Originally beta'd by SamiWami and maven13, before I went and rearranged some stuff...


Chapter 2 – What Went Around Comes Around

Martha glanced away from the Doctor's worried face to take in their surroundings. It was weird. It certainly seemed like the middle of London; but she'd never heard of half the shops, the cars and buses were all monstrous gas-guzzlers, and there was nothing retro about the bell-bottoms and other fashions displayed on the pedestrians. "I really should've gone to see Leo, first," she said at last.

Their eyes met again and the Doctor's expression seemed to clear. He grinned at her as he sat himself next to her on the bench and began shifting the former timey-wimey detector in his arms, searching his coat pockets. "If I'm right," he said, up to his armpit in an interior pocket of his overcoat, "this is all just part of the plan." He withdrew a purple folder with a shout of triumph. "Thank you, Sally Sparrow!"

"You said that name before," Martha observed as he dumped the detector into the pocket from which he'd just pulled the folder. "Who's she?"

"Remember the hatching? London, 2008?" the Doctor asked.

Oh, Martha remembered. She doubted she'd ever forget. Seeing the Doctor knocked unconscious was bad enough, but... "Ya mean when I had to drag you back to the TARDIS? In my heels and skirt with you all covered in rotten dragon egg? That hatchin'?"

"Sorry?" the Doctor said in a small voice.

Martha just shrugged it off with a smile. "Jus' par for the course, with you."

"But yes," the Doctor went on, "Sally Sparrow, she's the one who held us up when we first got out of the cab," he explained. "Said I'd need this when I got stuck in 1969, and to make sure I had it with me."

"So, we are stuck." Martha sighed, and then really looked at the folder, noticing a photograph through the transparent cover. "Is that - that's one of the Angels," she said, "the same as the Angels in that room."

The Doctor nodded. "Took me too long to place them," he said thoughtfully. "I knew they looked familiar, but I was trying to remember when I'd met them before. Turns out I never had. I didn't think of this 'til it was too late, obviously."

"Obviously," Martha agreed. "What else is in the folder?" she asked. "How do we get back to the TARDIS?"

"No idea!" the Doctor said cheerfully. "Never opened it. Wasn't sure I should," he added. "From the way Ms. Sparrow was talking, it sounded like a circular paradox. And with those," he said knowingly, "the less you know, the safer things usually are all around." Then he shrugged. "And I sort of forgot about it after the dragons."

"But we can open it now, right?" Martha asked. "If she said you were gonna need it, now's what she gave it to you for."

"I do believe you're right," the Doctor told her. He looked around at the nearby shops then stood up from the bench. "How'd you feel about grabbing a bite to eat?"


It took the Doctor some more searching of his various pockets, but he eventually pulled out a fiver from 1968. It was tucked within a wad of currency from 1970 that he hadn't even realized he still possessed. Fortunately, it was enough to get a large portion of fish, chips and change (which is more than could have been said for 2007), and he and Martha brought their small lunch to a table by the front window of the chippy.

"Here goes," the Doctor said, opening the purple folder and shaking the contents out onto the table.

Amongst the papers, photographs and envelopes was a small object that clinked onto the plastic surface.

"My TARDIS key!" the Doctor realized, picking up the key, still threaded onto the string he had used at the house. "Well that's a load off my mind, I'll tell you. I was afraid the Angels might've gotten it."

"How'd it get in there?" Martha gasped.

"Sally Sparrow," the Doctor told her, returning the key to its rightful pocket. "Definitely a circular paradox," he said as they began sorting through the documents between bites of their dinner.

"Explain that again?" Martha said as she picked at her chips. " I mean, I've heard of 'em, but I've never quite gotten my head around the sci-fi -"

"Sci-fact," the Doctor corrected. "You're in one, right now."

"Right," she allowed, "but what started it?" she asked. "When did it begin? You had that key in your pocket in the folder, at the same time you were holdin' it up in front of the Angel statues in that house; you jus' didn't know it."

"And Sally Sparrow," the Doctor answered, "is going to get that key and put it into a purple folder just like this one, and hand it to us about a year later - for her - when we visited for the hatching."

"But, I know that's why it's called 'circular'," Martha responded, "but where's it come from? What caused it?"

The Doctor waved his hand, dismissively. "Time travel makes causality a little... wibbly," he told her. "Just... trust me. One of my many skills as a Time Lord just happens to be recognizing paradoxes such as this one, and figuring out how to close the loop. It'll never end," he said; but at Martha's startled, hopeless look explained, "but our part in it will, once we get back to the TARDIS."

Martha took the photographs he passed to her, arranging them one-handed on the table in front of her, while she ate. "Look at this," she said ten minutes into their task, picking one of them up to show him.

It looked to the Doctor like graffiti under wallpaper. Wallpaper from - "Wester Drumlins," he said after he swallowed his last bite of dinner.

"That's what it says," Martha told him, and flipped the photo around to show him the note scrawled on the back. "Eighth of June 2007."

"Six days after we were there," the Doctor calculated. "Except I didn't notice that then, did you?"

"No," Martha admitted, "but look at the signature. 'Love from the Doctor, 1969.'"

"Add that to our 'to do' list, then," he said, and put the photo on top of the pile of papers to his right.

"'To do'?" asked Martha.

"Ye-ah," the Doctor drawled, looking at the various items on their table, "it seems like we've got our work cut out for us to complete the paradox."

"Complete how? To get the TARDIS back?" she asked.

"That's the hope," he answered. "At first blush, it looks like Sally Sparrow was able to compile this folder thanks to clues we left for her in 1969. And we were - or will be - able to do all that because of the folder she gave me. We just follow the directions to make sure everything happens the way it happened."

Martha nodded. "So, what's the first step?"

The Doctor gestured at the table. "This."

"Right," she said, returning the photograph to its place.

Minutes ticked agonizingly slowly by while the Doctor reworked his hypotheses with each new document he came across. Thus far, he had narrowed the probabilities to, oh, about three dozen or so.

He read through a letter from Katherine Wainwright, then handed it to Martha. It told him just a little bit more about the Angels, but didn't give him any insight into their current paradoxical predicament.

The Doctor picked up a transcript next, and read it twice over. "Of course," he muttered, wondering why he hadn't pieced it together earlier. "We have been lucky."

"How's that?" Martha asked, looking up distractedly from the letter she'd been reading.

"Very... very lucky." The Doctor repeated, pointing to the transcript in his hand. "They're the Lonely Assassins. Not fairy tales, not two different legends. They're real and they are one in the same."

"What are? The Angels?" asked Martha.

"The Weeping Angels... they're sort of a Time Lord fable," he told her. "They were supposed to be from way back, long before Rassilon even, nearly as old as the universe, they said. But the Lonely Assassins were more of a nightmare. They feed off of the potential energy of their victims' lives. That's why they sent us back in time. Trying to eat up all of the abstract might-have-beens. Unfortunately for them, we probably didn't give them much of a meal, being time-travelers and all. But oh, am I glad that I parked where I did. If they had gotten the TARDIS..." he shuddered.

"What?" Martha prompted.

"They could have wreaked some real havoc," he told her. "Wiped out a star, maybe. Or several."

"Good thing you've got your key back, then," she replied. Then with a gasp, reached down to check her own pocket. "'Kay," Martha told him, relaxing. "I've got mine, too."

The transcript went on the "to do" pile, and the Doctor picked up the next stapled packet of papers. It proved just as fascinating. "'The Mysterious DI Shipton'," he read aloud.

"Who's that?" asked Martha.

"'Born 8 October 1986, Died 9 June 2007, age... 59.'"

"Alright, I can add," Martha said, "an' that's not right."

The Doctor scanned through what seemed to be the detective inspector's personal timeline. "Ah," he said when he reached 2005. "15 July 2005, Assigned to, drum roll please, Wester Drumlins disappearances... 9 June 2007, Escorted Sally Sparrow to the Wester Drumlins impound... 21 March 1969, Owned a flat at a Kensington address for five years... then all the way back through to 9 June 2007, Dies in hospital." The man had had to live his way back to 2007, the Doctor thought gloomily, not at all encouraged.

Martha's mouth was slightly open as she took in what he had read to her. Then she blinked. "March of '69? When is it now? Can we look him up?"

"Sunday the 13th of April, at 4:47 in the afternoon," the Doctor answered, pausing to draw a hand over his face. They had been at this less than half an hour, but it was draining, trying to piece together the full picture of the paradox(es) from this limited supply of information. He flipped the page to see if Martha's idea was a safe one. "It seems like we do run into him," he said, reading over the summary of Billy Shipton's second meeting with Sally Sparrow in 2007. "But that's odd..." he trailed off, double-checking his mental math. "For us to have been sent back to the same year and city, if the Angels work the way I'm thinking they work, it had to be the same Angel," he told Martha. "But we were only sent back thirty-eight years, one month, nineteen days, eighteen hours -"

"Doctor..." Martha said, pleadingly, closing her eyes.

"Right. Sorry. But this makes it sound like DI Shipton arrived..." he glanced up at Martha, "... almost a month before we got here, even though he doesn't meet the Angels until a week after us."

"So?" Martha prompted.

"So," the Doctor said, mulling it over then nodding his head, "it's still worth checking out, but it might turn out to be part of a larger paradox."

"Great," Martha answered, popping the last of her chips into her mouth and picking up a napkin. "Anythin' about when we get the TARDIS back?"

The Doctor didn't exactly want to speak aloud the point that had him the most concerned. From what he could tell, nothing here actually confirmed they would get the TARDIS back. "More 'how' than 'when'," he said vaguely, having finished reading the last of Sally Sparrow's notes. "She's not sent back by an Angel, so it's a matter of the programming on the control disk that'll determine when and where we find her. Still, it looks like we'll be here a little while." He braced himself and then broke the news. "You're gonna need a job."

"Funny, that," Martha said without missing a beat, "sounded like you said 'you'. But you must've said 'we'."

"We're gonna need more money than a few coins in change," he explained, avoiding her eyes.

"An' you've got two hands," she countered. "You gettin' a job, too?"

"I've got other things to do to make this all work." He picked through the papers again to prove his point. "I'm gonna have to rebuild the timey-wimey detector for one. Program a hologram and activation protocol for the TARDIS, create a control disk..." he risked a glance back at Martha, whose narrowed eyes told him she wasn't quite buying it. "That's all going to take time and money. Besides," he said, showing her a line in the transcript, "it says here you're working in a shop, and we've got to complete the paradox according to the directions or risk expanding it even further."

Martha took the transcript and read her line aloud."'We're stuck. All of space and time, he promised me. Now, I've got a job in a shop. I've got to support him!'" She scanned the page, then held the stack out to the Doctor accusingly. "I don't see where it says what you're doin'," she told him. "You could've gotten a job and just not complained..." she trailed off and looked at him, as if appraising him. "Naw, you're right," she said, nodding. "No way you'd've been workin' a normal, borin' job and not been complainin' about it."

The Doctor snatched the transcript back, feigning insult. She was, after all, spot on. But he wasn't about to argue the point if it let him off the hook - er, left him free to work on his side of things.

Martha sank her head onto her hand. "Where'm I gonna find a job?" she asked, although it seemed she was more musing to herself than asking the Doctor's advice. "A shop. Does this count? Think they're hirin' here?" She sighed. "Mum'd be so proud; uni was s'posed to keep me from havin' to fry chips."

Unable to meet her despondent gaze, he looked back out through the window - and just narrowly managed not to laugh out loud.

"What?" Martha asked.

He nodded across the street over her shoulder at the building that had just caught his eye.

Martha twisted around to follow his line of sight. "What, Henriks?" she asked, turning back to face him.

"Help wanted, too," he observed.

Martha slumped in her seat, not nearly as encouraged as the Doctor had hoped.


To be continued...

Next chapter'll explain Billy a bit more (no, he didn't actually get sent back a month before they arrived).

Stay tuned; reality's about to really begin setting in, soon :)

PS - If you've ever had questions about "Blink", please send them my way. I want to make sure I cover all applicable bases.

PPS - If you missed the story of the above-mentioned dragon-hatching, there's a version with Martha and Rose in Chapter 8 of my "Gridlock" AU.