Night 53: Chapel

[freewill]

[From here.]

The room was just as empty as it had been the previous night, though Castiel made a note that this time his shadow was staying firmly in place. Then again, he had already determined that that incident had affected all patients, so it wasn't as if it had anything to do with this place specifically.

Nevertheless, it was best to double-check such things.

It seemed that for the moment all of them were most interested in the statue, and so Castiel started toward it without any further delay. He realized that it had to have some sort of power tethered to it, but it wasn't something he could sense at the moment.

As he reached it and saw the blood that was spilling from it as if from a fountain, Castiel recalled imagery of Hell and frowned briefly before turning to the others. "I suspect this blood would be fresh," he pointed with a motion to it. "But what was it you thought this was?" he directed to the Doctor specifically. A Weeping Angel, he'd said?

Comments

[kindalikedit]

That was just nasty.

Dean came up after Castiel, getting his first real look at the chapel's fountain, all nice and up close and personal. That was a disgusting amount of blood, more for what it meant that the fact it was right there. That was easily more than you could find in one stiff. The fact it was right there in the fountain was fucked up. Deliberate. Dean found himself shaking his head at the chapel, glaring at it.

"This here every night?" Dean asked. He shot a look at Castiel. Yeah, this stuff didn't exactly run like water. What bugged him almost as much as the fact the blood was even here in the first place was how distant Castiel sounded about the whole thing. They had no idea how many poor bastards it took to get the fountain like this. This amount, it seemed like some of the patients would've had to be kept alive, bled dry slow so they could get the most outta them.

Shouldering his duffel bag, Dean came closer to the fountain, kneeling down at the edge. Unlike the Doctor, he wasn't willing to stick his finger in the blood and give it a taste test. Yeah, no thanks. The statue puking up the fresh blood was one ugly little sonuvabitch, this twisted thing he instinctively wanted to take a swing at. Dean turned his attention from the statue to the base of the fountain, leaning back so he could read the inscription. Any sinner who is injured, step forward and be healed for a price. More of that mind game crap. Awesome.

[timedork]

Maybe the blood pouring from the statue was fresh, or maybe it was strangely soured like that other blood had been, but the Doctor wasn't, at the moment, in a hurry to find out. The taste in his mouth was finally fading, and if it was like the blood of that creature, he didn't particularly want to know unless it seemed important.

Which, in all likelihood, it could be.

"A Weeping Angel. It's a creature that is only stone while it's seen." The Doctor glanced only momentarily at Castiel before returning his attention to the statue. He circled around the edge of the fountain from one end to the other.

"But... Well, this statue isn't the angel—that's what I came to check last night—so yes, I'd assume it's here every night," he continued, nodding at Dean and then looking towards Castiel once again. "We were found by a Weeping Angel the night before—Dean and I, and Dr McCoy. The angel could still be somewhere around the hospital, but this is the only statue I've heard about."

The Doctor leaned over the pool of blood to get a closer look at the monstrous statue, torchlight focused upon it.

[freewill]

As the Doctor gave a description of a Weeping Angel, Castiel knelt down next to Dean, running his hands over the inscription and remembering what Renamon had told him. He wasn't foolish enough to want to test it merely to see how it worked, as it could very well curse any of them if they underestimated it.

He ran his hand over the statue next, trying to get some sort of feeling from it, some sense of what it was and how it had come to be. But there was nothing, and he wasn't used to that. In the end he dipped his hand into the blood, smearing it over the floor to examine it closely. His guess was that it was human, but he couldn't even be certain of that.

While part of him was tempted to try some manner of spell just to test his own abilities (he had a fresh source, after all, and it would let him know if the blood was human), he realized that he might just end up tiring himself out or injuring one of the others.

"Why is it called a Weeping Angel?" he asked after a pause as he stood up and started to look around. If this was witchcraft, then there would either be a hex bag or some sort of altar set up close by. "Dean," he said with a glance to the human, "help me search for hex bags." Even if the Winchester was far behind, he would know what those were.

[kindalikedit]

Dean raised an eyebrow at Castiel’s sheer balls. “Dude, I’m not your sniffer dog.”

He pushed himself up, staring at Castiel’s smear of blood on the floor. Okay, sure, he got it was fascinating and all that there was a fountain of human blood and maybe it wasn’t something you saw everyday. Still, couldn’t the guy look at least a little bothered what all that blood meant? Somehow he doubted Landel hit up his favorite blood drive and decided to dump all over it in a fountain. Shooting Castiel a look, Dean checked out the rest of the chapel, glancing from time to time to make sure there wasn’t anything crawling out of the shadows for the Doctor or Castiel. He still wasn’t sure what to make of Castiel, especially after the guy told him point blank to his face he was straight-up possessing someone. A “believer”, he’d said, or whatever. As if that was supposed to suddenly make it a-okay. It was kinda sad he didn’t know much more about the Doctor than he did Castiel but hey, at least he wasn’t using someone as a meat suit…or running around claiming he was a member of the angel squad.

Not like “time-traveling guy with blue box” was that much better, but…yeah, he had nothing.

Dean had no idea how he’d got to this point. This made everything from the gremlins and spirits suddenly look normal.

He prowled about the chapel, checking under each of the pews for any hex bags, sigils or anything at all. Dean was careful when he checked, making sure not to just stick his hand under there blindly. Never know what could be hiding under these things and he’d like to keep his fingers. At least they didn’t have to deal with that freak Weeping Angel of the Doctor’s.

[timedork]

The Doctor started to reach for his screwdriver, only to realize just before his hand would have dipped inside his coat pocket that the blood of the creature from earlier was still smeared across his fingers. He looked about himself—a handkerchief would be handy about now, but the closest thing he had was the gauze in his pocket—and finally wiped the blood off on the breast of his coat for lack of a better option. He could clean it later, if he didn't find it in his closet the next night looking pristine as ever, as he had before.

"Because that's what it looks like," was the Doctor's answer to Castiel, now retrieving the sonic screwdriver from his coat. He turned to look over his shoulder at the man, who had wandered off to look for something ('hex bags', he'd said, but that sounded like yet more superstitious gibberish). "Well... usually. An angel weeping into its hands..."

He turned to the statue once more, taking a moment to fiddle with the settings of the sonic screwdriver. "Of course, it's not really weeping; they cover their faces so that they won't accidentally see each other. They're quantum-locked when they're seen, so if they look at each other, well... They'll be trapped."

The Doctor pointed the screwdriver at the statue and turned it on. It came on with its usual glow and sonic whine—good, good! That was much better than its behavior the other night—but after a moment of running the screwdriver up and down the side of the statue, he frowned. The sonic screwdriver was working (or seemed to be), but it wasn't actually scanning... It was just sort of glowing.

[freewill]

While Dean made that comment, seemingly offended that Castiel had given him an order, he still did what he was told and helped with the search. The way the chapel was constructed made it easy for them to all hear each other even as they spread throughout the room. It also helped that it was so silent, though Castiel couldn't say for himself if it invoked a peaceful feeling or an unsettling one.

The fact that the only sounds were their footsteps, their voices, and the trickling of blood pouring over the stone of the statue led him to believe that the latter option was more likely.

As the Doctor explained, Castiel soon understood his meaning. Humans, obsessed with the idea of angels who could watch over them, had made many representations of them; most were incorrect, but statues of his kind were commonly found. He'd never heard of them being sentient creatures, but it wasn't something he was going to dismiss as impossible. There were countless forces out there, spirits who could possess items or curses that could be laid upon them.

Most of the rest of the man's explanation made no sense, but Castiel only nodded and continued with his search. Thus far, however, there was nothing. "If that statue is not one of those Weeping Angels," he hypothesized, "then there must be something else that's making it capable of transferring wounds the way it does." And was the blood formed by the statue itself, or had it been placed there? Was the blood itself what caused the transference to work?