Title: The Weeping Angel
Fandom: Supernatural/Doctor Who
Pairing: Doctor/Castiel
Rating: G
Warnings: Angst, I suppose.
Word count: 1,486
Author’s notes: This story features a character named Aliana. She’s the Doctor and Castiel’s daughter. Written to this song.
Summary:  …This, this empty, callous chasm within your chest, this is how humans feel when their children have cancerous bones and cancerous brains. This helplessness. Or, when Aliana turned into a Weeping Angel.

She woke one day and her tears were pebbles on her cheeks.

She’d had a dream the previous night, about the caves, the terrible, terrible caves that swallowed good people whole and preserved them as statues—statues that spread their wings and cried, eternally.

She’d touched the cheek of one of those statues. It was beautiful, smooth as a river and harder than metal. She’d gazed into its cinereal eyes and saw the universe, saw its life and its pain, until her father lead her away, to the next cavern.

That mechanical dawn, amidst the effervescent light of galaxies hovering outside her window, face turned into her downy mattress, her tears were pebbles. Shining. Seamless. Impossible to amputate with clambering hands and desperate fingers. They tugged at her skin, left it red and puffy as they swam down her face, to eventually plop on the sheets beside her.

She couldn’t stop crying after that.

Hours—minutes—later, her door creaked open, and the soft tap of a subtle shoe was thrown across the room.

“Aliana? Ali, are you well?“ A man in tweed and suspenders, her father (colloquially known as, “Papa”), laid a hand on her head. His fingers mingled with her hair as he continued. “You missed breakfast. I know, this is the TARDIS and, really, isn’t breakfast all the time? But there are traditions in this family; for example, even—no, especially—after a late night of vanquishing foes and breaking statues, we awaken at approximately the same time, gather around a table of sorts, and, erm, break our fast.”

She was silent for a while, face still pressed to the mattress, tiny stones falling from her eyelashes. She only put up the barest of fights when his hand moved to her shoulder and turned her towards him.

A gasp. Shame mixed with pride at managing to astound her papa, the prestigious Doctor, nomad of the cosmos. Apparently, none of his daughters had cried pebbles before.

“Ali—Are those? Ali, Ali, Ali, sweetheart, why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you say—If I’d known you’d looked—and you did look, didn’t you, you must have—I’d have—I’d have—Castiel!”

-

They had breakfast as planned.

Eggs, toast, marmalade (for Castiel), supremely sweet strawberry jam (for the Doctor), apple juice, sparkling water from some distant waterfall on some distant planet, pomegranates, grapefruits, and a wayward yogurt-covered pretzel.

Aliana drizzled her toast with desperation and small flecks of ground-up rock. It seemed the longer time stretched, the thinner her cobblestone tears became, until they were but gray and white flakes coating her skin like volcanic dust suffocated a crisp city. They couldn’t be removed.

She prodded her eggs with the fork in her left hand, since the Doctor hadn’t released her right; he gripped it tightly, ran his thumb over her skin, as if to make sure it hadn’t transformed yet. He still had her hands. He could still hold her hands, bend her fingers without worrying they’d break.

He could also look into her eyes without threat of imminent extinction, but he hadn’t exercised that right.

On his side, Castiel was silent; introverted. He neither pretended to eat, nor held her other hand (which had dropped the fork and was now tapping the underside of the table), nor looked her in the eye, nor urged her to, Eat, Ali, it’s called breakfast for a reason. Castiel simply sat, and searched within himself for answers to questions no one wanted to ask.

-

Breakfast eventually became stale crumbs and citrus stains, and the Doctor relinquished Aliana’s hand to reach under the table for the chess set. It was a family game—the Doctor and Aliana would play raucously, teasing and bickering, shoes nipping each other’s bare ankles; the Doctor and Castiel, serenely, comfortably, as if the tiny glass chess pieces and the dimensionally-transcendent marble board were less important than sharing company. Everyone won as long as the Doctor somehow, some-way, landed a kiss on Castiel’s nose before Cas could capture his queen.

This time was different.

The Doctor didn’t speak as he set the board; didn’t peep but for a tuft of frustrated air when the white king just would not stay still, and looped around the board, sweeping pawns off their glassy feet. When asked if he’d be joining them, Castiel stood and kissed their cheeks (his lips brushing the hardening flecks on hers, certainly a repellent) before leaving, hand lingering on Aliana’s shoulder.

The Doctor shrugged, eyes sad. The white king finally found balance. The game began.

Most times, the Doctor would forfeit the first few moves. He’d make bad puns to distract her from his wayward pawns, shuffling without purpose or pattern. And when she inevitably captured one (always swift to pounce on an opportunity), he’d switch to random, mind-boggling factoids concerning far-off galaxies, while directing his energy towards eliminating her sparkling, ebony pieces, one by one, plucking them off like characters in an Agatha Christie novel.

That day, that mechanical morning, the Doctor devised a quick plan and pummeled her in five turns. Reset. Loopy white king. Pregnant silence. Move number one, plan number two; score two-love, in his favor. She found, as she twirled a black bishop between her fingers (not yet sprinkled with gray, not yet) and stared at the grainy table, she didn’t mind at all.

-

In three days, her neck and collarbone were dusted with stone, and her shoulders were stiff where it’d leeched her arms. Her head, her hair—they were already cemented, if malleable. She could turn her face, eat, speak, and cry. She simply couldn’t smile.

Castiel lived in the library, although he joined them for meals, and to wish them goodnight in the evenings. Castiel enjoyed the pool too much to leave, joked the Doctor.

Her fathers stopped touching her. Gradually, painfully, they ceased the little things, like carding their fingers through her hair, and hugging her at random intervals, and she could only shrug to herself and pull her blanket taut around her (gray and ivory) shoulders. It was to be expected. They were busy—Castiel, obsessed with finding a cure; the Doctor, laying his mourning clothes on his bed, swallowing as if his throat were the one stuffed with granite.

She saw neither of them doing any of these things. Forgive her for knowing.

-

Day six, nearly a week since she saw the universe in cobblestone eyes, and her elbows were capped with rock; her tight torso was wound by stone. She was a fossil, half-realized—yet to harden in the furnace. Yet to melt and re-melt, twist in a swirl of plasma, and reshape into a stamp of time.

She and the Doctor still played chess. He’d gotten bored with his new strategy ages (hours, minutes) ago, and had taken to reciting a piece of obscure, alien literature before allowing himself to move. If he uttered the wrong word, used an improper inflection, he’d topple his unsteady white king and watch it spin.

She won twice before the week was up. Both times he’d attempted to muster a spark in his eye, a pinch of vicarious pride, but the flame wouldn’t take to the tinder. Both times she’d patted his hand in apology.

-

Eleven days, and it was almost time to go.

She wasn’t ready. None of them were ready. On the tenth day, Castiel had abandoned his futile search and hugged her for five entire minutes (hours, lifetimes), shivering hands seeking purchase in the new crevasses of her back, chin tucked into her hard, hard shoulder. She’d hugged him as well, rolled tear-shaped pebbles down his side. She’d miss him.

The Doctor, near-catatonic for the past two weeks, babbled and babbled on her last day. He told her everything he’d ever wanted to. He told her about his time on Earth, as a prisoner and a protector; about Gallifrey, the scorching fields, golden trees, and the massive, domineering dome; about his companions, Susan (a niece she never knew), Jamie, Jo, Romana, Tegan, Peri, Ace, Grace, Rose, Martha, Donna, and Amy; about his adventures, his fantastic victories, his glorious failures, his delusions of grandeur, his moments when mercy was either abundant or missing; about Castiel, and herself, and how much he loved them both, and how much he’d miss her when she was gone, and why does she have to go again, why does she have to leave them, why can’t she simply befriend a garden gnome on the TARDIS instead of on a Silurian’s lawn—

And then her wings broke her back. Her stone wings rose from her spine, weaved through her rock until they unfurled with a creak, a scratch, and a crack.

In an instant, she was gone.

-

…This, this empty, callous chasm within your chest, this is how humans feel when their children have cancerous bones and cancerous brains. This helplessness.