Thank you all for the comments.
El espectator - Thanks for the translation. Hablo Espagnol commo el nino dos tres anos.
In terms of me writing Harry without emotions, that was mostly on purpose (and partially because I'm not a good writer). Harry is broken, he's just now, a year later, starting to recover.
People cope with trauma in different ways ...
Harry sort of shut down only really reacting to extremes like Felicity rummaging through his trunk nude.
I guess I lacked the skill to show that through my writing.
Harry walked into a meeting room, finding Steve, still in his Captain America uniform, sitting at a conference table with the Black Widow while Dr. Banner stood in a corner away from the others.
All three were watching a large monitor that showed Loki being shoved into a high tech glass cell.
Fury walked up the control panel of the cell.
"In case it's unclear. You try to escape. You so much as scratch that glass…"
Fury pressed a button which opened a hatch underneath Loki's cell.
Loki appeared less than impressed.
"Thirty thousand feet, straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?!"
Fury closed the hatch.
"Ant."
Then points at the button which would drop Loki into the steel trap.
"Boot."
"It's an impressive cage. Not built, I think, for me."
"Built for something a lot stronger than you."
"Oh, I've heard." Loki replied, a smirk on his face. "The mindless beast, makes play he's still a man. How desperate are you, that you call upon such lost creatures to defend you?"
Harry wondered what Loki was talking about. Was there a werewolf inside SHIELD?
"How desperate am I? You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can't hope to control. You talk about peace and you kill cause it's fun. You have made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did."
"Ooh. It burns you to come so close. To have the Tesseract, to have power, unlimited power. And for what? A warm light for all mankind to share, and then to be reminded what real power is."
"Well, you let me know if Real Power wants a magazine or something."
The group remained silent as they processed what they had seen.
"He really grows on you, doesn't he?" Banner offered, breaking the tense atmosphere.
"Loki's gonna drag this out. So, Thor, what's his play?" Steve asked.
"He has an army called the Chitauri. They're not of Asgard or any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract."
"So he's building another portal. That's what he needs Erik Selvig for." Banner concluded.
"Selvig?"
"He's an astrophysicist."
"He's a friend."
"Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours." Natasha interjected.
"Speaking of that. How did your mission go?" Harry asked.
"We got Clint and we got the Iridium. Clint is in a cell here and the Iridium is somewhere safe on board as well."
"I wanna know why Loki let us take him. He's not leading an army from here."
"I think I'm going to go and get us some answers." Harry replied, standing up from his place at the table.
"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy's brain is a bag full of cats, you could smell crazy on him."
Thor turned to Banner, annoyance clear in his expression.
"Have care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he's my brother."
"He killed eighty people in two days." Natasha replied in her deadpan delivery.
"He's adopted?" Thor offered questioningly as if it explained everything.
"I'm not going anywhere near Loki. I'd get nothing but lies and miss-directions from the god of trickery. No I think I'll go and chat with agent Barton."
"I'll escort you there." Fury informed Harry from the doorway. It was obviously not a request.
The two made their way towards the detention cells, crossing Stark and Coulson on the way.
"You know, Barton is one of our best agents. He's trained to counter almost every interrogation technique." Fury offered in a conversational tone. "And torture of a prisoner is a human rights violation."
"Torture isn't really my cup of tea." Harry replied hoping to assuage the directors concerns.
"So how are you planning on getting the information?"
Harry continued walking for a few moments before answering.
"I have a few different techniques." Harry hedged.
"Look, we need to work together on this. Divided we fall."
"And if you knew everything about me, so would Loki right now." Harry countered softly.
"Even Felicity doesn't know everything I can do. What you don't know can't be used against me. That's one thing I learned the hard way. Your organization has been compromised, Barton, Selvig and who knows how many more. Who knows what they've told your enemies … I can't take that risk."
"Loose lips sink ships. That's something I learned early on." Harry explained, remembering the DA and Marietta's betrayal.
Fury put a hand on Harry's shoulder stopping.
"Fine. I get what you're saying. I also have contingency plans that are off the books. But right now, I need answers and I don't care HOW you get them. Do … you ... understand?"
Harry nodded, it was clear to him that Fury wouldn't care how the information was obtained.
"I'll get back to the others then, I don't like leaving Stark unsupervised for extended periods. Get me results Potter."
Harry looked around only to find that they had made it to the detention center. Harry walked in and the guards on duty simply waved him inside.
On a cot, inside a barred cell was a slightly battered and bruised agent Barton.The man's eyes, covered in a strange shimmering pattern, never wavered as they stared at Harry intently.
While the imperious could be detected by a wary observer by the look in the victims eyes, the power of the staff was far more obvious.
Harry attempted to passively skim the agents memories as he moved to a position in front of the cell but was met with resistance.
Turning around, Harry conjured himself a comfortable chair and sat down.
The two men stared at each other in silence. Harry continues to attempt passive legilimency to no success. Either Barton had some rudimentary defences or his enthralling by Loki's staff had granted him a measure of protection.
"You won't get anything from me." Barton explained, breaking the lengthy silence. "I'm sure Fury's told you I've been trained to resist interrogation techniques and even if he authorized torture, that's not in your psych profile."
"That's what the last person I tortured told me as well. Something about needing to really WANT to hurt her, that righteous anger wouldn't cut it."
This seemed to shock the man slightly.
"But I didn't want information from her. I just wanted her to hurt. No, I don't need torture to get the information I want."
Harry raised his wand and cast Legilimens, pouring as much power as he could into the spell.
Harry felt his spell smash into a wall around Bartons mind so he poured more power into the spell smashing through the defenses.
Floating in the man's mind Harry could see the man had no defences, at least nothing as described in his books.
Harry hunted about looking for information.
While the man had no real defences, Harry was far from a master Legilimancer so it took some time to find a relevant memory.
Barton had used his knowledge of SHIELD to gather a rather impressive group of men and women who all had a beef with SHIELD.
A few memory fragments showed Barton contacting people who needed little or no encouragement.
Some unknown time later, Harry finally found an interesting memory.
Barton was making his way through a makeshift lab walking up to an older man directing men about.
"Put it over there. Where did you find all these
people?" The man asked.
"SHIELD has no shortage of enemies, Doctor. This the stuff you need?"
Barton passed the man a tablet with some details on a mineral.
"Yeah. Iridium. It's found in meteorites, it forms anti-protons. It's very hard to get hold of."
"Especially if SHIELD knows you need it."
"Well, I didn't know." The man offered.
At that moment, Loki entered the small workstation.
"Hey! This is wonderful. The Tesseract has shown me so much. It's- it's more than knowledge, it's truth." The man exclaimed, ecstatically. An expression of neer religious rapture on his face.
"I know. It, ah- it touches everyone differently. What did it show you Agent Barton?"
The vision faded and Harry reached for another clustered close by.
Barton stood in front of a large group of men and women in a makeshift briefing room. On a whiteboard were technical details Harry could not understand but what he did recognise was a crude drawing of the Hellicarrier with several weak points highlighted with arrows.
"So to recap. We will take our stolen Quinjet and send in the confirmation approach codes. I'll disable one of rotors here, then we'll go in hard to reach the bridge where we'll disable the entire network. That'll leave them blind and crippled. Our priority will be to extract the VIP."
Barton turned back from the whiteboard.
"Bravo team, you got your instructions from Loki on where to setup the device?"
"Right, at Stark …"
The man, apparently the leader of Bravo team was quickly interrupted.
"That's need to know!" Barton baked out loudly. "Some of us are going on another mission where the risk of capture is, while minimal, still a possibility. You can't betray what you don't know."
The leader of Bravo team winced at the rebuke but sat down.
"Team Charlie, you work on a contingency plan in case we get captured while acquiring the Iridium. Again, keep you plans need to know. Your priority is …"
The memory ended as Harry was forcefully ripped from the agent's mind. All around, alarm bells were ringing. The brig was in shambles, part of the ceiling having collapsed due to an explosion of some kind that had thrown Harry several feet back.
Alarms blared and smoke billowed through the now dimly lit area but Harry could hear some pained moaning coming from outside the cell and drunkenly made his way towards it.
The two guards outside the door lay on the floor. One, obviously dead, his head crushed by heavy debris while the other was conscious but heavily injured, blood seeping from his damaged uniform.
"Hey! You'll be ok. We'll get you out of this." Harry whispered encouragingly as he knelt down next to the man, vanishing part of his uniform.
"No … you have to stop the attack."
Harry ignored the man's feeble protests.
"This'll only take a second Mr. Thomas. I just want to stop you from bleeding out. Now be quiet, healings not my strong suit and I need to focus."
Harry waved his wand over the man's wounds, causing them to slowly close.
"I spent seven years sharing a dorm in school with a Thomas. Dean Thomas, was a solid enough bloke, good at art but a bit of a slob or maybe it was just that Neville and me were just more conscious of the mess the other three made."
Harry just rambled on, trying to distract the guard from the pain since he had no pain relief potions on hand.
"And we're done. At least as much as I can do. I wouldn't move about, not sure how much internal damage you have."
"Right! Now get going. Fury's going to need his big guns." The man ordered.
"First, what happened and what's going on. I can't go out there blind."
"There was a call out about a dozen bogies coming in fast towards our position, we went into full alert when the Helicarrier shook from several explosions."
Harry turned around, just now remembering why he was there to find Barton gone from his cell, a small hole in the wall apparently his means of escape.
"Let Fury know Barton is loose but I was able to get some information. I'm going to track him down before he does more damage to the ship."
Not waiting for confirmation, Harry rushed to the cell and made his way into the hole.
Crawling deeper through the labyrinthine ventilation or maintenance shafts, Harry considered transforming into his raven form to alleviate the claustrophobia setting in when he finally emerged into some sort of engineering area.
Harry was interrupted in his search for signs of Barton by an inhuman roar, the rapidly approaching sound of crashing glass, protesting metal and heavy repetitive thumping.
Turning to the fast approaching sound, Harry saw a wild eyed agent Romanov expertly parkouring through the cluttered area. The reason for her panic was the green, nearly twelve foot tall, troll like mass of muscles running after her, tearing everything in it's path like it was all made of cardboard.
Harry turned and began to run with the spy but his own parkour skills and general physical fitness was not on par with the super spy and only by using short apparition jumps was he able to keep pace.
"Keep running." Harry ordered the red headed spy before turning back just in time to see a massive green fist barreling towards his face.
Harry spun to the side and apparated next to Romanov. The creature blinked in confusion where Harry had stood just moments earlier.
Harry could see workers trying to evacuate the area, helping some of their coworkers move from under collapsed pieces of equipment.
"Go find Barton, Loki's troll isn't the first I handle." Harry offered.
"That's not a troll, that's Banner."
The troll or rather Banner, roared in anger, grabbed a large chuck of machinery and launched it at them.
Harry flicked his wand and transformed the object, mid flight, into a massive amount of steel marbles.
The marbles hit Harry hard and when he turned to see if Black Widow was ok, he found she had already left.
"What do you mean that's Banner!?" Harry cried out in frustration.
Doctor Banner took a few threatening steps but lost his footing on the steel marbles. Not enough for him to fall but to slow his progress.
"FINITE INCANTATEM!"
Harry gathered as much power as he could and cast the general purpose magic canceling spell hoping it would revert whatever magic Loki had used on the soft spoken scientist but the spell had no visible effect.
Banner returned Harry's shout with a Primal roar of his own. The force of the scream forced the wizard to take a step back.
Harry flung a pair of bludgeoning spells at Banner, causing the creature to stumble back a half step. Before Harry could recover, the green juggernaut charged forward, his right fist punching forward.
Harry barely managed to throw himself to the side.
Banners fist hit a heavy piece of machinery ripping it from the floor and sending it careening into the wall five feet away where it embedded itself into said wall.
"LEVICORPUS!"
Harry cast the spell from his prone position, causing Banner to flip up and hang in the air as if caught in an ankle noose trap.
Banner roared in fury while Harry breathed a sigh of relief.
"Never thought I'd be glad for Snape taunting me with those pensieve memories." Harry whispered as he scrambled to stand from prone position.
But that relief was short lived as the trashing green giant suddenly grabbed hold of a large piece of machinery and some support struts and pulled, his massive muscled bunching from the exertion.
The ground shook as the spell holding Banner snapped and the troll like scientists efforts sent him crashing face first into the ground.
Banner was obviously a melee combatant while wizards favoured distance but the room was far too cramped for Harry to work with so Harry twirled his wand and with a push of power cast the space expansion charm around himself.
The charm had never been designed for such a hasty and casual use and Harry could feel the very fabric of reality protest the alteration. With a groan of protesting metal and several pieces of equipment experiencing a sudden catastrophic failure, the area warped and rippled before tripling in size, giving Harry a bit more breathing room and moving his green opponent further away by several precious feet.
Banner raised himself from the ground, looked about the expanded room, confusion briefly replacing the rage that had been there moments earlier.
"Dr. Banner, not sure if you can understand me..." Harry began, hoping to talk the now slightly less violent man down but at the mention of his name, Banners rage seemed to rekindle and his roar of rage reverberated deafeningly around the expanded room.
Harry snapped off a stunner that simply splashed harmlessly off Banners hide.
Banner leapt the distance between Harry and himself landing a punch that barely missed the wizard and left a massive dent in the metal floor.
Harry apparated away and transfigured a pipe into a large, if hollow, animated metal serpent, directing the snake towards the enraged man but Banner simply grabbed the snake and ripped it in half with only a slight effort.
Before Banner could throw the two pieces away, Harry transfigured them into manacles and connected them with thick chains to the floor.
This delayed Banner for a few precious moments and Harry continued with this tactic.
Chains began to spring up from several points about the room latching on to Banner and anchoring themselves to the walls, floor and ceiling.
The tactic appeared to work as Banner seemed to struggle under the constraints of a dozen massive steel chains.
Taking a moment to regroup, Harry noticed that the expanded room was empty except for a group of men trying to lift a heavy beam off one of their coworkers.
Harry cast a weightlessness charm on the beam and turned his attention back to Banner just in time to see him rip the chains in his arms from the wall, taking large sections of the wall with them.
Harry flung the standard spells at Banner. The man again shrugged off the effects of the stunning spell, the ropes from the incarcerous spell were weaker than the chains Harry had transfigured. The petrification spell actually had some effect but lasted only a few seconds.
Banner in the interim had easily ripped up the remaining chains and appeared even angrier than before. Grabbing several of the chains, Banner began whipping them about using them as a weapon.
Harry transfigured the mass of chains into a solid metal snake, directing the snake to coil itself around Banner and constrict.
While Banner struggled with the snake, hitting and denting it with his one free massive hand, Harry began working on the floor causing it to flow up Banners body, encasing his lower body in a metal skin.
Harry began to feel hope, he appeared to be gaining the upper hand against his hulking opponent when he suddenly felt a feeling like an elastic snapping.
With all the damage done to the room by Banner and Harry's own warping of the floor, the already straining space expansion enchantment had finally snapped.
Banner had apparently also felt that something had just gone horribly wrong as he stopped his struggles and looked about curiously.
The walls and floor began to warp randomly while shelving and support beams twisted into impossible shapes as Harry's corrupted spell fought to hold back the universe trying to right itself.
The conflicting forces resulted in a warped and distorted space, jagged spears of metal forming out of the environment .
Banner bunched his legs and leapt upwards, his arms shielding his head as he ripped through the warping ceiling.
Harry followed through the doctor with a ascendare spell, avoiding the jagged metal spearing through the deformed room as it haphazardly recovered its dimensions, into a warehouse type area.
Banner was grunting and slamming his fists against the metal floor in a primal rage, reminding Harry of a gorilla he had seen in a nature show on Privet Drive. Harry took advantage of the distraction and transformed a large shipping container into a vaguely humanoid metal statue and then animated it sending it charging at his opponent.
The metal construct slammed heavily into Banner, knocking him back a step before being beaten into a malformed lump as Banner vented his rage against the poorly animated golem like creature.
"Right, I obviously can't outfight you and you'll rip this ship apart if I let you loose. Let's try something mental."
Harry flicked his wand and cast an overpowered cheering charm, hoping a happy, or euphoric troll would be easier to deal with than an enraged one.
The spell took effect as Harry's animation spell buckled under Banners unrelenting blows.
Banner looked about as if confused for a moment, a large grin slowly forming on his face to be quickly replaced by a deep primal laugh.
Banner fell back on his back and began laughing uproariously.
Harry watched in amazement as slowly, Banner reverted from a massive green muscle bound troll and back to a skinny scientist.
"What?" Harry whispered in disbelief.
"What ... hahahaha … the hell … was that?" The man asked between fits of laughter.
"WHAT?!?"