Here's chapter eighteen.
Sorry for the delay! University exams got in the way!
Thanks a bunch for all of the reviews and feedback. It's always really appreciated.

"So remind me again why exactly I should be impressed?" Clara called after the Doctor, stepping from TARDIS and glancing around the chamber with raised eyebrows. "If you'll forgive me saying, this place kind of pales in comparison to some of the other "wonders of the Universe" you've shown me…"

"Humans!" the Doctor called back in response, rolling his eyes. "No patience and no sense of discovery. If it doesn't flash, glitter or glow, you lot aren't all that interested."

"That seems like a bit of an over-generalisation," his companion chided, walking to his side and shrugging. "But in my defence…" She let her eyes wander from chrome-plated wall to chrome-plated wall. "This really does just look like a regular hallway."

"Ah! You may be right there but there's one very important thing- one vitally important thing- about hallways that you, Clara, are forgetting!" The Doctor grinned as they rounded a corner, coming to an air-locked doorway. "And that is that every hallway has to lead somewhere and something! And just what and where does this hallway lead to? What wonders await us beyond this very door?"

The Doctor eagerly stabbed a number into the nearby keypad, humming a ceremonial trill to herald the opening of the door.

"Da-da, da, daa! Here it is!" He swung around to inspect his companion's immediate reaction. "Well? Isn't that impressive? You told me you wanted to see something impressive and here it is!"

Clara raised a thin eyebrow, looking around the new room with a mixture of disbelief and confusion.
The doctor had taken her to rather large-in-size but quite poorly lit room. The walls were completely decked from floor to ceiling with a hefty trellis of tangled black and red wires and upon these wires, was a layer of screens. The screens varied in size and each seemed to be accompanied by a metallic keypad- not too different from those of an automatic telling machine.

"You've taken me…to an IT room?" Clara queried, slowly walking into the centre of the room and looking around.

"IT room?!" the Doctor exclaimed, looking rather scandalised. "An IT room? You think this is an IT room?"

The brunette shrugged, spreading her hands and looking from screen to blank screen. "I'm prompted to assume that this isn't just an ordinary IT room?"

"It isn't an IT room at all! Not in the slightest!" the Doctor insisted, taking her by the wrist and hauling her over to the nearest screen. "This happens to be the control room- the central processing unit- of the largest biographic archive in the galaxy."

"Biographic archive?" Clara repeated, shaking her hand free of the Time Lord's grip and prodding the screen with a finger. "So what? It just stores information on people?"

"No, it doesn't just store information on people. It has hard-copy, fully-documented and one hundred percent verified information on everybody who is anybody, compiled from over one million different sources and sourced from over two hundred different galaxies!" He folded his arms across his neatly pressed tweed jacket. "I defy you to tell me that that isn't one of the most impressive places you've ever been…"

Clara bit her lip, swallowing back a small chuckle at his drive to gain her approval. "Ok, so it's a very, very important place that stores information on a lot of people." She ran her fingertips over the keypad. "Still, you have to admit, Doctor, you've taken me to places that are a lot more deserving of the title "impressive"…"

The Doctor's lip twitched and he frowned like a ten year old who had just lost at a game of marbles. "Well, everything can't always be all explosions and ghosts and monsters and horses, can it? Sometimes we've got to appreciate the things that are quietly impressive. Quietly impressive can be good too. Ok, it can be mostly boring but sometimes boring can be better than all of the explosions and…" The doctor rapped his fingers on the keypad. "Come on then! It's no good making judgements when you haven't tried it out yet. Pick someone! Anyone in the entire universe. Anyone you've wanted to know anything about…"
Following the right string of button clicks, the screen before them whirred to life and illuminated.

Clara squinted at what she saw. "It's all numbers. It's like some kind of programming. Or code."
"It's called Koptec. It's a numeric system of literacy," the Doctor explained. "After the rise of the Fourth Great Human Empire, this became almost like a universal language. Everyone speaks it. The TARDIS translator just must be taking its time to make sense of it. Probably a bit addled by all the information flying around in here. See? See? Even the TARDIS is beguiled…"

"Because she and I have always seen eye to eye," Clara muttered out of the corner of her mouth.
The Doctor, (either having not heard her or certainly doing his best to pretend that he hadn't), clapped his hands, jabbing a thumb at the screen. "Aha! There it is! Look, perfectly readable! Brilliant! Right, now let's ask it something about someone."

"Anything? About anyone?"
Clara took a moment to think before grinning and looking up at the Doctor. "Me. Clara Oswin Oswald."

The Doctor pulled a face. "No. Absolutely not. Spoilers."

"Alright then, what about you? The Doctor?"

"Definitely absolutely not. Mega-spoilers. Mega-ultra-spoilers. Huge-spoilers."

"…hmm…who to pick? Who to pick?"

"Oh come on! It's hardly a tough choice. Someone! Anyone! Anywhere in the galaxy! Pick a planet! Pick a continent! This isn't a hard choice. There must be something you've always wanted to know about someone famous."
"…well, you could always take me to actually meet the person and I could ask them face to face," Clara began, only to be met by such a look of puppy-eyed disappointment from the Doctor that she instantly found herself being prompted to say. "Edison. Thomas Edison. I want to know what his favourite snack food was…"

"Alright then! Here we go!" the Doctor began tapping away at the keyboard again. "Right, we just search the Milky Way…Earth…North America…Inventors…and here's an alphabetical list…let's go, first names…Thomas, Thomas, Thomas…"

"First names? Wouldn't it be easier to find him as "Edison?""
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "He always used to tell me to call him Thomas…or Tommy...after a few drinks…" Before Clara could ask for anything in the way of developments on that statement, the Doctor was already muttering to himself again. "Human alphabet...doesn't make an ounce of sense, does it? What, you've got your…Q….R…S…huh, look at that." The Doctor's finger hovered over a name on the list of American Inventors.

"Stanley Patrick Quinn," Clara read aloud, blinking. "Stanley? As in, Stan? Stan from the Summer Bank Hotel? He became an inventor?" She smiled widely. "Good for him! What did he invent?"

"Let's take a look, then. Shall we? Let's see what Stan the man made of himself." The Doctor clicked the keypad, bringing up the file on Stan's name. "Here, here…Stanley Patrick Quinn…born in North Carolina…on the twenty-seventh of July, 1944. Attended Fifth Street Elementary School…blah, blah, blah…Quinn went missing during the summer of 1971…"

Clara exchanged a look with the Doctor, raising her eyebrows. "Well, we know what happened there."

The Doctor's brow became heavy with the weight of muted anger but with a deep breath he maintained himself, turning back to the screen and reading onwards. "Was found sitting on the doorstep of his North Carolina home…blah, blah, yadda, yadda…studied engineering…eventually went on to design the first prototype for his economically balanced…kinaesthetic torch!?"

Faint eyebrows rocketing up into the folds of his forehead, the Doctor immediately stuffed his hands into his pockets, frowning slightly. "I never took back the torch from him, after everything that happened in Summer Bank. He must have reverse engineered it and used it to invent the kinaesthetic torch before its time…" The Doctor's frown deepened. "I really, really don't like it when people do that. Why can't they just let things happen the way they're supposed to? Let fate do its work? No, instead it's all money, fame and success…"

"…Quinn attributed most of his success to an unnamed "doctor" and though he refused to ever reveal the identity of his mysterious research partner, the packaging of every original, patented torch was inscribed with the message: "You helped us to fight the Angels in Hell, Doctor and I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for you. Thanks a bundle. Stan." The meaning and content of the message was never explicitly explained by Quinn," Clara read aloud from the screen, silencing the grumbling Time Lord. "Quinn donated the majority of the money made from his torches to furthering scientific research in the area of electronics and to various support organisations for the suicidal. He also gave a hefty portion of his funds back to his parents, ensuring that his elderly mother and father, (who was at this stage, a war veteran), spent their retirement days in comfort on the family peach farm in North Carolina…"

The Doctor sighed, rolling his eyes. "Well, I suppose if there were any major tears in time, courtesy of someone who'd travelled in the TARDIS, we'd have picked up on it by now." He folded his arms.
"Maybe Stanley P. Quinn really was meant to invent the kinaesthetic torch and we just helped history along a bit," Clara proposed with a smile, reading further down the page and suddenly laughing loudly. "And you're not the only one he remembered either! Look at this! The original kinaesthetic torch was marketed in 1974 under the name: "The All-Bright Torch"…"

The Doctor let out a bark of delight. "Ha! All-Bright! I get it!" He turned to his companion with a grin as wide as her own. "Named it after Miss Cassidy Albright, herself. Well, isn't that something? Must be nice to have a pun for a name. I'd like that, I think. A nice, punny name."

"The two of them really bonded while they were both being held in that hotel," Clara told the Time Lord, leaning against the plated wall. "Stan told me all about it when we were in the TARDIS, taking him home." Her smile softened. "I guess he wasn't lying when he said that she meant a lot to him as a friend."

"And hopefully if Stan the Man followed the instructions that I gave him, he'll be able to send her a lovely, long letter telling her all about the torch that he pseudo-invented and why he named it after her," the Doctor commented with a shrug, tugging Clara's sleeve. "Let's go to a different screen. A bigger one. A better one. On the one over there, you can look at holographic images of…"

"Can we look up Cassidy on this?" Clara asked suddenly, staring at the screen with wide eyes. "See how she's getting on, I mean? Do you think she'd be here? Didn't you say everyone in the universe was logged in here, somewhere?"

Clara looked down at the keypad, letting the TARDIS translate the Koptec and starting to type her into the database. "How do you do this again? Milky way…Earth…Europe…United Kingdom…London…"
The Doctor's eyes widened and he immediately raised his hands to protest, to stop his companion in her frantic typing. "Uh…no…maybe not a good idea to know about her future…not anyone that we know personally…"

"Well we don't know her that personally, now do we? We knew Stan for almost as long and you let me look at his profile."
"Yes, well Stan lived and died long before your time, Clara Oswin Oswald. Cassidy Albright lived and died in and around your time so there's the chance that a spoiler from her future could be a spoiler from yours too…"
Clara laughed. "So like if England gets nuked our something?"
The Doctor frowned. "Don't make jokes about that. You work with children. You should know better than that."

"Doctor, why can't I look at Cassidy's future?" she asked him, looking up at him with resolute firmness. "Why don't you want me to look at her future? You told me everything…that day at lunch…" She slowly dropped her hands to her sides. "You told me that when you met her in the past, in her future, she was…with the Angel…but you fixed it. You fixed it so that he wouldn't be able to harm her again."
Clara continued to look at him in earnest. "You told me that we'd corrected everything in her timeline and that she was going to be alright now…that we intervened at just the right time and made sure that she was going to be ok…was that a lie or something?"

"No, it wasn't a lie," the Doctor said quickly. "It's just that-…"
He sighed, rolling his shoulders back and slapping a hand to his forehead.
Clara and Cassidy hadn't spent a lot of time alone together but in the few exchanges that the two of them had, he could already tell that his current travelling partner had developed a kind of empathy for the prisoner of the Angels. There was no arguing with his companion when she got like this and any further questions would just lead to further suspicions being aroused. "Alright, fine. Just a quick look."

Clara grinned, returning to the search page. "You said that she gets married in the future. I wonder if she has any children. I might end up teaching them someday if this business with the education degree goes well." She pressed the search key. "Ok, second from the top, Cassidy C. R. Albright…London…born in 1991. That sounds about right, doesn't it?"

"Well unless a Rastellozalfrian Tree-Hanger has stolen her face, I believe that is her in the picture…"
"Ah…I see. God, the resolution on this thing is awful for such advanced technology. Ok, here we are, Cassidy Catherine Rosalind Albright Tiernan, born 1991 to Maria Bridget Ann Albright and Daniel Martin Tiernan….dropped her original surname after her parents' split…studied to become an archaeologist…hired by London Museum…disappeared on the 4th of November 2012…returned to her family home in Oakside, London on the…28th of November?" Clara looked up at the Doctor. "I thought you said we brought her back only a day after the Angel took her?"

"We did…we did! We definitely did," the Doctor insisted, grabbing the screen and staring into it, incredulously. "Or at least we should have. Those were the exact co-ordinates that I gave the TARDIS….it says here that she was interned at Mason Vale Rehabilitation Centre. What's that?"

Clara shook her head slowly. "It's like Bedlam….a psychiatric unit…only it's a lot more secluded. You can't just walk in there. You have to be sent there by the hospital."
"But why?" the Doctor pressed. "Why do they send people there? What for?"
"It's a psychiatric unit, Doctor," Clara repeated. "It's for people with mental health problems…schizophrenia, depression…"

The Doctor continued to scan down through the page, constantly chanting under his breath. "No, no, no…that's not right…that's very, very not right…that shouldn't be…"
Clara fought her way over his shoulder and managed to catch sight of a single sentence that made her breath still in her throat. "Cassidy Albright disappeared for a second time on the-…"

The Doctor turned off the screen, grabbing Clara by the arm and turning on heel for the door. "We have to go now. Straight away. This instant."

Clara yanked her arm away from his, massaging her elbow as she followed him into the TARDIS. "After Cassidy? Doctor, what's happened to her? Why is her future like that?"

"I don't know," the Doctor either confessed or lied, standing on one side of the console and staring down at the panel with a stony, serious expression. "But we're going to find out and we're going to find out now. No one messes with anyone I've helped. Not after I've told them that everything's going to be ok. Especially not after I've told them that everything's going to be ok. Hold on to something fast, Miss Oswald, we're headed back to London on the hyperdrive express…" He grabbed a nearby lever, tugging it sharply downward.
"Geronimo."

For Cassidy, slumber was somewhat of a welcomed risk.
Her mind was splintered and her body was drained of energy and as such, sleep was vital to the preservation of her health.
However, sleeping also meant dreaming.
Dreaming meant letting her guard down.
Loosening her grip on reality.
Forgetting the danger that she was in.

"Is that really such a bad thing?" she was forced to ask herself, in the midst of a near-lucid dream. "Don't I deserve to forget once in a while?"

No.
How could she just let herself forget that while she slept, she was being watched- her every breath counted and her every move scrutinised- by a psychopathic alien monster?

If it weren't the weakness in her body from pain and a lack of nutrition, she didn't know how she could even bring herself to fall asleep at all.
He may have deemed her "too weak yet"- whatever the frightening meaning behind that was- but it made her physically sick with fear to think about what he might do to her while she'd lost consciousness.

Her dream found her standing in the dark as always, completely unable to see her own feet beneath her.
Slowly lifting her head, Cassidy could still see no sources of light and could hear no noise anywhere around her.
She decided that she was probably standing in the cave that she usually dreamt about and willed herself to begin walking forward. Her heart was pounding in the back of her throat, the skin of the back of her neck beginning to crawl when she realised that someone, somewhere in the dark was watching her.

Cassidy froze, mid-step, desperately trying to sense how close her watcher was standing to her.
She heard footsteps in the depths of the black.
Light, quick-moving footsteps.

She was definitely not alone in the dark.

She bit at the inside of her mouth, realising that the footsteps were slowly getting louder; the walker was drawing closer to her.

She contemplated calling out to the person in the darkness and then quickly decided against it, instead, bracing herself for the approach of her faceless assailant.
Closer, the footsteps drew.
Closer.
Closer again.
Slowly getting faster.
Running now.

Cassidy swallowed, awaiting the inevitable impact of a running attacker.

She was surprised, however, to feel the sudden grip of skinny arms encircling her waist, the comfort-starved pressure of a small head against her stomach and a child's voice calling out from beneath her bosom.
"Mummy!? Oh, mummy!? Thank goodness I found you here!"

Cassidy stumbled backwards slightly, stunned, looking down at the offending infant with widened eyes and finding with further shock that she could see the child perfectly. Her small, round, pale-face seemed to be lit from within or by an untraceable light source; it was perfectly illuminated by a yellowish halo of light.

"I'm not your mummy," Cassidy began to say, surveying the girl's features. She was a scrawny, pale-faced child sporting a nose dotted with a spray of freckles. Her wide staring eyes stood out from the rest of her milky visage, despite being almost completely veiled by a stringy fringe of whitish blonde hair.

It was only when the little girl spoke, saying: "Oh mummy! Don't be silly! Of course you're my mummy" that Cassidy realised that the little girl firmly latched to her waist was in fact, herself…as a child.
"You won't forget that…that you're my mummy?" Little Cassidy asked with earnest. "Will you?"

"No, of course not," Older Cassidy replied quickly, still quite shell-shocked but yet thankfully capable of retaining control of her voice. Amidst the surreality of it all, she realised how crushed she would have been if her mother had suddenly started denying that occupation when she was just a little girl.

"And who's to say that this isn't me from the past?" Cassidy thought, her mind enraptured in a haze of disbelief as she took her younger self's hand. "After all, I've been involved in time travel before. I've seen it. It's really possible…and Auntie Christina always used to say that I looked a lot like mum when she was little…it would be an easy mistake to make…"

Little Cassidy was soon leading Older Cassidy by the hand, the two of them slowly making their way through the dark. The little girl seemed to know where she was going, still radiating that eerie aura of light and smiling toothily whenever Cassidy caught her eye.

"Mummy?" the younger asked, squeezing the older's palm with her fingers. "Why doesn't daddy love me?"
Cassidy blinked, looking down at the little girl. "What?"
"Why doesn't daddy love me?" she repeated, her once-bubby voice suddenly quietened by sudden despair.

"Daddy?" Cassidy echoed, feeling a lump slowly form in her throat and her stomach tightened. "Daddy-…" She paused, the fleeting, banished memory of a large man's ruddy face and his freshly shorn head- still sparsely patched with the whitish blonde hair that she had inherited from him- flashed before her eyes.

"Of course daddy loves you," Cassidy answered, reciting the same answer that her mother had always given her. "Daddy just has trouble showing it sometimes because he likes to act tough…"
Right down to the quivering smile that had always somehow come upon her mother's lip.

The answer seemed to satisfy the little girl though and with a restored happy grin, she tugged her older self into step once more. "Ok, mummy."

Suddenly a loud, hollow banging rang out from the darkness.
The unmistakable sound of a fist rapping on a wood-panel surface.

Cassidy jumped but her younger self let out a delighted squeal. "Mummy! Daddy's home! Daddy's home! Let's go and let him in!"

The older of the two allowed herself to be pulled forward in the darkness by the eager child but couldn't help but feel somewhat confused: she couldn't remember having ever been that excited to see her father at the front door.
In fact, when her father came home, she usually found herself staying away from the front door, Cassidy remembered, the discomfort in her stomach steadily growing.

A painted wooden door appeared before them.
A bright, yellowish light seemed to illuminate it- like a spotlight.
Just like the little girl's face.

The knocking steadily grew louder and more aggressive.
Cassidy froze, standing rooted to the spot.

"Mummy?" younger Cassidy questioned. "Why are you shaking? Let's let daddy in, now."

Cassidy found herself unable to speak, as though her voice had been stolen from him. She wanted to tell her younger self not to open the door.
But before she could stop the little girl, she'd already shook her hand free.

"Here mummy….I'll open the door…"

The little girl ran forward and took a hold of the handle, excitedly flinging it open.
"Daddy! You're here!"

Cassidy had recoiled slightly, expecting the sight of a short, portly man with nail-brush-like hair and dark, storm-cloud eyes, all wrapped up in a navy and red tracksuit.

But that wasn't the man who was standing there.
In fact, there wasn't a man standing there at all.
Not really.

Instead, towering in the doorway, was the hulking silhouette of a gargantuan stone seraph.
Staring down at the little girl with the cold, emotionless expression that she knew all too well.

"…Michael?"

"Daddy!" her younger self insisted, reaching up to take one of the outstretched hands of the Weeping Angel.

"No!" Cassidy shouted, holding out her hand to stop the child. "No! Don't touch him!"

The little girl paused, turning around to look at her adult self with a confused furrow in her brow.
"Mummy? What's wrong? Don't you love daddy?"

"No, no," the older insisted, running forward and addressing her younger self as her mother would have when she was younger. "No… Cassy. That's not your daddy…he's….he's…"
Cassidy pushed back the little girl's fringe from her eyes, revealing a set of wide and glistening grey eyes.

"But my eyes are blue," thought Cassidy numbly, confusion breaking over her like a cold, tidal wave.

"Mummy," the little girl said slowly, her small voice suddenly growing fainter as the light that illuminated her face grew weaker. "…why did you call me Cassy? My name isn't Cassy…"

"Mummy is just tired," a deep voice rumbled from behind the girl's head. "Give mummy a chance to wake up."

The little girl smiled brightly, seeming to be completely unaware of the capabilities of the creature who had just spoken. "Ok Daddy!" She placed her hands on Cassidy's cheeks, causing the young woman to shudder when she realised just how cold the little girl's skin was.
Cold as stone.
"Wake up, mummy! Wake up!"

"Wake up!"

Wake up.

Wake up.

Cassidy awoke with a start, inhaling sharply and massaging a painful crick in the back of her neck.
She couldn't quite remember what she had been dreaming about and it admittedly took her a few moments to remember where she was.

She shivered, looking around the living room, splintered rays of morning sunlight creeping across the floor. The early winter air had made the room draughty and the fact that the heating had been off had only contributed to the discomforting cold.

Instinctively, Cassidy untangled her limbs from their curled up position and stumbled from the armchair where she had been sleeping.
Armchair?
Cassidy frowned: she had fallen asleep on the sofa the night before.
Not the armchair.

"He must have moved me," she thought, quickly padding over to the electric heater and switching it on before looking around the room with darting eyes. "But where is he?"

Michael was nowhere to be seen.
Cassidy rolled her shoulders back, rubbing her tired eyes and stealing a glance out of the front window.
No sign of him.

The drunkenness of slumber quickly draining from her body, Cassidy walked over to sitting room door. With hesitant fingertips she siphoned the door open just wide enough for her to see into the hallway.
It was empty.
The Weeping Archangel seemed to have gone.

Cassidy pressed her dry, chapped lips together, trying to moisten them a little.
There was no way the monster would just leave her. Not after the lengths he'd gone to steal her away again.
But what if he'd left on one of his errands? To get her food? Or another twisted gift?

Her stomach writhing, Cassidy pushed the door open and slipped into the hallway as quietly as she could manage. She looked up and down the hall and swiftly glanced up the stairway to make sure that the first floor landing was similarly deserted.

Satisfied with this, she turned her attention to the front door.
She wasn't sure how Michael had initially gotten into the house but the door's old fashioned Yale lock could easily be manipulated from the inside.

She quickly padded down over the rug, across the glossy wooden floor and on to the coarse fur of the welcome mat. She sucked a deep breath in, filling her lungs as much as she could.
Maybe he would track her down.
Maybe he would chase her.

But if there was any way that she could put some distance between them, Cassidy was willing to do it.

However, the young woman's fingers had only just glanced the surface of the metal lock before when she heard a low, deep and unfortunately familiar voice behind her.

"Where are you going?"

Cassidy turned, her heart sinking in her chest at the sight of the stone angel standing only a few feet away from her, one of his long arms outstretched.
Reaching for her, even if only passively.

She heaved a sigh, her shoulders slumping as she turned to face him fully.
"Nowhere, I suppose."

"Good girl."

Cassidy gritted her teeth and with quivering knees, walked down the hallway, towards the kitchen door. She kept her eyes on the Lonely Assassin, turning her head as she passed him and only daring herself to look away the moment she set foot in the kitchen.

"You were trying to escape me again, were you not?"

He was fast. So unbelievably fast.
They all were.

Cassidy turned to face him, leaning against one of the marble counter-tops and looking at him once again. "Would you really be so surprised?" she asked him, her knuckles turning milky as she gripped the counter at her back.

Sealed in stone, the Angel stood at the other side of the room, barring the main exit. His expression was a neutral one but his tone was carefully mocking. "At your brazen act of defiance? No. At your continued refusal of a position of both security and status? Yes."

Cassidy resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him. "I think I liked it better when you couldn't speak."
"The feeling is mutual," the Angel responded, almost tonelessly, not taking the opportunity to move even when she blinked.

Gathering her nerves, Cassidy turned away from him and reached up into a nearby cupboard, trying to find something to eat.
With the return of her appetite, the young woman was determined not to be forced into starvation again.

"You moved me last night. You moved me from the sofa to the armchair."
"I merely repositioned you so that your breathing was not quite so laboured. The sound was becoming tiresome to endure listening to."
Cassidy's fingers found a cardboard box of bran flakes, tightly wedged against the back shelf of the cupboard.

After silently ascertaining that they were still in date and hadn't gone soft from a lack of proper storage or dampness, Cassidy dared herself to ask the question that she had been wanting to ask for a long time now.
"Why haven't you done anything to me yet?"
She slowly turned to look at him, finding that he had moved closer to her but his posture was still as unimposing as ever.

"Anything?" Michael questioned. "I fear you'll have to be more specific than that, Cassidy."

"Why haven't you-…" Cassidy swallowed, her voice warbling dangerously when she tried to speak. "…ordered me to do something for you yet? Or hit me for trying to run away again? Or…" Her voice lowered but her gaze remained affixed to the lower folds of Michael's toga. She knew she had to avoid his eyes: she had learned her lesson the first time. But her eyes concentrated, unblinking, on those drapes of silk-like stone with equally stony determination. "Or…finish what you started before I escaped Summer Bank?"

Reminding him was terrifying risk but she wanted to know what was going on in the Angel's mind.
Knowing helped her to prepare herself for what was to come.

Michael was silent for a moment as though contemplating an answer until finally he spoke. His tone was plain-speaking but Cassidy couldn't help but imagine a note of uncertainty in his words. Almost as if the Angel, himself, was unsure of what he was saying.

"You…are weak. You have proven yourself to be weak. In both body and mind. Any being who would willingly opt to die for no discernable reason, has clearly succumb to some kind of sickness. Your poor health makes you even more fragile than usual and I refuse to feed your sickness by unintentionally marring you to the point of fatality. I desire a perfect human specimen and in order for that to be, I must make certain that you are in good health."

"So, basically," Cassidy said slowly as she turned to find herself a bowl. "You don't want to accidently break me beyond repair, in case I die? Because I'm already so beaten up and so sick in the head."
She jostled the cardboard box and let the little brown flakes topple out, lightly clinking against the porcelain. "Is that it?"

"You will remain under my watch at all times. You will eat well and sleep until your health is restored. When you have recovered fully…" His voice lowered into a growl that made Cassidy's skin crawl. "…then I will issue you further orders and you will obey."

She slowly lowered herself into one of the kitchen chairs, feeling a little more confident with the knowledge that he wasn't going to attempt to grievously hurt her while there was still a risk of her not being able to recover from it.
"What makes you so certain of that, Michael?"

She gave an emphatic, forced cough from the back of her throat.
If the beast was only going to do anything to her when she was healthy again, Cassidy was suddenly determined not to recover.

The Angel had moved to her side at her next blink, his large stone hand gripping the back of her chair. He laughed slightly, his close proximity making her lips tremble but she did not look at him.
But he was smirking at her.
She could tell he was smirking.

"When you say that I fear that I will break you, Cassidy…you speak as though you are not already broken. I would say that you are a fully domesticated human."

She clenched her fists in her lap, seeing him as a greyish haze in the corner of her eyes but still refusing to turn her head. "And why is that?"

The Weeping Archangel laughed again. "I managed to prevent you from leaving me just now without having to place a hand on you."

Cassidy's stomach constricted but despite that, she reached behind her, taking a spoon from the drawer and started to eat her cereal.
The idea of leaving him had more than once crossed her mind.
But where on earth would she go? Who could she trust? Who would believe her story?
She had tried telling the truth before and where had that gotten her?
A psychiatric ward. Confined to a locked room. No better than she had been with the Angels.
If she was going to live, she didn't want to go back to Mason Vale. She didn't want to be trapped again.
But she didn't exactly have her freedom living under the Angel either.

Unfortunately, something he had said the night before- something about being enslaved by beings who were supposedly her equals- had rang true with Cassidy.
At least when the Weeping Angels had her confined to a room, it was because they actually had a kind of hold over her. They are all powerful aliens who could kill her, quite literally, in the blink of an eye. She didn't want to admit it but by the standards of evolution, they were superior beings to her in every way. She detested Michael's logic but she could see where it came from.
The doctors and nurses at Mason Vale were as human as she was.
They were just being paid by other humans to keep her there because they thought she was a threat to society.

And they could pump her full of as many drugs as they wanted but there was no way that her nurses could have overpowered her physically.

"I could easily have tackled Samantha. I could have easily hurt her…if I wanted to…"

Cassidy didn't know where the thought came from but she very quickly banished it from her mind.

The Angel watched her, his blank, stone eyes focused firmly on her face.
She recalled something that he had once said about enjoying watching her chew and swallow her food.
His fascination was quite possibly the crudest form of flattery that Cassidy had ever encountered.

Knowing that there was no hope of finding milk in the fridge, Cassidy had chosen to eat the bran flakes dry and swallowing them caused her discomfort. Her throat and mouth were lined with the same mucous-laced saliva- the residue left from her near-drowning and raw from coughing.
She placed a hand on her neck to aid herself but groaned as her fingers made contact with the stinging, scabbing scratch-marks and bruises.

She hadn't looked in a mirror in a while but she could feel the encrusted streams of blood and the tender areas where her skin had been torn.

Cassidy heaped another spoonful of cereal into her mouth, making doubly sure to grind every single flake of bran into miniscule fragmented granules.
She hated what he had done to her.
She hated what he could do to her if he wanted to.
But most of all, she hated what he did to her.

Even without the threat of physical injury, she still felt dependent on him.
Unable to leave him.

"People are still going to come looking for me here," she told him. "And even if you kill the first few, more will come. They'll never leave you in peace. Not until they've taken me back and locked me up…" Cassidy smiled to herself faintly, for the first time in a long time. "Or maybe someone will figure out that you're really a murderous alien and then they'll lock you up."

Michael gave a condescending snort of derision. "This place is but a temporary fixture. As soon as you are healthy enough for travel, I will take you to a better place of dwelling."

"And where is this "better place of dwelling?""

"That is none of your concern. You need only concentrate on restoring yourself to full health."

"I think it is my concern," Cassidy stated, scraping her spoon across the bottom of the bowl as she spoke. "I mean, wherever we go…if I'm going to live properly…I'm going to have to find work somehow…earn money to buy things…food, for instance…"

"You need not concern yourself with that matter either," Michael told her firmly. "I will hunt and procure food enough for you and I. You will not leave the place of dwelling."

"Procure," Cassidy repeated, rolling the word around her mouth. "The same way you procured the things in the hotel…the food in the basket…and the dress…and the…other things…" Her voice trailed away slightly and her gaze lowered for a brief moment before returning to the demonic living statue. "That's stealing. Bit low for a "higher being", don't you think?"

"It is not stealing, human. It is gathering. It is a natural and necessary part of survival."

"No. It's not "gathering." It's stealing. You took something from someone without paying for it. Ergo, you stole from them."

"That is untrue. I would have obtained a vital resource from one too weak-minded to protect it for themselves. You humans are so utterly deluded by your own materialistic values. If an individual takes an item from the natural world and puts a price on it, do they really own it?"

Cassidy furrowed her brow.
"Well, if they improve upon the original object then yes. They've made something better of it so essentially, they do own it now. They've made it their own. So to take it from them would be stealing."

"So in essence," Michael returned, unmoving as always but exerting his presence no less. "You have just confirmed the notion that you are my property. I have taken you from your natural environment and am in the process of grooming you to become an improved human being. By human logic, when I am finished catering to you, you will belong to me and if anyone takes you from me, they would be stealing. Is that correct?"

Cassidy's temples burned, throbbing and sending tense tremors of unease down through her face. "No," she told him through gritted teeth, dropping the spoon into the bowl, standing up and turning away to the sink.

When she turned back to face him, her breath caught in her throat for the Weeping Archangel was standing right behind her.
Her face was only inches from his broad, stone chest, his mighty wings having moved to encase her on either side.

"Is something the matter, Cassidy? You seem to have lost those delightful reasoning skills of yours…"

"Suppose I refuse to leave this place?" she said quickly, her voice starting to quaver. "W-What if I refuse? Then what will you do?"

The Angel growled, unable to move under her gaze but more than capable of displaying his anger. "Foolish little human. You do not have the ch-…" His tone sharpened, becoming much more predatorial. "Cassidy, who is that male?"

"What?"

"We appear to have an intruder."

Cassidy had experienced Michael's rage before but she had never seen him become so aggressive, so quickly.
"What…what do you mean an intruder?"

"His face…I recognise it…"

Trembling slightly at the sound of his escalating growls, Cassidy turned in his arms, only to see a face staring into the kitchen window.
A pair of staring blue eyes.
Wide, shocked eyes.
Almost draped over by a curtain of auburn hair.

"Oh God…"

It was Leon.

Hope you enjoyed! Sorry this one was a little shorter than usual.
Consider it more of a filler-chapter ;)
I promise that the next one will be nice and long again.