After Neville was sent back to the dorm to explain what was going on, Dumbledore had gotten Harry to open the Chamber of Secrets. The headmaster led Harry and the Weasleys through the Night Road into Niflheim, and then through another entrance that let out somewhere else on Vanaheim. The trip through the land of the dead was a bit sobering after how close people they loved had come to dying.
Harry made careful note of the passage out (and confirmed that the passage back to Hogwarts still seemed to be the one he'd used in his second year). Who knew when he'd need a quick exit to somewhere he could open a portal?
Dumbledore transported them to the courtyard of a large hospital in late-night Diagonalt, where they were shown through security of similar seriousness as in the Ministry before being let in. The rooms were fairly packed, housing warriors with a wide variety of battle injuries, though the hospital was quiet in the dark of the early morning. The activity was around the suite they traveled toward, where Arthur, Sirius, and three other individuals that Harry recognized from various late-night visions were in various states of injury. Well, he recognized Shacklebolt from Asgard as well as his visions.
Mr. Weasley looked the worst of them all, heavily bruised, splinted, and bandaged. Sirius just had his arm in a sling and a facial bruise. "Pup! You didn't have to come all this way for me," he said, when Harry moved over to his bed for a semi-private conversation. "Healers say I don't have any major trauma so I'll be okay tomorrow."
Harry shrugged, conveying in a teen way that just going back to bed would have seemed heartless. What he said was, "Make sure you get out as soon as you can. This is probably the hospital where they kidnapped and replaced Cedric."
Sirius nodded, but explained, "There's been a lot more security put in since then. And Moody will validate us a ton of different ways once we're out."
"The lizard guy got away?"
"Well, we got away from him. He was about as big as Remus when he's transformed, and nearly as strong. And he used some giant weapon. I haven't seen him on the field, before."
Harry explained, "Dumbledore thinks he's the guy that tried to help steal the thing my first year. Which means he works for Voldemort's boss directly."
"This bloke could be running a set of Death Eaters of his own, huh? That about figures. We might have taken him if our wands worked, but there's only so much we know how to do without them."
"Better set up practices. We are."
Sirius chuckled, "I bet you are. Tell me about it, unless you need to get some sleep?"
"Nah, I can sleep while the train is running and still meet everyone tomorrow afternoon."
Being back in a place where teleportation wasn't blocked, meeting his friends was almost as easily done as it was said. Around the time the train was supposed to be getting in, Harry stepped out of the fire from Diagonalt into the longhall that everyone used to go through the Leaky Cauldron back to Earth and waited for everyone else. He was only a little early, and caught them up on the basic details of what had happened as all the Midgardborn shuffled through to Charing Cross.
"I would have thought you would travel lighter, Harry," Master Mordo observed, as the kids going to the London sanctum followed him out of the train station. He had gestured to the unwieldy duffel bag that Harry had been lugging around since the night before.
"Runes project, sir," he explained.
"I get to see if it works, right?" Dean asked. It was interesting to juxtapose Mordo's look of interested skepticism next to Dean's grin of excitement. It was almost a comedy/tragedy mask pair.
"Yeah, I'm just going to set it up at the Tower. I can drop you at home after?"
"Awesome."
Hermione just shot them both a be careful look as she walked over to meet her parents, who waved at the rest of her friends. "Happy Christmas!" was all she actually said.
"Merry Christmas, Hermione!" they said, back, and then wandered through Kamar-Taj, proceeding to New York with many fewer kids.
"If you're… uh… I mean, can I get a ride, too?" Ned Leeds asked, realizing he was deep in Manhattan and probably a long trek from home.
"Your grandma's house?" Harry checked. "You want to call ahead and make sure there's nobody over that doesn't expect you to step out of a portal?"
"A portal!? I thought you had, like, a car. That's way more rad. Yeah, I'll call!" the boy said. He produced a fairly basic flip-phone, powered it on, and called home. "Nobody's home but my family," he confirmed.
Harry visualized the living room he'd been to the last year and spun open a portal, "There you go. See you in a couple weeks, Ned."
After months in a fantasy kingdom, the kid still seemed pretty excited just to walk through a portal to save a bus trip to Queens.
"Next stop, Avengers Tower," Harry told Dean, connecting his own phone to JARVIS. "I'm entering the Tower through my room, with Dean Thomas coming with me."
"Security measures deactivated. Welcome home, Mr. Potts," the synthetic voice told him.
"Thanks JARVIS," Harry said, to the building as a whole as he stepped out of a portal right into his bedroom. "Did Tony set up a room for me to keep my suit?"
"Yes. There is a secure closet on the second science level. I can guide you."
"And the communicator?"
The AI confirmed, "It is in the secure closet, with a new base layer."
"Great!" Harry grabbed his armor and mask from his bedroom closet. He'd not loved being without the armor all semester, but he wasn't about to shove it, with its pockets of holding, into another bag of holding. Weird things could happen. They were getting far enough on runes that they'd soon be making some almost-as-good armor for class anyway. But that wasn't the project he'd brought home. "You can leave your stuff here for a minute," he suggested to Dean, and then both of them wandered out to the elevators.
Avengers Tower was weirdly quiet. Tony and Pepper hadn't been in residence since the summer, and none of the other Avengers had really been back since May. It was probably overkill for the whole place to be rebranded as the headquarters for a team that wasn't working together that often. But Aunt Pepper swore there was a big tax benefit she'd gotten from the rebranding.
In another minute they were up on the science level, following the one bit of corridor that JARVIS had lit for them. "The secure area is hidden behind the janitor's closet in front of you," the AI informed him, once he stopped at an unassuming door.
"Sneaky," Dean said, appreciatively.
As soon as they'd opened it, a false wall at the back of the small room full of cleaning supplies opened into a slightly-larger room. It was dimly lit by recessed lighting and had matte gray walls. Other than a small bundle of black fabric, the only structures of note in the room were some hooks on the ceiling and what seemed like sci-fi ray gun barrels on opposite sides of the room, at about chest height for Harry.
"Is that to kill you if you turn evil?" his best friend checked.
"Inductive chargers. Powerful ones. So I don't actually have to plug in the phone. Communicator. Thing."
"Ooh, yeah. Wires bad for this, huh?"
"Very. Want to help me set it up?" Harry asked, unhooking the toggles on the Vanir-made oilcloth bag.
All that was inside was something that seemed very much like an oversized wooden marionette, even including the strings, though only connected to the back of the neck. As both teens unfolded the humanoid puppet, it was apparent that the red-rune-etched holly wood was almost exactly the same height and build as Harry. And would stay that way, due to the blood magic connecting it to him.
They got it to hang from the ceiling hooks in a basic T-pose like a glitching video game character model, feet barely off the floor and "heart" centered in between the inductive charging nodes. "You might want to step out of the room for this one," Harry cautioned his friend.
"Why? Oh! Right. Naked. Guess this is easier than trying to dress it like a dolly," Dean agreed, walking out into the janitor's closet and turning his back on the room.
"Here goes," Harry said, and then made a fairly-complex gesture with his arms, particularly the hand wearing the sling ring. Instead of opening a normal portal, a ring of sparks rushed down his entire body. As it passed, his clothes disappeared. By the time the sparks hit the floor, he was naked except for his sling ring and his invisibility cloak.
And his mannequin, which had experienced a similar shower of sparks, was dressed in the clothes he'd just lost.
"First step worked!" he said, excitedly. He was sure he'd made the runes correctly, but couldn't actually test it in no-teleportation Hogwarts. The mechanism was well-documented, and only slightly advanced, though used some blood magic. He'd had to take blood from his chakra points to scribe the runes, and had basically created a full-scale voodoo doll of himself. Hence the secure closet, lest anyone think about grabbing it. Hermione had found the process when she'd been looking up information about what forms of blood magic were legal, after his run-in with Dar-Benn. "Just give me a second to get on my onesie."
The replacement black undergarments had been specially fitted for him based on use data from the basic ones he'd worn in the fights in New York and Chicago. And they had a "phone" built into the chestpiece, rather than his own phone just getting shoved in a pocket. It was much closer to the internal comms that Tony used in the Iron Man suit, since it didn't really need a screen of its own while he was wearing his mask. The communicator was armored to better withstand any hits he might take to the chest, and the garment included a few other pieces of armor at key points (including integrated groin protection).
"You can look," Harry said, once he'd struggled into the outfit semi-blindly (his glasses having gone to the mannequin). It was a lot easier to finish getting dressed once he'd pulled on the mask (which, later in the summer, he'd finally gotten around to adjusting to have internal lenses with his prescription, rather than relying on contacts while he was in costume). The rest of the armor went on without much difficulty.
"And the cloak and ring didn't go?" Dean confirmed.
"Yeah. I specifically excluded neckwear, even though I bet it wouldn't go anyway unless it wanted to. But it was probably safer to not risk it screwing the magic up if it tried to take it."
"It's weird the way that mask changes your voice. But you should get some lifts on the boots if you really want people to think you're not Harry Potts."
"Laugh it up, fuzzball," he grumbled. Dean was still growing like a weed and had already crossed six feet, though he'd probably always be slender. Meanwhile, Harry was just hoping for another inch or two and didn't think it was too likely. "Alright, step back and I'll switch again."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Arcane, sir!"
"No respect. Even in Avengers Tower in my supersuit, I get no respect." Harry sighed and then made the requisite gesture again. Once more, a portal descended that only switched his clothing. When it was done, he was back in his street clothes and the Arcane costume was on the mannequin.
"That was really cool," Dean informed him. "You could barely see a seam between one set of clothes and the other. How does it feel?"
"Exactly like I'm going through a portal that's only taking my clothes. It's weird. But convenient! And now my clothes feel minty fresh. Glad Hermione suggested I put some cleaning runes on that thing." He checked himself over to make sure that he had everything he meant to still be wearing and then announced, "JARVIS, everything is in place. Please start security and charging."
"Active," the virtual assistant agreed, as they stepped out of the room and the hidden door slid shut behind them.
"I'd say let's run around in this haunted science mansion for a while," Dean suggested, closing the janitor closet behind them, "but I guess I should go see my family."
"Sure. Let's grab stuff from my room and we can head over."
A little more blasé about people in the know, Dean didn't bother calling before they left. His mother knew to expect him. He just had Harry open a portal into his room and both boys walked out. "Mom! I'm home!"
"And he just sneaked through the house!" Grace Thomas' voice said, seeming like she was inventing an explanation on the spot as cover for an unplanned guest.
"It's okay, Ms. T," Peter Parker's voice said from the living room. "I know Harry can teleport."
Sure enough, they stepped out of the bedroom and saw the young science prodigy grinning at them from the couch. He and Olivia, the older of Dean's two sisters, were set up with serious-looking textbooks strewn across the coffee table doing homework.
"I guess they are about the same age," Harry realized. "But how…"
Dean's mother bustled out from the kitchen, hugging Dean while explaining, "Pepper had me set up the requirements for the Stark Science School… I may have made sure that they'd work for my girls?"
"It's okay. I'm also benefiting from nepotism," Peter grinned at Olivia.
"I think like half the kids at the school are," she agreed.
"It's a trial class," Ms. Thomas shrugged helplessly. "And a bunch of donors had family they wanted included. Anyway, Harry, supper's about ready if you can stay?"
"I could eat," Harry agreed, realizing that he hadn't actually had anything since the leaving feast, and that had been probably most of a day earlier.
Over a delicious meal, Harry suggested, "If we'd known you'd be here, Peter, we could have just brought Ned with us, too."
"Oh, right, Ned's back!" Peter agreed. "I haven't been able to talk to him all semester, and it's weird."
"Guess he didn't buy an owl," Olivia rolled her eyes at the absurdity of Vanir communication with all the sour grapes of a near-teen that had to settle for Iron Man magnet school rather than learning to cast spells.
"I'll add you to my email list," Harry offered. "Hopefully JARVIS can read Ned's handwriting to transcribe any letters he sends you."
"Your… secretary?" Peter asked.
"Tony Stark's artificial intelligence," Dean corrected. "Guy basically builds SkyNet and Harry just uses it to check his email while he's at school."
"He does a bunch of other stuff!" Harry disagreed. "But, yeah, it's weird when you realize he's an AI, since you can just ask him and he can do so much stuff. It's a lot of trickery, though. Pretty much everything he can do is variations on things Tony set up specifically for his tech. He's far from a general AI."
"So he's not going to try to nuke the planet and make Terminators?" Peter confirmed.
"Well… I think Tony was working on teaching him how to remote control the Iron Man armors, so let's not rule that out," Harry admitted. It really was weird to rely so heavily on an AI, in a world that didn't have anything else of the sort. "But JARVIS doesn't really ever take initiative on anything, just responds to requests and follows rules people have set up. So we're probably fine. Anyway! I better get going. Thanks so much for the meal, Ms. Thomas."
"We'll see you for Christmas?" she checked.
"I don't know what Aunt Pepper has planned, but I'll try to stop by. Or bring you guys to Malibu. Portals are really convenient. Later!" he said, proving the utility by opening a sparking hole in space and stepping through directly to his bedroom in Encino.
As soon as he got there, he wasn't sure why he hadn't gone directly to the Malibu mansion. There was nothing of immediate use to him in the bedroom, not even any clothes that still fit. He hadn't really lived in the house in over four years, and had barely spent any time there in the last few. Neither had Pepper, clearly. Everything outside of Harry's room was a mess of opened cabinets and missing items as she'd clearly just stopped by to grab something she needed to take to Tony's house, returning home less and less. At what point in their relationship would she finally sell the old home and admit they lived with Tony full time?
How would Harry feel to lose that last piece of his childhood? Where even was his home?
He spent nearly ten months of the year sleeping in the dorm room at Hogwarts, but it was already becoming clear that the school wasn't really where his head was at any longer, as he was well over halfway through his time there. He'd bonded pretty quickly to his room in the Tower, but it was weird that nobody was there when he'd just stopped by. Tony had decided to move back to his mansion, and it didn't seem like the Avengers were ever really going to call the Tower their home. At the moment, it was just an extremely expensive secondary place to sleep for all of them.
Did he even have a room at the Malibu mansion? He'd stayed in the guest rooms enough, but before he'd left for school there still wasn't really a permanent space for him. Was the next place that was really going to feel like home somewhere that he picked out when he was finally an adult?
Without really doing it consciously, he'd gotten some paper and a pen out of his bag and sat down at the old kitchen table to write a letter to Fleur.
Got back to Earth safe. Here for two weeks. Do you get any time off for winter? Can I see you?
He wasn't even sure how he was going to send the letter, but when he walked out to the backyard, there was Hedwig in her tree. She'd known he'd wind up back in Encino, somehow. "It's weird being back during the winter, huh, girl?" he asked. Especially after coming through London and New York, the sunny California Christmas was a bit jarring. He'd spent the last few in places with snow, or at least cold. It was 60 degrees in the yard on what was mid-afternoon, LA time, Friday, December 21st. Hedwig didn't seem that bothered by the temperature change. "Can you take this to Fleur? You can come back here if you like it best. I'll check in on you."
As she flew away, quickly disappearing into one of the the aerial Night Roads only post owls seemed to know how to use, Harry sighed and went back inside to lock up. He didn't even have house keys anymore. Why would he need them? With another portal, he stepped through into the Malibu mansion.
The enormous house was warm and sunlit, but empty. There was a highly-vetted cleaning crew that came through on the regular. All the damage from back when Tony and Rhodey fought had long-since been repaired to the point you'd never notice it, even though they'd smashed through walls. "JARVIS, is anyone home?"
"Mr. Stark is in the garage. Ms. Potts and Mr. Hogan are still at the Stark offices," the AI answered.
"Which room am I in?"
"The usual one, sir."
"Got it," Harry agreed, and started walking to that end of the house. While he wouldn't trade the hard-earned sling ring for it by a long shot, maybe the problem was that he missed being picked up from school. He'd hit enough adulthood that his parental figures no longer even needed to make sure he was in the right place. He could go anywhere.
Where he went was the guest room he'd stayed in the past few times he'd been at the mansion. They hadn't really taken the effort to do it up like his room, as they had in the Tower. It was fine. It had a nice computer and TV with multiple game consoles. He had privacy at the opposite end of the house from Tony and Pepper (though Happy, who did have semi-permanent use of a spare room in the mansion, it turned out, was across the hall). But it was mostly a place to sleep.
He unloaded more clothing than looked like it would fit in the bag and put it in the drawers and closets, then went looking for Tony.
The garage was kind of a mess. DUM-E, the robot arm, was wearing a dunce cap and trying to wield a broom to clean up the space. Harry was never sure why Tony never upgraded his first attempt at a virtual intelligence, yet still treated it like an idiot. A therapist would probably have a field day. The robotic arm couldn't even really be counted on to sweep. In addition to scattered electronics detritus and snacks on the floor, pieces of Iron Man armor were scattered on various tables around the room.
"Maverick!" Tony greeted, as Harry let himself into the secure space. "I thought you weren't back until Friday?"
"It is Friday?"
"JARVIS, how long have I been awake?"
"Seventy hours, sir," the AI informed him.
"That'd do it. Friday. Huh," the sleep-deprived billionaire observed, "that'd be a good name for an AI." Harry realized he'd stripped down to an athletic t-shirt and his boxer shorts, a pair of blue jeans across a table nearby, and was using some kind of jet injector gun to shoot himself in various places along his thighs, wincing every time he did.
"Tony. Are you having a psychotic break?"
"What? No! Mark forty-two. Subdermal positional transponders for the armor pieces to attach to. Very scientific."
"Okay, I guess so. I had to do something like that for my suit frame," Harry admitted, weirdly captivated by his de facto father figure repeatedly shooting himself with medical implants that his armor could use as tracking beacons.
"Right! You mentioned that. Why you needed the secure locker. Is that done? Let's see it." It was a little jarring to suddenly have Tony Stark's full attention when he'd been totally distracted a moment earlier.
Harry nodded, moved into a clear area of the room, and repeated his mudra. He could tell the energy drain was significantly higher across the country compared to in the same room, but as a once-a-fight cast, it hopefully wouldn't be a big deal. Once again, he had the weird feeling of his clothes changing along a line running down his body, and in a moment he was in the Arcane costume.
"That was rad," Tony agreed. "I feel like I've been wasting my time here. JARVIS, did you get any of that? Can we figure out portals?"
"The sensor data is subtle and irrational, sir, but I will continue analyzing."
"That's me, subtle and irrational," Harry made a so-mysterious gesture, waving his hands in front of his face. It was interesting that the AR lenses in his mask automatically displayed little wireframe tags on each of Tony's medical transponders. Honestly, a ton of stuff in the garage had little metadata flags in his goggles. It was probably good to walk around in it for a moment and get used to the new undersuit, with its protection in… sensitive areas. "So you're almost done with the forty-two?"
"Yeah. Actually, getting these things into my hard-to-reach areas will go a lot faster with you helping. Tell me about your semester while you shoot microchips into my back."
Harry nodded and then summoned another quick-change portal, going back to his clothes. "Well, do you want to hear about the mean alien lady stuck in hot pink robes first, or that we found a holodeck hidden in the school…"
By Harry's third sunset of the day, they'd finished getting Tony fully tagged, and experimented with summoning the armor. It had some hiccups, as pieces tended to fly in various directions and smash objects while they were trying to orient. Harry refused to point out that Tony's armor-activating gestures looked like he was doing a magical girl transformation, because he didn't want pushback on what his somatic components looked like.
Nursing a bloody lip but carrying a feeling of success, Tony grudgingly agreed to wander upstairs and see if Pepper would be back, soon. He had JARVIS put on the six-o'-clock news on the big screen upstairs while they waited. The biggest story seemed to be a holiday family film festival at the Chinese Theater the next day, so they weren't expecting the show to suddenly cut to a paramilitary recruitment trailer with the production value of the video from The Ring.
Over the disjointed footage, a man's voice with an obviously-fake Americana accent narrated, "Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher. America... Ready for another lesson?
"In 1864, in Sand Creek, Colorado," the skinny, dark-bearded white man explained, "the US military waited 'til the friendly Cheyenne braves had all gone hunting. Waited to attack and slaughter the families left behind… and claim their land. Thirty-nine hours ago the Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait was attacked. I… I… I did that.
"A quaint military church filled with wives and children, of course. The soldiers were out on maneuvers. The braves were away. President Ellis."
"Oh, did Ellis get reelected?" Harry wondered, not really sure what movie the trailer was for and having missed the year's presidential election. Tony shushed him, weirdly engrossed.
The showy terrorist continued, "You continue to resist my attempts to educate you, sir. And now you've missed me again. You know who I am. You don't know where I am. And you'll never see me coming."
With that, a logo that was familiar to Harry appeared on screen, before returning to the newscasters, who seemed confused that they'd regained control of their broadcast.
"Who's that guy?" Harry asked, having obviously missed any news that might explain it.
"Terrorist leader. Several bombings the last few months. Blew up an air force base on Wednesday, like he said. Has the tech to take over all the TV broadcasts in the country, I guess," Tony seemed fascinated by this last point if nothing else. But then he mentioned his real issue, "That logo. It's what the people that kidnapped me used."
"The Ten Rings, yeah. I remember you looking into it."
"Yeah. Yeah. If that guy's behind them… I owe him. He calls himself the Mandarin."
Harry blinked. He'd gotten the basic warning about anything to do with the Ten Rings from Kamar-Taj, and learned more from Ying Nan about the story of Wenwu, the immortal warlord who had sought out Ta Lo and left with her sister as his wife. That guy was the number one person he'd sworn to never tell about the way into the hidden kingdom. And, well, from the descriptions he'd been given, Harry was sure about one thing…
"That guy is not the Mandarin."
I really gave serious thought about having MJ being Dean's little sister (different father, different last name), but that seemed like just one coincidence too far. So who knows what Peter's friendship with Olivia Thomas will mean for his later relationships? Stay tuned!
