AN: I have some story ideas, but none of them are really working very well, so I wrote a stupid one-shot to see if I could shake something loose. Seriously, pretty stupid. Gross and frankly scatological humor. A tad bit of naughty language. That's it.

Not set at any particular time.

Beta'd by the wonderful Janice, who was probably thinking what the heck? the whole time she read it but was too polite to say so.

Also, nothing smells worse than turkey manure. Nothing.

* * *

"This," Dean announced definitively, "is the most disgusting hunt we've ever done." It wasn't, but Dean was bored and grossed out, and he needed a distraction.

"Nuh-uh," Sam disagreed instantly, as if he were 14 again. He didn't stop poking the pile of...whatever it was with a stick. Dean wanted to make fun of him for his caution, but then Sam would probably turn over the job of investigating weird piles to him. The stick suddenly penetrated the pile and a noxious smell spilled out.

Dean wrinkled his nose. "Yeah? Name one that was worse."

"The wendigo that lived in a landfill."

Dean considered. That was pretty horrific. They'd stripped and changed at the car and abandoned the clothes they'd been wearing, and Dean still felt like he could smell garbage in his baby for at least a week.

Sam continued, "The Loveland frogman that blew up when you shot it."

Dean chuckled at the memory. "That was actually kind of awesome."

He could feel the bitchface directed his way. "Dad made us walk all the way back to our room, hosed us off outside, and had to give us buzz cuts because that green stuff wouldn't wash out of our hair. I think we went through an entire bottle of mouthwash too, just trying to not taste it anymore." Sam straightened, apparently satisfied that the pile was just normal swamp...stuff...and not the latest missing person.

"I think Dad hoped you'd keep your hair short." Dean imagined the eye roll he couldn't see. He moved to look for another likely lump and almost stepped on a gelatinous mass that was either a small, partially decayed animal or...he leaned closer against all his instincts. "Sam, look at this scat. Think it belongs to the Swamp Thing?"

Sam sighed but didn't argue. They didn't dare use a flashlight because they'd learned the night before that their quarry fled instantly at the sight of artificial light, so he had to lean close too. "Skunk ape," Sam corrected absently, using his stick again. "And yeah, I think you're right. There's nothing else that lives in the swamp that would leave a pile like that."

Despite everything that he hated about this hunt (the smell, the swamp, the smell, the mosquitoes, and the smell, for starters), a zing of excitement went through Dean. "I still think probing piles of swamp stuff to find where Pepe Le Pew stashed his latest girlfriend is one of the grossest things ever. Especially considering what other kinds of things we've found." Everything in a swamp was in some state of rotting, and Dean had been grossed out by more than one discovery. "Like that half-decayed alligator skull with its brain crawling with –"

"Mongolian death worm," Sam interrupted, working his way around a gnarled tree that fit in with the Lovecraftian landscape perfectly. With a squelch, Sam sank into the mud up to his knees. He didn't even react outwardly. They were wearing hip waders and had faced this situation frequently. Dean pretended to hate it because of how it limited their mobility, but in truth it was the feel of the slimy murk, even through the waders, that set his teeth on edge.

"That was pretty gross," he admitted graciously. The worm in question would swallow any creature it could fit in its mouth. It would digest said creature until the entire outer layer was gone, then spit out the rest. They were rare, but if not killed would eventually get big enough to include humans in their diet, so Sam and Dean had followed the trail of hideless bodies and cheerfully hacked the worm to pieces, then burned them.

The skunk ape was almost as disgusting, in Dean's opinion, solely because of where (and how) it lived. It haunted the deepest swamps and rolled itself in the smelliest things it could find to try futilely to disguise its own smell, which Bobby had described as "a skunk with raging diarrhea that's been dipped in cat piss and rotten eggs and left lyin' in the sun for a coupla days."

Skunk apes, like their cousins the yetis, were normally shy and stayed far, far away from humans and thus rarely appeared on a Hunter's radar. However, now that they were nearly extinct, once in a while, one would get lonesome and desperate and go a little crazy. It would grab a human being for...company. This one must be pretty far gone, because Jerry Leeds was the third person to go missing over the course of just two weeks. The first had escaped with a wild story of a stinky, bigfoot-like creature grabbing her and burying her in a pile of vegetation. (Man, Dean hoped that's what she'd actually been buried in.) The second victim had never reappeared, probably accidentally killed by the 8-foot tall cryptid.

"Kind of disgusting?" Sam kept his voice low, but his disbelief came through loud and clear.

"You barfed like four times on that hunt," Dean remembered with no small amount of glee. Hey, he was miserable, and everyone knows that misery loves company. "Ugh, I think the smell's getting worse. What are you putting your stick in now?"

Sam refrained from responding to either the taunt or the innuendo, possibly because he was more mature than Dean was, possibly because they'd been out here for hours already and Dean had been so deliberately annoying that he had to be on the verge of throwing a punch by now. "I already had food poisoning."

Okay, that memory wasn't actually very funny. At the time, Sam had recently lost Jessica, and he lost so much weight in a short period of time that after they'd killed the worm, Dean had found them a cabin to hole up in until Sam's cheeks didn't look quite so hollow. "Still, not very professional to toss your cookies in front of the local sheriff, who was already suspicious," said Dean anyway, because something had just squished under his foot in a way that was completely unnatural, and he just wanted to kill the smelly monkey and take a bath in Lysol and gargle with bleach.

"The ghost of Bill Hofer," said Sam confidently, again ignoring Dean's words, and Dean could actually hear the smirk in his voice.

Dean froze. "You...how could you bring that up?" he asked, incensed. It was a case that was firmly on the never-mentioned-again pile, or at least he'd thought it was.

In life, Bill was a highly successful turkey farmer. He was working in alone one day when he met with a highly unfortunate accident. One of his employees hadn't properly secured a brake, and Bill had been crushed to death by some farm implement Dean couldn't remember the name of right now. He'd chosen to haunt his farm and cause accidents. At first, it was little things like a gate open to let all the fowl in one area out or a tire going flat inexplicably. But it hadn't taken Bill long to escalate to fatal incidents, and that had drawn the Winchesters. When burning Bill's body hadn't worked, they'd returned to the scene of his death to locate his beloved Ag Seeds hat.

And because ghosts are assholes, Bill had dumped a load of liquid manure on Dean's head.

Sam had laughed as he'd burned the hat and as they'd driven back to their motel with the windows all open and as he'd handed Dean a garbage bag and gestured toward the shower. Dean could still hear Sam laughing as he'd stripped and turned the water on. Sam had made jokes about Dean being in deep shit while they ate later and hadn't let it go until Dean had made some very creative threats the next morning. (Sam had also cleaned the car, inside and out, disposed of Dean's clothes, stitched the gash in his arm without a single complaint about the smell, gotten them switched to a stink-free room when Dean was done showering, and picked up a giant burger with extra onions, fries, and an entire apple pie. But that was neither here nor there.)

Dean was ready to complain that bringing up the turkey shit incident was dirty pool when he decided he really didn't mind too much. Anything that took his mind off the horrific smell that surrounded them. The smell…

Sam had frozen, then tipped his head back slowly, like he had to look but didn't really want to.

Dean might have screamed a little, in a very manly way, when the skunk monster thingie leaped down from the tree like a huge, malevolent, and very odoriferous ball of Spanish moss, and tackled him into the algae-covered water. The scream meant he got a full mouthful of said water as 250 pounds of stink barreled into him.

Dean wasn't a Hunter for nothing. Even as they fell and he was drinking and inhaling fetid swamp water, he stabbed Florida's loneliest monster. He sensed rather than saw Sam stabbing at the thing's back, and suddenly it was gone. Dean was hauled up out of the water and came up coughing and retching. Skunky didn't smell any better dead than he had alive. "Do –" he started, and had to break it off to cough some more. He swore he could feel fungus clinging to the inside of his lungs. Dean bent over with his hands on his thighs but waved a negligent hand when Sam asked if he was okay.

"Jerry's alive," Sam announced. "Er, it buried him in…stuff…and was, er, hugging him." Dean wiped away enough goop to cast an eye at the man leaning against the tree trunk. He was maybe 5'6 and close to 300 lbs. His impressive beard was dripping, and Dean noticed Jerry was just as filthy as Dean was.

Jerry was staring open-mouthed at the corpse that was floating next to Dean, matted fur gently drifting in the water, black blood spreading around it. If Chewbacca had had a baby with a Rawhead and then it grew up and got stabbed a lot, this might be what it would look like.

Dead or not, the skunk ape's smell was getting even stronger, and how was that even possible? Dean gagged again, then gave it up as a lost cause. As he vomited, he wondered how Sam was going to break it to Jerry that he'd been kidnapped by a lonely cryptid that couldn't determine human gender, and that the sludge bath and cuddling were its version of foreplay.

"Um...that's a...um, serial killer. He likes to wear a costume," Sam said kindly to Jerry while keeping a comforting hand on Dean's shoulder. Dean went to wipe his mouth and reconsidered. He appreciated the (slime-free!) bandanna Sam offered, as well as his support during the puking. He also thought Jerry appreciated an explanation that didn't require him to adjust his worldview.

"Uh, he was a big guy, huh?" Jerry asked weakly, still staring.

"Yup." Sam firmly turned Jerry away from the (very much not a human in a costume) body and simultaneously pulled Dean to a standing position. "Untreated thyroid condition. Probably what caused his mind to snap. Look, we're FBI, and we'll come back and take care of the body. For now, let's get you out of here and to a hospital to be checked out, okay?"

Jerry nodded gratefully, missing the look Sam sent Dean. It was asking do you need the hospital too? Dean shook his head. He'd take some of their stashed antibiotics and hope he hadn't inhaled or swallowed anything that would hatch inside him. The thought almost made him puke again, but he hadn't actually gotten hurt.

"Why didn't you shoot him?" Jerry asked tentatively at one point.

"He hit me so fast I didn't get a chance," Dean lied. Bullets were next to useless against all members of the bigfoot family.

"I couldn't because he was too close to my partner," Sam added smoothly and Jerry accepting that, falling silent.

It was slow going. Jerry was exhausted and not exactly in shape, and Dean had a swimming pool's worth of water in his waders, so they weren't winning any races. But eventually, they were back at the Jeep they'd rented (ha! Baby wouldn't get slimed!) to get out nice and close to the swamp. They dropped off Jerry at the hospital and went to clean up and Dean threw out everything he was wearing, including the waders, despite Sam's objections.

"We don't have to actually go back and burn that thing, do we?" Dean asked later, after his hour-long steaming shower, while they were sharing some Jim Beam. It was medicinal – it should kill anything that survived the antibiotics and wanted to make a home inside Dean. And despite how his tone might sound, Dean was not whining.

"Nah," said Sam, cementing himself as one of Dean's favorite people. "They don't reanimate. Let the swamp take care of it."

"I'll drink to that." Dean clinked his glass against Sam's. Well, tapped, anyway, since they were Solo cups. Slogging through the swamp and taking the world's most disgusting bath notwithstanding, that case had been kinda fun. They'd gotten to track down and stab Stinky McLooking-for-love, save the not-quite-damsel in distress, and they hadn't even gotten hurt. Sam even looked pretty relaxed.

Dean leaned forward. "You know what?" he asked with the air of someone about to impart great wisdom. Sam lifted his eyebrows but kept most of the skepticism Dean could sense just under the surface off his face. "I didn't think it was possible, but that thing smelled even worse than turkey shit."

Sam laughed, Dean hummed Another One Bites the Dust, and together they toasted the end of the love-sick skunk ape.