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Sam cocks his gun slowly so that it doesn’t make enough noise to startle anyone, to alert anyone of his presence.
The docks have an ominous feel, there’s a fog settling over them, and Sam hides behind the grimy warehouse wall to conceal himself, but he feels something grab his leg, and then he’s submerged in water.
He thrashes and tries to find the thing that has him, shoots his gun, but it’s useless in the lake, the barrel clogging with water. He lets it float away and focuses on getting the . . . hand off his leg.
Sam fights the urge to scream because he’s losing air faster the further down he gets. He thinks his vision is blacking out, but it turns out he’s down so far there’s no more light to be seen.
The last thing he sees before he loses consciousness is Castiel’s face.
When he comes to the first thing he notices is that his lungs hurt. When his memories of what happened come back he finds that understandable. He’s above water now, but he’s still in it, pulled up half on the dock, but his legs are dangling in it.
His tail is dangling in it.
“Dean?” Sam yells, and he hears a groan from behind him. “Cas?” Sam tries to crawl over to him, but the tail weighs a freaking ton, and he can’t pull himself over without the scales catching on the wood of the dock.
The longer he’s out of the water, the tighter and heavier the skin feels, so he lets his tail fall back into it.
“Cas,” he croaks, and Castiel turns so he’s laying on his stomach. “What happened?”
Cas groans and there’s a trickle of blood making its path across the wet wood, and Sam throws himself into the water to get to Castiel quicker.
He wishes he had legs, this is ridiculous trying to maneuver the damn tail through choppy, nasty water.
“Cas, you okay?” When he nods his head Sam relaxes some.
“My grace is blocked, the water is cursed.”
“No shit --”
“Hey, what’re you two -- oh my god!” Dean screeches, and points his gun at the both of them.
“We’re not cursed, put the damn gun down.”
“You sure?” Dean throws some holy water their way anyway, but it doesn’t do anything more than irritate his skin like usual. “What the hell happened? Can’t Cas fix it?”
“The water -- they're like Sirens, but they’re actually Mermaids -- they turned the water into a sort of potion, and when Sam and I breathed it in --”
“You turned into Ariel and Flounder, got it.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Wait it out?” Dean asks, but Castiel shakes his head.
“No, there’s something missing here, a missing piece to the puzzle, as you say."
“I like your hair,” Sam blurts, and Cas’ brow furrows.
“Thank you, but I don’t think that’s helping,” Cas states. “I like your eyes.”
“What’s going on here?” Dean asks, and Sam’s eyes widen.
Truth potion.
Sam clamps a hand over his mouth, and realization crosses both Cas and Dean’s faces.
“Get to the big stuff, that’s always what breaks the spell, right? Last I heard.” Sam shoots Dean a look. “Uh, you know, I think I’m going to wait in the car.”
Sam turns back to Cas with flushed red cheeks.
“Sam, I like it when you wear red.”
“Thanks? Uh, Cas, we should skip to the big stuff, is there something you want to tell me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, uh, I do.”
“What is it?”
Sam pauses and stares at the angel for a long time debating whether or not he should say it, but his mouth betrays him.
“I love you.”
It hangs in the air like a bad smell, and Sam’s worried he’s said the wrong thing until sea-salt covered lips are meeting his own bitten ones, and the words are being whispered against wet skin over and over.
They kiss so passionately Sam doesn’t even notice that the swelling of his legs has gone down, and he’s paddling every once in a while to keep himself up, but Castiel is doing a pretty good job of holding onto him as their tails disappear.
“Get me the hell out of this water,” Sam gasps, and Castiel laughs. They struggle for a few moments before Sam is on the dock and panting. “You know, I bet Dean isn’t at the motel room, he probably left it for us to get cleaned up and stuff,” Sam says nonchalantly, but the implication for something else is there.
“I would like that,” Castiel says, and kisses Sam once more for good measure. And then again.
They don’t stop kissing for a long time, but Sam finds out that with just a little shock of grace to his system he’s able to go for longer periods of time without breath, and it doubles as a very pleasurable sensation Castiel fully takes advantage of.
Sam’s not complaining.