Harry's fourth teleportation (and his third jaunt across the entire galaxy) in the last few hours was different by far than the others. Stepping through a convergence was like entering a room. The portkey had been surprising but would have been much like crossing the convergence if he'd expected it. Taking a night road was always a bit like riding through a trans-dimensional water slide.
And he'd had other forms of travel to compare to, as well. The Bifrost had been like a better class of roller-coaster, all extreme speed and motion blur. The bonfire travel on Vanaheim was like the worse class of roller coaster, possibly an indoor one with too much of a light show. Going to the Goblin Market was just walking down a corridor where you didn't want to look too far ahead or you'd go cross eyed from the liberties taken with space. And sling ring travel was so mild you might not even notice it.
Whatever ritual he'd dived into was different. It had to be more like a Star Trek transporter. He felt like he'd been unmade and then reformed somewhere else, the transit seeming to take both an instant and an infinite amount of time. He didn't like it.
Perhaps he'd have liked it better if he'd come back to himself somewhere calm, rather than in a room where all hell was breaking loose.
At least still being wrapped in his cloak gave him a few moments of nobody noticing him to try to get his bearings. He was in some kind of big, windowless concrete space with NASA banners on the far walls. It wasn't brightly lit but was full of technology. He'd landed on a platform surrounded by red-hot reflectors of some kind, and blue plasma emitted by his entry was swirling up to the open, rounded ceiling above. Halfway across the main space, between him and most of the computers and science equipment, a complex metal armature was pointed his way, a glowing blue brick locked in the center of it.
And past that, Loki was killing a lot of guys.
Honestly, Harry hadn't been that far behind him, unless somehow he'd been slowed in transit. But he rather suspected that Loki had landed on the platform and more or less immediately started fighting the people in the room. And he could move. It explained a lot about how easily "Cedric" had beaten him out in foot races when he was really just an Asgardian royal in disguise. Actually going all out, it was pretty clear Harry better not get in a fistfight with the godling. He might not have a chance of survival even if he could learn that crazy martial arts style that Ying Nan was using.
Was Loki shrugging off getting hit by automatic gunfire?
As he was getting to his feet, Harry realized that there might not be much he could do if a half-dozen soldiers were going down in seconds. He didn't know where he was or who these people were, but he still had a twisted ankle and a headache, so wasn't at the top of his fighting form. And he'd need to be to even escape throwing down with an armored, crazed Asgardian wielding a Stone-powered melee weapon/energy blaster. Maybe the better part of valor would be getting out quietly and trying to call in help.
But then he recognized one of the "soldiers" as Natasha's friend Clint, and realized that he must be in a SHIELD base. Loki had killed everyone else obvious to Harry and looked like he was about to stab the man through the heart with the bladed spearpoint on his scepter. Harry had to do something.
"Loki!" Harry shouted, cloak whisking out of the way as he sprinted left so he had a direct line of attack that wouldn't be fouled up by the structure with the magic cube. What little plan he had was using an energy whip to grab the scepter and pull it away before it could stab Clint. Would it be as ineffective as trying to use his own strength to move industrial machinery? Maybe.
And yet, that put a pause on the rest of the room. Clint left his sidearm half-drawn, only a few feet from Loki. Loki stopped and turned Harry's way in surprise. Behind the demigod, another SHIELD agent was standing up, and a middle-aged man in a plaid blue shirt also stood from checking a downed colleague. That man asked, in a Norwegian accent, "Loki? Brother of Thor?"
A voice that Harry wasn't expecting piped up from Harry's right, where he'd been hidden by the armature. "We have no quarrel with your people," Nick Fury announced. Harry glanced over and could partially make out the man he'd met in a donut shop two years earlier.
Loki just smugly explained, "An ant has no quarrel with a boot." He was still watching Harry while he stepped closer to Fury, surprised at the boy's arrival and possibly worried about it. While Harry assumed there wasn't much he could do to Loki, maybe Loki thought otherwise? Harry could hopefully use that.
Fury was multitasking, and Harry saw the glowing block slip free of the machinery as if the SHIELD director had withdrawn it. He stalled by engaging, asking, "You planning to step on us?" With Harry on his left and behind, the man with the eyepatch probably didn't even have a really good idea of who else had just entered the room.
Clint was watching him for sure, though. Harry was slowly moving further into the open, closer to Clint and Loki, and gave the agent a head nod that he hoped conveyed his advice to run as soon as he could. Was a trained sniper going to take combat advice from a teenager that he'd played paintball with once? Probably not. But was he going to stay in stabbing range of a profound physical threat that had already no-sold machine gun fire? Probably not that either.
Loki seemed to get that they weren't going to try shooting him again for the moment, and that dispatching the remaining agents might open up a shot for Harry, so kept bantering with Fury, slowly moving away from Clint and the other agent, while keeping his footing and sightlines so he could attack them again if something changed. "I come with glad tidings, of a world made free."
Having apparently slipped the brick into a briefcase, Fury asked, "Free from what?"
"Freedom." Loki took a very serious pause, like he'd just said something profound, but winced as Harry pulled a disbelieving face and mouthed, "Free from freedom?" Barreling on, Loki explained, "Freedom is life's great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart…"
They hadn't noticed that he'd been wandering into melee range of the Norwegian scientist, and he suddenly spun and placed the speartip on the man's chest with surprising gentleness. Black and blue lines raced up his face as he hunched away from the contact, his eyes going black and then fading back to the intense blue of mind control.
"You will know peace," Loki finished.
Clint, no idiot, used the moment of Loki's distraction to start running to open up some distance, and Harry started to follow him to the door he was running toward. Fury was right behind them, armored briefcase swinging at the end of his arm as he tried to escape the room.
He was too close, so it was futile. Loki leaped and tackled the aging SHIELD director to the floor. The other remaining agent's shots went wide, and then the mind-controlled scientist clocked him in the arm with a piece of equipment to disarm him. Clint was spinning, about to try to save his boss with what little a sidearm could do, but Harry tackled him back through a doorway as a searing blast of blue energy from the scepter nearly obliterated the agent where he'd been standing.
As they hit the stone floor of the hallway, Harry heard Loki announce, "Are you important?" followed by the faint hum of the Stone controlling another victim.
The scientist's voice yelled, "Loki! The portal is collapsing in on itself. You got maybe two minutes before this goes critical."
"We have to move," Clint said, having realized what Harry did, that there was no chance of beating Loki at the moment. He rolled to his feet, Harry already also standing, and began to sprint up the narrow industrial corridor. "What did he do to them? And where did you come from?"
"Mind control. And it's a long story," Harry told the man, assuming he was running toward safety. He didn't like the sound of two minutes until critical. His ankle was going to hurt a lot, if they made it. "Crap. It's bad that he mind controlled Fury, right? Really bad?"
"We may all get buried under here, regardless," Clint said, not slowing down. Then his hand went up toward his ear as if something just came over his communicator and he relayed, "But he just told everyone that I've been compromised, so, yeah, it's bad."
They were running through an open concrete area full of cooling pipes, and then the last standing agent from the portal room came sprinting to catch up with them. Harry was about to attack him, assuming he'd been whammied, but he yelled out, "Barton! What the hell happened in there? Why is the Director saying you've been compromised?"
"Mind control," Clint told him. "Gonna need you to back me up on that."
"First we have to get out!" Harry added, the new agent hardly having registered that there was a teen boy in bulky orange-and-black robes who'd inserted himself into the debacle. He'd probably need to ditch the outfit before someone assumed he was an escaped inmate.
"Elevator," the new agent gestured at a steel-fronted service door in the direction they were running. "The director took Selvig and the intruder through the garage."
The three of them crashed into the industrial lift and Clint slammed the button for the ground floor. They were several levels down, based on the buttons, and the entire building shook as they started to rise. "Should we have taken the stairs?" Harry checked.
"It's a lot of stairs," Clint huffed.
"Who's the kid?" the other agent asked.
"Stark's CEO's nephew, Harry," Clint summed up. "Not sure why he's here."
"Loki kidnapped me. I jumped through the portal behind him," Harry explained. It was true. It was woefully incomplete, but it was true.
"Why didn't he use the stick on you?" Clint checked.
"Someone else tried a couple of years ago and it didn't work. There's a lot, and I'm not sure how much you're going to believe."
The elevator dinged open before they could ask follow-up, and the three of them sprinted across a lobby where a sign read Joint Dark Energy Mission. Outside, Harry could see several buildings along a nicely-appointed concrete road, and he tasted desert air as they exited into the night. The entire complex was shaking. Outside, Harry spotted another familiar agent insisting to several people trying to pick up boxes off of some stairs to, "Leave it. Go!" Phil Coulson spotted them charging forward and yelled, "Barton! Stand down!" He had his sidearm drawn and aimed at them fast enough that Harry was seriously impressed. Two of the other agents that had been trying to shift boxes also drew.
"No time! Have to go!" Clint yelled, charging forward.
While Coulson hesitated, the other two agents were on edge, and took that as an attack and fired. Clint seemed shocked that he'd actually been shot at. Or maybe he was just surprised by the energy shield Harry had thrown up to keep him from getting several bullets in the torso. That gave everyone pause, the shooting agents' mouths hanging open.
"Phil!" Harry yelled. "Fury's been compromised."
"It's true, sir," the still-unintroduced agent they'd picked up shouted. "Some guy with a mind control stick."
"I have… so many questions," Coulson said, not lowering the handgun but not shooting either. He stared probingly at the two agents and one teen that was definitely not supposed to be there. The complex rumbled again. "Let's go. You two," he ordered the agents that had shot at them, "go with the truck. I'll take them."
"I have a lot of questions too," Clint deadpanned, still moving.
"I told you I'm not sure how much you'd believe," Harry said, wincing as his ankle reported that it was almost done as he pounded down the stairs.
Coulson was waving off the last of the scientists into a covered truck yelling, "Go!" He turned to the rest of them, glanced at the helipad where a sleek vehicle was waiting. Pointing its way he said, "I've always wanted to say this: get to the chopper."
The four men piled into the black helicopter and Coulson slammed the door, tapped the pilot, and pointed up, and they were airborne in moments. Harry fell back to buckle himself into one of the seats, his ankle throbbing. Coulson regarded the other three of them warily, not holstering his pistol yet, but buckling in and putting on a headset. As Harry and the other two were getting their own on, so they could talk over the sound of the vehicle, there was a massive rumble and the entire complex began to fall into an enormous sinkhole. Harry wasn't sure if there had just been that much subterranean space that had been imploded, or if the portal energy had shunted it off somewhere else.
He was half-hoping that the Death Eaters at the graveyard were getting hundreds of tons of desert and underground structure dropped on them.
"How many were still in there?" Coulson asked, his voice coming in through the headset.
"Loki killed all the scientists in the room except Selvig," Clint explained, looking sad more at his own failure than at the deaths. "Killed six agents in under thirty seconds. Amos and I just happened to dodge, and the kid distracted him before he could finish us. Then he used a device to control Selvig and Fury. They have the object."
The other agent, presumably Amos, was just nodding along to all of that, adding, "He was so fast. Shooting lasers, throwing knives. Said we were ants and he was the boot."
"Loki. Thor's brother," Coulson recognized the name. "Are we at war with Asgard?"
Harry shook his head and explained, "He found some other aliens to work for after Thor kicked him out. But the machine that the Asgardians use to travel to Earth is broken, so I don't think they can get here to help. Loki's trying to bring in an army of aliens and take over the planet. I guess by using that brick to teleport them here? Oh, and the mind control stick is working on him too, so he's probably not totally responsible for his actions, but I don't know how easy it will be to fix him."
"There's a way to remove the control?" Coulson drilled in, clearly worried about Fury.
"Knock them out," Harry agreed. "While they're controlled, they won't really sleep."
"And that thing you did didn't look like Starktech," the agent continued.
Harry sighed and explained, "I… don't go to school on Earth. I go to the same school Loki did when he was a kid."
Coulson nodded, taking that in, finally just saying, "Romanoff owes me ten bucks."
"Where to?" the pilot's voice broke in over the headsets.
Coulson looked down into the giant void where the NASA installation used to be and then glanced into the night below. "Take us over to that convoy of trucks heading west," he decided, finally holstering his firearm.
A minute later, they were setting down on the road ahead of the lead truck to get it to stop, and Coulson got out to talk to the driver. There seemed to be some slight argument, but eventually the driver nodded and Coulson returned.
"Take her up," Coulson instructed once he was buckled back in. "I activated Havana protocols," he explained to everyone. "This isn't the first time we've had a director compromised. Told them to go dark for a few days. At least we can keep Phase 2 out of Loki's hands."
"What's Phase 2?" Harry asked.
"Classified," the senior agent deadpanned.
"First thing Fury would do would be to also get Hill," Clint had been thinking. "She was probably in the garage."
"Damn," Coulson agreed. "As soon as they realize I'm improvising, they'll cut me out." He asked the pilot, "How much range do we have?"
"Not a lot," the pilot admitted. "We could get to Vegas. Fort Mojave. Barstow. Not LA."
"Let's go to Vegas," Coulson ordered. "Then I need to make some calls."
In the high-tech SHIELD chopper, the flight took barely any time, the moon above still approaching full and lighting the Mojave Desert below. It was hard to conceive that it was the same moon that Harry had just been seeing the tail end of in the bamboo forest, skipping from dawn in China to not that late at night in California. He had almost wanted to tell them to try for LA anyway, let him just go home. But he knew he had a lot to do, and the world might fall if he decided to just go hide in his room.
Coulson didn't seem to be too keen to further debrief him on the flight, as if he was trying to keep the information partitioned; spying was ingrained deeply, even in such a crisis. As soon as the chopper landed, the agent (who Harry was beginning to realize was quite senior) ordered the pilot, "Smith, refuel and then fly to a random military base and go dark. I need to keep my travel secret for as long as possible." The pilot nodded, clearly not liking the orders but understanding what Havana protocols meant. "Amos, same thing. You can go with Smith or make your own way. Go to ground. Quietly contact your chain of command and tell them what you saw. Fury will be after you until we get this problem solved." The agent gulped and nodded, heading off. "You two. Hotel room. I need to debrief and think," he told Harry and Clint.
"Do you have any clothes that don't make you look like you escaped from prison?" Clint asked Harry.
"They're fireproof?" Harry apologized. "And no." He hesitated but decided that they would probably learn eventually and he needed to extend some trust and prove he could be useful. "But I can turn invisible." He let his cloak fall over him.
"That works," Coulson deadpanned.
They walked past slot machines and out of the building, just two armed agents and an invisible teenager. Harry honestly wouldn't have been the weirdest-dressed of the travelers in the Las Vegas airport. A quick street crossing and they were getting a motel room. It wasn't exactly staying at a casino hotel, but it had faster access to escape if they wound up needing it.
As soon as they were safely in the room Coulson said, "Fury's next move is to shut down the Avengers Initiative. They're the biggest threat right now."
"Call Natasha?" Clint suggested.
"And get her to pick up Banner," Coulson agreed.
"Bruce Banner?" Harry asked, surprised. "I can help with that. I don't think he's going to want to talk to you."
"How do you know Doctor Banner?" Coulson asked. "Nevermind. Will he recognize you on the phone if we put you on with him?"
"I can do better, I think," Harry shrugged, thinking. "I need to make some calls, too. Oh, and send email. Is there a smartphone I can use?"
"After I get off the phone with Romanoff," Coulson decided.
While he went over to the side of the room to break to the Black Widow that her Luchkov interrogation that evening would need to be canceled, Harry shrugged out of his robes down to his leather armor, which Clint raised an eyebrow at. "Looks like Stark picked the colors, but not the material," he suggested.
"It's a whole color scheme, thing," he shrugged, not ready to unpack the Gryffindor colors connection. He reached into one of the expanded pockets and felt around, enjoying Clint's widened eyes as his whole forearm seemed to disappear into his torso. Finally, he came back out with the palm-sized communication mirror. "Sirius Black," he ordered it.
"Pup! Thank Odin! Where in Niflheim are you?" Sirius' face appeared. Harry thought he saw the decorations from Dumbledore's office, and the old man's face appeared behind Sirius' so he could tell he was on the magical equivalent of speakerphone.
Harry tried to sum up quickly, explaining, "Cedric was Loki of Asgard all year. They replaced him after the World Cup. They probably tortured the real Cedric for information, then killed him. Loki's working with a tall, noseless telekinetic alien pretending to be Voldemort. Loki came to Earth to try to start an alien invasion and conquer the planet. The Death Eaters said they were going to start attacking in Vanaheim, maybe using the marauders. But I think they wanted my dead body as a symbol? They took me to a giant graveyard, and I escaped into the portal Loki took to Earth."
"I'll start sending owls," Dumbledore nodded, clearly believing him. "I'm glad that you seem to be okay, Harry."
"It was pretty close," he agreed. "Loki has the Stone from two years ago mounted in a scepter. He came here to steal some big glowy blue brick and whammied the scientist that was working on it and the head of the biggest intelligence service here. So we're kind of on the run with a few guys that believe me. Is the Ancient One still there?"
"Alas, she went back to Midgard before the convergence closed," the old man admitted.
"Fleur and Viktor?" Harry asked.
"We got them," Sirius explained. "The girl says she's really sorry. We saw on the video that it looked like she was trying to kill you. I guess that's why Dumbledore buys mind control."
"Indeed," the headmaster agreed, having left the mirror's feed to start writing letters.
"Are you safe?" Sirius asked.
"For now. We got ahead of them and got a hotel room," Harry told him.
"Don't do anything too crazy. If they're attacking here, too, I don't know if I can get to Midgard to help."
"My next call is Tony," Harry agreed. "Good luck."
"You too, pup," Sirius said, signing off.
"You have an interplanetary video conference system?" Clint asked, as soon as he was done.
"It's a prototype," Harry shrugged.
Coulson had caught a lot of his summary to Sirius and Dumbledore, and tossed Harry his smartphone. "I don't know if Stark will take a call from my number. Especially since it's early morning in New York."
"I'll email him. This thing isn't keylogging me, is it?"
"It's clean," Coulson agreed.
Harry nodded and opened the web browser, attempting to log into his Starkmail account. A prompt suggested that authentication had been enabled for the unrecognized device, and he was about to bemoan not bringing his own phone again when JARVIS' voice came out, "You are attempting to access a Stark email account from Nevada, when the owner should not be in that location."
"JARVIS, it's Harry!" he insisted. "It's an emergency. I'm with Agent Coulson. I need to talk to Tony and Pepper. Oh, and get into my email account, since I need to email some people, too."
"Voiceprint confirmed, Mr. Potts. Connecting you to Mr. Stark," the AI placidly informed him.
"Maverick? What the hell? You're not supposed to have phones in… your school," Tony answered, groggily. Had he actually gotten to bed before two in the morning?
"Harry? Why is Harry on the phone?" Pepper was asking in the background, presumably from the same bed. Her own grogginess was shading to panic.
"You're on speaker," Tony informed him, the tone changing slightly as switched the phone over. "What's going on?"
"I'm okay," Harry prefaced, to quell Pepper's panic. "I'm with Phil Coulson and Clint Barton." He then launched into basically the same quick summary he'd given Sirius—with fewer proper Vanaheim names—plus mentioning that Loki had mind controlled Fury and probably other people in SHIELD.
"God, of course this happened," Pepper huffed after his short summary. "Wait. Did you have to fight your way out of a SHIELD base?"
"Maybe," Harry hedged. "But the important thing is that you might not be safe! Phil thinks that Fury would go after anyone in that thing Tony was consulting on… that we weren't supposed to know about," he finished lamely, as Phil raised an eyebrow.
"A team of SHIELD agents do appear to be about to infiltrate the tower," JARVIS cut in.
"Let's show them that we don't like uninvited guests," Tony said, matter-of-factly. "This a good number to get back to you on?" he asked.
"Yeah. I need to call the Grangers, Thomases, and Patils too, and warn them."
"We'll get back to you once I've taken out the trash and Pepper's safe," Tony signed off.
"Be careful, Harry," Pepper cut in, realizing that he probably wasn't as safe as he was pretending.
"You too," he told them, already hearing the sound of Tony rushing off to armor up as the call was ended. "What now?" he asked the two agents.
Coulson said, "You contact the rest of your people, then we plan our next moves…"
I was prepared to have Harry just play tourist through most of Avengers, arguing with Fury for a chance to be involved as a minor. But when I rewatched the movie, I was like, "Why didn't Loki just whammy Fury, too?" And then I realized that doing so in this case really would give Loki an advantage to compensate for Harry being present and knowing more about what he was up to. Plus, it gives Harry much more to do. We'll still be hitting a lot of the same beats as the movie, but with Harry driving more of the action. Hopefully everyone enjoys the changes enacted by Harry showing up and saving Barton from mind control.