Short bit on Weeping Angels, after wondering how the angels are trapped forever by staring at each other without "holding the image of an angel and becoming itself an angel." It's paradoxical, if their eyes are beholding each other enough to keep them stone, the eyes are beholding each other enough to create another angel. I suppose they could probably avoid that by looking at each other but not in the eyes, but what if they didn't?
So here it is! This is my first fic ever, so don't judge it too harshly for all that's wrong with it :) reviews would be much appreciated!
To anyone watching, the stone angels of a man and a woman looking into each other's eyes by the fountain on a damp, green, mid-spring evening appear to be simply that- stone carvings, result of an artist or a landscaper's idea of love. Two angels immersed in their stare for eternity. But when people are not watching, something else is going on. For these are not regular stone angels, but living stone creatures- the Weeping Angles, a creature of old in the universe, and something unexpected is happening. As the legends of these creatures tell, "That which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel." And in the eyes of one, beholding her "lover" for all eternity, a new angel is being created.
Hours later into the deep darkness of the night, when no eyes are watching to freeze the process, a new angel is finally about to be born. Angels do not grow physically but they learn much quickly, so they are born unknowing of anything, and full-sized in the image of their parents. In the deep blackness of the night, a third angel appears in the scene, born into a world empty of anything that recognizes her existence. Unable to recognize her parents for who they are to her, she is nameless, knowing nothing but a deep desire, for something still unknown to her.
Unwatched, the newborn angel moves through the shadows to the nearest lighted area, a quieter city neighborhood by the peaceful park of her birth, at the edges of busier city streets. She does not know what she is looking for, she only knows the feeling of lost and cold; that the damp night is chilling to her grey stone figure. She is drawn towards the light, whether by smell or some sense of the Weeping Angels unknown to man, she feels she will find what she seeks where she is headed.
By the time she reaches the street with it's collection of half-worn down houses morning lights are beginning to spread over the horizon, and she keeps to the shadows even more carefully- instinct warning her not to be seen
"Yes, alright dear. I'll do it later! I've got the early shift, I'm gonna be late!" A door slams and she hears the tense voice of a man leaving his house- although she has no name for these things. He slings a bag over his shoulder, heading down this quiet street towards the busier parts of the city. The angel slips away after him, more quickly and silently than one would think a creature of stone could move.
She gets a bit ahead of him, and when he blinks, steps out into his way.
"Oy!" He blinks again in surprise, but this time she stays still. Not knowing why she is even here, she feels an increasingly intense curiosity about this man.
"Never seen the likes of you 'round here before." He says quietly, squinting at her, thinking that a stone carving of her size must not be moved easily, and wondering who discarded her there. "Who's gone and left this out here?"
He looks around, and as he turns away, she stretches out her arms in a flash and reaches for him, knowing now why, but overwhelmed with the sudden desire for contact with this one living being she has met in her short existence.
The instant her fingertips make contact, the shocking exchange would have taken her breath away, had stone any need for breath. For that brief instant, her body had flowed with warmth, with sight, with a million unknown emotions. Happy ones, sad ones. Things she hadn't yet imagined- laughter and kindness, then also things she was familiar with- loneliness, fear, emptiness. She saw everything in his past, and his future still unlived. All those people he would have met, would have loved or hated, all those experiences he would now never know. Then it was gone, and he was gone, in the tiniest moment.
She stood there in shock, staying until she was unable to move anyway, because the city was coming alive and there always seemed to be eyes on the lone stone angel so unexpectedly placed against the plain street.
After awhile when traffic died down and she darted into a street shadow, it began to sink in what had happened- she knew she had fed off his future, and that he had been sent to another point in time, never to return to the quiet life here he had always known. She knew now she felt less empty, full of the consumption of that life unlived. Yet now that she had experienced that warmth, she knew what she was looking for and felt even more desperate than before to seek it again. Now she knew what a life of not being alone felt like, the companionship and joy found in a human life, and how much could fill that moment of time when she was experiencing it. She needed to find another.
She stayed where she was for the remainder of the day, then as night fell she slipped through the deepening shadows back to the cover of the trees in the park. Afraid to get too close to any of the people in groups, she crept along waiting for a better opportunity to find someone alone.
Back in the streets of the park, a teenage girl was walking home. The angel placed herself ahead on the path, waiting, and felt herself tense with excitement as the girl came towards her. This time, when she reached out, she tried to hold on to the girl, keep her there longer, but the girl slipped away through her fingers just as fast as the last one had, and away through time she went. The same rush of emotions coursed through her as they had before. Warmth and love and moments of lost years filled her heart and mind before fading. Then she was left with nothing but a deep ache for more, an ache that was barely consoled by having just fed.
And so it went, She fed once again that night, but it did not ease the emptiness enough. And she began to realize the curse of what she was, that these lives she was seeing, so full of just that- life- would never resemble her own. Her only fate could ever be this wandering and waiting, hunting and consuming, all for the pursuit of a single moment of pleasure. Always being hungry, so hungry. Starved for touch, for contact, for that infinitesimally small moment it takes to send a being back in time. Feasting on the flash of all those years they will now never see, and feeling what it would have been like for them, with all those friends, loved ones. Before they're gone, off to live a new life, just as full, just as warm. And the angel is left alone again- as cold as the stone she is, waiting until another chance to feed is presented.
And so it went for years. Time passes differently for angels than for men. Both slower and faster, as their dull moments of being frozen stone can make time pass faster, yet the emptiness an hunger in their lives make their time seem much longer. Centuries pass of existing all but entirely alone, never being able to look at another of your kind, and never being able to touch another living soul without losing them instantly. Eventually the desperation turns to bitterness. Unable to stop seeking the addicting ecstatic moment of consuming a human life, and the desperate desire for something never to be truly had, angels become vicious, monstrously jealous of the ones who's lives they are stealing. Eventually after centuries have passed, the angel gets tired. Tired of desire, tired of viciousness and violence. And that's when they begin to seek out another. Together their eyes behold each other- becoming stone forevermore. Then, within the time it takes for stone to crumble and disappear with age, while staring into another of their kind, they begin the life of a new angel. And thus begins the cycle again.