Harry returned to his senses, head pounding and eyes fuzzy without glasses, in a bright white room and on a hospital cot. His grubby clothes had been replaced with a pair of clean pajama pants and bandages on his bare torso where he'd been injured with even the most minor cuts and scrapes. It took a few moments to remember exactly how he had been hurt, but when the events of the night before returned to him he sat up to get his bearings, blinking black spots from his eyes. As he groped around in search of his glasses, a pair of soft hands placed them on his nose. He turned around.

A woman of perhaps her early twenties, very pretty with pale freckled skin and ginger hair to rival Ginny Weasley's, took a step back and eyed him warily.

"Who're you?" asked Harry a bit hotly out of his dislike for being stared at. "Where am I?"

The woman crossed her arms, expression suddenly huffy and one eyebrow quirked suspiciously. "I'm Amy, who're you? And you bloody well ought to know where you are, as you broke in," she retorted in a sharp Scottish accent that made him think almost longingly of Professor McGonagall. First his old girlfriend, now his Transfiguration professor? Harry had an inkling he was dreaming all of this.

"I'm Harry," he begrudgingly allowed, shifting awkwardly on the cot.

"Harry who?"

"Amy who?"

She pursed her lips. "Amy Pond. Nosy."

"That's nice," said Harry without thinking first, still a little dazed from being unconscious. "Rather like a fairy tale. I'm…you really don't know who I am?"

"How could I? I've just met you," argued Amy irritably, picking at her fingernails. So she was a Muggle.

Feeling a measure of relief, he shook his head at his own paranoia. "Sorry. I'm Harry Potter."

Amy's eyebrows shot up. "Oh, that's nice," she mimicked him in a sarcastic voice, "but a bit too boy wizard, eh?"

Harry blinked cautiously, looking over Amy from her ginger hair to her blue trainers before deciding that she was just very stand-offish, and the wizard connection was just a coincidence. As wary of him as she seemed, she didn't have a wand trained on him. He shrugged at her. "It's just my name."

"Sure," she replied with a roll of her eyes. "Just sit quietly, okay? The Doctor'll be in to fix your head in a few moments."

A doctor? Was he in some sort of hospital? Why wasn't the nurse in a uniform? This couldn't be St. Mungo's, of course, but then where was he? The walls, ceiling, and floor were almost painfully white, and everything had a sleek, rounded look to it. How had Hermione found this place?

The thought and absence of Hermione made his heart begin to race as he looked around again. "Where's my friend?" he asked, remembering now how Hermione had been fighting for the both of them as Voldemort had come ever closer. "Where's Hermione?"

Amy twitched her eyebrows as though she wanted dearly to roll her eyes, probably assuming they were using code names. "She's with the Doctor, was bleeding something horrible as far as I saw."

"What?"

As if on cue, a muffled cry of pain reached Harry from beyond the door Amy was now blocking. Jumping to his feet, he was nearly blinded by a stretching, burning pain in his chest, and for the first time since he'd woken up Amy looked legitimately concerned.

"Slow down, Potter," she said firmly, pulling him back onto the cot while he wiped at his streaming eyes. "You had a splinter the size of a Dalek in your chest!"

"A what? Never mind," muttered Harry, getting more gingerly to his feet and restricting his movement. "Can I see my friend, please?"

Amy considered his plea for several minutes before opening the white door and leading the way through a veritable labyrinth of corridors, to another room with less intense light and color.

The first name for the room that came to Harry's mind was kitchen, but it was by far the oddest kitchen he had ever seen, faintly whirring and cluttered with machinery. However his attention was drawn away from the scenery when he spotted the blood on the floor, and realized that one of the many things cluttering the table was Hermione, slumped over and gasping for air.

"Hermione," he murmured, rushing to her side as quickly as allowed when slouched over to keep his wound from stretching. Her dark unfocused eyes flickered to his face before sliding closed. He looked around at Amy, who was absorbed in the function of an electric mixer. "Why didn't you look after her first?" he demanded angrily.

"She's being looked after," shot Amy over her shoulder.

Almost immediately after she said it, a lanky, raggedy sort of man in an Oxford shirt and bow tie came barreling out from inside one of the cupboards as if it were a cellar with a handful of salty potato crisps. The man who Harry concluded must be the doctor took one look at Hermione's face, slammed his free (but no less salty) hand on the table and cheerfully bellowed, "WAKE UP!"

Hermione's blue eyelids fluttered open and the doctor guided one of the crisps between her bloodless lips. "Suck. Amy, custard!" Amy did a half-turn from her place to Hermione's right, brushing Harry aside, and spooned a bit of what she'd been mixing into Hermione's mouth with all the precision of a twelve-year-old part-time babysitter.

"What are you doing?" asked Harry, looking incredulously between Amy, the doctor, and the bloody holes pierced in Hermione's jacket. "You've got to stop her bleeding, not raise her blood-sugar!"

"This is to stop the bleeding!" shouted the doctor, having just vanished into what appeared to be a wind-tunnel in the back of the crowded room (that Harry was beginning to relate to Mr. Weasley's messy shed of Muggle electronics). "The venom controls the blood-flow from the wound, and this is hopefully going to neutralize it. Here now Hermione, take a sip of this."

The raggedy doctor poured a measure of Tabasco sauce into Hermione's mouth. She choked, but Harry could see a visible slowing of blood-flow from her side. He closed his hand around hers, relief flooding him, thinking it was over.

However not quite finished yet, the doctor stuck his hand inside of the jar and returned it full of white powder, holding it in front of Hermione's face. "Lick."

Her eyes slowly focusing, Hermione made an indignant noise. "Your hands," she weakly said somewhere between a moan and whimper, "they're dirty." Harry fought a strained laugh. Typical Hermione to worry about hygiene at a time like this.

The doctor bent low until they were face-to-face. "And unless you lick, Hermione, you life will be over. Now, lick."

Tentatively, she stuck out her tongue, caught a bit of the powder on the tip, and shuddered. "Chalk dust?"

"Indeed," replied the doctor matter-of-factly, ducking under the table and coming up with a white paper bag. "Jelly Baby?"

Wrinkling her brow, Hermione looked down at the bloody hole in her jacket. "Hasn't it stopped bleeding yet? It…it feels like it's stopped."

The doctor blinked. "Of course it has, why would you need Jelly Babies for that? I was just offering," he replied before popping one into his mouth and grinning to himself self-satisfactorily. "Loved the things for two hundred years; good thing I regenerate or I'd be as big as the TARDIS. Anyway," he continued, tossing the bag carelessly over his shoulder into the depths of the room and pulling a gauze pad from another drawer. "Now, there is still some venom in your bloodstream, but your system will eventually pump it out; the process could take anywhere between a few hours and a few days, so we'll have to just patch you up and see what happens. Shirt up, please."

"What?"

Harry supposed it was a positive sign of her improving condition, for the color to rise, albeit weak in pigment, to Hermione's cheeks so rapidly. He could have laughed if the situation weren't so serious, but decided to step in instead. "Let me do it, I know her better." Taking the bandage in hand he felt perfect confidence, but when he saw how wide Hermione's eyes had become he had a surreal lapse back to the night they danced in the tent, the feel of her body hugged close to his. When he looked up and saw Amy fighting a laugh he finally blushed, quite aware that he was not wearing a shirt.

"Er," said Amy, "come along, Doctor, we'll go check the solar-shields."

"The shields? Amy, the shields are flawless, they – oh. Oh, they want to be alone! No, unacceptable, improper." Despite his apparent disapproval, the doctor was grinning wickedly at Harry and Hermione.

Rolling her eyes, the redhead seized the doctor's arm and hauled him to the door. "Honestly, old man, don't be such a badger…"

The door slammed shut behind them, and Harry and Hermione looked at one another before laughing weakly at their own folly. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," he said lightly to break the tension, peeling away part of his bandage to show her the shallow gash the splinter of wood had made in his skin.

Hermione wrinkled her nose in a cringe, but when she tried to lift herself off the table, all the color that had returned to her face minutes ago drained away again. Her eyes became glassy, and Harry had to wrap an arm around her shoulders to get her upright.

"I…I don't think I can move my arm," she said with some difficulty, the fingers of her left hand just barely twitching. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," he assured her quickly, carefully putting her left arm on top of his head as he knelt beside her, so she was balanced and he had a clear view. "I'm going to…" He cleared his throat, face and neck burning. "I'm going to lift your shirt up now."

"Okay. Go ahead."

Harry thought this would be easy, Hermione being his best friend for six years and all, but lifting the hem of her shirt the few inches it took to expose the dark red holes, oozing small amounts of blood, in her side seemed to take an age. Her skin was cold to the touch (and he was trying very hard not to touch her) and white where it was not stained rust-red. He reached for his wand to clean her up a bit before realizing that it was gone. "Have you got your wand on you?"

Hermione shifted slightly. "I…it's in my boot. I stuck it in there after we landed, in case of Snatchers or Muggles."

Nodding to himself, Harry reached into Hermione's boot and pulled out her wand, casting a quick Scourgifying Charm to clean up the congealed blood before carefully placing the bandage on. "So…how did we get here, anyway?" he asked.

She sighed. "I don't know, Harry. I was trying to figure it out too. Last thing I remember, I was pushing through a crack in the window at Bagshot's house. Then I Disapparated, but I must not have been focusing properly, I was terrified. All I could think was to get us somewhere safe. We landed here, and that's all I remember until that doctor was screaming at me to wake up, after you came in." She cleared her throat carefully, trying to be rid of the weary crack in her voice. She'd had to take long pauses between each sentence to gather her strength for the next. "Um, Harry?"

"Yes?"

"I think the bandage is on pretty well now."

Harry looked down and saw that his hands were still resting on her waist, and jerked them away. "Oh. Sorry." He stood up and looked around the cluttered room, trying to press his bandage back onto his chest, but the adhesive was spoiled. "So…where are we?"

"I don't really know," replied Hermione with a shake of her head. "I think I heard the doctor say something about it being a ship of sorts. Doesn't seem like one, does it? Seems more like an underground building, but…not underground…"

He couldn't help but guffaw a bit at that. "I think you need to rest a while, Hermione. Your head's not in the game." She nodded groggily, and Harry grinned. "I'll go find that doctor bloke, okay? Maybe he'll have something for you." She was barely able to voice her assent by the time he had left for the corridor.