"Honest – I thought it was my fault at first." Rose sank her head into her hands with a groan, then sat up and took a swig of her Butterbeer. They were seated at a corner table in the Three Broomsticks. It was towards the end of the evening and the pub was fairly quiet, with just a few tables occupied and a group of elderly warlocks propping up the bar. Behind the bar, Madam Rosmerta was humming to herself while magically collecting and washing glasses with expert flicks of her wand.
Rose went on, "I mean, there's this boy lying in the middle of the floor surrounded by broken glass, and I thought he was dead for a minute, and there's me standing there holding the wand like it's some sort of smoking gun, and right at that moment Madam Pomfrey comes marching in, and then Oliver looking for his wand…. I swear I thought I was about to be carted straight off to Wormwood Scrubs, or whatever their wizardy version is…. It's not funny, Doctor!"
The Doctor attempted to compose his face into a more serious expression. "Sorry. But the boy's OK, yeah?"
"Hardly a scratch on him." Rose shook her head in disbelief. "Just a bit shocked, but Madam P. gave him a potion and some chocolate and after that he was fine. His broom was a write-off, though. Said he just lost control of it. Neville, his name is. He was a bit upset about the whole thing, said he was going to have to write to his Gran and ask her to send him a new broomstick, sounded like she's a bit of a ferocious old woman…. Oliver was trying to make him feel better, telling him about his accident earlier on, but I don't think it was helping much."
"Hmm, and he just lost control of his broom to the extent of crashing through a window? Seems a bit odd, don't you think?"
"Yeah, but Madam Pomfrey was telling me afterwards that apparently this boy's, like, famous for doing stuff like this, falling off his broomstick and over his own feet and all that sort of thing…. Doctor?" Rose said seriously. "You do realise this lot are all complete nutters?"
"So says Rose Tyler, the totally sane and normal girl who ran off with a strange man in a blue box…"
"Yeah well. Point taken. But I still can't get my head around all this, you know? I mean I've seen the end of the world, and aliens in Downing Street, and faced off against a Dalek. But this… whole other world, right on my doorstep? People doing actual magic, with wands, and flying about on brooms like in kids' stories. It's mental." She shook her head and looked over at Rosmerta, who was now wiping tables by the simple method of pointing her wand at them and muttering a spell under her breath.
"It's part of your world, Rose. You just never knew about it before. Witches and wizards - they've always been there, but when they've come to the attention of you lot in the past, the results haven't always been comfortable for them. Nowadays they go to some lengths to keep their existence quiet..."
"I suppose they haven't always been popular..." Rose recalled old stories of witch trials and burning. "But that wouldn't happen nowadays, would it?... And I mean, this lot seem OK, really. Weird, but OK. This boy Oliver I met, for instance -"
The Doctor gave her a half-serious warning glare. "No more picking up boys, Rose…"
"Excuse me, I didn't pick anyone up….."
"OK, no more acquiring of waifs and strays, remember how well it worked out the last time?"
She pulled a face and laughed. "OK, Adam was a bad idea, I'll admit that. But what I mean is, these wizards and witches seem all right. On the whole. Which makes me wonder what we're doing here..."
"Most of them. And as for what we're doing here... let's just call it a fact finding mission, shall we? So far."
Rose knew it was pointless to question him further.
"Just one thing though, Doctor… I suppose it definitely wasn't me caused the accident, was it? I mean, I did wave the wand, and right at that minute…"
"Rose," said the Doctor. "Believe me, if you had a single shred of magical ability, you'd have got a letter when you were eleven, same as the rest of them. That's how it works. Nobody gets missed."
"Oh. All right." Rose felt a bit disappointed. Not that she actually wanted to make people crash through windows, but she was quite taken with the notion of wowing her mum and Mickey with her amazing magical skills, back on the Powell Estate. She could just imagine Jackie's face if she started doing the cleaning by waving a magic wand, like Rosmerta was doing now. To be fair, Rose acknowledged, Jackie would probably be just as surprised if Rose did any cleaning at all, with magic or without it.
"Anyway –" the Doctor drained the last of his Butterbeer and set his glass down on the table with a decisive clunk. "Better head back. Bright and early start tomorrow… Albus has asked me to take Lockhart's Defence Against the Dark Arts class."
Rose gawped at him. "You what? Have you completely lost your marbles? What exactly do you know about Defence Against the Whatsit?"
He grinned maddeningly.
"We'll find out tomorrow, won't we?"
oOo
"'Scuse me sir, but – where's Professor Lockhart?"
The second-year Gryffindors and Slytherins - instructed to join together for this one lesson, though they hadn't been told why - were agog to find that their usual teacher had apparently been replaced by the leather-jacketed man from the Ministry, who lounged at the front of the class flicking through a textbook as they entered the room and took their seats.
"Smith has probably headbutted him and left his body in a heap somewhere," sneered Draco Malfoy. His voice had been pitched to be audible only to the students around him, but apparently the new teacher had bat-like hearing (probably due to the size of his ears) because he gave Draco a look - silencing him effectively - then proceeded to ignore him completely.
"I can think of somebody else who's in desperate need of a good headbutt," whispered Ron with a nod of his head towards the Slytherins, then shut up hurriedly as the teacher's eyes turned in his direction.
"Morning, class. Your Professor received an urgent owl last night, apparently, summoning him to London. Something to do with a photoshoot for Modern Witch magazine." A faint titter ran round the room.
Something in the Doctor's expression of studied innocence as he imparted this information led Harry to wonder if Lockhart's urgent summons had been entirely coincidental.
"So, you've got me instead. Special treat for one lesson only."
"Well, he's got to be an improvement on good old Most-Charming-Smile," Ron hissed, earning himself a disapproving look from Hermione.
"Right," said the Doctor. Harry thought he looked slightly uncomfortable in the role of teacher. "Now, you'll be studying these subjects in more detail later on in your academic careers so I don't want to pre-empt anything too much –"
Malfoy looked extravagantly bored.
"- but what I'm gonna talk to you about today is about recognizing some curses you haven't met before. Turn to page 173 of your textbooks please."
The class flicked through to the correct page. Registering what was on the page, Hermione looked at Harry and Ron in surprise.
"Take the three so-called Unforgiveable Curses, for instance."
Malfoy perked up a bit.
"The Killing Curse," said the Doctor. "Yeah, you tend to notice when someone casts that one. The Cruciatus Curse. Again, fairly hard to ignore."
A slightly plump, untidy-looking Gryffindor boy stared fixedly into a corner of the room, looking as if he was trying very hard not to listen.
"The Imperius Curse, on the other hand, can quite easily go unnoticed by other people, if they're not paying proper attention. Some people might think that curse is less serious than the other two. You're not dead. You're not tortured. In fact, the experience of being Imperiused might feel like quite a pleasant one, a sort of lifting of responsibility, maybe a feeling of lightness and freedom. But freedom is exactly what it is not, because to take away someone's free will – make them do things they would never do, things that are against all their beliefs – now THAT is unforgiveable."
He stared around the room as if he expected the second-years to start Imperiusing each other right, left and centre if they weren't closely observed. Harry felt vaguely guilty, even though he'd barely heard of the spell before and certainly never entertained the idea of casting it. (Even though the idea of forcing the Dursleys to do his bidding was quite a pleasant one.) He was also wondering how the Doctor – who according to himself, was not a wizard of any description – knew all this in the first place. Not to mention why he was making such a point of telling them.
He clearly did know at least something about the subject, though, because he was now going on to describe how you might spot the signs of someone under the Imperius Curse and a couple of other equally non-obvious spells. Hermione was frantically jotting down notes, though it didn't really seem the sort of thing they were likely to encounter within Hogwarts. Perhaps she thought they'd be getting a test at the end of the lesson…
It appeared not, because the Doctor was rounding off the lesson now. "Right. Fantastic. Here endeth the lecture. Hopefully a small proportion of it has sunk into some of your heads. Enjoy the rest of your day." With a pointed glance in Harry's direction, he signalled the class to depart.
Hermione grabbed Harry's arm as the students filed out. "Harry, what's going on? Why did he look at you like that? Why's he telling us this? Why's he here at all, really? You know something about this, Harry, I know you do!"
