Every year, it seemed like Harry's trip to the Goblin Market became more and more of a circus, but 2012 topped them all. Combining a joint birthday trip for him and Neville at the end of July, everyone going for their school shopping, and Tony insisting on finally seeing the one part of the Hogwarts experience that wouldn't shut off his heart, it seemed like everyone was present. Basically all of his friends from school had come, along with their families (including the Weasley parents and each of their kids still at Hogwarts). Sirius had shown up with the Tonkses. Viktor had managed to make it. And then there was basically every member of the Avengers, plus Rhodey, all totally gobsmacked by the interplanetary bazaar. They had a crowd of nearly three-dozen.
The only ones that hadn't made it were Thor and Fleur, both of them apologizing by mail about their commitments at their respective courts (or maybe the same court; it was unclear from the letters).
Pepper had made sure to order Tony, Natasha, Clint, and Steve appropriate clothing to blend in among the fantastic flea market, and Bruce was already aware of the right method of dress. The slightly baggy robes were stuffed with various weapons and defenses, at least on Tony and Clint's parts, and Steve had simply put a leather cover over the famous shield. Natasha's weapons were always concealed, and Bruce basically was a weapon.
"This seems like cheating. Is it cheating if I buy a bunch of alien tech to look at?" Tony asked, as soon as he reached the first booths that weren't just pre-industrial Vanir handicrafts.
"You have an entire government division harvesting Chitauri technology for you," Natasha shrugged. "What I'm interested in is where I can get some of those magic pockets Harry has."
"I made those!" Sirius interjected. "I can add them to whatever you like?" He'd gotten infatuated with Natasha almost as hard as Harry had on first meeting her, and with even less chill about it. Harry was surprised at his own lack of jealousy, but did find it interesting that he was picking some up from Bruce.
Showing a Black family tendency toward crushing on Avengers, Tonks seemed to be similarly infatuated with Steve, but was at least a little more circumspect about it (though she seemed to always be within a few feet of him).
"Why don't we see what we can get off the rack, first?" Pepper suggested, clearly surprised that the teenagers in the group were stably paired or otherwise in control of themselves but the adults were flaring with hormones. "Check with me to make sure the prices seem reasonable, but we've got plenty of galleons to spend."
"Which I'm going to pay you back for," Tony told her. He'd been planning to walk in with a few bars of gold, or perhaps some krugerrands, but she insisted that they could just buy things using her personal bank account (which still had a pretty big backlog to try to launder into Earth currency).
"I can't believe we missed another adventure," Dean complained. "Doctor Bighead is our group nemesis!"
"And Mordo may have been less annoyed if I'd taken everyone," Harry agreed, having been surprised that the self-serious Master had actually had him do extra cleaning work with the other apprentices as punishment for disappearing without telling anyone.
"What happened to Stearns, anyway?" Hermione asked.
"Wait, Sam Stearns?" Bruce overheard the conversation. "He's the guy you've been talking about?"
Natasha explained, "I'll get you the files. After he helped power up Blonsky into the Abomination, he either intentionally or accidentally injected himself with your blood. It resulted in encephalitis and increased intelligence."
"And made him crazy," Harry added.
"Megalomania is very correlated with great intelligence," Luna piped in, blithely. Harry caught her staring at Hermione and at Tony to see if she could get a rise out of them with that comment.
"It's only megalomania if you're wrong about how awesome you are," the billionaire corrected, winking at the girl. He'd gotten her figured out pretty quickly.
"Point to Stark," Neville whispered to his girlfriend, and she shrugged and nodded.
"They have universal translators," Clint noticed, looking into the surgically-clean shop midway down the main drag.
"Oh, yeah, I got one, it's great," Harry agreed. "Except it doesn't work on Vanaheim."
"Now that does seem like cheating," Tony opined, proud of the foreign languages he'd learned.
"And it's pretty gross. Like the biggest shot ever. Right into the back of your neck," Parvati frowned.
"I don't know," Viktor mused, thinking about all the trouble he had communicating with Hermione. "Could be good to have."
"You're almost there," she squeezed his hand. "We could barely talk last year. I and, with pleasure, am Bulgarian learning." That last bit was in the Bulgarian that she'd learned, helpfully translated by Harry's implant. Viktor managed to smile and nod as if she'd gotten it right, but Harry must have winced. "What!?"
"You sure you don't want translators?" he asked.
"Aside from the pain," Dean explained, "they're a thousand galleons."
"Those are the gold coins," Bruce explained for the other Avengers. "Worth a little under ten bucks each." Needless to say, even the small coins weren't really pure gold, or they'd be vastly more valuable on Earth where $10 would buy less than a gram of the precious metal.
"Well I'm getting one," Tony decided, having had the last several seconds of conversation to realize that he would be a huge hypocrite if he avoided a technological upgrade out of some weird luddite urge to learn languages himself. And there were potentially a ton of alien languages he might need to know in the coming years. "And any of you that want one, I'll cover it. Well, Pepper will. And I'll pay her back."
With Stark Industries footing the bill and with the same realization that speaking every language might be worth the discomfort, all of the Earth-based kids got one. As did half their parents when they realized Tony's offer included them. Ron also got one, for all that it was unlikely to be useful to him in many circumstances: it was a free thousand-galleon item, after all. Natasha and Clint were more reticent, until Pepper explained that she'd tested it and it really did seem to be undetectable to Earth machinery (Sirius explained that they probably had the same charms he'd put on Harry's knife). And Steve was unlikely to have any ethical qualms about accepting permanent technological enhancement to his body.
Bruce just said, "Yeah, no. That sounds really useful, but… even if the pain didn't set me off, it would probably be ejected the next time I transformed." Everyone got an appropriately-disturbed look as they visualized the bullet-sized device getting shot out of the Hulk's neck.
"Why don't the rest of us go look around while everyone gets theirs?" Pepper suggested, after quietly authorizing the shop to charge the equivalent of around a sixth of a million dollars to her Gringotts account.
"It's probably a good time to try to get a meal at the Leaky Cauldron?" Molly Weasley suggested, trying not to show how thrown she was by even a Potter dropping that kind of cash on a whim. When she'd heard a few years earlier that Tony Stark was richer than the Malfoys, she'd only half believed it. "I'm not sure they have enough tables for all of us, so it might help to eat in shifts."
As it was, they still had 14 people in their crowd—the Weasleys other than Ron, the Lovegoods, the Longbottoms, the elder Tonkses, and Bruce, Pepper, and Harry. At least they'd jettisoned the members most likely to gawk like tourists, so they made it to the pub with a minimum of stops. Honestly, they'd seen it all before and didn't even have the new school equipment lists to assemble yet. They could go ahead and get the common things, and might after lunch, but there would need to be another trip later in the summer.
"Any idea about the new defense class?" Neville made conversation as they waited for their food.
"I think it's going to be Master Mordo," Harry revealed. "He seemed extra annoyed at the end of camp, like he drew the short straw."
"One of the Midgard sorcerers?" Mr. Weasley checked. When Harry nodded he sighed, "That's probably better than the alternative."
"Than young 'Madam Umbrage' you mean?" Neville's grandmother checked. When he nodded but everyone else looked blank, she explained, "We convinced enough of the members of the althing that there could be Death Eaters among them that they decided to turn to an 'objective outsider' for counsel."
"The Accuser!" Ted Tonks realized.
"You'll, of course, not tell anyone the pet name we use for her," Augusta declared, fixing Mr. Lovegood with a cowing stare from beneath the hat made of the stuffed vulture, Jimothy. Once he nodded to agree that this was off the record, she elaborated, "but she does seem to take umbrage about everything anyone says. Used to being a law unto herself, it seems."
"Where is she even from?" the lawyer asked. "I couldn't get a straight answer other than someone saying that at least she wasn't blue."
"Accusers! Kree!" Mr. Lovegood realized. "An empire that spans a galaxy guided by an immortal mind that drove all before them. But then a woman made of flame and starlight fell upon their capital city and smote it to ruin some few years ago. They began to lose more and more planets, until they could not win their centuries-old war against the Lords of the New Corpse." He took a pause and explained, "We ran a story last year. They look pretty much like Vanir, but some of them are blue."
"I believe it's the 'Nova Corps' rather than what you said," the elder Longbottom corrected. "But, yes, their judges are widely regarded as scrupulously, perhaps fastidiously, unbiased and incorruptible. It was decided that they would be impartial toward our circumstances, and thus dogged in pursuit of corrupting influences. And they were available, due to the recent armistice."
"But why did you think she was teaching defense?" Bruce pulled them back to the original point.
"Because no one can stand her," Augusta shrugged. "But she agreed to stay on Vanaheim for a whole year, and won't leave until then. People were talking about giving her a role at Hogwarts so she'd stop constantly getting in the way of the government." She once again leveled her gaze at the Lovegoods to make sure they weren't going to print anything she'd just said.
"Anyway, no, it's a Master. Probably Mordo," Harry reminded them, glad that they wouldn't have to put up with what seemed like a thoroughly annoying teacher of what was often his favorite class. "He's kind of uptight, but he's a good teacher."
"You don't see that every day," Bruce opined as a non sequitur, staring across the bar. While the Goblin Market was a melting pot of Nine Realms humanoids, the majority of people you saw were still primarily humans from Vanaheim or Midgard, or light elves that looked human enough, with a distant second being the goblins that called the place home. Those truly alien races that had figured out how to get into the interplanetary bazaar tended to wear concealing garb, and be built on a basically-human scale anyway.
They weren't, for example, a tree-man nearly as big as Hagrid accompanied by a bipedal racoon in an orange jumpsuit. The two drew a second look.
The raccoon was carrying a transparent slate similar to one of Tony's high-end screens, and staring through the digital readout at their table. "That's him," the diminutive beast-man told the ent he was traveling with. He had almost a New York accent, which was a change of pace in the strongly British-inflected accents common around the Realms. Other than Pepper, no one at the table seemed to understand, however, so whatever language he spoke was being live-translated by the implants.
"I am groot?" the ent asked, and that wasn't translated by the implant.
Harry caught enough of the tone to realize it wasn't an introduction, but Mr. Weasley started to take charge of the strange meeting and respond, "And I'm Arthur, how can we help you?"
Meanwhile, Luna's protuberant eyes had widened basically to the size of dinner plates, a look of joyful realization spreading across her face.
Before she could comment, however, the racoon responded to his companion, "So put him in the bag? It doesn't matter that he's at a dinner party."
The tree-man shrugged and produced a large gray sack with some minimal embroidery on it, then simply reached over and picked up Harry, fingers extending into vines to wrap around him. He hadn't even thought to try to get out of the way, because the tableau was so strange. He had also been bracketed between Neville and Ginny at the packed table, so hadn't had anywhere to go.
"What are you doing with my nephew?!" Pepper demanded, outraged, as Harry was bemusedly lifted through the air and plopped into the sack.
"There's a bounty, lady. You can try to bail him back out or get him a lawyer once he gets delivered," the raccoon shrugged, clearly not caring that he'd just taken a child from his guardian. Relenting only slightly, he explained, "Galactic Bounty Code 79-BD-09-J, for your records."
"Hold on!" Mrs. Weasley piped up, the bounty hunter having shifted into English to talk to Pepper. "You can't just file alien bounties here in the Goblin Market! Arthur, tell him!"
"Well, in most cases, no, but depending on the treaties involved…" Mr. Weasley vacillated. The sack Harry was in was at least comfortable enough. Since it was held by a tree man, it was a lot like being in a hammock.
"I am groot, I am Groot, I… am groot?" Luna asked, though with some hesitation as if she wasn't sure she got the grammar correct.
"He understands language, he just don't speak it good," the racoon told her. "C'mon, Groot."
"I am Groot," the tree, who was apparently called Groot, said apologetically to Luna.
"We're not seriously letting these guys kidnap Harry?" George wondered.
"Yeah, Professor Lupin could smash them both to pieces!" Fred added.
"And the bar. And the Market," Bruce winced. "Bad day to not have cell coverage." The densely-wired stone walls of the Market had proven to interfere with their comms pretty badly, and they obviously weren't on a phone network. Tony had plans to fix the radios for the next time, but they couldn't call back to the Avengers getting implanted across the cavern.
The pub was just busy enough that they would have had trouble finding seating for everyone, but it wasn't so full that their interaction was immediately obvious to the other patrons. At least until Neville extracted himself from his seat and declared, loudly, "We won't let you kidnap Harry Potter!" That got the attention of the room, that had been turning a blind eye to the strangeness of animate flora and fauna.
"Oy, how'd you even get in here?" Tom, the old bartender shouted across the room.
"Got a tip the mark would be here today. Knew a guy that could get us in," the racoon shrugged. He waved the tablet at the room, "All official. Bounty hunting." He had started moving across the room toward one of the corridors that led back to other planets.
"You're not going anywhere," Neville doubled down. He hadn't kept up with the combat practice as much as the Earth kids, but he was further along on wandless casting than most of the rest of the school. With some effort, he manifested an energy sword and leveled it at the duo. If it flickered more than Harry's did, you wouldn't know it from his steely expression. Behind him, his grandmother's eyes widened beneath the vulture, but she seemed inclined to let her ward play hero.
"I am groot?" the animate tree asked.
"I know you don't want to hurt them. So just toss 'em around a bit," the raccoon ordered, unslinging a gun nearly as big as he was from his back and barely acknowledging Neville as he told the rest of the room, "Listen up you superstitious numbskulls. This gun says I get to walk out of here."
"It's 'primitive screwheads' and 'this is my boomstick,'" Harry yelled from inside the bag, probably not taking this encounter seriously enough but just amused by the situation. He was being abducted by a tree man that could only say three words and a sarcastic woodland creature. "Dean's going to be so mad he's not here."
"Huh—boomstick—I like it," the uplifted mammal mused, still trying to slowly move out of the room through sheer force of will. "Right. I've got a boomstick. Don't try anything dumber than your faces already look."
It was a weird standoff. Despite the weapons on sale in the market, it was pretty rare for there to be a fight there: a ban by the goblins could mean a lifetime of lost access to the primary shopping district for several of the Realms. Most of the Vanir in the crowd didn't have any skill at wandless casting, their market trips being the only time they were without their magic. Those few that had the skill or holdout weapons weren't willing to just jump the strangers, in case they were fulfilling a legitimate bounty. What if the goblins kicked them out for starting a fight?
"I said no!" Neville said, having hoped that the room would back him up but not willing to just let them carry his friend off. He charged forward with his stuttering blade of energy and managed to put a slash at the top of the bag being carried by Groot before the flora colossus used his available hand to wrap the boy in a surprisingly gentle net of vines and hold him off the ground.
"That's my boyfriend!" Luna told him, half in warning and half out of pride.
"I am groot," he assured her that he wouldn't hurt Neville.
"Don't even think about it," the raccoon commanded, leveling his boomstick at Fred and George, who'd been trying to sneak around and pulling out prank items to throw at him.
Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were having a quiet argument about what to do, Arthur clearly reigning in her mothering instinct with legalities; perhaps if Harry had spent more time with her family, he wouldn't have been able to stop her, but the boy was still mostly a stranger to them. Bruce was just trying to keep himself calm; while he was growing more trusting of the Hulk, in this kind of enclosed space it really would be dangerous. The rest of the adults present were not Gryffindors, and had no intention of charging the unknown capabilities of the two bounty hunters.
"Appreciate the opening, Nev," Harry called out, doing that same math and realizing that it was time to save himself. The sack made it hard to do his spellcasting mudras, but he'd freed the knife that Sirius gave him and finished the cut that his friend had made on the bag, causing it to flop down to the floor. But as the bag collapsed as if the contents were rolling free, nobody could actually see anyone leaving the opening. Harry managed to flick the knife closed in a smooth movement as he let his cloak cover him while he tumbled under a bar table.
"What kind of dumb trick is this?" the raccoon demanded.
"I am groot?"
"I know he was in the bag. Now he's not. Where'd he go?"
"I am Groot," his partner began sending crawling vines out along the floor from the hand that wasn't holding Neville.
"Invisible? That is a pretty good trick. Hey, kid, give me your invisibility gadget and we'll call it even. I been needing me one of them."
"I am groot," the giant corrected, vines covering a good several yard radius around them where they'd gotten halfway across to the exit.
"Now they've got you talking about magic," the shorter partner sneered.
"It is, though, sorry," Harry agreed, cloak whipping away and back to visibility as he summoned a blazing sword and shield where he was standing back near his friends. "I don't think I've actually done anything illegal in outer space, so I'm going to have to reject your invitation to go visit."
While the patrons of the bar weren't sure they were going to risk helping, they were definitely enjoying the show. As the famous Harry Potter reappeared and brandished his summoned weapons, they cheered and clapped.
"Magic this," the raccoon sighed, pulling the trigger on his gun and launching a coruscating bolt of blue ball lightning that looked like it would basically be a full-body taser if it connected.
That kind of energy attack was exactly the thing that Hogwarts kids got a lot of practice on, and Harry caught it on his shield with a bit of a duck to make sure it grounded into the floor and not into him. That brought him low enough to the stone to hack at the vines that were now surging toward his legs, reminding him of the jungle planet through the portal right past the giant wolf in their first year.
Another shot from the gun went wide as the Boy-Who-Lived dived out of the way, sending a cascade of lightning trails across the floor. He realized almost too late that he was being herded, a pair of vines shooting through the air to try to catch him, and he barely knocked them free with his sword as he threw the shield toward the shooter, collapsing it into a bolt of orange energy as the raccoon dodged the return fire.
The crowd was starting to fall back, now that projectiles were flying in earnest, and Groot hesitantly dropped Neville near the bar to free up another hand. Not wanting to be left out, Luna managed to summon a bolt of orange energy to fling at the raccoon, while the twins finally lobbed their prank items at him. Surprisingly fast, he made his own roll beneath a table and launched a third burst of electricity to send the redheads diving out of the way. The way the thrown items hissed alarmingly where they landed meant the bounty hunter didn't want them anywhere near him.
"Stop playing around and get him!"
"I am GROOT," the flora colossus shouted back, annoyed, as he was directing both hands of vines at Harry, but feeling them getting hacked off by the burning blade of a magical sword turned up to lightsaber settings.
"It's one kid. You can't catch one kid?" the more talkative partner complained, laying down suppressive bolts of incapacitating energy from beneath the table to try to prevent the rest of the kids from helping.
"I am groot," he grumbled, clearly arguing that it was five kids, and he was keenly aware that their parents were about to join in. Nonetheless, he swept a hand of vines behind him to put Neville on his butt as he was charging in to help with another glowing sword, and then managed to knock a table into the twins on the backswing. He just nodded at Luna, however, who grinned back at him before firing another energy bolt at his partner.
To their credit, they were keeping Harry too busy to think with portals, and his other tricks didn't seem to work well on their alien gear. He landed an energy whip around the gun, but the raccoon flipped a switch on it that somehow made the magical construct discorporate in the electrical feedback. No matter how many vines he hacked away, the tree man was able to make more. The Weasley parents were distracted by checking on Fred and George. Unless something changed, the resourceful duo might actually manage to confine him again.
Fortunately, it had only been a matter of time before the cavalry arrived.
Led in by a winded Ginny, who'd gone to get them as soon as Harry was grabbed, everyone that hadn't still been in the chair getting minor brain surgery came pouring in from the Market. Clint had a portable bow expanded and nocked, Steve had his shield brandished, Natasha had a pair of pistols drawn backed up by Rhodey with his service weapon, the study group and Sirius had their own magical constructs manifested, and Tony had a portable repulsor gun clipped onto his arc reactor.
They all paused for a moment to appreciate how well Harry seemed to be doing on his own, before Tony ordered, "Hey! Trash Panda! Put the gun down or we'll make you put it down."
"I am groot," the tree man chided.
"I know the briefing didn't say he'd have this many friends!" the raccoon acknowledged, unsure about how insulted he should feel about the trash panda reference. He genuinely considered taking on the whole group, but then frowned distastefully and admitted. "Fine. Just hope you know the next bounty hunters won't be all nice like us. Let's get out of here."
"I am Groot!" the flora colossus waved at Luna as he retracted his vines and fell back after his partner into the exit corridor.
Before anyone could light into him about never leaving him alone again, Harry told Tony, "At least nobody was trying to kill you for my birthday this year."
I got the big MCU timeline book. It's pretty, but I was very disappointed that they had no interest in picking a date more specific than the season and the year for nearly every event in the book. But what it WAS willing to do was confirm that, in canon, Thor 2, Iron Man 3, Captain America 2, and Guardians 1 all take place in the 2013-2014 school year, leaving ZERO movies to happen 2012-2013. And since it ALSO broke my canon-adherence by knocking Iron Man 1 back a year from where I'm pretty sure the wiki had originally placed it when I started this fic, I don't feel that bad about moving a couple of films up a year so I won't have none to do in year 5 and four to make work in year 6. I bet you can start to guess, based on the references in this chapter, which movies got moved up.