A Proper House with Doors and Things (4/4)
Title - A Proper House with Doors and Things (4/4)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, Jack, OCs
Spoilers - I don't think there are any, really, but let's say through "A Good Man Goes to War," just to be safe.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids and their taggers-along, they're all mine.)
Summary - The Doctor wants to buy a house. As usual, what could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Many thanks to chicklet73, who made this better.
Part One - Part Two - Part Three
Part Four
Brem and Fortuna stood in the room and regarded their mother’s note scrawled on the wall.
“1969,” said Fortuna. “Well, it matches what Dad’s saying in our heads.”
“Guys,” interjected Sylvain, from over by the windows.
“It doesn’t make any sense. How could they travel to 1969 when the TARDIS is right here?” asked Brem.
“Guys,” said Sylvain again, more urgently.
“What?” Fortuna turned toward him.
He was staring fixedly out the windows, very still and not moving. “You’ve got a problem,” he said, grimly. “A big problem.”
“What are you talking about?” said Brem. He followed Fortuna over to stand by Sylvain, looking out the window at a cluster of six angel statues. “Have those always been there?” he asked, with mild interest, because he didn’t remember them from before. Really ugly statues, they were. Frankly terrifying. Mum and Dad ought to have them taken away.
“You’ve got Weeping Angels,” said Sylvain, still not looking away from the window. “Lots of Weeping Angels. It’s, like, an infestation of Weeping Angels.”
“What are Weeping Angels?” asked Fortuna.
“Do you really not know?” Sylvain sounded astonished. “Do you see those statues?”
“Yes.”
“Keep your eyes on them. Everyone needs to look at them. All of us. Jackie, you, too.”
“We all need to look at the statues?” Jackie asked, confused, and then, “Oh, but there’re more of them. There weren’t this many yesterday.”
“No. They’re calling their friends. How have you been traveling space and time and no one ever gave you a primer on the Weeping Angels?” Sylvain’s frustration was obvious.
“Wait,” said Brem, slowly, pulling a memory painstakingly from his childhood. “I think I know about these. I think Dad told me…But it was a story. A bedtime story. I was a kid.”
“Your father told you about Weeping Angels as a bedtime story?”
“Living statues, he said. Living statues, but they can only move if no one is looking at them.”
“Right.”
“You can’t blink, Dad said. They’re so fast, if you blink-”
“Exactly.” Sylvain’s voice held finality.
Brem stared out at the Weeping Angels. His eyes were beginning to water from not blinking. He knew they were all looking at the angels, that that should help, but if they happened to all blink at once, or to not pay attention to one of them-
“What happens?” asked Fortuna. “What happens if you blink?”
“Then they get you,” answered Sylvain. “And they rip you out of your time and send you back. Use up the energy of the life you would have had. Kill you nicely. And excruciatingly slowly.”
“Send you back,” repeated Fortuna. “Like to 1969.”
“Right.”
“So the Weeping Angels got Mum and Dad. And now they want to get all of us, too.”
“They don’t want us,” Brem realized. “Why would they want us? They could go get anyone, lots of people around, lots of people who know nothing about Weeping Angels.”
“They want the TARDIS,” Sylvain finished.
“Yes. The energy in the TARDIS, that’s what they want.”
“And now we’ve got three TARDISes here.”
There was a moment of silence. “What are we going to do?” Fortuna asked, finally.
“I’m open to suggestions,” Sylvain replied.
Aurelia said, “I don’t understand what any of you are talking about!”
***
At first when Rose found herself in 1969, she had no idea she was in 1969. Which was understandable, since a millisecond before she’d been standing in her back garden. And then she was on a busy street in a city that was recognizably London but not her London. Rose had done enough time traveling to know when she was looking at another era, but that didn’t make sense: She had never heard of time traveling without a TARDIS or some sort of device like Jack and Sylvain and the rest of the Time Agents had had. But she looked at the fashions around her-and at the curious looks some people gave her as they went by-and concluded that she was either sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, or she was so far in the future that they had regressed back to the 1960s or 1970s. Always difficult to know these things.
But she’d been traveling long enough to know not to panic. So she didn’t have her mobile, so she couldn’t ring anyone up. There were surely other ways to get in touch with them, other ways for them to figure out where she was. She had an entire family of time travelers to help her, surely they would show up in no time. And, until then, she had a bit of money in her pocket that she could use to buy food and stuff. Maybe it wasn’t quite the right era of money, but she hoped it would be close enough.
First things first. She went in search of a newsagent’s to ascertain the date. Which was 1969, confirming her guess. She was momentarily pleased with herself, and then realized that she should have known right away that she was in 1969, because she’d left a message for the Doctor on the wall of their house that that was where she was.
Now the cryptic message made perfect sense. All she had to do, she thought, was go to the house and leave the message and the TARDIS would probably show up immediately, once she had done in the present what she was supposed to have done in the past so that she could be found in the future. Or something.
She managed to convince a cab driver to take her to Wester Drumlins and to accept her futuristic money as payment. He looked dubious about the legitimacy of the money, but she fluttered her eyelashes a bit and that still counted for something, thank God.
Someone was in the process of fixing up the house, but the work looked halted when Rose got there, as if they’d lost interest in the process. She picked her way around piles of construction debris and the detritus that the workmen had left behind, heading toward the room where she’d discovered the message decades in the future. The walls of the room were bare, and she knew they were eventually going to be covered by wallpaper. With her message intact underneath it.
She stood in the middle of the room and regarded the blank wall and wondered what she was going to write the message with. She wished she’d thought to bring something with her to write with. A piece of charcoal, or something. It had looked like charcoal, hadn’t it?
The step on the hallway outside the room startled her, and she looked around for a weapon. She really hadn’t thought ahead at all. There was an abandoned piece of wood in the corner, and she grabbed it up, preparing to swing it at whoever appeared, and hoping that whoever appeared was just a stray cat.
It wasn’t a stray cat. Tall and thin, he leaned against the doorjamb, crossing his ankles, and held up a piece of charcoal. “Look what I brought you,” the Doctor said.
She dropped the wood and launched herself on him with an enthusiastic kiss. “You got here before I could even leave you the message!” she exclaimed, her arms draped around his neck.
“Wellllllll,” he said. “Sort of.”
She tipped her head at him. “What’s that mean? ‘Sort of’?”
“I…don’t quite have the TARDIS.”
“Where’s the TARDIS?”
“It’s…you know…” He fidgeted a bit.
“You got here the same way I got here,” she realized.
“I did,” he confirmed.
“And just how is that?”
“Weeping Angels, I think.”
“What are those?”
“A very ancient species of aliens that are quantum-locked as long as they’re being observed-”
“Let’s skip the part where you babble at me and I don’t understand and get to the part where you put it in normal terms.”
“Living statues.”
“Living statues?”
“Basically.”
“Oh,” said Rose, comprehension dawning. “Statues of angels. They were in the garden.”
“There you go. Exactamundo.” He winced. “Or something. I keep saying words like that; we’ve really got to put a stop to that, Rose.”
“We’ll work on that later. So how do we get back without a TARDIS?”
“Luckily, we have children, all of whom have TARDISes. I’m broadcasting a message to them; they should be here any minute. In the meantime, you have to go leave a message of your own.” He nodded his head in the direction of the wall.
She took the charcoal out of his hand and regarded the wall. “Where do you think the message was? About here?” She indicated a spot on the wall.
“Just write it. It’ll be in the perfect spot, because you’ve already done it.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Makes perfect sense to me.”
She looked over at him. He was settling himself on the floor, back against the wall near the windows, looking completely unconcerned by their predicament. She took a step forward and held the charcoal to the wall.
“I don’t think the message was there,” he said.
Rose sighed and ignored him and wrote Doctor-1969 Love, Rose.
“There.” She took a step back and regarded her handiwork. “How’s that?”
“Top banana,” he said.
“Now what do we do?”
“Now we wait.”
She went and sat beside him on the floor, snuggling against him.
“Waiting’s boring, isn’t it?” he said, after a minute.
Rose smiled and shifted her head, breathing against his neck. “Don’t think of it as waiting. Think of it as an opportunity.”
“An opportunity for what?” he asked.
She took his earlobe into his mouth and sucked.
“Oh,” he said, as she shifted to straddle across his lap. “An opportunity for that.” She slid his tie off of him, flinging it across the room. “The kids are going to kill you if they walk in on…opportunizing.”
“Not a word.” She pushed his suit jacket off of him.
“It’s a word of sorts.”
“Tell the kids to give us five minutes.”
“Five minutes?” he squeaked, indignantly.
“Shut up,” she said, and kissed him.
***
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Fortuna decided. “One of us is going to go get Dad, because he’ll know what to do.”
“This is an excellent plan,” drawled Brem. “How are we going to find Dad?”
“We know he’s in 1969,” Fortuna pointed out.
“When in 1969?” Brem countered.
“Can’t you just, you know, ask him, with that weird mind thing you lot do?” asked Sylvain.
“He’s gone a bit fuzzy,” said Brem.
“What does that mean?”
“Could mean anything,” said Fortuna. “We’re not especially good telepaths; we don’t do it very often, so the lack of practice sometimes interferes with us.”
“Well, we know they have to come back here,” remarked Sylvain. “Because your mother writes this note.”
“I could just keep popping up in this room during 1969, see if I can catch them,” Brem suggested.
“Fortuna’s a better pilot than you,” Sylvain told him.
“That I don’t deny, but we don’t have any coordinates for this. I can hit a year. And, you know, a rough locale.”
“And you could take me home,” said Aurelia, firmly. “Because I have had enough of all of this.”
***
“So.” The Doctor stared at the mildewing ceiling over their head. “Now we’re back to waiting.”
“Mm-hmm,” mumbled Rose next to him. She’d wrapped herself up in his coat and looked as if she were ready to fall asleep.
He did not want her to fall asleep. In the TARDIS, he had lots to distract him while Rose slept. Here, the only thing he had to distract him was Rose herself. If she went to sleep, there would be nothing, only the impossibly slow crawl of time.
“We should have sex again,” he decided.
“We should save that for an hour from now when you’re really bored,” said Rose, dryly. “We should put the wallpaper up.”
“The wallpaper?” He sounded as if she had suddenly begun speaking in tongues, using words that didn’t make sense to him.
“Yes. In the future, the wallpaper covers my note. What if the workmen come in tomorrow and find my note and wash it away?”
“They won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because they didn’t.”
“Maybe they didn’t because we’d already covered it with the wallpaper.”
The Doctor sighed and rolled into a standing position, studying the wall critically. “I don’t know how to put up wallpaper,” he admitted.
“I’ve noticed,” remarked Rose, following suit. “Isn’t there a setting on the sonic or something?”
“A wallpaper setting? Why would I need that? The TARDIS takes care of her own walls.”
“Well. I think probably you don’t put on wallpaper whilst naked. That’s probably the first step, getting dressed.”
“I already don’t like this wallpaper thing,” said the Doctor.
***
He was, unsurprisingly, terrible at putting up wallpaper. He could not be bothered to put it on straight, or to put it on thoroughly. Rose followed after him, adding more paste so that the corners would stick. “No wonder this comes down so easily in our future,” she told him.
“Oi,” he said, good-naturedly. “If you’re not careful, I’ll paste you to the wall.”
“Which would be fine, as I would easily be able to walk away, as you are terrible at actually pasting things to the wall.”
“I would be thorough with you,” he promised. “Aren’t I always?”
She smiled and pressed some air bubbles out of the wallpaper. “Indeed.”
The afternoon was shifting into evening, and it was growing too dark in the room for them to work. The Doctor sonicked the lights on for them, and they worked a little longer in companionable silence, until the wall was done. For a given value of “done,” thought Rose, regarding the crooked and bedraggled nature of it. Oh, well.
“It’s a good thing I don’t love you for your home improvement skills,” she told him.
Settling back onto the floor against the wall, he half-shrugged, which she interpreted as yes, it is.
“Now I wish the kids would hurry up. I’m starving. They get their punctuality from you, you know.” She settled against him.
“I know,” he agreed, easily.
They were silent for a moment. The Doctor felt Rose fit herself against him, their angles smoothed into interlocking pieces. It was like erosion, thought the Doctor. Years of finding this fit, and their bodies had eventually worn themselves into it. If they ever lost the other-an unthinkable thought, that-their bodies would bear the evidence of the absence, a geological record of the influence.
He pressed his nose against her hair. “I would wait, here, forever, so long as I had you to wait with,” he told her, hoarsely.
She shifted, looking up at him in surprise, disturbing the fit of them. “Where’s this coming from?”
“Nowhere, just…” He drew his knuckles lightly across the curve of her cheek. “Just, if I had to wait, if we were stuck here and we had to wait, it would be okay.”
She was about to answer him, her mouth open to do it, when the unmistakable sound of a TARDIS filled the air around them, and there, blocking the doorway, a red TARDIS materialized.
Brem opened the door and looked at his parents. “Finally,” he said.
***
“It’s Weeping Angels,” the Doctor told Brem, following Rose into his TARDIS.
“I know that. We figured it out.”
“How’d you figure it out?”
“Sylvain knew about them.”
“Oh. Yes. That makes sense.” They took up position on either side of the console automatically, piloting in tandem.
“So how do we get rid of them?”
“No idea.”
Brem looked across at him in disbelief. “No idea?” he echoed.
“I’ve never run into them before,” the Doctor defended himself.
The TARDIS landed with a half-hearted crash that barely threw them off-balance, and they opened the door onto a dark, empty room.
“Where are we?” the Doctor asked.
“Oops. Wrong room,” said Brem, and closed the TARDIS door and went back to the console and made a couple of adjustments.
“Why didn’t you send Fortuna to come and get us?” complained the Doctor.
“Because I had a stop to make first.”
“A stop?” repeated Rose. “You stopped somewhere before you came to get us?”
Brem looked at her blankly. “Well. Yeah. I had to. There was no room in here, what with the horses and everything. Anyway, it’s a time machine.”
Rose looked at the Doctor accusingly. “He is so much like you.”
“Moving on.” The Doctor cleared his throat, and Brem’s TARDIS landed again, a bit more energetically this time.
When they picked themselves up and opened the door, they were in the right room, and Sylvain, Fortuna, and Jackie were standing at the windows staring fixedly out at the assembled Weeping Angels.
“Brem?” asked Fortuna, without looking away from the windows.
“Yeah. I’ve got them. Although I had to try a couple dozen times. You could have been more specific with the date than just ‘1969.’”
“I didn’t know any more specifics than that,” the Doctor said.
“I did,” admitted Rose. “But my note just said ‘1969,’ I didn’t want to change that!”
The Doctor stood in front of the windows and frowned at the Weeping Angels. “So.” He turned to the rest of the people in the room, deciding they had the watching of the statues well in hand. “Any ideas?”
“That’s why we went to get you,” Fortuna pointed out.
“I’ve never run into them before. Sylvain, what did they tell you about them in Time Agent training?”
“Not to run into any Weeping Angels.”
“And what if you did?”
“You weren’t supposed to blink.”
“Okay, but how you were supposed to get rid of them?”
“The training didn’t get that far. I assume that they assumed you’d eventually blink and die, so they didn’t need to get any farther.”
“Welllllll, that’s not very helpful, is it?” The Doctor looked back at the window, trying to think.
“A Complex Space-Time Event would work,” said Sylvain.
“Yes. It would also work to end the universe,” agreed the Doctor.
“True. I’m just saying, that’s the only thing I ever heard of that could kill a Weeping Angel.”
“But we don’t need to kill a Weeping Angel,” said the Doctor, slowly. “We just need to trap a Weeping Angel.”
“Trap one?” said Rose.
“No, trap all of them. We could make a run for it, all of us, back to the TARDIS, but it would leave the Weeping Angels here to wreak havoc on London. But if we trap them…”
“How would we do that?” asked Brem. “Someone would have to stay behind to keep staring at them without blinking, and that’s not even possible.”
“They’re living things,” said the Doctor.
“Yes,” said Brem. “We know. Living statues.”
“No,” Sylvain breathed. “They’re living things. Oh, that’s brilliant.”
“I’m missing it,” said Brem.
“They’ll quantum-lock each other,” Sylvain explained. “If they look at each other. They’ll quantum-lock each other. That’s why they’re always weeping, because they can’t take the risk of accidentally seeing each other. But if we could trick them into seeing each other-”
“Then they’d stay quantum-locked forever,” Brem finished. “Because they’d always have a living thing looking at them. A living statue.”
“Exactly,” said the Doctor.
“How are we going to trick them into looking at each other?” asked Brem.
“We have what they want. We have TARDISes. And do you know what TARDISes do? They disappear.”
There was a moment of silence.
“We should have thought of this ourselves,” commented Fortuna, eventually.
“Rose, get your mother to the TARDIS. The rest of you, you’re going to make a run for your TARDISes when I say. Stay in them until you feel the angels surround you, then de-materialize. They’ll be trapped. Shut off your monitors, otherwise they won’t be able to get to you because you’ll be seeing them through the monitors. Everyone understand the plan?”
“Yes,” said Rose. “Here we go, Mum.”
“What are you going to do?” Fortuna asked.
“I’m going to go last.”
“No, you’re not,” said Brem. “I’m the only one with a TARDIS in this room, I’m going to go last.”
“Brem-” his father began.
“Stop it. I think I can outrun a Weeping Angel a couple of steps.”
“They’re very fast.”
“So am I. I think I’ve got a better shot of outrunning the Weeping Angels in a couple of steps than you do through the house.”
The Doctor frowned and tried to come up with a rebuttal.
“Anyway,” Brem continued, “if the Weeping Angels send me back in time, I’ve got my mobile in my pocket, and I’ll get the exact date for all of you.”
“Fine,” the Doctor agreed, reluctantly. “On the count of three, we’ll go.”
“I’ll stare at them for as long as I can,” said Brem.
“One,” said the Doctor, “two, three, go.”
***
They ran into Jack at a bar on New New Earth (not to be confused with New Earth) and went for drinks together.
The Doctor said, “I will have you know, I went out and got a job and a house.”
Jack lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “Really? And how’d that go?”
“I think it went very well,” the Doctor said.
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, Jack, OCs
Spoilers - I don't think there are any, really, but let's say through "A Good Man Goes to War," just to be safe.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids and their taggers-along, they're all mine.)
Summary - The Doctor wants to buy a house. As usual, what could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Many thanks to chicklet73, who made this better.
Part One - Part Two - Part Three
Part Four
Brem and Fortuna stood in the room and regarded their mother’s note scrawled on the wall.
“1969,” said Fortuna. “Well, it matches what Dad’s saying in our heads.”
“Guys,” interjected Sylvain, from over by the windows.
“It doesn’t make any sense. How could they travel to 1969 when the TARDIS is right here?” asked Brem.
“Guys,” said Sylvain again, more urgently.
“What?” Fortuna turned toward him.
He was staring fixedly out the windows, very still and not moving. “You’ve got a problem,” he said, grimly. “A big problem.”
“What are you talking about?” said Brem. He followed Fortuna over to stand by Sylvain, looking out the window at a cluster of six angel statues. “Have those always been there?” he asked, with mild interest, because he didn’t remember them from before. Really ugly statues, they were. Frankly terrifying. Mum and Dad ought to have them taken away.
“You’ve got Weeping Angels,” said Sylvain, still not looking away from the window. “Lots of Weeping Angels. It’s, like, an infestation of Weeping Angels.”
“What are Weeping Angels?” asked Fortuna.
“Do you really not know?” Sylvain sounded astonished. “Do you see those statues?”
“Yes.”
“Keep your eyes on them. Everyone needs to look at them. All of us. Jackie, you, too.”
“We all need to look at the statues?” Jackie asked, confused, and then, “Oh, but there’re more of them. There weren’t this many yesterday.”
“No. They’re calling their friends. How have you been traveling space and time and no one ever gave you a primer on the Weeping Angels?” Sylvain’s frustration was obvious.
“Wait,” said Brem, slowly, pulling a memory painstakingly from his childhood. “I think I know about these. I think Dad told me…But it was a story. A bedtime story. I was a kid.”
“Your father told you about Weeping Angels as a bedtime story?”
“Living statues, he said. Living statues, but they can only move if no one is looking at them.”
“Right.”
“You can’t blink, Dad said. They’re so fast, if you blink-”
“Exactly.” Sylvain’s voice held finality.
Brem stared out at the Weeping Angels. His eyes were beginning to water from not blinking. He knew they were all looking at the angels, that that should help, but if they happened to all blink at once, or to not pay attention to one of them-
“What happens?” asked Fortuna. “What happens if you blink?”
“Then they get you,” answered Sylvain. “And they rip you out of your time and send you back. Use up the energy of the life you would have had. Kill you nicely. And excruciatingly slowly.”
“Send you back,” repeated Fortuna. “Like to 1969.”
“Right.”
“So the Weeping Angels got Mum and Dad. And now they want to get all of us, too.”
“They don’t want us,” Brem realized. “Why would they want us? They could go get anyone, lots of people around, lots of people who know nothing about Weeping Angels.”
“They want the TARDIS,” Sylvain finished.
“Yes. The energy in the TARDIS, that’s what they want.”
“And now we’ve got three TARDISes here.”
There was a moment of silence. “What are we going to do?” Fortuna asked, finally.
“I’m open to suggestions,” Sylvain replied.
Aurelia said, “I don’t understand what any of you are talking about!”
***
At first when Rose found herself in 1969, she had no idea she was in 1969. Which was understandable, since a millisecond before she’d been standing in her back garden. And then she was on a busy street in a city that was recognizably London but not her London. Rose had done enough time traveling to know when she was looking at another era, but that didn’t make sense: She had never heard of time traveling without a TARDIS or some sort of device like Jack and Sylvain and the rest of the Time Agents had had. But she looked at the fashions around her-and at the curious looks some people gave her as they went by-and concluded that she was either sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, or she was so far in the future that they had regressed back to the 1960s or 1970s. Always difficult to know these things.
But she’d been traveling long enough to know not to panic. So she didn’t have her mobile, so she couldn’t ring anyone up. There were surely other ways to get in touch with them, other ways for them to figure out where she was. She had an entire family of time travelers to help her, surely they would show up in no time. And, until then, she had a bit of money in her pocket that she could use to buy food and stuff. Maybe it wasn’t quite the right era of money, but she hoped it would be close enough.
First things first. She went in search of a newsagent’s to ascertain the date. Which was 1969, confirming her guess. She was momentarily pleased with herself, and then realized that she should have known right away that she was in 1969, because she’d left a message for the Doctor on the wall of their house that that was where she was.
Now the cryptic message made perfect sense. All she had to do, she thought, was go to the house and leave the message and the TARDIS would probably show up immediately, once she had done in the present what she was supposed to have done in the past so that she could be found in the future. Or something.
She managed to convince a cab driver to take her to Wester Drumlins and to accept her futuristic money as payment. He looked dubious about the legitimacy of the money, but she fluttered her eyelashes a bit and that still counted for something, thank God.
Someone was in the process of fixing up the house, but the work looked halted when Rose got there, as if they’d lost interest in the process. She picked her way around piles of construction debris and the detritus that the workmen had left behind, heading toward the room where she’d discovered the message decades in the future. The walls of the room were bare, and she knew they were eventually going to be covered by wallpaper. With her message intact underneath it.
She stood in the middle of the room and regarded the blank wall and wondered what she was going to write the message with. She wished she’d thought to bring something with her to write with. A piece of charcoal, or something. It had looked like charcoal, hadn’t it?
The step on the hallway outside the room startled her, and she looked around for a weapon. She really hadn’t thought ahead at all. There was an abandoned piece of wood in the corner, and she grabbed it up, preparing to swing it at whoever appeared, and hoping that whoever appeared was just a stray cat.
It wasn’t a stray cat. Tall and thin, he leaned against the doorjamb, crossing his ankles, and held up a piece of charcoal. “Look what I brought you,” the Doctor said.
She dropped the wood and launched herself on him with an enthusiastic kiss. “You got here before I could even leave you the message!” she exclaimed, her arms draped around his neck.
“Wellllllll,” he said. “Sort of.”
She tipped her head at him. “What’s that mean? ‘Sort of’?”
“I…don’t quite have the TARDIS.”
“Where’s the TARDIS?”
“It’s…you know…” He fidgeted a bit.
“You got here the same way I got here,” she realized.
“I did,” he confirmed.
“And just how is that?”
“Weeping Angels, I think.”
“What are those?”
“A very ancient species of aliens that are quantum-locked as long as they’re being observed-”
“Let’s skip the part where you babble at me and I don’t understand and get to the part where you put it in normal terms.”
“Living statues.”
“Living statues?”
“Basically.”
“Oh,” said Rose, comprehension dawning. “Statues of angels. They were in the garden.”
“There you go. Exactamundo.” He winced. “Or something. I keep saying words like that; we’ve really got to put a stop to that, Rose.”
“We’ll work on that later. So how do we get back without a TARDIS?”
“Luckily, we have children, all of whom have TARDISes. I’m broadcasting a message to them; they should be here any minute. In the meantime, you have to go leave a message of your own.” He nodded his head in the direction of the wall.
She took the charcoal out of his hand and regarded the wall. “Where do you think the message was? About here?” She indicated a spot on the wall.
“Just write it. It’ll be in the perfect spot, because you’ve already done it.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Makes perfect sense to me.”
She looked over at him. He was settling himself on the floor, back against the wall near the windows, looking completely unconcerned by their predicament. She took a step forward and held the charcoal to the wall.
“I don’t think the message was there,” he said.
Rose sighed and ignored him and wrote Doctor-1969 Love, Rose.
“There.” She took a step back and regarded her handiwork. “How’s that?”
“Top banana,” he said.
“Now what do we do?”
“Now we wait.”
She went and sat beside him on the floor, snuggling against him.
“Waiting’s boring, isn’t it?” he said, after a minute.
Rose smiled and shifted her head, breathing against his neck. “Don’t think of it as waiting. Think of it as an opportunity.”
“An opportunity for what?” he asked.
She took his earlobe into his mouth and sucked.
“Oh,” he said, as she shifted to straddle across his lap. “An opportunity for that.” She slid his tie off of him, flinging it across the room. “The kids are going to kill you if they walk in on…opportunizing.”
“Not a word.” She pushed his suit jacket off of him.
“It’s a word of sorts.”
“Tell the kids to give us five minutes.”
“Five minutes?” he squeaked, indignantly.
“Shut up,” she said, and kissed him.
***
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Fortuna decided. “One of us is going to go get Dad, because he’ll know what to do.”
“This is an excellent plan,” drawled Brem. “How are we going to find Dad?”
“We know he’s in 1969,” Fortuna pointed out.
“When in 1969?” Brem countered.
“Can’t you just, you know, ask him, with that weird mind thing you lot do?” asked Sylvain.
“He’s gone a bit fuzzy,” said Brem.
“What does that mean?”
“Could mean anything,” said Fortuna. “We’re not especially good telepaths; we don’t do it very often, so the lack of practice sometimes interferes with us.”
“Well, we know they have to come back here,” remarked Sylvain. “Because your mother writes this note.”
“I could just keep popping up in this room during 1969, see if I can catch them,” Brem suggested.
“Fortuna’s a better pilot than you,” Sylvain told him.
“That I don’t deny, but we don’t have any coordinates for this. I can hit a year. And, you know, a rough locale.”
“And you could take me home,” said Aurelia, firmly. “Because I have had enough of all of this.”
***
“So.” The Doctor stared at the mildewing ceiling over their head. “Now we’re back to waiting.”
“Mm-hmm,” mumbled Rose next to him. She’d wrapped herself up in his coat and looked as if she were ready to fall asleep.
He did not want her to fall asleep. In the TARDIS, he had lots to distract him while Rose slept. Here, the only thing he had to distract him was Rose herself. If she went to sleep, there would be nothing, only the impossibly slow crawl of time.
“We should have sex again,” he decided.
“We should save that for an hour from now when you’re really bored,” said Rose, dryly. “We should put the wallpaper up.”
“The wallpaper?” He sounded as if she had suddenly begun speaking in tongues, using words that didn’t make sense to him.
“Yes. In the future, the wallpaper covers my note. What if the workmen come in tomorrow and find my note and wash it away?”
“They won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because they didn’t.”
“Maybe they didn’t because we’d already covered it with the wallpaper.”
The Doctor sighed and rolled into a standing position, studying the wall critically. “I don’t know how to put up wallpaper,” he admitted.
“I’ve noticed,” remarked Rose, following suit. “Isn’t there a setting on the sonic or something?”
“A wallpaper setting? Why would I need that? The TARDIS takes care of her own walls.”
“Well. I think probably you don’t put on wallpaper whilst naked. That’s probably the first step, getting dressed.”
“I already don’t like this wallpaper thing,” said the Doctor.
***
He was, unsurprisingly, terrible at putting up wallpaper. He could not be bothered to put it on straight, or to put it on thoroughly. Rose followed after him, adding more paste so that the corners would stick. “No wonder this comes down so easily in our future,” she told him.
“Oi,” he said, good-naturedly. “If you’re not careful, I’ll paste you to the wall.”
“Which would be fine, as I would easily be able to walk away, as you are terrible at actually pasting things to the wall.”
“I would be thorough with you,” he promised. “Aren’t I always?”
She smiled and pressed some air bubbles out of the wallpaper. “Indeed.”
The afternoon was shifting into evening, and it was growing too dark in the room for them to work. The Doctor sonicked the lights on for them, and they worked a little longer in companionable silence, until the wall was done. For a given value of “done,” thought Rose, regarding the crooked and bedraggled nature of it. Oh, well.
“It’s a good thing I don’t love you for your home improvement skills,” she told him.
Settling back onto the floor against the wall, he half-shrugged, which she interpreted as yes, it is.
“Now I wish the kids would hurry up. I’m starving. They get their punctuality from you, you know.” She settled against him.
“I know,” he agreed, easily.
They were silent for a moment. The Doctor felt Rose fit herself against him, their angles smoothed into interlocking pieces. It was like erosion, thought the Doctor. Years of finding this fit, and their bodies had eventually worn themselves into it. If they ever lost the other-an unthinkable thought, that-their bodies would bear the evidence of the absence, a geological record of the influence.
He pressed his nose against her hair. “I would wait, here, forever, so long as I had you to wait with,” he told her, hoarsely.
She shifted, looking up at him in surprise, disturbing the fit of them. “Where’s this coming from?”
“Nowhere, just…” He drew his knuckles lightly across the curve of her cheek. “Just, if I had to wait, if we were stuck here and we had to wait, it would be okay.”
She was about to answer him, her mouth open to do it, when the unmistakable sound of a TARDIS filled the air around them, and there, blocking the doorway, a red TARDIS materialized.
Brem opened the door and looked at his parents. “Finally,” he said.
***
“It’s Weeping Angels,” the Doctor told Brem, following Rose into his TARDIS.
“I know that. We figured it out.”
“How’d you figure it out?”
“Sylvain knew about them.”
“Oh. Yes. That makes sense.” They took up position on either side of the console automatically, piloting in tandem.
“So how do we get rid of them?”
“No idea.”
Brem looked across at him in disbelief. “No idea?” he echoed.
“I’ve never run into them before,” the Doctor defended himself.
The TARDIS landed with a half-hearted crash that barely threw them off-balance, and they opened the door onto a dark, empty room.
“Where are we?” the Doctor asked.
“Oops. Wrong room,” said Brem, and closed the TARDIS door and went back to the console and made a couple of adjustments.
“Why didn’t you send Fortuna to come and get us?” complained the Doctor.
“Because I had a stop to make first.”
“A stop?” repeated Rose. “You stopped somewhere before you came to get us?”
Brem looked at her blankly. “Well. Yeah. I had to. There was no room in here, what with the horses and everything. Anyway, it’s a time machine.”
Rose looked at the Doctor accusingly. “He is so much like you.”
“Moving on.” The Doctor cleared his throat, and Brem’s TARDIS landed again, a bit more energetically this time.
When they picked themselves up and opened the door, they were in the right room, and Sylvain, Fortuna, and Jackie were standing at the windows staring fixedly out at the assembled Weeping Angels.
“Brem?” asked Fortuna, without looking away from the windows.
“Yeah. I’ve got them. Although I had to try a couple dozen times. You could have been more specific with the date than just ‘1969.’”
“I didn’t know any more specifics than that,” the Doctor said.
“I did,” admitted Rose. “But my note just said ‘1969,’ I didn’t want to change that!”
The Doctor stood in front of the windows and frowned at the Weeping Angels. “So.” He turned to the rest of the people in the room, deciding they had the watching of the statues well in hand. “Any ideas?”
“That’s why we went to get you,” Fortuna pointed out.
“I’ve never run into them before. Sylvain, what did they tell you about them in Time Agent training?”
“Not to run into any Weeping Angels.”
“And what if you did?”
“You weren’t supposed to blink.”
“Okay, but how you were supposed to get rid of them?”
“The training didn’t get that far. I assume that they assumed you’d eventually blink and die, so they didn’t need to get any farther.”
“Welllllll, that’s not very helpful, is it?” The Doctor looked back at the window, trying to think.
“A Complex Space-Time Event would work,” said Sylvain.
“Yes. It would also work to end the universe,” agreed the Doctor.
“True. I’m just saying, that’s the only thing I ever heard of that could kill a Weeping Angel.”
“But we don’t need to kill a Weeping Angel,” said the Doctor, slowly. “We just need to trap a Weeping Angel.”
“Trap one?” said Rose.
“No, trap all of them. We could make a run for it, all of us, back to the TARDIS, but it would leave the Weeping Angels here to wreak havoc on London. But if we trap them…”
“How would we do that?” asked Brem. “Someone would have to stay behind to keep staring at them without blinking, and that’s not even possible.”
“They’re living things,” said the Doctor.
“Yes,” said Brem. “We know. Living statues.”
“No,” Sylvain breathed. “They’re living things. Oh, that’s brilliant.”
“I’m missing it,” said Brem.
“They’ll quantum-lock each other,” Sylvain explained. “If they look at each other. They’ll quantum-lock each other. That’s why they’re always weeping, because they can’t take the risk of accidentally seeing each other. But if we could trick them into seeing each other-”
“Then they’d stay quantum-locked forever,” Brem finished. “Because they’d always have a living thing looking at them. A living statue.”
“Exactly,” said the Doctor.
“How are we going to trick them into looking at each other?” asked Brem.
“We have what they want. We have TARDISes. And do you know what TARDISes do? They disappear.”
There was a moment of silence.
“We should have thought of this ourselves,” commented Fortuna, eventually.
“Rose, get your mother to the TARDIS. The rest of you, you’re going to make a run for your TARDISes when I say. Stay in them until you feel the angels surround you, then de-materialize. They’ll be trapped. Shut off your monitors, otherwise they won’t be able to get to you because you’ll be seeing them through the monitors. Everyone understand the plan?”
“Yes,” said Rose. “Here we go, Mum.”
“What are you going to do?” Fortuna asked.
“I’m going to go last.”
“No, you’re not,” said Brem. “I’m the only one with a TARDIS in this room, I’m going to go last.”
“Brem-” his father began.
“Stop it. I think I can outrun a Weeping Angel a couple of steps.”
“They’re very fast.”
“So am I. I think I’ve got a better shot of outrunning the Weeping Angels in a couple of steps than you do through the house.”
The Doctor frowned and tried to come up with a rebuttal.
“Anyway,” Brem continued, “if the Weeping Angels send me back in time, I’ve got my mobile in my pocket, and I’ll get the exact date for all of you.”
“Fine,” the Doctor agreed, reluctantly. “On the count of three, we’ll go.”
“I’ll stare at them for as long as I can,” said Brem.
“One,” said the Doctor, “two, three, go.”
***
They ran into Jack at a bar on New New Earth (not to be confused with New Earth) and went for drinks together.
The Doctor said, “I will have you know, I went out and got a job and a house.”
Jack lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “Really? And how’d that go?”
“I think it went very well,” the Doctor said.