Chapter Text
The coven job’s a mess. They knew it would be, going in fast after a single day of research—witches and missing kids, man, Dean’s least favorite combo in the entire world. Sam gets the leader nice and easy; a clean head shot as they burst through the basement door. The knife she was holding above poor, screaming, eight year old Timmy Fothergill’s sternum clatters safely to the floor, so that’s a win if they can hold it. But the room is packed like it’s convention week at the Hilton of Evil. Dean shoots two more, and it’s barely a dent in the crowd.
And it turns out their demon patron’s there too, all decked out like a gothlord to personally accept their tribute of the week. He does the handwavey thing demons always do, and Sam and Dean crash back against the cinder block wall. The live witches drag the dead ones into a corner and Gothlord monologues at Sam and Dean while the poor little rugrat sobs for his mom.
“Once the child has been sacrificed to Hell,” Gothlord pontificates, “you, Dean Winchester, will be next, and your brother can watch as we carve out your heart.”
Dean struggles against the invisible bonds holding him to the wall, but as usual with demon powered captivity, it does nothing whatsoever to free him. A skinny chick in a black velvet Hot Topical dress grabs the dead witch’s knife off the floor and takes her place threatening Timmy at the altar.
And that, thank Chuck, is when Cas shows up in a flutter of wings.
Cas is still wearing his psych ward hospital pajamas, but peacefully watching the bees must not be on today's agenda. He takes down the demon first, burning it from its host in a crackling orange glow. Sam and Dean come unstuck from the wall and start shooting again, while Cas walks casually around the room like a badass, smiting witches as he goes. The ones who aren’t dead yet chant and gesture away like mad, trying to cast whatever nastiness they can before they’re filled with either lead or Cas’ mojo. The room smells cloyingly of incense and sulfur, and Dean’s feeling pretty good now actually, adrenaline singing through him and only three more witches to gank before the town is safe and they can drive little Timmy home to his parents.
An especially unattractive witch with blood red fingernails and purple hair runs to where the fallen demon lies, and stands possessively over his husk of a meatsuit. She snarls Latin at Cas, and a burst of green rushes from her hands and crashes into Cas with the deafening roar of a concussion grenade. He staggers under it, but if he screams, Dean can’t hear it over the ringing in his ears from the spell. Tendrils of magic spark around Cas, writhing against the walls and falling from the ceiling in slimy glops, filling the room with green and purple so bright it’s an effort for Dean not to waste precious shooting time shielding his eyes. He squints and puts a bullet in the witch’s chest, and Sam takes out the other two. Cas is grimacing in pain, with his body bowed forward over the ruins of his dress shirt, and his hands scrabbling to brush the green and purple goop from his skin. Sam’s got some slime on him too, but he shows no signs that it’s bothering him.
“I’M FINE,” Sam yells “GO ON. I’VE GOT THE KID!”
Dean runs to Cas.
“I’m fine too,” Cas says, while he slumps to the floor in a distinctly not fine way. Dean can’t hear him too well over the after-effects of the spell, but it’s clear enough from his lips what he’s saying.
Dean pulls off his flannel overshirt and pats fluorescent purple slime off Cas’ face with it. “YOU DON’T LOOK FINE,” he says, possibly a touch too loudly. “YOU LOOK LIKE HAMMERED CRAP.”
“Well, I assure you—” Cas starts.
Then he stops. His lips thin into a tightly shut line and he disappears.
~*~*~
“What do you think’s going on with Cas?” Dean asks later, when little kidnapped Tommy has been returned to his white picket suburban home, and Dean and Sam are safely behind salt lines, stripping down to their T-shirts and boxers in their crappy hotel of the night. Sam got a fair amount of splashback slime on him, and once the excitement died down and Dean had time to look at his own clothes, it turns out he got even more. Neither he or Sam has noticed any typical spell effects, but showers are in order anyhow, because better safe than sorry.
“Dunno,” Sam replies. The constant buzz in the background of Dean’s hearing is down to post-rock concert levels, already loads better than when they left the coven. Nothing a couple of beers and a good five hours of rack time won’t cure. “You tried calling him?”
“Yeah, while you were getting the room. I prayed to him too, and called the hospital, but Meg says he took off and hasn’t checked in.”
Sam towels some stray purple glop out of his hair, hauls out his laptop, and plugs in the charger. “I’ll try running his phone.”
“He’s probably fine,” Dean says. Because he is probably fine. Almost definitely fine. He survived for millennia without Sam and Dean to take care of him.
Although Dean does feel a tiny bit nauseous when he pictures Cas collapsing to the floor with his face all scrunched up in that grimace of agony.
“Mmm,” Sam says noncommittally, typing away at his laptop.
“Gee, thanks for your input, Chatty Cathy.”
Sam looks up and his expression evolves from resting Sam bitchface into a combination of fond and something Dean can’t place. Whatever the second thing is, it’s definitely girly and annoying. “Go take a shower and get the magic gunk off, Dean. I’ll let you know when the phone trace goes through.”
“Yeah yeah, whatever,” Dean replies, because it’s not like he wants to sit there twiddling his thumbs and looking at Sam’s ugly mug while Sam does all the Cas-finding work anyhow.
He heads into the tiny bathroom. It has no particular color scheme other than mold, and the housekeeping staff—assuming there is one—appears not to have cleaned it since the Renaissance. Still, a shower is a shower, and even the worst hotels are a luxury these day, what with the leviathan after them and everything. The water’s moderately warm and the pressure’s almost adequate, and when he lathers up his hair with the entire contents of the single microscopic hotel shampoo bottle, the scent is pleasantly neutral.
He closes his eyes and lets the warm water sluice the hunt off him. He’s achy all over from smacking into concrete during the slammed-by-a-demon portion of the fight, and if the water doesn't exactly pound down on his back muscles or anything, it’s still pretty nice. The bathroom pipes clank, or maybe it’s rats in the walls. It’s weirdly loud, even over both the shower and the ringing in Dean’s ears, but ignoring noises that aren’t either monster-y or making the hot water fail is standard cheap motel survival skills, and—
—Wait, is that the shower curtain rattling now? Dean’s eyes pop open and his heart almost stops, because holy mother of god, it is the shower curtain.
Being opened by a brown, wrinkly, and heavily be-suckered tentacle.
There, six inches from Dean’s face, is an enormous, hideous, octopus monster.
~*~*~
Dean grabs behind his back for his 1911, but it’s not there of course, seeing as how he’s buck naked. His knife’s on the toilet lid, but he’ll never get to it past the gelatinous bulk of the monster, which takes up most of the bathroom, and its assortment of tentacles, which take up the rest.
“Saaamm!” he yells in a not at all panicked fashion. He could just use a hand is all.
“HELLO, DEAN,” rumbles the monster.
Sam kicks the door in, Taurus at the ready. The monster bops Sam gently on the forehead with one of its mammoth tentacles. Sam collapses. Dean heart rate skyrockets.
“IT’S ME; CASTIEL,” the giant octopus monster who is apparently Castiel says. “BE NOT AFRAID.”
“Cas?”
“A MATTER OF SOME URGENCY HAS ARISEN,” Octopus-Cas continues in his very loud octopus voice. “PLEASE COME WITH ME.”
Dean steps out of the shower stall and starts sidling, subtly he hopes, towards Sam. “What’d you do to Sam, Cas? And you’d better be about to tell me he’s just taking an unexpected nap.”
“HE IS TAKING A NAP.”
Cas doesn’t make any further threatening moves, so Dean squats down and checks Sam’s pulse. It does seem strong, and he looks peaceful, if—given the relative sizes of the bathroom and Sam—somewhat squished.
“Still bad manners, dude, but he did have a gun on you, I guess.”
Sam landed with one arm underneath him. Dean shoves him onto his side so he won’t wake up with pins and needles.
“How urgent is the situation exactly, Cas? Leviathan-are-breaking-down-the-door urgent, or just I’d-rather-not-be-an-octopus-all-week? And if you wouldn’t mind using your indoor voice, you’re making my ears bleed.”
“THIS IS MY—eh hum. I mean, this is my indoor voice, Dean. Your ears are not bleeding. As to the time frame—” Cas’ beady, dinner plate-sized, eyes glance shiftily around the room. “—it concerns neither octopii nor Leviathan.”
“Oh-kaay then,” Dean replies, and reaches for a towel. If nothing’s about to eat them all whole, being dressed is Job Next.
Cas makes a frustrated-sounding growl, and amends, “There is no exact time-frame required. However, sooner would be more felicitous than later.” He nods his head—which disturbingly is also most of his body—definitively, apparently more pleased with this second, not in the least bit clearer, answer. Dean is trying to squeeze past and get to his pants, but he’s not having a great deal of luck. Cas as an octopus is maybe not Chrysler Building-sized, but he’s still pretty huge.
“Shall we go, Dean?” One of Cas’ tentacles shoots out and grabs Dean around his wrist and another does the same with his shoulders and Cas starts pulling and prodding until rather than walking calmly to the bedroom to recover his dignity and then maybe dragging Sammy to bed to sleep off his Cas hangover, Dean is more or less forced to step over Sam’s prostrate body and shuffle reluctantly towards the window. The glass has a hole in it surrounded by spiderweb cracks that weren’t there when Dean got in the shower.
“Upsie-daisy,” Cas pronounces, and lifts Dean bodily to the window. Dean’s cheek smacks into the glass. He has a sudden flashback to a youtube video he saw once of a six hundred pound octopus compacting it’s body down small enough to fit through a hole the size of a quarter.
“Hey! Hold on a minute there, Terror of the Deep. Are you trying to take me outside? Because first of all, I can’t fit. And b, I’m naked.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Cas pulls Dean back down from the abortive window exit attempt and octo-handles him into a bridal carry. His body is giving and a bit jiggly where Dean is pressed against it, and surprisingly warm for a sea creature. It’s less unpleasant than Dean might have expected.
In fact really, if not for the part where Dean is a manly dude who doesn’t enjoy being carried around like a delicate princess and the other part where Cas is behaving even more irrationally than his recent norm, it’s actually kind of nice.
Cas slithers across the cracked linoleum floor, propelled on all of his remaining six tentacles that aren’t cradling Dean to his jelly-like bosom, past Sam’s snoring body, out into the hotel room where Dean was trying to go not thirty seconds previously, and from there across the hideous orange and chartreuse carpet towards the door.
“Still naked here, Bud,” Dean points out.
“Yes; you look lovely, Dean. Truly one of my Father’s most resplendent creations.”
“Um,” Dean says intelligently. He is definitely not blushing.
Despite being naked.
And now in the hall.
“Cas,” he hisses. “People will see us.”
“I’ve noticed you humans always find an erroneous but less frightening explanation for supernatural phenomena,” Cas says calmly, like its all about him. He doesn’t turn around to get Dean some pants.
Dean makes a series of token attempts at escape, but while Cas is less the consistency of concrete than he’s been in the past when Dean has hit him, he’s apparently equally impervious to damage. He slimes his way obliviously down the corridor and through the lobby. Both of which, by virtue of being the combined public areas of the cheapest hotel in the entire state of Indiana, at three p.m. on a Wednesday, are thankfully empty except for the clerk. The clerk is watching TV in Spanish and doesn’t notice anything amiss.
Cas squishes himself and Dean into the revolving door, lets it revolve them around to the outside, and just when Dean is seriously considering whether poking Cas in the eye would be out of bounds or not, turns into an eagle.