Chapter Text
As the sword jabs at his stomach, the only thought in Harry’s mind is “Merlin, not again!”.
He hisses as the blade pierces his stomach, and the cloaked figure laughs. Harry has the sense to roll his eyes and holds out his hand, whispering a quick “Confringo.”
The cloaked figure lets out a shrill scream as it is thrown backwards, and Harry falls to the ground, closing his eyes as the battle rages on around him.
When he opens his eyes, he’s in a stark white train station.
“You’re early,” a rumbling voice whispers.
Harry turns and nods to his companion. “It’s been a while.”
“Barely a year,” Death replies. “It is nothing to a god like yourself, Master.”
Harry sighs. “Yes well, as it is, I’ve become accustomed to this place.” He looks to the empty space in front of him.
He looks to the white train, doors open and waiting for him. Death hums. “The train will wait, if you choose to stay.”
A freezing presence touches Harry’s arm lightly, and he shakes Death’s hand off. “That’s enough, Death. Where am I going next?”
“Enjoy your time, Master,” Death bows. “I can sense that this world may have need for you.”
“All of them do,” Harry mutters in response to the non-answer.
He boards the train as he has done for years, walking down the aisle into his favorite compartment, the very same since his first journey on a version of the same train when he was eleven, years ago, and as his father before him. Harry isn’t sentimental, doesn’t dwell on his old life, but it is not his fault that this is the compartment which makes the transition easiest.
He sits back on the seat and leans his head against the window, looking out onto the platform, where Death still stands looking in his direction. It’s all relative, of course– its face is hidden beneath its hood as it always has been, if a metaphorical being like Death even possesses a face, but Harry has learned that Death’s eyes will always follow him.
And so, Harry Potter closes his eyes.
When they open and he is on a bus that smells like weed and urine, surrounded by humans, he decides that his name is Henry Powell. He’s ended up in the same world twice before, and he’s exposed himself more than once as well; he’d rather not take the risk.
The bus pulls to a stop and Harry gets up, pushing past the crowd that has gathered aboard, slipping out the door and onto the street.
There are people milling about, and when Harry looks up he sighs; he can see the Empire State Building in the distance, which means that this is probably New York. Harry hates New York.
And so that is how Henry Powell ends up settling in a nice apartment in the Upper West Side, in an apartment with a decent view of Central Park and prime location to be able to get to whatever Death sent him for, but far enough from Times Square that his new apartment hopefully won’t get destroyed when whatever altercation is bound to come, comes.
The thing with Death is that it doesn’t plant him in these different worlds for no reason, but only most of the time. For all Harry knows, he might just have to wait it out and find a way to pass on to the next one if he waits too long here to not become suspicious.
For the time being, Henry Powell is perfectly happy living in his nice apartment in the Upper West Side, looking out over Central Park.
It takes him a few months to make sure that he hasn’t been in this world before, at least on this planet; his first hint is when he picks up a newspaper and it’s talking about actual superheroes in America, but he visits the places where he goes most often when he ends up on an Earth; London, there don’t seem to be any recent battlefields, nor are there any in Alaska, or Moscow (‘Henrik Pototsky’ reigned hell there a few lifetimes ago when Gods descended from the sky and declared Northern Russia the birthplace of Ragnarok, to the chagrin of the humans residing there).
Harry spends some time researching himself on the internet, even visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be entirely certain, but he eventually declares that he has yet to visit this Earth.
And so, Henry Powell settles. He spends his days falling in love with MOMA for the dozenth time, wandering Central Park, and going to see Broadway shows. Sometimes he spots a fallen child and subtly heals a skinned knee, or flicks his wrist just in time to stop a car accident. Nobody knows, and when there’s no American Ministry that descends upon him, he decides that he’s not really harming anyone.
His life is slow-paced for once, until he’s taking a walk through the fairly isolated Central Park East Green on an early winter morning and notices a man leaned up against a tree, crouching and coughing, clutching at his chest.
Harry runs over immediately. “Sir? Sir!”
The man gasps and looks into Harry’s eye, falling against him. When he stops spasming, Harry makes a decision quickly; he can feel the man’s soul shivering, and batting against Death supersedes his vendetta against revealing magic in front of Muggles.
He lays the man down quickly, and presses a hand to his chest, where tough metal meets his fingers. He unzips the man’s jacket as he groans, and finds a light blue light emitted behind his shirt. THe man manages to pull his phone out of his pocket, but drops it. “Call–” He starts, but breaks off into a coughing fit. “It–”
Harry isn’t going to get anything out of this man if they continue like this, so instead he presses a hand against his temple and looks into his mind to try and find anything that might tell him what the glowing object’s purpose is.
As soon as he catches something about it keeping metal shards from piercing his heart, and what more, a poisonous substance leeching into the man’s veins, Harry presses a hand against his chest again and wills as much random power as he can without actually killing the man into the object’s core. The man gasps and coughs again, this time as though in relief when Harry leans back on the palms of his hands and sighs.
When the man has managed to sit up and calm the coughing a bit, he looks at Harry. “Shit kid, who the hell are you?”
Harry recognizes the man from somewhere, and it comes to him with a start– this is Tony Stark, literal Iron Man. Of course, of all the people Harry could have ran into today, he runs into one of the most well-known faces on the planet.
Still, he’s done this much to save the man, and he spots Death across the field looking at them. Harry can feel the glare he’s getting, so he gets up and offers a hand to the man. “Come on, lets get you to somewhere where you can take care of that thing before it tries to kill you again.”
“What the fuck,” Tony mutters, but takes the hand and leans against Harry when he’s up. He nods in the direction of Fifth Avenue. “There, I can call my driver and he’ll get me, it’ll be fastest.”
Harry inconspicuously summons Stark’s phone to his hand while the man is distracted looking off into the distance, and passes it to him. They limp towards Fifth Avenue as Harry witnesses one side of the conversation. “I think the Arc Reactor blew– No Happy, I’m fine– Pepper certainly does not need to know, no–
They reach the outskirts of the park, and Harry lets Stark lean against a railing as he hears a yelp and turns, inconspicuously waving his hand and muttering a charm to keep a little girl from falling flat on her face a few meters again.
“What did you do back there?” Stark asks, one hand on his chest as the other supports his weight.
Harry smiles at him. “I’m not sure to be honest, mate. I was just checking on you and then you were fine. It must have been a fluke,” Harry nods towards the glowing light of the arc reactor, still visible beneath his shirt. “You know how unreliable technology can be, I’m sure.”
Stark doesn’t look convinced, but a black car pulls up to the curb right as he opens his mouth. He hums. “That’s my drive.”
A man is rushing out of the car and towards them, and Harry whistles. “You weren’t kidding when you said he’d be fast.”
“Tony,” the driver grunts, slinging Stark’s arm over his shoulder. He nods to Harry quickly before turning them both away and starting towards the car.
The last thing Harry catches in the conversation is Stark’s deep, “Honestly Hogan, I haven’t got a clue.”
He snorts at that, and turns away himself. The little girl he stopped from tumbling over is being doted on by her worried mother, nobody is glancing towards him. Henry Powell walks away.