dr. Banner in Canada and attacked him. Phoenix was there as well and intervened. Our satellites also captured an image of the spot where the battle took place. It was easy to identify because a significant patch of forest was leveled. We're preparing a report with all the details, but Ross is demanding a meeting with you. He seems to be under the impression that you orchestrated Phoenix's presence, and he's on the warpath."

Fury felt a tension headache make its presence known at the back of his skull. "Ross can go jump off a bridge for all I care," he snapped. "I'm calling Phoenix, and if he doesn't give me satisfactory answers to my questions, I'm shooting the bastard in the face."

"Very good, sir."