They were alone, Sam's eyes unnaturally bright through the flames. "I don't know what to wish for." said Dean.

"Hurry up and think! The candles are melting!" said Sam, "You could wish for a bike. Then we can chase the ice cream truck in our superhero capes."

Sure enough, they'd been sitting so long that only one flame remained. Dean swallowed back tears. "That sounds really good Sammy. But I'm not a kid anymore," said Dean, "And neither are you."

Young Sam closed his eyes. "Then I'll make one for you."

Sam rushed to Dean's side, skidding on his knees in the rocky sand. "Dean!" he yelled, voice booming off the cliffs. Then he lay his hand over Dean's heart, and softer, over and over, he said the gentle, spiraling word that would always bring him home. It pulsed into Dean's body, warmth that could only be summoned from Sam in the presence of his brother curling around his brain and his lungs and his heart.

For a moment nothing happened. Then Dean opened his eyes. Looked at Sam.

"Did you get your wish?"

Sam breathed out hard and looked down at Dean with his god-blue eyes. "Yes," he said, and he grabbed Dean by the face, thumbs pressing at the hinges of his jaw, and kissed him hard.

"I could never have been hers," he whispered, pressing his forehead against Dean's, wet strands of hair sliding against Dean's face. "I'm yours."

Sam was changed, or rather he looked like a dream of Sam, droplets shining in his lashes, skin a pearly luminescence, his hair the iridescent rainbow of an ocean sunset. He looked beautiful. He looked cold.

"Am I dead?" said Dean, half-convinced Sam was some god of death come to reap his soul and wrapping his arms around him anyway, "Tell me it's really you."

Something broke in Dean as he pulled Sam in, stealing the breath from his lungs as water crashed and dissolved around their bodies, Sam's fierce kisses calling him further from that borderland between life and death, until finally a great tumult echoed from the cave behind Dean as bats burst forth and spiraled upward and the moon disappeared in a cloud of black wings.

And then they heard her singing.

Sam looked round. Farther down the beach, waves pounded the surf, some as much as thirty feet high, but Sam knew it was neither the tide nor a storm nor any natural thing that might force the water to act in such a manner.

The Atlantic was rising.

"My king."

A path had been carved in the ocean. Hair coiling upward, naked save for a scanty loincloth about her hips, the priestess's hands stretched over her head between two walls of water hundreds of feet high, a dry ribbon of land leading from her to Sam.

"Come back," she commanded. Dean clutched Sam's arms, sand shivering around them in the wake of her words.

Sam felt the pull of her words, felt the tug of her command as his Consort, but it was nothing compared to the grasp of Dean's hands on his arms. He stared down into Dean's eyes, ignoring the priestess for a moment.

"I won't," Sam assured Dean, though the warmth that would usually be in his eyes was absent in the solid cold blue of them.

Sam pressed one more hard, cold kiss to Dean's lips, then stood, facing the priestess.

"No force can make me," Sam said, his voice booming over the tumult of the raging waters, standing tall and solid and immovable, his broad shoulders squared. He felt energy rise up in him in preparation for this confrontation. Thin ribbons of it spilled out of him and gave the air around him a curling, hazy glow.

Storm clouds boiled in the sky. She walked toward him, her footsteps filling with blood. "Then I will take my wedding gift."

And with that her body swelled and tentacles burst from her face, whipping round Sam to latch onto Dean.

"Dammit!" Dean shouted, catching sight of his knife mere inches away. He rolled over, black tongues whispering his name and licking his bare skin hungrily, but the knife lay out of reach.

"Sam!" Dean shouted. Slimy tendrils dragged him belly-down across the sand, his fingers scoring deep grooves in the sand, and then lifted him in the air like a trophy as the walls of water closed in fast, ready to swallow him up.

Rage boiling up inside Sam as he watched the tentacles writhe and clutch at Dean, pulling him toward the priestess, into danger, away from him, Sam took a step forward and whipped his hands outward, thrusting the walls of water away from Dean and the priestess.

She was powerful, yes.

But she seemed to have forgotten that she had given him the power of a god.

"You can't have him!" he bellowed, thunder in his voice, lightning arcing down from the clouds to strike the beach around him, burning the sand into jagged formations of glass where it struck.

Though Dean was lashed to and fro in the air, like the world's last bone being tossed between two dogs, Dean had a moment of clarity. He wasn't going to die, not today at least.

Sam would not permit it.

"Lady," said Dean, his little smartass smile hovering inches from the dripping horror of her face, "You shoulda run when you had the chance."

Sam took another step forward. With a slice of his hand, a razor-thin sheet of water jetted out from the churning walls of the sea, severing the tentacles off a foot from her face. As she shrieked, he jerked his fingers backwards, and Dean was sent flying to the beach, still-flailing tentacles wrapped around him. He skidded across the rocky sand for a dozen feet before he came to a stop.

The priestess advanced on him, her face twisted in rage, black blood streaming from the slashed tentacles dangling from her mouth. Sam held his ground. Dean was a warm, living presence at his back.

The priestess's face squirmed into a smile, triumphant.

But Sam smiled back.

Cthulhu, whose Dreams and godhood Sam had inherited, had been many magnitudes of power stronger than Sam, possessing knowledge and abilities beyond comprehension. However, he lacked one thing: Sam's sharp, well-trained, analytical human brain. For Cthulhu, the language he spoke had been just that: a language.

For Sam, the vocabulary was a machine with many parts, one that could be taken apart and put back together as he saw fit. He could make and remake words, and this he did now, thinking furiously, concentrating his entire being on pulling the correct syllables and accents and subtleties together.

The priestess opened her mouth to sing once more, a garbled, many-voiced horror of a song.

Sam smiled wider as the machine parts fit together in his head. Hair whipping around his face, he raised his hand to her, palm out. He took a deep breath.

He spoke the word of UnMaking.

The world flashed white as her song was abruptly cut off, and then there was a crater miles wide and miles deep beginning where she had stood, digging out the bottom of the sea. Tumultuous waves rushed in to fill the hole.

Sam made it to Dean's side before he fell to his knees in the sand.