A/N: Hot damn, does Supernatural have some awesome music, or what? I've been listening to it a fair bit lately and getting a whole ton of Winchester related inspiration. Most of which isn't helpful for this fanfic, but oh well, I can't have everything. I'd like to thank to the brilliant people who read and reviewed these past three chapters and have waited so patiently for this one - thank you all very much.
Supernaturally Bad Luck
A Supernatural/Discworld Crossover
Chapter 4:
Not Like the Smurfs
~~~~~~.~~~~~~
Bobby arrived in the town of Wellsboro as evening fell after driving the whole day, stopping only for gas and bathroom breaks. He was determined to investigate what had killed the weather witches and, more importantly, search for any hint of what happened to Sam and Dean.
He found the cheapest motel and checked for the Winchester boys' booking – a room under the name of Wetton. * The boys hadn't checked out yet, much to the motel manager's annoyance, and there had been no response from the room all day. Bobby offered to clear out the room and give the manager his number in case they wanted to know where their stuff had gone, and this was gratefully accepted.
"Right," Bobby said, once he had loaded Sam and Dean's things in his car and was alone once again. "I better get to those woods and see what's what."
Getting access to the ring of stones was less difficult than he was expecting – it seemed that the Police had gone home for the night already, leaving the hardly foreboding 'Police Line - Do Not Cross' tape between Bobby and the crime scene. He ducked under it with barely a thought – as with most Hunters it was hardly the first time he'd gone into a still closed crime scene.
The bodies of the weather witches had been removed, but signs of their deaths were clear even in the fading daylight – blood was painted grotesquely across the ground and even part way up the standing stones. It had been a massacre. The snow that had been reported in the newspapers had obviously melted during the day under the warm summer sun but the evidence of it remained – the ground all around the stone circle was muddy and upturned. There were very clear hoof-prints in the mud, tracking blood away from the crime scene and leading off into the forest.
There was not a hint of Sam or Dean anywhere.
"Balls."
~~~~~~.~~~~~~
"Rise and shine, Sammy!" Dean said enthusiastically.
"God, Dean what time is it?" Sam groaned, trying to hide from the world. "Is it even light yet?"
"Sun's just comin' up now." Dean said cheerfully, pulling back the curtains to let a ray of light fall on his brother's face, who groaned again and pulled the blanket over his head.
In truth, Dean was nearly as unhappy about being awake as Sam, but irritating him into wakefulness was a great source of entertainment. It kept Dean sane... or at least, as sane as any Hunter could be.
Dean would've killed for some loud classic rock and a bacon-y breakfast of deliciousness - the only decent way to start any day, in his opinion, but he settled for humming 'Highway to Hell' as loudly as he could manage, as Sam groaned and tried to bury himself under blankets again.
"Dude, if you wake Nanny Ogg up and she gets mad, there's no way I'm helping you escape." Sam grumbled from beneath the blanket.
Dean lowered his humming at that threat, but only to the point of making it too quiet to travel to another room while still loud enough to prevent his brother from falling back asleep. Dean was determined that he wasn't going to be the only one of the Winchesters awake in medieval England.
He so hoped bacon was on the agenda for breakfast.
"Fine," Sam said with a long-suffering sigh, "I'm awake, Dean. You can stop humming AC/DC now."
"I'll stop when it stops being good." Dean replied, grinning at his brother's annoyance before switching to humming 'Back in Black'.
He picked his jacket up from the floor where he'd shrugged it off the previous evening and put it on.
It was lighter than he was expecting.
"Where's my flask?" Dean said, frowning as he patted down his pockets. "It should be here and it's not. Where is it?"
"Don't look at me," Sam replied, raising his hands in a defensive gesture. "When have you ever known me to drink before lunch?"
There was a barely audible clink – the sound of something metal being put down gently on something hard. The Winchesters turned towards it and there, on the other side of the room and sitting on a little table amongst pictures of the Ogg clan, was Dean's flask.
He crossed the room in three swift strides, sleepiness long forgotten, picked the metal container up and swished it lightly.
"It's completely empty," Dean said slowly, as if wishing something would happen to contradict him. "I swear it was filled with Guinness last night."
"Maybe you just forgot you had it," Sam said, in a tone indicating he thought something was listening.
"Yeah, maybe, man." Dean replied, tilting his head to acknowledge that he knew what Sam was thinking. He scanned the room for possible weapons, his eyes falling on a poker set next to the small, currently unused fireplace.
Sam spotted it at the same time and, being the closer of the two, pulled two pokers out of the holders without making a sound. He tossed one to his older brother, who caught it expertly.
"Still, I don't remember putting it down on that table." Dean said as he moved forward, more to make noise to mask his movement than actually wanting to talk.
"If you had all that Guinness then I'm not surprised you don't remember, Dean." Sam said with false reproach in his voice. "You've got to learn not to drink so much, dude."
The brothers went still and quiet when they heard a small voice coming from the closet.
"Oi, Rob, the bigjobs are unsuspectin'," it said in a distinctly pleased, strong Scottish accent. "It dinnae matter tha' I forgot to put the flask back."
"Shut ya gob Daft Wullie, or the bigjobs'll hear us," a second Scottish voice whispered furiously.
Sam and Dean looked at each other in identical expressions of confusion. The little voices didn't sound threatening as such, but they did sound responsible for the alcohol disappearance.
"Ach, I'm quiet as a wee mousie, Rob, quit fashing ya'self," the voice referred to as 'Daft Wullie' replied without worry. "The bigjobs slept right through the stealin' and the drinkin', so what makes ya think they'll notice us naow?"
"Mebbe cuz the scunners are awake naow, ye great daft thing!" The voice called Rob admonished, his voice raising in volume from annoyance. "And mebbe if we don't bring ourselves to their attention, Daft Wullie, mebbe we might get to steal some more drink from them."
Dean used the not so hushed conversation as cover for inching towards the cupboard. He stretched one hand out to reach for the door handle and lifted his poker with the other. His fingers closed around the handle and he paused, steeling himself to whatever awaited on the other side of the door.
He flung open the door and utterly froze at the sight of the two little blue men, looking for all the world like dirty, angry, red-haired Smurfs.
"Crivens, look what ya did!" Rob said, cuffing Daft Wullie around the head before both of the little blue men disappeared.
Not like ghost disappeared, with the flickering and the fading, more like simply moving very fast so as to not be there anymore.
"What in the hell were they?" Dean said, recovering slightly from the shock. "I mean, they can't be Smurfs – 'cuz the Smurfs aren't exactly known for stealing and drinking and being Scottish." **
"Or being real," Sam pointed out completely reasonably, a smirk on his face.
Dean scowled at his younger brother.
~~~~~~.~~~~~~
Bobby entered the morgue under the guise of FBI Agent Kenneth Stoop***, finding that it was just as disturbing as the crime scene. It had obviously run out of normal storage space, meaning several of the bodies were just out in the open with tarps covering their forms – as if trying to give the dead some dignity since they couldn't be given the conventional holding space. The air conditioning had been dialled right down too, in an effort to keep the less protected corpses as chilled as possible.
Bobby pulled back a tarp gently, and cringed at the gruesome sight.
"Hooves," he said to himself as he looked at the mangled form that no person could realistically identify. Dental records wouldn't do any good, either – there was too little left... but it wasn't Bobby's job to identify them, so he dismissed those thoughts from his mind.
"That would take one very angry horse to do this kinda damage." He frowned and covered the tarp over the body again, only to examine a different corpse. "And again... Now, what would be able to keep them all there, while whatever it was took its time to massacre these women like this? They're hardly gonna stand by and watch their friends get slaughtered this bad without even thinkin' about runnin' away."
Bobby heard the door to the morgue open quietly, so he ceased narrating his thoughts and pulled the tarp back further. There was a gaping hole in the chest - like this woman had been run through with a javelin.
"Huh, the reports weren't kidding," Bobby said aloud, turning his attention for the first time to the morgue attendant. "Boy, do you know if there were any drugs in these poor women's systems?"
The young man gave a start at being addressed before hurriedly snatching up a clip-board and flicking through the contents. "Uh, no... There was no alcohol or recognisable drugs of any kind in any of their bodies at all." He looked up at Bobby, worry etched into his young face. "Sir... what could possibly have done this?"
"I'm working on that," Bobby replied, using his best FBI-Agent voice. "Now, what was the cause of death, the trampling or the great big hole in the chest?"
"The hole, sir," the young morgue attendant said sadly. "Tests show that the trampling was post-mortem, but not by much. Death would have been almost instant, sir."
"Well at least they didn't suffer the trampling," Bobby said, putting the tarp back over the woman's body and heading for the door.
Bobby grudgingly decided he'd have to look up lore on Unicorns – since that's what all the signs were pointing to, as much as he didn't want to believe it – before figuring out what to do next.
Not that anyone would ever hear that he was researching Unicorns.
~~~~~~.~~~~~~
Nanny Ogg had woken up, initially brought to semi-wakefulness when Greebo had sauntered in and decided that her feet were excellent pin cushions, and then roused into full-on consciousness at the sounds of voices. Feegle voices, more accurately.
Nanny got out of bed with a quiet groan and headed to her liquor cabinet. She opened the door without enthusiasm and... all her bottles were filled exactly as she remembered they were. Nanny Ogg frowned, shut the door and went to her kitchen.
Again, the alcohol was untouched.
Feeling a lot more awake now, she went to her favourite chair and dug around between the seats. Nanny pulled out the old bottle of scumble she hid there for special occasions and, yet again, the bottle was as full as it should have been, if not quite as full as she'd have liked. (*)
It was bizarre... but it all added up to the likelihood that the Feegles weren't there to drink all her alcohol. Which meant that they had an easier target. Or targets.
And what was the chance that their names were Sam and Dean Winchester?
Nanny snatched up her pointy hat, rammed it on her head, and strode towards the boys' bedroom, really hoping that they hadn't done something stupid like trying to fight the little blue men. Even Greebo wasn't that thick.
The Feegles voices had stopped and Nanny could now hear Sam and Dean talking. Well, at least that meant the Feegles hadn't knocked them unconscious and kicked them black and blue.
Nanny opened the door and saw the brothers turn together, automatically raising the pokers they held in their hands. Their eyes widened comically as they saw the 'intruder' and the poker irons were dropped, clattering loudly on the floor.
"See, I told you to be quiet!" Sam hissed to his older brother. "You woke Nanny Ogg up!"
"It's not my fault the Smurfs came to town and drank all my booze!" Dean hissed over his shoulder angrily before turning back to the witch with an apologetic smile. "Uh, we're real sorry if we woke you, Nanny."
"Nah, you didn't wake me," she said with a dismissive wave of a wrinkled hand. "And I think you may have met the Nac Mac Feegles."
"The Nac Mac Feegles?" Dean repeated with a frown. "What are they? And why did they steal my alcohol?"
"They're pictsies," Nanny replied, wondering how the young men didn't know about them – the Feegles were infamous all the way down to Ankh Morpork. "They love to drink, fight and steal. How come you don't know of them?"
Sam was frowning, deep in thought – his face the very image of worry and concern, but it went unnoticed by the other occupants of the room.
"We're new here, how could we have known about them?" Dean replied.
"I thought everyone on the Disc knew about them by now," Nanny said with a shrug, before turning away and heading out the door. "Anyway, breakfast is just about ready."
"Wait, wait, hold up. Did you say: 'the disc'?" Dean asked, confusion in his voice.
"Are you boys coming or not?" She called out.
Dean turned to his brother. "Did she just say 'the disc'?"
"Yeah, I think she did," Sam said, coming to a very unwelcome realisation. "Dean, I don't think we're on Earth anymore. I think this is a whole different world."
~~~~~~.~~~~~~
A/N: Out of curiosity, does anyone know why people often refer to Dean as being blond in fanfiction? I honestly don't see how he's even remotely blond. I would reckon I'm blonder than he is, and I'm not blonde at all...
Okay, that's enough of that wee rant.
I'm just mentioning now that I fully intend to finish this story. It might be slow, it might be ages between updates (real life has a terrible habit of getting in the way of my writing plans), but it will eventually get done. So never fear – I shall not leave this story abandoned.
Onto the footnotes!
* John Wetton was one of the writers (and singers) of 'Heat of the Moment' by Asia, which Dean is a fan of (see Mystery Spot, Season 3, Episode 11 if you don't believe me), and since most of the Winchester aliases are either movie or music references, I thought this was apt.
** I know in the recent Smurf movie that there is a Scottish Smurf but (a) this fic is set before 2011, and thus that movie hadn't come out, (b) there's no evidence of any Scottish Smurf in the original shows at all and (c) even if it was 2011 or later for the Winchesters in this story, they are unlikely to have seen it because they seem to rarely get a chance to go to the picture theatres (all their favourite movies are decades old).
*** This name was from a random name generator, and has no inherent meaning, just so you all know. Bobby tends to use things that are either very obscure references or completely random names as aliases.
(*) Scumble is a type of hugely alcoholic Discworld cider, for those of you unaware of this. It's made from apples, or mostly apples, and Nanny Ogg makes her own – which most people find to be too strong for them. The Nac Mac Feegles love the stuff, as does Nanny.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter, dear readers, and please review before you leave with any questions, comments or suggestions. Or even just to answer my 'Why do people say Dean is blond?' question. It's always appreciated!
Chou for now!