"I know I'm walking right into this," Tony explained, half-joking, half-puzzled, "but you can't be serious."
"And yet, I am," Sirius nodded, grinning. "Both spellings."
Tony and Sirius had just been introduced on the Stark Industries jet as they picked up Harry's godfather and the Grangers in London on the way to Slovakia. Unfortunately, Dean was at an art camp, so wasn't able to take off the few days needed to go with them to the race. "Admit it. You had it changed. You wanted to be in a band," Tony insisted, reclined in his favorite seat in the plane's central cabin.
"I mean, I did kind of want to be in a band," Sirius shrugged. "But, no, you can blame my family."
"They go in for star-themed names," Harry explained to Tony from his own seat. "I told you I go to school with a kid named Draco, right?"
"Wait, like the constellation?" Tony checked. "I thought you were saying that with a G. I just assumed his family was Russian. Or really-early Game of Thrones fans."
"That show just came out," Harry cocked his head in confusion. "How would a kid born fourteen years ago be named after Khal Drogo?"
Hermione, scandalized, interjected, "They're based on books that have been coming out since before we were born, Harry."
"Huh," Harry nodded. "Why haven't I read those?"
"They were a little mature for you before you went off to school," Pepper explained.
Thinking back on the episodes of the show that his aunt had grudgingly let him watch over the last month after Tony, Rhodey, and Happy all insisted, Harry had to agree that was probably reasonable. "We should get those to take back to school," he concluded. Most of the kids would probably be way into them. The other Earth fantasy novels the Midgardborn had brought had been big hits for entertainment reading in Gryffindor.
"I think we have a spare set," Hermione figured, and her parents nodded. "Well, we only have the new one in hardback. Hopefully the author gets the last couple of books done before the show catches up."
Tony shook his head. "I've met George at a couple of parties. Nice guy, but I wouldn't put money on his writing speed." He was absently looking at Helen Granger and noted, "By the way, you know you look a lot like Lady Stark from the show?"
"I've been hearing that lately, yes," Hermione's mother admitted.
"Pilot says we're ready to go. Strap in," Rhodey suggested to everyone as he came into the cabin from the front of the plane. Harry was excited he was actually going with them to a race this time. His and Tony's friendship seemed to have been significantly improved from where it had been the previous year.
It had been a pretty good summer, for all that it had only been two months. They'd randomly picked a day the week before his birthday to go to Disneyland, and done the celebrity thing with hats and sunglasses to escape notice. They'd still used Tony's pull to skip a bunch of lines, of course. Nobody had managed to attack Tony at the happiest place on earth, for all that he'd opined afterwards that it would have been a pretty cool place for a brawl.
On the actual day of July 31st, refusing to tempt fate, they'd stayed in and had a small party at Tony's house, with the security staff reinforced and multiple redundancies for calling the cops and SHIELD. But nobody had stormed the place trying to kill Tony after all, so he was now all jokes about having dodged Harry's birthday curse, as if he'd never actually believed in it. But Harry was pretty sure he was relieved.
They'd done their Kamar-Taj summer camp over the first couple weeks of August, and it seemed like the Masters had all been very impressed by how much progress the kids had made. Even Parvati was feeling okay about her wandless casting, and Harry and Dean were doing better with theirs than quite a few of the adult apprentices that had been in training for a long time. Sadly, even if they might be ready for it, they probably weren't going to get to learn magic that didn't use their personal energy until they were legal adults. Master Mordo, in particular, insisted that, if they couldn't sign legal contracts yet, they definitely shouldn't be allowed to make deals with Principalities for magical spells.
And the Masters still weren't ready to hand over sling rings to the teens.
As a consolation, in addition to the promised personal training she was giving Harry to improve his astral projection, the Ancient One had given them some one-on-one time to teach them advanced techniques for things you could do with just personal magical energy. They were a long way away from creating something as complex as the combat fans she could manifest, but were at least having some luck making their conjurations less… well… floppy. Harry and Dean had both managed to make short sticks of orange light that could block weapons and spells, and the taller boy was already planning to emphasize the Kali-like moves Gamora had taught them in their martial arts practice, since those would be good with the energy batons.
The girls hadn't gotten that far, but were doing well with their shields. Honestly, Hermione and Padma were much more interested in Sirius' magic mirrors. It had turned out that, indeed, there was basically no interference in the connection even with Harry on Earth and Sirius on Vanaheim. The implications for faster-than-light communication were massive. It was very likely that Hermione was planning to corner Sirius for an extended period on this trip and work out exactly what he and James Potter had done to use runes to essentially quantum entangle the two mirrors together.
Somewhere over Germany, Tony managed to segue the small talk into more investigation into the new adult man in Harry's life. "So, Jim Morrison," he started, managing to catch Sirius' attention with the nickname. He did have a very Lizard King look, with his full, shoulder-length hair and affected slouch. "How's life outside of bars?"
"I don't know. I still try to visit bars pretty regularly," Sirius fired back, getting a smirk from Tony and earning a point. "But if you mean out of jail, it's great. I don't recommend going to prison."
"Oh, yeah," Rhodey tagged in, "Harry said something about that's why you weren't around until now, despite being his godfather? What happened?"
"Mistaken identity," Sirius summarized. "As soon as Harry found out about it, he and his friends did a lot of research to get the charges dropped." It was technically correct, which was the best kind of correct, Sirius always figured.
"And you didn't know about it?" Tony checked with Pepper.
She shook her head, "We weren't really in touch. He was James' best friend. And he went in right after Harry's parents died, so I was a little distracted. Sorry, Siri." Tony couldn't help but be mollified that his girlfriend hadn't given a spare thought to the rock-star-looking man until Harry had wanted to meet his godfather.
Sirius waved her off, "Your help with the lawyers more than made up for it."
Tony wasn't stupid. He knew there was probably a bunch being left out. But if a man didn't want to talk about over a decade of being in prison for a crime he didn't commit, he wasn't going to make a big deal of it. He wasn't even going to nickname the guy "Dr. Richard Kimble," for all that he'd considered it. But the search he'd quietly had both JARVIS and a private investigator do couldn't contradict anything that he was saying, so as long as the guy didn't seem like trouble, he figured he could let it lie.
The reason neither the finest virtual intelligence on the planet nor a highly-paid London PI had been able to find a problem mostly came down to magic. There was a time coming soon when there would be enough electronic records that creating a new identity on Earth would be a problem for the Vanir. But in 2011 it was still possible to mostly exist off the grid, as long as you had paper documents in enough places that didn't go in for digitizing old files. And if Sirius Black's birth certificate, incarceration records, and miscellaneous details hadn't actually existed until a few weeks earlier, they certainly looked like they'd been yellowing in filing cabinets for the appropriate number of years.
Magic was great at creating that kind of thing. It was how the Potts family paper trail had managed to hold up to SHIELD scrutiny.
"So you're really going with 'Morrison' for him?" Rhodey checked. "With the goatee, I'd have said 'Zappa.'"
"Hah! The Doors and Frank Zappa!" Sirius said, finally getting it and owning the resemblance. "Lily used to play them for us in the dorms. She loved oldies."
"I thought there was a 'no electronics' rule?" Tony checked.
"Harry's mum was brilliant," the longer-haired man (with a less-awesome goatee, in Tony's opinion) clarified. "For a class project she made a mechanical record player that used…" he realized at the last second that he shouldn't say "magic" and turned what was going to be a wand gesture into pantomiming winding up clockwork, "...you know, gears and things? I'm not actually sure how she got it to work."
"Oh! Like an old-style Victrola!" Hermione added, both to sell the deception and because she wondered if she could make something similar. She asked Harry and Pepper, "Do you know if it was in with her things?"
"I think she gave it to McGonagall as a present when we graduated," Sirius shrugged. "But I doubt it would be hard for you to make another one, especially if Minnie would let you have a look?"
Hermione nodded, adding another project to her mental list.
"My mom liked 70s rock?" Harry asked, himself more educated about what bands that entailed than the vast majority of kids his age because of Tony's obsession with early metal and everything conceptually nearby.
"And boy bands," Sirius shuddered. "Fortunately, it was harder to find something called… New Boys in the Neighborhood?... on vinyl. She was always trying to sing it for us, though. Seemed a little trite."
"The fact that you escaped knowing who New Kids on the Block are is a small blessing," Tony opined, warming to the man since it was clear he'd been genuine friends with Harry's mother. Tony was vaguely aware that Pepper hadn't known her sister-in-law well and had never been able to tell the boy much about her, so Harry having access to a school friend of hers was probably huge for him. "But I'm guessing you missed the real classics?"
"Tony is obsessed with AC/DC," Harry explained, since Sirius clearly wasn't sure what Tony meant.
"I love AC/DC!" Sirius corrected Tony, after the clarification. "Back in Black is my personal anthem, obviously. Dog Eat Dog. Dirty Deeds. Love 'em." He gave it a beat, and then explained, "That wasn't one of Lily's, though. Once she got the record player working, a bunch of other kids started bringing their vinyl in."
Tony filed away that Sirius was acting like the only place he could have experienced rock music was at school with his friends bringing in records. Maybe his family just kept him very sheltered? But he couldn't help but grin at the ringing endorsement of his favorite band. "Right on. Sadly, you pretty much just missed their Black Ice tour. They went for two years! Who knows when they'll go again."
"Tony saw that tour in three different cities," Pepper rolled her eyes.
"They don't always play the same songs!" the billionaire argued. "And we were in Vegas anyway for one of them."
"Because you scheduled a conference around when they'd be in Vegas," she fired back.
"Heh. Yeah," Tony admitted, grinning as he remembered the show. At the time, he'd known that the palladium poisoning was increasing, was no closer to a cure, and thought it might be the last time he'd see them.
Tony barely had time to probe the rest of Sirius' musical fandom (and absently plan how to construct a totally-clockwork record player with the part of his brain always devoted to engineering) before they were landing at Bratislava airport. Unloading at the terminal was Harry's first real opportunity to use his translation implant, the Slovak text getting English superimposed over it. Not that it was hard to find their way: airports were pretty much airports, wherever on Earth you went. He did benefit from the translation of the intercom, apologizing for construction. Apparently the main terminal had been demolished earlier in the year and was reopening the next, so they were having to use one of the secondary terminals while the main one was being rebuilt.
"What's a Schengen?" Harry asked.
"Countries in the European Union that get to use the other terminal," Pepper explained, also having translated the announcement. "They're inside the border control zones, so they have to go through less security."
"Not that it really matters," Tony said. "I don't wait in lines."
Sure enough, Happy forged ahead into a security lane you'd probably barely notice if you weren't looking for it, provided a set of documents to the security agent, and they were breezed through with barely a metal-detector wanding. "I swear," Rhodey complained, "I was standing in security lines for an hour the last time I came here. For work."
"Don't hate the player," Tony grinned.
Meanwhile, Harry was glued to Sirius, quietly explaining things so the Vanaheim native didn't give himself away by being overly fascinated by something that would have been obvious to someone from Midgard, even if they'd been in prison since the 90s. He hadn't quite wanted to fight the man with the metal detector wand, but the electronic squeaking had clearly been off-putting. "But if the wand is a magnet, what if I'm carrying non-ferrous contraband?" the head of the Black family asked, understanding the idea of magnetism even if he didn't have much experience with electronics.
"Then you shut up about it so you don't get strip searched," Harry hissed.
"Right," he nodded. "Oh! Look at all the little cafes. It's like one of those shopping malls."
"Overpriced," Hermione inserted herself into the quiet conversation. "My parents never want to pay airport food rates if they don't have to. You're basically a captive audience, so they can charge whatever they want for food that isn't that good."
"Probably better than prison food, at least," Rhodey interjected. They obviously hadn't been as quiet as they thought. "First big time in civilization since you've been out?"
Sirius, who had maybe been through London once on the way to the Midlands to meet Lily's parents in the 90s and had otherwise never seen Midgardian metropolitan engineering, said, "Believe it. Whatever they're selling, I'm sure it's better than what I was eating for years." Which was nothing, in the timeless void of the Dark Dimension, but, again, technically correct…
"We're going right to the hotel so you can have real food in an hour," Pepper piled on. "But if you need to pee, this is the time." She gestured at the signs for the restrooms.
Harry, Sirius, and Hermione shared a look, realizing that they needed to be quieter if they were going to try to keep secrets from Tony, Rhodey, and Happy.
Everyone was willing to hold it until they got to the hotel, so they quickly piled into a limo that Happy had acquired from somewhere and headed into the city. While Sirius was glued to the window taking in the sights, Harry was a little blasé. Bratislava was a growing city, and other than the Slovak signage (which his implant helpfully translated) it could have been any municipality in Europe. Especially with any overheard conversations from locals being instantly translated, it was easy to think of Earth as one big interconnected civilization, so different from that of other Realms.
He probably needed to keep it on the down-low that he could effectively speak Slovak. Unfortunately, he wasn't really sure how to tell his implant to not auto-translate for him.
In a quarter of an hour, they were unloading at one of the city's swankier hotels, named after a sun god. Ultimately, they decided to just have dinner at the hotel, rather than going out: Slovakia wasn't Sokovia but it was next to it, so Happy and Rhodey both wanted to keep Tony's presence in the country as low key as possible, just in case. And for everything else, there was the additional support and security staff that was sharing their floor with them.
Hermione was still getting used to the idea of renting out a whole floor of a hotel.
It included a whole suite designated for hangouts, but most of the crew started to fade quickly after dinner. Happy and Rhodey were both more diligent about trying to adjust to the new time zone. Pepper and Tony left not long after to have some alone time in their own room. Hermione's parents cautioned them not to stay up too late before heading off to bed. That just left Hermione, Sirius, and Harry, free to finally talk in person.
There was a moment of awkwardness before Sirius remembered, "I brought your birthday present, pup! I guess I could have trusted it to Hedwig, but, well…"
Harry took the small box that Sirius had withdrawn from his pocket. Roughly large enough to hold a big phone, and itself made of beautifully polished rosewood, Harry admitted, "Yeah, it might be a little big for her to carry comfortably." He slid off the lid to reveal a large folding pocketknife, with wooden scales that matched the box and a silvery blade that looked incredibly sharp. "Wait, did you bring this through airport security?"
"And their wands didn't find it!" Sirius smiled. "I guess the nondetection charms will hold up against Midgard tech as well as normal searches. Should be a good holdout for someone that gets in as much trouble as I heard you have. It's got various sharpening and preservation runes on it as well, and it should be especially good against locks and bindings."
"Thanks, Sirius," Harry said, giving his godfather a hug.
Having allowed them the moment, Hermione whipped out a notebook and mechanical pencil, "Right. Speaking of runes, I need to know everything about how those mirrors work…"
They left for the race early the next morning, everyone but Happy and Rhodey clearly fighting off lack of sleep from jet lag. Harry's lack of sleep was from the weirdly vivid dreams he'd been having for the last few days. They featured a horde of zombie-aliens being loaded onto spaceships, a vast graveyard, some dark-haired guy being tortured in a featureless room, and a bunch of other things that had him wondering whether bingeing every show and movie he'd missed over the year in a few weeks was great for his brain.
The half-hour drive was mostly down a freeway that had noise barrier walls blocking off any useful views, but the last third was through some interesting countryside and Slovakian villages. It was Sunday, but they'd left early enough to not get bogged down in whatever church traffic there might be. Sirius was clearly holding his questions for later, since, "Is this a pretty common type of architecture on Earth?" would make him seem like the alien he actually was (even if the answer was, "Yeah, city and suburban architecture is shockingly similar, wherever you go.").
Surprisingly minimalist, the Slovakia Ring had exactly the number of facilities that one might expect for a race track so far from the city center: a small hotel for those that wanted to stay overnight, a medical center for accidents during the race, a restaurant that was probably fairly overpriced since you had nowhere else to go, and a big parking lot between them. The stands for the track was a long building with garages beneath, and bleacher seating for over a thousand. The parking lot was becoming packed, and they could hear the sounds of a rapidly-filling audience ready to watch the FIA GT3's penultimate round, before the finale in October.
"Are we… just sitting with the crowd?" Hermione checked, realizing that Tony's usual enhanced security didn't really fit in with sitting on bleachers with hundreds of random guests. Their follow team of additional security was planning to wait outside, keeping an eye on the parking lot for terrorist attackers coming in hot, so wouldn't be much good against someone already hiding in the crowd.
"You're welcome to if you want," Pepper explained, as Happy (laden with the Mark V armor briefcase) was already leading them away from the stands and through a large room currently set up as a kitchen. They could see a covered open area through the glass walls on the other side, where a much smaller crowd had set up table seating. "But we don't really do crowds if we don't have to."
"I guess Justin's not going to be here this time," Harry realized. The last time they'd watched a race, it had been along with Tony's least-favorite billionaire.
"Nope. Hear he's got a nice room in Seagate," Tony grinned, but then glanced at Sirius. "Not that sending anyone to prison is funny, per se."
Sirius shrugged, "I don't know. I'm pretty thrilled about the guy that set me up getting to enjoy it for a while."
Tony raised an eyebrow at that wrinkle of the story that hadn't come out yet, but they were walking out onto the terrace and he had to be friendly with the other racing magnates. "Jean!" he flagged down the new president of FIA and began conversing with the man in French, "Thanks for the extra seats. I've got the whole friends and family range today."
"Your friends are my friends," the man replied, shaking hands with Tony. Harry hovered nearby, amused by his implant letting him follow the French conversation.
Tony continued, "So who should I keep an eye on to hire away from everyone else here?"
"The driver for the Czech team, in the Mercedes," Jean explained, "Though I think he's actually Romanian? Maybe Bulgarian. Kid came out of nowhere and is exactly your kind of crazy. He'll be a pro soon. Get him while you can."
"Thanks, Jean," Tony agreed, moving on to gladhand with the rest of the small crowd.
Harry wandered over to the tables that their party had claimed, overlooking the expansive race track. It was a really good view of the beautiful countryside. The weather was on track to get fairly warm by the afternoon, but the humidity was low and there was a brisk wind to carry away the heat. "Nice day for it," he observed.
"Cars go vroom," Hermione nodded. A racing competition wasn't exactly her, well, wheelhouse, but the Grangers weren't in the habit of passing up a Stark-funded summer vacation. And on the car ride over, Tony had, unprompted, told her that he was going to email her plans for a mechanical phonogram, but that he didn't want her to think he was stealing her project. He'd just had the idea. Tony Stark had done a custom design for her, and apologized in case he was stealing her thunder. What even was her life these days? "Wait… isn't that the actress from Crouching Tiger?!"
"I think she's engaged to the guy who runs the thing," Rhodey grinned. He was long over getting star-struck, with all the time he'd spent around Tony. Now that he'd spent time with both of Harry's best friends across the past two summer vacations, he was pretty pleased at the kid's influences. "You want to go say hey?"
"I couldn't," she insisted. "It's not that I'm afraid, it's just that I don't know any of her other filmography. But I should text Parvati and ask if she wants an autograph…" She began to furiously type on her phone, and Harry assumed that he should plan for the Patils to demand a trip the next summer.
The cars did, indeed, go vroom. Even Hermione wound up getting into it, with the excellent view of the track and how there was clearly more going on in the tight turns and varied high-performance cars compared to American-style racing. Also, the boys were furiously narrating and pointing out interesting things going on the whole time. The fact that this competition was limited to skilled amateurs resulted in a lot of places where someone made a, well, rookie mistake and suddenly the entire order changed.
"Jean was right!" Tony exclaimed, during the second round. "Did the Mercedes just go sideways through that chicane and then manage to overtake? Whoever this kid is, we're hiring him!"
"If he's enough of a maniac, you won't be tempted to take over for him?" Pepper checked, still miffed about Tony's stunt at Monaco the previous summer.
"Well, we'll see," Tony said. "Much harder to drift an F1 car. But I'd pay to see it."
The race finished with the Germans pulling out the win, but the Czech team was extremely close, mostly by virtue of their young driver. If the rest of the team had been as fast as he was, they'd have won by a lot. As the results were announced, their area of the stands was being set up for a banquet: clearly the chance for the drivers to network with the rich fans. Tony had put in word that he definitely wanted to talk to the man of the hour, and as buffet tables of expensive foods were being set out, Jean herded him up to their group.
Tall and probably whip thin under his racing suit, he had crew-cut dark hair, thick eyebrows, and features too blocky and angular to really be considered conventionally handsome, but which gave him an imposing look. He was probably only a few years older than Harry, and moved with a bit of an uneven gait that made him look far less graceful on foot than in a car. "This is the Stark Industries party, including the CEO, Ms. Potts and Tony Stark," the president explained in passable Romanian, which Harry's implant translated (though he assumed he'd have gotten the gist from "Stark Industries" and the names). In English, he introduced, "And this young man is Viktor Krum."
Krum shook hands with Tony and Pepper and was clearly doing his best, despite not having enough grasp of English to keep up with Tony's patter. After a few moments of that, they got to the rest of the introductions, and as soon as Harry was introduced, the bigger boy's eyes flicked to the famous scar and he asked, "You… you are Harry Potter?"
Harry's eyes widened. The last time someone on Earth had recognized him like that, they'd also been magical. "Harry Potts… but yeah," he agreed, trying to make it seem like the language barrier had just caused Krum to mangle his last name. "You want to come sit with me and my friend for lunch?"
As soon as Krum saw Hermione, he nodded in agreement, clearly happier with teen company than with more networking. "I vood love to." Tony gave him a thumbs-up for the excellent salesmanship as they moved to the furthest table they could grab. Harry was just hoping it would be quiet enough that he could get some answers from the taller boy.
Because Harry had obviously never seen him at Hogwarts, or at Kamar-Taj, so if Viktor Krum was magical, where had he learned it?
Yes, I've changed Viktor from a quidditch player to a race car driver. It will make more sense as the changes to the other magic schools become apparent over the next few chapters (they don't play quidditch).