Gods and Monsters [cs: torture and murder and scary stuff]

[beetlebutt]

Jaime Reyes was standing on a street in El Paso, looking very confused, and talking to himself. Well, at least it looked like he was talking to himself. Really, he was talking to the scarab, because the two of them were trying to figure out what the heck had just happened. The world had blurred, Jaime had passed out and now...

"This is so not El Paso."

Now he was in a place that was home and yet not home.

|T L[][]KS \|/E|RD. \|/HERE'S THE PUTT-PUTT?

"Exactly. And that - what is that? That building wasn't there yesterday. Neither was that bank building. And where's the El Diablo?"

/-\LTERN/-\TE D|/|\ENS|[]N?

"Are your sensors picking up anything weird?"

...SENS[]RS /-\RE |N[]PER/-\T|[]N/-\L.

After doing a systems check, the scarab trilled a little wordless cry of alarm.

"What's wrong?"

/|\UTIPLE SYSTEMS |N[]PER/-\T|[]N/-\L. []NLY B/-\S|C L|FE SUPP[]RT, B/-\SIC TR/-\NSF[]O/|\/-\T|[]N /-\B|L|T|ES, /-\ND C[]/|\/|\S /-\V/-\|L/-\BLE. D|/-\GN[]ST|CS UN/-\BLE TO DETER/|\INE WHY.

"Whoa, whoa, okay, calm down, you're kinda panicking. Stop with the brain klaxons, okay?"

|'/|\ RUNN|NG BL|ND. Y[]U C/-\LM D[]WN!

"I know this is freaky, and you're not used to being blind like this, but you're still conscious and I'm still conscious, and we're not fighting an evil death satellite or, I don't know, being shot at by aliens. We'll figure this out, okay? Just keep a cool head."

The response was a very surly, | D[]N'T H/-\VE /-\ HE/-\D.

Jaime rolled his eyes. "You know what I meant, Mr. Literal. Look, we'll figure this out, okay?"

In fact, maybe he could just talk to someone and get some answers. Some teenagers ran down the street towards him.

"Hey! Very, very lost superhero here," he said, waving them down. "Any chance you could -"

They didn't notice. In fact, with a feeling like cold mist, they ran right through him. Jaime froze up after they did, expression stricken.

"Okay, we're a ghost or something and no one can see, hear, or touch us. Time to panic."

| T[]LD Y[]U!

Comments

[fromfryingpantofire]

Bunny's tunnels took some getting used to. Sam hadn't been all that great at surfing the few times he'd tried it at Stanford, but he had pretty good balance and managed to stay on his feet until the end.

He could smell the blood when they arrived, nose wrinkling slightly. It wasn't the same as demon blood and it didn't bring up that longing in him, but for the scent to be this heavy, nothing good had happened here. "I'm following your nose here. But I've got your back and I'll keep an eye out for what I can see." But even then he was only human.

[beetlebutt]

The trail was easy to follow. Blue blood had dripped on the ground the entire way, so as they followed it, they eventually found an area that had clearly been the location of a vicious fight. The dirt and leaves on the forest floor had been disturbed during a scuffle and there was a furrow in the ground where the dropped chainsaw had dug into the dirt. Chunks of strange blue and white pieces from Jaime's armor lay scattered in a few places from where they'd been chipped off.

A small amount of blue blood had sprayed out onto a nearby tree from a chainsaw cut. But the attacker, her blood was here, too, splattered on the ground. There wasn't as much of it but it was clear this was a place where he'd fought back.

This was the only place out in the forest where the attacker's blood had been spilled, though. The trail that led out of the forest was all blue, making it clear that her victim had done most of the bleeding. Alongside the blood, there was furrows in the ground where he'd dragged his injured foot while limping.

The trail led to an open clearing, although "open" was a bit of a misnomer. The clearing was overgrown with weeds. There was a large building there, a meatpacking plant, with a long road that led away from it down into a valley below and up in the other direction into the mountains.

Outside the building, a fire escape door had some kind of strange and ugly rig outside it that looked to be like a flamethrower of some kind that had been set up to fry anyone that opened it. And a large medical waste truck was in place at a truck loading bay, secured at the loading bay so they couldn't peek into the building. The trail of blue blood led to the truck. It was smeared on the windshield where Jaime had slid down from the roof of the truck. If they decided to climb up top, they'd find that the trail led to hatch that led down into the inside of the truck.

There were other doors that led into the place but they all seemed fastened shut, possibly chained up and padlocked on the inside.

This was the source of the smells of human blood and meat. It reeked of blood and rotting things. Blood and rotting things that had once been many people.

[mywarrenmyrules]

Bunny already wished he hadn't felt the need to bring Sam. No mortal should be subject to this experience, not even a human as jaded and unfortunately qualified as Sam was. But he needed someone to watch his six, because returning this place to peace was going to take all his concentration. Not a safe thing to do alone, when a minion with a chainsaw was probably still out for blood.

His heart dropped a little as he remembered the glimpses of the child's face he'd seen through the cracks in the armor, and remembered that the kid had been wholly, completely subjected to this.

"We're not gonna see a single thing that's pretty in there," he muttered to Sam, a little dry, mostly trying to distract himself from the boiling rage and horror that was threatening to rise past the surface if he didn't keep a lid on himself. "I'm gonna open a tunnel in and make sure it's safe, decide if I need you in or out. Don't follow until I call."

The fire escape booby trap caught Bunny's eye - or nose, rather. Only a nose as sensitive as his could pick out the smell of active machinery amidst all this organic material, but in a way, it stood out only because it was such a little, distinct scent amidst all the gore.

If he'd felt less cold, growing fury, he would have sneered at it as he tapped the ground and opened a tunnel right under and into the warehouse.

Something fell into the tunnel with a heavy, wet squelch, and the rotten smell rolled out at them, almost a physical force pushing them back with its strength.

Bunny gritted his teeth and stuck his head into the tunnel's mouth for a deep smell of the horror and all the details one smell could give him - which was as good for him as a look inside would have been for a human.

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam didn't get a chance to reply to Bunny before he was off, so Sam settled back to wait and look around. Just because he hadn't seen the kid that Ray and Bunny had brought back didn't mean he couldn't tell that things were bad. After all, there was way, way too much blood around for him not to be concerned.

He unholstered his gun, flicking the safety off but keeping his finger alongside the barrel. There was no telling who had been out here or if they were still around. Sam was kinda hoping they weren't, just to make life a little easier for once.

[beetlebutt]

The smells told Bunny everything he needed, everything that could give him a picture of what was inside. Blood and rotting flesh, that had once belonged to many people. The exhaust from a chainsaw. The acrid smells of the chemicals used in taxidermy and the dry smells of mummification. The smell of the boy's blue blood - and of his fear. The place still reeked of it, of the normal pheromones humans gave off while terrified, but there was something alien and electric underneath.

There was also the smell of the woman that'd done all this but it was faint now. She was likely long gone.

Also cake. There was the smell of cake.

Cake aside, this was clearly a place of darkness and death and despair.

[mywarrenmyrules]

He took it all in, glad he hadn't eaten anything recently to need to throw up at the awfulness of the scene, at the sheer smell of the carnage.

He got everything, all right. Down to the distinct scent of each and every victim. Down to the number. The ages they'd been before decay set in.

He pulled his head out of the hole and took a couple breaths of fresher air. He had all the info he needed. And more than he needed to be angry.

Too angry, if he let himself feel it, even to function. There were children in there. There were too many people from too many separate families. Someone had killed a lot of people, shattered the lives of the living. Those lives might shatter more once the bodies were found, once the living saw the way their missing loved ones had died.

And he'd missed this. A mountain of carnage and he'd been in Sumatra tracking down a rogue manananggal, a tricky, elusive one, but with a body count that was not above two, and meanwhile one of Kuk's people - it HAD to be one of Kuk's people, who else would trap a new Guardian? - was making a mountain of carnage.

The noise he made as he snuffled in his forearm, getting the last of the scent out, could have been anger or disgust or fear or any combination of the three, but it was animalistic and raw. For a second guilt overwhelmed his anger, the memory of another cavern of rotting bodies blotted this one out, and the knowledge that at least one surviving kid would have to live with surviving this, battled for his full attention, his full sorrow.

It was another horror that he'd remember long after every mortal it affected had gone, another failure of his sight, lives ruined in ways no life should ever end.

He took another breath and, with centuries of practice, put those thoughts aside.

"I'm really sorry to ask you this," he said to Sam, voice calm, civilized again, as he rose from his crouch and out of his instincts.

This was not the time to be an animal. This was the time to be a spirit of life.

"I need someone to go in there with me. I won't ask you to help with the bodies, but I'm going to need to concentrate for a long time in order to set this place right. I need someone to stand watch in case whoever did this comes back. Can you do this?"

It was a very genuine question. He knew he could ask Jack to do it instead - but he didn't want to ask anyone. Still - he couldn't risk his own tail so severely, not when the stakes were this high.

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam hadn't moved from the end of the hole because that would be leaving Bunny's back wide open and he wouldn't do that. No matter how curious he was or how much he was really itching because it felt too exposed out here.

When Bunny came back, though, Sam could already tell that things inside were going to be bad. Maybe worse than he'd seen on Earth.

But possibly not worse than he's ever seen.

He looked at Bunny for a long few moments before he nodded, putting the gun away for a few moments. "Yeah. Yeah, I can do that."

And, well. If there was a part of him that was curious about what Bunny was going to do? He wasn't about to admit it out loud.

[mywarrenmyrules]

Bunny looked him in the eye for a moment before nodding.

"Right. Follow me."

It hurt his heart that he believed, just by looking Sam in the eye, that he'd seen enough in a mortal lifetime to be able to handle this alongside him. But unhappy as he was that Sam was so experienced, he had to admit, the children of the world, with this to face, had made the right choice in calling Sam to their aid.

They needed more heroes that could do this. That could turn a charnal house into a funereal mound.

Bunny knelt and picked up the rotten, half-person that had fallen into his tunnel when he opened it. The blood and offal of rot soaked into his fur, but he put his objections away in the same place that he was putting every one of his other feelings that got in the way of what needed to be done now and couldn't be done later.

Crying, being disgusted, were always things one could do later. But bodies had an expiration date.

He jumped from the base of the tunnel, body in arms, to land on the floor of the warehouse. If he'd thought the sight would be more awful than the smell - well, the truth was, he hadn't, and it was worse.

The rictus grins and rigged bodyparts stopped him in his tracks for a moment, his breath hitching as he saw the intricacy of the carnage. There was so much depth in the thought of how horribly to mangle these people, how much dignity to rob from their deaths.

"I was right," he called to Sam, dry tone a little strained in warning. "Not a single pretty thing."

There were children dismembered and re-posed with wire, mouths stapled into grins so wide their lips had split. Crying could always happen later.

Bunny laid the half-body - a woman, perhaps 25 - near to, but not quite in the center of the warehouse. He looked around and found the nearest pile of remains that was also a torso, picked it up, and laid it next to her. In life it had belonged to a teenage boy. A severed arm hung from a wire, and he sniffed it, identifying it as having belonged to the same teenage boy who'd also lived in that torso.

"Keep an eye out for traps," he muttered, keeping his bile down as he took the arm down and put the arm with the body it had belonged to. "Tell me if you see anything. I can keep an ear out during this part."

He loped to the next mostly-solid set of remains, smelling for the identity of the person it had once been, and laying it alongside the bodies he'd already begun to - barely - reunite.

[fromfryingpantofire]

To his credit, Sam at least gagged when he pulled himself out of the tunnel, taking a moment to look around. "And here is where I'm glad I don't have to sleep so much any more." Because...yeah. It was bad. It was really bad.

And, in a lot of ways, it was worse than anything Sam had seen before. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. "At least I can confidently say that whoever is behind this was human. I haven't seen anything else that gets this...creative." Even Lucifer hadn't. He could only draw on what Sam already knew. Angels didn't really have a lot of creativity of their own.

He was careful to breathe through his nose, taking his gun out again because it felt...not safer. But better to have something in his hands, something to do. Because there were spirits here, even he could feel them and wasn't certain if that was because of his place on the mythological scale or if that was some previously unknown 'myth power' of his rearing it's ugly head.

"Out of curiosity, what are you going to be doing here?"

[bringinghopewithme]

Sam's words were meant to be comforting, but Bunny would have preferred a monster of some kind behind this mess. A human was someone he should have been protecting as a child, someone he might have been able to prevent undergoing the sort of experiences that made them need to do these things.

If the woman who'd done this was strictly human, maybe she'd seen something like this as a child, and was only continuing a cycle of violence that turned good kids into monsters. And that was a worse thought, to Bunny, than something that was made monstrous, instead of ruined into monstrosity.

"I'm gonna give the souls their rites," he said, slinging a nearly-full body over his shoulder and loping on three legs back to the semi-circle he was making with the remains. He laid the 10-year-old child down and sniffed the air for her missing hand, which was - wired to the body of another 10-year-old girl, this one in a much less advanced state of decomposition. The puppet family suspended around their television were piecemeal. He carefully undid the wire through the hand and brought it back to the child. "Enough to make sure their souls aren't stuck in this mess, waiting for their bodies to be found, and then waiting because they don't know how to go on -"

He pulled a little blade from the pack on his back, and carefully severed the threads holding the corpse's mouth in a rictus grin. The face was sunken and rotted beyond where her features could have been discerned, and the rotted, stretched out lips stayed mostly in the position they'd been pulled, but Bunny carefully removed the threads anyway, pausing with one paw on the ruined flesh as he closed his eyes, then closed what remained of the little girl's eyelids.

He did this with every body when he'd assembled all the parts of it he could find, muttering soft words over them, too soft for Sam to hear. Private words between him and the children he'd failed to save - and every one of them, no matter their age, was or had been a child under his protection.

"You know I'm - I'm a spirit of rebirth, of life," Bunny went on, as he continued sorting the remains, arranging the bodies in a more complete circle. "I'm springtime and summer and the new growth, but you - you can't have life without death," he said, his words a little rambly, but aloud. It was part of doing your departed their honors to let them know who you were. "It shouldn't be like this, though. This sort of death - any kind of murder, that's not how it's supposed to go. But even if the whole world lived like they oughta, there'd still be death, right next to birth on the wheel of life. They're not opposites. They're not supposed to be like this, but they're -"

He was losing his train of thought, losing it in memories of having done this before, buried too many bodies and prayed over them, that time with only himself to talk to. Someone had to do this. He was glad that because he was there to do it, others didn't have to.

"You gotta know both if you're gonna know one," he went on. "Being a spirit of life means knowing how to honor when it ends," he said, picking up his own thread. "So I'll give them the honor of last rites. That means sendin' the souls off with a promise to find whoever did this to them and stop them from doing it anymore. And it means making sure their families find the bodies. They need that closure, you know. They need to conduct their own specific rites."

He gestured to the twisted, puppet corpses, the mockery of living in the murderer's work.

"They don't need to find them like this, though," he said, darkly, snipping another pair of stitches. "So I'll make sure they're found, and make sure that when they're found, at least their remains will have been given some dignity before another mortal saw 'em. They deserve that. Their families deserve that."

Some cops would be mad at him, for tampering with evidence, but they were never going to solve this murder anyway.

"I can't give them their final rites, though, because they're not my family. That's up to their loved ones to finish, both for them and for their spirits. If they were my family, though," he went on, almost lightly, as if he hadn't once had to do something so like this for his own family, so long ago that he had to be holding Tooth's hand before he could remember their voices - "I'd build a mound in the earth, and I'd bury them there. That's how we honored the cycle."

Oops. He'd slipped a 'we' into there. This was getting more personal than he'd intended.

"Not just death, but life," he went on. "That's where the Earth comes in, that's where burial comes in. If they were my family, I'd bury them, and build a mound over their graves, and plant flowers. When you bury something that came from the earth long enough, it becomes earth again. We all go back to being part of this living thing."

He closed another dead child's eyes, and bowed his head to speak his quiet, private words over it.

"Kuk and all his minions will never take that from us," he finished out loud, a growl back in his voice as he went for another body. "No matter how horrible the murder, they'll never stop us from still being a part of that which is always alive."

[fromfryingpantofire]

Even though he heard the 'we', Sam didn't bring it up or point it out. It was one of those things that Bunny didn't talk about and Sam could accept that. It wasn't like there weren't plenty of things that he didn't want to talk about. Or at least wouldn't talk about sober.

"Dean and I...we don't do that. Or we don't back home. Most spirits move on on their own. They don't need our help. The only time we have to step in is when the spirit has either deliberately not gone on or has somehow gotten caught in something that won't let them." Which happened sometimes. Especially when people did things like this, though this didn't feel like it had the ritual qualities that he was used to seeing.

"When spirits can't go on back home, they can become violent. That's how poltergeists are created. If that happens, the only way to release the spirits and put them to rest is to salt and cremate the remains." He glanced around for a moment. "We wouldn't leave the bodies the way that they were here, but this place? We'd probably burn it down."

There was a part of him that was still seriously considering it, but Bunny had a point about the families.

On the other hand, DNA was a wonderful thing these days.

[mywarrenmyrules]

The look Bunny gave Sam was sort of incredulous, not as if he were quite disgusted, but as if Sam had suggested solving a land ownership dispute by blowing up the land.

"Do me a solid and run it by me before you do that here," he said. "I get you're working with the best of what you've got back where you're from, and it sounds like a terrible place, but it doesn't have me."

He laid the last of the puppet-bodies in the forming circle and waved Sam after him.

"Next room. This is not going to be a short day."

[beetlebutt]

The next room didn't have much in it but that made it all that much more ominous. There were meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. One was hanging by itself, mostly free of having any other meat hooks around it, almost like it was - in its own morbid way - a strange place of honor. It was the focus of the room.

Under that meat hook there were more fragments of blue and black armor, and there was more blue blood. Quite a bit of it had dripped here and the circular patterns the drips made on the concrete made it clear that the dangling body that had bled them out had been knocked around, like a pendulum making circles in the sand during an earthquake.

The setup near the hook wouldn't have looked out of place in a Saw movie. A table was there and on it, there were scattered rusty tools that had brown bloodstains on them. A sledge hammer rested against the table, but this was smeared with blue. A pinata was hanging from another hook and had vague meat shapes leaking out of the middle where it'd been split open. A half eaten cake shaped like a creepy clown face was also on the table and next to the table was an oversized teddy bear sitting in a chair. It looked like a broken zombie of a doll, with teeth that were far too sharp for a children's toy, something purposefully constructed by some evil doll Dr. Frankenstein to be terrifying.

Most of the torture tools were bloody but it was long since faded to brown and on many of the tools none of it was blue. The drill, however, was dripping in blue blood and drill bit had been broken off. There was also a spool of wire, like the kind used to pose the others - clearly the person that had done this had wanted to add the boy in the blue armor to her "family."

On the ground with the fragments of armor were some fragments of rope and duct tape that had been cut by something that chewed them up - most likely a chainsaw. There was a small smattering of fresher red blood - belonging to the woman behind all this - as if she'd been kicked in face and bled a little, but most of the blood that had dripped on the floor was blue.

The hook was hanging in clear view of the other room, where the the dead puppet people had been propped up, meaning the boy that had been here had been shown them as she'd started to torture him. The trail of blue blood led off to a door that had been sawed through by a chainsaw and seemed to lead to possibly a kitchen. The trail had smears along the way that made it clear that the person dripping all the blood had been limping, dragging their injured leg as they tried to escape.

[fromfryingpantofire]

"I haven't seen the same sorts of things happening here." Yet. "That said, if I do run into a spirit who is causing a lot of issues, I'll give you a shout first."

Because, yeah. They didn't have Bunny back home and, honestly, Sam wasn't sure that what he did would work back home. Though they'd probably never, ever find out. But he really wasn't going to dispute that it was a pretty terrible place.

He paused as they stepped into the next room, taking a moment to look around and take in what he was seeing. Which was uncomfortably close to a few things he remembered from Hell. Luckily, the memories had a level of distance to them these days. "The person who was here? Yeah, pretty screwed in the head. The Guardian who got away was pretty lucky."

Creepy. Creepy as anything was what his mind kept circling back around to.

[mywarrenmyrules]

They'd have to go back to where the kid was resting at the Pole and make sure this horror hadn't gotten to him in similar ways.

Some people, when something this terrible was done to them, didn't come out the same.

He sniffed at the meat pinata to see if the remains were human, eyeing the blue-blooded hammer and the hook with its telltale pile of armor parts.

Bunny took a quick pause aside to take a deeper sniff of the woman's blood. He had to be able to pick her out by a papercut after this. Had to, because someone who did this to children could not be allowed to live anymore in his world, even if she had been a child who'd needed protecting once.

"Let's keep going," he said, moving on to the next room. They weren't done finding victims.

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam took another look around them for a moment before nodding. "Yeah, okay. Just...be careful."

Somebody like this might have felt that they were safe enough that they couldn't be found. But that didn't mean that there weren't traps there somewhere. More than just the one on the door. Especially since this was pretty much definitely the work of at least one of the 'anti-Guardians', as Sam was calling them to himself.

Sure, Bunny was probably better equipped to sense them before Sam did, but that didn't stop him from readying a shield in his mind. Just in case.

[bringinghopewithme]

"I brought you, didn't I?" he pointed out, with the briefest wry smile.

So much of his instincts had said do to this alone, without exposing one of the new Guardians, but that would have been an irresponsible risk at this point. And Sam was already so jaded, something that saddened Bunny even as he was in a way glad that someone as competent as Sam was available for horror and danger of this scale.

He crept on through the warehouse, on to find the rest of the victims.

[fromfryingpantofire]

There were plenty of people who would say that bringing a Winchester along wasn't the best way to be careful, but Sam just snorted and forced a crooked smile for Bunny.

He stalked the other Guardian's footsteps, staying close and keeping his steps as silent as possible, head and gun up as he scanned the area. Just in case they weren't alone.