Aircraft carriers are big. They have to be, for what they do. But the common visual for them is against the vastness of the ocean. It's hard for the mind to grasp the scale involved.

When one is hovering over Manhattan, it's a lot easier to put it into context.

Harry frantically let his cloak fall to cover him as he crested over the behemoth in the skies, which very quickly eclipsed the lights of the city below. They weren't high enough that he was having trouble breathing, but the winds above the tallest skyscrapers were still intense and required him to hunker close to the broom and slow to remain hidden. "It's humongous," he relayed over the comms. "I think I see the jet they took Loki on." There were quite a few airplanes lashed to the carrier, but only one that looked like it had just taxied to a stop near the prominent control tower on the side of the immense platform.

JARVIS advised, "I'm detecting interference. They are likely jamming common frequencies. You may lose contact if you land on that ship."

Tony's voice ordered, "Not going to say not to go, but be quiet and careful. We're getting Thor an earbud, then I'm on my way. JARVIS, work on finding us a frequency that will at least let us talk while we're up there."

"I'll try to go in a back way," Harry promised, then flew low to the deck. He gave a thought to sabotaging the planes on the way, but didn't think he could do so without risking being noticed. However, he did see a few hatches with vent coverings that looked like they might go down into the ship. It was safer than trying to go in the door on the control tower.

As he landed on the deck, the AR readout on his lenses advised that there was no signal. He was on his own for the moment. It wasn't an unfamiliar situation.

Landing on the deck was its own kind of strange. Despite the helicarrier's size, the turbulence above the city was at least as frenetic as the ocean currents, so the surface subtly pitched and rolled. It wasn't nearly as dramatic as being on heavy waves, but even lost across the immense platform, there was no question that he wasn't on solid ground. He crouched against the hatch he'd chosen, checked for cameras, and then put his broom away. There wasn't a way to shove a conveyance that was over a yard long into a pocket without it briefly escaping the folds of his invisibility cloak, but he didn't think he'd been spotted.

The grate itself was barely a challenge. Whispers of magical energy severed bolts to allow him to pry the thin sheet of vented metal up enough to slip in (after checking that it seemed to go somewhere solid and inside). It wasn't extremely secure: he probably could have just kicked it in if he wasn't worried about someone noticing his ingress. He landed in what was clearly a maintenance tunnel, rather than airducts; the walls were covered in pipes and the flooring was gridded steel. He registered that he really didn't know much about the realities of ship architecture, whether or not they could fly. Maybe it was normally so difficult to get to the deck of an aircraft carrier undetected that nobody was worried about how easy it was to break in after that point.

It was probably something he should keep in mind for a lot of places that had no security protocol for people that could fly and turn invisible.

Where did he even need to go? Probably to find the Tesseract, right? If it was onboard, he could potentially slip in and snatch it, and it would be game over for the big plan. At the very least, maybe he could find the scepter and get it away from the place, removing the chance of any more allies getting turned into enemies. It was a reason to get moving and scout.

His big problem was navigation, which was a reality he became very aware of about a minute into walking down the oddly-spacious maintenance tunnels. It wasn't obvious which direction of the ship was the front, he'd gotten turned around anyway, and it wasn't like he had any guesses where important locations would be on the stadium-sized aircraft. He could make a guess that nothing super important would be higher up, to give a couple of floors of defense against attacks from above. He let himself out into a hallway as soon as he found a pressure door out of the tunnels, and started looking for a way downstairs.

The halls of the ship proper had the same kind of profligate decorating strategy as the SHIELD offices in Manhattan. It was much more sleek and high-tech than Harry expected from an aircraft carrier. Spacious hallways, clean gray walls, and bright track lighting in the ceiling provided easy avenues throughout the vessel. He had real physics concerns about why something that needed to not just fly but hover for extended periods made such a wasteful use of interior space. It was impressive, more than efficient.

What the interior decorators hadn't done was add essential signage. While there were plenty of wall panels with obscure codes on them, he wasn't finding anything like a "This way to the bridge" hanging plaque. He probably should have asked Coulson for schematics earlier, since, in hindsight, it was inevitable that they'd have to get onto the helicarrier. He did his best and started skulking invisibly in search of a stairwell.

From what he could tell, the upper floor was mostly barracks, storage, and a large central area that was probably a giant elevator to shuttle planes to the deck from internal hangars and workshops. The barracks were empty, when he glanced in. Had they whammied the entire ship, so they couldn't sleep? That had to mean there would be half again as many people running around the ship as usual, right? But it at least meant, while he had the element of surprise, the barracks level didn't have very many people at all.

After what seemed like forever, but was actually only a couple of minutes, Harry finally found a "You are here" map next to an elevator. It looked like, unlike a normal carrier, a lot of important stuff was on the lower floors. Did this thing ever actually land in water? It couldn't possibly land on the ground without collapsing, could it? How hard was it to ensure the seals on the lower levels held up against water from all sides? From the map it looked like there were spaces on the lowest level that could just exit directly into the air rather than having to go up to the top deck. He was starting to think that SHIELD had too much money, causing them to deal with any kind of technical problem with overdesign. Harry had been privy to enough Stark Industries discussions about miniaturization and economy of space that all of this waste was almost physically painful.

Regardless, he figured out how to take a picture with his AR lenses so he'd have the map, determined that one of the doors near the elevator was stairs down, and started looking for his objectives.

He was only two floors down before he felt the stairs shudder. Alarm klaxons started playing and the overheads switched to red emergency lighting. "–hear me?" Tony's voice asked over the comms.

"Just the last part," Harry said. "Did you bring the explosions?"

"I took out one of their engines to try to get them to land. But I may need your help to be sure they try to go down into the bay."

"By… taking control of the bridge?" Harry checked.

"You still have those little hacking discs?" Tony checked, heavily implying that they'd somehow be able to take control if Harry placed them somewhere important. "Uh oh. They got jets into the air faster than I thought they would."

Harry slipped out of the stairwell on the floor that supposedly contained the bridge. The high-tech hallways were an absolute chaos of SHIELD agents running to and fro. "Do we have heavy machine guns on board?" Fury's voice was yelling sarcastically from nearby. "Then get our best marksmen on the deck and start firing!"

He followed the sound into what had to be the control center of the airship. A huge pit of computer terminals faced mostly toward a hemisphere of viewing windows out the front of the ship. In the middle, Fury stood on a platform among a collection of monitors, not far from a comfy-looking conference table at the back of the room. It honestly felt more like an orchestra pit than a ship's bridge. Outside, Harry could make out the Iron Man armor blasting by, pursued by a fighter jet. Tony was probably handicapped by unwillingness to shoot a jet down over Manhattan.

But hopefully he would be okay, since Harry had his own stealth mission to complete. He had fished the little dime-sized discs out of his pocket, and tried to eye the flow of traffic in the room and pick out significant-looking computers. He was counting on Tony's ingenuity, since most of the computers seemed to use some kind of proprietary hexagonal port rather than simple USB. He timed the rushing-around of agents and slipped into the walkway between terminals. One disc on the ports of a workstation where the guy was distracted by furtively playing Galaga. One on a significant-looking bank of three monitors while the agent manning them was looking away. And the next one needed to go on Fury's console, right?

The mind-controlled Director himself was standing at basically parade rest on the platform, scepter clutched behind his back in a firm enough grip that Harry didn't fancy his luck trying to snatch it away before alerting the entire room. His bank of monitors was made of the same material as Harry's lenses, so had to be several thousand-dollars'-worth of Starktech each. It seemed another crazy expense to have transparent screens, but it made sense in light of the sheer amount of money put into the helicarrier. "He's more maneuverable than you are!" Fury complained. "I need you to coordinate. Get him in between you so you can fire in a way that won't hit us."

"We're at least keeping him off the other engines," Maria Hill informed him from her position to his right. Harry recognized the slender brunette from his briefings. She was one of the people that was hard to gauge mind control on, since she'd always had light blue eyes, but it seemed pretty damned likely.

"He's not the only one we need to worry about," the Director replied. "Watch out for lightning."

By that point, Harry had slipped invisibly onto the platform through one of the handrails around it, and snapped a hacking disc onto the back of the monitor array. Apparently he wasn't quite stealthy enough, though, as Hill, already looking towards Fury, yelled, "Infiltrator!" and dived at him.

She was taller than Harry, but came at him from a weird angle, so her strike wasn't too bad. He was fortunate that he was in between her and technicians on the opposite edge of the pit, or she probably would have just taken the shot with her handgun. But even her thin frame had enough mass to upset his precarious balance and knock him over the railing and to the floor of the pit, crashing against the chair of a redheaded woman that was controlling an array of monitors to Fury's left.

Worse, his cloak unfurled as he hit the ground, making it even more obvious what was going on. "It's Potts!" Hill announced. "Get him!"

"Discs planted," Harry whispered into his comm as he rolled to his feet. Agents around the room were already turning their unnaturally-blue eyes in his direction, and he wasn't sure he could get out even if he re-cloaked, so he let it hang loose to give him some cover by disguising his silhouette and summoned a pair of energy sticks. "And I'm… distracting them."

"Don't die," Tony ordered. "Thor's on his way. JARVIS, get me control of those terminals."

Harry was pretty sure the only thing he had going for him was that the layout of the room meant that nobody was willing to just shoot him. Just like Hill hadn't tried, there was too much risk of hitting another technician or some important computer system. But a couple-dozen trained SHIELD agents were definitely starting to rush him. And he wasn't sure whether he could stand up to even one trained SHIELD agent, let alone a whole room full of them.

What Harry didn't realize was the dirty little secret of Vanir genetics. Namely, that there weren't any.

No scientist on Earth would be able to determine a meaningful difference between the DNA of a person from Earth and one from Vanaheim. Sure, they might note that there were uncommon haplogroups and an unusual combination of heritages, some of which didn't show up often on mail-in-test candidates. With enough sample size, those could be used to make a reasonable guess about which samples were from offworld subjects due to the specifics of lineage. But there wasn't a Vanir gene. There was no genetic reason that the natives of Vanaheim lived longer than those of Midgard.

Instead, the physiological differences had everything to do with magic. Truly native Vanir might have some slight advantage, but adolescent intake was key. Hogwarts started just before puberty to maximize the access of young wizards to the dense magical field the castle dwelled within. The difference in magical suffusion between, say, Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy was negligible, since they'd both been at the school since they were eleven. Nonmagical Vanir that never went to school got the benefit of the planet's overall magical field, of course. But even the Midgardborn students, barring danger and disease, would, on average, outlive native-born Vanir who didn't get to go to Hogwarts.

Sure, the Masters of the Mystic Arts wanted Hogwarts graduates because they'd had years of magical instruction from a young age. But what they really wanted was kids who'd drunk from the well of Vanaheim's intense magical field until their cells were bursting with it. No apprentice trained on Earth could match that advantage, even in Kamar-Taj. They could maybe get close by bonding with magical relics, but Harry Potts had one of those, too.

And the benefit of mystical physiological enhancement wasn't just limited to an increased lifespan.

It had been a while since Harry had fought purely-human adversaries. He'd marveled at Loki's ability to burn through half a dozen agents in under a minute, but he'd been underestimating his own prowess. The first agent down was the woman he'd fallen near: one magical stick to the head knocked her out. He turned as two more jumped down into the pit, taking one out at the knees with his right arm while stabbing the one on his left in the windpipe. He rapped the first one in the head while the second choked, diving basically through him with a shoulder check to send the man ass over teakettle into the agents that had been jumping into the pit behind.

Three agents basically down in ten seconds. A whole bunch more to go.

Harry wasn't exactly going to stand in the pit and let them swarm him. An agent behind him missed as he ran up the stairs onto the outer ring of the room at Fury's 9:00, the swing going wide as, from behind, the kid was little more than a head and arms around an invisible void of the hanging cloak. The technicians standing up from their terminals on that side both had their legs swept out from under them by magical escrima sticks as Harry tried to plan. Juking right would take him all the way around the room from Fury, but leaping left would put him into the conference area with fewer reasons behind to not just start shooting. He opted right.

Maybe if some of the elite operatives like Rumlow, Romanoff, or Barton were on the bridge, Harry wouldn't have been able to go through the place like a bowling ball. But, for all that they were required to maintain a minimum combat proficiency, most of the agents on the bridge were analysts, pilots, and logisticians. They weren't really prepared to be attacked by a half-invisible dervish who'd been spending most of his free time on martial arts and athletics for the past four years.

Two more got pitched into the pit by strikes from his sticks. A guy that looked like he was going to try shooting anyway had a moment to marvel as Harry flung the right stick at him, and it turned into a burst of painfully stinging light as it hit. The Boy-Who-Lived didn't even notice how smoothly he spun his left-hand stick into a shield to deflect a knife strike from the next person ahead, slamming her attack into her computer screens and giving her a punch to the side of the head that would hopefully knock her out.

Harry had basically cleared through the outer edge of the pit until he was back at another set of stairs down onto a big standing area in front of the viewing glass. Agents were starting to charge across at him so he just leaped off the platform and managed to stick his landing onto one's face and shield-check the next person in line as he fell. With a recovery roll that probably looked more impressive than Harry had actually planned, he came to a crouch in the middle of the floor, staring directly up at a mystified Fury and Hill. To Harry's right, nearly a dozen agents were at least put on their asses by his charge around the room. A few were fully unconscious.

He wasn't sure what he was going to do about the other half of the room, or the security officers that were surely on their way to the bridge, but the shock on the Director's mind-controlled face at how well he'd done would remain a cherished memory for a long time.

"Kid's been sandbagging," Fury announced after taking a moment to gawk. "Shoot him."

Wincing as he realized he really had put himself in a position where it was safer to shoot, Harry hunkered down and put as much magic into his shield as he could, trying to turtle behind it as another dozen agents to his front and left began to empty their sidearms into him. At least he'd mostly handled the ones that could easily flank him from the right. It was still loud, and his shield flickered from all the impacts. A few got through, slowed by the deteriorating shield but painfully impacting into his armor.

At least the barrage was chaotic enough that nobody seemed to notice him sliding back to the lip of the viewing platform. There was a railing to keep anyone from falling over into where the windows curled under the room, but that was exactly the space Harry wanted to fall into. When the shield suddenly winked out, there was no body left behind it. "Where did he go, sir?" Hill asked.

"He's still in here somewhere," the one-eyed man growled. Harry felt fortunate that Fury hadn't taken a shot with the scepter, likely owing to the risk of it blowing out the viewing window with a miss.

Harry, wrapped in his cloak again, slunk carefully along the edge of the windows, resolving for the future to lean harder on being sneaky rather than fighting a room full of armed individuals. He could tell he was bruised from the spots of pain where bullets had hit, but Sirius did good enchanting work. He was pretty sure he wasn't bleeding. The AR readout from JARVIS was supposed to tell him if he was bleeding (though it was unclear whether he needed a full data connection to the AI for that to work).

"Sir, systems are going haywire!" one of the technicians that stayed at his console announced. Harry grinned, assuming that meant that the hacking discs were finally working.

"We're losing engine power!" Hill yelled. "Can someone get control of the helm?" There was a notable sense of slightly-reduced gravity as the massive structure began to descend, along with a kick from the back as it maneuvered. "It's going to put us down in the bay!"

"We've got bigger problems," Fury growled, noticing lightning arcing up from the Empire State Building. "The rest of you try to get back control and find the kid. I'm going to wake up our VIP." With that, he turned and left.

Harry managed to twist past the few agents trying to find him and pursue the Director.

"Fury's going after Loki with the scepter, I'm following," he said quietly as he sneaked down the hallway. He was just able to finish whispering that and slide into the elevator after the man, hoping the invisibility would hold up in tight quarters. Up close, he almost felt like the Director was having some kind of mental episode. His head twitched and he didn't spare any awareness for whether an invisible assailant had followed him inside.

Harry gave half a thought to whether he might be able to actually beat Fury, but the elevator ride only took a few seconds, and the door opened to another corridor with two agents standing guard on a door. "Did you manage to wake the VIP?" the man asked the first person in a lab coat he came across.

"We've given him drugs to try to counter the anesthesia, sir," the auburn-haired young woman explained in an English accent. "But we can't rouse him."

"Let's give him a kick," Fury decided, brandishing the scepter and striding directly into a small medical room with a peculiarly-gridded dividing wall. Through the viewing window, Harry could see Loki in a cot, unconscious.

Harry couldn't risk Loki getting tagged back in. His resolution to just stay invisible failed within a minute, as he launched a bolt of magic into the guard that was on the far side of the door, shoulder-checked the one closer to him into the woman in the lab coat, and yelled, "Fury. Stop! It's over." His whip of orange energy wrapped around the man's scepter-holding arm, keeping him from making contact with Loki.

He didn't manage to actually drag the Director out of the room, as the agent he'd knocked over swept Harry's legs out from under him. He grunted as he hit the floor. The agent huffed with the effort. Fury snarled as his arm was yanked by the energy whip. There were a lot of pained noises in a very short time frame.

In a ground fight with a much bigger individual was exactly where Harry didn't want to be. The agent was already going in for a wrestling hold, and Harry had to roll backwards to escape, but felt himself come up short as the man managed to grab the trailing edge of his cloak. "Rude," the Boy-Who-Was-Being-Strangled gasped, managing to manifest a magical club and whack the guy in the arm to get free. His cloak with an almost-affronted snap wound itself safely back around his neck.

Harry was in a tight spot. His back against the elevator, there were two security agents recovering from his initial attack, Fury in the room with the scepter, and no telling whether Loki was about to wake up. At least the scientist had rolled clear and didn't seem to be interested in trying to fight him. But he spotted that, inside the room, Fury wasn't actually holding the scepter: he was massaging his wrist as if Harry's whip had managed to disarm him.

"Fury! You have to fight it!" he tried, while summoning a shield in his left hand and preparing to go hand-to-hand with the agents in the hallway.

It was unclear whether it was his last plea or the shudder in the airship that likely came from Tony or Thor blowing something up above, but Fury blinked and his eye started to lose the blue haze. "Stand down, agents!" he ordered, somewhat hesitantly. Both men that Harry was facing glanced their Director's way for confirmation, the blue in their own eyes seeming to weaken (or maybe Harry was just being optimistic). "We need to… assess our actual objectives here."

"You're the shield that protects the Earth," Harry entreated. "You've been working to install a puppet leader for an alien that wants to kill half of everyone in the universe!"

"That's… why would…" Fury started to work it out, his own long-buried indomitable will starting to throw off the control with no hand on the scepter any longer. His one eye increasingly shaded back to brown as he, with growing confidence, decided, "Agents. We've been misled… before Selvig can start it, we need to get Iron Man down to the–"

His announcement was cut off by the blade of the scepter emerging out of the front of his chest.

As the Director of SHIELD slumped to the floor, Harry could finally see the newly-woken Loki standing behind him, hands on the weapon that had been stabbed into his back. For a moment, it looked like the Aesir prince was confused about what he'd done, but after a few seconds of holding onto the scepter his affected smirk returned. Almost gently, he used his left hand to shove Fury forward off of the scepter, and asked, "Did you miss me?"

Any thoughts Harry had about convincing Loki to throw off the mind control were dashed by the swirling blue within the scepter's gem, matching a renewed blue in the demigod's eyes. "Loki's awake, the scepter has him again, and he just stabbed Fury!" Harry narrated into his comms. "I need Thor in here, now!"

"As much as I'd love to try this on my dear brother," Loki mused, "perhaps this is a good time to make my exit. I hope you enjoyed the distractions." With that worrying pronouncement, he blasted out the wall behind him with a gout of blue plasma and dashed through the hole.

"Distractions?" Harry wondered.

"The Tesseract…" Fury managed to whisper, where he was rapidly losing blood onto the once-pristine floor. "Already in place. The portal is opening soon."

"Uh. Guys?" Bruce's voice came over Harry's comms, apparently the jamming finally having been turned off. "I found out where the Tesseract is… it's on the roof of Stark Tower."

It took Harry several seconds to sprint to a room that had an exterior window. From a helicarrier rapidly descending into the New York Harbor, it was immediately obvious where Stark Tower was on the Manhattan skyline…

It was being highlighted by a needle-thin beam of blue light bisecting the predawn sky.