Ever been in the middle of a chapter, and everything was going swimmingly, and then all of a sudden, poof! Nothing. Nada. Forsaken by the muse. Inspiration has left the building.
If not, consider yourself lucky. Even if you do know the feeling, I'm still sorry. I know you've been waiting ages for this chapter, and I'm sorry. Sorry, sorry, oh, sorry!
Thanks for the reviews and the patience. Sorry for the absurd wait.
The Doctor had been kind enough to leave a trail, albeit a back-tracking, confusing one, for the Ponds to follow. They traced his footsteps in the dust down hallways and into rooms, only to find the Doctor had turned around upon finding nothing of interest. More than once they lost the trail on broad swatches of carpet that were devoid of dust. Every time they had to reestablish the trail, Amy grew more frustrated. They didn't have time for dead ends and playing find-the-footprint!
"I wish he'd say something. Do you think we should call him, maybe?" Rory asked.
"If he had something important to say, he'd say it. He probably can't risk giving away his position," Amy responded.
Rory was beginning to get the same feeling George had gotten: the feeling that something was wrong with the whole situation. He knew next to nothing about the angels and their abilities, but he couldn't explain the misgivings away as a product of his ignorance. It wasn't paranoia or primitive and baseless fear of the unknown. Something was off, he knew it, and Amy knew it, too, though she refused to admit it.
"What did George mean when he said the angel might have taken the Doctor's voice?"
"Nothing."
"Amy, if it's something that could kill me, don't you think I should know about it? I'm good at dying, and I don't like it very much, so any help would be appreciated."
"It's nothing, Rory. Forget it. You're not going to die, and neither is anyone else."
Rory knew pressing the subject further would only earn him one of Amy's withering glares. He reluctantly shut his mouth and tried to tamp down the increasingly dark feelings that were creeping into him. He of course met with no success. If anything, the ominous feelings rose higher and clouded his mind with blacker shadows and more foreboding thoughts.
Not far from where the Ponds were deciphering footsteps in decades of dust, the Doctor was trying not to cry. Rassilon, that had hurt! Why had he ever done anything so stupid?
The Doctor moaned.
Oh, right, that was why. To reclaim his voice, to break it free from the shackles the angel had wrapped around it, and to prove himself manly enough to stand up to the harshest Sontaran interrogation while he was at it. Mission accomplished on all fronts.
Now that he had freed his most dangerous weapon, he needed only to wait for the opportune time to fire it. Shouting at the angel and insulting its mother would accomplish nothing, and not only because the angel didn't have a proper mother. Screaming mindlessly for the Ponds also wasn't a particularly good idea. They would come running, and the angel would either kill them or disappear down the hole and into the dark basement long before they arrived. There would be a time to call the Ponds, but it hadn't arrived.
Until that time came, the Doctor had to be patient. Patient, but alert and ready. The Ponds would be smart enough to try for stealth, but Wester Drumlins would betray their approach to the angel just as it had betrayed the Doctor's. If the Time Lord wanted to save his friends, he needed to hear them coming before the angel did. That required complete silence and concentration on his part.
By covering his eyes, the angel had inadvertently done the Doctor a favor. He had no sense of sight, so his other senses tried to compensate. His hearing might never be as sharp as that of an owl, but his ears were more fine-tuned to every creak of the ancient house than they would have been if he could see.
The Doctor focused his almost-but-not-quite-owlish ears on picking up the faintest scrap of voice or the creaking of a floorboard protesting against a foot. He heard nothing but the internal sounds his body made: his slow, steady breath, the double drumbeat of his hearts, and the gurgle of his guts that reminded him he should have eaten a decent meal that morning, as it was a terrible shame to die on an empty stomach. The angel's body, it seemed, made none of these organic noises. There was no soft cycle of inhalations and exhalations, no angry, rumbling empty stomach, not even the electronic buzz Cybermen's circuits gave off. The angel might have been the quietest thing in the universe.
"I have seen into your mind, and I know you are planning to stop me."
So much for the quietest thing in the universe. The Doctor should have known the angel wouldn't be able to resist taunting him, especially since it had such a brilliant voice with which to do the taunting.
"I know all about you, Doctor. I know what you did to my kind. I saw you condemn them to worse than death. To non-existence and to starvation."
The angel was trying to distract him, provoke him, break his concentration. He couldn't let it. He had to block out its insidious voice and ignore its jabs. He had better things to do than defend his actions to a stupid talking block of rock.
"Your friends are coming to save you, and I think it's only fair that I invite friends of my own to meet them. My friends, I'm sure, will be eager to make your acquaintance, Doctor. You were responsible for locking them in stone, after all."
Oh, bugger. The four angels in the basement would not be happy to see him. And he wouldn't exactly be thrilled to see them either, nasty, sneaky things that they were, but that was beside the point. The stony quartet would not be in a forgiving mood should they gain their freedom, and the Doctor had no plan for how to deal with five free angels. His little group's superior numbers would suddenly not be so superior anymore, and their overall chances for survival would plummet to somewhere close to zero.
He needed to keep the number of mobile angels at one, and to do that he needed to think fast. Any moment now the angel with its talons around his throat would make its move and dive into the basement to liberate its comrades. The Doctor had to delay it long enough for the Ponds to reach him.
"I wish I could say I was sorry about that, but I'd be lying," the Doctor said.
Though he couldn't see the angel's face, the Doctor knew he'd struck a nerve, as the hand at his throat tightened perceptibly. Breathing became a struggle, but the Doctor knew he couldn't let a little thing like strangulation stop him. He had to push the angel until it forgot all about rescuing its friends.
"Since you've been spelunking in my head, you know I was a different Doctor when I met your friends. I…he…pronoun…was sorry about everything. Step on a dandelion, three hours of brooding. Burn the pancakes, don't expect the tears to stop for a week. All that and he still didn't regret playing Medusa with your mates."
A sharp spike of pain in the side of his neck made the Doctor wince. The angel was, as expected, not happy with what it was hearing. In retaliation it had crooked one finger and dug the stony claw into the Doctor's flesh hard enough to draw blood.
Ignoring the trickle of blood that ran down his neck, the Doctor brazenly continued. If the four angels in the basement were a sore spot, the last stand of Angel Bob and his merry band of miscreants would be a pulsating, ugly wound on the weeping angel's psyche. Poking at said wound would enrage the angel to the point, the Doctor hoped, where it would decide to hurt and kill him all by itself.
"And don't even get me started on Angel Bob. Alright, fine, I will. But only because you insisted. Angel Bob was the absolute worst rock monster I've ever had the displeasure to meet, and that's saying something. I've met Eldrad, last of the Kastrians. Nearly blew up a nuclear power plant, that one did. Still nowhere near as bad as Bob."
Earlier than he'd hoped, the Doctor found his air supply cut off. With his respiratory bypass system, oxygen deprivation wouldn't be an immediate concern; he'd have a few minutes before hypoxia started to affect him. Unfortunately, the Time Lords hadn't evolved a survival mechanism that allowed them to talk while they were being choked. It would be difficult, unless the angel understood semaphore or Morse code, to finish the tale of Angel Bob and keep the weeping angel sidetracked with rage.
Not twenty seconds after he was forcefully muted, and long before he could formulate a new strategy, the Doctor finally heard confirmation the Ponds were coming his way. Unfortunately, the Ponds' chosen sound was so distinct and obvious there was no way the angel could mistake it for anything innocuous. Instead of footsteps or a creaking floorboard, the sound was the buzzing of the sonic screwdriver coming from right down the hall.
The Doctor, had his windpipe not been pinched shut, would have sighed with exasperation. He knew exactly which door had the Ponds stymied, and he knew, for a plethora of reasons, that they were wasting their time with the screwdriver. For starters, the door wasn't actually locked; its knob was just old and stubborn and in need of a kick. Even if the door had been locked, the Doctor could tell by the screwdriver's pitch that it was on the wrong setting for picking locks. The only way that setting would ever open a door would be if it spontaneously caused the screws to shoot from the hinges like corks from bottles of champagne, and the chances of that weren't favorable. No, the Doctor figured, Amy and Rory would have better luck gnawing through the door with their teeth.
Whichever Pond was abusing the sonic screwdriver finally decided nothing was going to happen and the high-pitched hum died. That moment of wisdom arrived a bit too late to keep the Ponds from revealing both their exact location and their ineptitude with the Doctor's tools to the weeping angel. While the Doctor bemoaned his companions' great human capacity for stupidity, the angel was assured of its victory. Hunting down and extinguishing the Doctor's friends would hardly be considered sport.
Sport or not, the time had come to make the Doctor suffer for his crimes. Careful to keep the Time Lord's eyes covered, the angel took a step back and brought the Doctor away from the wall. Given freer range of movement, the Doctor began to struggle. He lashed out furiously with his hands and feet, landing solid blows that would have dissuaded a softer creature. The angel, being built of sterner stuff, couldn't be bothered to do so much as flinch.
Writhing and kicking exhausted the Doctor's limited supply of oxygen, and he had no choice but to stop when he noticed his limbs suddenly felt as heavy as stone. Though he knew it would be as fruitless a gesture as striking the angel had been, the Doctor opened his mouth and tried desperately to inhale. Nothing, not so much as a molecule of oxygen, managed to sneak into the Time Lord's lungs.
The moment the Doctor went limp in its grasp, the angel moved with speed that made it all but invisible to the naked eye. The combination of inhuman acceleration and oxygen deprivation made the Doctor's head spin.
They came to a stop a moment later. The Doctor couldn't tell if they'd traveled a foot or halfway across the universe. His sense of distance had jumped ship and the rest of his senses had followed like lemmings. In their place was the sensation of floating on a warm, fluffy cloud. The core of rationality that remained functioning in his oxygen-starved mind screamed that no matter how peaceful and benevolent the sensation seemed, it was nothing more than a harbinger of approaching brain damage. If the Doctor didn't do something soon, his neurons would die en masse.
That was terrible, all those brain cells leaving behind widows and children, but for all its bluster, the rational core couldn't think of a way to stem the coming extinction. It was only capable of bleating "something" over and over again. Well that was useful, wasn't it? Why had the bloody siren even raised the alarm if there was nothing to be done about the problem? If the Doctor was going to asphyxiate in the talons of the universe's oldest psychopath, he wanted to do it without his survival instinct shrieking away like an idiot child.
And it looked like he was going to get his wish. The alarm bells, either chastised or too devoid of oxygen to protest any longer, fell silent. The Doctor relaxed. That was much better. Now he could float on his wooly cloud, forget all his troubles, and slip away.
He slipped, fell for a moment, and then did a spectacular belly flop.
The Doctor sucked in a great, gasping breath. Along with life-giving air, he inhaled a cloud of dust that filled his mouth and throat. The Time Lord gasped a second time before descending into a spasm of coughing.
He had not survived being throttled by a weeping angel just to choke and die on a handful of dust. The Doctor rolled onto his back and struck himself in the chest. A few quick thumps to the sternum and the coughing fit eased to the point the Doctor was no longer worried he was going expel his lungs. He lay flat for a moment longer before rising up onto his elbows. The Doctor turned his head and spat, rubbed his nose, and spat again. His mouth tasted like he'd been licking a coal miner's boots. Blegh! The Doctor spat a third time.
That was all the spitting the Doctor allowed himself to do. He had more important things to worry about than a bad taste in his mouth. He had to find out where he was, where the angel was, and if there was anything he could do to stop it from destroying the solar system.
The Doctor's first theory was that the angel had finished him off and the afterlife was a dark, filthy mine tunnel. Considering the number of species that theorized the dead, especially the dead that killed their entire species, spent the rest of eternity belowground, that wasn't completely unfounded conjecture.
The Doctor was not ready to declare himself a resident of Tartarus until he eliminated any other explanations. He sat up and looked around. Wherever he was, it was dark. The only break in the monotony of blackness was a beam of light that descended from the ceiling and created a rough circle of brightness on the floor. The Doctor squinted at the one source of brightness. As he watched, two silhouettes appeared.
"Doctor, are you down there? Doctor?"
"He must be. There aren't any footprints leading out from this room. Doctor!"
Amy and Rory! The Doctor opened his mouth to call out to them. He produced a little squeak that could have been outdone by a hamster with laryngitis. That was not going to alert them of anything.
The Doctor massaged his throat and tried again. This time what came out was audible…if one happened to be listening with a long-range parabolic microphone.
Damn it! This was not going to work. The Doctor would have to make himself known in a visual way. He had to get to that spotlight and he had to do it before the Ponds gave up and went elsewhere.
The Doctor staggered to his feet. His legs felt like those of a sailor who had taken his first step on land after months at sea. The Time Lord wasn't surprised; he had, after all, been strangled to the precipice of death and some weakness—and voice-loss—was to be expected.
Jellied legs or no jellied legs, he had to get to the Ponds. The Doctor took a step towards the light and then froze as solidly as a weeping angel that had been seen. There were now three shadows reflected on the floor.
And the third shadow had wings.
TBC
For anyone unfamiliar Eldrad was a Fourth Doctor era villain who was made of silicon rock.