Chapter 61
20 weeks since the Toclafane invaded...
The Thames had flooded. That didn't matter because it was also frozen.
He'd had to kill half a dozen wild animals to get this far into the city.
It wasn't just dogs, cats and some animals that had escaped from the zoo.
No magical animals, very few were surviving. Rolf and Luna had been training the other members in the Resistance to look for signs, try to preserve them.
There wasn't anything like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that Richard had told him about for animals, magical or otherwise. The location Hermione had raided had brought several potion ingredients that could be used to restart certain magical plants, and they'd preserved others. Hogwarts also was a repository for that sort of thing, very useful, especially with Neville in charge there.
But the models they were now looking at going forward, especially this winter, were far, far harsher than anything predicted and would leave them in quite a bad place.
Harry pulled the scarf into his jacket a little more. He had dressed for a polar exploration and he still felt cold even with the charms he'd cast earlier about his person. It was as if the snow was wriggling in through his jacket and biting at him.
Maybe that was just the mood of the planet, slowly being pecked to death by ducks.
Why here? Harry looked over at the clock tower.
He'd had to walk here.
He'd driven into the Resistance's London Base; the Post Office Tower. It was where they were slowly connecting up old telephone cables to give them some communications around the country. Ones that weirdly the Master couldn't or didn't think to monitor.
He didn't want to risk driving through London any further than that.
There hadn't been too many patrols of the Master's agents. A few he'd dealt with.
No wizards. Just regular humans, the vicious willing servants of the Toclafane and their Master.
Wizards couldn't get into the city easily, not now. The Toclafane had done a lot of sweeps of the city since they'd invaded. Or perhaps they had discovered their effect on wizarding transportation. Whatever the reason apparating into London was quite difficult and extremely risky.
The Treasury building was a blackened wreck, the Toclafane or maybe the Master's doing. His assault on capitalism like the rest of the world, brutal and without imagination. Rather unlike the man he once knew.
Harry grit his teeth as a breeze whipped through the city, the wind was biting and hard. He'd considered casting some more warming charms on himself, but he wanted to be relatively magic free, just in case whatever he was investigating reacted.
He didn't know what, just that he should come and have a look. That was what the message had said.
-/
Harry felt her approach before he saw her and drew his wand before she got too close.
She shimmered and revealed herself quite soon after.
"Harry," she said as she pocketed a device with a brief smile.
Harry shoved his wand back into his pockets. "Sarah," he exhaled a sigh of relief and wrapped the older woman in a hug.
"We should get inside," she said after he'd released her gesturing towards the clock tower.
Inside houses of parliament it wasn't much warmer but it was out of the wind at least. There was a distinct smell of damp.
"The water's been getting in. Bombardment from the Toclafane." Sarah said as they walked.
Harry nodded. "K9 sends his best," he lied. K9 hadn't really said anything, but he had told the metal idiot that he was going to see his 'Mistress' today and that seems to make him a little more friendly towards him.
"Liar. It is good to see you Harry." Sarah smiled at him.
"How have you been Sarah?" Harry asked with sincerity. "You haven't contacted us for a long time."
She shrugged. "I've been helping people, getting things. Making contacts."
"I was getting worried," he admitted.
"I heard about...I'm sorry Harry." She stopped walking and turned around to look at him.
"Thanks, I..." Harry trailed off, he didn't know what to say even now. 'I'm planning various ways of killing the bastard in the most painful ways' wasn't really something you dropped into conversation unless it was with Judith or Draco Malfoy.
He wasn't obsessed about it. He had been clear not to become obsessed. There were a great many more things to become obsessed with other than Ronald Weasley's death.
He almost listed them out loud. They had become checklists that he did each day.
General Resistance things, things, especially now they were trying to move more resources out to the villages and towns housing the people the Master was using to build the remaining rockets. With winter settling in food and fuel were the two things they were trying to provide people. So they would survive, even though they couldn't or wouldn't fight back the Archangel Network was still present and running, just not exactly at the uppermost strength, but enough to keep the population of the Earth mostly placid. The Toclafane were there if anyone hit out.
The Resistance tried to be there if anyone found themselves wanting out. They'd failed a lot of those times. It was one of many things he was still learning to deal with.
There was Brian's projects, his research for one had identified the earliest point where the Prime Ministership had become unstable and also points where the Doctor had intercepted Harriet Jones. It was in fact a complicated mess, but it'd found some 'magic whiteboard' which was actually a science whiteboard projection sort of thing to explain it.
There was also their Mars project.
Then there were so many other smaller things to worry about, those were the things he didn't think about, not immediately when he woke up.
Immediately when he woke up he still thought about Daphne.
-/
"We need to go down here." Sarah gestured through a door that had been opened with no apparent force what so ever.
"And what lies down here?"
"I'm not really sure Harry," Sarah said taking out a torch from inside a small backpack she was wearing. "Just that it will help the Resistance," she said leading the way. "And that you would be interested in it."
"So said your contact," Harry mused into the darkness as he followed her.
Sarah had been quite vague about her contact, only that he'd met her when she'd been out and about helping out people, making contacts and passing information and assistance out.
Sarah was invaluable, although Harry had said he was worried about her, out in the world. A concern which Sarah had smiled, practically patted him on the head and told him she'd been out adventuring before he'd been born and she'd faced far more dangerous things than the Master.
Though possibly not as dire circumstances that they were now in, the effects on ground level were bad, but when data and observations from around the globe and the Moonbase were brought to the table, then things just became far grimmer.
They, the human race no longer needed to worry about climate change, the damage done in less than half a year by the Master was now advanced enough that they had possibly gone past the point of no return. However beyond that point the data was becoming increasingly sketchy. The factories billowed exotic smoke into the atmosphere, the rocket test fires and malfunctions had taken out chunks of the coastline. Environmental degradation was a phrase they now used in almost common conversation, it had become another term of their invasion.
"Did your contact say anything about why we're in the cellar of Westminster?" Harry asked sweeping his torch beam around. The cobwebs down here had cobwebs. It was also just as cold down here, ice crunched beneath their feet as they walked.
"No. Harry, he was insistent that you were here," she explained.
"And that he doesn't want to kill me I hope?" Harry exhaled. "I have a few more people I need to kill before I get stabbed in the back."
Sarah turned around and looked at him. "You shouldn't talk like that Harry."
Harry shrugged. "Maybe," he paused and held a finger up to his lips and swept the torch around. It felt like something was here and said as much to Sarah.
"Anything?" She asked, her breath showing as mist around her.
"Nothing. Just tunnels and corridors." Harry allowed himself a little smile. "He'd love this."
This brought a gentle smile to Sarah. "Too much running."
"Now you prefer to be sneaky and mysterious, leading me astray under London." Harry pulled open his bag and dug around for his combined portable energy detector. "I'm done with trying to feel for the mystery," he said to Sarah's quizzical look. "If you didn't get any more info we could be looking for Guy Fawkes' secret sex pad until the Master launches his rockets."
Sarah made a quizzical noise.
Harry switched the detector on. For a moment there was nothing, then a stream of English and Dalek characters and numbers streamed across the screen.
Even now, here in London, dying, degrading, there was still too much energy wash from the countless alien invasions. Even now, that he'd programmed in a filter for the detector to get rid of the Toclafane's distortions there was still too much.
Harry sucked in a breath of the stale, mildewy freezing air. "Lead on Sarah. We do this the old fashioned way." He clipped the energy scanner to the outside of his bag in 'alert mode', just in case they walked into an irradiated zone or something.
"Old fashioned." Sarah shook her head. "Proper investigating Harry."
Harry snorted. "Journalist."
"'Paranormal Investigator'," she countered and managed to put quotes into her speech.
"Not any more. The paranormal and the science are hand in hand." That was the way forward. He said to himself.
-/
Harry wasn't sure how far they'd come, it felt like they'd walked miles underground, they could be at the tube lines by now; underneath the Thames. He'd completely lost his bearings. But it felt like they were still under the Palace of Westminster rather than veering off on some tangent away from the palace.
As they were continuing along he almost missed it, Sarah had continued before he called to her.
"What do you think?" He was standing in front of a musty, dusty wall, but there was something.
"It's a wall." She turned away to move on.
"Stop. Sarah. That's what's interesting."
She frowned at him and smiled. "You're like him. Him, him. Who I first met."
Harry smiled weakly. "He and I and the Brig did spend some time together." Harry reached into his pocket and was going to go for his wand but pulled out something else. As did Sarah. "Snap." He said when he saw Sarah was holding her sonic lipstick.
"Is that...?" She trailed off when she saw what he was holding. Something he'd got back off Richard before heading out into the wilderness.
"A friend gave it to me," Harry said, aiming it at the wall.
"That takes me back." Sarah smiled and shook her head as she seemed to try and shake the memory.
Starting at the top of the wall Harry moved around the outside edge. Then door shuddered and slid open.
"Magic," Sarah chuckled.
"Wicked," Harry said grinning.
As soon as they stepped into the room, which looked like it was a crypt his energy detector started going off.
"What's that?" Sarah asked; worried as the door slid shut.
"Probably the door trapping us in no doubt." Harry commented distractedly as he grabbed the detector. The scanner was bleating its heart out because of an undetermined energy that had been detected. Not lethal. Probably.
"And your scanner?" Sarah queried.
"Nothing too much to worry about." He slid it back into place and pulled his gun and wand out, clipping a smaller torch onto the former.
"Harry?" Sarah was surprised and annoyed, but she had also reacted pulling a weapon from within her coat. Her 'no guns' policy had been abandoned some time ago. The world was a much less friendly place, even Sarah had to admit that.
"The perfect time for an ambush," said a voice in the shadows.
"Almost clichéd," Harry said keeping his wand and gun pointed in the direction of the voice.
"Hardly Mr Potter, only for people like yourself and Ms Smith who frequent situations like this. Beneath London wandering through corridors."
"Step into the light and stop being so bloody mysterious," Harry growled, it was too cold, too late in the day and his voice was far too cultured for him to really carry off being mysterious.
"So you can shoot me Mr Potter?" He sounded amused.
"I want answers, and I won't kill you," Harry said and mentally added 'for the moment'.
"Yes. Your 'red man'. He certainly deserves to die, though perhaps not just for what he did to your Ms Greengrass." He stepped out into their torchlight. He was tall, stockily built with a cultured face and nose. Aristocratic is a term that could have been applied to him. Edwardian hair and dress sense to match.
"You're presumably who we were sent to find." Sarah commented as he drew himself up straight.
"Not quite Ms Smith, but you are correct, one of my associates did point you in this direction."
"Associates?" Harry asked lowering his gun.
"Oh? You trust me Mr Potter?" He seemed amused.
"I'll kill you with my wand. My arm's tired from holding my gun," He lied. He actually wanted to grab his energy detector.
He chuckled. "You can check your scanner Mr Potter. The energies are not an issue for you."
"Oh?" Harry asked and looked at the detector which he'd muted. The energy levels were holding steady, not quite in the dangerous realms but it had resolved further information now that they were stood in here longer. Temporal energy.
"And who are you Mr...?" Sarah asked him, to Harry's ears it was her best journalist interrogator's voice.
"My name is less important than what I represent," he paused.
"Silence for drama?" Harry asked.
"Cohort Dow," he said with a smug smile.
Harry exhaled and swore. "Marvellous. Well. What. Now?" Harry ground out.
"No impassioned questions Mr Potter? Demands of me?" He seemed disappointed.
Harry shook his head. "Those are questions for another time." He felt like his problems with Cohort Dow were of another lifetime. His past with them didn't matter anymore. There was just the future and what they could make of it. What was left of it.
"Perhaps Mr Potter, perhaps," he continued smugly.
Harry wanted to torture him a little bit just to get the smugness off him. Just a little bit of torture to move things along a little faster, it wouldn't hurt. It'd hurt Mr smug git, but not him. Just a brief Crucio would make everything a bit smoother.
"Do you have any idea where you are Mr Potter, Ms Smith?" Smug man asked.
"Under Westminster. Far underground given the amount of steps we've gone down," Sarah answered.
Harry was still musing on how to hasten this explanation with the careful use of chopping off a limb of Mr 'I don't need a name'. Given the temperature here he wouldn't bleed out too quickly.
"Imprecisely yes," he seemed amused.
"Something no doubt is significant," Harry commented.
"Indeed Mr Potter, your reputation and intelligence is not to be undermined."
"My patience is limited," Harry countered.
Mr Smug Cohort Dow smiled smugly and gestured with his hand past them. Several lights turned on as he gestured.
"Very droll," Harry noted in a tone more used by Draco.
"And what's down there?" Sarah asked as the man walked past them.
"What I sent you for." He answered as he continued past them. "Something Mr Potter may find useful."
Harry wondered what that was. Maybe the man could extract his smugness from his arse. He'd find that useful in the current situation.
The passageway was short and ended with a concrete structure. It was odd looking, almost cheap garden centre looking, except...not.
"This is what you wanted us to see? An architrave?" Sarah asked.
"Or it more of a mantelpiece?" Harry mused distractedly as he noticed his energy detector was flashing out of the corner of his eye and grabbed it before Mr Smug Gittish Cohort Dow man could speak again.
"Neither. Or perhaps both. What it is apparently Ms Smith and what it is in actuality are in fact very different things. And one and the same. You don't need to concern yourself with that Mr Potter," he said removing a torch from his pocket and pointing it behind Harry and Sarah. Harry tensed even though it was just a torch.
"Those are keeping us safe enough." Harry turned around to look at what the torchlight was illuminating.
Sarah looked to Harry. "What are they? Some sorts of carriage clocks?"
Harry shook his head. "They're time turners." Sarah looked at him puzzled. "Wizarding's own time travel."
"Indeed. Mr Potter. Top marks." He seemed pleased with himself.
"Wizards have time travel?" Sarah was surprised.
"Indeed we do," said the smug gittish man, whom Harry had forgotten would need to be a wizard. Probably. To be in charge of the Cohort Dow, or part of, or whatever the smug bastard was.
"Well, what do these 'time turners' have to do with this?" Sarah went to take a step towards the bad concrete thing in the room but Harry put a hand on her shoulder.
"You're quite safe," he held a pause just slightly too long. "Mr Potter, Ms Smith."
"There's a probably missing from that sentence." Sarah looked at him shrewdly.
"Perhaps there is Ms Smith. You pair have far more experience than I do."
Harry looked at his energy scanner again. The readings hadn't shifted since they'd come in. They were high. Higher than anywhere else he'd measured. But not dangerously so.
Probably.
Not much better than 'perhaps'.
"It's probably safe," Harry said as he took a step forward. The concrete was very chintzy.
"Not my taste at all," commented smug gittish man idly as Sarah and Harry approached it.
"Indeed," Harry said. But as he got closer he got a feeling, a sense that he'd felt before.
Both Harry and Sarah looked at each other at the same time.
"It's a TARDIS."
The smug Cohort Dow man started clapping softly. "Indeed Ms Smith, Mr Potter it is."
"Whose?" Both Harry and Sarah asked at the same time.
The man seemed to enjoy being asked this question. "It was recovered by a predecessor of mine. The muggles, your friends at UNIT weren't to be troubled with it. Time travel is something that our country thought best be left to wizards. We have the most experience with such temporal matters."
Ah, Harry thought to himself. There's the smug wizarding tone that he'd not heard for quite some time. As the man paused Harry considered just stunning the man and extracting the memories from him by force. It would certainly be more preferable than listing to his smug ooze out all over them. He felt dirty already.
But there was likely a reason the man had not used a wand to illuminate their way and reveal the time turners. One mishap here with these time turners, not to mention this TARDIS that was leaking vast amounts of temporal energy and he didn't know what could happen.
"From where?" Harry asked carefully. UNIT had bits of the Doctor's TARDIS console and had attempted during its rough period in the 80s to reconstruct a TARDIS console based on the bits and pieces the Doctor had used to rebuild his in the 1970s. From what he knew (which wasn't much) nothing had come of it, or anything that had had been moved to C19's Glasshouse facility or maybe elsewhere that hadn't been recorded.
"Amsterdam. An old pumping station I believe." He looked at Harry seemingly looking for some recognition.
Harry matched his look with a hard stare. Amsterdam didn't ring a bell with him.
"So why is it below London?"
The man chuckled. "Heart of the Empire Mr Potter. We need to be careful with our things." He nodded at the TARDIS. "This had been our base of operations. Completely secure. Usefully controlled," he paused, leaving a question hanging waiting to be asked.
Harry thought to himself about where they were. "The clock tower?"
The man clapped softly again. "All that travel does broaden one does it not Ms Smith?" He commented idly, Harry fancied it sounded like an insult. "Indeed, the clock tower. A perfect temporal control element. Regulating the temporal flow of this TARDIS," he paused and looked to them. "Do interrupt me if I'm going too fast."
"Oh, please go on," Sarah commented sarcastically. "I'm sure we can keep up." She looked to Harry.
Harry felt this was not the time to channel the Doctor and say 'I'll explain later' even though he desperately wanted to.
Instead he asked something he'd been wondering. "It's damaged then?"
"Not drastically. Not when we'd recovered it. Our techniques have kept the temporal energies in line. We have dealt with situations like this before Mr Potter. It is not outside our knowledge."
"Indeed. Well of course. You're Cohort Dow," Harry said in mock praise.
"That explains everything." Sarah looked between them.
"Oh hasn't Mr Potter explained his investigations of our organisation?" Asked the smug git.
"They're the wizarding part of Torchwood. Lovers of acronyms and experimental torture," Harry explained without preamble.
"Sanctioned and approved," Smug man countered simply.
"The temporal energy wasn't always this extreme then?" Harry asked.
"No," he admitted. "The space craft collision with the tower compromised the temporal viability of this structure. We made certain alterations to Big Ben during the repair process." Again he was very smug.
"Of course you did and?" Harry snapped, annoyed Mr Smug was leading the conversation along.
"It was going swimmingly." He seemed to have foul taste in his mouth.
"And then the Toclafane invaded. Along with the Master," Sarah picked up his explanation.
"With his damnable 'Paradox Machine'," Smug man continued. "It's destabilised the TARDIS much further. We have managed to keep it in check, but its temporal energies have continued to leak out."
"And?" Harry asked suspiciously.
"My agents attempted to stabilise the situation." He explained simply.
"What happened to them?" Sarah asked.
"We're probably standing in them," Harry said as he realised that wasn't frost underfoot.
The man beamed again and clapped. "Top marks Mr Potter. Os a plenty."
"What?" Sarah seemed panicked by this revelation.
"We've travelled in time, so we've been exposed to more fluctuations in temporal energies. More exposure to temporal engines and the like," Harry paused and looked to the smug git. "More so than your...agents."
"And what do you expect us to do?" Sarah asked.
"Nothing, Ms Smith. But this is war, and I believe you may find some use from our TARDIS."
Harry nodded and decided to raise something he'd realised. "It doesn't work does it? I assume you've tried to demat it."
The man smiled again. "Indeed Mr Potter. That was attempted. Even repairing the control systems did not help. The temporal energies are residual though significant."
"I see," Harry lied. He had understood most though not all of this conversation and was in part just winging it.
For once he wished K9 were here. Then changed his mind. He'd rather be a little bit ignorant and winging it than have the jumped up fax machine here being its smug, irritating all knowing self. With Sarah here he couldn't even 'accidentally' kick it in the dark.
Harry turned away from him. "You don't have a key?"
"We have yet to need one Mr Potter, we have always had someone within."
"And when you encountered it?" Sarah asked.
"It revealed itself to us Ms Smith," he answered mysteriously.
"I see." Harry pulled out his sonic screwdriver. "And I guess you've not been in a temporal field to withstand the energies here, that's why you've been standing there?" He looked over at the smug man. "I've half a mind to drag you over here. Watch you turn to grit."
"Harry!" Sarah exclaimed.
The man chuckled a low chuckle. "And why have you not Mr Potter?"
Because. Harry thought to himself, but that was an answer the man would have some smug retort for. "We have other things to deal with for the moment. I have more notable people I need to kill." Harry then turned away from him and returned to the flat portion of the chintzy concrete thing. Which was none of those things.
Going all around the outside there was nothing from the TARDIS entrance.
"Maybe two of us Harry. Double the power?" Sarah asked holding up her sonic lipstick.
"Perhaps," Harry mused. "Opposite sides or together?" He wondered to Sarah.
"Together I think," Sarah said.
Starting at the left hand corner they both activated their sonic devices on full power. The noise of sonic devices echoed around the chamber as they made their way around the perimeter of the entrance.
As they got to the other side there was a hum from within the TARDIS.
"That I think is my cue. Good luck Mr Potter. Ms Smith," the smug man said as the front plate of the TARDIS rose, bringing a blinding light to the passageway.
"Should we go after him?" Sarah asked.
"No." Harry squinted against the bright light. After being in the cold, dark passageway for so long it was hurting his eyes to look in. "Well." Harry held a hand out to Sarah. "Shall we?"
-/
Walking hand in hand they walked into the light, the find themselves in a room that was familiar, yet not.
Everything had a green tinge to it and the first room that they were in was lined with computer banks.
"Not much of a control room." Sarah sniffed.
"Indeed. No console." Harry gingerly poked some of the computer banks with his sonic screwdriver. Almost all the computer banks looked to have overloaded at some point. There seemed to have been attempts at rewiring them or doing something. There seemed to be some patches made to the circuitry. None of it with recent tech, very 1970s or maybe 80s vintage.
"This is usually where the controls would be." He looked over to Sarah. "Have you ever seen anything different Sarah?"
She shook her head. "The Doctor showed me a different control room, and that had a door outside, away from the other one." She smiled at the memory. "Then those other ones. The cavern and the coral."
Harry nodded, mostly understanding the reference. "Maybe this is older," he mused.
"Should we explore?" He wondered to her.
"If we must," she reluctantly answered.
"We could just stay here stood in the ambiance and glow." Harry looked around with a frown.
Sarah led the way into the next room away from the control room. It was typically wizard, set within a TARDIS. It was all quite odd. He remarked as much out loud to Sarah.
An oak desk sat to one side, lamps around the room.
"Should we go further, the TARDIS is huge." She commented with a tone of warning. "The Doctor's TARDIS." She clarified.
"Hmm." Harry made a noise in thought. "This TARDIS feels different."
He and Draco had spent some time within the Doctor's TARDIS, wandering through its rooms and corridors while they were on-route between the neverwhere and the neverwhen. Discovering a great many things about several Lasts and Greats in one of the libraries. That had been particularly interesting and terrifying. He had Draco to think for his rescue from that. Or maybe Draco and the TARDIS.
Sarah shivered. "Yes, something alien. Different. Do you think it's safe Harry?"
The green tint all around them, the exploded computer banks when they came in, the hum, that background noise of a TARDIS, it was different, a sound that whenever he'd encountered it was reassuring. Here it wasn't. It was more than disconcerting, it was...something that was just outside the realms of human perception.
"We weren't vaporised when we crossed the threshold." It wasn't much of an answer.
"That's not what I asked Harry." She looked at him.
"It's the best answer I can give. I don't feel safe, only just-" Harry then added. "Embrace it Sarah. It's what you used to live for."
Sarah laughed. "I've had my fill of corridors today Harry Potter."
Harry smiled. "I promise I won't make you crawl through any ventilation ducts."
"You'll be the one doing it, if they're in here they'll probably go on forever!" She exclaimed in a certain tone pointing at him.
"We'll have a little look around I think." Harry walked past her and pushed open the next door; revealing a corridor which had a less green tinge to it.
Unfortunately it was one of those TARDIS corridors. Long and samey.
"A little look around," Sarah repeated.
-/
Several hours later, and having made sure they could actually exit the TARDIS they'd decided to stay the night within. They had managed to find the door controls in amongst the damaged controls. They'd also found a room in their wanderings where they could bed down for the night. It was a room that the wizards who'd previously occupied the TARDIS had used.
"Are you sure we're safe in here Harry?" Sarah shivered.
"Safer than out there." He happed a thumb back to the door as he unpacked some food and water. "You know more about spending nights in London."
"It's getting dangerous Harry," she admitted.
"So you'll come back with me then? This is a pretty big find. Even damaged."
Sarah nodded. "For now, yes."
"You can say hello to K9," Harry said without much joy.
Sarah smiled at him. "Have you been treating him well?"
"I've wanted to throw him down a flight of stairs a few times. But he's been working with the professors. I try not annoy him," he replied honestly.
"Harry," Sarah warned.
"I did upgrade his batteries. He seemed happy with that."
"What?" Sarah looked at him oddly.
-/-/-/-/-/-/ -/-/-/-/-/-/ -/-/-/-/-/-/ -/-/-/-/-/-/
The next day was even more bitterly cold than the previous. They'd not found anything like a key or a lock to be able to close the TARDIS from the outside. But their combined sonic devices aimed at it had closed the door to the TARDIS.
Outside of Westminster everything was covered in a thin layer of snow. It was quite brown and sickly in places.
Sarah looked up at the clock tower. "Do you think that's doing anything Harry?"
"I think those time turners are. Who knows," Harry mused. He'd had a look at the time turners and wished that Hermione were here with them now. She knew more about the time turners than he did. Both in using one, which he still thought was insane that the Ministry allowed it, or whatever portion of the Ministry, maybe it was Cohort Dow pushing it for whatever reason. But she'd mentioned in passing that she'd also been doing her own research into how the Ministry got access to them in the very first place.
"Come on. We shouldn't stand out in the open waiting to be attacked." Harry zipped up his jacket a little more as some wind ripped through the city kicking up the freshly fallen snow around them.
It might have looked beautiful had the snow not been brown with contaminants and had the city not been deathly silent. Dead, but for wind and the smell of decay.
Now it held a little glimmer of hope, one he wasn't sure how to use. Not yet. He had some ideas. But if they started to mess around with the timelines anything could happen. Anything might happen.
Harry looked up at the sky, the dying, brown-white sodden sky of pollution and Toclafane and muttered to himself. "Has to be better than this."
-/-/-/-/-/-/ -/-/-/-/-/-/ -/-/-/-/-/-/ -/-/-/-/-/-/
A/N:
I don't often cast characters with actors, but in the case of smug Cohort Dow man, I imagine Stephen Fry playing him.
Finally here is Cohort Dow. In my early planning for Cohort Dow it was going to be somewhere else, maybe under Liverpool, Birmingham or Glasgow. But keeping stuff under London is practically a Doctor Who tradition.
Cohort Dow's base of operations is Omega's TARDIS from Arc of Infinity, it was wrecked at the end of that story, which is why it's damaged and leaking temporal energy here. Not a lot. It wasn't leaking a huge amount before the Toclafane invaded and it's only leaking a lot now because there's a paradox sitting on top of it.
It will make a re-appearance in the 'proper' timeline.
There are 2-3 more chapters in this arc.
