Harry had seen Hogwarts become a battleground before, of course. He still remembered seeing his friends and loved ones fight off Death Eaters. He remembered seeing giants stomp across the grounds and spiders crawl through the halls. And while it was horrible, while the sights and sounds followed him into his dreams each night, it had all felt inevitable. Ever since Dumbledore died, he'd known something like the Battle of Hogwarts was coming. He'd prepared for it.
This was different. What he saw now was beyond anything he was capable of predicting. Alien crafts lay burning on the Quiddich fields. The Hogwarts statues were exchanging echoing blows with Sontarans, Cybermen, and a hundred more creatures beyond description. Daleks as far as the eye could see were hovering twenty feet in the air, firing relentlessly at anything that was moving.
"This is getting out of control," said the Doctor.
Harry side-eyed him. "You think?"
"No really, though," said the Doctor. He was staring with great trepidation at the spot where his future self's TARDIS had just faded from view. "I knew there was a going to be a fight tonight. But when other versions of me start showing up, things get dangerous on a temporal level." He dragged his gaze away and patted the inside pocket of his jacket, where he had placed the piece of mirror frame. "We need to end this and end it quickly."
"Ron and Ginny," said Hermione, already looking up towards the West Tower, and the Owlery within, where the Doctor had sent her boyfriend.
"We split up," said the Doctor. "You each go and grab a Weasley, and then we meet back by the TARDIS – my TARDIS – in exactly ten minutes. Deal?"
"Well what are you going to do while we get the others?" asked Harry.
"I'm going to stop the greatest warrior races in the universe killing you by distracting them with my charm."
He began by selecting a large rock from the floor by the Herbology greenhouses, which he then promptly chucked at the nearest Dalek. The eye-stalk of the floating war machine swung around wildly looking for the source of the projectile, so the Doctor went running across the grounds.
"Oi, Daleks!" he cried into the night. "Look at me, with my arms and my legs and my breathing! Bet ya can't kill me, bet ya can't kill me, bet ya can't kill me."
Harry and Hermione watched in disbelief as he hopped and weaved across the field of battle, dodging death rays and shoving Zygons into one another.
"He is utterly, utterly mad," said Hermione.
"Let's go get the others before he gets himself killed," said Harry.
Most residents of Hogsmeade had come out into the streets as soon as they had heard the beginnings of the battle that was now taking place. Ginny had banged on the doors of the heavy sleepers that hadn't, and then ordered every one of them to apparate as far away as possible. Of course, not everyone was able to apparate. Anyone who hadn't taken their test or was too young to have done so would have to escape via floo powder. And for that to be possible, they needed the houses that contained their fireplaces to remain upright and intact.
This is how Ginny found herself leading a one-woman defence of Hogsmeade. She was dashing about the narrow, cobbled streets, fending off any strays from the conflict at the castle until the villagers weres safe somewhere far, far away.
She blasted a Cyberman through the wall of the Post Office. Something tall and covered in reptilian scales was marching up the path towards her, but she blew up the sign hanging above The Three Broomsticks and allowed it to fall and crush the creature. Seconds later, the window of Gladrags Wizardwear behind her shattered, and she felt a plastic arm from within grab her by the neck. An Auton (sporting a fashionable new robe currently on sale) was squeezing the life out of her, and any spells she blindly sent behind her seemingly had no effect, if they hit their mark at all. Feeling her head go light and her vision go blurry, she looked around desperately for anything that might help, seeing only the rubble she'd just caused by the Post Office.
Without thinking, and with possibly her last breath, she gasped "Accio bricks!"
The crumbled remains of the Post Office lifted off the ground and flew at her. She tried as best she could to drag the Auton in front of her, but she still felt several bricks hit her hard in the face as she and the plastic dummy fell backwards onto the shop floor. She had barely lifted a hand to the cuts and scratches on her forehead when she felt the Auton already beginning to stir and come back up for another attack. In desperation she aimed a Bombarda spell at the shop's roof, and then dived back out of the shattered window before she could be caught in the cave-in that followed.
She lay still on the cold cobbles for a moment, catching her breath, feeling her body twinge and throb from her various injuries.
"Ginny! Ginny, where are you?!"
She couldn't stop the smile that came across her face at the sound of Harry's voice. She dragged herself to her feet to see him at the other end of the village, desperately searching for any sign of her.
"Here!" she cried with difficulty.
He hurried towards the sound of her voice, and his face fell at the marks of battle scratched into her face.
"What have they done to you?"
"I'm fine," she said, placing a hand over his when it came to rest on her shoulder.
He shook his head vehemently. "Nothing about this is fine. Enough is enough, we need to find what they're after and get out of here."
"Let's get back to the Doctor then," she said, beginning to head back down the path that led to Hogwarts. He stopped her.
"No. He's only causing more chaos. Let's finish this together, me and you. We'll find the Angel remains and be gone before anyone notices."
Ginny thought she must've heard that wrong. "Without Ron and Hermione? Don't be ridiculous, we can't just leave them in the middle of this mess. And anyway, what 'Angel remains' – what are you talking about?"
Frustration took over Harry's face. He tried to reach out for her hand again, but before he did, lighting struck him. Ginny instinctively lunged backwards, and then watched in horror as his whole body shook and contorted with electricity. And then in the blink of an eye, the lightning stopped and it wasn't Harry's body at all. It was a Zygon, who fell unconscious to the floor.
"Do I really sound like that?"
Ginny turned to see Harry – another Harry – standing a few feet away, lowering the wand he'd just used. She reached for her own.
"No," she shouted, aiming it at him. "Stay there. Don't come any closer until you prove you're you."
Harry thought for a moment. "You have a single, weirdly long hair that grows in your left ear and keeps coming back no matter how many times you cut it off."
Ginny's eyes clenched shut as part of a full body cringe. She lowered her wand. "My favourite colour would have sufficed. My middle name. The street I grew up on. Really, just about anything other than that."
Harry grinned as best he could under the circumstances and came to embrace her. "Come on, stuff happening, lots to do."
"What was the he talking about? The not-Harry, I mean."
"Oh," Harry shrugged. "I stole a piece of the Mirror of Erised after it blew up, and it turns out it was actually a piece of a dead Weeping Angel, this really dangerous killer alien that's tormented me since I was a kid, and all these other aliens are here to try and steal it back."
And now Ginny knew it was really him. Only Harry Potter attracted that kind of life-threatening nonsense.
In the distance, they heard a harsh, piercing voice bellowing out orders.
"HARRY POT-TER HAS LEFT HOG-WARTS. HARRY POT-TER MUST BE FOUND. SEEK. LOCATE. EXTERMINATE."
In response, they saw several Daleks leaving the fray around the castle to start floating out into Hogsmeade.
"You got everyone out, yeah?" Harry asked.
Ginny looked through nearby windows to see if she could still spot anyone around fireplaces. "Looks like it."
"This is going to be tricky, getting back to the castle underneath them."
The last window Ginny's eyes fell upon was a Quidditch supplies store.
"Who says we have to go underneath them?"
Hermione's journey towards the Owlery was a perilous one. The fighting had spread inside, and the staircases were packed as warrior races of all shapes and sizes struggled to deal with Hogwart's newly-animated defenders. A lone Sontaran was trying desperately to fight off four or five suits of armour, but every time the alien spud landed a hit which reduced a tin soldier to a pile of helmets and breastplates, the pieces would just draw themselves back together, and then lunge forward with its sword. A battalion of large, black-clad creatures, with heads that resembled a rhinoceros, were trying to charge forwards, but kept getting hit with heavy books and cauldrons which were being chucked from a few floors above by statues that Hermione recognised from usually standing near Ravenclaw Tower. Even the stairs themselves were fighting back: Hermione was pretty sure she saw a giant crab snapping wildly at the banister of a staircase which was swinging wildly back and forth, perhaps hoping the creature would pass out from dizziness.
She ducked and weaved through the chaos as best she could, only fighting when she was attacked herself. She did as the Doctor(s) had told her, using practical spells instead of waiting to find out which aliens were vulnerable to magic or not. She had just conjured a gale force wind to send a golden-skinned alien over the banister and plummeting out of sight, when she felt her own left foot plummet slightly. Too late, she realised what she'd done: in all the mayhem, she'd accidently tried to climb up the vanishing step which she'd learned to avoid her third day of first year. She tried to pull it out and began to panic when it wouldn't budge. No one had spotted her yet, there were plenty of things to throw punches at crowding the staircases after all, but someone would soon, and her ability to defend herself was severely impaired if she couldn't move from the spot she stood in.
"Granger…" said a hissing, rasping voice. She looked up, to see a Zygon creeping down the steps towards her. The beady little eyes sunk into the red, blotchy face were shining with malice. "Hermione Granger. Daughter of Henry and Jean."
Hermione's breath caught in her throat. "What? How do you know that? What are you doing?"
The Zygon was slowly pushing it's three-fingered hand towards her face.
"Taking a memory print," it said. The black, glassy eyes narrowed for a second, then a grin spread across its face. "Ronald. Ronald Weasley. The Owlery."
"No!" Hermione yelled. "Don't go anywhere near him! I won't let… oh my god."
Nothing could have prepared Hermione for the sight of the Zygon's blotchy, sucker-covered form crunching and morphing, until she was looking at a young woman with bushy hair who was wearing her favourite jumper. The Zygon had taken her appearance.
"Ron," said a pitch perfect recreation of her voice. "Ron's gone to the Owlery." A twisted smile came across her twin's face. "I'll have to go and find him, so we can find the Angel corpse together." Hermione pulled on her foot with all her might, but she was still stuck on the step as the Zygon started heading in the other direction, stopping only to tell her, "I'm sure we'll be able to find it. After all, I am the brightest witch of my age."
Harry had never flown above Hogsmeade. It might've been nice, he thought, to enjoy being back on a broom and able to see the majesty of Hogwarts from the air again. The Daleks rather stepped on his moment.
He'd been in his fair share of fights, but these things were ferocious and relentless. They seemed to be travelling in swarms yet attacking without any shared, cohesive plan. There was a gun attached to their mid-section, and he and Ginny had to employ all of their flying skills to navigate their way through the constant hail of fire being thrown at them.
"Stupefy!" he yelled, and a jet of light shot towards the nearest floating Dalek, but merely fizzled into nothing when it struck.
"YOUR ATTACKS ARE FE-EBLE. DALEKS ARE SUPER-IOR TO ANY FORM OF HU-MAN TRICK-ERY."
Harry grinned. "Made you look though."
Ginny came soaring up from below, and conjured up huge tarpaulin, which flew at the Dalek and covered it's eye stalk.
"MY VISION IS IM-PAIRED! MY VISION IS IM-PAIRED!"
It flung itself about in the air, trying to shake off the covering, and in the process ended up crashing right through the roof of The Hog's Head, which promptly exploded in a gulf of flames.
"If we survive this," said Harry, "Aberforth is going kill me."
Ginny shrugged. "It was good shot, though, wasn't it? It's not easy, throwing a tarpaulin at things, you know. Especially at this altitude, with the wind resistance, and –"
Another Dalek fired its ray gun and they each had to swerve their brooms to avoid being hit. Ginny threw back whatever spells she thought might work, while Harry glanced back toward the castle grounds. There was no sign of Ron or Hermione yet, but it wasn't hard to spot the Doctor. A tiny little stick-figure was dashing about to and fro, explosions usually popping up wherever he had been seconds earlier. But the tide was turning – Harry could see the various other clumps of fighting gradually beginning to turn and focus their attention on the only common enemy in sight.
"We've got to get back," he cried out to Ginny.
She allowed two Daleks to think they were flanking her, then flew up suddenly and allowed them to collide in another fiery blast.
"Right behind you," she yelled back.
Harry grinned again, then headed towards the castle.
The West Tower was aflame. A piece of burning debris from a ship had blew in through one of the large windows in the Owlery and quickly spread. Ron had completed his task and sent orders for the Ministry to stay back, and then shooed the rest of the owls out into the night and far from harm's way. None of his attempts to extinguish the blaze were effective, so he gave up and began sprinting back towards the Great Hall. Everyone would still be there, waiting for him. No one would be hurt. They were going to get out of this. All of them, this time.
Adding to these horrible mental images as he ran through the corridor, was the violent quakes that rocked the whole castle every minute or so, and the awful sound of bricks and stone crumbling not so far away. Large pieces of Hogwarts were breaking apart, and with every corner he turned, he wondered if he was going to have any corridor to left to run down.
So the sight of Hermione at the end of the third floor hallway was a welcome one.
"Ron!" she cried, running to throw her arms around him and grip him tighter than he knew she was capable of.
"Ow," he croaked. "Too tight, too tight."
"Sorry," she squeaked, and quickly released him. "You're okay!"
"So are you," he beamed. "Let's get the hell out of here before that changes. Where are the others?"
"Looking for a Weeping Angel."
Ron stared. "Did they find the evening's events as they were to be a bit dull?!"
"I know, it's crazy. The Doctor said Harry put a Weeping Angel's dead body somewhere in this castle, and that's what all these monsters have come for. But Harry's gone after Ginny, so it's up to us to find it. Can you think of absolutely anywhere something like that might be hidden?"
Ron blew out an exasperated breath. "The Chamber of Secrets? The Room of Requirement? There's loads of places to hide things here."
Hermione squeezed his hand (still a little too tightly). "Think of Harry, Ron – where would Harry hide it?"
Ron shrugged. "Maybe our old dormitory? It's the a part of Hogwarts that really felt like home to him."
Hermione's face lit up. "Then that's where we'll start!" She set off running down the corridor, pulling him along by the hand.
"Okay," Ron warned. "But just remember there's a new group of teenage boys living in there now, and they might not have been as clean and sanitary as we were."
Hermione laughed. "I could care less. We just need to find that Angel."
Ron stopped dead.
"What did you just say?"
Hermione frowned. "I said we can't let some kid's smelly socks stop us finding that Angel's body."
"No, what did you actually just say, like, word for word – what was the first part of that sentence?"
Again, Hermione looked at him in puzzlement. "I said 'I could care less'."
Ron waited a second, then nodded. "Right. Sorry, I thought you did. Just had to be sure, you know."
"Ron we really don't have time for stuff like this, we have to hurry."
Ron nodded again. "If you say so, dear." And then he stepped forward, gripped his girlfriend by the shoulders, and pushed her out of the third-floor window. She screeched as she fell out into the night.
He leaned against the window frame for a minute or so, watching the now red and blotchy body lie motionless on the ground, before he heard footsteps approaching at the end of the hall,
"Ron!" Hermione came flying around the corner. "Get away from her! It's not me, it's a –"
"- a Zygon, yeah." Ron finished. "Way ahead of you."
Hermione stood quite still for a moment, looking between Ron, the otherwise empty hallway, and the shattered window frame he was standing in front of.
"You threw her out the window?" Ron nodded. "But… how do you know it wasn't me?"
"She said 'I could care less'," he explained.
Hermione stared at him, wide-eyed. "That's it? If you had guessed wrong, I'd be dead right now!"
Ron merely raised her eyebrows at her. "'Could care less' – you? Seriously?"
Hermione huffed. "I'm not some sort of Grammar Nazi," she grumbled, as she ran towards him just to grab his hand and start pulling him back in the other direction. "Now hurry up, we've got to get to the TARDIS."
"What happened to you shoe?" he asked, glancing down at her left foot with was only wearing a sock.
"It was the only way I could get my foot out of the trick step."
The West Tower collapsed. The rumble of its bricks and stones breaking apart echoed across the grounds like thunder, and as he watched it fall, the Doctor realised he had no way of knowing if Ron or Hermione had been there when it went.
Abandoning his strategy of buzzing about the different armies like an annoying wasp, he climbed onto the smoking wreck of a Krillitane ship.
"Enough!" he yelled, whilst sending an ear-piercing bleeping noise into the air with his sonic.
Everyone stopped. Cybermen, Daleks, Axons, Nevernots, Sycorax – the faces of a hundred different species of warriors turned towards him. The Doctor mildly wondered what it said about himself that blood thirsty killers took him so seriously.
"This is insanity. Even for you lot. You race across the stars, drop down in the middle of a Level 5 planet, and start tearing up a school – and for what? For a fairytale! Weeping Angels can't die, everybody knows this. They were here before all of us and they will stand beneath starless skies and watch the universe end long after we're all dead and in the ground. Didn't it ever occur to you that maybe this was a trick? That somebody dangled a fable in front of you, just to get all of your armies away from your home planet, and let you decimate each other?"
That caused a stir. The aliens were glancing at one another, wondering who was standing guard at home if they were all here.
"But this doesn't have to be a wasted journey," said the Doctor, regaining their gazes. "You came here for a corpse? I'll give you one. If you swear, on the blood of each of your species, to leave this planet within the hour and never return – I will give you something far more valuable than a dead Weeping Angel." The species may have been wildly different, but the gleam of excitement in everyone's eyes was exactly the same. They each took a single, eager step towards him. With a deep breath, the Doctor held out his arms in surrender. "To save Hogwarts, I offer you the death of the Doctor."
Within seconds of saying this, Harry and Ginny sped towards him on broomsticks, a storm of Daleks hot on their tail, and came to land right next to the ship the Doctor was standing on. Before they had even hopped off their brooms, Ron and Hermione came hurrying out of the Entrance Hall and stopped next to the TARDIS that stood by the doors. The Doctor glanced at all of them, did a quick headcount, and when he was sure he had all four, turned back to the assembled armies of the known universe with an apologetic grin.
"Sorry, too slow, changed my mind. Btw, the Weeping Angel corpse is real, and we have it. Thanks for playing. See you at the after party." He turned to the others. "TARDIS – now!"
Their three-metre sprint to the Police Box was accompanied by the offensive fire of every weapon able to get a clear shot at them. Harry and Ginny cast shield spells around them all, Hermione used her wand to pull up a huge chunk of the ground behind them to take any hits that magic wouldn't stop. Ron held the TARDIS doors open.
Safely inside and mostly unscathed, everyone shared an exhausted look.
"Right then," said the Doctor, removing the chunk of mirror frame that was actually a Weeping Angel from his jacket. "Get your breaths back. Now comes the tricky part."
End of Chapter 15
(A/N) A few notes:
1) I almost posted this chapter in four little instalments as I wrote them. I worried it might ruin the chaotic feeling I was trying to create here, but I think this might be what I do in future, so I don't go five months between updates.
2) Hermione's mum and dad don't have canon first names?
3) The collective noun for Daleks is 'storm', I've decided.
