Jonas stared at the Time Turner in his hand. It glowed softly, spinning just a little even when he held it still.
The Eye of Harmony waited behind him—five fragments floating in slow orbit, pulsing with quiet energy. The final slot shimmered like a heartbeat.
He could do it now. Drop the Time Turner into the core. See what happened. Fly away from this cursed world.
But the image of the three burned Hogwarts students haunted him—slumped at the TARDIS console like broken puppets, robes singed and blackened. Hermione's ghost had looked calm. Peaceful, even. But the death she'd left behind wasn't peaceful.
Jonas took a slow breath.
"No. Not yet."
He wasn't ready to get roasted alive.
If he was going to activate this thing, he wanted at least a chance at surviving it. Something. Anything. Armor, insulation, duct tape—hell, even a lead box to crawl into would be better than nothing. The Time Turner could wait.
And besides… this wasn't just a ship. It could be a home.
A mobile home through the multiverse.
He started exploring the deeper levels of the TARDIS again—if it could still be called that. The architecture shifted while he moved like it remembered being bigger than it was. He passed a hallway that used to be a closet. Now it was a corridor leading to what looked like a workshop.
The door creaked open with a hiss.
Inside, the room was dim and cluttered, tools scattered across benches, open access panels glowing faintly, sparks frozen mid-burst in the corner where a welding bot had long since powered down. And in the center of the room, laid out on a diagnostic table, was something that made Jonas stop.
A half-assembled robot.
It looked like the work of a mad tinkerer, or maybe a very desperate one.
The head was unmistakably a Soong-type android head, Data or Soong himself. That man was hung up on himself. It had the typical pale artificial skin. Its eyes were dark, but its scalp plating was open, wires splayed like a crown of thorns.
The torso was wrong for it, though, angular, armor-plated, painted with faded red markings.
A Star Wars Separatist battle droid? Maybe a variant. The chassis had been welded into the spine with jury-rigged brackets made from what resembled old Dalek plating.
Jonas took a step closer.
The arms didn't match.
The right was liquid metal, constantly shifting—like the T-1000 from Terminator 2. It was fused to the shoulder, pulsing with a mindless ripple every few seconds. The left arm was thick, coated in fake flesh that looked uncomfortably real. A Terminator model, probably—but oversized, mismatched. Still, it looked like it could've come from the same origin as the android head.
The legs were worse.
One looked like a cybernetic raptor's limb—curved talons, birdlike articulation. The other… he wasn't sure. It might've been a robotic arm reprogrammed to function as a leg. Or maybe it was a leg, just not meant for anything humanoid.
"Someone really went wild with this one," Jonas muttered.
And then he saw it, sitting nearby on a secondary bench. A familiar dome.
An R2 unit's head.
Standard astromech design—scuffed, dented, but mostly intact. Someone had attached additional tools to it, retractable limbs, even a plasma torch. It could be mounted on a body, maybe even linked to the main unit like a detachable head, or double as a shield?
Jonas tilted it, turning it over in his hands.
Was Hermione trying to build a helper bot? A mobile toolkit? A friend?
Or something that could repair the ship?
A computer on the nearby table chirped to life when Jonas touched it. Its interface was crude—built from scavenged parts—but English text scrolled across the screen in neat Hermione-like formatting.
PROJECT: COMPOSITE-DRONE "PATCHWORK"
Status: INCOMPLETE
Estimated Utility: Assistant, Repair Unit, Possible Interface Proxy
Missing Components: [LISTING 37 ITEMS]
Current Viable Parts in Storage: [21/37 Located]
Awaiting Final CPU Interface and Primary Power Regulator
Jonas grinned despite himself.
Hermione had been trying to build a repair assistant out of junk. Just like he would've, if he were smart enough.
He scrolled through the diagrams. Some of the missing parts looked weirdly familiar. Over the years, he'd cracked open dozens of useless gadgets.
Pulled things apart out of boredom. Some he'd even tried, badly, to fix. He repaired a couple of things and made a few of his own gadgets, but they were all pretty basic.
Looking at the schematics, he realized he might already have some of these parts in the pile outside. Some are buried in old crates. Some in boxes he hadn't opened in decades.
He wasn't a genius. But he wasn't stupid either. If this "Patchwork" robot was designed to help, maybe it could fix the things Jonas couldn't. The TARDIS. The power grid. The guidance systems.
Or maybe just give him someone to talk to who wasn't moonwalking bread-bots and sarcastic music boxes.
He looked back at the robotic corpse on the bench.
No… not a corpse. A skeleton. Waiting to be filled in.
That was when the realization struck him.
This wasn't just Hermione's side project.
This robot had been built with intention. Every piece, every bolt, every bit of nonsense he'd fished up over the years… maybe it wasn't all nonsense.
Maybe the rod was giving him exactly what he needed. He'd just never seen the pattern.
Until now.
Jonas walked back to the junk room with a new mission.
He didn't need to rush. He wasn't aging. Time wasn't normal here. If it took months or years, that was fine.
He would sort every crate, scan every device, test every weird doohickey that hadn't screamed when he opened it. He'd catalog, clean, and repurpose every fragment that looked like it could fit Hermione's list.
This was how he'd prepare. Not with luck. Not with blind faith.
But with junk.
And if the Patchwork bot came online…
Then maybe, just maybe, he'd have someone to help him fix the TARDIS.
And leave this graveyard behind.
Jonas woke with a sense of direction for the first time in… maybe ever.
For years, everything had been about survival. He fished, he ate, he didn't die. A win was a gadget that didn't explode or scream in ancient Sanskrit. A good day was when he didn't dream of Earth.
But now?
Now he had a goal.
The TARDIS needed fixing. The android needed finishing. And his junk—his wonderful, maddening, multiversal junk—might finally have a purpose.
He started with what he remembered.
Certain objects, half-buried in the piles he'd collected over the years, had always seemed interesting. He hadn't known what to do with them before. Now, armed with Hermione's project schematics and a checklist, he knew what to look for.
The first item was buried beneath a cracked replicator and a half-melted Muppet head. He recognized the casing immediately—a weird spherical translator orb he'd always assumed was broken. But now, he saw it was a plasma phase stabilizer core, one of the components Hermione's diagram listed under "Sub-processing Power Distribution."
He carefully cracked it open. The internal sphere was intact. Still humming with low, steady energy.
Piece one, collected.
The second item was trickier.
He'd stored a malfunctioning data cube years ago because it had a strange tendency to float slightly off the ground. He always figured it was for navigation, or maybe just poorly coded. But as he pried open its crystalline casing, he found a spatial recalibration matrix tucked deep inside.
It was fused in place, so it took him nearly an hour of gentle laser carving and improvised clamping to get it free without frying it.
He dropped it into a padded bin marked "Confirmed Compatible."
Two for two.
The third component was sitting in plain sight all this time—taped to the side of a retro-futurist toaster he'd used as a footstool for six years. The multi-spectral input driver was nestled in a clamp mount, still blinking occasionally, like it was annoyed at being ignored for so long.
"Well, that's embarrassing," Jonas muttered as he pried it off.
After logging all three pieces into Hermione's list on the TARDIS terminal, Jonas knew it was time for a proper overhaul.
No more digging blindly through the hoard like a raccoon.
He needed to sort.
He picked two rooms near the central corridor.
The smaller one, although it seemed big to him, square, with a wide folding table, became his Parts Room. Anything useful, anything he could take apart or reassemble, went there. It was filled with bins he collected.
He remembered going to a junkyard when he was in High School. There were open bins that held similar items, carburetors, alternators, or whatever; they were marked and easy to find. That was his goal for this room. He had marked the bins, and that corresponded with an old tablet with an Excel worksheet that gave details.
The stabilizer, the matrix, the driver—he laid them out carefully, like relics on an altar. The room had a few floating lights and a soft hum of electricity, like it approved of its new purpose.
The second room he chose was darker. Circular. Cold. No consoles or tools—just smooth stone and silence. It looked sturdy, as if something exploded, it could take it.
It became the "Do Not Touch" Room.
Here, he placed everything that worried him.
A music box that once rewound time for thirty seconds every time it played. A glove that screamed when worn, accusing the wearer of not asking permission before inserting their hand, "not even dinner," it once angrily commented. A jar labeled "Don't Breathe This" that he'd never dared open. Even the black monolith he'd once fished out, which made all sound vanish within five feet of it.
That room gave him chills, but it was necessary.
He sealed the door with a digital lock and marked it:DANGER / STORAGE / ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARES
Back in the Parts Room, Jonas mounted the three new components into the android body.
Nothing activated—not yet. These weren't critical systems, just subsystems. But slowly, Patchwork was becoming real.
He paused, staring at the robot's mismatched limbs.
A battle droid's torso.
A Soong-type's head.
Liquid metal flexing like breath.
A T-800 Terminator arm with a Soong-type artificial skin.
Raptor-leg and the maybe-leg.
And an R2 dome sitting like a crown beside it.
Whoever Hermione had imagined this thing becoming—tool, companion, technician—it was clear she hadn't meant for it to be a weapon. Every part, even the ones from war machines, had been reprogrammed for function, not violence.
Jonas exhaled slowly and looked over the growing catalog on the TARDIS terminal. 3 parts down. 34 to go.
No rush.
The Eye of Harmony wasn't going anywhere. And for the first time in decades, Jonas had something more than survival.
Jonas leaned against the table in his new Parts Room, taking in the mess that was starting to feel more like an organized chaos. Tools, gadgets, and components were scattered about, some on benches, others in crates stacked high along the walls. He could hear the faint hum of the TARDIS working, its engines stirring with a quiet life, though he had no idea where to start in figuring out how to use that life.
The android, now a jumbled assembly of mismatched parts, stared at him with glassy eyes. For all the progress, there was still something missing—something vital that he couldn't quite place. The three components he'd salvaged were useful, but they didn't make the machine alive.
And then there was the TARDIS itself. He couldn't ignore the nagging feeling that the ship was more than just an ancient puzzle box; it was a living thing, too. It had watched him, or so it felt, from the moment he arrived. But watching and helping were two different things.
Jonas wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead and looked at the terminal, its glowing interface pulsing as if to beckon him forward. The TARDIS still had plenty of rooms he hadn't explored. His initial thought had been to keep moving, to find what he needed and escape. But now? There was something grounding about the ship. It was his now, in a way, and it was time to make it work for him.
He spent the next few hours meticulously sorting through the piles of old parts. Each box and crate was a piece of the puzzle—some might work for the android, others for the TARDIS, and some were completely useless but might hold sentimental value. The more he sorted, the clearer the pattern became. It was the same one he'd been following for years, only now it had purpose: repurposing the broken.
The first thing he tackled was a broken communication module, an object that looked like a shattered radio. He had no idea what it was meant to do, but he'd noticed the schematic for it in Hermione's logs. It seemed to be part of the android's voice interface. He took it apart, carefully scraping off the grime and testing each wire until he was satisfied that it could work in Patchwork's neck.
Next, he moved to a spare sensor relay that he knew could help with the android's vision system. It wasn't the most advanced sensor, but it would get the job done. He attached it to the back of the head, securing the wiring and taking a moment to examine the odd shapes of the components—each piece an artifact of a different world.
The room was quiet except for the occasional clicking of tools and the hum of the TARDIS, but Jonas had begun to notice the sounds. Not the mechanical hum. The soft, almost imperceptible sounds of something alive, something watching him. Was it the ship? The android? Or was he just imagining it?
Finally, he grabbed the multi-spectral input driver and installed it into the android's chest panel. It wasn't vital to its activation, but it would help with the body's overall functionality, enabling Patchwork to interface with more technology.
By the time Jonas had finished, the android looked… different. Not fully assembled, but a significant step up from the mismatched mess of metal it had been before. It now resembled the idea of a being—less scrap heap, more prototype. The flickering R2 dome blinked once, as if in acknowledgement.
Jonas stood back and gave a low whistle.
"You've got some style, Patchwork," he said.
The name felt right. It wasn't just a machine. It was a stitched-together monument to universes colliding—Star Trek precision, Star Wars brute functionality, Terminator muscle, liquid metal unknowns, and maybe a dash of cartoon logic. And now it had a place. So did he.
That's when he realized the ship—the TARDIS—was beginning to feel like home.
Not just in the "you live here now" sense, but something deeper. It adapted to him. Rooms shifted when he needed them. Doors appeared. Lights dimmed when he was tired and brightened when he worked. He didn't command it—but it responded.
It was time to get serious.
Jonas went back into the main junk pile and began hauling pieces in waves. But he didn't just dump them anymore—he sorted.
He chose three rooms near the TARDIS central hall:
Room One became his Parts Lab. It was clean, well-lit, and already humming with low-level energy fields. Here he laid out all the tech that might be used for Patchwork, or the TARDIS, or future devices. The replicators. The drivers. The sensor arrays. Anything he could tinker with safely.
Room Two became The Do-Not-Touch Room. The name he carved into the door with a plasma cutter. Inside went all the terrifying or deeply confusing tech—the whispering moonstone that made your blood feel carbonated, the bottle that refilled itself with a different poison every week, the 8-bit music cube that made nearby plants bleed.
He locked that door tight.
Room Three was his Living Quarters. He hadn't needed much before—his old tent was enough. But now he had a proper bed, a folding table, a mounted screen, and a shelf where he placed his favorite useless gadgets, including the tiny walking bread-puncher and a stuffed toy that cried when left alone. The TARDIS even generated a working shower and clothes recycler for him, once he cleared the space.
The days blurred.
Jonas worked steadily, cataloging, stripping down broken devices, and comparing parts to the schematics Hermione left. The TARDIS provided food, comfort, and power. The music box still played strange songs in the background. Sometimes, Jonas caught himself humming along.
He didn't rush.
That was the key.
There was no real time here. The twin suns outside rose and set when he needed them to. He didn't age. His hands didn't wrinkle. He wasn't sure if days passed or decades.
But he was getting closer.
One morning—or what passed for morning—Jonas sat in the Parts Lab with the Soong-type head resting in his lap.
The eyes had lit up. Not glowing with power, but… awareness.
Patchwork wasn't just a robot anymore. It was starting to feel like a collaborator. He'd caught the fingers of the Terminator arm twitching on their own while running a diagnostic scan. The liquid metal limb had changed shape in its sleep. And once, when Jonas sneezed near the android, the R2 dome chirped something that sounded suspiciously like "bless you."
He'd laughed for ten minutes.
That night, curled up in his new bed, Jonas stared at the ceiling and let his mind wander.
Maybe this is what Hermione wanted.
Not just someone to finish what they started, but someone who wouldn't burn up in the chair. Someone who'd take his time. Who'd think like a scavenger, not a hero.
And maybe that's all I ever needed to be, Jonas thought. A junkman with a ship. And a purpose. Although he wasn't really a junkman, he still fished, and his rod continued to give him strange things and wonderful things. He was at heart a fisherman. He fished the multiverse.
He turned out the lights.
Tomorrow, he'd dive deeper into the old piles. See what else was buried in the forgotten corners of a thousand universes.
He was going to bring Patchwork to life.
And when the Eye of Harmony pulsed again, it would find him ready.