Chapter Text
“I told you not to touch that! Why don’t you ever fucking listen to me?”
Sam’s booming voice is so painfully loud that Dean actually has to slap his hands over his ears, craning his neck to look up at his brother.
Way up.
Way, way up.
Like…miles up.
“Well,” Dean squeaks—oh, shit, he sounds like a fucking chipmunk, not cool, “if you’d mentioned the part where it was gonna turn me into a Smurf—“
There is a brief pause, and something about Sam’s carefully controlled face tells Dean that the hulking monster towering miles above him is restraining laughter at Dean’s squeaky little voice. “Oh, don’t exaggerate,” Sam finally says, voice significantly quieter in deference to the size of Dean’s ears, “you’re not blue. And I actually think the Smurfs were a little bigger than you.”
“If you will pardon me,” an icy, somehow still gravelly squeak comes from behind Dean, “I do not know what a Smurf is, but can we focus on the fact that Dean has somehow managed to shrink us?”
“Hey,” Dean chirps defensively, “it wasn’t actually me that shrank us, it was that thi—“
“DO NOT FUCKING TOUCH IT!” Sam thunders from above them, just as Dean’s miniscule hand gets within a couple millimeters of the unassuming wooden homunculus lying on its side on the floor beside them. Both Dean and Cas cry out and recoil at the roar, which actually shakes the ground underneath them. Pausing and taking a breath, Sam crouches down, wrestling his overshirt off and using it as a barrier to pick up the small figurine. Dean watches it soar away with a scowl which is probably somewhat less effective than usual on a GI Joe sized face. “Sorry,” Sam apologizes a good deal more quietly, although Dean suspects he’s really apologizing to Cas, “but for all we know it will shrink you again.”
“Or it might regrow us,” Dean argues, annoyed.
“Has anything ever been as simple as that?” Sam demands rhetorically, forgetting to control his volume. Dean winces again.
“Can you try to keep it down, Gigantor? Little ear drums.”
Cas strides up beside Dean, tiny trenchcoat flapping. He’s still not looking at Dean, presumably too annoyed. “Sam, you clearly suspected what this object would do, as you instructed Dean not to touch it. I do not suppose this means that you are aware of how to undo its effects?”
Sam, who was leaning close to hear Cas better, sighs deeply, and the gust of warm air knocks both Dean and Cas on their asses. Grimacing a little, Sam rubs a hand over his face. “Sorry again. No, unfortunately not, Cas. It’s gonna take some research, and I don’t think you two are gonna be much help.”
“Well, why the hell not?” Dean pipes up, offended, “I can do anything you can do! Don’t go getting all sizeist on me, Sammy.”
“Think you can hold a book?” Sam inquires dryly, and Dean is brought up short.
Literally.
Scowling up at Sam, he remains silent, because he’s sure as hell not going to admit out loud that Sam was right. Cas, meanwhile, finally turns to Dean, and the ferocity gleaming in his blue eyes makes Dean take a small (well, a very small, he guesses) step backward. “Unless you have anything actually helpful to say, Dean, it strikes me that you have done more than enough damage. Be silent.”
Dean opens his mouth furiously to argue, then snaps it shut with a gulp as Cas advances on him a single, menacing step. Nodding once, Cas turns back to Sam, who is watching with an expression of mild amusement on his enormous face. “Very well, it seems that Dean and I are not likely to be of much use in researching, given that we are not currently to scale,” Dean has to bite down on his lower lip not to snicker at Cas’s choice of words, as if they were a diagram in a math book, “but do you think there is anything else helpful we can do in the meantime?”
Sam’s brows knit thoughtfully as he stares down at them. “Honestly, Cas, I can’t think of anything right now. I hate to say it, but I think our best bet is to put you somewhere safe—we can’t risk me stepping on you—and let you hang out while I figure this thing out. I’d have you make phone calls, but I doubt you could be heard over the phone and I’m not sure a touchscreen would even register you.”
Cas sighs, then nods in resignation as Sam puts a hand down on the floor, palm up. Dean stares at it, mystified, until Cas strides over and clambers atop it, frowning thoughtfully before he seats himself, presumably aiming for greater stability. Then both he and Sam swivel their faces toward Dean, who is already shaking his head stubbornly. “Oh, no. No way. I am not going to be toted around by my brother like some kind of doll, that’s— what the fuck, Sam?!” His voice rises sharply in pitch as he suddenly finds himself soaring what looks like miles off the ground, jerked off his feet by the thumb and forefinger that have closed around the back of his flannel.
“We do not have time,” Sam booms censoriously from above him, “for your shit right now, Dean. Either you get with the program or I will get you with it. I’m not playing games with you.”
Sam stands, and Dean actually has to close his eyes for a second. He’s not afraid of heights, per se, but suddenly having your legs flailing the equivalent of hundreds of feet off the ground would be unnerving to anybody. When he gets himself under control enough to open his eyes again, the first thing he sees is a very smug-looking Cas, comfortably seated cross-legged on Sam’s open palm. Dean flips him the bird, still smarting at the indignity of being toted around like this, but reconsiders at the warning look that crosses the angel’s face. Dropping his hand, he turns his face back up to Sam, trying to ignore the stomach-roiling sight of the ground rushing by far below his dangling feet.
“Okay, okay, I’m with the program. Can you just…put me on your other hand? You have no idea how creepy this is.”
Sam grunts, but shifts Dean over, causing his legs to swing wildly. Squeezing his eyes shut again, Dean waits until he feels a reasonably solid surface beneath his feet. Two little (well, they feel normal-sized to him) hands settle around his waist, steadying him and pulling him down to a seated position. Dean goes willingly, not opening his eyes until he’s sitting comfortably. It’s still weird to be chilling on his brother’s hand, wind whipping through his hair and ruffling his flannel as Sam strides down the hallway and up a flight of stairs, but it’s a hell of a lot less freaky than dangling was, so he goes with it.
Twenty Minutes Earlier
See, what had happened was, Sam dragged them down into the archives to help him hunt for this object that he thought might help them in defeating some of the bigger monsters they encountered. And Dean had totally listened to the part about what the thing looked like…but once Sam started getting all detailed about why he wanted it, Dean tuned out.
That’s probably where the trouble started.
They were going through the lock boxes that contained powerful objects—apparently, this particular section of the archives wasn’t as well organized as others, so they didn’t know the exact number of the correct box—and Dean was just lucky enough to be the one who spotted the thing:
“Oh, hey, Sammy, I think I’ve got it. Damn, this little dude is fugly.”
“Awesome. Remember what I said earlier, don’t—“
“No, seriously,” setting a hand on Cas’s arm to turn the angel toward him, Dean reached out for the little figure to show Cas his face.
Another hand grabbed Dean’s elbow and jerked sharply, pulling his hand away. Dean pivoted to face Sam, offended.
“Goddammit, Dean, I said don’t touch it!”
“Jesus, Sam, I’m not stupid, I wasn’t gonna use my bare hands, I was—“ he was lying, is what he was doing. He had definitely been about to pick the thing up with his bare hands, and Sam damn well knew it, but never got the chance to call him on it. Wrestling his elbow out of Sam’s grip, Dean took a hasty step backward—and directly into Cas, who was still where Dean had pulled him. The angel staggered, Dean stumbled. One of his hands shot out to stabilize Cas, and the other reached out to catch himself on the nearest surface.
Except the lockbox was on the nearest surface.
Instead of closing around the edge of the table, one of Dean’s flailing fingertips brushed ever-so-lightly against the head of the don’t-touch-that.
And…well. Thirty highly uncomfortable seconds later, he and Cas stood staring upward at a Sam who was now not so much moose sized as space-shuttle sized, at least in proportion to them.
There was a moment of silence in which all of them processed what had just happened. Cas was the first to recover.
“Father dammit, Dean!”
Sam was next.
“I told you not to touch that! Why don’t you ever fucking listen to me?”
Several Hours Later
This sucks. This absolutely, positively fucking blows. First Sam had the nerve to set him and Cas up in a cardboard box. A fucking CARDBOARD box. Like they were, what, a couple of stray kittens? He even put a towel in the bottom, announcing that he wanted them to be comfortable, as if the whole thing wasn’t humiliating enough.
And now, now Cas won’t even talk to him. The angel had settled down in some lotus-position shit maybe thirty minutes ago and started to do something that looked for all the world like meditating, insisting that he needed to focus to see if he could somehow use his grace to undo the effects of the object.
“I’m bored,” Dean announces, flopping onto his side and dropping his head into Cas’s lap. The angel’s perfectly composed features twitch slightly, but he doesn’t open his eyes or acknowledge Dean.
“Caaaaas, I’m bored.” Still nothing.
Okay, fine. If he can’t get the angel to amuse him, maybe he can amuse the angel and thus himself by extension. It’s been an hour since Sam strode out of the library, muttering about some books that are buried in the archives that might be helpful. And Sam can’t see into the box when he first comes into the library, anyway, so they’ll hear him from a mile away. Rolling over, Dean nuzzles his face into Cas’s crotch.
He can’t see whether Cas’s face is twitching, but something else sure is. Wriggling his head just right, Dean has just managed to get his teeth latched around Cas’s zipper (something he knows perfectly well drives the angel absolutely wild) when a firm hand tangles in his hair. Dean’s first thought is that Cas has decided to get in on the action in traditionally toppy fashion—right up until the hand tightens to the point of not-good pain and pointedly peels his face away from the crotch in question. Dean yelps.
“Ow ow ow ow ow, Cas, c’mon, that hurts!”
“Perhaps,” the implacable voice comes from above him, “you would be less likely to find yourself under assault if you refrained from molesting the unwary.”
“Hey, you molest me all the time, and—“
“One, that is different, and two, I do not do so during times at which you have specified you are not to be disturbed.”
“Okay, whoa, how the hell is that differ—owowowowow!” The fingers have tightened further and Dean finally has to go along with the tugging or risk losing a chunk of hair. He lets himself be hauled back upright, squirming until Cas’s fingers release his hair. He finally gets a good look at the angel’s face, and sees that Cas is actually not mildly amused by what Dean calls antics and Cas calls bratting. He’s not amused at all. In fact, he looks downright ornery.
“You know perfectly well why it is different, and I assure you, if you lay another hand on me while I am attempting to fix the damage you have caused, you will regret it. And,” he adds unnecessarily, “not in the good way.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll entertain myself,” Dean says hastily, scrambling out of reach. Cas gives him a single, narrow look, not even bothering to dignify Dean’s words with an answer before once again settling into his weird meditative state.
And Dean tries. He really does. First he unravels a thread from the towel and uses it to play cat’s cradle—but that’s not much fun solo, and he only half remembers how to do it, anyway. Then he tries to take a nap, but he’s way too restless.
Another twenty minutes have passed before he finally kicks back and starts a one-man karaoke show. He starts out with Zeppelin’s Ramble On to warm up, then moves on to Metallica’s Sad But True. By the time he hits Motörhead's Killed by Death (which he feels a special affinity for, for obvious reasons), he’s really hitting his stride, and honestly, he’s completely forgotten about the angel attempting to concentrate about twelve inches over, which is probably why his volume has risen to kind of a squeaky crescendo.
By the time he hears Cas calling, he has the distinct sense it’s not the first time the angel has called his name. Or the second. Or the tenth.
“DEAN!”
“What, what?!” He pops up like a daisy, whirling around to hunt down the threat, but there’s nothing other than an extremely disgruntled angel glaring at him.
“Must you make that racket?”
“Hey, those were classics. It’s not my fault you don’t appreciate the finer things in—“
“I am attempting to concentrate. If you must serenade yourself, at least do so outside the confines of the box.” Dean is already on his feet and jumping for the nearest cardboard wall when Cas adds firmly, “but do not leave the table."
Dean gets a running start and manages to parkour his way to the top of the wall via the corner. He’s scrambling over the edge as the angel’s voice chases him, “Dean! I mean it.”
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” Dean calls back, surveying the giant obstacle course that the library’s long table has become. Sam has helpfully left another towel resting just outside the box, having apparently decided that one towel should be more than enough for them to get comfortable on. Dean promptly flings himself off the top of the box and tucks into a cannonball, crowing as he sails through the air. “Banzai!”
He hears Cas’s irritated grunt, a little muffled from within the box, but pays it no mind as he lands comfortably in the plush towel, then rolls to its edge and drops to his feet.
Freedom. Fuck, yeah. And not just that, angel-sanctioned freedom! Cas can’t give him a hard time about escaping the box when he’s the one who told Dean to do it.
And, yeah, maybe Cas told him to stay on the table, but it’s not like there’s actually anything to do up here either. Dean is going to have to (he starts snickering as soon as the thought occurs) think outside the box on this one.
Remembering something he’s pretty sure he spotted from the top of the box, Dean takes off at an easy lope, heading down the table. Sure enough, about a third of the way along its length, much too far from the box to be heard, he finds the small plastic container of thumbtacks that they use to affix things to the bulletin board they sometimes use when they’re working through details about a case. Sam was using the board this morning to organize information about some of the objects in the archives (hence the whole Dean and Cas being able to comfortably live in Barbie’s Dream House now), and Dean thanks his lucky stars for it, because he’s had an idea, and it’s killer.
Snagging a pair of the thumbtacks—the ones with colored protrusions—he hefts one in each hand. They’re just about the perfect size for his purposes. He feels a little bad for what he’s about to do to the table, but it’s not like anyone routinely looks at its legs, anyway.
Jogging back down to the end of the table, Dean is unsurprised to hear Cas’s voice calling for him, again with a level of annoyance suggesting that this isn’t the first time.
“I thought you were trying to focus!” Dean hollers back, and he can actually hear the angel gritting his teeth when he responds.
“I am, but it seemed prudent to ascertain that you had not gone AWOL first.”
“Still here, Captain Bossypants,” he calls back cheerfully, feeling safe to use the nickname Cas despises since the angel can’t actually get his hands on Dean easily at the moment.
There are a few seconds of silence before the annoyed voice calls back. “You are treading on extraordinarily thin ice, Dean Michael.”
Oh, shit. First and middle names. “Yes, Sir,” Dean says, making sure to sound appropriately chastened. He can get away with it, too, since Cas can’t see his face enough to spot that he is not remotely chastened.
Another moment of silence before Cas calls back.
“Better. Now please try to keep it down.”
“Yessir,” Dean says absently, already plotting his escape. Cas subsides into silence, but Dean waits at least a couple minutes, just for good measure, before he very quietly jogs to one of the table’s corners and peers over the edge.
A bit of careful strategizing, a few minutes of yanking on a loose thread in the towel outside the box, and a final trip down to the little plastic box to grab a third thumbtack later, and Dean is good to go.
He wraps the end of the thread carefully around one of the thumbtacks four or five times, then drives the thumbtack into the corner of the table with all his strength, anchoring the thread. Then, using his knowledge of knots (they came in damn useful in hunting), he wraps the thread around his own waist and ties it off in a solo-climbing knot before seizing his remaining two thumbtacks.
The actual process of rappelling down the side of the table is ridiculously easy and fast. He barely needs the thumbtacks at all, but those were more to get him back up when he’s done, anyway.
Once he’s settled on the floor, he unties the thread from around his waist and leaves it there to await his return. Between that and the thumbtacks, it should be easy to rock climb back up to the table without Sam or Cas any the wiser about his excursion.
Now that he’s on the floor, Dean takes a minute to really look around.
The library looks a shit-ton different from five inches up than it does from slightly over six feet. The floor that he always thought was perfectly smooth doesn’t seem like it anymore, and spaces that could be crossed in a step or two suddenly stretch out ahead of him endlessly. It should maybe be a little intimidating, this very real evidence of just how small Dean really is, but Dean Winchester is not easily intimidated. What he is, is ready for an adventure.
He didn’t actually give a whole lot of thought to what he’d do once he got off the table before now; he’d focused entirely on his escape plan. Now that he’s actually made it, he takes a minute to consider his next step. It doesn’t take long to decide on a course of action, because let’s face it, Dean is always hungry, and Sam wasn’t kind enough to leave them with anything to eat when he fucked off.
So…kitchen. It’s gonna be a bit of a trek at his current size, but he’s never backed down from a challenge before, and he distinctly remembers the bag of potato chips he left on the counter yesterday evening. He could swim laps in those potato chips at his current size.
Thumbtacks firmly in hand, Dean pauses long enough to cut off a good six inches of spare thread from the end of his hanging “rope,” such as it is, carefully winding it around one arm before slinging it over his shoulder. A man should never go anywhere unprepared.
Thus equipped, he sets off toward the library door.
Everything goes fine, for a while. He’s made it almost all the way to the entranceway, and he figures that’s at least a third of the way to the kitchen, when the tremors start. The ground shakes a little, once. Then again. Then a third time. The tremors are rhythmically spaced, and getting stronger. It takes Dean almost no time to put together what they must be.
Footsteps.
He takes off at a sprint, aiming for a chair near the door, figuring he can tuck himself behind one of its legs. His first thought is simply to get out of the way before Sam accidentally steps on him and squishes him (okay, maybe the kid had a point about putting them in the cardboard box), but he almost immediately decides it’s also probably a good idea to avoid being seen, because if (when, he guesses, now) Cas finds out that he left the table despite strict instructions not to, he’s gonna get his ass handed to him. At this point, that’s pretty much an inevitability, so he might as well have a little fun before reaping his just desserts.
He makes it in the nick of time, ducking behind one of the chair’s heavy wooden legs just as an enormous foot clomps down exactly where Dean was standing not sixty seconds ago. He twitches a little at the thought of being splattered across the bottom of Sammy’s shoe (seriously, though, after everything they’ve survived, how would that look in the obituary?), then grimaces as the booming voice breaks over him from aloft. Jesus, Sam can project.
“Okay, guys, nothing definite yet, but I’ve actually got a few ideas from this book I—“ Sam, who was striding across the room as he spoke (and who managed to cross a distance that took Dean at least fifteen minutes in about five seconds, damn him), suddenly cuts off, and Dean is pretty damn sure he knows why. Sure enough… “Uh, Cas? Where’s Dean?”
He strongly suspects Cas is speaking, but Dean can’t hear him from this distance. His suspicions are born out a moment later as Sam responds to the unknown words.
“I don’t think so. I don’t see him. Give me a sec, let me make sure he didn’t crawl into the tissue box to take a nap or something.” There is a pause, then the sound of rifling. Dean peeks out from behind the chair leg and sees Sam digging through the various objects on the table. After a moment he rises to his full (and way more impressive than usual, from Dean’s perspective) height and steps back down the table to peer into the cardboard box once more, shaking his massive head. “Nope, he’s definitely not up here, Cas. And I don’t think he fell. There’s no way he wouldn’t have been injured, and he’s not lying under the table or anything. How the hell did he get out of the box, anyway?”
There’s a moment of silence, in which Dean can practically hear Cas’s exasperated squeak in his mind.
“You what?” Sam demands suddenly. “Are you out of your mind? In what universe was he ever actually going to stay put? Have you met him?”
This is when it occurs to Dean that standing here eavesdropping is incredibly unwise. Any moment now they’re going to realize that he can’t have gotten far and start looking. And since Sam can cross enormous distances in a heartbeat (it’s actually kind of funny, Dean thinks, how fast his mind has adjusted to his size and begun thinking of perfectly normal sized objects and distances as gargantuan), it’ll probably take him about five seconds to find Dean.
The idea of being caught and returned to the box so quickly, without having any kind of really solid adventure to speak of, is incredibly depressing. After all the trouble he went to in order to escape, he at least deserves to get a good story out of it. At the very least, he should get to wallow around in that swimming-pool-sized bag of chips.
Look, he’s under no illusions. He knows that eventually he’s gotta go back, and he definitely knows that the instant he does, he’s going to catch it something fierce. Sam’s bitching he can handle—God knows he’s been dealing with that ever since the kid (the kid, Dean’s brain reminds him, who is now more than fifteen times his size) learned to talk. Dean can tune that out easy. Nod and smile, that’s how you deal with Sammy’s lectures.
But Cas—well, Cas is a little more hands on, these days. He’d discovered somewhere along the way that, as hard-headed as Dean is, he tends to respond to more…concrete consequences. Dean’s not entirely sure how the hell they ended up where they are now, but he’s gotta admit it works. Their relationship is the best it’s ever been, for the most part, and ultimately nothing happens that he doesn’t consent to, at least in the abstract. And God knows the sex has never been better.
Yeah, Dean has to acknowledge that there’s something to be said for Cas’s hands-on strategies. What he doesn’t have to do is march his way to the firing squad willingly. And especially not without banging a few gongs first.
Which means it’s time to go find a gong.
The good thing about being this tiny is that he doesn’t have to go to any particular pains to be quiet, so he doesn’t tiptoe or anything. He figures his best bet is to use the chair as cover, make his way to the wall, and sneak around the library’s entranceway. From there he can continue to hug the wall while he heads for the kitchen. Not only will he be a lot less likely to get stepped on, he’ll be harder to spot. It’s a solid plan.
It would’ve worked, too, if not for his slight miscalculation.
In two minutes, he will be cursing himself soundly for not remembering why the chair was in that particular spot in the first place. In two minutes, he will be kicking himself for not using what are ordinarily impressively sharp powers of observation. In two minutes, he will be regretting a number of his most recent life choices.
Right now, though? Right now, Dean is feeling great. He’s got a plan, and it’s gonna work.
Keeping a close eye on Sammy’s feet, which haven’t moved in the last minute or two as he continues to carry on a one-sided (from Dean’s perspective) conversation with Cas, Dean starts to back quickly toward the wall. He doesn’t waste the time to turn around and more closely survey the terrain. After all, he lives here. He spends hours a day in the library. He knows this place like the back of his hand.
He registers at the last second, as his foot slides backwards, that something is not quite right—but it’s too late. Suddenly there is nothing beneath his left foot, and he is so surprised that instead of flinging himself forward and back onto solid ground, he tumbles backward.
If he’d landed just a little differently, he would’ve been able to crawl or tightrope his way back to solid ground, but of course the universe is not that kind to him. It does him one solid, though, as the sharp yelp that would have given Dean away is lost beneath Sam’s voice.
“Well, that’s all very well,” Dean hears his brother say, “and believe me when I tell you that I fully support whatever comeuppance he gets, but how does that help us now?”
Yep, Dean thinks, as he topples through the heating grate embedded in the floor, I am so screwed.
He manages to catch the edge of a metal grate with the fingertips of one hand. He hangs there for a second or two, feet dangling over the abyss below. He has just enough time to be annoyed that it’s summer (if the heat were actually on at the moment, Dean would’ve felt the airflow coming from the vent long before he, uh, stumbled across it) before his fingertips slide off the smooth metal, and he tumbles into darkness.