This is kind of short, but hopefully kind of fun.
Taking care of a child should be simple. All that's required for looking after Potter is feeding him, making sure he's clean, and making him sleep.
Yet Potter is old enough that these things are not a constant process. The boy doesn't loudly wail and demand feeding every few hours like an infant would. Somehow the Asset knows that is what infants do, despite not having any experience with caring for them.
So far, Potter has not asked for food at all, instead simply waiting for the Asset to give it to him and assure him he can eat it. If it were the Dursley boy the Asset was looking after, there probably would have been a thousand demands in these past 11.2 hours, 98% of which probably could have been ignored. Unlike Potter, that boy did not need extra nourishment.
Potter probably will not need to be fed again for a few more hours.
The Asset dries the boy's messy, black hair and realizes that it is untamable as it continues to stick up in every direction. He checks the boy's injuries. The cuts from the plate have healed a surprising amount, as if the boy is has slightly enhanced healing himself.
"Tank you." The boy thanks him for the bath, or perhaps bandaging him, as if it was a gift. He had done the same thing with the food earlier this morning.
Fortunately, the boy knows how to properly deposit bodily wastes in a toilet, despite having an accident sometime in the escorts' car when the Asset was fighting that enemy asset who wielded the weaponized stick. Potter demonstrates this ability after the bath. He almost doesn't pull his pants up when he's done, as if he can't bring himself to dress himself in new clothes, so the Asset hoicks them up.
"Try not to urinate in your pants, Potter." The Soldier says, remembering last night.
"Yessir." The boy nods quickly. "I don't need nappies, but I'm not a big boy like Aun' Tuna told Dudley when he went potty."
"You are undersized, Potter." The Asset agrees. The boy's eyes light up again when his surname is used.
"Did...did you knowed my Mummy and Daddy?" The Asset catches just a glimpse of the boy's wide, hopeful green eyes, before Potter immediately ducks his head and stammers out an apology. His parents seem to have been a forbidden subject with the Dursley family.
"It's did you know." The Asset corrects. He does not know the answer to that question, does not even know who the boys parents are, or were. He could have been sent to kill them. The fact that he doesn't remember a previous target named Potter is meaningless- he's not always told his targets' names.
Maybe Potter's parents were influential somehow, and the boy would gain HYDRA some political favor? What other use would the boy be for them?
It does not matter, it is not the Soldier's place to question the reasoning behind his missions. Even when he is delaying the mission, such as now.
"Aun' Tuna says my mummy an' daddy died in a caw cwash." Potter mumbles, mispronouncing the last two words. The Asset remembers the vision of the mission where he'd made the targets' deaths look like a car accident, but somehow he doesn't think those targets were this boy's parents.
"I did not know them." The Asset answers eventually. The child looks slightly disappointed.
Feeding and bathing Potter have only taken up 56 minutes, leaving a large amount of time with no discernible objective.
DELIVER THE BOY.
He should, but he doesn't. It is still unclear why, aside from the fact he is defective.
"What d'you want me to do, Mr. A'set, sir?" Potter asks as the Asset rewraps the bandages around Potter's tiny hands. The Asset suspects that the late Mrs. Dursley made Potter clean as well as cook. From what he observed, the Dursley boy never lifted a finger to help. "Cleaning?"
They have not been here long enough for the ski resort to get dirty, aside from Potter dribbling soup on the table earlier, which is already cleaned up. None of their food requires cooking, and it seems pointless to send the boy out to cut the grass with a pair of scissors like he reportedly did at the Dursleys' residence. Furthermore, it is odd that Potter is asking about cleaning when his old clothes were filthy with tears and mucus.
"There are no chores for you to perform, Potter." The Soldier tells him.
The boy nods and shuffles off.
The Soldier follows and watches the boy enter the wardrobe he'd been hiding in earlier. The Dursley's clearly used the cupboard under the stairs as a place to store Potter when they had no use for him, but it is inferior to the cryo tank in that he is still conscious and requires basic things like food when not being used. Not that the Dursley parents had fed Potter adequately, despite drastically overfeeding the Dursley boy.
The Soldier pulls the boy out of the wardrobe, since he needs to keep an eye on him. The boy starts asking about what chores he should perform again, seeming lost at the idea of not being given work to do. It had been the same earlier, when the boy thought he had to cook breakfast.
The Asset knows that feeling all too well at the moment. He's still not sure what he's doing right now.
"Stick by me." The Asset orders, although his voice is still quiet. He has much more experience obeying orders than giving them. "Unless I tell you not to. Do as I say."
"That's it?" Potter asks, although he nods in acquiescence to the instructions. "But, that can't be it. I haf'to earn my keep. Can't be a lazy boy, 'cos t'en you'll send me back to da Dursleys." The boy looks at him fearfully.
The Soldier presses his lips together in annoyance. What does he need to say to get Potter to retain the information that he cannot go back to the Dursley's? He could just tell the boy he killed the Dursley family, but for some reason, he doesn't. "You are not going back. Stop thinking that."
The boy looks at him as if he doesn't really believe it, clearly thinking the Soldier will redact that sometime. "But I'm a ung'ateful freak."
He is far from ungrateful, and 'Freak' is still an unclear designation for the boy. The Asset remembers in the store in the very early hours of the morning, Potter had said something about freaks being ungrateful and not deserving new clothes, presumably something that was said to the boy himself. Yet the boy is extremely grateful for almost everything the Soldier does simply to keep him alive.
At least wanting to be useful would serve Potter well with HYDRA. After all, the Asset's handlers always find some sort of use for the Soldier when he is not in cryo, even if it is making sure he will obey by supplying correction.
Currently, Potter is not nearly as useless as the defective Soldier.
The child follows the Soldier out to the main sitting/dining area as ordered and stands unobtrusively off to the side. Most children his age probably would not be able to stay still for so long while not doing anything.
The Asset is very good at staying motionless while observing his surroundings. He has had missions with a lot of waiting. He had sat motionless in a hedge for almost five hours last night, but that was part of the mission.
He chooses the ideal angle to see out the window while minimizing the ability of outsiders to see him in return and watches for any sign that somebody will stumble across them in this ski lodge. They remain undisturbed, but that will not be the case forever.
HYDRA is surely looking for him. The Asset is too valuable an asset to just let go. Or, normally he is. His value might be lower now that he's malfunctioning, but they will be able to fix him.
COMPLETE THE MISSION. COMPLETE THE MISSION. The mission keeps blaring in his head, reminding him to leave now that the boy is fed and bathed, that the punishment will only get harsher the longer he delays.
"Do you want me to shine your shoes, sir?" The boy asks uncertainly after 2.9 minutes of silence, as if he doesn't have as much experience with polishing shoes as cooking and isn't sure whether he should be speaking up at all.
The Soldier looks down at his combat boots, which are not shoes in the first place. They are not particularly dirty, yet they are not completely clean either. Nor is there any reason for them to be clean.
"No." The Asset murmurs.
Potter whispers something about 'Aunt Tuna' being mad about dirt.
At 1350 the Soldier prepares a late lunch for Potter, since they had a late breakfast ("I'm s'posed to cook" Potter protests again when he sees the Soldier preparing the meal).
Potter ends up preparing a meal for the Asset, and the Asset stops the boy from frying bacon on a stove, despite clearly knowing how to do it. The boy's hand is still damaged from Vernon Dursley pressing Potter's hand into the stove yesterday evening.
Potter passes the Soldier a plate with bread and marmalade and another plum. He insists the Asset eat it before he eats. His functionality is still within acceptable parameters, no nourishment is required, but the Asset eats it anyways.
Not because the boy ordered him to- the boy is definitely not a handler or similar superior- but because he will not waste it.
The meal the Asset prepared for the boy has not only some soup like breakfast, but a few crackers (or 'butter biscuits for children', as they're labelled on the package). The crackers/biscuits are shaped like anatomically-incorrect animals that bare little resemblance to real animals.
Potter still seems shocked that he is allowed to eat, especially the animal crackers, and he stares at the Soldier with wide green eyes until he is given permission to eat. Apparently only the Dursley boy got so-called "fun" food like animal-shaped crackers.
Potter clearly enjoys them, and starts to make animal noises as if the crackers are alive. "Rawr, rawr." The child lets out a quiet, playful roar as he moves an animal cracker that vaguely looks like a tiger. He looks up at the Soldier as if he'd been caught doing something naughty by playing with his food and quickly bites off the tiger's head.
The boy casts a longing glance at the bag of crackers when he finishes the first few, and the Asset gives him more once it's clear they're not coming right back up. Potter gives the Asset the biggest smile yet, as if he's the greatest person in the world, instead of a deadly assassin, simply for giving him more crackers. That smile makes the chest malfunction in a way that's different from the previous errors.
At the end of the meal, the boy is still clutching three crackers- a lion, a seal and a bear. He seems to think the Soldier will take them from him at any moment. Even though he hunches over them protectively, he probably would not fight back if the Soldier tried to take them from him.
The Soldier lets him keep them and the boy clutches the crackers, though he occasionally continues to play with them as if they're toys. He stands just a bit closer to the Soldier than before lunch.
At 1410, the Asset turns on the screen in the bedroom they'd slept in, while Potter crawls into the wardrobe. It does not matter right now, the Asset can still see the wardrobe, so Potter is still staying close by as he was told to do.
There is a screen in each bedroom, as well as three in the large sitting area of the ski lodge. The pictures are not projected on the screen, but are projected from the screen itself.
Some part of him thinks it remarkable that the pictures are in color, and that the screens are in ordinary places like this. It is a very odd thought, because the Asset has seen television screens before. The Dursleys had a few in their home, but he doesn't think that was the first time he saw them.
At first, the screen shows a segment about deodorant, and then, once he switches the channel, some mindless program featuring those stupid anthropomorphic locomotives. He changes the channel again, quickly.
'BBC News' is currently doing a report on the so-called tragic gas fire that took Vernon, Petunia and Dudley Dursleys' lives when it exploded their house. Just as the Asset predicted, it seems the reporter had no clue that Potter was there at all.
Of course, they don't know the Soldier started the explosion with the oven.
The news also mentions the stolen car and burgled Tesco store from the early hours of this morning, which means the authorities will be looking for the car, which means driving it around more would be stupid.
The car is almost out of gas anyways, since he drove it around for 4.8 hours earlier rather than only 17 minutes. In fact, he might not have enough to make it to a gas station anyways, and stealing gas in daylight would be even trickier than stealing it at night.
If Potter is hearing and processing what the screen is saying about the house blowing up, he does not comment from within the wardrobe.
The Asset debates staying here for a bit. It is a fairly good base of operations, although he is not supposed to be here and the mission is constantly pounding in his head to return the boy to the base.
Despite his enhanced hearing, the continual battling inside, coupled with the noise from the news report, mean he doesn't hear the footsteps outside until they are near the lodge.
So, is it HYDRA? Snape? Teens looking for a deserted place to party and/or do drugs?
I know Harry hasn't done any magic aside from accidentally blowing up the street lights. Although his magic might be helping him heal quicker than normal.