Harry perched disconsolately on the roof of Rockefeller Center. It was where they'd apprehended Loki. Thor and his brother had fought to the inescapable conclusion while Harry had been on his way to close the portal, and Loki had fallen, disarmed. Thor was sure he'd seen the scepter bounce toward 49th Street. It should have been a simple matter of collecting the concealed Stone. A powerful artifact like that didn't just fall into a hole and go missing, like a dropped phone or keyring might atop the skyscraper.
But it was gone.
"I sensed you needed me," an English-accented woman's voice said, from his right, and Harry glanced up to see the astral form of the Ancient One hovering next to him. She was translucent enough that he suspected that anyone without magic wouldn't be able to perceive her.
"It's gone. The Stone in the scepter. We all looked, and then I looked for another hour. I missed the fancy donuts Tony got when he realized the shawarma place wouldn't be open until lunchtime," he complained. "Tony's sure it'll turn up but… he doesn't have the problems with it that I do."
"Curious," she agreed. "It should be around here?"
"It's where Thor and Loki fought," he agreed, looking down at the immense drop to the street with the confidence of a wizard with a broom easily to hand. "We missed you," he couldn't help but dig.
The Sorcerer Supreme's translucent face gave a bit of a smirk and explained, "Perhaps the recordings of the battle will fail to explain why so many enemies disappeared heading south, around Bleecker Street. We were not idle, though our secrecy remains important. For a time you may be the only one of us that can act openly."
"Yeah? Can I have a sling ring?" he asked, slightly mollified that they'd at least been taking magical potshots from the sanctum's roof.
She regarded him, eyes somehow even more piercing when only present as a spiritual projection. Finally, she shrugged, "If you can prove competent this summer, then yes. I agree that it may be time."
"Really?! I mean… I won't disappoint you, ma'am."
"Now, let us consider the problem you currently have. I have not foreseen any issues regarding the scepter directly past this point, but perhaps something more subtle has happened."
As she looked over the rooftop, Harry asked, "Was this… could I have stopped it? I just keep thinking back to the moment I left the roof, but I could have closed the portal early. Or what if we'd found it even earlier? Kept the portal from ever opening. What if I could have saved Fury?"
They'd received word while they cleaned up that Director Fury hadn't survived the hasty surgery from the wound Loki had given him. Natasha and Clint, in particular, seemed distraught, and it was unclear who would take over for the implacable leader.
"It may ease your mind to know that there were very few futures without the portal opening. It was close to an Absolute Point, and the timelines that did not include it were altogether darker, as Earth was unaware of the threats that might face it from the stars." She paused her inspection to validate Harry, explaining, "You changed things, and people died. I'd advise looking into the Trolley Problem, if you are unfamiliar. Had you not intervened, others might have died. I have not weighed the particular differences, and you should not either. While I'm certain some of the other Masters would disagree, it has been my experience that good people remaining inactive in a crisis is almost never better than the alternative, unless you have specific warning about the consequences of your choices."
"You're saying if Fury had lived, someone else might have died," Harry nodded, getting it. "But I still wish I could have saved everyone."
"It is the curse of the protector to feel so," she agreed, sadly. Turning back to inspect the rooftop, she looked frustrated, and opened the Eye of Agamotto hanging spectrally around her neck. A thin green beam of light hit her torso from the south, where the real Stone was hanging around the neck of her physical body. She wheeled her arms around, though Harry didn't see anything change, and figured she must be using the Time Stone to rewind to the moment Loki was disarmed and follow the path of the scepter. "Fascinating… and worrying," was her final pronouncement, as she let the amulet close and the green light stopped.
"Bad?"
She floated over to a particular place at the edge of the building and commanded, "Stand here and extend your senses."
Harry obliged. She wasn't going to tell him what she'd sensed until he proved whether he might be able to figure it out. Though he wasn't nearly as sensitive to magical energy as Parvati, he'd learned a little bit. "Something here feels… wrong. Itchy. Red. There shouldn't be any magic here at all, should there?"
She nodded, at least pleased that he'd detected it. "In my postcognition, the weapon reached this point and then vanished. It is no small feat to conceal the recent past from the Eye. An entity whose name I shall not speak is meddling, though he should be long dormant. Why, I do not yet know."
"Some big dimensional bad guy has the scepter?" Harry asked, worried.
She shook her head, clarifying, "It was a momentary intervention. Concealment upon the path of destiny. Wherever the Mind Stone landed, it could prove useful to him if we do not secure it. This entity makes grand plans. Perhaps we will recover the scepter in an hour, it having already knocked over another domino, or perhaps it will be used more directly. Leave this to me. Of course, if you find it, acquire it. But there are forces moving beyond you, at this time."
Harry huffed in annoyance, guessing, "We save the world from aliens, and some Principality is using that chaos to get something?"
"A more adequate summary than even you are aware. But do not let being thwarted on this deter you. You were a hero today. The world knows it. The leeway that performance will give you should not be underestimated."
"Because you're giving me a sling ring," he grinned, not letting her forget about that.
"If for no other reason then, yes, that," she agreed, with a smile. "Return to your new friends. I shall alert you should I find the weapon. Or your aunt, to pass along the information, should you already be back at school."
"Oh, right, I should call Sirius!" he realized, glad at least that finding the scepter wasn't his sole responsibility. "Thank you, ma'am," he said, doing the bow that she didn't really like and then leaping on his broom to fly off.
Stark Tower was pretty wrecked, at least cosmetically. Only the A was left of Tony's last name that had been blazoned in giant letters across the top of the building, and that had given him the idea of rebranding it to Avengers Tower. After all, it had been the locus point of the attack and the news was already calling them all heroes. It still remained to be seen how deep the damage was and how long it would take to fix (especially with all the contractors that could get to the city having all the work they could handle fixing the rest of Manhattan).
At least the automatic window on the floor that Harry's room was on still seemed to work, and JARVIS helpfully opened it to let him fly in. None of the windows on the level even seemed to be smashed in, on casual inspection, so hopefully Harry's room was okay. Was it weird to have already accepted it as his room? Harry happily pulled off the mask and shoved it into a pocket as soon as he was sure he was out of sight of the street. The kitchen table still had an array of donuts left over, though the dozen boxes had clearly been attacked with a gusto.
Only Bruce was in evidence, puttering around the coffee machine. "Everyone else had things to help with," he gestured vaguely. He'd at least been able to switch back to undestroyed clothes after reverting from being the Hulk. Before Harry could try to make him feel better about not being able to help, he asked, "Find the stick?"
Harry frowned and shook his head, choosing his words carefully since Bruce knew about the Ancient One but he was supposed to be keeping that secret from anyone that didn't, he explained, "You know that lady that gave you a ride that time?" Bruce nodded. "She can't find it either. We think something big is meddling. But she's on it."
Bruce huffed in frustration, "Be easier if we had that to throw in a pit. But at least Thor kept SHIELD from taking the blue brick."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I think they were mad they couldn't take it or Loki. But that Coulson guy is still in charge and backed him up. Oh, right, he says he's waiting for his dad to send him some kind of device so he can get back to Asgard, and that he can drop you on Vanaheim if you want."
"Huh, yeah, that'll make things easier. Wasn't sure how I was going to go other than sneaking through the Goblin Market," Harry shrugged. "I was about to call Sirius and make sure things are okay there. You want on the call?"
"Sure," Bruce nodded, pulling a couple of chairs closer together so they could both look into the mirror at the same time.
Harry grabbed a donut and sat down, fishing out his communication mirror with his other hand. "I wonder what time it is in Vanaheim," he mused, realizing it wasn't even eight in the morning in New York. He did some quick mental math about time zones and what time it had been when he'd left not even three full days earlier (had it really been under 60 hours?), and figured that even with the longer Vanaheim days it was still probably morning there as well. "Sirius Black," he told the mirror.
Within a few seconds, Sirius' face appeared on the small pane of glass. It would be very easy for onlookers to just think that it was a video call on a super-thin Starkphone. "Pup! Remus!" he said, excited to see both of them, for all that he looked like he hadn't gotten any sleep. The background looked like his kitchen in the Black manor house in Diagonalt. "Has Loki made a move yet?"
"Yeah. We won. Manhattan took a beating, though," he explained, then between Harry and Bruce they managed to quickly sum up the events that Sirius didn't know about yet.
"I'm glad you're both alive!" Sirius said, having only interjected with various barks of incredulity and worry as they'd been talking. "Makes what we've been dealing with here seem tame by comparison. We've been portaling around trying to take out various pockets of the so-called marauders. Some of them have had Death Eaters backing them up, but nobody's spotted You-Know-Who."
"Were you up all night fighting?" Bruce asked.
"No. Emergency althing," Sirius explained. "Well, so I guess I was fighting. But only other jerk landowners. With words. I'd have preferred if it was still aliens. Malfoy was right there, too, acting like he hadn't spent the previous day trying to kill aurors."
"They're still in the government!?" Harry boggled.
"Same problem we had in the war," Sirius grumbled. "Unless you physically catch them and unmask them at the scene, it's basically impossible to prove it was them. And they all just do that stupid smoke teleport if it looks like they're going to lose. When they pick the battlefield, it's hard to set up wards to prevent that ahead of time."
"So I'm guessing that you can't really get anything done with the bad guys sitting in the meeting making the decisions," Bruce figured.
"Exactly. They even tried to blame Harry." At Harry's shocked and indignant face, his godfather explained, "We found Cedric's body in the graveyard. They'd cleaned out everything else and staged it. Fleur's knife that you took off her in his back, his hands clutching your belt pouch and the trophy."
Madder about it than he'd expected, Harry gritted out, "Did they make it look like he wrote H-A-R-R-Y in his own blood too?" Of course those assholes would try to frame him.
"Hah," Sirius barked. "Not that complete of a frame up, no. But fortunately Dora and aurors that she trusts were first on the scene, since I gave them the tip. Maybe someone else would have jumped to the conclusion that they wanted, but she made sure they did the forensics right. No actual blood from the wound, nothing to indicate that he'd died in that position, and signs of dark magic and preservation. They're going over the body with a fine-toothed comb, now, but I was able to argue that he'd been dead for months and of course the Death Eaters wanted to ruin your name."
"So I'm not going to be arrested if I come back?" Harry checked, slightly mollified that they'd done the police work, though upset about the proof that Cedric was definitely dead and had been for a long time.
"No. Are you coming through the Market?" he asked. "When are you coming?"
"Thor thinks he can drop me off," Harry explained. "I don't know when. Maybe today or tomorrow?"
"Blows my mind that you two are friends with Thor."
"Us too," Harry agreed. Bruce just shrugged, never having bought that far into the literal Asgard-worship.
"Oh! I met a couple of SHIELD agents," Sirius remembered. "They helped lead us to a bad guy camp near the train platform. They said they were your undercover protection detail, and they got stuck over here when you went to school last year."
That didn't make sense to Harry, then a couple of memories surfaced and he asked, "Bald guy with glasses and a big, dark-haired guy?"
"That's them. Sitwell and Rumlow."
"I wonder why they didn't say anything when I saw them last Christmas?"
"Spying," Bruce figured. "They weren't supposed to follow you, and didn't want to admit they screwed up and got stuck."
Harry nodded, realizing how much that could have screwed up for him earlier, but shrugged. "Well, Vanaheim's kind of out of the bag now, I guess. They helped, at least?"
"Yeah, we probably wouldn't have found the camp without them," Sirius agreed, but had looked thoughtful at Bruce's suggestion. "You're probably right that they're a little dodgy."
"I'll see if Coulson wants them back," Harry figured. "And maybe talk to other people about whether they need to have their memories erased."
"We can't really send them back until the convergence opens anyway, so we've got time," Sirius agreed. "They're talking like they want to be ambassadors to SHIELD, so hopefully everyone's on the up-and-up. Anyway, I'll send a letter to the school that you might be back soon. Or are you coming here?"
"Not sure. I'll let you know when I know," Harry told him. They said a few more small-talk goodbyes and signed off.
The rest of the day was hectic.
Most of that was the debriefs, where they all tried to reconstruct everything that had happened in a very short timeframe. It ultimately worked out to under an hour between when they woke to the SHIELD building being attacked and when the portal closed. Harry had basically forgotten about the time he'd battered his way through a dozen adult agents, and started trying to assume he'd misremembered it. Then Coulson turned up the video from the Helicarrier's bridge and even Harry was duly impressed with himself.
Then there was a bit of time to shower, take a brief nap, and get a late lunch of the promised shawarma (sadly from a different place than the one that Tony had noticed, since that one wasn't fit to start working for the day, amidst the rubble). But by the afternoon, Thor had received the device from Asgard that would let them leave, and seemed keen to exit before SHIELD made another play for the Tesseract or his brother (who was conscious again, but securely manacled and gagged in purpose-built Aesir bondage gear, just in case). Pepper had wound up flying to the west coast, so wasn't able to get back in time to see them off, but was exchanging texts with Harry right up until he was ready to leave the planet.
For whatever reasons of cosmic resonance, Thor thought they needed to leave from Central Park, rather than Stark Tower, which left Harry the only one having to keep his mask on as everyone else switched to street clothes to send them off. He supposed it helped keep up the idea in the minds of the public that Arcane wasn't Harry Potts, but some mysterious mage from wherever Thor and Loki came from. There had been plenty of people taking photos, and keeping a polite but interested distance back as they stepped onto a large metal grate at Bethesda Terrace. "We should try to get together when I'm back in July!" Harry insisted, as he put his hands on both the handles of the large vacuum tube that housed the Tesseract in the middle, while Thor and Loki both held one.
"I can try to swing back later in the summer," Bruce shrugged. He still wasn't comfortable hanging around. The whole group seemed like they might go their separate ways rather than sticking together, having arrived via separate transports. But if Harry got his sling ring, it wasn't like anyone on Earth was far.
"Do well on your exams," Tony ordered him in farewell, as Thor turned his handle and the three disappeared into a flare of blue light.
The only Gryffindor students that had a sixth period class on Tuesdays happened to be the seventh-years in advanced potions (so, hardly anyone). And that turned out to be the time back on Vanaheim when Harry and the princes of Asgard appeared right in the middle of the common room among a few dozen students just counting down until dinnertime.
"That was better than the first time, but not by much," Harry complained, still hating the disassembled-and-reforged feeling of using the Tesseract to travel. It took him a moment to realize that most of his dorm-mates were surrounding them, some having gone into battle stance as the seemingly-impossible happened and someone teleported right into Hogwarts. He pulled his mask off and said, "Oh. Hey everybody. I really thought we'd have gotten shunted off to Hogsmeade or something. Noted. This thing doesn't care about wards." He had visualized the room for the transport, but hadn't thought it would work.
"Is that…?" Hermione was the first to get some words out, but still, even with all her experience with Harry, wasn't quite prepared for him to show up out of nowhere in the common room with two Asgardian gods (one in manacles and a gag) and an obviously-powerful glowing blue cube-in-a-tube.
Loki, though his mouth was covered, clearly conveyed his amusement as he completely understood where he was, and might not have ever managed to sneak into the Gryffindor dorm (though, despite theoretically being a consummate Slytherin, nobody had ever actually asked what house he'd been in). Thor simply smiled and waved his hammer, but said, "Greetings! Apologies that we dare not tarry longer." He knew that he was about two seconds from getting mobbed, and that would delay him until professors started trying to talk to him. "Farewell, Harry. Students of the Lion!" The room was dead silent, except for the subtle click of an SLR camera at the back.
With another twist of the glass tube once Harry had stepped away, Thor and Loki once again disappeared, hopefully emerging next in Asgard itself.
"Was that Thor!? And Loki?" Hermione finally finished her thought.
"Yeah, it's a long story. But I should tell adults I'm back first?" Harry covered, exhausted. "I really didn't expect that I'd actually make it right here."
And that was the last sentence he got out before the cacophony of questions began. Colin Creevey very quietly stowed his camera. He'd finally learned Harry didn't like getting his photo taken, but hadn't been able to resist taking the shot. When was he ever going to get another chance for a photo like that?
There was no actual way that Harry was going to get out of the room without telling at least some of what he'd been up to since they'd seen him heading into the convergence three days earlier (it still felt weird that it had only been three days). The only reason they let him leave at all was to run upstairs to go change out of his armor because the Weasley twins convinced everyone it would be funniest if he just showed up to dinner like nothing had happened. Under an hour after he'd reappeared, he was, indeed, just sitting at his normal spot at the Gryffindor table like he did every night.
It took the hall about ten minutes before the people that noticed quickly convinced everyone else, and the whispers turned into an uproar.
"Yes, he's back," Dumbledore announced over the hubbub. It was unclear whether he'd known that Harry had made it into the school, though he'd probably heard from Sirius that it was the plan. "I'm sure Mister Potter will explain his adventures over the next few days." He met Harry's eyes and tilted his pointy hat just enough to indicate that Harry was expected to debrief him immediately after dinner.
Those debriefs became as much a part of Harry's next few weeks as his exams were. In fact, it was only Hermione's force of personality that gave him any peace from recounting his deeds, as she insisted that study time was sacred. Sadly, the other schools had already cleared out after the final task, so Harry didn't get to speak to Fleur or Viktor in person, though he sent letters. The Minister and his staff had likewise returned to deal with marauder attacks and politics, so it wasn't even totally clear whether Harry was considered the winner of the tournament. He would have been inclined to demand it posthumously go to Cedric, except that Cedric had never actually participated in the events.
He managed to find a moment to quietly explain it to Cho and she was as shattered as he'd been afraid of. She'd already heard that Cedric had died, but to be informed that she'd been dating an imposter all year. That it was Loki, simply playing a role while, himself, mind controlled… it was so much to shoulder. Hufflepuff mostly got the story secondhand, as he didn't have any close friends in the house, and it was unclear whether most of them believed him.
Slytherin didn't, or at least pretended not to. Their parents had clearly told them to push the narrative that Harry had killed Cedric, despite what the forensics said. Ravenclaw, with Padma, Luna, and Cho all believing, leaned toward accepting Harry's stories. The Midgardborn in all the houses had sent letters home, and had confirmed at least that their world was now a very different place; one that knew about Asgard and aliens.
Gryffindor had obviously seen Harry arrive in a flash of blue light with Thor and Loki, and didn't understand why so many students in other houses thought they might be making that up.
Eventually, over a month after the tournament and in the middle of exams, a formal letter arrived for Harry from the Ministry, designating him the victor and noting that the prize money had been deposited to his account at Gringotts. It seemed very grudging. At least Christine's article about it in the newspaper was glowing, and it mitigated a little of the tension at the school. The secondhand stories of Harry's adventures on Midgard had filtered around the school, and the urge to bask in his reflected celebrity seemed to be winning over the urge to treat it as notoriety among most of the student body.
Harry wasn't really thrilled with either outcome, though at least it was for things he'd done beyond surviving the attack on his parents.
He'd received a couple of letters from Fleur, mostly apologizing about getting mind controlled and trying to kill him. She mentioned a few things about her summer plans. He vastly undersold his adventures. There didn't seem to be much hope of seeing her over the summer, but at least they were writing (though pen-pals sending written letters wasn't the preferred written communication method for a kid raised on real-time texting). Meanwhile, he mostly talked to Viktor secondhand through Hermione, and they were working out how to hang out over the summer. Harry was trying not to be a little jealous, realizing that Hermione still had three more years where she'd only have letters for the vast majority of the time. Assuming things worked out at all, which was the thing all of them had to worry about at their age.
Which was driven home by Dean and Padma admitting they hadn't really been together for a while, but were pretending for the group. They were talking about seeing other people the next year. Lavender was also at a maximum level of trying to make it work with Ron (who seemed more or less oblivious to the growing tension in his relationship). And it was kind of hard to tell what was going on with Neville and Luna from the outside.
As much as he enjoyed learning and spending time with his friends, Harry was increasingly looking forward to the summer. He had promises of unique martial arts training and a sling ring. He wanted to make sure that the Avengers didn't totally fall apart after one outing. He was pretty sure that Aunt Pepper wasn't serious about grounding him anymore.
When the train finally rolled away from Hogwarts, it was with a bittersweet feeling that he was growing up, and the school was increasingly becoming his past rather than a home. He was nearly 15, and adulthood had basically already been thrust upon him in many ways. Could he continue to find time to enjoy the last years of his teens, before responsibility truly fell upon him? Or was having to spend so much of the year away at school going to become an increasing imposition on his newfound role as one of Earth's mightiest heroes?
Only time would tell, but he was at least committed to enjoying his summer. Maybe it would be an uneventful one?
Please enjoy this chapter as my gift to you for the holidays. I'm hoping to start posting again regularly soon, but my buffer still isn't where I want it to be. I'm also hoping FFnet's gift to ME will be fixing the stats soon (if you're wondering why the updates have diminished across the whole site, it's likely because no authors have gotten any statistics on readership for months now). So please review and let me know what you're enjoying and what you want to see more of: right now, it and favorite/follow notifications are my only clue that anyone is reading!