all_inclusive | Once we're gone, you won't be coming back here for a while

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Once we're gone, you won't be coming back here for a while

There's a doorway to New York City standing before the Doctor.

It's a recognizable sight that anyone would know from the gleaming lights of the skyline in the background and the Empire State Building in the glory of its construction looms above it all, though the Doctor can't move his eyes. He knows this city and he knows the year. He knows that this is New York City in the 1930's and he knows that Amy and Rory are there. If he walks through that door, he will see them again. Even this hotel with its infinite possibilities and all its doors can't bring him back to them.

He can walk through that door, but there's one large problem standing in his way.

"Don't move," he says to whomever has come up next to him. He can feel their presence with the breath in his general area, he can tell that he isn't alone given the way the hairs on his arms have begun to stand up on end. The Doctor stares before him, but avoids looking at the eyes because he's been in this situation before and he knows what looking in its eyes will do. "Don't blink," he breathes out.

He has to close this door. He has to close this door and leave the possibility of Amy and Rory behind. It's far too dangerous. There's no telling if he could even get back if he managed to get past the Weeping Angel, who guards the door, only offering the scantest bit of space to move past. If he gets past that Weeping Angel guarding New York City, he can find them and he can...he can, do what? He can warn them? He can try and tell them to get out of that graveyard before Rory looks at the gravestone?

Time can be rewritten, Amy's voice whispers in his mind with all its temptations and all its promises. I know it can. Can he do that? Can he walk through this door and risk unleashing a lethal enemy on the hotel behind him? All for the sake of companions he had thought lost. High upon a cloud, he had mourned them until a remnant of the future past had brought him down, but now he's faced with something far more difficult.

He can get them back.

But people will likely die in the process. If he goes through that door, that Weeping Angel will come in and it won't stop. He doesn't blink, not for a moment, but his vision clouds as he stares at the creature that had taken them away from him, at the monster who stands between them. What does he do? What does the Doctor do?

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Easier sad than done when human eyes demand to be blinked regularly. Were he still a vampire, not blinking wouldn't be much of a problem. Somehow, he manages to avoid doing so before the man shuts the door and blocks out whatever it was about that version of the city that deemed blinking a hazard.

Then he does — once, twice, a couple of times until his eyes no longer burn. Definitely another thing to add to his growing list of things he misses about being undead: not having to blink.

"I was gonna say New York doesn't look anything like I remember it, but actually, it kind of did. Twenties?"

The Doctor holds his palm out for a moment towards the shut door, though he knows if he opens it up again, the city will be gone along with the angel and his chance to see Amy and Rory again. He has a feeling there won't be another such chance for some time. When he banishes the icy rage from his heart (burning it down to the bottom of his soul), he looks to the man standing with him. "Thirties," he says, heavily. "Right before the war."

A war that Rory and Amy have both lived through, in different ways, in their own ways, once already. Rory guarding the Pandorica and Amy in Churchill's bunkers. His glorious Ponds.

Thirties, right before the war. He remembers what New York City had been like back then; he'd lived in New York back then. And in spite of doing everything in his power to stay out of sight and ensure he'd be left alone, to keep himself uninvolved with the war efforts, he'd still been found and dragged into it. Damn the Initiative.

"Fight in it? The war, that is. Not the city."

Although, the city had seen its fair share of fights, just nothing that could be included in your non-demonic history book. People had a way of seeing what they wanted to, and the reality of what was going on around them was hardly it.

"Not the war I should think you mean, but I was involved in quite a number of them at that time period." Honestly, sometimes the Doctor can't begin to think about how many incarnations of him were around at varying points of the war, in varying regenerations, all swept up in their own individual wars and battles. "The city, too," he supplies, hearts aching as he thinks of Amy, Rory, and that fateful trip.

He pushes the grief down, forces himself to come back from it swinging. "Wars and cities, though, you throw a rock and you hit yourself a dozen!" he says, energy beginning to pick up again now that the door is closed and he's had a chance to recuperate. "What about you, eh? Fight some good wars in the city during the thirties?" he asks, mimicking boxing moves -- or, potentially, mixer arms, but they really are quite similar, aren't they?

"A couple; though back then, I was still mostly keeping to myself. Now, I fight battles pretty much every day."

Battle was no longer an oddity or a rare occurrence in his life. For the past decade, 'battle' has been synonymous with 'it's Tuesday,' practically. Another battle, another day, another apocalypse stopped. Rise and repeat.

He holds out a hand. "I'm Angel."

The Doctor lifts up the hand and presses a kiss to the knuckles with a pleasant smile, as if he's trying to observe human manners in the general time period. "I'm the Doctor," he introduces himself, clapping Angel's cheek fondly. "And I'm sorry that you're coping with a daily onslaught of battles, though I do know something along those lines. Though, this is hardly to compare," he says, holding back index fingers up as if to mimic a goal post. "Only to sympathize," he insists. "What sort of battles, then?" he asks, crossing the door and scanning it behind his back, trying to see if New York is still there. "If you care to share?" he asks, smiling pleasantly as if suggesting that the Doctor loves sharing.

Angel isn't used to being touched. People don't touch him unless it involves fists and a whole lot of violence. Not since he lost Cordelia, not since he joined up with Wolfram & Hart. Even Lorne had retreated back across the personal bubble sidelines in the wake of that madness, and after he asked him to take care of Lindsey in the end, who could really blame him?

This 'Doctor' kind of reminds him of Lorne, actually. Even the name fits — the Host, the Doctor. Probably even has a name that doesn't bear much repeating, too. Angel doesn't ask for clarification on that part; no 'Doctor Who?' or 'What doctor?' just quiet acceptance of the name. Being someone who hasn't used his actual name in centuries, he's the last person to judge.

"Of or relating to apocalypses, usually. Occasionally you have your smaller skirmishes — demonic infestations, territory wars between rival demon clans — but half the time they're due to those kinds of forces being riled up by what's coming, so: apocalypses. Though, I have seen my fair share of traditional wars, if you can call them that. Fifteen — sixteen if we're including Vietnam."

The Doctor feels as if he ought to have started a club for people who prevent apocalyptic events on a grand scale, on a regular basis. He's not sure he'd put that on the resume, but Oncoming Storm has a ring to it that does get associated often with battles (and, of course, nefarious weather systems). "Well, you can hardly create peace among demons without breaking a few demonic eggs, can you? That's not how you make an omelette," the Doctor says with great emphasis and enforcement. He claps his hands together, peering Angel up and down.

"Where I come from, there's no demons. Aliens," he corrects, sticking a finger in the air to clarify. "Aliens that look remarkably demonic and potentially the devil in a pit on a planet in the far reaches of the universe and...well, some demons are particularly deceptive, given their appearance."

Well, Angel doesn't usually put the Scourge of Europe on résumés unless throwing all that dark weight around works to his advantage. Sometimes it paid to remind the demons he was fighting of exactly who he was and used to be. Half the time, it got them out of town before he even had to pull his sword out of the weapons cabinet, those he was about to go up against having thought twice about the poor decisions they were about it make.

"Demons, aliens — they're all the same at the end of the day, aren't they? Relatively speaking. Most demons aren't of earthly origin in spite of what some people might think, and other dimensions aren't always alternate versions of Earth."

"Well, no, you see," and here, the Doctor felt he was going to grow rather pedantic about their opinions. "Demons and aliens, both, are immensely different and both species does have a range of loyalties, one imagines. There are aliens out there with hearts as cold as ice, the same as humans. Demons, I think, would be the same." He's folded his hands before him, as if beginning a philosophical lecture on the topic, and this is hardly the time or the place for that. "Oh! Oh, you meant that they're the same genetically!" he says, when his ears catch up with his brain. "Quite possibly, yes. After all, we name what we know. If you saw something you didn't quite understand and it didn't look like you. Well, alien and demon might be quick to leave your tongue."

"Maybe not mine. I like to think I'm far more inventive," he says, a delighted smile on his lips at the thought of naming things.

Angel smiles when catches on to what he meant. Sometimes he wasn't as clear as he could be when he spoke, often mistakenly assuming that people were on the same page with him when he was on page twenty-seven and they were still stuck on page fourteen. It's a fault, one he's very aware of.

"Right, name what we know. People in my time — my original time, the one I was born in — had no concept of alien life. People coming from the stars? Nobody had ever heard of that, much less thought of it. But demons were something we were well aware of, tales that had been told for centuries by our forefathers. It's easier to label something unknown that comes from another world as a demon, because that's what you know. That, you can understand."

He couldn't be the judge of names, given the fact that he'd yet to give a proper on to the demon plane-like things that frequented the sky in hell.

"Somebody has to be. Otherwise you end up with pineapple instead of ananas like the rest of the world. It doesn't look anything like a pine cone."

"Did you know on one of the distant moons of Aurelia Four, they call it the prickly skin biter of tropical taste?" the Doctor says, always eager to impart some of the useful knowledge that he's picked up. "They still don't taste the same as on Earth, admittedly." He eyes the man in front of him curiously, because sentences that begin with 'my original time' usually mean there's more of a story to things. "How old are you, then?"

"Literal name." Very literal.

And very interesting. It wasn't often, in his experience, that planet life on another world or plane of existence so closely resembled that on Earth. The plants in Pylea had either smelled wrong, were a different color, or looked like nothing he'd ever seen before. Then again, Pylea was all about turning the Earthly standards inside out and on their heads. H experienced that firsthand.

"Two hundred and seventy-eight. Or is it seventy-nine? This past year's been kind of a blur for me."

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Peter has been skateboarding through the halls again. He comes up short when he sees a skinny guy in a suit staring out through a door that is definitely New York City, which is kind of his town so it gets his attention. Except...the skyline looks a little different. It's missing a couple of notable landmarks. Peter walks up behind the Doctor, head tilted, stare far too intense for blinking at the moment. He has his skateboard in hand.

"Is that...no way...."

The Doctor's panic rises when he hears someone coming along and automatically, he flings an arm out in desperate, uncoordinated, giraffe-like panic to prevent him from getting within reaching range of the angel for fear of what it might do. "Back!" he warns, as stringently as he can despite the massive thought processes circling through his mind. "Stay back, back! And don't blink."

One of them is going to have to close the door because the lights appear to be dimming, which is far, far from being a good sign.

The gesture works to some degree. It does make Peter back pedal in order to avoid getting smacked by a flailing Doctor.

"Don't blink...okay." He has no idea what is going on. "Uhm...could we...should we both slam the door and back out of the room?"

He doesn't know why the Doctor is worried about this statue that looks like the Statue of Liberty (it can't be the Statue of Liberty can it?) but he thinks maybe it'd be better for both of them to get away from the door considering how panicked the Doctor is.

He could. He could, but he loses the ability to get Amy and Rory back. He could slam the door shut and lose the potential to see them again and he knows that he should, but he can be so very weak in ways. His eyes remain on the Angel and he doesn't dare remove them, but he knows that his own personal distress is required in the face of the greater good. "You keep watch," he says, fishing his sonic screwdriver from his pocket to prepare himself before wading into this battle. "Don't blink, whatever you do. I'll close the door," he says, hearts aching as he thinks of what he's about to lose again.

Maybe it's worse this time because it's the potential of everything he could have saved. "Ready?"

It's a lot to sacrifice, the ability to see someone you care about. Peter ha a door back home, one he can slip through any time he needs to go see Aunt Mae. Having to close that door, to keep it closed would be hard. In fact, he's not sure he could do it.

"All right," Peter responds, stock still and focusing on not blinking. He pretends he's playing a game at school, some sort of 'first one to blink loses' kind of thing. He clears his throat, trying to avoid the instinct to look at what the Doctor is doing.

"Ready." And his eyes are starting to ache from not blinking.

The Doctor has faced these villains many times before, has been in impossible situations in which the Weeping Angels have thought themselves victorious, but there's a bitter pill to swallow with this perceived victory. He will win because he will shut the door and prevent them from entering the hotel, but this will cost him a personal loss. The Angel isn't smiling with that grim visage, but it might as well be, because it's won this much.

He gets close enough to reach for the doorknob without getting in the potential choking reach, closing the door frantically and scanning the knob with his sonic screwdriver to ensure that New York City has been lost and can never be found.

No matter how much that hurts him. He clenches his jaw tighter, pressing his back heavily against the door before he even registers that someone else has been helping him through this. "You can go ahead and blink," he instructs. "Unless you've found it so enlightening that you wish to take it up on a more permanent basis."

Peter definitely lets out a sigh of relief when the door is closed, taking a step back and letting his shoulders fall, eyes closing for a moment.

"Wow. Okay...what was with the not blinking?" Whatever it was, it had been intense for a moment or six there.

"They're quantum locked," the Doctor rambles, pacing back and forth to try and shed some of the excess energy that comes from an encounter with them, especially one so fraught with intense emotion as that had been. He smacks his forehead with his hand, an attempt to snap him out of it. "Normally, they might displace you through history and feed off the energy created from that, but I don't think they were going to do that," he says, given how cross they probably are with the Doctor.

No, they probably had been ready for a kill.

Quantum locked. In theory, Peter understands what that mean, but in practice is another story. He watches the Doctor pace, eyes flicking back and forth. He's got his own energy burn thing going on in a random series of twitches, restless shifting and gestures. He pushes his glasses up on his nose a lot, shifts his weight, scrubs a hand over his hair as he listens. He's never still even though he never moves from that spot.

"They're locked in a particular...time, so they're not usually...which makes--makes sense if they...wow." It's a lot to absorb. His eyebrows go up and he furiously scrubs his hand through his hair a moment as he tries to process.

"Okay, so what were they going to do to us?"

"That depends." There's definite emphasis in how the Doctor points at his new companion, whose name he doesn't even know. "The first time that I came into contact with the Angels, I had a whole new face." New? Old? Oldish new. Newish old, youngish fresh, he thinks, gesturing to the face and pulling his jaw back. "Those Angels only displaced you back through time to feed on your energy. I've run into ones that only want to kill, but that one...that one, would've sent you back and kept you locked away to feed and feed and steal!" His rage flares for a moment before he subdues it, patting the lapels of his suit to give him something to focus on.

His smile is weak, heavy with grief. "Good news, eh? Door's closed, it can't get to us."

His emphasis gets Peter to straighten up a little. Obviously this is important. Of course, that's immediately followed by confusion. How could someone even have a new face? The rage distracts him from his confusion though. "They can keep you alive and feed on you over time?"

Because in that case, definitely glad the door is closed.

"What about the people in the city?" Because he comes from New York City and while that looked a little different from his NYC, it was still NYC and there were still people trapped there with it.

"The endless parade of their habits could fill a book," he remarks, smile grim. "Without pictures, one hopes, as the image of an angel does itself become an angel." The Doctor wishes, honestly wishes, that he didn't have such a storied knowledge of the creatures, but they've invaded his life and have ripped parts away from him, so much so that he can't even ignore them.

He bows his head lower, breathing out. "They'll be fine. That was the last of them, I think. The paradox had been closed, in our timeline, at a high price, but it worked. Unfortunately, that does mean that door is likely to never turn up again."