“Ooh, wizard. My son is a wizard.”
“Jarvis, lock it down,” Tony said the instant Harry ran out the emergency exit. “Don’t let anyone in or out of the tower.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tony moved slowly over to Fury, watching his chest intently for any movements at all. As soon as he saw the way his chest rose and fell, a knot of tension unwrapped itself in his chest. Sure, he’d help the kid hide a body, but he didn’t exactly mean to start out with the director of SHIELD. Killing Nick Fury was the kind of thing a person worked up to.
Tony hadn’t been watching Fury, he’d been watching Harry. He watched as the kid got more and more agitated by whatever Fury was getting at before he finally seemed to snap. A great burst of energy, energy so strong it had been palpable, seemed to rush from Harry’s body to defend himself.
“What the fuck is going on?” Tony asked himself aloud as he stared down at where Fury seemed to be unconscious, but relatively uninjured. He checked his pulse, relieved to feel it thrumming along.
“Mister Stark, young Mister Stark has opened the emergency downstairs exit and is outside of the building now.”
“I just told you to lock it down!” Tony yelled. He didn’t even bother with pants, he just moved to the elevator and slammed his hand on the over-ride system, allowing the elevator to move to him immediately. He got on and began jabbing ‘One’ over and over with increasing desperation.
The kid was not in a good mindset, any idiot could see that. He’d looked furious and terrified, lashing out at first with his words then his weird energy thing (‘Your son is a wiz—‘) before finally bolting.
“I did, sir. It seems as if young Mister Stark used the same energy against the door as he did Director Fury,” Jarvis said while the elevator flew downward at what the public safety department had called ‘incredibly unsafe speeds’.
“Of course he did,” Tony muttered. “‘Wiz’, Jarvis, what do you think ‘wiz’ means?”
“I am unsure, sir.”
Tony scoffed, “Call Happy, tell him to get Fury out of the tower and change protocol, Fury doesn’t come back in unless I override the system, got it?”
And Tony wouldn’t be overriding a damn thing until he figured out why Fury had been there, wheedling his kid, pushing the kid to a breaking point.
Jarvis was confirming Tony’s demand as the elevator doors opened and Tony took off through the vacant and dark lobby in his boxers. He no more than stepped out the doors, his head turning side to side to find his kid, when he saw a dark blur sprinting down the sidewalk.
Tony raced after him, certain that dark blur was his kid. “HARRY!”
God damn the kid was fast.
A small part of Tony’s brain, the part that wasn’t worried as hell about this kid, cursed himself for not suiting up before chasing the kid.
Another tiny piece of his mind wondered if there’d be a piece in the morning news about Tony Stark running down the street in his boxers in the middle of the night.
‘Stark goes stark’, or something clever; probably mention his past drug and alcohol abuse, speculate on his mental status, same old story. Rhodey would get a kick out of it anyway.
“KID! STOP!” Tony pushed his legs as hard as he could— the two of them were going to eventually discuss Harry’s future as a track star —and tried to reach forward, grab the kid and make him talk, when…
Crack!
Tony fell backward so quickly that he fell on his ass.
His kid just disappeared.
“Ooh…” Tony smacked himself in the forehead as he stared hard at the spot where Harry had been standing. He finallyrealized what Fury had been trying to say before Harry zapped him. “‘Wizard’. My son is a wizard.”
An incredibly unhelpful though to have, but Tony realized that Clint was not going to be happy about Harry’s skill.
“Sir?”
“Not now, Happy,” Tony said brusquely as he strode back in the apartment. “Jarvis, track Harry,” he said as he went straight to his room for some damn clothes. He pulled on a pair of jeans, figuring he wasn’t going back to bed anytime soon and grabbed a shirt at random. He ignored Happy when he stepped back in the living room and started typing commands in his phone.
“Sir, young Mister Stark is at 225 West 57th St.”
Tony glanced up from his phone toward Happy. “What is that?”
Harry’s brows were pinched together in the center of his forehead and he shrugged one of his broad shoulders. “Central Park Tower, maybe?”
“Jarvis, I want every available camera footage in the area being fed to me,” Tony ordered. “Do you have eyes on Harry?”
“I do, sir.”
A screen popped up from Tony’s phone and Happy got up from the couch to come look at it.
“Son of a bitch.” Happy whistled lowly. “How the hell did he get up there?”
Tony’s stomach clenched as he watched his kid cry out- sounding truly miserable and alone -after expelling his stomach contents on to a rooftop.
“I have to go,” Tony said abruptly, not answering Happy until he knew for sure what was happening. “Sirius said stay off ledges, and that is a tall fucking ledge.”
“Want me to come?”
“Nope.” Tony hit a button built into the wall and summoned his suit from the lab. It began forming itself around him while another quick button slid part of the windows into the wall and gave Tony an easy escape. “Stay here, keep everyone out. I’m going to go get King Kong down without killing any civilians.”
Happy shouted ‘good luck’ while Tony flew out the window.
“Alright, Jarvis, let’s see that footage, what’s the kid doing?”
“Crying, sir.”
Unhelpful.
One side of Tony’s interior helmet began a live feed of a rooftop security camera featuring what looked like the loneliest damn kid in the world. Harry stood at the edge of the roof, over a thousand feet in the air, and had tears trailing down his cheeks while he stared out at the skyline.
“Scared?” Tony murmured to himself, attempting to assess Harry’s mood while he flew toward him. “Depressed? Does he think anyone cares that he knocked Nick’s ass out?”
“Sir…”
Tony swerved in time to avoid a building. “Good looking out, Jarvis.”
He was closing in on the kid, less than two minutes out, when the scene unfolding before him began to change.
“No, no, no, what are you doing?” Tony hissed. His kid leaned forward across the rail and laughter rang through the feed as Harry was nearly pulled down the side of the building. “Get down! No! Damn it, Harry James! That is the opposite of what you should do!”
Harry couldn’t hear him, probably wouldn’t care if he could. He climbed up on the ledge and dangled his feet over a thousand feet in the air, and began inching forward.
“Faster,” Tony commanded his suit. He activated the jet exhaust, cutting his time down. “Fly fas- NO!”
Tony could see on the footage as he kid, his son, pushed himself forward and disappeared. “NO! No, no, no!”
He put everything he had in his speed as he raced forward, his eyes on reality now as he could make out a small blur free falling from the top of the building. The blur- not a blur, but a kid, his kid -got bigger the closer Tony got, but it also picked up speed the further it fell.
“This is going to hurt like hell,” Tony murmured as he angled it just right, coming up from the bottom and caught Harry’s body against his solid iron suit.
Harry’s body let out a harsh ‘oomph’ and his head smacked against Tony’s helmet, but Tony had his arms around him and flew them back up to the top of the building.
“WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!” Tony yelled the moment they were on the roof and his face shield was up. He kept ahold of Harry’s shaking arms, gently, but firmly, in case the kid tried jumping again. “DID YOU THINK YOU COULD FLY?!”
Harry had a split on his forehead from where he’d smacked Tony’s helmet, a small stream of blood oozed out, but it wasn’t fatal.
Not like that landing would have been.
“WHY DO YOU CARE?!” Harry screamed, defiant despite the never ending tears. “LET ME GO!” He yanked his arms, but Tony wouldn’t relent. He wasn’t going to hurt him, but he wasn’t giving him any easy chances to jump again. “LET ME GO!”
“Not until you tell me what you were thinking,” Tony said, more calmly as he saw the terror and misery in the kid’s green eyes. He pulled Harry down to the ground with him, forcing him to sit, and held his arms in place at his side.
“Thinking?!” Harry let out a loud bark of joyless laughter. “I was thinking ‘oh, hey, here’s a way to be done!’ I was thinking everything is ruined, I’ve ruined everything, AND I DON’T WANT TO DO IT ANYMORE!”
“Hey, shh, calm down.” Tony gently placed Harry’s hands on his lap, his own arms outstretched and prepared to lunge if the kid moved. “What did you ruin? I don’t understand. Will you explain it?”
Whatever it was Tony said, it seemed to snap some life in Harry’s expression. His lips tightened and he worked his jaw from side to side as he looked at the visible part of Tony’s face.
He would take his helmet all the way off, but he didn’t want to be unprepared if he needed to follow the kid off the building.
“You saw,” Harry said. He licked his lips and averted his eyes down to his lap. “You saw what I did.”
“Magic?”
Harry’s eyes snapped upward then went right back to his lap. He tried to inch backward on his knees, but Tony grabbed them and carefully held him in place.
“Is it… is it new?” Tony guessed wildly, unsure why the magic would make Harry so incredibly upset that he was prepared to smash himself on the sidewalk.
“No.”
“Did it hurt?”
Harry didn’t move much, merely raised his head maybe half an inch so he could look up at Tony through his lashes. “No?”
Tony sighed and closed his own eyes. “I don’t get it then. How did you ruin everything? And- and why… why did you jump?”
“Is he dead?”
“Who? Fury?” Tony nearly laughed, was that what Harry was afraid of? That he had killed him? “No, Harry, he’s fine. I mean, I’m certainly going to kill him myself, but you didn’t do more than knock him out.”
“Why?”
Tony needed a damn translator. He had been incredibly close to calling Sirius Black in that moment, wake his ass up, make him translate. “Why what?”
Harry’s shoulders curled inward and he seemed determined to not look at Tony. “Why’d you stop me?”
Tony’s jaw dropped open. “Did you think I wouldn’t?” he asked after puzzling through the question and only seeing a single meaning. “Did you think I’d just want my son to die?”
Harry’s shoulders hitched at the end of Tony’s own question. “You don’t get it,” was all he said though.
“Explain it then, please,” Tony begged. “Tell me what I don’t get, tell me what I’m missing, tell me everything, kid. I can’t help you if I don’t understand.”
Harry raised his hand to his forehead, and Tony frowned at the injury he’d unintentionally given him.
“Ow.”
It wasn’t that Tony doubted if the cut hurt, but Harry chose a convenient time to notice it.
“Do we break into the building and walk downstairs or do you want me to carry you back home?” Tony asked when it seemed as if Harry wasn’t going to say anything else at the moment.
Harry’s hand shook where he held it against his forehead nearly as hard as his voice did. “If I go back there, they’ll find me. I- I have to leave…”
“Hey.” Tony grabbed Harry’s hand and lowered it so he could see his face. “Who?”
Harry’s eyes began darting around the rooftop, as if searching for an attacker amongst the rock and the wind. “MACUSA.”
That was actually the second time Tony heard the term. The first was in a text Sirius had sent Harry, ‘MACUSA is looking for you. Stay out of Landfara Way for a bit’. Tony, Bruce, and Natasha combined couldn’t discover the meaning behind the nonsensical term, but Harry clearly understood it.
“Who is MACUSA?” Tony asked Harry. “I’m not going to let anyone find you if you don’t want found. Tell me who they are and what they want you for and I’ll figure it out.”
Harry laughed bitterly again and shook his head, still seeking out something with his restless and weary eyes. “American magical government, they’re going to find me and they’re going to arrest me.”
“For what?” Tony asked, sick of having to ask questions and not just know the answers already. The first thing he was doing when he got home was calling Sirius and demanding answers. “Fury is fine, Harry, and he’s not going to press charges,” Tony assured him.
“Underage magic is illegal,” Harry said flatly, his voice no longer shaking. “They’re going to arrest me.”
“Kid, do you think I can’t keep you hidden from a couple wizards?”
Harry finally looked straight at him and Tony almost wished he hadn’t. He wasn’t frantic anymore, he wasn’t scared, he just looked… accepting. Accepting in a way that men walking to the electric chair might look.
“You won’t be able to stop them,” Harry said, not a taunt, but a fact.
Tony smirked, “How much are you willing to bet? My team stopped a God with an army of aliens from another universe. I didn’t see any puny wizards helping us then. No offense,” he winked.
Harry didn’t grin, didn’t change expression at all. He mumbled ‘we’ll see’ and tried to stand up.
“Woah, easy there, Elvita Adams,” Tony reached out to steady Harry as his legs shook and looked ready to collapse beneath him. “Where we going, kid?”
“I…” Harry blinked and shook his head, Jesus, the kid was out of it. He probably hadn’t gotten good sleep since before their last fight on Wednesday night. “I don’t know?” Harry mumbled.
“Home?” Tony coaxed him. He ducked down so that Harry could see the truth in his words and the genuine hope in his eyes. “I want you to come home and I will keep this MACUSA from getting you. Just… just trust me a little, Harry, please?”
“I don’t want to go to prison, I don’t want to go back, and I don’t want to go in a cupboard,” Harry said plaintively. He stared at Tony hard, not blinking, until Tony realized he was supposed to answer that incredibly messed up statement.
“I don’t even have a cupboard, and I wouldn’t let anyone put you in one if I did,” he added quickly. No need to make a joke about the Hulk cage. “Nobody’s taking you anywhere.” Tony tapped his chest with one hand, the metal knocking ringing in the wind that surrounded them, “They’d have to fight me, and I’ve never lost a fight before.”
Not many, anyway.
It felt tense, the air between them. It felt like their entire future hung on what should have been a simple request. Kids trusted their parents to protect them, to help them, to give them a home. Tony wasn’t asking Harry to trust him forever, just this one damn time.
“I- I don’t know that I can make it down the stairs,” Harry said quietly, his face as red as it had ever been and his eyes firmly on his sneakers.
Tony let out a heavy sigh, relief sagging his shoulders inside his suit. “You like flying?”
There was a tiny, ‘blink and you’ll miss it’, glimmer in Harry’s green eyes when he peeked up at him. “Love it.”
As much as Harry might have loved flying, Tony had never sweat inside his suit as hard as he did as he held his son tightly in his arms and flew them toward Stark Tower.
“Who’s Elvita Adams?”
“What?”
Harry shouted again, “You called me Elvita Adams, who is that?”
Tony silently cursed at himself for being so damn witty in the worst moment to the worst audience.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
Harry hummed skeptically, but went back to watching the skyline as they flew from one tower to the other.
Happy leapt to his feet the moment Tony and Harry flew through the window. “Sir, everything okay?”
“Fine,” Tony said. He stood Harry firmly on his feet and retracted his helmet. “We are on PHAT Lockdown, as of now until I override with the password, got it?” Tony and Happy made eye contact as Happy nodded. “Go get me a package of bandages, Happy.”
“Yes, boss.”
“What’s fat Lockdown?” Harry asked without any real curiosity in his tone.
“P-H-A-T,” Tony explained. “It’s something Happy and I developed a whole back. Everyone moved in, things got a little crazy, so I separated myself from my team with ‘Pepper, Happy, and Tony’ Lockdown. Basically a fun acronym for ‘leave me the hell alone’. Now it’s PHAT, with a double H, Ph-hat, or something. We can rename it later.”
“Ah.”
Whatever moment of vulnerability Harry had shared on that rooftop seemed to be slipping away as his muscles stiffened, his face hardened, and his eyes were hooded and uninterested when Happy returned with the box.
“I can do it,” Harry said when Tony approached him with the bandaid. He touched his forehead again and smirked slightly, “Think it’ll scar?”
“Probably not,” Happy said with his adorable earnest energy. “It’s just a little cut.”
“Damn.” Harry pocketed the bandages and stared up at the ceiling with disinterest.
“Oh! Yeah! Harry, you got an… owl… twice,” Happy said. He handed Harry a fistful of papers that were on the coffee table. “One flew back through the window after it left that envelope. The other one went in your room, Harry. I, uh… I tried to get it out, and, well…” He held a finger with a tiny trickle of blood up sheepishly. “It bit me.”
“So you just let it in—”
“Hedwig.”
“What?” Tony looked down at Harry and saw a very slight hint of a smile on his face. The first one he’d seen in days. “You know this evil carrier pigeon?”
Harry’s lips curled up a little more. “If she hears you call her that, she’ll bite you again.”
“It’s real mail then?” Happy asked curiously. He sucked on his injured finger before looking at Harry expectantly, “From who?”
Harry lifted the papers Happy gave him and blanched.
“Hap, why don’t you wait for me in my office and we can gossip and have girl time here in a few?” Tony said in a bright and pointed manner. He tilted his head toward his office, “Now? Happy?”
Harry unrolled the thicker paper, the one rolled up like an old fashioned scroll, after Happy left the room. Harry took one very brief look at it and quickly stuffed it in his back pocket.
“That good, huh?” Tony asked.
Harry shrugged, “My friends,” he said simply.
He slowly opened the envelope, moving with all the delicacy of a bomb detonation expert, instead of elaborating on the other letter and pulled out a perfectly normal seeming sheet of paper. “What the fuck?” he whispered after he stared at it for a long and tense moment.
“The suspense is killing me, kid,” Tony groaned dramatically, yet truthfully, when Harry didn’t seem all that inclined to let him hear what it said.
Harry glanced up at him and held the sheet of paper out. “You might as well read it, it mentions you,” he said flatly. “Seems as if I get one last night of freedom.”
Dear Mister Potter-Stark,
Greetings!
I wanted to reach out to discuss your recent bouts of accidental magic in the presence of no-maj’s on Sunday, June 19 at approximately 0321, 0325, and 0331.
If you and your father have no contradicting plans, perhaps we could discuss this at my office located in MACUSA Headquarters in the Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway on Monday morning, around 0800. If this does not work for you, kindly contact us and we will be happy to reschedule. If you are unable to come to us, I will come to you at Stark Tower.
Your father should know where our building is located, as his green friend once smashed an alien through our windows.
I look forward to meeting you both in person.
Best regards,
President S. Quahog
“Well, he’s got ‘vaguely threatening’ down to a science,” Tony mused as he reread the part about the President coming to Harry. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and looked up at Harry and frowned to see his son looked like he was a second away from just falling over.
“You, bed,” Tony said firmly. “Sleep, rest, reset your batteries. We will deal with this,” he shook the letter before laying it on the coffee table, “tomorrow. Today, just… just sleep, alright, kid?”
Harry continued to just stare at him with dull eyes as he swayed in place. “I… I can still stay?” he asked softly, breaking Tony’s heart by the implication.
Between the sarcastic kid with a quip for everyone and the wide-eyed kid who looked surprised at basic human kindness, Tony wasn’t entirely sure who his son was.
But he was determined to get to know him.
“Ki— Harry, you’re my son, my family,” Tony said firmly. “I don’t care if you’ve got an entire army of wizards chasing you. I’m not scared of them, and I’ve got a hulk on our side. This is your home, your US Embassy, and MACUSA can fuck off with their underage magic bullshit. Got it?”
Harry blinked at him and shook his head slowly, as if he’d never heard anything so outrageous in his life, so Tony simplified it for the kid.
“I want you here,” he said firmly. “We are a family, you are stuck with me. Go, sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Harry just stared at him for a long moment, searching for something on Tony’s face, before jerking his chin in a nod and moving to his room with all the noise of a ghost.
“Oh, hey,” Tony stopped him before he shut his door, “leave that open, will you? So little Mister Arsehole can come out if he wants? Poor little guy’s been trapped in there all night.“
And the last thing Tony needed was Harry deciding a razor looked as tempting as a 1,000 foot free fall.
As soon as Harry silently did as he asked, Tony moved toward his office and poked his head in.
Happy sat in Tony’s desk chair, his feet propped up on the mahogany desk, two cups of steaming coffee in front of him.
“Morning, boss,” he said. He moved his feet and dropped them to the floor with a heavy thud. “Feel like telling me now why I had to have Natasha and Clint drag Nick Fury back to his own office?”
“Not particularly, no,” Tony said. “Here’s what I need, Hap, I need you to go sit right outside Harry’s bedroom door and don’t move. Any noise, any movement, check on him. If he’s breathing too loudly or too quietly, check on him. If you need to take a piss, text me first so we can swap out.”
Happy got to his feet immediately, it was hardly the oddest request Tony had ever made of the poor man.
Tony stopped him when he went to grab one of the coffee mugs, “Leave them,” he said. “Please.”
Happy’s brow furrowed as he stepped up beside Tony in the doorway. “Rough morning?”
Tony let out a joyless laugh when he saw the clock said it wasn’t even six am yet. “You have no idea,” he said.
Happy clapped him on the shoulder, entirely sympathetic despite having no idea what all had happened. “Someone after the kid?” he guessed.
“Himself, so far,” Tony told him. A partial truth, at a minimum. “Seems to be his worst enemy. Oh, and some pissed off wizard politicians, maybe.”
Happy’s eyes were soft despite the crinkle of confusion in his forehead and he nodded before moving out of the office doorway so Tony could step inside.
“I’ll watch him, boss,” he said, despite his obvious confusion about the entire scenario.
“Remind me later to give you a raise,” Tony called quietly as Happy moved through the rooms with practiced silence.
Not like Harry.
Harry moved silently as if he didn’t want anyone to know he existed. Harry floated. Happy’s every step was trained, careful, precise. Happy moved like a soldier, Harry moved like the ghost he tried to make himself become.
Tony sighed and rubbed his forehead as he moved to go slump down in his chair. He hadn’t been equipped to handle a teenager. Let alone a teenager with magic. A teenager with magic who did a swan dive off a 98-story building.
A teenager with magic who did a swan dive off a 98-story building who was in some sort of trouble with the American magical president.
Tony gave himself approximately five minutes to have a private pity party before he pushed himself in a sitting position, drank half a cup of the scalding coffee, and pulled out his cell phone.
“Jarvis, is Harry asleep?”
“He is in bed with his eyes closed, sir.”
“Good enough. Happy in there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
Tony pulled up his contact list and sent a text to the person who seemed to know exactly how to handle the cluster fuck of a situation he found himself in…
Call me, immediately.
He then looked over Harry’s summons again and thought it over carefully.
“Jarvis, give me everything you have on a S. Quahog,” he ordered. He pulled up his computer screen in preparation for the files. His eyes then flicked over when his phone vibrated and he saw the name.
“Send me the files, Jarvis,” Tony said curtly. “I need to take this.” Tony reached over and clicked the accept button before drinking down the second half of one of the coffees Happy left.
“Tony? Everything okay?”
“No,” Tony said truthfully. “It’s been a hell of a day, but I have the big piece of the puzzle and I’m ready for the details.”
Sirius’ voice was instantly alert and wary. “Is Harry okay? What happened?”
“No, and everything,” Tony said with purposeful vagueness. “You first, tell me everything.”
Sirius hesitated, “What do you know?”
“Magic,” Tony said. “The kid’s magic. Tell me the rest now.”
“Tony, I’d be bloody thrilled,” Sirius sighed. “Let’s start with the week Lily found out she was pregnant…”
Tony snagged a notebook and pen from his desk drawer and began writing as Sirius began finally giving him all the answers he needed…
Happy sat in his seat outside Tony’s asshole son’s bedroom door, peeking inside occasionally to check that the cute little pup was the only one moving around, while he played Tetris on his phone. All in all, working for Tony was an easy gig, paid well too. Sure there were some oddities like the Hulk, the Super Soldier, and now wizards, but still, easy money working for his buddy.
Happy startled and dropped his phone, his hand moving automatically for the gun he carried on his hip, when he heard Tony shout clear from his office behind the walls reinforced for privacy.
“WHO THE FUCK IS VOLDEMORT?”
Happy grinned wryly as he plucked his cell up from the floor and went back to moving a few blocks, checking on the kid, moving a few blocks, check on the kid.
He didn’t know who, or what, a Voldemort was, but if they were causing Tony to shriek like that, then they better watch their back. Tony was a spiteful and cruel son of a bitch when he wanted to be.