Chapter Text
“Sam?” Dean called as he entered the motel room. The running water from the bathroom paused briefly as Sam made an affirmative noise.
“How was the library?” he called over the noise of the shower.
“Fine,” Sam called back, “they’ve got pretty detailed archives going back to the 1850s. There were a couple Scandinavian families that immigrated around that time, but I couldn’t find anything that seemed vengeful. I think they were farmers.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a pissed off Viking, dude,” Dean said, emptying his pockets onto the side table, “I found these weird old inscriptions carved into the stone in some tiny room near the chapel. Pretty sure they’re like, Swedish or whatever.”
“ The hat is an anachronism! ” Sam hollered from the shower. Dean rolled his eyes.
The small, semi-rural town they’d found themselves in had been making headlines with a series of bizarre deaths. The locals had been swearing up and down that they’d been seeing the ghost of a viking - horned hat, braided beard, double headed axe and all. Sam, of course, had immediately been suspicious, bitching about how ‘they didn’t wear hats like that’ and ‘it’s a total anachronism’ and ‘Dean would you shut up for a second’ and blah blah blah.
Shows what Sam knew. The runes were a dead giveaway as far as he was concerned.
They’d split up when they got here, Sam heading to the archives to look at records of any tragic deaths with Scandinavian last names. Dean had gone to talk to the locals, who’d all been very certain that the old church was haunted by a pagan spirit. They’d shown him the weird old room off the back of the church, kept locked and covered in crosses, which had been covered in old runes and archaic inscriptions.
The church had been very accommodating to the ‘nice young reporter’, and had even leant him their shiny new printer so he could print out the photos he’d taken on Sam’s shitty digital camera.
“Are you decent yet? I got some pictures of the room for you to put your eyeballs on,” Dean said, counting the coins on the nightstand. If he went out hustling he might be able to scrounge up enough for a couple of beers in the one sad looking bar in town.
The bathroom door swung open in answer, a plume of steam billowing out into the bedroom. Sam was dressed in a loose t-shirt and worn pyjama pants. They’d need replacing sooner rather than later.
He was brushing his teeth, and gestured for Dean to show him the evidence. Dean pulled the print outs out of his jacket, unfolding them and holding them up.
It was definitely supernatural, he’d thought. There’d been carvings all over the room - in the stone, under the rug, on one of the wooden beams. Some were runic but some were in the modern alphabet, with a couple of extra old-looking letters thrown in. Sam squinted at them, picking the runic inscription up to get a closer look.
“Probably some kind of pissed off poltergeist, right? The guy tries to communicate in the only language he knows, nobody gets him, and-”
“Those are fake,” Sam said, with a great deal of certainty for a man with a mouthful of toothpaste.
Dean resisted the urge to smack the toothbrush out of Sam’s hand.
“Dude,” he snipped, “I took the fucking photos myself. I saw ‘em. They’re real.”
“No, the inscriptions are real, they’re just not Old Norse,” Sam said, and turned back to the sink. “Someone did ‘em recently. Ish. Probably-”
“What?”
“These are fake inscriptions, it’s not real Old Norse.”
Dean looked again at the photographs. Inscriptions that said stuff like æðra inn vikingr and ᚺᛖᛚᛚ ᚷᛖᛏ ᚢ didn’t look particularly fake. Plus, a couple of them had been literally burned into the rug and carved into stone.
“And you know this…how?”
Sam briefly looked over from the mirror to point at one of the photos, one that had been carved directly into the stone wall. “Everything here is in the nominative case-”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“-Meaning that everything would be the subject of the sentence. Modern English grammar is mostly reliant on word order to determine the subject and object of the sentence, but that’s not true with Old Norse - they use cases, which are shown by suffixes-”
“When did you have the time-”
“-and none of these words have a suffix,” Sam took a moment to spit out a mouthful of toothpaste and closely examine the photograph “Except this one, but they didn’t do the u-mutation to properly make it a plural. It makes no grammatical sense, so it was almost certainly just a really lazy translation job, probably by some undergrad or something. Someone who knew enough about Old Norse to translate stuff but not enough to get the grammar right. I bet if we translated it word by word we’d get a really unambiguous English sentence.”
Sam went back to brushing his teeth
“What about this one, it looks old,” Dean said, waving the runes in Sam’s face. Sam pulled back a bit, dodging a papercut.
“That’s just a modern english sentence written in the elder futhark,” Sam said distractedly, “they were banking on the older script confusing you enough that you wouldn’t bother trying to read it properly. Look-” Sam pointed to the runes one by one -” B-E-W-A-R-E. It doesn’t even say anything sinister. It’s too vague.”
Dean looked again at the thing Sam had pointed out. ᛒᛖᚹᚨᚱᛖ didn’t look much like an English word to him.
“What?”
Sam shrugged and put his lips directly on the tap to rinse his mouth out. There were a few moments of blissful silence, when Dean didn’t have to listen to Sam say the most insane shit he’d ever heard in his life.
“Alright wise guy, what about this one?” Dean said eventually, fishing another one out of the pile.
“That one’s real Old Norse, but-” Sam said, and squinted at the photo for a bit. “ Vituð ér enn eða … yeah, this is from a poem. Like, one of the most famous ones. It’s about the end of the world, told by this fortune teller hag. I guess that makes sense? But she isn’t evil or anything. And this sentence isn’t, like, a curse or anything. I bet someone copied this out from a textbook. This poem’s on, like, every Old Norse syllabus ever written.”
Sam turned back to the mirror, snapping off a piece of floss.
Dean stared at the side of Sam’s head, wondering if he should pull out some silver. Maybe some holy water.
Sam met his gaze in the mirror and raised his eyebrows, guileless.
“What are you looking at me like that for?”
“When did you have the time to learn fucking Old Norse ?”
“Dude,” Sam said, exasperated, and turned to look at him directly, “You know Latin. ”
“I don’t know Latin -”
Sam scoffed. “Yes, you do, you can stop pretending to be-”
“I know exorcisms in Latin, that doesn’t mean-”
“You know Latin, I know Latin, Bobby knows Latin-”
“That doesn’t mean Bobby knows-”
“Latin is way, way harder than Old Norse anyway. Way more boring. Way more complicated. Way more-”
“Way more useful!”
“Yeah, to us and catholic priests! Nobody else is using Latin, ever. Not even classics professors.”
“But they’re using Old Norse? ”
“There aren’t even any good poems in Latin after you finish with the Anead. Just long, weird manuals on farming or whatever. There are tonnes of epics and poems in Old Norse, and you really can’t get the sense of it if you read them-”
“Wait, wait, time out,” Dean said, holding up his hands in a ‘T’, “You learned Old freaking Norse in your spare time to read poetry ?”
Sam’s silence was brief, but it was enough for Dean.
“Dude!”
“I had a lot of spare time in my freshman year!” Sam said defensively, but there was a little bit of redness coming up in his cheeks.
“At Stanford, ” Dean said in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Sam said. A little shortly. Dean narrowed his eyes. Sam shrugged jerkily.
“Was there a girl involved?”
“No!” Sam cried, looking off to one side.
“Dude…”
“I just-”
“Sammy.”
Sam’s shoulders dropped three inches, his breath coming out of him in one long sigh. Dean cackled.
“Well, don’t that explain it. God, you’re such a freak. Can’t even hit on a girl normal, you have to go and learn a whole dead language.”
“Shut up,” Sam groused, “I just saved us like, so much time with this stupid case. I told you the helmet was-”
“If I have to hear you say ‘arachnid’ one more-”
“It’s ana-”
“One more time, Sam,” Dean said, holding up a finger, but there wasn’t any heat in it. He just couldn’t bring himself to admit that Sam had been right.
“So, what,” Dean asked, chucking the photos on the bed, “this is just some weird prank?”
“Yeah, maybe another tulpa or something,” Sam said, his words coming out around a mouthful of floss, “like that one in Texas, remember?”
“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Dean sighed and flopped down into a chair, rubbing at his eyes.
“Just once, y’know? I’d like it to be a simple salt n’ burn just one goddamn time,” he grumbled. Sam made a sympathetic noise from the sink.
Dean tipped his head back and thought for a few seconds.
“Did it work?” Dean asked, Sam glanced over at him, one eyebrow raised.
“On the chick? Was she impressed?” Dean asked.
“No,” Sam scoffed, going a little pink again, “It um, turned out she was gay?”
There was a brief silence in the room.
“I mean, like, duh. She was studying Old Norse,” Sam said, one corner of his mouth creeping up.
Dean burst out into broad, loud cackles.