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It’s 1999, and Dean is ten years old. He sits on the beach and watches the waves roll in, hissing gently against the sand in a careful caress. The rhythm of it soothes him, and with the sun setting behind him, his shadow stretches long and dark along the beach, barely grazing against the water’s edge.
Overhead, a gull wheels idly, searching for any last morsels of food before it disappears for the night. Dean watches it, wishing he could hold this peaceful, sun-bathed moment like a suspended droplet in time. He doesn’t really feel like heading back home just yet, but the setting of the sun, for him, is an inescapable curfew.
The sea would be beautiful by the light of the moon, he thinks.
His shadow stretches and stretches until it disappears into the ocean, and as the gull wings away on the wind, Dean knows that it is time for him to return home.
He stands, bare feet sliding in the loose sand until he finds his footing, and as he does, he catches a glimpse of something in the water. It’s a dark shape, barely visible now that the darkness is beginning to set in properly, but his keen eyes pick it out regardless.
His curfew calls, the promise of a warm dinner and a night spent doing homework with Sam while their dad drinks in front of the television, but his curiosity is too strong.
Dean takes a step towards the water, and then another, pulled towards the dark shape. It seems to float on top of the water, gently pushed and pulled by the rhythm of the waves but not moving in any specific direction. Just… existing.
And as he gets closer, and the cold touch of the ocean hisses over his feet in the retreating grip of a wave, he sees that it’s not an indecipherable shape, an object caught in the water’s grip, but a creature.
A young seal, limp and exhausted and carried by the rolling tide, the ropes of a fisherman’s net caught securely around its body. Dean’s breath catches in his throat.
They get seals around here often, but not usually at this time of year, and Dean has never been this close to one. What is it doing out here, all alone? How had it come to be like this?
Is it still alive?
Dean is standing shin-deep in the water now—had been wading closer, but now he stops. The thought of this young seal being dead breaks his heart, and he doesn’t know if he wants to find out, but on the slim chance that’s it’s not…
He forces himself to keep walking, until he’s within arms’ reach of the trapped creature. Tentatively, fearfully, he reaches for it—
And wide brown eyes snap open, locking directly onto Dean’s.
The seal thrashes in the net, desperately trying to get away even with the last reserves of its strength. It’s still alive, still fighting, but even as Dean watches, its struggles get weaker and weaker. Every breath strains against the ropes that bite deeply into the seal’s skin.
“Shh,” Dean pleads, holding out his hands, even though he knows it won’t be of any use. This creature is wild, and no matter how much Dean wants to help it, he may not be able to. “Please, please, I just want to help.”
The seal watches him with those intelligent brown eyes, gives one more weak thrash of its tail, and then goes still.
Dean holds his breath as he reaches for the ropes. His fingertips brush rough nylon, and then slide over the seal’s skin, and here in the gathering dusk, the touch feels almost ethereal. Magical. “You’re okay,” he whispers, as though the spell could be broken at any moment by a too-quick movement, or a sound just slightly too loud.
It feels like neither of them are breathing as Dean wades another half-step closer, the waves tugging at his waist now, his clothes soaked. How am I going to explain this?he thinks, this surreal moment that is happening even as he should be making his way back to the safety, the normalcy, of home.
But instead he’s standing in the ocean as the sun disappears beneath the horizon and the stars begin to come out above, ignoring the bitter cold of the water to free a seal that watches him warily but almost seems to know that Dean is its only chance at survival right now.
Dean reaches down with his free hand to his pocket and rifles around in it for a second—a handful of change, a now-ruined box of matches, the little green army man that he takes with him everywhere. Thankfully, he always carries a small pocketknife whenever he’s out exploring on his own, and this is what he grabs now. The blade is reluctant to show itself, and he probably should have considered that before he waded into the ocean, but he eventually manages to free it.
The seal jerks at the sight of the bare steel glinting in the fading light, and Dean has to fight the instinct to hold it in place with the fingers he has curled under the rope. He doesn’t want to scare it even more. “I’m not going to hurt you, I promise,” he says softly, and he keeps his movements slow as he reaches out with the knife.
The blade slices neatly through one of the ropes holding the net together, but doesn’t touch the seal, and Dean sees it relax just slightly. His confidence boosted, he works carefully but quickly, slicing through the net until enough of it is free that he can unwind it from around the seal’s body.
He’s not quite sure what he’s expecting to happen, as he bundles the remains of the net up in his hands and shoves it into his pocket, but he’s definitely not expecting for the seal to stay there, exactly as it had been, still just watching Dean.
Seconds pass, so slowly, and the gentle crash and hiss of the waves is all that can be heard. The seal seems to be studying him, almost considering.
It blinks, and then between one heartbeat and the next, it’s gone, disappeared back beneath the waves where Dean can’t even follow it with his eyes, let alone the rest of him.
For a long time, Dean stands in the water and stares at the spot where the seal had been, until the moon is high overhead and his chattering teeth force him in the direction of home.
~~~
The next day, Dean goes to the beach, and he waits.
Technically, he shouldn’t be here—his dad had been pissed when he came home so late, and with his clothes full of seawater—but he doesn’t care. The seal had haunted his dreams last night, and he can’t stop thinking about how it had looked at him.
Like it knew what he was thinking. Like he could understand.
He sits on the sand and looks out over the ocean, every dark, cresting wave bringing with it a new hope that the seal has returned, and then breaking that hope as it too breaks. The gull joins him, watching for food from the sky above or hopping along the beach. It eyes Dean with idle curiosity, but he’s not a source of food or interest, sitting as still and unmoving as he is. It hops away down the beach.
Dean sits there until the sun has passed its peak and begins to sink back down to the horizon. He sits until his stomach starts to rumble, and his mind begins to wander.
He sits until he begins to wonder if he was imagining the whole encounter.
Eventually, the hunger and the cold and the gnawing doubts are too much for him to bear. His heart heavy, he stands from his place in the sand, young bones protesting from hours spent in stillness as he watched the sea. “It didn’t come,” he says quietly, to himself, and the words taste bitter and sad on his tongue. He’d so hoped, so longed, for something just a little bit special.
He should have known better.
Dean’s feet scuff sadly at the sand as he turns, putting his back to the sea. Ahead of him now, the sun is beginning to set once again, and he realizes that he’s been here for hours. Waiting. Hoping. It only makes the seal’s absence even more bitter—but how stupid must one be, to believe in such a foolish fairytale, that last night had been something special and that a moment just as magical could be repeated once more in the harsh light of day?
Hot tears prickle against his eyelids, a sob welling up thickly in his throat.
“Hello!”
The voice rings out across the beach, and Dean winces—how had he not known that he wasn’t alone? He quickly swipes a hand across his eyes, not wanting to face whoever the voice belongs to like this, and then turns.
There’s a boy standing in the ocean.
He definitely hadn’t been there before—Dean could swear there hadn’t been anyone anywhere on the beach just a few moments ago, so how had he gotten there without Dean seeing him? Where had he come from?
Dean takes a tentative step closer, and then another. The boy just watches him, head tilted to the side, the waves lapping at his waist and pulling at the trenchcoat that is slightly too large for him.
The white t-shirt beneath, his dark hair… it’s all dry.
Dean walks until his toes dip into the ocean, and then he stops. Across the water, they watch each other—this strange boy who has appeared out of thin air, and Dean.
“Who are you?” he calls out, not too loudly so as not to shatter this fragile moment, but enough that his voice carries across the space between them.
The boy blinks, his eyes more blue than the sea itself and piercing through to Dean’s very soul. He reaches out, fingers extended, and then curls them.
Come here.
He shouldn’t.
He does.
The waves drag against his skin as he steps forward, welcoming him back into the sea. It’s so different from last night—now there is nowhere to hide, no silvered softness of the moon. Just the raw brightness of the slowly-setting sun that glimmers off the water.
Dean walks, toes sinking into the sand, until he’s an arms-length away from the boy. This close, those eyes are almost inhumanly blue, his hair rumpled, skin tanned against the white shirt that becomes translucent where the waves lap at it. The heaviness of Dean’s own jeans barely registers.
“Who are you?” he asks again. This time, it’s barely more than a whisper.
The boy regards him for several long seconds, and then he looks down. He pushes aside the untied edges of the trenchcoat until the ends fan away from him in the water, curls his fingers around the hem of his t-shirt, and lifts.
There, on one side of his torso, are a serious of angry red lines…
In the shape of a fishing net.
Dean inhales sharply, gaze flickering over the marks and then lifting again to meet the boy’s eyes. “You—you’re the seal,” he breathes, his eyes widening with the realization.
The boy just nods.
“What are you?”
“I am a duine-ròin,” he says, and the way he curls his tongue around each syllable makes them sound almost magical, like they’re not something that Dean should be privy to. A shiver runs the length of his spine. “Your people know my kind better as ‘selkies.’”
A seal, with the power to shapeshift into a human. Dean remembers the name from one of the days he spent at the library with Sammy, curled up in the corner with a book on mythological creatures.
He’d never thought that he’d meet one face-to-face.
“A selkie,” he repeats, trying to wrap his head around this. “So… that means you have a skin, right? Like in the stories?”
The boy’s expression shifts, there and gone so quickly that Dean almost misses it. “Yes,” he says quietly. “My skin is what lets me become a seal again. It is very precious to me.”
And then he reaches for the lapels of the slightly-too-big trenchcoat and carefully peels it off his shoulders, drawing it down his arms until it’s completely off. He folds it in half, then in half again, until it’s become a meticulously-made bundle cradled between his hands, tan and darker tan where it’s soaked through with seawater.
“What is your name?” he asks, then, and his eyes lift from the coat to meet Dean’s once more, searching.
Something about this feels special. Private. Magical. It takes a moment for Dean to realize that he has to reply, instead of simply standing there, enthralled. “Dean,” he says, “Dean Winchester,” and for the first time, the boy’s lips curl up into a smile.
He takes a step forward and reaches for Dean’s hand, which he carefully places on top of the bundled-up coat. Whatever is happening, the gesture and the touch and the look in the boy’s eyes all tell Dean that this is very important.
“My name is Castiel,” he says, and again, there’s a musical, magical quality to the word. His fingers tighten over Dean’s, and the softness in his eyes and his smile have Dean’s heart thudding against his ribcage.
“Thank you for saving my life, Dean Winchester.”
~~~
It’s 2019, and Dean Winchester lives in a cottage by the ocean.
The whole town whispers about him and his husband, in the way that small towns often do; gossip born of curiosity and little else, certainly devoid of malice. They’ve been inseparable for longer than anyone can remember, and although they mostly keep to themselves, they’re handsome and polite and they’ve drawn many the eye over the years. Still, it’s common knowledge in the town that they’re completely devoted to one another—if the small wedding ceremony by the sea hadn’t been evidence enough, the way that they look at each other is. Soft, loyal, in love.
And so the townsfolk gossip idly, but inevitably resign themselves to never quite knowing where the intrigue comes from, or why it’s even there in the first place. No matter how much they talk, they’ll never quite know.
Because the fairytale beginning of a young boy who saved the life of a seal, and the rest of the love story that has spun out from that single moonlit night, is for Dean and Castiel to hold in their hearts for the rest of their lives; a single secret, just for them.