Son of the Storm

Introspection

As soon as Harry had got on the Hogwarts Express, he had known that something was up. People stared at him openly, when they thought he weren't looking, but when he returned their gazes, they tended to look away, embarrassed. He was pretty sure that he saw some students of more obviously wizarding background all but bow to him and heard them murmur, 'milord' in respectful undertones.

When, distinctly unnerved, he broached this subject in the compartment they'd selected, Ron had snorted. "Isn't it bloody obvious?" he said. "Mate, you're the son of Thor."

"That doesn't mean that people should be…" Hermione began, then slowed as Ron gave her a look that suggested she was being extremely dense. "Oh," she said quietly. "Of course."

"What?" Harry asked.

"Harry," Hermione said quietly. "This may be hard for you to hear… but your father was worshipped, right?"

Harry nodded slowly. He'd known this in the abstract, and in any case, aside from the odd neo-pagan sect, which his father seemed mostly to be embarrassed by, it was in the distant past.

"Well, in the Wizarding World, some people still worship him. Loki and Odin, too, and the rest of your pantheon."

Your pantheon.

The words hit him like a punch in the stomach. From the Hulk.

Not, the still functioning part of his brain pointed out, that the Hulk would ever hit him. Where Harry was concerned, he was the Big Green Cuddle Machine.

Harry brushed that aside, and gulped as he touched the edge of a fundamental truth that he'd been skirting around, backpedalling away from and generally pushing to one side for most of the last two months.

He. Wasn't. Human.

Not anymore.

Really, he thought distantly, it shouldn't be so much of a shock. His father, his uncle, Sif, even Diana, had pointed it out to him.

But it did. Because just like that, there was an enormous gap between himself and his two friends.

His father had lived for nearly a millennium and a half, and still looked like a fresh faced young man just entering the prime of his life. His uncle, likewise. His grandfather did, admittedly, look like a particularly vigorous old man, maybe in his seventies.

But that was because he was well over five thousand years old.

As a matter of curiosity, Harry had inquired of his father how old the oldest Asgardian ever had been.

Thor had given this some thought.

"It is difficult," he said. "To say for certain. Some men and women have been known to live to seven and a half thousand years old, but they were severely aged on their death beds, and, frankly, long into their dotage." He hesitated.

"Dad?"

"Well, it is little more than rumour," Thor said slowly. "But some say that my great-grandfather, Buri, your great-great grandfather, is still alive. History tells us that he disappeared many millennia ago, abdicating the throne to his eldest son, Bor, choosing to spend the remainder of his life travelling the Nine Realms. Others have suggested that Bor did away with him."

Harry's eyes widened, and Thor gave him a grim look. "My father speaks little of his own father, but what little I have gleaned from him, mother and history says that King Bor was a very hard man. A ruthless one. Even a cruel one. So I would not rule the possibility out." He shook his head. "But I think it severely unlikely. If nothing else, Buri was a Skyfather, and a renowned Master of Sorcery, something which fell out of favour in Bor's time, making him a very hard foe to survive, let alone defeat and slay."