Before he started sending out emails, Harry had to be convinced by Coulson and Barton (it was easier to think of them both using last names than alternating between "Coulson" and "Clint") that Fury wouldn't immediately be able to intercept them. According to them, that level of security dragnet wasn't something even the director of SHIELD could do casually. Coulson also grudgingly admitted that Tony had quietly beefed up Starkmail encryption after Harry passed along Doctor Bighead's warning, and SHIELD was having trouble scraping it even with a court order.
Thus, he'd quickly snapped off emails to Kamar-Taj, the Grangers, the Thomases, and the Patils to give a very high-level overview of the situation. It would hopefully be enough to make everyone understand the danger without giving too much away if his email wasn't as secure as they thought.
Someone replied quickly from the Kamar-Taj account that they'd be picking up his friends' parents and bringing them to safety, and regretted that was all they'd be able to do. Harry read between the lines that he was still somewhere in the Ancient One's absolute point in time and she was holding back aid lest she make things even worse somehow, probably by making SHIELD aware of Earth's sorcerers. Which maybe also meant that Loki wouldn't bother to mention it to Fury for some reason? It was honestly possible that he didn't even know how many sorcerers there were on Earth, beyond Hogwarts graduates lying low and the Ancient One.
Regardless, even if Harry understood the logic on an intellectual level, he was petulantly annoyed about it, as only a teenager being told to handle a problem himself by adults could be. He'd really hoped at the very least he'd get a teleporting global taxi service out of it. Maybe just a sling ring of his own. How many times would he need to save the world before he'd get one? In the back of his head, he figured he'd still be ready to talk them into a portal here and there if it made sense.
He'd also gotten a message back from Tony pretty quickly that they'd managed to run off the SHIELD agents trying to sneak into the tower and were locking the building down, with fallback plans in case Fury tried something more overt. He was considering calling a press conference about the issue, particularly since he had already been planning to finally turn on the building's arc reactor in the evening and push Stark Industries' green energy technology.
Coulson and Barton had decided to use the motel room as a command post for a few hours while they put things into motion and gathered resources. They were of the opinion that they'd be able to travel more quietly if they weren't trying to organize a plane in the middle of the night. And they didn't even have a plan of where to go yet. Periodically, one of them would slip out into the night to go talk to someone or acquire gear: the beauty of hiding out in Vegas being that the city didn't really fully shut down, even at four in the morning.
Not that Harry witnessed much of it, since he took the opportunity to catch a nap. After everything, he was exhausted enough to get right to sleep.
"So we aren't just trying to put Banner on the phone with you when Romanoff gets there?" Coulson asked after they woke him up a little after sunrise. Natasha had checked in that she was close to Banner's location.
"No. Fancier than that," Harry grinned. "But I need to know exactly where I'm going. On a map."
Coulson nodded and produced a laptop that they'd picked up. Harry thought both men had managed a couple of hours of sleep while he'd gotten four or five. The mild-mannered agent brought up a satellite map of Asia and drilled down to India, centered on Kolkata. Before he could zoom in further, Harry stopped him for a moment to get a sense of where everything was relative to Kathmandu. It was honestly close enough that it might be within range to detect magical kids: the Patils lived in between the two locations. Then they zoomed all the way into the city as Harry tried to get a sense of the broad landmarks. He was about to try to figure this out "from the air" and was at least glad that they'd sent Natasha out early enough that there would still be a little daylight left to orient by rather than trying to find his way around an unfamiliar city in the dark.
"This is the area we've tracked Banner to," Coulson zoomed all the way into what looked like a slum on the edge of the city. "Romanoff should be getting off her plane in a few minutes."
"Show me where that will be. And then I need to meditate. Don't let anybody shoot me. I'll be dead to the world until we're done," Harry explained.
"You aren't doing what I think you're doing?" Barton asked.
"Maaaagic school," Harry winked.
"The world was so normal before Stark put on that suit," the sniper complained.
"You only think so because you missed the 1995 incident," Coulson disagreed.
Harry situated himself on a blanket leaning against one of the beds, expecting that he might be in his meditation pose for long enough that he should be comfortable. After a year of walking meditation to protect against elf empathy, it wasn't hard at all to slide into the routine he'd practiced with Banner and perfected at the previous year's summer camp. In only a minute, he was hovering astrally above his body.
Neither agent seemed to notice, so he exerted himself a bit to make sure he could make himself seen. "Hey, guys," he said.
Barton just sighed, shook his head, and passed a five dollar bill to Coulson. For his part, the senior agent said, "That's terrifying. We have no defense against anything like that. And it kind of reminds me of some 80s movies."
"Everything reminds you of Ghostbusters," Harry objected. "Anyway, I'm on my way."
Letting himself lapse back into his normal level of astral visibility (which theoretically meant only other sorcerers and certain highly-sensitive individuals would notice him), he started to fly. Well, it wasn't really flying. It was more like snapping himself from one place to another location that he had an emotional connection with, and then hovering around. He covered the distance to Kamar-Taj in moments.
He figured he should probably use this power more often. Being a sorcerer was about having a ton of capabilities that were overkill in most situations and then frequently forgotten about during a crisis. It was a real problem.
First, he landed in the streets of Kathmandu, having chosen a point he'd been several times over the summers that wasn't in Kamar-Taj proper just in case he'd bounce off the wards. He had half a mind to go in there and try to argue with someone, but he knew he'd just get some apologetic-sounding denials if the Ancient One had decided he needed to handle this himself. From there he hovered into the air, figured out which direction was southeast, and began to zip across the landscape at the speed of thought. With only a few course corrections once he started to spot landmarks, he covered four-hundred miles in only a few minutes. It took him longer to find the tiny commuter airport that Natasha was using in the busy cityscape than it took to get to the city proper.
But as he willed himself to the ground, he knew he was in the right place. For one, he was able to drift vaguely in the direction of people he knew once he got close enough, so began to feel a tug towards Natasha about a hundred yards over the airport. For two, there were a bunch of locals crowding around the high-tech VTOL airplane that she'd managed to commandeer to get from northwest Russia to southeast India in only a few hours.
He found her talking to the plane's pilot, already changed into an outfit appropriate to the area, for all that a beautiful redheaded white woman wasn't likely to move through the slums of Kolkata unnoticed with just an outfit change. "Refuel and then relocate," she was telling the man. "Meet me back here in an hour and a half."
"Yes, ma'am," the pilot told her. Harry vaguely wondered how often SHIELD agents had to go dark to avoid different elements of their own organization. Tony's complaints about dealing with spies seemed apt.
The other thing that Harry noticed after the first time seeing his crush in nearly two years was that he wasn't reacting the way he'd expected. Maybe it was that he was basically nothing but pure mental energy at the moment, or maybe it was that he'd transferred that crush to a certain elf… his mind flinched away from introspecting on that thought too hard.
As Natasha moved off from the airport toward the road, she had a brief moment of privacy. Harry glanced around to be sure and used the opportunity to make himself visible. "Hey, Nat," he said.
Blinking once but otherwise using her years of training to avoid visibly reacting in surprise, she simply asked, "Harry… why are you a hologram?" Coulson had at least told her that Harry was helping, so she'd been expecting him in some sense.
"Astral projection. I'll explain later," he shrugged, not sure how much he'd explain later. "But I'm here following you, and I can talk to Bruce when we get there. Speak up if you need something."
"Has Coulson already pitched you about joining SHIELD?" she deadpanned, clearly seeing the immense spying benefits that astral projection provided.
"He's got to get in line," Harry smirked, fading back into invisibility before anyone in the neighborhood noticed that she was talking to a ghost.
She got into a cab and Harry wondered if Natasha's instructions to the pilot to return for her in an hour and a half were overly optimistic as she hit evening traffic in Kolkata. At least the little tuk tuk she was in could fit through gaps that a full-sized sedan would have struggled with. Terrifying, tiny gaps. Harry was glad he was there as an immaterial spirit rather than riding along. Even as a thrill-seeker, that seemed like it would be more nerve-wracking than he could handle.
The most interesting thing about the trip was that Harry's translation implant was working. Whatever someone might believe about astral projection sending his immortal spirit free from his corporeal body, he was clearly still using said meat to process everything he was seeing and hearing. Even astrally, the implant figured out how to translate the local spoken language and plaster English text over billboards and other writing.
Finally, Natasha stepped out of the cab in a densely-packed part of the city. As he'd expected, she didn't blend, immediately getting looks from the passing locals in the twilight. The area didn't seem to have much in the way of streetlights at least. "Hopefully he hasn't already left for the evening," she said, for Harry's benefit. She checked her phone and it managed to create a wireframe of the local buildings with a dot that presumably indicated where Banner was residing. Harry expected that they hadn't managed to get a tracker in him, and it was just a fancy address locator.
They were near enough that his familiarity with Banner—not, perhaps, as intense as his connection to Natasha, but much deeper after months in the man's classroom and after-class meditation sessions—kicked in and let him confirm that the former professor was close by. Harry drifted toward where he felt him, which seemed like it was probably also the address on Natasha's phone.
Sure enough, Harry found Banner in a tiny apartment that didn't really look like it had a private bathroom, but at least seemed to have a small kitchenette with running water. Bruce was sorting through medical supplies and packing them into a brown satchel. He'd donned a similarly-brown suit and looked rougher than he had the last time Harry'd seen him over a year earlier. "Remu… er… Bruce!" he announced himself, becoming visible inside the room.
"Gah!" Bruce flinched, and Harry realized that he probably shouldn't surprise the man. Fortunately, there didn't appear to be any sudden flickers of green. "Harry! What the hell? Shouldn't you still be at school?" At least he was more familiar with the idea that Harry could astral project, for all that he'd left before the kid had a chance to really master it.
"Long story," Harry said, having gotten the spiel down to, "Loki was hiding at Hogwarts all year. Kidnapped me and tried to leave me with the alien running the Death Eaters. But I followed him here. He has that mind control gem that got Neville my second year. And he took control of the director of SHIELD. He stole some other powerful Stone that he's going to use to teleport an army of zombie aliens here to try to take over the planet."
"Loki. Like from Asgard?" Bruce raised an eyebrow. "Wait. I thought I heard he died?"
"That's what everyone thought. Instead he fell into the void and bad aliens pulled him out. I think? I'm realizing that maybe I shouldn't take everything the god of trickery said as totally true."
"And you're here because you want me to try to help fight an alien army? I don't think that's going to work out as well as you hope…" Bruce frowned, finishing packing things into his doctor's satchel and going ahead and grabbing another bag for spare clothes. At least he realized he would probably be moving on regardless.
"Hopefully we'll stop them before they get the portal open?" Harry shrugged. "No, I'm here because SHIELD has you on a list and we're worried they'll send people after you."
Natasha's voice sounded from outside the door, "And we could use your expertise in gamma energy. The object they've taken has a distinct signature you might be able to track."
"Who's that?" Bruce zipped up his backpack, looking warily at the door.
"One of my friends from SHIELD," Harry explained. "We're trying to tell as many as possible their boss is mind controlled."
"Can I come in?" she asked. "We might not have much time." She didn't really wait for approval, stepping through the door and closing it behind her. The lock, such as there was, wouldn't have slowed Harry down, so he wasn't surprised she'd picked it quietly.
Bruce looked a little annoyed at the presumption, and Harry thought he actually saw the unflappable Natasha flinch slightly. Oh, right, SHIELD basically knew Bruce as an engine of mass destruction that could go off in an instant if he got angry. Maybe Harry should be more worried about that, now that the man wasn't on calming potion all the time?
"Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner," Harry made the introductions.
"You know, for a man who's supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked a hell of a place to settle," she observed, trying to regain her composure under snark. She was probably considering the harrowing ride to his apartment.
"Avoiding stress isn't the secret," Bruce shrugged, trying to get a read on her. Harry was curious how Bruce would react to the beautiful agent. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it off his face in a way that Harry had probably failed at. "How did you even find me?"
"We never lost you, doctor," she explained.
"That doesn't seem totally true," Harry chuckled. "Unless they thought you were still in Canada all last year."
"So… you were at Harry's school while you were off our radar," Natasha figured out and Harry blinked, realizing that he'd probably only kept his secret for as long as he had because he hadn't spent as much time with her as he would have liked. And because the idea he might be learning magic on another planet wasn't something she'd even consider. He'd need to be very careful about even hinting about Kamar-Taj and the Earth-based sorcerers whenever he was around her. "We need to move. I think your apartment is being watched."
"Watched by whom?" Bruce asked, his bags shouldered and giving the place once last, experienced once-over before abandoning it forever.
Harry had been poking his head out into the hallway (through the door) as Natasha noted the threat and quickly pulled back in and announced, "Mercenary-looking types. With guns." He was pretty sure he'd dropped his visibility so they hadn't seen a ghost head poking out of the wall. Mostly pretty sure.
"Window," Natasha and Bruce said simultaneously.
"It's clear for now!" Harry confirmed, after floating at the speed of thought out onto the roof of the tenement below. "Go! I'll distract them. Somehow!"
The mercenaries (or maybe just SHIELD agents under faulty orders?) had been slowly creeping toward the door up the rickety stairway, but started rushing as they heard the sounds of exfiltration. "They're on the move," Harry overheard.
"Go hide in the closet! They're coming!" Harry yelled from the opposite side of the room from where the window was. The room didn't actually have a closet, but he was hoping it might work. As he faded back to invisibility again, the door was kicked open and, sure enough, he saw the lead mercenary orient toward the side of the room he'd yelled from. Limited success! "I bought you a couple of seconds!" he told Bruce and Natasha as he flickered through the walls to their position, in the middle of a bounding run over rooftops in the slum.
It looked kind of fun, honestly. Harry was beginning to be sad that he wasn't here physically.
"How's your control?" Natasha asked the man with the anger issues.
"Probably okay as long as nobody shoots me," Bruce answered, leaping across a narrow alley. Natasha looked grudgingly impressed that the seemingly-sedentary man was managing the athletic flight. Harry was impressed that she was doing it in what seemed like a pretty tight skirt, with no obvious difficulty.
"Then don't turn left," Harry yelled back, having rushed ahead to check their route. "More guys coming up that way." He was pretty sure the guy climbing up the roof in front did spot his ghostly body in the neighborhood's twilight. At least he had enough trigger discipline to just look surprised, rather than firing at the spectral boy. It wouldn't have hurt Harry, but it was a populated neighborhood with thin walls.
"Bus!" Natasha called as she juked right to the edge of the building next to the road below.
"Really!?" Bruce asked, but obligingly followed after her.
While the evening in the neighborhood was slow, they'd crossed the rooftops to a relatively major roadway. And there was, indeed, a large bus passing pretty close to the rooftop. The left-side-drive of the nation meant it was driving away from the agents chasing them.
Both Natasha and Bruce jumped. She effortlessly landed in a spread-out pose low to the roof. Bruce slid and had trouble managing his two bags, rolling toward the back of the bus as it continued in motion. Harry floated there helpless to keep him from falling right off. If he hit the ground, would the injury be enough to trigger the Hulk?
Fortunately, Natasha was able to rush forward and grab Bruce's trailing medical satchel, putting enough of her weight into it to give Bruce a second to spread himself out and plant a foot against a seam of the back of the vehicle and gain a moment of purchase. "Um. Ow," he grumbled, but Harry didn't glimpse any signs of turning green in the dark.
Planted a couple of feet from his face, her blending-in-clothes probably ruined from the grime at the top of the bus, Natasha's face lost the momentary rictus of panic—she'd had the same worry as Harry—and settled back into her putting-people-at-ease look. "Stay low and we'll hopefully be safe," she consoled him, spotting the agents on the roof fading into the distance as the emptying streets allowed their bus to proceed at its nominal speed rather than immediately stopping in traffic. "We'll get a cab at the next stop."
"Not one of those little ones that takes corners really fast," Harry suggested, flickering momentarily into visibility. "I'll stick with you both until you get back to the airport."
Well, what he actually did first was float invisibly back to the roof to spy. "No good. He got away," one of the men was speaking over his radio. "Looked like he was with Romanoff?"
"Fury should have mentioned she was involved. What's even going on?" the hand-held device squawked back, presumably from their man in the van. "Clear out."
He managed to flicker back to the two of them before he lost the sense of where they were, and followed along as they made their way back to the airport. Natasha put on a bunch of patter for the driver like they were a tourist couple, and Bruce looked vaguely uncomfortable at having a beautiful spy trying to convince people they were romantically involved.
Harry also suspected that she was getting more out of Bruce than he thought, since part of her patter involved talking about other places they'd been on vacation, and prompting him to invent stories. If nothing else, she was figuring out what locations he'd genuinely been to by the accuracy of his fabrications. She was so good at it that, by the end of the half-hour cab ride, Bruce had lost a lot of his wariness in playing along, and seemed to have grown pretty comfortable with Natasha. Harry reminded himself that he should probably be extra-careful around her now that she knew the right kinds of questions to ask to figure out more of his secrets.
They did manage to get back just as her fancy jet was landing to pick them up, so Harry also had to give her more credit for timing. "Okay, I have to go back. Meet you both when we get where we're going?" Harry asked, flickering into visibility as they walked from the road into the airport. He was assuming Coulson had told her where that was, because he wasn't sure.
"Be careful," she nodded.
"Good luck," Bruce told him.
With that, he allowed himself to relax, the great distance from his body having created a massive tension that he'd been fighting for the entire hour and a half he'd been there. Snapping across the planet on a spiritual rubber band, the collision back into his body was enough to make him very glad he'd chosen a well-braced spot.
He might have spasmed a bit and flopped to the floor.
"Potts!" Coulson said, with a moment of worry.
"I'm okay," he insisted, figuring out how to use his physical limbs again. "Snapped back to my body faster than I expected. Bruce and Nat are fine. Left them getting on their jet. Some agents tried to stop them and they had to run. Said Fury sent them, but didn't expect her to be there or know why they got the orders."
"Hmm. She might have been able to talk them out of it," the senior agent figured. "But that would have taken time."
"And they had guns out," Harry volunteered. "Maybe he told them to shoot Bruce so he'd Hulk out and wreck the city?"
"Yeah. That would have been bad," Coulson undersold. "Get dressed, and we'll get on our own plane."
As part of their efforts over the evening, they'd acquired clothes that would stand out less than Barton's fatigues, Coulson's men-in-black suit, and Harry's tournament robes or armor. They'd gone for very relaxed t-shirts and jeans for Harry and Barton, and a slightly more buttoned-down look for Coulson, but they would potentially pass as family on a trip. The rest of their gear was stuffed into backpacks, and Harry hoped he wouldn't need quick access to anything. "Are we going to be able to get through security with your guns?" he checked, noting that both of the men had left their sidearms in the packs.
"We'll show our badges quietly and hope that it doesn't make it to Fury before we land," Coulson shrugged.
"I'm an air marshal," Barton grinned.
"Yeah. I should have been an air marshal," the senior agent shrugged. "Let's get moving."
It was easy to blend into the bustle of people leaving Vegas, even though it was still before dawn. The airport certainly never slept. But the Wednesday morning crowd was light enough that they got through quickly, especially when the agents quietly flashed their badges to get diverted into the ultra-fast line, where they only received a cursory wanding and were passed through. Harry wasn't really sure that kind of privilege wouldn't make it into the computers faster than Coulson hoped.
He remained bemused by the slot machines right next to the boarding gates. He'd never gotten to go to Vegas with Tony, and it was enough of a difference from all the other airports he'd been in to think that maybe every one of them on Earth wasn't basically the same after all.
They'd grabbed coach seats on a commuter flight direct to JFK airport, letting Harry know where they were going, finally. Maybe they were just planning to reconvene with Tony and figure out their next play? Regardless, the three of them settled in and tried to get a little more sleep on their five hour flight.
Well, Coulson had connected his phone to the plane's wifi and was trying to stay in touch with the world. Or at least maybe Natasha? When Harry woke up as the plane started to descend, he looked a little worried. "We should move quickly as soon as we land," he explained.
"We're made?" Barton asked.
"Potentially. Fury cut my and Romanoff's logins, but I'm seeing chatter from other sources. Don't want to get in a firefight in the middle of JFK at lunchtime."
"Guess we aren't stopping to eat, then?" Harry asked, his teen stomach awakened by the reminder that they were landing in a time-zone where a meal could be had.
"We'll grab something offsite," Coulson promised.
That promise seemed on the verge of being broken as both agents went on high alert the moment they got off the plane, eyes flicking around as they spotted individuals they recognized. "STRIKE. I see Rollins, but where's Rumlow?" Barton asked, quietly, worried. Harry didn't know what STRIKE was, but it sounded like it wasn't scrubs.
"On some assignment for the Secretary for months," Coulson confided, trying to nonchalantly plan an exit. The number of travelers seemed lower than expected for a busy New York concourse: it was mostly just the people leaving their plane. Harry didn't even see any gate agents.
"Well, that's something," Barton said, stretching his left arm to limber up and then putting his hand into his bag to have his gun ready. Whoever Rumlow was, not facing him seemed to at least improve their odds?
"Just let me know what we're doing," Harry told them, moving his own backpack in front of him so the armor inside might stop a bullet shot at his chest and so it wouldn't be in the way of his cloak falling to cover him.
"Huh. Maybe we're talking," Coulson said, with some surprise, as the man that they'd glanced at when Barton said "Rollins" walked toward them.
A skinny blond guy with slicked-back hair off of a large forehead, Rollins was sporting prominent facial scars and full tactical gear. "Coulson. Barton. Potts? We need you to come with us," he suggested. Up close, Harry could see that his eyes were brown. So at least he hadn't been mind controlled?
"Asking, or insisting? Coulson asked, his own hand free to grab his gun but currently not plunged into the bag. He probably didn't like his odds.
"Fury's orders were to insist," the man shrugged, wary of Barton more than any of them. He seemed to disregard Harry as much of a threat, so maybe Loki hadn't fully briefed Fury, or Fury hadn't passed it on.
"And if we told you that Fury's been compromised?" Coulson asked, hand getting closer to his bag.
Rollins smirked and admitted, "In that case, the Secretary is worried about the orders Fury's been giving this morning and wants to hear your side of it. We can take you to him."
Coulson flicked a glance to Barton, who shrugged. Moving his hand free of his bag, the senior agent said, "Lead the way."