Disclaimer: not mine.

Bobby isn't sure how to drive an ambulance. Dean isn't sure when he turned into a fish.

This takes place directly after the escape from Sioux Falls. Recall that Dean is on morphine at this point, and the thing about pain meds is, they pretty much remove every emotional barrier you have. And occasionally some of your sanity.

A Fish Story

Bobby keeps cursing but Dean thinks he's doing pretty well for his first time driving an ambulance underwater. In fact, he turns to tell him that but all that comes out is this weird glugging sound, sort of wet and wobbly, which is really in fact a reasonable sound for a fish to make. Quite reasonable.

Bobby doesn't think so, it seems. (Poor man; he has never been a fish.) "Dean, you with me?" he keeps saying, and Dean just sort of keeps glugging wetly in reply.

"Look, I know you're full up to the gills-" (Gills! Dean giggles noisily.) "- with morphine but I need your head clear. Now ain't no time for this."

For being a fish? Dean tries to ask, but instead humans words seem to jump out of his mouth.

"I thought you died," he hears his voice say, then it fades back to glugging.

"I know," Bobby says quietly. "Speaking of. That message? Don't ever let me hear you say something like that again."

Dean's pretty sure he knows what Bobby's talking about- pretty sure he remembers something about a car and a cliff- but fish don't care about such things of course. (Would he really have done it? Maybe not. But could he really live after losing the only stable surface he had left in his life?)

Glug.

"Case you ain't ogled me lately," Bobby's saying, "I got a few decades on you, kid, and monsters aside I'm going before you. And you'll be fine when I do."

I won't be fine, Dean tries to say, but instead he asks where all the water is going. Bobby just gives him a look.

"Finer than you are now," he growls, and his non-fish face twists up in a weird expression (which human Dean recognizes as a man trying to drive an ambulance for the first time while his friend is sobbing incoherently in the passenger's seat).

"I'm... swimmy," Dean laughs. "Things are going... swimmingly."

He presses his fin(ger?)s against his eyes; his cheeks are slippery wet and his scales are sliding around against each other. He can barely taste the salt of the ocean on his tongue; where has all the water gone? He flops ineffectually in his seat.

"Careful with your leg," Bobby snaps, and when Dean tries to tell him that fish don't have legs, it comes out instead as "I thought you died too." His voice is muddy and brown to his own ears. Bobby doesn't have anything to reply to that, so Dean sinks down as low as he can and tries to gasp in the last of the water, wondering where it's all going to, remembering a time when there had been an entire ocean around him. There had been, right? At some point?

Bobby is still driving, still cursing the huge, foreign machine, and every time Dean hears his voice (though it's thick and far away) or sees his face (though it's distorted by the water still clinging to Dean's eyes), he feels better, and worse.

Bobby Bobby Bobby. I thought you up and died on me too. Up and died on me just like Cas.

There's a terrible feeling at his core that is probably the sun burning him up (although human Dean thinks differently and groans, "gonna spew".) Something crinkly and dry is thrust at him- how is that going to help?- and somehow even without hands he manages to hold it to his mouth while he spits up more water. He glugs a little because he's pretty sure fish need water and he's scared to be so dry. (You're not a fish, his mind argues. You're a human being puking in a McDonald's burger bag.) But that sounds like a less fun thing to be. The fish in him just wants to swim away.

So it does.

"We're five minutes out. I need you to keep it together at least til we're inside. Can you do that?"

Dean nods, throws the bag out the window, and sinks back into the seat. He presses his hands back against his cheeks and is a little comforted- embarrassed?- to feel that there's still water running down them. He takes a deep breath (air? He can breathe air?) and the world stops spinning, just a little.

Bobby's voice is quiet, but no longer fuzzy and hollow. "I'm with you, kid. I know you're tripping morph right now like it's nobody's business, but listen to me. I'm with you, and I ain't going nowhere til we got this all sorted out."

And then Dean hears himself say "okay, Bobby," and it's a human voice, and when he opens his eyes he's got a human body too.

"Ohhh," he groans. "Fuck me."

Bobby glances over, then snaps his eyes right back to the road. "That sounded a little less Pineapple Express."

"Yeah. I..." (where is all the water?) "I think I'm with you, Bobby."

"Good. Can't hardly handle one of you off your rocker."

Dean moans; he's not a fish anymore but he's soaked anyway. Tears and snot all over his face and sweat all over everywhere, and, yeah, that looks like a little puke on his shirt. Lovely.

"I'm gonna have one helluva time explaining why I moved you two this way," Bobby remarks dryly.

Tell them we needed to get someplace with water, the not-so-little part of Dean that isn't sober insists. Someplace with less sea monsters.

"How did you get out of the house?" Dean asks quietly, working desperately with his sleeves to try to dry his face off.

"Wasn't in the house, genius. Do leave it sometimes, y'know. Got back just in time to follow the ambulance."

"Oh. Okay." All of this coherent conversation might just have been a little too ambitious, because the greyness is back at the edges of his vision, and he has to laugh, just a bit, at how Bobby's going to react to this one. "Hey, Bobby?"

"What?"

"I think I might be passing out on you."

"Don't you dare," Bobby snaps, just as they pull into the ambulance bay, but suddenly Dean feels calm and, absurdly, safe. "Aw, hell," he hears Bobby growl, then he's sinking back into the darkness of the ocean.