Angel of Vengeance Chapter 3, a Doctor Who + Five Nights at Freddy´s Crossover fanfic

Angel of Vengeance, Chapter Three

a Five Nights at Freddy's/Doctor Who crossover

Jeremy was still panting from the short run from the office to the storeroom and shaking from adrenalin. The Angel was trapped in the office with Chica, at least until Chica got bored and moved on, and Jeremy didn't really trust this door, no matter what the Doctor had said.

He heard the noise again, and tried very hard to pretend that he had imagined it. He couldn't face the possibility that . . . .

No. He wasn't going to think it. It didn't matter, anyway. Either he was trapped in here alone and would starve, or he was trapped in here with an animatronic and would be murdered. So, might as well assume the best. Right? Right. Because that totally always worked. Right.

His flashlight's batteries wouldn't last if he kept it on. He turned it off, and the tiny cone of light disappeared. The darkness pressed heavily in around him.

He pressed his ear firmly against the door. Any second, he expected to hear pounding as the Angel tried to get in, but he could hear nothing. He thought he heard one of the animatronics, faintly in the distance, but that was all.

He sighed deeply and slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor. As long as he remembered that he hadn't heard that noise, he could find comfort in the darkness. Darkness didn't judge, and in this moment of stillness, he could imagine the entire universe was confined to his head.

How had his life come to this point? He was an adult, but he damn well didn't feel like one. The past ten years, his life had been spiraling further and further down. He knew most people were supposed to hate middle school, and that's certainly where it had all started to go wrong for Jeremy. But he'd gone through all the usual checkpoints of life after that — driver's license at 16, registering for selective services at 18, the party at the bar when he turned 21 — but somehow instead of feeling more in control, with each step he felt like he was moving further away.

And then there was Sally.

A sound startled him out of his brooding. Foxy was screaming again, an outraged howl that pulled Jeremy's frayed nerves tighter than ever. Not close by.

What was going on out there?

—

"What's going on in there?" asked Amy Pond.

The Doctor didn't answer. He was too busy slamming his palm into his forehead. He sighed, then leaned forward heavily on the TARDIS console. The rich, golden light inside the TARDIS console room was no comfort. He looked up at the monitor, frowned at the inscrutable readings flowing across it, then glared at the telephone. "Of course he forgot to take the ansaphone with him."

"Well of course," replied Amy. The tall, willowy Scot rolled her eyes and struck a pose with her hands on her hips. The Doctor was such an idiot sometimes. "It's what, 1986? 1989? Everybody had a corded phone then, didn't they? He probably doesn't even know you *can* have a phone that works when it's not plugged in." She paused a moment. "Would it even work not plugged in? The whatsit you put into the phone, will it make it work without being plugged in?"

"Yes, of course it will," said the Doctor, exasperated. He ran his fingers through his hair, then finally straightened up and adjusted his bowtie. Clearly, he was getting something of a grip on himself. "But you're right, of course. I should have told him to bring it along. I didn't, so now he's on his own."

"I still don't understand why we can't just go in there with the TARDIS and pull Jeremy out of there."

The Doctor didn't answer right away. He was tapping on the screen with a very serious look on his face. Amy sighed. Traveling with the Doctor was amazing, but he just didn't make very much sense most of the time. Instead of just materializing right there in that weird pizza restaurant with the suspicious-smelling carpet and plucking Jeremy right out of the jaws of disaster, or even intercepting him outside the restaurant, on the way in to work, they were doing this whole elaborate business of traveling back in time to leave things that would help him out later. Like the phone. And now that weird door lock.

The Doctor tutted. "See this?" he asked. He swung the monitor around so Amy could see. It didn't help; the readouts were in Gallifreyan. "The Blinovitch quotient is off the charts. The Angel's probably going to strike soon."

"So we should just go right in there!"

"No," said the Doctor, firmly. "I've explained this already. It isn't just about rescuing Jeremy. We have to neutralize the Angel as well. And the only time we can do that is at night, because that's when the animatronics are allowed to roam."

They'd visited during the day, scouting the place out, and Amy had not liked the animatronics one bit. They'd smelled terrible - worse than the carpet, which was saying something - and although they'd just moved jerkily along with a collection of badly-synched songs about pizza and fun, there had nevertheless been something very "off" about them. The kids all seemed to love them, but in a way that Amy simply couldn't share. She'd never felt so more separated from childhood than in that restaurant, faced with something kids loved but which made her skin crawl.

Usually, the Doctor loved anything kids loved; he seemed like an overgrown child himself most of the time. But this hadn't been one of those times. It was like he knew something. No, not *like* he knew something. Amy knew the Doctor well enough. He *did* know something. So she'd just have to get him to tell her.

She looked across the console at him. He glanced back out of the corner of his eye, and then pretended he hadn't. Yep. Definitely hiding something. Well, she could be patient too.

—

Chica was just about finished being patient. Her eyes narrowed and her beak opened, exposing all her teeth, but it didn't flinch. (Why would a bird have teeth? Once upon a time, before, long before, maybe she would have wondered. Not any more.) She reached out to touch the newcomer. Maybe if she gave it a poke it would react.

Her hand clunked against cold, lifeless stone.

She turned her head to the left, then to the right, examining the statue. For that was all it was. All it could be. It wasn't alive. It wasn't even animatronic! It was solid stone.

She pushed harder, the steel of her endoskeleton squashing the foam rubber and felt that covered her hands, to a point that surely would have caused excruciating pain to a human. But the statue's surface had no give in it at all. It was stone. It wasn't real at all.

She leaned back. Foxy had seemed so certain about the newcomer. And *something* had clearly been in the other hallway. But this wasn't real. This was a statue. It hadn't been here before, during the day, but that didn't mean anything, so clearly this was not the newcomer. She had to find the real newcomer.

It was a pity none of them could really describe anything. They had no voices. All they could do was scream. So all they could do was move on. And on. And on. Round and round and back to where they started, every morning, every night, always the same thing, over and over and over and over . . . .

In the distance, she heard Foxy scream. He had found something.

Chica lost all interest in the statue and turned to walk back down the hallway towards the main room.

Behind her, where no one saw, the statue moved.

—

Foxy screamed again, letting out the discordant howl that was his only form of communication. He'd found something that the others needed to see.

While Chica had checked the left hallway and Freddy had checked one of the party rooms, Foxy had checked the other.

The room was filled with cafeteria-style tables, each covered with a disposable plastic tablecloth. Party hats were laid out at each spot, ready for any number of birthday parties the next day. It was all completely untouched.

But the pictures on the wall . . . Foxy had wanted to find the angel, but he couldn't ignore the pictures. He'd been marked Out of Order for so very long, and he missed seeing children. He knew why he was marked out of order. It hadn't been his fault! He hadn't meant to harm the boy! But there it was. So sometimes at night, he would wander into the party rooms and look at the pictures the children had left.

They weren't normal pictures. They would change sometimes, and not just when there were children around to pin up new pictures.

Today they had changed far more than was normal.

Freddie was the first to arrive, stomping into the room on his heavy feet. Chica was close behind. If her face could show any emotion, it would be murderous rage, but as it was her face was as blank as any of theirs. Bonnie was last to arrive.

The other animatronics stared at him, waiting for him to show them what was so important.

He raised his hook and pointed at one of the pictures.

There was a drawing of an angel, its hands covering its face just as Foxy had first seen, and also a drawing of a blue box, with two figures standing next to it. Grownups, surely, and Bonnie began to emit a low whine that could have been a growl. Why were the children drawing grownups? They never drew grownups! At least, not when there was anything good happening.

Foxy tapped the picture of the grownups with the blue box. There was a man in a bowtie, and a woman with red hair. They seemed to be talking to the children.

Well, the man was talking to the children. But the picture had changed since Foxy had first seen it. Now the woman was staring at the next picture, which was just a picture of the angel. She looked very worried.

Foxy tapped the picture of the angel now, and turned to the other animatronics, as if to say "see! this is what we're looking for!" But how had the children drawn pictures of it, if it hadn't been there during the day? None of them had seen it then, so where had it come from? These pictures had been drawn days, maybe even weeks before. Some were years old, yellowing and curled at the corners.

Freddy laughed. Foxy's eyes narrowed and he snarled. Chica laughed too. They didn't believe him! Even though the pictures had changed, which only ever happened when something was important.

He punched his hook through the picture of the angel and ripped it off the wall, leaving a scar in the plasterboard wall. Bonnie made a noise and leaned in, so Foxy turned back to look at where the picture had been.

There was writing.

"FOXY: THE IMAGE OF AN ANGEL BECOMES AN ANGEL"

Foxy's eyepatch flipped up in surprise. He looked down at the paper impaled on his hook. With his other hand, he grasped the paper. This was difficult; he was not very dextrous. But despite that, he could be very gentle when he set his mind to it, and he managed to gently peel the crumpled paper back.

The crayon drawing of an angel was snarling back at him.

—-

The Weeping Angels are ancient.

Not even the Time Lords know exactly how they got started. Or perhaps they do, and just don't want to say.

Over the millennia, they have become scattered across the cosmos. They are drawn to places of temporal shock, and communities with great potential, for it is essentially that potential upon which they feed, the potential to influence events downstream, the difference between the "is" and the many "could bes". The greater the potential, the greater the feast.

This angel had been alone a very, very long time. It was far from the only angel on Earth, but this one had no truck with the others. Sometimes angels would cooperate, but mostly they worked alone. Working together meant they could be a little less lonely, but it also made them vulnerable to one anothers' gaze. You can only cover your eyes so long before you just have to risk a look . . .

Angels are fierce, fast predators, but they are also astonishingly patient. Like many ambush predators, they don't need to feed very often. They can afford to wait for only the best prey.

And like some predators, they enjoy playing with the prey first.

The human had left the room, gone down the hallway where the angel had started out. But there were the others. The angel did not know what to think of them. They were not really robots. Robots could be dealt with. Push a little electrical current the right way, short them out, even make them walk backwards. But there was clearly something else. They couldn't possibly be alive, and yet they had frozen the angel.

A threat? Perhaps. It would be worth investigating.

Preferably *after* dinner.

The angel moved.

-*** TO BE CONTINUED ***-