"Are you still on the East Coast?" Dean asked, somewhat frantically, over the phone. Harry thought he could hear gunfire and crashing in the background.
"No, we're back in LA. What's going on?" Harry checked, worried. It was Friday evening, less than a week since the battle at the Expo, and he was hoping they could at least go until he was back at Hogwarts before there was another crisis.
"Green sasquatch!" Dean nearly shouted over the sound of something blowing up nearby. "Smashing up the street in front of the Apollo."
"From the news?" Harry checked. There had been pretty good online footage of Jean Granger's "green sasquatch" fighting with the military at a Virginia university on Wednesday.
"This one is bald… and kinda spiky? Maybe it's mutating," Dean explained, things getting quieter as he tried to take cover. "How long until Tony could get out here?"
"At least a couple hours, I think, even supersonic," Harry was fairly vague about the exact math and how fast the current Iron Man suit could go.
"Don't think that's going to be soon enough," Dean said, and there was a feral roar in the distance. "Oh! There's two of them now. The one from the college just showed up to fight the spiky one."
"Are you in the middle of it? Your family?" Harry checked.
"Family's fine for now. We live a few blocks away. I came to check it out, though," Dean said blithely, in true Gryffindor spirit. There was the sound of roaring and a titanic battle. "Okay. Looks like the fight is moving off. I think it's going the opposite way from my house. I'm going to see if I can help any injured people. I'll let you know if anything else happens. Bye!"
As soon as he was off the phone, Harry ran downstairs to find Pepper actually not working for once. They'd come back to 5730 Encino Avenue, and had spent more time there than usual. Now that Pepper and Tony were "dating," she felt paradoxically weirder about just spending all her time at his house. Interrupting her show, he said, "Two green sasquatches fighting with the military in Harlem! I don't think Tony can get there in time to do anything, but maybe we should tell him just in case?"
"Are the Thomases okay?" Pepper checked, sighing that this kind of crisis was her life now, and grabbing her own phone.
"Yeah," Harry nodded. "Dean said the fight was going away from their house. But a lot of people might have gotten injured on the street. He said he was going to try to help."
"We should get you first aid training," Pepper said, absently, as she texted Tony.
"Huh. Yeah, probably," Harry nodded.
Pepper's phone pinged, and she relayed, "JARVIS says Tony's already on the phone with SHIELD, but they don't think he'd be there in time to help."
Harry nodded, "That's what I figured. If this goes on for hours, there might not be any city left."
She switched the TV over to a news station that had coverage, and it looked from the helicopter footage like the fight had stopped at some convenient demolished lot, with a few ruined stone walls still around. "We should buy that," she made a note for herself. "I can't believe that much real estate on the island is just sitting empty, even if it's not a great neighborhood."
Pepper started making phone calls to have Stark Industries provide help (and maybe buy some newly-available real estate) as they both sat on the couch, watching with the rest of the nation as the "Hulk" (as people were starting to call the original monster) defeated the bald, spiky one, saved the people in a military helicopter that had crashed, and then bounded off into the night.
"I don't think those were jotuns," Harry considered. "Frost giants are blue. And the fire giants are supposed to be red and on fire."
"Probably doesn't have anything to do with the Realms," Pepper sighed. "I'll see if Phil can tell me anything. With the military and research universities involved, my guess would be some kind of mutated humans."
"Can't have Iron Man suits so they turned soldiers into giant green monsters?" Harry nodded. "Stupid."
Pepper agreed, "It wouldn't be the scariest thing I've heard rumors about at parties with other government contractors."
Harry's phone pinged with a text message and he relayed, "Dean says he's okay and his family's okay. Master Kaecilius and Master Drumm showed up with a few other sorcerers to check on him, and they're doing what they can to help the injured."
Pepper pursed her lips, "It would be so useful to have EMTs that could make portals, but I doubt that would happen even if magic gets outed. Too much chance for abuse, and not enough sorcerers." But she made a coded note to herself to look into having a legal and support structure in place if that ever happened, just in case.
The next day, Harry went with Pepper over to Tony's mansion to work, since the biggest question in the media seemed to be, if he'd been available, whether Iron Man would be able to defeat the Hulk. Down in his garage, Tony didn't seem too worried. "Fury already has me talking to the General whose project it was. Official SHIELD consultant, that's me. I'm supposed to talk him into handing over his mutant for this whole initiative neither of you are supposed to know about."
"They're sending you?" Pepper asked, with a raised eyebrow.
Tony defended his record, "Lots of history talking to the military brass. Probably more than SHIELD. Military guys don't really like spy guys. Makes sense. Plus I warned the general about super soldiers years ago, so we have a history. No, what I'm more interested in, is whatever Agent was up to in New Mexico." He rolled back in his chair and ordered, "JARVIS, load the Puente Antiguo files."
"Presently, sir," JARVIS' voice echoed through the garage as the video wall filled with pictures and video of a desert. "Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, May 30th through June 2nd."
Tony took over narration, gesturing to pictures which took focus as he explained them. "Multiple aurora borealis events in the region in the last few months. In the southwestern US. Those aren't common. One Jane Foster, astrophysicist, puts in a grant request to study them."
Several bad camera images of colorful night skies appeared. Pepper got nervous and put a hand on Harry's shoulder to caution him. He recognized the effect on the sky before a Bifrost connection. After all, he'd been in the middle of one a couple of weeks earlier. It was more obvious in the middle of the empty desert at night than on a sunny London afternoon.
"Then on May 31st, a 'meteor' hits. Makes a giant crater. There's a hammer in the middle of it," the pictures that showed up included some amateur footage of musclebound men trying to dislodge an object in the crater, and one person even ripping the bumper off his truck trying to tow it with a chain. Tony explained, "That's when Agent told me he had to go to New Mexico."
The next few pictures were more sparse. Images featured a giant fenced compound in the middle of the desert, taken from a distance and a really cool night shot of lightning over the makeshift base.
"Not a lot of thunderstorms in New Mexico," Tony summed up. "Then there's a media blackout. Rumors of a giant Iron Man suit blowing up the town fighting agents in black and guys in Ren Fest costumes. And SHIELD won't tell me anything about it."
"It's Thor," it just slipped out of Harry's mouth, even with Pepper's warning squeeze.
Tony spun around and actually gave Harry his full attention. "What's a Thor?" So interested in the new information, he'd even failed to make the, "What's sore?" pun.
Harry, who obviously jumped to the conclusion based on whose coronation he knew was supposed to be a few days earlier covered with, "The thunder. And the weird hammer. In Norse myth, the god of thunder, Thor, used a warhammer with a handle that was too short for anyone not as strong as him to wield."
As Harry talked, JARVIS loaded pictures from mythology that backed up Harry's description. Tony peered at them and had to admit the kid had a point. "Well, probably not pagan gods. At least I hope not. But with the LARP costumes they mentioned, it could at least be Thor cosplay. I'll bother Fury with that and see if he blinks. Thanks, Maverick."
When Pepper got Harry alone later, she asked, "Harry. Why?"
"He'll know eventually," Harry shrugged. "I think this is what the Ancient One meant. Asgard revealed itself. We may be able to tell Tony soon."
Pepper blanched. She was not anywhere near prepared to explain to her new boyfriend that she'd been lying to him for over a decade and was, in fact, an alien from another planet. Best case scenario, the bad jokes would never stop. "Let's not… rush into that, unless we have to," she finally said.
Harry shrugged. He figured at the rate he was going, he'd out himself eventually anyway.
"By the way," she wielded what punishment she could for Harry nearly outing them to Tony, "after your heroics in Monaco and the rumors that you helped at the Expo, the Boy Scouts definitely want you to give a speech. The subject is 'Be Prepared.'"
"Of course it is," Harry groaned.
Drilling for that presentation kept Harry busy for the next couple of weeks. He still wasn't prepared.
"How is that so easy for Tony?" he complained as they were leaving the gala. "How was it so easy for you?"
Rhodey, who had also gone, since Harry'd been right that he'd been an Eagle Scout, explained, "Public speaking? You just have to learn it. It gets easier the more you do it. Well, Tony has been good at it as long as I've known him. I think it's because he's always picturing everyone in their underwear."
"You think they noticed I was just reading from the paper the whole time?" Harry asked. Rhodey had recovered the car he'd left at Tony's house when he flew off with the Mark II, and was driving them both back to the mansion from the hotel in Pasadena where the Scouts had held the gala. It turned out it had also been the 100th anniversary of scouting, which might have been why Tony thought to donate his art collection in the first place.
"Maybe. I don't think anyone minded. You're not even thirteen. Plenty of time to get better at speaking," he consoled, as they barreled down Arroyo Seco Parkway. At least the show went late enough that traffic had cleared out, but it was still a 45-mile drive across town. "I should have signed out a helicopter."
"Can you just do that?" Harry checked.
"No," Rhodey admitted. "It'd be cool, though."
"You should teach me to fly," Harry realized. "You should teach Tony, too. I bet he'd crash into a goose or something if JARVIS wasn't helping him navigate."
Rhodey was about to shoot down the suggestion, but glanced over and asked instead, "You bored?"
"So bored," he nodded. He'd already done most of his summer homework and he still had two weeks before his normal summer break would have started if they hadn't been released early. Video games weren't cutting it anymore either, with as much of an adrenaline junkie as he'd become. "Plus you and Tony need to actually do something together. You can't just decide you're friends again but not actually hang out."
"Me trying to teach Tony anything wouldn't be hanging out," Rhodey argued. "Believe me. I've tried it before. It's better to just hand him a manual, let him go away and read it, and answer his questions when he's done. Drove our professors insane. Didn't help that he was like sixteen at the time."
That reminded Harry who asked, "You both went to MIT, right? Why don't you want me to go there, if you didn't go to the Air Force Academy?"
"Fast track," he explained. "I probably should have gone to the Academy. I would have been in the air a lot faster. Wouldn't have met Tony, though…" he allowed. It wasn't just because he'd miss the friendship, but because he was pretty sure that Howard Stark had pulled strings. He'd met the Starks, they'd decided he was one of the few good influences in their son's life, he'd mentioned that he wanted to go into the Air Force after he graduated, and it had just happened. Sadly, they hadn't lived to see him finish training. "But if you think you want to do MIT instead… Honestly, Tony might have you in a suit of your own as soon as you're legal, and it wouldn't hurt to know how to fix it."
"He swears I'm not his kid sidekick," Harry grinned. "I don't know if I'm going to be Iron Boy or anything, though." If nothing else, he was pretty sure it would be a lot harder to do magic in power armor, if only for how it would impede the casting movements and block the energy projection loci on his hands and brow.
"Iron Man and Kid Steel, clearly," Rhodey corrected.
"Clearly," Harry rolled his eyes. "But anyway, we should do something. Something exciting. And not something boring. You can tell Tony it's for my birthday."
"Your birthday isn't for a month and a half," Rhodey corrected.
"Then that just gives you a while to plan," he nodded.
Rhodey smirked, "Touche."
While Harry was waiting for that plan to come together, he did his best to find entertainment in a world that seemed to be moving suddenly slowly. Nothing was even trying to kill him. He finished his classwork. He practiced spellcasting. He took the first aid class Pepper had suggested. He convinced Happy to take a weekly aikido class with him (for all that Happy thought it was cheating). He went to a Boy Scouts trip that he'd been invited to during the gala (and didn't wind up loving basically being a captive, camping celebrity). He even made an abortive attempt to figure out how to play the violin that Gamora had given him.
In addition to the martial arts class, Harry was spending a lot of time being entertained by Happy in general. They'd seen pretty much every new movie that was out that summer (Dead Before Arrival, Simon Williams' new film, they'd even seen twice). Both of them pretended they didn't know it was to get him out of the house so Pepper and Tony could have adult alone time.
Finally, a week and a half before his birthday, Rhodey sent some links to videos on small unit tactics, wilderness mobility, firearms discipline, and the forests of the Hudson Valley in New York. "Are we doing Blair Witch?" Harry replied on his phone, after receiving that last one.
Rhodey replied, "just 4 that, i keep map." His texting remained atrocious.
They were out in New York anyway for the week around his birthday. Pepper had, indeed, bought the ruined building in Harlem where the two green titans had slugged it out over a month earlier, and was thinking about doing even more in the city. "We need to give back after the debacle at the Expo," she'd insisted.
"Are you coming on whatever Rhodey has us doing?" Harry asked her.
She shook her head, seemingly knowing what it was. "You boys have fun. I need to spend the time going on tours with real estate agents anyway."
Happy asked, "Do you need me to…"
She shook her head again, "The real estate agents will be the ones driving. Go bond with Tony." Pepper seemed to still remember Tony's comments about losing the kids in the divorce, and wanted to make sure he got to spend time with Happy.
They gathered at Tony's Manhattan apartment on Friday night, the day before his birthday. Contrary to what one might expect, the place wasn't that gigantic or ostentatious. Tony wasn't in the city that often, and basically just used the place to sleep (or, prior to dating Pepper, to "sleep"), so it didn't need to have all the amenities. The main benefit over a hotel was just the security. "That doorman was intense," Dean confirmed, when he arrived, looking slightly shaken by the thoroughness of his vetting to get in the building.
From behind Dean, Harry heard, "Not as bad as getting into one of our facilities." He saw that Natasha and a man he didn't recognize had walked down the hall just behind Dean.
"Hey, Nat," Harry said, fighting the urge to look down bashfully. "I didn't know you were coming?"
"Surprised Tony invited me," she agreed.
"We needed a team of seven, and Maverick doesn't have any other friends in New York," Tony explained, walking past the door with a drink he'd just made for himself at the bar (the apartment, of course, had a full bar despite its relatively minimal furnishings). "Surprised you came."
"And miss an opportunity to evaluate you in a tactical scenario?" she smirked. Still standing in the doorway she asked, "May we come in?"
"She's a vampire!" Tony mock-exclaimed. "That explains so much."
Natasha rolled her eyes and entered. Dean had already walked in after Harry and was looking around the place, finding it less imposing than he'd expected from a Tony Stark apartment. Harry glanced at the man that had come with her as she introduced him as, "This is Clint." In the light of the apartment, Harry got a better look at him. He was shorter than average height and had blond hair, but was otherwise another nondescript adult of the spy persuasion. Where Coulson would fit in at any white collar job in North America or Europe, Clint would similarly slide effortlessly into any blue collar job. He just had that vibe.
Speaking of Coulson, Tony raised an eyebrow, "I thought you were bringing Agent?"
"He's still on cleanup for the last mission," Natasha explained.
"Oh, yeah," Tony nodded. "Norse gods wrecking towns. Lot of damage."
"I wasn't read into that mission," she shrugged, giving nothing away. But Harry thought he caught a flicker of surprise on Clint's face, so maybe he was.
Tony seemed to have caught that flicker as well and peered at Clint, finally offering, "Want a drink, Clint?" He stressed it as if he didn't believe that was the man's real name.
"If you've got beer?" Clint shrugged. "I'm easy."
Tony nodded as he walked to the bar and grudgingly added, "Agent Romanoff?"
"I'm okay," she shook her head.
"So, I assume you know how to shoot, Agent Clint?" Tony checked.
"I passed my certifications," Clint allowed, with a confidence that even Harry realized meant that he probably really knew how to shoot.
"Wait, are we shooting something?" Dean asked, also not having been told what the activity was.
With perfect timing, Harry was just letting Rhodey and Happy in. Happy had gone down to meet him and was helping lug up two large duffel bags. Rhodey clocked the two agents and Dean, who he hadn't met yet, with cool professionalism. "Yeah. Paintball."
"Neat," Dean said.
Harry and Dean helped the men get the duffels situated on the coffee table, both also skipping the offer of drinks, and everyone gathered on the couches as Rhodey finally explained. "Family paintball adventure weekend. We had to wait until Harry was technically a teenager to qualify, so, tomorrow. It's in a big forest area. You can fight the other teams but there are also staff guarding objectives that we're trying to take."
Tony frowned and said, "That sounds like a LARP. We have one activity rule, and that's no LARPing."
Rhodey rolled his eyes, "We have more than one activity rule. And this isn't a LARP. It's a forest adventure game with… LARP elements."
"What's a LARP?" Dean asked, right before Harry could. Harry had forgotten he'd been curious about the acronym when Tony had mentioned it weeks earlier.
"Live action roleplay," Tony rolled his eyes. "It's like D&D but you dress up as your character and hit each other with padded sticks to use as swords and I'm not talking you out of this, am I?" Harry and Dean's eyes had widened at the idea. It honestly sounded a lot more fun to the active boys than playing fantasy games sitting around a table. "I think you have to be eighteen for most of them," Tony lamely added, mentally tracking the five-year reprieve and hoping they didn't realize you could start earlier if you had a parent go with you.
Even he wasn't aware that he was planning that far ahead for his relationship with Pepper and the kid that was effectively her son.
Somehow Tony talked the apartment manager into letting them do some shooting practice in an empty suite that was being renovated, and they all spent a fun hour splashing paintballs against hand-drawn bullseyes on the various walls. Clint never once missed the target, and the rest of them did pretty well (for all that it was short-range and stationary). Natasha and Clint offered to find protective outfits for them, and planned to meet them at the range the next day, Rhodey went to his own place and was meeting them for the drive, and the boys and Happy stayed in the guest rooms at Tony's apartment (it wasn't so small that it didn't have multiple guest rooms).
"Don't modify these," Rhodey exhorted Tony before leaving. "The range has speed caps for safety."
As soon as his best friend was gone for the night, Tony disappeared into his small workshop in the apartment to do exactly what Rhodey had just told him not to. Pepper had to force him to go to bed when she got in late from various business meetings she'd scheduled to not be in the way while the boys talked paintball.
On the ride a couple of hours out of the city, Tony and Harry, still jet-lagged, mostly slept while Rhodey and Dean talked (with commentary by Happy from the driver's seat). They arrived to find Natasha and Clint in their own nondescript sedan, and they passed out some quite-nice protective outfits. "We use them in SHIELD training exercises," she explained.
Wearing the face shields, Tony didn't even have to worry much about being an international celebrity.
The game itself proved to be a very good time. Harry and Natasha as the smallest, most agile team members proved adept at drawing and dodging enemy fire. Tony and Rhodey worked pretty well together at middle range. Dean picked up a lot of pointers from Clint about laying down suppressive fire and hitting targets at long range with slower, less-accurate weapons (Clint seemed to be talking about how the paintball guns were similar to arrows in that way, but Dean was quietly thinking about how spells often moved slower than a bullet).
Happy got shot a lot.
"Maybe I should go to one of those larks Tony was talking about," he was complaining, having been taken out yet again.
"LARPs," Harry corrected, accompanying him back to the base camp. They'd already been out on the range most of the morning, and Harry was ready for a break. Happy being "dead" for a while gave him the excuse to take a rest himself.
"Right, those," Happy nodded. "I bet things would be a lot more fair if it was legal for me to get up on people and hit them with a stick."
"Nat might like that too," Harry grinned. He'd noticed that the spy didn't really seem comfortable with rifles, and had been doing better with a paintball pistol that the rest of them hadn't bothered to carry. It didn't really have much ammo capacity, however.
"Gentlemen," a French-accented man's voice sounded from nearby. "It looks as if we 'ave caught ze prize goose!"
"We're out of play," Harry assured him. "Already dead."
"I do not zink it shall come to zat," the man said, moving into view flanked by several others. He was tall and burly, though as nondescript as anyone from behind the protective face mask. Harry couldn't help but notice that all of them had rifles that looked way too real to be paintball guns. He gestured toward where Harry and Happy had been walking from, where they'd left the rest of the group, ordering several of his men, "Allons. Go keep ze ozzers from following." He turned back to Happy and asked, "You are ze one zat carries ze armor suitcase, non?" The backpack that he was wearing did, indeed, have the repaired Mark V suit. "I shall 'ave zat… and ze boy for insurance."