"This is a mess, Coulson," the Secretary began. They'd been brought to a large conference suite in a hotel near the airport. Grudgingly giving up their backpacks to the STRIKE escort who formed up in the corners of the room, they hadn't had to wait very long for their host to arrive. Tall and thin, in an expensive, gray, three-piece suit, the man's reddish hair was graying, and he wore bespoke glasses. His blue eyes were dark enough behind them that Harry was optimistic that he wasn't whammied.
"I agree, sir," Phil agreed. He looked uncomfortable. Harry got the impression that he was normally not the one that had to report to this man. By his bearing, "Secretary" probably meant a highly-placed political leader rather than just the administrative assistant to someone even more powerful.
They'd been given chairs around the suite's large table, Harry and his two agent allies along one side. The Secretary, however, chose to stand. The grandfatherly man checked himself before starting up, realizing that he hadn't been introduced. "Mr. Potts. I'm Alexander Pierce. I apologize that we had to meet under these circumstances."
"Under circumstances like these is how I seem to meet most people, sir," Harry responded.
"You're our expert on the situation?" the much-older man asked. "Or should we wait on Stark to arrive?"
"Um, no sir," Harry shrugged. "I can get you up to speed?" He glanced at Coulson for permission, and the agent nodded. "You know about Asgard? From when Thor showed up?"
The Secretary said, "I'm familiar with that, yes." The STRIKE team's eyes widened, suddenly realizing how bad this could be.
"Did he mention that he was going back to fight his brother, Loki?"
"Coulson would know for sure?" Pierce prompted.
Phil shook his head, "We debriefed the people he talked to on Earth, and it seemed unclear. There had been some information from his, er, entourage that some kind of dynastic coup was happening on their homeworld. But we didn't receive any further information after he returned to Asgard."
Harry summed up, "What I heard was, basically, Loki tried to take over, they fought, and, in the process, they broke the machine they use to travel between worlds. They thought Loki had died, but it turned out that he was rescued by another alien. Who I guess is also a really bad guy and might be trying to kill half the people that exist? It's not really clear."
"So Loki is here to wipe out half the planet?" the Secretary summed up.
Harry shrugged, "Maybe eventually. I'm not really sure he knows what he's doing. They gave him this scepter thing that lets him mind control people he touches with it. It also shoots lasers. But I think it's controlling him almost as much as he's controlling everyone else. Anyway, he used it on Fury and they took the blue brick. I think they're trying to use it to open a portal to bring an army of aliens from the other side of the galaxy."
Pierce rested his hands on the back of one of the chairs around the table. Harry thought he had a very Dumbledore vibe, trying to remain in control and acting like he wasn't completely floored by this new information. "And you know all of this because…?"
"I go to school on one of the other planets in the group that Asgard calls the Nine Realms?" Harry admitted. "It's the same school Loki went to centuries ago. And the people there kind of think of the rulers of Asgard as their gods." He anticipated the next question of how he'd gotten involved by explaining, "When I was a baby, my parents died saving me from the big alien guy that rescued Loki? And everyone thinks he died, but he was probably just badly injured. Anyway, that means I'm kind of a symbol of being able to beat that guy. So their people kidnapped me to kill me to prove it was a fluke or something. And I managed to escape and follow Loki through the portal."
The Secretary had been looking increasingly grim throughout that explanation. If even half of what the kid was telling him was true, things were bad enough that there were very few angles available to him. A mind-controlled alien overlord representing an unknown outer space threat bent on galactic genocide wasn't good for anyone on Earth, no matter their political aims. This unknown alien probably wasn't going to show up and negotiate in good faith for which half of the world got killed. Pierce pondered all of this for a moment, and said, "So if I can sum up? A banished royal from a group of powerful aliens, working for another group of powerful aliens, is trying to bring an army to attack Earth, using the Tesseract. He has some kind of weapon that lets him suborn anyone he can touch with it. And the first person he got with it was the director of the organization designed to protect the planet from things like this."
Harry, Coulson, and Barton nodded.
"How big of a threat is this guy, personally?" Pierce asked. "Coulson's report had Thor smashing through buildings and giant robots."
Musing, Harry figured, "He's probably not quite as strong as Thor, but he killed most of the agents in the room when he came in, and they were shooting at him." Barton nodded his agreement, so Harry continued, "Even without the scepter, he can create really convincing illusions. Change his appearance. Turn invisible. Make holograms of himself while he's sneaking up to stab you?" Harry was just guessing a bit based on what he'd seen Loki do as "Cedric" and what he remembered Fandral complaining about in his stories. "He can probably do a bunch of other weird tricks like that." Harry wasn't sure what other kind of magic Loki could manage. It had been interesting all the things that "Cedric" hadn't been able to do.
"Could Stark beat him?"
"If he was ready for his tricks, probably," Harry figured. He doubted Loki would shrug off a repulsor or micro-missile as easily as small arms fire.
Pierce regarded them for a long moment, taking in the earnest faces of his "guests" and the disbelieving ones of his bodyguards. He eventually said, "It sounds far-fetched, but with Fury and Hill cutting off communications as soon as I started questioning their orders of the last few hours, I'm inclined to believe that something has gone badly wrong. They've managed to take the entire helicarrier dark, and I didn't know that was even possible." Coulson and Barton looked worried about that revelation, though Harry had no idea what a helicarrier was. "Fury had Rogers picked up and brought to him this morning, and, I understand, ordered an assault on Stark Tower that Iron Man had to rebuff. And I also understand that Romanoff picked up Banner in India a few hours ago, out from under another team with orders to bring him in by any means necessary."
"We're in communication with Romanoff," Coulson volunteered. "We worried that Fury would go after the Avengers Initiative list. The Hulk triggered in a dense area…"
"That's good news, at least," the Secretary agreed. He decided on a course of action that would give him maximum flexibility toward freeing up his own agents, and ordered, "Phil Coulson, as the highest-ranking agent that so far seems uncompromised and read-in on the situation, I'm giving you operational control." As Pierce made that decision, the STRIKE bodyguards seemed to subtly relax, though they still had an eye on Harry as a potential issue in a room that was otherwise spies getting along. "So do we have a plan?"
Coulson frowned at the new, if temporary, promotion, but explained, "The Tesseract emits a gamma signature. It's possible Banner could use his expertise to track it. And if it's on the helicarrier, we can find that too." He volunteered Harry's intel, explaining, "In theory, victims controlled by this weapon will have bright blue eyes and can be freed by knocking them unconscious."
The Secretary nodded, seeming to like the idea that there was a way to recover his people and guard against further infiltration. "This is a mess," he reiterated. "I need to go brief the security council. I'm sending orders to the New York office that you're in charge for now. Make sure we don't lose the planet, Coulson."
"Yes, sir," he agreed.
Pierce looked at Harry like he had a lot more questions, but then decided to wait to read the reports on what the rest of his agents figured out. Asking the boy if he'd seen Sitwell and Rumlow would tip his hand too far, but hopefully the kid would mention something later. He nodded and left the room, a couple of the STRIKE agents staying with him as bodyguards, but Rollins and one other staying behind. Fortunately, it was the one holding their bags, and he turned them over. "That went better than expected," Coulson said. "You guys have a car?"
"We can drive you," Rollins nodded.
"Then let's get to the office before traffic gets worse…"
"The office" turned out to be a high-rise building about a quarter mile from Times Square and less than a mile's walk down 47th Street from Stark Tower. Harry wasn't sure how they afforded the real-estate, taking up several floors of a building that was otherwise the offices of a multinational investment firm. It was probably great cover for people in suits coming and going at all hours.
Inside, the space was very clean and open. Off-white marble tile floors and walls overlooked the open windows out over the neighboring streets. Harry idly wondered if the army of janitors it would take to keep clean were also high-security-clearance spies.
Harry was deposited in an office and then Coulson and Barton went to have meetings with the confused agents in the building who were suddenly reporting to a different boss late in the work day on a Wednesday. Harry's room was basically a hot-desking space for agents that came and went: a comfy enough chair, an empty desk, and nothing else of consequence. It was probably bugged. Harry could have just astrally projected to eavesdrop on whatever it was that he wasn't invited to, but he figured it was just Coulson having to give the same briefing he was fully aware of over and over.
They could have at least left him with a laptop, but at least they hadn't tried to steal his backpack. With a bit of mental concentration, he found two trackers that someone (presumably the STRIKE agents) had slipped into the bag's lining and where the listening devices were in the room. Magical electronic counter surveillance hadn't been particularly useful on Vanaheim, but Master Mordo had been insistent that all the kids at summer camp learn it. Harry felt a little guilty over frying the listening devices, and hoped they weren't ruinously expensive.
Feeling relatively more private, he fished out his mirror and called Sirius. "Pup!" his godfather answered within a few seconds. The background behind him was clearly one of the cars in the Hogwarts Express. "Are you safe?"
"Yeah. Turns out SHIELD is pretty good at dealing with their leaders getting compromised?" Harry explained, leaning back in the chair. "I'm at their office in New York, right down the street from Tony's building. I helped get Remus out from being attacked in the middle of a city this morning, and we're waiting for him to show up. You're on the train?"
"Glad to hear about Remus. But he probably shouldn't be hiding out in a city with his condition. Yeah, it took longer than I hoped for us to get moving. Should be getting to the station soon. And then it's an emergency Wizengamot meeting. There were already owls about renewed attacks, but nobody's saying anything about You-Know-Who. Maybe he decided to sit this out?"
"Or is just waiting to hit where you least expect? Or until Loki fully distracts Earth and Asgard? Be careful, he's got a whole Manchester Black thing going on." Harry guessed Bruce and his mother hadn't really brought comics for Sirius to read and elaborated, "That's a comic character. Massive telekinetic powers. The alien guy may not be able to lift living things directly, but just the force he was putting on the ropes around me was a lot. Might be able to disarm everyone near him. Throw boulders at people. That kind of thing."
"Noted. Yeah, Dumbledore said powerful levitation was common going up against You-Know-Who in the past, so maybe it's the same guy?"
"I think it must have been at least two guys," Harry shrugged. "The one that killed my parents has a deeper voice, and I think he's the 'Father' that's really in charge."
"Just when we thought that a dark lord was the worst thing we could face," Sirius frowned. "We're pulling into the station. Thanks for checking in, pup. Call if you think there's something we can help with over here."
"Will do. You be careful," Harry signed off.
He'd barely been off the call five minutes, sorting through his stuff and figuring out whether there was anything useful he should keep to hand, before a young agent watching the office door knocked and poked his head in, saying, "Um, Mr. Potts? Apparently Mr. Stark is here to talk to you, and is insisting on it now."
"Hah," Harry grinned, slinging his backpack back on. "Let's go."
They actually went up a couple of floors. SHIELD seemed like it filled some unknown block of the lower-level part of the building, with its own private set of elevators. Presumably the bankers on the top floors didn't even realize the base of their building was a government installation. He figured out why they'd been going up when they exited into an open space that looked out onto a partial roof access: the building had some tiered stair-step blocks of floors before shooting up straight into the sky. Tony had clearly landed on this HVAC jungle/large balcony, having flown over in the Iron Man armor rather than traveling unarmored down 47th.
At least he had his helmet off, to indicate he wasn't going to start shooting agents yet.
"Maverick!" Tony said, as soon as Harry was escorted off the elevator. "You're not getting vivisected!"
"Why would I be… oh," Harry said, realizing that Tony was referencing the idea of him being alien-autopsied by SHIELD. He couldn't quite tell if that was sarcasm, since worry about that was probably what Pepper explained for not revealing their secret to Tony earlier. He shrugged, "If I wasn't the only one that knew what's going on, and Coulson wasn't in charge, maybe they would have tried?" In hindsight, he hadn't gotten a great vibe off of the STRIKE agents, and the Secretary reminded him unconsciously of Obadiah Stane.
"Agent's in charge?" Tony asked. "I really thought he was, like, middle management at best? How many superiors got mind controlled if he's who's left?"
Harry shrugged again. His agent babysitter had the good grace to pretend to not be listening, staying by the elevator as Harry walked into the open space to talk with Tony. "He's at least high enough that being up-to-speed counted for a lot? We talked to Secretary Pierce, and he put Coulson in charge."
"They haven't even let me talk to Pierce," Tony pouted. "So do they have you doing spy stuff?"
"No. Shut me in an office without a phone or a laptop until you showed up. It was comfy, at least. I don't think they know what to do with me."
"I don't know what to do with you," Tony agreed. "Pepper wants me to fly you back to the Tower right now and start your grounding. Well, she half wants me to."
"She's okay?" Harry checked.
"Yeah. I scared off the agents last night and we flew her out to a secure location this morning. I guess she could come back, since they sent me a big apology thirty minutes ago? Which was good, because I was halfway to calling a press conference about government overreach. No apology fruit basket yet, though. But anyway, you ready for your grounding?"
Harry sighed, "As much as I would love to go hide, I think they're going to need me to help. How's the Tower coming along, by the way?"
"I was supposed to hook up the arc reactor so it's self-sufficient today, but instead I'm here. May do that anyway. Nice subject change, by the way. So you're refusing your grounding?"
"Aunt Pepper can ground me after the world is saved?"
Tony regarded him for a moment for teen histrionics and didn't seem to detect any. "Really that bad, huh?"
"Army of space zombies or something, just waiting to show up if we don't get back the thing that Loki stole," Harry agreed.
"JARVIS, look into loading the Mark VII for 'space zombies,'" Tony ordered. Presumably the AI responded in his earpiece with something droll, because he smirked.
Before he could say anything else, the elevator opened again and Coulson stepped off with a veritable entourage of agents, though Barton seemed to have better things to do than shadow the acting Director for the day because he wasn't present. "Mr. Stark," Coulson nodded.
"Agent," Tony responded.
Coulson produced a tablet and held it out towards Tony. "Glad you're here. We need you to look this over. Soon as possible."
"I don't like being handed things," Tony responded, deciding to be difficult.
Harry rolled his eyes and grabbed the tablet, opening it up. It wasn't like Tony could safely use a touchpad in his armor without syncing it with JARVIS anyway. "Is this stuff about the Tesseract?" Harry asked, scrolling through. "And the Avengers Initiative?" Tony was willing to shoulder-surf as Harry scrolled. The agent entourage looked positively scandalized by an un-NDAed minor going through so much classified material, but Coulson didn't seem bothered so they held their tongues.
Tony said, "The Avengers Initiative was scrapped, I thought. And I didn't even qualify." Harry glanced his way with a questioning look, since Tony hadn't really mentioned that in the casual bragging he'd been doing about his consulting with Fury. "Apparently I'm volatile. Self-obsessed. Don't play well with others." Harry snorted in amusement at the apt description.
Coulson just explained, "This isn't about personality profiles anymore. Banner is en route but not interested in combat. Thor is apparently out of reach. Rogers is missing and, we have to assume, compromised. Commander Rhodes is on assignment overseas, and the Air Force isn't cooperating. We need your help. Right now, you basically are the Avengers Initiative."
"Well, plus Nat and Clint," Harry noted, having scrolled further down the file menu. "But as 'support' agents. Wait, why is my name on here?"
"I guess Fury assumed you'd be in position to help in a few years," Coulson shrugged. "That file will probably need updating."
"Who's Danvers?" he asked, pulling open a file that just had a redacted Air Force record for a female test pilot.
"Last ditch possibility," Coulson explained. "I don't have a way to contact her. And if she's even still alive, she's probably not available quickly."
"Okay, so it's just me and the kid. Well, and the agents," Tony figured, managing to take the tablet from Harry without crushing it in his gauntlets. "I'll read up on this. I'm going to courier over a phone, and you better give it to him. Honestly, not giving a kid a phone to play on. Have Maverick call me if there's a crisis, or I may not pick up."
"Thanks," Coulson nodded, and Tony seemed a little nonplussed that the situation was bad enough for such a simple statement. Tony put his helmet back on, walked back onto the roof, and blasted off. "I didn't know they'd left you without a phone," Coulson half-apologized to Harry.
"I may have burned out your bugs in the office they stuck me in," Harry half-apologized back.
"Why are there bugs in our office?" the Acting-Director turned to his entourage, who all tried to look totally innocent of the routine espionage. "I'll set you up with your own copy of the tablet, since you've already seen it. Hopefully we can get Ms. Potts to agree to an NDA for you."
"No protocol for minors?" Harry asked.
"No protocol for minors," Coulson agreed.
Within an hour, Harry had both a tablet and a phone. He'd had to go down to the lobby to accept hand-delivery from a Stark Industries courier, who seemed to have no idea why he was running a sealed package right down the street to the CEO's nephew, but was chuffed about the whole situation.
Inside the package was a new Starkphone, a low-profile set of earbuds, and a trio of fingertip-sized hexagonal metal discs. "See if you can attach those to unlocked, networked computers," Tony's message on the phone suggested. "SHIELD. Bad guys. Whatever." Harry was kind of impressed with how miniaturized Tony had gotten what were clearly automated hacking devices.
The tablet was not networked. But it did, indeed, seem to contain basically the same material that had been on Tony's tablet. It came with a post-it note from Coulson saying, "Please review this information and let us know what's wrong. Ms. Potts agreed to the NDA. And says to call."
Figuring he better face the music, he had JARVIS connect him to Pepper. She picked up instantly, asking, "Harry! Why am I approving SHIELD NDAs for you? Why didn't you go back to the Tower with Tony?"
"Unless Asgard figures out how to get here, I think I'm it," he told her.
"You shouldn't have to be it," she insisted. "Phil's in charge of SHIELD? Why can't he handle it?"
"Loki killed half a dozen armed agents in less than a minute," Harry told her. "It was crazy. I was honestly starting to think that six-second combat rounds were too short."
"I don't know what that means! Did one of the princes of Asgard kill a bunch of people right in front of you?" Pepper was getting upset. "Harry! Is there anything I can do to get you to come to me and hide?"
"I'm sorry," he sighed, again realizing that it would be really nice to just go to wherever his aunt was and watch all of this play out without him. But, on the other hand, a small part of him craved the chance to step up and show everyone that he could do something important. He was almost 15. He was probably technically the Tri-Worlds champion! "I'm the one that spent the year with Loki, even though I didn't know it until yesterday. I'm maybe the only person he can't mind control. Nobody else has a real idea of what he can do. I'm going to be as careful as I can, but… who else is there?"
"You can't fight a god!" she insisted. "They're basically gods!"
"And you want Tony to fight him alone?"
"I don't want either of you to fight him!" she yelled into the phone. "Harry! I don't want you to die." She'd left unsaid the part about, "Not like your father." That part was unsaid a lot between them in the past few years.
"I don't want to die!" he told her, almost yelling back. He was glad of the bug-destroyed office for his fraught conversation. "But if I don't fight. If Tony doesn't fight… Aunt Pepper, I think they're trying to kill half the universe. If we lose, there's a fifty-fifty chance everyone we know dies anyway."
He could hear her stifle a sob on the other end of the call. Marshal her thoughts. Make a decision. "And you think you have better than a fifty-percent chance?"
"Aunt Pepper… I think we're going to show a bunch of aliens why you don't mess with the Nine Realms, whether or not Asgard can help at the moment."
"Okay," she huffed, voice still full of unshed tears. "Okay. Harry. You aren't allowed to die. You aren't allowed to let Tony die. I'm counting on you both to come back."
"Sure," he told her. "After all, I still have a grounding to serve."
That got a broken chuckle out of her. "I love you, Harry."
"I love you too, Aunt Pepper."
It was after eight in the evening before Nat and Bruce showed up. Harry had spent the afternoon reviewing the tablet. Well, he'd spent a couple of hours reviewing the tablet, boggled at how little they knew, and then spent the rest of the evening using his phone to catch up on the year's pop culture that he'd missed. They'd ordered dinner for him. He was getting sick of the empty office and was thrilled when Nat popped her head in. "We're back. Meeting upstairs."
"Nat! Hey," Harry quickly shoved his phone into a pocket like he hadn't been watching clips from The Hunger Games. "R… er, Bruce is here? You're both okay?"
"Other than the traffic from the airport, yeah. Thanks for providing overwatch," she said, with that friendly half-smirk. Harry must have made a face reminding himself that the engaging smile couldn't be trusted, because she shifted her own expression into a sad frown. "Don't forget the tablet. Someone gets assigned to a base in the arctic if you forget the tablet." He hastily shoved it into the backpack, put it on, and followed her.
Outside, his door guard had cleared out and it was basically just him and Natasha walking the windowed marble hallway. He was a little surprised to find the sun had gone down and Manhattan was lighting up outside the windows, after spending hours in an interior office. It really was a nice view, even though they weren't far up. And he was a little surprised that he was appreciating the view of the city rather than the view of Natasha, back in her form-fitting SHIELD catsuit/uniform. Maybe it wasn't just being in astral form when he'd been around her earlier. "You, uh, get some sleep on the plane?" he asked, a little lamely.
"Enough. And I don't think I'm going to have a long night. Banner, probably," she explained, leading him to the elevator.
"I didn't get to mention it in India, but sorry about Fury," he told her, getting onto the elevator. He remembered that she and the mind-controlled director had seemed weirdly close. "We're going to try to get him back."
"It's not the worst thing that's happened around here," she allowed. "But it's not fair just making people give up their secrets and do what you want. It's going to put me out of a job," she mock-pouted. Pushing the button for three floors up, she asked, "How was school? Other than getting kidnapped by a Norse god?"
He shrugged, already fully put at ease by the agent despite his wariness. "Fine. Loki put me in a tournament where I could have died. But everything else was okay." Maybe it was her ineffable interrogation method, or maybe it was just bravado, but he mentioned, "I'm kind of dating one of the other people in the tournament."
"Kind of?" Natasha asked, nonchalantly leaning against the wall of the elevator.
"Well, she's a little older. And her dad already has plans for who she's going to marry and it's not me," he admitted.
"But you're Harry Potts," she smiled at him. It wasn't even sultry. It was just an acknowledgement that this skilled, beautiful agent was sure that he was a catch.
"Thanks, Nat," he told her, having completely forgotten his wariness around her. Natasha Romanoff was very good at her job. "Not that I'll even see her again, since she lives on a different planet." He barely even realized he hadn't meant to give that detail up.
"You'll make it work out, if it's important to you," she insisted. The elevator dinged and she just led the way to the conference room without further comment.
They'd picked a nice one. It was probably big enough for two-dozen people around a big table, with large monitors on the wall for audio-visual elements. Tony had seemingly decided that his physical comfort was more important than his safety, since he was just in jeans and an AC/DC t-shirt. He was clearly in the middle of an animated nerd-out with Bruce, who was somehow still wearing the mud-brown suit. Barton was posted up on the far side of the table, watching the others, changed back into his black fatigues. And Coulson had returned to his suit, as if it was genuinely a comfortable look for him halfway to bedtime.
"It's just the six of us?" Harry asked, taking a seat at the table next to Tony.
"As much as I love having confidential meetings with dozens of agents standing around…" Coulson deadpanned.
"Personally, I have other things to do," Tony suggested. "So if we could speed this up?"
"I, uh, want to know how long I'm staying," Bruce suggested.
"Once you can safely move on, we'll let you," Coulson told him. "But in the meantime, we're hoping for your help tracking the Tesseract. We're sweeping every wirelessly-accessible camera on the planet. Cellphones. Laptops. If it's connected to a satellite, it's eyes and ears for us."
Harry and Tony shared a look at the blatant illegality of that, but Bruce just asked, "You have to narrow the field. How many spectrometers do you have access to?"
"As many as you need?" Coulson shrugged.
Seemingly excited about playing with SHIELD's dubious authority over every science organization in the world, Bruce insisted, "Call every lab you know. Tell them to put the spectrometers on the roof and calibrate them for gamma rays. I'll rough out a tracking algorithm based on cluster recognition. At least we could rule out a few places." He grudgingly realized, "Do you have somewhere for me to work?"
Tony, who'd apparently already become science-bros with Bruce before Harry got to the room, offered, "You can come down to the Tower. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'll love it. It's Candyland. Maverick, too," he turned to Harry. "I bet this place doesn't have bedrooms."
"Well, we have some," Coulson allowed. "But if you can be ready for a problem, and Stark Tower has better facilities for Banner…" Less of a control freak than Fury, Coulson shrugged. "Just be ready for a call. Things could move quickly. And keep us informed."
Tony already had a car waiting to take them down the street to the Tower, and Bruce looked out at the late evening in Manhattan with a bit of trepidation. "Last time I was here, I kind of broke… Harlem."
"It's fine," Harry assured him. "That was like a week after Tony broke Queens."
"True, and besides," Tony grinned, "I promise a stress-free environment. No tension. No surprises. BOO!" He suddenly leaned forward and yelled in Bruce's face. Bruce just sighed. "Nothing? You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?"
"We tried 'huge bag of weed' last year," Harry informed him.
"It was medicinal!" Bruce objected.
"Last year?" Tony put together. "Wait, were you at 'no electronics' school, too?"
"For a while," Bruce admitted. "They were trying to help me manage my problem, and get my help with a problem they were having."
"He went to school with my dad and Sirius," Harry explained. If he was done with keeping secrets from Tony, then he was going to make use of that freedom.
"You met Sirius?" Bruce checked, wondering how Tony would react to his old friend.
"Yeah. Good times. We bonded over rock music."
"Lily's records!" Bruce remembered. "I'd forgotten about those. Bunch of people used to basically-medieval technology singing along to the Stones. It was hilarious."
"Did everyone but me know about how easy it is to go to space?" Tony checked with Harry.
Harry just gave a helpless shrug, "It surprised me, too, that he was the Hulk. After this year… I kind of blame the Norns for messing with probabilities and stuff."
"Yeah?" Bruce asked. "I assumed the Norns were just Vanaheim superstition."
"After the shit that happened at the tournament, I don't know," he grimaced. "I kind of want to go find them and yell at them to give me a break."
Even in Manhattan traffic, the ride to the tower was quick, so they were soon unloading into the parking garage and taking Tony's private elevator up through the tower. "I got the reactor hooked up earlier, so we're totally self-sufficient," he bragged. "Even if someone tried to cut power to the place and siege us or something, we'd be able to keep going."
"What if they smash in through the windows?" Harry asked.
"Science floors are reinforced," Tony shrugged, but frowned at the reminder that enemies might just damage his beautiful new building. "And here they are."
It really was like Candyland for scientists. Bruce couldn't help the grin that spread across his face as he took in the pristine, high-tech equipment and spacious labs. "I can work with this," he said. "Give me a few hours to rough out an algorithm."
"JARVIS, assist Bruce on that," Tony ordered.
"Of course, sir," the synthetic voice echoed through the room. "Doctor Banner, I'd suggest using terminal three…"
"Is that an AI?" Bruce boggled. "There were rumors, but, wow, natural language recognition and dynamic assistance. I'm impressed."
Harry and Tony hovered in the lab as Bruce worked out his algorithm. Tony was alternately offering suggestions for the tracking algorithm and puttering around with his own work on another terminal, asking questions of Harry and trying to optimize his next set of armor for whatever might be coming and to design other countermeasures. Most of what both of them were doing was well over Harry's head, but he was happy to see his old professor actually in his element, rather than in an electricity-free castle. He also made use of the facilities and JARVIS' help to print a few things he was lacking: like a mask for his armor.
"There. I sent it to the SHIELD servers. May take hours and hours to run," Bruce announced around midnight. "And I'm beat. I think my body thinks it's like ten in the morning and I've been up all night."
"I… have no idea what time my body thinks it is. I guess I should sleep, too," Harry agreed.
"Rooms down a few floors. JARVIS can direct you. I'm going to be up a while longer," Tony told them.
Harry was surprised to see that the room JARVIS directed him to was actually his room. It had clearly been set up similarly to his bedroom back in LA, rather than just being a generic hotel-style space. And it had lots of clothing in his sizes and styles already in the dressers and wardrobe. Even though he and Tony had been basically cool all day, seeing that he'd been given a permanent space in Stark Tower really made it hit home that he wasn't going to be thrown away because of his secrets.
He slept pretty well. It seemed like even Tony had gotten enough sleep, as the three of them met late in the morning around a well-appointed kitchen table with an amazing view of the city, and a whole breakfast spread that had been brought up. Though Harry was only halfway through a bagel when JARVIS announced, "Agent Coulson, calling."
Tony sighed over his coffee and said, "Put him through."
"Problem," the acting Director announced without preamble. "The agents I sent off with some of the key material from PEGASUS just reported in."
"The guys you told to do the Havana thing?" Harry asked.
"Right. They think their location is compromised. If Team Loki gets their hands on that equipment, we could have a real issue."
"You think they're going to send Loki to try to get it?" Tony asked.
"They'd basically have to. The equipment would be… a big help against any regular attack. The problem is, it's in north LA, and Fury has most of the quinjets. We only have the one Romanoff used, and it will take at least half an hour to get to from here. Romanoff and Barton are on the way, but we're maybe two hours out."
"I can get there in just over an hour," Tony suggested. "Send me the exact address. I'm on my way." He slurped down the rest of his coffee as he was already moving to the elevator.
"Can he fight Loki on his own?" Bruce asked Harry.
Harry frowned. "Probably. But Loki and whoever else he has with him?"
"And how did they find out they were compromised?" Bruce agreed.
"Trap?" Harry asked.
"Trap," Bruce agreed.
"You know I'm still on the line?" Coulson asked over the room's speakers.
"Same," Tony agreed.
"I may be able to get out there in under an hour, too…" Harry realized. "And I may be the only backup Tony has. Send me the address?"
"How are you going to get across the country in an hour?" Coulson asked.
Harry just grinned and told him, "Maaaagic."