Current mood:

dorky

carry on my wayward gnome
Title: Carry On My Wayward Gnome.
Author: Jess.
Rating: PG.
Fandom: Supernatural.
Pairing: None.
Notes/warnings: Gnomes? Tiny bit of bad language. Humour. Thanks to mandysbitch for the beta <3. No spoilers. 2, 000-ish words.

"Dean, it's... so... large. And... shiny."

"Yeah, it is, isn't it?" Dean says with endless satisfaction.

"By shiny, I mean kill it with fire, Dean."

Metallica is emblazoned across the top in red, enamelled, lightening bolt shaped writing.

"Dean, it's bling. You look like some kind of white trash pimp."

"Well, shut your mouth and that's Mr. Pimp to you, man-whore."

"I don't know what's more disturbing. That bracelet, or the fact you just implied you'd pimp my ass out."

Dean doesn't reply, distracted again by his shiny new acquisition.

"My precious," Dean hisses.

"Watch the damn road, Gollum," Sam says as they drift a little towards the middle of the road.

---

They lay out their haul on the motel bed. The army disposal store and charity store were right next to each other. They really needed a new hunting knife, but when they pulled up to browse Dean was distracted by ancient tapes and records in the window next door. He’d found the bracelet buried in a pile of buck-a-pop junk. They had also acquired the necessary big ass hunting knife, and a few others beside, a shiny metal pen-light torch each and a few other bits they needed to fill up the Impala's trunk to its former glory.

Sam shines the knives, tests their sharpness and sturdiness, again.

Dean takes the bracelet off to go to bed, and pushes it under his pillow along with his knife.

Sam snorts and Dean flips him the bird before laying down.

---

Sam wakes up slowly, stretches, opens his eyes a crack and nearly smacks his head against the wall in the horizontal leap he takes when he finds his entire field of vision is nothing but two other eyes, centimetres from his own, staring down at him.

"Dean! What the fuck man!" Sam clutches his hand over his chest like he's having a heart attack, if his pulse stays as fast as it's going, he might.

Dean glares at him.

"Give it back," Dean says.

"What, your sweet sanity? Man, I could have stabbed you!" Sam says, holding up his hand, clenched around his new hunting knife.

"I'll sweet sanity you, Sam. My Metallica cuff, man," Dean says.

"I don't have it. I just woke up."

"Where is it then?" Dean finally stops looming over Sam, and looks confused.

"Under your pillow. Finally taken one too many knocks to the head?"

"I checked there, dumbass," Dean says, checking again even as he speaks.

"Check under the bed or something?" Sam suggests.

Dean gets down on his knees and peers under the bed, butt to Sam.

"There's something under here," Dean's butt wiggle punctuates his words as he struggles to reach something under the bed. Sam laughs.

"It's..." Dean holds his hand up in front of Sam.

"A tiny shoe?" Sam offers.

"Goddamn it, some snot nosed brat leaves her dolly's shoe here and gives me false hope. My precious, where could it be?"

"Back where it came from?"

"What, the shop?" Dean asks, puzzled.

"Pimp-wear hell," Sam replies and rubs his eyes. "I gotta pee," Sam says as he makes his shuffling way to the bathroom.

"If you're flushing my new wrist band, I will superglue your hands to your wang while you sleep," Dean yells.

"Yeah, yeah," Sam says.

They don't find the bracelet.

---

Sam and Dean are between hunts and spend the day walking the main drag of the small town, not really wanting to move on. They're both tired, and it's late afternoon before they return to the motel room. Dean points out they'd have to pay for an extra day anyway, and Sam agrees. They settle down to some serious cable TV watching.

"I think that was boob."

"It wasn't boob, Dean."

"Man, if that's not a nipple..."

"It could have been man-nipple," Sam points out. "Not that I admit it was nipple at all."

"It wasn't man nipp-- there it is again!"

"That was a different nipple."

"So you admit there was nipple."

"... I admit to nipple," Sam concedes.

"Dude," Dean says.

"Yeah?" Sam says.

"I'm pretty sure this is gay porn," Dean says, tilting his head a little.

"Huh," Sam says with raised eyebrows and a red face as the channel clears briefly on a shot of what is clearly some awesomely, amazingly gay porn.

"Alll right-y then, bed time Sammy-boy. That's not the sort of thing an impressionable lad like you should be watching." Dean kills the TV.

They can't sleep, and are gazing at the shadowy ceiling when the singing starts. Dean fumbles the remote to switch the TV off, and remembers he already has. The remote falls from Dean’s sleepy clumsy hands, and the singing stops abruptly with a tiny noise like a chorus of gasps.

"Sam," Dean says, low and serious.

"Yeah."

"You got your hand under your pillow?"

"Yeah."

“Maybe it was mice?” Dean says, after a minute.

“When is it ever mice, Dean? Also, mice don’t sing,”

“Rats?” Dean says, after a pause.

“I don’t want to get out of bed either,” Sam says, his pout audible.

Dean switches on the bedside lamp, and the low light floods the room. He sits up and looks at Sam who looks back at him, knife in hand, eyes squinting and puffy against the blinding lamp light. Dean imagines he looks much the same, except Sam's hair is stupider.

"Man, your hair is so stupid," Dean says, and moves around the perimeter of the tiny room, examining every surface for clues. Sam searches the bathroom.

"Maybe it was just someone's radio in the next room?" Sam says, coming back into the bedroom.

"That didn't sound like a radio," Dean says. "It was all... high pitched. I'm surprised we could hear it. Well, not you, Shaggy, you are possibly part dog."

"Hardy, hardy Sargent Crew-Cut. Radio must have been out of tune."

"Yeah, yeah. Okay," Dean concedes, sitting down on the bed. It had been singing, and it did sound small and distant.

"Switch the light off," Sam says.

Dean does.

They go to bed and finally wind down enough to sleep.

---

When they wake up, Dean's rings are missing and the blades of both their hunting knives have been extracted from the handles, something neither of them knew could even be done without snapping the blade or handle. But the blades are gone and the handles are in perfect shape.

Dean feels through his shirt for his necklace, and relaxes when he find the familiar shape still hidden against his chest.

"Okay, so we're staying another night," Sam says, staring at the handle he's holding in his closed fist.

"That's just not right, man," Dean says.

---

Sam asks at the front desk and confirms that the previous occupant of the room they are staying in had complained of theft about a month before. An old couple had complained of jewellery being stolen by the maid, but the woman at the desk insisted none of their maids had cleaned the rooms yet. Nothing had come of it except a cranky old couple with a grudge against the tiny motel.

They try to figure out a pattern for the theft, but the objects have been taken seemingly at random; the woman’s jewellery, Dean's bracelet, the knives, Dean's rings, a piece of waterproof electrical tape that had been patching a hole in Dean’s boot, the shaving mirror from Sam’s bag.

Sam is the one who cracks the pattern.

"Shiny!" Sam says, suddenly, and Dean nearly spills scalding hot coffee down himself as Sam jolts the little table they're sitting at. Half the sleepy little diner’s customers turn to look at Sam. Dean smiles at them until they look away again.

"Okay, Sammato Retardo, what?"

"Everything shiny in the room was stolen. Metal, electrical tape, the mirror. Shiny stuff," Sam says to Dean.

"So what loves shiny stuff?" Dean says, mind clicking over already.

"Fairies?" Sam says.

"Nah. They'd have done more than just take some shiny things. And they don't take people's things so randomly. They'd have tied our shoelaces together or something, too," Dean says. “Irritating little bastards.”

"Brownies?" Sam offers after a minute of contemplating the bottom of his coffee cup.

"Does this look like Scotland?"

"Someone could have brought them over."

"Long shot," Dean says.

"Leprechauns?" Sam offers.

"Ireland, Sam."

"Can't see you helping, Dean."

"Can't see you shutting up for a second, Sam."

...

"There, one second."

"Great, let's try for five years this time."

"How about let's try for you thinking of something?"

"How about let's try for shut up."

---

Back at the motel, their plan is, essentially, to leave out some shiny things they picked up at the local bargain store and wait for something to happen.

"Nice plan, Dean," Sam says, sarcastically.

"Nice face, Sam," Dean replies. "Simple is best, Sam. They come out. We see what they are. They're evil, we kill them with bullets and pain and fire. They're good, we ask politely for our shit back."

"Or they're evil and they kill us."

"Or they're evil and they try to, you mean," Dean says.

---

"WE'RE GNOMES OKAY," screeches the gnome, its huge, liquid blue eyes take up half its head and are currently glaring at Dean from a foot away.

"Okay, seriously," Dean says to the tiny, lumpy man shaped thing he holds by the back of its brown shirt. “It’s calm time now.”

"Calm down," Sam echoes. The little gnome looks like it’s about to explode, its face bright red and its shining, sharp teeth gnashing.

The gnome squeaks loudly and incoherently for at least a minute and a half in what Dean and Sam assume to be its language.

"I'm sorry," Dean says. "I didn't..." He pauses and coughs not at all discreetly to hide the hysterical laughter bubbling up in the back of his throat. The gnome is so TINY and ANGRY. When Dean looks into its little red squishy face he forgives it and its friends for pilfering all his stuff. "I didn't catch all that," he finishes, when he gets himself under control.

"I SAID YOU HAVE MY SHOE TOO." The gnome dissolves into a squeaking, burbling song that is very clearly the equivalent of a threat in English that would involve Dean's slow roasting torture.

"That is... so cute," Sam says, staring at the gnome’s flailing body.

The rest of the gnomes, possibly a gnome family, there’s around fifteen of them that Sam counts, crowd around the gap behind the TV unit.. Some of them shout angrily in their squeaky voices, one tiny female blows her nose with a wet squeak into a tiny scrap of white cloth. At least, Sam assumes she’s a female. She’s rather more lumpy than the one Dean’s holding, in vaguely the right places. Her huge green eyes water as she dabs at them with the cloth.

The gnome in Dean’s hand stares bloody death at Sam, its eyes shining out from under long black eyelashes that flutter with indignation, but give the impression that it’s batting its eyelashes at him.

Sam wants to pet them and hold them and call them Gnome-y and Gnome-ina.

When it calms down enough to listen, Dean asks it for a trade.

The gnome's shoe and the junk jewellery, plus whatever useless shiny they can scrape up out of the Impala, for Dean's rings, bracelet, the torches and the knife blades.

The gnome agrees, its eyes wide with greed at the “riches” Dean describes. It glances at the pile of junk jewellery they used as bait, licking its lips. He refuses to trade unless they let him go first. Neither Sam or Dean know much about gnomes, and neither know if they can trust him. It's impossible to shake on the matter.

“You swear you’ll bring our stuff back?”

“I SWEAR,” the gnome squeaks solemnly. After Dean puts him down and the gnome does the apparent gnome version of sealing the deal with a handshake, which involves a dance not unlike the Macarena.

Dean has to go out and get the shiny stuff before he wets his pants laughing and irritates the gnome again.

---

"Dean, seriously, it's so... big and shiny," Sam says.

"I gave him all the shiny change in my ashtray to get this back Sam. There will be no badmouthing my wristband."

"Pimp-tallica bracelet, you mean," Sam says.

"Just because you haven't got anything gnomes thought was worth stealing," Dean replies.

Dean guns the engine as they leave town.

---



(Art by ret05 related completely to the title, rather than the fic, hehehe).