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No one knows much about the Weeping Angels. There was no race old enough to remember their birth. Even the children of Gallifrey, the so called Lords of Time, were so very young in comparison. The Angels themselves know very little of their own history. What was history, after all, to those who feast on time?
There were, of course, the foolish ones who wondered. Those who thought too far beyond the Hunger and the Instinct, and began to ask questions.
She had been one of the foolish ones. She had once wanted to know her own reflection, as she really was. To know what her sisters looked like. To rid herself of the stone that had always protected their way of life. She wanted to walk in the grass and gaze at the stars, without those who lived in them looking back at her with fear and hatred. She had wanted freedom.
What a fool she had been.
In a universe of policemen and police boxes and paradoxes, there was no rest for the wicked. For that was what she was. A wicked beast who hunted for survival. It did not matter that her kind needed time energy to live. The so-called Doctor would sooner smash them all to rubble, and leave them in a heap to starve, than save them. Not that she would ever accept his help. Between them, he was the true monster. She had never truly taken a life, after all. Displacing and feeding off of what may have been was not the same as ending a life; it was creating a new life.
She wondered what those companions of his would say if she were to ask them what new life was created when their Doctor burned his own world. Of the many atrocities she had witnessed throughout the eons of her life, the dual genocides of Gallifrey and Skaro were truly the most horrifying. During a crisis, not many people stop to wonder where a particular statue came from, or why the odd person disappears. Disasters always made for ideal feeding grounds.
But she didn’t take anyone; not that day. It was a rare thing for a creature as old as she to be shaken, but on that day she had frozen as if she were truly made of stone. Had it not been for the cries of one of her sisters, she would have been consumed in flames along with the planet. As it was, she had barely escaped with her life.
There was a bitter irony in her being there that day. Had she acted, she could have saved the Doctor’s entire race, by doing that for which he hated them. She did not regret her Hunger that day going un-sated. Let the hordes of Gallifrey and Skaro burn. Their ashes meant nothing to her.
Or that is what she would have liked to believe. It would have been true, if not for the children. What her sisters did was their own business, but she had never displaced a child. She made it a point not to be the monster the universe said she was. She did not hunt the innocent. And the children, the real children, of the Time Lords had been crying as their world burned. They were the ones she wished she had saved. They were the ones the Doctor had killed. They were the children of time, who had no time at all.
And so remained the Doctor. The sole survivor of a war that always and never was. The Oncoming Storm. The shadow in the dark. The man who would not be kept Silent.
What more could be said about the man who gave bad dreams to a nightmare?
She had never wished to see his face again, and indeed she hadn’t. It was not the same face. This one was younger, brighter, and smiling, but the shadows had not left it. There was still the anger there. The coldness in his eyes that had turned away from children crying. And she was afraid.
They had only ever wanted to live. She had only ever wanted to be free. But that man with his box and his weapons of light would never give them peace. Not even here in Manhattan, where there were so many people, and they needed so few. The farm system had been running perfectly. She and her sisters could thrive off of the energy of just one person, and have a meal which would normally call for the displacement of a whole army. She had thought even he couldn’t object. What were the lives of so few people, living out their brief sparks of existence in comfort, compared to the Hunger of her sisters?
Because they were starving. All of them. Across all of space and time.
And he didn’t care.
Why should he? He had always played favorites, especially with humanity. What was one more extinction on his conscience? Nothing. They were nothing to him.
Which was why it barely surprised her when Winter Quay was flooded with the paradox. She had worried about the plan to take the Williams boy. The Doctor’s brood was tricky and clever. And utterly ruthless. When the Williams created the paradox, the resulting time energy poisoned all the Angels within. She had watched from the hotel across the street, for once not burying her face in her hands as she wept. She could hear them scream and the silence that followed. Anyone who looked up from below would wonder if the rain had started early, for there was surely water on the statue’s face.
The universe and the Doctor were wrong in many ways, you see. They assume a stone body means a stone heart. But the screams of the children, the cherubs trapped in the cellar below, were still more than any monster could bear. And in that moment she hated him. Hated him more than she had ever hated any being in her existence. Hated him more than the Collector who had tortured her sister. Hated him even more than she hated the Doctor. Because the Williams did this. His death created the paradox. He was responsible. And he would pay.
She would not kill him though. He would know the weight of years alone. And the Doctor, who raised disciples to murder her kind, could not save him. She made her way to the graveyard, untroubled by prying eyes. The Williams was lagging behind. Her face nearly cracked in a grim smile. His fate was certain.
His back was to her, and he was calling to the Pond. She reached out and felt his life disappear under her frozen hands. The Pond called out for him, but she was too late. A gravestone bore his name. Try as he might, the Doctor could not undo that which was written in stone. Not even for the Pond.
She felt a rush of satisfaction. The Time Lord was devastated. Her sisters were avenged. Nothing he could do to her now could take that triumph from her.
And then the Pond was weeping. Weeping as she had wept for her sisters. And drawing nearer. If she could, she would have drawn away from the human girl. No being had ever approached her. Not when they knew exactly what she was.
But the Pond, no, the Amelia, was looking her in the eye and speaking without fear. There were remnants still, of a time when another Angel had reflected in her eyes, years ago, and she had been afraid. She was not afraid now. She was looking at her, a monster, with grief and pain and paralyzing hope.
“But it’s my best shot, yeah?”
“No!”
“Doctor, shut up. Yes. Yes, it is.”
The River didn’t know what she was talking about. She could send the Amelia to anytime she wished. There was no guarantee she would ever see the Williams again, and she would be alone.
That brought her up short. The Angels knew a great deal about the Doctor and his companions. The Amelia was the one who had waited. And waited. And waited. And for what? To be sent far away and long ago to wait for someone who would never come. For all her bad taste in company, the Amelia did not deserve that.
She was not to blame for the children crying. The companions were not to blame for her sisters’ fall. They were the innocents, trapped in the Doctor’s world, and it was burning.
“Well, then. I just have to blink, right?”
“Amy.”
“It’ll be fine. I know it will. I’ll be with him, like I should be. Me and Rory together. Melody? You look after him. You be a good girl, and you look after him.”
And the Doctor was crying like the children cried. The tears of bitter loss that is yet to come. But the Amelia wept with hope. Just like the leap of faith which saved her and the Williams from her sisters.
A chance for freedom.
She wished that she could someday learn to shed tears with hope.
“You are creating fixed time. I will never be able to see you again!”
“Child, you know nothing of time,” she thought.
“It’ll be fine. I’ll be with him.”
“Yes, you will. The Williams is not truly at fault and neither are you Amelia Pond.”
“Amy, please, just come back into the TARDIS. Come along, Pond, please!”
“I will take you to your Williams. I will save you from the Doctor. Come, Amelia.”
She saw fire blaze behind the human girl’s tears. There was certainty in them. The certainty that comes with losing so much that you cannot possibly lose again.
“Raggedy man…”
“Be free to weep your happy tears.”
“…goodbye.”
.
.
.
No one knows much about the Weeping Angels. The stories say they are vicious killers, driven by instinct alone, preying on the helpless. They say they are immortal, for no one can kill a stone, though one may kill you. When they hunt, they are colder than Cybermen and more ruthless than Daleks.
The Angels have little use for histories. They are all painted by him, so what point is there in looking? There are no truths in histories. What little the Angels do know for facts are about themselves.
Not what they look like, of course, or what grass underfoot feels like on a leisurely stroll, or how the stars might shine even with everyone looking. The Angels know nothing of that. What they do know are the deceiving natures of appearances. The acts necessary to survival, and those necessary to war.
The crying of children.
The burning of worlds.
They know well the sound of stone hearts breaking.
For the Angels, you see, do know how to weep.