In hindsight, the battle against the Chitauri took about twenty minutes.
While it was happening, Harry felt like it took forever. He had to check with JARVIS later for the timestamps. There was so much going on, but the AI had been keeping track. He could never think about combat rounds in D&D the same afterwards. Of course you could do a lot with six seconds, if the fate of the planet was at stake.
Later, he was never totally sure how he got up to the deck of the helicarrier so fast. He had vague memories of the scientist that had been trying to revive Loki doing everything in her power to save Fury's life. Either the mind control had broken with Fury, or it hadn't kept the whammied agents from trying to help their Director. All over the aircraft, the agents fighting Tony and Thor had stopped. "Loki stabbed Fury and then ran," Harry explained to them, over the comms, but they didn't have time to try to chase him down or to wait to see if the Director could be stabilized.
An army was beginning to fall from the sky.
It was a little over six miles to Stark Tower from where they abandoned the helicarrier as it was dropping into the upper bay. Harry made it in less than three minutes, pushing his broom to its limits. Tony had raced ahead, nearly fracturing the sound barrier to make it in under a minute. The rest of the team had basically been right there.
The United States national guard was minutes away. And that was forever when hundreds of aliens were flying out of a giant portal, intent on inflicting the maximum civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure. Unknown to them at the time, there was a mothership coming, slowly but surely. The first waves of Chitauri sent were just to shock and awe the civilian populace. It was unclear whether the aliens behind the Death Eaters truly understood much about Earth, but they at least knew how to stage a beating for the media. If Manhattan fell on live television, overrun by superior and terrifying infantry from outer space, the morale of the planet would take a substantial hit. They weren't just playing for the lives of the populace of one of the most densely-inhabited cities on the planet, but for the faith of the entire world.
It was New York City. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.
A lot happened while Harry was streaking across the skyline while keeping pace with Thor. The literal prince of Asgard was only a few yards away from him, having basically flung himself through the air by hanging onto a magical hammer. They were on a team together. Harry wasn't sure the kids back at Hogwarts were going to believe it because he barely believed it. In the minutes they were both in the air, the other Avengers were narrating their own trials over the comms.
"I think Harry was right about them being some kind of alien cyberzombies," Bruce described. "These guys are ugly. A bunch of them on some kind of flying… chariots, I guess. I can see them out the Tower windows."
"Everyone with rifles get to the roof of the SHIELD building," Steve ordered. "We need to start trying to take them out of the air."
"I don't think that's going to be high enough," Clint opined.
"Or close enough," the Captain agreed. "But it's what we can do for now. I'm on the move to get to the Tower."
"I'm snagging a bike. We're right behind you," Natasha confirmed.
"Almost there, but they're already hitting the early morning commuters," Tony announced. "At least the streets are mostly clear." At a few minutes before six in the morning, he wasn't wrong: it could have been a lot worse if the attack had happened any later in the day. "Oh, man, they're hitting that cafe you like in front of Grand Central, Maverick."
Harry blanched under his mask and put even more of his magic into the broom, urging it to go faster. He knew that cafe opened pretty early. "Bruce, I know you don't want to do it. But we need him," he urged his former professor.
"I'll just make it worse," the man with extreme anger management issues argued.
"I don't know if it can get worse," Harry told him, finally moving around the Empire State Building and getting a real look at the problem. Above the Tower, armed, flying monsters were pouring from a hole in the sky. There were so many of them that, even from just a mile away, it looked like rain. "Thor and I are thirty seconds out."
"About the same," Steve huffed, clearly running. Had he covered the half-mile from the SHIELD building in barely a minute on foot? "Widow and Hawkeye are right behind me."
"Good, I need the backup," Tony told them, and Harry could track his position both by the AR-augmented waypoint on his lenses and the explosions in midair as he shot down everything he could. Harry winced as he got close enough to see a barrage that the man wasn't able to fully dodge. "Argh! And I'm going to need you to keep them off me for a minute so I can switch armor. This set was already damaged and my thrusters aren't working right."
"So be it, Man of Iron," Thor announced, having finally adapted to the chatter from his earbud. "Rearm yourself, and I shall guard the skies."
Matching actions to words, the God of Thunder began to surge with electricity as he covered the final few blocks to the battlespace, crashing through the enemy front and sending arcs of chain lightning all around him. A dozen Chitauri sleds exploded and rained to the ground, but there were many more that turned on the new aerial threat.
"I'm on scene. We need containment," Steve ordered. "They're targeting civilians and infrastructure. We can't let them spread out across the city. Thor, see if you can keep them focused on you up there. We'll try to get their attention on the ground."
"I'm here, what about me?" Harry asked, the chaos of the battle more intense than even he'd experienced before. There were too many enemies to track. Lasers. Explosions. It was basically a shoot-em'-up video game, but far more intense than on a screen. His Firebolt absently prompted him to wheel out of the way of a stray energy beam, and the Chitauri weren't even really aware of him yet.
"Get to the roof and see if you can shut down the portal?" the Captain suggested.
"First thing I tried," Tony corrected. "It's got a force field. Self-sustaining. But maybe with your magic… I don't know. Give it a shot. I'm switching armors."
As Harry flew in over the Tower, he saw the Iron Man armor descend through a gap that Thor had made and land on the platform outside the building's penthouse. Landing on the miniature roof at the very top, Harry could see the machine that Loki's puppets had made: the Tesseract whirling within a large clot of technology, blasting its energy upwards and glimmering with the telltale signs of a globe of force around it. The older scientist that Loki had first suborned, Selvig, was groaning on the ground nearby, seemingly knocked out by the earlier attempt on the device.
But Harry didn't have too much time to deal with that, since the slowness of Tony's armor machine was about to get him killed. As armatures rose and fell from the walkway below, each one stripping another piece of armor, a few Chitauri seemed to notice and wheeled away from Thor to try to take shots at the currently-vulnerable engineer. "Iron Man!" Harry warned, then had to drop his broom to send bolts of magic at the banking undead soldiers. Neither hit the rapidly-moving warriors on sky-sleds, but it did get their attention. "Crap!"
Furiously shielding against the energy weapons being turned on him, Harry scrambled across the gravel "rooftop" at the apex of Stark Tower. It really was only a few square yards of space, most of which was taken up by the spinning and glowing Tesseract machine. He caught a couple of the alien plasma bolts on his shield and was pleased to discover that they didn't hit nearly as hard as Phase 2 weapons. But a stray blast clipped the radius of the machine's energy field, and the resonance emitted a wave of force that shoved him off the edge of the uppermost roof and sent him crashing down to the next tier below. It was only about a three yard fall, and he managed to land well enough. It still knocked the air out of him.
It caught the approaching Chitauri as well, flinging their sleds off into the distance, so that was nice.
"I'm clear, thanks kid," Tony said over the comms. "You okay?"
"I don't like this gravel, the roof should have foam rubber or something," Harry replied, scraping himself up and letting his cloak fall as he climbed back up the maintenance ladder to the top level. He saw that Selvig was still unconscious but looked like he'd been far enough from the edge of the machine that he hadn't been injured by the force eruption. "Checking out the machine now."
No new Chitauri seemed to be focused on the roof, assuming he must have been knocked well away, so he was able to risk letting his hands out of the cloak to feel at the edges of the force field. It was loud and chaotic, but he thought he felt the machine respond as he reached out. His scar prickled, and he detected turbulence along the shimmer delimiting the protected space as his hands got closer.
Any conclusions he could draw from that were shoved out of his brain by Steve's announcement in his ear of, "Banner. It can't get worse. We need you down here."
Looking up to see what the Captain was talking about, Harry's eyes widened behind his mask as a massive creature, somewhere between a whale and a giant snake, swam out of the portal. It was hard to judge the scale, but then Harry's seeker's eyes spotted the Chitauri infantry clinging to the sides—dozens of them. "Of course they have living spaceships," he complained. "Well, maybe unliving."
"I'm on it," Tony announced, blasting out of the top floor of the Tower in shiny new Mark VII armor.
"We could use some more support down here," Steve added. "Too many civilian targets. We need to hold their attention. Try to keep the fight near the Tower. Thor, Arcane, we could use you both if you can spare the time."
"Wait, is 'Arcane' me?" Harry asked, checking his broom to make sure it was undamaged, and then manifesting an energy sword before hopping on.
"We workshopped it," Natasha explained. "Means both magic and being mysterious."
As Tony chased after the leviathan, Harry flew toward the elevated part of Park Avenue in front of Grand Central where his HUD indicated the others were forming up. "I'm going to bring a few more down to us," he said, blasting his broom toward a nearby sky-sled and hacking at the bottom to try to disable it or at least get its attention.
"A worthy objective," Thor agreed, diving from the rooftop he'd been using as a platform and smashing through three other sleds on his way to the ground.
It was chaos on the ground. Steve, Natasha, and Clint had been using the edges of the raised road and stopped cars as cover from the incoming Chitauri troops. It was interesting that they were so willing to enter the middle ranges where those three were most effective, though perhaps they'd discovered that hanging back with their laser rifles didn't work since Clint was a better shot. Harry did a Wronski Feint to cause the Chitauri chasing right behind him to hurriedly pull to a stop where Steve's shield bounced between rider and driver and send them careening into three other foot-based troops. That gave Harry enough time to land and shove his broom back into a pocket. "That's still so weird to watch," Clint commented, loosing an explosive arrow into the center of a group of sleds following Thor.
"And yet, I desperately want magic pockets for all my clothes now," Natasha quipped as she parkoured by, doing a full-body taser-fisted takedown on a Chitauri warrior that had been trying to sneak up behind them.
"Bruce down there yet?" Tony asked, over the comms. "My missiles aren't able to get through this thing's armor."
"I'm coming, I'm coming," the scientist complained, and they saw him hustling on foot along Park around Grand Central, wearing bright purple sweatpants and an I Heart NYC t-shirt. "Had to raid the lost-and-found on the way out for clothes I could ruin."
"Good. Suit up. I'm bringing the party to you," Tony instructed.
"I don't see how that's a party…" Natasha mused, getting her first good look at the incoming leviathan as it chased after the Iron Man armor.
Steve paused from where he was smashing a warrior and suggested, "Dr. Banner. Now might be a really good time for you to get angry."
Harry could hear the smirk in Bruce's voice as he explained, "That's my secret, Captain. I'm always angry." With that, he turned and began to expand. The last time Harry had seen it, it had been dark out and the whole thing was unexpected, so he hadn't really gotten a great look. In the daylight, it was as impressive as any transfiguration he'd seen at Hogwarts. Where was the extra mass coming from? One moment, there was an adult man who was a little on the smaller size, especially compared to Steve and Thor. The next, there was a green titan that was even bigger than Hagrid.
And one overhand punch from the Hulk was enough to stop the leviathan cold, the biological spacecraft crumpling on itself like a slow-motion train derailment. The berserker barely budged backwards.
Tony took the opportunity to launch missiles into gaps that appeared in the armor as the leviathan moved in ways its designers had never intended, putting it down for good. Harry and Steve put up magical and physical shields to protect themselves and their teammates from the explosion of gore and crashing space whale, Natasha and Clint hunkering down behind them as Thor simply put an arm over his head. The undead warriors lining the street displayed some level of emotion that was a surprise to Harry: they briefly took off their face armor to roar in anger.
It was barely six in the morning. Harry had been on the scene for a little over five minutes.
From above, they spotted a sled that was coming from the south, Loki clearly visible aboard his taxi-from-outer-space because he'd recreated his illusory giant-horned helmet and was wielding the scepter. He was close enough that Harry could make out the sneer of anger as the demigod regarded the seven Avengers all arrayed in a circle below him. Doing his best lip reading, Harry thought the God of Mischief said, "Send the rest."
Two more leviathans immediately snaked their way from the portal in the sky, concealing who knew how many more sled-based Chitauri. Clint and Natasha were already getting low on ammo. Tony's missiles weren't unlimited, even so close to the Tower. And Harry had already worn himself out a fair bit in the preceding festivities. Could they bring down two more leviathans? Maybe. But what if there were hundreds more?
"Call it, Captain," Tony suggested as the seven of them regarded the new arrivals.
Steve's plan was quick and to the point. Clint was placed up high figuring out the big picture. Tony was called on to try to maintain a perimeter that kept the fight around the Tower. Thor was to try to destroy as much as possible as soon as it came through the portal. Steve and Natasha would try to draw the ground troops to where they already were: it couldn't get much more wrecked. Harry was on duty trying to protect civilians while they fled.
"And Hulk: Smash." As the green giant grinned at that final pronouncement, setting off to destroy the alien invaders, Harry felt some thrill at being right. There was a reason the Irish still considered Cú Chulainn a hero, despite the danger of his ríastrad. Given enough enemies to slake the battle-lust, having berserkers on your side could be really useful.
"JARVIS, do we have street cameras? Can you show me where the people are?" Harry asked.
"Requesting access from SHIELD," the AI responded. Harry was still on foot at the moment, a flickering patch of limbs as his flaring invisibility cloak moved around and disguised his silhouette. He made a mental note to practice more wandless casting on the broom, so he'd be more useful in the air off of Vanaheim. The Masters didn't exactly have the freedom to fly around on brooms on Earth, so hadn't emphasized those techniques at all. As he looked for a good place to go, he used his whip to disarm a few of the rifle-wielding soldiers: he wasn't sure what the regimental difference was between ones with skinny staff weapons and ones with a giant gun basically built around their arms. The former were easier to disarm. "Access obtained. Attempting to create a battlespace mockup. Note that not all hostiles may appear."
"Just do your best," Harry agreed, knowing that the AI trying to create a full tactical map of the chaotic area just from whatever traffic cams he could access was already asking a lot. But little red and blue arrows began to appear on his lenses, giving him much better insight on where he would be useful. "Are there a bunch of people over in that bank?" he checked, not liking the cloud of blue arrows being surrounded by red.
"Most of the civilians on the nearby street went that way," JARVIS explained. "A door was opened by energy fire."
"And it seemed like it would be safe, because it's a bank," Harry got it. "But they're probably trapped in there. I'm on my way."
42nd and Madison was only about a block out from the center of the fight, and Harry had been arbitrarily running that way anyway. As he got closer, he saw the entering footsoldiers with his eyes as well as with his HUD, and wasn't sure if he'd bitten off more than he could chew. He vaguely remembered having gone in the bank during their Christmas in the city over a year earlier: Hermione had been interested that there was a classic multi-tiered bank with balcony levels inside the footprint of an otherwise-modern, glass-fronted high rise.
With his cloak on, Harry managed to find a second-floor window that the Chitauri had blown open but weren't watching, and used an energy whip to pull himself up. It seemed less risky than going in the front door. From inside the dimly-lit bank, he could see that the main floor was partially full. Most of the trapped civilians were in jogging clothes. A few had angrily-barking dogs that they'd been out that early walking. The few that were in professional attire, having already been at or on the way to work, drew his eye—including one blonde in waitress' attire, who started slinging coffee early.
Harry was never going to let even a bunch of strangers get slaughtered, but he'd met Beth. She liked D&D. She called WiFi "wireless" in an endearingly-wrong way. If she got hurt, it would be personal. And one of the alien technozombies was readying some kind of rectangular beeping device that was probably a grenade, to treat the huddled civilians like fish in a barrel.
"Hey assholes!" he said, probably in Chitauri if his translator had that language, as he let his cloak retract. "It's pretty funny that your boss talks about randomly removing half the universe, but it seems to always be innocent people you're actually killing." They cocked their heads at him, as if they understood and were confused that they understood. But they didn't seem to have the capacity to meaningfully respond. Well, at least with words. After a moment, the two with staff weapons started shooting at him and the one with the grenade went to lob it down at the crowd.
Right. This wasn't even the worst odds Harry had faced in the last half hour. For longarms, run closer. Nobody with a rifle expects a charge. He dove below the stray shots while he summoned up his energy whip. Good old energy whip. With object-catching instincts that his quidditch team would be thrilled about, he managed to snag the grenade as it was leaving the Chitauri's hand, wrapping it in orange strands of energy and yanking it back away from the center of the room. He meant to fully fling it back out the window into the street, but it hit the wall and bounced to a stop just short, still inside. Harry groaned in annoyance as the blue lights and beeping sped up, with no clue what the blast radius was.
Also, there were now three pissed off aliens looming over him. The one that had thrown the grenade had one of those hard-to-disarm blasters. Well, Harry still had a whip conjured. A couple of solid kicks into his midsection hurt a lot, the nearest Chitauri putting a boot in. But they couldn't really aim at him with their staff weapons while he was right at their feet and moving erratically. He caught the grenade-thrower's leg with the whip and managed some kind of reverse-somersault that hopefully didn't pull a hamstring as he kicked himself over the ornamental balcony railing from prone.
The snagged soldier getting pulled off his feet and into an ally really helped to slow Harry's descent to the floor below.
He'd barely reached the ground and released the whip before the grenade went off upstairs. The radius turned out to be dangerous to the entire balcony area, as a blue-and-white energy explosion all but incinerated the struggling soldiers, but left the ground floor untouched save for having to dodge a bit of damaged railing.
"Everybody okay?" he asked, looking up at the soot-streaked and panicked civilians. "Six-second combat rounds, am I right?" he asked Beth, getting a baffled look from the bubbly waitress. Oh well, she'd get the reference later, when she had time to think about it. Hopefully it didn't blow his secret identity. At least he'd had a modulator built into his mask that lowered and disguised his voice. "Nice dog," he told a guy with a black lab that reminded him a little of Sirius. He took another second and then rolled to his feet, "Okay, let's get going. I think there are cops coming." JARVIS had helpfully put little badge symbols on the blue arrows that were moving down 42nd outside.
"Arcane, are you free?" Natasha asked, from wherever she'd wound up.
"Yeah. Civilians saved. Aliens exploded," he confirmed. "What's next?"
"I'm on the Tower. Selvig says that he designed a failsafe. The Tesseract can't protect against itself, and he thinks that the scepter should be able to get through the barrier since it's made of the cube."
"But it's not, though. It's its own Stone," Harry disagreed, exiting the building and waving the crowd into the line of cops that was forming up to try to hold the area. A couple of people did a double-take as he withdrew his broom from seemingly nowhere. To New Yorkers, alien technozombies and space whales were one thing, but a really good magic trick was impressive.
"Yeah. And Thor is currently fighting Loki five blocks away and I don't think we can even get it. So I'm out of ideas," she confirmed.
"I may have a bad one," Harry said, finally thinking back to the wobble in the force field when he reached toward it. If any other Stone could get through, did he somehow count? "I'm on my way. But Thor, if you can get that scepter from Loki, it would be a good backup."
"Understood," Thor agreed, his comm staying open as he yelled, "Loki! Look at this! Look around you! You think this madness will end with your rule? Give us the scepter and cease this misery!"
JARVIS cut whatever the rest of the conversation with Loki was, explaining, "Call from Acting-Director Coulson."
Harry was weaving through sky-sleds on as direct a route as possible to the top of the Tower when Coulson explained, "We all just received orders from all the way at the top to go into the bunker under the SHIELD building. I think UN diplomats received the same command. Not just to shelter in place inside the building. To get to any actual bomb shelters they have under their embassies. Immediately."
With that many words from Agent, Harry knew it was serious. It was Natasha, ever the student of realpolitik, who got it, explaining, "They're going to nuke the city if we can't contain this."
By then, Harry was landing on the roof where she and Dr. Selvig were regarding the glowing Tesseract device. "Then let's contain it," he said, setting down his broom and moving over to the edge of the field.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Something dumb. Stand back," he suggested. And, with that, he began to lean against the sphere of force. For the first time consciously, he tried to feel whatever energy of the Soul Stone was still coursing through his body. His scar ached, and his vision shaded orange as he pushed. It felt like trying to reach into a running garbage disposal, unlimited energy whipping past his arm at infinite speeds, but it just failed to flense the flesh from his arm. It didn't even rip away his armor, for all that it felt like it should. A subtle orange glow coated his body. "I… I think I can close it. If I can knock the cube loose, I can shut the portal down."
"Do it!" Steve ordered over the comms. He sounded exhausted. Things didn't seem to be going well on the ground.
"No, wait!" Tony countermanded. "That nuke's already coming in. I can see it. It's gonna blow when it gets where it's going. And I know just where to put it."
Harry, fully charged with Soul Stone energy, could effortlessly see Tony in his mind's eye.
Catching up to the missile. Latching himself to it and bodily dragging it upwards into the portal instead of toward the top of the Tower. Starting a call to Pepper, that she was too distracted watching both of her boys on the news to pick up.
Harry had promised her that he'd get himself and Tony home alive. And there was nothing he could do to keep that promise. "Stark, you know that's a one-way trip?" Steve confirmed Harry's worry.
"Be ready to close it. He's going to get out," Natasha tried to console Harry.
As he summoned up a stick of energy so he wouldn't be shoving his hand into the center of the machine, Selvig was looking at his laptop and noted, "This is truly amazing."
Tony shot on an arc into the sky, dragging a nuclear missile up through the portal. The damned thing had come from the south, almost certainly launched straight from the helicarrier. If only they'd kept them from reactivating their communications, maybe they could have avoided it all. If only he'd tried to breach the field minutes earlier. As Harry's physical eyes saw his arm straining to put the energy stick into place within the armature, he was still mentally with Tony.
The failed phone call. The armor blacking out in the void with electrical systems untested in space beginning to fail. The horror of the vast armada ready to come through and take over the entire Earth behind their Asgardian puppet leader. And, somehow, the missile continuing to streak through space, unexpected and unstopped. The mothership exploding in a slow-motion nuclear inferno.
"Come on, Stark," Natasha urged, without much hope.
The fireball began to expand enough to threaten flame and fallout over the city if they left the portal open, and Steve reluctantly ordered again, "Close it."
"I'm sorry, Tony. I'm sorry, Aunt Pepper," Harry breathed. He'd lost the vision of space, and had no idea whether Iron Man was stuck moments from incineration, or had somehow passed back through the portal, but there was just no more time. With a final yell of pain, he took another step forward and jammed his conjured weapon into the heart of the portal machine. He was a little surprised when it didn't explode. It just suddenly cut out, the beam into the sky stopping and the portal beginning to collapse like fog in the sunlight.
And, in the suddenly clear dawn sky, there was a tiny red-and-gold speck, dropping back toward the city.
"Son of a gun," Steve breathed over the comms.
"His systems cut out!" Harry realized before the others noticed that Tony was in freefall. He didn't even have a chance to see what had happened to the rest of the machine as he crossed the roof back to his broom and kicked it into his hand, rocketing for the sky in one practiced motion.
This was going to be the most important snitch catch of his quidditch career.
"Tony!" he tried. "JARVIS. You have to reboot the armor." Tony had been falling for long enough that he was probably already going over a hundred miles per hour. With the armor's mass, Harry didn't look forward to trying a direct impact. Powered down, the lack of inertia dampening in the suit might make it just as bad for Tony as for Harry.
"I'm afraid I've lost contact with remote onboard systems," the AI apologized. "Still attempting."
The reverse of the Wronski Feint was easier: he got nearly up to Tony and then flipped around, allowing gravity to pull him back down as he struggled to regain speed. By the time he caught back up to the falling armor, they were both going nearly two-hundred miles per hour, and the ground was coming up fast. "I may… need some help if this doesn't work," he told the others as he held the broom with his legs and wrapped both arms around his seemingly-unconscious father-figure and then tried to pull up and cut speed.
It was almost working. Even with four-hundred pounds of extra weight, he wasn't asking the broom to do much more than go slower. To arc up and give him a few more seconds to shed speed. Iron Man on his broom was certainly far more weight than trying to ride with Natasha, but it wasn't an impossible amount.
The problem was skyscrapers. They were too close to the ground. Even as he started to pull level, they were still going far too fast to dodge the rapidly-looming bulk of the Lincoln Building. Harry had to chuckle to himself that he'd been worried about a hundred-mile-per-hour crash into the armor, and now he was going to flatten both of them into a skyscraper at that speed. Moments away, Harry was just trying to aim for a window and hope that it would hurt less than a wall.
And then his whole world was green.
It took a few painful moments to realize that they'd been caught out of the air by the Hulk. And somehow the impact hadn't killed him. The monstrous Avenger had turned his seemingly-unlimited strength into a momentum-defying redirect, bounced off of the Bloomberg building's roof, made a facade-destroying slide down the opposite high-rise, and gave one final kick to land shockingly close to the others on the raised section of Park Avenue. They skidded to a stop, Hulk having wrapped both Harry and Tony in his arms and used his back to absorb the final impact, seemingly none-the-worse for wear.
Harry shook the cobwebs out of his head and staggered off of the giant green airbag, absently confirming that his broom hadn't been crushed. But Tony just flopped to the road with a clank, like a broken toy. "Is he breathing?" Steve demanded, rushing up. Negligently, he tore off Tony's faceplate to regard the unconscious billionaire. He put an ear to Tony's mouth and didn't seem to hear any signs of life.
"His arc reactor should have kept his heart going even without suit power," Harry mumbled, trying to figure out what was wrong. Had Tony's purely-human body not taken the impacts as well as he had? Had he lost enough pressure in space to suffocate, or, worse, rupture his lungs? What kind of CPR could they even do to someone with so much machinery in his chest that it would–
Hulk roared in frustration and Tony suddenly startled awake with a gasp. "What the hell?" He glanced around at the surprised collection of fellow Avengers demanding, "What just happened? Please tell me nobody kissed me?"
Harry fell back into a destroyed car in relief that he wouldn't have to tell Pepper that Tony was gone. He absently noted that there were no more Chitauri running around. Had they all just shut off when the mothership blew up? That seemed like a real design flaw for technozombies. Steve just summed up, "We won."
Tony continued to ramble, as nonplussed by his survival as Harry was. "Alright. Yay! Hurray.. Good job, guys. Just… let's just not come in tomorrow. Let's just take a day." He glanced at Harry and asked, "Have you ever tried shawarma? There's a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don't know what it is, but I wanna try it."
"Yeah, it's like… meat and sauce and stuff. It's good," Harry explained. The Grangers had taken him to have some during one of their visits.
Thor, a bit of downer, glanced up to where he'd apparently left Loki on another rooftop. "We're not finished yet."
Tony nodded as much as he could in the damaged and still-rebooting suit, agreeing but insisting, "And then shawarma after."
And that's Avengers. There's still a little denouement to do, but I think you can see where that's going, plus a short wind-down for the last two months of school that Harry technically has to go back for. And then it'll be hitting the ground running to barrel into fifth year. In addition to the adaptation of the Potter side of things, we've got Iron Man 3 coming up plus there are only two Infinity Stones that Harry hasn't encountered yet, so I bet you can make an educated guess about what kind of hijinx are coming toward the end of the school year.
Which all means that this chapter is my best stopping point to take a hiatus. I've been posting weekly for over a year, and crept a lot closer to the end of my buffer than I'd like. The next couple of school years are planned, but I need a little more breathing room to write them. I'm hoping it will be short, but I need to get a safe number of chapters back in my queue before I'm in danger of missing a week of posting due to surprises.
So follow if you haven't already so you'll get a notification when I'm back. And, in the meantime, please review with what you're liking, what you'd like to see more of, where you think things are going, and what plotlines you think I've forgotten and need to be sure to revisit.
Note Aug 2023: This hiatus is lasting longer than I planned. A series of time-disruptors cropped up since I stopped writing, not the least of which was a new job last month, so I have not made nearly as much progress as I'd hoped. I'm hoping to get back to a place where I can write regularly again soon, but don't want to start posting the little that I have yet in case I can't keep up the pace. Additionally, there's a plot point I'm planning for fifth year that might prove to be supported or contradicted by The Marvels, so at this point I might actually wait until November and do a bunch of new chapters as part of NaNoWriMo.