6: Time Travelers and Hunters

Dean, Sam, and Castiel stood frozen, staring at the door of the tiny motel room.

"Who is that?" Cas asked.

"Well gee, I dunno Cas! Let me use my magical seeing through doors abilities."

"I do not appreciate your tone Dean."

But Dean walked forward to peek carefully through the small eyehole in the door.

"What the-"

"What?"

"Three people. A guy, a girl, and some goofy-looking dude in a bow tie."

"That doesn't sound very threatening…" Cas ventured.

"Let them in, Dean." Sam gave his brother an encouraging nod.

"Okay but we're testing them. Get the holy water ready."

Finally, Dean swung the door open. Sam was right behind him, ready with the flask, and a second later all three of the strange people standing at the door were spluttering and blinking blessed water out of their eyes.

"What the hell was that for?" the flaming-haired girl spat angrily.

"Holy water. Had to check," Dean stated unapologetically.

"Sorry, you can come in now!" Sam motioned for them all to enter, backing up his long lanky form to allow them passage.

"Well thank you! And what a lovely welcome!"

The silly man with the bow tie and the gangling legs stepped through first. He seemed to have recovered quickly from being splashed in the face and was now looking around the dirty motel room as though it were some new and fascinating archaeological find. "I'm the Doctor by the way, and these are Amy and Rory."

He motioned at the red-haired girl and the stressed-looking fellow who trailed in behind her.

"The Doctor? Doctor who?" Sam asked, confused.

"Just, 'The Doctor,'" Amy clarified; giving Sam what he felt was an unnecessarily aggressive glare.

"Okay, Doc what do you want?"

Dean was doing his best to match Amy's aggression with his own defensive stance, making it clear that he did not trust the intruders any more than they trusted him. The Doctor, however, seemed unperturbed, continuing to regard these new acquaintances with bright-eyed joy.

"Now that!" he exclaimed, "Is an interesting question. We believe you might have information regarding the black cloud."

"What black cloud?" Sam stepped forward, looking concerned, and he and Dean exchanged a meaningful glance. The Doctor's eyes darted between the brothers.

"What are your names?"

"I'm Sam Winchester. And this is my brother Dean."

"And I'm Castiel."

It was the first Cas had spoken since the new arrivals, and the Doctor looked over at him in interest.

"Well now, what have we here?"

He began to circle Cas, looking him up and down with twinkling eyes as Cas shot Sam and Dean a confused glance.

"I am an angel of the lord," he said finally, his eyes flickering back to the Doctor, watching him pace uneasily.

"Is that what they're calling it these days? Fascinating!"

"Wait an angel of the lord? What is that supposed to mean?" Rory spoke finally, looking absolutely dumbfounded.

"It means, Rory, that he is one of the oldest beings to ever inhabit the Earth and the alternate dimensions existing around the Earth."

"It is not an alternate dimension, it is heaven."

` "Is that what they're calling it these days?"

Everyone in the room seemed to be growing increasingly disgruntled as the Doctor danced around, the only person in the room who was in on his own joke.

Sam looked to Amy for an explanation, but she just shrugged. Dean finally cut the tension with a growl.

"Do you mind explaining to us what the hell you're talking about? And you never answered me about that cloud. That could be demons, it sounds like-"

"Oh we already know they're demons. We came here to try and find where they came from."

"Wait… how do you…"

"Are you a demon hunter, I take it?" The Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver with a flourish and scanned Dean with it. Dean looked like he was about to punch the Time Lord in the face. "Yes, scanners indicate that you are, indeed, human…"

"Got that right, or you know, you could have just asked…"

"My most sincere apologies, you must understand this is really just fascinating. I had no idea demons were still even active on earth. I hadn't heard from their species in years."

"Well I don't know what planet you've been hanging out on, buddy, but we've been dealing with demon crap since we were kids, and we know they've been around long before that too. They just tried to cause the apocalypse a few years ago, them and the angels anyway. Where were you for that?"

"Apocalypse? No… I don't recall… It's a pity though I really hate to have missed it. It must have been quite a show!"

"A show? A SHOW? We almost died! Sam got possessed by Lucifer—"

Dean gestured to his little brother at this, to which Sam gave a guilty smile and a sheepish wave.

"—And you think it must have been a good SHOW? What is wrong with you? And who are you really, because I don't believe for one second that you're a doctor."

The childlike grin had finally slipped from The Doctor's face.

"I didn't mean to belittle your pain. I apologize."

"He sometimes just gets overexcited about things, really," Amy put in imploringly.

"You're right. I'm not a doctor. I'm The Doctor. I'm a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey and I'm over one thousand years old."

This announcement was met with dead silence. Castiel's expression remained unchanged, but Sam and Dean eyed each other with wide-eyed shock.

Finally Sam spoke, his gaze flickering between the newcomers with renewed trepidation. "So… you're an alien?"

"Yes."

"Just him, though. Amy and I are from London," Rory clarified. Amy raised her eyebrows. "I'm Scottish actually but yes."

"He has a time machine, and Amy and I travel with him. We meant to go to Ancient Greece but somehow we wound up in a field not far from here just in time to see a strange black cloud fly overhead, and we've been trying to figure out where it came from ever since. He says it was a bunch of demons," Rory said, relieved to finally give the Winchesters a full explanation. They didn't have time for The Doctor's cryptic ways right at the moment. However, sometimes living their lives made it easy to forget how strange the whole thing sounded when recounted to strangers. Rory slightly overestimated how well the others would take the news.

"You have a time machine?" Sam asked, disbelief dripping from every syllable.

"The only things we've ever seen with the power to do that are the angels. And one time a Greek god sent me back to the 40s, and it was a bitch getting back. But time machines aren't actually… real…"

"He's not an angel," Castiel confirmed, walking forward and squinting at The Doctor. Now it was his turn to conduct an examination. "I know all of my brothers and sisters. He's something else. I think he's what he says, Dean."

"But a time machine, Cas?" even Sam sounded incredulous. "There's no precedent."

"Not for you, maybe," The Doctor said. His eyes were twinkling again.

"Look we can show you the time machine later, right now we really need to focus!" Amy stepped in, snapping everyone to attention. "Those demons were on the move. We need to figure out where they came from and why. This situation could be very… bad," she finished the short speech with slightly less vigor than she'd begun with, realizing at the last minute that she still didn't know the full extent of what demons could do and that she and Rory were still comparatively out of the loop in a lot of ways.

"We think we know who's doing this, actually," Sam said. "Castiel here just came by to tell us an important artifact has gone missing from heaven, and it can control demons. And we got word from a demon we just exorcised that the name of the man calling the shots these days is Moriarty. He's probably trying to raise a demon army of his own. There is an opening to hell not far from here that demons can escape from. I bet that was the black cloud you saw."

The Doctor beamed at him. "Brilliant deductions! I bet you're right!"

"You seem awfully happy to hear about some crazy guy raising a demon army," Dean said with an undeniable note of accusation.

"Oh he's always like that," Rory told Dean, just barely managing to keep himself from rolling his eyes. "Complicated situations excite him."

"So! Moriarty… Moriarty…" The Doctor was off in a frenzy of moment again, pacing the floor. "Does anyone have any idea who Moriarty is?"

"Actually, we met him awhile ago. He came to us in disguise, told us his name was Moore. He wanted us to catch a demon for him. We did." Dean's voice was gruff. He was already starting to regret helping a stranger so quickly as they had. He couldn't believe how stupid it had been of them to not do more of a background check on the guy first. But then again, helping people, no questions asked, whether they wanted it or not, was kind of their M.O. Dean figured it was the least they could do after causing almost as much harm as they'd stopped, half the time.

"We're still trying to figure out why he needed us to take down that demon for him though," Sam interrupted Dean's thoughts, continuing to fill the time travelers in on the situation. "It doesn't make any sense."

"But it might…" Amy interjected, her face thoughtful. "Rory and I still only know half of what's going on with these demon things. Most people would probably need a tutorial on how they work before they can just go around controlling a whole army of them. He probably just needed you to show him the basics."

"Great. Just great," Dean muttered.

"Well, it's all in the past now! The least we can all do is try and stop him. We should probably try to figure out where Moriarty is now, though, if we're going to go about that…" The Doctor said all of this very fast as he kept up his pacing.

"Well he's from London…" Sam gestured to the article on his laptop he and Dean had been studying earlier.

"But that does not mean he remained there. He could be anywhere in the world, and as long as he has Pandora's Box, the demons will follow him and do his bidding," Castiel put in.

"Well thanks, angel boy," Amy grumbled. "Look there has to be some way to narrow the search down, everybody think!" She felt slightly hypocritical saying this though, considering she was also drawing a blank.

Everyone was silent, even the Doctor.

"We should start looking into news reports for strange phenomena. Things that might seem to be related to demon attacks," Rory suggested. He wrung his hands habitually but his voice was strong.

"We deal with weird news stories all the time," Dean stated bleakly. "It might be hard to narrow it down to what's related and what's not. But it's worth giving a shot I guess—"

Right then he was cut off by the gravelly chords of "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple. "Sorry, just a sec." He picked up his cell phone and answered it. "Hello?"

No one else seemed to know what else to do, so they watched Dean, listening intently to his half of the conversation.

"The very same. But we're kind of in the middle of something, is this an emergency? …A demon, huh? What makes you think that? …Yeah you're right, sounds like that case has demon written over it… No, no one thinks you're crazy. We deal with this stuff all the time… Okay man, what's your name? …Watson, okay got it, and where are you located?" his eyes were flickering around the others as he talked. They widened, suddenly. "London? Okay well we've got contacts over there, we can send someone to-"

"No!" Cas and Sam shouted at the same time.

"Dean, this could have to do with the Box! We need to go!"

Dean cupped a hand over the phone, trying to muffle their voices for the other end.

"We don't know that for sure. Besides, how are we supposed to get all the way over to London? Even by plane, which you know I'd rather not do, it would take us forever to get there!"

"I believe I have the solution!" The Doctor stepped triumphantly forward and grabbed the phone straight from Dean's hand, to Dean's indignation.

"Yes, hello, Watson, is it? This is The Doctor. We'll be right over in a jiff, we just need to know exactly where to find you! Mhmmm… got it! Sounds easy enough to remember. Baker, like baking. Yes got it. And you say that's two 2's? Okay wonderful! ...Are you all right, Watson? Watson…?"

The Doctor handed the phone back to Dean, looking concerned. "We must get to the TARDIS immediately. It would seem that Watson is in trouble. The line just went dead."