Title: Harry Potter and the Twelve Steps
Rating: G
Genre: Humor/Crossover (with, well, everything)
Wordcount: 3484
Notes: Inspired by a conversation with a beta reader almost nine years ago (and written at that time, in the summer of 2006). Never posted here until now. Enjoy!

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Harry Potter looked up at the CHA sign on the door of the rundown old church, frowning and unsure about whether he was in the right place (for him). After all, if he really wanted to, he could quit any time...

Maybe.

Feeling slightly conspicuous, he smoothed the fringe above his brow over his distinctive lightning-bolt scar and opened the heavy oaken door. In the cavernous half-timbered hall he found a strange mix of people dressed in lab coats, tights, capes, masks and, in some cases, bizarrely unmoving hair styles that seemed to owe much of their structural stability to massive amounts of mousse. Some of them had skin and hair colors and textures he did not normally associate with human beings. Or animate beings, for that matter. Some of the women were wearing very, very tight outfits that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. One of the women even carried a whip and wore an outfit that looked designed for pole-dancing, making Harry wonder whether he might have wandered into the Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting by accident.

The meeting attendees were mostly seated on rickety wooden folding chairs, the ones whose anatomy made that possible. Others stood off to the sides, facing forward expectantly. Harry checked his watch as he took a seat in the otherwise empty back row; the meeting was about to start. The mumbling from the crowd's low conversations lessened in anticipation but did not halt altogether.

A very normal-looking (for this crowd) man who bore a remarkable resemblance to Harry himself went to the podium; his lanky black hair flopped over his brow and his glasses kept sliding down on his nose, making him push them back up repeatedly. He was far more muscular than Harry, however; that much was plain even though he was wearing a commonplace blue button-down shirt and a red-and-gold striped tie that wouldn't have looked out of place at Hogwarts' Gryffindor table. He didn't use a gavel or anything other than a mild clearing of his throat to get the others to quieten before he began speaking; once he did he had their rapt attention.

"This meeting of CH-Anonymous will come to order. How is everyone tonight? Does anyone have some progress to report?"

A chipper young blonde woman both raised her hand and leapt to her feet; she was extraordinarily petite and yet exuded an inordinate amount of power in addition to her perkiness. "Hey there! Yeah, I want to report that I now have thirty-four days!" She beamed around at the gathering and the others clapped their appendages (some didn't have what could be called hands) in honor of her accomplishment. The man at the podium nodded and smiled at her.

"That's wonderful! But—no, wait, that could have been someone else I saw last night...in the graveyard..."

She looked nervous and started twirling her hair with one finger, her eyes wide with forced innocence. "What? You were going to say something?"

He shook his head. "No, no, if you say you have thirty-four days..."

The young woman looked dangerous now as she put her hands on her hips and glared. "Are you saying that I don't?" she snapped at him. When she moved her arms her jacket swayed for a moment and then something fell out of it, clattering to the floor. It appeared to be a wooden stick, very pointed at one end. The young woman's face was quite red as she bent to pick it up, but another young man with very short dark hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses got to it first, picking it up so quickly Harry wasn't sure what he'd seen. It was almost as if the young man had shot some sort of sticky string at it from his wrist and pulled the wooden stick toward him that way, but Harry blinked and the string was gone; it was just the short-haired young man holding the stick while the blonde glared at him.

He sniffed the pointed end of the stick and glared back at the blonde. "Fresh blood. And a little bit of dust. Also fresh, if you can call dust fresh. Jumping jehosaphat, Buffy, if you're going to fall off the wagon you could at least wash your stake before showing up at a meeting and claiming that you're still clean."

"And I suppose, Peter, that your supply of webbing is doing just fine because you're still clean, too? Or do you want us all to believe that you only use it when you don't feel like crossing the room to get the TV remote? Bound up any muggers in webbing and hung them from the town hall lately?"

"They—they could have gotten there a lot of different ways," Peter mumbled, sitting down again and tossing the wooden stake back to Buffy, who caught it one-handed, without really looking, and put it back in the inside pocket of her leather jacket.

"Now, now," the man at the podium said placatingly, holding out his hands in supplication. "We're here to support each other, not to accuse. But we do ask for honesty. If you've suffered temptation—and who hasn't?—this is the place to talk about that temptation and strategies for overcoming it in the future. No one is perfect; it's possible—even probable—that we'll all slip from time to time. We see a couple of muggers and we leap into action, instead of calling the police," he said, raising an eyebrow as he looked at Peter. "Or we find ourselves unable to resist taking a walk through a cemetery after dark, even though we know what kind of temptation that will represent," he added, looking meaningfully at Buffy. Both she and Peter grimaced and looked at their feet.

Harry swallowed, feeling sweat breaking out on his brow. He had severe doubts that even if he tried to quit he could make it more than a few days before slipping again. Sometimes when he simply thought about quitting cold-turkey he started shaking uncontrollably...

Another young man raised his hand and stood. "Thanks for reminding us of that, Clark. I know that I'm really grateful to be able to come here, because I'm still struggling, and I admit that. As you can see," he said, gesturing to his torn trousers and nonexistent shirt, "I even lost it on my way here. My skin's even still a little bit green, although that's probably because I'm just so damn mad at myself for—"

"It's okay, Bruce, calm yourself, Bruce, don't get into a bad cycle..." Clark said soothingly as Bruce's skin started to take on a grass-green color and his chest and arms began to swell with enormous muscles. Everyone who'd been sitting near him moved quickly away, looking alarmed, although Buffy had pulled out her stake and Peter seemed poised to shoot some webbing. Bruce started breathing more slowly, methodically; the green tinge in his skin lessened and his muscles deflated again. He nodded at Clark.

"Thanks, man. I don't even want to go into the reason that I got mad, because that'll probably just make me mad again, but like I said, I appreciate coming here, because even though I'm not there yet, I feel like maybe the success some of you have had will rub off on me and I'll be able to control it someday."

"That's a wonderful attitude, Bruce. We're all pulling for you," Clark said, smiling at him, although it turned into a frown a moment later. "You can go back to sitting near Bruce, everyone. He won't bite." Reluctantly, the people who'd been sitting near Bruce, whose skin was still a tiny bit greenish, took their seats again.

A woman wearing what appeared to be a very tight red-white-and-blue swimming outfit and knee-high boots, carrying a whip on her belt, was sitting next to Bruce; she stood now, her hand on his shoulder, and said, "Well, we all know that the first step is to admit you have a problem, that we're powerless over our addiction and our lives have become unmanageable because of it. I've got twenty-one days now but there's hardly a moment that I don't think of hopping into my invisible plane and flying around the world if I so much as hear about a flooded village or a capsized boat. I try to tell myself that normal people would just give to a charity that takes care of that sort of thing," she added, her voice growing fiercer, "but I'm itching to get out there and..." She fondled the whip and trailed off, her teeth clenched together, before sitting abruptly, head bowed, while Bruce rubbed her back in sympathy.

"It's okay, Diana... it's okay," Bruce mumbled to her.

A very dapper man in a tuxedo stood near the front of the hall. "Well, I'm making a bit of progress on my list. I confessed to my butler that my always expecting him to have my outfit and car ready, and all of my other 'toys' was just plain selfish and unreasonable; I mean, most butlers only have to cook and clean and answer the door, but here I am expecting him to organize a cave and one that's filled with bats, too!" He sniffed. "Alfred hates bats!" he cried, distraught. "I don't know why he still puts up with me..."

A tall red-haired woman in a rubbery-looking black suit that seemed to be painted on her stood and patted him on the arm. She also wore a strange sort of cap with two points on top, where ears might be if she were an animal. "You're doing better than I am, Mr. Wayne. After all, you're dressing like a normal human being. I'm still working up to that... I tried putting on a blouse and skirt yesterday, but I couldn't do it, I just couldn't do it!" she sobbed. "Even if I'm not rescuing someone, if I can at least wear the outfit I feel a little bit better." Mr. Wayne gave her a hug and they sat again, commiserating.

"Our loved ones put up with us because they love us," Clark said simply. "How many times did I fly off to save someone on the other side of the world without a word to the people I cared about most? Not to mention all of those years when I purposefully put lead in the drinking water of everyone I knew, so they wouldn't notice the resemblance between me and—well, me. I know I should have just come up with a better outfit from the start, something with a mask... It was very hard to make amends for everything I'd done, incredibly hard to admit that I'd actually made the people around me stupider, just so I wouldn't have to admit that I had a problem, and to make amends for hurting them, but everything seemed justified when I was doing it for my addiction..."

He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose noisily. "Today I can proudly announce that Jimmy Olsen no longer needs help tying his shoes or cutting his food; his most recent IQ test puts him at 95, an all-time high for him, and Lois Lane has been doing very well in her remedial computer and English classes and may be able to go back to work at the Daily Planet again soon." Polite applause rippled through the audience and Harry joined in, having no idea who the people were that Clark was talking about.

Suddenly the doors burst open and a lithe young man somersaulted down the aisle and stopped in front of Mr. Wayne, pulling him to his feet by his pleated shirt front; the acrobatic newcomer wore a small black mask over his eyes and a very brief red-and-green outfit with black accents. "There you are, Batman! Alfred told me I'd find you here!"

The red-haired woman next to Wayne stood with her fists on her hips, glaring at the young man. "Leave him alone, Robin! He's trying to get his life back on track!"

Robin looked at her scornfully. "It's Nightwing now, remember? Robin's dead, thanks to him. Jason's fate is on his head!" he shouted, pointing accusingly at Mr. Wayne. "And I suppose that's why you're here, dressed like that? Not doing a very good job of kicking the habit yourself, are you Miss Gordon? What would the Commissioner say? He thinks you've gone straight."

"Don't you go talking to my father about me behind my back, Dick Grayson!" she snarled at him. "I'm working at making amends to him, he knows that! I just—I just—" She looked down at herself and ran her hands slowly over her hips. "I like the way it feels, okay? Is that so wrong? It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to lose my head and do something stupid..."

"Well it damn well should!" Grayson exclaimed. "Everything's gone to hell without all of you out there!" he cried, pointing at the entire assembly; Harry slouched down in his chair a little. "You were always the ones willing to pick up the slack! Ordinary humans aren't used to coping!"

He shook his finger at Mr. Wayne. "I should have suspected you'd do something like this years ago. Now, I was glad that you found someone else to take my place when I went off to school, I really was. I became Nightwing and I had the Teen Titans. And you had a new Robin. Fine. But you screwed that up! First you don't tell Jason that Two-Face killed his father. Then you try to ground him... You know, it's your fault that the Joker killed him! Where the hell were you? At another one of your precious twelve-step meetings, trying to unlearn how to be a hero? Well, congratulations! It worked!"

"Break it up!" Clark roared, pulling Grayson away from Mr. Wayne and Miss Gordon. "Listen to yourself! Do you honestly think that you alone can solve all of mankind's problems? You even said it; ordinary humans aren't used to coping! And whose fault is that? Ours!" he said, gesturing at the members of the audience. "They'll never learn to get on without help unless we stop helping! And yes, some lives will be lost. But in the end, I think humankind will thank us for stepping aside."

"Thank you? Are you insane? Do you know how many disaster stories I saw on the news before I came over here? Not two miles away from here a school bus full of children turned over on the highway when it was hit by a tractor-trailer with heavy sewer pipes on it... I'm not equipped to deal with that, and neither is the average man or woman on the street! I was trained to be a circus acrobat, for pete's sake!"

Bruce, his skin turning greener by the second, stood, clenching and unclenching his hands. "Are the kids all right? I said, ARE THE KIDS ALL RIGHT?"

Everyone around him started screaming as he grew larger, his bulging green muscles perfectly enormous. He started roaring like a wild animal and throwing the vacated folding chairs, which Peter was fetching out of the air with his webbing, before they could strike anyone; he hung them from the rafters, out of Bruce's reach. The woman with the whip was whirling it over her head, like a lasso, and she looped it over the shoulders of the enormous green monster, pinning his arms to his sides. This made him roar even louder; he pulled on the trailing end of the rope and then used it to fling the woman against a wall, knocking her out.

Harry gasped; this was getting out of hand. Other attendees had started doing all manner of dangerous-looking things in preparation for fighting the green monster—someone was a walking tower of flame, another person seemed to be made entirely of water, and one man was stretching himself into a long rope as though he was planning on adding to the bindings around the monster. Even Clark was starting to tear off his clothes, revealing a rather gaudy red, yellow and blue outfit underneath his pale blue shirt. Harry sighed, regarding the mayhem before him.

"Oh, bloody hell."

He took out his wand and pointed it at Bruce, who was rampaging around the hall, his arms bound to his sides, while various people tried this and that to pacify him, with no success and considerable harm to the hall, which had been set on fire three times (the fires were put out by three different people, with a wall of water, an icy glare and a cold breath). There were also several holes in the roof, walls and windows that Peter was trying to cover with layer after layer of webbing. The floor would never be the same either; great pieces of it rose up at odd angles, as though the room were on all of the world's most active tectonic plates and they'd all decided to rearrange themselves at once.

"Stupefy!" Harry cried. Bruce went right over with a thud, his skin fading from green to pale peach again, his muscles shrinking back to normal size. With a couple of other waves of his wand the damage to the hall was repaired and the chairs were even back in their neat rows. Harry smiled feebly at the shocked faces before him, waiting for the inevitable wave of gratitude that usually followed his doing such things.

He would be waiting for a long time.

"Someone's in denial..." Mr. Wayne said in a sing-song, his arms folded.

"I—erm, I—" Harry stammered.

"Typical wizard," Buffy said, rolling her eyes, her arms crossed on her chest as she sneered at Harry. "Fix everything with magic. La-di-da, poof and voila!" She punctuated her mockery of him with elaborate arm-waving, as though she were doing a magic show.

"Well, I—I don't usually—see, we do have laws about that sort of thing, so I generally only help if it's in the wizarding world..."

Peter laughed. "And is it called 'the wizarding world' because you're the only wizard in it? Can't wizards generally take care of themselves? Why do they need saving? And why does it need to be you?"

He heard Miss Gordon say to Mr. Wayne, "Talk about the grandaddy of all messiah complexes..."

Buffy was still sneering at him. "Looks like someone else thinks he's the Chosen One..."

"Well, technically I am... I mean, there was this prophecy and all..." he tried to explain.

Buffy snorted. "Don't talk to me about prophecies. I've had it up to here with prophecies. You know what's interesting about prophecies? They can be gotten around. Hey, just because a prophecy says I'm going to die, why does that mean I'm going to stay dead? The moment you let a prophecy run your life is the moment you've given up responsibility..."

Harry nodded. "Yeah, I know that, but what if the other person in the prophecy isn't interested in letting it go? What if he just keeps bringing it and bringing it and—"

"—the world will end if I don't do something," about a dozen people, including Buffy, said in unison.

Harry grimaced. "Well, it would have," he said feebly, folding his arms and looking down; after a moment, though, something made him look up. He met Clark's eye; Clark looked calmly at Harry, one eyebrow raised.

"But you don't want to live that way anymore, do you? You're here for a reason, right?" Harry nodded reluctantly. "Don't worry about what just happened; if we could all control ourselves, our instincts, we wouldn't be here either." Clark's shirt was still rumpled and the tight, bright blue outfit underneath it was visible past his dangling necktie. "Would you like to introduce yourself? We're here to be supportive," he reminded the gathering, giving them a gimlet eye. Buffy, Peter and the others who'd still been standing ducked their heads guiltily and sat, then looked over their shoulders at Harry, expectant.

Harry swallowed, once more smoothing down his fringe. "Um, okay, but there isn't much to introduce. I'm, erm, Harry, and I'm, well—" Clark nodded at him, wide-eyed and encouraging. "—and I'm a compulsive hero," he finished quickly, smiling feebly when he was done. The others were still all looking at him, kinder, more understanding expressions on their faces. They knew where he was coming from; they'd all been there themselves. Smiling warmly they spoke together, welcoming him into their ranks:

"HI, HARRY!"

THE END