Chapter Text
The thing is, maybe Dean should have known it was gonna end this way.
Cas was always gonna lose interest. That’s the way it was always gonna be. Dean was never gonna be enough to make him stay.
But now Dean can see it happening. He can feel it happening.
Dean doesn’t tell Bobby, or Rufus. He sure as the seas doesn’t tell Sam. He can't deal with the “I told you so.” He’d rather shred his caudal fins with a piece of coral and then waggle his bleeding tail at a shark.
Dean can read the carvings on the wall, okay? And maybe it isn’t his fault. Bobby told him, right from the beginning, that it wasn’t going to work out—that Cas’s species doesn’t even do the whole long-term mating thing.
And Dean? Dean said that was just fine. They were ‘just clouding up the water.’ Right, right.
Maybe he believed it at the time.
It starts with a shell.
The stinging shell is sitting, pretty and threatening, outside Dean’s coral reef hollow.
It’s kind of an awesome shell. Dean doesn’t know the exact name for this kind of mollusk, other than knowing it’s some kind of venomous cone snail, but Sam probably would. All Dean knows is that they’re a whole-ass son of a seagull to catch.
Cone snails live in little burrows, in cracks in the reef, and sticking a hand in there is just asking to get stung. Dean’s heard that the meat is really sweet, but cone snails are so small and their shells are hard—not really worth stabbing around in their little hidey-holes with a spear on the off chance of poking through in just the right spot rather than knocking them around. Because if Dean’s wrong about whether he hit or stunned it? Reach in for the prize, and stabbity. Needle to the hand. And then paralysis and hallucinations for a whole day? No thanks.
So Dean’s only ever seen cone snails alive—normally scuttling away into the backs of their burrows, the smug little bastards—or pretty much squished. And what fun is picking bits of shell out of the tiny chunk of meat on the inside? Dean might love to eat, but not even he thinks it’s worth the trouble.
But this one isn’t squished at all. The shell is whole—a pristine, pretty cone, creamy white with tiny golden spots all over in an impossibly perfect spiral. And it’s just sitting there on the flat rock outside Dean’s ledge, not moving.
Dean flips it over with the tip of his spear warily before he touches it—he’s not afraid of it, dammit, but he’s also not going to grab it with his hand without making sure there isn’t a needle still attached and ready to deploy. But the shell drifts upwards and then sags back down in the water in a way that proves it’s empty. And next to it, weighed down with a piece of coral, is the cone snail’s flesh—wrapped in a few thin strands of bubble-seaweed.
How…?
“What the hell?” Dean asks, peering into the empty shell, then down at the—whole—piece of meat. It can’t have been here long, because otherwise, one of the fish that live around Dean’s ledge would have gotten brave and nabbed the tasty morsel before Dean woke up and came out to get the day started.
It’s a nice gift, though. Even the shell alone would have been a really fancy, show-off kind of gift, to say nothing of the meat. A cone snail shell! Dean doesn’t know anyone else who has one of these—not whole, rather than little crushed fragments for jewelry or sparkle.
How did someone even get the meat out of the shell without damaging it? Some kind of hook? It must have been, but… why?
That’s not the real trouble here, though.
Dean lives off in the ass-end corner of the reef, just barely far enough from the drop-off that most sharks won’t cruise in the direction of his ledge. And so what? He likes the view out here, and the fish for hunting are a lot bigger over the edge, the water around Dean’s ledge not as clogged with coral bits and fish shit. Besides, Dean’s got good ears and he sleeps light—he’d have to, living by himself rather than with the colony.
The trouble is, he didn’t hear any other mer echolocating their way around his cave in the dark, and why would someone just leave a present like this without taking credit? He can’t even see the shadows of someone’s tail flapping them away, even though the visibility is great today.
Sam doesn’t need to bounce sound to make his way here, he’s been here often enough, but he’s the only one, and he wouldn’t swim all the way from the colony in the dark, not even to freak Dean out by leaving a gift while he was sleeping. And there isn’t a kelp forest to hide in and watch Dean’s reaction from, anyway…
“Um,” Dean says, confused, looking around. Still no one. “Thanks?”
(Doesn’t hurt to be polite, right?)
And then he pops the piece of cone snail in his mouth, bubble-weed and all, ‘cause dammit, he’s hungry, and it looks tasty.
It’s just one little bite, but damn, that’s good—Dean’s okay with some seaweed if it comes with things as delicious as this. The meat is so sweet that Dean’s eyes fly open wide, and it’s soft and fresh, not rubbery at all. The salty pods of the bubble-weed pop pleasantly between his teeth as he savors it. Dean closes his eyes and chews until he can’t anymore, before he swallows.
Damn. What a nice gift. They couldn’t have left a symbol, though, so he’d know who it was from?
“Someone just left it there?” Sam says, looking up from his—frankly envious—examination of Dean’s prize shell. “Just… left it, right there, outside your ledge? While you were sleeping?”
“Yeah, on that flat rock where I get the bones out of fish, you know? The meat, too, wrapped in a piece of seaweed,” Dean says happily. “Man, it was really good, Sammy! I just—”
“You ate it?” Sam’s so agitated that actual bubbles drift up from his gills.
“Don’t pop an air sac, Sammy. Yeah, I ate it? What’s the big deal? It was really sweet, never had anything like that before,” Dean adds, licking his lips at the memory. “Would have been rude not to, it being a gift and all.”
Sam blinks—both his eye membranes, one after the other, the dramatic dolphin that he is. “Dean…” he says slowly. “Ivory cones are very venomous.”
“Yeah, I know. I wasn’t hatched yesterday.” Okay, Dean didn’t know it was an ivory cone, but he knew it was a cone snail, okay? They’re all venomous as fuck.
Sam doesn’t point out that Dean didn’t hatch at all. “And you… ate it.”
“Did you get stung by a stonefish?” Dean asks, exasperated. “I already said that. What’s the worst that could have happened? They’re venomous, not poisonous.”
Sam pinches the bridge of his nose and blows air so hard out his gills that Dean’s sure he’s going to have to go to the surface later to gulp some more. “Dean…”
Okay, seriously, Dean brought the shell to Sam because he broke his last sharp bone needle and didn’t want to crack the shell trying to use a dull one, but he didn’t think getting his shell put on a string was going to come with a side of a lecture. If he’d wanted that, he’d have brought it to Rufus.
“I get what you’re saying, Sam,” Dean retorts. “But if someone wanted to kill me? There are lots easier ways to do it than by poisoning me. Seriously, leaving an itty-bitty piece of meat from something that’s got a stinger everyone knows about, outside my ledge? That’s the most convoluted murder plan I’ve ever heard. They could have just stabbed me. I was asleep.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?!”
Dean blinks innocently at him. “Yeah?”
Sam gives up.
(And then the giant whale shark that is Dean’s brother has to struggle his big-ass way to the surface to refill his air sacs, because it turns out he did blow too much air out at Dean. Which kind of takes all the current out of his fins, doesn’t it?)
Still, Dean doesn’t tell Sam about the whole eel he finds in front of his ledge the next cycle. It’s a fucking terrifying-looking thing, with a whole mouth full of pointy teeth sticking out in all directions. Dean thinks it’s a moray; it’s sort of a kelpy-green color. Ordinarily, Dean would have thought that the eel had just up and died in front of his ledge—in which case eating it probably wouldn’t be great.
Except there’s no reason at all for an eel to be swimming anywhere near here: they normally stay in their reef holes. Plus, even though there aren’t any tool marks on the eel anywhere, it’s coiled into a perfect ring on the same rock the cone snail got left on before.
When Dean finally thinks to bend it this way and that, he realizes that something must have broken its spine, leaving the flesh unharmed. Huh.
Dean’s never eaten eel before. They’re slippery bastards—duh—and fast when they’re out, even faster when they disappear into their hidey-holes. Dean can’t imagine sticking in a hand to try and grab something whose face is mostly teeth. And poking a spear in blindly doesn’t seem like it’d work any better than it would for a cone snail—more likely to piss off the eel than get him a meal. This might be the only time Dean gets to try this particular kind of delicacy.
He hesitates and looks down at the eel in his hands again. It’s heavy, and thick: there’s enough meat that it could make a nice, light meal for two rather than just a filling meal for one… he could share. Sam might be an orator, a big deal in the colony, but Dean’s hands-down the better hunter. So if Dean hasn’t tried eel before, Sam definitely hasn’t…
Yeah, Dean doesn’t want his treat with a side of side-eye and scolding. No thanks.
He only feels a little bit stupid when he waves the eel in the water and says, “Thanks, uh… this is awesome,” to the open ocean, the clucks and clicks of the reef waking up around him. Then he goes to get his knife to prepare it.
It takes him a little while to figure out how to gut it open without tainting the meat, but Dean manages.
It’s delicious—strong and kind of heavy-tasting rather than the lighter flesh of most fish. Kind of like that time some of the hunters brought down one of the bigger sturgeon, with its tough flesh, except softer than that—rich and meaty.
Dean eats every bite.
When Dean comes back from a hunt three days later, just as the reef is starting to get dim, there’s a juvenile tiger shark wrapped in kelp on the flat rock, belly already slit and the parts that go rancid neatly removed.
Okay, this is getting ridiculous.
So, for the first time since the gifts started to arrive, Dean goes searching. He really does. He casts his voice out, over and over, looking and listening hard when the echoes come back to him. For a second he thinks he has something—mer-sized, mer-shaped—before he sends out another hello and gets a happy whistle and a cackle back instead: just a dolphin, diving low to play at the edge of the reef before it flips away.
Dean even looks over the edge of the drop-off and sends a call down, shuddering a little when he doesn’t get back an echo because of how deep it is. The section of the drop-off nearest his ledge doesn’t have any corners large enough to house another bachelor merman, Dean knew that when he moved in—Dean’s a fine hunter, but not even he’s that good, to claim and hold a disputed territory like that. (He’s just too lazy, honestly. There’s a reason he lives all the way out here, where the water is colder, rather than closer to the colony. Well, other than what happened with Lisa.)
“You see anyone swimming around here?” he asks the clownfish living in the field of anemones nearest his ledge. They’re tiny, but clownfish are mean little suckers, and he was thrilled to find a place to live so near a patch of them. Sure, it meant that Dean was getting flicked and clicked at and threatened by something that couldn’t so much as take off his ear for a couple of cycles before the clownfish decided he wasn’t going to eat them. (Kind of cracked him up, ‘cause they’re so damned tiny and cute, but, well, fish will do what they gotta, he guesses.)
But they got used to him eventually. Probably helped that Dean drops his bones and the guts and little bits of meat near or on their anemones, and now, the clownfish colony will set up a racket for anyone but him: as good as an early warning system. They’ll even swarm Sam and try to bite at his hair when he comes to visit, which—hilarious.
But his stripey orange buddies aren’t standing guard or even cowering down in their anemones the way they do when they’ve decided that they can’t scare off whatever they’re threatening. They’re happily chowing down on a batch of fish eggs—the tiny pink ones that Dean likes to snack on himself when he finds them.
Which—huh, weird, flying fish don’t normally spawn around here—
Then Dean double-takes.
‘Cause it’s true that flying fish don’t spawn here—but more importantly, no fish other than a clownfish would’ve laid a clump of eggs right in the middle of a fucking anemone.
Dean wants to say he’s surprised to find a small, immaculate piece of fan coral—perfectly preserved, even though the tides normally break the fragile skeletons into pieces once the little frondy things inside die off, or they get eaten by parrotfish—sitting just inside his ledge, near the little groove where Dean normally floats when he’s sleeping.
But this time, Dean just looks out over the sun-bathed reef, and laughs. “You bribin’ my watch-fish now?” he demands, but he shakes his head, grinning. “Well… thanks, anyway.”
He carefully pins the fan up at the back of his ledge, in the protected area where the water currents won’t break off the delicate bits.
And the next time Dean goes hunting, when he manages to take down a grouper that’s big enough to share, he keeps back the egg sacks and the cheeks—his favorite parts, the most tender bits—and leaves them outside his ledge, weighed down with a rock and covered with a pyramid of small rocks, so the clownfish won’t try and get them. They’re busy with the bones and tail anyway.
The treats are gone when Dean wakes up.
And just so Dean knows it wasn’t a scavenger that took them, the little pile of rocks has been arranged into something that looks a lot like a smile.
In the end, it’s a shark that does it.
If there’s one downside to living where Dean does, at the edge of the reef—and the reason why no one from the mer colony with any younglings would find themselves anywhere near Dean’s territory—it’s the goddamned sharks.
Most predators aren’t very smart—hey, Dean will point right to his own face when he says that, even if Sam swats him for it—but they’re also not suicidal, and most of them will steer way clear of a mer’s living territory. Dean might not be a family group with young fry—no one in the whole ocean fucks with those parents—but he’s still a bachelor mer and a hunter, and like Charlie tells him, that makes him an apex asshole of the sea.
Sharks, however, do not care if things are assholes. They’re just that dumb. And sure, they’re not dangerous to Dean most of the time—Dean doesn’t hunt near where he sleeps, so there’s no blood in the water. But that doesn’t mean Dean wants one of them anywhere near his home shelf while he’s sleeping, thanks, because sharks are also lazy as shit and they’ll aim for the easiest target.
So when Dean swims out one morning and his echo over the edge sends back the message that there’s something over the drop-off that has a goddamned dorsal fin and is just hanging out there, hovering and still—dolphins ain’t that way, they get bored too quickly—Dean sighs and goes back in to get his spear.
The clownfish are all huddled down in their anemones when Dean makes his way past them. They peek their stripey orange faces out at him as he cruises past.
“Some watch-fish you are,” Dean grumbles, but he can’t help his smile. It isn’t their fault. Part of sharks being so stupid is how indiscriminate they are, and they don’t know clownfish are too little to be good eating. A shark’ll charge right into the anemone and not even realize it’s stung until the damage to the little guys is done.
But when Dean releases some air out of his swim sac so he can sink slowly over the edge of the drop-off and sends out a cautious hum, what the echo tells him is that the shark isn’t a shark, it’s two—and they’re not just swimming past on their way to whatever bloody business they’re inclined towards, they’re fucking circling.
Dean can’t smell any blood in the water, but he’s also not shark-kin—like Charlie reminds him often, folding her own scratchy, grey tail around herself proudly.
Still, goddammit, fuck. There’s something bleeding in Dean’s territory that he does not want there, and Dean’ll swim into a trench before he lets sharks consider his place part of their hunting grounds.
“Hey!” Dean yells, bunching his tail to launch himself down and over the edge of the reef, blowing bubbles behind him to flatten his air sacs out fast and give himself a little extra diving oomph.
The sharks, ‘cause they’re sharks, don’t even twist to look at him before Dean spreads out all his fins just enough that he’s not going to ram into the wall, flips himself so he’s tail-down, head-up again, and then punches the nearest one in the face.
What? It works. Yeah, Dean could’ve used his spear—he had enough momentum to his dive that he probably could have run the murder fish all the way through. But again, plural on the sharks, and if they’re circling rather than cruising past, there’s got to be some’s blood in the water already. He doesn’t want there to be more.
Besides, sharks are dumb, but nothing is dumb enough that it doesn’t flinch back and away at being punched in the eye.
The blacktip doesn’t scream as it jerks away from him—the creepy fuckers never make any sound—but it does break its circling, finning forward and nearly hitting its face on the reef wall as it tries to get away from Dean.
Now that Dean’s close enough, he can actually taste some of the blood in the water—just a trickle, just enough that Dean wrinkles his nose at the tang in the back of his throat: cold and stale, fish, not mammal. In fact, it smells a lot like…
He almost doesn’t recognize the long gash on the blacktip shark’s side—now bleeding again in thin, murky puffs with the shark’s jerky motion away from him, and shit, oh, shit—before Dean’s reflexively backfinning hard, and away from it.
So much for not putting more blood in the water.
He hears the rush of water displacing almost before he feels it. Almost before he sees the second shark coming in a rush—mouth already open. It’s smaller than the one that Dean punched, but fuck, a tiger shark, why is there a tiger shark anywhere in Dean’s territory?!
For a single second, Dean thinks of the baby one, stringy but still good and fresh, that got left next to his ledge.
But the tiger shark isn’t interested in him. It wouldn’t be. It crashes into the bleeding blacktip’s tail so hard that it twists them both in the water before it latches on to the meaty part just behind the other shark’s dorsal fin—hard.
The spray of blood isn’t hot. Shark blood isn’t. But it fills the water, dark and thick and murky as silt.
Neither of the sharks, predator or prey, make any noise as the two bodies spiral down, down, down, thrashing and snapping, sinking into the cloud of blood and trailing a thin, bitter stream of it upwards into the darkness.
Then the only sounds are the sounds of tearing. Of teeth. The struggle of motion and then… not.
Dean’s heart is still beating hard enough that he can hear it flutter in his ears over the sound of his own tentative whistle as he sends a careful echo out and listens to the sharks sink, sink. He hears it when the bigger shape stops moving. And then they’re gone, out of the range of Dean’s song.
Wow. Fuck. That… that could’ve been… well.
Why was there a wounded shark around here anyway?! That doesn’t make any sense.
Dean stares down hard, but the predators have sunk down into the dark and the cloud of thick, cold blood dispersing in the water, deeper than Dean can see. Up above, the reef has gone silent, wary of the scent of shark blood in the water.
Dean’s so not telling Bobby about this. The old sand-dollar already makes a fuss about Dean living this far out. And then he’s going to nag Dean about having to source some finless sole as shark repellent, because those little bastards are expensive. (And hard to find if Dean wants to try and find some himself rather than trading for it. Sure, Dean is a fine hunter himself, but finding a fish that’s basically eyeballs and nostrils poking out of the sand is not easy.)
Dean turns around and bunches his tail, preparing for the oh-so-fun struggle of swimming back up and over the edge of the reef without the aid of a nice, full, buoyant swim sac. That’s when he sees it looking out at him from a tiny cave in the reef wall.
No.
Not it.
Him.
There's a pair of droopy blue eyes in a pale, sad face peering out at Dean from a hole in the sheer, craggy surface of the coral cliff.
Dean jerks in horror and redirects, but by then, the face has disappeared—so fast that Dean thinks he’s imagined it. But when he sings out, the echo comes back at him—that’s a person in there, that’s definitely a person stuck behind that claustrophobically narrow entrance—
“Shit!” Dean exclaims, grabbing for the edges of the rock face—but it's not the kind of rock that’s made of coral fluff, the stinging, squishy polyps on a soft base. This is the deep stuff, the hard stuff that makes the base of the reef. Dean scrapes helplessly at it, his claws doing nothing more than making a horrible noise on the rough stone.
“I'm gonna get help!” Dean sings, his voice echoing loudly off the vertical reef wall in alarm. He doesn’t normally like to call attention to himself like this over the deep water, but that doesn’t mean he can’t. Dean can make his song carry; he gets good volume when he wants to.
(But Dean also lives all the way out here specifically so he doesn’t swim into other mer every time he turns. How the fuck did this dude even get this deep into Dean's territory without Dean hearing him navigate?)
“Just hold on!” he insists. “Just keep moving, can you move in there?!”
Is there enough current in that narrow space to keep water and oxygen moving across the guy’s gills? But how the fuck could there be? Dean’s song, even as muffled as it is, gives him back the contours of a space so narrow that he can feel his own blood-scales going white with fear.
“Dean,” the man in the tiny cave says—and he sounds shockingly calm for someone who's at risk of suffocating if they don't get him out of there. Or is he losing oxygen already?! Fuck, Dean saw that happen to another mer just once, and it was the most horrible thing—the way the guy just started to sink, his tail moving slower and slower, his face going so calm and flat as his gills stopped fluttering. “Dean, I'm alright.”
“The hell you are!” Dean spits. There’s something wrong with the guy’s voice—it’s like he got hit in the throat with a motor or breathed in some bad water or something. There’s an undertone to it like the sound Dean’s claws made when he tried to scrape at the stone—maybe that’s why the man didn’t sing out for help when the sharks started coming for him? Did one of the sharks hurt him before he shoved himself into this suicide shelter?
The rest of the mer settlement lives on the other side of the reef. Dean’s fast, he’s really fucking fast, but he won’t make it: it’ll still take too long to get someone and bring them back for a rescue effort. There’s no way the guy won’t suffocate before they get back. But Dean has to try, doesn’t he? He has to do something—
Then Dean pauses. He pauses, already with his tail bunched to shoot him up and over and outwards. His whole tail cramps with the effort of holding back the thrust, his fins splaying out in a painful jerk.
Wait, what the fuck did the dude just say? Did he just say…
“Wait, wait,” he blurts. “How do you know my name?”
Blue Eyes in the cave sighs. He pushes his face forward and into the hole in the cliff face, enough that Dean can see his eyes again—a long-fingered hand, too, grasping at the edge of the stone. “I know you’re concerned, but I'm not stuck. I'm safe. I'm choosing to be here. Can't we leave it at that?” he says insistently. “Please, I'm sorry I bothered you.”
“Bothered—you're in a cave!” Dean insists. He holds out a hand. “C'mon, dude, no need to be embarrassed, this shit happens when there’s sharks around.” And him being embarrassed is seriously not worth his life. “If you're not stuck, then get the hell out of there so I can stop having a heart attack!”
And then maybe the dude can explain how he managed to sneak into Dean's territory in the first place without Dean hearing him, and why he was getting cruised by sharks. But first, he's got to not, you know. Die.
“Look, I emptied my air sacs getting down here and my tail’s getting tired,” Dean adds, when Blue Eyes just peers at him.
(Dean’s tail isn’t actually getting tired—or at least, it won’t for a good long while. He’s a hunter, okay? He’s got a nice, thick tail and plenty of stamina, thanks. But he also doesn’t want to be hovering in open water like a stunned seahorse, his tail waving over the depths. Not being able to see or hear the sea floor gives him the jeebies. Especially when he can still smell shark blood all through the water.)
There's a sigh so deep that the guy actually, weirdly, makes bubbles out of his mouth. Dean blinks again. How is he even doing that? Dean only bubbles after he's been up to the surface to refill his swim sac, and he does that out of his gills, not his mouth.
Then Blue Eyes swims out of the cave.
No, that's not right. 'Cause he doesn't. Swim out. Exactly.
Dean has no idea how he makes his shoulders fit out of the tiny opening, because he has shoulders all right, wow, okay, those are nice shoulders. But he just sort of twists into the tiny space in a way that Dean knows he wouldn’t be able to do himself. And he comes out, and out, and…
He pulls himself out of the cave. But not with his arms.
Or maybe it is his arms. Are those arms? Wait, no, that'd be weird, because they're below his waist. But they're also nothing like the legs that humans have.
And those sure as fuck are not a tail and fins.
“Oh,” Dean squeaks, his eyes trailing over long, textured tentacles. Where they join towards the middle, the soft, fleshy edge ripples like the flutter of a cuttlefish. There’s a delicate transition where the man’s flat, pretty belly, rather than becoming scales, turns into pebbly, dark blue skin below the waist.
He doesn’t have a belly button. He doesn’t have nipples. Just muscles, and flesh, and those… those… well, jumping jellyfish, what are those? They have suckers on them!
(Yes, Sam, Dean’s well aware that jellyfish can’t jump, that’s the point.)
“Oh, fuck. Dude, what are you?” Dean blurts.
It's the wrong question. The guy's teeth draw back in a snarl and all the tentacle-things and the soft, thin flesh connecting them flare out around him—a ways around him—holy shit, his top half is about the same size as Dean’s, but there is a lot more of him at the bottom when he's not all gathered in on himself. He’s also holding himself completely still in a way that’s sort of eerie. When Dean’s attention is drawn by a hint of motion, he sees that three of the tentacles have grabbed onto the rock face in a way that sure as starfish looks like the tentacle dude’s preparing to launch himself off it.
Dean swallows down his own sudden trill of alarm. “Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean—just never met anyone like you before!” he says hastily. And he is not gonna backfin, dammit, not in his own damned territory, even though his tail is coiled and ready for it. “Are you, uh...” Dean looks carefully down at all the dangly bits, currently spread out in what anyone would recognize as an obvious threat display. “A mer-squid? A merpus?” Wait, no, that all sounds terrible and the squint he's getting confirms it. “What’s your name?” There, that's better.
“I'm a cecaelia,” the not-a-merpus says, eyes narrowed. “Before you hurt yourself.”
“Fancy,” Dean says, with a roll of his eyes. (He doesn’t want to sound as impressed as he, well, sort of is.) “Well, I’m Dean. I’m mer. Uh, obviously. Tail and… uh, yeah.” He waves at his own tail, then winces. Wait, the dude already knew Dean’s name somehow, and he has eyes, so that’s all pretty pointless.
“Yes, I know,” Blue Eyes says. The threat display of all those arms-legs-whatever relaxes downwards, and he retracts like he’s easing back down on the tripod of tentacles he’s using to cling to the—vertical—edge of the rock face. Then, just a little shyly and much less grumpily, he offers, “I’m Castiel. You do have a very beautiful tail, Dean. I like your spots.”
Dean feels those same spots go brighter as blood rushes through both sets of them—the tiny gold ones on his face, but more obviously, the bigger, brighter gold blood-scales scattered across his tail. Even here, in the darker spaces off the edge of the drop-off, they sparkle brightly in the retained light. “Oh. Thanks, man, I like your... uh. Those.”
Dean gestures out at the… everything. He still doesn’t know what the fuck they're supposed to be called.
He said it to be polite, but it's true, though. Now that Dean's eyes have adjusted to the lack of light down here, there's something sort of neat about the tentacle-things—there are so many of them, for one thing. They’re really broad at the base, like they’re legs—thighs?—for real, but they taper out to tiny, clever, pointed tips that twirl and move in the water like seagrass in a current, curling together like a clingy seahorse’s tail. There are suckers all down the length of them.
The way the water current moves across the soft flesh stretched between them makes it look really soft, delicate as the ripply edge of a stingray. The tentacles are a dark blue, mostly, but the undersides, where there are little suckers, are the color of shallow sand in sunlight. Damn, Dean just doesn't know where to look.
Then Dean blinks and floats a little closer. Some of the tentacles tense up, going curved and ready again, but the guy doesn't attack, and he doesn’t put his back against the rock face for defense.
“Hey, where are your gills?!” Dean demands, staring hard at the unmarked lines of the guy’s sides, the little stripes of muscle between his ribs.
“I don't have any,” Castiel says, frowning.
Dean stares, open-mouthed. All of a sudden he can feel his own gills acutely, stretching across his flanks, the tender fan-like edges of them wafting back and forth as he breathes in the still-bloody current. “You don't have...?”
“I'm not going to repeat myself,” Castiel answers, looking a little disgruntled, and to Dean's amazement, his color fades. All over. The blue of his... maybe-legs, maybe-arms, turns a dull stone-gray, what in the ever-lovin'— “I'm going back to my cave now. If you're done staring,” he says grouchily, and starts to pull away, heading towards the sheer wall again.
He doesn't wait for Dean's answer before he turns back to the small, scary hole in the reef wall where he... lives? He lives in that cave?!
Dean's still processing that when, as Castiel is pulling himself in, Dean catches sight of something amongst all the... legs, Dean's gonna just call them legs until someone tells him different. They move the guy along and they’re below his waist, aren’t they? So it counts. Humans wish they had legs so cool.
There’s the delicate, pristine shell of an ivory cone snail, held tightly in the trim loop of one of the legs, sand-colored suckers protectively cupped around it.
Huh.
Okay, then.
“Hey,” Dean calls in. “Look, there’s gonna be blood in the water for a while. Couple of hours at least. The sharks—”
“I can handle sharks,” comes the gruff answer from inside the creepy little unswimmable hole.
“Oh, yeah, sure looked like you were handling them,” Dean mutters, but he knows when he’s not wanted. “I’ll bring down some glow-stones,” he offers. “You can line your cave mouth with ‘em, sharks don’t like that. Not that the sharks can fit in your little hole, I guess, but at least you’ll have some light in there. Okay?”
He doesn’t wait for a response before he fins upwards and back onto the reef, and then up towards the surface again for some air for his swim sacs. Hovering without any air is tiring.
There’s no response when he puts a handful of chlorophane glow-stones—he made sure to get them really nice and charged up in the sun—at the edge of the cave later that afternoon. But when he sends out a soft click, the echo tells him that Castiel’s definitely in there. A second whistle into the opening confirms that the cecaelia-dude must be asleep, tucked into a compact ball that rocks a little as he breathes.
Huh.
A few mornings later, just as Dean’s waking up, the clownfish set up a clicky clamor that quiets down a little too suddenly.
This time, when Dean pokes his head out from his sleeping ledge, he’s not too surprised to see the little cuties gathered around a clump of what smells like rock shrimp, pecking happily at the tiny bits.
“Traitors,” Dean grumbles and glances around, letting out soft echolocation chirps—
All of Dean’s muscles twitch and he almost backfins as his voice and his eyes tell him at nearly the same time that there’s someone just off to his right side, perched… no, sprawled on top of Dean’s ledge in a way that no mer possibly could. Dean did not hear anyone coming at all, and for a second he just doesn’t know what to do with the echo his voice is giving him. He rubs his sleep-mucky eyes and stares.
In the early morning sunlight, and now that there’s no blood in the water making Dean squint, Castiel isn’t just interesting—he’s fucking spectacular. His lips are such a pretty pink against how pale his torso and face are, and his hair is so dark that it almost seems to be absorbing the light streaming over the rock ledge. The wide splay of his legs around him, holding him balanced in place on top of the rock, isn’t dark blue at all, so Dean doesn’t know how in the seas he’d thought it could be. Below the waist, Castiel is dark orange with surprisingly rhythmic patches of delicate yellow lined with copper.
When Dean squints, the bands look for all the world like…
Like the clownfish in the anemone field. Wow. Okay, holy shit. What? How did Dean miss that?
“Oh,” Castiel says, sounding startled—and a lot less grouchy than the last time Dean saw him. The fleshy bits bunched between his legs ripple again, flashing the way his underside is a delicate, creamy yellow now too. It’s not Dean’s imagination, is it? He was a different color before. “Hello. Your neck-fins are green, too. How pretty.”
Dean reaches up and uses both hands to smooth his neck-fins down from where they’d fanned out aggressively. Dean’s tail is a respectable kelp-green, with the exception of the golden blood-scales he has scattered from his hips to his caudal fins, but Dean’s neck-fins are much brighter. He’s lucky he doesn’t get startled often, ‘cause it just ain’t a mermanly color, and how’s he supposed to scare off threats when he’s colorful as a parrotfish?
“Don’t be a creeper,” he grumbles, and makes sure the damned fins are staying back. “Personal space, you know?”
Castiel just blinks at Dean.
Okay, maybe he doesn’t know, considering that he squishes himself into a hole.
Dean waves at his colony of clownfish, all happily munching away. “You the one who keeps bribing my fish?”
“They kept attacking me even when I tried to camouflage,” Castiel says apologetically, gesturing down at the gold-orange spread of his legs around him.
Dean swallows down a gulp of laughter as he realizes what in the hell the guy’s talking about. Clownfish aren’t very smart, it’s true, but, uh… yeah. There’s camouflage and then there’s camouflage. “Of course they’re not buying it. You’re a lot bigger than a clownfish, dude.”
Castiel looks down at himself, frowning. “I know, but I thought I could mimic an anemone, a little,” he grumbles. “I didn’t want to hurt them. They’re very cute.” And he tucks the spread of all of those legs-arms-whatever under himself in a neat, startlingly small package, like he’s trying to look smaller.
It works, too. Now that he’s not sprawled out enough to occupy the entire roof of Dean’s sleeping ledge, he looks like he could fit inside a cave. But not before Dean catches a glimpse of something large and flat by his… hip? (Does he have hips? Dean does, but Dean also has bones, and he’s not sure, from the way those legs move, that Castiel does.)
Dean tenses, but only a little. Like he told Sam: clearly Castiel’s been deep in Dean’s territory, right near Dean’s sleeping space, while Dean’s been sleeping. If he’d wanted to harm Dean, he’d have done it by now. “What you got there?” he asks, pointing.
“Oh. I just…” The pod of legs ripples slightly, and after a moment, one of them sneaks out from the tangled bundle and picks up the flat shape, offering it shyly towards Dean. Castiel folds his fingers in front of himself. “I owe you an apology. No one likes finding sharks in their territory, and it was nice of you to try and help.” Castiel pauses, then mutters, “Even though I didn’t need it. And it really wasn’t my fault the blacktip scratched itself on coral when it charged me.”
Well, that’s a hell of a not-apology, and Dean would snort, but he’s too busy staring down at what Castiel’s holding out to him.
It’s a whole finless sole. One of the biggest that Dean’s ever seen.
A little laugh sneaks out of Dean, like the rush of bubbles when he dives down from the surface. He swims closer and takes the sole from Castiel. “Wow,” he murmurs, staring at the milky-eyed treasure, limp in his hands. Holy shit, where did Castiel even find this monster? They’re not pretty—flatfish are never pretty—but this sole won’t just make shark repellent for one, it could make shark repellent for, like, a whole family. Sam, the nerd, would probably bubble himself to see it. “Okay, dude, wow. Just feed me and tell me I’m pretty, why don’t you?” he blurts.
Some of the long octopus legs uncurl from under Castiel’s torso into a more relaxed splay again, draping and dangling over the edge of Dean’s sleeping ledge like the kelp curtains that some of the ladies like to put up for privacy. “The meat is good, but the skin produces a chemical that makes it a good shark deterrent if prepared properly,” Castiel offers, as if Dean didn’t already know that. This time, Dean actually gets to see it as the color of his lower half fades—going from that strange, banded not-quite-orange to the dark blue that Dean remembers from before, with sandy gold suckers underneath. Okay, he’ll grudgingly admit that the color shift is really fucking cool…
As Dean watches, one of the biggest clownfish—Dean, in his own head, calls the little dude Buster; he’s as big as Dean’s spread hand, so a real specimen, for a male clownfish—swims closer to investigate the tips of Castiel’s legs, which are waving around in the current with the suckers rippling delicately.
And then Buster takes a bite.
“Hey!” Castiel rumbles indignantly in that strange, rough voice of his, flicking the fish away from him with a little whip of the tentacle. “Stop that! That’s rude.”
Buster clicks angrily then swims away, back to the main anemone and his harem.
“I guess my camouflage must have been working a little,” Castiel mutters, studying the tip of the tentacle that got nibbled through narrowed, annoyed blue eyes. “Maybe it needs to be brighter.”
Then he squints, and, right before Dean’s eyes, turns his whole lower half a brilliant, impossible, clownfish orange.
“There,” he says, proudly, looking down at himself. “Better?”
Dean loses it.
He only stops laughing for long enough to invite the weirdo cecaelia into his ledge so they can share the finless sole.
~to be continued~