The Doctor, Amy, and I strode through the camp the soldiers had set up at the beach. It was nighttime now, and we were following Father Octavian, who was explaining some things to us. "The angel, as far as we know, is still trapped in the ship. Our mission is to get inside and neutralize it. We can't get through up top, we'd be too close to the drives. According to this," Octavian pulled out what seemed to be a handheld tracking device as we paused by a desk, "behind the cliff face, there's a network of catacombs leading right up to the temple. We can blow through the base of the cliffs, get into the entrance chamber, then make our way up."
"Oh, well that sounds fun." I remarked sarcastically. I was extremely worried about the weeping angels, and what I was about to get myself into, but there was no way I wasn't going to do it. I had already made the promise to myself. The daleks getting away last time was kind of my fault, after all, and I could never tell anyone... nor did I want to.
This was the least I could do.
"Fun, ma'am?" Father Octavian questioned me, not sensing my sarcasm. Maybe they didn't have it in the 51st century.
"Dark catacombs. So fun." I stated blandly anyway, staring out into the dark night ahead of us.
"Technically, I think it's called a Maze of the Dead." Father Octavian corrected me. I refused to close my eyes in fear, like I tended to do, and took a deep breath, staring out into the darkness. I almost forgot about that part. Almost.
"You can stop any time you like." The Doctor commented, noticing my distress. Father Octavian was called away by some soldiers, and he excused himself while the Doctor pulled out his sonic and scanned the equipment on the desk.
I refused to stop staring into the dark abyss. I did not want to think about the stupid thing I was about to do anymore, and the darkness was pretty distracting.
Amy sat up on the table. "You're letting people call you 'sir'. You never do that. So, whatever a weeping angel is, it's really bad, yeah?"
"Now that's interesting," the Doctor commented, ignoring Amy and playing with some scanner that kept beeping. "Nova, you shouldn't have gone out there." He said to me. I could feel him staring at me, but I refused to look back, practicing my not blinking on the black abyss. Maybe if I closed one eye at a time it would work better, like winking back and forth. Or maybe I could squint. Does squinting work? My eyes would probably take longer to dry up that way...
"Nova?" Amy asked me this time, cutting into my thoughts.
I suddenly snapped my head towards her, forcing myself to look away from the darkness. "Huh? What-- sorry, lost in thought." I casually recovered, moving to sit on the desk next to Amy.
Amy looked at me skeptically for a moment before the Doctor turned to her. "You're still here. Which part of 'wait in the TARDIS till I tell you it's safe' was so confusing?"
"Ooh, are you all Mister Grumpy Face today?" Amy mocked, making a fake grumpy face towards him, but the Doctor was dead serious.
"A Weeping Angel, Amy, is the deadliest, most powerful, most malevolent life form evolution has ever produced, and one is trapped inside that wreckage and I'm supposed to climb in with a screwdriver and a torch-- and assuming I survive the radiation, and the whole ship doesn't blow up in my face-- do something clever which I haven't actually thought of yet. That's my day, that's what I'm up to. Any questions?"
Amy mockingly glared at him. "Is River Song your wife?" She asked playfully, killing the Doctor's serious mood. "Because, I don't know, she's Nova's best friend, but the way she talks to you, I've never seen anyone do that. She's kinda like, you know, 'Heel, boy!' Though, there is something off about it..." Amy trailed.
"Yes." The Doctor nodded with a pause. "You're right. I am definitely Mister Grumpy Face today."
River Song stuck her head out of the trailer then. "Doctor! Nova! Father Octavian!"
I got up and ran into the trailer with River, and she looked at me strangely. "Are you alright?" she asked. When all I did was stare at the grainy black-and-white screen of the weeping angel with its back turned instead of respond, River continued. "Oh no, I know that look. Are you going to do something stupid?"
Now it was my turn to look at her strangely. It seems she really did know me well. All I could do was shrug in response, because in all honesty, I was starting to have second thoughts.
River shook her head and laughed. "What are we going to do with you?"
I looked at the screen again, letting myself blink and not seeing it move, and remembered what Amy did to shut off the weeping angel. I knew what to do, but I also knew that certain things had to happen, even if it wasn't to the same person. I was concentrated on the screen so much, I didn't even notice when the Doctor and Amy joined us.
"What do you think?" River asked the Doctor, as he walked up to the screen. "It's from the security cameras in the Byzantium vault. I ripped it when I was on board. Sorry about the quality-- it's four seconds, i've put it on loop."
"Yep, it's an angel." The Doctor confirmed. "Hands covering its face."
"You've encountered the Angels before?" Father Octavian asked him.
"Once, on Earth, a long time ago. But those were scavengers, barely surviving." The Doctor recalled nonchalantly, and I finally tore my eyes from the screen to look at him. I knew exactly what he was talking about. It was strange, because when I was watching this as an episode, I didn't remember him saying that. But now that he's right here in front of me, I remember Martha and Sally Sparrow and the 10th Doctor in 1969. The man in front of me, studying the screen with crossed arms, wasn't just 11-- he was really the Doctor.
With that thought in mind, I breathed a little easier. If I couldn't get myself out of the mess I was about to get into, and neither could Amy or River, then the Doctor definitely could.
"But it's just a statue." Amy pointed out, not seeing the threat.
"It's a statue when you see it." River corrected.
Amy pulled me back a little, while the Doctor asked River where the statue came from. "What does that mean, it's a statue when you see it?" she asked me, whispering.
I looked to the Doctor and River, who seemed to be discussing too intently to pay attention to us at this point, so I decided to explain it to her. "When you're looking, they can't move, because they're quantum locked. So when you look at them, they literally don't exist, and turn to stone. When you aren't looking, they aren't stone, and they can move around and have the power to send people back in time, because that's kind of like... their food. When they send someone back in time, they feed off of all the days they were supposed to have. Meanwhile the victims live to death in a different time period."
Amy began smiling, and I realized that the Doctor and River went quiet behind me. "I get it!" she exclaimed.
"How did you know that?" The Doctor asked me.
I looked to River, and she grinned at me mischievously, as if she already knew what I was going to say. I shrugged. "I know how stuff works."
"She's a scientist." River added, and I found myself smiling also. I tended to tell people that a lot, too, especially back in the real world when people questioned how a young girl knew so much about astrophysics. Even before I was officially a scientist, my best friend Deevia in high school would call me one jokingly every time I got exited over something I'd learned.
Meanwhile, Amy seemed excited at learning this new information. "So, what happens if they stare at each other?"
"They die." The Doctor finished bluntly, walking out of the trailer, River following him out with a device in her hand. Amy stayed inside, and I knew that this was it. I wanted to tell Amy to go out and tell River I was going to do the stupid thing now, but I was afraid that the weeping angel would hear. Could weeping angels even hear? I couldn't remember anything from my locket about the weeping angels, so everything I knew about them, I knew from the show.
I looked around the mess of supplies scattered around the desks for a paper and something to write with, and thankfully, I found someone's notes.
I took the paper and scribbled a quick note for her and handed the paper to Amy. "What's this? Passing notes?" She asked me.
I shook my head. "I need you to go out there and give this to River." I folded the paper and shoved it in her hand this time.
"She's just right out there, you know." She stated wearily. I took her by the shoulders and spun her around towards the door.
"I know, but I need to be here."
Amy gave me one last worried look before shrugging and turning out the door.
888
"I found this. Definitive work on the Angels. Well, the only one. Written by a madman, it's barely readable, but I've marked a few passages." River Song told the Doctor, handing him an old book. The Doctor quickly flipped through the pages and finished reading it in a matter of seconds.
"Hmm. Not bad, bit slow in the middle. Didn't you hate his girlfriend? No, hang on, wait, wait, wait!" The Doctor sniffed the book as Amy approached them, puzzled.
"Did you just read the entire book like that?"
"Yes," He replied, with an obvious tone to his voice. "But this book is wrong! What's wrong with this book? It's wrong." He figured rapidly.
"Oh, it's so strange when you go all baby-face. You don't know who I am yet, do you?" River smirked at the Doctor, observing him as he examined each page of the book slowly, sniffing it and feeling it. Thanks to Nova's warning from the future, River was able to figure out that this was early for the Doctor, also.
"How do you know who I am? I don't always look the same. And how do you know Nova?" He asked her, while still intently studying the book.
"Nova is a different story," she raised her eyebrows and sighed, getting a little distracted at the memory. "But I've got pictures of all your faces. You never show up in the right order though. I need the spotter's guide..."
"—Pictures. Why aren't there pictures?" The Doctor realized, after listening to only half of River's sentence.
Amy shook her head at him and tapped River on the arm, handing her the note Nova gave her. "Dr. Song, a message."
888
When I turned back to the angel, its face was already uncovered. When I turned to grab the remote control to the monitor, I looked back to see it was already facing me with its arms open.
"Okay," I said aloud, still not too sure whether or not the angel could hear me. "I really hope this works."
I pointed the remote at the screen and turned it off at a random point, and sure enough the monitor only shut down for just a second to blink back to life, the angel still staring at me. I fought to keep my eyes open and did the one thing that no one should do when facing a weeping angel, but I knew that I had to, or else things wouldn't work out right. I was already making a stretch by taking Amy's place in this trailer, so if I didn't get affected the same way she did, the timelines might turn out to be so different that more people would get hurt than what the universe had originally planned. I was doing this in the first place because I planned for less people to get hurt, so I couldn't mess up.
I mean, I guess technically I was already messing up, but getting affected the way Amy did would probably make it less messed up.
It definitely felt different here than it did at my job. Sure, I didn't exactly join Area 51 until I graduated high school, but my whole life, my dad had been teaching me little things that I didn't think were unusual to learn at the time. He taught me computer coding in 6th grade. I knew four languages. All my science courses were as advanced as they could possibly be while still being in high school, and eventually I came to love the subject so much, I took extra classes at a local community college. So by the time I had joined Area 51, I had already completed half of the necessary training.
The second half was the part I wish I wasn't so good at. The second half was really what Dylan did. He went out and stole things from people, and sometimes we had to take actual people who have been infected by something potentially alien and run a ton of different tests on them, torturing them until they couldn't take it, and returning them to their homes in a fragile state with all the resources we could possibly provide them with. It was awful. Sure, I've only had to do that twice in all my years of working so far, but I hated it every time. I would have nightmares about it for weeks on end, and the guilt would eat away at me until two months later when I got the report of all the things the government had given them as compensation, even though they didn't know they were getting it from us.
It was absolutely ridiculous. They would be tortured and not remember anything afterwards except the pain, and when we returned them in their horrible condition, they'd spontaneously win the lottery and move into a brand new house. It wasn't enough-- it was never enough after everything we took from them, but according to the directors, it was all they could do. It wasn't enough, but it had to be, or else none of us would be able to live with ourselves. I've tried to stop it over and over, complaining to Professor Zodiac to see if there was any other option, pulling up presentations and papers to show to him to send to the directors to prove that we didn't have to do it, that maybe there was another way. Of course, there never was. Someone had to do it, so the directors forced us to— the people in charge of us who we mostly didn't even know.
Sure, I don't have to kill anyone, but I have to do things that make scars in people they may never heal from. All the good work I did, and I got nothing. Then a test subject comes around—and the other scientists in my group tell me if I do it, they'll listen to me. If I press the button, they'll read my paper, they'll stop ignoring me, they'll analyze my results. I knew that they wouldn't— they just didn't want to carry the burden of being the one to induce all that torture on an innocent person. Of course I did it anyway, both times. All I had to do was press a few buttons, but each time I did it, I swore I would make a change. I did it in the name of everyone else—of all the cowards who would rather have the weakest vessel beaten then take the blame.
If I didn't do it, one by one, they would be fired. It started at the top of the project, whoever was in charge until it was down to me, the very last resort. If I didn't press the button, the people who mistreated me would have their memories erased and end up homeless on the streets. It was a lose-lose situation, and they wanted me to do their dirty work, so painfully simple as flipping a switch, pressing a button. It was hard. It took nearly half an hour each time just to muster up the courage, glaring hard at the control panel, then back to the test subject, all while trying to ignore their cries of, just do it already! Until eventually I did.
Those two subjects—I still remembered their names, and every other detail from their profile. Watching them squirm around like worms, convulsing, swelling up, screaming for help.... it felt like I had strip them of their humanity, and turn them into a lab rat.
Sometimes, I feared that killing them would have been better, no matter how easy their life became afterwards. They still lived with the trauma. They still lived with fragments of painful memories they couldn't put together.
Maybe it was insane, but I felt that I could make up for it all in this universe. There were so many times in 51 where I wish I could go back and change something that I did just to do it differently, so it would hurt less or not at all, but I never could. Here, not only could I literally go back in time, I knew what was supposed to happen. If I tried hard enough, if I was really careful, maybe I could change things for the better.
I knew about all the deaths and heartbreaks to come, and I thought about them. I thought about how it would be worth it if I could change just one, and let myself stare into the eyes of the angel.
Maybe this is the universe's way of redemption.
888
"This whole book— it's a warning, about the Weeping Angels. So why no pictures? Why not show us what to look out for?" The Doctor ranted, still scanning through the book.
River took the note from Amy, expecting for it to be a message from a cleric, but realized it was written from Nova instead. "An image of an angel becomes an angel itself. AKA, whatever looks like a weeping angel turns into one," she read out loud.
The Doctor was listening carefully, not knowing who the note was from, until a thought struck him.
"Nova!" The Doctor exclaimed, running over to the trailer, realizing that the book was wrong and picture-lacking for a reason.
888
There are two faults to my stupid plan.
The first one is that pausing a video at the perfect moment is a lot harder than I thought while you weren't exactly looking at the time stamp.
The second one is that I have always sucked at staring contests, and I still do.
I blinked for just a split second, and suddenly the angel was out of the television standing just in front of me, looking slightly like a hologram, but still very real.
I jumped back. "Doctor!" I yelled his name first without even thinking about it, pointing the remote at the screen and clicking it rapidly over and over, not thinking about strategy.
Thankfully, I got a response. "Are you all right? What's happening?" I heard the Doctor worry from outside the trailer.
"Doctor? The angel came out of the screen! And it looks really mad!" I yelled to him, running over to the door and trying to open it, but of course, it was locked.
"Don't take your eyes off it!" He warned me.
I squinted my eyes a little and held out the remote again, this time not just crazily pressing the button, but actually paying attention to the time signature on the monitor. "I'm not!" I yelled back, "But I think I know how to stop it!"
I heard the Doctor's sonic whirring, and River and Amy joining him. "It's deadlocked!" I heard the Doctor exclaim.
"There is no deadlock!" River retorted.
"Yeah, instead there's a weeping angel!" I heard Amy shout. For some reason I was glad that she got the answer right out of all of them. It was the weeping angel that deadlocked the door.
Carefully, I stared at the time until the video froze on a small glitch, and pressed the off button. The angel became a grainy grey image, and then it went away as the monitor turned off. "I did it!" I shouted triumphantly. "The angel is gone!"
A few moments later the door opened, and Amy, River, and the Doctor came in. They all looked rushed and worried, and I turned back to them casually. "The angel wouldn't go away when I turned the monitor off, but I found a glitch." I explained, feeling just a little bit proud of myself, even if I didn't exactly have to come to the conclusion.
The Doctor smiled at me a little, and then hugged me urgently. "You're alright, you're okay," he repeated, rubbing my back. I felt like something jump-started in me when the Doctor touched me, like a tiny rush of adrenaline that assured me I could do this.
"Yeah, I-I'm fine." I lied, trying my best not to concentrate on how I felt nice and fuzzy in his arms, but on how I just let the angel enter into my soul, or something.
"Good... good." The Doctor finished, awkwardly releasing me from his hug and heading over to the monitor to scan the wires it was connected to.
"That was amazing!" River complimented me. "So it was here? That was the angel?"
"That was a projection of the Angel. It's reaching out, getting a good look at us. It's no longer dormant." The Doctor explained to us, before an explosion sounded.
"Doctor, Nova! We're through!" Father Octavian yelled to us from outside.
"Okay," The Doctor turned to us, "now it starts." He walked out of the trailer to Father Octavian. River and Amy followed, and I went after them, while rubbing at a prick I felt at the inner corner of my eye.
888
All of us climbed down a rope ladder into the main chamber of the Maze of the Dead. I pulled out my flashlight and looked around the cave like everyone else did.
"Do we have a gravity globe?" The Doctor asked Father Octavian.
"Grav globe!" He commanded his soldiers, and one of them tossed a sphere to him, which was then tossed to the Doctor.
"Where are we? What is this?" Amy asked, looking around with the flashlight.
"It's an Aplan moratorium. Sometimes called a Maze of the Dead." River told her. I looked around at all the muddled rock and endless darkness, and shivered. I haven't even been in this place a minute, and I already hated it.
"What's that?"
"Well, if you happened to be a creature of living stone..." the Doctor kicked the gravity globe, and it flew far up into the air, lighting up and revealing the large area and the thousands of stone statues we were surrounded by, "The perfect hiding place."
I gulped nervously and reached into my pocket, pulling out another saltwater taffy. No one really seemed to care about how much noise I was making taking it out of the wrapper, but River looked to me and chuckled a little. I gave her a look and ate it anyway. I needed all the stress relief I could get right now. I was the one with an angel inside me, but they didn't know that... yet.
"I guess this makes it a bit trickier." Father Octavian observed. "A stone angel on the loose amongst stone statues. A lot harder than I'd prayed for."
"A needle in a haystack." River remarked.
"A needle that looks like hay," The Doctor continued, "A hay-like needle. Of death. A hay-alike needle of death in a haystack of, er, statues... No, yours was fine."
"Right. Check every single statue in this chamber. You know what you're looking for. Complete visual inspection. One question— how do we fight it?" Father Octavian asked.
"We find it, and hope." The Doctor responded, walking off further into the cave, Amy following. I followed just a little, but paused to hear Octavian grab River by the arm.
"He doesn't know yet, does he? Who and what you are. Nova seems a bit off, also. She's not the same girl who broke out," Father Octavian observed, speaking in a warning tone.
"It's too early in his time stream. Nova knows who I am, but... she doesn't know herself." River whispered to him.
I continued walking on, following Amy and the Doctor, knowing I shouldn't hear the rest of it. I didn't even want to think of what he could have meant by 'broke out'.
I rubbed at my eye, and felt sand fall through my fingers.
888
I fell to the ground, but this time it was worse than all the others. I was wet, and the ground was sand, so it stuck to me. "I can't do it anymore! I just can't!" I shouted, desperate, heaving on the floor, trying to wipe the sand from my eyes with the parts of my arm that weren't also covered in sand. I didn't even have to look up to know he was crossing his arms.
"It's one or the other. You stay down and you lose, or get up and win the war," his words were encouraging, but his tone was hardly motivational. The grumble to his voice startled me into sitting up.
"It's not like that. I can fail standing up," I pointed out. Just because you get up doesn't mean you win. I've been here all day, and I was sick of it. The only reason we were going through this anyway wasn't because he believed having the ability to defend yourself was noble and a young women is no exception to the rule, or whatever nonsense he was trying to justify himself with. No, he was doing this because he trusted the words of the prophet too much, even though he claimed he didn't. Why else would he be talking about a war that hasn't happened yet?
"No, you fall again. Then you rise again," he hit my knee with his staff. "Up!"
I sighed, and stood up.
Maybe that's the secret. As long as you're standing, well, you aren't losing yet.
888
"You alright?" River asked me, just as Amy walked back to us also.
"I'm fine." I assured her, a little too quickly, if the look she was giving me was anything to go on. She raised her eyebrows at me, but sighed, as if she already knew prodding me was a lost cause.
"What's a Maze of the Dead?" Amy asked us.
"Oh, it's not as bad as it sounds. It's just a labyrinth with dead people buried in the walls." River explained calmly, but Amy and I shot her a worried glance. Dead people buried in the walls, caves infested with millions of weeping angels, what was the difference anymore? Everything was making me worried. "Okay, that was fairly bad... Right, give me your arm." she said to Amy. River grabbed hold of her arm, pulling out a syringe. "This won't hurt a bit."
River gave Amy a shot, and Amy winced. "Ow!"
"There, you see. I lied. It's a viro-stabilizer. Stabilizes your metabolism against radiation, drive burn, anything. You're going to need it when we get up to that ship." River explained.
"Won't I need it too?" I asked.
"Nope. You're a Time Lord," she smiled, and I was stunned for a moment. I kept forgetting Time Lord biology wasn't the same as a human's.
Amy was looking at the Doctor intently as he scanned the rocks and statues just a few feet ahead of us. "So what's he like? In the future, I mean. Cause you know him in the future, don't you?"
"The Doctor? Well, the Doctor's the Doctor." River responded, because that was all she could really say.
"Oh, well that's very helpful. Mind if I write that down?" Amy replied sarcastically.
River ignored Amy's sarcastic comment and was staring at the Doctor smugly. "Yes, we are."
The Doctor didn't look up from his device. "Sorry, what?"
"Talking about you."
"I wasn't listening, I'm busy."
"Right," I commented. "It's the other way around." I told him, having figured out how the device works after seeing River poke around with it all day.
"Yeah." The Doctor turned the device the other way up and finally looked to us, and River raised her eyebrows at him.
"You're so his wife." Amy told River.
"Oh, Amy, Amy, Amy! This is the Doctor we're talking about. Do you really think it could be anything that simple?"
"Yep."
"You're good. Maybe the Doctor could be that simple. But do you think Nova is that simple?" River asked, and she gave me a knowing glance before walking away to check on the Doctor's readings.
In the Doctor's universe that I knew, that answer was very different. That answer was about River being the Doctor's wife... when they saved the universe and fell in love. So what did it have to do with me?
A/N: Hm... what does it have to do with Nova? Anyway, sorry about that super depressing glimpse of Nova's past life as Scarlette. I really want to know what you think of it, and I hope that now her guilt complex and lack of confidence in her intelligence makes sense. And then there's that angel in her now... nothing good can come out of that.
Life is absolutely insane but i do already have (and i just checked) 5 chapters of 5k words on average completely written out and edited so I'll update another one soon! Probably in a few days :)