(A.N.) I'm back, and this time I'm determined to finish this.


Harry jumped across the wreckage, and the disembodied plastic corpse that lay at her feet, until he reached Hermione. And for a moment, any bad blood or awkwardness between them was forgotten.

"Are you okay?" he asked hurriedly, placing worried hands on her shoulders.

Hermione nodded, but her face was covered in cuts and dirt and signs of a fight. The cool, almost emotionless Hermione that had blown that dummy's head clean off was fading away before his very eyes, leaving behind a shaking young woman who'd just been in a struggle for her life.

"Hey," said Harry. "Hermione, look at me." She did, with big brown eyes starting to well up. "You're alright, okay? You're alive."

The lift opened again, this time full of more officials and medical personal to begin tending to the wounded. All of these officials were shoved out of the way so Ron could make his way onto the floor. He scanned quickly, with panicked eyes, until he spotted her.

"'Hermione!" he called.

Hermione looked up at his voice, and Harry moved aside so Ron could sprint over to her and wrap her up in his arms. Hermione, Harry noticed, had started to sob quietly into Ron's shoulder while he stroked the back of her head.

"I'm okay," she was saying to Ron. "It's okay. I'm alright."

There was something intensely uncomfortable about the sight. Not the intimacy between his two best friends of course, he'd seen more than enough of that over the years to have built up a resistance to making a 'yuck' facial expression. It was the way Hermione couldn't stop shaking, and the way Ron was gripping onto her as though he had spent the last few minutes wondering if he'd ever hold her again. It was the way they were both reacting to this situation.

Harry looked around. No part of the office had been spared, everywhere was wrecked. Aurors were being helped to their feet if they were still conscious, and the unconscious ones had healers standing over them, shouting out for assistance. The disembodied parts of the plastic dummy were scattered across the floor, some of them still with tiny flames flickering upon them from Hermione's spell.

It was carnage. And Harry felt fine.


An hour or so later, Harry was opening the door to a secluded office on the Ministry's Auror floor, wherein Hermione sat with her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea, with Ron by her side. They both looked up at him as he closed the door behind him.

"Everyone's alive and accounted for," said Harry. "No fatalities. How are you?"

Hermione, who his question had been addressed to, looked down at her tea and nodded.

"I'm fine," she said.

It was quiet, and for a second Harry didn't know whether or not to be convinced, but then he decided that Hermione seemed more exhausted than anything else. So he didn't push. Instead he walked further into the room; this tiny space he'd sent them to. It was nothing special, just some chairs and little tables in a drab little room. Mostly used for meetings between Ministry officials. Anyone else involved in the 'incident' had been sent to the medical wing or apparated to St Mungo's. But not Hermione. Because there were things they needed to talk about.

"What happened, Hermione?" Harry asked, coming to sit in the chair across from her.

"Harry," said Ron gently. "Maybe this isn't the best time."

"There's a whole staff of Aurors out there who want to vet Hermione extensively," said Harry. "I've been holding them off for an hour now. But something very dangerous just found a way into the Ministry of Magic and started shooting. That's not supposed to be possible."

Ron looked ready to reply, but Hermione cut across them both.

"It's been here for days," she said, still watching the steam swirl up and out of her warm mug. "You sat across from it yesterday morning, just after Duggy had died. We've all just been sitting in the same office with it. Not even knowing."

Harry and Ron shared a tense look.

"Did you talk to it?" Ron asked her. "Before it started attacking, did it say anything?"

"Did it seem like there was someone in there?" Harry added. "Or was it some sort of magical creature, something we don't know about?"

"I just kept finding it at my desk," said Hermione, shaking her head sadly. "Every now and then I'd turn around, and when I looked back, there it was. Sometimes I thought… I mean, I knew Terrence was putting it there as a joke most times but sometimes I wondered if… but I just dismissed it." She looked up for the first time, and stared at Harry. "Like I dismissed you."

Harry paused, taken aback. "It's okay, Hermione. Now's not the time for that. I don't hold it against you."

"Good, because I'm not sure I'm apologizing for it," said Hermione plainly. "I'm not sure if I should. I'm really not sure of anything right now."

She ran a hand through her hair and let out a long sigh. Ron scooted closer to her.

"I'm okay," she said, patting his knee to stop him. "Really. I just… I really just need to think about all of this."

Suddenly she was standing up, and Ron and Harry jumped to their feet instantly in response. Hermione rolled her eyes.

"I'm not going to jump in front of a bus or anything. I just need some air."

There was a knock at the door, and then Ginny was poking her head into the room.

"Look," said Hermione brightly. "Here's Ginny. Why don't I go for a walk and you three can talk about all the mad things going on lately? I'm sure she has loads of stuff to add."

"Actually," Ginny said, glancing between the three of them and sensing the uncomfortable vibes, "yeah I do. Turns out the people who blew up that shop at the end of our road were spying on us in our flat."

Hermione smiled – a smile like someone who'd just stepped in dog muck and simultaneously been soaked by a car driving through a puddle might have smile.

"See?" she said. "Loads to talk about."


Down in the lower, lower levels of the Ministry building, past the Department of Mysteries and further down than most people knew existed, Davart found himself alone in a morgue, staring at the remains of a plastic mannequin laid out on a table.

Davart stood in that room for an hour and stared at the thing in the flickering light of the candles dotted around the room. He couldn't help it. Everything about the thing was a complete mystery.

"What are you?" he found himself saying.

"Funny," said a voice from behind. Davart turned around. A tall man with broad shoulders had entered the morgue and come to stand at his side. "I was rather hoping you knew the answer to that question, Davart."

Davart averted his gaze, uncomfortable under the stern eyes of Kingsley Shacklebolt.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, Minister," he said.

"What do we know?" asked Shacklebolt, picking up the dummy's arm and peering admiring how charred, blackened and burnt it was. "Aside from that we should never pick a fight with Miss Hermione Granger.

"Not much," Davart regretfully replied. "At first we thought it might have been a person inside there, there's quite a few people who'd love to slip into the Ministry unnoticed after all, maybe have a peek around the Auror floor and see what they could see. But – " The Minister was looking at the end of the arm, where nothing but plastic innards could be seen. " – obviously not."

"Obviously," muttered Shacklebolt. "So if it's not a person, not some criminal sneaking in disguised as the Department for Magical Creatures' new uniform model, it must be an ordinary mannequin brought to life by magic?"

Davart swallowed nervously. "No, sir. We've checked. We checked and we checked and we checked. There's no trace of magic anywhere on it. No curse, no spell. Nothing."

Kingsley sighed.

"Leave me with it," he said suddenly.

Davart frowned. "Sir?"

"Leave me with it," Shacklebolt repeated. "I'm Minister for Magic. This thing attacked these premises under my watch. The fault for that falls at my feet. I wish to determine how this happened, and I wish to do it alone."

Davart hovered on the spot, not sure if this was correct procedure but not sure he was allowed to refuse a direct request from the Minister of Magic.

"Right," he said eventually, nodding quickly. "Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Send word if you need any assistance."

"I won't," said Shacklebolt, already picking up other piece of the plastic body and examining them.

Just before he left the room, Davart threw a look over his shoulder at the Minister, and couldn't shake off what a strange decision had just been made. He should have trusted his instincts. And he also should have learned from the blunder with Yip the Yelper and Duggy Dungonan the day before. Because the man Davart left alone in that room was not Kingsley Shacklebolt.


"The earliest photo is from a month ago," said Ginny, sitting in the chair that Hermione had vacated and showing Harry and Ron the pictures she'd been given.

Ron held one up in particular. It was of Ginny, on the couch in their flat and reading a magazine, while Hermione could be seen in the background – she was probably walking from the bathroom to her bedroom, Ron guessed, because she was soaking wet and wearing only a towel. He gripped the edges of the photo until his knuckles turned white.

"Harry," he asked, voice wavering as he tried to keep his cool. "What is this? This isn't like anything that we've had to deal with before. What the hell is going on?"

Harry looked at the dozens of photos Ginny had spread out before them.

"I don't know," he answered genuinely. "The lights in the sky, the Doctor, Yip, a plastic dummy trying to kill Hermione, and now this? They must be connected, they're all happening to close each other. I'm just not seeing how."

"Forget Yip," said Ron, still staring at the photo with a clenched jaw. "Forget the lights, forget the Doctor. What is this about?"

Harry gave him a helpless look. Ginny reached out and touched his knee.

"It's okay, Ron," she said. "I'm fine, Hermione's fine."

"It's not okay, and you're not fine," Ron fired back. "Someone is spying on my sister and my girlfriend and I want to know who."

For a second, nobody spoke. Harry stared at the photos again, willing them to give him some sort of clue. Then he sighed.

"The dummy," he announced.

"What?" asked Ginny.

"The dummy that attacked Hermione. Let's go and see it."

"The dummy's half destroyed," said Ron. "I don't care about that, I care about these pictures."

"The dummy's the only lead we have," said Harry. He stood up from his chair, and without waiting, walked to the door. "There's got to be something about it, something that'll point us in the right direction. Otherwise we only have one other option, and I'm pretty sure that one is impossible."

"What's that?" asked Ginny, standing up from her own chair.

Harry paused at the door.

"Finding the Doctor," he said.


If Hermione thought she was conflicted before, that was nothing compared to how she felt now.

She sat in the atrium of the Ministry. By a bench near the fountain, she watched the people go by. Fussing and bustling, gossiping about the calamity this day had seen. And Hermione wondered, if the circumstances were different, would she be gossiping too? Would she find all this commotion exciting, if Harry Potter weren't at the forefront of it all?

There was so much going on in her head. Worries and fears and adrenaline. It was enough to make her dizzy. Not to mention the fact that she'd preached and preached about Harry being paranoid, and Hermione really did not like being proven wrong.

But no, she thought to herself. It was more than that. Her eyes drifted over the far end of the atrium, where she could just see the lifts. It was only a few hours ago that she'd stood there with Ron.

"You don't think something weird is going on?" he'd asked.

"Whether there is or isn't, that's not the point," she had replied. "The point is I think Harry wants there to be."

That hadn't changed, Hermione decided. Even if there was something nefarious at work, something that threatened their lives and involved strange lights in the sky and possibly the Doctor (unless she'd been hallucinating that brief visit to a very TARDIS-like room, she hadn't made up her mind on that one yet); the fact remained that Harry had never been able to cope with everyday life. Getting up, going to work, having a girlfriend, getting on with things. He'd been restless since the day Voldermort's dead body hit the ground. He'd been itching for some sort of panic, some sort of emergency. Because maybe that was the only situation in which he felt of any use to the world.

With that thought, Hermione stood up from the bench and started walking. She got in the first empty lift available, and descended through the Ministry. Down and down she went, past all the Ministry departments that were known to the public, and into the ones that weren't. Fine, she had decided. Harry, Ron and Hermione had found themselves in the middle of another dangerous mystery. So be it, there was no point resisting anymore. But the sooner this thing was over, the sooner she could sit Harry down and talk some sense into him.

This was her motivation, for venturing down to that dingy old morgue she knew they'd taken the mannequin to. She wanted to get a better look at the thing, solve this mystery early and get home in time for tea. She had not been expecting to find the Minister for Magic standing in the dim light of the room, staring over the lifeless plastic body.

"Oh," she said with a surprised squeak. "Kingsley. Sorry. Hope I'm not interrupting."

Kingsley Shacklebolt drew himself up straight, and put a pleasant smile on his face.

"Not at all, Hermione, come on in," he said, motioning for her to come stand at his side.

Hermione made her way across the small room, glancing around and mildly wondering where all the Aurors or experts in rare magical creatures were. Why was the Minister the only person examining the thing which had torn a whole floor of the Ministry in half?

"Quite the eventful afternnon, eh?" said Kingsley when she reached his side. "I trust you're alright?"

"Yes, thank you Minister," said Hermione gratefully.

A strange silence followed. Kingsley simply continued to stare at her, rather than the creature which had attacked his government.

Hermione cleared her throat. "So, what do we know?"

"Oh, not much, I'm afraid," said Kingsley. "I was rather hoping you could provide some answers?"

Hermione frowned. "Me?"

"Yes. You did seem to be the focus of the attack, after all. Any idea why the creature seemed so interested in you?"

"No," said Hermione honestly, the thought only really just occurring to her that the dummy had been found at her desk, and not Harry's. "None at all really."

"Come on, Hermione," Kingsley chuckled. "You must have some theories, a clever girl like you. What could it have been after? What do you have that someone might want?"

Hermione, momentarily confused by Kingsley Shacklebolt chuckling, could only continue to frown in confusion. "I'm really not sure what you mean, Kingsley."

"The Auton had to have been after something," the Minister pressed. "It singled you out in particular. Perhaps it wasn't even something of yours it was after, perhaps it was something you were looking after for a friend? Maybe even something of Harry's?"

There were so many strange things about that sentence: the idea that Hermione had something in her desk drawers so valuable to a maniacal plastic dummy that it warranted a full scale attack, the not so subtle way that Kingsley inserted Harry into the conversation where he had no logical right to be, among other things. But it was something at the very start of sentence that truly caught Hermione by surprise.

"Auton?" she repeated. "Sorry, Kingsley, did you just say Auton?"

Kingsley paused for a second. "Yes," he answered eventually. "I heard one of the Aurors mention it, Davart I think. It's what they've been calling this thing."

"No," said Hermione slowly. "There's no way he could've mentioned that. I'm the only one who knew that was a name for this thing, and I haven't told anyone."

Kingsley put on that really pleasant smile again. "You must have let it slip right in the aftermath of the fight. You were quite rattled, remember?"

"I don't even know if the person who told me that name is real or a symptom of being hit in the head by a plastic fist. So I haven't exactly shouting it from the rooftops." Hermione looked at him, properly, for the first time since entering the room. The smile on his face, the way he was standing; something about the Minster was just plain off. "Kingsley, how could you have possibly known that name?"

Kingsley chuckled again, opened his mouth to talk… but nothing came to him. No plausible explanation that Hermione would buy. So, instead, he stopped smiling. He sighed in deep frustration.

And then he grabbed Hermione by the neck and threw her against the wall.

"Where is it?" he roared, pinning Hermione to the wall with both hands. "Answer me! You will tell me where it is or I will end you, right her and now."

Hermione gasped in fright. Kingsley's eyes had turned wild and furious, and while she didn't know what had come over him, she believed every threat that came out of his mouth. Unable to reach her wand in her back pocket, Hermione reached instead for a beaker of pink liquid from a table of potions next to them, and she smashed Kingsley over the head with it.

The Minister howled in pain and drew both hands to the wound on his face. Hermione dropped to the floor, breathless, but quickly crawled away from Shackelbolt. She jumped to her feet, drew her wand, and rounded on Kinglsey. Her wand hand faltered at what she saw.

The Minister stood before her, scowling like you would expect if someone had just smashed a glass over his face. But the most alarming thing was that the place where the potion had struck Shackelbolt – the skin had worn away, revealing not a bloody cut or anything even close to that. Instead, there was a patch of deep red skin exposed just beneath his eye, and Hermione thought she could see one or two fleshy circles of skin sticking out, like suckers on an octopus. It was as though the face of Kingsley was a mask, and Hermione had ripped a piece of it off.

Kingsley, or whoever this was, took a step towards Hermione.

"Hey!" came a voice, and both Hermione and Not-Kingsley turned to the entrance of the morgue, where stood Harry, Ron and Ginny. All had their wands raised in the direction of the would-be Minister.

"Hermione," said Harry, "any chance you could explain what in the Sam Hill is going on here?"

"Would love to Harry," said Hermione, turning her own wand back to the Shacklebolt impersonator. "But I'm not entirely sure myself. So… who are you, and what have you done with Kingsley Shackelbolt?"

The man wearing the face of the Minister looked between the four of them and then around itself. There was no other way out, he was trapped against the back wall of the morgue. So he spoke, and answered Hermione's question, but suddenly it wasn't Kingsley's voice talking anymore, and was instead a horrible, gurgling, hissing noise.

"Your leader is in our custody. If you hand over the remains, we will return him to you. If you do not hand over the remains, he will be executed."

"Remains?" said Ron. "What do you mean? Remains of what?"

"And who is 'we'?" Ginny added. "Who's mad enough to kidnap the Minister of Magic?"

"Someone who works in this building," Harry mused. "You'd have to be close enough to Kingsley to get something to put in the polyjuice potion."

The man smiled again, but this time it was not pleasant.

"Mr Potter," he hissed. "We have no need for polyjuice potion, nor any of this world's cheap tricks."

As he spoke, all four of them became aware of some sort of crimson liquid beginning to leak out of the man's mouth. And when he was done talking, more of those fleshy suckers began to break out across his face. His skin began to lose all colour, and his body raised itself taller and taller until the clothes he wore no longer fit and were torn away.

Within seconds, the man in front of them looked nothing like Kingsley Shackelbolt. It looked nothing like a man at all. It was a huge, towering creature with blobby, deep red skin covered in suckers. Above the thing's shoulders was not a neck but rather one large cone of flesh that had a face sunk into it. Sharp, jagged teeth could be seen below the eyes that were currently staring right into all four humans in the room, delighting in the astonishment that had clouded all of their features.

"What… the hell?" Ron whispered.

"We," said the creature, "are the Zygons. We will smoke this planet and find the remains in the ashes if we have to. We will win this war before it begins."

"War?" said Hermione, staring at the Zygon from head to toe in amazement. "What are you talking about? Who is starting a war?"

"No one," came Harry's voice, and he took a step closer to the Zygon, trying with all his might to appear unshaken. "There will be no war. I don't know what remains you're after, and I don't care. You will give us back Kingsley Shacklebolt. Immediately. No negotiations, no bargains."

The Zygon let out a gurgling laugh. "You have no idea how out matched you are. Let me show you."

The Zygon raised its left arm in the direction of Hermione. The was some sort of barb or sting growing out of the palm of its hand, and this sting begun to buzz and light up as though summoning some sort of electricity. None of the humans waited to see what would happen next.

"Stupefy!"

All four of them sent a stunning spell at the Zygon at the exact same time. All four spells struck the Zygon like four little cannon balls. The Zygon did not, as they expected, fall to the floor. But it stumbled. It stumbled and stumbled and its eyes went glazed. But then it shook that cone shaped head, and let out a gurgling growl of pain, and thrust its hand towards Hermione again.

"Stupefy!" all four of them cried again.

That did the trick. The Zygon cried in pain as it was peppered with stunning spells again, and then it collapsed, with a thump, to the floor.

No one spoke. All four of them stayed where they were, gazing at the hopefully unconscious creature laying on the cold tiles of the morgue floor.

It was Ron who finally broke the silence.

"So," he said. "That happened."


End of chapter ten.