I don't own these characters or profit from them.
Doctor Who: Blind Love
By, Clayton Overstreet
After a particularly harrowing adventure involving the Weeping Angels Yaz looked at the Doctor and asked her one day and asked, "How did you learn so much about the angels in the first place? I mean they feed on time energy and they're so fast… I'd think they would be a match even for the Time Lords."
"Oh they were," she said. "Actually we discovered time travel by studying the angels. I rather think they might have sacrificed a few of their own so that we would." She sighed. It still stung, having found out some of her lost past and knowing that her body had been the source of the Time Lords, giving them their regenerative abilities and so much more. Honestly she wondered what that meant for his offspring, including his children and grandchildren, any others she might have had from the memories she was still missing, and fort Jenny, last seen regenerated and living back in Victorian times with her lizard woman wife Vasta.
She was a little afraid to find out. Lifetimes that she remembered thinking she was merely a rogue time lord and now she had no clue what she really was. So answering Yaz's question was a relief from thinking about it for a while.
"So they're all just unrelentingly awful. Even to their own."
"Oh not at all. Naturally they are predators and it seems like that, but we only hear about the nastier ones or those who act out of desperation. Like on your planet. Most of the people in the Middle East or Ireland or even the South End are quite lovely. They just do not make the news. Humans did not exactly do the tiger or the elephant any good."
"Well you're umpteen billion years old or whatever," Yaz said snarkily. "Have you met a good one?"
"Oh yes. Actually she lives on Earth. I met her in the nineteen seventies shortly after being attacked by four other angels trying to steal the TARDIS."
Martha Jones frowned as they walked through the streets of Chicago until they came to an apartment building. They mad passed a truck full of chickens and whatever dinging device the Doctor had been using since they left airport had left quite a mess. "I hope this is worth it. I had to work for the tickets and my boss was not exactly happy giving me the week off even if my mum died."
He shrugged. "What do you expect? My skill set would drastically alter your entire timeline and in this decade that could wipe you from existence. And you decided to become a doctor instead of a quantum engineer. SO I'm working on getting us to the proper time and you pay for fish and chips. Seems fair."
"Oh how I've wasted my life," she said sarcastically.
"Look on the bright side, if we get home soon enough and don't spend most of your savings, by the time we get back the interest should be rather substantial."
"Don't they close inactive accounts?"
"Not the way I've set it up believe me, I've got a few in many decades."
"Wait a tick, if that's true them why am I…?"
His machine dinged again. "We're here. This id definitely the place," he interrupted. She narrowed her eyes in suspicion, but as usual followed him. It did not do to question these things too closely. Like why this all happened when Martha remembered that odd woman at the book store interrupting them using bows and arrows to stop that migration of inter-dimensional reptilian parasites. She had apparently given him a file explaining all of this and how they would get back to he future. Had even let them set up a young former cop to get the video entertainment industry on its way. Yet here they were, still in the seventies. She had the autographs of the cast of the Munsters to prove it.
They went inside and followed the device. Someone must have been having breakfast because there was a squawk from inside one of the apartments and the too familiar sound of an egg popping. They moved on, rather than stay and try to explain it. Finally they came to number 4. Turning off the device the Doctor knocked on it.
The door opened and a lovely young woman stood there smiling. She was quite beautiful, with Asian features and an ample bust. She wore a tie-dyed bandana and hoop earrings and a bath robe. Around her neck was a blindfold, the kind people wore to bed. She was dishabille and sexy in a way that people usually associated with the kind of statues people dedicated to goddesses in temples and normally would have left any onlooker, make or female, tongue tied.
However the two at the door were instead drawn to a figure behind her. It was almost exactly her likeness, except it was apparently carved out of white stone. The statue was nude and the difference between it and the human before them was a pair of feathery wings at its back as it stood in the middle of a rather cheap suburban apartment rather than in a park or a museum. It was also looking rather annoyed, hand on hip.
The Doctor and Martha could not help it. They were surprised and despite themselves, they both blinked. And in that moment the statue vanished.
"Can I help you?" The woman said.
"Possibly," the Doctor said as he and Martha looked around nervously.
"Where did it go?" Martha hissed.
The woman frowned. "Did you just refer to my angel as an 'it' you filthy ni—!?"
The Doctor held up a hand. "None of that now." He was used to this sort of thing. Being an alien he had never been particularly racist about humans. Black, brown, golden, or white. Even the occasional green scaly one that popped up since the dinosaurs. He could barely tell them apart as it was. However one thing that always bothered him on his own kind was their superior attitude especially towards other quite nice people. Racism also reminded him of the Daleks. So all in all it angered him and he was against it,.
Still it was the seventies and neither woman appeared to be a white male age 18-35 so they had both been on the receiving end even in Martha's own time and he knew that it was better to stop that sort of thing at the start. Humans tended to think of racism as white-versus-everybody else, but he knew better. For a start pasty folk used to enslave each other just as Genghis Kahn had no qualms about who he put in chains, be they white, dark, or his fellow countrymen. Solomon's wives had been a rainbow of women, all sniping at each other, among other things (a man could only satisfy so many women himself) and it was like the Doctor had told that young Joshua kid in Nazareth that one time, you had to love all the children of the world whatever color they were or the fighting would never stop.
"We came to talk, not fight."
"Well, then I suppose you can come in," the lady said. "She warned me you might be by. Though we were rather in the middle of something." She said this defiantly and glared, as if daring them to say anything about her being a lesbian or the angel again.
"What? How... oh," Martha said, seeing the blindfold.
They went in and she went to the kitchen. They could all hear something in the back bedroom. "Sorry about being rude, but Balia and I aren't much for company. I'm a bit of a curmudgeon and she just freezes right up." She giggled a bit. "At least I don't have to explain myself when people drop by unexpectedly. They do wonder a bit about my choice in artwork but…" She looked at them. "I notice you don't."
"I've never seen an angel that looked quite like that," Martha said. "Usually they have a certain similarity…"
"They can appear in many forms," the Doctor said. "They are often in the forms of statues because people from many cultures choose the best looking and most powerful people for artwork like that. At least the best looking at the time. Concepts of beauty change. The Greeks on this planet were rather prolific and influential and heavily influenced the cultures that followed so the angels often take the forms of their artwork."
"She could have been this woman's twin," Martha said. "Sorry for not introducing ourselves. I'm Martha Jones and this is the Doctor. We're time travelers."
"My name is Jan Shi, and I appreciate the comparison," she said. "It may seem a bit narcissistic that I've fallen for someone who looks so like me, but…"
"Nah I get it. I've got a cousin in Westchester. She's had five girlfriends and they all looked like her. It's called twinning where we're from."
"Lots of people find things attractive in other people that remind them of themselves," the Doctor said.
"No wonder you're still single… oops. Sorry." He nodded and let it go. "So you say you were expecting us?"
"She said someone was coming, but there are rules about affecting the future…"
The Doctor said, "Yes, even for them."
"Are you her enemy?"
"I'm an enemy of the Daleks and a few others," he said. "But overall I'm a live and let live kind of guy until someone else breaks the rules first. I'm not a huge fan of poachers."
"Yeah, in our experience it's not like these angel blokes go after puppies or cattle," Martha said. "They literally ripped us out of time and planned to eat the lives we coulda had. I didn't spend years in medical school earning to be a doctor so I could be sent back in time to the time before cellular phones and heavier racism so a pigeon roost could such up the days I could have lived, thank you very much."
"Balia would never do that."
"Why don't you tell us a bit about you two and let us decide that?"
"And you'll judge us?"
"No. That friend in the other room will decide things. If she stays put and doesn't attack us, we'll leave shortly. We came here because we need at least a mild time shift for my ride to lock onto, one that I don't use regularly. Normally the TARDIS keeps me from bumping into myself accidentally or draining away time energy I'd use in the future. I don't know where I'll be. I can barely remember all the places I've been." And that was before I found out about having lots of my memory erased and that I am the source of the Time Lord's abilities, future Doctor explained to Yaz. "A place a weeping angel calls home is rare on Earth. Residual time energy should act as a flare. If we can just sit here for an hour or two the dominos I set up to get us out of the attack by the four angels we faced in the future that stranded us here should send my time machine here to pick us up.
"However I tend towards thwarting evil wiles of aliens. I see a wile, I thwart."
"It's sort of his thing," Martha said. "Save the planet. Stop the alien invasion. Keep people from being eaten. So we'll do some checking but so long as you convince us your girl back there isn't a threat, we don't get involved. It's not like we've gone back to stop Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy…"
"Ted who?"
"Actually Jack was…"
"Not the time Doctor."
Jan smiled. "Well that's easy then. If you're really the good people you claim to be then you should have no trouble with us. We're all about free love." She nodded to the wall where hung a picture of her, naked with her arms draped around an angel statue's neck and waist, pressing between her wings and into her back. The statue was holding those hands and crying red tears that were vibrant against the white cheeks and they both wore wide identical smiles of pure joy. "It started some time ago. I've always been…"
Martha said, "Let me stop you right there. I'm from about thirty-years in the future. We aren't a 100% on the gay thing, but most of us aren't bothered by it. Even had a fling myself in medical school and I've been crushing on him for a while now and he ain't half human either."
The Doctor shrugged. "I'm nine hundred years old. I've seen a few things. Done a few more. When I was younger and looked a lot older I was a bit of a chauvinist. Not exactly proud of that, especially since my species sometimes changes gender when we regenerate. Plus I'm the last of my kind, so there's that. We won't judge you on who or what you fall in love with, Fact is the world could use a bit more love in it. At least before the Hazath-krim arrive in twenty-forty—" He clamped his mouth shut.
Jan looked confused but nodded. "Very well. Anyway I've always liked women and after a few false starts with men I learned of clubs and groups. However being half Chinese and half Japanese doesn't help. Even my own people do not generally like me. My parents met in the war when they were all thrown together in a concentration camp. Never mind that my mother was not Japanese, they didn't care. Then when I was caught with my first lover… well they despised me too. Meanwhile the other lesbians… well most of them were white or black or they wanted a girl in a man's suit or something else. I never seemed to find anyone who loved me for me. A few liked sex, but…" She shrugged.
"So I heard about this special group who went through a pen-pal like situation. The idea being that we would write each other letters. Get to know one another without looks getting in the way. I understand a lot of women were into it if they were worried about being judged by race, age, weight… whatever. I didn't hit it off right away, but there was this one… her letters were so beautiful and she told amazing stories I never believed. I wrote back. We were both so lonely…" She smiled. "Her own kind are… judgmental to say the least. I suppose every culture has its biases. Balia just wanted someone she could connect with. But she comes from people who cannot even look at one another. They can't see themselves in a mirror without freezing…"
"Really?" The Doctor said, raising an eyebrow. "I didn't know that." He sounded like it might be useful later. "I suppose it's fortunate for them that eventually the light goes out."
"Yes. And when the light shines and they can move, they do so quickly. Without much time to think. But frozen they think often too much. Envying the rest. Watching them age and die. Is it any wonder they rarely connect with others? See them as food? It is not as if their normal way of hunting is overtly cruel. Any more than a butcher tortures a cow. Their so called victims still live out their full lives."
"And how many victims has your angel had?"
Jan smirked. "How many criminals disappear? Murderers. Rapists. Uncaught. Unpunished. The occasional Cyberman or Dalek who comes to Earth. Balia is very choosy in her targets. And who notices if they dig up a white man's skull a hundred years and a thousand miles before they should have been there? An archaeologist marks it down; they study it, shrug, and say a lost Viking must have made his way too far west. Remember up until about five hundred years ago no white man stepped on our shores and a squirrel could hop from tree to tree coat to coast without touching the ground. If they find it at all. Who digs up graves in a forest? How many bones last more than a few years between elements and animals? The evil aliens she dumps into the sun's gravity well."
A doctor Martha nodded. "I see your point. I can think of a few people in our time nobody would miss if they got shoved back in time to a forest or desert to think about what they've done."
"Done it myself a few times," the Doctor admitted. "I keep some things like chains forged in the heart of a dwarf star around just incase." He looked at Martha. "Not so long ago we trapped a bunch of space witches in a crystal ball. Fun times, eh?"
"Yeah, loads," she said sarcastically. "You know meeting you is probably what made Shakespeare go bald. Main reason I turned him down when he propositioned me."
Jan smiled. "Anyway we exchanged letter. Balia admitted she came to check me out and thought I was beautiful. Even took on my features. Inside and out. She told me the truth and… asked to meet. I thought it was a joke, even when the statue first turned up on my doorstep." She sighed. "As if I was not already in love. Magic. And more. Do you know what it's like to see amazing things? To be with someone who can take you to see the Parthenon being built, the wars of the Mongols, and Atlantis before it sank into the ocean? We only sleep here to give me a break between wonders. I paid for this apartment building by pawning the match to the Hope Diamond stolen from the same statue. Everyone thinks I'm just the landlady. Balia and I exchange notes when we talk and we live, together. I know the angels are called the lonely assassins, but I try and keep her from being quite so stone hearted."
"I know a little something about that," Martha said.
"So that's essentially it."
"It's practically twilight," Martha said.
"What?"
"Never mind. Nothing you'll miss." She looked at the Doctor. "What do you say?"
Suddenly a noise began to fill the room. Like a loud breathing noise, or someone turning a vacuum on and off. "I say our ride's here." He looked over at the bedroom. He saw a white face peeking around the frame, staring at the TARDIS as it materialized in the same shot the angel had been standing when they arrived. "Don't go getting any ideas." He looked away. When he and Martha looked back at her the angel was there, arms wrapped protectively around her. "Jan, do me a favor and keep an eye on your friend there. Those of us who see time differently, it's good to have someone else around to remind us what's important. I think your lady there might need you more than you think you need her."
Touching one of the stone arms encasing her like a tomb Jan smiled. "I've known that for a while Doctor."
She watched as they got into the blue box and then vanished. Then she closed her eyes and smiled as suddenly soft hands squeezed her. She reached down and interlocked her fingers. "It was nice seeing him again. Or her. Too bad we had to play dumb, but we'll see them again, in the past."
Soft lips kissed her ear and she turned, putting her hands on her lover's shoulders, caressing soft feathers and long hair as warm hands gripped her lips. She peeked and gasped. The angel's face had changed. Now it resembled that of Martha Jones. Smiling a little Jan said, "Naughty girl." Then she closed her eyes and they shared a kiss.
"Did you ever see them again?" Yaz asked.
The Doctor nodded. "Off and on. Might again. Time travelers tend to run into each other. But angels and I… we don't like being in the same place too much. I did a swing by Jan's life a few times, just to make sure she wasn't lying or being coerced. Whatever happens between then and another then, she dies and gets entombed in one of the big cemeteries in Chicago."
"And that's it?"
"Not necessarily. Angels feed on time energy. They can also share it. Not often, but if needed. Balial's not the first to fall for a human. There are stories of them and their children the nephilim. Giants with bones of stone. Anyway when they share their energy they can revive the dead, temporarily. You get a lot of stories of cemeteries with moving statues and ghosts who dance among the headstones. Sometimes in Chicago you can find Jan and Balial. Other times and places too. A week here. A day there. When they can be together and the soul of a human can dance across time in the arms of an angel. Not forever, not in this world. The angels don't even have a time lord's lifespan."
"Sounds like heaven to me," Yaz said wistfully. "besides I've been with you long enough o know there are a few afterlives people can go to and that what we see is probably not all there is to life. I'm not going to discount eternal paradise for lovers just yet."
"I killed the devil once," she said.
"There you go then. If the world didn't keep throwing us the occasional curve ball, the game wouldn't be any fun." She slapped the Doctor on the back. "So, where to next?"
Still looking concerned the Doctor forced a smile. "You pick."
Outside the universe sped by as the Doctor and his TARDIS flew between the stars. Meanwhile on a small moon they passed by a Chinese woman in a space suit stood on the moon, eyes shut and dancing with an angel, their feet puffing up clouds of moon dust around them. They stood cheek to cheek so the angel could hear an Elvis song playing in the helmet. "Wise men say, only fools rush in…" A short time later if you checked they would be gone, but a thousand years later a random astronavigator would stop to collect solar energy and marvel at the footsteps, bare feet in tandem with obvious boot prints.
Author's Note
I went to Anime Banzai, a Utah anime convention this week. Not much going on, but when I was wandering through artist's alley and saw a picture of a woman hugging an angel statue and immediately thought of this little story. I considered making the woman in love with an angel blind and unawake of who she loved or even having her gouge out her eyes. However I was never fond of the Beauty and the Beast, he was a prince the whole time, ending. Plus I like that picture where the Statue of Liberty and Justice are kissing (especially funny for Doctor Who fans). A blindfold would work just as well and better since the angels can't talk so writing notes would be a must and brail would be pushing it in my opinion.
Frankly after their first appearance the writers messed up the angels, making them work together in large groups like that when they are supposed to be "lonely" and as much a danger to themselves as others. The Byzantium and New York… those had to be one offs. Presumably the angels can even see in the dark or those four in that basement would not be trapped too long. Not that they logically will be. Someone's going to find and move the statues eventually.
It just occurred to me that overcoming their natural problems was better than a quick fix like poking out somebody's eyes. The whole red-light-green-light thing could be fun in sexy times too, as I put into my book the Lesbian Sleepover and Slumber Party Handbook. Great sacrifice, but a wee bit on the creepy-crazy side. Saw that in Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic with Mr. E. No thanks. At least not without a better longer story line than I'm willing to do in a short fan fic. That's novel material. I've got books to write like my latest, A Coven of Witches, now available from Amazon. Check it out. Besides the Doctor already did the whole sacrificing his sight for someone he loves thing. I thought it was a little bit of a cop out not to involve the angels or the Silence in that arc anyway.
