Eventually, the Doctor stopped shaking and straightened. He had no idea how long he had been standing there, and he was absolutely certain that that question didn't matter.
He could feel time. All Time Lords can. They can feel it passing over their skin like a gentle breeze. They can see moments in flux and fixed moments and everything in between. For them, it was as simple as standing there.
And, standing there, the Doctor could feel that something was terribly wrong with time. It was still moving, that much was true. It continued flowing at the same speed which it had before. But it flowed in from different pasts, pasts which hadn't happened until right at that very moment, at which point they had always been, and the past that he remembered, the past which should have happened, was lost. And so, standing there, the Doctor watched as the buildings flickered and changed, as he stood on the pavement – on the street – in the square – on a bridge – on the pavement. The only thing that was solid and unchanging was the tower.
Something was very wrong with time, and it was causing him physical pain to stand there while the past changed over and over again.
If time breaks and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Only he could tell, he knew. The boy who had led him to the magic shop – the reason that he had doubled back on himself so many times was because he had been walking down roads that no longer existed, taking paths that no one had ever made. They all belonged to an orphaned past, a fragment with no future. Far from taking the road less travelled, he'd tried to take one which, now, had never been there at all.
And that was just the beginning. It was speeding up, now, as much as these things could. Time was breaking, and he was the only one who noticed. Maybe that was why he was here. It was as good an explanation as any. It might even go some to way to explaining why the TARDIS couldn't see the universe. If time was breaking, then it would be even more affected than he was. Plus, what with the relationship between time and space-
"You new in town?"
It was the woman that the Doctor had briefly met before. The one who had had his chalk and then, suddenly, never had. She was wearing different clothes than she had been before, and her hair was shorter, but the eyes were the same. They were too tired for someone that young.
The Doctor decided to skip the pleasantries. "I need to know about the angels."
The woman tilted her head and looked at him. Her expression didn't change, but there was a strong impression that she was sizing him up. "Why?" Her tone was guarded.
"Because, if they're what I think they are, then they are very, very dangerous. Something is happening and they are right in the middle of it. Them and this tower."
At the mention of the tower, the girl flinched slightly. She looked at it as though she couldn't avoid doing so, even though every instinct in her was telling her not to look. She went pale, paler even than before. "You've seen them before. The angels."
The Doctor nodded. "Yes. I think so. Somewhere… far away. They killed a lot of people. Please, can you tell me what you know?"
Ask them about the angels.
"You know, the people in this town call them guardian angels?" The woman said in a tone of such bitter derision that the Doctor wondered what could possibly have happened to this woman, this girl of barely fifteen, that made her sound so old. "After the fire, and... after she left, everything's been pretty quiet. Only the vampires have been active, and that's because most of them are too stupid to figure out what will happen when she gets back. But when they hunt, when they're about to kill – there they are. The angels. They touch them and they're gone. The vampires. We don't know what happens to them. No one ever sees the angels move. They're just there, just in the nick of time. Guardian angels, saving people from the vampires."
"You sound like that isn't a good thing." The Doctor said gently.
The woman shrugged angrily. "Yeah, well. We have a bad track record with things that seem like they want to keep the town safe. We keep an eye on them."
"You don't trust them." The Doctor said. He didn't mention that keeping an eye on something that could be half way on the other side of town in the blink of an eye was futile. It would take more than one person to guard against a Weeping Angel. "Even though they seem to be saving people. Why?"
"Because she made them."
"Who?" No one made the Weeping Angels. They weren't made. They were ideas, ideas that had taken form. They weren't made any more than a TARDIS was.
She looked at him incredulously. "You really don't know, do you? You must be really new. Well, trust me when I say that the best thing for you would be to get so far away from this town that to get any farther away you'd start coming back. And maybe even that isn't far enough."
"Who is she?"
"My sister." She said, as though that explained everything, as though there was not only nothing more that needed to be said but that that was all that could be said. As though everything the Doctor needed to know was contained in those two words.
The Doctor stood up. He hadn't been sitting a moment earlier, hadn't even been inside, but not only was he there now but he had been for the past half hour or so. The conversation he had had outside in the square was just a fragment lost in time – now he'd had a slightly different conversation in a different place with girl with different clothes and different hair and different makeup but the same old eyes.
And then, before the Doctor had a chance to say anything else, there was a knock at the door.
