Planet of Fear

The cloister bells rang out across the expanse of the TARDIS. Thick rivulets of grey smoke poured from the central column of the console room, the glass at the core of the impossible machine laced with spiderweb cracks. The room, usually lit cool blue, was cast in a dark red by the emergency lights that lined the perimeter. The Doctor, barely noticing the damage to his TARDIS, focused entirely at the boy lying on the floor. The boy coughed harshly, and it was as if something had snapped the Doctor back into the present.

"Activate extractor fans!" He yelled and pulled his jacked up to cover his mouth and nose. The fans whirred into life, clearing most of the smoke from the room. He hadn't had to use those since Melody had shot his TARDIS all those years ago, the thought of his previous companions still lanced through his chest, spearing both his hearts in a moment of pain.

He darted over to the boy, who still lay unconscious on the floor, hooked his arms around the boys and dragged him to the door, stumbling out into whatever planet the TARDIS had dumped them on. Wherever they had landed would be better than the damaged time machine, she would need time to repair herself anyway. The Doctor spluttered, tripped backwards through the door, and landed sprawled on the ground with the boy on top of him. As soon as they were clear the TARDIS doors slammed shut, and the cloisters fell silent. The Doctor let his head fall back on the hard ground and let out a brief sigh, the TARDIS never liked having occupants when she was damaged. The cracks along the control rooms central collum were a minor issue, all things considered, no doubt she would be up and running in no time.

The sky flashed with the constant exchange of plasma fire from the ships above. Long green strands of light, flickering from one ship to another. They would sometimes disperse along energy shields, harmlessly rendered into motes of light. Sometimes they would slice through those shields, lancing into the metal below, exposing crews to the fatal vacuum of space as their ships came apart at the seams. Maybe they would have been safer in the TARDIS after all.

He lay the boys head on the ground as gently as he could. The war raging above him could wait, as could the rubble laden abandoned street he was standing in. With a flick of his wrist, the Doctor had his sonic in his hand and had begun to scan.

"I'm sure I've seen you somewhere before," The Doctor muttered to himself, "I just can't quite put my finger on it."

The sonic bleeped and fed the relevant data straight into the Doctors mind. The boy, whoever he was, displayed two distinct energy signatures. One rippled across his skin, a simple kind of temporal background radiation, similar to that which the Time Vortex imparted onto those who travelled through it. But the levels of saturation were unlike anything the Doctor had ever seen before, and he had been travelling through the Vortex for millennia. The second was deeper within the boy, nestled just below his heart. It was a kind of energy the Doctor had never seen before, the Sonic was unable to quantify it, though it seemed to sit somewhere in the Psionic wavelengths.

"Hey, hey you, out in the open!" Called out a voice from the ruins over to the Doctor's right. "What are you doing just lying there? It's a wonder a sen-beam hasn't scorched you yet! Get your friend up and get over here!"

The Doctor extricated himself from under the stranger who had appeared in his ship and spied the woman who was gesturing for him to come over. Without further delay, The Doctor once more hooked his arms beneath the strangers and haphazardly dragged him across the road to the cover of the ruined buildings.

"Come on come on, get in," the woman said impatiently, darting out to grab the boys legs to speed up the process. "What happened to your friend here?"

The Doctor quirked an eyebrow, surprised that a woman in the middle of a warzone would so openly help two total strangers in the middle of open conflict. Then, they didn't exactly look like soldiers.

"Well, he's not really my friend," The Doctor said, "He just sort of… well… appeared."

"You mean he was brought to the surface by a transmat?" she asked and glanced down at his unconscious body.

"A transmat? No silly transmat could beam someone onto my ship," The Doctor said, puffing his chest out in pride before his face settled back down into a grimace of confusion. "No, definitely not a transmat, would have been ten to the power of, oh, at least fifteen times more powerful than your basic transmat beam to pierce the shielding on the TARDIS."

She quirked an eyebrow at that, "Did you say TARDIS?"

"Yeah," The doctor replied, "That's the name of my ship, the blue box back in that street there."

"HIGHER TECHNOLOGY LOCATED. LOCK ACTIVATED. BEAM VECTORS CONNECTED. ESTABLISHING TRANSPORT," a robotic voice grated out, seemingly from nowhere and yet everywhere at once.

A bright beam of light erupted from above and tore into the ground. The air shimmered under the intensity of the light, cracks laced outward from the impact site, and a great metallic screeching filled the air. It was over as quickly as it began, and the TARDIS was gone.

"Well, that was a bit more powerful than your basic transmat beam," The Doctor said, almost dropping the boy in his arms. "Who took my ship?"

"Your ship was just taken by the Sumaran Empire, they've been waging war on our world for the past month," the woman explained. "Listen, your ship, a TARDIS you say, is gone. If that ship really was a TARDIS, and you're really a… a Time Lord," She said, her breath hitching over the words, "Then we could really use your help, Doctor."

~~~~ THIS IS A LINE BREAK ~~~~

Harry was dreaming again. That much he was sure of. It was odd, being so aware that you were in a dream, but that was the only possible explanation. Like so many times before he was scrambling over the bracken and felled logs of the Forbidden Forest, walking familiar steps to the site of his first death. It had always stuck with him, though he tried to never let it show. He remembered the biting heat of the Avada Kedavra as is slipped through his flesh and burnt through his soul. How he melted away and found himself standing on the platform of the train station where his life had first changed all those years ago. Explosions lit up the sky, pepper pot creatures that he now knew were called Daleks streamed overhead, their little gun armatures firing off deadly beams of white light. The dream had changed, then. Harry walked on anyway.

The forest opened up into a clearing, as it always did. But something was different. Hagrid, in his big and heavy chains, was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Voldemort's core of Death Eater guards. It was just the serpentine man himself, sitting on a log, Nagini curling around his feet.

"You have a very interesting mind, Harry Potter," Voldemort said, his head not lifting up from his cursed companion. "Daleks fly overhead, magnificent creatures roam these woods, and yet…" his tongue flicked out of his mouth, slim and forked like that of a snake, "The air tastes of Earth. These images were not in the minds of other Earthlings I have inhabited."

"You… You're not Voldemort," Harry managed to stutter, barely able to bite out the name of his mortal enemy.

"Voldemort…" The pale phantasm of a man in front of him chewed over the name, as if it had never passed those lips before. "Something about this form likes that name very much, it sings to its core, but no. I am not Voldemort, I am… the Mara."

Harry felt the world ripple with the weight of that announcement. He had known for years that there was a kind of power that came with names, Voldemort had used the speaking of his as a tracker for his enemies. But this was something else. The name of the creature itself seemed to resonate in the very fabric of creation around him, a fact the Mara had clearly noticed as well.

"Oh… that's different. But then, Harry Potter, much is different about you isn't it. A boy, captured by the Daleks from Earth in the heart of the Medusa Cascade just a second out of synch with the rest of the universe," Voldemort, no, The Mara shook its head. "Taken out of time by the Dalek Time Controller itself, and converted completely into a Dalek. Perhaps it saw your destiny, etched into the threads of the untempered schism, your meeting with the big Bad Wolf. A destiny that could not be avoided, a fixed point."

"I.. I have no idea what you're talking about," Harry said, stumbling back from the creature who wore his oldest enemies face.

"No, I don't suppose you would," The Mara leered. "Still so early in your time stream, so long before you become revered across the galaxy almost as much as The Doctor himself. You… and your magic."

"This is just a dream… This is just a dream, none of it's real," Harry muttered to himself. "I'll wake up in the Burrow any moment now."

"Oh, the great and mighty Harry Potter, reduced to a snivelling child in just a few minutes," The Mara taunted. "Where's that brave boy who stood down legions of Death Eaters, and the Dark Lord Voldemort himself?" The Mara surged to its feet, wand in hand. "Where's that brave boy who took a hit from a killing curse, not just once but twice. What is it they call you in the world you think you come from? The boy who conquered?"

The Mara was in front of Harry in an instant, Voldemort's cold and clammy hand wrapped around his face.

"Remember what your dear old Professor Dumbledore said, just because it's in your head, that doesn't mean it isn't real," The Mara hissed in his ear.

Harry dipped a hand into his pocket, where his wand had always been kept, and found his fingers curling around the familiar piece of wood. He pulled the wand out and jabbed it into Voldemort's ribs in one fluid motion. He couldn't call out a spell, and so channeled as much energy as he could into getting off one overcharged silent Stupefy. The familiar recoil from his wand told him the spell had worked, but the Mara stood strong in Voldemort's body, as if it hadn't been hit by anything.

"Oh there he is, the spitfire Harry Potter, saviour of the Wizarding World. Well, in the real world Harry Potter is just a story Earthling's read when they're children, just like you. I can see it buried down in your repressed memories. The story you told yourself to run away from what the Daleks did to you."

The Mara threw Harry roughly to the ground, where he lay sprawled out and panting among the dirt and leaves.

"Usually I would overpower a hosts mind slowly, take it over bit by bit, lull them into accepting my rule by twisting their mind against them… but you Potter… the Bad Wolf gave you such powers. How was she to know that I would use them against you so quickly?" The Mara gave him a look of pure hatred, one so foul it looked ten times more deadly than anything Voldemort had thrown his way. "Imperio!"

~~~~ THIS IS A LINE BREAK ~~~~

The Doctor sat by the young man's bedside, a cup of coffee in his hand. He took a sip of the black liquid, swilled it around his mouth for a moment, and then spat it back out again with a sound of disgust. He placed the cup on the bedside desk and shook his head, he couldn't understand why Humans would drink such a drink even this far out into the colonies. There were some habits his favourite species would never grow out of.

The Doctor sighed, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palm, and looked over the boy once more. There was no denying who he was, how could there be? Those perfectly circular glasses, the lightning bolt scar on his forehead, the psionic energy that hummed in his core. This young man, somehow, was a man taken straight from the realms of fiction. Harry Potter, complete with even his powers. It was a total impossibility.

The door to the room opened and the woman, Esra he had later learned, slipped through. She had carried Harry with him through the rubble and danger of the war zone to an underground bunker. A lift and a series of winding corridors later he and the woman had carried Harry to the medical wing. She had told him that they knew of the Time Lords, and of him specifically, as tall tales whispered down through the generations. Of a war to end all wars, raging across every moment. But they were nothing more than bedtime stories. Clearly there were some pockets of the universe that he hadn't managed to erase his presence from, he was still too big. Either way, on this world he was known as a great warrior. Still someone who could turn an enemy on its tail with just a glare. The Doctor had just sighed and straightened out his bow tie, of course he would help them, it's what he did.

"Any updates on the boy?" Esra asked, sitting down on the chair opposite from the Doctor.

"I've been scanning him regularly, there's been some fluctuations in his psionic core, but other than that I can't see any reason for him to still be asleep," The Doctor scratched at the back of his head, deep in thought. "It's like something's physically pushing his mental state down under the surface, forcing him to stay unconscious."

Considering the way he had manifested in the TARDIS, likely something similar to an apparation if the books were anything to go by, he was lucky to not have been ripped apart at the seams. There was no way he could have known where he was going, so splinching or appearing within the console itself would have been a genuine possibility. That didn't explain why he was still unconscious though.

"No matter, he'll be safe down here in the bunkers. Will you be joining us for a briefing on the current situation?" Esra said, "We're in… dire straits Doctor. The Sumaran's push harder on our Orbital Defence Line with every passing day. As you saw when they took your TARDIS, they have ways of breaking through the blockades for brief intervals."

"Yes right," The Doctor said after taking a deep breath, unwilling to leave the mystery on the bed unsolved. "Briefing, I need to get my TARDIS back, and you need to stop an evil empire from knocking at your door. Piece of cake!"

The Doctor jumped up with a grin, some of his manic energy leaking through the worry he had allowed to take hold of him. He strode out of the room and turned a sharp right.

"Other way Doctor," Esra called out, only just getting out of her chair herself. She followed the Doctor as he passed the door frame again, grumbling under his breath.

Neither of them were there to see Harry shift slightly under the covers. Neither of them thought to check his arm, where the Dark Mark had begun to ink itself onto his skin. Neither of them saw the slight sheen of red on his teeth, or the glimmer of red light under his still shut pupils. The Mara was rising, and it would leave nothing in its path.