Supernatural: Hydra [Part 1/2]
Title: Hydra
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Dean, past Sam/Amelia
Rating: NC-17 for tentacle porn (\o/!), the tiniest hint of breathplay, and permanent physical injury (blindness)
Word Count: 17,713
Author’s Note: This is the first of (hopefully) many humble submissions from me for the glorious tentaclebigbang. Initially I was writing something completely different for this, but then 8x14: Trial and Error happened and Sam made that beautiful speech about how there's a light at the end of the tunnel and he's gonna make Dean see it, and I was like, "TROLOLOL. YES, SAM IS GOING TO CARRY DEAN TO THE LIGHT. IN. HIS. TENTACLES." For five minutes it was a joke, but then Twitter happened and also, when do I ever joke about tentacles? So somehow that minute-long scene spawned this bigbang. Yeah, I don't make excuses for me anymore. I would like to thank a few people for helping me birth this monster: blythechild first and foremost for picking my fic for art and doing this INCREDIBLE ILLUSTRATION that, I mean, honestly. I freaked the fuck out when she sent me the first draft. There is so much raw emotion in her art and if you don't want to read this fic-if tentacles or Wincest aren’t your thing, trust me, you have still *got* to look at this art. Secondly, a huge thank you to killabeez who saw my desperate tweet about needing a beta when I took too long finishing to get it to my original beta (mea culpa) and bravely answered the call. She not only beta'd this SUPER SPEEDILY but also gave great comments, addressing all the things I knew were an issue in my original draft but had no idea how to fix (and then all the other bad writing, too). Next a shout out to the squiggly mod herself, unavoidedcrisis for allowing Chat to peer pressure her into making a new bigbang for all our weird, kinky needs. THIS ONE REALLY WAS AFTER MY HEART. ♥ And finally, many cuddles and kisses to deirdre_c and zubeneschamali, because they are THE WORST INFLUENCES and were the first and most vocal respondents to my tweet about how this fic should exist. I would like to say they supported me from the very conception of the fic all the way until I finished, but the more honest way to put it is they enabled the crap out of me and convinced me this was a good idea. THANKS, Y'WHORES. I hope you guys enjoy it every bit as much as you were expecting to!
Summary: Sam completes his second trial-slaying a hydra-and is one step closer to shutting the gates of Hell. The hydra's venom has a curious side effect, however, and Dean wakes up one day to find six tentacles have sprouted from his brother's back. When Kevin sends them to an oracle to find out the last trial, they discover why.
ART
AO3 ~ PDF
TIMESTAMP: Tunnel Vision - set after this story, does contain spoilers
PART ONE
"Don't cut its heads off anymore," Dean yells at his brother. "You're just making it worse."
"Yes, thank you, Dean," Sam calls back, struggling to hold onto one of the hydra's thick necks as at least ten others turn on him. "I noticed that. But it's kind of hard not to cut them off when they're trying to eat you!"
He's so distracted responding to Dean that he nearly doesn't see the pointed spike of a tail as it tries to crash down on him. Thankfully, it knocks one of its own heads unconscious instead of Sam, but that's nothing but pure luck. And this kind of shit right here? This is why Dean was supposed to be the one up to his balls in these stupid trials. He's a backseat monster slayer. He doesn't know how to just stand here and watch as this thing tries to tear down his brother.
It's bad for his blood pressure, okay?
The hydra looks both exactly and nothing like Dean expected. It's a giant, hulking mass of dark purple and blue scales (they change color in the sunlight, which would be kind of cool if the thing weren't trying to swallow Sam), rising up out of the water and towering above them as tall as any cliff Dean's ever seen. He didn't even know hydras lived in water, except that this is where Kevin sent them, and it was pretty clear this was no ordinary beach as soon as they arrived. The rocks jutting up from the ocean are all worn down, not by erosion but from contact with the vile, bright purple poison the monster drools and spits and keeps trying to drown Sam in. Even the sand on the beach is singed in places-apparently the shit is so toxic it burns right through anything it touches.
The police in town had warned them when they tried asking questions about this beach. "That one's not for swimming. We tell everyone: stay away. Sometimes, tourists don't listen, and that's where your missing persons come from." Dean was expecting some local legend about the monster in the water, but the cop laughed at him and shook his head. "Nothing silly like that, just some toxic waste. But it'll burn right through your skin-no kidding. That beach is restricted and don’t go poking at it."
He's trying really hard not to think about that right now.
The hydra looks like a thousand giant snakes tangled together, with its big body so obscured by the squiggling mass of long necks, spiked tails, and tentacles that it's hardly there at all. It crawled up on the beach to try and get to Sam when he first started fighting for its attention, so Dean, standing on the sidelines with front row tickets and a direct order not to do anything, has a pretty clear view of it.
The tentacles are the part that catch him off guard. All the drawings of hydras Dean's ever seen show them standing on four thick, clawed legs, but this thing just has what looks like hundreds of tentacles to swim and walk on. Maybe he shouldn't be so thrown by that-when do the things they hunt ever actually look like popular lore says they will?-but it's such a freakish sight watching this enormous creature trying to balance itself that Dean can't adjust. It sucks, too, because legs can be sliced at, worn down, forced to buckle, leaving the monster at the disadvantage of not being able to move, but the tentacles, like the heads and, Dean suspects, the tail as well, just grow back double when Sam slices through one with that dopey sword they'd doused in gasoline (of all the things to kill a hydra…). It looks so tiny, like a sewing needle, next to one of the hydra's massive heads, and there's tons of those. He doesn't know how the hell Sam is going to beat this thing with such a dinky weapon.
Well, okay, he does. Sam needs to stab the sword right into the monster's brain, which sounded a lot easier when Dean assumed that meant piercing any of the heads in the right place would be the end of it. No, no, apparently only one of the heads-the original one-actually has a brain inside it. The rest are just extensions of the body, like the tentacles, only with big, snapping jaws. Which explains why they're all so stupid. And Sam gets to try to figure out which one in particular is somehow special. He's already driven the knife's blade through about twenty of them to no avail.
Along with the seven or eight heads that the monster has taken out itself trying to swat at or bite Sam (Dean's not joking when he says the creature is an idiot), that leaves nearly thirty heads hanging limp and dead-which is good, it’s slowed the beast considerably by weighing it down, but there's no way Sam is going to have time to take out the rest of them before something goes wrong. The hydra has hundreds of heads. Sam's been fighting and fighting well for over an hour straight and he's hardly made a dent. Something is going to have to give before his brother is too worn out to keep fighting. Dean wants to close the gates of Hell and all, no doubt about it, but if it gets to the point where Sam can't fight, he's stepping in. Whether it ends the quest or not, he doesn't fucking care. He's stepping in.
It's the venom that has Dean the most concerned. He knows Sam's a capable hunter-maybe he's never fought anything this big, but he's wrestled some strong, smart sons of bitches, scarier than this giant, idiotic creature, and he's quick enough that the heads are confused by him, trying their best to keep up, but they keep biting at each other and missing Sam. Dean taught him well, what can he say? Sure, that many heads, each with long rows of teeth that seem as tall as Sam (and, to Dean's unending bitterness, Sam is not exactly what you'd call a short guy), trying to eat his brother is bad enough, but the venom is just the kind of shit that Winchester luck has to be wary of. Sam would kill a fucking hydra only to be burnt up alive by a flying glob of stray drool.
Right now, Dean is watching the heads instead of his brother, trying to be useful because keeping his eyes on Sam is just making him freak out even worse. Sam's doing fine, doing great, Dean keeps reminding himself, but his odds are not very good at all, and it makes him angry all over again. This should be his task. Sam should be sitting where he is, useless and concerned in that Sam way of his but not on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. This wouldn't be torture for Sam like it is for Dean and if something is gonna go wrong-well, if something goes wrong, it's one thing if it's Dean who dies and something completely different if it's Sam.
Hell, if Sam could sit back and watch this attack like Dean is, take the time to be his nerdy, analytical self, he would probably already have figured out which head to kill, would have told Dean, and voila. Trial number two complete, bring on the next, Dean wouldn't be afraid.
Instead? Instead he's sitting here with his thumb up his ass, trying not to wonder what task number three is going to be if they get this much more dangerous in degrees, because fuck. He thought the hellhound thing was bad.
Sam swerves impressively, taking the chance to jump down and land on another head as the one charging at him chews straight through the head he'd been on before. Purple ooze-is that its blood, maybe?-rains down, just hardly missing Sam and burning the creature's back instead. The hydra rears its many heads, letting out a cry of pain, and Sam manages to take two more out of commission while it's distracted.
Dean takes a deep breath and tells himself it'll be alright. If there's one thing Sam knows how to do, it's fight, no matter the odds. Well, fight and have bad hair, but that's two things, and right now it's the fighting Dean wants to focus on. He needs to pay attention, try to be useful, try to find the one head in a million that matters when you stab it.
Then he spots something unusual. One of the heads is hanging back instead of throwing itself at Sam like a mindless killing machine. It doesn't look any smarter than the rest-in fact, it looks considerably dumber, with its neck tilted and its tongue dangling out, eyes fixed off in the distance instead of on the carnage going down on its own damn body. Dean would laugh at it, but he's got a suspicion scratching at him. He doesn't know if hydras can have plans, but if they can, this isn't a bad one. Keep the important head at a safe distance, all the while making it look so stupid no one would think it could possibly be the one with the brain inside.
The son of a bitch is acting.
"Get the stupid one!" Dean cries out.
"They're all stupid," Sam replies, slicing at one big eyeball.
"No, I mean the really stupid one. The one that looks checked out. To your left, but way back."
Sam takes only a second to look over his shoulder where Dean directed, blade sliding into the monster's nearest cranium as he does so. Even from the distance he's at, Dean can see Sam's eyebrows draw together once he sees the dopey head, and then they smooth out as it clicks, Sam letting out a breathless huff of a laugh.
Then he's sprinting the long length of the neck he was standing on as that head falls down, leaping onto another, and Dean's going to have a heart attack watching the crazy bastard running around like that, all impulse and no caution. Not that Dean would behave any differently in his place, but fuck, he really, really, really hates having to watch.
Sam climbs the spikes on necks, jumping from one to another like Tarzan swinging on vines. Dean has to cover his eyes. If Sam falls, it'll be right into a sharp tail, wide jaw, venomous puddle, or the thrashing waves of the sea around the monster, right into range for the tentacles to drag him under. If Sam falls, it's game over and if he doesn't, he's still got all those angry mouths to contend with.
But Dean can't look away forever and finally he chances a glance. Sam is crawling up the neck of the head Dean thinks will kill the hydra, and although that head hasn't snapped out of its playing dumb defense mechanism, its eyes are trying to focus on Sam, a much more intelligent, worried look in them than it had when Sam was ignoring it. Once he reaches the top, the hydra really starts getting pissed, all of its remaining heads turning on Sam, and Dean knows they have the right one. He stands, yelling…he doesn't even know what encouragement. Sam doesn't let the oncoming trouble distract him, but if this isn't the right head, it'll be the end of Sam and their stupid quest. Too many are coming now at once.
Dean can't hold back anymore. He looks around for something, anything, and bends over to pick up a big rock. It won't do anything to a monster this size-at least not enough to cause real damage, which Dean knows he's not allowed to do. But maybe he can distract it, buy Sam a few more moments.
He throws the rock as hard as he can, hitting one of the heads in the back. They all stop and hiss at him for a second, and that second is enough. Sam stabs down hard and the hydra lets out a cry that will probably wake the whole town, even though it's a few miles north of the beach. The hydra thrashes a few seconds longer, until finally it begins to collapse down toward the ground, Sam surfing it.
Dean jumps in the air, whooping in victory, before running from the cliff, arriving at the beach right on time to see Sam hop onto the sand. Alive. Looking exhausted but unharmed. Alive, he's alive, and Dean wants to wrap his arms around his brother and swing him in a circle, he's so fucking happy, but Sam's too big for that, and, anyway, Dean needs to play it cool.
"That took you long enough," he says, meeting Sam on the shore.
Sam drops the sword and falls to his knees, taking deep breaths, until finally he can manage a wheezy, "Fuck. You."
Dean grins, patting him on the shoulder. "Hey, man, you did it."
"Yeah," Sam says, his voice a little steadier now. He smiles up at Dean with the look on his face from back when he was just a kid and Dean used to be his hero. Dean's chest aches a little. "Thanks to you."
"Hey, what can I say? I'm a genius."
Sam snorts, struggling to his feet, and then he moves toward the hydra, walking up to one of the open mouths. He grabs at a tooth, trying to wiggle it free, and Dean launches forward, grabbing his hands to pull them away. "What the hell are you doing? That shit's still poisonous. If the tip cuts you-"
"I didn't tell you the whole task," Sam admits, letting Dean pull his hands away, but looking guilty as he does it.
"What do you mean, Sam?"
Sam swallows. "I didn't tell you what I had to do after I killed the hydra, because I knew you wouldn't let me even try if I did."
Dean's got a really bad feeling about this. "What else do you have to do?"
"Remember how after the first task I had to say those words to activate myself or whatever?"
Dean nods.
"Well," Sam's eyes dodge away from his, "after this one, I have to, uh. I have to stab myself in the heart with one of these teeth."
Dean stares at him flatly, unimpressed by the joke, but Sam doesn't start laughing. "What the hell do you mean you have to stab yourself in the heart with it?" he nearly yells. "There are three trials. The second one can't kill you."
"That's the idea," Sam answers uneasily. "According to Kevin, if I'm the right man for the job, if I have the strength of will and mind and the right intentions, then instead of killing me the tooth will fuse into my bones, the venom into my blood, and give me the strength of body I need to accomplish the final task."
Kevin. That little bastard. Just so happened to forget to mention that part to Dean. He's gonna kill that kid the next time he sees him. "No. No way. I'm not letting you do it."
"Dean," Sam says, exasperated already. "You know I have to. We can't turn back now."
"You're talking about stabbing yourself in the heart-"
"I'm talking about closing the gates of Hell forever."
Dean goes right on, not really interested in the why. "With a razor sharp hydra tooth full of venom so strong it eats through rock."
"Kevin said that if I'm destined to do this, it won't be a-"
"You're strong enough! You don't need supernatural steroids to do whatever the next task is."
"They're going to give me something," Sam insists. "Some new kind of strength that I absolutely need to finish this thing."
Dean crosses his arms over his chest. "And what's that?"
Sam shrugs. "Look, I don't know. Kevin said the prophecy was kind of vague, but this is what I need to do."
"Yeah, that's great. Let's go poking you full of holes so that you can satisfy some vague prophecy. What if he misread it? What if the strength turns you into the Hulk? You don't know."
"Oh, just say it," Sam yells. "What if I'm not the right person? What if I'm too weak to see this through? That's what you're thinking, and I know it."
"Well, what if you're not the right person?"
Their shouts seem to echo across the beach for minutes, and Dean feels bad as soon as he sees the stung expression on Sam's face. His brother's eyes dim, and he looks angry, but his voice comes out in a low, measured tone. "Then it's too late to do anything about it. We have to try."
"Sam," Dean says in a placating tone. "I'm not trying to doubt you. I don't know of anyone strong enough to take a tooth like that to the heart and live to see the next day. Not to mention, you haven't exactly been at the top of your game, physically, ever since you finished the first trial."
Sam looks a little surprised to hear Dean say it, but then he gives a resigned shrug. He can't really have believed Dean wasn't noticing all the coughing, the bloody napkins, Sam's dodgy responses trying to cover it up. So he doesn't try to lie about it. "Maybe the strength this gives me will fix that. Maybe I'll be healthy again."
"Maybe you'll be dead. It's not worth it, Sammy."
"Not worth closing the gates of Hell?"
Dean doesn't back down. "Not if it's going to kill you."
"This is ridiculous," says Sam. "If you had gotten your way, this would be done right now. You wouldn't have stopped to worry about the consequences, you wouldn't have asked my permission, and I wouldn't have doubted you."
"It's different," Dean replies.
"Why is it different?" Sam asks. "Because you don't think your life matters as much as mine? Well, tough shit, Dean. It's my trial. It's my heart. I decide what to do here, and I'm doing it with or without your support."
He returns to the hydra's corpse and works at the tooth again. It's not nearly as big next to him now that the monster isn't a threat-maybe as big as his hand, which is still pretty big, especially for a tooth. Especially for a tooth Sam intends to stick into his goddamn heart.
Once Sam dislodges the sharp canine, he turns back to Dean, walking right up and placing the thing in Dean's hand. "I can do this alone if I have to. But it's not like I'm not scared. It's not going to be easy. I believe I can do it. Please, can't you believe in me, too?"
"I believe in you, man," Dean says, more to the tooth he's looking down at than to his brother. "But I can't just watch you do this."
Sam takes his hand and guides it to his chest, pressing the point against his heart. He looks terrified, but he catches Dean's eye and holds it, so brave Dean is still a little in awe of who his brother grew up to be.
"Help me, Dean," Sam pleads. "I really need you with me on this."
Sam presses lightly, urging Dean to make the final push. He wants Dean to be the one to drive this through, and Dean can't, he can't. But then he looks up and sees Sam's eyes braced shut as he prepares himself for whatever comes of this. Dean thinks of all the other impossible shit Sam's pulled off over the years. If Sam can be this strong, Dean can believe in him.
"It's gonna be okay, Sammy," he tells his brother, and Sam nods, eyes still shut.
Then Dean takes a deep breath and throws all his weight forward, like jumping into the deep end. Sam gasps at the first impact, but Dean watches in amazement as the tooth goes in and in, Sam's chest lighting up for only a moment as it sinks through the flesh and becomes a part of Sam. No blood. No cut. Sam opens his eyes wide when it's done, looking a little shocked, a little hazy, but not like he's in agonizing pain.
"Are you okay?" Dean asks.
Sam lifts his hand up to his chest, feeling around. Then he meets Dean's eyes, a disbelieving smile starting to spread across his face. "I…I feel great."
_______________________________________________________________
Sam feels so much better that he spends the entire next day locked up in his room at the bunker sulking. At least, that's what Dean assumes he's doing in there. He's triple-bolted the door (the first time Dean isn't thrilled by how paranoid the Men of Letters were, because seriously, who needs that many locks on a bedroom door?) and won't come out for anything, not even food, not even to tell Dean what crawled up his ass after the great mood he'd been in after killing the hydra yesterday.
So, yeah, Dean assumes he's sulking, or crying, or writing emo poetry, because that seems in character for Sam, and Dean's been studying Sam since he was nothing but a fleshy bump in their mom's stomach. He considers himself something of an expert.
Problem is, 48 hours ago Sam was coughing up blood and trying to hide it from Dean, and 24 hours ago he seemed to be on the mend, was swearing up and down that he hadn't felt so good in years, and Dean believed him. But he's no idiot. Sam hasn't shown his face since they waddled their drunk asses to bed last night. Whatever's making him hide out has to be bad-has to be worse than the dying-hooker-coughing-up-blood routine, and Dean's getting anxious imagining all the horrible ways the second trial might have backfired.
The venom was supposed to be instant death, he keeps reminding himself, it would have burnt Sam up in seconds if it was gonna hurt him at all. But what if something went wrong? What if he drove a spike of poison right into his little brother's heart and Sam drops dead in there alone trying to pretend he's okay?
The only thing that's kept Dean from battering the door down has been the fact that Sam's room has been quiet-no coughing, no cries of horrible agony-all day. But he's just about reached his limit. He takes down the closest gun from the wall (a hunting rifle from the early 20th century), checks that it's loaded (it is, Dean fucking loves the Men of Letters), and sends a warning shot into the middle of Sam's door.
Silence for about half a minute until finally, "Dean, what the hell?"
Dean feels an instant surge of relief. Sam sounds annoyed and bitchy, like he would any day Dean fired a bullet into his door. Not in pain. Not dying. Just annoyed. "This is the last time I'm gonna ask you to quit jerking off and open the door before I shoot the damn thing down."
He hears a heavy sigh through the metal and takes a little heart from it, so he continues, "And don't think I'm kidding, because I'm not."
"Yeah, Dean." He hears one of the locks slide on the other side and feels both more and less tense as he realizes Sam's about to open up. "I could have guessed that from the fact that you just tried to kill my door."
It only opens a crack, but Sam peeks out through it. He looks fine, and Dean's worry subsides as his eyes scan down for signs of injury and he realizes Sam's not wearing a shirt and, fuck, Dean's eyes jump back up before he stares or at least before it becomes too obvious.
"What's up, man?" Dean asks.
Sam shrugs. "Nothing. I told you I'm fine. Can't I have a damn day to myself?"
"No," Dean says. Then, "I mean, yes. But not until you come out here and eat something and prove to me that you're not about to cough yourself to death or something equally embarrassing to our family name."
He tries to push the door open a little more; Sam holds it where it is. It doesn't even budge, which only makes Dean push harder. He's throwing his whole body on the door to no effect; Sam's only got one arm that can be holding it, but he doesn't even look like he's breaking a sweat.
"You got someone in there?" Dean asks, curious as to how Sam might have slipped out to pick someone up between now and the last time Dean saw him out and about.
"No," Sam replies, and then he scrubs a hand over his face.
He stops and stares at his left hand just as Dean's attention is catching on it, too. Sam isn't holding the door at all, at least not with his arms.
"Yes, I do," he adds quickly, but Dean just raises an eyebrow. "Okay," Sam says. "If I let you in, you have to promise to stay calm and not-"
Dean starts shoving at the door harder, throwing his whole body into it. Without warning, it opens, and Dean doesn't have time to slow himself before he finishes hurling his body through the open space where the door should be.
"Freak out," Sam finishes calmly, looking down at Dean.
From the floor, Sam almost looks like he's all wiggly, or maybe Dean hit his head and didn't realize it.
Then Sam reaches down, offering Dean a hand up and pulling him to his feet. As soon as he's upright, Dean sees more clearly what he thought he was imagining down on the ground. Sam is wiggling alright. He's got-Dean stops to count-six fucking bright purple tentacles protruding out of his back.
"Holy shit," he says. "What the-?"
Sam smiles awkwardly and shrugs, "You promised not to freak out."
"No I didn't!" Dean says. "I was too busy collapsing through the-what the hell is on your back, man?"
"What do they look like, genius?"
Dean blinks a couple of times and then can't help it, he doubles over in hysterical laughter. "You're a tentacle monster," he wheezes. "Dude, you're a fucking tentacle monster!"
Sam's expression is flat. "Thanks, Dean. For being so understanding."
Dean stands up straighter, trying to wipe the tears of laughter away. "Oh my god, oh my god, you're an octopus. Sam. Sammy-you've got eight arms and six of them are purple."
"Gee, I wonder why I didn't want to let you in earlier," Sam mumbles, but Dean sees that there's a tiny touch of a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Seriously, cut it out. It's not funny. I have no idea how I'm supposed to go outside like this."
That sobers Dean a little, and he does his damnedest to swallow the laughter, because Sam's got a hell of a point there. How are they supposed to go get burgers, let alone accomplish the third trial, when Sam looks like Cthulhu's way less intimidating baby brother?
"I guess we'll just have to cut them off," Dean says.
Sam swallows hard and nods, like he'd already figured that would be the next logical step but he's not particularly excited about it.
It only takes a few minutes to set up. Sam lies on his stomach with six thick tentacles squirming in the air above him.
Dean takes a step closer to his brother, observing the extra limbs with a little kid's fascination for all things creepy or crawly. The tentacles look like the ones that were on the hydra yesterday-which makes sense, if any of this can be said to make sense-only much smaller. They're a dark shade of purple that turns to a metallic blue when they catch the light, the suckers on the bottom of each two-by-two rows of dark teal. They meet Sam's skin with just the slightest pretense of blending in, slick purple skin turning to Sam's bronze seamlessly. Despite that, they look almost natural, almost like they belong, and Dean worries for a moment that he'll miss the line and cut Sam instead of the unwelcome appendages.
"Can you just do it already?" Sam grumbles into his arms. They moved into one of the spare rooms, Sam not wanting to ruin his bed with blood and tentacle goo and whatever else comes out. Sam has that poison in his veins now after all, and if it's going to burn right through the floor, it might as well not be anywhere they've gotten attached to.
"Alright," Dean says, pulling back and picking up the machete he'd brought with him. "But they're kind of cool." He pokes one gently with the tip of the blade. "Did they hurt to grow?"
"Nah, they didn't hurt. I just woke up this morning and there they were." Sam laughs, turning his face so half of it is looking up at Dean. "Our lives, huh?"
Dean gives his brother a weak smile. Sam looks like he's a little more nervous than he's trying to let on, and Dean can't help reaching out with his empty hand, stroking gently over the hair on the side of Sam's head. "Hey, that probably just means this won't hurt, either."
Sam nods, closing his eyes tight. "You should hurry up and do it. I can't really control them all that well, and they might try to fight back once you start."
With one quick swing, the tentacle just under Sam's left shoulder blade falls to the floor, wiggling desperately like a fish out of water. Sam lets out a scream and Dean stops before continuing. "You alright, Sammy?"
"It feels about as good as losing a limb usually does," he says through gritted teeth.
Dean swallows hard, wondering how many times Dean has lost a limb in Sam's memory and whether his brother meant his answer rhetorically or if he's really just in enough pain that he's forgotten that Dean doesn't remember any of those deaths. "Do you want me to keep going?"
"I can't really walk around with five tentacles on my back, now can I?" Sam snaps.
Dean decides not to hold the prissy tone against his brother and quickly hacks away at the tentacle on his right shoulder. He moves all the way down, deciding to lob off the bottommost tentacles before the ones in the center of Sam's back. It's not until he's halfway through the fourth, bottom left, that he sees the skin beneath the first wound he made starting to shift.
"Why are you stopping?" Sam asks. "There are still two more. I can take it, okay, just get them off me."
Dean watches in horror as two tentacles begin to grow like vines from the shoulder where there had only been one before. Sure enough, the right side begins to shift in the same way, and after a few more seconds, both of the bottom wounds are, too. "You can't feel that?"
"Feel what?" Sam asks. He begins to push up so he can look at Dean, but Dean pushes him back down, so Sam yells, "Feel what, Dean?"
"We, uh, we probably should have thought this out a little more," Dean answers.
Sam's hands reach back and he groans when he feels ten hydra-like limbs where there had only been six, face falling into the pillow like he's hoping it'll swallow him. "This can't be real."
But of course, it is.
_______________________________________________________________
"Alright," Dean says awkwardly, pacing in front of the table and looking at his brother. "This isn't the end of the world, right? We can figure this out."
"I have tentacles," Sam says in the kind of too-calm, too-collected voice that makes Dean think of the eye of a hurricane, or Dad just before the last drink would hit him. "Ten of them. Growing out of my back." Sam's voice begins to rise. "There are tentacles growing out of my back, Dean!"
"It could be worse," Dean reasons. "We really found this hideout just in time. At least we've got somewhere to store your freaky ass."
Sam's expression doesn't change even for a second. "Tentacles. Growing out. Of my back."
"I know, Sam, but-"
"But what? You want to sit there and tell me this is going to be okay? I can never go outside again. No one but you can ever see me again. I'm going to die down here alone and I can just give up on any kind of life that's-"
"Normal," Dean finishes for him, because he's heard it so many times and all he's ever wanted was to stop hearing it. "I get it."
Sam stops yelling with his mouth open, then looks at Dean for a long time before he shakes his head and looks away, completely defeated. "Bearable. I gave up on normal years ago. But after the trials were over, we…I was supposed to get out. I'll never get out."
Dean decides to let it go, as much as it hurts, because this is not new, this is what he knew he had to accept as the price for keeping Sam just a little while longer. Bringing up how much hearing Sam talk like that bothers him is just going piss Sam off more and, anyway, it doesn't matter. This isn't about Dean; this is about Sam and Sam being trapped and Dean shouldn't be just the tiniest bit happy to think that his brother will never be able to leave him again, though it probably wouldn't surprise anyone that he is.
He takes a deep breath. "I just mean that there's gotta be a workaround, okay? All we have to do is find it. The trials can't get completed if you can't go anywhere because you have a bunch of tentacles, and they weren't built to be impossible, just nearly. So there's a way, Sam. But you need to calm down so we can figure it out."
Sam blinks a few times, then gives a sulky nod, and Dean nearly laughs at the petulant look on his face, and the fact that Dean telling him to quit his bitching actually worked for the first time since Sam's tenth birthday.
After a few seconds of tense silence, Dean spreads his hands out on the table. "Okay. You said you can control them."
"Hardly," Sam replies. "And only when I'm focusing."
"Maybe it's like driving, you know? At first you have to think about everything, but after a while it's muscle memory."
"Yeah, okay," Sam replies curtly. "But controlling them doesn't change the fact that they're there."
Dean circles around the table and takes a seat, then turns to face Sam. "Unless you can retract them."
Sam gives Dean a look like Dean's the one sprouting limbs at random. "Retract them? That's your big solution? Where are they gonna go?"
"I don’t know," Dean says, waving his arms in the air. "Away."
Sam narrows his eyes, but he also makes a constipated face, and Dean knows he's trying to concentrate on pulling the extra limbs back into himself. It doesn’t work, but Dean does at least manage to get a quick picture on his phone.
As soon as he hears the shutter sound as the camera clicks, Sam opens his eyes, and, before Dean knows what's coming for him, he gets smacked on the side of the head by a tentacle.
"Ow!" Dean says. "What was that for?"
"You gave me that idiotic bullshit idea just to distract me so you can take a picture!"
"That wasn't why I-hey, wait a minute. Sam, look at your hand."
Sam looks down, then back up at Dean confused. "Yeah, it's your phone. I took it. So what?"
"You took it with your tentacle. You whacked me with your tentacle."
Sam's eyes brighten a little. "I didn't even have to think about it!"
"You were distracted so you kind of just did it. Like I said, muscle memory. Am I a genius or what?"
"You're a moron," Sam replies. He looks down at the phone, pressing a few buttons, which Dean fears might mean the hilarious picture of him trying to crap out his tentacles is getting erased, and then looks up at Dean with a bemused smile at the corner of his lips. "Sometimes you get lucky."
"I'm amazing," Dean says, grinning and kicking his feet up on the table.
Sam looks at his feet for a long minute as if he's trying to burn a hole into them until finally a tentacle swoops down and Dean gets what Sam was trying to accomplish. The appendage wraps around his ankle and yanks, and Dean finds himself dangling upside down. It's kind of hot, actually, how strong they are.
Fuck. If ever there was a train of thought that needed to be killed quickly, that was it.
Over the next three hours, they test the limits of Sam’s control. He’s not so good at first, but the more Dean distracts him (pisses him off), the more cool tricks they discover, until finally Sam has a handle on, well, the fact that he now has ten extra handles.
By evening, Sam has taught himself how to pull the tentacles into his back so that all they are is six big, bright purple scars. They look freaky, sure, but they fit under a shirt, and if Sam ever wants to get laid again, they won’t look inhuman. He still has trouble holding the position, so that every now and again little tails begin to wiggle and shift their way out, and when Dean tries holding a conversation, they manage to slither themselves to nearly the length of Sam’s arm before he realizes he’s lost control.
Still, it’s pretty obvious Sam won’t need to spend the next 40 years of his life hiding his wiggly ass in a bunker in the middle of Kansas, so, on the whole, Dean thinks the day has been a great success. He’s good to keep them both fed until they can be sure Sam can go outside without getting arrested for being a giant squid.
They get drunk again after dinner-because why the fuck not, right? It’s not like they can go outside-and start having some real fun. Because if Dean thought it was cool to have genuine pirate swords hanging on the walls in his new home, that coolness gets like eight hundred times more awesome when you’ve got a real kraken to swashbuckle with.
“Hey, what the fuck does swashbuckler even mean?” Dean asks, laughing when one of Sam’s tentacles wraps around his ankle and pulls him up into the air again. “I don’t think that’s a real word, Sammy. I think it’s a conspiracy. I think everyone’s just been lying to everyone else about it being a word so they don’t look stupid.”
He's starting to feel a little light headed. That could be the alcohol, or the fact that he's talking so fast, or the whole dangling-upside-down thing. It's about 50-50.
“But isn’t that all words are, anyway?” Sam asks, his eyes scrunching up like that’s a deep question as another tentacle pokes at Dean’s face. “Like, what does anything mean if we all don’t agree it means what it means?”
"You know, these things are kind of awesome," Dean observes as the tentacle that had been wiggling in his face tries to tickle his ribs and Dean swats at it. “They look like dicks, though.”
Sam shakes his head and then meets Dean’s eyes, looking like that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. “What?”
“Your tentacles,” he says, reaching out and wrapping his hand around the end of one. “They’re kind of dick-shaped. I wonder if you could-”
Before Dean even knows what’s happening, he hits the ground ass first, Sam having dropped him.
“That’s so fucking gross, Dean,” Sam snaps. “You’re sick.”
Dean laughs, reaching out and gesturing for Sam to come back. “Aww, come on, Sammy. I was only joking,” he says, waggling his eyebrows. “Come play with me. I won’t try to grab your tentadicks unless you want me to.”
Sam throws him a middle finger over his shoulder, and Dean sits up against a wall, letting his head tip back as he laughs until it hits the plaster. It's not the first time he's left wondering how he managed to raise such a puritan.
_______________________________________________________________
They wait three days before they hear from Kevin again. They're out for dinner-their first time leaving the bunker since Sam's fun new appendages popped out-and Sam leaves to go to the bathroom, probably because after 45 minutes of perfectly controlling the tentacles he needs a few seconds to let them relax. It's Sam's phone that rings, but Dean doesn't even bother checking caller ID before he answers it. They hardly have boundaries, and in their line of work, whether a phone gets answered or not can mean the difference between life and death for the person on the other end of the line.
"Hello?"
"Sam? It's Kevin."
"Kevin," Dean says. "Oh, I've been meaning to talk to you."
"Can you put Sam on?"
Dean laughs. "Sam's not here at the moment, Kevin. Why don't you go ahead and give me the message?"
"I'll call back," says Kevin.
"I'll hide the damn phone if I have to," Dean says in an icy tone. "You think you pulled a fast one on me with that little thing you left off when you told me about the last trial, huh? You're telling me whatever you called Sam to tell him about the last one."
"Pulled a fast one? Fuck you, Dean. You wouldn't have let him do it. I did what I needed to do to get the second trial done so I can get the hell off this boat and see my mom again."
He sees Sam coming back toward the table as Kevin talks and gestures to the phone. Sam nods, making a Who is it? face without having to ask.
"Garth," Dean mouths, his hand over the receiver. He points to the door so Sam knows he's gonna take the call outside. Sam shrugs, returning to his salad.
Once the diner door is jingling behind him, Dean says, "He could have died."
"You know, it's funny you mention that, Dean. It reminds me of something. God, what does it remind me of…?" Kevin pauses for effect, then all but yells, "Oh, right! You tried to stab my mother."
Apparently that's not a grudge Kevin plans to let go of. Dean can't say he'd act any differently in Kevin's shoes. He lets out a defeated sigh. "Look, will you just tell me what the third trial is?"
Kevin is quiet on the other end of the line. "I don't know what it is."
"Don't be smart with me," Dean says. "Just tell me. Look, I'm not gonna stand in the way, okay? I let him do the goddamn stupid thing with the hydra tooth-"
Kevin snickers. "How many tentacles?"
"Ten." Dean's mouth drops. "Wait, you knew about the tentacles?"
"Yeah, I lied to Sam, too." Kevin sounds so nonchalant about what a manipulative sonofabitch he's being that Dean almost wants to be proud of the kid, except for how it's him and Sam being dicked around. "You guys aren't really my favorite people in the world right now. And maybe you have your bullshit guilt complex and think nobody can ever get out of this life, but I'm done with it. I'm helping you guys shut Hell's gates, and then I'm going home and maybe to college, and you can get yourself killed chasing monsters for all I care, but I'm done."
"Fair enough," Dean says. "Sooner you tell me the third trial, the sooner it gets done."
"I really don't know what it is," Kevin replies. "That's what I was calling Sam to say."
"And I should believe you because?"
"Because you have no choice, genius." He can hear Kevin smiling when he adds, "And because I do know who can tell you."
_______________________________________________________________
"An oracle?" Sam repeats for the thousandth time. He looks forward, out at the dark road stretching in front of them. It's gonna stretch on for days before they reach Delphi, Indiana. "At Delphi? Are you sure he wasn't messing with you?"
"That's what he said, Sammy. He said it's an unbroken line from the old Greek temple, passed down from generation to generation. Same temple traditions as the good ol' days, transplanted here and a town built around it with the same name as where the oracle came from."
"But that doesn't make any sense," Sam says. He probably doesn't know there are three tentacles holding his hair out in different directions, and Dean's not about to tell him. But he does have to look away and pretend to cough to cover the laugh. "What does a Greek oracle have to do with closing the gates of Hell?"
"The same thing that hydras and hellhounds are doing in Greek myths, apparently. Kevin said the prophecy was supposed to be read and taken care of a long time ago, so the seeds for defeating the trials were planted in the civilizations that sprung up after they were invented. But I guess humans suck more than God thought, because nobody's ever pulled them off."
"Oh, great, I feel real confident now." Sam tries to slump back in his seat, and that's when he realizes there's a halo of slippery arms poking around his head. "Dammit!" he says, swatting at them, then forcing himself to calm and get them under control the way he and Dean have been working on. "I hate these stupid things."
Dean finally lets out all the laughter he's been holding back for the last 100 miles. "You should have seen the bunny ears they gave you back around St. Louis."
Sam huffs. "Can you not encourage them?"
"I thought you could control them, Sammy," Dean teases.
"I can!" He crosses his arms over his chest. "Just…sometimes they get ideas. And some of the ideas are easier to stomp out than others, especially when I'm not really paying attention."
"Oh yeah, like what?"
Sam's eyes hover somewhere in the vicinity of Dean's mouth for a long beat and then he looks out his window. "Just don't encourage them, okay?"
PART TWO
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Dean, past Sam/Amelia
Rating: NC-17 for tentacle porn (\o/!), the tiniest hint of breathplay, and permanent physical injury (blindness)
Word Count: 17,713
Author’s Note: This is the first of (hopefully) many humble submissions from me for the glorious tentaclebigbang. Initially I was writing something completely different for this, but then 8x14: Trial and Error happened and Sam made that beautiful speech about how there's a light at the end of the tunnel and he's gonna make Dean see it, and I was like, "TROLOLOL. YES, SAM IS GOING TO CARRY DEAN TO THE LIGHT. IN. HIS. TENTACLES." For five minutes it was a joke, but then Twitter happened and also, when do I ever joke about tentacles? So somehow that minute-long scene spawned this bigbang. Yeah, I don't make excuses for me anymore. I would like to thank a few people for helping me birth this monster: blythechild first and foremost for picking my fic for art and doing this INCREDIBLE ILLUSTRATION that, I mean, honestly. I freaked the fuck out when she sent me the first draft. There is so much raw emotion in her art and if you don't want to read this fic-if tentacles or Wincest aren’t your thing, trust me, you have still *got* to look at this art. Secondly, a huge thank you to killabeez who saw my desperate tweet about needing a beta when I took too long finishing to get it to my original beta (mea culpa) and bravely answered the call. She not only beta'd this SUPER SPEEDILY but also gave great comments, addressing all the things I knew were an issue in my original draft but had no idea how to fix (and then all the other bad writing, too). Next a shout out to the squiggly mod herself, unavoidedcrisis for allowing Chat to peer pressure her into making a new bigbang for all our weird, kinky needs. THIS ONE REALLY WAS AFTER MY HEART. ♥ And finally, many cuddles and kisses to deirdre_c and zubeneschamali, because they are THE WORST INFLUENCES and were the first and most vocal respondents to my tweet about how this fic should exist. I would like to say they supported me from the very conception of the fic all the way until I finished, but the more honest way to put it is they enabled the crap out of me and convinced me this was a good idea. THANKS, Y'WHORES. I hope you guys enjoy it every bit as much as you were expecting to!
Summary: Sam completes his second trial-slaying a hydra-and is one step closer to shutting the gates of Hell. The hydra's venom has a curious side effect, however, and Dean wakes up one day to find six tentacles have sprouted from his brother's back. When Kevin sends them to an oracle to find out the last trial, they discover why.
ART
AO3 ~ PDF
TIMESTAMP: Tunnel Vision - set after this story, does contain spoilers
PART ONE
"Don't cut its heads off anymore," Dean yells at his brother. "You're just making it worse."
"Yes, thank you, Dean," Sam calls back, struggling to hold onto one of the hydra's thick necks as at least ten others turn on him. "I noticed that. But it's kind of hard not to cut them off when they're trying to eat you!"
He's so distracted responding to Dean that he nearly doesn't see the pointed spike of a tail as it tries to crash down on him. Thankfully, it knocks one of its own heads unconscious instead of Sam, but that's nothing but pure luck. And this kind of shit right here? This is why Dean was supposed to be the one up to his balls in these stupid trials. He's a backseat monster slayer. He doesn't know how to just stand here and watch as this thing tries to tear down his brother.
It's bad for his blood pressure, okay?
The hydra looks both exactly and nothing like Dean expected. It's a giant, hulking mass of dark purple and blue scales (they change color in the sunlight, which would be kind of cool if the thing weren't trying to swallow Sam), rising up out of the water and towering above them as tall as any cliff Dean's ever seen. He didn't even know hydras lived in water, except that this is where Kevin sent them, and it was pretty clear this was no ordinary beach as soon as they arrived. The rocks jutting up from the ocean are all worn down, not by erosion but from contact with the vile, bright purple poison the monster drools and spits and keeps trying to drown Sam in. Even the sand on the beach is singed in places-apparently the shit is so toxic it burns right through anything it touches.
The police in town had warned them when they tried asking questions about this beach. "That one's not for swimming. We tell everyone: stay away. Sometimes, tourists don't listen, and that's where your missing persons come from." Dean was expecting some local legend about the monster in the water, but the cop laughed at him and shook his head. "Nothing silly like that, just some toxic waste. But it'll burn right through your skin-no kidding. That beach is restricted and don’t go poking at it."
He's trying really hard not to think about that right now.
The hydra looks like a thousand giant snakes tangled together, with its big body so obscured by the squiggling mass of long necks, spiked tails, and tentacles that it's hardly there at all. It crawled up on the beach to try and get to Sam when he first started fighting for its attention, so Dean, standing on the sidelines with front row tickets and a direct order not to do anything, has a pretty clear view of it.
The tentacles are the part that catch him off guard. All the drawings of hydras Dean's ever seen show them standing on four thick, clawed legs, but this thing just has what looks like hundreds of tentacles to swim and walk on. Maybe he shouldn't be so thrown by that-when do the things they hunt ever actually look like popular lore says they will?-but it's such a freakish sight watching this enormous creature trying to balance itself that Dean can't adjust. It sucks, too, because legs can be sliced at, worn down, forced to buckle, leaving the monster at the disadvantage of not being able to move, but the tentacles, like the heads and, Dean suspects, the tail as well, just grow back double when Sam slices through one with that dopey sword they'd doused in gasoline (of all the things to kill a hydra…). It looks so tiny, like a sewing needle, next to one of the hydra's massive heads, and there's tons of those. He doesn't know how the hell Sam is going to beat this thing with such a dinky weapon.
Well, okay, he does. Sam needs to stab the sword right into the monster's brain, which sounded a lot easier when Dean assumed that meant piercing any of the heads in the right place would be the end of it. No, no, apparently only one of the heads-the original one-actually has a brain inside it. The rest are just extensions of the body, like the tentacles, only with big, snapping jaws. Which explains why they're all so stupid. And Sam gets to try to figure out which one in particular is somehow special. He's already driven the knife's blade through about twenty of them to no avail.
Along with the seven or eight heads that the monster has taken out itself trying to swat at or bite Sam (Dean's not joking when he says the creature is an idiot), that leaves nearly thirty heads hanging limp and dead-which is good, it’s slowed the beast considerably by weighing it down, but there's no way Sam is going to have time to take out the rest of them before something goes wrong. The hydra has hundreds of heads. Sam's been fighting and fighting well for over an hour straight and he's hardly made a dent. Something is going to have to give before his brother is too worn out to keep fighting. Dean wants to close the gates of Hell and all, no doubt about it, but if it gets to the point where Sam can't fight, he's stepping in. Whether it ends the quest or not, he doesn't fucking care. He's stepping in.
It's the venom that has Dean the most concerned. He knows Sam's a capable hunter-maybe he's never fought anything this big, but he's wrestled some strong, smart sons of bitches, scarier than this giant, idiotic creature, and he's quick enough that the heads are confused by him, trying their best to keep up, but they keep biting at each other and missing Sam. Dean taught him well, what can he say? Sure, that many heads, each with long rows of teeth that seem as tall as Sam (and, to Dean's unending bitterness, Sam is not exactly what you'd call a short guy), trying to eat his brother is bad enough, but the venom is just the kind of shit that Winchester luck has to be wary of. Sam would kill a fucking hydra only to be burnt up alive by a flying glob of stray drool.
Right now, Dean is watching the heads instead of his brother, trying to be useful because keeping his eyes on Sam is just making him freak out even worse. Sam's doing fine, doing great, Dean keeps reminding himself, but his odds are not very good at all, and it makes him angry all over again. This should be his task. Sam should be sitting where he is, useless and concerned in that Sam way of his but not on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. This wouldn't be torture for Sam like it is for Dean and if something is gonna go wrong-well, if something goes wrong, it's one thing if it's Dean who dies and something completely different if it's Sam.
Hell, if Sam could sit back and watch this attack like Dean is, take the time to be his nerdy, analytical self, he would probably already have figured out which head to kill, would have told Dean, and voila. Trial number two complete, bring on the next, Dean wouldn't be afraid.
Instead? Instead he's sitting here with his thumb up his ass, trying not to wonder what task number three is going to be if they get this much more dangerous in degrees, because fuck. He thought the hellhound thing was bad.
Sam swerves impressively, taking the chance to jump down and land on another head as the one charging at him chews straight through the head he'd been on before. Purple ooze-is that its blood, maybe?-rains down, just hardly missing Sam and burning the creature's back instead. The hydra rears its many heads, letting out a cry of pain, and Sam manages to take two more out of commission while it's distracted.
Dean takes a deep breath and tells himself it'll be alright. If there's one thing Sam knows how to do, it's fight, no matter the odds. Well, fight and have bad hair, but that's two things, and right now it's the fighting Dean wants to focus on. He needs to pay attention, try to be useful, try to find the one head in a million that matters when you stab it.
Then he spots something unusual. One of the heads is hanging back instead of throwing itself at Sam like a mindless killing machine. It doesn't look any smarter than the rest-in fact, it looks considerably dumber, with its neck tilted and its tongue dangling out, eyes fixed off in the distance instead of on the carnage going down on its own damn body. Dean would laugh at it, but he's got a suspicion scratching at him. He doesn't know if hydras can have plans, but if they can, this isn't a bad one. Keep the important head at a safe distance, all the while making it look so stupid no one would think it could possibly be the one with the brain inside.
The son of a bitch is acting.
"Get the stupid one!" Dean cries out.
"They're all stupid," Sam replies, slicing at one big eyeball.
"No, I mean the really stupid one. The one that looks checked out. To your left, but way back."
Sam takes only a second to look over his shoulder where Dean directed, blade sliding into the monster's nearest cranium as he does so. Even from the distance he's at, Dean can see Sam's eyebrows draw together once he sees the dopey head, and then they smooth out as it clicks, Sam letting out a breathless huff of a laugh.
Then he's sprinting the long length of the neck he was standing on as that head falls down, leaping onto another, and Dean's going to have a heart attack watching the crazy bastard running around like that, all impulse and no caution. Not that Dean would behave any differently in his place, but fuck, he really, really, really hates having to watch.
Sam climbs the spikes on necks, jumping from one to another like Tarzan swinging on vines. Dean has to cover his eyes. If Sam falls, it'll be right into a sharp tail, wide jaw, venomous puddle, or the thrashing waves of the sea around the monster, right into range for the tentacles to drag him under. If Sam falls, it's game over and if he doesn't, he's still got all those angry mouths to contend with.
But Dean can't look away forever and finally he chances a glance. Sam is crawling up the neck of the head Dean thinks will kill the hydra, and although that head hasn't snapped out of its playing dumb defense mechanism, its eyes are trying to focus on Sam, a much more intelligent, worried look in them than it had when Sam was ignoring it. Once he reaches the top, the hydra really starts getting pissed, all of its remaining heads turning on Sam, and Dean knows they have the right one. He stands, yelling…he doesn't even know what encouragement. Sam doesn't let the oncoming trouble distract him, but if this isn't the right head, it'll be the end of Sam and their stupid quest. Too many are coming now at once.
Dean can't hold back anymore. He looks around for something, anything, and bends over to pick up a big rock. It won't do anything to a monster this size-at least not enough to cause real damage, which Dean knows he's not allowed to do. But maybe he can distract it, buy Sam a few more moments.
He throws the rock as hard as he can, hitting one of the heads in the back. They all stop and hiss at him for a second, and that second is enough. Sam stabs down hard and the hydra lets out a cry that will probably wake the whole town, even though it's a few miles north of the beach. The hydra thrashes a few seconds longer, until finally it begins to collapse down toward the ground, Sam surfing it.
Dean jumps in the air, whooping in victory, before running from the cliff, arriving at the beach right on time to see Sam hop onto the sand. Alive. Looking exhausted but unharmed. Alive, he's alive, and Dean wants to wrap his arms around his brother and swing him in a circle, he's so fucking happy, but Sam's too big for that, and, anyway, Dean needs to play it cool.
"That took you long enough," he says, meeting Sam on the shore.
Sam drops the sword and falls to his knees, taking deep breaths, until finally he can manage a wheezy, "Fuck. You."
Dean grins, patting him on the shoulder. "Hey, man, you did it."
"Yeah," Sam says, his voice a little steadier now. He smiles up at Dean with the look on his face from back when he was just a kid and Dean used to be his hero. Dean's chest aches a little. "Thanks to you."
"Hey, what can I say? I'm a genius."
Sam snorts, struggling to his feet, and then he moves toward the hydra, walking up to one of the open mouths. He grabs at a tooth, trying to wiggle it free, and Dean launches forward, grabbing his hands to pull them away. "What the hell are you doing? That shit's still poisonous. If the tip cuts you-"
"I didn't tell you the whole task," Sam admits, letting Dean pull his hands away, but looking guilty as he does it.
"What do you mean, Sam?"
Sam swallows. "I didn't tell you what I had to do after I killed the hydra, because I knew you wouldn't let me even try if I did."
Dean's got a really bad feeling about this. "What else do you have to do?"
"Remember how after the first task I had to say those words to activate myself or whatever?"
Dean nods.
"Well," Sam's eyes dodge away from his, "after this one, I have to, uh. I have to stab myself in the heart with one of these teeth."
Dean stares at him flatly, unimpressed by the joke, but Sam doesn't start laughing. "What the hell do you mean you have to stab yourself in the heart with it?" he nearly yells. "There are three trials. The second one can't kill you."
"That's the idea," Sam answers uneasily. "According to Kevin, if I'm the right man for the job, if I have the strength of will and mind and the right intentions, then instead of killing me the tooth will fuse into my bones, the venom into my blood, and give me the strength of body I need to accomplish the final task."
Kevin. That little bastard. Just so happened to forget to mention that part to Dean. He's gonna kill that kid the next time he sees him. "No. No way. I'm not letting you do it."
"Dean," Sam says, exasperated already. "You know I have to. We can't turn back now."
"You're talking about stabbing yourself in the heart-"
"I'm talking about closing the gates of Hell forever."
Dean goes right on, not really interested in the why. "With a razor sharp hydra tooth full of venom so strong it eats through rock."
"Kevin said that if I'm destined to do this, it won't be a-"
"You're strong enough! You don't need supernatural steroids to do whatever the next task is."
"They're going to give me something," Sam insists. "Some new kind of strength that I absolutely need to finish this thing."
Dean crosses his arms over his chest. "And what's that?"
Sam shrugs. "Look, I don't know. Kevin said the prophecy was kind of vague, but this is what I need to do."
"Yeah, that's great. Let's go poking you full of holes so that you can satisfy some vague prophecy. What if he misread it? What if the strength turns you into the Hulk? You don't know."
"Oh, just say it," Sam yells. "What if I'm not the right person? What if I'm too weak to see this through? That's what you're thinking, and I know it."
"Well, what if you're not the right person?"
Their shouts seem to echo across the beach for minutes, and Dean feels bad as soon as he sees the stung expression on Sam's face. His brother's eyes dim, and he looks angry, but his voice comes out in a low, measured tone. "Then it's too late to do anything about it. We have to try."
"Sam," Dean says in a placating tone. "I'm not trying to doubt you. I don't know of anyone strong enough to take a tooth like that to the heart and live to see the next day. Not to mention, you haven't exactly been at the top of your game, physically, ever since you finished the first trial."
Sam looks a little surprised to hear Dean say it, but then he gives a resigned shrug. He can't really have believed Dean wasn't noticing all the coughing, the bloody napkins, Sam's dodgy responses trying to cover it up. So he doesn't try to lie about it. "Maybe the strength this gives me will fix that. Maybe I'll be healthy again."
"Maybe you'll be dead. It's not worth it, Sammy."
"Not worth closing the gates of Hell?"
Dean doesn't back down. "Not if it's going to kill you."
"This is ridiculous," says Sam. "If you had gotten your way, this would be done right now. You wouldn't have stopped to worry about the consequences, you wouldn't have asked my permission, and I wouldn't have doubted you."
"It's different," Dean replies.
"Why is it different?" Sam asks. "Because you don't think your life matters as much as mine? Well, tough shit, Dean. It's my trial. It's my heart. I decide what to do here, and I'm doing it with or without your support."
He returns to the hydra's corpse and works at the tooth again. It's not nearly as big next to him now that the monster isn't a threat-maybe as big as his hand, which is still pretty big, especially for a tooth. Especially for a tooth Sam intends to stick into his goddamn heart.
Once Sam dislodges the sharp canine, he turns back to Dean, walking right up and placing the thing in Dean's hand. "I can do this alone if I have to. But it's not like I'm not scared. It's not going to be easy. I believe I can do it. Please, can't you believe in me, too?"
"I believe in you, man," Dean says, more to the tooth he's looking down at than to his brother. "But I can't just watch you do this."
Sam takes his hand and guides it to his chest, pressing the point against his heart. He looks terrified, but he catches Dean's eye and holds it, so brave Dean is still a little in awe of who his brother grew up to be.
"Help me, Dean," Sam pleads. "I really need you with me on this."
Sam presses lightly, urging Dean to make the final push. He wants Dean to be the one to drive this through, and Dean can't, he can't. But then he looks up and sees Sam's eyes braced shut as he prepares himself for whatever comes of this. Dean thinks of all the other impossible shit Sam's pulled off over the years. If Sam can be this strong, Dean can believe in him.
"It's gonna be okay, Sammy," he tells his brother, and Sam nods, eyes still shut.
Then Dean takes a deep breath and throws all his weight forward, like jumping into the deep end. Sam gasps at the first impact, but Dean watches in amazement as the tooth goes in and in, Sam's chest lighting up for only a moment as it sinks through the flesh and becomes a part of Sam. No blood. No cut. Sam opens his eyes wide when it's done, looking a little shocked, a little hazy, but not like he's in agonizing pain.
"Are you okay?" Dean asks.
Sam lifts his hand up to his chest, feeling around. Then he meets Dean's eyes, a disbelieving smile starting to spread across his face. "I…I feel great."
_______________________________________________________________
Sam feels so much better that he spends the entire next day locked up in his room at the bunker sulking. At least, that's what Dean assumes he's doing in there. He's triple-bolted the door (the first time Dean isn't thrilled by how paranoid the Men of Letters were, because seriously, who needs that many locks on a bedroom door?) and won't come out for anything, not even food, not even to tell Dean what crawled up his ass after the great mood he'd been in after killing the hydra yesterday.
So, yeah, Dean assumes he's sulking, or crying, or writing emo poetry, because that seems in character for Sam, and Dean's been studying Sam since he was nothing but a fleshy bump in their mom's stomach. He considers himself something of an expert.
Problem is, 48 hours ago Sam was coughing up blood and trying to hide it from Dean, and 24 hours ago he seemed to be on the mend, was swearing up and down that he hadn't felt so good in years, and Dean believed him. But he's no idiot. Sam hasn't shown his face since they waddled their drunk asses to bed last night. Whatever's making him hide out has to be bad-has to be worse than the dying-hooker-coughing-up-blood routine, and Dean's getting anxious imagining all the horrible ways the second trial might have backfired.
The venom was supposed to be instant death, he keeps reminding himself, it would have burnt Sam up in seconds if it was gonna hurt him at all. But what if something went wrong? What if he drove a spike of poison right into his little brother's heart and Sam drops dead in there alone trying to pretend he's okay?
The only thing that's kept Dean from battering the door down has been the fact that Sam's room has been quiet-no coughing, no cries of horrible agony-all day. But he's just about reached his limit. He takes down the closest gun from the wall (a hunting rifle from the early 20th century), checks that it's loaded (it is, Dean fucking loves the Men of Letters), and sends a warning shot into the middle of Sam's door.
Silence for about half a minute until finally, "Dean, what the hell?"
Dean feels an instant surge of relief. Sam sounds annoyed and bitchy, like he would any day Dean fired a bullet into his door. Not in pain. Not dying. Just annoyed. "This is the last time I'm gonna ask you to quit jerking off and open the door before I shoot the damn thing down."
He hears a heavy sigh through the metal and takes a little heart from it, so he continues, "And don't think I'm kidding, because I'm not."
"Yeah, Dean." He hears one of the locks slide on the other side and feels both more and less tense as he realizes Sam's about to open up. "I could have guessed that from the fact that you just tried to kill my door."
It only opens a crack, but Sam peeks out through it. He looks fine, and Dean's worry subsides as his eyes scan down for signs of injury and he realizes Sam's not wearing a shirt and, fuck, Dean's eyes jump back up before he stares or at least before it becomes too obvious.
"What's up, man?" Dean asks.
Sam shrugs. "Nothing. I told you I'm fine. Can't I have a damn day to myself?"
"No," Dean says. Then, "I mean, yes. But not until you come out here and eat something and prove to me that you're not about to cough yourself to death or something equally embarrassing to our family name."
He tries to push the door open a little more; Sam holds it where it is. It doesn't even budge, which only makes Dean push harder. He's throwing his whole body on the door to no effect; Sam's only got one arm that can be holding it, but he doesn't even look like he's breaking a sweat.
"You got someone in there?" Dean asks, curious as to how Sam might have slipped out to pick someone up between now and the last time Dean saw him out and about.
"No," Sam replies, and then he scrubs a hand over his face.
He stops and stares at his left hand just as Dean's attention is catching on it, too. Sam isn't holding the door at all, at least not with his arms.
"Yes, I do," he adds quickly, but Dean just raises an eyebrow. "Okay," Sam says. "If I let you in, you have to promise to stay calm and not-"
Dean starts shoving at the door harder, throwing his whole body into it. Without warning, it opens, and Dean doesn't have time to slow himself before he finishes hurling his body through the open space where the door should be.
"Freak out," Sam finishes calmly, looking down at Dean.
From the floor, Sam almost looks like he's all wiggly, or maybe Dean hit his head and didn't realize it.
Then Sam reaches down, offering Dean a hand up and pulling him to his feet. As soon as he's upright, Dean sees more clearly what he thought he was imagining down on the ground. Sam is wiggling alright. He's got-Dean stops to count-six fucking bright purple tentacles protruding out of his back.
"Holy shit," he says. "What the-?"
Sam smiles awkwardly and shrugs, "You promised not to freak out."
"No I didn't!" Dean says. "I was too busy collapsing through the-what the hell is on your back, man?"
"What do they look like, genius?"
Dean blinks a couple of times and then can't help it, he doubles over in hysterical laughter. "You're a tentacle monster," he wheezes. "Dude, you're a fucking tentacle monster!"
Sam's expression is flat. "Thanks, Dean. For being so understanding."
Dean stands up straighter, trying to wipe the tears of laughter away. "Oh my god, oh my god, you're an octopus. Sam. Sammy-you've got eight arms and six of them are purple."
"Gee, I wonder why I didn't want to let you in earlier," Sam mumbles, but Dean sees that there's a tiny touch of a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Seriously, cut it out. It's not funny. I have no idea how I'm supposed to go outside like this."
That sobers Dean a little, and he does his damnedest to swallow the laughter, because Sam's got a hell of a point there. How are they supposed to go get burgers, let alone accomplish the third trial, when Sam looks like Cthulhu's way less intimidating baby brother?
"I guess we'll just have to cut them off," Dean says.
Sam swallows hard and nods, like he'd already figured that would be the next logical step but he's not particularly excited about it.
It only takes a few minutes to set up. Sam lies on his stomach with six thick tentacles squirming in the air above him.
Dean takes a step closer to his brother, observing the extra limbs with a little kid's fascination for all things creepy or crawly. The tentacles look like the ones that were on the hydra yesterday-which makes sense, if any of this can be said to make sense-only much smaller. They're a dark shade of purple that turns to a metallic blue when they catch the light, the suckers on the bottom of each two-by-two rows of dark teal. They meet Sam's skin with just the slightest pretense of blending in, slick purple skin turning to Sam's bronze seamlessly. Despite that, they look almost natural, almost like they belong, and Dean worries for a moment that he'll miss the line and cut Sam instead of the unwelcome appendages.
"Can you just do it already?" Sam grumbles into his arms. They moved into one of the spare rooms, Sam not wanting to ruin his bed with blood and tentacle goo and whatever else comes out. Sam has that poison in his veins now after all, and if it's going to burn right through the floor, it might as well not be anywhere they've gotten attached to.
"Alright," Dean says, pulling back and picking up the machete he'd brought with him. "But they're kind of cool." He pokes one gently with the tip of the blade. "Did they hurt to grow?"
"Nah, they didn't hurt. I just woke up this morning and there they were." Sam laughs, turning his face so half of it is looking up at Dean. "Our lives, huh?"
Dean gives his brother a weak smile. Sam looks like he's a little more nervous than he's trying to let on, and Dean can't help reaching out with his empty hand, stroking gently over the hair on the side of Sam's head. "Hey, that probably just means this won't hurt, either."
Sam nods, closing his eyes tight. "You should hurry up and do it. I can't really control them all that well, and they might try to fight back once you start."
With one quick swing, the tentacle just under Sam's left shoulder blade falls to the floor, wiggling desperately like a fish out of water. Sam lets out a scream and Dean stops before continuing. "You alright, Sammy?"
"It feels about as good as losing a limb usually does," he says through gritted teeth.
Dean swallows hard, wondering how many times Dean has lost a limb in Sam's memory and whether his brother meant his answer rhetorically or if he's really just in enough pain that he's forgotten that Dean doesn't remember any of those deaths. "Do you want me to keep going?"
"I can't really walk around with five tentacles on my back, now can I?" Sam snaps.
Dean decides not to hold the prissy tone against his brother and quickly hacks away at the tentacle on his right shoulder. He moves all the way down, deciding to lob off the bottommost tentacles before the ones in the center of Sam's back. It's not until he's halfway through the fourth, bottom left, that he sees the skin beneath the first wound he made starting to shift.
"Why are you stopping?" Sam asks. "There are still two more. I can take it, okay, just get them off me."
Dean watches in horror as two tentacles begin to grow like vines from the shoulder where there had only been one before. Sure enough, the right side begins to shift in the same way, and after a few more seconds, both of the bottom wounds are, too. "You can't feel that?"
"Feel what?" Sam asks. He begins to push up so he can look at Dean, but Dean pushes him back down, so Sam yells, "Feel what, Dean?"
"We, uh, we probably should have thought this out a little more," Dean answers.
Sam's hands reach back and he groans when he feels ten hydra-like limbs where there had only been six, face falling into the pillow like he's hoping it'll swallow him. "This can't be real."
But of course, it is.
_______________________________________________________________
"Alright," Dean says awkwardly, pacing in front of the table and looking at his brother. "This isn't the end of the world, right? We can figure this out."
"I have tentacles," Sam says in the kind of too-calm, too-collected voice that makes Dean think of the eye of a hurricane, or Dad just before the last drink would hit him. "Ten of them. Growing out of my back." Sam's voice begins to rise. "There are tentacles growing out of my back, Dean!"
"It could be worse," Dean reasons. "We really found this hideout just in time. At least we've got somewhere to store your freaky ass."
Sam's expression doesn't change even for a second. "Tentacles. Growing out. Of my back."
"I know, Sam, but-"
"But what? You want to sit there and tell me this is going to be okay? I can never go outside again. No one but you can ever see me again. I'm going to die down here alone and I can just give up on any kind of life that's-"
"Normal," Dean finishes for him, because he's heard it so many times and all he's ever wanted was to stop hearing it. "I get it."
Sam stops yelling with his mouth open, then looks at Dean for a long time before he shakes his head and looks away, completely defeated. "Bearable. I gave up on normal years ago. But after the trials were over, we…I was supposed to get out. I'll never get out."
Dean decides to let it go, as much as it hurts, because this is not new, this is what he knew he had to accept as the price for keeping Sam just a little while longer. Bringing up how much hearing Sam talk like that bothers him is just going piss Sam off more and, anyway, it doesn't matter. This isn't about Dean; this is about Sam and Sam being trapped and Dean shouldn't be just the tiniest bit happy to think that his brother will never be able to leave him again, though it probably wouldn't surprise anyone that he is.
He takes a deep breath. "I just mean that there's gotta be a workaround, okay? All we have to do is find it. The trials can't get completed if you can't go anywhere because you have a bunch of tentacles, and they weren't built to be impossible, just nearly. So there's a way, Sam. But you need to calm down so we can figure it out."
Sam blinks a few times, then gives a sulky nod, and Dean nearly laughs at the petulant look on his face, and the fact that Dean telling him to quit his bitching actually worked for the first time since Sam's tenth birthday.
After a few seconds of tense silence, Dean spreads his hands out on the table. "Okay. You said you can control them."
"Hardly," Sam replies. "And only when I'm focusing."
"Maybe it's like driving, you know? At first you have to think about everything, but after a while it's muscle memory."
"Yeah, okay," Sam replies curtly. "But controlling them doesn't change the fact that they're there."
Dean circles around the table and takes a seat, then turns to face Sam. "Unless you can retract them."
Sam gives Dean a look like Dean's the one sprouting limbs at random. "Retract them? That's your big solution? Where are they gonna go?"
"I don’t know," Dean says, waving his arms in the air. "Away."
Sam narrows his eyes, but he also makes a constipated face, and Dean knows he's trying to concentrate on pulling the extra limbs back into himself. It doesn’t work, but Dean does at least manage to get a quick picture on his phone.
As soon as he hears the shutter sound as the camera clicks, Sam opens his eyes, and, before Dean knows what's coming for him, he gets smacked on the side of the head by a tentacle.
"Ow!" Dean says. "What was that for?"
"You gave me that idiotic bullshit idea just to distract me so you can take a picture!"
"That wasn't why I-hey, wait a minute. Sam, look at your hand."
Sam looks down, then back up at Dean confused. "Yeah, it's your phone. I took it. So what?"
"You took it with your tentacle. You whacked me with your tentacle."
Sam's eyes brighten a little. "I didn't even have to think about it!"
"You were distracted so you kind of just did it. Like I said, muscle memory. Am I a genius or what?"
"You're a moron," Sam replies. He looks down at the phone, pressing a few buttons, which Dean fears might mean the hilarious picture of him trying to crap out his tentacles is getting erased, and then looks up at Dean with a bemused smile at the corner of his lips. "Sometimes you get lucky."
"I'm amazing," Dean says, grinning and kicking his feet up on the table.
Sam looks at his feet for a long minute as if he's trying to burn a hole into them until finally a tentacle swoops down and Dean gets what Sam was trying to accomplish. The appendage wraps around his ankle and yanks, and Dean finds himself dangling upside down. It's kind of hot, actually, how strong they are.
Fuck. If ever there was a train of thought that needed to be killed quickly, that was it.
Over the next three hours, they test the limits of Sam’s control. He’s not so good at first, but the more Dean distracts him (pisses him off), the more cool tricks they discover, until finally Sam has a handle on, well, the fact that he now has ten extra handles.
By evening, Sam has taught himself how to pull the tentacles into his back so that all they are is six big, bright purple scars. They look freaky, sure, but they fit under a shirt, and if Sam ever wants to get laid again, they won’t look inhuman. He still has trouble holding the position, so that every now and again little tails begin to wiggle and shift their way out, and when Dean tries holding a conversation, they manage to slither themselves to nearly the length of Sam’s arm before he realizes he’s lost control.
Still, it’s pretty obvious Sam won’t need to spend the next 40 years of his life hiding his wiggly ass in a bunker in the middle of Kansas, so, on the whole, Dean thinks the day has been a great success. He’s good to keep them both fed until they can be sure Sam can go outside without getting arrested for being a giant squid.
They get drunk again after dinner-because why the fuck not, right? It’s not like they can go outside-and start having some real fun. Because if Dean thought it was cool to have genuine pirate swords hanging on the walls in his new home, that coolness gets like eight hundred times more awesome when you’ve got a real kraken to swashbuckle with.
“Hey, what the fuck does swashbuckler even mean?” Dean asks, laughing when one of Sam’s tentacles wraps around his ankle and pulls him up into the air again. “I don’t think that’s a real word, Sammy. I think it’s a conspiracy. I think everyone’s just been lying to everyone else about it being a word so they don’t look stupid.”
He's starting to feel a little light headed. That could be the alcohol, or the fact that he's talking so fast, or the whole dangling-upside-down thing. It's about 50-50.
“But isn’t that all words are, anyway?” Sam asks, his eyes scrunching up like that’s a deep question as another tentacle pokes at Dean’s face. “Like, what does anything mean if we all don’t agree it means what it means?”
"You know, these things are kind of awesome," Dean observes as the tentacle that had been wiggling in his face tries to tickle his ribs and Dean swats at it. “They look like dicks, though.”
Sam shakes his head and then meets Dean’s eyes, looking like that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. “What?”
“Your tentacles,” he says, reaching out and wrapping his hand around the end of one. “They’re kind of dick-shaped. I wonder if you could-”
Before Dean even knows what’s happening, he hits the ground ass first, Sam having dropped him.
“That’s so fucking gross, Dean,” Sam snaps. “You’re sick.”
Dean laughs, reaching out and gesturing for Sam to come back. “Aww, come on, Sammy. I was only joking,” he says, waggling his eyebrows. “Come play with me. I won’t try to grab your tentadicks unless you want me to.”
Sam throws him a middle finger over his shoulder, and Dean sits up against a wall, letting his head tip back as he laughs until it hits the plaster. It's not the first time he's left wondering how he managed to raise such a puritan.
_______________________________________________________________
They wait three days before they hear from Kevin again. They're out for dinner-their first time leaving the bunker since Sam's fun new appendages popped out-and Sam leaves to go to the bathroom, probably because after 45 minutes of perfectly controlling the tentacles he needs a few seconds to let them relax. It's Sam's phone that rings, but Dean doesn't even bother checking caller ID before he answers it. They hardly have boundaries, and in their line of work, whether a phone gets answered or not can mean the difference between life and death for the person on the other end of the line.
"Hello?"
"Sam? It's Kevin."
"Kevin," Dean says. "Oh, I've been meaning to talk to you."
"Can you put Sam on?"
Dean laughs. "Sam's not here at the moment, Kevin. Why don't you go ahead and give me the message?"
"I'll call back," says Kevin.
"I'll hide the damn phone if I have to," Dean says in an icy tone. "You think you pulled a fast one on me with that little thing you left off when you told me about the last trial, huh? You're telling me whatever you called Sam to tell him about the last one."
"Pulled a fast one? Fuck you, Dean. You wouldn't have let him do it. I did what I needed to do to get the second trial done so I can get the hell off this boat and see my mom again."
He sees Sam coming back toward the table as Kevin talks and gestures to the phone. Sam nods, making a Who is it? face without having to ask.
"Garth," Dean mouths, his hand over the receiver. He points to the door so Sam knows he's gonna take the call outside. Sam shrugs, returning to his salad.
Once the diner door is jingling behind him, Dean says, "He could have died."
"You know, it's funny you mention that, Dean. It reminds me of something. God, what does it remind me of…?" Kevin pauses for effect, then all but yells, "Oh, right! You tried to stab my mother."
Apparently that's not a grudge Kevin plans to let go of. Dean can't say he'd act any differently in Kevin's shoes. He lets out a defeated sigh. "Look, will you just tell me what the third trial is?"
Kevin is quiet on the other end of the line. "I don't know what it is."
"Don't be smart with me," Dean says. "Just tell me. Look, I'm not gonna stand in the way, okay? I let him do the goddamn stupid thing with the hydra tooth-"
Kevin snickers. "How many tentacles?"
"Ten." Dean's mouth drops. "Wait, you knew about the tentacles?"
"Yeah, I lied to Sam, too." Kevin sounds so nonchalant about what a manipulative sonofabitch he's being that Dean almost wants to be proud of the kid, except for how it's him and Sam being dicked around. "You guys aren't really my favorite people in the world right now. And maybe you have your bullshit guilt complex and think nobody can ever get out of this life, but I'm done with it. I'm helping you guys shut Hell's gates, and then I'm going home and maybe to college, and you can get yourself killed chasing monsters for all I care, but I'm done."
"Fair enough," Dean says. "Sooner you tell me the third trial, the sooner it gets done."
"I really don't know what it is," Kevin replies. "That's what I was calling Sam to say."
"And I should believe you because?"
"Because you have no choice, genius." He can hear Kevin smiling when he adds, "And because I do know who can tell you."
_______________________________________________________________
"An oracle?" Sam repeats for the thousandth time. He looks forward, out at the dark road stretching in front of them. It's gonna stretch on for days before they reach Delphi, Indiana. "At Delphi? Are you sure he wasn't messing with you?"
"That's what he said, Sammy. He said it's an unbroken line from the old Greek temple, passed down from generation to generation. Same temple traditions as the good ol' days, transplanted here and a town built around it with the same name as where the oracle came from."
"But that doesn't make any sense," Sam says. He probably doesn't know there are three tentacles holding his hair out in different directions, and Dean's not about to tell him. But he does have to look away and pretend to cough to cover the laugh. "What does a Greek oracle have to do with closing the gates of Hell?"
"The same thing that hydras and hellhounds are doing in Greek myths, apparently. Kevin said the prophecy was supposed to be read and taken care of a long time ago, so the seeds for defeating the trials were planted in the civilizations that sprung up after they were invented. But I guess humans suck more than God thought, because nobody's ever pulled them off."
"Oh, great, I feel real confident now." Sam tries to slump back in his seat, and that's when he realizes there's a halo of slippery arms poking around his head. "Dammit!" he says, swatting at them, then forcing himself to calm and get them under control the way he and Dean have been working on. "I hate these stupid things."
Dean finally lets out all the laughter he's been holding back for the last 100 miles. "You should have seen the bunny ears they gave you back around St. Louis."
Sam huffs. "Can you not encourage them?"
"I thought you could control them, Sammy," Dean teases.
"I can!" He crosses his arms over his chest. "Just…sometimes they get ideas. And some of the ideas are easier to stomp out than others, especially when I'm not really paying attention."
"Oh yeah, like what?"
Sam's eyes hover somewhere in the vicinity of Dean's mouth for a long beat and then he looks out his window. "Just don't encourage them, okay?"
PART TWO