"Why are you throwing together a bunch of Home Depot junk?" Harry asked, floating translucently in the motel room he'd found Tony in before dawn in Atlanta. The process of tracking him down had been both easier and more boring than justified repeating.

"Making stuff," Tony shrugged, barely jumping in surprise at the appearance of the teen apparition. "A kid in Rose Hill reminded me I'm a mechanic. Suit wasn't working, but I don't need the suit. I had way less to go on than a big box store when I made it in the first place."

"How did you even find a store that was open this early on Christmas Eve?"

"It's amazing what business hours you can find in a big enough city."

Harry shrugged, ceding him the point, but finally getting to his own point. "You know that Killian kidnapped me and Happy like ten hours ago, right?"

"I… did not know that, no."

"So you were driving nine-hundred miles in the middle of the night to his mansion because…"

"It's the site of the Mandarin broadcasts," Tony explained, finally distracted enough from his focus on the gadgets he was making from consumer home improvement items to give Harry his full attention.

"Huh. I guess I'll go see if I can find that guy when I break out in a minute. Were you going to actually sleep or just get driving again when you made your stuff? Either way, isn't it going to take hours? Where's the Mark Forty-Two?"

"It's having issues charging off of the power in Rose Hill."

Harry boggled, "Tony. You have an arc reactor in your chest. The main reason you have it is to charge the suit!"

"I was trying something new with the capacitor distribution so each piece could fly autonomously," the billionaire argued, embarrassed. "And I didn't let JARVIS finish the tests. And I may not have gotten much sleep in… months. So it has charging issues, okay?"

"Just… stay here. I'll portal you and a working suit over to Killian's mansion in a few minutes."

Harry let himself snap back to his body before Tony could get the last word in. And it was a good thing he did. He was still shackled to a metal frame in the masonry pool house that was Aldrich Killian's lab (probably designed less for cleanliness and more for not taking out the main house if an Extremis patient exploded). An ex-soldier in a lab coat was looming over him with a syringe, and while he'd been looking for Tony, he'd apparently missed the injection given to Happy, still unconscious on the neighboring frame. The ex-boxer was starting to redden with the biological processes going on. Maybe Harry should thank the Norns he wasn't astral projecting long enough to get injected without being able to do anything about it.

"I have to pee!" he announced. "Really bad."

"We'll cath you," the grizzled man shrugged, barely pausing while looking for a vein. Did Maya Hansen even know that the whole medical part of the science had skipped from Hippocratic Oath-following doctors to sociopathic Extremis soldiers willing to inject hostages at their boss' orders?

"What are you injecting me with? Why!?" Harry asked, hoping he was seeming properly scared while he stalled, left hand furiously working. Getting out of restraints with his right arm in a cast was harder than he'd expected.

"Let's just say, if you're lucky, that arm isn't going to be hurting you anymore. And if you're unlucky, it's incentive for Stark to help fix the formula." The man actually leered. Harry wasn't used to getting leered at. It was unsettling. The soldier brandished the syringe and said, "Now hold still."

"Actually, I'm feeling kind of lucky already. Since these cuffs came off." The man was so surprised at being shown the detached cuffs that he didn't even notice the rest of the bindings coming off. They'd worked hard at figuring out a strap to restrain the arm in the cast. "Yoink," Harry said, plucking the syringe from the nonplussed man's hand.

To his credit, the man was an Extremis-powered soldier, with strength and reflexes that might have even put him closer to Steve Rogers than to a normal human. To his detriment, nobody expects a small, injured teen to go from unconscious and fully restrained to doing his best Bugs Bunny impression in a few seconds. By the time the man started trying to grab Harry, he was already halfway out the door of the room.

He'd have to retrieve Happy in a minute. Doing so probably wouldn't leave time to go ahead and find the "Mandarin."

The early morning in south Florida was strangely pleasant: just under 60 degrees Fahrenheit and only a little muggy out. And the compound wasn't well lit enough that he couldn't go from the pool house to shadow in moments. He had already scouted the place astrally, so made for a direction that would let him clear down a couple of stone-walled terraces and break line of sight without going through any of the patrols of the late night guards. There was a powered soldier only a couple of seconds behind him, he had an arm in a cast, he was barely dressed, and his glasses were fogging up a little bit from leaving the air conditioned lab room into the early Miami morning. He was drawing on all his defense seminar training from Bruce to escape and evade.

Yes, he could have turned invisible whenever he wanted, but he was trying to make the bad guys think he'd escaped like a normal person.

"The kid! Stop the kid!" the soldier in the lab coat shouted into the night, drawing the attention of the patrols. Enough people spotted the bits of white cast, skin, and hospital gown that they totally believed that Harry Potts was a fleeing teen that they could just box in and re-capture. "Peters, go right! Sanchez, left." The man started bounding down the stone steps toward the pool, certain that the kid would have nowhere to go in the elaborate mansion gardens that wouldn't trap him against wall or water.

Which was why it was so alarming when they lost him somewhere in the shadows.

Invisibly, Harry doubled back as soon as the place went up like an angry anthill, non-Extremis security guards breaking out the high-powered lights for a proper grid search. Once he was back in the lab, it was easy enough to disable the cameras (which were meant for remote monitoring of subjects and, probably, showing off the hostages to Tony). By the time security noticed the electronics were down, Harry had already portaled himself and Happy across the country.

He'd left his tracker in one of the nearby garden pots just to make it easier for SHIELD to find the place.

"I need doctors!" Harry yelled, as soon as the portal deposited them on the floor of the Los Angeles SHIELD office. He'd tried to pick a part of the building that wouldn't incinerate the whole facility if Happy went off like a bomb, but he was really holding out hope that wouldn't happen. It wasn't long after midnight, Pacific time, so the place was pretty clear of bystanders anyway.

"Potts!" a blonde that matched the picture JARVIS had sent him of Agent 13 said, rushing out of an office with some other scrambling late-night agents. "What's wrong with Hogan?"

"They injected him with Extremis while I was out," he explained, embarrassed. "The bad guys are going to realize something's wrong in a minute. I'm going to grab Iron Man and whoever else I can and go back in. Oh, here's what they put into him." He handed her the syringe he'd swiped from the soldier. "Maybe Tony can fix the formula, like Hansen said. Or at least neutralize it for Happy."

"On it," she said, all business. He didn't know Sharon Carter well enough yet for his empathy to detect the emotions she felt on being handed a source of unstable super powers.

If nothing else, the long sleep on his fight had basically recharged his magical batteries and finished his healing, so it wasn't much effort to create a portal again immediately, especially since he was just going into the Malibu garage. "JARVIS!" he said. "What Iron Man suit can you have ready fastest that's fully tested? Heat resistant, if you've got one. I need to take it to Tony. The Mark Forty-Two's not recharging. Do it as fast as possible, please. Skip the tests unless it was damaged earlier."

"The Mark Thirty-Three will be available in ninety seconds," the AI told him.

"Thanks," Harry nodded, taking a breath and being glad his repairs to the garage hadn't failed and caused it to fall into the bay. "Can you call the Avengers that are still around and have them give me their location?"

"Patching you through."

It actually only took 87 seconds for the triangular-profiled red armor with silver accents to decant from the silo and walk into the garage, which was enough time for Harry to gather up Natasha, Steve, and Clint. "Let's make this fast," she said, clearly a little tired having been portaled across the continent twice in one day. "We're on the arms deal in three hours." They were all in pajamas, with their gear in bags, but had come through the portal from the safehouse where Harry had retrieved Natasha earlier. She must have just gotten back there the normal way after he'd been kidnapped.

"Just have to pick up Tony," Harry agreed, sad that Bruce was still off grid and that sending Thor an owl would take too long. He'd been close to getting the whole band back together. "And I'll brief you about the location on the way…"

A minute later, as they all stepped out into Tony's motel room, Clint wryly observed, "Is that a TASER mitten?" The space was suddenly cramped with five Avengers and a JARVIS-piloted suit of armor.

"I was improvising," Tony said, tossing away the gadget he'd been soldering together. He nodded at the armor that Harry had picked out, "Silver Centurion. Not bad."

Steve took command before it turned into a snark fest, "Harry will brief us. Everyone suit up."

They attacked at dawn. Killian's mansion had an impressive view east over the water, which meant anyone with a gun would be firing at silhouettes as the Avengers appeared out of a portal at the water's edge. As noted the previous summer, adding Iron Man to the mage and the SHIELD agents turned it from a stealth mission to something a lot more loud. But that just meant that the quieter members could get into position while the mansion's guards were squinting at the red-and-chrome armor flying out of the sun.

It worked out better than expected. There were so many shouts of "Iron Man is here!" that the goons barely seemed to notice anyone else until they were taken out, one by one.

Black Widow had effortlessly scaled the back of a terrace wall and started laying out unenhanced security guards. She managed to use the stone railings to disguise her silhouette against the dawn, each running man with a gun not noticing the moving shadows until a wrist-mounted taser was knocking him unconscious.

Hawkeye had asked for a secondary portal, and Arcane had dropped him right on the red tiled roof of the stucco house itself, giving him a commanding view of the grounds. He'd quietly taken out the guards who also thought that was a great vantage point, and was lying in overwatch. If anyone else on the team somehow got overwhelmed, he was ready to snipe.

Captain America didn't blend much more than Iron Man, for all that he at least wasn't powered by jet engines. He'd made for the helipad northeast of the house, on what had been a lovely stone dock until Killian had redecorated it. A large military transport helicopter was waiting there, and it seemed the most likely escape route for the men in charge. After easily taking out a couple of unpowered guards, he'd found himself in a wild brawl with Savin, whose heat and rapid regeneration was currently evening out the Captain's physical advantages while he figured out how to fight the man without getting burned.

Iron Man was unleashing a lot of pent-up frustration about his last couple of days on the goons heading his way. With the armor on, he had nothing to fear from small arms fire (for all that the security guards kept trying), and the exterior of the mansion mean his flight was a huge advantage against soldiers whose super powers maybe meant they could jump a little higher. A red-glowing warrior had sprinted his way and promptly found himself decapitated by the Mark 33's extendable swords.

They'd decided as a group that taking Extremis soldiers alive wasn't safe or likely. Given the expectation they could take out Iron Patriot, what Stark had seen in Rose Hill, and the possibility they'd explode in a firestorm if they got too worked up, putting them down fast and hard was the Captain's reluctant order. If Hansen was right, they might be too far gone mentally to ever be rehabilitated.

While everyone else was working their way through the guards, Arcane had already invisibly infiltrated the house. The mansion was huge, but the majority of the people in it were outside fighting Iron Man. The mage's empathic sense was leading him almost subconsciously toward the two places where there still seemed to be people. The first room he found was a large office on the ground floor. Killian's shouting coming out of it probably also had something to do with locating it so quickly.

"I needed you to do two things! Keep SHIELD off my back and get Rhodes into place for the plan!" The AIM founder was barely keeping from getting hot enough to melt the cell phone he was holding as he yelled, pacing around the elaborately appointed room. It was full of expensive Asian bric-a-brac: scroll paintings on the walls, jade carvings and elaborate vases, and, of course, various Chinese swords.

"JARVIS, are we recording?" Arcane whispered, as he moved invisibly to take in the conversation.

The AI agreed, "I'm flagging the last thirty seconds of video and audio for retention and recording until told otherwise."

"Might as well save my feed, too," Iron Man agreed, over the party comms. "We'll see if we want to post any of it on social media. Do it for the clout."

"And whose fault is it that he was tipped off?" Killian was continuing, having heard the argument from the other side. "Iron Man is at my house! I'm going to have to take care of that. You do your job, if you really want to be the first Puerto Rican president. That job is to keep anyone else from interfering." A pause for further excuses then, "I don't care that your family is at your house for Christmas Eve! Tell you what. Send Rhodes here. I can still make this work. Just keep anyone else from coming. Maybe we'll have both the Iron Man and Iron Patriot armors to use."

With that, Killian hung up and set down the phone, carefully stripping out of his expensive shirt to reveal that he was an even bigger white-guy-too-into-Asian-culture than the room's decor would indicate: he had massive Chinese dragon tattoos across his chest and shoulders. With the way he was heating up as he readied for a fight, it was a wonder the ink survived. Did he get them after he had Extremis regeneration? What kind of tech had he invented just to get culturally-appropriative tattoos?

"Have to do everything myself," he grumbled, striding out of the room as Arcane moved out of the way.

"You all get that?" the invisible mage asked, moving deeper into the house to the other location he felt was important.

"He was talking to the Vice President," Hawkeye figured. "Rodriguez is Puerto Rican."

"They're planning to assassinate the President!?" Captain America said, offended.

"Probably with some big performance. It's why they needed Rhodes' armor to get close to him," Black Widow agreed. "And here comes Killian."

"You all have this?" Arcane checked, having slipped into what appeared to be a recording studio. "I think I found where they're making the Mandarin broadcasts."

"I finished with my guy," the Captain agreed, not having bothered to learn the name of Killian's most elite bodyguard. "Catch that terrorist leader if you can."

An entire wing of the house seemed to be dedicated to the phony Mandarin. Surprising to Arcane was that the entry to the area included a blonde in a turquoise sequined dress passed out on a couch, as if she'd had a long night of partying. The area otherwise looked like a bodyguard station, but whoever was on duty must have left to go deal with the fighting outside. He considered waking the woman, but he didn't get the impression she was a threat.

Through a set of double doors, an enormous room had been turned into a cobbled-together film studio, with video monitors, boxes of equipment, set backdrops, and makeup tables haphazardly arranged. How many of the "on location" shots for the Mandarin videos had just been video editing, while the man himself was in front of a large piece of painted plywood, or a green screen?

One corner of the room had an enormous and elaborate bed installed, along with a dresser and lamps, indicating that it was functioning as a bedroom. With the mansion to use, did the country's most wanted terrorist just sleep in the back of his film studio? Was it to reduce the risk of anyone coming to the house noticing anything was amiss? Given the two other women passed out under the burgundy duvet, it seemed like there wasn't a lot of operational security.

How deep were these women in on it that they hadn't gone to the cops about who they were sleeping with? Or were they just that checked out, and maybe unaware of the kind of reward that would come with revealing a terrorist on United States soil?

The "Mandarin" himself, wearing a black t-shirt and red satin pajama pants, was sprawled across the women in a way that was probably only tolerable because all three had basically just blacked out in an intoxicated stupor a couple of hours earlier. Arcane really considered waking them up. Getting answers. But the whole setup seemed a little lame to him. Maybe this guy was just an actor? A real co-conspirator wouldn't be drugged out of his mind with a couple of party girls while so much was going on, would he? If he'd been important, why hadn't Killian sent anyone to wake him up when Iron Man attacked?

Arcane just carefully and quietly took the time to create a large portal and let it slide over the bed, depositing all three unawares into a SHIELD holding cell.

"We could actually use a little help up here, Arcane," Black Widow announced over the comms. "Reinforcements."

"Plus Killian is giving Iron Man a hell of a fight," Hawkeye snarked.

"This suit hasn't been combat tested. I'm having to figure it out as I go!" the billionaire argued, not too overwhelmed to snipe back at his teammates.

Rather than sprint back outside, Arcane just created a quick portal to jump to the once-nice grounds of the mansion. The antique stonework had been taken apart from bullets, missiles, and just flying goon bodies, and patches were on fire where someone with Extremis heat had bumped into vegetation. There were another dozen or more of the powered soldiers mixing it up on the grounds. A couple of speedboats drifting away from the mansion's dock suggested that they'd come in a hurry from somewhere nearby on the water. The sun had risen enough to cast long morning shadows across the grounds, and begin the area's rise to being too warm for how humid it was.

It was interesting to watch the Avengers work, in the few moments Arcane had to assess the battlefield before he joined in. Iron Man really was tied up with Killian, who was glowing red hot and leaping off of walls and other garden structures to keep the flying hero on the defensive. If the armored billionaire just backed off well into the air, the fiery mastermind might go after the others.

For the most part, Captain America and Black Widow were holding their own against a larger number of powered foes. Even as ex-military, none of them had skills approaching either Avenger, but they had numbers, were dangerous to get hit by, and were very hard to casually take out due to their regeneration. Hawkeye was helping where he could, but a couple had the parkour skills to have chased him onto the roof, and he was fighting his own battle retreating over the terra cotta while trying to maintain overwatch.

"Hands off the lady," Arcane announced, finally revealing his presence, as he threw an energy whip and caught the arm of a goon who was swinging a burning hand in a way that looked like it might catch Black Widow unaware. The man was stronger than the teen mage, but surprised, and the magical energy whips had extra force to them if you knew how to use your willpower to help with the leverage. He had more luck than they'd had with the troll in first year, and yanked the man over backwards into a fountain, where the bit of water left in there for the winter erupted in a blast of steam.

"Thanks," she said, realizing that she'd almost been tagged from behind. She repositioned to fight the other two she was brawling with. "Go help the Captain."

The star spangled man with a plan himself was, indeed, close to getting overwhelmed by the seven soldiers that had chosen him as the biggest ground-based threat. It was impressive to watch him still doing well for himself. There were enough stone walls, trees, and other adornments on the mansion grounds that he was able to duck and weave to keep from getting fully surrounded, his shield bouncing off of goons and terrain and yet back in his hand in time to block any searing Extremis punches. Honestly, he might be able to pull out a win except the temperature was getting to him: even the attacks that he blocked heated the metal of his shield and the air near him, so he was functionally fighting in a sauna.

Time to even the odds a little. "Captain. On your left," Arcane told him over the comms, spinning open a portal that he could see the morning sky through behind one of the more overheated men attacking the first Avenger. The hero in blue wasted no time kicking his assailant through the portal, and actually managed a shield throw that knocked a second man into position to be kicked through a second later.

A quarter mile up and out over the water, both men were suddenly falling. If terminal velocity into the ocean didn't overwhelm their Extremis regeneration, at least they'd have to swim back to the fight and would probably not be able to explode dramatically.

Not liking the sudden change in odds, one of the remaining five fighting the Captain turned on Arcane, while the man he'd whipped into the fountain recovered and joined in as well. Both larger men came at him hard and fast, their military training at least enough to keep them from trying to talk at him. They were all business: the mage broke the rules they knew about fighting, so they needed to keep him from continuing to even the odds.

But other than their ability to generate heat, Arcane had dealt with this kind of fight before. It seemed like every few months he was having to deal with multiple large bruisers with beyond-human strength and speed. And these guys were over-reliant on their super power. If they'd remembered to bring guns, they might have been a problem. The Avengers' mage didn't even bother with a shield spell, instead manifesting an energy sword in each hand, turning up their cutting power, and extending them long enough to have a reach advantage.

It turned out that whatever heat protection Extremis gave you, it didn't make you immune to what was basically a lightsaber. And when you'd lost your arms suddenly and were waiting for them to regenerate back, your neck was an easier target. Arcane would need a lot of storytelling in his future to get over the four men he'd killed by sword or portal in thirty seconds, and he was just hoping that Hansen was right that they were basically unredeemable, due to what Extremis had done to their brains.

The fight having so quickly dropped from thirteen-on-four to nine-on-five, the other Avengers were handling their own goons. Black Widow had figured out a combination of gadgets and nerve strikes that was allowing her to knock her foes unconscious. Without having to concentrate on helping the others on the ground, Hawkeye had found a few particularly lethal arrows and acted as a deadly cupid, shooting directly through his opponents' hearts. Captain America had reluctantly decapitated a couple of his own foes with the edge of his shield, and managed to smash the other two into unconsciousness against the stonework of the garden.

Iron Man still seemed to be having a little trouble with Killian, who had managed to melt crucial parts of the armor so its maneuverability was compromised. The Avenger barely managed to fly above the cone of fire that the AIM founder was breathing like an actual dragon, before shouting, "It was always me, Tony. Right from the start. I am the Mandarin!"

"You're really not," Arcane noted, simply, from behind the man, whose tunnel-vision trying to kill Iron Man had left him blind to how the fight was going against his henchmen. As he spun around to face the new target behind him, the red-and-chrome armor finally lost flight power and the billionaire inventor turned the several-yard fall into an advantage. He extended one of the suit's arm swords and wound up bisecting Killian basically in half down the middle.

"I meant to do that," Iron Man said, as he desperately staggered to keep from falling over completely on the garden's cobblestones.

It was suddenly quiet, except for the sizzling corpse halves of Aldrich Killian. There were a few Extremis soldiers that were simply unconscious, and two that might need to be fished out of the ocean if they'd survived their fall, but most were headless or heartless and cooling across the grounds. Most of the non-powered thugs had been easily incapacitated and also needed to be arrested. Singed and tired, the Avengers regarded the area, wondering if there was anything else they needed to handle before three of them had to go back to stop an arms deal.

The calm was broken by the sound of jet engines as Iron Patriot blasted in from the north. JARVIS finally linking him into their comms, Rhodey announced, "I'm coming in hot, where do you need me? I'll drop in on… you're done already, aren't you?"


And that's Iron Man 3, except for a bit of denouement that will mix with some additional winter break stuff.

This one fought me. Killian's plan only seems to work in the movie because he's read the script and knows that Iron Man has a set of armor that doesn't work right (and that the director has forgotten that charging the suit is the one thing the arc reactor does) and won't call in SHIELD or the other Avengers. Also Pepper goes to hide at a hotel with some random woman rather than hiring a security detail (or also going to SHIELD). So putting Harry's fingers on it and not collapsing it immediately was a challenge. And that's not even mentioning the head scratchers like North Carolina shooting that had them recreate a Malibu bar but just use Epic Games as Stark Industries (on its fully-forested campus with Raleigh-area trees). From dialogue, I think the finale fight at the ship facility with the Norco is supposed to take place 10-20 miles offshore of Miami on some kind of artificial island/oil rig? Where was Air Force One flying from and to that would take it OVER Miami when Savin attacks?

I must have rewatched the movie enough times to give Disney+'s algorithm fits trying to figure out a way of making it consistent enough for a story that changes things.

Which is basically all to say that I barely got THIS chapter done before it was due to be posted, and my buffer for my other fic is also becoming precarious. So I'm going to have to take a (hopefully short) hiatus on this fic while I finish that one and then try to build my buffer back up for Infinity Stones. Then we'll be back with the rest of winter break and back to Hogwarts.

This is a great time to review with what you hope to see in the back half of Year 5!