OMG, I cannot f***ing believe how long these updates are taking! I don't even know if there's anyone continuing to read this story... if you're out there, I'd love to hear from you, just to know there's a reason to finish this thing!

You may recall the recent revelation that the Rift has different aspects, different channels that lead to different places... including Cardiff. Glenn was shown the Rift Manipulator, and asked to try and identify where the Weeping Angels came from, while the Doctor and Jack had a heart-to-hearts about human nature and trust. I daresay it made them closer! Also, Martha, working with Tammy's psychiatrist, learned a bit more about their patient. This gave her a bee in her bonnet, making her anxious to get in touch with the Doctor.

In this chapter, we have a run-in with Glenn's mum's Angel, but we also learn a great deal about it! Martha's situation in 1980 digs in further, and the Doctor is left slightly on-edge...

Enjoy!

CHAPTER 12

"Are you sure you're okay?" Jack asked, as he, Glenn, and the Doctor boarded the TARDIS once again, in that order.

"I'm fine," Glenn said, wiping his forehead. "That was intense."

"Intense how?" the Doctor wanted to know, shutting the door behind him.

"How? Do you mean in what way is being flooded with the energy from a rift in time and space intense?" Glenn asked him, annoyed, stopping on the ramp.

"Yes, exactly," the Doctor said, not catching the tone. To him, it was a perfectly reasonable question.

"It's terrifying. It feels like falling, staring into a void, being electrocuted… possibly all at once," Glenn said, a bit short with his temper.

The Doctor nodded – this sounded right. But Glenn was different from himself, and in fact, different from all other humans. "Did it make you want to… do things?" he asked the half-Eternal man, recovering from villainhood.

"Oh, I see what you're asking," Glenn said, turning back down the ramp to face the Doctor. He sighed and then, "I thought it would. But it turned out I just needed Jack to hold my hand because it was scary, and I don't know how to deal with scary anymore. Time was, I could just… you know…"

The Doctor nodded. "I see. You've got a ways to go, Glenn."

"I do," he said.

"Are you up for this, then?" the Doctor wondered. "I can't guarantee it won't be scary."

"Will it help get my family back?"

"Well, sort of… I mean, not strictly speaking. But bigger than that, it might help guarantee that no-one else loses their family in the same way."

"That's something," Glenn muttered.

"That's huge," Jack corrected. "But if you're not up to it, need a breather…"

"I'm up to it. Just don't leave me."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Jack assured him. "Doctor, what's next?"

"We're going to materialise far away from here, so as not to interfere with Torchwood's equipment, and then we're going to open up that CPU and see who's in there," the Doctor said, his jaw tight with trepidation. He slid past both of them and began to move round the console. "I mean, we know very well who's in there, but we're going to see if there's anything we can do about her. It. Whatever. Everyone ready for that?"

"We are," Jack said, referring to the fact that he and Glenn were immune to the effects of the Weeping Angels. "Are you?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Ready as I'll ever be. Ready to get this over with."

"Aren't you kind of glad Martha's not here now?" Jack asked.

"I wish she were safe in one of the rooms in the back, frankly, but that wasn't offered to me as an option, so…" the Doctor muttered, as he slid the handbrake out of activation and the TARDIS began to grind and wheeze.

Jack chuckled. "That's never going to be an option with her."

"I know."

"Would you truly have it any other way?"

The Doctor sighed. "Fine, touché."

Jack slapped him on the back. "Good man. Now where the hell are we?"

It had only taken the TARDIS a few seconds to quiet itself, and the Doctor had said they were going "far away."

"Same day, same time, different galaxy. The Castelooper, to be exact," he answered. He then ripped up a floor panel and climbed down on a ladder into the lower recesses of the TARDIS console, and came back up with two fairly standard-looking computer cables. One of them he used to plug Glenn's mum's CPU into a power source on the console.

He brandished the other one, and Glenn chuckled, "That just looks like a monitor hookup."

"That's what it is," the Doctor said to Glenn's surprise, plugging it into the back of the CPU. He then dashed forty-five degrees round the console and opened up the same compartment they had previously used to interface Glenn with the TARDIS. The Doctor asked him, "Can you put your hands in here, and concentrate on absorbing energy from the Angel at the same time?"

"Should be able to, yeah," Glenn said, stepping forward.

"I'm right here," Jack reminded him, as Glenn slipped his hands in.

Then the Doctor simply stared at the heavy, boxy, grey thing on the console for a few moments, clearly dreading what was about to happen. "Here goes nothing."

He plugged the other end of a cable into the back of the TARDIS' monitor, and hit the power switch. They could all hear the machine booting up, and separately, all of their bodies began to do the same thing. High-alert, buzzing…

"So, last you used this thing, a Weeping Angel was projecting out of the screen, yeah?" Jack asked, slightly breathless, ready to launch, if necessary.

"Yep," said the Doctor.

"Then…" but Jack didn't finish his sentence. He shoved the Doctor out of the way just in time for the Angel to project itself exactly where he'd been standing.

"Blimey, good catch," the Doctor breathed, having careened into a railing. "Thanks."

"Yeah," Jack said, keeping his eyes on the beast.

The Angel propelled itself out of the monitor, and onto the console room floor. Transparent, six feet of holographic death.

"Okay, gents," the Doctor said, never taking his eyes off it either. "I know you are invulnerable to it, but don't get lazy. At the moment, it's still clearly tied to the screen – it's still an image of an Angel. But if you let it move, it could detach itself and become independent. Solid. Then we won't be able to stuff it back into the CPU."

"Great," Jack sighed.

Glenn had to turn his head to see it from his position at the console. "This is the thing that killed my mum and Hannah?"

"Yes," the Doctor said. "But it's also the thing storing the information that will help us get them back, so concentrate on that."

"Can it be killed?" Glenn asked, teeth clenched.

"I'm working on that bit," the Doctor said. "But Glenn, you need to do this quickly. The less time it spends hooked up to the TARDIS, the happier I will be."

Glenn then began to stare at the Angel with that penetrating gaze, the one that had so disturbed Martha when they'd first met, the one that meant he was absorbing and reading energies from his subject.

It was intense, and if a gaze could be noisy, this would have been it. Jack fancied that he could hear the energy passing between the Angel and Glenn… nonsense, he knew, but with emotions running high, perhaps it was simply blood rushing through his head.

"This is harder," Glenn said after twenty seconds or so, teeth still clenched.

"It's all right, Glenn," the Doctor encouraged. "Try to cope – it will be worth it."

Glenn gave an angry growl, then pursed his lips, and seemed to concentrate harder.

"That's it, buddy, try not to let go," Jack chimed in. He grasped Glenn's shoulder for support.

The air seemed to become thicker, as if everything was moving in slow motion, and/or through warm water. The three of them had the sense that even if they wanted to turn and run just now, they would not be able to, that it would be like trying to run while shin-deep in sand. The Doctor recognised the oppressive force of time filling the space, and it was nauseating. The TARDIS reacted with what amounted to panting. But it also meant that Glenn was getting something good, something very much needed, from the Angel.

And it took a few minutes… Jack kept his eyes on Glenn, the Doctor kept his eyes on data that was forming on the screen. It mounted dizzyingly fast, but not too fast for the eagle-eyed Time Lord. He stood back and could see through the Angel, to read what the TARDIS was translating from Glenn.

"Getting anything?" Jack asked.

"Oh yes! December, 1979," the Doctor said.

"That's awfully close to April of 1980."

"Maybe it's an image of the same Angel that zapped Tammy Litzinger."

"That would be weird. Is that possible?"

"Absolutely!" The Doctor squinted at the screen some more, and said, "Western France. A town called Niort."

"That's not close to Connecticut, but…"

"But it's an image of the Angel, Captain, not the Angel itself. Maybe some of its properties got distorted. Like a reflection of the moon… it can't do all the same things the moon can do, but rather, it does its own thing. Or… actually, that's a bad example. Scratch that."

"Doctor, am I done?" Glenn asked, desperate.

"Not yet, Glenn," the Doctor said.

"What?" Glenn now shouted. "Sorry, I can't hear you..."

The oppression in the room was growing heavier, and they needed to have this done.

"Not yet!" the Doctor shouted. "I still don't have a point of origin. Please get it, if you can!"

The room hummed a bit longer, and Glenn muttered, low, angry, "And where did you come from, you translucent bitch?" And he closed his eyes, and seemed to push hard, as though something was going to ooze from his pores as he did so. After a few beats, he groaned, "Oh, I fucking hate this."

"Rift energy?" Jack asked. "It's all right – you can't fall into it. You're safe."

"It hurts!"

"Just give it ten more seconds, and if you don't get anything from them…"

"I'm getting something, it just hurts! Doctor, can you read it?"

"Not yet. Ten more seconds ought to do it!" the Doctor answered.

"Jack!" Glenn called out.

"I'm right here!" Jack responded, grabbing onto now both of the other man's shoulders, but now keeping his eyes locked on the Angel, since Glenn's were shut and the Doctor's were on the monitor. "Ten, nine, eight…"

Glenn joined him counting down, shouting as he did so.

"Three! Two! One!" Jack shouted with him. "Now you can let go!"

Glenn opened his eyes, and pulled his hands out of the slots. "Doctor, please tell me you've got it."

"I do," said the Doctor, his eyes wide and manic, staring at the screen. He reached over and switched off Glenn's mum's CPU, and the Angel disappeared unceremoniously from the console room. "I've got a point of origin! I know where they came from!"

"And we can send them back?" Jack asked.

"Theoretically, yes! We're going to need the Rift Manipulator. Again."

"No problem. Just tell me what you need, I'll get Tosh on it ASAP," Jack told him, his voice crisp and practically chirping now. "Doctor, are you okay?"

"Yeah," said the Time Lord. "Just need to shake off the last few minutes."

"Why?"

"You didn't feel it?"

"I must not have felt what you felt," Jack said. "What do you need?"

"Half an hour. And to call Martha."

"Hello?" Martha whispered.

"Hi, it's me. Can you talk?" the Doctor asked. Hearing her voice was like a cool drink of water in the desert.

"Yeah! I've been needing to call you. Hang on, let me slip into a broom closet. There was a brief silence, then clicking and rustling, and then she said, "Okay. This should do. There's an old sofa in storage, so I'm sitting behind it. Oh good – a dead mouse."

"Lovely."

"How are things going, wherever you are?"

"Well… I miss you."

"I miss you, too. It's only been a day!"

"I know, but I've been on pins and needles… but you already know that," he said, laying out flat on his bed with his feet on the floor. He was harried, exhausted.

"Well, then, give me some good news."

The Doctor went on to explain the last couple hours – the trip to Torchwood, Glenn's communing with the Rift, his reading of the Angel, and what it was like. "Thought I might be sick. The Angels pervert time, plus there was this question of it having travelled through the Rift. It never occurred to me that reading that sort of energy in that air, the air of the TARDIS, would be so thick. Traumatic."

"I hope it yielded something useful."

"Indeed, it did," he said. "Which brings me to why I called."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, sorry," he said. "I wouldn't ask, but… well, I feel like with things the way they are, the Angels being what they are, and now having one in the TARDIS, locked in a CPU though it may be…"

"If you're going to ask me for something, just do it."

"I'm telling you, Martha, I think the energy transfer was a wake-up call for me, as to how much we are actually playing with fire…"

"Doctor!"

"Sorry," he said, then cleared his throat. "Things being what they are, I think that the less we travel through time, the safer we will all be until things blow over."

"Okay, so?"

"So, I need you to try your best to track down Glenn's mum and niece."

"Oh. Are they here?"

"They were zapped to western France in December of 1979."

"Okay, hang on, I'll be right back." The Doctor was "on hold" for about two minutes, before Martha came back, and said, "I ran down the hall to get a pen and paper. So, December 1979, western France… do you know what town?"

"Niort," he said. "N-I-O-R-T."

"Really? I've been there. Nice enough town… not exactly a British person's Mecca. So you think it's safer to make one trip to 1980, then just cross the ocean, rather than rescuing them on a completely separate mission to 1979?"

"I do. Do you disagree?"

She chuckled. "What am I, a Time Lord?"

"Well, in my Time Lord opinion, this is the best course of action, unless and until I can work out something more efficient."

"What's her name? Whatever good that'll do me."

"Patricia Eileen O'Keeffe," he said. "And the little girl is Hannah Beatrice Amberlin."

"Different last names?"

"Yeah, Glenn and his half-brother, Hannah's dad, have different fathers, remember?"

"Right, how could I forget?"

"Glenn said he thinks it's unlikely they'll have stayed in France, since his mum only speaks English, and she's not the most well-travelled individual. She's probably back in Britain. He also thinks it might not have occurred to her to change her name, or to stay away from Newcastle."

"Seriously?"

The Doctor shrugged. "I don't know. Hard to believe, since Glenn's pretty clever, that his mum would be obtuse enough to go home, where there's literally another, younger version of her raising an eight-year-old Glenn, but who knows?"

"So, we might be, on top of other things, risking Glenn crossing his own timeline in 1980?"

"Ugh," the Doctor groaned. "Hadn't thought of that. But yeah."

"Maybe she could be convinced to travel somewhere to be rescued," Martha said. "Like, say, Connecticut?"

"Maybe. That's if she's gone back to Newcastle."

"Couldn't you search for a time anomaly in Newcastle in 1980 and track them down fairly easily? And if there isn't one, then it means they're not there. I mean, it's not everything, but it might be a good place to start."

"Not a bad idea, actually, except I'm trying not to travel too much... Are you sure you're not a Time Lord?"

She laughed. "I'm sure. I'm just a run-of-the-mill, time-travelling-almost-doctor."

"And you're the best in the universe at it," he said, affectionately. "Damn it, I wish you were here. I hate doing this stuff without you."

"I know, but we're well on our way, Doctor."

"Yes, yes, eye on the prize and all that," he muttered, mostly affectedly. "So, speaking of almost-doctoring, what news on Tammy?"

Martha sighed. "Well, I debriefed with Dr. Penn this morning, and she showed me some notes on 'Louise' over the past couple of months. Time-travel delusion, general depression, difficulty functioning – nothing we didn't know there. She's been keeping details of her life and origins under wraps… she admitted to having been married, but she won't say her husband's name, which country she got married in, where she was born or grew up, or any of it. They know she's from England, but that's it."

"All of that stands to reason."

"Yeah, and get this: she told them she used to be a photographer, but one day she took a photo of something so disturbing, it sent her reeling."

"Oh! What do the staff make of that?"

"They think she may have witnessed a crime, or found a dismembered body or something."

"Yikes. Probably best to disabuse them of that."

"I thought so, too. I went to talk to her after debriefing with Dr. Penn, hoping to come up with a story she could tell them about that photo, so she could be treated and released. In fact, I was talking with her when you rang."

"And how did that go?" the Doctor asked, wincing, having a feeling it hadn't been as easy as Martha might have hoped. Tammy was not delusional about time travel, but she wasn't completely well either.

Martha sighed again. "She started telling me again about how she doesn't want to leave here. I told her, I suppose she doesn't have to come back to the twenty-first century if she doesn't want to, but we should at least get her out of the hospital. She said that was fine, but she still wasn't yet interested in making up a story about the disturbing photo."

"Did she at least give you a reason as to why she doesn't want to return to the twenty-first century?"

"Yeah, but it's pretty dodgy."

"How so?"

"She feels that this situation is the universe giving her a huge, loud signal that she's supposed to make a brand-new start."

"Interesting."

"It sounds fake, doesn't it?"

"Well, I don't know. I mean, something pretty extreme did happen to her. And it didn't seem like she was terribly happy in her marriage… at the very least, she had a husband who didn't seem to get her, and her mental illness. I could see how she might feel that way."

"But why can't she come back to 2008 and make a brand-new start? Get a divorce and get on with life?"

"I don't know. Why does she need to?"

"I guess… because… it would set things right?"

"Not necessarily."

"Because her family will miss her otherwise?"

"Okay, fair enough," he said. "But in the end, it's her decision. You know that, right?"

"Yeah," she sighed.

"And maybe there's something to be said for starting your life over again in a simpler time," he said. "Easier to be anonymous, live off the grid. Pre-9/11, pre-computers, pre-everything-goes-digital, pre-24-hours-of-news…"

"Oh, you know what? Speaking of everything going digital, I had an epiphany!"

"About what?

"About our social media problem. I…" she stopped. Then she whispered, "Hang on, I think someone's trying to find me."

"Martha?"

There was a long pause, and then Martha said, "I've got to go. Sorry. I'll ring you later if I can. I love you."

Then she cut off the call.

The Doctor felt vexed, but understood that she did not want to be "caught" hanging out in a cupboard behind a storage sofa, talking to herself.

The Doctor stalked back into the console room.

"So? Is she good?" Jack asked.

"Of course," the Doctor dismissed with a wave of his hand. "Actually, she says she has an idea about our social media problem."

"You mean the fact that there are God-only-knows how many pictures out there of Weeping Angels, all of which have the potential to become Weeping Angels, and zap God-only-knows how many people into oblivion?"

"Yeah, that problem," the Doctor replied.

"What's her idea?"

"Dunno. She cut me off. Didn't want to get caught with the mobile phone," the Doctor said. Then he clapped loudly and said, "But! First things first. Glenn, I'm still one-hundred-per-cent committed to rescuing your mum and niece, but since they are in the same time period now as Tammy and Martha, I think we should get them all at once."

"Oh. Okay. Mum won't be in the States, though," Glenn pointed out. "But it's fine. You're the boss."

"It's just, if we're going to rescue folks who got zapped from Oystermouth, that's a lot of hopping about, messing with the Angels' work. I don't want any more hopping than needed. As it is, we might be screwing with events – I just don't know for sure."

"Then why are we doing any rescues from Oystermouth?" Jack wondered.

The Doctor sighed. "Something in my gut is telling me to do it. That these disappearances undone will set things right. Probably because the Weeping Angels are out of their element. They're not supposed to be here or now, and their work needs to be erased."

"What about all the social media disappearances, which, by the way, there are bound to be more, since we've been working on this," Jack offered.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, Jack, I've got a lot on my mind!" the Doctor snapped.

"I'm not judging!" Jack said, putting his hands up in disarmed stance. "I'm just saying. There are more – guaranteed. And I don't understand why they're different from the ones in Oystermouth."

The Doctor sighed. "I don't know that they are," he said. "Not yet, anyway. But as you say, there are bound to be so many… and we only have so many resources. Glenn's not going to be able to do a whole bunch of these readings, and the TARDIS…"

The Time Lord looked up in to the churning green Time Rotor, and sighed wistfully.

"Okay, I get it," Jack said, squeezing his friend's shoulder. "One thing at a time."

"Oystermouth is something I can handle. I'm sorry if that makes me short-sighted, but…"

"No, never," Jack whispered. "You're the only guy in the universe who can undo this damage – with Glenn's help, of course…"

"All I do is gather data," Glenn shrugged. "It's meaningless without the Doctor to interpret it."

"So, beggars can't be choosers," Jack said, with finality. "This is your ship – I await your orders."

"Until Martha gets Tammy fit for release, one way or another, she won't come with us, so we have to wait," the Doctor sighed.

"All right. What other problem can we solve?"

"Let's get that 1980 Angel, and see if we can't blast it back to where it came from. It's wrought enough havoc, as far as I'm concerned," the Doctor said, teeth gritted.

Okay, we now know exactly where the Angels came from... next step is to get rid.

Once again, if you're reading, drop me a review! Hopefully you're enjoying and easily following the story (not too convoluted). Thanks so much for reading!