Chapter Text
"You feeling seal or fish tonight?" Dean asks, swimming lazily.
Sam shakes his head from side to side to dislodge a remora. "Definitely seal," he says. "There's something weird about the fish out here; they taste horrible."
"Giving up your embargo on mammals, huh?"
"Dude, the choice is mammals or fish that give me indigestion," Sam says, "Cut me a little slack, alright?"
Dean bumps up against Sam's side and flicks a pectoral fin at him with a laugh. "Relax, Sammy," he says. "Like I'd give you shit for actually acting like a shark and not a lame ass dolphin. Come on, let's go see if anything's stupid enough to just swim into our mouths."
Those are the best meals. Sam doesn't feel as guilty about those ones; he calls it natural selection or whatever and doesn't get that tragic look, eyes all stupid and dilated with shame.
The first time Sam bit a seal, it squealed and gibbered something. Dean doesn't speak mammal so well, but Sam'd had Jess once upon a time, and he understands it well enough to inform Dean that seals beg not to be eaten when you're, well, eating them.
Dean doesn't care enough to stop eating 'em, but it puts a serious crimp in Sam's style when he can understand the creatures he's eating. Poor pup.
Sam’s weird issues with eating live animals is one of the reasons they aren’t hunting seals in warmer water. The other reason is the Flat Seal Incident from two years ago. Sam doesn’t like to talk about the Flat Seal Incident, but Dean thinks it’s hilarious.
A few years ago, after Jess, they’d been happily (grudgingly in Sam's case) hunting seals around some island, Cas hitching a ride on Dean’s back every now and then. Dean’s pretty damn proud about how high he can breach.
Sam huffs and turns in tight circles, hunting down the seals Dean misses, not that it’s a lot or anything. “If you stopped trying to show off,” Sam says, “You wouldn’t miss so many of them.”
“Dude, do you see how awesome I am?” Dean flings the remains of a seal at Sam, swimming in lazy spirals as he contemplates the best way to scrape Cas off his back. He loves the guy, but those suckers get obnoxious after a while.
The last time he asked Sam to help pry him off, Sam “accidentally” almost swallowed Cas.
“You’re exploiting our privileges as apex predators,” Sam says.
“Swallow your mouthful of seal before you get snotty at me, dude.”
Sam sulks, but eats his damn seal. He’s horrible at breaching; he’s too damn fat or something. He can barely get out of the damn water, but, whatever, Dean is an awesome brother and can hunt enough blubber for the both of them.
At least Sam’s useful at scaring away orcas and shit.
A boat motors along overhead, so they dive down and drift for a minute, lazy. Dean thinks about scraping Cas off on the bottom of the boat. The last time he tried that, he accidentally capsized the boat and then had to deal with Sam getting bitchy about him chewing on the crew.
It’s not his fault humans are so fragile. He just wanted to help them back to their boat. And maybe see if they had blubber. Turns out they don’t, so it’s not like Dean would have eaten them. He’ll take a fat baby seal over one of those pink things any day.
“Is that a seal?” Sam asks, staring up at the wake of the boat.
Dean grumbles. He hates when the seals are smart enough to hide next to the boats. It makes it damn near impossible to eat them. “If it is, it’s a lost cause, dude. Come on, I gotta go scrape Cas off. Let’s head to shallow water.”
Sam’s still staring at the seal shaped shadow overhead though. “I could get that,” he says.
“You suck at hunting seals,” Dean points out. He nudges against Sam’s tail with his snout. “Don’t make me bite you, dude. That seal looks sickly.”
“We’re supposed to hunt sickly seals!”
“Not ones that are that sickly! It looks like all its guts are missing.” Dean eyes it suspiciously. “If you’re still hungry, I’ll get another seal on the way. Come on.”
Sam swims around him; Dean hates when he does that. Sam’s big enough that trying to swim in his wake is way more trouble than it’s worth. “No, man, I can totally get it,” Sam says.
Cas mutters something into his skin. Dean cranes his tail around to look at him and says, “Dude, can’t hear you when you’re sucking on me. Let go and try again.”
He feels Cas detach and circles to make sure the little fish doesn’t get pushed away by the current. “What, man? Hurry up, I gotta go stop Megalodon over there from making an idiot out of himself.”
“Humans mutilate sharks that attack the flat seals,” Cas says. He stares at Dean meaningfully. “It would be wise if Sam left it alone.” He reattaches to Dean, right behind his dorsal fin, before Dean can ask him what the hell he means by mutilate.
Great. “Sammy!” Dean yells after his brother’s fast retreating tail. Sam flicks his pectoral fin back at Dean but keeps right on going. Of course. “If you get mutilated by the humans, I’m going to laugh at you.”
“It’s a seal,” Sam yells back. “How is a seal going to mutilate me? That makes no sense.”
“Sam, I’m saying to just leave it alone. I mean it.”
Sam curves around to glare at him, tail flailing in agitation, and Dean’s got a second to think, ‘well, fuck,’ before Sam deliberately turns away from him and swims right at that fucking sickly seal.
“Don’t you dare bite that seal,” Dean says.
Sam bites the damn seal. Then he makes a surprised noise and pauses. “Dean?”
Dean comes up alongside his brother and eyes the part of the flat seal that’s still sticking out of Sam’s huge mouth. “Yeah?” he says, absently pushing forwards to bump it with his teeth. There’s no way that thing’s a seal.
“There’s a hook in my mouth.”
They haven’t encountered a hook since they left the warm waters they were spawned in years ago. Dad’d pointed it out to the both of them and told them to never touch fish parts hanging in the ocean, and that had been the end of that.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have bitten the flat seal, moron,” Dean says flatly. He tugs on the end of the not-seal he’s got, but Sam makes a small noise of pain and Dean can smell his blood on the water suddenly.
There’s a splash behind them. Dean swims around Sam in a wide arc, watching as the boat veers around. “What the hell?” he asks.
“Dude, I don’t care,” Sam says, swimming in a tight circle. Dean can see the tether in the not-seal now, how it’s attached to the boat and keeping Sam from just swimming off. “Just get the damn hook out.”
Cas sucks on his skin hard and detaches again. “Pull the flat seal,” he says. “Before the humans haul him in.”
“Haul him in?” Dean demands. He gets a better grip on his end of the freakin’ liar seal, snout bumping against Sam’s, and yanks backwards. The blood smell gets stronger, but fuck that, Dean’s big enough to fight off any other shark that may come sniffing around. He needs to get the damn hook out.
The not-seal tears. It tastes as bad as Dean figured it would.
“Got it,” Dean says, triumphant. He is an awesome brother.
“Still stuck,” Sam mutters. Dean can see the hook now, passing through the left side of Sam’s mouth and coming out again below his eye.
Dammit.
Sam jerks away from him when Dean tries to get his teeth around the edge of the hook. “Dude,” Dean says, “Hold still.”
“I’m not moving!” Sam jerks again, sideways through the water and towards the boat. His tail flails and nearly catches Cas in the spiral of bubbles. Dean feels him attach to his pectoral fin right before Sam plows into him.
“What the hell?”
Sam’s response is garbled. Dean sees why a second later; he’s being pulled along by the hook in his mouth, whole body flailing in agitation behind him. Dean whips around and zeroes in on the goddamn boat hauling his brother in and sees humans waving their freakish fins around and squealing like a pod of dolphins under attack.
Dean loops around until he can butt up against Sam, scraping his back reassuringly along Sam’s belly until his he hits the pelvic fin. Then he spirals down and swims out. He’s going to need momentum to get that sonuvabitch boat.
He can feel Sam’s bulk displacing the water all around them, attracting some of the smaller sharks. He takes a minute to chase them off again. The last thing either of them need is for some enterprising little shit to try to take Sam out while he’s tied up.
Fucking humans.
The water goes still. Dean pauses for a moment before he darts up to the surface, spyhopping to locate the boat and Sam. There’s Sam’s, floating belly up, which is weird as all hell, and one human is pointing menacing things at his claspers while another cuts into Sam’s belly.
Sam’s blood on the water makes him thrash. He vaguely feels Cas slide off of him and get lost somewhere in the undertow, but he’s more concerned with the fact that he can smell Sam on the waves. Sam isn’t even moving, his vulnerable white belly open to the scavengers circling the boat.
Dean’s nowhere near as big as Sam. He’s pretty sure Sammy outweighs him by a thousand pounds, but Sam’s a fucking Megalodon or something. In the regular shark world, Dean’s fucking impressive.
The humans start squealing when Dean rams into the side of the boat. Sam doesn’t move, bobbing with the backsplash Dean causes. While the boat rocks and the humans scream, Dean cruises around again to come up from underneath. He gets the edge of his snout against Sam’s dorsal fin and heaves.
A human slams into Dean’s spine before it tumbles off him and into the water. Its blood smells terrible as it floats away, but he can feel a couple of the smaller sharks lurking below him, waiting for him to get out of the way. Fine. Whatever, he doesn’t care if the humans get eaten.
He just wants Sam to start moving again.
Sam flails around suddenly, hitting first Dean’s claspers and then one eye when Dean automatically tries to curl protectively away. “Sam,” he barks.
“What’sit?” Sam slurs. His tail gives a single, sluggish flick as he sinks completely underwater. Dean lets him go. If Sam’s moving, he’ll heal.
In the meantime, he’s got a boat to punish.
Dean wasn’t kidding about having the best breach record in this hemisphere. He gauges the height of the boat, and feels his eyes start to roll back into his skull. He’s going to take that motherfucker down.
He circles down into the water. The trick to breaching is that you have to start deep enough that you’ve got the momentum to get yourself out of the water. It’s why Sam sucks at it. The seals don’t swim out far enough for Sam to get as deep as he needs to propel 3200 pounds out of the water.
The humans start screaming again when Dean slams down on top of the boat.
He beaches himself on the boat and cheerfully snaps at a couple of the braver humans, the ones trying to grab his tail and heave him back overboard. There’s where the tether connects to the boat; if he can’t get the hook out of Sam, he can do the next best thing.
He’s always deeply uncoordinated on land, but he manages to wriggle and push his way towards the end of the boat with this pectoral and caudal fins. Dean smacks another human over the side of the boat with his tail on the way, just because he can.
“You are showing off,” he hears. “This would go faster if you stopped.”
“Dude,” Dean pants, “When did you reattach?”
Cas’ tail slaps against Dean’s trunk. “Sam was going to eat me,” he says. “You should hurry before you run out of oxygen.”
A human gets in his way, shouting and waving a piece of straight driftwood around. Dean negligently rolls to hit it with a fin, careful of Cas, before he’s suddenly right where he needs to be. One good chomp takes out the rope and whatever its attached to and Dean slides gratefully back in the water with a wiggle of his tail.
Sam meets him underneath the boat. He’s paddling around the humans flailing in the water. “Overkill,” he says when Dean nudges him.
“Dude,” Dean says, “You weren’t fucking moving. There is no such thing as overkill.” He glances at Sam. “Now hold still and I’ll try to pull the hook out.” Their teeth aren’t made for doing anything delicately, but Dean still tries to get his teeth around the hook.
No go.
“How attached are you to your face?” Dean asks after a moment. He thinks he can maybe grab that hook, but only if Sam’s willing to grow back a good chunk of his face.
“Pretty attached,” Sam says.
Dean sighs and switches his attention to humans frantically trying to get back on their boat. “Looks like you’ve got a new fashion accessory, pup,” he says. “Can I eat a few of the people? Maybe just bite them? A little bite.”
Sam sighs. “Only if you don’t cripple them,” he says grudgingly. They swim back and forth, bobbing under the boat and mock rushing at the humans still in the water. The waves taste like human blood, which Dean figures is an improvement on the water smelling like Sam.
One of the smaller sharks spit out a human, grumbling about the lack of blubber and general taste. The human bleeds all over the water, but the news is out at this point and the other sharks circle, but generally leave them alone. Nobody wants to eat one of those when there are seals about.
“So,” Dean says, “The next time I tell you not to eat the sickly looking seal...?”
“Shut up, Dean.”
It becomes known as the Flat Seal Incident, mostly because Sam gets pissy when Dean calls it that-time-Sam-didn’t-listen-to-me-and-we-had-to-have-Bobby-pull-a-hook-out-of-his-face. Also, that was a mouthful.