Obligatory disclaimer: It all belongs to JK Rowling, Warner Brothers, Disney, or who knows what other important media entity. I own none of it.


Virginia "Pepper" Potts, of 5730 Encino Avenue, was very proud to say that she was perfectly normal, thank you very much. As a young woman who'd been to a good college, begun her professional career, and bought an affordable house in a safe neighborhood not far from the office, you wouldn't expect her to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because, well, her background seemed so consistent.

Ms. Potts had recently become a secretary at a firm called Stark Industries, which made weapons. She was a slender, intelligent-looking woman whose hair was strawberry blond (she'd like you to avoid calling it red, please, because that was her sister-in-law's hair color, and it would say weird things about her brother if she admitted their hair colors were shockingly similar).

While she was pretty enough to fit the standard administrative assistant mold, she had been recruited specifically for her brains. Edwin Jarvis, lifelong personal assistant to the founder of the company, knew he didn't have much time left and wanted to make sure the Stark family was well-cared-for. Tony Stark had recently taken over the company, a few years after his parents' untimely death in a car accident, and Mr. Jarvis knew he'd need even more handling than his father had. Ms. Potts' background check threw up some irregularities, but he still considered her the best candidate to eventually replace him.

That someone would discover those irregularities was one of Ms. Potts' greatest fears. While her history would stand up to a bit of scrutiny, all it would really take was for someone to try to meet her family. They came from a different world, quite literally, and had given her the choice to stay in that world as a second-class citizen or to try to make her own way. She'd chosen the latter.

She still heard from home, though she could almost never visit, save for her parents' funeral a few years previous. Her little brother had recently had a son, and nothing made her sadder about her choices than not getting to be part of their lives. But there wasn't much she could do there, and there was a war going on that her family was right in the middle of. It was a good thing that her last name had gotten mangled during her immigration, because that was one less connection between her and the Potters, who had a madman after them.

When Ms. Potts woke up on the sunny Los Angeles morning in November when our story starts, there was nothing about the bright blue sky outside to suggest that tragic and magical things had been happening far away, or that they'd soon be coming to Encino. Ms. Potts rushed around the house putting papers into a briefcase while trying to eat a piece of toast and talking to one of her coworkers on the cordless telephone.

Thus, she didn't notice a large, tawny owl, completely inappropriate for a California morning, flutter past the window.

At half past eight, she walked out to her driveway and got into a new, black car being driven by a former boxer by the name of Harold "Happy" Hogan, who got the nickname because he rarely smiled. Despite his gruff exterior, Mr. Hogan was a teddy bear at heart, and was happy to pick Ms. Potts up while her car was in the shop. He was usually Mr. Stark's driver, but the company's CEO was out extremely late at a Halloween party the previous night, and wouldn't need a driver until at least noon. This was not unusual for Mr. Stark. It gave Mr. Hogan the chance to get to know Ms. Potts better. He understood from Mr. Jarvis that the two of them would probably wind up sharing a lot of duties keeping Mr. Stark's life in order.

As they pulled out of Encino Avenue and started heading toward the freeway, Mr. Hogan could have sworn he noticed something peculiar—a cat reading a map. For a second he didn't realize what he'd seen, then jerked his head around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Encino and White Oak, but there wasn't a map in sight. Rather than look foolish in front of Ms. Potts, he just said, "Cute cat." She noticed the cat, who seemed to have seen them both in the car, and was regarding them with too-intelligent eyes with interesting dark markings around them. But both quickly forgot the incident, and started talking about the large deal for missiles the company was hoping to make that day.

Stuck in traffic on Ventura Freeway, both couldn't help but notice that there were a lot of tabby cats on the side of the road. It couldn't be the same one following them to work, could it? "We should have the company donate to the local animal shelters. There are too many strays out," suggested Ms. Potts. She made a note of it, but both of their minds were back on missiles by the time they got to the Stark Industries office.

Ms. Potts worked out of a cubicle on the top floor, or she might have noticed the same cat snooping around the outside of the building all morning. She filed some paperwork, she made some schedules, she sent some electronic mail (Stark Industries was well ahead of its time on its quest to become a paperless workplace). She was in a very good mood until lunchtime, when she thought she'd stretch her legs and walk across the street to have a sandwich from the bakery.

"Potter, yes," a vaguely-familiar older woman was asking the front-desk receptionist in a Scottish accent.

"No Potters, but we do have a Ms. Potts, though," the young lady admitted, fortunately just missing the person she'd named, who ducked back into the hallway.

Fear gripped her, and she considered confronting the old lady, but thought better of it. She dashed back up to her cubicle, picked up the phone, and had almost finished dialing a very specific emergency number when she changed her mind. She put the receiver back down and realized she was being stupid. Potter wasn't such an unusual name, and the lady looked more like a schoolteacher than a government agent. Surely anyone that wished her harm wouldn't inquire at the front desk. There was no point in worrying.

She did find it a lot harder to concentrate that afternoon, and was so distracted that when she turned a corner around three o'clock she walked straight into someone just coming in off of the elevator. "Mr. Stark! I'm so sorry!" she apologized to the company's CEO, who staggered slightly as a pile of Ms. Potts' papers spilled to the floor (proof positive that the office wasn't truly paperless yet).

The handsome twenty-something wunderkind just gave her a charming smile, though the effect was somewhat diminished by the still-hungover look on his face, half-hidden by sunglasses indoors as it was. He didn't seem all that upset by being nearly knocked to the ground. "Pepper, right? Don't worry about it. In fact, if you want to bump into me more often, just put it on my calendar," he told her with a look that was just short of an HR violation. Without offering to help her pick up the papers, he slouched off toward his corner office.

Rattled by the run-in and busy picking up the spilled documents, she didn't notice the tabby cat giving the whole encounter a look of apparent disgust from a high nearby shelf.

When she pulled into her driveway later that evening, having gotten her car back from the shop after work, she couldn't help but notice the cat sitting atop her neighbor's brick-and-steel fence. She was sure it was the same one from the morning.

"Are you from around here?" asked Ms. Potts, soothingly. "I'm going to put out some tuna. But I don't think I should be encouraging strays to hang out in the neighborhood, so don't get used to it, okay?"

She left the tin of tuna out while she was getting her own dinner together, and was a bit surprised by the last report on the evening news. "And finally, many citizens of LA have said they saw the aurora borealis this morning. The 'Northern Lights' is a weather phenomenon that results in colors across the horizon, but it's based on the Earth's magnetic field and usually only happens near the North Pole. Scientists are still looking into what could have caused colored lights over LA, though this station expects that it's probably just filming for a new movie."

Ms. Potts thought hard about what had happened. People asking about her family name was one thing, but these strange lights could very easily be how her people traveled. If family had come to town, they would have contacted her. But if enemies had come, she didn't want to give away her position if they hadn't tracked her down. It still wasn't quite to the point that she would call the emergency contacts she'd been given for news of home, but she slept poorly, keeping a surprisingly dangerous-looking sword next to her in bed.

While Ms. Potts might have been drifting into an uneasy sleep, the cat outside was showing no signs of sleepiness. It simply sat and watched the parking lot of the school across the street. It didn't move to eat the tuna, so much as quiver when a car door slammed nearby, or even seem to notice the owls swooping overhead on their own missions of surveillance. In fact, it was nearly midnight before the cat moved at all.

So fast you'd blink and miss it, a six-foot-wide hole appeared in the air where the cat had been staring, throwing sparks that spun around its circumference, showing a completely different sky behind it, and a man stepped out and allowed the portal to close behind him.

The man was far out of the ordinary, but still not that unusual for Los Angeles. Tall and thin, he was old enough to have silver hair and a long beard, both of them far too long for the heat of the LA summer, but possibly grown out for a particular acting role. The long robes and purple cloak, though, would really only fit in at certain parties from the previous evening, and gave the impression that the man was lost for a late Halloween gala or very, very hung over from the night before. He wore half-moon spectacles atop a long nose that looked like it had been broken on more than one occasion, and anyone on the Strip would have told you to avoid the man if you were not ready for the kind of Southern California bender that gave you plenty of material for a stage show or a criminal record. His name was Albus Dumbledore.

Albus Dumbledore didn't seem to realize that he was at least a dozen miles away from the parties anyone would assume he was looking for, and instead rummaged in his cloak, looking for something. He did seem to notice the cat, and gave it an amused glance, chuckled, and muttered, "I should have known."

Finally finding what he was looking for, he pulled out what looked to be a silver cigarette lighter, and if there'd happened to be a local onlooker, they'd have expected him to spark up something highly illegal in the parking lot. Instead, when he flicked the lighter, the nearby street lights started to go out with little pops, one per time he flicked. He clicked the deluminator until the whole neighborhood looked like it was suffering from another blackout of the scale suffered a few years previously in 1994. If anyone looked out of their window now, they wouldn't be able to see what was happening, and would probably be too busy phoning the power company to notice the business of one Albus Dumbledore.

He took a moment to figure out how to get out of the fence surrounding the parking lot, before making a gesture and causing it to simply bend down and out of his way before popping back into its previous state. He crossed the street and leaned against the fence next to the cat, and after a moment he spoke to it. "Fancy seeing you here, Professor McGonagall."

If anyone could have seen in the darkness, the cat flickered in a single second from a small feline into a tall and severe-looking woman in black, with square glasses exactly the same shape as the markings the cat had around its eyes. It was the same woman Ms. Potts had seen asking for her earlier. Unlike Albus Dumbledore, she looked like she'd put in some effort to dress for Encino rather than Halloween, wearing an out-of-date skirt suit that wouldn't raise an eyebrow with her apparent age and tight disciplinarian's bun. "One of us had to be the responsible one, Albus. I assumed you'd spend the day at parties."

"You can't blame me, Minerva. We've had precious little to celebrate for eleven years."

"I know that," she said with some irritation, "but it seems a terrible risk losing our heads. Are you actually certain that You-Know-Who really has gone?"

"It certainly seems so," he nodded. "We have much to be thankful for. Would you care for a War Head?"

"A what?"

"A War Head. They're a recently-invented Midgardian sweet that I'm very fond of. They're sour on the outside, and sweet on the inside." He left, "Much like yourself," unstated but heavily implied.

"Definitely not," said Professor McGonagall, clearly upset by the man's fondness for local confectionery. "But even if You-Know-Who has gone–"

"Professor, surely, especially now, you can at least call him by his pseudonym? All this 'You-Know-Who' nonsense as if a boy's anagram was a word of power. Voldemort." The professor flinched, but Dumbledore was tearing a sour candy from its foil wrapper and seemed not to notice. "There never was any reason to be frightened of the name, and certainly not now."

"You're different," she insisted. "Everyone knows you're the only one You-Know- oh, alright, Voldemort, was frightened of. And don't say I flatter you. You know it's true. Even Frigga was too frightened to come down from Asgard and challenge him, but it was you he feared."

"And yet, it was not I that was his undoing."

Professor McGonagall nodded, as this neatly brought them to the reason for their presence outside the Potts home. "The word I heard before coming here is that last night he turned up to find the Potters, despite all their protections, and that Lily and James are…" she seemed to want Dumbledore to tell her she'd heard wrong.

"I'm sorry, Minerva, but it's true. We're still trying to figure out how he found them."

"That's not all. They're saying he tried to kill the Potters' son, Harry, and that the act somehow broke his power and destroyed him." With Dumbledore's nodding assent, she exclaimed, "It's true? After all he's done, and all the people he's killed, he couldn't kill a little boy? How did Harry survive?"

"We can only guess," he hedged, clearly having suspicions. While the professor took out a lace handkerchief to dab at her eyes, he checked a golden watch with a strange astrological apparatus inside instead of normal clock hands. It must have made sense to him, because he simply said, "Hagrid's late. I suppose he told you I'd be here, by the way?"

"Yes," she admitted. "And I suppose you're here to leave him with his aunt?"

Dumbledore nodded, "She's the only family Harry has left now, aside from his mother's sister."

"Small favors for that," Professor McGonagall nodded. "Lily never had a single nice thing to say about Petunia. But at least the Dursleys have a family. I've been watching Virginia all day. While she has a good heart, she lives alone and is overworked. Her employer seems to be at best a well-meaning lecher and at worst a modern-day Roman emperor in the making. One of the bad ones, like Nero. I worry that she doesn't have the means or the attention to care for a young child."

"I think you may be misjudging Mr. Stark," Dumbledore disagreed. "I did my research as well, and I think he'll be quite empathetic about Ms. Potter—sorry, it's Potts here, isn't it—raising an orphan, since he, himself, tragically lost his parents only a few years ago. And she was obviously mentioned in her parents' will and likely in James and Lily's. If she's made to choose between her job and Harry, she will not lack the means to support them. I've written her a letter."

"A letter?" scoffed Professor McGonagall. "We could at least wake her and explain the situation. She may not know what she's getting into. After all, he'll be a legend. I wouldn't be surprised if books are written, this day becomes a holiday, or if every child in Vanaheim knows his name."

"Exactly why I think he should be raised as far away from our world as possible, lest it go to his head. Famous before he can walk and talk! Ms. Potts should be able to shield him from all that while still giving him a link to our world. However, I admit, the letter is easier. Like most squibs, she lost her chance at magic and was forced to choose between the villages or Midgard. I do not want to risk whether she's bitter about that fact."

"She'd have every reason to be. If our laws were more fair, she'd have been heir to the Potter fortunes without her brother having to be killed by a maniac." She sighed, regarding Dumbledore's cloak as if worried he was smuggling Harry in its folds, "How is the boy getting here?"

"Hagrid is bringing him." He waved to cut off her objections, "Yes. I'd trust him with my life. He'll see that young Harry comes to no harm."

She looked like she was about to object when suddenly an enormous, sleek metal boat styled after a Viking longship rippled into visibility directly over their heads, floating in the air as if it were the sea, then carefully settled down into the middle of the street. If one only had the captain of the boat for reference, though, it might look small, as he was almost twice as tall as a normal man and significantly more broad. With black tangles of long hair and beard, he seemed to be an ancient Norseman plucked out of time and sense of scale. In his vast arms, he was holding a bundle of blankets.

"Hagrid, at last," said Dumbledore, relieved but nearly as perplexed as McGonagall over the boat. "Where did you get an Asgardian Skiff?"

"Borrowed it," the man called Hagrid shrugged, lowering a gangplank and gingerly stepping down. "Young Sirius Black knew where ta find it. No idea how he knew. It were moored up and hidden in a cave. It's got a stealth field."

"So I noticed. In that case, I believe it might belong to Hogun the Grim, so you should return it where you got it on the way back. Any problems?"

"No, sir. Well, the house were almost destroyed and the aurors weren't far behind. Would'a been a mess o' paperwork had they show'd up. Took me all day usin' the night roads yer showed me. Could'a been here hours ago if'n I could'a used the Rainbow Bridge or cut through the Goblin Market. Fortunately, the tyke settled early and weren't no difficulty."

Dumbledore and McGonagall bent forward to regard the bundle of blankets, and the baby boy swaddled within, fast asleep. His hair was jet black, but didn't quite conceal a cut on his forehead, shaped like a bolt of lightning, or the rune Sowilo.

"Is that where–?" McGonagall began, then nodded. "A curse scar. I guess he'll have it forever, then. It could have been far worse."

"And scars can come in handy," nodded Dumbledore. "Well, give him here, Hagrid. Let's get this over with."

With a teary goodbye, Hagrid handed over the bundled boy, Dumbledore placed his letter, and they left him on Ms. Potts' front doorstep. "We might as well all take the skiff back together," suggested the elderly wizard. "Chin up, all. It's a brave new day, and there are still celebrations ongoing, I expect."

As the strange boat lifted into the air, a single click as if of a lighter could be heard before all the lights in the neighborhood flared back into life just as Hagrid re-engaged the stealth mode of the ship. Startled from her fitful sleep by the change in illumination, Ms. Potts made out the shimmer of the boat in the air outside of her window before it became fully invisible. Hefting the sword, she rushed downstairs, finally unable to continue to self-delude that nothing unusual was happening.

Yet on the doorstep, there were no enemies to fight, only a letter about the tragedy that had befallen the last of her family and the nephew she had not yet had a chance to meet, that even now the citizens of Vanaheim were toasting as, "Harry Potter, the boy who lived!"


This fic has three major functions:

* Explore how the Potterverse could work within the MCU canon

* Follow how Harry is changed if raised by Pepper and around Stark Industries

* Follow how the Avengers are changed with the early insertion of Harry (and his knowledge of magic)

The Potterverse timeline has been adjusted by 17 years so Harry's first year is in 2008, starting shortly before the events of Iron Man. Assuming Pepper's age is about the same as Paltrow's, she's around four years older than James Potter.

My goal is to stick to MCU movie canon with as few changes as possible, at least through what was established by 2020 when I started writing this fic (and trying to fit in all the newer stuff that comes out). I do reserve the right to change facts not established solidly in a film if necessary (particularly as regards incidental background dates and locations established in supplementary material that wouldn't have made a difference onscreen). This is basically proceeding from the idea of adapting the Potter books into some form that would work as an MCU film or TV show, rather than forcing the MCU to adapt to a huge population of wizards and magical creature that somehow go unknown and unremarked on Earth: hence, seeing if it can work truly separated from the muggle world and on Vanaheim.

To maintain the relevance of the Nine Realms to the overall MCU plot, one simple but possibly significant change I do plan to make to the MCU canon is to restore the Courting Death element of Thanos' motivation that we all thought meant he was trying to romance Hela before Infinity War came up with the Malthusian motive. That likely won't be relevant until deep into the story, but I figured it was fair to mention it early.

This story updates regularly on Fridays. I'm keeping enough of a buffer that I don't currently envision any breaks in service, but if I do realize I'm about to outpost my writing speed, I intend to at least pause on a stopping point rather than a cliffhanger.