Thanks for the reviews!
To Hush2.0: I am eternally sorry to make you wait. I swear I'm working on it. Once again, I'll ask for a week. If I fail, feel free to threaten me with whatever you'd like.
To Caitlin M: It's been years since I read A Hitchhiker's Guide, so if it is a reference, it came from my subconscious.
It had taken all of his wit and courage, plus an incredible run of good luck, to survive the man-eating dog, an uncharacteristically territorial flock of hens, and the equally defensive codger. The dog had nearly taken a bite out of his backside—a very large bite, as the dog had been as big as a pony—but the old man had been napping in the warm sunlight with his hefty stick across his lap. The only injury the Doctor had sustained had come courtesy of the chickens.
As he hauled himself over the last fence, and the last obstacle in his path, the Doctor reflected back on the chickens. He'd never seen chickens with such a violent streak. He'd barely set foot in the yard, and six of them, a blend of breeds, had attacked him. They'd gone after his legs with beaks and claws, and one had somehow managed to get its feathered head up his pant leg, where it had pecked him hard enough to draw blood. The injury was minor, but it was insulting.
"Bloody chickens. Just for that, I'm eating eggs for breakfast the rest of my life."
The Doctor dropped down on the other side of the fence and took a moment to catch his breath. He was good at running—if he hadn't been, he'd have been permanently dead centuries ago—but fence-hopping and shaking rage-infected chickens out of one's pants did take a toll on one's stamina. Unless he wanted to collapse on top of the angel, he needed a respite.
After taking a few deep breaths and making sure his twin hearts weren't going to quit on him, he decided it was high time to give his blood pressure another massive spike. He was really, really, really looking forward to searching an old bone yard for two weeping angels, and the man one of them used to be married to.
The cemetery wasn't going to get any more appealing, and George's chances of dying horribly weren't going to decrease, either. The Doctor convinced his feet to get moving. They carried him across a narrow, badly-paved street, then across a thin strip of field. He stopped when he came to a waist-high stone wall. Beyond the wall lay the graveyard.
Before he hopped the wall, the Doctor decided to do a little reconnaissance. He scanned the area and was taken in by the quaint church that rested on a slight hill just beyond the cemetery. It really was a lovely bit of architecture. Surely centuries old, the church must have seen so much. So many weddings and funerals, so many generations of people. The Doctor wished he had time to admire it, explore it, get to know it better.
As marvelous and charming as the church was, the Doctor hadn't come here to sight-see. He'd come to rescue George, stop the angels from killing anyone else, and save the world. They were lofty goals, and if he wanted to achieve any of them, he'd better get started.
Taking his eyes off the church and focusing them on the graveyard, the Doctor looked for anything suspicious. He noted plenty of white, weathered stone and a massive yew tree that could have hidden an entire flock of weeping angels. This was not going to be easy.
The Doctor climbed over the stone wall and took another long look around the cemetery. This was the perfect habitat for the most cleverly disguised killer in the universe. There were stone carvings—many of them angels in various poses—everywhere the Doctor looked. Most were harmless, nothing more than horribly inaccurate portrayals done by moderately talented stonemasons. Two, hiding somewhere among the graves, were lethal.
Checking the individual statues would take ages, but the Doctor had no choice. It was either that, or turn his back on the graveyard and wait for something to sneak up behind him. He wasn't looking forward to being the freshest corpse in the cemetery, so he walked to the nearest winged figure and examined it.
The first angel was heavily eroded; it looked like the humanoid statues of decayed angels in the Maze of the Dead. The second angel, perched on a tombstone like a sparrow, was no larger than the Doctor's foot. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth were likewise miniaturized, none of them standing more than two feet tall. The seventh had a halo. The eighth had long, flowing hair and a harp. The ninth was tiny and was carved into the face of a tombstone. The tenth had lost a wing sometime in the distant past.
The Doctor walked around the massive trunk of the gnarled yew, and found yet another angel. This one had not been worn down by decades of slow erosion. It was not some humanized cherub, playing a harp or any of that rubbish. It was also, unlike the rest of the statues, not standing watch over somebody's eternal resting place. It was removed from the surrounding graves, skulking alone in the shadow of the ancient yew.
"Got you," the Doctor said. "Wonderful hiding place, I'll give you that, but you're…George?"
George was so deathly still he could have passed for a weeping angel if he'd been a bit grayer and had a wingspan. Asides from the slow, steady cycle of inhalations and exhalations, there was no sign he was even alive. His eyes were unfocused; they looked like the vacant eyes of someone doped to the gills on potent painkillers.
"What's wrong with you? George!" the Doctor shouted, trying to snap the man out of his trance.
"I'm stone," George replied, his voice so quiet the Doctor had to strain to catch it.
"You're...stoned?" the Doctor asked.
"Stone."
"Oh, stone. Got it. When did you turn into a stone, George? You were a human last I saw you."
"Molly did it." George looked like an amateur ventriloquist when he spoke. His lips barely moved at all.
The Doctor looked away from George and back to the angel. Against his better judgment, he looked the angel directly in the eyes, though only for a second. Probably not long enough for it to climb in the door to his soul. Probably.
"George, you haven't been staring at the angel's eyes the whole time, have you?"
"Yes."
If he'd still had his glorious, prestigious hair, he'd have gathered two handfuls of it and screamed. Since most of his hair was either scattered in the hallway or clutched in a weeping angel's fist, he just gritted his teeth and moaned loudly.
"Stop it! Look somewhere else! Anywhere else! Look at my bum for all I care!" the Doctor said. There was one phrase he hoped to never, even if he lived as long as the Face of Boe, ever repeat again.
"It's alright. Molly told me to do it, told me we could be together again."
"That thing is not your wife! It's an ugly piece of rock that talks like her! She's dead, and I'm so sorry, but she is. And if you don't stop looking at its eyes, you're going to die, too. If you turn into an angel, you will not be George anymore. You will be Angel George, and your life will consist of killing people and doing a spot-on impersonation of an Easter Island head whenever someone looks at you. That is no way to live."
It was a marvelous argument, full of both logos and pathos. Any normal person would have been swayed. George, though, was far from normal. He was a man who, in the span of one day, had been introduced to killer aliens from the early days of the universe, had lost his wife to said aliens, and now had been turned to stone, at least in his mind, by his fossilized dead wife.
"If you won't look away, I'll help you," the Doctor said.
He then proceeded to draw back his foot and kick George in the shin. Pain could shatter the illusions angels instilled in their victims, as the Doctor had learned by biting Amy on a planet far, far away. Just as the trick had worked there and then, it worked in the here and now.
George yelped and clutched his injured leg. The Doctor had not held back, and George, always assuming he lived, would develop quite the bruise on his shin. That was an infinitesimal price to pay, in the Doctor's opinion, for snapping him out of his self-destructive funk.
"You're not stone, now prove it and run!" The Doctor grabbed George by the hand and yanked him.
They had made it all of eight steps when George locked his feet and became an anchor. The Doctor's forward momentum managed to drag George a little farther, but the resisting weight soon stopped him. In something growing dangerously close to a panic, the Doctor whirled around to confront George.
"I am not going with you. That thing, as you put it, is still Molly enough for me. She knows who I am. She remembers me."
"We haven't got time for this now. I'll explain it all, I swear I will, but not until we're safe. The angel's going to kill us if we stay here. You aren't fit to make rational choices, so you're coming with me," the Doctor replied.
"Don't you dare tell me what I'm fit to do! I'll knock ten head right off your bleeding shoulders!"
The Doctor froze. "What did you just say?"
"I'll knock the head right off your bleeding shoulders, and I will. Now let go of my hand."
"The head, you're sure? Not ten head?"
"Ten head? That doesn't make sense. Stop being an idiot and let me go."
The Doctor released George's hand. The feeling of horror that sat nestled like an alien embryo in his chest constricted his heart. Ten. The. Only a few minor differences in spelling, but it could potentially be the difference between the sun being extinguished or it shining another five billion years.
"How about a compromise? See the church on the hill? Wait, don't look! Keep your eyes on the angel. It's up there, alright? And it's practically a fortress. Just come with me, and let's talk about this," the Doctor suggested.
"There's nothing to talk about, Doctor. The angel is nine the closest thing I have to a wife. I am not abandoning her, and she is not abandoning me."
"Nine. The angel is nine."
"What is it with you and numbers?" George demanded.
"Close your eyes, George, or you are going to die."
"Bollocks."
"Do it. There's an angel in your mind, and you're feeding it, nurturing it."
George smiled wryly. "Fine by me."
"It's not! Molly died quickly. Broken neck, most likely, over and done with in a flash. But this will not be pleasant. Not for me to watch, but especially not for you to experience."
"If you tell me she's dead one more time, I will eight you."
"Ten, nine, eight. A countdown. Close your eyes before it gets any lower. I need time. Time to figure out how to save you, you stupid ape." Stupid ape, there was a classic!
Some remaining specks of reason and the never-to-be-underestimated survival instinct kicked in. George closed his eyes. In doing so, he stopped looking at Angel Molly, who was no more than seven meters behind them. The Doctor was now faced with the impossible and overwhelming burden of keeping his eyes on the angel and somehow removing the fledgling angel from George's mind.
"We've got to run, George, and run very fast. I'll guide you. Don't worry about falling. Just run when I say go. Go!"
The Time Lord took off, again dragging George behind me. George was not light on his feet. The Doctor discovered this when George tripped over not a tombstone, but his own shoelace. He fell flat in the grass, bringing the Doctor down with him.
Brilliant. Just bloody brilliant. He'd survived the Time War, paradoxes, possession by unknown entities, torture, Daleks, androids, bombings, Cybermen, the Master, the Master's music and dancing, Donna's slaps, and a whole slew of other events that would have killed anyone else. All that surviving amounted to nothing. He was going to meet his ultimate fate because of an untied shoelace.
Come on, then. Get it over with so I don't have to live with the shame, the Doctor thought as he lay sprawled out in the grass.
The angel did not pounce of them, though they were helpless. The Doctor didn't know what held it back, but he didn't intend to give it a second chance. He clambered to his feet and looked for the weeping angel. It had not moved from its original location.
"It's Molly enough not to kill us. I told you, I did. I love her, seven loves me and you're a twat."
"Seven doesn't love you, I'm not a twat, and close your eyes. You're wasting your seconds."
"I'm through listening to your rubbish. 'Oh, she's not your wife, she's going to slaughter us all.' Right, that's what happened." George scoffed at the Doctor's grievous errors.
"The angel's not holding back out of love. They can't love. It's holding back...ah. I know why."
George shook his head in disbelief. "No you don't. You're an idiot, that's all."
"It's holding back because you've got a developing angel in your mind. It's not strong enough to burst out of you and take its own form yet. Killing you kills it. And me? It's keeping me around for fun."
"You're not any fun, Doctor," George muttered.
"To you, no, I'm not. To them, I must be a barrel of laughs. And it'll get even better. Once you've given birth to a human-sized block of stone—imagine how that's going to feel—I'll be next. Maybe you'll be the one to do it. Yeah, probably. First kill and all that. Baptism by blood."
"I would never kill someone! Not even you!"
The Doctor said, "Of course you wouldn't. But what you haven't grasped, what I can't make you comprehend, is that you stop being you. You stop thinking like a human, you stop having morality or love or any of the good stuff humans have. You think like a weeping angel, like the ultimate predator you are."
George couldn't believe it. Or rather, he wished more fervently than he'd ever wished for anything in his life that is wasn't true. Because if the Doctor was right, Molly was gone forever. To make the stabbing pain of that loss even worse, a cheap imposter had used her voice to lure her husband to his death.
"Close your eyes, George. Please, trust me and do it."
Closing his eyes would mean he'd given up on Molly. It would mean he believed the Doctor over the disembodied voice of his wife.
"Alright."
George closed his eyes and the Doctor felt slightly better about the situation. Yes, Angel Molly and her friend—who could be hiding anywhere—were still out there. Yes, the angel in George's mind wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Yes, Bob and Amy were still on their own and the Doctor had no idea what they were doing about their angel.
And no, he didn't have the faintest idea about how to solve any of those problems.
TBC
Updates, meh, who the hell knows. I've given up on trying to predict my schedule.
