The Doctor awoke with a pounding headache. He groaned in pain and tried to push himself to his feet, but his legs felt like jelly and he promptly slammed back on the ground, his face hitting the dusty floorboards.
Shaking off the dizzying feeling inside his head and the clamminess that racked his body, which was soaked in a cold sweat, the Doctor slowly lifted his head and opened his eyes, only to be met with darkness.
Well, not total darkness, for the moonlight illuminated enough through a window behind him to show him he was in a small, circular room. The Doctor forced himself into a sitting position with slight difficulty, and felt something binding his hands behind his back. He tried to tug against the bindings, but they were too tight. Apprehensive of having been tied up, he rested his back against the stone wall behind him, the moonlight shining upon him as his eyes slowly adjusted to his surroundings.
Peering around, the Doctor saw that, to his increasing fear, that he was no longer inside the TARDIS. Instead, he was in some circular room with the oddest assortment of objects and knick-knacks he had ever seen in one setting. And that was saying something considering all the places he'd traveled to in over his 900 years of living.
There was a desk in front of him, on top of which stood a broken spinning top. On a small table in the corner, there was what appeared to be some sort of squiggly, golden television aerial that was humming, but no programs were playing on it; It seemed to be in a perpetual state of static. To the right of that was a giant multi-layered, opened trunk whose insides appeared vast and ravenous. Opposite him hung an obscure ornate mirror that showed not reflections, but shadowy figures, none of them in focus.
His mind as foggy as the mirror, the Doctor shook his head once more, trying to make heads or tails of where he had ended up. It seemed familiar to him for some reason, like he'd seen it before….'But where?' he thought, as he tried to rack his brain and recall any obscure circular rooms he'd been familiar with, perhaps in another lifetime.
As he fidgeted and fought with the restraints binding him, the Doctor felt a heavy coat hanging off him, its sleeves having slipped down his arms the more he wriggled.
"What?"
Looking down, the Doctor saw that he wasn't wearing his familiar clothes— that of his beloved blue pinstripe suit with long, flowing brown trench coat, and scuffed red trainers. Instead, he was wearing an extremely baggy dark green jacket that seemed to be five sizes too big for him over a loose black shirt; equally baggy, muddy black trousers, and, oddly enough, a single shoe, leaving his other foot bare. Even then he could feel that the shoe-clad foot had more than enough room to slip out of it.
Though his head was still riddled in a thick fog, the Doctor grunted and pushed his tied hands against the wall behind him as he forced himself to stand shakily on his feet. He staggered backwards, and for a fleeting moment of intense fright, he almost fell through the open window behind him. He would've all but met the exact same fate as his fourth incarnation if not for barely managing to catch the edge of the windowsill with his bound hands and the back of his legs. While his upper half hung backwards out the open window, the Doctor's jaw dropped at what he saw. Even though he was upside down, the moonlight of the overhanging waning crescent illuminated enough of the outside world for him to gawk at.
From his vantage point, he spotted hedges of which were surrounded by colorful stands that rose far above the ground. The Doctor quickly discovered that these colors were a plethora of banners that criss-crossed around the stands. He saw one patterned with red and gold stripes with a lion pinned in its center; another was checkered blue and bronze with an eagle in its wake; the next was yellow and black with a friendly-looking badger; and the last was green and silver with a sinister snake emblazoned upon its crest.
On either end of these colorful stands, standing beyond the hedges, were three large basketball hoops that rose more than hundreds of feet off the ground. They were awfully high, and were so big that they looked as though they would dwarf even the tallest of professional basketball players. Even then, who ever heard of playing basketball outdoors in an open field covered in thirty-foot high hedges?
"What?"
The Doctor began to feel the blood rushing to his head and with the lower half of his body still hanging inside, he used his legs to push off the wall as he stumbled back in. He staggered, trying to dispel the dizziness that accompanied him back inside, and bumped into the desk where something fell off. The Doctor nearly jumped out of his single shoe as something sharp pricked his bare foot.
"Rassilon!" he cursed aloud in his native Gallifreyan upon the sudden sharp pain that pierced through the bottom of his foot. The Doctor jumped up and down, trying to shake off the hurt of his now bleeding left foot. He froze, one leg comically up, when saw the blunt end of a small knife upon the stone floor.
Seizing the opportunity, the Doctor fell back and groped around until his fingers grazed the metal blade. He struggled for a moment, but finally managed to grasp hold of the knife and adjusted its position as he began to slice off the ropes. It took some time, especially when the knife kept clattering to the floor and the Doctor had to fumble around for it, readjusting his position continually.
Finally, after what seemed like hours—'Funny. My sense of time has all gone fuzzy'— the Doctor tugged at the ropes and they fell off. He stretched his arms, rotating his wrists which felt completely sore and numb. As he slowly regained the feeling back within them, the Doctor paused for a moment when he noticed something off about his pulse. He put two fingers to his wrist to double-check.
Bum-bum. Bum-bum.
'No. It can't be…It just can't!' The Doctor placed both hands on either side of his chest just to confirm.
Bum-bum. Bum-bum.
His face morphed to that of sheer terror when he recognized the thrumming of a singular heartbeat emitting only from his left side.
"Heart? Heart!?" the Doctor gasped out, his voice feeling hoarse. "I'm a-a…a human?" the last word felt like bile on tongue as he said it. "A lowly primitive ape? That's disgusting!"
Though when he looked down, despite the baggy clothes he was donning, he recognized the same skinny body of his tenth form. Running his hands through his hair, he could confirm it still felt like the same fluffy mess as ever, just lacking in the gel he had applied to it earlier that morning. He rolled his shoulder blades and he felt that, yes, there was the same mole he could feel right between them.
Even if the mirror on the other end could even show him what he looked like, the Doctor already had a guess he would appear exactly the same. Exactly the same, except for the fact that he was now a single-hearted human. Exactly the same, except that he now found himself in the world of Harry Potter.
"Blimey! How brilliant is this? It's real. All of it!" he couldn't help but exclaim in spite of his predicament and as he gazed out the window at the Quidditch pitch once again. A giant grin etched across his face. "The world of Harry Potter exists! The wizarding world! Albeit, most likely in some alternate universe. Oh, if only Donna were here right now, I—"
The Doctor froze, for while reminiscing how Donna berated him for being into the Harry Potter series and how she found reading the books or watching the films a complete waste of time despite his best efforts to convince her otherwise, he suddenly noticed that Donna was nowhere to be found.
"Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no!"
He twisted around the room, but of course he knew she wasn't there. If she had been, he would've heard her by now.
'But if she isn't here with me, then she could still be in the TARDIS,' he reasoned, pacing back and forth in thought. 'She would be safe, of course, with all the failsafes set into place, so she would just be roaming around in space until I get back, and—'
The Doctor faltered. If this world of Harry Potter did exist in some alternate universe, then how in the name of Gallifrey's two suns was he supposed to get back to his own? He ran a hand through his hair, messing it up as he tried to think things through, when he felt a searing pain on his left forearm that caused him to recoil.
Lowering his hand down, the Doctor began to scratch the itchiness that seemed to pulsate against his left forearm. When it didn't relent, he shrugged off the coat that hung over him like elephant skin and went to examine what was causing him so much itchy irritation. He let out a yelp of alarm, tripping over the small table with the golden television aerial where the object was sent spiraling with a shatter against the wall.
The Doctor fell on the stone floor with a thud, and his head felt as though it threatened to split open when it slammed against it. Seeing stars, the Doctor shook them off quickly, his hearts racing….'heart,' he reluctantly reminded himself as he thrust his left forearm in front of his vision. He hissed in great loathing when he spotted a tattoo of a snake wrapping itself around a skull and protruding through its hollowed eyes—the Dark Mark. The black ink was full and seemed to be pulsating with great power.
"I'm a-a Death Eater?" he squeaked out in utter disbelief. That's when the gears inside his now human head began to turn.
If he was in the world of Harry Potter, and if the Quidditch pitch overgrown with hedges were anything to go by, and the fact that he was laying in, what he remembered, was described to be the Defense the Against the Dark Arts office during Mad-Eye Moody's tenure, then he must be no mere human, but one with extraordinary abilities; magical abilities. In fact, he deduced that he was no ordinary wizard at all, but one that had thought to have been long dead. Long dead, but kept secretly alive by his father all these years.
The Doctor scowled when it dawned on him that he was none other than Fake Moody himself.
"Barty Crouch Jr.," the Doctor said out loud, completely incredulous that this very thing could even be happening to him. He sat up, anxiously feeling around the body he now resided in, finding himself to be in an even greater state of panic than before.
It was just odd. Completely barmy. Though Donna once pointed out offhandedly how similar he and the bloke in the fourth film appeared, the Doctor had never given it much thought, even laughing off her silly comments to her face that he could ever be some git with a crazed snake-tongue. As he nervously ran his tongue over his teeth upon that recollection, the Doctor was relieved to find that he did not have a snake-like tongue flitting about. Then again, he supposed that was a movie-only tick of the character.
But as he felt around, everything else was exactly the same on the outside. The only thing that was different was that everything now felt, well, exclusively human on the inside. It was like being a complete stranger around something that seemed so familiar. Like a trick of some regeneration gone wrong.
Then the Doctor's eyes widened as a thought struck him. A thought so cold that it nearly took the breath out of his lungs—'I have lungs now, too!? Oh, this is just nauseating!'—if he was currently in the world of Harry Potter in Barty Crouch Jr.'s body then the wizard must be….
"No! Oh, come on! I finally get to see that the world of Harry Potter exists in some alternate universe, and this is how I'm treated! This is a sick joke, you know that!" he shouted to nobody in particular while inwardly cursing the bloke that played him in the fourth film.
Though he knew it to be completely illogical, he believed, that if nothing else, that prat of an actor must've been the reason why some wicked Death Eater must've been his tenth form's doppelganger in this alternate world where Harry Potter existed.