Chapter 15

Life fell into a routine, as it always did, no matter if you were a school student, a prisoner, or an agent of a spy organisation most people didn't know existed. Harry was sent on missions with his team that were both more difficult and more rewarding than those they were doing while still on probation. He let Steve take control of his investigation, and occasionally went along if Steve wanted to find something he couldn't access remotely.

More often he joined Steve, Thor and occasionally Tony on the kind of missions where heavy hitting superheros was the appropriate response. Those missions had been the final jolt the two humans had needed to realise Harry wasn't the seventeen year old he looked like, and they were both finally treating him like an adult capable of making his own decisions.

"Shots on me!"

Like drinking whatever he wanted without even making a joke about it.

"Drinks are always on you Stark." Harry teased.

"Yeah but generally I can expect to get something out of it."

Harry shrugged. "I mean, if you want."

"You look like a skinny seventeen year old. Actual jailbait isn't my type."

"Fair. But seriously. Can you go get drinks please. I'm not in the mood to get carded." Harry turned back to the table, finding that Steve and Thor had found a large booth that they would easily fit into.

"How are we feeling, mates?"

"…. Good battle, my friend."

"It wasn't much of a battle, thanks to you two." Steve mumbled, playfully.

"Just because you didn't contribute anything, is no reason to not revel in our victory." Thor grinned. "I'm certainly winning our tally, after all."

"Hey, I still think the building itself should count for something." Harry slapped his hand on the table. "Red card, I say."

"Fuck off, you were the one who called for a vote." Tony dropped the tray of shots and a jug of beer on the table. "Drink up, I've told them to keep it coming."

Harry was coming to suspect that he would have to get used to waking up with people sleeping draped around his apartment. Although today it was actually only Steve lying on his couch, legs curled up against the arm rest, and his head pillowed on a massive bicep.

While Harry could have cast a charm around the kitchen to prevent sound from leaking out, it was mid-morning, and he knew Steve never liked to miss too much of his day by sleeping. So, it wasn't a surprise when a bleary super-soldier wandered into the kitchen only a minute after he had pulled a saucepan out of the cupboards.

"Eggs and bacon?"

"Sure. I eat a lot though."

'I'll put a dozen on to fry then, and you put the bacon in until you think there's enough. Juice is in the fridge." Harry waved his hand toward a cupboard. "Glasses."

He heard Steve move around the kitchen behind him, eventually to stand next to him with the pack of bacon. Harry moved out of the way to open up the pan, and Steve laid out enough rashers to cover the bottom of the enormous pan. Harry cut off another knob of butter that he scraped into the pan, the sizzle of frying food increasing for a moment.

Harry's breakfast was done soon after, so he piled it all onto his plate, and seeing that Steve had everything for his own breakfast in hand, sat down at the table to eat.

"You mentioned that you had something to show me? A couple weeks ago?"

"Hmm?"

"About how your world does art."

"Oh, right. Yeah. Let me get it after breakfast. I think you'll really like it."

"Did your world have the same kind of artistic development as we did?"

Harry had to shrug. "I don't really know honestly. I never studied it. I know we learned a lot about paint from you, but I think there was a fairly early European divergence, because a lot of stuff was inspired by the Bible, right?"

Steve nodded, having sat down at the table, placing the full saucepan in front of him on a folded tea towel. "Yeah, up until the Rennaisance and Reformation, kinda slowed it down, but until then Christian art was mostly it."

"Right, so very few wizards are Christians. We're much better a preserving things, see, so we keep around more information than muggles have, which is good sometimes, but keeps a lot of outdated opinions around too.

"But with art that means we learnt some of the same techniques, use the same tools, but it wasn't really anything until someone learned to animate portraits during your Middle Ages. Then suddenly, everyone with any money commissioned one of their whole family including the dog." Harry rolled his eyes. He meant house elves, because he'd seen too many in paintings around Grimmauld Place, but he couldn't be bothered to explain the nuance to Steve.

"Wait, animate? Like they can move?"

"Yeah, move, talk, change paintings, think for themselves somewhat. We know now they aren't really alive. But they're a good mimicry."

"So, your portraiture must be incredible. Is it lifelike?" Steve seemed to have forgotten his food, leaving his fork on his plate, and letting the rest of it cooling in the pan.

"Nah, or well, some of it is, but it was just really creepy to have basically a completely lifelike version of a dead person in your home, so painting techniques kinda moved away from that not soon after it was developed."

"Do you have any I can see?"

Harry waved Steve back down into his seat, "Eat your breakfast. I don't have any portraits, because I don't want strangers in my house, but I have a few books with animated illustration plates."

He wandered over to his bookshelf, pulling out a few of Teddy's old picture books that he learnt to read from, a modern copy of Beedle the Bard and a book on famous botanists Neville had left behind years ago that had animated, but silent, pictures of the witches and wizards, as well as some of their findings in a natural habitat.

Harry had been telling the truth when he said he didn't have any portraits, but not the reason why. He'd had a couple, Snape, Dumbledore, one of Sirius at seventeen, but he'd spent too much time talking to them, and not enough living his life that he'd removed the temptation. Harry figured in a couple of decades, or centuries, he'd bring them back, along with any portraits of his long dead friends he managed to commission or buy, but he was trying his hardest to focus on the present right now, and didn't need the distraction.

He put the books down on the table in a pile, pointing out what each one was to Steve. "Here, have a look through, take them back to your house, but don't leave them lying around. Keep them in your room or something."

"Thanks, Harry." Steve grinned up at him briefly, before turning back to Teddy's book that was open to a page with a prancing unicorn.

"No problem, return them whenever."

"See, what I don't understand-"

"Fucking what? Are you incapable of shutting up?" Damien snapped over the comm line after Christian started talking again.

"Oh, piss off. We're stuck here until the dude leaves, and by the looks of things that could be another half an hour. But, as I was saying, what I don't understand is how you manage to do this so fast, Harry."

Harry rolled his eyes from where he was on his knees breaking into the apartment next door to the one they would be entering in the next hour, hopefully. "What do you mean? You're surprised I'm good at my job?"

"Nah, we're all fantastic at everything we do, but breaking into a house without the pass code, key, or, I don't know, a battering ram for the solid steel door, is pretty much impossible. I would know. But here's wonderkid five seconds later walking in like he owns the place."

Harry turned around to wink at Christian who had entered the room behind him, "Like you said, we're all fantastic at everything we do."

"Well not too fantastic, considering you can't manage to do the same thing next door."

"Oh fuck off. He's got a camera trained on the front entrance, and I'm not the one responsible for hacking."

"Leave me alone." Damien said. "I'd like to see you do better. Wait, you can't.

"Also, he's getting changed now, so actually he's ahead of schedule. We could be in an out in the next hour."

Harry and Christian went to wait near the door to the balcony they would be climbing over in the next little while, making sure to not touch any furniture, or get too close to any window.

"Ooh mate, not that tie." Damien muttered, "Not with that jacket."

Harry flicked his eyes to Christian, and saw he was pressing his lips together to stop himself from laughing or commenting.

"Colourful socks are never a good idea. This is black tie and you are not a celebrity."

Harry shut his eyes for a moment, biting his lip. Damien did this no matter where they were, and it was always funniest at the most inappropriate time.

"The invitation is where you left it, on your coffee table, no, no, turn left, turn left, there you go. Well done.

"Alright, he's leaving give it ten minutes because I wouldn't put it passed him to have forgotten something."

"Sure, we'll start setting up." Christian replied. Harry was already walking out onto the balcony, and tying the rope securely to the massive marble sculpture resting on the balcony. It was ugly, poorly designed, and completely at odds with the style of the rest of the apartment, but worked fine for what they needed, so Harry would give the owners a pass.

"Alright, you guys are good."

Christian nodded, and loosely trailed the rope between his gloved hands, "Hold on tight."

Harry winked, clipped the carabiner to his belt and jumped across to the other balcony as Christian let out the rope, but faster was better in this situation, and as he landed, he notched the carabiner back to the handrail for Christian to shimmy across.

The door into the apartment was unlocked. Only one person in the whole building actually bothered to check each night, but then again, they were 20 stories up. Harry led the way through the apartment into the office. It was terrifyingly traditional, with leather bound books along one wall, and a heavy desk opposite, but at least the desk served a purpose.

Christian nudged Harry out of the way, "My turn." Harry would never have been able to move the desk without magic, which is why two of them had entered the building in the first place.

"Who even does this anymore? This is a new building. He had to get this put in. How do you ask someone to put a safe in your floor and have them take you seriously?"

"I don't know what I have to do to teach you idiots to stop chattering while you're working, but when I work it out you're all going to do it for a week straight." Adrian cut in, from where he was supervising in Damien's hotel room.

"If you can also work out Harry's balcony fetish as well…" Christian quipped before he fell silent, all of them focusing back on their jobs.

It went fairly quickly after that, cracking the safe, taking a photo of each piece of paper in it, and then putting everything back exactly as it was.

They left the building with the rope wrapped up in Christian's gym bag, and all their collected information on the phone in Harry's back pocket. Harry was enjoying this, this S.H.I.E.L.D. thing, in the same way he'd ultimately enjoyed school. It was something so different to what he was used to, to any previous experiences he had, but it was challenging, and fun and he was good at it.

He was looking forward to sticking around for the next decade or so. Maybe he work his way up to Fury's position, make him watch Harry succeed without any way to stop it. Because he was used to magical politicians with centuries of dirt. He could deal with anything Fury threw at him.

Harry unlocked the door to his apartment with two fingers, holding a bag of groceries with the rest, and a gallon of milk in the other hand. It took him a minute to jimmy the key out of the lock, and as he was pushing the door shut he heard footsteps moving quickly towards his door, and Steve calling his name.

He poked his head back out the door. "Yeah?"

"Sorry, I thought I'd catch you before the door shut. Here are some of your books back."

Harry looked down at the bag being held out, and then to his own full hands. He knocked the door open with his foot. "Come in. You can tell me what you thought."