"Well I guess I'm glad we didn't wind up nuking Harry Potts," Secretary Pierce mused, after Sitwell and Rumlow finished their report. "And you've obtained one of these… they really send mail with interdimensional owls?"
"Yes, sir," Sitwell confirmed. While the information was urgent, the Secretary hadn't been immediately available when they finally were able to follow the schoolchildren off the train platform and back into London. He'd gotten time to shower in a modern bathroom, put on a tailored suit, have a meal made with food that had to follow safety standards, and pretty much rejoin the modern world. Just getting to sit in a padded chair with proper lumbar support while he debriefed was a little slice of heaven. "We have an owl and we were able to make several contacts in the Ministry, and even with some of the more powerful non-wizard landholders."
"I'm going to leave you on point for this, then, since I'll need time to wrap my head around the political situation. I look forward to reading your detailed reports. I'll let you know when we've decided on a strategy."
"Thank you, sir. Who do we… officially report to now?" They'd received a short explanation of what had happened to Fury, but hadn't gotten a full breakdown of the new hierarchy.
Pierce explained, "We've moved to a more distributed model of authority. Officially, it's so there's not a single point of failure for the Earth's defenses anymore. Obviously, it should give us more room to work. We confirmed Maria was no longer being mind controlled and basically made her the official liaison between facilities, and she reports to me and the council. But she doesn't have the authority Nick had. I left Phil in charge of New York for now, but he's requesting the West Coast. Apparently there's a girlfriend in Portland. Robert, Victoria, and Anne are taking on new administrative responsibilities. I'm going to task you two, Felix, and John with posts as well." He considered and then summed up, "Which is to say that you'll technically report to Maria Hill, but have a lot more latitude than you did under Nick. She's still drawing up areas of authority and staff reporting trees so we don't wind up tripping over one another. But we should be able to get all that to you after you settle back in."
Sitwell was feeling a little imposter syndrome at suddenly being thrust into a serious management role rather than just being a high-level field officer, but Rumlow seemed thrilled at the promotion. "It'll be great to not have to run everything through the one-eyed bottleneck," he opined.
Pierce nodded, "You may get orders before Jasper does. Maria doesn't have the same contacts through the organization as Nick did, and is less likely to notice if a few potential roadblocks get removed. Tony Stark has already complained about how disappointed he was in the helicarrier's technology, so we think we can massage him into getting Insight operational faster than expected. We're going to have to be fast, nimble, and situationally aware, but we're closer than we've ever been…
"Hail Hydra."
Not far from the London SHIELD office where Hydra was debriefing, Harry was getting a bit of a debrief of his own with the Ancient One. She'd come to the London sanctum and filled a room with the sanctum heads—Masters Sol Rama, Tina Minoru, and Kaecilius—as well as Mordo and Wong. She'd booked two hours for Harry to just explain everything that was going on with both Vanaheim and the Avengers.
As he finally wound down, she explained to the Masters, "Now that you've heard the challenges he's been facing, you'll all understand why I've promised Mr. Potts some additional privileges. Notably, a sling ring."
Harry grinned at that pronouncement and then hastily steeled his expression into one of wise adulthood. Kaecilius and Wong clocked it, but he was pretty sure he'd looked solemn again before Mordo glanced his way. That well-known stickler among the group simply regarded him impassively for a moment but then relented with a nod. "I fear we need more eyes upon the situation in Vanaheim, however," was all he said.
The Ancient One gave a broad smile at the suggestion, admitting, "And that is why I've suggested to the headmaster that he accept one of our own as a teacher for their defense seminar this year. He seemed to be having trouble finding a qualified candidate anyway, and feared that his political opponents might insist on one of their own agents."
"So we'll insert our agent, instead?" Kaecilius smirked.
She returned the smirk, obviously the thought having occurred to her. "If a new war is starting over there, it will help to have someone that the Ministry cannot object to being present to protect our interests. Which, of course, includes students from Earth that might wish to continue their magical studies here."
"Yeah," Harry added, "it couldn't hurt to have someone actually explain what you do here. A lot of the kids at school are afraid they'll just get killed by Lovecraftian horrors on their first day on the job if they sign up."
"Volunteers?" the Sorcerer Supreme glanced around the table. As everyone started trying to marshal their arguments for not being it, she relented. "We'll look into responsibilities and make a decision in a month. Meanwhile, I shall endeavor to ensure that Mr. Potts is proficient with portals before we send him on his way."
Another hour later of private instruction, and she seemed satisfied that Harry wasn't going to cut his own arm off in a portal, and could basically get around. "At school, they call that 'splinching' yourself," he revealed.
"What a lovely Vanir talent for understatement. Consider that it happens often enough there's a word for it." She thought for another moment and then revealed, "Your services may also be required in the next couple of days. There is a potential student in New York City that we had been inclined to not reveal the existence of Hogwarts to, but the situation may have changed."
"Parents in SHIELD or something?" Harry guessed.
"No, completely free of political entanglements. However, my previous auguries had indicated that he might accomplish something important by remaining in his normal life and school. Recently, however, I believe that the course of things can be preserved… but for some reason only if you and Mr. Thomas are there to introduce the boy to our world. The child's name is Edward Leeds…"
Having gotten back from Vanaheim on the weekend of the beginning of July, Harry didn't actually have a chance to fulfill this new recruitment mission until the Fourth of July, which landed on a Wednesday that year. He'd spent the rest of the weekend and Monday and Tuesday settling into the largely-repaired Stark/Avengers Tower. From that vantage, it was amazing what they'd managed to do with cleaning up the borough in just two months, but there was still a lot left to do. Tony mentioned that he was working with Coulson to get SHIELD's Damage Control division spun up into a full agency with the resources to quickly repair that kind of catastrophic property damage from superpowered and high-tech events.
Nobody who was honest thought that the Battle of New York would be the last time a city's infrastructure would suffer sudden destruction from powered individuals clashing. They just hoped it would be on a smaller scale.
Despite the holiday, the fireworks laws in the city meant that the afternoon of the fourth was relatively quiet in the neighborhood of single-family homes that Harry, Dean, and Master Drumm visited looking for the Leeds residence. Well, perhaps the quiet was also because the city had seen enough explosions in the past few years that even delinquents were hesitant to risk terrifying their neighbors. The house they'd identified was in a majority-immigrant neighborhood, primarily Pacific Islanders from the people they saw wandering around in the July heat, but the trio only seemed to get a second look because Master Drumm was so buff. Harry, of course, had donned a hat and sunglasses to avoid notice.
The two-story house was well-maintained, and showed evidence of an 11-year-old in residence, if only in the two under-sized boys' bikes chained to the front porch railing and damage to the bark of the yard's tree as if it had been climbed repeatedly. Lacy curtains shrouded the bay window, but silhouettes of flowers and picture frames sat inside. The mat on the front door said "Welcome" in both English and some language that Harry's implant helpfully translated to another instance of "Welcome."
"Do we just knock?" he checked.
"I called ahead. I… think we're expected," Drumm explained. "The woman I spoke to didn't seem to speak much English. Tagalog, maybe? Not my specialty."
"I can probably translate," Harry said, tapping the back of his neck vaguely where his implant was.
To their knock, the door was opened by an imposing but friendly-looking older woman with short, graying black hair wearing a knit housecoat over a floral-patterned dress. "You from the school?" she asked. When they nodded, she began shouting up the stairs, her mouth movements not quite syncing with what Harry heard so he assumed she'd switched languages. "Ned! The man from the school I told you about is here. Come down!" She peered back at the three of them and started sizing them up for threats, but then got an interested look on her face. "My Ned is special, yes?"
"Yes, ma'am," Drumm nodded, seriously.
"Come in. Sit down. I'll get lemonade. NED!" she said, allowing them to enter the sitting room past a set of wooden stairs on their right. The room was dominated by a large dining table with rolling chairs upholstered in an interesting shade of green. The entire decorating scheme seemed very mid-century, with the wallpaper of flowering vines, a variety of religious or grandmotherly wall art, and the plastic-coated brown floral couch.
She'd barely had them sit at the table and given them a moment to appreciate the blown-glass floor lamps and mounted plaque full of interestingly-shaped knives before the stairs were suddenly pounding with the arrival of two pre-adolescent boys, descending from the upper floor with haste. The child in the lead (it was weird to think that Harry had thought of himself as much older when he'd started Hogwarts at the same age, four years and a lifetime earlier) was stout and dark-haired, even bigger than Malfoy's goons had been at that age.
The much slimmer, much whiter kid behind him seemed oddly familiar to Harry, but he couldn't quite place him until the boy's eyes got really big and he said, "Dean? Harry?"
"Wait, you know the guys from this school?" Must-be-Ned asked his friend.
"Yeah! Remember I told you about the Stark Expo?" he explained, and Harry suddenly flashed back to the tiny child in the Iron Man mask that they'd saved from Hammeroids.
Dean, seeming just as surprised as Harry to run into the kid, nonetheless remembered his name, pointing out, "Peter! Weird running into you here."
Peter Parker shrugged, explaining, "Ned's my best friend. Is this a private school? I didn't know you'd applied to a private school, Ned."
"I don't think I did?" the larger boy said, easily sliding into a seat at the table, not bothered by the three strangers in the room, especially since Peter knew the older boys.
Drumm seemed slightly thrown by having to do his pitch in front of a non-magical child, particularly one that Dean and Harry were already acquainted with. He somewhat lamely covered with, "We actively search for students at a particular intersection of talent and means." His deep voice gave the thin story a little more gravitas than Harry could have managed.
"Peter's family's poor, too," Ned argued, in a way that Harry thought felt very Hufflepuff in his loyalty to his friend. "I don't think he shouldn't get a shot just because he's white."
"That's not what it's for," his probably-grandmother explained in Tagalog, such that only Ned and Harry seemed to be following. "I told you that you had the magic in you! I'm just happy somebody that could teach you noticed."
"Lola!" the boy argued, in English. "That's Harry Potts. This is probably a Stark magnet school for technology." He'd obviously remembered Peter's story and recognized Harry, especially since he'd politely removed his hat and switched back to his regular glasses inside the house.
Looking slightly helpless by not understanding Ned's Lola and still not sure what he could say in front of an unrelated minor that wouldn't involve a memory spell later, Drumm considered his options. Thinking on his feet, Harry offered, "Not exactly. It's a little private, though. Peter, you want to go talk with me about your school outside?"
"Sure, okay," the boy said, picking up that something wasn't quite right and starting to get a little defensive about it.
"Take your lemonades," Lola ordered, passing them both glasses. Well, they were large plastic tumblers with an air gap between the inner and outer walls to keep drinks cold, and a kitschy spray of sunflowers painted inside the translucent housing.
They were glad to have the lemonades as they went outside and sat on the small front stoop, trying to stick to the shade in the afternoon that was already 90 degrees. "You still making stuff?" Harry asked, vaguely remembering that the kid had been excited that he'd made his Iron Man costume from a kit.
"Yeah," Peter nodded. "We were just upstairs working on a radio." He trailed off and shot Harry a look, covering his trembling lip with a sip of the lemonade.
"Ned's your best friend?" Harry got it, realizing how he might feel if someone showed up offering Dean or Hermione a more prestigious school that he wasn't invited to follow them to. That moment of natural empathy seemed to kick off a connection to his barely-understood power, and his scar itched. He could tell that the boys were misfits that didn't really have any other friends besides each other, and Ned was Peter's rock of socialization. They had grand dreams of the two of them spending the rest of school together. Harry wasn't sure if he was getting a premonition of the future or just Peter's hopes for it, but he saw them both, teenaged, together in a high school for the scientifically gifted.
"Woah!" Peter's mouth gaped, and he was in danger of dropping his lemonade in his excitement. "Your eyes just turned orange!"
Well crap. Harry hadn't actually realized that happened when he had those flashes of empathy.
Before he could come up with an explanation, the little genius' mind was assembling facts. With Soul Stone powers running, Harry could almost watch the synapses firing as Peter re-evaluated his encounter with the older boys at the Expo two years prior. Even then, he hadn't truly believed his toy repulsor had worked to blow up the giant robot, but didn't have a better explanation. He remembered that Harry had used some kind of energy whip that he'd assumed was based on the guy who'd destroyed the Monaco race, but, in hindsight, didn't look like it had any wires inside to define the plasma field. And then, at the Battle of New York, a mysterious, masked Avenger that might have been about Harry's size used the same orange whips in some of the cell phone video from the people Arcane had saved in the bank.
Harry was kicking himself. Eight words into trying to keep Peter from overhearing about magic and Hogwarts and he'd given the kid a key into possibly an even bigger set of secrets.
"You're an Avenger!" Peter whispered excitedly, not even noticing that his lemonade was sloshing out of the cup and onto the concrete of the stoop. "Is Ned going to be an Avenger? If he is, can I be his support guy? Is Dean your guy in the chair?"
Sighing, Harry realized that he wasn't going to convince the kid of a lie without the Runes of Kof-Kol. Instead, he asked, "Can you keep a secret? I'm not supposed to tell you any of this. My life is ruined if the world finds out about this. I'm too young for this. Tony would get in trouble."
Peter straightened to attention in a fairly adorable way for a skinny pre-teen, finally remembering his lemonade and setting it down on the ground. He brought the hand up as if he was going to salute, but then just clasped his hands together in front of his chest as if pleading, "I can! You can trust me! This is the coolest thing ever. And especially if Ned already knows, who'm I gonna tell?"
Still empathically connected, Harry believed him. And something about his enthusiasm made Harry think that Peter might have been the reason that the Ancient One had considered leaving Ned unaware of Hogwarts. His tie to the Soul Stone didn't give Harry prescience, the way the Time Stone could have, but he could tell that the kid had a mountain of inner potential. "Ned's probably not going to be an Avenger. And Dean's not my… guy in the chair." If anything, that might wind up being Hermione or Padma, honestly. "There are more people that can do things like I can do. Most of them don't live on Earth, but sometimes people on Earth have the ability to be trained. So we go to school to learn how to use our powers."
Peter thought back and explained, "Weird stuff happens around Ned sometimes. We just thought it was because he was clumsy or forgot. But he's magic." Harry had been hoping to avoid the M-word, but he just shrugged and nodded. "And I'm not?"
"No. But I think you might have potential in a different way."
"Iron Man isn't magic!" Peter grinned, realizing.
"Or Black Widow or Hawkeye," Harry added. "Or Hulk, really, but you shouldn't science yourself into a big green monster." He wasn't going to explain that Bruce was a little magic, with the berzerker heritage.
"I'm going to be really good at science! I'm already best in my school. They let me and Ned enter the middle school science fair last year and we won. I already have ideas for things I could do with chemistry that I could use to fight bad guys. Like Mr. Stark does!"
There was no boast in Peter's voice, and Harry considered. "You're having to go up grades to work at your own level?" He'd known a few kids that had gone to his elementary school not because their parents were rich tech sector employees, but because they'd needed the challenge over normal public school.
"Ned and I were planning to get into Midtown Technical High School," he admitted, a little sadly, realizing that he was losing his partner in that goal. "But, yeah, I don't think there are any magnet middle schools I can get into."
"Give me a minute," Harry told the kid, setting his lemonade on the stoop and pulling out his phone. Peter sipped his own drink bemusedly.
Aunt Pepper
Do we have any scholarships. For like, smart
pre-teens that are really into STEM?
We do college scholarships. Why?
No, like, for kids to go to magnet schools.
Remember that kid that nearly got killed
by the Hammeroids? We're kind of taking
his best friend away to my school. And he
seems really smart but not rich. He can't go
with us, but he needs more than public
middle school, you know?
Does his aunt work at FEAST? Happy
has been going over there a lot since
the Expo.
Maybe?
We probably SHOULD do something
for the city like that. Yeah. I'll put Grace
on it. I have more questions when you
get home, but sure.
"Does your aunt work… at a feast?" Harry checked.
"FEAST. All caps. It's a homeless shelter," Peter nodded.
"Okay, cool. Give me your contact information. We're going to make sure you have a better option than whatever local public school. I miss my best friends from elementary school, but I made a bunch of really good new friends at my new school. It helps when you have a lot in common with everyone."
"Really?!" Peter said, excited. "I don't want special treatment or anything," he said, realizing that he'd basically guilted a rich kid into getting him a scholarship.
"My aunt said we were going to do something like this for the city anyway, I just reminded her," Harry fibbed.
"That's awesome. You won't regret it. I'm going to learn so much!"
Harry nodded, glad that little crisis was solved and hoping the Ancient One would think he figured out the best solution for the kid. Now he just needed to figure out how to explain to the other Masters that he'd taken the boy outside to try to keep him from learning about Hogwarts, and accidentally told him even more than he might have learned sitting in on the conversation.
While Harry Potts and Peter Parker were sitting on a porch in Queens drinking lemonade, 700 miles away, a man thought dead was drinking his own glass. Suburban Atlanta wasn't really the first place that Nick Fury would choose to spend a sweltering July, but he remembered how to stay cool from growing up one state over. There were too many other major cities where he ran the risk of getting recognized by an old ally or enemy. Most other places that had the kind of medical rehab he needed, a black man would at least get a second look. And he didn't want anyone to even take a first one.
The facility he'd chosen featured an honest-to-God veranda for the patients to spend time on, sipping lemonade and looking out at the forested grounds. They'd wrapped a high-tech medical facility in Southern charm, and the spy in him liked the deception.
He didn't like that he was having to sit, basically helplessly, in a wheelchair while he took in the view. He could walk if he had to, but he'd probably tear open some important internal sutures. It could have been worse. Fortunately, even through the scepter-induced brain fog, Dr. Fine had remembered the plan. Tetrodotoxin B, to slow his heart enough to make it possible to fix him before he bled out, and make it look like he'd died on the operating table.
With any luck, he could count the number of people that knew he'd survived on one hand.
One of them was walking up for the meeting. He had no clue what name the man had signed in under, or what face, but the facility prided itself on not spying on private conversations between its patients and their guests. As he caught the wounded spy's one eye, he shifted into his resting form: still former SHIELD director Robert Keller.
Robert had died quietly, from cancer, a few years after he retired. They'd kept that fact secret so the identity could still be used in a pinch. Talos seemed to have grown very comfortable in it.
The skrull leader dragged over a rocking chair and sat next to the wheelchair, commenting, "I love these things. Kind of feels like sitting on a ship with a broken grav system." Pleasantries out of the way, he opined, "You look like shit, Fury,"
"You would, too, if someone put a spear through your back. Lost a kidney. May never get full lung function back. Just glad it missed my spine and my heart." He still didn't know how much the missing kidney was going to affect sampling his favorite whiskey. The doctors were very adamant he wasn't allowed to even try to find out for a long time yet. "No Soren?"
"Giah's hitting that phase where she knows better than both of us," Talos explained, about his daughter and wife. "Thought she needed some quality time with her mother after the last few months."
"No luck?"
He shook his head grimly. "Everywhere's still full of refugees from the Kree-Nova war, even after the armistice they just signed. Nobody's willing to take skrulls."
"Where are they refugees from? Can't your people live in places that have been nuked?"
"Your nukes, sure. The ones the kree use? Even we can't live on a planet they've sterilized. That's sort of why they made them. Though, there's a chance we'll negotiate getting Tarnax IV in the reparations. My cousin Dro'ge is already styling himself emperor."
Changing topics from a sore subject, Fury asked, "You heard anything from Danvers?"
"Not recently. She was too busy hitting the kree where she could. Doubt they'd have given up on a war going that long if she hadn't made it too costly. You need her?"
"We might have used her a couple of months ago. But, no, what I can use right now is you. I need some confirmation about a theory I have, about the loyalty of some of the members of SHIELD. It seems like exactly the kind of problem your people can help me get to the bottom of…"
Note that the events of The Marvels seem to contradict a couple of major lore pieces from Secret Invasion, and I'm erring on the side of The Marvels where necessary. I'm also having to make the timeline make sense between The Marvels and Guardians 1, regarding the Kree-Nova war.
We're back, but going to an every-other-week schedule for now. Due to a bunch of (positive) changes this year that affect my available free time, I have to be very diligent to get enough writing time in, and I'm not convinced yet that I can keep up the thousand-words-a-day rate I managed last year. I'm optimistic that I can stay on a regular schedule semi-weekly, and will try to get enough in the buffer that I eventually feel good about going weekly again.