Chapter Text
“If the two of you don’t shut up so help me I will run this car into the swamp,” Sam says.
Dean whips back around in the passenger’s seat from where he’s facing in the wrong direction, turning his body and his anger to Sam. “Don’t you dare,” he says, and then goes right back to arguing with Cas.
The angel, meanwhile, didn’t even pause to listen to Sam’s threat. “If you weren’t being so reckless,” he says to Dean, but Dean drowns out the rest of his own sentence with a loud groan accompanied by an exaggerated eye roll.
Sam screeches the Impala to a halt, causing Dean to protest that his brother needs to take better care of the brakes when it’s his turn driving.
“Take better care of the brakes yourself,” Sam says, throwing up his hands in exasperation and then reaching to open the door of the car. “I will literally walk the rest of the way if it means not listening to any more of this.”
Cas snaps his mouth shut and Dean turns, surly, to face forward in the passenger’s side, so Sam shuts the door and begins to drive again.
The morning is disgustingly humid and oppressively hot; even in the shade of the trees the road passes under, the sun beats down on the black car and warms it like a preheating oven. Dean tugs at the collar of his shirt and then shrugs off his jacket, flinging it into the backseat without bothering to make sure it doesn’t land on Cas.
They’ve been hunting sporadically in the months that followed Chuck’s downfall, Jack putting everything back into place, and the world going back to about as normal as it had ever been. Sometimes it’s just Dean and Sam, sometimes it’s just Dean and Cas, and sometimes, like now, it’s all three of them, crammed into Baby like old times.
And like old times, sometimes it’s good, and sometimes they’re at each other’s throats. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the fact that Dean had gotten a nasty injury from a werewolf on their last hunt, but Dean and Cas have done nothing but fight from Arkansas to Florida.
Dean sulks in the passenger’s seat, crossing his arms and staring out the window. When they pull up to the motel, he jumps out of the car, grabs his duffle bag, and heads into the reception office before either Cas or Sam can follow. He’s half-tempted to get his own room, just for some peace and privacy, but he’s more interested in getting started on whatever hunt Sam has found for them, so he just gets their usual shared space with two queen beds a pull-out couch that Cas will never actually sleep on, and waits for the others to join him inside.
“So what exactly is this case?” Dean says, when Sam and Cas enter the motel room, which is incredibly dated and decorated in shades of lime green and hot pink that he assumes are meant to make it look tropical. The wallpaper is peeling from the heat, and the ceiling fan turns slowly with little effect. “What kind of monster we talking here? Swamp thing? Bigfoot? Are there Bigfoots in Florida?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Sam says, dropping his bag on one of the beds. “But get this, there’s a massive cave system that goes all across northern Florida. A lot of natural springs where people go scuba diving and stuff, and they all funnel down into underground caverns and tunnels.”
“Okay, so cave monster,” Dean says. “Grendel? Grendel’s mother?” When Sam looks at him skeptically, Dean says, “She was in a cave under a lake… I read, okay?”
“Ancient… poetry?” Sam asks.
“It’s good stuff,” Dean says with a shrug. “Lotta murder.”
“Right,” Sam says. “Anyway. Six people have disappeared over the last two weeks. The police report says that disappearances aren’t uncommon around here… people get lost in the forest and fall into springs, crocodile attacks, cave diving incidents, uh, meth… but these disappearances, well, the people don’t entirely disappear.”
“What do you mean?” Cas asks from the doorway.
“Uhm,” Sam says, “pieces of them turn back up later.”
“Delightful,” Dean says. “And what makes us think this isn’t just a big, hungry croc?”
“Because the first disappearance was thirty years to the day since the first of another set of disappearances,” Sam explains, opening his laptop and pointing at a grainy scan of a news story on his screen. “Fifteen disappearances total, and the six so far have all happened exactly three decades after the first six of those. Exactly, to the day. Crocodiles can live a long time, but they don’t hibernate for decades. It’s too much to be coincidence.”
“That makes sense,” Castiel agrees. “If it isn’t a crocodile, is there any indication what it might be?”
Sam shakes his head. “I’ve been researching but the lore is thin. A lot of urban legends, but nothing that looks promising or concrete. And there’s no folklore around here that matches the m.o. or any of the details we have.”
“Murderous unknown monster, no lore… well, bright side, we’ve done more with less,” Dean says. “What’s the plan?” Cas makes a noise somewhere between a cough and a laugh and Dean glares past his brother at him. “You got something you wanna contribute to this discussion?” he demands.
“I’m just surprised that now you’re willing to wait until there’s a plan before you go bursting in somewhere dangerous,” Cas says.
Dean opens his mouth to respond but Sam cuts in before can reply to Cas’s jab.
“Okay,” Sam says pre-emptively, “I’m going to go take a look at the scene. And hopefully the monster will eat me so I don’t have to deal with you two anymore. Are you coming with or are you both going to stay here bickering like Bobby and Rufus?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says, grabbing his jacket where he’s tossed it on the bed, although there’s no need for it in the Florida heat. “C’mon.”
The scene of the latest disappearance — or, rather, re-appearance, as they go to the crime scene where the latest victim’s left hand had been found by an early morning jogger — yields no further leads. A trip to the library to pore through old books in search of lore that hasn’t made it to digitization yet gives no answers either.
Sam makes a frustrated noise and sets down the book he’s holding. “Another dead end,” he says, “and according to the dates of disappearances from thirty years ago, we’re looking at two more deaths tonight.”
“Then screw this,” Dean says, putting down a sheaf of papers from the reference section, “Let’s go check out these caves.”
+
A dirt service road takes them into the woods, more like a jungle than a forest with the way the humidity coats the leaves and the ground with a damp blanket of heat. They’d found a map in the library of the known entrances to the local cave system, and picked the largest one that was near two of the disappearances as a starting point.
Dean parks the Impala along the side of the dirt road and Sam leads them between the trees for about half a mile until they reach the cave opening.
“A lot of the cave entrances are underwater,” Sam explains, “Springs or pools where people go swimming or scuba diving. But there are plenty of dry tunnels also. We don’t know if this thing is aquatic, but we know it definitely travels on land.”
“We wouldn’t get very far in a flooded cave anyway,” Dean says. He peers into the cave entrance. It’s a dirt passageway surrounded by rocks, narrow but tall enough for a person to walk through, set into a sloping hill that’s covered in moss and ferns.
“We can’t go in until we know what we’re dealing with,” Sam argues.
“Then why’d we even come out here?” Dean asks. “Look, you said nobody in town’s got any clues, the research was a bust, and if we don’t do something two more people are getting eaten by this thing tonight.”
“Dean’s right,” Cas agrees with a sigh. “We can’t afford to wait.”
“Well, don’t sound so happy about it,” Dean grumbles. They make their way back through the woods to the car to load up on what they’ll need to take into the cave. “Sam,” Dean says, “Why don’t you stay topside and see if you can find out anything else?” Sam nods. “I think those old walkie talkies still have batteries; we can use those. Cas—”
“I’ll go with you,” Cas agrees, before Dean can finish.
After a stop back at the Impala for guns, flares, rope, and flashlights, they return to the mouth of the cave.
“I don’t like this,” Sam says, looking into the mouth of the cave. “We have no idea what’s in there.”
“Yeah, well,” Dean says, standing next to him and staring into the darkness. “I don’t love it either, but…” he shrugs and slings a coil of rope over his shoulder. “Whaddya say, Cas? Journey to the center of the Earth?”
“I doubt this cave goes anywhere near the Earth’s core,” Cas says.
Dean snorts at this and rolls his eyes. Then he steps over the pile of rocks at the entrance to the cave and begins to walk into the darkness, sensing Cas following him close behind.
There’s a moment cavers often talk about, when they penetrate far enough into the cave that the natural light from the entrance no longer follows them into the blackness.
Sometimes the light that connects cavers to the world above grows fainter and fainter, slowly, as one travels along a straight tunnel into the depths of the earth, until it finally gives way to the unending darkness beyond.
Other times, it is almost immediate — caving at night, for example, offers no natural light from the start, or a cave system with sharp twists and turns can lose the sun only a few yards in.
In this cave, that moment comes quickly. The tunnel grades downward from the entrance for some fifty yards, then bends sharply to the left. When they turn the corner, Dean looks back, but any hint of sunlight is gone.
Cas seems to take no notice, but then again, he can see in the dark. Dean hesitates before turning the flashlight on. He doesn’t want to give whatever they’re hunting a heads up that they’re on their way, but he reasons that if he can’t see it, he can’t kill it, and he’s more likely to plunge into a hole and break his leg than he is to suddenly develop infrared vision, so he presses the button on the flashlight and floods the tunnel with brightness.
Dean squints until his eyes adjust again. The tunnel is narrow and getting narrower. The walls are slick with water, gray-green algae growing like wallpaper over them. At about waist height there are long scrape marks in the algae from, Dean assumes, the creature.
Inside the cave, the temperature is steady even as they go deeper. There’s no sun to warm it, no wind to cool it. The air feels stale and dead.
As they walk, the floor begins to slope noticeably downward, and Dean keeps his flashlight trained on the uneven ground to avoid tripping. When the beam plunges a long line into the darkness, he stops. The dropoff is sudden and sharp. The flashlight’s light doesn’t reach the bottom.
“Can you see how far down it goes?” he asks.
“Yes,” Castiel replies, peering over the edge.
“And?” Dean prompts, rolling his eyes.
“About thirty feet,” Cas reports. “I will lower you on the rope.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Dean says. He shines the flashlight down into the void again. “I don’t want to end up fish food for some Cthulhu down there.” He peers down into the blackness.
“I see no sign of the creature below us,” Cas says. He joins Dean in looking over the edge. “I might remind you that just because your vision as a human allows you to only see short distances in the dark doesn’t mean that my ability is similarly limited.”
Dean rolls his eyes. Cas isn’t quite a full-power angel anymore, these days, but he’s definitely not human either. He still can do things like see in the dark and smite demons, although now he gets tired, sometimes, and his grace wanes and needs time to recharge when he uses it.
Dean doesn’t know exactly why Jack left Cas with some of his powers and not all of them, if it was a decision they made together or something Jack decided in his capacity as their new god, or just a result of deciding to more or less permanently live on Earth instead of in Heaven. Dean keeps meaning to ask Cas for details, but it seems like every time they try to have a discussion lately they end up fighting instead, so they haven’t talked about it. There’s a lot they haven’t talked about.
“Please stop thinking so much,” Cas grumbles. “You’re very loud.” Dean rolls his eyes again. “Now,” Cas continues, “Tie the rope around your waist.”
Not seeing another option, Dean complies. With Cas holding tight to one end of the rope, Dean steps to the edge of the dropoff and turns around. He shoves the flashlight into his waistband; he can’t figure out any way to hold it so that it shines any light below him, and he begins to climb down into the darkness, fumbling beneath him for outcroppings of rock where he can set his feet, scrabbling with his hands for purchase as he goes.
Thirty feet feels like a mile. Dean can just barely see Cas above him, letting out rope hand over hand. Dean knows it’s not long enough to reach all the way to the cave floor, and when the rope gets fully taut, he presses his body against the wall and holds on with both hands as Cas drops his end of the rope, letting it fall down past Dean and to the ground somewhere below him.
Dean reaches one foot down and feels around for a shelf to step to, but finds nothing that juts out enough for him to place his boot. He must be near the bottom, he thinks. He wants to look up and see how far away Cas appears, but is afraid to lose his balance against the wall.
But he’s made bigger leaps than this, so he takes a deep breath and lets go, jumping to the ground and landing hard, bending his knees as much as he can to cushion the fall. He’s sore when he lands; his knees aren’t as young as they used to be.
Dean waits as Cas scrambles down, able to see the right places to put his hands and feet where Dean couldn’t in the dark.
“Showoff,” Dean mutters when Cas reaches the ground. Cas doesn’t dignify it with a response, just brushes past him and down the dark corridor ahead.
The walls of the cave get wetter the farther they get, shifting from slightly damp and tinged green with algae to full-on rivulets of water streaming down the sides from somewhere within the rocks above. The ground is getting wetter, too, slick and slippery underfoot. Dean keeps his flashlight pointed just ahead of his boots so as not to fall.
Then there’s another dropoff, but this time it’s not into regular darkness. The passageway is filled with water, going deeper into the cave through a flooded tunnel. Dean shines a flashlight into the water, which is clear and free of silt, movement, or any sign of a living creature, but can’t see how far it goes.
He looks to Cas, and the angel shakes his head. “I can’t see how much is flooded,” Cas says.
“Okay, how do we get through?” Dean asks. He looks at the spot where the water meets the wall. There’s no gap between the surface of the water and the ceiling of the tunnel; they’ll have to go under to go through.
“We don’t,” Cas says, as though the answer is obvious.
“Not an option,” Dean says.
“Oh, I’m sorry Dean,” Cas says dryly, “I must have forgotten that you’ve packed scuba gear in your pocket.”
“Cas, you know what—” Dean starts, cuts himself off. “Okay, shut up, let me think.” He doesn’t need to shine his flashlight in Cas’s direction to know that he has rolled his eyes in response. He stares down into the dark water, traces the path from where they stand to the place where the underground pool becomes an underground river through the cave wall.
“Can’t you—” Dean begins again, thinking out loud, “Can’t you make it so that I don’t need to breathe?”
“I can kill you, yes, if that’s what you’re asking,” Cas replies, tone as arid as a desert in contrast to the humid air inside the cave. Now it’s Dean’s turn to roll his eyes. “Dean, have I ever shown an indication that I can fundamentally alter human physiology? Even when I had all my strength? Evolution is real, you know. Even Chuck wasn’t giving out fish gills personally.”
“No, I know, I know,” Dean says. “But you can heal me. Right?” He starts speaking faster, still thinking aloud. “I run out of breath, you fill my lungs back up. We keep goin’. Angelic air tank.”
“Dean,” Castiel says. Dean trains the flashlight on him. Cas is looking at him in complete disbelief. “Of all of the stupid plans you have ever come up with…” he trails off and simply shakes his head to show what he thinks of Dean’s idea.
Dean is undeterred. “And your better alternative is?” he asks.
“I go alone,” Cas replies.
“Not happening,” Dean says. “We don’t even know how far back this cave goes. I ain’t letting you take off by yourself.”
“Exactly,” Cas says. “Cave systems can stretch for hundreds of miles. And this one could be flooded from here on out. We would need to stay within reach for your plan to have even a hope of effectiveness. What if I lost you?” he asks, then amends it to, “Lost contact with you?”
“So don’t,” Dean counters.
“Dean,” Cas says.
“Cas,” is all Dean replies, in a tone that brooks no room for argument. He pulls the beam of his flashlight away from Cas’s face and turns it down into the black water. The light is quickly swallowed up by the darkness, distorting and diluting until it fades into the murky depths.
Castiel sighs, and then says, “Take off your clothes.”
The words send a jolt straight through Dean. He knows that Cas doesn’t mean… that. Context clues, obviously. But that doesn’t stop his body’s immediate reaction to the order, so he tries to smother it down with a joke. “Cas, buddy, I’m flattered, but—” he begins, before Cas interrupts.
“This is suicidal enough without your six layers of denim and flannel weighing you down.”
“Right, yeah,” Dean says. He shrugs his jacket off his shoulders, strips off his plaid shirt, and opens the zip on his jeans, letting his pants slide down around his ankles before toeing off his boots and kicking them all the way off. When he’s standing in just his boxers and an old Motörhead t-shirt, he bends down to grab his knife out of the back pocket of his jeans. No point in taking the gun when it won’t work once it’s been submerged.
He doubts the flashlight is waterproof either; he’ll have to rely on Cas’s ability to see in the dark. He’s not turning it off until they go under, though. He loops the rope around his waist and ties it like a belt.
Castiel, meanwhile, has removed his trench coat, suit jacket, button-down, and pants, folding them carefully into a neat pile even though they’re covered in dirt and grime from brushing up against the narrow walls of the cave.
This leaves him in a white undershirt and dark gray boxers, and even in the current circumstances — both their being in a cave searching for a monster and the fact that he and Cas aren’t exactly on great terms at the moment — Dean can’t help but take a moment to enjoy the view. The ill-fitting coat and suit combo sometimes makes him forget that underneath Castiel is solid and surprisingly muscular. Even if he didn’t have any of his angelic strength, Dean thinks that he could hold his own in a fight. Or in other situations.
“Dean,” Cas says, pulling him out of his thoughts and away from his staring. “Are you sure you want to do this? We can go back to the entrance and look for another route down to—”
“Cas,” Dean says. “You heard what Sam said. The longer we take, the more likely that thing’s going to come oozing out of its lair again and kill someone else.”
“Okay,” Cas says. “But you have to stay within touching distance. Don’t wander off, as you have the tendency to do.”
“Buddy,” Dean replies, turning off the flashlight and setting it on the rumpled pile of his clothing, “I can’t see in the dark and I can’t breathe underwater. Where do you think I’m gonna go?”
“Maybe you should hold my hand,” Castiel says.
“Okay, mom,” Dean replies, sarcastically, but he reaches out until his fingertips come in contact with the cool skin of the angel’s arm, and he slides his hand down until he can intertwine his fingers with Cas’s.
He can count on one hand the number of times he’s held Cas’s. He’s always been careful about where he touches Cas, where it feels like he’s allowed to touch him. The shoulder, sure, a friendly pat as he walks by. He lets himself touch Cas’s face only when they’re in serious danger, on the brink of death. Then everything else goes out the window. But his hands, something about them feels off limits. Even in Purgatory, when nothing felt off limits, he rarely let himself touch Cas’s hand.
Cas gives Dean’s hand a squeeze, shaking him out of his thoughts. “Ready?” he asks. Dean nods, assuming that Cas can see it.
Together, they step forward into the water. It isn’t as cold as Dean would have expected. Like the cave air, he assumes it remains temperate due to being underground and unaffected by the weather. It’s not pleasant, but he doesn’t think he’ll get frostbite at least. His feet don’t touch the bottom.
“Are you ready?” Cas asks again.
Dean takes a deep breath. His last real breath for who knows how long. “Okay,” he says, “Ready.” Cas grips his hand tightly and pulls him down below the surface.
+
If walking through the pitch blackness of the cave felt akin to being buried alive, it’s nothing compared to the feeling of being underwater in the dark. Immediately, Dean feels disoriented. He reaches out the hand that isn’t clutching Castiel’s and his fingertips brush against the cave wall — or is it the ceiling, or the floor?
Dean kicks gently, trying not to stir up silt and block Cas’s vision. He closes his eyes — not like he can see anything anyway. His lungs begin to feel the pressure of holding his breath, tightening in his chest as his body uses up the oxygen in them. He feels like he’s choking, like he’s suffocating, and he claws at the water, at the cave wall, at Cas’s hand until suddenly he feels a flood of warmth where their palms connect and then his lungs are full of air again.
His first instinct is to try to breathe, and he only just manages to stop himself from opening his mouth and letting water in. His heartbeat is pounding in his head, rushing in his ears, and he presses his hand against the cave wall to try to ground himself and keep from panicking. He kicks his feet a little harder, trying to move faster through the tunnel.
Beside him, Castiel’s movements are smooth, assured. The benefits of being able to see in this seemingly unending darkness, Dean thinks. Dean trusts him, of course he trusts him, with his life, literally, even though they’re fighting, but he’s still eager to reach the end of the flooded portion of the cave.
Cas refills his lungs twice more before he’s guiding Dean upwards, and when they break the surface Dean gasps, nearly swallowing a mouthful of water as he tries to inhale real air. He coughs as Cas pulls him to the edge of the water. Dean crawls out on his hands and knees, spitting and sputtering until his airway feels clear.
“Fuck,” he says.
“You should wait until I tell you it’s safe before you breathe when we come up,” Cas tells him. “Carbon dioxide can build up in air pockets.”
Dean coughs in response, then says, “You really waited ‘til the last second to work your mojo, huh.”
“Yes,” Castiel agrees flatly. “I don’t know how far we’ll have to go underwater, and I can’t risk using more power than necessary. I’m monitoring your vitals; I won’t let you drown.”
“I know, no, I know,” Dean says, climbing slowly to his feet and taking a few deep breaths. “God, okay, let’s find this thing and gank it, get this over with.”
“I told you I would go alone,” Cas says, his annoyance radiating through the darkness even though Dean can’t see him.
“And I told you that’s not happening,” Dean replies. “So what’s next, back under?”
“No, this next section is dry. Well, there’s water, but it appears walkable. But stay close.” His hand finds Dean’s again, and while the physical contact isn’t strictly necessary when they’re not submerged, Dean doesn’t object. It immediately comes useful when he takes a step forward and puts his foot down on an algae-coated rock. Before he can slip backwards into the water, Castiel’s grip tightens and keeps him upright.
“Thanks,” Dean mutters, and Cas relaxes his grip again as they begin to walk. The cave is near-silent apart from their footsteps splashing through the water, which ranges from ankle to knee deep and back again as they go farther along the tunnel. Somewhere, there is the drip, drip, drip of water trickling in through the ceiling. The air is stagnant, with no movement that would signal any connection back to the surface.
Dean wonders how deep they are, how far they’ve penetrated into the cave system. He wonders how many more miles it stretches into the earth. Hundreds, maybe. He doesn’t think the monster could have gone that far, not if it comes out most nights. But there’s no way to know for sure, not without knowing how fast it moves. They could follow the minotaur deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, with only the thread of Castiel’s grace to lead them out. They could follow it until the cave becomes their graves.
Dean shudders involuntarily, and he feels Cas’s fingers stroke soothingly over his wrist. His pulse jumps beneath the pad of the angel’s thumb. Then Cas thrusts his arm and their enjoined hands across Dean’s chest, stopping him from taking another step forward.
“It gets deeper again here,” Cas reports. “Are you sure you want to—”
“Cas,” Dean cuts him off firmly. So Castiel leads him into the water and under once more. It’s not any easier the second time. This flooded section is longer, narrower. There isn’t space for them to move through it side by side, so Castiel guides Dean’s hand down to hold onto him by the ankle instead.
Dean can feel the cave walls brush against his shoulders on either side. He suddenly remembers reading a news article some years back about a spelunker who was trapped head first in a cave, and the long effort to rescue him before he finally succumbed. The article had said the cave ceiling would be collapsed with explosives to keep anyone else from accessing it, with the caver’s body left there, his final resting place.
Dean remembers the feeling of waking up in his own grave after Castiel had raised him from Hell. The claustrophobia of punching and kicking through the rotting wood of the coffin only to meet an avalanche of soil, the feeling that he had been mysteriously brought back to life just so that he could suffer once more as he suffocated under a mountain of dirt until he clawed himself out by the handful.
Just as he has to fight the urge to hyperventilate, Castiel refills his lungs with air again and at the same moment, the tunnel widens once more. There’s a slight current here, water coming in slowly from some underground well or spring, and the feel of the flow against his left side is even more disorienting than the darkness. Dean’s first instinct is to swim towards it, but Cas pulls him in the opposite direction and then upwards until they break the surface once more.
There’s a soft whistling noise here, the sound of air moving. Dean looks around to see if there’s any speck of light that would indicate an opening that leads aboveground, but he only sees the same flat blackness in all directions.
Cas has taken hold of his hand again, and he drags Dean forward until one of Dean’s knees scrapes against the hard surface of the cave floor where the water gets shallow enough to stand. He tries to do so and knocks his head hard against the ceiling of the cave.
A trickle of blood runs down Dean’s forehead and he wipes at it absently with the hand that isn’t linked with Cas’s. He smears the blood across the side of his face and into his hair, but he’s already so covered in muck and grime he doesn’t take much notice.
Dean hunches over as he begins to walk, so as not to smack his head against the cave ceiling again. The tunnel is narrower here as well, and although Dean doesn’t quite have to turn sideways to fit through, he is forced to walk with one shoulder dipped forward to squeeze between the tight walls of the cave. He wonders if they’ll reach a point where they can’t go any further.
He wonders how the creature gets in and out, if it’s smaller than they think, or if it can make itself smaller to traverse the tunnels, or if it has some other exit by which it can reach the surface.
Then Dean crashes against Cas’s back as the angel stops walking, and a moment later Cas has him pinned up against the wall.
“Shh,” Cas hisses, covering Dean’s mouth with a wide palm. “Listen,” Cas whispers, his voice a low rumble that Dean can feel through where his hand is pressed against Dean’s lips.
Dean listens, but he can’t hear whatever it is that Cas hears. And it’s a little hard to focus with Cas pressed up against him in the narrow passageway, undershirt soaked through from their journey through the flooded tunnel, hand tight over Dean’s mouth as though he can’t be sure that Dean won’t give away their position to whatever he heard in the depths of the cave.
Then, Dean hears it. A scraping, squelching noise that rubs along the cave walls from somewhere deeper. It sounds like it’s far away in the darkness, but it also sounds like it’s growing closer. Dean can’t guess the distance between themselves and the creature, can’t guess its size or whether the sliding noise of its body is a serpentine torso or a dragon-like tail.
It’s not like it’s uncommon for them to be going in blind on a hunt. Half the cases they do, it’s not until one of them is bleeding freely from the forehead and firing off shots at whatever it is attacking them that they actually know what exactly they’re dealing with.
But this? Not only are they literally in the dark, but they’re figuratively in the dark as well. They’d found no lore, no similar cases, nothing that would give them any indication as to what the creature is or what its weaknesses — if any — are.
They’ve got nothing but a coil of rope and Cas’s angel blade and Dean’s knife, and suddenly Dean thinks that his decision to head into the caves in spite of Cas’s accusations of recklessness may have only served to prove the angel’s point.
Dean’s heart thuds in his chest. It sounds loud in his own ears; the cave is silent except for the dripping of water along the walls and the slithering of the creature in the distances. Dean wonders if it can hear his heart beating, if it can hear him breathing.
Dean gets that digging-out-of-his-own-grave feeling again, clenching like a fist around his heart and filling his lungs with lead. He can feel his breathing speed up and he tries to no avail to slow it back down. Oh god — he’s about to have a panic attack.
Dean can no longer hear the sound of the creature’s movement, but he has no idea if it has moved further away from them or if its noises are just indecipherable under the pounding of his own heart. For all they know, it could even be like so many supernatural creatures across cultures — sounding inexplicably louder when it’s farther away, falling to silence as it draws nearer to its prey.
Dean narrows his focus to Cas’s hand that still covers his mouth, the press of the angel’s fingertips into his cheek. He closes his eyes. He’s in full darkness anyway, but at least squeezing his eyelids shut makes him feel, briefly, like the darkness is under his control.
Once upon a time he used to do this in Hell, pretending that when he blinked his eyes open again he would see something other than the red flames that constantly surrounded him. This time, when he opens his eyes, he still sees nothing. He can sense Cas’s face, inches away from his own, but he can’t even make out the outline of his silhouette.
Then Cas drops his hand from Dean’s mouth and steps away. “Okay,” he says, above a whisper but still keeping his voice low. “Let’s go.”
Dean sticks close to Cas down the corridor. The ground is wet, and they try to splash through the puddles as quietly as possible. Cas stops him before they’ve made it more than another hundred yards.
“Deep again here,” he reports. “Are you sure you want to—”
“Come on,” Dean says, before Cas has a chance to finish the sentence, to offer an out that they both know they can’t take.
Cas grabs Dean’s hand, and they step into the water.
Cas is just tugging him surfaceward again when something wraps long fingers around Dean’s ankle and yanks. Dean’s mouth flies open in shock as his hand is wrenched out of Cas’s, and he can feel a flood of air bubble up past his face as the creature drags him down, down, down.
Water fills his mouth and nose, rushing down his throat and into his lungs as he claws uselessly upwards, no match for the creature’s swift movement deeper into the depths. He tries to cough out water but there’s nothing to replace it, and he inhales even more when the creature’s nails pierce the skin of his leg. Dean can taste the sharp iron tang of his own blood in the water as the creature drags him down through it.
His lungs are on fire. He’s choking. He’s suffocating. He has no vision to blur but pain explodes behind his eyes as his synapses desperately fire, trying to make use of the last available molecules of oxygen in his bloodstream. He tries not to throw up; he doesn’t want to die with the sour taste of vomit in his mouth.
He’s getting disoriented from the lack of oxygen, can hardly tell which way is up anymore, but he tries to struggle away from the creature, taking more and more water into his lungs as he gasps and coughs. The thing’s claws are deep in his leg, a vise grip he’s quickly growing too weak to hope to escape.
He stops struggling and gives in to it, unable to do anything else. He closes his eyes.
It feels almost peaceful, the water surrounding him, rushing in his ears. If it weren’t for the pain where the creature's claws are rending his ankle open, it would feel like he was floating.
There’s a thundering noise and the water crackles with electricity. His eyes fly open as suddenly the blackness of the dark water is gone, replaced by a vibrant blue light. There’s a roar from below him, the sound carrying clear and loud and violent through the water.
Dean slips into unconsciousness.