Don't even say anything.
Disclaimer: I own neither Harry Potter nor Doctor Who
The sign on the main road read Rattigan Academy, sharp letters colored in fresh white paint against the dark wood. The country road was empty except for the UNIT jeep stalled next to the open gate that led onto the property. The Jeep's three passengers looked through brick fence posts to the green campus beyond.
"Turn left," ATMOS ordered.
"UNIT's been watching Rattigan Academy for ages," Jenkins said, revving the engine to turn past well-trimmed hedges. "It's all a bit Hitler Youth: exercises at dawn and classes and special diets."
"One question," the Doctor said. "If UNIT thinks ATMOS is a bit dodgy..."
"How come we've got it in the Jeeps?" Jenkins laughed. "Tell me about it. They're fitted on all government vehicles. We can't get rid of them unless we can prove something's wrong. Drives me round the bend."
Around the corner the main building came into view. The Rattigan Academy was an old manor house at the outskirts of London, a feat of architecture from a bygone age, all brick walls and gravel paths and sprawling grounds. Carefully Ross parked the Jeep along the front drive.
"You have reached your final destination," ATMOS told them as they exited the car. Luna looked around in interest. It wasn't like a public school, like the one she'd been at in 1969, or the sprawling castle that was Hogwarts. Rattigan Academy was somewhere in the middle, imposing and also a little bit average. From around the corner of the house a pack of students came running around the corner in matching red sweatsuits. Some of them, Luna noted, were younger than she was. This was a school she might have gone to, had things played out differently. A science place instead of a magic place. She could see echoes in time.
"Is this Phys Ed?" the Doctor asked, bouncing almost as much as the students. "I wouldn't mind a game of footie."
At the front of the group a boy in grey sweats peeled off. He was tall, dark-haired, walked with a self-assured swagger that left no doubt that this was Luke Rattigan. Barely older than Luna and nearly as smart, if everything UNIT said was true. Behind him the other students filed inside. "You must be the Doctor," Rattigan said, smile thin and sounding wholly self-assured in his intellect. "Your commanding officer phoned ahead."
"Oh, I haven't got a commanding officer," the Doctor waved off. "Haven't you?" Rattigan smiled again, just as thin, and looked over the Doctor's shoulder to Luna and Jenkins. "Oh," the Doctor said, making a show of remembering his manners. "This is Ross. Say hello."
"Afternoon, sir," Jenkins greeted dutifully.
"And you?" Rattigan asked, turning to Luna.
"Luna," she replied, offering a hand. Rattigan shook it, and for a moment the gold around him was alight with memories of making secrets and the promise of a choice. Luna returned his smile, thin and careful. He wasn't quite a threat, but there was something in his shadow, and Luna hated puppets with masters in shadows.
"I assume you want to see inside," Rattigan said as she stepped back. "I'll give you a tour. All of the students are busy." Implicating that they were interrupting, and Rattigan clearly wasn't happy with that. Luna didn't really care.
Inside the house was nearly as impressive as the grounds outside. Arched ceilings, thick rugs, walls covered in intricate wooden paneling and paintings that probably deserved to be in museums. The Doctor paused in the foyer and took a deep breath.
"I can smell genius," he said with gusto. "In a good way."
Rattigan scowled slightly and led them through to a room every bit as overwrought and decorated as the rest of the house. But what was in the room was far more impressive – technology and innovation to rival the creative output of the planet. The Doctor looked like Christmas had come early. Luna understood the feeling.
Students were bent over projects, uninterested in the visitors even as the Doctor peered down over their shoulders. There was single-molecule fabric and gravity simulators, and vaguely recognizable bioforming software scrolling across a computer screen. Luna wandered through the room, staring at innovation as she went. Along the back wall a boy and girl about her age fiddled with the parameters a nano-tech steel construction machine.
"Set the frequency four nanometers higher," Luna offered under her dad's hyperactive babbling ringing through the room. "The metal ions will vibrate in sync."
They looked up, surprised she would talk to them, but Rattigan was busy with the Doctor and Luna was waiting patiently for them to try it, so the boy at the controls twisted a dial and input a number sequence and the machine hummed quietly, far smoother and softer than the rattle it had been making a moment ago.
"Thanks," he said. His partner asked, "Do you have any other tricks?"
"Well," Luna considered. "The Cheveran have – will have – a similar machine, except they used – use – will use a copper cable jack instead of the steel one because the metal is-"
"Luna!" her dad interrupted from across the room, gesturing out the door where Luke and Jenkins were waiting. Luna smiled, apologetic, and hurried over to them. Luke led them up three sets of stairs until they reached his quarters at the top story.
"You're smarter than the average UNIT grunts, I'll give you that," Rattigan said once the door was closed. The Doctor looked affronted.
"He called you a grunt," he said to Ross. Then, back at Rattigan, "Don't call Ross a grunt, he's nice. We-"
"This place," Luna broke in, dragging her father back on topic. Not that he wasn't running through a million scenarios in his head that very minute – Luna knew her father very well – but the quicker they dealt with this the quicker they were back in the TARDIS, away from all these potential threats and victims. Luna didn't like being grounded for long, not after Hogwarts. It made her anxious. Too many enemies and nowhere to run. "It's a little different, isn't it?"
"What does that mean?" Rattigan asked them, biting back a heavy sigh. The Doctor sobered up.
"We were thinking," he said, "what a responsible eighteen year old. Inventing zero-carbon cars, saving the world."
"It takes a man with vision." He didn't sound proud; he sounded aggravated. Tense.
"Mmm," the Doctor hummed. "Blinkered vision. Cause ATMOS means more people driving, more cars, more petrol. Which means?"
"Oil's gonna run out faster," Luna answered for him.
"Exactly. Your ATMOS system would make things worse."
"Yeah, well," Rattigan said quickly, word's almost tripping on their way out. "That's a tautology. You can't say ATMOS 'system' cause ATMOS stands for Atmospheric Emission System so you're saying Atmospheric Emission System system. Do you see, Mr. Conditional Clause?"
Luna didn't know what he was talking about, but the Doctor clearly did. "It's been a long time since someone's said no to you, isn't it?" He asked, voice gentler by far than it had been since they arrived. Rattigan scowled, looking less and less like one of the world's millionaires and more and more like Luke, an eighteen-year-old kid.
"I'm still right though," he argued.
"It's not easy being clever," Luna said into the big, almost-empty room. "No one else sees the patterns and the answers. They're all so slow."
"Yeah," Luke agreed slowly.
"And you're on your own," Luna continued, knowing that he was, knowing exactly how he felt being the clever genius among all the normal people, the strangers who couldn't understand and therefore didn't care.
"Yeah."
He wanted to turn away, she could see it in his eyes, but she had him caught fast. "I hated playing the puppet for all the tiny men. How do you stand it?"
"Sorry, what?"
"Nothing," the Doctor broke in, pulling an entire ATMOS device out of one of his bigger-on-the-inside pockets and giving Luna a careful look over Luke's head. She scowled, ugly and out-of-place, and let it go. Rattigan blinked, clearing his vision.
The Doctor kept talking as if nothing had happened. "There's no way you invented this by yourself. It's Earth technology, yeah, but it's like building a cell phone during the Renaissance. Actually, no, I'll tell you what it's like. It's like finding this thing in someone's front room." He tossed Jenkins the ATMOS unit and strode across the room – the very large, very empty room – to a thing in the corner that Luna had half-noticed when they had first entered and ignored in favor of examining Rattigan. Now she focused as her dad pointed it out. It was large, unwieldy and ugly and out-of-place in the big empty room. And Luna found herself thinking it did look somewhat familiar.
"Why?" Jenkins asked. "What is it?"
"It just looks like a thing, doesn't it? People don't question things. They look at it and go, 'Oh, it's just a thing.'"
"Leave it alone," Luke ordered sharply, looking almost frightened.
"Me," the Doctor continued, wholly content to ignore Rattigan. "I make these connections. And to me this looks like-" He found a button and pressed it with glee, and his last few words were cut off as he blurred for a split-second and then disappeared.
"Dad!" What was he doing, activating a teleport without knowing the destination. He could get someone killed doing that. Himself, for example.
But he was back before she was halfway across the room, eyes bright and running the minute his feet solidified enough to hit the ground.
"Time to go," he grinned. "Luke, you better come with us." But the teleport was humming to life again, something appearing on the open pad. Luna drew her wand, shorting out the machine's controls with a whisper of magic, but the teleport had already done its job and the Sontaran was already in the room.
Which was surprising, actually. Because Sontarans were the kind of space-faring race that avoided subterfuge like the proverbial plague. They faced their enemies head on, even if winning was more a move to mutually assured destruction than an actual victory. On one hand Luna could count all the occasions in known history that Sontarans had used hiding and proxy puppet wars over a straight, simple attack. It never ended well. Luna did not put her wand away.
"Sontaran!" If the Doctor was worried or unsettled by the abnormality of the events he did a masterful job of hiding it. "That's your name, isn't it?" The Sontaran – short and round and sheathed entirely in armor, as all Sontarans were – paused for a moment, gait stuttering to a stop in the middle of the room, the gun on his back half-drawn. "How did I know that, eh? Fascinating, isn't it. Worth keeping me alive."
Jenkins was not so interested on utilizing curiosity as a survival method. He drew his gun, aiming at the alien, speaking well-memorized words. "I order you to surrender in the name of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce."
The Doctor gently lowered his arm, bringing the gun back down. After a moment he stepped up to Luna and placed a hand on her arm. She refused to lower the wand.
"He's dangerous," she said softly, staring at the alien soldier over her father's shoulder.
"He's curious," he replied, staring at her intently. "You can't begrudge him his curiosity."
"He's a threat."
"And so are you. Put it away, Lunette. We don't need threats here."
Unhappy, she did as he ordered, contenting herself with the knowledge that should something go wrong she could be armed in seconds, and that there were dark secrets of combat that she barely understood hidden deep inside her mind. He stared at her for a moment longer, assessing, and then stepped back. His next words were addressed to the Sontaran.
"The copper bullets won't work, will they?" he asked, gesturing to Jenkins' gun. "Cordalaine signal's exciting them."
"How do you know so much?" the Sontaran asked, voice gruff through the helmet.
"Well," the Doctor shrugged, and he didn't answer the question.
So the Sontaran turned to Rattigan while the Doctor wandered the room. "Who is he?"
Rattigan shrugged. "He didn't give us his name."
"Why are you hiding?" Luna demanded, arms crossed, voice hard and deadly soft. "This isn't Sontaran behavior. Stopping bullets before they're fired, using teenagers, refusing to show your faces, that is no way for a warrior to act. Shame on you."
"You dishonor me!" the Sontaran roared at the accusation.
"Then show yourself," Luna challenged him.
"I will look into my enemy's eyes," he agreed, shifting the catch on his helmet and carefully pulling it away so the world could see his face – his round head, his small eyes, his scowl. Next to her Jenkins gaped.
"Your name?" the Doctor asked from behind them. Luna itched to pull her wand.
"General Staal of the Tenth Sontaran Battle Fleet," answered the alien soldier dutifully. "Staal the Undefeated."
"What happens when someone defeats you?" Luna asked lightly. Staal growled.
"It looks like a potato," Jenkins said, mouth finally catching up with his brain. "A baked potato. A talking baked potato."
"Now Ross, don't be rude," the Doctor admonished him stepping forward. He had a tennis racket in his hand. "You look like a weasel to him." From one of his infinite pockets a tennis ball appeared, and he bounced it experimentally a few times. "Sontarans are the finest soldiers in the entire galaxy. Fearless, strong, all that good stuff. Entire race dedicated to a life of warfare. A clone race grown in batches of millions, with only one weakness-"
"Sontarans have no weakness!" Staal protested loudly, hands reaching towards the gun. Luna watched him carefully.
"No, it's a good weakness," the Doctor assured him. Rattigan was staring at it all, incredulous.
"I thought you were supposed to be clever. Only an idiot would provoke him."
"Don't worry, he knows what he's doing," Luna assured the teenager.
The Doctor continued as if nothing had happened. "The Sontarans are fed by a probic vent on the back of the neck. That's their weak spot, which is why they always have to face their enemies in battle. Isn't it brilliant?" He grinned a crazy little grin at the ingenuity of the universe. "They can never turn their backs."
"We stare into the face of death," Staal proclaimed with solemn pride.
The Doctor bounced the ball again, and Luna could already see where it was going, could see a thousand different ways it could turn out. Carefully she prodded Jenkins back towards the door, away from the Doctor and Staal and Rattigan and whatever mess was about to go down.
"Yeah?" the Doctor asked above it all. "Well stare into this!" His aim was perfect, and the tennis ball bounced off the racket, off the teleport and hit Staal dead center in the probic vent. He staggered and fell, gasping. The Doctor was already herding everyone out of the room, but Rattigan broke away and ran back to the Sontaran. They didn't wait for him.
The Jeep started malfunctioning almost immediately after they climbed into it. The first to go was the radio, and then the wheel. Jenkins fiddled with every button within arm's reach as the car drove itself off the road. It did no good. ATMOS had full control of the vehicle.
"Turn left," the machine ordered, steering them towards the river approaching far more quickly than anyone liked. Jenkins tugged the wheel right but nothing happened.
"I've got no control," the soldier said for the third time.
"It's wired through the entire car," Luna said, shifting around the flooring in the backseat. "I can't turn it off."
"And the doors are dead bolted shut," the Doctor finished, thumbing his sonic uselessly for emphasis. "I can't stop it."
"Turn left," ATMOS ordered again. In the front window the river got closer very quickly
"Is it going by itself?" Luna asked, almost to herself. "Or is it just contradicting our orders?"
The Doctor jumped on the idea. "ATMOS," he asked, "are you programmed to contradict my orders?"
"Confirmed," the machine stated.
"You'll ignore anything I say?" he asked, just to be sure.
"Confirmed."
"Then drive to the river," he ordered as they reached the beach. "Drive straight into the river. Drive, drive, drive!"
And instead of speeding up either further the car stopped, jolting them all forwards.
"Turn left," ATMOS ordered. "Turn right. Left. Right." The locks disengaged and all three jumped out of the car. ATMOS got louder, and higher as it continued. "Right. Left. Left. Left."
"Get down," the Doctor ordered when it started to whine, high pitched and incessant and worrying. The three ducked down along the side of the road as the car sparked, and then ATMOS went silent. The Doctor poked his head up, frowning. "That's it?"
When it exploded he was the only one who singed an eyebrow.
An hour of walking and a particularly grouchy cabby later they arrived at Donna's house in Chiswick. The Doctor rang the doorbell with the heavy air of a man who had hitchhiked from Glasgow to Cardiff. Luna reminded him gently it hadn't even been all the way across London. He had only scowled and pressed the bell harder. Donna opened the door moments later.
"You would not believe the day I'm having," he said without preamble. Behind him Jenkins and Luna made faces at each other.
"I'll requisition a vehicle, sir," Jenkins offered quickly.
The Doctor waved him away. "Anything without ATMOS. And please don't point your gun at people."
He wandered halfway down the street to make a call. Luna half-contemplated joining him, but Donna was coming out of the house and leading the Doctor to the car on the street and there was someone inside calling out to them and someone had to make sure everyone behaved because she had learned a long time ago that leaving Donna and her dad alone together for extended periods of time could be a recipe for disaster.
That said, she would have loved to find some place in the TARDIS to curl up with a book and forget about all this stress and the fact that they all could have died twice so far that morning and how painfully difficult it was not to just draw her wand and wipe the Sontarans out of existence for threatening her homeworld and her father. But she could be better than that. She would be better than that, because her dad knew she could be and there was nothing she hated quite as much as disappointing him.
"Is it him? Is it the Doctor?" An older man had followed Donna out of the house and down to the street, a slightly familiar old man who was just missing a red cap and a coat but otherwise looked exactly the same as he had over Christmas years and years ago. Luna could see his connection to Donna in the gold (grandfather, maternal) and saw the coincidence, but there wasn't really such a thing as coincidence when it came to her dad, and there was something more going on that revolved around Donna; it was faint, pulsing and sometimes-there in the gold and it made her worried. Despite the recognition and the camaraderie and the ease of introduction it made her worried.
"What, you've met before?" Donna asked, and the Doctor answered from where he stood out on the street, poking around under the hood of the Nobel's car.
"Christmas Eve."
"He disappeared right in front of me," the old man reminisced. "And there was a girl with him too, pale blonde thing, about up to here..." Luna waved to him quietly, and he grinned back. "Grown up a bit, though." He offered her a hand. "Wilfred Mott. Wilf. Pleasure to meet you."
"Luna," she replied. "I don't think we made it to the pleasantries last time."
"You lot didn't stick around long enough."
"And you never told me?" Donna demanded. Wilf shrugged.
"You never asked." Then, to the Doctor, "So you must be one of those aliens."
"Well, don't go shouting it around." He stood up straight and offered Wilf a hand. "Nice to meet you properly."
Wilf shook it enthusiastically. "A proper alien hand."
"We should let the Colonel know about the Sontarans," Luna said. "Ross can-" But Jenkins was at the far end of the street, on the phone himself. Donna pulled out her mobile.
"Hang on, Martha gave me her number. In case of emergencies or complaints and all that. Let me-" She picked up on the third ring, voice tinny and distorted on the end of the phone. The Doctor moved over, standing next to her.
"Martha? Hold on, he wants to talk to you."
The Doctor took the phone. "Martha? Tell Mace it's Sontarans. Code Red Sontarans. They're in the file. But if they're inside the factory, don't start shooting, UNIT will be massacred. We'll be back as soon as we can. You got that?"
An affirmation on the other end, and then she hung up. The Doctor handed Donna the phone back.
"Now," he said, turning back to the car with sonic in hand. "Let's see what you're hiding."
"You've been at this for ages," Donna complained from her seat next to Wilf on the curb. "Sonicing it before didn't help, why would it help now?"
"It's only been twenty minutes," Luna said mildly, poking aside a bit of wiring. "And now we know what we're looking for."
"Which is what, exactly?"
She gestured vaguely. "Alien stuff."
The car sparked suddenly, and the Doctor jumped back in surprise. "Ooh, temporal pocket! Ha! I knew there was something there. One second out of sync with real time."
"What's it hiding?"
Approaching footsteps interrupted. "Men and their cars," Sylvia Noble groused at them, coming down the sidewalk. "Sometimes I think if I were a car-" She stopped short, lip twisting in distaste. "Oh, it's you. Doctor- what was it?"
"Yeah, that's me," the Doctor waved, still waving the sonic around under the hood.
Wilf looked back and forth between them. "What, have you met him as well?"
"Dad, he's the man from the wedding! When you were sick with the Spanish Flu. I'm warning you, the last time that man turned up it was a disaster!"
"Yes," Luna agreed. "He rather does tend to make a mess."
"What- who're you?" Sylvia turned to Donna. "Who's she?"
But before Donna could reply the car sparked again and thick, clouds gas began hissing out of the car hood.
"Back, everybody back," the Doctor ordered. He switched sonic frequencies and buzzed at the car. A few moments and many more sparks later the thing spluttered off, leaving the car shrouded behind a screen of smoke.
"That'll stop it," he said. Sylvia gaped at him.
"You've blown up the car! I told you, Dad, he's a nuisance! What sort of Doctor blows up a car?"
"Not now, Mum," Donna grouched. Sylvia turned the brunt of her ire on her.
"Oh, should I make an appointment?"
"I doubt that would help much," Luna said, straight-faced. "He's not very punctual."
"And who are you anyways? What sort of teenager hangs out with madmen like him?"
"I'm his daughter."
Sylvia gaped, gave up and stalked off. Wilf elbowed the Doctor surreptitiously. "So is it aliens?"
"Yes, yes," he waved off. "And that wasn't just exhaust fumes. That was artificial gas."
"Poisonous." Luna added. Because what was the point of mysterious gas in every car in the world if it wasn't poisonous.
"It's not safe," Wilf declared. "I'm gonna get it off the street."
There was a flash of smoke and suffocation and danger and "No, Wilf, don't-" but Luna's warning came too late and the car doors locked themselves on Donna's grandfather before anyone even registered what was happening. All along the street the other cars started hissing, spewing foul, cloudy gas up into the atmosphere. Wilf banged on the glass, Donna cried for help, the Doctor tried to sonic the car open, and nothing helped. Wilf coughed, choked on the gas inside the car, crumpled. In the doorway, Sylvia looked on in panic.
Everyone became shadows in the haze. Luna closed her eyes for barely a moment, sorting through a handful and then a dozen possibilities in a split second before making a decision, knowing how to fix it.
"Break the glass," she said quietly. She could see it in the gold, Sylvia with a hatchet, Donna with a crowbar, Ross' gun, herself with-
"Reducto!"
Glass shattered (and maybe the front fender crumpled a little but who cared) and Donna helped her drag Wilf out, coughing. The Doctor was suddenly standing over them.
"Get inside," he ordered, brushing broken glass off Wilf's sweater. "Get inside and block out as much of the gas as you can, okay?" Behind them Jenkins pulled up in a tiny black cab that had seen better days.
"It's the only thing I could find without ATMOS," he called by way of apology.
"It's perfect," Luna assured him while her father herded Wilf and Sylvia into the house. "I call shotgun."
A minute later they were racing towards UNIT's temporary HQ and no amount of sulking on Donna or the Doctor's part could persuade Luna to change seats with them.
Yes yes I'm sorry I meant to post this in March (freakin' March yes I know) but things happened and I'm lazy and besides we all know the sequel never lives up to the original.
Reviews are, as always, welcome and are also in fact highly encouraged because it was thanks to a review that y'all are getting this so definitely review.
Also hey what did you guys think of the season finale/this entire season, huh?