Happy Holidays, everyone! I can't believe it's almost December!

This chapter has been ready for a while, but I'm tweaking the outline again, and haven't been sure whether it was fit to post, given some of the changes I've made, but... here we go!

This chapter sees the beginning of kicking some actual Angel Ass, as well as Martha plunged into a new kind of despair...

Enjoy!


FOURTEEN

The TARDIS was intermittently out of control, having been highjacked by a Weeping Angel that had wormed its way inside, and another, who was right here, flesh and stone, in the console room.

The vessel began to careen in a different direction, and everyone was jostled, including the Angel, which slid up against the railing, narrowly missing crushing Glenn. The Doctor used both hands, and the heel of his shoe, to get it back under control again.

"You and I both know, Glenn," the Doctor was saying, now holding a tense stance, speaking quickly, loudly. "That there's a fine line between technology and energy. An energy signature can easily be digitised – these Angels are taking advantage of that beautifully. Slithering into our computers, short circuiting the lights in the TARDIS…"

"And?"

"And… energy…" the Doctor mused, looking into Glenn O'Keeffe, eyes widening, everything slowing down for a moment. "Consciousness. Quantum lock. Quantum… particles molecules… just a phone box! Matter! Air and stone and ones and zeroes! Oh! I've got it!"

"Got what?"

"Energy signatures! Different types, Glenn O'Keeffe! Oh yes, we've found them – you've found them! - and all we have to do is convert it… and… send it back! Could it really be that easy? Yes… no. But yes, it could!"

"What the hell is happening?" Glenn asked Jack, whose eyes were still on the Angel, useless though that effort had become.

"All I can say is, the Doctor's working. Other than that, I have no idea."

The lights went out again, this time for longer.

"Ha!" came the Time Lord's boisterous laugh in the dark. "They're getting scared!"

And then there was a loud bang through the blackness.

"Doctor, what was that?" Jack called out.

The lights came back on, and the Doctor had disappeared from the console platform.

"Oh shit!" Glenn cried out. "Doctor! Doctor!"

"What?" came the Time Lord's voice. "I'm down here!"

Glenn and Jack simultaneously realised that the bang had been the Doctor's feet hitting the floor of the area below the console.

"Jeez, don't do that to me again!" Jack scolded, and threw himself between the Doctor in the pit and the Weeping Angel on the platform, just before the lights went out again.

And then the blue light of the sonic screwdriver partially illuminated the space. Jack was lying on his back at the edge of the hole in the floor, and the Angel was standing over him, looking down at them both. It had impassive, beatific look on its face for the moment, and its arms were at its sides. But the eyes were open, and Jack knew the hunger was great.

He whispered a curse, and breathed quickly.

"What?" asked the Doctor, sonicking a little black box.

"It's right here, Doctor. Right here," replied the Captain, voice trembling. The lights came back on, and he called out, "Glenn, is there anything you can do to get this bitch away from us?"

"I can read it when it moves, that's it," Glenn said, from somewhere nearby. "It knows it can't get me, and even if it could, I'm not as juicy as a Time Lord."

"Doctor, don't let that blue light go out," Jack said.

"Doing what I can, Captain."

"What are you doing?"

"It's a damn good thing we Bluetoothed up to Torchwood and the Rift!" replied the Doctor, though it really was no sort of reply at all. "This is the thing, right here, that Tosh helped me retrofit, and thank goodness we got online before all hell broke loose…" And he kept on sonicking.

He stopped for less than one second to change the screwdriver's settings, and everything went dark again. Fortunately, the blue tip of the sonic allowed them to see the Angel faintly, and it could not advance. Jack lay still where he was, determined not to let it get his friend.

"That doesn't really answer my question," Jack said.

"Essentially, if the Angel can strip the TARDIS of its stores of potential time energy, ending its interface with the Vortex – remember me saying that?"

"Yeah! Who could forget?"

That's when the lights came back on once again, and the TARDIS lost control of its own trajectory for a few moments – its internal battle with the digital Weeping Angel was still going on. It might have been the only thing distracting the Angel enough to keep it from doing exactly what the Doctor had just said, stripping the stores of potential energy, causing utter chaos in their lives…

The time vehicle turned sideways just for a second, before it righted its gravity boosters, long enough for Jack and Glenn to lose their footing, for the Doctor to get pushed aside from his task momentarily. And for the Angel to slide back out of position, against a railing again, and give the Doctor a bit more breathing room.

Jack and Glenn both got to their feet and put themselves once more between the Angel and the Time Lord.

But everyone understood that though they had the upper-hand temporarily, there was no time to waste.

And the Doctor kept on talking, dizzyingly quickly, "If an Angel can do that to the TARDIS, basically rip out its consciousness and render it just a phone box, like I said, then what's saying the TARDIS can't do the same to an Angel?"

"What? That's brilliant!" Jack shouted.

"Of course it is!" the Doctor shouted back.

"So you're going to render this thing just a statue?"

"Oh yes!" the Doctor replied, with gusto.

The lights went out… mild panic.

This time, Jack and Glenn could feel the Angel pressing against them in the dark for the second or so before the lights came back on.

"Persistent bugger," Glenn said, instinctively moving away, recoiling from being touched by the thing.

Jack didn't budge.

"Jack, they can do things besides zap you back in time," the Doctor warned.

"Like what?"

"Like snap your neck."

"I've had my neck snapped before. Didn't bother me. Bring it on." He said the last part with a growl, and he bit his lower lip.

And a bright orange light began to explode out of the hole in the floor where the Doctor had been working. A white-ringed pulse throbbed through the TARDIS, and the Doctor cried out, "Ha! We're online! Brilliant, brilliant Tosh!" and hoisted himself back up onto the platform with one big push.

The noise was growing into a wind, a din…

"Glenn, I need your hands in the slots so the TARDIS can interface with you," the Doctor instructed, and Glenn moved immediately. "Guys, I'm going to close my eyes when the time comes. Jack, make the Angel move, make it come after me and give off energy so Glenn can interface with it, but don't let it touch me. Glenn, are you in?"

"Oh… oh God, yes…" Glenn answered, hands in the console, terror mounting in his voice.

"Just hold on, all right, mate, hold on," the Doctor encouraged. "You're interfacing with the TARDIS, and the TARDIS is Bluetoothed with the Rift Manipulator…"

"I know, I can feel it! But why?" Glenn asked, near tears.

"Because the TARDIS can't just strip out the Angel's energy and consciousness and swallow it whole like the Angel could do to the TARDIS," the Doctor said, with compassion in his voice. "Then we'd have another Angel consciousness in the TARDIS and an even bigger problem! No, Glenn, we have to put the Angel's energy back where it belongs, and only you can help us do that."

"Oh my God."

"You, the Angel, and the Rift Manipulator are going to form a triangle, essentially one apparatus that has all of the needed data in it. And the TARDIS is carrying it all within, and when we go through it…"

"Go through it? Go through what?" asked a panicking Glenn.

"The Rift."

"What the… are you barking mad?" Glen cried out.

"Glenn, you've done weirder things before, all right? When we go through the Rift, the energy will return to where it came from," the Doctor explained.

"How?" asked Jack, incredulous.

"I wasn't just down in that hole Bluetoothing into your hub, Jack. I was rigging it to latch onto the Rift's polarity and reverss it. So when we fly into it, it will magnetise instead of expel. And by the laws of Time Lord physics as I know them, the energy signature from the Angel will then recognise its own energy signature within the Rift, and naturally rejoin it."

Jack, who basically understood the physics of it all said, "Holy shit, Doctor. Are you sure you want to do that?"

"Better ideas?"

"But it's so violent! You're essentially ripping out its soul!"

"Then please tell me what else to do! Please!"

"But it will change the function of our Rift Manipulator!"

"Not necessarily."

Another blackout, another crash sideways, three men thrown sideways once again…

…still a snarling, pissed off Weeping Angel in the console room of the TARDIS.

"Yes, it will! And Tosh is clever, but she's not a Time Lord! It could put the whole Hub at risk!"

"Then call your team and tell them to get out of there," the Doctor said. "We're linked in now – we don't need their help. Get them to safety if you're worried about it! Please do what you need to do!"

Jack did as suggested – he called his people. Gwen argued, so he yelled. He told her it was an order, then trusted his Torchwood family to get the hell out. It took about ten seconds.

Air whooshed through the console room like mad, as the orange light continued to course through, and the pulses came steadily from the Rift.

"I'm going to make the Angel move now. Where are you supposed to be?" Jack asked the Doctor.

"Right here," the Doctor answered, brandishing the sonic screwdriver. "Doing my thing. Three, two, one…"

And the Time Lord shut his eyes.

Jack began to blink in quick succession, and the Angel began to move. The Doctor reached out and hit the button on the sonic screwdriver.

Immediately, the orange light that was enveloping the room, light from the TARDIS' connection with the Rift, began to expand.

"Doctor, back up a few paces, it's close to you!"

"I can't!" the Doctor called back. "Take that green knob over by you and turn it all the way to the left! And hold onto something."

Jack never took his eyes off the Angel, and did as he was told. The knob caused the TARDIS to tip all the way to Jack's right and knock them all off-kilter, again causing the Angel to slide across the floor, away from the Doctor.

"Okay, that worked, it's a few metres away again," Jack said.

"Get it moving!"

Jack blinked again in quick succession, and the orange light crawled round the room, and Glenn groaned. "Jack!"

"Come on, dude, you can handle it!" Jack called out.

"I know, I know…" Glenn said. "I know. I can do it. I can. Okay…"

"What's happening to the light?" the Doctor asked.

"It's all over the room now!" Jack said. "I'm still blinking…"

"Good keep it up!"

"Is the light supposed to do that? Is this meant to happen?"

"Yes!" the Doctor said. "Eventually, it's going to swallow…"

And the light enveloped the Angel next.

"It has the Angel! Is that it? Can I relax?"

"She doesn't need to move anymore, the rift found her!" the Doctor called out. "Glenn, well done! Keep doing whatever you're doing!"

And then the entire room was flooded with orange light that became blinding. Jack and Glenn had no choice but to shield their eyes, and they screamed against the brightness, the blinding, loud, Rift energy, now pulling them through time and space, ripping through untold dimensions, and set to spit them out God only knew where.

The light and noise were unbearable. Jack wanted badly to go to his knees and lose his faculties altogether, but Glenn… he had to be strong for Glenn.

He made his way blindly around the console and grabbed onto his new friend's arms.

"Glenn, I'm here, just a little bit longer…" he said.

"Jack, I'm here for you, too," Glenn said. He was near tears. "Whatever that means…"

Jack put both arms around Glenn and laid his head on the man's shoulder. "Just be strong. Be strong… we both will!"

The Doctor was on the floor, digging his fingers into the grate on the floor for dear life. The TARDIS was built to fly through the untampered Vortex, but the Rift was raw and more disordered. More accidental, and much less compatible with this technology, much less forgiving.

He heard Jack and Glenn comforting each other, and thought of Martha. Everything they were doing now, it was all experimental, damn it. It would render the stone Angel in the console room harmless, but he didn't reckon it would do anything to expel the consciousness of the Angel that had insidiously entered the TARDIS' heart. Therefore, everything they were doing now would do nothing to help get Martha back in their lives. They were playing with fire, and it was his fault. This whole thing could blow up completely and he'd never see her again…

…God, how could he have risked this?

How?

He cursed, and willed this moment to be over. In truth, he had no idea how long it took them to get through the Rift – ten seconds, sixty, four minutes, a week? But it felt like ages. It felt like pain.

The TARDIS shook, and so did the men… to their cores.

And then, all at once, they were through. All of the orange light retreated, the sound got sucked back into its vacuum…

And there was calm.

And they breathed.

The Doctor could feel his chest heaving up and down, in and out. Slowly, his heartrates were returning to normal.

Feeling came back into extremities, the simple trauma of loudness retreated from ears…

"That was horrible," Glenn said.

The Doctor got to his feet. "Did the Angel's energy come through you?"

Glenn nodded. "And the rift, and everything in the universe, it felt like. The universe crammed into my brain."

The Doctor felt like saying welcome to my world, but he refrained, and simply reassured Glenn that he had done well.

It had happened in the midst of utter bedlam in the TARDIS, mostly while the Doctor's eyes were shut, so he had not seen the Angel's essence get stripped away and deposited back into the Rift (apparently through Glenn), so he couldn't be sure of anything.

The Weeping Angel, still wearing Martha's purple swim cover-up over its wings, was still there in the console room but it was back in its calm, Weeping stance.

"Is it just a statue now?" Jack asked.

"Yep," answered the Doctor.

Glenn walked over and poked it, as though that would prove anything. "How can you be sure?"

"Because what we did to it, the ordeal we just went through… its essence cannot still be in there. What you felt and heard, gentlemen, was the Rift being angry with us for stroking it in the wrong direction, as it were, as a housecat might do. It's meant to bleed energy, not suck it in. It was bristling and resisting… I made it do something unnatural. I don't know whether to feel proud about that or…"

"Feel proud," Jack interrupted. "Let's go with proud. I don't want to think about the alternative."

The Doctor nodded, and continued, "Good old sonic, good old Rift Manipulator… good old Glenn who can get the Angels to emote! We'll run some tests later – maybe Tosh and Owen could be of help – just to make sure, but I'm ninety-five per cent certain that all we've got on our hands right now is a hunk of rock."

"Did we kill it?" asked Glenn.

"Not really. Its 'soul,' if you will, has rejoined the collective energies wherever it came from, because thanks to you, we know that the Rift has channels!"

"So we did kill it, but there is life after death?" Jack asked. "It rejoined Nirvana, the God-head or something? The collective consciousness?"

"Sure," the Doctor shrugged. "How very Hindu of you. But that's about the size of it."

"And we have to do that three more times?"

"I'm afraid so," said the Doctor. "It would be too dangerous to try and strip them all out of here at once. Three of them could do so much damage to the TARDIS, that if we make one little mistake, they actually could destroy the…"

"Never mind," Jack sighed. "I get it. I was just hoping to be wrong."

"So where are we now?" Glenn asked.

The Doctor squinted at the screen to read the data that would answer that very question, but it was then the eye of the storm ended, as the TARDIS began to cry out…

"Didn't the Rift rip out the Angel that's got into the TARDIS?" Jack yelled, hands over his ears.

"I guess not," the Doctor responded, wincing. "That one didn't come from the Rift. It came from a computer!"

"Now what?"

"I don't know!" the Time Lord shouted, now covering his ears as well. And the TARDIS spun again, knocking them both off their feet.


"Still nothing?" asked Dr. Sybil Penn, puffing, as usual, on a cigarette. She was standing in the doorway of a bedroom in her home, which she was currently lending out to Martha Jones. She was wearing a camel-coloured corduroy skirt, high heels, and a pink and purple ruffled plaid blouse. Her honey-coloured hair was down around her face in long curls, and her giant round glasses had been, presumably, placed in her purse.

"Still nothing," Martha echoed, sighing. She smiled at her friend. "You look nice."

"Thanks - I'm headed out."

"Autumn in Connecticut – better wear a coat."

"I definitely will!" Then there was a pause, and Sybil said, "I'll stay. If you want."

"No, no, go have fun," Martha said, waving her away. "Don't worry about me."

Sybil sighed and looked at Martha sadly. "I feel terrible leaving you. Especially for a date."

"Why? I'll be fine," Martha said.

"Okay, well," Sybil said, as she reached into her pocket and took out a business card, and handed it to Martha. It turned out to be Dr. Penn's own business card, but on the other side, there was writing. "I brought you the name of the restaurant we're going to, and the number. And Mitch's home number, too, just in case we decide to go there afterwards. Call if you need me."

"Thank you."

"I'm serious. Helping people in psychological distress is my job," Sybil said, with a smirk.

"I appreciate that," Martha said, with a chuckle. "I'll use it if I need it."

"Take care of yourself."

Martha nodded and waved as Sybil walked away in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

And as soon as she heard the front door click shut, Martha threw open as many windows as she could, sprayed air-freshener, and began running fans. She was grateful for a place to stay in New Canaan, but hated the fact that her temporary housemate was a chain smoker. She herself put on a jacket, and put a kettle on, to keep herself warm while she waited for the house to air out.

She liked Sybil a lot, but Martha rather hoped she'd spend the night with Mitch, just to give Martha's nose and lungs a break.

She stood and absently watched the kettle for a few moments, and then reminded herself a watched kettle will never boil.

But she had nothing else to think about that didn't lead to pain.

It was now the 29th of October, 1980, and today, it had been three full weeks since she had heard from the Doctor. Each day, she shut the door to her bedroom and tried several times to reach him across time and space, using her mobile phone (if Sybil was home, she would take the house phone off the hook and dial a random number so Sybil would hear), to no avail. It would ring twice, and then there would be static. Every time. Given what the Doctor was facing, the implications of this were terrifying. More questions mounted every day. Every minute, even.

Tammy Litzinger had been discharged one week previously, still with no intention of returning to the twenty-first century. She had hugged Martha, thanked her, and gone off to stay with a co-worker for a while. So, since then, Martha had begun trying to track down Glenn's mum and niece in France, and/or the UK. The Doctor had asked her to do this, and she now had no other intellectual pursuits. She had their full names, as they were in 2007, but she had no idea whether they would change them, and to what. She had been able to locate Patricia O'Keeffe in Newcastle, but that was the "original" Patricia, who was raising a seven-year-old Glenn. She was attempting to dig into the woman's history, to get an idea of what she might do if she suddenly found herself zapped back in time to a different country, and whether she might change her name, and if so, to what. But it was so damned slow with no Doctor, and no internet. And, it was difficult to concentrate, what with her emotional turmoil, not to mention, she had to do it under the radar, when Sybil wasn't about.

She reckoned that soon, she might have to simply fly back to Europe and do the leg-work physically. But she wanted to be here, in case the TARDIS came back for her…

Sybil had known that Martha had come to New Canaan with a team of "doctors," three other men, and that they had briefly consulted on Tammy Litzinger, then left the country with Martha here, working further with Tammy. She also knew that in the first days of her stay, Martha was keeping in touch with them regarding Tammy's progress. Martha had been brought in to appeal to the patient "culturally," and worked with her own team – it made sense for her to call them, and consult.

After three days of not hearing from the TARDIS crew, Martha had told her that communication had gone dark, but she was still trying. Two days after that, Sybil had caught Martha sobbing on the floor beside her bed, and the latter had been forced to confess that her distress came partly from the fact that she was in a relationship with one of her "team," and she was terrified she'd never see him again. Sybil had then put her arm comfortingly around Martha and told her to stay as long as she needed. They had got sloshed together that night, and talked about their woes, though Martha had still been very vigilant not to let anything slip about what was actually going on.

Martha knew that Sybil was making the assumption that Martha had been ditched by her boyfriend and probably some misogynistic colleagues. She knew that Sybil was probably wondering why Martha was still trying. It was a fair assumption, when one did not understand who the Doctor was, and how they had got here to New Canaan in the first place. But she couldn't come clean – Tammy Litzinger was committed partly because she believed she had travelled through time (she had), and the last thing Martha wanted was for Sybil to begin looking at her like a mental patient. So she continued to allow her housemate to assume that Martha was just being a silly woman, pining after a man.

She was pining, but it was far from silly.

Given what the Weeping Angels could do to the TARDIS, to the Doctor, to time itself… it sent her mind reeling to dark, dark places. The pain in the pit of her stomach became unbearable when she went to that place.

Nevertheless, she had resolved to begin looking for her own place to live if it came to six weeks with no word. She would find a job somewhere and try to settle in New Canaan in 1980…

The thought of it made her burst into tears over the kettle.

And then, to her shock, the doorbell rang.

It startled her, but she immediately reckoned it was Sybil, having forgotten her keys. So she wiped her tears hastily, and went to open the door. When she did, she found two strangers.

Both were men, which put her immediately on-alert. She was home alone, in a strange place and time…

Although, if she wasn't mistaken, both men's faces brightened upon seeing her.

"Can I help you?" she asked, noting that there was a fireplace poker just out of arm's reach if she needed it.

"I hope so," one man said. He was thin, with sandy blond hair that hung in his face. His friend was a bit taller, darker, and pleasantly unshaven. "Are you Martha Jones?"

"Erm… I suppose so, yes."

The two men looked at each other hopefully.

The blond man said, "My name's Steve Kingsley – though here, I'm called Steve Anderson. And this is my friend, Haroun Shaan. Or Haroun Chowdhury, take your pick."

The man spoke with an unmistakable, thick-as-a-tree-trunk Welsh accent.

"Not from around here, are you, Steve?" Martha asked.

"No, indeed," said the man, smiling at her accent, as well. "Nor are you, I see. I'm from Swanswea. You a Londoner?"

"Yeah."

He smiled wider. "Funny, no-one told us we were looking for a fellow Brit."

"That is funny," Martha said. "Who told you… anything? Who are you?"

Steve said, "Well, Haroun here is a Journalist based in Cardiff, though originally, he's from Mumbai, yes?"

Haroun nodded. "Yes. Raised in Kent, though."

Steve continued, "And me, I'm a Welshman whose grandmother was buried in Oystermouth Cemetery near his home."

"I'm sorry to hear that," she said, though the mention of Oystermouth cemetery caused her ears to perk up.

"In 2003."

"Oh!" Martha said, her eyebrows rising high.


Well, I hope you're curious about Steve and Haroun... though you might have some idea of why the Doctor hasn't called in three weeks.

I would love love love to hear from you, if you're reading this story. Why not take a sec, and leave a review, let me know you're there. I haven't been getting feedback on this thing, and am wondering who's out there...

Thank you for reading!