An Incomplete Potter Collection ch Collection 11
XXX
WANTED
Different Minds
Avenging Magic
XXX
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
XXX
XXX
Story: [WANTED]
Summary: Harry landed in the One Piece verse a long time ago. He adapted, even if he didn't age.
Crossover: One Piece
Genre: Adventure
XXX
Harry sighed.
In the beginning, he'd tried to get back, to return to Hogwarts and magic. But after a while, he grew more and more aware of just how bad of an idea that would be.
He didn't age anymore. It'd been nearly a decade, sailing wherever, yelling at sea-kings who tried to eat him, blasting pirate ships to splinters at first sign of aggression, blasting Marine ships to splinters on principle – Merlin, but he hated the world nobles – and just generally minding his own business.
A decade, and he hadn't aged a day since he'd arrived. He still looked like he did when he was fourteen, which – in all honesty – meant that everyone assumed him to be damn near prepubescent. Damn the Dursleys and their inability to actually do the decent thing and feed him. He'd probably have his growth forever stunted.
Except for the whole he-no-longer-aged thing making it impossible to grow taller anyway.
He'd had a few theories on why, mainly revolving around either his home-world, or the accident that had brought him to this one. So, either the accident had stopped his aging, or time moved differently somehow to the way it ought to do according to what his body believed. The latter of which translated into: 'time hasn't passed at Hogwarts, so time hasn't passed for his body'.
Regardless of how well-adapted his body might've been to return to Hogwarts for his Fourth Year and simply slip straight back into the role of the Boy-Who-Lived, Harry had spent a decade in a world where killing people was a fairly common occurrence for him.
There were bounty-hunters who wanted his head for cash, Marines who wanted his head for duty, pirates who wanted his head for reputation, civilians who wanted his head for vengeance, and some really disturbing types who wanted his body because of the way he looked.
Harry had long since grown used to killing people. Sometimes it was in self-defense, other times it was because he didn't appreciate the thought that they'd continue breathing, and finally there were times when it was just easier to kill everyone instead of bothering with the whole mess.
Not to say that he was some kind of sea-faring mass-murderer. Sure, he left corpses in his wake, but that was life. And if they didn't want to die, then they shouldn't try attacking him... or work for the World Government. Disgusting nobles.
Shaking his head, Harry dismissed the thought.
It was always so easy to get caught up in introspection about things when there was no one around to talk to.
Especially after he'd figured out how to steer the ship even in his sleep. Magic was kind of a game-breaker.
He didn't have a crew, mainly because he didn't feel like bothering with one, but in part because he absolutely awful at making friends. Ron and Hermione had been a one-in-a-million thing apparently.
Which was kind of depressing, but there wasn't a lot he could do about it.
He'd circled through a few crew-members over the years. Some of them had turned out to be complete assholes, others had turned out to be traitors, and still others had simply decided to leave the ship in order to pursue their dreams.
In the end, the only one left on the ship was himself, and with magic it was relatively easy to have everything working smoothly. Once he'd figured out how to do magic without his wand, anyway.
He missed having someone to talk to, he missed his friends, he missed Hedwig, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't bring himself to missing Hogwarts.
Hogwarts had been home once upon a time. It'd been an escape from the Dursleys, a way into a bright new world filled with wonders.
It'd also been a school with the crappiest disciplinary system that he could imagine, some of the absolutely worst authority figures he'd heard of – excluding the world nobles, because the only one comparable to them were Snape, and he would probably still end up second – and with a fantastically retarded way of going about teaching its students.
Sure, it'd taken Harry life-and-death situations and nearly three years of study to master wandless magic. But, from the way the professors would talk about it, wandless magic was supposed to be damn-near impossible.
So, whilst he missed his friends, and many other things from his home-world, he couldn't bring himself to miss Hogwarts. To miss the constant goading of the Slytherins, the mindless gossiping of the students, the harassment from authority figures, and the Ministry who he actually disliked more than he did the Marines.
The Marines obeyed the world nobles, true. But at least most of them tried doing the right thing. Whilst the Ministry cheerfully ignored any potential ability to do the right thing, over the possibility of hefty bribes.
Sure, Harry still killed the Marines at sight – when he was out at sea, or couldn't slip away into the crowd undetected – but that was a danger every Marine knew when signing on. He didn't hate them, they were just in the way.
And that probably didn't help his case of trying not to be a mass-murderer, but after the first dozen or so times that he'd been captured to be executed – despite not actually having broken any of their laws, and without the good fortune of looking forward to an actual trial on the matter – Harry had simply decided to kill them all at sight.
Again, all of this meant that he was... whilst not 'happy' about being trapped in this new world, he was far more happy over here, than he would be back there.
He would've had his friends, true. But he would've also had a disgusting amount of supposed responsibility, coupled with a crippling degree of authority.
He could protest the Ministry's actions until he was blue in the face, and they would just brush him off as being 'a child'. But the moment that he made a single mistake, they would undoubtedly pounce on him for not being 'mature' enough to make his own decisions.
Yeah no. He had absolutely zero interest in dealing with that kind of crap.
A gigantic head rose from the other end of the railing.
As he started to tell it to piss off and not drool all over the deck of his ship, Harry was struck with the curious thought that perhaps this was why he could never keep a crew around.
Parseltongue was supposedly rather unnerving to listen to after all, and it seemed like every damned sea-king he'd ever met spoke it fluently.
Which probably explained why the Marines wanted him dead so badly, actually.
Sea-kings were powerful creatures, and if someone could actually order them around? That person could potentially capsize an entire navy on their lonesome.
Not that Harry gave a rat's arse about their reasoning for wanting him dead. He was planning on surviving.
Waving hello, and ignoring the sea-king's questions about if he was as deliciously edible as he smelled, Harry turned the conversation to why he was there.
"Where did the fire-man go?"
Normally, he wouldn't travel the Grand Line and try to get a message to some pirate, but Shanks was kind of a special case.
Perhaps it was that the Yonko and his crew were always willing to share their booze with him despite him looking like a kid, perhaps it was that the man very rarely requested much of anything from him especially anything serious, or perhaps Harry simply had a thing for redheads.
Who could say?
Regardless, when Shanks had asked him to keep Portgas D. Ace and some other guy called Marshall D. Teach from beating the tar out of each other, Harry had listened.
Which was why he'd started asking the local wildlife about some kid who could turn into fire, which in turn had led him to his current position.
The sea-king seemed about to answer, but as a second sun bloomed on a nearby island, Harry figured that he could guess the way from here.
XXX
XXX
Story: [Different Minds]
Summary: An adventure written in an attempt to describe how I'd imagine the Golden Trio and Luna's "mindscapes".
Genre: Adventure, Spiritual?
XXX
They'd been looking for a way to let Harry master Occulemency without interacting with Snape.
What they'd actually found-... well, it wasn't exactly that, but it was something that could help on the way there.
It was a spell that was supposed to show you the workings of your own mind, by submerging yourself in it. The spell continued on with some kind of complicated-sounding things, and none of the four people present – Luna had been the one who'd stumbled upon the spell in a rather odd place, so of course she was included with the regular trio – could figure out quite what it was alluding to.
So they'd cast the spell.
And that was how the whole lot of them were unceremoniously dumped inside of... somewhere else.
After some looking around the empty, not-dark not-bright place, Ron stumbled upon chaos.
Or well, it looked an awful lot like chaos. With angles that were off and space that was twisted, and things creeping around the edges of perception.
Unsurprisingly in hindsight, Luna easily pointed out what things were, and why certain things were other things, along with leading them on a guided trip through the oddness of it all.
All the way until they reached the swirling void of images-scents-feelings-tastes-sounds-emotions-memories. Then she realized where they were, and suddenly looked a lot more vulnerable than any of the members of the trio were comfortable with her being.
They were inside of Luna's mind, so of course she understood how things worked there, even if she obviously wasn't comfortable with having them in there with her. Understanding what a massive – if accidental – breach of privacy they were participating in, all non-Luna members of the group closed their eyes and swore themselves to secrecy.
Fortunately, they were kept from berating themselves for previous transgression when Luna simply gathered them in a hug, and told them that that was enough. Apparently, their willingness to not see it, was enough to convince Luna that she should show them.
None of them were entirely sure how this came about, and all of them were very much aware of just how much trust their friend was giving them.
Luna's memories were odd, but then memories in themselves were odd, it being considered fairly normal for memories to be kind of mercurial in how they were remembered. Sometimes, a scent would bring to mind a song, or a song would bring to mind a scent, or the touch of gravel underneath your feet would remind you of ice-cream. Memories flowed into each other, and Luna's 'whirling void of memories' captured that sentiment almost perfectly in its chaotic spiral.
All four of them spent an indescribable length of time simply being with the memories, seeing her life, seeing the world through her own eyes, and coming to understand a little bit about how her mind switched from one track to the next.
Then they decided to begin walking again, because they couldn't stay there forever, and none of them were entirely sure if the spell that had landed them there would bring them back out if they didn't actively try to find a path out for themselves.
So they walked, and Luna guided them back out into the endlessness once more.
Again they wandered, searching for some way out, none of them willing to leave the others' side on the off-chance that they would get separated in this odd place.
Finally, new impressions arrived.
It was careful, hesitant. Things would move only after having remained still, except when they didn't and things cascaded horribly.
Ron would wince every time something moved without apparently thinking it through, and would stare at the things refusing to move with a frustrated expression, as if he wanted to shout at them to rush forward, but was too scared that they might cause the damage of their fellows if they were ever to move.
Considering the way that Luna had reacted to her own mind, and the way that Ron was now reacting to this place, it stood to reason that this was Ron's mind.
It wasn't an orderly place, but it wasn't a chaotic place. It was a place, filled with things, and everything was in contact with everything else, and all of them would shift and shudder and things would break and things would try to be mended.
It kind of reminded Harry of wizard chess. Not only in the way that some things would seem to follow perfectly guided routes, but in the way that they were destroyed, and repaired, and everything needed to be thought out, even if half the time it seemed to be thinking it through too much, and the other half not thinking it through at all.
Finally, Ron's meandering had them stumble upon the tower.
Where Luna had been a swirling void, a tornado of sorts, Ron's was a tower that was in the middle of construction.
And whoever was constructing it had to be madder than a hatter.
There were balconies, and spires, and statues, and extensions, and pillars, and windows of a multitude of color and shapes, and doors in painfully awkward places. It was a tower, yes. But it looked more like a pile of junk, shaped by an architect who was more used to gluing chairs together than designing buildings.
Ron blushed, and looked like he wanted to force all of them to keep their eyes shut. But then he kind of just sighed, shaking himself of the feeling, and settling down to watch his own ever-constructing swirl of memories.
The rest of them were a bit unsure about it, but finally shrugged and joined him.
Ron's memories did explain a lot of how it worked, how he tried to think everything through like a chess-game, because you should always think things through. And then how he'd get annoyed, or tired, or just bored, and then he'd do something just to get to see the pieces move. Because what's the point in living if you have to look over your shoulder at every turn?
It was different from Luna's bizarre chaos, and it suited Ron well.
In the end however, it was time to continue onwards, and the four of them set off back into the endlessness.
Hermione was the one who seemed to figure out their new environment the fastest.
In fact, she was pretty much the only one who seemed to be having a single clue as to what it was.
Everything was moving, all the time. And it flowed like Harry imagined air-traffic did. Whizzing along in its own set paths, everything flowed around each other in perfectly controlled chaos. As in, it looked like chaos, because there was too much to comprehend, but it was extremely orderly.
Or, at least that was what Hermione kept insisting, blushing every now and then.
When she finally managed to guide them through what seemed to be an opening in the sheer mass of flying things, and they made it to her own memories, the sight that greeted them confirmed Harry's earlier association with air-traffic.
It was a tower, but where Ron's had been built like a maze even to the one looking at it from the outside, Hermione's tower was perfectly pristine. It was still being built, but it was being built with carefully constructed arcs and spires. And it seemed almost hollow in how it was perforated so that the flying things could fly through it without any kind of congestion.
It was a masterpiece, and the endless bustling of things made the almost boringly utilitarian approach of it all come alive. Everyone spent some time trying to watch her memories, but soon they were growing green around the gills, simply from getting dizzy trying to keep up with it all.
Hermione, seeing that her memories seemed to be causing the rest of the group some issues, immediately began dragging them back towards the endlessness.
Everyone breathed a silent sigh of relief at exiting the carefully controlled madness of Hermione's mind. Though Ron managed to catch his breath long enough to shake his head with a smile and mutter something about her being 'brilliant but scary'.
By now, considering the pattern, Harry was resigning himself to trying to figure out how his own brain worked in comparison to the ones of his friends.
And he wasn't disappointed.
Things flowed oddly in Harry's mind.
Where Luna's had skittered in and out of their perception, and Ron's had caused avalanches of their own, and Hermione's had followed rigid paths. Harry's meandered.
They would meander without purpose, until suddenly they'd decide that they needed to be someplace, whereupon they'd immediately get there, even if it meant disturbing the other things from their own meandering.
It didn't take long before they realized just how violent the things could get, and it was unanimously decided that the things were not to be touched, in any shape or form. Lest someone lose an arm to the vicious little things.
Still, they remained relatively peaceful most of the time, seemingly content with meandering around the place, and not particularly bothered by much of anything.
When they finally made it to Harry's memories, they were greeted by a lake.
It was impossible to see the bottom, and it was hard to tell just how deep it went, but it remained placidly undisturbed for the most part. The only exception to the mirror-like surface being how some of the things would walk in and out of it, swimming lazily in its calm waters.
It was peaceful, especially so after the mind-twisting order of Hermione's memories, or the hesitant guilt of Ron's, or the randomly appearing ones of Luna's.
Which of course led to the moment where the water shivered and frothed and the wind made waves grow large.
It was to be expected, most of them agreed, considering just how calm and peaceful most of the things were, until they decided to actually do things. It made sense then, that the core that they surrounded, would be much the same.
Harry agreed, but hurried with guiding the lot of them back out into the endlessness again, not wanting to see just what it'd be like to be dragged into the lakes murky depths, and having his speed more than a little bit encouraged by the fact that there were waves that were quite literally lapping at his heels.
XXX
XXX
Story: [Avenging Magic]
Summary: Magic is on the verge of being revealed, so our heroes decide to simply get it out there before it's revealed to the world in a really bad way. They choose a group of prominent superheroes to be their first contact.
Crossover: Avengers
Genre: Humor
XXX
"Harry, I don't know how, and I don't know why, but I'm sure that this is all somehow your fault." Hermione stated with utmost conviction.
"Wha-? My fault? How is any of this my fault?" Harry demanded indignantly.
"It's always your fault, Harry. Everyone knows that!" Hermione pointed out with impeccable logic.
"No it isn't!" Harry denied. "You're the one who came up with the DA-thing! I had nothing to do with it!"
"That wouldn't have been necessary if you hadn't provoked the Ministry! I only did what I had to do in order to secure our education!" Hermione vehemently defended herself.
Harry boggled at the girl. "How is 'not being assassinated properly' in any shape or form provoking anyone?!"
"Before that, Harry! Stop pretending to be dumb." Hermione rolled her eyes at her friend.
"You mean when I informed them that I'd been attacked, and asked them to do their bloody jobs?!" Harry responded.
"Exactly! You can't ask the government to do their job, Harry! Everyone knows that politicians just do random stuff and either take credit for the success, or blame others for the failure." Hermione reasoned.
Ron sighed, watching as his two friends devolved into a shouting match again.
He'd probably be upset at them for fighting like this, but he and Hermione tended to fight over even more insignificant things – though that could mainly be attributed to the sexual tension that just wouldn't leave them the hell alone.
Still, it was times like this that he pitied Harry's side of things. Namely, to be caught in between the yelling.
"Are they always like this?" The man in the metal suit asked curiously, sounding amused even through the metallic distortion of his voice.
Ron shrugged. "Not really. Harry's usually the diplomat." He stared at his two friends for a moment longer, just to make sure that they really were planning on bickering pointlessly for the next hour or so, before turning back to the group in front of him. "Right, well... Magic is real, we didn't really want to deal with the whole 'fix all of our problems'-thing that the muggles had going back in like-..." He made a vague motion with his hand. "- waaay back. Don't ask, I hated history. So we hid away. But since you'd probably be able to find us now, if you actually started looking, we figured we should minimize the potential damage and just say hello."
Quite a few faces in the group stared incredulously at him.
"You really don't deal with diplomat-stuff, do you?" The metal-guy mused, the sound of an amused smirk in his voice. "How did you get landed this magic-is-real job?"
Ron shrugged. "Hell if I know. I guess I'm kind-of-famous nowadays, and recently I threw a chair at our Minister's head for being an idiot about this whole thing." He paused, smiling happily at the memory. "It bounced. Three people got injured."
"Uhh..." Everyone in the muggle-group stared at him, as Hermione and Harry continued yelling in the background.
Ron snapped back to the present, ears turning red. "Politicians, you know." He frowned. "We got some of the corrupt ones in the post-war restoration, but well... politicians." He said in a 'what can you do' kind of way.
"War? What war?" The guy in the blue body-tights asked, face serious.
Ron made a face. "A civil war in Britain, a few years back. Crazy madman trying to take over the world. That kind of thing." He paused, turning to stare at his two friends again, face turning somber at the sight. "Merlin knows how we made it out alive."
XXX