InsaneJournal

The Haunted Asylum (Mary/9, email log, tbc in comments)
The first thing Mary noticed when she came to was that she no longer had a dozen layers of skirts. The second was that she was sleeping on a cot with straps. A look around revealed a poorly lit room that looked like it belonged in some sort of loony bin. A draft played over her and she sucked in a breath as she sat up. A few brown stains suggestive of blood decorated the walls and floor, and she thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye.

"Well, this feels a little more like home," she muttered to herself.

A quick look around turned up her own supply bag. The simple canvas bag contained a few of her favorite guns, knives, two canisters of salt, a can of spray paint, and three bottles of holy water. There was a small comfort in having her things, but that didn't stop the hair on the back of her neck from standing on edge when an inhuman scream sounded from somewhere else in the building.

She got to her feet and headed out into the hall. She supposed she should be thankful that the lock on the door had rusted over and was easy enough to jimmy open. She also gave a moment of thanks that she hadn't woken up in a straight jacket.


----

The Doctor heard the scream, too.

Interestingly, until that moment, he couldn't remember what he was doing, or where he was. And even now, it was fuzzy. He stood, sonic in hand, in front of a door, and his head was turned over his right shoulder now. Everything here was fairly dark, so he had the sonic on torch mode, too.

He wore his normal clothing, which was excellent, but he didn't see the TARDIS anywhere. He patted his pockets for the key and did have it, so that was also a good sign.

The scream wasn't.

He used the screwdriver on the door lock and went through it.

----

Once in the hallway, Mary didn't waste anytime arming herself. It took a quick check of the guns to figure out which one had the salt rounds in it. They wouldn't buy her much time, but they'd do more than bullets if this place had the occupants she was expecting. Looking around, she thought that it was a bit of a cliche. Though how many other cliched horror settings had she found herself in back home? She just hoped that these were the brand of ghosts she was familiar with, because she wouldn't put it past the aliens to send them somewhere that ghosts were immune to salt and iron. And if they had, she'd just have to figure out what would work and adapt or die. Wasn't that always the case?

She didn't mind that feeling so much. It was a whole hell of a lot more familiar than being stuck on a ship surrounded by death and not knowing when the monsters in the sea might come for you, or being caught in a seemingly idyllic 1940s town without knowing what the catch was. This felt right though. This was just another day with the family business.

As she got further up the hall, a door opened. She paused and kept the gun trained on it until a familiar face emerged.

"Doctor," she said in a tone just loud enough to be heard. No use drawing too much attention to the pair of them until it came down to a fight with whatever was in here. "You have much experience with the supernatural? I'm guessing you do?" After all, he'd traveled through all of time and space and spent time on the Hellmouth with the rest of them. She imagined that he might be able to teach her a thing or two. Hell, she hoped for that. If you weren't learning in hunting, you were dying.

----

The door creaked open. Of course it did.

The Doctor stood in the doorway considering the hallway beyond it. In the soft, greenish light of the sonic, he could see a blond girl standing there with a gun. She lowered it almost immediately. For a moment, he thought she was her mother, and the Doctor smiled a bit sadly.

Experience with the supernatural?

He stepped through the door and more toward Mary, and the Doctor smiled broadly. "You could say that. You wouldn't be wrong."

Problem was, supernatural things weren't scared of him, not unless they were really aliens and not demons or ghosts. Sometimes that was the case. True spirits, true bump in the night things from Earth.... they weren't always intimidated.

The Doctor was just a man to them.

"Did you just find yourself here, too?"

----

That reply wasn't entirely reassuring, but Mary would take it. And even if the Doctor didn't know how to handle what was in here, she had a feeling that she would be able to do just fine with it. She shouldn't be happy about waking up here, but it was just nice to be in a situation that felt more familiar. Which might be a pretty damning description of what it was like to be a Winchester. Always more at ease when their lives were in danger.

She nodded and started to move again. She figured that the Doctor would be able to keep up.

"Yes. It seems like this is the newest planet the aliens have decided to leave us at. And if we're here, there are probably others too. It's going to be better if we can find them and stay together. And if these are the ghosts I'm used to, then a salt line will keep them out and iron will disrupt them for at least a little bit." She wasn't sure whether he needed the lesson, but she wasn't going to wait until something forced him to learn the hard way.

And speaking of something... a ghostly woman in a nurse's uniform emerged from one of the walls of the hallway. She brandished a large hypodermic needle at them. "It's time for shots..." she said in a singsong voice.

Mary didn't let her get through much more than that before she aimed her gun and shot a salt round straight through the woman.

"We should go before she gets back," she said.

----

The Doctor followed.

He hadn't been here long, but perhaps Mary had been here a bit longer.

And, he was smart enough to know that he was in a place that was much more her element than his--at least it seemed right now.

When the woman appeared, he scanned her with the screwdriver, and she was indeed an apparition. There wasn't anything he could do apart from yell boo at her, and after watching Mary's actions, he found himself wishing the sonic had a salt setting.

He showed no fear or worry. He was not afraid or worried.

"Do you know there is a place where the nurses are cat people?" He considered his last visit to that particular place. "I've never been much of a cat person. That really did it. Nurses, either."

As they passed various doors, he was peering in, looking for the TARDIS.

----

Mary reached into her bag and pulled out a tire iron to hand to the doctor. He seemed capable enough, from what she'd heard. She didn't think that he was the sort to lose his head and hurt someone because he was careless. So it made sense to arm him against what they were facing.

"Swing this at them and they'll disperse at least long enough for us to get away."

Her eyes swept the corridors for any signs of more ghosts. She knew they were coming eventually. And she supposed they'd be lucky if it was only ghosts in here.

"Cat... people? As in people that look like cats? Or people that just own cats?" Somehow, she thought it was the former. And as crazy as that sounded, she'd seen crazier since getting abducted. Lots crazier. "That sounds like something that I'd rather never see. I'm not a cat person either."

And nurses... well, nurses just asked too many questions and had that pesky responsibility to inform police if it looked like there'd been a crime.

----

"This is a tire iron," the Doctor said, somewhat cheerfully. He chuckled. He saw no tires. He knew why he was being handed such a thing, but it still was amusing.

He continued to creep along the hallway.

"Oh no people who look like cats. ARE cats, strictly speaking. Nun habits on their heads, too."

Somewhere, not far ahead, a door creaked open. There was a shuffling sound behind the creak.

----

"You're observant," Mary deadpanned.

She liked the Doctor. Her mom and dad had spoken highly of him, and she tended to like those who could still throw out quips when in the middle of a potentially deadly situation. And it didn't get more terrifying than what looked like an old asylum straight out of a horror movie.

"Cat nuns," she repeated with a shudder. "I'll definitely take the angry spirits."

She looked up as the door opened and got her gun ready. Moments later, a ghost in a straight jacket floated through the door and glared at them, snarling.

----

The Doctor stopped advancing.

The ghost kept coming. He wasn't worried about it... the only power a ghost had was in the scaring, wasn't it? He was unafraid. But as the thing came closer, the Doctor felt a pain in his chest. In one of his hearts. Only then did he notice the apparition was advancing with its hand out, making a squeezing motion. As his knees bent, the Doctor was glad it was him and not Mary having this problem, though it wasn't in any way easier to take the pain of having one's heart squeezed.

He waved the tire iron at it ineffectually.

----

Mary thought that she'd communicated the risk appropriately to the Doctor. But when he just stood in place while the ghost moved towards him, she realized that she might have undersold the danger they were in. She pumped her shotgun and fired off a salt round into the ghost, who dispersed.

"You all right?" she asked, moving forward to offer him her arm. "We should really keep moving. We need to see if there's any others here, and then we should find a room to line with salt so we can stay safe."

She really didn't want to think about what they were going to do about food or water if they were stuck here for longer than a few hours. She was simply going to focus on keeping the two of them alive until they could get to a safer place. And then she'd worry about supplies for basic survival needs.

----

The Doctor was often impressed by the heroics of human beings, as well as unimpressed by their many apelike qualities. When a person came along that so fully stopped him from being speciest, he had to pause. In this case, it was that plus the feeling of a ghostly hand in his chest needing to pass that had him paused.

It was not that he did not understand what it was the Winchesters did. It was that they did not regenerate, and he was starting to grasp just how much physical pain might be involved in their jobs. It was not something he thought about much, mostly because the Doctor was a Timelord, and not a human being.

He got to his feet and nodded.

"Two hearts. Handy." He looked both ways down the corridor. "Mary, do you have any ideas about why precisely there was a hand in my chest?"

That didn't strike him as a normal ghost. And he would like all ghosts to keep their hands to themselves.

----

Mary stared in surprise for a moment.

"Two hearts?" That was a new one. She knew that the Doctor wasn't strictly human, but she hadn't expected him to have two hearts. She wondered what else was different internally.

Once the Doctor was on his feet, she glanced around to make sure that this room was temporarily ghost free. She had a feeling that it wouldn't last, but she wanted to at least give him a moment to catch his breath before they kept moving. Two hearts or not, it still wasn't a laughing matter to have a ghost reach into your chest and squeeze.

"That's what every ghost I've ever encountered does. When people die, sometimes they end up sticking around because they're holding onto something. Sometimes that something is just a strong feeling from before their death. Sometimes it's a person or an item." She shrugged. "Whatever the case, they hang onto this thing that they really shouldn't and eventually it changes them. The longer a spirit is walking the Earth, the more they lose themselves and the angrier and more powerful they get. Judging by this place, most ghosts likely died violently and have been here for a very long time. So when they see someone alive, they just want to pull you into death with them. That's why you have to stay on your guard. You can't let them get that close again, okay?"

Two hearts or not, she didn't want to test the extent of the Doctor's immortality, if that were the case.

"We really should keep looking to see if there's anyone else here. And then we need to find a safe room to hole up in. Lining it with salt should keep the spirits at bay."

----

Two hearts? He smiled at her.

Aside from the obvious situation--that this was just another trap with different scenery-- the Doctor wondered why trying to get out wasn't an option.

"What about leaving? Or trying to get them to rest?"

He was pushing a door open as he said it, peering inside, then moving to the other side of the hallway and doing the same. No one there. Just them. Three heartbeats. He looked back at Mary. "Can we stop them being restless any other way than hiding?"

----

"I don't want to leave until we know that we're not leaving anyone behind," Mary answered. Everywhere she'd ended up, at least half the group had been there. She wasn't going to turn tail and run until she was sure that no one else alive was still in here. "As for getting them to rest, we'd have to find where their bodies are buried and salt and burn them. All of them. So... if there's a graveyard on site, it's possible."

She liked that option better, though it was a long shot. With how hard it was to find just one body... And she wasn't sure that they had enough salt for how many bodies they'd have to salt and burn. But if they could help some souls rest, she'd prefer that. Even the dead deserved peace. And even if they didn't, taking care of a ghost meant saving the next person who might stumble across this place.

So she considered the options and wondered if maybe the aliens had put them in this place to do just that. And as much as she would love to be contrary and not do what they wanted, doing her job was more important than a power struggle with the aliens.

"Feel up to searching the place for a graveyard?" she asked.