Happy February, everyone. I've got this written through chapter 19 and adding at least a chapter a week, so I'm feeling good about having a sufficient buffer for when this goes weekly at the end of next month, after Born in Fiendfyre finishes. Please enjoy this chapter, and I'll see you all for the start of weekly posting in a month.
To Hermione's pleasant surprise, being integral to an actual victory over a vicious troll did not make Ron Weasley more insufferable. Quite the opposite in fact. Maybe it was because it was a team effort. Maybe it was because his brothers had been in mortal danger. Maybe it was because he realized how close he had come to dying. But he leveled out significantly afterwards.
Less helpful to the study group's desire to keep a low profile, Ron was also convinced that the first-year Gryffindors were now some blooded troupe of heroes. The rest of Hermione's dorm room, who had missed the fight entirely, were implicitly accepted. It wasn't their fault they'd missed the fight, after all. But there was still a bit of a vibe of her being the token shieldmaiden among the group of guys that Hermione wasn't totally happy about.
If Ron was assembling a pre-teen band of adventurers, unassailable in their earned reputation among the other first-years, it was nothing compared to Percy. The prefect who had previously been considered insufferably officious and a bit overly bookish had nearly been sent to Valhalla throwing his body and magic against a superior foe to protect the charges in his care. In the culture that had inspired the Norse, that kind of behavior sold.
Lee Jordan and the Weasley twins also got a boost to their reputations, but, unlike everyone else, they had already been cool.
The rumor going around school within a few days was that someone had sabotaged the lake-entrance portcullis, making it easy to smash through. Coupled with him having been coming from the forbidden third-floor corridor with the portal to the giant wolf, Severus Snape was most of the students' prime suspect. After all, Snape just seemed evil, and his chemistry knowledge could easily be used to brew an acid to eat away at the bars.
Hermione eventually got tired of insisting that the gate had looked rusty already, frost giants could freeze metal to make it brittle, trolls would resist the school's wards, and Professor Snape had obviously been securing the portal to the wolf along with Mistress Morgan. Nobody really wanted to listen to her when it was more fun to imagine their meanest teacher getting arrested and replaced.
For his part, Harry was doing a lot of thinking about his newfound discovery of how real combat was not like his video games. The fear had been real, a palpable force crushing his chest in a vice. He could have died with one misstep or if the teachers had shown up only thirty seconds later. Logically, he should avoid doing anything like that ever again.
But if the fear had been much more real than in any game, so had the triumph. Not even elite sporting teams or multiplayer clans could truly know the shared camaraderie of a victory over a legitimately deadly opponent. Rhodey had tried to explain it to him before, when they'd been talking about his fellow airmen, but Harry hadn't had the context to really get it. Before, he'd liked his housemates, but now they were bonded. Even Hermione felt it, for all she didn't like being the token girl, and helped him explain it to the rest of the study group who had missed out.
He figured he'd probably do it again, if he had to.
This resolve wasn't put to the test in the back half of his first school term. After the memorable Halloween, the next-most exciting events were the quidditch matches, particularly Gryffindor vs. Slytherin. Cheering hard for his housemates, Harry kind of wondered if he should have tried harder to get around the requirement to be second-year to try out: Katie Bell was clearly not the greatest seeker, their chaser line was fairly weak, and the rival team nearly shut them out. But Harry had also heard how many practices Oliver Wood, the captain, inflicted on the members of the team and wasn't sure he had the time, even if he'd be able to convince them to give him a try.
It wasn't like good reflexes was all he had going for him.
Class-wise, they'd learned a few more introductory spells and were actually getting to experiment with simple materials changes in transfiguration. The study group was excelling at them all, and even Ron and Seamus acknowledged that the tools they were developing might be worthwhile. After all, levitation had brought down a troll.
As winter's chill set in, Harry started to think about the upcoming winter break. Stay in the castle for two weeks, see if he could spend it with the Masters of the Mystic Arts, or endure the long trip back to LA to veg out at home for a few days around Christmas while his aunt would probably be working? The choice got made for him when Aunt Pepper explained that she would be flying out to London and spending basically the whole holiday with him.
Tony had actually suggested it, and had scheduled his own things to do in London. Harry was surprised. Tony had always been conscious of family time for Stark Industries employees around Christmas itself—he'd lost his parents shortly before the holidays when he'd been younger, so had never wanted to be the one to separate anyone from their own families. But going so far out of his way, and guaranteeing Pepper the whole break, was over and above what Harry had expected. There was probably some kind of technology conference or maybe a fashion show with supermodels that was the real draw for Tony, but Harry would take it.
Dean had a simpler worry: while he could easily use mystical and mysterious means to get back home, his mother couldn't afford an extra round-trip plane ticket for him as cover. If word got around that Dean Thomas was in New York with no obvious means of transit, it could eat away at the secrecy of the Masters. Government agencies had computer algorithms to notice that kind of thing.
Harry mentioned it to Aunt Pepper, and she suggested that Dean stay with them in London for the holidays. She wanted to meet his new friends, particularly Midgardian ones that might be in Harry's life for the foreseeable future. He gave her Dean's mother's contact information to get permission, and his new best friend seemed much more excited to spend the break sightseeing in London than cooped up in the castle with whoever had to stay behind.
This was particularly true since the Weasleys were pretty much the only Gryffindors remaining for the vacation. As much as Dean got along with Ron pretty well after the troll incident, he didn't exactly want to spend two weeks with nobody else for company.
The group bid Ron farewell and rode in carriages from the castle down to the train station. "Are those… three-legged horses?" Harry asked.
"The carriages of Hogwarts are pulled by helhests," Hermione quoted from some book about the school. "Not everyone can see them. You have to have witnessed a death. I guess the troll counted?"
Dean mused, "With as violent as things are around here, I bet most adults can see them."
Still thinking about the semi-spectral horses, they took the train back to the convergence platform. Hermione spent most of the way back working out various things the three of them might do around London, allowing for her parents and Pepper's family time plans that she wasn't yet privy to. At the very least, they had all exchanged phone numbers.
The lonely train platform where they'd boarded four months earlier looked the same, if a bit drearier, when they disembarked from the Hogwarts Express. As Harry, Dean, Hermione, Seamus, Padma, and Parvati started to walk toward the end of the platform they'd entered from in September, it was Oliver Wood that ran over and interrupted them. "Nae portal fo' winter hols," he assured them.
"Then how do we get back?" Harry asked the burly Scottish boy.
He waved toward the bonfire at the other end of the platform. "I'll show ye. Gotta go through th'Leaky Cauldron."
Hermione argued, as they followed, "But you can't use the Goblin Market for transit."
"Ye can," Oliver assured her. "As long as ye mean t'come back." They queued up behind the other students meeting their parents and teleporting through the fire to various places around Vanaheim. Virtually every Midgardborn from school was there and waiting their turn. "Supposed t'be dire consequences if ye stay home for more'n a couple weeks. Ye're anchored 'ere noo, fo' purposes o' th'Market. It's all mystic or something."
A girl with curly blond hair and an English accent who Harry thought was a Ravenclaw prefect nodded, "When I was a second-year, someone got sick enough to not make it back after the holidays. He was in a really bad state when they finally managed to go get him and bring him back to the school. Get back here after New Year's, no matter what."
It was finally their turn, and the kids raced with all the others going to Midgard into the flaring green bonfire. Some of them wouldn't have had the nerve for it, if not for the stampeding teens around them (who obviously thought diving into a green bonfire was perfectly reasonable). After a few moments falling weightlessly through an inferno, they all strode onto another flagstone floor.
Well, Harry mistimed his step and went sprawling. "Happens to someone every time," the blond prefect assured him.
They had come out of the fireplace in a longhall, with a high roof and several huge wooden tables. A bunch of Vanaheim natives waved at the parade of several dozen Midgardborn, who were quickly passing through and entering an optical illusion within the building's wall similar to the first time Harry had traveled to the Market. Not long after, all the students were emptying out into the dank bar and interdimensional nexus that was the Leaky Cauldron.
Tom, the wrinkled old proprietor, was directing traffic. "Alright, you lot, signs are up on the doors you're going to. Remember to be back here on January 2nd, your time, and we'll get you sorted out. Don't forget to hit the Market if you need to visit your bank, otherwise, this way."
Harry vaguely considered that it might be nice to hit up the Market again on the way back, but went with the majority of the crowd to the door marked "London." It seemed that most of the students were pretending that they were attending a private school that was somewhere in the UK. It wasn't long before they were all spilling out of the wall about ten feet from Platform 6 ¾.
"My head hurts. This wasn't efficient," Harry complained.
Hermione, frantically covering for something she hadn't realized either, justified, "Well it would be weird for the convergence to be open whenever it's convenient for holidays. I think we should just be grateful we didn't come out in some magic shop on the other side of the city. Oh, there are my parents! Mum! Dad!"
Harry and Dean didn't see Aunt Pepper immediately, so they stepped aside to meet Dr. and Dr. Granger: both of Hermione's parents were dentists. "See you later!" they assured Seamus and the Patil twins, who were hustling to make various connections.
"Dean and Harry?" Hermione's father guessed, while hugging her. He was tall, and had the same bushy brown hair as his daughter. Dean rolled his eyes, realizing Hermione had probably described him as her black friend for her father to make that conclusion so easily. Each of the boys shook the man's hands as Hermione switched to hugging her mother, a dark-haired woman with Greek features. He explained, "I hear we may be showing the two of you around London this week?"
"If it's not too much trouble, and if my aunt hasn't planned anything," Harry demurred.
Dean got a confused look, "Is your aunt the redhead over there, Harry?"
"She's sensitive about that. Call her 'strawberry blond,'" Harry said as he spotted Pepper. She was crossing the terminal with a woman and two young girls that must be Dean's mother and sisters (Harry at least recognized them from a photo Dean kept in their room). "Is that your family?"
"I didn't think they'd be able to make it!" Dean said, surprised but happy, as his two little sisters slammed into him like rockets, nearly knocking him over. "This is Olivia and Emily! How did you get here?"
"Pepper insisted," his mother said. She was a tall, light-skinned woman with long dark hair in a neat ponytail. Barely in her early thirties, she was clearly only just old enough to have an 11-year-old son.
"My boss insisted," Pepper added for Harry's benefit, stepping up. She shrugged the shrug of a weary assistant that had lost a fight she'd been happy enough to lose. "We were already going to be stopping in New York. Didn't cost extra to add three more people to the plane."
As the Grangers were trying to puzzle that out, it was Olivia who shouted, "We met Tony Stark!" That exclamation almost got the attention of passersby in the busy train terminal at mid-afternoon, and her mother shushed her.
Hermione quickly put together Harry's vague allusions to his aunt's boss, Tony, who was "really smart with technology." She withdrew from her mother's hug and put her fists on her hips, staring down her friend. "Harry James Potter. You didn't tell me you know Tony Stark!"
"I'd sound like Malfoy," Harry argued, lamely. "And I didn't know if you'd meet him. He doesn't usually fly my friends' families to London!"
Pepper explained, "I think he's super curious about how your boarding school is different from the one he went to, so we need to plan what you can say around him." She waited a beat and added, "And he got invited to a party with Mick Jagger, Bono, and Bob Geldof a couple nights ago."
The doctors Granger did a silent conference for a couple of seconds, and Hermione's mother suggested, "Well, we were planning to show Hermione's friends and Ms. Potts around London when we thought it was just the three of you, but if you're going to be busy…?"
"Oh! No!" Pepper assured the slightly-younger woman. "We'd be happy to. If you can make space for Grace, Olivia, and Emily?" She clocked the look on Hermione and her father's face: she'd met a large number of people that would really like to meet Tony. She hoped they wouldn't be disappointed. "I don't know if Mr. Stark will include us in any of his plans, but we can call you if he suggests something?"
"That sounds lovely," Hermione's mother said.
After a brief round of introductions and all the adults making sure they had contact information, the Grangers left for where they'd parked while the Pottses and Thomases headed toward the cab stand. Harry and Dean just had large backpacks with clothes for the holiday, and bags with presents from their friends. They hadn't seen the wisdom in dragging their whole trunks around, so it was easy enough to pile two grown women and four children in a van.
As they rode through traffic in the dense city, Dean's little sisters frantically tried to catch him up on everything that had happened to them in the last four months that he'd missed, while Harry just smiled, happy to be back in civilization, bathed in the warm glow of a smartphone booting up and connecting to the cell networks. Pepper Potts and Grace Thomas, who had clearly already bonded on the plane ride over and during the last couple of days, asked the boys vague questions about their semester, conscious of the cab driver who wasn't ready to hear about magical schools on another planet.
When they pulled up to the fancy hotel across the street from Kensington Gardens and entered the elaborate foyer, Dean gasped, "Mom, can we afford this?"
Pepper smoothly interjected, "Tony rented the whole hotel. For security. Any rooms we didn't use would just be empty." Seeing that the child of a single working mother was still floundering, she instructed, "Harry, do the math for him?"
As they followed their guardians toward their rooms, Harry explained, "Yeah, it freaked me out too when I figured it out. Tony's a billionaire. Human brains can't really understand that easily. Do you think you would feel like you could get a room here and not worry about how much it cost if you were a millionaire?"
Dean, head on a swivel at the elaborate furnishings, nodded, "Yeah. That's pretty rich. I guess I could stay in, like, one room here."
"A billionaire is a thousand times that rich," Harry elaborated. "Him renting a whole hotel like this for the holidays is pretty much like our families spending $100. Maybe less."
"That's crazy," Dean boggled.
Harry sighed, agreeing. "What's even more crazy is that he mostly eats off the dollar menu at Burger King and most of his wardrobe is just band t-shirts."
They didn't actually see Tony for the first several days of the vacation. The Pottses and Thomases were being big tourist goobers across London, with the help of the Grangers. They saw landmarks and museums, they shopped for Christmas presents, they took boat and train tours: the whole thing. Meanwhile, there was evidence that Tony was in the hotel, probably somewhere upstairs, since they kept seeing various models and actresses doing the walk of shame through the lobby in the morning.
Harry was just pleased that his aunt was restraining her normal need to be catty about it with the Thomases around. He wasn't sure if she just didn't approve of that kind of behavior, or was jealous that it wasn't her doing adult stuff with Tony (the kind of thing that Harry wasn't supposed to know about at his age).
On Christmas Eve, everyone had agreed they were exhausted, and were just going to hang around the hotel. Harry and Dean had commandeered the giant TV on one side of the lobby, hooked up a game console, burrowed into a very comfy leather couch, and were busily trying to catch up on the video games they'd missed over four months at Hogwarts.
"I know you already played that one, Salt," Tony's voice said from behind them. He'd seen Gears of War 2 on the big screen and come wandering over.
"The beta. Didn't get to finish it. Besides, it's the only game with co-op," Harry explained, without pausing or looking back. "Also, stop trying to make 'Salt and Pepper' happen, Tony."
Tony shrugged, "Hard to pin down a nickname for kids. You haven't done anything interesting yet."
Dean, who was less surprised to finally see Tony Stark than he'd expected, since he'd been marinating in the guy's largess for days, simply chuckled and said, "The-Boy-Who-Lived."
Harry elbowed his friend to try to get him to shut up, but Tony had heard it. "Boy who lived?"
The boy in question scoffed and explained, "You know how I'm a legacy at my school? All the teachers knew my parents, and a bunch of the other kids' parents went to school with them. So everyone knows that I survived when they died. It sucks."
"Yeah," Tony said, shaken out of his usual teasing mode. "I know how that is. Everyone at my boarding school was obsessed with my dad, too." He switched back into his normal affect and said, "Just means we need to get you a nickname so good it sticks and everyone calls you that instead." He looked over at Dean and asked, "What do you think, Harry's friend? You're… two first names, right?"
"Dean Thomas," Dean introduced himself, and Tony nodded. That was what Pepper had told him. "We could call him Trollslayer."
"That was a team effort. Mostly Percy," Harry negated. Sensing that Tony was going to ask, Harry spilled out the explanation they'd come up with for all the slips they were likely to make about the nature of Hogwarts. "You know how the school doesn't let us have any screens or phones? We play a lot of D&D for fun. We managed to kill a troll at first level, without anybody dying."
"Well of course," Tony nodded. "Kids these days don't know how hard we used to have it, fighting trolls. Calculating THAC0. Up hill. Both ways!" While he had all his charm and celebrity to make sure everyone thought he was cool, Tony was a science geek who was majorly into heavy metal. He had obviously also played a bunch of D&D in high school.
The impending conversation probably would have started to test the boys' lie since Dean didn't actually know that much about roleplaying games, but it was interrupted by a voice that Harry was hoping not to hear, as Obadiah Stane shouted, "Tony! There you are."
Harry paused the game and shrunk down further into the couch, and Dean followed suit a little confused. Their backs were to him, so if the big man didn't get too close, he might just assume Tony had been playing the game and not notice the kids. Tony turned and leaned back onto the couch, asking, "What's up?"
"Where are we on the Jerichos?" Obie asked.
"Did you get us a supplier for the palladium?" Tony asked. His business partner nodded, so he said, "They're putting in the last of the fabricators in my house while I'm over here. Should be able to start production in a couple of weeks. Plenty of time before the demonstrations."
"Your house?" the big man thundered, exasperated. "Tony! We have a whole facility set up in Arizona that could spin up to make as many as we can source the materials for."
"These things are just short of a nuke. We shouldn't need to make many of them. I don't want to be on the hook if any of them wander off, or for some general to think they've got enough they may as well just use a few when they don't have to. I still get hate mail from Sokovia, and that was almost a decade ago." Justifying himself, Tony had stood up and gotten visibly more tense, while still trying to seem relaxed. "For now, we'll keep this one locked down. Small batch. Artisanal. Besides, I have a whole missile silo under the house I've been waiting to keep something in."
With a deep sigh, Obie rolled up his temper in the face of his recalcitrant golden goose, and said, "Okay, Tony. Well, I came all the way to London to find you and it's almost lunchtime. Why don't you explain the production plan to me over fish and chips?"
The two men walked off, Tony not saying goodbye since he'd actually picked up on the fact that Harry was avoiding Obie and didn't seem to want to have attention drawn to him. As soon as they were out of the lobby, Dean asked, "What was up with that?"
"I thought I told you about the time I got kidnapped…"
They didn't see Tony or Obie again before Christmas, and with the Grangers off with their extended family, it was just a Potts and Thomas family celebration, in one of their oversized suites of rooms. Harry was surprised that his family had mostly gotten Dean sketchbooks and colored pencils. "You do art? Why haven't I seen you draw?"
Dean shrugged, "With what time? But these are great, mom, thanks."
"You really only have one day for the weekend?" Olivia asked. "That's not enough!"
"It's why I'm such a workaholic," Pepper joked. "I never got used to the long weekend when I moved here."
After working their way through the stack of gifts from family, Harry and Dean opened their gifts from friends, which was mostly magically-enhanced candy that they knew they'd never get away with not sharing with Dean's little sisters. Finally, Harry came to one last package. It was a light, flat box that felt like clothes. "It isn't signed. I know I brought it with my stuff from school, but I don't remember anyone handing me this one." He showed off the tag that was attached in narrow, looped writing he'd never seen before:
Your father left this in my possession before he died. It's time it was returned to you. Use it well.
A Very Happy Christmas To You
Aunt Pepper had gone red in the face, and was narrowly avoiding cursing because of the children present. She finally managed to get out, "That meddling old… he had no right." Everyone was staring at her in shock, so she took a deep breath and said, "If that's what I think it is, it's one of our family heirlooms that went missing when your parents died. And someone who thinks he knows better than everyone else has been holding onto it for a decade. I guess go ahead and open it."
Nonplussed by his aunt's anger, Harry tore the wrapping and opened the box, releasing a flowing pile of silvery fabric.
Pepper just nodded, her suspicions confirmed. "You can play with it for the rest of the holiday, but that stays with me until you prove you can use it responsibly." Everyone stared at her, confused by her vehemence about a shiny blanket, until she ranted, "Honestly, giving an 11-year-old an invisibility cloak…"
If you have ideas for better Tony Stark nicknames for the kids, please include them in the reviews!