.

II

OTHER WAYS TO WRECK A MARY SUE

Chapter 6 – Crouch's Explanation

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"Teardrop" Jose Gonzalez

Danika had fallen asleep—how, she didn't know, but it might have had something to do with her sitting as still as possible and having nothing to do for hours and hours—and startled awake to the sound of a rock smacking against the platform she lay upon. Glancing around, she found that her head had cleared enough from her nap to make better sense of her surroundings.

Across from her was a cave in the side of a mountain, the ceiling of which stretched out to hang her barred platform by a hook, though the floor of the cave ended far from her so that she hung over nothing with a gap between her and a solid surface.

Danika's eyes strayed to the abyss of the gap—it couldn't have been further than ten feet across, but it was miles and miles downward—and then she looked over to the firm ground where the orc had been sitting. There was no longer an orc, but a tall and skinny man in a long, black leather jacket with unkempt brown hair. He looked familiar, but Danika was too startled by the way he stared at her maliciously to form a thought.

"Comfortable?" The man asked with a strange lick of his lips.

The action caught Danika off-guard and she was suddenly very grateful for the gap between her and the flat land. In her mind, the lick seemed to forebode some disgusting fate on her part…

"You're Barty Crouch," She pointed at him, eyes widening.

"Junior," He corrected, crossing his arms in amusement.

"From… Harry Potter?" Danika looked at him with a quizzical look.

He nodded.

"What do you want?"

"I want you to tell Kili to come."

Kili.

Why were they after Kili? What could Crouch possibly want from him?

"He doesn't know where I am. He probably doesn't know how to get here." She knew it was foolish to say aloud—a trap was useless if their intended prey couldn't find it!—but she was already fearfully affected by the placement of her cage, hanging over an endless abyss, and she wasn't able to filter her words before she said them.

"Him and his motley crew already followed the false trail we left behind. All it took was a candy-wrapper and a fez to get them started." Crouch smirked. "It's amazing how simple it was—they just ran right after it."

"Why are you telling me all of this?" She narrowed her eyes at him. "Idiot-criminals give their monologue about 'The Plan', I thought you were smarter than that."

"Well, normally, you'd be right, but I need you to look terrified—it will make Kili get here quicker." He licked his lips again. Despite how often he did it, Danika became more and more unsettled each time his sharp tongue darted out of his mouth. "If I tell you that you've been accessory to the downfall of fan fictions everywhere, it might help things along."

"Telling me your tactic doesn't seem very smart, either." Danika crossed her arms.

"We'll see." He nodded with a grin.

"So, what's the rest of the master plan?" She yawned. "Kili comes after me, blah blah blah, I get it. But that seems like too much work just to lure a dwarf in."

"No, we don't want the dwarf." Crouch shook his head. "We want the hobbit."

Bilbo. Danika's heart dropped. No, not Bilbo… "What for?"

"The Ring. Sauron can't take form and come into the fullness of his might unless he has the Ring, and Voldemort can't come here until that happens."

Danika's eyebrows rose and she resisted a relieved smile. "Bilbo doesn't have the Ring."

"You're right, he doesn't, we checked." Crouch nodded, pursing his lips. "But he knows who does. He doesn't have many attachments to use as motivators, but I'm pretty sure your dwarf would be able to convince Bilbo to come out with the Ring when he sees that we have you."

"Do you really think Kili would trade me for the One Ring?" She asked incredulously. "Maybe you don't know him as well as I do. And that still seems like you went to too much effort for one thing."

"Two," Barty Crouch Jr. held up two fingers. "The Ring and the Tardis. We'll kill two birds with one Danika-shaped-stone."

"I'm confused," Danika said in irritation, wondering how all of this was supposed to make her scared if she didn't understand it. "Firstly, why would The Doctor show up here with the Tardis? And secondly, what in the world do you need a time-travelling spaceship for when apparently you've already opened up a pathway between Middle-earth and Hogwarts?"

"That's one pathway, and it took the combined power of Sauron and Lord Voldemort to make it—the Tardis can open up several with ease." He rose to his feet, brushing the dirt off of his knees. "And to answer the first question—you're obviously familiar with Dr. Who, so you have to know already that you look like his companion."

"I'm not a red-head," Danika threw her hands up in the air. "So unless you gave me polyjuice potion while I was asleep—"

"Not that one. The one before." Crouch shook his head at her. "Rose Tyler."

Oh. Danika couldn't argue against that—she even remembered the few times when someone pointed out her likeness to Rose, though she really hadn't made anything of it until now.

"The Doctor brings the Tardis, Bilbo brings the Ring," Crouch licked his lips at her, but it wasn't a darting motion like before. This time it was slow, causing Danika's skin to crawl. "You were a marvelous stroke of luck. Sauron will have the Ring and become whole again, The Tardis will allow him and Lord Voldemort to move through the fictions and recruit other allies, and the whole fiction world will fall under their rule—all because of you."

And as much as she tried to resist it, the train of thought he led her to was working to make panic rise in her chest. Although she tried to persuade herself that it was just a story and wasn't in the real world, a wiggle of her toes in her shoes and the feel of the breeze against her skin told her that the world she existed in was very much real—at least to her. There might be some solace in knowing that the damage of the villains would be limited to the inside of the story and no further, but Danika could not deny that it frightened her very much to be stuck in that chaotic bubble while it happened.

Danika's breathing increased as she thought of the friends she had made in Middle-earth and what they would suffer on her behalf, when she realized it would also affect the characters in the other stories as well—the ones she'd read about but had never met: the Harry Potter universe, The Doctor Who world, and whatever others these dark lords would lurk into.

"I won't call him," She said, hoping that her last act of defiance might be enough, but considering that her efforts were probably useless. "I won't say a word to Kili."

"I don't need you to." Crouch said with a blank face. His smiles before had made Danika nervous, but now his expression was numb and that scared her even more. The previously chatty Barty Crouch Jr. was completely silent now, having done his work of planting fear in her head, and was now moving to do something else with his wand.

Pointing at a boulder beside him, a burst of green was emitted from the wand and a circular picture churned to the stony surface, not unlike a television screen. The image was blurry for a moment, swirling and rotating, until it became clearer and showed a moving picture of dwarves, a hobbit, and humans, all aboard the Tardis. They were looking down at a console, oblivious to the fact that they were being watched.

And then Crouch pointed the wand at Danika and she ducked down to her knees, taking her head in her hands and anticipating the pain she was certain would come.

But it didn't.

Agonizing seconds ticked by in which Danika felt nothing and she was afraid to look up, thinking that Crouch was playing with her. But then she released the hold over her face and opened her eyes.

The wooden boards which had once been beneath her feet were no longer visible, though she could still feel their solidity beneath the soles of her shoes. A rush of terror swept over her and she realized that Crouch had cast a spell to make the cage invisible. She might have preferred torture to this.

Taking steadying breaths, Danika clamped her eyes shut and willed her limbs to stop trembling. If Crouch wanted to frighten her into doing his bidding, he was going to have to do better than that. But then she remembered what he'd said before.

"I won't call him."

"I don't need you to."

It didn't matter if she was willing to speak, she was already terrified out of her mind- her screams would be sufficient to motivate Kili to come.

Danika looked up just in time to see Crouch point his wand at her and she felt a force drive her backward, pushing her into the bars and tipping the platform with her weight. She let out a startled shriek and it got the attention of the dwarves, whom she could still see on the circular image on the boulder.

"Danika?" She heard Kili whisper in recognition, but her attention was diverted from his image as she was pushed further back and began to slip through the bars, the spaces between them wide enough to allow her shoulders to pass through without touching.

Her horrified scream was piercing even to her own ears as her arms reached wildly for something—anything!—to grab hold of and keep herself from falling over the edge of the platform. Finally, her hand struck a bar of the cage and she grasped it with all of her strength, her knuckles going white with the grip.

"Danika!" She heard Kili shout after her and she caught a small glimpse of his horror-struck face, filling the entire circle on the boulder. If her mind had been working, she might have shouted to him that it was a trap and that he should stay away, but her limbs were seizing with fear and her lungs were busy heaving deep breaths between alarmed cries.

Kili's voice turned angry and the dwarf began to shout violently. "I'll kill you, Barty Crouch!"

"Junior," The man corrected again, looking bored. "The Tardis should be able to read where we are, so consider this your official invitation to drop by."

"Oh, I'm coming," Kili said threateningly as he shook with fury. "I'm coming to end your miserable existence!"