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firewhiskeyficTitle: we could have been neck-deep in dicks
Author:oldtoadwoman
I am of legal drinking age in my region: yes (more than times two )
Pairing(s)/Characters/Fandom: Sam and Dean Winchester (Supernatural) and if I don't forget the prompts Nearly Headless Nick should show up at some point.
Challenge/Prompts used: all of them! (Nearly Headless Nick, Godric's Hollow, Jack-o'-lantern, Graveyard, Harvest Party, Bewitch)
Summary: headless bodies are turning up in a New England town that Dean can't remember the name of
Rating/Warnings: ? headless bodies so it might get gory, we'll see
Word count: 2,200 (how???)
Author's Notes (if any): Hi! OMG,ya'll. Not just art. There was drunkn foto editing too! that was the hardest part
The best part about autumn in New England was that pie was absolutelly guarnateed. Maybe pumpkin. Maybe apple. Probably both. Dean was hopingn for both. But pie of some kind was a guarantee.
The worst part of catching a case in New England was that it wasy way the fuck away which mean the Winchester brothers didn't roll into town until the fourth body was in the ground. Dean felt slightly guilty about that and Sam was slouching and furrowing his brow even more than usual, which suggested he was also feeling guilty about it which only made Dean cranky and defensive.
The first death hadn't even made the national news. Murders are a dime a dozen. A single murder wasn't going to end up pinging their radar not even with the gruesome detail of "the head still has not been found".
The second headless victim may or may not have ended up on the national news but it wasn't enough to flagging any of the keyword filters Sam had set up to search out weird cases.
The third death was the first one that tripped Sam's search criteria. One of the witnesses claimed to have seen a shadowy rider flee the scene on horseback. Weird? yes. Possibly a case? yes. Definitely their kind of case? not necessarily. Human murderers were perfectly capable of riding horses too. And besides, they had a werewofl situation to deal with in Tiujana which meant delays getting higherw-quality forgeries than they normally had to bother with and Dean was still showering werewolf guts out of his hair when Sam banged on the door and told him the fourth victim had just turned up with all current and previous heads sitll unaccounted for.
Which put theme several days away from New England and Godric's Hollow or STars Hollow or Sleepy Hollow or whatever the fuck tht town was called once they decided to chedk it out.
(Sam got directions when their GPS started sending them in circles and they found a local who helpfully explained it was past Hollow Brook but if you get to Brook Hollow you've gone too far. Dean had a few fleeting disparaging thoughts about New England but then he remembered pie. And it was also fucking scenic this time of year, no aruging that.)
They missed the autopsy by a full day and the itnermtn by a few hours.
The grave was unmmarked as none of the victims had yet been identified. Neither their fingeerprints nor DNA were in the system and barring that, it was hard to do an id without a face.
The coroner had been less than helpful. Cause of death was a big fat "duh" and the man didn't seem to understand why more information than "head missing" was particularly relevant.
"Sword? Chain-saw? Lightsaber?" Dean prompted. "Any indication of the type of weapon at all?"
The coronor finally dropped his smug expression and shifted uncomfortably. "Yeah, sowrd probably or maybe an axe," he paused and added, "in at least two of the cases."
"And the other two?" Sam asked with far more patience than Dean felt.
"One showed signs of strangulation with all the surface tears pinching inward from all sides. If I had to guess? Cable wrapped around his neck and pulled tight until..."
"His head popped off," Dean said when the man didn't seem inclined to finish.
"Yup."
"And the fourth victim?" Sam prompted.
"Chronologically, he was one of the swords or possibly hatchet victims, as was the first, who was our only woman, by the way." Dean cleared his throat but before he needed to prompt again, the coroner spoke. "It was the third victim who, uh, who..." He took a long swig from a travel mug that Dean was beginning to suspect did not contain coffee and then continued staring vacantly over Sam's shoulder. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear that his head had just been twisted off."
Dean had been hoping for a quaitn Mayberry kind of small town because those had the best pie. Also it was handy when all the peopel yuo wanted to interview were close by a town square. The butcher the baker yadda yadda. Instead WhereevertheFuck Hollow was just a wide spot in the road with a few branching backroads and no one lived near anyone. They had to go one town over just to find a library never mind pie.
The library didn't turn up any local lore about decapitations, ghostly horsemen headless or otherwise, or generally anything spooky at all. When they asked about local legends and ghost stories, the librarian helpfully suggested they join the creative writing club that met there every Saturday. She didn't even sound condescending when she said it. She gave Dean a flyer and everything and then gave them directions to a diner with good pie.
By their third day in town they were slowly working their way through witness interviews which started out contradictory and unhelpful but had now worked their way up to contradictory and ... weird. Their randomness was almost a theme in itself.
A headless horseman had been seen riding away in the night wielding an axe.
A headless motorcyclist had been seen riding away in the night wielding a flammig jack-o-lantern.
A headless man in a ruffled collarr with his head tucked neatly under his arm had walked through a solid brick wall near the school.
A headless bride had been spotted hitchhikking near the interstate.
A *nearly* headless ghost had been seen flying at motorists at the gas station, it's head flopping from a narrow band of connective tissue. The witness made a point of adding that the ghost bore an uncanny likness to John Clesee
The victims remained unidentified and no locals had been reported missing. The victims were assumed to be tourists just passing through or in the area for the leaf-peeping or possibly the Harvest Festival coming up this weekend.
It gave the case an oddly detached feeling. No grieving relatives equaled no sense of urgency among the local police. The sheriff even sounded hopeful as he suggested it was probably out-of-town drug gangs and thus not their problem at all.
They were just a few miles away eating pie when the fifth victim was killed. Dean ordered a second slice to go just in case they didn't make it back this way again. The body was still warm and still in posession of its heart and liver and most, though definitely not all, of its blood so it was easy to rule out vampires ,werewolves, and a number of other ghouls. They didn't find the head itself, but they did find three teeth and something that might have been brain matter though the coroner was noncommittal and sent the sample to the city for a formal lab analysis. Cause of death (beyond the obvious "duh") was labelled "high-velocity impact with object unknown".
The headless bride was seeen again and when Sam and Dean pressed for more details the witness reluctantly added that "she smelled of lilacs" and when they followed up asking if he'd noticed anything weird "anything at all" he hesitated before nodding.
"Well?" Dean asked, trying hard not to sound as irritated as he felt. This town could not be hurried.
"I dont know what lilacs smell like," the man answered in a quiet whisper.
"Excuse me?"
"She smelled like lilacs," the man said firmly. "I'm 100% certain of that. I'll swear to it. The scent of lilacs was in the air. It's a fact. I *know* it. But..."
"You don't know what lilacs smell like," Sam finished.
"Are they ... a tree or a bush? Or ... they grow like a flower like lillies? I thought for a moment... my sister has this scented candle, but then I realized that's lavendar. I just ... I *know* it smelled lilke lilacs. It's just this fact that I can see as clearly as the lace on her dress. I must have smelled lilacs once and just forgotten. Right? That's the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise... that would be crazy?"
Later as they got into the car, Dean muttered, "That's not the kind of confidence you'd want to put on the witness stand."
Sam agreed that it was a good thing their cases didn't require a judge and jury.
The police were happy to pass along another witness that they didn't feel like interviewing themselves. "Dude claims he heard a cannon the night of the murder," the deputy said with an eye roll.
"High-velocity impact," Dean agreed and took the man's contact information.
The witness swore to the sound of the cannon shot, but hesitated when asked if he saw or heard anything else "no matter how strange, *especially* if it were strange".
Dean rode a hunch and pressed. "Do you *know* anything about this case that you can't know? Like 'The scent of lilacs was in the air' but you don't know what lilacs smell like, that kind of thing."
The witness nodded. "This is gonna sound crazy."
"No judgement here," Dean said trying to sound as reassuring as possible. "No matter what it is, we've heard weirder."
That seemed like a pretty solid statement given everything tehyd' been through, but Dean was not prepared for this one.
"It doesn't even make sense," the man said.
They waited.
"The cannon shot that I heard ... "
"Yeah?" Dean was going to straight-up strangle someone today if they didn't get to the piont.
"It was misspelled."
"It was what now?" Dean asked.
"Misspelled. C A N O N instead of C A N N O N."
"The cannon shot that you heard," Sam repeated, "was misspelled?"
"Yeah."
Dean patted the man on the back and sent him on his way. "Buy me a beer, Sammy, I cracked the case."
"That made sense to you?" Sam asked.
Dean got into the car and waited for Sam. "That ghost at the gas station, that was Nearly Headless Nick from the Harry Potter movies, right?"
Sam frownded and stubbornly refued to nod, but Dean knew that expression. Sam agreed with him. "It *could* be Nearly Headless Nick, yeah."
Dean handed Sam a flyer as he fastened his seatbelt in the Impala.
"Oh," Sam said, reading the flyer over. "Yeah."
The librarian couldn't help them with any kind of membership list so they had to wait until Saturday's meeting.
No pie, but there was fresh coffee and good donoughts which was a close second in Dean's book.
"So I see we have some new faces," their leader began.
Dean stood up and announced. "Hi. I'm Dean and I'm an alcoholic."
"Oh, um, this isn't..."
"... and I want to know which one of you witches is responsbile for all the headless corpse shenanigans in this town."
"Oh."
Everyone looked embarrassed but no one looked particularly shocked. Most looked towards a brunette who sat fidgetting in the corner.
"And at least one of you needs a lesson in how to spell 'cannon' which," Dean pointed at Sam, "my brother can help you out with because he went to college."
The brunette's head snapped up. "*That* was Theresa! *I* know how to use a spell checker!"
"Speling is not the point, Jennifer!" Theresa yelled.
"The spell wasn't supposed to be literal!" Jennifer protested. "I didn't mean that! I just... I had writer's block... I was just trying to work a little magic to bring my writing to life not... not everyone's writing *to actual life*."
"You couldn't have done this for the Valentine's edition?!" another writer snapped. "We could be neck-deep in dicks and washboard abs right now, but noooooo you had to wait for the Harvest Party edition to go all Bewitched on us."
"I didn't mean to do it!" Jennifer wailed.
"Well, whatever, undo now. Ctrl-Z. Hand over your hex bags, your magic books, all of it."
Jennifer surrendered all magical pariphanelia including a book that Sam was very excited about and they burned everything (except the book because Sam wouldn't let him) in the parking lot. And that seemed to be that.
They waited around a whole week just to be sure that it really was over and then they gave Jennifer a stern talking to about meddling in dark magic and Erica, the group leader swore this was the last horror prompt and they were all going back to erotica after this anyway.
the winchester brothers swung by the graveyard on their way out of town. The graves were all still there, including those five unidentified plots most-recnetly dug. The graves were real. Were the bodies still inside them? Dean was curious, but not curious enough to dig any of them up. If the headless assailants had all been a product of overwrought imaginations, it was just possible that all the headless victims had been as well. In which case... did it even matter that they'd solved the case?
Neither of them complained about it being a fucking waste of time. Sam shrugged and said, "The fall leaves were pretty."
Dean nodded and shifted into drive. "And at least there was pie."
"Shame about the lack of dicks though," Sam said wistfull staring out the windwo at the autum n leaves.
"Your'e telling me," Dean agreed.
Author:
oldtoadwomanI am of legal drinking age in my region: yes (more than times two )
Pairing(s)/Characters/Fandom: Sam and Dean Winchester (Supernatural) and if I don't forget the prompts Nearly Headless Nick should show up at some point.
Challenge/Prompts used: all of them! (Nearly Headless Nick, Godric's Hollow, Jack-o'-lantern, Graveyard, Harvest Party, Bewitch)
Summary: headless bodies are turning up in a New England town that Dean can't remember the name of
Rating/Warnings: ? headless bodies so it might get gory, we'll see
Word count: 2,200 (how???)
Author's Notes (if any): Hi! OMG,ya'll. Not just art. There was drunkn foto editing too! that was the hardest part
The best part about autumn in New England was that pie was absolutelly guarnateed. Maybe pumpkin. Maybe apple. Probably both. Dean was hopingn for both. But pie of some kind was a guarantee.
The worst part of catching a case in New England was that it wasy way the fuck away which mean the Winchester brothers didn't roll into town until the fourth body was in the ground. Dean felt slightly guilty about that and Sam was slouching and furrowing his brow even more than usual, which suggested he was also feeling guilty about it which only made Dean cranky and defensive.
The first death hadn't even made the national news. Murders are a dime a dozen. A single murder wasn't going to end up pinging their radar not even with the gruesome detail of "the head still has not been found".
The second headless victim may or may not have ended up on the national news but it wasn't enough to flagging any of the keyword filters Sam had set up to search out weird cases.
The third death was the first one that tripped Sam's search criteria. One of the witnesses claimed to have seen a shadowy rider flee the scene on horseback. Weird? yes. Possibly a case? yes. Definitely their kind of case? not necessarily. Human murderers were perfectly capable of riding horses too. And besides, they had a werewofl situation to deal with in Tiujana which meant delays getting higherw-quality forgeries than they normally had to bother with and Dean was still showering werewolf guts out of his hair when Sam banged on the door and told him the fourth victim had just turned up with all current and previous heads sitll unaccounted for.
Which put theme several days away from New England and Godric's Hollow or STars Hollow or Sleepy Hollow or whatever the fuck tht town was called once they decided to chedk it out.
(Sam got directions when their GPS started sending them in circles and they found a local who helpfully explained it was past Hollow Brook but if you get to Brook Hollow you've gone too far. Dean had a few fleeting disparaging thoughts about New England but then he remembered pie. And it was also fucking scenic this time of year, no aruging that.)
They missed the autopsy by a full day and the itnermtn by a few hours.
The grave was unmmarked as none of the victims had yet been identified. Neither their fingeerprints nor DNA were in the system and barring that, it was hard to do an id without a face.
The coroner had been less than helpful. Cause of death was a big fat "duh" and the man didn't seem to understand why more information than "head missing" was particularly relevant.
"Sword? Chain-saw? Lightsaber?" Dean prompted. "Any indication of the type of weapon at all?"
The coronor finally dropped his smug expression and shifted uncomfortably. "Yeah, sowrd probably or maybe an axe," he paused and added, "in at least two of the cases."
"And the other two?" Sam asked with far more patience than Dean felt.
"One showed signs of strangulation with all the surface tears pinching inward from all sides. If I had to guess? Cable wrapped around his neck and pulled tight until..."
"His head popped off," Dean said when the man didn't seem inclined to finish.
"Yup."
"And the fourth victim?" Sam prompted.
"Chronologically, he was one of the swords or possibly hatchet victims, as was the first, who was our only woman, by the way." Dean cleared his throat but before he needed to prompt again, the coroner spoke. "It was the third victim who, uh, who..." He took a long swig from a travel mug that Dean was beginning to suspect did not contain coffee and then continued staring vacantly over Sam's shoulder. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear that his head had just been twisted off."
Dean had been hoping for a quaitn Mayberry kind of small town because those had the best pie. Also it was handy when all the peopel yuo wanted to interview were close by a town square. The butcher the baker yadda yadda. Instead WhereevertheFuck Hollow was just a wide spot in the road with a few branching backroads and no one lived near anyone. They had to go one town over just to find a library never mind pie.
The library didn't turn up any local lore about decapitations, ghostly horsemen headless or otherwise, or generally anything spooky at all. When they asked about local legends and ghost stories, the librarian helpfully suggested they join the creative writing club that met there every Saturday. She didn't even sound condescending when she said it. She gave Dean a flyer and everything and then gave them directions to a diner with good pie.
By their third day in town they were slowly working their way through witness interviews which started out contradictory and unhelpful but had now worked their way up to contradictory and ... weird. Their randomness was almost a theme in itself.
A headless horseman had been seen riding away in the night wielding an axe.
A headless motorcyclist had been seen riding away in the night wielding a flammig jack-o-lantern.
A headless man in a ruffled collarr with his head tucked neatly under his arm had walked through a solid brick wall near the school.
A headless bride had been spotted hitchhikking near the interstate.
A *nearly* headless ghost had been seen flying at motorists at the gas station, it's head flopping from a narrow band of connective tissue. The witness made a point of adding that the ghost bore an uncanny likness to John Clesee
The victims remained unidentified and no locals had been reported missing. The victims were assumed to be tourists just passing through or in the area for the leaf-peeping or possibly the Harvest Festival coming up this weekend.
It gave the case an oddly detached feeling. No grieving relatives equaled no sense of urgency among the local police. The sheriff even sounded hopeful as he suggested it was probably out-of-town drug gangs and thus not their problem at all.
They were just a few miles away eating pie when the fifth victim was killed. Dean ordered a second slice to go just in case they didn't make it back this way again. The body was still warm and still in posession of its heart and liver and most, though definitely not all, of its blood so it was easy to rule out vampires ,werewolves, and a number of other ghouls. They didn't find the head itself, but they did find three teeth and something that might have been brain matter though the coroner was noncommittal and sent the sample to the city for a formal lab analysis. Cause of death (beyond the obvious "duh") was labelled "high-velocity impact with object unknown".
The headless bride was seeen again and when Sam and Dean pressed for more details the witness reluctantly added that "she smelled of lilacs" and when they followed up asking if he'd noticed anything weird "anything at all" he hesitated before nodding.
"Well?" Dean asked, trying hard not to sound as irritated as he felt. This town could not be hurried.
"I dont know what lilacs smell like," the man answered in a quiet whisper.
"Excuse me?"
"She smelled like lilacs," the man said firmly. "I'm 100% certain of that. I'll swear to it. The scent of lilacs was in the air. It's a fact. I *know* it. But..."
"You don't know what lilacs smell like," Sam finished.
"Are they ... a tree or a bush? Or ... they grow like a flower like lillies? I thought for a moment... my sister has this scented candle, but then I realized that's lavendar. I just ... I *know* it smelled lilke lilacs. It's just this fact that I can see as clearly as the lace on her dress. I must have smelled lilacs once and just forgotten. Right? That's the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise... that would be crazy?"
Later as they got into the car, Dean muttered, "That's not the kind of confidence you'd want to put on the witness stand."
Sam agreed that it was a good thing their cases didn't require a judge and jury.
The police were happy to pass along another witness that they didn't feel like interviewing themselves. "Dude claims he heard a cannon the night of the murder," the deputy said with an eye roll.
"High-velocity impact," Dean agreed and took the man's contact information.
The witness swore to the sound of the cannon shot, but hesitated when asked if he saw or heard anything else "no matter how strange, *especially* if it were strange".
Dean rode a hunch and pressed. "Do you *know* anything about this case that you can't know? Like 'The scent of lilacs was in the air' but you don't know what lilacs smell like, that kind of thing."
The witness nodded. "This is gonna sound crazy."
"No judgement here," Dean said trying to sound as reassuring as possible. "No matter what it is, we've heard weirder."
That seemed like a pretty solid statement given everything tehyd' been through, but Dean was not prepared for this one.
"It doesn't even make sense," the man said.
They waited.
"The cannon shot that I heard ... "
"Yeah?" Dean was going to straight-up strangle someone today if they didn't get to the piont.
"It was misspelled."
"It was what now?" Dean asked.
"Misspelled. C A N O N instead of C A N N O N."
"The cannon shot that you heard," Sam repeated, "was misspelled?"
"Yeah."
Dean patted the man on the back and sent him on his way. "Buy me a beer, Sammy, I cracked the case."
"That made sense to you?" Sam asked.
Dean got into the car and waited for Sam. "That ghost at the gas station, that was Nearly Headless Nick from the Harry Potter movies, right?"
Sam frownded and stubbornly refued to nod, but Dean knew that expression. Sam agreed with him. "It *could* be Nearly Headless Nick, yeah."
Dean handed Sam a flyer as he fastened his seatbelt in the Impala.
"Oh," Sam said, reading the flyer over. "Yeah."
The librarian couldn't help them with any kind of membership list so they had to wait until Saturday's meeting.
No pie, but there was fresh coffee and good donoughts which was a close second in Dean's book.
"So I see we have some new faces," their leader began.
Dean stood up and announced. "Hi. I'm Dean and I'm an alcoholic."
"Oh, um, this isn't..."
"... and I want to know which one of you witches is responsbile for all the headless corpse shenanigans in this town."
"Oh."
Everyone looked embarrassed but no one looked particularly shocked. Most looked towards a brunette who sat fidgetting in the corner.
"And at least one of you needs a lesson in how to spell 'cannon' which," Dean pointed at Sam, "my brother can help you out with because he went to college."
The brunette's head snapped up. "*That* was Theresa! *I* know how to use a spell checker!"
"Speling is not the point, Jennifer!" Theresa yelled.
"The spell wasn't supposed to be literal!" Jennifer protested. "I didn't mean that! I just... I had writer's block... I was just trying to work a little magic to bring my writing to life not... not everyone's writing *to actual life*."
"You couldn't have done this for the Valentine's edition?!" another writer snapped. "We could be neck-deep in dicks and washboard abs right now, but noooooo you had to wait for the Harvest Party edition to go all Bewitched on us."
"I didn't mean to do it!" Jennifer wailed.
"Well, whatever, undo now. Ctrl-Z. Hand over your hex bags, your magic books, all of it."
Jennifer surrendered all magical pariphanelia including a book that Sam was very excited about and they burned everything (except the book because Sam wouldn't let him) in the parking lot. And that seemed to be that.
They waited around a whole week just to be sure that it really was over and then they gave Jennifer a stern talking to about meddling in dark magic and Erica, the group leader swore this was the last horror prompt and they were all going back to erotica after this anyway.
the winchester brothers swung by the graveyard on their way out of town. The graves were all still there, including those five unidentified plots most-recnetly dug. The graves were real. Were the bodies still inside them? Dean was curious, but not curious enough to dig any of them up. If the headless assailants had all been a product of overwrought imaginations, it was just possible that all the headless victims had been as well. In which case... did it even matter that they'd solved the case?
Neither of them complained about it being a fucking waste of time. Sam shrugged and said, "The fall leaves were pretty."
Dean nodded and shifted into drive. "And at least there was pie."
"Shame about the lack of dicks though," Sam said wistfull staring out the windwo at the autum n leaves.
"Your'e telling me," Dean agreed.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-04 03:56 pm (UTC)pie!
Date: 2022-10-12 02:44 am (UTC)If I were to re-edit this as a sober fic, I think there would be more pie.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-04 07:51 pm (UTC)thank you!
Date: 2022-10-12 02:46 am (UTC)The drunk art was the most fun. I don't even remember how/when I got the idea to go meta with the fic, but I was giggling at myself a lot that night.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-04 07:53 pm (UTC)thank you!
Date: 2022-10-12 03:20 am (UTC)The fun part of writing Supernatural fic is that literally anything is plausible.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-05 04:49 pm (UTC)This was twisty and intriguing.
sad lack of dicks
Date: 2022-10-12 03:23 am (UTC)That would have been a much better story, indeed. Every![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
firewhiskeyfic, I swear "I'm going to write actual smut this time" and every time ... lacking in dicks.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-06 11:42 am (UTC)Love the solution too, of it being one of the writers group. So smart!
Could have been neck deep in dicks and washboard abs - a crying shame. Fab art, too!
Hollows
Date: 2022-10-12 03:27 am (UTC)I googled towns named "Hollow" in the northeast to see if there was a plausible place to set this story (already having the line "Sleepy Hollow or Godric's Hollow or whatever" in my head) and ... so many! So so many places named Hollow AND it turns out that Jared Padalecki's previous show was set in a town called "Stars Hollow" and so I had to throw that one in there too. :-)
no subject
Date: 2022-10-07 08:23 pm (UTC)thank you!
Date: 2022-10-12 03:32 am (UTC)I put so much effort into making sure I spelled "canon/cannon" right (and gave up on all other typos).
no subject
Date: 2022-10-08 05:25 am (UTC)♥
Date: 2022-10-12 03:34 am (UTC)There's never enough pie! (or dicks ... one of these times I'm going to write actual smut, I swear)