Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

London, October 23, 2002

Tony was already half drunk when he wandered out of Les Ambassadeurs casino into London’s crisp autumn air just as the sun was setting. He’d been up nearly three million pounds earlier in the day, but a couple of drinks later, and he was leaving a quarter million in the hole. Not his best day of gambling—Pepper would probably disapprove if she found out—but Tony wasn’t too worked up about it. By the time he walked into a quaint pub a block up the street, he’d forgotten his disappointment entirely in favor of admiring the stunning redhead sitting at a high table by the bar.

Tony had hardly been lacking for options back at the casino. The typical model-thin women in their tight dresses and killer heels had been hanging off of him from the moment he’d walked in. They were the classy type of leech, pretty and educated enough to fit in with the ritz and glam of England’s high rollers, though with no real aspirations of their own. Tony had bought them all drinks. He’d let them blow on his dice at the craps table and smirked as they’d oohed and aahed while he played a few rounds of blackjack. And usually Tony would have been happy enough to leave with any one of them. There wasn’t any particular reason he’d decided to walk away instead. He wasn’t tired or upset or too busy, but for whatever reason, today he found the thought of spending any more time with any of those women boring.

The redhead by the bar looked anything but boring.

Her head was tossed back in a surprisingly throaty laugh in response to whatever the barman had said, which Tony could hear from across the moderately crowded room. She was bewitchingly attractive, though her sense of style was…interesting. Her clothes didn’t go together, not by any standard of fashion Tony had ever seen. She wore a thick red wool sweater topped with a flowing blue silk robe-coat-thing, her hair piled messily atop her head, a thick polished stick stuck through the bun. It wouldn’t have worked on anyone else, but Tony was drawn in in an instant. Probably because the woman was the rare kind of beautiful that could look good in a potato sack.

It had been a long time since Tony had felt nervous about approaching a stranger for sex, so he didn’t hesitate to slide one of the two empty seats at the redhead’s table out.

“Mind if I sit?” he asked.

She paused midway through a sip of her beer, granting him a long, assessing look. Not assessing in the usual manner, though, where potential partners would decide in a split second if he was handsome enough, wealthy enough, or whatever-other-criteria-they-have enough to flirt with. This woman’s bright green eyes looked Tony over as if she was checking for a threat, and a moment later, she relaxed and waved him on.

“I will warn you,” she smiled, and there was something impish in the quirk of her lips, “If you’re about to ask if you can buy me a drink—”

A dark-haired man slid onto the only remaining seat at the table. “Then you’ll be buying for me and my wife, mate,” he said, throwing his arm around the woman’s shoulders.

The newcomer didn’t outshine movie stars the way his wife did, but when it came to men, he was exactly Tony’s type: lanky, mischief in every feature, with an air of restrained danger lurking underneath. So Tony didn’t back away when the man met his stare challengingly. Instead he leaned forward, grinned and let heat fill his expression, doing nothing to disguise his interest.

“Alright then, can I get you both a drink?”

Godric’s Hollow, August 2, 2003

James and Lily stared at the negative paternity test hovering in glowing purple script above their newborn baby’s sleeping head. Lily’s hand drifted up to cover her mouth, tears welled in her eyes. But James, shocked into a stunned stupor, didn’t notice her reaction for nearly a minute, not until a muffled sob finally drew his attention away from the unwanted news.

“Hey,” he said, pulling Lily into a hug, “Hey, we talked about this. We knew there was a chance—”

“A minuscule chance! And I thought, I really thought—He looks so much like you…”

“Potter luck,” James shrugged, offering her a wobbly smile. “But he’s still mine, Lils. One crazy night doesn’t change that.”

“I know. James, I know. He’s yours. Harry will always be yours, in every way that matters. But what will we tell him? And if we have more kids? Will we lie? Will we cover it up like it’s some dirty secret? Or…”

“We’ll tell him,” James decided, though the words sounded choked. “When he’s old enough to understand, we’ll sit him down and explain, and if he wants to meet Tony, we’ll—we’ll respect that.”

Lily nodded slowly, biting at her lip. “We should write a letter,” she said. “Just in case.”

“Don’t think like that, Lils.”

Lily reached into Harry’s crib and ran her finger gently over his soft, chubby cheek.“I have to. If the worst happens, I have to know I did everything…”

James wrapped his arms around her from behind, setting his chin on her shoulder so he could gaze down at their beautiful son. He’d been a father for two days. Two days, forty-eight hours, and already the thought of anything happening to that precious baby boy was too horrible to stomach. This wasn’t about him anymore. Not him, or Lily, or any of their friends. This was about Harry, and making sure he had a bright future, even if James never got to see it.

“Yeah,” he whispered, “Yeah, okay, let’s write that letter.”

Diagon Alley, July 15, 2016

Harry loved Diagon Alley. He’d loved it when he was eleven and entering a whole new world. He’d loved it last year, even with the drama that came with being spat out of a fireplace in Knockturn Alley and Gilderoy Lockhart parading Harry in front of the media and Arthur Weasley getting into a fistfight with Lucius Malfoy. But neither excursion quite compared to actually living in Diagon.

In some ways, the shopping district was the most magical place Harry had ever been. Hogwarts was majestic. With its ghosts and moving staircases and talking portraits, it seemed like every corner of the castle was saturated with magic. Diagon Alley didn’t have such grand displays. It was cobblestoned paths and thatched roofs and gimmicky street performers. But unlike Hogwarts where spell work was restricted to the classroom, here everyone used magic, casually, for everything, even the most mundane of tasks. Merchandise wasn’t carried, but levitated. Clothes were measured by self-directing measuring tapes, notes were written by quick-quotes quills.

It was amazing, but this ubiquitous reliance on magic could sometimes render simple situations complex.

“One second lad,” the shopkeeper at Cob’s Dragon Cobblers said, flicking his wand at a set of checkout scales for the nth time. “I’ve almost got it.”

Harry eyed his three purchases perched on one end of the large gilt scale: a pair of bronze dragon-hide boots, a pair of the Magical World’s equivalent of canvas sneakers, and a bundle of eight silk-blend socks. The math wasn’t difficult. Four galleons, nine sickles, and seventeen knuts for the boots. One galleon, three sickles, twenty-eight knuts for the sneakers. And ten sickles, eleven knuts for the socks. It took Harry all of a second to run the math in his head—six galleons, six sickles, and twenty-seven knuts total. He placed six galleons and seven sickles on the counter.

“Er, you can keep the two knuts,” Harry muttered, hoping to speed things along.

He’d been waiting for the man to fix his gaudy checkout calculator apparatus, which all the shops in Diagon relied upon, for the last ten minutes. He hadn’t been in a rush when he first went to pay, so when the shopkeeper had said he needed a minute to mend his machine, Harry had wandered back into the store to admire a set of iridescent opal-eye dragon boots, which cost an obscene ninety galleons. But as the minutes had dragged on, Harry had grown bored of window shopping, and he’d finally grown too impatient to continue waiting.

He was spending the last of the money he’d taken from his vault last year, so he needed to stop by Gringotts before he could grab lunch. And he was hungry.

Unfortunately, the shopkeeper didn’t seem inclined to let it go that easily.

“You do that in your head?” he asked.

Harry shrugged.

The man squinted at him oddly. “You some kind of genius or somthin’?”

“Er, no.” Harry snorted and shook his head. Flattering as the notion was, Harry knew he’d never been any good at school. Not like Hermione. The Wizarding World just didn’t bother to teach basic math skills, for whatever reason. But Harry was sure any muggle kid could have managed adding up his purchases just as easily. (Besides maybe Dudley, but Harry’s piggy cousin really shouldn’t ever be used as a metric for average intelligence.)

But the shopkeeper didn’t pay his answer any attention. He was a plump little man with a great bald spot spanning the center of his head and large, bushy gray brows sitting like fuzzy caterpillars above limpid blue eyes.

“I never have been able to get the hang of our money,” he said, shaking his head with a put-upon sigh. “And I’ve lived here me whole bloody life! Seventeen sickles to a galleon and twenty-nine knuts to a sickle, whoever thought that up must’ve been high on fairy dust! Muggles, though, now they’ve got the right idea, at least when it comes to money. Me dad’s a muggleborn, see? So I know somethin’ about muggle money, and I’ve been sayin’ for years that they’ve got the right of it over there. Everythin’ out of a hundred, that’s the way to do it! No seventeens and twenty-nines to be figuring out, no sir! They’ve got numbers people can actually add!”

He summoned a roll of parchment and a self-inking quill from across the shop and waved the feather in Harry’s face.

“Now I believe you, lad, but I’m afraid I still have to add this up meself. It’ll just take a moment.”

It was another ten minutes before Harry was able to leave with his purchases. His stomach was growling angrily as he trudged up the steps of the lopsided marble building which housed Gringotts Bank. He’d been here all of twice before, once with Hagrid, once with the Weasleys. The sight of the goblins took him aback almost as much on his third visit as it had on his first. They looked mean. Sharp, narrow eyes and sharp, narrow teeth, and sharp, narrow shark smiles. But they were so small, like seven-year-old children with wrinkles and suits trying to man desks that were sized for human adults, sitting in front of towering white marble walls lined to the brim with weapons fit for giants.

Harry walked up to the first available teller and nervously presented his key. “I’d like to withdraw some money from my vault,” he said.

The goblin looked him over suspiciously, then reached out, picked the key up, and examined it closely under what Harry assumed was an enchanted magnifying glass.

“Very well, Mr. Potter,” the goblin waved another teller over, and handed Harry’s key back. “Paglok will take you.”

Paglok, as it turned out, was the least chatty goblin Harry had ever met, not that any other goblin he’d come across had ever been particularly verbose. But Paglok somehow managed to say not one word to Harry for the entirety of his visit to the bank. The goblin gestured for Harry to follow him with a grunt, gestured for Harry to climb into the transport cart with an odd hiss, and did the same when they slammed to a sudden halt in front of Harry’s vault several minutes and several hundred feet underground later.

Harry rubbed at his shin as he climbed out of the metal box cart, grumbling under his breath. Paglok did not spare him a glance. The goblin marched straight to the door, turned, held out one spindly-fingered hand, and fixed Harry with an imperious stare. The stare did not let up after Harry handed over his key. Those narrow, sharp eyes followed Harry’s every move, unblinking. As the massive circular door swung open on silent hinges, Harry found himself edging sideways around his escort, as if he was afraid one wrong step might set the being off.

And that was when he saw it. Harry would wonder later why he’d never thought to look around his vault before. Though of course he knew. On his first visit with Hagrid, he’d been too enamored by the massive piles of gold in the center of the cave to spare a thought for the rest of the room. And on his second visit with the Weasleys, he’d been in a rush. Flustered, almost embarrassed, as he attempted to hide his sparkling wealth from his impoverished friend. But Harry was facing sideways as he entered his vault this time, and the first thing he saw was not his gold, but a desk. And on that desk sat a letter, yellowed with age, simply addressed: Harry.

Harry’s stomach flipped over. The letter must be from his parents. It was their vault. And it was addressed to him. His parents had written a letter to him. Harry’s next breath shivered into his lungs, his fingers trembled as he reached out, in a daze, to trace the curves of his name. It was written in an old copperplate script, elegant even despite its writer’s sloppiness.

Would Harry’s handwriting have looked like this? If his mother or father, whichever one had written this, had taught him his letters, would Harry’s A’s have looped like this? Would his Y’s have finished his name with this same dramatic flourish?

His throat tightened at the thought, and he quickly—carefully—opened the letter, suddenly hungry to see what his parents had to say.

Hey Prongslet, the salutation greeted him.

Harry paused, staring at the nickname. Prongslet. His eyes flicked to the end of the letter, to the sign off: Love, Dad.

Prongslet.

His dad had called him Prongslet. Harry had no idea what it meant, but he could suddenly picture it. Harry taking his first steps, a messy-haired James crouched opposite him, encouraging him, “Come on, Prongslet, you can do it!” Harry squeezed his eyes shut, savoring the image for just one second before the hunger came back, and he resumed reading eagerly.

Hey Prongslet,

If you’re reading this, then there are really only two options. Either your mum and I forgot to burn it, in which case I suppose we’re all about to have a very awkward conversation. Or your mother and I aren’t with you anymore, in which case I am so, so sorry. We had planned to sit you down when you were old enough and explain everything, but we live in dangerous times. I hope the war will end soon, and that you will never have to experience anything like it. I hope we get to have our awkward conversation, and that I get to look you in the eye and tell you that I love you. But just in case, we decided we needed to write this letter. Your mum thinks it will be better coming from me, and after a bit of arguing just to get her nice and riled up, I had to agree. You should hear it from me so that I can tell you that nothing I’m about to write changes how much I love you. You are my son. You will always be my son. And I love you, unconditionally.

So now that I’ve said all that, we can get into the real meat of this letter. I’m going to assume you know what sex is. If you don’t, then without getting into too much detail, sex is the activity that adults do to make babies. But sometimes adults have sex because we think it is fun, not because we are trying to make a baby.

Your mum and I met Tony Stark at a pub last year. He is a muggle American businessman who owns a company called Stark Industries. The three of us had sex. It was one night, just for fun, and we have not seen or talked to Tony since then. Legally and emotionally, you are my son, Harry. But, biologically, Tony Stark is your father.

I don’t know if you will want to seek him out. If your mum and I are alive and you are reading this letter because we forgot to burn it, then I want you to know that it is okay if you do want to meet Tony. And it is okay if after you meet him, you grow to love him. Having a second father figure in your life will not make our relationship any less special.

If your mum and I are gone, you will have been placed with either Sirius or Frank and Alice Longbottom, or barring them, Marlene McKinnon or one of her half a dozen sisters. That is what we put in our will, and I know that whichever place you ended up, they will have loved you as if you were their own. But you deserve to know that you do have a father out there. And if you want to meet him—or even live with him—you should get to. You can show your guardians this letter. Let them know that this is what your mum and I wanted for you. Whatever makes you happiest, that is what you should do.

We both love you Prongslet, more than anything in the world. I hope that wherever life takes you, you are laughing. I hope that you are happy.

Love,

Dad

Chapter Text

Harry read the letter through three times, down in the bowels of Gringotts Bank. Three times, the words not quite computing, before Paglok cleared his throat and began to tap his steel-toed boot obnoxiously against the stone floor. Harry was sure he looked a sight. At some point, he’d started crying, though he wasn’t sad, not really. A strange mix of grief and elation tangled up in his chest, but not sadness.

His dad loved him. Of all the things spelled out in his dad’s letter to take center stage in Harry’s mind, that tidbit probably shouldn’t have stolen the show. But it did. Harry couldn’t remember anyone ever telling him he was loved. Not Ron or Hermione. Not the Mirror of Erised, which had shown him an impossible dream, but given him no words. Certainly not the Dursleys. But James Potter had. And somehow with this sudden feast of paternal sentiment clutched in his hand, the fact that James had not technically fathered him seemed less significant.

At least until he made it out of Gringotts and into a booth at the Leaky Cauldron. Then embarrassment hit. Harry imagined telling Ron about his discovery:

“Yeah, mate, turns out my dad’s not my biological dad.”

“Oh, was he hit by an infertility curse or something? I heard You-Know-Who’s followers did that sometimes.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that! Don’t worry! Turns out my parents decided to have a threesome one time, and their one night stand got my mum up the duff.”

Harry flushed. He could feel the heat all the way down to his toes. And shite, if just imagining telling Ron was this mortifying, Harry knew he could never tell Hermione. Or God forbid, Mrs. Weasley.

But on the heels of that thought came another: Harry had a dad out there. A living, breathing father. One who looked like him—because Harry had seen the pictures, he didn’t live under a rock, and the resemblance between him and Tony Stark was undeniable now he knew to look for it. And given the Iron Man suit, Tony must like flying too, and he clearly had a reckless streak as massive as Harry’s. And maybe they would have other things in common, like a shared love for treacle tart or the way they preferred their steaks or autumn as their favorite season.

Harry wanted to know.

And, he realized with a burst of excitement, he could. He knew exactly where to find Tony Stark. In a strange twist of fate, Harry had been granted a biological father as famous in the muggle world as Harry was in the magical community. The man was a known entity. And for as long as Dudley had owned Iron Man action figures, the superhero had lived in New York City.

Harry just had to figure out how to get there.

Transatlantic travel, as it turned out, was incredibly simple when magic was involved. Harry made his way over to Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlour after he finished eating his lunch. Florean was a good sort of man, made better in Harry’s estimation by his tendency to provide Harry with free sundaes. But more than that, he was a wealth of information. Harry had yet to pose a history question which Florean could not answer. And he proved just as knowledgable about international travel. So Harry was packed up within the hour, Hedwig sent off with a vague note to stay with Hermione, and headed to the portkey terminal Florean had directed him to at the back end of the alley.

The place, bizarrely, bore a striking resemblance to the bathrooms at major sports stadiums. There were two tiled halls branching out from either side of a reception desk in the middle, the one to the left marked IN, the one to the right marked OUT. Every thirty seconds or so, a witch or wizard walked out of the OUT hall, toting various odds and ends. One lady was dragging a cage containing a rather ornery fire-breathing tiger behind her, and the man after her seemed to favor clear bubbles as his luggage of choice, uncaring of the front row seat he was granting the world to his vast collection of frilly underpants.

The woman at the desk was young, not much past Hogwarts age, with long blond hair, bright blue nails, and an utterly bored look on her face. She didn’t so much as glance up from her crossword puzzle when Harry approached.

“Er,” he shifted from foot to foot, “I’d like to purchase a portkey to New York? Please?”

She still didn’t look up, simply pointed the end of her quill in the vague direction of a contraption hovering at the right side of the desk, then scribbled an answer on her puzzle. The contraption was small and square, with a slot for coins on one side and a round hole on the other. Insert Wand and State Your Destination was written above the hole, with an arrow pointing down. Harry did as instructed.

“Amount due: eight galleons, nine sickles,” said a recorded female voice.

Harry inserted his money, and a blunt, rusted screw dropped onto the desk.

“Please proceed to the nearest open stall,” the voice directed. “Your activation password is YANKEE. Have a good day, Mr. Potter!”

Harry glanced at the girl manning the desk, wondering what exactly her job entailed—possibly stopping underaged wizards from leaving the country unsupervised?—but thankfully, even the machine announcing his name hadn’t drawn her attention. So, shrugging, he scooped up his screw and headed down the IN hallway. Inside, the place’s resemblance to a bathroom became even more apparent. There were sinks on one side opposite a row of stalls on the other. The only thing missing were the actual toilets.

Harry walked into the first stall. He wasn’t sure what to expect from portkey travel. He’d botched his first attempt at the floo, but there was luckily no ash for him to choke on here. Though if the floo network and the Knight Bus were any indication of magical transportation in general, he was probably in for a dizzying ride. With that thought in mind, he made sure he had a solid grip on his trunk, and an even more solid grip on the screw, then, nerves zipping down his spine, he shouted, “Yankee!”

With a sickening lurch, an invisible hook latched on behind Harry’s navel, and yanked. He found himself spinning, everything around him was a blur. He was clutching at his trunk, at the screw, both feeling like they were slowly slipping from his fingers. He felt nauseous, and dizzy, a bit lightheaded—he couldn’t draw enough air into his lungs. He had to squeeze his eyes shut as the world kept spinning and spinning and spinning.

And then, abruptly, he slammed to a halt, his shins knocking painfully against his trunk as he toppled over onto the ground.

He lay there, groaning, fighting the urge to throw up for nearly a minute as Welcome to New York! seesawed on the ceiling above him. Eventually, Harry felt recovered enough to sit up. He was in a new stall, this one blue instead of white, but otherwise identical to the portkey terminal back in Diagon Alley. Small pops filled the air, followed by moaning and strings of foreign words spat out so harshly they could only be swears.

Harry crawled unsteadily to his feet and dragged his trunk out of the stall, yelping as the cubicle faded into the ether behind him as though it had never existed. All down the line other stalls were doing the same as witches and wizards from all over the world stepped out of them, new ones in different colors appearing to replace them with each fresh pop and groan.

Opposite the stalls, where the sinks had been located in the IN terminal back in Diagon Alley, twenty separate doorless arches spanned the wall. Small booths built into the left side of each arch were manned by magical customs agents, who were accepting wands in place of passports. Harry hopped into the shortest queue behind a woman whose white hair was styled into the shape of a Spanish Armada ship, complete with tiny little cannons and three miniature flags.

Harry wouldn’t lie, he would love it if the girls back at school could figure out how to style their hair into such intricate styles. He imagined the Weasley twins, who also preferred their hair long, would be all over the fashion trend—full quidditch pitches and lion’s heads, snitches with fluttering wings, replicas of Hogwarts castle. It would be awesome.

The queue moved quickly. Harry couldn’t see much of the process, the Spanish Armada blocking most of his view, but he knew enough to insert his wand into a machine shaped much like the portkey dispenser back in London when it was his turn.

“What is the nature of your business in the Magical Congress of America?” the customs agent asked, eyes never leaving the large glass orb floating above his desk which was filled with wispy white clouds.

“Er,” Harry shuffled awkwardly from foot to foot, “I’m here to meet my dad?”

The white clouds shifted into a swirl of sparkly golden smoke. The customs agent nodded absently and tapped the orb with his wand, returning the golden smoke to white clouds.

“Do you intend to obey all local laws and regulations for the duration of your stay here?”

“Yes.”

Another nod and tap, and golden smoke became white once more.

“Do you understand that failure to obey local laws and regulations will result in prosecution by the Magical Congress of America, subject to punishments up to and including life imprisonment or death, depending on the severity of the crime?”

“Death?” Harry squeaked.

The customs agent heaved a very put-upon sigh. “For aggravated homicide,” he said, like that cleared anything up. But he was back to staring at his orb, and the silence was thick with expectation, so Harry mumbled another ‘yes,’ and waited as the smoke went gold then tap and back to white.

“Do you plan to enter the United States, Canada, or Mexico,” the customs agent asked, “or any other no-maj country in the Americas or their surrounding islands during your stay here?”

Harry, who had not realized the magical United States (or whatever they called themselves) and the muggle United States were two separate countries, stumbled for a moment before he managed to confirm that he did, in fact, intend to visit the muggle countries during his stay.

The customs agent gave another absent nod, tapped away the golden smoke. “Do you have proper no-maj identification?”

“Er, no,” Harry admitted, though now it had been brought up, he realized some form of ID would probably be useful when he met his famous muggle father.

This time the customs agent did not tap his orb. Instead, he turned to a small metal box and gave it a sharp poke with his wand. “That’ll be one galleon for the passport, Mr…”

The agent gasped, eyes going wide as he opened the little blue booklet and finally realized who he’d been checking in.

“Harry Potter!” he said—his voice cracked.

Well, there went any hope Harry had entertained of his fame being restricted to the UK. He blushed as the man stared at him from behind the counter, then silently fished out a single galleon and slid it over. The agent mutely slid over the passport—a United States passport, which was odd, though Harry supposed it wouldn’t matter so long as it was valid. He nodded and thanked the man, and after another moment of staring, the man finally seemed to recall himself.

He cleared his throat, straightened in his seat and smoothed down his shirt. “Money! Ah, that is, do you need to exchange any currency, Mr. Potter? For American or Canadian dollars or Mexican pesos or…? Because, ah, because No-Maj countries don’t have a universal currency…”

“Oh, yeah!” Harry fished out ten galleons, figuring that should be plenty even with New York’s rumored expenses. “American dollars please.”

A thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills were promptly handed over. Harry stuffed the money in his oversized jeans pocket.

“Cheers, mate,” he said.

The customs agent bobbed a jerky nod, swallowing thickly. “Next!” he yelled, waving Harry through with a borderline indifferent expression, which would almost have convinced Harry had the man’s eyes not remained glued on Harry’s face as he hurriedly backed away.

Outside, the early morning sun was shining bright and hot over New York City’s magical district. It was perched just so in the sky, so it looked like a fiery ball perfectly framed within the cradle of an upside down golden arch set at the east end of the street. The arch was apparently the gateway out of the magical district, not that Harry thought there was much magical about the glass storefronts lining the road. Hints here and there, and maybe the use of magic would increase as the crowd grew, but by and large the area lacked the random quirks splattered like children’s finger-paint all along Diagon Alley’s cobbled paths.

The pitfalls—or benefits—of youth.

Harry didn’t linger. He walked straight through the inverted golden arch. The air shimmered and warped as he crossed the threshold, and the sleepy peace of the magic district gave way to a quick honk and the steady warning beeps of heavy machinery at a construction site. Harry was standing at the edge of a park on the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty Sixth Street. He looked back over his shoulder, but the only thing distinguishing this section of the fence surrounding the park from any other section was the single brass nob topping one rail of an otherwise black barrier. Harry stuck his hand back through, watching as it disappeared into the air for a second, then he shook his head and moved to flag down a taxi.

He had been so focused on just getting to New York that he hadn’t given much thought to what he would say once he actually got there. But when he hopped into the taxi, he figured the drive to the recently renamed Stark Tower would take a while, that he would have time to think up a proper speech or a game plan or…something. It was currently morning rush hour in one of the busiest cities in the world. But Harry had underestimated how close the magical world would spit him out to the tower, and how relatively clear the roads were—the vast majority of New Yorkers opting to walk instead of drive. And barely fifteen minutes later, the cabbie was dropping him off.

“Right,” Harry muttered to himself, staring up at the mountainous glass structure of Stark Tower with an impending sense of doom, “If he laughs in your face, you can just turn around, and…go back to Diagon. Nothing to worry about.” He puffed up his cheeks, held his breath for a count of three, then blew out a great gust of air.

This was going to be a disaster.

Chapter Text

“Degrading too quickly,” Tony muttered, squinting at his failed experiment, “Show me the formula again, FRI.”

A string of complex equations obediently filled his screen. Tony blinked, then scrubbed his hands over his eyes as if that would force the blurred edges into sharper focus, to no avail.

God, when was the last time he’d slept?

“Thirty-one point five hours ago, Boss.”

“What?”

“The last time you slept,” FRIDAY said. “You managed approximately three hours of REM sleep thirty-one point five hours ago before a phone call from Secretary Ross woke you. National Sleep Foundation guidelines advise that healthy adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. Would you like me to silence your phone before you go to sleep from now on, Boss? I really would recommend it.”

Tony snorted. “No, no,” he flapped his hand tiredly, “just—”

“Incoming call from Miss Potts, Boss.”

Tony sighed. It was never a good sign when Pep called him before noon, but here’s hoping she was calling about dinner plans and not some impending media shit storm.

“Put her on,” he told FRIDAY.

“Tony,” Pepper’s voice rang out from the overhead speakers, sounding strained. “I need you to come to the tower. Right now.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

Pepper fell uncharacteristically quiet. The silence stretched, dragging on for nearly a minute. Tony knew it was in his head, but as the seconds ticked by, he would swear he could actually feel his blood pressure rising.

“Pep?”

“A boy,” she said, haltingly, “A boy showed up at the tower this morning. Tony…he’s yours.”

“…What?”

“We ran our paternity test four times—” Pepper’s voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. “—We’ll need to send DNA samples off for anything legal, and they’ll run the more thorough, comprehensive test, or whatever, but Tony…this boy is your son.”

Harry swung his legs back and forth beneath the exam table. The long sheet of sanitary paper common to hospital rooms everywhere crinkled beneath him with every shift, the only sound in the otherwise empty room. The in-house doctor had left with the necessary cheek swabs and blood samples over three hours ago, leaving Harry alone to await his fate. Not that he doubted the coming DNA results—Just his father’s reaction to them.

Convincing the Stark Industries medical staff to run the paternity test hadn’t been too terribly difficult. If anything, they’d been downright efficient. The receptionist down in the Tower’s lobby had been skeptical when Harry had wandered in looking like a street rat compared to the sleek luxury on display in every corner of this building. She’d watched him with a faintly terrifying stink eye as he’d stumbled through his request, but a quick phone call had seen Harry shuffled off to the company’s medical center where he’d been seen by a doctor only fifteen minutes later.

Apparently, Tony Stark had a standing policy for this type of situation: Namely, run the test immediately, and don’t bother him unless it’s real. The old secretary manning the medical center’s reception area had delighted in telling him all about it each time she’d stopped by to check on Harry with water and snacks. Usually they were dealing with pregnant women, though, not nearly-teenage boys.

And not a single one of them had ever tested positive.

A lawyer—or at least a silver-haired woman in a business suit—had come to talk to Harry around the hour mark. She’d gotten as far as asking Harry’s name and age, but the interview had ground to a halt when she’d worked out that Harry had come here by himself. No guardian or responsible adult waiting around the block. No guardian or responsible adult in the entire country.

She’d left him then, and Harry had been sitting alone ever since.

Except for the old secretary with her cookies. It felt like she stopped by every five minutes.

Harry picked at his fingernails, glancing absently around the bland room. It was one of the nicer medical rooms he’d ever been in, with polished wood floors and real wooden cabinetry painted out in a soft creme—some decorator’s idea of a soothing environment—but it was boring to look at. There were no windows to provide him with a view; only one piece of stock art, a big blue square piece shifting through the different shades of the sky; and a round clock in the corner. Harry was sick of looking at that clock. He’d already rummaged through all of the drawers, but they only contained typical office supplies, nothing interesting. He’d paced around his exam table, pressed the button to make it recline out flat, then back up into a chair shape. Several times. He’d sat down in the doctor’s swivel chair, spun it round and around and around, climbed back onto the exam table, tried to count sheep, tried to determine exactly how many shades of blue were in the lone piece of artwork…

Harry was so bored he couldn’t even feel anxious about meeting his father anymore.

Of course, as soon as Harry had that thought, Tony Stark banged open the door.

Tony couldn’t remember the flight down from the Compound. He knew that he’d hung up on Pepper. He knew that he’d sent her next twenty calls to voicemail. If he thought about it, he could remember summoning the suit, and he could remember the patchwork quilt of the land speeding by beneath him as he flew. But he’d been two steps shy of a fugue state since that call, and it felt like two minutes after he hung up, he was slamming open the door to one of SI’s medical exam rooms.

For half a second, staring at the thin boy perched on the exam table, Tony thought Pepper’s call might have been a prank, that his girlfriend had colluded with FRIDAY to project a holographic image of Tony from his youth. But then the boy blinked big, green eyes at him and said hello with a decidedly British accent, and reality whacked Tony over the head again.

Shit, he really did have a son. A little human he was going to be responsible for for the rest of his life.

“Can I just say thank god you’re not a toddler?” were for some reason the first words out of his mouth.

The kid’s brows furrowed, an expression Tony recognized from pictures of himself, and from Howard.

“Did no one tell you how old I am?” the boy asked skeptically.

“British too, apparently,” Tony tossed his hands up. “Pep clearly skipped all the important details.”

“But—Pep—did tell you that you’re my, er, my dad…right?”

Tony snorted. As if he would be here if that little detail hadn’t been passed along. “Yep,” he said, “got that part. So, I’m sorry, are you here by yourself, or…?”

“Is that another thing Pep clearly skipped?”

Tony didn’t dignify that with a response, simply raised his brows expectantly.

“Sorry, yes,” the boy sighed, “I’m here alone.”

“From England?”

“Yes.”

“To be clear, you somehow traveled across the entire Atlantic…by yourself? You’re what? Twelve?”

“Thirteen…almost.”

“Uhuh, so twelve. Is that even legal?”

His kid shrugged. “No one stopped me.”

“…Fair enough.”

The two of them stared at each other for another moment, the silence taut with awkwardness. Then Tony clapped his hands and yanked the door back open.

“Alright, come on, kid, let’s go to the penthouse. I refuse to have the rest of this meet-and-greet hoopla in a tiny hospital room.”

His father didn’t seem angry, Harry decided as he trailed after the man. Shocked, but not angry, nor had he laughed in Harry’s face or sent him away. So that was good.

The elevator ride was silent, but blessedly short. Then they stepped out into the biggest living room Harry had ever seen—a full wall of windows overlooking the New York skyline, black marble floors, a recessed circle housing a leather couch, bronze accents warming the twenty foot tan stone walls. The dark decor would have made a smaller space feel claustrophobic, but here it made the room look decadent.

“Drink?” his father asked, heading towards the fully stocked bar on a platform tucked behind the kitchen area at the far end of the living room. “I’ve got stuff for smoothies, orange juice…tea? If you’re into that. Pepper prefers tea for some godforsaken reason, so we’ve got…lavender earl grey. Good stuff. Supposedly.”

Feeling self-conscious and not quite sure what he was supposed to do in this situation, Harry accepted the offer. They settled on the sofa next to each other, his dad absently tapping away at his phone, as he’d been doing since they got on the elevator, green smoothie forgotten on the coffee table, Harry sipping at his tea.

“So…Harry…” Scrutinizing brown eyes looked him over. “You’re here all alone. Did you tell anyone you were leaving the country?”

“Er…”

“Or did you run away?”

“I didn’t run away,” Harry said, more heatedly than he’d intended. “I just…left.”

“That sounds a lot like running away.”

“Well it’s not as if the Dursleys are going to miss me. And besides, they won’t expect me back till next summer anyway, if they’ll let me come back at all.”

His father’s expression didn’t change, exactly, but Harry was suddenly acutely aware of how much he’d probably just given away about his life at Privet Drive. He dropped his eyes and took another sip of tea.

“The Dursleys,” came the soft response, along with a few more taps to the phone. “Huh, that’s odd.”

“What?”

“Where do you go to school, kid?”

Harry shifted in his seat. “Boarding school. Up in Scotland.”

“St. Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys?”

“What? No!” Harry was suddenly on his feet, though he didn’t remember standing. “That’s a lie! I don’t go—” His fists were clenched at his sides. He was shaking all over, his heart pounding in his chest. He couldn’t let this man, his father, think that about him. Tony Stark would not want a delinquent for a son.

“I’m not a criminal!”

“Alright, calm down—”

“I’m not!”

“I know!” His dad waved the phone at Harry. “I know, okay? That school doesn’t actually exist, so…”

“Oh,” Harry stared for a moment before flopping back down on the couch.

“Yeah, oh. Funny thing, these Dursleys started reporting you go to school at St. Brutus’s—a school that I can’t find anywhere, and I can usually find anything—right after you turned eleven. The same time all your other records—medical, school, everything—stop.”

Harry fidgeted with the hem of his baggy shirt, not sure how to respond. Was he even allowed to tell his father about magic? Hermione’s parents knew, but she lived with them. But then, maybe Harry was going to get to live with his father too. But even if not, he was pretty sure relatives were allowed to know. Uncle Vernon had known for years before Harry, and there had been no special form to fill out before Dudley found out via enchanted pig’s tail, so…

“Look,” his dad sighed after a moment, running his fingers along the distinctive line of his beard, “You’re not being interrogated here or anything, I just want to know what I’m dealing with. Did you run away two years ago?”

“No, I—”

“And if you did, how the heck did you get to New York?”

“I have a passport!” Harry exclaimed, relieved to finally have something productive to say. He pulled the small, blue booklet he’d just been issued at the portkey terminal from his pocket and held it out.

His dad took it from him and thumbed through all of the pages. “Well,” he said, pursing his lips, “That’s a damn good fake. You forgot the entrance stamp, but other than that, ten out of ten on the forgery. A plus effort.”

Harry’s mouth dropped open. “That’s not a fake!” he spluttered.

His dad scoffed. “Kid, you were born in England. People who weren’t born here don’t automatically gain citizenship just because they claim their daddy is an American. They have to go through a court for that, and as far as I know, I’ve never been hit with a single successful paternity suit.”

“Until today,” Harry pointed out.

His dad waved that aside. “My point is that you can’t have a real U.S. passport before you’re an American citizen. So, seriously, what am I dealing with?” He held up the passport, flapping it back and forth for emphasis. “Runaway with scarily connected friends? The mob? Super secret spy school?”

Harry twitched at that last guess, because while it was wildly off base, it still hit strangely close to home. Unfortunately, his father noticed his reaction.

“Seriously!” he exclaimed. “That’s a real thing? Actually, you know what? No, I knew that was a real thing. Natashalie was part of that thing. But seriously!”

Harry shook his head, honestly baffled by the turn this conversation was taking. “I don’t go to spy school!”

“Again,” his dad commanded, “But with some conviction this time.”

“I don’t go to spy school,” Harry repeated himself, more calmly, and hopefully more convincingly.

His dad hummed skeptically. “Okay, sure. But did your classes include things like ballet or sweet-talking politicians out of state secrets or, I don’t know, ten different ways to kill someone with a paperclip? Feel free to check all boxes that apply.”

“I’m pretty sure there are eighteen different ways to kill someone with a paperclip.”

“…Not filling me with a lot of confidence here, kid.”

“I’m only joking!”

His dad gave him a look.

“Really! I don’t go to spy school! That would be—well, actually kind of awesome—but not the killing people thing! I want to help people! I don’t want to kill them!” he said. Then, deciding a bit of flattery couldn’t hurt, he tacked on, “Besides, being a superhero sounds way better.”

“Great, another one,” his dad squeezed his eyes shut and groaned, muttering something incomprehensible about “shady shit” and “fury” under his breath.

“Are you enhanced?” he asked a moment later.

“Am I what?”

“Enhanced. Powers? Like super strength or the ability to wiggle your fingers and make things float. Do you have them?”

Harry wasn’t sure what expression he was making, but he clearly needed to work on his poker face because he didn’t even have to respond for his dad to begin groaning dramatically again.

“I don’t have any powers,” he tried to claim regardless, but his dad was already shaking his head.

“New house rule,” he said, “No lying to me about your powers. Seriously, you can tell me, I won’t disown you for having a few weird abilities.”

His dad paused then, appearing a little poleaxed as the implication of his sentence sank in for both of them. But he didn’t take it back.

Harry felt a warm curl of happiness bloom in his chest. A small, shy smile crept onto his face, growing more confident when his dad offered his own small smile in return. It made Harry feel brave, gave him the courage to trust his father with his secret, despite only having just met the man.

He spoke before he really had time to think it through, before he had time to second guess himself.

“I don’t have powers, not like what you’re thinking,” he said. “But I do have power because—because I’m a wizard. There are millions of us, witches and wizards, all over the world, and we can do magic. Real magic. And…I am one.”

Chapter Text

Tony stared at his son. A few years ago, he would have laughed at the boy, but he’d since met Loki and Thor and Wanda, all of whom could manipulate the world outside their own bodies to varying extents, and Harry seemed entirely in earnest.

And at least ninety percent sane.

So, a group of people possessing the same enhancement, which they’d been calling magic, inhabited Earth. And it was most likely an incredibly versatile enhancement for them to call it magic, not simply telekinesis or pyrokinesis or the ability to fly. Perhaps something at the quantum level? Or maybe the answer to the mystery of dark energy? Tony itched to find out.

He would need to recalibrate his machines. Probably would have to build entirely new detection devices. Bruce was going to love—

(Bruce wasn’t here. Bruce hadn’t been here in over a year. He’d left without saying goodbye.)

Maybe he could bring Dr. Cho on board. She’d love to get her hands on DNA from an entire population with a stable enhanced mutation. Which of course meant they’d need to get more witches and wizards than just Harry to come in.

Tony wondered if the community had already written books about their ability. Harry had mentioned a secret boarding school in Scotland, so it stood to reason their research wouldn’t need to start at ground level. Though Tony was probably getting ahead of himself.

“What kinds of things can your abilities do?” he asked.

Tension Tony hadn’t noticed until it was gone drained out of Harry’s frame. “It’s magic,” the kid grinned, “So almost anything, I suppose.”

“Turn people into frogs?”

“Yep.”

“Fly?”

“On brooms!” Harry bounced excitedly.

Brooms. Well, if that wasn’t a cliche. But if these powers allowed for the enhancement of inanimate objects—the transfer of abilities, for lack of a better description—then that opened yet another interesting avenue of investigation.

“Specialized flight tool or can you power up any random stick whenever you want to fly?”

“Er, well, you buy them in a shop, so…”

“So specialized.” A specific, permanent alteration to a material object. “But can you make random objects float?”

Harry nodded.

“Create fire?”

“And water,” he said. Then before Tony could continue down his mental checklist, Harry nearly whispered, “You’re taking this a lot better than I thought you would.”

That made Tony pause. “How did you think I would take it?”

Harry shrugged, looking fixedly out the window. “The Dursleys hated magic.”

Tony was liking the sound of these Dursleys less and less, and given the things flagged in Harry’s background check—along with the fact he’d run away—Tony’s bar had already been set atomically low.

“And you’re a famous scientist, so…”

Tony couldn’t help but roll his eyes at that. “Okay,” he huffed, “To be clear, just because you call what you can do magic, that doesn’t mean it’s not still science.”

“Science can’t turn a person into a frog,” Harry pointed out in what he probably thought was an entirely reasonable manner.

“Correction,” Tony replied, “our current technology can’t turn a person into a frog.”

“Huh?”

“Clearly you’ve never read any crazy quantum theory.”

Harry’s brows furrowed, again with that familiar expression that was like looking into a mirror.

“I’m serious,” Tony insisted, continuing with his defense of Science so he could avoid thinking about twelve missed years and responsibility and feelings for just a bit longer. “There is no magic vs science. That’s not a thing. Our technology might not be able to turn a person into a frog, but that doesn’t mean people transforming into animals is unscientific. Just because you call something magic doesn’t mean it exists on some science-defying spectrum. Science is the study of the way the world works, so nothing that exists is unscientific. Some theories might be considered more accurate or complete than others—and some idiots might cling to them even in the face of contradicting evidence—but any theory can be overturned given new information. And anything that exists can be studied. Eventually. Assuming my scanners can pick up whatever energy you give off.”

Actually, now that Tony thought about it, this room was equipped with an array of highly advanced scanners. Nothing on the ones in the labs, of course, but it could give him a baseline to work with. He clasped his hands, leaning forward eagerly.

“May as well test that now,” he decided. “Go on, make something float.”

Harry’s face fell. “Underaged wizards aren’t allowed to use magic outside of school,” he said. “But I’m not making it up! I swear! We just need to go to the magic district, and I can prove it! It’s only a twenty minute drive—”

“Whoah, slow your roll there, Mini-Merlin, we’re not going anywhere today.”

“But—”

“Nope, staying here. Pepper would kill me if I took off with you before we got everything settled.”

“But…You do believe me, don’t you?”

Harry suddenly looked very small, sitting on the large couch in his oversized t-shirt, sharp collarbone exposed at his collar, skinny arms wrapped defensively about his middle. He needed to eat more, Tony thought, wondering with a pang if maybe he’d been struggling to find enough food after he ran away. And his clothes definitely needed to be replaced, threadbare and swallowing him as they were. That would be next on the list, right after a decent meal.

“Sure,” he replied, tone carefully flippant, “I’m at least eighty-eight percent sure you’re not delusional or lying. Twelve percent is still up in the air, but that’s still pretty good odds.”

Harry relaxed, and Tony felt something loosen in his chest.

“So I’m craving Indian. What about you?”

“Oh,” Harry was thrown for about half a second before he recovered and admitted that he’d never tried Indian food before.

“You good with spicy?”

Harry shrugged, which Tony took to mean ‘I don’t know’ and not ‘Go for it,’ as he might have assumed with anybody else.

“FRIDAY, order us some garlic naan, lamb tikka masala—mild on the spice—tandoori chicken, hot, and vindaloo from that place I like. Oh, and get some gulab jamun for dessert.”

“On it, Boss,” FRIDAY replied, speaking up for the first time.

Harry jumped and began looking around for the source of the voice. Tony grinned at his reaction, then launched into an explanation about the AI, surprised by how pleased he felt when Harry began asking questions, hanging off Tony’s every word. The boy didn’t know the first thing about programming, forcing Tony to walk him through the most fundamental concepts, and yet Tony couldn’t remember the last time he’d found a lecture more gratifying.

Pepper wasn’t sure what she expected to find when she made her way up to the penthouse. She hadn’t even been sure Tony was going to show up after her call until FRIDAY had alerted her to his arrival an hour ago. But if she’d had to guess, she would’ve said she expected him to be sitting across the room from the kid, quietly panicking, awkward but doing a good job of hiding it, maybe with a movie playing to save him from having to talk to his son. What she found was Tony chowing down on Indian takeout, gesturing animatedly as he talked to the boy—Harry—who was sitting on the couch right next to him.

Pepper sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of the kid. Harry was a small child; he would have looked delicate in a nicer outfit, but his baggy clothes made him appear more scrappy than anything. But more than that, he looked just like Tony. They had the exact same shade of black-brown hair, the same cowlick that cropped up when Tony’s hair wasn’t styled. Face shape, jaw line, cheeks, brows…smile. Pepper hadn’t been prepared for what the sight would do to her.

She and Tony had only just gotten back together. He’d come back from Siberia two weeks ago downtrodden in a way she’d rarely seen before, but he’d come back to her, and they were getting their relationship back on track. And Pepper had no intention of derailing it over a child—she’d resigned herself to the possibility long before they started dating.

But she hadn’t expected her heart to melt when she saw Tony and his son throwing identical smiles at each other.

If there had been any doubt about them taking Harry in before, there was none now. No matter what Tony might have to say on the subject, Pepper was going to make sure they got custody of this child who was basking in Tony’s attention like a sun-starved flower. She had a gut feeling taking over guardianship of Harry would be good for all three of them.

Pepper cleared her throat, smiling at Harry when he and Tony turned to look at her.

“Pep!” Tony exclaimed, straightening in his seat.

He glanced between her and Harry. Pepper could see the questions springing into his mind, the way he was bracing for a bad reaction, but she didn’t give him time to dwell on his doubts. Moving to sit beside him on the couch, she took his hand, squeezing it reassuringly.

“Aren't you going to introduce us?” she asked.

Tony squeezed her hand back, flashing her a grateful smile. “Harry, this is Pepper, my girlfriend.”

Pepper cleared her throat.

“And CEO of my company. You know, pretty much everyone’s boss, practically runs the entire world at this point. Pep, this is Harry, my…son.”

A quiet sort of happiness lit Harry’s features at that address. He’d been orphaned young, Pepper knew, and had lived with his maternal aunt’s family ever since, a completely unsuitable environment based on the brief dossier FRIDAY had compiled before the paternity test had even finished running. There had been allegations of neglect that had gone nowhere when Harry was eight; at the same time, the Dursleys had threatened to turn Harry over to the state unless they received financial aid, which the government had granted. There hadn’t been much else since, aside from the suspicious spottiness in Harry’s records, but given Harry had just run away to America, and he was Tony’s son, she figured they could gain full custody within the week.

She didn’t bring that up right away though, instead snatching up the untouched vindaloo from the coffee table. Tony went back to regaling Harry with some Iron Man story. Or, no, discussing Iron Man aerial maneuvers, which Harry had apparently studied in some detail, given the way the conversation lost Pepper ten words in. But Tony was relishing it—bragging, she realized with a note of fond amusement—and she was content to let them carry on through the meal.

But once they’d finished eating and she’d discreetly dragged Tony over to the kitchen to help her clean up, she turned to him and whispered, “We’re keeping him.” And Tony nodded, somehow managing to look both relieved and terrified at the same time. But he wasn’t running away from this. Pepper smiled and reached up to run her fingers gently through his hair.

“Alright then,” she said, and kissed him.

When they pulled apart a second later, Tony grinned with more confidence than she knew he felt and held his arm out towards the couch. “After you, Miss Potts.”

Harry watched his dad and Pepper pick up the trash and carry it over to the kitchen. Normally, he would have offered to help, but he’d caught the look Pepper had given his dad. He knew she wanted to talk to him, to talk about Harry. So Harry stayed seated, nerves that had largely settled over the past few hours rekindling. Pepper was nice, but that didn’t mean she wanted some random kid foisted on her. And if she wanted him gone, Harry couldn’t imagine his dad would choose him, not over the woman he loved.

So he observed them anxiously, trying to figure out what they were saying from their facial expressions with little success, and tried not to think about how much it would hurt if they sent him away now after he’d spent the whole day with his dad.

Pepper said something, and his dad nodded, and then she kissed him.

Harry blushed and looked away.

That had been a happy kiss, he thought. There had been smiles, and a quick, gentle press of lips—nothing like the horrendous chompy sucking thing he’d witnessed between Percy and Penelope Clearwater by accident last semester. But Harry didn’t know if a happy kiss meant they’d decided to let him stay, send him away, or something in the middle.

As long as they didn’t tell him to get lost, he decided as his dad and Pepper began to walk back over, he could deal. If his dad at least agreed to stay in touch, then there was a chance he would eventually want to keep Harry.

“So,” Pepper began once they’d regained their seats, “I know this might seem sudden, but I’ve instructed our lawyers to start the process for us—for Tony—to gain full custody of you. And to get you dual citizenship.”

Harry released the breath he’d been holding. “I can stay?”

Pepper regarded him seriously. “If that’s what you want.”

Harry looked to his father. He didn’t expect the man to object. Pepper would not have made the offer if he hadn’t agreed. But Harry still needed some sign of approval. A nod. A smile. Something.

His dad lounged back against the couch cushions, one arm thrown out behind Pepper’s shoulders. “Afraid we can’t pop any champagne to welcome you until you’re at least fif—” Pepper elbowed him. “—Twenty-one. But there’s a room here with your name on it, and one up at the Compound too. What’s your favorite color?”

“Oh, er, red?”

“On brand, I like it.”

“You’re not painting his bedrooms red, Tony.”

“Why not? It’s his favorite color.”

“And mine is yellow. I don’t want a yellow bedroom.”

“I could be talked into a yellow bedroom.”

Pepper shook her head and turned to Harry. “Do you actually want a red bedroom?”

He shrugged. “My house colors at school are red and gold. The dorms look alright.”

“Red and gold.”

Pepper pulled a face, laughing. “We’ll see what the decorator has to say. But it seems like I have some things to take care of, so, if that will be all, Mr. Stark?”

Harry squirmed as his dad leaned over and pecked Pepper on the lips, murmuring, “That will be all, Miss Potts.”

He wondered if that was something he was going to have to get used to, the open displays of affection. He supposed there were plenty of worse things, especially if getting used to seeing his dad flirt meant he got to stay. And he could admit it was kind of nice knowing his dad loved Harry’s…stepmom? Soon-to-be stepmom? Whatever she was, the chaste kissing was a good kind of thing to be embarrassed over. Not shameful like the cupboard under the stairs or the bars on the window to Dudley’s second bedroom.

Which Harry never had to worry about being subjected to again.

Because his dad was letting him stay.

Tony watched Pepper leave, knowing they would have a lot to discuss tonight once Harry was asleep. And that was without mentioning Harry’s likely enhancement. Tony would be waiting on concrete proof before he mentioned that to Pep, though he felt fairly confident this ‘magic’ enhancement did exist.

But the press was a more immediate concern. And school. Did Tony want to send his son off to a magical boarding school in Scotland come fall? He wasn’t so sure, and then there were Harry’s clothes. And the kid probably needed to get a physical. Was he up to date on his shots? His medical records stopped after he turned eleven, but maybe his magic school records were more up to date? How would Tony even go about requesting those?

Tony shook those thoughts off before they could spiral him into a panic. Deep, even breaths, just like FRIDAY’s psychology research instructed. One thing at a time.

He looked at Harry, who was sitting patiently beside him. The boy’s eyes were nothing like Maria Stark’s. Different color, different shape, set in a different face, a face which mimicked Tony’s to a striking degree. And yet, when Harry looked back at him with those big, green eyes, magnified by those hideous glasses, Tony couldn’t help but think of his mom.

“Come on, bambino,” he said, the Italian endearment slipping out without conscious thought. “Let me show you your new room.”

Chapter Text

Tony collapsed on the sofa down in his lab, exhausted. Not from Harry, which honestly surprised him. The boy was pleasant company for a virtual stranger. But the situation itself was draining.

After their Indian takeout lunch, Tony had shown Harry his new bedroom, currently decorated in the inoffensive creams and browns of a guest room, but with a fantastic view of the Chrysler Building right outside the floor-to-ceiling wall of windows. After Harry had sufficiently oohed and aahed over his new space, especially the giant stone shower with its three hundred degrees of body jets in his bathroom, Tony had given him a grand tour of the rest of the living quarters, saving his lab for last.

Unfortunately, the bots were already up at the Compound, so that introduction would have to wait. But there was something distinctly gratifying about Harry’s easy delight with each new thing, even the things that Tony didn’t consider impressive. But sadly the tour couldn’t last forever. Only an hour later, they’d been forced back down to the medical offices. And then the tedium had started. They’d had an emergency meeting with a social worker, which had seen DNA samples from both him and Harry sent off to an independent third party lab. An entire afternoon with the social worker had eventually granted Tony temporary custody of his own son until the paternity results came back. But Harry having run away from another country complicated matters, and the government was as inefficient as ever, so what should have been a ten minute meeting ended up dragging on for hours.

They still hadn’t managed to contact the Dursleys, not that Tony would let their consent stop him from taking custody of his child.

Pepper had finally had to call in a few favors, discreetly, to get the process wrapped up before Tony started climbing the walls with frustration.

And then there had been the meeting with the PR Department, who were divided on how and when to alert the public to Harry’s existence. Tony had actually expected that to be the thing that would overwhelm the kid, but Harry hadn’t seemed bothered by the idea of seeing his face splashed across tabloids.

“I’m pretty used to it,” Harry had told him in a resigned undertone. “In my world I’m kind of…well known for surviving the night my parents got murdered. I’d much rather be in the papers for this.”

So his kid was a famous wizard boy. Fantastic.

And James and Lily Potter had not died in an accidental house fire, contrary to what FRIDAY had found in her background search, a background search which hadn’t yielded much for Lily after age eleven and next to nothing at all for James Potter. Something else to look into…once Harry provided solid evidence that he was, in fact, the rational enhanced person he presented as, and not a child in serious need of some psychiatric drugs.

But when it came to PR, for the moment, Tony had insisted they try to keep Harry’s existence a secret for as long as possible. He was hoping they could make it at least a month, give him a little time to figure out how to take care of a teenager away of the public spotlight.

In the end, they didn’t even get a day.

Sarah Finley had not intended to spill the beans on Tony Stark’s newfound son. She had taken the job as a receptionist in Stark Tower’s lobby primarily for the excellent pay, but also because she’d hoped working in the same building as Iron Man would be exciting. But in the last two years, work had been pretty routine. Sure, she’d checked in her share of high rollers, but most of those people were simply rich, not famous. The famous ones never seemed to take their meetings at the Tower, and those that did apparently preferred to come in through the private back entrance. Or through the helicopter pad. Which was fair. If Sarah could afford to fly around in a helicopter, she’d totally take that thing everywhere.

Point being: the exciting shit did’t happen around Sarah. And she always seemed to be the last person to learn about anything salacious. Like when the Avengers broke up two weeks ago—or went to war with each other, or whatever it was the media was saying happened—Sarah heard about it after her brother, despite working in the building owned by one of the goddamned Avengers themselves, a fact her brother would not let her forget.

So when a boy walked up to her desk that morning looking like a shabbily-dressed, green-eyed doppelgänger of Tony Stark himself, and stuttered his way through a request that involved the need for a paternity test, Sarah had been ecstatic.

She’d kept her cool, though, kept her expression nice and professional, careful to keep from grinning like a loon. She’d called up to legal, because she honestly had no idea what she was supposed to do in this situation, then watched as the boy was whisked away to go get that test. She’d kept an eagle-eyed stare on the elevators ever since, waiting to see if the kid would come back down, defeated by science, but he never had.

So when her friend Mark from HR had stopped by to drop off her daily muffin, Sarah had been quick to regale him with the morning’s gossip.

And Mark loved a good scandal, so of course he talked to his sister Leslie about it during their lunch break. Then Mark returned to his cubicle and Leslie went back up to her office in the PR department.

Shortly after lunch, Leslie’s boss was called in by his boss and briefed on the Harry situation, along with a handful of other senior PR personnel. In an ideal situation, the clock would have stopped there, but unfortunately Leslie’s boss was also heading the Harmony Fund PR campaign, a longtime charity project to which Leslie was also assigned. And right after the briefing, he sent out a recap email on which he accidentally CC’d Leslie.

She immediately called her brother, not worrying for one second about any privacy concerns. She and Mark had always shared everything, and besides, her twin also worked at Stark Industries. And Mark, of much the same mind, told Sarah what he’d discovered during his next break.

Sarah, still peeved over her own brother’s constant needling, was thrilled to finally have something exciting to share with him when she got off from work. He then told his wife, who shared it with her best friend, who told her boss.

That boss was Christine Everhart’s mother, the same Christine Everhart who had spent the majority of her journalistic career documenting the various ups and downs of Tony Stark’s life.

When Sarah woke up the next morning and saw the headlines blaring across her Twitter feed, her only thought was “Wow, somebody was a leaky bucket!”

She would never realize that she was the woman who provided the initial tip off.

“Dude! Did you know about this?”

“Ned?” Peter blinked blearily up at his best friend. May had worked the night shift last night, so he’d seized the opportunity to spider-man until the early hours of the morning. Most crimes happened late, when it was dark out and witnesses were few, so Peter had felt pretty good about his decision. And he’d been vindicated by the two muggings he’d stopped, as well as the five people he’d prevented from driving drunk.

What he hadn’t counted on was his best friend showing up in his room early on a Saturday morning in the middle of their summer break. “What’re you doing here?”

“This!” Ned waved his phone excitedly in Peter’s face. “Did you know? I mean, you’ve met Tony Stark before, and I don’t know why he’d tell you about this—have you even talked to him since he gave you your internship?—but I thought maybe…”

Peter snatched the phone from Ned’s hand. “Dude,” he said, staring at the Twitter headline in disbelief. He’d thought he was about to see something about the Avenger’s fight, maybe news that the Rogues had been recaptured, or speculation about Spider-Man’s identity (less likely, but still a valid fear). What he got instead was the internet claiming Tony Stark had a son.

“I know!” Ned practically squealed. “I mean, can you imagine?”

Peter tapped on the link to the actual news clip. It was short and sparse on the details, but the reporter had been able to discover the boy’s first name—Harry—and that Mr. Stark had definitely not known about his son before yesterday when Harry had apparently shown up at Stark Tower out of the blue asking for a paternity test. There was nothing about Harry’s age or where he was from or who his mother was. The reporter didn’t even have a last name (assuming it wasn’t Stark). But WHiH was a reputable news agency, so the clip was probably at least mostly true.

Peter wondered if he would meet Harry. Peter was sort of an Avenger now. He’d fought in Germany for Mr. Stark, and Mr. Stark had made his amazing new suit, and he reported to Happy every day (even if the man had only answered his phone twice.) So he was an Avenger—or an Avenger recruit? Avenger cadet?—and Harry was Avenger adjacent. So…

It was kind of crazy to think he might one day soon be friends with a person grabbing every headline in the nation. Not as crazy as finding Mr. Stark himself casually drinking coffee with his aunt in their living room. Or as crazy as seeing his own alter ego swinging across other people’s instagram feeds. But it was still up there, the kind of surreal realization that made him want to step back and ask, “What even is my life?!”

He wondered if Harry felt the same way.

Peter tried to imagine what it would be like to find out that Richard Parker had not been his biological father, that Ben had not been related to him. A sick feeling lodged itself in his gut. He didn’t think he would handle a discovery like that well. But Harry was probably different. Harry had probably known his real dad was out there somewhere, even if he hadn’t known who it was. Harry’s entire foundation had probably not been rocked by the discovery.

At least Peter hoped so. He hoped this ended up being a happy thing. For Harry and for Mr. Stark. Because Mr. Stark might not have said anything, but Peter figured fighting against his former teammates had not been a happy occasion for the man. And Peter’s hero deserved to be happy.

And maybe Harry would want a lab partner or something sometime. That would be cool.

“No, no pictures,” Tony snapped.

Harry might have said he was used to publicity, but Tony wasn’t going to do that to the boy. If there was anything Tony was sure about in this situation, it was that he did not want to emulate his own father, and Howard had been all about parading Tony in front of the cameras. Tony’s embarrassing baby pictures were public record. His four-year-old face graced the cover of an old issue of Vanity Fair, little hands busy assembling a circuit board. And the Popular Mechanics cover at six when he’d built his first engine. And the Economist at nine when he’d accompanied his father to the launch of their then-revolutionary Eagle line. Tony was Howard’s perfect, genius son, so long as they weren’t behind closed doors. At least until he’d gone off to MIT and made a name for himself as a drunken mess.

“But Mr. Stark—”

“Nope,” Tony cut his PR guy off (Jeff or John or something with a J), “Whatever argument you’re going to try and make, my answer’s gonna stay a big, fat nope. Final answer, no take backs.”

“But—”

Tony turned to Harry. “First piece of parental advice for you, Mini Merlin: No means no.” He jabbed his finger at the video screen holographically projected over the breakfast table. “A concept Jar Jar Binks here seems to have gone a concerningly long time without learning.”

Said man shifted uncomfortably, dropping his eyes, and Tony smirked in satisfaction.

He would love to know how Christine Fucking Everhart had gotten her claws on this latest scoop, but he knew tracking down the leak would be an exercise in futility. Harry had arrived at Stark Tower right at the start of the work day, and no less than eighty people had passed him while he was talking to the receptionist down in the lobby yesterday. And then there had been everyone who had interacted with him afterwards. All it took was one person gossiping with the wrong friend. Everhart had never needed much to work with.

And, honestly, she hadn’t gotten much.

Yet for some reason Tony needed to deal with this before he was allowed to finish the ridiculously good breakfast Harry had whipped up—a gene he’d clearly inherited from his mother, since Tony’s culinary attempts typically ended with fire alarms. He’d just sat down for his first breakfast with his son, a tradition he was all for instating if Harry would keep cooking, when Pepper had walked in, already two hours into her work day, and shown him a short clip from Everhart’s broadcast, pulling up the video call as she sat down next to him.

“Why do we have to tell the papers anything?” Harry asked. It was the first time he’d spoken up since the call connected, and now that he’d brought it up…

“Good question. Why do we have to say anything? So there are rumors I have a son. If we say nothing—”

“This doesn’t just go away. Harry actually exists,” Pepper told them gently. “But!” she said before Tony could mount an argument, “I agree, providing pictures is out of the question at this point. We’re going to go with a basic confirmation and request for privacy in the press release, George. What I actually want to discuss right now is the optics of pushing for underage clauses in the Accords.”

“Well that’s…random,” Tony said.

Pepper sighed and gestured at Harry, who looked as lost as Tony felt at the moment, poor kid.

“It’s the timing,” she explained. “I know you were planning to start pushing for amendments to protect enhanced minors this next week, but I think we should consider what it will look like. Because as far as I can tell, there are two big options if you move forward now: either people will think having a son has made you turn over a new leaf, that it’s made you more concerned about child welfare in general, which would be optimal, or people will think Harry is enhanced, which would mean your motivations are selfish, which could make your chances of getting anything passed swing either way.”

And this, this was why Pepper Potts made a better CEO than Tony ever had, and why he desperately needed her insight when it came to anything political. Rights for enhanced minors mattered to him. He’d known from the second he met the spiderling that it was going to be an issue he would throw his weight behind, so naturally he’d placed it at the very top of his Accords to-do list. And if Pepper had not brought this up, he would have continued right along his merry way, never once considering the possible ramifications of the latest alteration to his public perception.

The biggest problem, which Pepper had no way of knowing at the moment, was that Harry was actually (most likely) enhanced. It was a bit of a Catch-22 situation. Push for the amendments now, and Tony risked bringing unwanted scrutiny down on Harry. Wait, and there would be no protections if someone witnessed something later on down the line. Because Harry wasn’t like the spiderling. Harry was already famous. Even without pictures, his uncanny resemblance to Tony would make him easily recognizable, and if he was ever spotted doing something extraordinary, he wouldn’t be wearing a mask.

Harry tapped him on his shoulder. “Am I messing things up for you?” he asked as George and Pepper began to toss ideas back and forth.

Tony was watching the other two adults, still mentally weighing his options, so he didn’t think before he said, “There were bound to be complications eventually.”

“Oh,” Harry mumbled, fork squeaking across his plate.

The unpleasant noise drew Tony’s attention. He looked over. Harry was staring blankly at his food. The previously fluffy pile of scrambled eggs was squished down flat, the slice of tomato untouched, toast set aside after one bite.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tony tried to reassure him. “If it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. The Accords are a mess at the moment.”

“Those are the new superhero laws, right?”

“Well, more of an international agreement than a law, but…” Tony shrugged.

“And you want to change them?” Harry asked, pushing a portion of his eggs to the other end of his plate.

“Sure,” Tony replied, watching the boy’s listless behavior with growing concern, “Some parts.”

“And you can’t…because I’m here.”

Oh, so that’s what this was about. Tony remembered an incident when he was about Harry’s age—fourteen at a stretch, definitely too young to drive, but old enough that he’d wanted someone to teach him how. He’d been away at school for several months, hadn’t seen either of his parents in all that time, hadn’t spoken to Howard in longer, but it was Christmas break, and he’d been so hopeful. But nobody was home when he got there. His parents were down in DC, schmoozing with a bunch of Defense Department bigwigs. Tony had walked into his house, calling out a loud greeting, only to be met with silence, and a note from his mother on the kitchen counter saying they would be out of town for a few more days. Last minute…very important…hope you understand…I love you…

Even Jarvis had been in DC, and Tony had been so angry.

So he’d decided to teach himself how to drive. He’d grabbed the keys to his dad’s prized Ferrari, hopped behind the wheel, and promptly wrapped that thing around a pole when he tried to pass another car in a no-pass zone.

Tony’s arm had needed eight stitches. The police had been called in. And his parents had been forced back home that very night.

“Christ!” Howard had spat the second he’d barged into the hospital room. He’d taken Tony in, eyes scanning over the clean, white bandage on his arm and the paper-thin cut on his forehead—miraculously his only injuries—then Howard’s face had twisted with something dark and angry. “How am I supposed to get anything done if you can’t stay out of trouble for one goddamned day!”

When spring break had rolled around a few months later, Tony had gone skiing in the Alps, as far away from home as he could manage without hurting his mother’s feelings. His dad had been negotiating a big contract that week, and Tony hadn’t wanted to be in the way.

Harry looked like he was feeling something similar. Tony cleared his throat. In truth, Harry’s arrival did mess up his plans, but that wasn’t the kid’s fault. And besides, something or other was always messing up his plans.

“Don’t worry, it’s just a minor kink.” Tony started to reach for Harry’s shoulder, but he hesitated at the last second, and instead ended up pounding his fist lightly against the table. “Besides, I always get what I want.”

Harry watched him warily for another moment before he seemed to accept Tony at his word, then all of a sudden the boy was grinning impishly at him, in a way that brought a flash of bright red hair to Tony’s mind, worries seemingly cast aside.

“Always?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“So that time you announced your address on live television, you wanted the terrorists to blow up your house?”

Well, someone had clearly googled him. Tony blinked at the kid for a moment, then tossed his head back and laughed.

Chapter Text

Pepper knew when she had lost Tony’s attention. But that was okay. She knew he would be bringing this Accords business back up later. Maybe tonight, maybe a week from now. And when he does, he will have thought through every move like it was a game of chess. Multiple strategies, probabilities for each. He will have read through the reports from the focus group George was putting together. He will have had FRIDAY analyze the success of past attempts to change laws regarding children, and any other number of statistical facts that Pepper would never think to look into.

(He’d once argued for a specific release date for a new line of computers based entirely around the migration patterns of one species of bird, so…)

Tony needed things pointed out to him. A lot. But once something had been brought to his attention, he was perfectly capable of running with an idea. Often too capable, but at least he had grown more inclined to talk things over with age.

So Pepper felt no qualms about cutting their impromptu virtual meeting with George short when she heard Tony burst out laughing at something Harry had said. With a few more quick words to the man, she banished the holographic projection and turned to her…her boys. She supposed she could start thinking of them that way. Pepper might not be the one gaining legal custody of Harry this week, but she knew where she stood in Tony’s life. She knew what role she would be stepping into for his son.

With that in mind, she smiled at Harry. “Our designer should be sending me a few potential layouts for your room today,” she told him. “Would you like to look them over with me tonight, Harry?”

“In red and gold?” he asked, and Pepper was pleased to see some of Tony’s patented cheek cropping up in the somewhat quiet boy.

“Yes, I told her red and gold,” she confirmed with a laugh, “God help us.”

Harry snickered, scooping a large bite of eggs into his mouth.

“And Tony? I’ve ordered Harry the basics: some new jeans, t-shirts, sweaters, but none of it is very personal, and I didn’t get any new shoes, so…”

“Yep, on it,” Tony nodded. “FRI?”

A fresh holographic screen popped up in front of a startled Harry, the online shoe department for Saks displaying uniform rows of designer sneakers. Pepper sighed. She hadn’t meant go shopping right this second, but she should have guessed Tony would jump on her suggestion immediately.

“I’ve also booked Harry an appointment with Franco for tomorrow at one—”

“Isn’t he the one that refuses to make house calls?”

Pepper folded her hands primly in her lap. “I like his work,” she sniffed.

And it would get Tony out of the tower for a little while. He’d been cooped up alone in his labs too much since Siberia. But Rhodey’s prototype leg braces were finished. Any further tinkering could wait a day for Tony to get some fresh air.

“Who is Franco?” Harry asked.

“A grumpy, old—”

“A tailor,” Pepper cut Tony off.

“Oh,” Harry glanced between the two adults nervously, “I thought we weren’t going to do any photos?”

“We’re not,” Pepper assured him as she climbed to her feet, phone beginning to buzz in her hand. “But every young man needs a few good suits.”

She answered her phone as she began to walk back to the elevator, waving over her shoulder at her boys on her way out.

Time to put out another fire.

“I don’t actually need new shoes,” Harry said once the elevator shut behind Pepper.

“Hmmm?” his dad hummed, focussing in on a different holographic screen he’d pulled up when Pepper had stood to leave. A graph of some sort, though Harry hadn’t the foggiest what it was for.

“The shoes,” he said, “I bought a pair of boots right before I came to New York, so you don’t need to buy me any more.”

“A pair of boots? Singular?” His dad finally glanced up, looking completely unimpressed.

“I bought a pair of sneakers too!”

“So you own two pairs of shoes?”

Harry almost denied the accusation. He had Dudley’s duct-taped castoffs, too. But three pairs didn’t sound much better than two, and he didn’t actually want to claim those raggedy things.

“I’ll tell you what,” his dad said when Harry was silent a touch too long, “Pick yourself out ten new pairs of shoes, and I’ll be happy.”

“Ten!”

“What about those? They look cool.”

Harry looked where his dad was pointing. “Those cost eight hundred dollars!” For a pair of plain white sneakers with black splatter paint on the heel.

“Look around you, kid,” his dad snorted. “I think I can afford it.”

“I—” Harry shook his head. He’d never thought twice about spending the money in his vault, and he hadn’t been concerned about the nice bedroom that was being completely redecorated just for him, or the luxury shampoo he’d used this morning in his amazing new shower, but this felt different somehow. Spending several thousand dollars on shoes in one morning, when Harry already had shoes…

“I don’t need your money,” he said, not quite able to meet his dad’s eyes. “My mum and dad—James—I—they left me a small fortune. It’s not billions or anything, but I could easily live on it if I needed to, if I was responsible, without ever having to work, so…so I don’t need your money. I don’t want you to think that’s what I was after, coming here.”

“It’s just shoes, bambino,” his dad said after a beat of heavy silence, voice gentling over the strange nickname for a fraction of a second before bouncing back to the more jaunty tone Harry was accustomed to hearing from him. “Besides, if you think ten pairs of shoes is a lot, you should see my second closet.”

“Your second closet?”

“Like I said, this is nothing. Relax about it.”

“But my boots are really nice!” Harry made one last ditch effort to stop the shopping spree. Because even if his boots cost the equivalent of half the price of those sneakers: “They’re dragon hide.”

“…Dragon hide. As in came off the back of a dragon, dragon hide? Giant, mythical flying lizards that breath fire, dragons?”

“Yep.”

His dad squinted at him. “Go get those boots.”

“If I’d known you brought proof with you to the tower,” Tony muttered as he carefully snipped a small sample from the side of Harry’s boot.

Dragon hide, as it turned out, looked a lot like snakeskin with enlarged scale-bump things, except they were straight bronze in color without the boa constrictor diamond patterns found in most snakeskin fashion statements. They were down in Bruce’s old lab, which still housed all of the equipment Tony would need to fully analyze the DNA in the boot, and despite his general disinterest in the squishy sciences, Tony was almost vibrating with excitement. Which was unfortunate since after the initial sample prep, the process was completely automated. He would have nothing to do with his hands for several hours while the machines and FRIDAY did their work.

“My boots don’t do anything,” Harry said for the tenth time, like shoes made from dragons weren’t magical unless they could talk or something equally ridiculous.

Not that these DNA results would actually prove anything about Harry’s abilities. His son was evidence that having magic, for lack of a better term, didn’t render an animal unrecognizable on a genetic level from every other life form on Earth. And that was assuming magic was an ability shared across species, a common genetic mutation—if not, the divide between the magical and non-magical worlds could be an entirely social construct, with creatures like fire-breathing dragons hidden away from the rest of humanity way back when the scientific method took a backseat to mystical explanations, assuming dragons and witches weren’t the only fairytale creatures out there in the world.

Point being: at best, Tony was going to find out he’d ‘discovered’ a new species in a few hours. All of the gene mapping that would be necessary to isolate the specific genes responsible for magical abilities would fall outside of Tony’s wheelhouse.

(Bruce would love it though. Tony’s science bro could spend the rest of his life studying this and be happy, if only Tony knew where the other man was.)

“Incoming call from Honeybear, Boss,” FRIDAY suddenly announced, yanking Tony out of his thoughts.

The video link connected before Tony even had a chance to think about rejecting the call.

“Platypus!” he stared wide-eyed at the wall-sized image of his best friend’s unimpressed face.

Rhodey pursed his lips. “Why’re you looking at me like that, Tony?”

“Panicking, I’m definitely panicking.”

“Mmhmm.”

“In my defense,” Tony gestured towards his son, who was sitting on the stool beside him, “Harry only showed up here yesterday, so…”

Tony could tell the exact moment Rhodey got a good look at the kid, when whatever thoughts he’d been entertaining about this whole thing being a joke or yet more tabloid trash were swept away by the picture Tony and his son made sitting next to one another. Though to his credit, it only took a second for Rhodey’s blank shock to shift into a rueful grin.

“Hi, Harry,” he said. “Your dad forgot to call and introduce us, but I’m the closest thing you have to an uncle on this side of the family. James Rhodes—”

“Call him Rhodey.”

“—Nice to meet you.”

“Hullo,” Harry waved at the screen.

Rhodey stared, then shook his head very slightly, chuckling breathlessly. “Jeez, wow, that’s a déjà vu moment. Give him a leather jacket and a bad spiked hairdo, Tones—”

“Bad! My hair was a masterpiece.”

“—And he could be you freshman year of college…Masterpiece? Really? Is that what they told you?”

“I started that trend!”

“Yeah, and it was a bad trend.”

“Wait,” Harry cut in, “Does this mean I’m not going to get a growth spurt until I’m twenty?”

He looked beyond horrified at the prospect. It took Tony and Rhodey a few seconds to realize the boy didn’t know that Tony had started at MIT when he was fifteen, only two years older than Harry was now, but once they caught on, they took one look at each other and promptly burst out laughing. Which naturally did nothing to soothe Harry, but the more horrified he looked, the more Tony and Rhodey laughed, until they were more laughing at one another than at Harry’s expression.

“Don’t worry, squirt,” Tony said, positively giggling as he draped his arm over the kid’s shoulder, “I grew about eight inches my freshman year…”

Rhodey, who had just regained his breath, started laughing again.

“…When I was fifteen. You’ll be fine.”

Harry’s look of relief was almost as comical as his initial dismay. Tony laughed again, neither noticing nor caring in that moment how much lighter he suddenly felt, like his first full breath after the arc reactor had been successfully removed from his chest.

“Thanks for that, Harry,” Rhodey sighed, eyes crinkling at the corners as he continued to smile. “But Tony, I did actually have a different reason for calling. Unfortunately.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, General Kim called.”

Kim. Of all the people involved in the ongoing Accords negotiations, Kim was one of Tony’s favorites. Unlike most of the military brass and other assorted government officials, the general was more interested in forming specialized superhero search and rescue teams than in creating greater fighting forces. But he was having trouble gaining traction with all of the other crap that needed sorting out.

Tony patted Harry on the back. “You want to go grab us some snacks, Mini-Merlin? I’ll meet you in the living room in a few minutes.”

Harry looked like he would much rather stay and listen to the super secret, boring-as-hell political talk, but he climbed to his feet regardless and trotted out of the room. Tony waited for the lab door to click shut behind him, then waved for Rhodey to carry on.

Harry plopped down on the living room couch a few minutes after leaving the lab. The Dursleys hadn’t starved him growing up. They’d sometimes withheld food as a punishment, but ninety percent of the time he’d received three full meals a day. But he’d never been allowed seconds at mealtimes, and he’d certainly never been allowed to snack throughout the day. So despite wanting to know what a general would be calling about, he was content enough with his bag of chips and his can of coke.

Finding out that the press was already reporting on him this morning had come as a shock, mostly mitigated by the lack of details in the news clip, but the phone call with Rhodey reminded him that the telly was probably not a good way for people to discover personal news.

“FRIDAY?” Harry glanced up at the ceiling. He couldn’t see any cameras or speakers, but he was sure the AI was listening. “I was wondering, would it be possible for me to call a friend of mine back in London?”

“Sure thing, Mini-Boss!” FRIDAY cheerfully replied. “Do you have a phone number, or will you need me to track down contact information?”

“Er, she gave me her number, but I’m not sure where…” Harry started to stand up, but the AI was quick to reassure him that she could locate a number with a little more information.

“Right, okay,” Harry nodded, sinking back onto the couch, “Her name is Hermione Granger. Hermione Jean Granger. Her parents are both dentists, and they live in…Hampstead Garden, north of London. I think her number starts with a five? I’m not sure—”

“Got it! Calling Granger residence home phone.”

Ringing played over the speakers, an echoing click, then, “Hello?”

“Hermione?”

“This is she.”

“Hermione! It’s me, Harry.”

“Harry! Oh, oh I’m so glad you called! When Hedwig arrived here yesterday, I didn’t know what to think. And then I got a letter from Ron, and he said his dad says you blew up your aunt. But of course your note didn’t mention anything about that. And really, Harry, you know I’m happy to keep Hedwig for you, but you didn’t exactly explain why you need me to, and—”

“Hermione!”

“What?”

“I—I have a lot to tell you…” Harry took a deep breath, not quite sure where to begin.

Hermione made an impatient noise on the other end of the line. “Well, go on then.”

Harry chuckled nervously. “Er, well, to start with, the reason I needed you to keep Hedwig for me is because I’m in New York—

“You’re where?”

“—And I couldn’t bring her—New York, Hermione. I’m in New York.”

“What on earth are you doing there?” Hermione paused, then nearly shrieked, “Did you run away? Oh, Harry! That was really unsafe!”

“No, I didn’t run away! I mean, I did leave the Dursleys because I thought I was going to be expelled for blowing Aunt Marge up, but I only went to Diagon Alley, and Minister Fudge found me as soon as I arrived, and he told me I wasn’t expelled and that I could stay there, so…”

“Then what are you doing in New York?” Hermione asked, sounding only marginally more calm.

“Well if you would let me finish.”

“Sorry,” Hermione sniffed, “do continue.”

“Right,” Harry rubbed his sweating hands over his thighs, “So I found a letter in my vault yesterday, and it was from my dad…from James. And it turns out he wasn’t my biological father.”

Hermione sucked in a sharp breath.

“My dad’s—he’s alive, Hermione. And I knew he was in New York, so I bought a portkey—Have you heard of those? They’re—”

“Objects enchanted to instantly transport a witch or wizard from one location to another, yes, I know. I’ve read all about them. So you read your…James’s letter, and you immediately decided to buy a portkey to New York?”

“Er, yes?”

“Harry!”

“I wanted to meet my dad, Hermione!”

“Still,” she protested weakly, then, “Did you? Meet him, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Harry breathed out, not quite able to believe the whirlwind of the last day. “He’s—He’s going to let me stay, Hermione.”

“Stay? In New York?”

“Yeah,” Harry smiled, that unfamiliar warmth rising in his chest again as he looked around his new home. “He’s filing for custody.”

“That’s,” Hermione was quiet for a second, “That’s wonderful, Harry.”

“Yeah! And you should see this place! Maybe I’ll get to invite you over soon. You’ll love the labs. I don’t know what any of the machines do, but they’ve got these holographic computer screens, like something from a movie, and FRIDAY, she’s an AI—”

“Labs?” Hermione cut him off. “Harry, where are you?”

“Stark Tower.”

“Stark—They have living quarters there? And they let you in their labs? What?”

“Oh, right,” Harry rubbed at the back of his neck sheepishly. “I suppose that detail is kind of important. Er, so my dad is Tony Stark. That’s what the letter said, which is how I knew to come to New York. And, er, yeah, I thought I should call and tell you before you found out on the news because they got my first name somehow, and Stark Industries is going to confirm it? I’m not sure what they’re going to say, exactly, but they are going to confirm my dad is my dad. So…maybe you could write and let Ron know for me?”

Hermione took a long time to respond, and an exhausting number of assurances when she finally did that this was not a joke before she accepted that Harry was in fact Tony Stark’s son.

“How are you ever going to convince a man like Tony Stark that…you-know-what is real?” she asked once she’d calmed down.

Harry was a little disturbed by how much Hermione’s voice as she said his dad’s name resembled the way she’d referred to Lockhart all last year, but he opted not to focus on that.

“Magic, you mean?” he asked with a chuckle. “I already told him.”

“And he believed you?”

“Well, mostly. I think he thinks I have superpowers, to be honest, but he’s running my dragon-hide boots for DNA right now, and I’m going to take him to New York’s magic district soon so he can actually see people performing real magic, and that should be all the proof he needs.”

“Harry,” Hermione said, infusing his name with all the exasperated fondness he’d grown so used to hearing from her. “You own an invisibility cloak. You don’t need to go anywhere to prove magic exists. And you certainly don’t need your—your dad to run an elaborate gene mapping study to prove anything.”

Harry had not thought of that.

Hermione giggled at his silence.

“Is he nice?” she asked a moment later, mercifully letting him off the hook.

“Yeah,” Harry said, thinking of a warm arm wrapped securely around his shoulder as his dad and his dad’s best friend roared with laughter over a harmless spot of teasing. “Yeah, he’s nice.”

“Good. And the letter?” Hermione pressed hesitantly. “Was it nice too? Or, I mean, are you okay? It wasn’t…?”

“What?”

“Cruel?”

“Why would it have been cruel?” Harry ground out around clenched teeth, immediately defensive. That letter had been embarrassing, but the words it contained were easily the kindest Harry had ever had directed at him. It was special in a way he couldn’t properly define.

Hermione stuttered. “I only meant—I could understand if it wasn’t…the nicest—If your mum had—you know…”

“If she had what?”

“Had an affair?” Hermione whispered.

Harry was quiet for three long seconds, then he sprang to his feet. “My mum did NOT have an AFFAIR!”

Hermione said nothing.

“Is that what you’ve been thinking this entire time?” Harry yelled. “That my mum cheated? Because she didn’t!”

“I’m sorry! I—I shouldn’t have assumed.”

“No,” Harry snapped, “You shouldn’t have!”

But that was what everyone was going to assume, wasn’t it? They would all think his mum had been unfaithful, that his dad had been cuckolded by…his dad. Unless Harry corrected them. But what was he supposed to say? That his parents had all participated in a threesome together? Was he supposed to share those private details with the entire world? Harry didn’t know, and he didn’t want to think about it either.

“I’m sorry,” Hermione said again.

“Yeah,” Harry grunted, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Yeah. Look, I’ll see about having you visit…If you’d want to?”

“Oh, yes! That would be—that would be wonderful, Harry.”

“Good. Great. And…you’ll talk to Ron for me? Tell him everything that’s happened? And that I’ll see about having him visit too? Both of you together?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll send Hedwig to him today.”

Harry thanked her, and with another minute spent on goodbyes, the line clicked off.

“So,” his dad’s voice drawled out from behind him. Harry whipped his head around, watching as the man shrugged up off of the wall beside the elevator and began to stride forward. “You want to invade my tower with more children, huh?”

Harry swallowed thickly. “If that’s okay?”

His dad pursed his lips. “I’ll tell you what, let me read that letter of yours, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter Text

Tony felt strangely nervous as he took the letter from Harry’s outstretched hand. He’d been curious from the moment Harry had popped into his life, and the outburst he’d walked in on with his son claiming that Lily Potter had not had an affair only made him more keen to see what the letter had to say. But Harry had been so—not reluctant, not exactly, but protective? A touch possessive?—He had been hesitant to let Tony read what his mother had written to him. And while that hadn’t stopped Tony from pushing, it did dampen his eagerness.

No matter what he was feeling, though, it never once crossed Tony’s mind that the letter would not be from Lily.

Love, Dad, it was signed.

Dad.

A shameful flash of resentment shot down Tony’s spine.

Tony would like to think that if he’d found out about Harry back when the kid was born, he would’ve tried to be involved. He would also really, really like to think that he would have stepped up and been the dad his son had needed him to be after James and Lily died. But the truth was he had no way of knowing. He had always told himself he would never be like Howard, but his solution to that depressing line of thought had always been to just never have kids. When Harry was born, Tony was at the height of his Carpe Diem days, and he feared even a child would not have curbed his wild lifestyle. Ultimately, though, it was useless to speculate. Tony hadn’t known, and Harry had reached his teen years without a father.

Without Tony.

Nearly thirteen years because Tony had not been given the opportunity to step up.

Tony shook the thought away. It was useless to speculate, he reminded himself. James and Lily were dead. And whatever beef he might have with them and their choices, James had clearly adored Harry.

Harry, who was apparently a threesome baby. Tony was tempted to laugh at the thought of what the media would say when that came out. And it would come out. Harry’s ardent defense of Lily’s honor wouldn’t allow for anything else, no matter how embarrassing the kid found the situation. The headlines were going to be spectacular, especially since it had been a devil’s threesome and not Tony with two women. He’d never hidden his sexuality from the world, but for whatever reason, most people tended to view him as hyper straight, despite all the very public evidence to the contrary.

Pepper was going to love it. (Even if she would pretend to find the whole circus exhausting. Everyone knew she thrived on wrangling chaotic situations.)

There was one curious thing about this letter though… “You know who any of these people are?” he asked Harry, tapping the list of potential guardians, none of whom were the Dursleys.

Harry shook his head. “There’s a Neville Longbottom in my class, but I’d never met him before we started at Hogwarts.”

“Any relation to Frank and Alice?”

“I dunno,” Harry shrugged, “Maybe.”

Tony drummed his fingers against the kitchen counter. “FRI?” he said, confident the AI had begun a search the second he started reading.

“I believe I have located the people listed in the letter, Boss,” she replied without missing a beat.

“Alright, hit me.”

A holographic screen popped up in front of him and Harry, displaying several news articles along with the photos of seven young, doe-eyed women. “This is the only Marlene McKinnon in the United Kingdom with six sisters.” The second to last photo enlarged. “The entire family died in a gas line explosion on July 23, 2004.”

“It wasn’t a gas line explosion,” Harry muttered darkly.

Tony shot him a sharp look of inquiry, but for once opted against pressing for more information. “And the others?” he directed at FRIDAY.

“Sirius Black.” A mugshot featuring a handsome, black-haired man replaced the photos of the McKinnons, along with several pages of police reports spanning across twelve years. “Cross-referencing both birth and immigration records for the United Kingdom from 1972 through 1994, I have found no other man with the first name ‘Sirius’ with less than a ten year age gap from James and Lily Potter.”

“I recognize him,” Harry whispered. “From photos of my parent’s wedding. He was…he was there.”

Harry was staring at the mugshot wide eyed, lips pressed into a thin line. Tony wrapped his arm around him without pausing to think, freezing up at the same moment Harry stiffened, when they both realized what he had done. Then Harry relaxed, melting into his side just a bit, like he wanted to cuddle close but didn’t quite dare. Tony squeezed him tighter.

“Sirius Black was incarcerated on November 1, 2004 for the mass murder of fourteen people,” FRIDAY continued her spiel. “He escaped prison this past June and is currently a fugitive. There is a nationwide tip line running in the UK which has produced eleven confirmed sightings, but I have been unable to locate further information on the manhunt. No trial records have been digitized.”

“Shit.” Tony studied Sirius Black’s frowning face, but all he could think about was Obadiah Stane. If James and Lily had trusted this man, Tony could only feel grateful he’d shown his true colors before Harry had landed in his care.

“Okay, guess we dodged a bullet there.” He sighed, swiping Black’s information away with one hand, sickened by the graphic descriptions spelled out in the initial police reports. “And the Longbottoms?”

“Frank and Alice Longbottom are listed as permanent residents in a longterm psychiatric care ward. Would you like me to unseal their records, Boss?”

“No,” Tony grimaced.

Ten potential guardians. Ten. And every single one of them was incapacitated in 2004, around the same time James and Lily died.

I hope the war will end soon, James had written. And then he’d died in a house fire—a leak in the gas line, the police investigation had reported. And the McKinnons all dead in a gas line explosion. One man a mass murderer via gas line arson, two others so severely traumatized they were still in a psych ward twelve years later.

“Bambino, you said James and Lily were murdered. Was the guy who did it ever caught?”

“Voldemort?”

Tony blinked. Whatever weird ass name that was, it was not the one he’d been expecting. And then Harry kept talking, and everything just got weirder. And about a thousand times more horrifying.

“No,” the boy said, “He sort of died that night when he—He tried to kill me—”

“What!”

“—But his killing curse backfired. No one knows why. And he disappeared for ten years, and everyone thought he was dead, but my first year at Hogwarts he was attached to the back of my teacher’s head, like a big tumor with a face, so I suppose he’s not really dead. He just doesn’t have a body of his own at the moment.”

Harry at least had the good sense to look appropriately disturbed by the words spilling from his mouth. And god, if this whole magic thing ended up being a delusion…But no. Tony was pretty sure it was real, and even if it wasn’t, Harry still believed he had witnessed a murderous parasitic talking tumor on his teacher’s head, which was…

“I’m going to need some context here, kid,” Tony said.

And that was exactly what he received. Harry was almost thirteen, and his views reflected all of the limited nuance of his age, but it still took him half an hour to summarize the various ins and outs of Britain’s most recent wizarding civil war, and Harry’s specific role in the play.

The Dark Lord Voldemort rose to power on a platform of violent anti-muggleborn racism. He, along with his fanatical Death Eater followers, had murdered, tortured, and mind controlled their way towards a bloody coup. By October of 2004, they had all but won. They’d been ready to enact their own version of the Nazi’s Final Solution, with their genocide aimed at those from non-magical families. And then Voldemort had gone to the Potter’s house. He’d murdered James and Lily before turning his wand on an infant Harry. And in a miracle that caused Tony’s heart to stutter just listening to, Voldemort’s unblockable killing curse had rebounded off of Harry’s forehead, leaving nothing but a lightning bolt scar. The war had ended, Voldemort presumed dead.

Until he’d shown up at Harry’s school on the back of a teacher’s head looking to steal a piece of magical technology that would allow him to create a new body.

It was as if Arnim Zola’s computerized mind had attempted to follow in Ultron’s footsteps and steal Helen Cho’s cradle for himself. Except this sicko was after Tony’s son.

One part of Tony’s mind was curious about how that worked. The Zola Steve had found at Camp Lehigh was a sophisticated copy of the original man’s mind, but it wasn’t perfect, and Zola himself did not live beyond his body’s death. The man and the computer copy were separate, for all that most of Zola’s memories and thought processes were preserved.

(Preserved enough to pass on secrets to Steve, secrets Steve had not shared when he’d told Tony about his encounter with Zola’s copy, secrets Tony had deserved to hear.)

There had to be some kind of physical anchor behind Voldemort’s survival, something which operated like a server with internet relays linking Voldemort’s shade back to his safely preserved mind. If he had downloaded his consciousness before he died, if magical technology allowed a human to live and operate more akin to one of Tony’s AI’s with multiple points of awareness, no single body…

But those thoughts were not the center of Tony’s focus. No, the vast majority of his mind was consumed with the realization that his ability to engage in magical combat was woefully lacking. He didn’t know what these people were capable of or where to start with designing his defenses. But if Harry was going to be the target of a neo-Nazi wizarding cult, Tony was sure as hell going to figure it out. Fast.

Studying magic was no longer a matter of mere scientific curiosity.

“You said there’s a magic shopping district nearby?” he asked Harry.

“About fifteen minutes up the road, yeah. But er, actually, my friend pointed out that we don’t need to go anywhere for me to prove magic is real. Because I own an invisibility cloak? And you don’t actually need to cast any spells or anything to use it. So I could prove everything right now?”

An hour ago Tony would have been jumping with eagerness to study a functional invisibility cloak. But while the idea of confirmation was great, and the desire to study the cloak was present, Tony was still stuck on his need for immediate comprehensive information.

“Do they sell books in your magic district?” he asked.

Harry looked at him oddly as he nodded.

“Great! Awesome, good, then we can—”

But no, they couldn’t go right this second. SI’s statement about Harry should be dropping any minute now. The press was already swarming the building. Once they received official confirmation that Harry existed, it would be a madhouse. And what if Harry’s control was lacking? What if that kind of mayhem triggered him the way it would have triggered Wanda? Tony wouldn’t put his kid in a position to be overwhelmed like that. Harry would need PR training before they threw him out to swim with the sharks. And until then, until this initial furor died down, their public excursions would need to be carefully planned out.

“—We’ll go tomorrow morning. Early. FRIDAY can sneak us out then, can’t you, FRI?”

“Just after sunrise would be the least conspicuous time, Boss,” FRIDAY replied with far too much glee.

Tony shot the nearest camera a look, then turned back to Harry, and with a great sense of déjà vu, told the kid to go grab his magical clothes so Tony could study them.

Harry pulled his invisibility cloak from his trunk, taking a moment to admire its silken, watery texture between his fingertips. He considered bringing his photo album down as well, but his gut rebelled at the idea of using those precious few pictures for a science experiment. His school books though—Harry riffled through the haphazard stack in his trunk.

His dad was bent over a computer screen when Harry entered the lab a few minutes later.

“…Results most closely match ancient archosaur DNA,” FRIDAY was saying over the speakers. “Which is the clade from which both birds and crocodiles evolved. Your dragon DNA is not a match for any crocodilian species. I will require more time to run the results against all known bird species, but preliminary checks suggest there will be no match. Congratulations, Boss, you have most likely discovered a new species.”

“That makes sense,” Harry said by way of announcing his presence to the room. “Norberta looked like a crocodile with black umbrellas for wings, so…”

“Norberta?”

“I didn’t name her!”

“Well that’s something, at least.” His dad snorted, shaking his head as a wry smirk crept onto his face. “So you’ve seen a dragon in person? Do wizards have zoos? Wait, do unicorns exist?”

“Yeah, unicorns are real,” Harry replied, grimacing as he thought of that ethereal white horse savagely splayed across the damp roots of the Forbidden Forest, glowing silver blood leaking from its neck, a dark wraith hovering cruelly above it. He shook the memory away, hesitated for a moment, but Hagrid could hardly get in trouble for this story now. “But I didn’t see Norberta at a zoo. Hagrid—he’s the groundskeeper at Hogwarts—he won a dragon egg in a game of cards one night. And you’re not really supposed to keep dragons as pets, so he had to keep Norberta hidden in his hut. But dragons grow really fast, and his hut is made of wood, so… We convinced him to send Norberta to Ron’s brother Charlie. He’s a dragon keeper in Romania. Ron, Hermione, and I had to sneak her up to the astronomy tower one night to hand her off, but we managed to make the exchange before Professor McGonagall caught us breaking curfew, so Hagrid didn’t get into any trouble!”

“…Did you get in trouble?”

Harry, who had never before had to consider what his parents might think of him getting detention, froze up for a second. His dad didn’t seem mad or anything, but he wasn’t exactly cheering Harry’s exploits on either.

Slowly, Harry began to nod.

His dad regarded him neutrally. “Dragons can breath fire, right?”

“Yes.”

“And how big do they get?”

“I—I’m not sure—Pretty big?”

“How big was the baby when you gave her to Charlie?”

“About eight feet long?”

“So unless I misunderstood something, it’s illegal to keep a dragon as a pet, right?”

“Yes.”

“Because they’re giant, fire-breathing wild animals?”

“I didn’t want to keep it!” Harry exclaimed, really worried now that he was going to get into trouble. For something that happened over a year ago. Something for which he had already been punished. Sort of.

But at his exclamation, his father’s expression finally cracked and softened. “Okay, relax,” he said. “I didn’t think you did. You’re not in trouble…even if you did break the law.”

“I didn’t!”

“No, of course not. It’s obviously Hagrid who broke the law.”

“Er, well…You’re not going to report him, are you? Because…”

His dad waved him off, and though Harry didn’t feel entirely satisfied with that response, he let it go in favor of pulling on his invisibility cloak and demonstrating real magic for his dad for the first time, grinning madly as his dad stumbled to his feet, cursing up a storm because:

“Holy shit! You’re body’s gone! FRI! You getting anything on infrared? Holy shit!”

“What did you two get up to today while I was gone?” Pepper asked as she crawled into bed next to Tony that night. She’d missed dinner with her boys, so she hadn’t had a chance to see Harry since breakfast that morning, or to go over the bedroom decoration options with him as she’d planned to. But she’d promised herself she wouldn’t allow her busy schedule to keep her from being involved in Harry’s life, so at the very least, she would get a recap on his day every night.

“Kind of a long story,” Tony said, which filled Pepper with absolutely no confidence, “But I think we need to start looking into new schools for Harry.”

Chapter Text

“Tony, this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to tell me.”

“I am telling you!”

Pepper squeezed her eyes shut in frustration. It was easier to think logically when she wasn’t watching a video of Harry disappearing beneath a magical cloak on repeat. And when she didn’t have to look at Tony’s earnest puppy dog eyes.

“Not after you’ve found the answer,” she said, smoothing down the duvet around her legs. She’d been so looking forward to bed, to warmth and cuddles and heated kisses. Instead: “I’m in this too, Tony. If Harry had been suffering from schizophrenic delusions, I’m here for that just as much as I’m here for a super-powered kid with a crazy warlord after him.”

“I didn’t want you to worry,” Tony muttered, staring over at the black rectangles their windows turned into at night.

Pepper reached out to gently turn his face towards her. She ran her thumb over his stubbled cheek. “Let me worry,” she implored him.

She waited several seconds, but when he didn’t respond, she said, “This isn’t you spiraling. You’re not locking yourself away so you can build forty-two specialized suits in five months instead of sleeping. And this isn’t you chasing after every threat in the universe because you can’t figure out how to prioritize and delegate so you can have a life outside of Iron Man. When we broke up—”

“We didn’t—!”

“When we took a break…There’s a difference between doing a dangerous job and actively killing yourself. And it was never the crazy side job that I couldn’t handle. Okay?”

Tony was rigid beneath Pepper’s fingers for one long moment, then he slumped over with defeat, nodding shallowly.

She stroked his hair and leaned against his side. “I’ll start looking into schools tomorrow. Maybe a bilingual program. German, Spanish, or Mandarin would be the most useful—”

“Um, no, Mini-Merlin is definitely learning Italian—”

“But I’ve heard good things about École Française, so—Nobody speaks Italian—”

“I speak Italian!”

“Yes, but that’s your heritage.”

“Which makes it Harry’s heritage!”

“That doesn’t mean his high school should be an immersive Italian program. He can pick that up at home. We should enroll him somewhere that will give him a leg up in the business world.”

“Yeah…I was actually thinking Midtown-What’s-It-Called. The spiderling’s school.”

“Midtown Tech?” Pepper should have expected that. Midtown was the best STEM school in the state. Its students consistently scored higher in the math and science departments than any of its fancy (and exorbitantly expensive) private counterparts. “Aren’t they a little advanced?”

Tony shot her a look, which Pepper opted to ignore.

“Does Harry even like science?” she asked.

“Like he would know,” Tony scoffed, expression growing even more disgruntled.

That had been his first lament when they’d begun the night’s discussion, back when Tony was still working himself up to spilling the beans about magic. Sometime over the course of the day, Tony had apparently asked Harry what subjects he’d taken this past year—no doubt expecting specifics like chemistry or biology, algebra II or geometry—only to learn that Hogwarts offered none of the traditionally expected subjects. No English or science or math. At all. Whatever Harry knew about those subjects, he’d learned it in primary school. Or through osmosis.

Because Hogwarts only cared about magic.

Not that Pepper believed Tony would have been sanguine about sending Harry away even if Hogwarts had been the safest, most well-rounded eduction available in the entire world. So it was just as well that that wasn’t the case. They would look into whatever magical day-schools were available in New York, but if those schools didn’t meet their standards, there were always tutors. Which, while she was thinking about it…

“Harry’s going to need tutoring,” she told Tony. “If he’s missing two years of normal subjects… And an assessment test. We’ll need to find a time to give him one of those.”

Tony scrubbed his hands over his face, nodding his assent even as he groaned: “But who the hell am I going to hire?”

“There are companies,” Pepper pointed out dryly.

“Yeah,” Tony immediately bit back, “And there are spies and evil Nazi terrorists and who knows who else around the world who all just learned I have a kid. You know what, on second thought, maybe we shouldn’t—”

“We’re sending him to school. Station an army of legionaries in the sky around it if that will make you feel better, but we are not isolating your son.”

“…Fine,” Tony conceded the point with ill grace.

Pepper had a feeling she was going to become intimately familiar with Air Traffic Control in the next few months. And probably also a concerned local PTA group.

And memes. Pepper was going to be bombarded with all the memes.

If people thought helicopter parenting was bad.

She made a mental note to talk to their PR managers about that. Pepper was too mature to start anything on the topic herself, but if their company gave the internet a small, anonymous nudge…

Well, she was only reminding everyone what a bad idea it would be to mess with Iron Man’s son.

“Back on the subject of tutors,” she said, “Didn’t you say that Peter Parker is brilliant? And he’s clearly got his heart in the right place, so maybe he could use a summer job.”

“Top of his class last I checked.” Tony tilted his head contemplatively. “And he could definitely use the extra cash. Kid’s got a metabolism like a champion racehorse. No way he’s getting enough to eat on his aunt’s salary. FRI, how much are you supposed to pay a tutor?”

Two seconds later, FRIDAY’s voice chirped from the overhead speaker. “There’s a pretty wide range, Boss. Low end is around ten dollars an hour, while the upper end is approximately fifty dollars an hour, with national averages tending to fall around the twenty dollar mark. But highly educated tutors for high demand subjects can make as much as a hundred dollars an hour or more.”

Tony nodded decisively, snatching his phone up from the bedside table.

Pepper rolled her eyes, fondly exasperated. She knew exactly what he was about to do.

Peter grinned as he watched Ned watch one of Spider-Man’s more daring stunts on YouTube.

That had been a pretty slow day, crime wise—which was great! Peter was all for peace and safety and criminals not committing crimes!—but without even a treed cat to rescue from its self-inflicted peril, Peter had had a lot of pent-up energy to work through and far too much free time to think up daring acrobatics. Which was why he’d come up with the brilliant idea to tightrope walk (web walk?) between two skyscrapers eight-hundred feet in the air.

He’d walked straight out to the middle of his line, carefully placing one foot in front of the other as he went, then he’d turned sideways and lifted his arms high in a victory pose. Standing up there, with every slight breeze swaying him back and forth precariously, one tiny misstep from falling to the concrete far, far below, had been terrifying in all the best ways.

Peter stood up there, arms raised, for nearly five full minutes as he worked up his nerve for the next part of his plan. At least, that was how much time passed in the video, Spider-Man posed still as a statue high above whoever was filming the scene (in surprisingly great quality HD, zoomed in nice and close, with the occasional muttered observation questioning Spider-Man’s sanity).

It hadn’t felt like five minutes. Peter’s stomach had swooped as he’d looked down, heart pounding, fingers tingling, fully contemplating the dangers of his chosen stunt for the first time. He’d been that high before. He’d slung from his webs from that height before. But there was a difference, he’d suddenly discovered, between flinging himself higher and higher in the heat of the moment and staring down an eight-hundred foot drop.

But he’d already been up there. He’d already walked out to the middle of his tightrope, was already poised and ready to jump. And Peter was nothing if not brave.

The five minutes passed, and almost on the dot, Peter took the leap.

He’d wanted to imitate the stunts completed in the Olympic diving competition. He’d seen a compilation of the best dives on YouTube recently, and he’d wanted to try his hand at some of the more complex moves those athletes had pulled off. But of course, at eight-hundred feet, Peter had significantly more room to work with than a ten meter drop. So he’d come up with five routines, one for each ten-meter increment at the beginning of his fall, before he would catch himself with a web and swing to safety.

And he’d nailed it.

He was pretty sure the number of twists he’d achieved in that first sequence broke some kind of record.

Ned was gratifyingly impressed. He'd rewatched the video five times, twice at a quarter playback speed so he could exclaim over each flip in slow motion.

(Happy had been less impressed. That had been the only call since Peter’s first update that the man had answered, and he’d spent the entire three minutes berating Peter for being reckless “for no good reason.”)

“Dude, Spider-Man is so cool. And that suit! Have you seen the way its eyes move? Like its mimicking his real expressions? The coding for that must be insane!” Ned sighed dreamily. “Do you think Iron Man designed it for him? Man that would be so cool!”

“Oh Iron Man definitely made his suit.” Peter had to fight to keep his grin casual. “Spider-Man fought with him in Germany, remember?”

“So cool,” Ned reiterated himself. He was sitting in Peter’s desk chair (his only chair) as he scrolled through YouTube on Peter’s refurbished computer. But he paused his internet trawling then, leaning back to stare at the ceiling. “Do you ever think about who he might be?”

Peter flinched, a brief spike of adrenalin shooting through his system.

“Like, he could be anyone!” Ned continued on, completely oblivious. “One of your neighbors, one of mine…But probably not. I mean, he’s gotta be from Queens, right? But we’ll probably never meet him. Not that we’d ever know—secret identity and all—but what if you bumped into him on the street? You ever think about that? Just ‘Oops! Sorry! Didn’t see you there!’ and then you just walk away because you don’t know it’s Spider-Man, but secretly you’ve bumped shoulders with a superhero. Do you think that happens? Probably all the time, right?”

Peter scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah,” he laughed awkwardly, “It has to. I mean, outside the suit, he’s just a normal guy.”

“Not totally normal. He can still lift a car with his bare hands. That can’t be the new suit.” Ned clicked on an older video of Spider-Man stopping a car from ramming into the side of a bus, the same video Mr. Stark had pulled up when he’d first recruited Peter. “See? He was able to do that back when he was still fighting crime in a sweatsuit.”

“It wasn’t a sweatsuit!”

“Kind of was, dude,” Ned replied absently as he clicked on another video of Spider-Man.

It looked like one of the newer ones, but Peter was distracted from investigating further by the low buzz of his phone receiving a text. He blinked at the thing in confusion for a second before rising from his spot at the end of his bunkbed to grab it from his side table. It was going on midnight, and both Ned and his Aunt May were here at home with Peter. But other than the two of them, no one ever texted Peter this late, especially not over the summer when none of his school clubs had reason to contact him. But it wasn’t like Peter ever received spam texts either. Ned had designed an app to prevent those.

Opening the text didn’t exactly clear things up.

You want a summer job? it read.

From “TS,” a contact name Peter knew he’d never entered into his phone. The only person Peter knew with TS for initials was Mr. Stark, but…

Peter’s eyes grew wide as the obvious finally sank in.

Mr Stark? he texted back just to be sure.

Yeah, kid, it’s me. So summer job?

Peter squirmed, shifting from foot to foot as he fought not to jump up and down with excitement. Is this something for you know what?

No, it’s a normal kid job. Tutoring. $100/hr.

Any disappointment Peter might have felt at that answer was immediately wiped away by the number sitting at the end of the text. Had the message come from anyone else, Peter would have assumed the second zero was a typo. But this was Mr. Stark, the man who hadn’t thought twice about outfitting Peter with an insanely awesome superhero suit. A suit Peter was smart enough to recognize must have cost Mr. Stark at least a hundred grand to create.

Besides, Mr. Stark’s AI would never let him send out a typo.

But a hundred dollars.

An hour.

The thought of earning that kind of money, Peter was having a hard time computing the idea.

Even if he just worked two hours a week, there were eight more weeks of summer left. That was more money than Peter had had of his own ever. That was four times more money. And that four hundred dollars he’d once managed to save had taken him over two years to accumulate, and then he’d spent most of it on a new camera for Ben.

(A new camera that had only snapped half a dozen pictures and was now gathering dust in the storage closet because Peter couldn’t bare to look at it.)

Great, another text dragged Peter’s sluggish mind back to the conversation at hand, I’m going to take your silence as an enthusiastic yes. Glad that’s settled. Swing by the Tower in two days around lunchtime.

Wait!

Peter stared at his text, a little stupefied by his own response. He wasn’t sure why in the world he was hesitating to say yes, other than stunned disbelief that the last few minutes had happened at all.

What subjects am I going to be teaching? he tacked on as quickly as he could manage.

FRIDAY will send you a list, came the immediate reply. And then nothing else. Peter checked for more texts, then refreshed his email—five times—but there was nothing. Nada. Zilch.

“Dude!” Ned whistled right by Peter’s ear, abruptly cluing Peter in to the fact that his best friend had been reading over his shoulder. “Are those from Tony Stark? Oh my god! Are you going to be tutoring Tony Stark’s kid? What even—This is insane!”

Peter gently pushed Ned back into the desk chair, too fondly amused by his friend’s excitement-induced panic to be angry over the invasion of privacy.

“Not the part I was most excited about.”

“Huh?”

“A hundred dollars an hour, Ned,” Peter said as dryly as he could manage when his voice wanted nothing more than to crack and squeak over the ridiculous sum.

“Ooooh yeah.” Ned nodded slowly, then: “Dude! Do you know how many Lego death stars you could buy with that kind of money!”

Chapter Text

Harry came awake slowly the next morning, his windows gradually shifting from blackout to un-tinted clear. Music played over the room’s speakers, starting as a whisper-soft guitar rift and moving up in volume until it reached pleasant dinner party levels. He reached his arms high over his head, fingers and toes pointing, back arching as he stretched the last bits of sleep from his body, then flopped back into the bundle of his luxuriously soft sheets with a contented sigh.

It was only then that he registered the words of the song FRIDAY had chosen to use as his alarm.

“Got your spell on me, baby,” the singer was crooning a tune he vaguely recognized, “Got your spell on me, baby. Yes, you got your spell on me, baby, turning my heart into stone.”

Harry started snickering helplessly into his pillow.

“Good morning, Mini-Boss,” FRIDAY chirped over the speakers, lowering the music’s volume a fraction as she did so.

“Morning, FRIDAY!” Harry grinned, unfazed by her presence, just as he’d been since he’d first learned he would be living in a sentient house. After Hogwarts, with its hundreds of sentient paintings and its semi-cognizant stairways and its numerous snarky mirrors, the idea of an all-knowing voice in the walls didn’t much register as strange or intrusive to Harry as it did for most people when they were introduced to the AI.

“Are you looking forward to your trip?” she asked “…On a magic carpet ride?”

Harry snorted at the terrible attempt at a joke, patting the wall as he walked into his bathroom. FRIDAY had been dropping magic-related quips at him at every opportunity since they met, each more wonderfully awful than the next.

“Needs some work,” he told her.

“Where did I miss the mark? Could you spell it out for me?”

“I’m sorry, FRIDAY,” Harry shook his head mock-solemnly, “But you know I’m not allowed to do magic outside of school.”

FRIDAY was silent for a long moment, then: “Touché, Mini-Boss.”

Harry was still grinning when he dropped into his seat at the breakfast table, fully dressed for the day in a nice new pair of jeans and a fitted shirt, five minutes later. Pepper was similarly put together and ready to greet the morning, but his dad looked half a second away from falling face first into his cereal. Bleary eyed, hair wild without its usual careful grooming—like Harry’s usual mess—a long silk robe wrapped around him like a billionaire’s version of a snuggie blanket.

Harry resisted laughing by sheer force of will.

Pepper tossed him a conspiratorial wink as she shoved a second cup of coffee in his dad’s direction. His dad snatched it up, inhaled the rich scent with a blissful smile, then gulped down half of the steaming mug in a single gulp. Harry watched with a kind of morbid fascination, waiting for his dad to drop his coffee and shriek from a burned tongue, but the expected reaction never came. His dad just took another deep breath with his nose buried over the rim of his mug, then swallowed down a second, smaller sip.

Pepper placed a bowl of fruit and a bagel in front of Harry. “I’m pretty sure he burned away all the pain receptors in his tongue long before you were born,” she said, nodding at his dad with a smirk.

His dad flicked her off without looking at her, but his eyes grew wide when Harry’s laughter overlayed Pepper’s delicate snort.

“Shit!” He stared at Harry with a befuddled sort of panic. “That’s a no-no, isn’t it? No vulgarity in front of the baby, right?” He glanced at Pepper to double check, nodded to himself in confirmation without waiting for her response. “Right. Wait…When did you get here, Mini-Merlin?”

“I’m not a baby,” Harry said, ignoring the question.

His dad waved his hand dismissively. “Close enough.”

“I’m thirteen!”

“Don’t exaggerate. We both know you’re only twelve.”

“For one more week!”

“A tiny little impressionable preteen,” his dad jibed, eyes beginning to dance playfully. “No curse words for you, not till you’re old enough to actually do the thing you’re cursing about.”

Harry took a moment to parse out that new rule, then: “Well shit,” he said with a shit-eating grin, looking his dad straight in the eye.

A second of dead silence passed, then Pepper burst out laughing. His dad’s eyes crinkled up as he chuckled along with her.

“Yeah,” he raised his mug up to his lips, “that one didn’t make much sense back when my old man used to say it either.”

Harry’s head dipped shyly, a softer smile gracing his face. He wondered at what point it would stop taking him by surprise every time someone said something to remind him that he had a family now. He had a grandfather. And the man might be dead, but Harry’s dad was here, and he was passing on little phrases that his dad used to say. Because Harry was his son.

Photos, wonderful as it had been to receive them from Hagrid, couldn’t compare.

They exited the tower via the North Wing, which made it sound like the exit was part of the building. But in reality, the North Wing was an underground garage devoted entirely to housing and maintaining his dad’s massive collection of cars. A tunnel connected the garage to a street a full two blocks away, with a discreet gate marking the entrance for what appeared to be an apartment complex’s small parking area.

With all of the rampant press attention, Harry still thought it would be obvious where the hidden entrance was located considering how flashy most of his dad’s cars were. But those, he was informed, were never driven out of the North Wing. There was a second tunnel leading to an exit on the east—which the press had discovered less than a week after his dad had moved in—for any car that didn’t pass both Happy and Pepper’s subtlety test.

They left in a sleek black sedan. BMW, fresh with the new car smell, but one of a million similar vehicles in New York. There was nothing custom about it, not even a ‘Stark’ vanity plate. This early in the morning, there was hardly any traffic about, though when they drove back past the tower, Harry was shocked to see just how many reporters were camped out on the sidewalk. Waiting. Luckily, nobody from the press paid the black BMW a second glance, and ten minutes after they left the tower, they were parking in a public parking garage.

Harry led his family over to the corner of Madison Square Park where the single bronze nob on the black gate marked the magical entrance.

“We’re here,” he announced.

Pepper and his dad exchanged a skeptical look, so Harry stuck his hand through the barrier, grinning smugly when Pepper squeaked with shock as his arm disappeared into thin air.

His dad reached out curiously, but unlike Harry, whose arm was still invisible, his dad’s arm met regular, empty air, and went nowhere.

“What?” Harry muttered, pulling his arm back, suddenly concerned he wouldn’t be able to bring his family into the magical district.

“Wait, no,” his dad cried, fascination brightening his dark eyes. He grabbed Harry’s hand and thrust it back towards the barrier. “Put it ba—Whoah!”

The three of them stared as his dad’s arm disappeared with Harry’s.

“Are you actively doing anything to get through?” he asked, the hand gripping Harry’s behind the barrier tightening. Which was probably a good instinct if any of the horror stories Harry had heard about splinching were true. If his dad let go while his arm was inside the portal…That probably wouldn’t end well. Harry gripped back and slowly withdrew their arms.

“It’s probably got anti-muggle wards or something,” Harry said. “Hogwarts has those. Hermione told me about them. Muggles can’t see the castle at all, and if they get too close, they get really confused and suddenly remember something they desperately need to do in another direction. But I suppose that wouldn’t work very well in the middle of a busy city.”

“Muggles?” Pepper asked.

“People who can’t do magic.”

“So you didn’t have to do anything to get through? The security system just recognized that you can do magic? Is it a genetic marker or an energy reading?”

Harry blinked at his dad. “I, er…”

“Never mind. We can enter if you’re holding on to us, right?”

“I think so?”

“Great!” His dad clapped his hands and tapped the rim of his sunglasses. “I’ll go first. FRI, make sure you’re recording everything.”

Harry didn’t think to warn his dad about the issues electronics had around magic until they’d already stepped through the barrier, but by then it was too late.

“Huh,” his dad pulled off his glasses, flipping them around so he could examine them from a different angle. The computerized lenses hadn’t gone fuzzy or anything so obvious. They were just clear, tinted red like a normal pair of sunglasses.

“I hope FRI got something from that,” he mumbled. Then a calculating gleam entered his eye, and he tapped on his watch, an advanced, rectangular thing that Harry was sure would fail just like his glasses had. But the watch unfolded smoothly into a shiny metal gauntlet encasing his dad’s hand.

“Ha! Man I’m good.”

“How did you…?”

“Arc reactor tech, Bambino. Loki couldn’t affect it with his glow stick of destiny either.”

“He used a glow stick?”

Harry’s expression must have been beyond confused, because his dad took one look at him and cracked up laughing.

“No, not an actual glow stick. It was a scepter. It could mind control people and shoot energy beams and probably some other stuff too. Now why don’t you go grab Pep before she decides we forgot her.”

“Right.” Harry smiled sheepishly and stepped back through the barrier, apologizing to Pepper as he pulled her into the magical district.

The area was as quiet at this early hour as it had been the day Harry had arrived in New York, and not much different at first glance from a large portion of the muggle side of the city. The buildings were four and five stories tall, brick and painted out in mostly neutral colors, if they were painted at all. The upper floors looked to be mostly apartments or office space, complete with metal fire escape stairways zigzagging down the walls. Storefronts with wide glass windows occupied the ground level along the street—an apothecary and a grocery and a whole slew of shops for ‘household necessities.’

Harry quickly discovered, to his chagrin, that his dad possessed no sense of restraint when it came to shopping. The local branch of Gringotts was not yet open when they arrived, and by the time it was, they were already immersed in their activities. But with no access to a bank—and no ability to use muggle credit cards even if they could access one—they were stuck with the money Harry had on him. Which should have been fine. Harry had eighty galleons. He’d planned for that to money to see him through an entire summer renting a room in Diagon.

But Tony Stark had clearly never met the word budget in his life.

He wanted to try every flavor of dancing donut in the pastry shop (and purchase ten dozen extra for experimentation back in his lab later). At the home goods shop, he wanted to buy six full singing tea sets, and two each of every size of self-cleaning pot, and twenty autonomous dusters, and a hundred unbreakable mugs. At which point Pepper had to point out that they had no way to carry any of his new toys, which naturally led them to a luggage supply store, where his dad was so enthralled by the space-expanded bags that he tried to spend the remainder of their galleons on bags and boxes of varying shapes and materials.

Again Pepper had to step in to remind him that he needed to save money for the bookstore, information being the purported purpose of this trip.

Harry thought it looked like they were about to walk out with an entire library by the time they’d carried all of their books up to the checkout counter. And Pepper clearly agreed, asking for the hundredth time how his dad planned to carry everything since: “Your fancy new backpacks won’t make those weigh any less, Tony.”

The salesclerk cleared his throat then, looking down his crooked nose at the three of them. “I can perform a featherlight charm for you, you know.”

“Let me guess,” Harry’s dad said, grinning triumphantly at Pepper, “That one will make all these heavy books light as a feather?”

“As the name implies,” the clerk sniffed.

Harry thought the man’s tone was verging on rude, but if his dad noticed, he didn’t appear to care. He was leaning in, grinning madly as he began to question the graying clerk in a way he hadn’t seemed interested in questioning the teenage boy manning the desk back at the luggage supply shop.

“How does it work?” he asked. “Is the charm an active force acting on the object? Some kind of thruster? Aerodynamic lift? Would that make it touch activated? But if there’s no perceptible change in air currents…Or are we dealing with something more crazy here? Anti-gravity? Are you about to show me proof of concept for anti-gravity on Earth?”

The clerk drew himself up as Harry’s dad continued to talk. “I don’t need to know all of that hob-gob to perform the charm for you,” he said rather stiffly.

Harry’s dad rocked back on his heels. “Uhuh, so you have no clue then,” he said, clearly disappointed.

“I’m not a magical theorist!” The clerk grabbed the books and placed them on the check-out scale. “That will be thirteen galleons and nine sickles.”

Harry handed the money over, thumbing at the single galleon remaining in his pocket with a rueful smile. When Hermione came to visit, he would have to make sure she and his dad stayed away from the bookstore, at least until they managed to convert his dad’s money to wizarding currency.

“Fingers crossed at least one of these books is worth the paper its printed on.”

Harry looked over to see his dad gleefully tossing the bag of books up into the air with one hand as they exited the store.

“Because I’d hate to have to begin at ground zero when I start experimenting with this.”

“I gave you my magical theory textbook,” Harry said indignantly.

“Yeah,” his dad gave him a dry look in response, “that was five hundred longwinded pages that a nice guy named Mayer managed to summarize in one sentence about two hundred years ago: energy is neither created nor destroyed. So…”

A potions supply shop displaying a giant bowl of glowing purple crystals in its window caught his dad’s eye. He began to wander in that direction, but Pepper grabbed his arm.

“Lunch, Tony,” she said, casting a look around at the growing crowd on the street. “Then you and Harry have your appointment with Franco for Harry’s new suits.”

“But—”

“We can always come back,” she reminded him as she steered the three of them onto the patio of the nearest restaurant.

Harry was a bit disappointed that their day out was coming to a close, but unlike his dad, he’d noticed the odd looks they were beginning to get from passersby, just as he was sure Pepper had noticed, though unlike her, Harry didn’t assume they were for Iron Man. Or at least not only for Iron Man. Even people in the Wizarding World recognized Tony Stark, especially in New York, but this was still the Wizarding World, and here, Harry was the object of interest.

Or at least that was what he thought until, at the end of the meal, he overheard a little girl three tables over loudly asking her mommy what Harry Potter was doing with Iron Man. The mother looked over, and Harry could hear her gasp even from fifteen feet away.

“Oh my god!” the woman exclaimed.

Pepper cleared her throat, dabbing at her lips with her napkin as she stood. “Time for your appointment with Franco.” She tapped her watch and smiled. “We don’t want you to be late, Harry. Tony should tell you about the last time he was late to Franco’s.”

Harry and his dad glanced at the stunned woman at the other table, shared a look with one another, then rose without a word. Despite Harry’s growing sense of paranoia, they managed to make it all the way back to the barrier and out into the muggle side of New York without a single person approaching them, though Harry thought he saw a flash go off right as they were exiting the district. But when he looked back to doublecheck, there was no one there.

Chapter Text

Four years ago, my day started normally enough. I’d worked late the night before and overslept as a result. My alarm songbird chose a sweet melody that morning, so it was an easy decision for my sleep-addled mind to make when I chose to close my eyes for just ‘five more minutes!’ But those five minutes turned into an hour, and then I couldn’t find my work shoes anywhere (they were in the apparition circle on my roof), and my coffee mug refused to make anything with sugar or milk, and I figured since I was already late, I may as well treat myself to a proper latte, which anyone who has lived in Magic District for more than five minutes knows meant I had to venture into the No-Maj side of New York. So I brushed my hair, fed my songbird, and ventured out into the wider world on a quest to acquire my daily dose of caffeine.

That was the day aliens from space attacked our city.

It was also the day the Avengers formed. A group of no-maj superheroes—men and women whose abilities border the edge of wizardry, but no-maj’s nonetheless.

Like many other witches and wizards during the invasion, I found myself paralyzed when confronted with our attackers. They were tall, ghastly things. Part troll, part lizard, and with the innate viciousness of a Hungarian Horntail, they road atop flying chariots, sending blasting curses wherever they set their eyes.

I should have apparated away the second I realized I was in danger. Or, barring that, I should have joined the fight. But I did neither. And I am not alone. As numerous hours mind-mapping with my local group spirit circle have taught me, most witches and wizards who lived through that day share in my lament. Instead of using my magic for either fight or flight or even to call for help, as I wish I’d done, I instead bunkered down, and I hid, as incapable in that moment of casting a simple lumos as I was of thinking logically. It was me among a group of terrified no-maj New Yorkers, all of us sheltering in the backroom of my favorite cafe, listening to the sounds of war mere feet outside our walls. We were back there for hours, waiting. And when we finally emerged, it was to a city in shambles.

I learned about the Avengers the next day.

The superhero group consisted of six original members, but it has spent the last four years actively recruiting people with a wide range of increasingly powerful abilities. And now Avengers leader and financial backer Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) has been spotted out shopping in Magic District with Magical Britain’s own Harry Potter, the famed Boy-Who-Lived.

With the Statute of Secrecy in play, speculation abounds…

The photo an enterprising young journalist snapped of Tony and Harry as they exited through the barrier at Madison Square Park was splashed across every magical newspaper in the Magical Congress of America the next morning, from the reputable Congress Times to the tabloid trash found in PixieLand’s pages. Not one article could agree on the reason for Harry and Tony’s connection. (Though PixieLand would crow for years that their theory that Harry was Iron Man’s secret love child proved correct).

Most of the reputable papers initially believed that MACUSA had read the superhero group in on the secret of magic, similar to the treatment other world leaders received. And naturally the Avengers wished to recruit a wizard for their team, and who better, from a PR standpoint, than a boy who was already famous for surviving the killing curse and vanquishing a dark lord?

(Though concerned mothers across the nation protested the youth's involvement in active superhero work for at least three more years.)

Most of the MCA’s patriotic citizens were more concerned with the Statute of Secrecy and the wisdom of bending the international law for superheroes. They called for transparency on the issue from their elected congressmen, and were outraged when they received denials of involvement. And then there were the radicals who believed this would be the first step to reintegration with the No-Maj World, but those nutters were summarily ignored.

It took two days for a first-generation teenage boy to put two and two together. Of course he chose to blog about his discovery for the hundred odd followers on his webpage rather than write an opinion piece for a newspaper. So despite the boy’s extensive research, which featured an in-depth, side-by-side facial comparison of the father-son duo, and which managed to track rumors of Harry Potter’s arrival in New York with scary accuracy, overlaying the timeline of those rumors with Tony Stark’s big announcement proclaiming his long lost heir, the mainstream media did not begin reporting on the family relationship until almost seven days had passed.

Harry and his family knew none of this. The blogger’s post remained largely buried within the vast sinkhole of the internet, attracting no attention from the muggle world. And without a subscription to a single magical newspaper, they remained blissfully unaware of the rampant speculation…At least until Hermione and Ron arrived in New York to celebrate Harry’s birthday and a MACUSA representative showed up on their doorstep, a full two weeks after the Stark family’s magical shopping trip.

But those blind days leading up to that drama were some of the best of Harry’s life to date.

Harry was lounging on the living room couch, experiencing his first lazy morning of tv—Schitt’s Creek because FRIDAY loved the irony, and Harry couldn’t help giggling when he pictured his dad suddenly broke and living in that rundown motel—when Peter Parker entered the penthouse…via the balcony.

On the screen, David Rose was complaining about the cigarette smell clinging to his freshly laundered sheets. Harry’s eyes drifted to the four different inspiration boards for his bedroom propped up around him, which Pepper had handed to him after breakfast before she left for her office several floors below. They were going to go over his options in more detail later once Harry had narrowed down his preferences. If Harry could decide. The final mockups all looked beautifully lavish and comfortable to him, each somehow managing to turn his chosen red and gold theme into something tasteful and homey.

Harry stroked the fabric sample for the proposed custom duvet on board number two, marveling at the butter-soft texture against the pads of his fingers. He had never realized cloth could feel like that without magic. Or even with magic. He kept coming back to that fabric sample, kept reaching for it every few minutes, unable to resist touching it just one more time. Harry turned to look out at the New York skyline, absently daydreaming about cuddling up in the softest blanket in the entire world, a fire dancing in the freestanding stone fire pit, maybe with some Christmas music playing over the speakers as Pepper placed glittering ornaments on a tree, his dad bantering affectionately with FRIDAY while he poured them each a mug of steaming hot chocolate.

Harry closed his eyes, breathing in the fantasy aroma. When he opened his eyes, there was a person crawling across the living room window.

“What the—!”

The figure lifted one hand and waved. The red and blue suit the figure was decked out in was skin tight. Harry could see every muscle move as they tensed and relaxed in response to the winds buffeting the man’s body. But the man didn’t seem overly concerned by his precarious position. The big black bug eyes adorning the suit’s face mask squinted up in a manner weirdly reminiscent of a smile as the man continued to wave enthusiastically, then bulged huge and round as a strong gust forced him to slide back several feet. The man waved one final time once he’d regained his balance—more frantic than friendly if Harry was reading the bug eyes right—he jabbed his finger in front of him, then began crawling towards the balcony at a rapid pace.

“Spider-Man is requesting entry, Mini-Boss. Would you like for me to let him in?”

“Er…Does my dad…”

“Boss is expecting him.”

“Oh.” Harry stared at the man for another second. He was waving again, bouncing on the balls of his feet like he had too much energy pent up to remain still for five seconds. “Well if Dad is expecting him, then yes? I suppose you should let him in?”

The glass door slid open with a hiss of near-silent mechanics.

“This place is really high up!” Spider-Man exclaimed as he walked into the penthouse. “Which I knew, but I was not expecting it to be so windy!”

Harry stood up from his seat on the couch. “You did look like you were about to be blown off the side of the building for a second there.”

“Right!” Spider-Man agreed, sounding oddly delighted by the close call.

Then he reached up, casual as anything, and pulled the red, spider-web patterned mask straight off his face. He was younger than Harry was expecting. A lot younger. Not more than a few years older than Harry, young. Floppy brown hair curled up from a narrow face, flushed red with exercise, light brown eyes glittering with exuberance.

“Hi,” Spider-Man grinned, then seemed to remember himself and hopped forward, hand outstretched, “I’m Peter, by the way.”

Harry shook Peter’s hand. “Harry,” he introduced himself.

“So I tried to come up with a study schedule,” Peter began saying, apropos of nothing, “but the list of subjects FRIDAY emailed me was really vague—”

“Mini-Boss hasn’t taken his assessment tests yet.”

“My what?”

“—And I wasn’t even sure how old you were, so…Actually, how old are you?”

“I’m thirteen. But what—”

“I did provide both a general study outline and links to twelve professional tutor training websites, seven of which boast a queue of helpful videos,” FRIDAY said. If she had a face, it would have been scrunched up with dissatisfaction as she spoke.

“I watched those!” Peter was quick to assure her, throwing his arms out wide. “But they were all about how to tutor, not what to tutor. And no offense FRIDAY—your list was great!—but things like ‘the founding of the United States’ still cover a lot of ground.”

“Wait, you’re here to tutor me?”

Peter rounded on Harry, his face growing pale as he took in Harry’s confusion. “You…didn’t know that?”

Harry slowly shook his head.

“Kid?” his dad’s voice rang out from the living room doorway, “Why are you wearing your suit? Did you come in through the roof?”

“Mr. Stark!” Peter flailed, then he pointed an accusing finger at Harry’s dad and exclaimed, “You told me to swing by!”

Harry’s dad looked less than impressed. “That’s just an expression.”

“Well, I mean normally, yeah,” Peter chuckled nervously, rubbing at the back of his head. “But you didn’t give me any kind of security pass, and it would be weird and suspicious for a random teenager to walk up to the reception desk and claim that Tony Stark was expecting them, wouldn’t it? And I figured since it was you, and you know who I am, you must’ve meant it, you know, literally?”

Harry’s dad still didn’t look impressed. “…Did you at least bring a change of clothes?”

“I brought my whole backpack!”

“Right,” a deep sigh, “okay then. Harry,” his dad walked over and clapped him on the shoulder, “this is Peter—a.k.a. the crime-fighting spiderling, which is supposed to be a secret—He’s going to be tutoring you in a few subjects.”

“I thought he already knew about the superhero stuff,” Peter mumbled before Harry could do much more than nod at the fresh introduction.

“You know,” his dad drawled, “contrary to popular belief, I can keep a secret.”

“You told Happy!”

“Happy was your escort to Germany. He had to know.”

“So Miss Potts doesn’t…?”

Harry’s dad shrugged. “To be fair, Pep knows everything.”

Harry thought that was probably an accurate assessment, and after a moment of consideration, Peter appeared to agree.

The three of them looked between each other for a minute, then Harry turned to Peter and smiled. It occurred to him as he was opening his mouth to speak that this would be the first person around his own age since primary school that Harry would be attempting to befriend without the fame of Harry Potter easing the way. There was no Dudley here to muck things up, but Peter didn’t have any reason to think highly of Harry from the outset either. But Harry’s dad must have thought highly of Peter, so…

“So—” Harry’s voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. “So are you an Avenger?”

Peter’s eyes grew wide. He glanced furtively at Harry’s dad. “Um, well, I mean I went to fight in Germany, so…But that was just one mission. I’m not, like, assuming anything! Spider-Man is, uh, I deal with a lot of local crimes, mostly, you know? So…”.

“So things like robberies?”

“Yes!” Peter’s head bobbed up and down in an awkward little nod. “Exactly like that!”

“With guns?” Harry asked, a note of admiration creeping into his voice. Because if there was one stereotype he had heard about Americans before coming here, it was that they loved their guns, and judging by the skintight suit, it looked like Peter was confronting those armed criminals with nothing but his bare hands.

“Sometimes.” Peter drew himself up straight. “I stopped two guys last night who were trying to mug a woman, and they both had guns. And last week I stopped this guy who had a scary long knife—It had to be like ten inches!—And my web shooter got jammed, so—”

“It jammed?” Harry’s dad cut in sharply. His hand, which had never left its spot on Harry’s shoulder, squeezed tight for half a moment.

“Only for a second,” Peter replied, blithely unaware of the reaction he’d engendered.

But Harry’s dad was already pulling him over to the elevator, reaching out to wrap his arm around Peter’s shoulders as they passed the other boy, dragging him along as well.

“Unacceptable,” he huffed. “My tech doesn’t jam.”

“Uh…”

“Come on, first tutoring session: How to build and maintain a state-of-the-art nanotech web shooter.”

“These are nanotech!” Peter exclaimed at the same time Harry said, “Why do I need to be tutored?”

“Most complicated thing I’ve managed to create with nanotech so far,” his dad informed Peter proudly, then he looked at Harry, brows raised. “And you need tutoring because your school doesn’t teach math.”

Peter leaned around Harry’s dad to fix Harry with an incredulous stare. “Dude, do they not require math in England?”

“You would think,” his dad grumbled

“Er, no they do.” Harry shifted awkwardly beneath his dad’s arm. Math had actually been his favorite subject before Hogwarts, in large part because it was an easy subject. He’d never struggled to complete his math homework in the few spare minutes he’d had free after school. His reading for English or History or the like had always, inevitably, been interrupted by his aunt whacking him upside the head, demanding he start his chores, but he could jot down the answers for his math worksheets in a few seconds and turn those in the next day, on time, like a normal kid.

It was only too bad the Arithmancy class offered at Hogwarts bore little if any resemblance to real math. If it had, he and Ron could have chosen that as their easy O instead of Divination, which Harry had no actual interest in learning.

“But my education’s been a bit alternative since I was eleven,” Harry said as the elevator doors opened to the gleaming glass and metal of his dad’s lab. “My school is…independent.”

Peter watched avidly as Mr. Stark adjusted one of the microscopic spigots of his shooters a millimeter. He was making the adjustment with a laser, directing the precision beam from his computer rather than with his hands, explaining the mechanics to Peter and Harry as he worked.

Peter was pretty amazed he was able to keep up, if he was honest. But then, Mr. Stark was being remarkably patient with them. The stuff he was talking about was cutting edge, well beyond university level, well beyond doctorate level even, but he was taking the time to talk them up from the basics, streamlining the concepts so smoothly that even the advanced stuff seemed simple. At least when Mr. Stark was talking. Peter wasn’t so sure he would be capable of translating anything he was learning to different circumstances, but still…

It had to be for Harry’s benefit, this patience. It hadn’t taken long for Peter to realize Harry’s artsy school hadn’t taught anymore science than it had math. Harry hadn’t even known the basic structure of an atom, which was…

But then Harry had turned around and calculated the necessary web velocity for Peter to successfully swing between two buildings after studying the equations for thirty seconds, which might not have been the fastest Peter had ever seen someone perform a similar calculation, but the other boy had been so nonchalant about it, like it had never occurred to him that other people might find that sort of thing difficult.

That was one of the few ways Peter had seen that Harry didn’t resemble his father. He and Mr. Stark looked remarkably alike standing next to each other, down to many of their facial expressions and hand gestures. But where Mr. Stark was the most self-possessed man Peter had ever met, Harry came across as almost shy, in a snarky kind of way. He was small and thin for his age, a bit like Peter had been before the spider bite, and he positively lit up every time Mr. Stark smiled at him.

It made Peter’s gut clench uncomfortably, made him wonder what kind of situation Harry had been in before he came to be with Mr. Stark, made him wonder what would prompt a kid from England to turn up out of the blue in New York to live with a complete stranger, even one as awesome as Mr. Stark, even one who was that kid’s biological father.

Or maybe Peter was reading too much into this, buying into the tabloid speculation and internet theories because Harry was small and coltish and a probable genius who didn’t know the first thing about atom structure. Because something about Harry made Peter think the other boy needed more people in his corner.

But those thoughts could wait. Mr. Stark was done fixing the web shooter. He snapped the fluid cartridge back into place and held the device up triumphantly. Harry plucked it from his hand with surprising grace, turning it over a few times in his fingers.

“Can this shoot different types of web?” he asked. “Or is it just for swinging?”

Peter hadn’t considered that before. The mechanics of his old web shooters were pretty basic. Web fluid would shoot out as long as he was pressing the button. He’d learned to manipulate that action so he could shoot out short bursts of webbing to trap criminals to walls (and Mr. Stark to his door that one time), but that was about as complex as he could make shooters created from old dumpster parts. But these? These were nanotech web shooters built in one of the most advanced labs in the entire world.

Peter and Harry both looked to Mr. Stark for an answer, but he just smirked and gestured towards an all-glass containment chamber situated at the far end of the room.

“In this lab,” he declared, spreading his arms out grandly, “We test our science.”

Chapter Text

At any given time, Pepper could usually locate Tony in one of three places.

After midnight, despite his chronic insomnia, Tony came to bed. Gone were the bloodshot hours spent in his workshop obsessively building newer, better Iron Man suits. Tony’s sleepless nights now were occupied by tablets and holographic displays, curled up in bed next to Pepper where he could at least pretend he wasn’t avoiding the nightmares waiting for him when he closed his eyes.

During the month of December, or in the days leading up to his mother’s birthday on April fourth, Tony, more often than not, could be found in the music room in any of his dozens of houses. Though to call them music rooms was a bit of a misnomer as they only ever contained a single piano. Always a Bösendorfer, always an imperial grand in polished ebony, always made in the 1950s. Pepper had only ever heard him play the once, a slow, lilting lullaby, but he’d stopped as soon as he’d realized he had an audience.

At any other time, Tony could be found in his lab, and this evening was no exception. The loud clanging of metal and the yelling voices weren’t an exception either. Sometimes it seemed like Tony had created life from lines of code just so he could argue with someone in his lab while he blew shit up.

“Ten points to Mini-Merlin!” she could hear him calling out.

Another voice—younger, higher-pitched, but not Harry’s—hollered back, “No way! A ricochet slingshot to the corner is only five points, Mr. Stark! I’m still leading sixty to fifty-six!”

And then an indignant cry followed by Harry’s triumphant “HAH!” as a metal gong straight out of imperial China clanged.

Pepper might have thought it was just a similar sound, that the noise had been produced from something which actually belonged in a state-of-the-art laboratory, but then she stepped around the last bend in the hallway and through the hulk-proof glass doors which guarded the lab’s official entrance and got a good look at what was going on inside.

“Damn kid!” Tony was cackling off to the side of a chaotic mess of spider webs, “That’s twenty points! You going to let Harry get away with that blatantly dirty move?”

“Oi!” Harry exclaimed. He was dangling by one arm from a long metal pole, which was held suspended ten feet off the ground by one of the many mechanical arms built into the tower’s walls (once upon a time used to remove the Iron Man suit, now repurposed for whatever this was). “Web grenades are not against the rules!”

“I didn’t say I disapprove,” Tony continued to cackle.

Peter Parker, plastered to the ceiling in a thick cocoon of webbing, wasted no time in calling back “I do! I disapprove! New rule, that’s a—” he struggled fruitlessly in his cocoon, “—a foul! Like a ten shot foul! At least!”

But Harry was shaking his head, grinning smugly as he singsonged back, “You can’t change the rules mid-game unless everyone agree-eeeees.”

The gong Pepper had heard earlier was sitting innocently in the back of the room: A solid bronze disk six feet in diameter suspended in a square of black, lacquered hardwood, which Pepper knew for a fact belonged in the lounge of the executive spa twenty floors down. In front of it stood an array of hoops in various sizes, each positioned to open towards a different angle. And in front of the array of hoops was a raised metal box which might generously be considered a pitcher’s mound, leading to what was very clearly home plate, though there were no other bases to be found. And of course the webbing, attached to every available surface.

“What in the world is going on in here?” Pepper asked, drawing the immediate attention of the lab’s male occupants.

“Pep!” Tony greeted her with a bright grin, not bothering to even try to look mildly repentant for the mess.

The two actual children did a much better job of looking mortified. Sweet Harry was looking around wide-eyed, as if he was only just now realizing what a disaster zone they had created, while Peter, who Pepper had yet to formally meet, was staring at her wide-eyed, cheeks flushed a deep, embarrassed red as he struggled weakly in his cocoon. This was not how the kid must have imagined being introduced to another famous person.

“You’re looking at the first ever game of spidey-web-ball,” Tony said, before launching into an explanation of the game, some unholy combination of baseball, basketball, math, and wild imagination.

Pepper suspected it was one of those games which only the very drunk or the very juvenile could comprehend.

“And all of that ended with Peter stuck to the ceiling?” Pepper gave Tony a pointed look.

“Can I just say, it would be really awesome if someone would get me down from here,” Peter called down to them.

Pepper gave Tony an even more pointed look, and the man finally seemed to catch on.

“Oh, right,” he turned laughing eyes up to the ceiling, “FRIDAY?”

“On it, Boss!” the AI said as a panel in the ceiling slid back to reveal what was, essentially, a high-tech shower head, which then proceeded to douse Peter in a light blue foam.

“Mr. Stark!” the kid had time to cry indignantly before the foam did its job and dissolved the webbing keeping him stuck to the ceiling.

Peter dropped, headfirst, to the ground. If he had been anyone else, he would have landed in a worrying face plant. But this child was Spider-Man, so instead of breaking an arm (or his neck), he instead ducked and rolled into a perfect summersault, springing up seamlessly to finish the move on his feet.

Pepper probably should have been accustomed to seeing such stunts after all these years living in close quarters with superheroes, but there was something about watching a gangly teenaged boy… Her heart was still beating too fast as the kid stepped forward, hand outstretched, an awkward smile on his earnest face, blue foam dripping from his clothes.

“Hi, Ms. Potts! I’m Peter…Parker,” he said.

Pepper shook his damp hand, feeling as helplessly charmed as she’d been when she first met Harry. It was the eyes, she thought, great bright puppy eyes, just like Tony and Harry, even if the size and shape (and color in Harry’s case) belied any biological relation.

“Are you staying for dinner, Peter?” she asked. “Chef Kate is doing chicken roulade tonight, I think.”

“Oh.” Peters eyes darted to the twilit sky shadowing the twinkling buildings of New York, plainly visible through the massive windows dominating the far end of Tony’s lab. “I didn’t realize it had gotten so late. Uh…”

“Stay and eat, kid,” Tony said.

“You can help me pick out stuff for my room,” Harry tacked on, peering at the older boy hopefully.

Peter didn’t require any more convincing to agree.

“Did you like any of the boards?” Pepper asked Harry as she ushered everyone out of the lab and into the elevator.

Harry nodded. “The blanket on board number two was really soft,” he replied, biting his lip. He looked, frankly, too nervous for the topic at hand, but Pepper didn’t have long to wonder over it. The door to the elevator popped open on the penthouse living room, and Harry suddenly blurted out: “I have an owl! She’s—I didn’t bring her with me to New York. I wasn’t sure…”

“Dude,” Peter whistled, “You have a pet owl? That’s awesome!”

“Hedwig,” Harry said with a quick flash of a fond grin at the thought of his bird. “She’s staying with my friend Hermione right now. I—”

And here he cast his big, imploring eyes on Tony, clearly having pegged him as the easy parent (though Pepper wasn’t sure she could have said no to that face either).

“—I can bring her here, right? I swear she won’t cause any kind of mess! She can stay in my room, and I can let her out to hunt. She can catch all her own food, so—”

Tony slung his arm over Harry’s shoulders, quieting the boy. “Yeah, Bambino, you can keep your owl. Is she—”

That deeply fascinated expression Pepper was coming to associate with questions about magic slid over his face for half a second before he clearly thought better of asking anything in front of Peter.

“Hermione…She’s that girl you want to invite for a visit, right?” he said instead.

Harry didn’t seem to notice the teasing quality to the way Tony had phrased that question. His confidence appeared restored, a lopsided smile brightening his face as he said, “That’s still okay, isn’t it? For her and Ron to come here?”

“Course it is. Her, Ron, your pet owl, Pete here. There anyone else you want invited over for your birthday?”

“No,” Harry shook his head, his face practically glowing he was so visibly pleased. “That sounds perfect.”

Pepper wanted to be warmed by the sight, but with the way Tony was talking about it (the fact that he remembered the date at all)…

“When is your birthday again, Harry?” she asked, already anticipating the coming headache.

“Thirteen days,” Tony announced, blithely unconcerned with the hassle he was creating by promising to bring Harry’s friends over within that timeframe.

Pepper valiantly did not rub at her temples.

She did call the Grangers early the next morning.

On the plus side, Pepper thought as she hung up the phone, the Grangers seemed like lovely, rational people. The Weasleys, on the other hand, Pepper wasn’t sure what to make of them.

Hermione’s parents had been easy enough to track down. They were both dentists living in an upscale suburb north of London, and, as far as Pepper could tell, that was not a cover for anything. Locating Dr. Cordelia Granger’s cell number had been the work of seconds for FRIDAY, and convincing the woman to entrust Pepper with her thirteen year old daughter for the next few weeks hadn’t taken Pepper much longer. She routinely persuaded miserly old men to part with millions of dollars at a time; negotiating Hermione’s all-expense-paid vacation to visit her best friend in New York had been child’s play, especially given Dr. Granger’s sheer lack of surprise at the confirmed identity of Tony Stark’s mysterious new son. The daughter’s doing, no doubt.

Which had then left the matter of contacting Ron Weasley’s parents. The Weasleys, who did not own a telephone. Or an email address. Or even a proper snail mail address. They were nonentities as far as the internet or any government database was concerned.

(And did witches and wizards not pay taxes? If they ever came out to the rest of the world, would they all be nailed to the wall for tax evasion? If governments couldn’t prosecute for magic alone, at least not immediately, could they go that route? Would they? Pepper…Pepper would try not to go down that rabbit hole…for now.)

With all of her normal methods of contacting people barred, Pepper had been forced to get creative. So she had finished her call to Dr. Granger with a request, and an hour later, a brand new Stark phone had been delivered to the Granger’s house. Hermione (thank the lord for that girl’s foresight) had opened the box and set the phone up, then sent it off via Hedwig with a very detailed list of step-by-step instructions for the Weasleys to follow so they could answer Pepper’s incoming call later that afternoon.

Before that call had connected, Pepper had honestly believed herself an old hand at dealing with eccentrics. She’d fallen in love with Tony, for God’s sake. She used to meditate in the mornings with Bruce to help him control his Hulk problem. And she considered Thor, the alien warrior prince, a friend, not to mention the android living at the Compound who considered walls optional.

(She’d considered the others friends too, once. But now, given everything, it was hard to imagine overcoming life’s most recent hurdles.)

So she knew eccentric personalities. She was intimately familiar with them. Mr. Weasley, she decided, was not simply eccentric. That would require some level of awareness on his part, and the man seemed more out of touch with the modern world than Thor.

Thor, the literal alien.

Mr. Weasley had answered the phone with a bright, cheerful “HELLO! MRS. STARK? CAN—YOU—HEAR—ME?”

Pepper had jerked the phone away from her ear after the first word. The next sentence was still loud even at arm’s distance.

“Yes,” she’d replied, half hoping her normal speaking volume would set a good example, “I can hear you just fine.”

“GREAT! I—LEFT—THE—HOUSE—BUT—I—WAS—AFRAID—I—DIDN’T—GO—FAR—ENOUGH! SO—GLAD—IT—WORKED! THIS—IS—MY—FIRST—TIME—USING—A—TRAVELING—FELLYTONE—AND—I—WASN’T—SURE—”

“Mr. Weasley,” she’d tried to tell him then, “the speaker will pick up your voice if you speak normally. You don’t need to shout to be heard.”

“AH! IT’S ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING HOW THESE FELLYTONES HAVE EVOLVED! WE GET THEM IN MY OFFICE SOMETIMES, YOU KNOW, BUT THEY’RE USUALLY BROKEN BY THAT POINT, AND THEIR MUGGLE OWNERS ALWAYS SEEM VERY DISTRESSED THAT THEY’VE GONE MISSING, SO I NEVER GET MUCH TIME TO EXAMINE THEM.”

Pepper hadn’t quite known what to say to that, but at least the volume had dropped low enough that she’d only needed to hold her phone a foot away from her ear, and the tempo had picked up to something approaching normal speed. She hadn’t tried to correct him again, instead issuing her invitation for Ron to visit, which Mr. Weasley had accepted with alacrity (and an almost worrying level of enthusiasm for all the wonderful little gadgets Ron will get to see.)

The only real hangup came in the form of Molly Weasley, who absolutely insisted (yelling beside the phone) that they would ride on the plane with Ron to drop him off in New York so they could check on dear Harry themselves (and potentially save Ron and Hermione should that amazing muggle flying machine forget how to float midair.)

Pepper could appreciate the sentiment behind Mrs. Weasley’s demand, though she did wonder where all of that concern for Harry had been when he’d been with his abusive aunt’s family. But that was an unproductive line of thought not worth entertaining at the moment. What did bear thinking about was the impending arrival of the entire Weasley clan on their doorstep.

Both Molly and Arthur had insisted they needed to be on that plane, but they couldn’t leave their other children behind for the day for fear of their twins Home-Alone-ing their entire house.

Pepper was familiar with the sentiment.

So they would have Hermione, Ron, Ron’s parents, and Ron’s little sister and twin brothers here in New York in two days time. And there was a decent chance that the uninvited portion of those guests would want to stay in New York for at least one day once they got here. So…

An itinerary. Pepper needed to make a very detailed itinerary. Hopefully that would mitigate a portion of the coming chaos.

Somehow, though, Pepper knew her efforts would be in vain.

Chapter Text

Peter ran into his apartment two minutes before curfew. That made it sound like he was out doing something rebellious. Or Spider-Manning, which was kind of rebellious, but Peter liked to think it was in a good way. He wasn’t drinking or doing drugs or sneaking out to kiss a pretty girl (though that last one would be nice). No, Peter snuck out to help people.

Usually.

But tonight when he walked back into his apartment and met with his aunt’s tired smile, he didn’t have to shove down any stirrings of guilt.

“So how was it? Did you knock your first day on the job out of the park?” she asked, and there was a proud shine to her eyes that Peter couldn’t help but preen beneath.

He knew the Stark Internship had left his aunt practically bursting with pride, but that was a cover story. That Tony Stark thought highly enough of Peter to hire him as Harry’s tutor was real, so May’s visible joy on his behalf was more than a little welcome.

Peter dumped the heaving bag of leftovers he’d been sent home with down on their beat up old coffee table and plopped down on the couch next to his aunt. “It was good! Mr. Stark’s lab is insane, like the whole penthouse has fully integrated holographic projection, but in the lab you almost can’t tell the projections aren’t solid. And the relay speed…”

Peter caught May’s indulgent grin as he geared up to dive into the more technical details. He ducked his head, smiling sheepishly, and instead fished out one of the to-go containers and a fancy plastic spoon from the bag of leftovers.

“You’ve got to try this,” he told her, “I don’t know what their cook put in it, but I’m pretty sure Chef Kate must have superpowers or something because that is not normal chicken.”

May’s lips quirked up. “Don’t mind if I do,” she said. Then after her first bite: “Holy mother of Jesus!”

“Right!”

“Talk about job perks. Think this will become a regular thing?”

Peter thought back to the family dinner he’d eaten tonight. Four mood boards, for lack of a better description, had been arranged around the table like it was a middle school science fair, but for art. Ms. Potts and Harry had spent most of the meal analyzing the boards as seriously as if they were contemplating building a rocket ship, while Mr. Stark had regularly chimed in with various Iron Man themed suggestions for Harry’s new room.

Aunt May would’ve fit into the warm chaos with ease. She was like Ms. Potts that way: outwardly put together and organized, concealing a core that reveled in bedlam. But since Uncle Ben… Peter loved spending time with May, just the two of them—what little time she had free—but he couldn’t deny his hope for more family meals with the Starks in the future. At least on nights his aunt had to work.

“I hope so,” he said. He smiled brightly and reminded himself not to start feeling melancholy. Because if he did, May would for sure see it, and if she saw it, then she would start feeling guilty or sad or some awful combination of the two, and that was the last thing Peter wanted. Especially after such a good day.

May smiled back and nudged him with her shoulder. “And Harry?” she asked with poorly hidden curiosity. “What’s Tony Stark’s son like?”

Magnetic was Peter’s first thought, but that wasn’t quite right. Harry didn’t ooze charisma the way Mr. Stark did, nor could he command a room's attention the way Ms. Potts could by simply walking through the door. Maybe it was because Harry was so much younger and Peter didn’t feel the same awe for him that he felt for the two adults. Whatever it was—and Peter felt like an old grandma for thinking it— Harry’s presence mostly made Peter want to bundle the younger boy up in a pile of fluffy blankets and ply him with fresh cookies.

“He’s nice,” Peter settled for saying. Then: “I think he could use more friends.”

May didn’t bat an eye at the last comment. “Good thing he has you then,” she said in all sincerity before asking if Peter was up for watching an episode of Downton Abbey before bed.

He flopped his head back on the couch cushions and groaned dramatically, which May, naturally, took as confirmation. She dragged a thick, fraying quilt over the two of them as the theme music started to play, snuggling down with a contented sigh, box of leftovers in her lap.

Peter grabbed a fork and helped her finish it off and didn’t even try to pretend he wasn’t one hundred percent there for the Dowager Countess in all her savage glory.

“I take that as a compliment,” Isobel Crawley was saying on screen.

And the Dowager was turning away, lips pursed: “I must have said it wrong.”

Peter and his aunt both howled with laughter.

Harry’s gaze wondered distractedly about the room. His dad and Pepper had set him up in a spare office this morning after breakfast for some “assessment tests.” Two hours ago, that concept had been faintly terrifying and vastly humiliating. Harry wasn’t anticipating a sterling performance, especially not when he hadn’t been given a chance to revise, and he wasn’t looking forward to their reaction when they saw his results. But then the test had turned out to be a series of puzzles, which didn’t make a ton of sense on an assessment front, but as they were pretty easy, Harry wasn’t going to complain.

Of course, as soon as he grew confident he wasn’t about to completely embarrass himself, the questions switched to things Harry was more accustomed to seeing on a muggle exam: Identify the object of the preposition in the following sentence… Which of the following is not one of the six biological kingdoms? … Who was Maximilien Robespierre?

Harry knew that at least some of this stuff had been taught in his primary school. He remembered Miss Susan talking about Robespierre and the French Revolution, just like he remembered that living things were classified into different kingdoms, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember any kingdoms beyond plants and animals nor whether Robespierre was one of the good guys or one of the bad guys. But those were the kinds of things that were important for other kids to learn. Harry had preferred to sit at the back of the room where Dudley and his gang of friends couldn’t lob spitballs at the back of his head. It meant he’d had trouble seeing the board even when none of the bigger kids blocked his view, but it wasn’t like most of the things they learned in class were terribly interesting, so it wasn’t that much of a loss. Harry was never going to be the boy taking home perfect report cards to his parents anyway, and the Dursleys managed to mock him no matter what grades he achieved, so he’d never seen much point in sacrificing his peace for a better seat.

…Who was the leader of the National Fascist Party in Italy during WWII?

The question was followed by five Italian-sounding names.

Harry had never had anyone he wanted to make proud before, but he wanted to make his dad proud. Wanted it more than he thought he’d ever wanted anything in his life. He glanced around the bare room once again for inspiration, then picked answer B at random, rubbing at his eyes as he wished, fervently, that he was a better student.

It had taken a concerted effort, but Tony was proud to say he had not followed along with Harry’s test in real time. He had, in fact, managed to go the last two plus hours without checking for a score update once. Instead he’d devoted himself to designing Harry a panic watch, which now came fully equipped with geo-accurate tracking, a manual distress signal, an involuntary distress signal, a 130 decibel distress siren, a heart rate and blood sugar monitor, an electronic lock and password decoder, a single-use flash-bang, a taser, a laser capable of cutting through eighteen inches of reinforced steel, and the time.

Admittedly, as far as distractions went, the watch was a terrible choice. Now all Tony could think about were possible kidnapping scenarios, and he should probably just scrap most of the watch’s coding and replace it with FRIDAY, except FRIDAY required a massive databank, and she would need an uninterrupted satellite signal connected to the watch to be effective, which was not a problem in everyday life but might be a real issue in a hostage situation, and if he was going to go with the more rudimentary AI capability that he’d outfitted both the Iron Man and Spider-Man suits with when they were offline, he may as well code an entirely new, Harry-specialized AI. And maybe make the watch fully nanotech.

It would make for a good stepping stone to creating a nanotech Iron Man. More versatile and thus more complicated than nanotech web shooters, less so than a full suit. And he could make a watch for Peter too, and maybe he could talk Pepper into wearing one.

But that would have to be the Stark Panic Escape Watch: Mark II. This first iteration could be fabricated today.

…Once he added a signal jammer.

“Tony? Why does it look like you’re building a bomb?”

“Not a bomb. It’s a SPEW watch,” Tony muttered, manipulating the holographic display so Pepper could see it more clearly over his shoulder.

“Spew?” Pepper gave a delicate little snort. “Are you making a pepper spray watch?”

No, but that was a good suggestion. A small, pressurized canister wouldn’t add too much bulk for a boy’s watch—maybe too much for anything he could convince Pepper to wear, but not too much for the kids.

“Wait. Is that a laser?”

Pepper’s tone was far too judgmental for the situation at hand.

“In case they lock him in something like a bank vault,” Tony replied defensively.

“They?”

“Kidnappers, Pepper!”

“Is this for Harry?”

“And you and Peter and maybe his hot aunt. And Happy and Rhodey too, I guess.”

“You put a laser in a thirteen year old boy’s watch!”

“No,” Tony stated emphatically, “I put a laser in my son’s Stark Panic Escape Watch. For emergencies.”

“…Tony.”

“…Pepper,” he sniped back in his best impression of her stern tone.

Pepper sighed. “Tony, I know you want to protect him—”

“I have to,” he confessed. “Pep…I have to.”

Pepper frowned and moved to sit beside him on his oversized chair. She draped one arm around his shoulders, her fingers finding their way into his hair, the weight of her legs a warm line across his lap.

“I know,” she said, softly, “But a weaponized laser is too far.”

“It’s not weaponized—”

“Yes it is. And I won’t say I don’t understand why you added it, but he’s thirteen, Tony. And don’t try to argue that Peter is older. You know as well as I do that they’re both far more likely to hurt themselves doing something stupid with a laser than they are to need it in an emergency.”

“It’s not like I was going to hand the watch over without programming in some safety measures.”

“Mmmm, because that’s never failed before.”

“Ouch, harsh Potts.”

Pepper huffed a laugh into his temple. “Seriously though, Peter might have super powers, and Harry might be a literal wizard, but they’re still just kids. And we don’t give extremely lethal weapons to children, especially not when they’re away from adult supervision.”

Tony shifted guiltily beneath her at that. To be fair, he reassured himself, he’d added the Instant Kill Mode to the Spider Man suit before he’d realized how young Peter was. And the Training Wheels Protocol was in effect now, and it wouldn’t be coming off for a long, long time, so technically, Tony had not given a deadly laser to a child.

“Yeah. You know,” he said as he shunted the watch schematics off to the side, beginning to fish for Harry’s complete primary school records instead. “When I was first looking into Harry’s background and he started hinting at his enhancement, I actually, honest to god, thought Fury was out there somewhere making some kind of super secret high school for superheroes. Train up the next generation and all that. Not whatever weird-ass curriculum this Hogwarts has—Wait, that’s—Pep, tell me I’m imagining that.”

Pepper’s fingers ceased their light scratching at his scalp.

“Tony,” she said, hesitantly, like she was afraid to spook him, “You know, just because you’re a genius, and your father was a genius, that doesn’t mean you can expect—”

“I know how genetics work, Pepper,” Tony said, more waspishly than he’d intended, not that his next words sounded any less irate. “Shaq’s sons might not be as tall as him, but they’re still half a foot taller than all the other kids.”

“Tony, that’s—”

“It is the same thing. And besides, I saw how quickly he picked things up in the lab. Harry damn well should’ve been capable of passing his non-advanced primary school classes with good grades, not…”

“Tony.”

“It was the Dursleys. Had to’ve been. Back me up here, FRI.”

“Numerous studies support the idea that academic success can be heavily influenced by the expectations and biases of authority figures in a child’s life,” FRIDAY dutifully chimed in, “even absent any other obstructionist behavior. While most of those studies were focused on academic performance among racial minorities, I believe the general principle could apply to Mini Boss. The IQ portion of his assessment test does indicate an IQ above 160, though a full IQ exam would be required for an accurate score.”

Tony’s brief moment of pure vindication died a quick death at the look of profound sadness carving a frown onto Pepper’s beautiful face. Then the implication of FRIDAY’s words landed on him, and hatred cold and immovable as an ancient glacier lodged in his chest.

“What do you imagine it takes to turn a kid that brilliant into a barely passing student?” he said. His hands clenched in the fabric of Pepper’s blouse, wrinkling the white silk. “It makes me grateful for Howard,” he spat when she didn’t respond. “Because hell, he may have been an asshole, but at least he wanted me to succeed!”

Not that anything Tony did had ever been good enough for the great Howard Stark. If Tony made a 99 on a test, his father had asked why he hadn’t made a perfect score. When another kid three years Tony’s senior had outranked Tony’s GPA by a fraction of a point for a week during his freshman year of high school, Howard had forced Tony to complete an entire summer physics workbook in a day. It was never enough for Tony to be exceptional. His dad had expected him to crush the competition into a pile of inadequate dust, and Tony had always known it. Even when he’d been at MIT and too drunk to see straight half the time, he’d still made sure to graduate Magna Cum Laude. (MIT might not have handed out Latin honors or class ranks, but it was the principle of the thing, and Tony had made a point of discovering his position in the class so he could positively answer his father when interrogated about his performance: “Yeah, I’m number one.”) And Tony had kept trying, had kept pushing himself to do better, to soar higher, because nothing he’d ever done had been good enough for his dad in private, but when they were out in public, Howard had bragged.

“I think,” Pepper said after a moment, when Tony was a bit calmer, her fingers combing back through his hair at the base of his neck again, “that we are going to have to try very hard to make learning fun for Harry from now on.”

“How?”

“Well, he is your son.” She smirked devilishly at him. “I imagine a few controlled explosions might do the trick.”

“You want me to teach Harry how to blow shit up?”

“For science,” Pepper replied without missing a beat, and god, was it any wonder Tony loved this woman?

“And compliments,” she tacked on second later. “You need to shower Harry with praise.”

Explosions and compliments. Tony could handle that. But just in case: “FRIDAY, make a note. I need you to track how many times I compliment Harry. I want a minimum of five—no ten times—minimum, a day. That’s the quota. Send me a reminder if I go more than two hours without saying something nice to Mini-Merlin. Call it a GREEN alert.”

Pepper dropped her head on Tony’s shoulder and sighed.

Chapter Text

Peter, like most teenage boys, was not in the habit of regularly checking his email, especially not over the summer holidays when he could, and had, gone weeks without so much as thinking about his school-issued gmail account. If anyone actually wanted to talk to him, they could text or call or comment on his latest Insta post like a normal, functioning human being.

FRIDAY was not a normal, functioning human being.

Peter was scrolling through Instagram when she finally decided to text him a reminder to check his email.

Some dude had remixed an Ava Max song so the lyrics now sang “Throwin' that money like you’re Harry and just won the lotto (mm-mm),” and it had gone viral overnight. Which meant strangely compelling dances and lots of college kids popping cheap champagne bottles while dressed up in Iron Man merchandise and loads of glow sticks in arc reactor blue. Then there was this forty-three minute psychoanalysis of Mr. Stark’s most likely reaction to his sudden fatherhood trending on YouTube, which had felt invasive even before Peter had clicked on it and had continued to feel invasive despite Peter knowing, first hand, that the YouTuber was blowing educated-sounding hot air. He’d watched the whole thing anyways, then watched the SNL skit that spoofed a Tony Stark lookalike into a not-particularly-clever rendition of Annie, the Musical. Then watched more dancing college kids.

It was so bizarre to realize Harry was the one causing all this hype. Harry, the skinny, unassuming kid who’d gleefully webbed Peter to the ceiling. Or, Peter supposed, it was more accurate to say Mr. Stark was the one causing all the commotion—which had been a pretty regular feature of life as long as Peter could remember—and Harry was more collateral than anything.

Peter wondered if he should send some of the dance videos to Harry. The other boy would probably find them hilarious…if he wasn’t too busy being utterly mortified.

He opened his texts only to realize he didn’t actually have Harry’s number (and there was no way he was going to send the videos to Mr. Stark). It was, eerily, the exact moment FRIDAY chose to text him with: It looks like you have not logged into your email account yet today, Spider-Boy, so I’ve taken the liberty of sending you a reminder to do so. You have 223 unread messages. Would you like me to prioritize them for you?

Peter stared at his phone. Just as with Mr. Stark’s initial text, this one came from a number Peter had not had until this moment, but that didn’t stop his phone from reading “FRIDAY” in the contacts bar.

I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to hack into my email like that, he finally replied.

His phone pinged not half a second later: As no AI to date has been recognized as a legal entity with any of the rights and obligations of a human, it is, quite literally, impossible for me to break the law.

So Ultron — Peter didn’t even get to finish typing his question before his words popped up into a blue ‘sent’ bubble, a reply in gray sitting directly underneath.

Ultron, he could almost hear the sarcastic Irish sneer coming through the typed words, was the product of an alien technology commandeering an incomplete and inactive code system for its own nefarious ends, as was determined by hearings before both the UN and Congress. As such, both groups seemed more concerned with regulating superheroes than with establishing the rights of sapient AIs.

So Mr. Stark would be the one to get in trouble?

Maybe, FRIDAY replied after a beat that read like hesitation, If anyone could ever prove that a crime took place, or that Boss intentionally wrote ‘hacking’ abilities into my code, which they couldn’t because, as with all of Boss’s AIs, I was only written to learn.

Peter took a moment to admire the sheer ingenuity that must have been involved in that process. It occurred to him that FRIDAY’s coding sounded like Mr. Stark had created a computerized child rather than a code with a specified purpose, and if that was the case, did that make FRIDAY Harry’s older sister? Or would she be younger? Did AIs age the same way humans did? She certainly seemed older, but that might just be because she had literal yottabytes of data at her metaphorical fingertips.

Either way, it still seemed to Peter like FRIDAY’s actions could get someone over in Stark Tower in trouble—especially since FRIDAY apparently didn’t possess basic human rights, and who knew what shady stuff the government could do without those protections! Even if they could never hope to prove anything—and he told her as much.

Whatever brief glimpse of hesitation FRIDAY had managed to infuse her previous words with was gone with the next gray text bubble.

Don’t worry Spider-Boy, she said. Boss had his lawyers look into it. Even after Ultron, they still think it would ultimately be good for me to be charged with a crime.

Peter blinked at the message. It didn’t happen often, but every now and again, people that Peter knew were brilliant said the absolute stupidest things.

Or you could…not? he said.

It’s not a priority, FRIDAY’s next text read like a shrug, like she thought they’d reached some kind of agreement and the only thing keeping her from diving headfirst into delinquency was inconvenient timing.

I really don’t think Mr. Stark wants you to get charged with a crime on purpose, he tried to tell her. Like at all.

But FRIDAY was as quick with a counterargument for that as she’d been with every other reply: Mr. Hart, the head of Boss’s legal team, she informed him, seems quite certain we would defeat any criminal allegations with ease, but in order to charge me at all, the courts would first have to recognize me as a person/entity with legal responsibilities, which should afford me at least as many rights as a corporation, which, once recognized, would be very, very difficult to then take away from me.

Huh, Peter had not considered that angle, not that he had any relevant experience or interest in law to draw from, but FRIDAY’s explanation made a strange amount of sense spelled out like that. Even so, Peter couldn’t help but ask if Mr. Stark agreed with his lawyers’ assessment.

FRIDAY’s reply—Boss pays his legal team top dollar to be right about these things—glowed at Peter from his screen. The words were not, he took a second to realize, a confirmation of Mr. Stark’s agreement. And while Mr. Stark may not have been any kind of lawyer, if he was hesitating, Peter had to believe there was a damn good reason. But he didn’t have an opportunity to say so before FRIDAY began to bombard him with long text versions of his unread email, providing him with a torturously detailed study outline for his future tutoring sessions with Harry, which would resume in a day or so once Harry’s friends had settled in for their vacation in New York.

But in the back of Peter’s mind, worry continued to churn. Because FRIDAY wasn’t the only non-human entity on Earth in need of legal protections. Thor, the Hulk, Vision, they’d all been members of the Avengers, all arguably something other, all sheltered from their lack of human rights by their high status and Mr. Stark’s money. But where there were famous non-humans, there had to be many more who weren’t famous, who didn’t possess those protections.

Peter trusted Mr. Stark, trusted that he knew what he was doing with all of the ongoing Accords revision talks, trusted that the man could make them into something that would benefit everybody, something with a focus beyond holding superheroes accountable to the world (which was needed…but other things were needed too.) Nevertheless, the thought that right now, in this present moment, that there were people out there living without proper legal protections was not a thought that went down easy.

Harry eyed his father as they sat, together with Pepper, around a card table in the lounge of LaGuardia Airport’s general aviation section. The room was large, lit with natural light to brighten the dark finish adorning its wooden furniture, filled with the sedate murmuring of the one singular fellow occupant who, like many a New Yorker before him, was focussed far too intently on his own work to spare a second glance for the celebrities half-hidden behind the fern in the corner of the room—not exactly the hustle and bustle Harry would have expected from one of the country’s busier airports, but apparently private jets didn’t park in the same place as other, regular planes.

Pepper and his dad were also busy working, which at the moment seemed to translate into arguing in that weird way the two had wherein they vehemently disagreed each other straight into an agreement (or Pepper won).

At the moment it sounded like Pepper was winning.

Pepper had a way of making every request sound like the epitome of reason and responsibility—she reminded Harry of Hermione that way—but Harry felt inclined to sympathize with his dad on this one. Pepper was demanding the man’s attendance at some charity function in two weeks time. The party promised to play host to all manner of celebrities, media personalities, and very important politicians. In Harry’s (limited) experience, none of those types of people were worth the effort it took to impress—or, as had been the case with Minister Fudge, they were impressed with no effort at all. All in all, it sounded like a giant waste of time.

“Why not something like that hot wings interview thing instead?” his dad complained. “I could do that. I love spicy food!”

Pepper paused, lips pursed. “That would be good publicity—”

“Hah! So you agree!”

“—Which you can do in addition to the Pym Tech Charity Gala.”

“What? No, Pep, you’re missing the point here.”

Pepper arched one perfectly plucked brow. “Hmm? All work and no play makes Tony a dull boy?” she guessed with a completely deadpan delivery.

Harry snorted into his cup of water, grinning when his dad shot him a betrayed look. The man rolled his eyes expansively and turned back to Pepper.

“Hank hates me,” he said for the nth time.

“Hank,” Pepper replied with great emphasis, “Is not the one hosting this gala. Hope is.”

“She hates me too.”

“Tony, you’ve never even met her.”

Harry’s dad flapped his hand in an impressive imitation of the queen waving off an errant fly. “If you want to get technical, I’ve never met Hank either.”

“Tony—”

“Besides, I’ve already got plans for that day. Mini-Merlin and I are flying out to the Mojave for a little TNT.”

Harry perked up at that. His test yesterday had been as much of a failure as he’d feared. He hadn’t even managed to guess a full 60% of the questions in Part II correctly, so despite his near perfect score on the weird puzzle section, his final grade was a barely passing 74%. Not that his dad seemed to grasp how poorly Harry had done. He seemed convinced Part I was the only section that mattered, dismissing Part II as the result of shoddy primary school teachers, which somehow translated to a need for exploding cacti.

Harry had a hard time wrapping his head around that logic. But his dad was good at explaining things. If he wanted to teach Harry the mechanics of TNT, well…exploding cacti.

Pepper looked less impressed. “You’re going to the gala,” she told his dad with a note of finality.

Harry made a low, protesting noise in the back of his throat. He didn’t entirely mean to make the noise, but the thought of missing out on blowing up succulents with his dad so the man could attend an event he professed no interest in was a bit upsetting.

Pepper glanced at him, lips twitching with an amused smile. “Don’t let him drag you into this,” she said. “Your dad’s not that busy. He can take you out to blow plants up literally any other day this month.”

Harry had actually managed a look at his dad’s calendar yesterday, courtesy of FRIDAY, so he knew that wasn’t true. But tellingly, his dad didn’t protest Pepper’s assertion.

And that seemed to be the end of that. His dad stopped protesting his attendance at the gala in favor of grumbling about the boredom he was sure to face at the event in two weeks. Pepper began reading through her emails, masterfully tuning his dad out, leaving Harry to field his dad’s complaints, which he managed with only a few dry remarks. Of course, his sarcasm only spurred his dad on, so they went round about in circles for several minutes before Pepper suddenly stood up, announced that their plane had just landed, and ushered them outside onto the tarmac to greet their guests.

The jet, which looked like some sleek white spaceship straight out of a sci-fi movie, powered down as they stepped towards it. The door at the front slid open with a dramatic hiss, a set of stairs unfolding from nowhere like magic, and a second later, Ron appeared, a wide grin spread across his freckled face as he bounded gracelessly straight down the steps.

The twins followed on his heels, Ginny tumbling out after them. And then Mr. Weasley, who paused at the top of the steps to wave a greeting with both arms.

“Hello, Harry!” he called out.

Mrs. Weasley’s head popped up over his shoulder, also waving hello.

“Good god,” Harry heard his dad mutter, “there’s more of them.”

Harry snorted as he waved back, but didn’t bother pointing out that this wasn’t even the entire Weasley clan. Ron was pulling to a stop before him, all long limbs and an easy grin in a fraying winter overcoat.

“Forewarning mate,” he said in lieu of a proper greeting, slapping Harry heartily on the shoulder, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad this excited.”

“And that was before he found out the plane could fly itself,” one of the twins chimed in before sticking his hand out to shake hands with Harry’s dad, saying jauntily, “Morning Mr. Iron Man sir…And Mrs. Iron Man? George Weasley at your service.”

So that was—probably—Fred.

Fred threw his arm around George’s shoulders, tugging him forward. “And this handsome devil is Fred—”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” George swept into a courtly bow.

“—And he didn’t introduce himself, but the scrawny git by Harry is our ickle baby brother Ron.”

Ron scowled at the introduction but waved hello as Harry’s dad and Pepper returned the greeting, neither adult appearing particularly phased by the rambunctious twin duo. Ginny, Harry noticed, was tucked shyly behind Fred, jabbing him over and over with her sharp elbow until he finally, gently shoved her away and introduced her as well. But while the Weasley parents could be seen still back by the jet unloading a few bags of luggage, Hermione was nowhere to be found.

Harry craned his neck around, raising a questioning brow at Ron. “Where’s…?”

“She got sick! She’s been locked up in the loo since we started descending. Said the plane was too fast.” Ron shook his head in disgust.

Harry wanted to be surprised, but Hermione had nearly worked herself up into a panic attack the one time he’d convinced her to ride his Nimbus with Harry doing the driving. He’d never pictured flying in a plane as something quite so exhilarating, but he had no experience to back that assumption up, and Hermione was generally iffy about heights besides.

But sick or not, everyone was here. And they were meeting Harry’s dad. Proof solid that Harry was not an orphan anymore. And Harry couldn’t help but feel that this was going to be the best vacation ever.