"Is Kevin Bacon still the greatest actor of all time?" Quill asked, standing in one of the cramped metal corridors of Yondu's ship. He'd gotten a little sidetracked from explaining the plan to stop Ronan from destroying Xandar after he found out the teens were from his home planet. Well, it had also taken a minute to explain that to him, since he'd uncritically spent the last few decades thinking that he was from the planet Missouri.

It was weird the blind spots people could have when they were abducted by aliens as a kid. Harry was being generous and assuming it might also have to do with the Earth/dirt translator error. "He's still working, but I don't know about 'greatest'…"

Dean saw the grown man's face fall, some crucial piece of his childhood identity attacked, and threw him the bone of, "He is the guy everyone uses to rate their stardom by."

"Oh, right, Bacon number," Harry agreed. Seeing Quill's confusion he explained, "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon. He's in so many movies that you can figure out whether you've made it as an actor based on whether you've been in a movie with him, or a movie with someone that's been in a movie with him, and so on."

"Neat! See, I told you!" he insisted to Kraglin, who he'd come to meet, along with the boys, to pitch his plan for their seeming suicide run to try to save Xandar.

"Yeah," the skinny pirate sighed, explaining to the teens, "Pete's been telling me about the man named for salted meat strips for years."

"Greatest Eighties actors, though," Dean continued, leaning against the wall in deep contemplation. "I might have to go Schwarzenegger, for sheer staying power."

"I almost forgot about Schwarzenegger!" Quill beamed. "I worried he'd peaked at Terminator."

"Oh, man. You left before Terminator 2 came out," Dean said, "and True Lies!"

Harry added, "Yeah, he had a lot of stuff in the 90s. Probably would have done even more, but he retired to be governor of California until, like, last year."

"No!"

Suddenly realizing that there were now three of exactly the same kind of terran nerd that he had to wrangle, Kraglin insisted, "Yondu needs to know we're not just gonna get killed on Xandar."

Brain still on all the pop culture updates he could pry out of the teens, the guy that was really trying to make "Star-Lord" happen visibly reined himself in and got back to his business face. "It's simple. Ronan's a prima donna jerk. He could sneak down to the ground on Xandar, or just drop the Stone in a missile or something, but we're pretty sure he wants to land there in his dumb giant ship. We just need to stop him."

"Wasn't he going to give the Stone to Thanos?" Harry asked. "I thought we needed to figure out how to stop that handoff"

Quill shook his head, "Gamora says she's sure he's going to double-cross her dad. Overheard him already planning it."

"Can this ship stop his?" Dean checked.

"We need to slow it down enough that we can get in and kill him. And I'm going to call Nova. I think they'll help. It's their planet."

"I called some people too," Harry said. "Not sure they can get to Xandar, but it was worth a shot."

Quill nodded, not really happy to acknowledge that someone else might add something to the plan, and continued, "But, yeah. Gamora knows how to shut down the defenses inside the ship. We'll just slip in, fight to the control room, kill Ronan, take the orb, get out clean. Easy."

Harry was sure he was overselling his confidence, but before he could point that out, Yondu walked around a corner and insisted, "And then you give that orb to me."

"That is what we agreed to," the terran that was basically his adopted son said, but didn't love it.

Grinning with his pointed teeth, the Ravager leader patted the man on the shoulder and said, "We're a bit out. Work out with them wizards what they can add to the plan then come brief us."

"They're wizards?"

While Quill boggled at the idea of wizard teens, Harry went past him into the cargo room the rest of his motley crew was hanging out in, which had been the same place the teens had been held prisoner earlier. The other three Hogwarts students had already found their way in. Groot was bemusedly being inspected by the plant-obsessed Neville while Luna translated. Hermione seemed to already be working out a plan with the raccoon (who, they'd eventually found out, was named Rocket).

Was he actually a raccoon, or just an alien that looked like one? Had Hermione already asked him about it? Did it not occur to her because raccoons weren't common in Britain and unheard of on Vanaheim? Would it be rude of Harry to ask, in case she hadn't?

He was fortunately interrupted from that thought process by the green woman that approached as soon as he entered the room. "Harry," Gamora said, honestly seeming pleased to see him, but she was all business, "the orb we are seeking is another of the Stones. I don't know if you've…"

"I've seen most of them, ma'am," he interrupted. "The Norns are trying to get me to see… maybe touch?... all of them for some reason. I only have one left after this one."

Her eyes widened. "My fath… Thanos… has only ever held one. But he desires them all."

"So he can use them to kill half the universe."

That got a bewildered smirk out of her. "That old headmaster has figured it all out?"

"Well, I put a lot of it together and he filled in the details," Harry shrugged. "You don't happen to know about some woman—big antler headdress, power over the dead, Aesir bogeyman—that he's working with, do you?"

That stopped her for a moment as she considered. "He has never taken a wife or mistress, and there are rumors among his followers. As much as we are allowed to joke, I have heard many times the idea of him trying to 'court death' and it seems to have dual meanings."

Drax leaned in and stage-whispered, "Metaphor." He had been holding so still they had barely noticed he was a couple of yards away, listening to their conversation.

"Double entendre," I think, Harry disagreed. Maybe he should continue to take history with Binns for his last two years, even though he didn't have to, now that he'd finished the exams. It had been a surprisingly reasonable education in English. "You think Thanos might be in love with this… person? Goddess?"

She scoffed, "He's never loved anything other than himself. But if he's been secretly working with an entity with powers over the dead, his plan makes a lot more sense. He claims that it's about saving the resources of the universe from overpopulation."

"Really?" He thought about that for a minute and said, "That's dumb. I think Earth's population has doubled in, like, the last forty or fifty years, and we'd do it again even if you killed half of us. But Vanaheim's population has been basically stable for centuries and they're doing okay. And there's already so few wizards that inbreeding is a problem, so killing half of them would be bad. Plus! With all the Stones couldn't he just make more resources for everyone?"

"He likes to kill," the big gray-skinned kylosian shrugged. "It is stupid to pretend you are killing for some noble goal, if you just like to kill. It is okay to like to kill. It's fun. The galaxy would be safer if leaders admitted they just like to kill."

Both Harry and Gamora were both about to object, but then realized that neither had much of a leg to stand on. She, if she was being honest, really did like to kill. Harry was pretty sure he didn't, but would definitely prefer if his leaders were honest that they did.

Before they could discuss the reasonableness of killing for a cause, or a death goddess, or your own whims, Hermione interrupted from the other side of the room, where Quill had joined her conversation with Rocket. "Harry! The new plan might hinge on whether you can make portals onto the Dark Aster. That's Ronan's ship."

"I'll practice. Not sure how well it will work when the portal ends are moving at high speeds in different directions," Harry considered. "But Ronan was able to break a portal with his hammer thing. Called it 'Lem tricks.' They might have some kind of tech built into the ship that acts like wards."

"So we may have to open holes to unseal the ship and bridge before portals are viable," she explained to the human and the raccoon.

"Holes… we can make," Rocket nodded.

That's how they found themselves a few hours later in an aerial chaos straight out of a shoot-'em-up video game. Even the Battle of New York hadn't been so hectic. The Ravagers had come with a bunch of small ships. The Dark Aster had launched a bunch of small ships. There were ships everywhere, all shooting at each other.

"Team Yondu: Now!" Rocket announced over the comms they were all fitted with. The teens had opted out of Ravager coats, since their rune-armored clothing was plenty of defense (and because they wanted to make Hermione feel special for the coat she'd won at cards), but they'd accepted some other tech to help coordinate. They could see the explosion from the side of the Dark Aster. Ronan's giant ship was a massive near-cylinder of symmetrical, independently-rotating ring habitats.

"I need to see inside," Harry said, clinging onto the back of Yondu's pilot seat as the centaurian wove through the fray. The cockpit of the smaller, jet-like spacecraft was packed with the other four Hogwarts students, Quill, Gamora, Drax, and Groot. The Ravager leader flipped a switch that made the center of the canopy zoom in to display a magnification of the hole, and Harry could see enemy soldiers rushing about within the exposed interior. "Okay. Keep it steady and lined up on the ship!" he insisted.

He hadn't solved the portal problem, yet. There hadn't been time to really figure out how to make two moving anchors for both ends of a portal, especially at interstellar speeds. He'd been taking for granted how easy it was to make portals on a planet, where no matter how far apart the ends were, they were more or less stable relative to each other. But if he could get their ship to stay in the same position and distance from the destination…

"Ready! You're going into a fight. And there's a drop! Go, go, go!" he yelled at everyone, the portal stabilizing on their ship's bridge and showing him the interior of the enemy cargo bay. Fortunately, it was a big space, because the other end of the portal was at least a yard off the floor and waving around. Yondu couldn't sync his ship perfectly. "I'm right behind you!"

The other four teens were first through, already conjuring shields so they could protect against any enemies that reacted quickly. Shortly behind were Gamora, Quill, and Drax. Groot, taking up the most space, had to duck and step carefully through the portal, which barely fit him in the small cockpit.

"We got company!" Yondu announced, a moment before a blast hit the ship. They had been holding far back, but had been noticed.

The ship began to spin, Harry lost the portal as the other end smashed into the floor of the Dark Aster, Groot got a foot splinched off as it collapsed, and Harry was still on the wrong side in a crashing ship, desperately trying to buckle himself into a seat.

The salty pirate captain narrated as he tried to control his and Harry's descent to the surface of Xandar. "Aw, hell! We're going down, Quill! No more games with me, boy! I'll see you at the end of this!"

Before they crash landed, they at least heard over their comms that the Nova Corps had joined the dogfight. Quill thought it was because he'd sent them a dick message, but there was no time to unpack that.

Banged up but alive when Yondu managed a survivable impact in a field somewhere on the planet's surface, Harry had a moment to appreciate the impressive lattice of Nova ships in the air above. They meant "blockade" more literally than normal fleets. Each of the small, star-shaped ships was connected on beams of golden force to its neighbors, making a massive aerial net that the Dark Aster was wrapped in, trying to keep it from reaching the ground through sheer oppositional force.

He only had that one moment to look, however, since enemy ships had tracked them to the ground and spread out sakaaran soldiers around them. As they staggered out into the air, one of the armored aliens pulled off his mask, revealing a buglike face. Harry had worked out that most of Ronan's soldiers were basically cousins of Aragog, the spiderlike alien that lived in the Forbidden Forest. "Yondu Udonta, order your men to turn on the Nova Corps!" the leader bellowed.

Yondu's face twitched. He reached to move his coat off his leg, where his weird arrow device was holstered. Harry rolled his eyes and asked, "Do we need to fight these guys?"

"Guess not…" the blue-skinned man shot him a look.

"Cool." Harry spun open a portal and jumped through before the aliens could even react, the pirate right behind him. They emerged in the main plaza of the Nova city where they'd met the Broker the previous day. The battle was right overhead, and citizens were fleeing in terror.

Opening portals between two stable points on a planet was way easier.

"I don't like the look of that!" Harry told his unexpected partner, the ground already littered with pieces of ships that had crashed into the area. There were dozens of people trying to escape the debris, and the plaza was mostly open and far on foot from any kind of legitimate protection. "Everyone's a sitting duck down here! Or fish in a barrel."

"Used'ta ship barrels of fish on the regular. Lotsa things you can hide in there," Yondu absently said, observing their predicament. He gestured about a mile across town, at a large defensive tower with a giant star emblem on the side. "Safer over near the Nova building."

"On it," Harry said, having to guess where to place the other end of the portal since he'd never been there specifically, but had a pretty good line of sight to the location. He could see the building through it, though the egress was a bit off the ground. "Everybody!" he shouted to the fleeing citizens, putting a little magic into his voice to amplify it. "Come this way to get to safety! Watch your step!"

They might have normally not been inclined to follow the advice of a random teen standing next to a guy in Ravager uniform, but Yondu went through the portal like his ass was on fire as soon as another sakaaran ship crashed about a dozen yards away and exploded, so the nearby citizens got the message and fled after.

Harry would have rather been on the flagship, fighting, but realized he might just have a bigger impact saving civilians on the ground.

The communicators were spotty with his friends within the hull of the ship and him on the ground, or maybe they were just tied up and forgetting to use them since everyone else was present. Hermione eventually remembered to share, "Gamora is fighting her sister while I try to get these doors open. Everyone else went to fight to the control room."

"It's just like that last big fight when we opened the Room," Dean acknowledged, from where he and the rest of the team were fighting. "Lots of guys."

"I'm in the city getting civilians to safety," Harry told them.

"Good. They're going to dive bomb," Rocket broke in. "I told Nova to stay put. We're coming down."

Sure enough, Harry looked up and saw dozens of enemy necrocraft orienting themselves toward the ground, abandoning the dogfight and leaving nothing in the air but the Dark Aster slowly growing larger as the blockade couldn't fully hold it, only partially countering its engines. "Go! Go! Go!" he yelled at the last few citizens that were rushing his way. He'd had almost a minute, so had basically cleared out everyone within a hundred yards that could see him. The feather-headed Broker was one of the last people through, lugging an overfull satchel that presumably carried his most expensive goods and shooting a worried look at his shop and all the treasures he'd had to leave behind.

Harry let the portal close after the last person stepped through and took a deep breath. Opening a portal across town wasn't exactly strenuous, but holding it for a minute while a few dozen people used it wasn't nothing.

He shouted at the sky, "Hey! If you're going to be able to make it, now's the time. No pressure, but it would be appreciated!"

Then he limbered up, sighted at the enemy ship trying to crash into him as the only person left in the empty plaza, and spun open the biggest portal he could. The practice he had over the winter with redirecting missiles paid off, and he managed to send the ship that was coming right for him directly into another ship that was still a ways off of the ground, both of them erupting into a massive explosion as they collided. "Wizard boy!" Yondu yelled at him over the comms. "I thought you was right behind all them people! Ravagers! Shoot those bugs afore they hit the ground and protect that dumb kid!"

Harry had certainly made himself an obvious target for the other ships, which at least clustered the attacks on the center of the plaza. For all that Rocket and the other Ravager ships, hovering over the nearby river, were doing a good job shooting most of the necrocraft before they could hit the ground, the exploded pieces of them raining down weren't exactly safe. Harry was having to put portals over his head just to catch falling debris, rather than dive-bombing ships.

He felt like he'd been at the center of a storm for hours, though it had probably only been a minute, when there was a huge beam of rainbow light that punched a hole through the rain of sakaaran necrocraft and traced a knotwork searmark on the white Xandarian pavement. When the flash of light cleared, there were a dozen figures visible, some astride an Aesir flying boat.

"Apologies for our lateness, Harry," Thor said. "This is progressing faster than we expected." With a wink, the God of Thunder whirled his hammer and flung himself up and through an incoming ship.

Loki told him, "You're responsible for the diplomatic incident this might cause with Xandar," and then lifted off in the Aesir craft, the Warriors Three, Sif, and a few einherjar manning the weapons stations on the oddly anachronistic aircraft.

"It's… raining men?" Bruce observed, and then started running toward an undefended part of the plaza, turning big and green as he went. The purple-and-silver Aesir-woven robes he'd been talked into wearing on the campaign against the marauders cleverly shifted into a pair of shorts and vest as he grew, rather than tearing apart. The Hulk leapt into the air, managing to snatch a necrocraft before it hit the ground and hammer toss it into another one nearby.

"What the hell is that!?" Yondu demanded, over the comms.

"The friends I called," Harry said, simply.

The next minute or so was a weird throwback to the Battle of New York, only Loki was on their side in the ballet of aerial explosions. With the Aesir vanguard in play, well-trained in this kind of fight after months of driving other aliens off protected worlds, the sakaaran necrocraft barrage was pushed further and further back. By the time Hermione mentioned over the comms, "I think that did it! The door should be unlocked. Sorry. I had to figure it out while Gamora was beating up her sister," there was mostly clear sky above.

"Loki!" Harry managed to catch the God of Mischief's attention as he piloted the sky skiff by, getting him to descend low enough that the teen wizard could use a conjured whip to grapple up and swing onto the deck. "Can you basically match speeds with the bad guy ship?"

"Your portals still need to be fixed to each other, eh?" the younger of the two princes teased him. "I think I can manage."

"We're going in," Quill said over the comms, as Harry was waiting to get in position to open a portal. "The Hadron Enforcer is loaded!"

"Right behind you," Gamora announced, a little out of breath.

"You did it!" Drax said, after Harry thought he spotted the flare of an explosion on the Dark Aster's bridge that was visible even thousands of yards away and through the yellow light of the Nova blockade. Harry wondered if he would even need to portal up, if the plan had gone so smoothly.

"He didn't do it!" Hermione near-shrieked moments later.

"They're in trouble!" the Boy-Who-Lived announced to Loki, starting to spin open a portal. "Tell Thor!"

Instead of his friends and allies on the comms, the next thing he heard was Ronan's voice, seemingly broadcasting on every channel. "Xandar, you stand accused! Your guardians of the galaxy: what fruit have they wrought? Only that my father and his father shall finally know vengeance."

Hoping against hope that everyone wasn't dead, Harry semi-blindly targeted his portal using the same empathic sense that he'd use to find loved ones when he was in astral form. As he leaped through onto the explosion-wrecked bridge of the Dark Aster, he saw the Accuser standing triumphantly against the detritus, universal weapon held aloft with the purple light of the Power Stone gleaming from where it was affixed to the side of the hammer's head.

Drax was sprawled near him, insensate or unconscious, and the other seven seemed to have been blasted into various corners of the room. Some were struggling to get up but others lay still. Harry thought that his empathy would let him know if any of his friends were dead, but they'd obviously taken a beating, possibly from just one wave of overwhelming force from the Power Stone. Was that same power protecting Ronan even from massive explosions?

The kree looked like he was charging up the energy within the Stone for something else, maybe to destroy all the Nova ships still blockading his flagship, and Harry tried to figure out a way to distract him. Glancing at Dean and Quill struggling to get up, all he could think about was 80s movies.

"Ronan the Accuser! Good evening! As a self-appointed representative of the planet, nation, and city of Xandar, I order you to cease any and all superpowered activity and return forthwith to your planet of origin or to the nearest convenient neutral region!"

Almost to his feet, Dean yelled the next part of the quote, "That ought to do it. Thanks very much, Harry."

As Ronan turned to Harry, head tilted in confusion, Quill explained to the genocidal alien, "You're supposed to ask him if he's a god."

"Are you a god?" the Accuser obliged, completely nonplussed by this whole exchange.

"No…" Harry admitted, turning his head slightly to glance out of the corner of his eye and make sure his timing was right. "But he is."

From the still-open portal behind him, the other end near Loki's skyship, Thor had landed on the deck, whirled Mjolnir, and launched the smaller hammer through and straight at Ronan. While the Power Stone was, perhaps, invulnerable to being smashed by the uru-forged artifact, the universal weapon it was stuck to was significantly less sturdy. The hammer of Thor slowed very little as it shattered the hammer of the kree, rocketing past and smashing out the front canopy of the Dark Aster's bridge.

Everything seemed to go into slow motion.

In the purple surge of energy, even more of the front of the ship exploded outward, following the path of Mjolnir. The alien pilots in the room, barely having endured the first explosion, lost consciousness, and the ship began to tilt forward.

The Power Stone hovered in the air, a dark purple star. But with the Nova blockade still slowing the warship, gravity began to pull it down. It would only be moments before it hit the floor, sloping away, and risked skipping toward the front of the ship.

If it fell toward the ground, would the blockade stop it? Or would the tiny stone slip unhindered, making its way to the planet's surface, eradicating all life below?

"No!" Harry and Quill realized simultaneously. The teen's reflexes were faster, but Quill was closer. Both of them got a hand on the Power Stone on its first bounce off the deck of the ship.

Ronan, an actual adult, had taken a full step back, long past the juvenile reflex to try to catch a dropped, dangerous object and risk injuring himself.

For Harry, it was like thrusting his hand into an electrical socket that was also a wood chipper and a pool of strong sulfuric acid. It was a full-body pain greater than anything he'd experienced before. Everything around him seemed to fade away into roaring purple smoke. All he could see was Quill, who was starting to look as bad as Harry felt, skin melting away into black dust. This was probably what it felt like to get hit with dark magic: coruscating and disintegrating. Was this the torture that Neville's parents had survived?

Death should have been instantaneous, rather than this ongoing pain. A faint orange glow surrounded Harry, the Soul Stone power within him doing what it could to delay the inevitable. There was no telling why Quill wasn't instantly disintegrated. He and the teen shared a look of hurt and embarrassment that they'd wound up choosing such a stupid way to die. And then, over the man's shoulder, Gamora's face and arm swam out of the storm of power. "Peter! Take my hand!"

The phrase sent a jolt through the Ravager's heart. In full contact and Soul Stone powers flaring, Harry couldn't help but share the memory. As Quill turned to look at her, Gamora was overlaid with a bald, dying woman. Like Harry, Peter Quill had to watch his mother die right in front of him. Cancer wasn't fast, like Lily Potter's death had been, and he hadn't been a toddler so he was old enough to remember it. Old enough to run from it. Nearly three decades later, maybe he was finally ready to stop running from people that might love him. The man who called himself Star-Lord reached out into the storm, grasping the hand that shifted back to Gamora's as he took it and shared some of the burden.

Dean and Hermione didn't bother asking. While he'd been watching Quill, Harry's friends had forced their way in and laid their own hands on his arm.

With each of their friends piling in, sharing the slow disintegration, the storm pushed back a bit. Groot got a branch around both of them, Luna and Neville held onto the flora colossus, and Drax put a hand on Quill's shoulder. The pain was still immense, but it was shared. Still only a long stride away, Ronan stood dumbfounded, demanding, "You're mortal? How?!"

Star-Lord quipped, "You said it yourself, bitch. We're the Guardians of the Galaxy."

"Also, the Avengers!" Harry noted.

Timed well, again, on that team-boosting statement, having finally caught Mjolnir and flown himself up the long way, Thor emerged out of the storm and dealt Ronan a mighty blow to the back of the head, felling the Accuser in one stroke.

Hermione fished out one of the replacement orbs that Rocket had fabricated back on the ship, and dropped it where Harry and Quill could shove the Power Stone in.

As soon as the small metal ball snapped closed around the node of pure destruction, the storm ceased. Somehow, despite looking like they were high-energy mummies a moment earlier, none of them were the worse for wear. It was just nine exhausted people looking up at a grinning God of Thunder, the villain of the piece unconscious and slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and the giant warship bobbing drunkenly on the net of Nova Corps ships.

"Do they have shawarma on Xandar?" Thor asked. "I still haven't gotten to try it…"

Down on the ground, Yondu was racing on foot toward one of the Ravager ships, announcing over comms, "You get that orb? Remember the deal we made!"

From seemingly out of nowhere, a tall, slender, dark-haired man that he'd never met stepped in front of him. "Apologies," Loki said, "but Asgard insists on seeing that Stone safely contained. However… I'm quite impressed with your fleet. Have you ever considered… privateering?"