He woke up in a dimly lit room, windows shuttered against the morning sun. It was warm and he was laying on something soft, for all that he felt numbed. There was a vague ache in his right arm, and the back of his head. Maybe some of his ribs. Calm beeping noises and the faint whir of machinery were the only sounds nearby, but there was a bustle of movement not far away.

Ah, a hospital room, he realized as he managed to peel his eyes open. Even without his glasses, he could tell that much. He tried to move his head but it appeared to be locked into place. "Ugh," was all he managed to get out of his question about where he was.

"Harry!" Aunt Pepper's voice said, and in a second she swam into blurry view above him, from where she'd been sitting at the side of the room.

"Everybody live?" he managed to ask, hopefully.

She got that face like she was protecting him from information, and said, "They think you saved at least twenty people by getting them to run." His rough guess had been more people than that were in the courtyard, so what she wasn't telling him was which ones didn't get out.

"The family? In the door?"

"Injured, but alive. They think you used some kind of Stark personal safety device. They didn't really see what it was, but they're grateful." She thought about that for a minute, and realized, "We really should make something like that."

"Happy?" he worried that the man wasn't standing up, even though he clearly got the sense that he was in the room.

"Still unconscious. He's right there," Pepper gestured to Harry's left, confirming his feelings. She teared up a little, "He's on a ventilator." Ah, that was the machinery noise. "They aren't sure when he'll wake up." The "or if" was implied. "Harry. What happened? Did they set off a bomb to target you and Happy? That's what the media thinks. That's why…"

"No. We followed Killian's driver. That Savin guy. He gave another guy a drug that made him explode. Was this supposed to be a Mandarin bombing? Maybe they're all guys that explode." While she was reeling from that, he asked, "That's why what?"

"Tony thought they targeted his family," she smiled a little, at the thought of their weird collection of people somehow becoming one. "He was here until a little while ago, but the press ambushed him on the way out. He invited the Mandarin to fight. He gave out the address of the mansion."

"I think they're all military guys with super-powers," Harry groaned. "They're going to blow up the house!" He was just thinking about if one of the soldiers went off like a bomb during a fight with Iron Man, honestly, but it was a strangely prophetic thought. "We need to tell SHIELD. Rhodey can't just let the military do this themselves anymore."

"We don't need to do anything!" she insisted, nonetheless reaching for her phone. "You went through that thing between the theater doors, Harry! It's called a mullion and I didn't even know that until they told me you went through it. Your arm is broken in multiple places, you have cracked ribs, a cracked skull, and they're saying it's a miracle you didn't break your back!"

Oh, right. She'd known intellectually how much danger he got himself into, but this was the first time she'd seen the aftermath. It sucked that it was the worst he'd been hurt, maybe ever. No way to ease into it.

"But the family lived," he told her, patting her on the arm with his working left one.

She was fighting to not openly weep, and she nodded, "Yeah. You saved a lot of people. And you're going to keep getting hurt saving people, aren't you?"

"I must have learned it from someone," he grinned.

"Probably Tony," she managed to give a teary smile.

"Do you have my bag?" he asked, a bit of a non-sequitur. She found it and brought it over, and he fished inside until he came out with two potions. They hadn't had much use for them, but Harry and his friends had never stopped brewing holdouts. "Probably tell SHIELD to come up with an excuse for why I'm not in the hospital anymore."

"Are you allowed to carry around and administer medical potions without a healer to prescribe them?"

He just gave a one-shouldered shrug and downed them with a grimace. The bone-healing potion (affectionately called "skele-gro" by the kids at school) tasted like liquid chalk, and the general healing potion he chased it with was sickeningly sweet to cover what it really tasted like. "I don't know how long this will take. Hopefully less than it takes Tony to get in a fight at the house."

The potions started working immediately, and he hoped they'd take less time than they had when he'd basically smashed his arm to powder playing quidditch under the influence of Fandral's Asgardian alcohol. Pepper put on the news while she made phone calls, and it was non-stop footage from all the helicopters circling the mansion, just waiting for something interesting to happen. "I think Happy's probably going to be okay," he mentioned at one point, while they waited. He felt like he'd be able to tell with his Soul Stone empathy if the man was never going wake up.

He probably had the Norns to thank that something interesting waited to happen until just as he'd managed to climb out of bed (Pepper having grudgingly undone the brace keeping his head from moving) and remove the IVs, rather than while he was still in traction. Glad to have his glasses back (perfectly intact thanks to his rune-work), he was able to see the video feed turn to take in what looked like… "Did they shoot a missile at the house?"

"A missile!?" Pepper turned, face showing how offended she was that someone would shoot a missile at her house. Well, Tony's house. But maybe eventually her house. Practically her house.

"Can't wait any longer," Harry said, wishing he'd had more time to recover. He was probably mostly fine, but his magic was a little low from spending the better part of an hour healing him up. He'd already grabbed his sling ring and managed to do the mudra to switch into his armor one-handed, the cast going with his hospital gown and glasses to the secure room in New York, while his armor appeared around him. "Go with SHIELD when they get here," Arcane ordered her, pulling his broom free of the bag of holding and then handing it to her to keep safe. "If they're shooting missiles at the house…"

"Yeah. Be careful," she ordered, meaning that for both him and Iron Man. "Go!"

He tiredly opened a portal that appeared in the air above the house and jumped through, straddling the Firebolt as he began to fall.

It was chaos when he arrived. The missile had already collided with the living room, a fireball blossoming outwards over the cliff. The news choppers were pulling back, and reporters that had showed up in vans out by the driveway were retreating out of the yard while their camera-people tried to find an angle that left them safe but with visibility on the attack. A dark-haired woman that Arcane didn't recognize was fleeing out of the front of the house and toward a car. "Adding you to the battlespace," JARVIS' voice sounded in his ears, as his comms booted up.

An AR box showed up inside the house to designate where Iron Man was, clearly dangerously close to the explosion. "Maverick! You're okay?"

"Tired but mostly healed," he agreed. "You invited them to the house?"

"I didn't expect them to bring assault choppers. My flight is still booting, by the way. What've you got?"

Three helicopters were coming in over the water from the south, and he could make out panels extending from the sides, which were probably guns and missiles. "Let's keep them from shooting more rockets into the house?" Arcane fed a little magic into the broom to try to meet them before they got into easy aiming range, feeling how low his personal reserves were from the strain. "Don't you have like forty more suits under the house? Can JARVIS run them?"

"Thirty-four that are autonomous. Good thinking in a crisis, kid. JARVIS, boot up the Iron Legion. House Party Protocol." Iron Man's marker was moving through the house, clearly trying to figure out an angle of attack before his flight controls came online.

"Full readiness in ten minutes," the AI suggested.

"It's going to need to be faster," the billionaire corrected. The house shifted slightly, as if already unsteady on its pylons that overhung the cliff. "Skip all tests. Get them in the air."

"Understood, sir."

Arcane had made it to the helicopters as the argument was ongoing, and one of them was turning to try to track him, beginning to spray bullets in an arc that couldn't keep up with his altitude or his speed. He was coming in from their left, so they were hopefully spraying them high enough that they'd miss the residences in the hills and land harmlessly in the state park. Now he just needed to figure out what he could do to fight an attack chopper from a broom while almost magically exhausted.

One of the two vehicles not focused on the young wizard scored another missile hit on the living room.

"I don't know if the house will take another one of those," Arcane worried, not liking the cracks running up the back of the building.

"I really didn't rate it for missile impacts," Iron Man admitted. "Ironic, considering it has a missile silo." He launched the baby grand piano out of the window with a repulsor blast, forcing the nearest helicopter to pull up violently to avoid the collision. "Damn, almost had him."

Managing to get above the chopper that had been firing on him, Arcane had a moment to consider what he could do. He'd been practicing more mudras on the broom, but he wasn't sure he could make a portal from up there. But there was something that was probably more effective on good-old military surplus vehicles that wouldn't work on alien alloys. Giving a moment of thought to the realization that everyone on board was trying to kill Tony, and now him, he made the gesture.

Helicopters, it turned out, failed violently when the steel components in their rotors were suddenly transfigured into softer metals.

"One down. Good job," Iron Man congratulated as the blades went flying off of the top of what was now a metal coffin accelerating at the full speed of gravity into the water below. "I think you got their attention."

The other two had realized that Arcane was the bigger threat at the moment, and were both turning to shoot his way, including launching a missile each. Fortunately, they headed out over the water, and didn't seem to be able to track a fast-moving, human-sized target. It was a hell of a scare to see them bearing down, though.

"I'll just throw the stupid thing," the tech hero grumbled, seemingly mad at his prototype armor for not cooperating. "Get the Legion moving," he reminded JARVIS.

"Momentarily, sir."

There was a sudden explosion behind the chopper closest to the house, where Iron Man had, indeed, flung a mini-missile and ignited it with a repulsor blast. "Uh oh," was all Arcane heard over the comms as the flaming helicopter wound up crashing into the house.

"Tony!" the sorcerer yelled, diving under the last helicopter's firing arc and rushing to make sure his father-figure was okay. The blast seemed to have taken out something structural in the wall of the garage, and the entire facade of the house was sloughing off into the water below. He could see Iron Man's tracking marker descending down the house.

"Really. Would be good. To have flight power," the billionaire's voice complained, seeming stressed.

"Iron Legion deploying," JARVIS gave him instead, as the marker descended with a couple of sports cars and a big chunk of the back of the house into the surf below.

"Send them to catch Tony!" Arcane ordered the AI. "Well, and if any can shore up the house."

"Yeah, follow the kid's orders," the inventor insisted, over the comms, ending with a grunt as the suit hit the water and went under.

Arcane hadn't forgotten about the last helicopter, which didn't seem to be sure that it had completed the job. It had tracked his flight and launched another missile, aiming at the base of the foundation that supported the garage over the cliffs. But the boy wizard had landed on a currently-solid part of the floor, the fires in the room distant enough to not be an immediate worry, and hissed with the exertion of spinning open a portal in front of himself.

He'd placed the other end correctly, and he could see the missile's target through his side of the portal. Which meant the missile went into the other side and came out toward the chopper as if "shoot missile" was a new spell he'd learned.

His targeting wasn't exact, however, and the missiles had enough programming in them to avoid locking onto their owner. But the pilot of the chopper saw its own missile redirected back toward it, noticed several Iron Man armors starting to launch from the other side of the garage where they were exiting the hidden silo, and decided to cut his losses. The vehicle suddenly pulled up and started flying away as fast as it could.

Arcane didn't want to let it get away, but he was going to need everything he had left. "First armors find Tony. Next few start shoring up the house. If there are any left that can follow the chopper and bring it down, do it."

"Understood. I have lost contact with the Mark Forty-Two," JARVIS informed him, two suits diving in after Tony while the remainder started to hover around the house before bracing the foundation and causing the rapid collapse of the building to at least halt. "However, it is unlikely that power to the Iron Legion will last until a repair crew can arrive. I am modeling significant metal fatigue from heat and force."

"Highlight the worst parts and show me how I can get to them," Arcane ordered, putting Tony out of his mind for the moment. He didn't have his underwater breather from the tournament task under Jotunheim quick to hand, or the magic to do anything useful if the Iron Man armor was trapped under tons of brick. But, looking at DUM-E frantically catching U with his servo arm as the two robots were still slowly sliding out of the house, he felt like he could at least save the mansion.

He wasn't sure where home was going to ultimately be, but this was one of the main options.

His visor lit up with red squares highlighting broken foundation supports and blue paths for how he could get to them through the damaged building. Favoring an arm that was still healing, and feeling a pounding headache where the back of his skull was doing the same, he nonetheless began doing the work, broom hooked onto a shoulder where he'd installed a catch that didn't require him to fully stow it in a pocket, but left his hands free. And he set to work transfiguring hot, failing steel back into something much more stable.

The Vanir thought of it as a "repair spell," because it was permanent, unlike most other forms of transfiguration. Transforming an element into another one basically had to be impermanent, unless you really put a lot of power into it. Actually changing atomic structures like that would risk children having the power to create nuclear blasts on a whim. But transforming a material back into itself had fewer conceptual hurdles. Depending on the material lost, it would never be as strong, but it wouldn't just suddenly dissolve into its broken state when the magic ran out the way other transfiguration would.

As he repaired more and more beams and bits of flooring, the ground shifted less and less. It probably also had to do with the increasing number of Iron Legion suits shoring up the house, including one super-chunky suit that had found a key point and latched into place, bracing the whole structure. "Repairing these last two locations should leave the building structurally sound," JARVIS informed him, an unknown amount of time having passed.

"Good, because that's about all I have left," Arcane huffed, hoping that a bed had survived upstairs for him to lay down in. "Did you find Tony?"

"There was evidence that he cut himself free, and his transponder was moving east."

"Why didn't he check in? Did someone manage to capture him?"

The AI admitted, "The Mark Forty-Two contains its own onboard computers, and an instance of my programming. It became desynced from my main network during the attack. If Mr. Stark was unconscious, it would have executed its own attempts to save him."

"So he should just be somewhere on the bluffs? Over in LA?"

"It has limited processing power, and may have been damaged in the impacts. Based on its trajectory, it was likely executing a flight plan I created for Mr. Stark immediately prior to the attack."

"Which was?" Arcane asked, finding it weird that the AI could basically choose to beat around the bush because it had made a mistake. He finished repairing the last highlighted support and slumped to lay on the finally-level floor. DUM-E had managed to move U back away from the hole in the wall where a couple of very-expensive cars had once parked, picked up his broom, and was uselessly moving rubble around on the floor with it.

"Rose Hill, Tennessee. He went to investigate the Mandarin bombings."

"Sure. Great. I think I'd know if he was dying, so he's probably okay. Please tell Aunt Pepper that we're okay."

"Yes, sir," JARVIS agreed, happily. "I regret to inform you that that the third helicopter escaped pursuit. Are you interested in the house guest?"

"The dark-haired lady? Who was she?"

"I do not know, but I have her license plate number. She was most insistent that she be allowed to see Mr. Stark, five minutes before the attack."

"Right. Suspicious. Have the armors check the house over to make sure all the fires are out and we didn't miss anything that needs to be fixed, then start putting them back in the silo." He'd only been out of bed for maybe fifteen minutes, and he was already ready to go back to sleep. "Give me a minute to sit, and then I'll talk to SHIELD."

It was actually more like five minutes. And the only thing that got him moving again with the bone-tiredness of having used so much magic was worry about the rest of the house that he hadn't seen. The glass wall between the garage and the stairs up had shattered, so he didn't have to worry about whether the door worked. The living room was a ruin, with only a narrow path to the rest of the house. It was just fortunate that the fire-suppression systems Pepper had gotten installed after Tony and Rhodey's birthday fight had shut off the gas and kept anything flammable from burning.

Plus, the explosions had probably cleared out anything too flammable anyway.

The interior rooms were remarkably unexploded, though would require major fixes to their walls and ceilings. The room he'd been staying in had a shattered door, with the door frame more of a parallelogram than a rectangle, but his clothing survived. That was good: he'd need something other than a hospital gown when he switched back out of the armor.

Seeing the reporters still milling around outside, he asked, "JARVIS, have you put all the armors away, yet? Is there one that looks the closest to the Mark Forty-Two you can have pretend to be Iron Man and follow me out onto the lawn and through a portal?"

He hoped he was up to another portal.

The ruse seemed to work. Arcane and an Iron Man armor that would probably be assumed to contain Tony Stark walked out of the front of the house where the press could make them out. Arcane gave a tired wave, and JARVIS even managed to have the armor look over the cracks in the house visible from the front and shake its head. Before anyone could think to run up to them and ask questions, the sorcerer waved open a portal and both he and the armor stepped through quickly, letting it close behind them.

He'd placed it so it wasn't obvious that it just went back down into the garage. That was about the distance he'd felt up to.

"Wait, is Tony with you?" Aunt Pepper asked, her icon popping up on his visor and connecting immediately as she joined the JARVIS chat. She must have seen the news. "He's not picking up my calls."

"No, that was an armor JARVIS was controlling," he explained, sneaking back up into the house invisibly, just in case of passing news choppers, and collapsing on his bed. "Tony's probably unconscious and his armor's taking him to Tennessee. But we think he's fine."

"Why would he go to Tennessee?!"

"Some lead he wanted to follow about the bombings, I think?" JARVIS had given him the basics while he'd been sitting. "Are you safe?"

"I'm at the SHIELD office in LA," she explained. "I'm going to send security over to keep the reporters out of the house and see if I can get any contractors out this close to Christmas. They blew up the house! Is anything okay? Are you okay?"

"I'm okay, just exhausted. I think your room is mostly fine. Living room is exploded. There's some giant stuffed bunny that didn't survive? Lost part of the garage and a few cars. Everything is cracked, but I repaired what I could so it hopefully won't just fall apart later."

"Harry! You were just in traction thirty minutes ago. Lay down and finish healing."

He admitted a nap would be about what he needed. "That sounds like a good idea. But tell someone I need to talk to Coulson or somebody. Track the car that was here. JARVIS can send you the license plate. It might be a clue. JARVIS, wake me up in an hour or something…"

He didn't even remember to take off his mask or "hang up," simply passing out on the bed. So the next thing he heard was the AI's voice telling him, "It has been one hour."

It was weird to wake up from a power nap wearing armor and a face mask, but he nonetheless groggily declared, "I'm up." He didn't seem to have collapsed into the Pacific while he slept, so that was a plus. "Any word from Tony?"

"I estimate that the Mark Forty-Two is still in transit. It is unlikely to be using its top speed without Mr. Stark's piloting."

"Right. Lead foot, even in a flying suit." He sat up and collected his thoughts. He felt better, both in pain levels and in tiredness. Hopefully he'd finished healing and recovered a little magically. "Can you connect me to SHIELD?"

"Arcane," a younger woman's voice sounded as JARVIS connected him. He didn't recognize it. "This is Agent 13. Coulson and Hill are monitoring other events, so I'll be your handler for today."

JARVIS helpfully broke into the SHIELD database and popped up a headshot of a twenty-something blond woman, with a note that the connection and voice print matched the agent. "You can't have actually been the thirteenth agent," he figured, based on her apparent age.

"Nobody seemed to want that number, for some reason," she joked. "I've tracked your license plate. It's a rental car, rented to Maya Hansen. Flew into San Diego for a genetics conference two days ago, then canceled her flight back to Miami tonight at approximately the same time Stark was on the news this morning. The car was booked in San Diego so she probably drove up the coast to get to Malibu. Timeline just works out for the drive. She's currently waiting on her rescheduled red eye flight back to Miami from LAX."

"Genetics. Old friend of Tony's?" he asked.

"I can't place them as having any known associations, except they both attended a conference in Bern at the end of 1999."

That clicked with what Happy had mentioned about Killian, so he asked, "What about connections to Aldrich Killian?"

"She's employed by AIM in an unspecified but highly-paid role, for over a decade."

"Extra suspicious. Did Au… er… Ms. Potts catch you up on how Killian is involved?"

There was a slight humor in her voice, clearly having detected his almost-slip, as she explained, "That a man working for AIM was behind the Chinese Theater bombing, by causing another man to explode, and that he seemed to have some kind of super powers."

"Right. I think these guys can heal really fast. Heat themselves up to burn other people. Probably super strong, since one flung Happy through the air pretty far. And if they get too hot, they seem to explode. Genetics. Want to bet that AIM is making them?"

"My first Avengers bet," she joked. "Standard five bucks?"

"I'll even go for ten, if that's not too much for a sure thing," he told her. "I feel like they all move and fight like they're military. And there were attack helicopters. How many ex-soldiers does AIM pay?"

"They're a military contractor with preferred hiring for discharged personnel," she explained. "So… I'm finding fifteen that are in their official books. They might have freelancers. They also hire disabled veterans. Most of these people were on medical discharge."

"Can we get more information on those freelancers?"

"Maybe. Part of the reason the higher-ups are staying out of this is it's political. We can help you as an Avenger, but if we start poking into a US military contractor without enough proof…"

"So I'll get proof," he nodded, even though she couldn't see it. "Which, I guess, means talking to Maya Hansen.

"Since this is Avengers business, can you get me Black Widow?"