It looks like there's actually a little bit of interest in this story, which really means a lot! I'll do my best here.
This chapter has some action, but ultimately, is a lot of talking, some exposition, some reminiscing about Blink. (It makes me want to write another 1969 story.) Hope you have fun and enjoy! :-D
THREE
A video of a cemetery in Swansea. A Weeping Angel. An ex-Time Agent both in the console room, and on the video…
"Oh, my God!" Martha shrieked.
The Doctor quickly paused it. "What? What is it?"
"Look at it!" she said, pointing emphatically at the Angel onscreen. "It not only moved to face Jack when the others were walking away, but… Doctor, look at its hands!"
The Doctor pulled his glasses (probably unnecessarily, mostly for flourish) out of his breast pocket and threw them on. He examined the screen. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," he said again without moving his lips. "That can't be good."
"What?" Jack wondered.
Martha said, "Jack, the first time we watched the video, the Angel had its eyes covered in both positions, before and after moving. Now…"
Jack's eyebrows shot up high when he realised it: the Angel had lowered its hands, and its eyes could now be seen. A chill ran down his spine. "Ohhhhh…. my God. What the hell does this mean?"
"Doctor, how is this possible?" Martha wondered.
"I'm not sure yet, but something tells me… well, just don't take your eyes off that screen," he replied.
"No way. Now we can't blink at the screen?" Martha asked, incredulous.
"Are you absolutely certain it's the same video? The same patch of video at that?" Jack wondered, now getting serious. And loud. "Check the time stamp."
"Jack you saw me rewind! You hear the identical words!" the Doctor repeated.
Nevertheless, Martha reached under the console quickly and produced some sort of brochure and a random pen. She quickly jotted down the time code on a blank spot, and said, "Play it again."
The Doctor obliged, and surely enough, the time code was the same. This time the Angel's hands were completely down, and its eyes were fixed on Jack in the video, standing still, with his back to it, texting his friends.
Martha shuddered. "Oh, that's creepy."
"It's the same bit of footage," the Doctor concluded, darkly.
Then his hands began to flit over the nearby controls, and Martha asked, "What're you doing?"
"I'm asking the TARDIS to make absolutely certain that there is not a duplicate of this video, anywhere in her memory banks," he replied.
A message in red, in Gallifreyan popped up on the screen, and the Doctor said, "Damn. No duplicates."
Then he played the clip again. This time, the Angel was reaching out to Jack with one hand.
"Jesus," Jack breathed. "This is mental."
The Doctor played it again. The Angel seemed to be somewhat translucent this time, with both its hands up around its head.
"What's happening?" Martha wondered. "Is it disappearing?"
"No, we couldn't be that lucky," the Doctor said. "I've got a very bad feeling about this."
"Besides, Martha, look," Jack said, pointing at the paused screen. "The Angel now seems to be taking up the same space as me. It's like… coming through me."
"Ohhh, no…" the Doctor groaned. But then he played the clip again.
The Angel was again translucent, but noticeably closer to the camera, it seemed. Jack was now behind it in the video, but still visible because of the Angel's seeming intangibility now.
"Doctor, what is happening?" Jack asked.
"Something very, very bad," the Doctor said. "But I have to know for sure. I have to…"
And he played it again. The Angel was even closer, and it now had its claws over its head, and it was snarling. The three of them all cried out with a start, and hopped back.
One more time. This time, the Angel, in the same position, seemed to be holographically emerging from the screen.
"Oh shit!" Jack shouted, backing up as far as he could.
Martha ducked down instinctively. "Doctor, what the hell?"
The Doctor had backed up against the railing as well, and took the sonic screwdriver from his pocket. He aimed it at the console, and turned off the monitor. The image of Oystermouth, and the Angel emerging from the screen, was gone.
Martha stood. She looked at the Doctor with deadpan fear in her eyes. "They can come through a screen?"
The Doctor stood deadly still and scowled at the spot where the Angel had just disappeared. "I don't think that's what it is."
"We just saw it!" Jack protested.
"It didn't come through the screen. Quantum lock wouldn't allow for that type of interfacing with technology, because technology of this sort wouldn't produce any measurable tangible quantum force."
"Then what just happened?" Jack demanded. "If that Angel didn't come through the screen, then…"
"It's something about the image," the Doctor said. "The Angel in the image was not displaced. The image of the Angel became displaced. The image… it's like the image became an Angel in its own right. Is that… does that make sense?"
And he began to walk in circles round the console, talking to himself. Martha and Jack looked at each other, and now both knew to stand aside – there would be no rushing him.
"It's just a camera…" the Doctor was muttering. "Early twenty-first century, operated by a human… maybe something about the TARDIS… how would we… can't test it without endangering… damn. But how… Jack?"
"Yeah?"
"Is the camera standard human issue? You hadn't scavenged it?"
"Standard human issue, yeah," he said. "Bought it at Currys a year ago."
The Doctor stopped pacing. "Then we can't rule out the Angel interfacing with the TARDIS," he said. "Unfortunately, we can't know without pulling up the clip again, and based on what I saw… well, we do not want to do that. Too risky. So for now, let's just assume that an image of an Angel can become an Angel. Which actually makes sense… why didn't I know this?"
"Er..." Martha began.
"Which means, first of all, kids," the Doctor said. "What's the most annoying earworm you can think of? A song that once you hear it, it never leaves your mind?"
"What?" she asked.
"You heard me. Earworm. Of the deadliest variety," the Doctor said. "Come on, our lives may depend upon it."
Martha and Jack looked at each other again, and the latter said, "Well, back around the turn of the twentieth century, I heard some kids playing a game and singing a song about Gophers… stuck with me for quite a while. Erm…"
"Okay. Martha?"
"That Paul McCartney song, the Christmas one," she said. "Hate that thing."
"Oh yeah!" Jack exclaimed, delightedly. Then he sang, "Sim-ply hav-ing a wonderful Christmastime!"
"Ugh," she groaned.
The Doctor did a thing, and another thing, with controls on the console, and (Simply Having) A Wonderful Christmastime began to play. "Enjoy this as a distraction, my friends. Because the image of the Angel is in all of our brains. Got to play it safe."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" Jack shouted, over the music.
"I might be wrong," the Doctor said. "But kidding? No."
As they listened to the song a couple more times, another problem occurred to the Doctor, but he didn't voice it just now. If the Angel interfaced with the TARDIS, it could be in her brain now too, and that could be a very big, bad boon for the Weeping Angels on Earth.
Once again, his hands flitted over the equipment, and this time it was Jack who asked, "Now what are you doing?"
"Deleting the video," the Doctor replied.
"Kill the music, would you?" Jack requested, as he pulled out his phone and punched a button.
"Thank God," Martha sighed as the music stopped.
"Jack, where are you?" a voice asked through his phone, on speaker mode.
"I'm still with the Doctor and Martha," he said. He looked at his friends in the console room, and said, "Say hi to Tosh!"
The Doctor and Martha both said hello a bit awkwardly.
"Listen, Tosh, you've got to delete the Oystermouth video," Jack said. "Do not watch it, just delete it."
"Why?"
"Just trust me. Delete it from the camera, and from any other device or hard drive to which it might be saved."
"Why can't we watch it?" she asked. "I was going to try and…"
"Don't bother," he snapped. "The Doctor has already figured out what it is, and it's something that can harm you via the video, so delete it."
"Wait, that makes no sense," another voice said. Martha recognised it as the cameraman, presumably Ianto.
"It has to do with quantum lock," Jack said. "Creatures that…"
Ianto interrupted. "No way, quantum-locked creatures are a myth. Torchwood studied the concept, back before…"
"They never finished," Tosh interrupted in turn. "And just because it was never proven doesn't mean it's not true. The researcher who was working on it disappeared and they never pursued it any further."
"Well now we know why he disappeared, if he was working with cameras," Martha whispered to the Doctor.
He nodded, feeling dread in his guts.
"I, personally, have always believed quantum lock is real, but I too became stymied anytime I tried to work out the math," Tosh continued. "Not that I tried that hard, it's just I got blocked by…"
"The interaction between the composition of any known stone, and how it might shift on a quantum level in reaction to an extremely minute removal of energy focus?" the Doctor wondered.
"Yes," Tosh replied. "I kept coming to the conclusion that it couldn't happen in this dimension, that we'd have to jog sideways into theoretical spacetime. Which would support the idea that on Earth, the creatures are indeed, a myth, even if they exist elsewhere… But just because little ol' me couldn't work it out, doesn't mean it's not work-out-able. I'm just saying."
The Doctor said. "If you want to see the math, I'll send it to you."
"Yes, please!" Tosh said, excitedly.
"Be right back," the Doctor said. And he jogged down the hall, leaving his Companions a bit nonplussed.
"Tosh, are we clear?" Jack asked. "Don't watch it. Don't delay. Just delete."
"You've got it," Tosh responded, then cut off the call.
Jack turned to Martha and crossed his arms quite seriously over his chest. "Okay, tell me everything. Clearly the Angels have got you rattled. Him, I could see. But when and why and how did you run afoul of these things?"
Martha sighed. "One day we were headed into the nest of this… well, giant lizard thing from the Eidechse galaxy that had set up shop in the cellar of an old Apothecary in Spitalfields. Our only task was to go in there, and shoot the mother lizard with these poisoned arrows before hatching, because if hatching occurs after injecting the poison, the offspring are more manageable and the Doctor would be able to get them into an incubator in the TARDIS, and return them to their home planet. If they hatch while Mummy is healthy, they are like little Gremlins, who bite and scratch and spit, and when there are two-dozen of them… well none of that is either here or there."
Jack laughed. "Wow. I'm going to need that whole story someday as well."
"On our way, we got out of a taxi, and this woman ran up to the Doctor, and said 'oh Doctor, it's me, remember me?' A blonde. I thought the worst, of course, and back then, I was frustrated all the time with him. Very often because of rubbish like that. I mean, he didn't have to like it so much."
"Aw, cut the man some slack. He hasn't always been this adorable."
She chuckled. "Right, so I've learned. But listen: jealousy was not the only reason I tried to pry him away from her… we did have an impending giant lizard hatching!"
"Of course you did."
"I want that known," she said. She was serious, but she smiled a bit because she realised how ridiculous she sounded, especially in light of things, and in the context of the harrowing story she was telling.
"Duly noted," he said, giving a little salute."
"But here's where things get interesting: the Doctor said he didn't know her at all, and told her he was sorry, but that things don't always happen to him in the right order. Whereupon, the woman, Sally Sparrow was her name, realised something apparently incredibly important which the Doctor and I would not understand until later. She said something like, 'oh my God, it was me all along! You got all of the information from me!' Then she told him that eventually he'd get trapped in 1969, and handed him a big plastic envelope and said he'd need that, when it happened."
"Oh! That is interesting!"
"After we returned the infant lizards to the Eidechse galaxy, and had the mother picked up by the appropriate intergalactic medical authorities, we opened up the packet and looked at what was inside. It was a warning about the Weeping Angels, and instructions on how to get the TARDIS back, once we got stuck in 1969."
"What?" Jack asked, his voice high-pitched. "How would a random Sally know about how to get the TARDIS back to the Doctor?"
"An incident that had happened to her, it simply hadn't happened to us yet. Instructions she got from the Doctor, she wrote it all down, and ended up giving it to the Doctor as instructions from her. And round and round and round. The Doctor calls it…"
"Timey-Wimey," Jack finished. "I know. I've heard."
"And surely enough, one day when we were chasing the Schuppig, also from the Eidechse galaxy, a cousin of the original lizard, along the edges of Epping Forest, we came upon this old house, and got ourselves cornered."
"By Weeping Angels."
"Yep. And it was terrifying. I remember backing up to the wall with the Doctor, eyes on the Angel, and hearing him say, 'listen, you and I both know what happens now,' so I asked him if he had the packet, he said yes, and we held hands, and counted to three, blinked at the same time, and wound up, as Sally had said, in 1969."
"You let yourselves get zapped?"
"There was no choice! Neither of us had blinked in two minutes – do you have any idea how difficult that is? And it had waited until we were literally cornered to even show itself! We were caught off-guard. And the Doctor reckoned it was meant to happen, so…" she sighed. "I didn't see any way out of it without a zapping!"
"So, how long were you stuck in 1969?"
"Six very long months," she sighed. "Do you know what it's like to be trapped in a tiny flat with a time traveller who can't travel in time?"
"I kind of know what it's like to be one."
"Think, caged tiger in a bathroom cubicle. Which... I guess you already know."
"Oh, I'm not the Doctor though. The itch is nowhere near as great," he said. Then his tone changed. "A tiny flat, eh? What was that like?"
"Torture," she answered, bitterly, without hesitation. "One bed, no sofa…"
"Pre-Pleasure Vortex," Jack said, then winced. "Ouch."
"Yeah, I'd rather not revisit it. I'd rather just be grateful for the way things are now."
"Good for you," he said, rather subtly, genuinely happy for her (if a little jealous).
Martha went on to discuss what they did, once they were in 1969, as per Sally's instructions, to get the TARDIS back. It all came down to getting Sally to do the right thing in 2007, so that the TARDIS could be activated and find the Doctor and Martha, where they were. They graffiti-ed a wall, built the Timey-Wimey Detector, greeted Billy Shipton, spent a lot of time convincing him they weren't nutters. The key, of course, was the DVD Easter Egg, planted for Sally to find, and have a conversation with.
"Wait," Jack said, then he shut his eyes tight. "A video of a guy in a suit, making random, seemingly cryptic comments? Embedded in a dozen or so different DVDs?"
"Seventeen, actually. But yeah, how'd you know?"
He opened his eyes wide. "The guy in the suit is the Doctor! Oh my God! We heard rumblings about it at Torchwood, but Tosh looked into it, and it seemed like a bunch of geeks on the internet, fixating on a mistake of the publisher, or something a troll had planted."
"Did you ever watch it?"
"No, but Tosh did. Mind you, even if I had, I wouldn't have recognised the Doctor in it. I'd have enjoyed watching it, but I wouldn't have known it was him."
"Really? The weird way he talks, the things he talks about? The fact you were looking for him?"
Jack shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. Remember, I was looking for a guy with a specific face, and it's not the face we both know and love today, Miss Jones. And he's not the only guy I've ever heard talk about…"
"At one point on the video, the Doctor says the Angels have the phone box."
"Oh yeah. That would've clued me in," he conceded.
"Mm," she agreed, with a chuckle.
"Damn. I wish I'd known."
"Well, what could you have done about it, really?"
"True."
"Sent Tosh the Math," the Doctor said, bounding back into the room. "What'd I miss?"
"Nothing," Martha said. "Just telling Jack the story of Sally Sparrow, the Easter Egg, the Angels, et cetera, et cetera."
"Good," the Doctor said. "Although I thought we could tell that story during the bus ride."
"What bus ride?" she asked.
He stood up straight and announced, "Kids, we're going to Oystermouth. But we've got to take the bus."
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