Honey, I shrunk the Winchesters
PART ONE
“Ow! Son of a bitch!”
Dean shook out his hand and glared at the thin layer of viscous green goo that had just oozed out of the cupboard where he kept the fry pans and given his fingers an electric shock. That Wicked Witch of the West bitch had really done a number on his kitchen. He’d been finding bits of residual magic for a week and that stuff had quite a bite.
“You okay, Dean?”
Dean jumped and caught his head on the edge of the kitchen bench. “Ow! Goddamn it, Sam!”
Sam was leaning in the doorway, arms folded across his chest. He grinned when Dean rubbed at his head and Dean glared at him. “I thought you were up to your neck in Oz lore?”
Sam grimaced. “Yeah. I just came across a little-known passage about the reproductive proclivities of Howler Monkeys; figured it was time for a break.”
Dean raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like they kept all the good stuff out of the published stories,” he rinsed his hand under the tap, ignoring Sam’s disgruntled mutterings about reality and porn. “I was just about to make bacon cheeseburgers,” he said. “You want one? Or…” he crossed to the clunky old Frigidaire and pulled open the door, “we have eggs and tomatoes too. I could make you an omelet with a side of bacon, if you want?”
When he turned back to look at Sam, his brother was wearing a fond expression on his face that Dean didn’t like one bit. “What?” he growled.
Sam broke out his dimples. “Look at you, goin’ all 1950s Housewife. It’s adorable!”
“I have a wooden spoon,” Dean said calmly, producing the implement from somewhere behind himself with a flourish. “And I ain’t afraid to use it.”
Sam held his hands up, palms out in a gesture of submission. “An omelet sounds great. You want some help?”
Dean regarded his brother for a moment, gauging his seriousness, and then nodded. “Sure. You can beat the eggs.” He turned away from Sam to get the mixing bowl and when he opened the cupboard where it was kept a flood of green goo gushed out of the cupboard, drenching him from head to foot. “Son of a bitch! I freakin’ hate witches!” Dean wiped the goo from his eyes and spat it from his mouth.
“Uh, Dean?”
“What?” Dean glared up at Sam.
And up.
And up.
And…what the hell?
“Dude!” Sam’s voice held a slight note of hysteria. “You’re shrinking!”
--
Dean paced the wooden table top, watching with unconcealed irritation as Sam pored over a weighty, leather-bound Oz tome.
“Anything?” he demanded.
Sam sighed. “No, Dean, in the two and a half minutes since the last time you asked, I haven’t found anything that could help us reverse the shrinking.”
“Goddamn it, Sam! You gotta read faster!” Dean kicked at the base of the table lamp and then hopped away, rubbing at his toes. Why couldn’t he have been shrunk with his boots on?
Sam’s look was a combination of pity and amusement. “It could’ve been worse, Dean. You could’ve shrunk down to microscopic size. At least you stopped at doll size,” he inclined his head and looked at Dean with a pensive expression. “You know, you look like one of those Ken dolls.”
“I will stab you,” said Dean.
He turned to the big black ashtray in the center of the table, now filled with paperclips, pen caps, rubber bands and packets of post-it notes, and grabbed hold of a paperclip, which he began to un-bend.
“Found something!” Sam said.
Dean dropped the paperclip. “Really?”
“No. But if you try to stab me with a paperclip, I’m gonna pick you up and put you on top of that bookshelf. Just sit tight, Ken, and let me do my thing.”
Dean stared at Sam for a moment and then sat himself down on the edge of the ashtray and put his head in his hands. His throat was sore from having to shout everything at Sam in order for the giant Sasquatch to hear him, and he was still aching all over from the ordeal of shrinking. On top of that, he was feeling completely humiliated. Earlier, when he’d finally stopped getting smaller, Sam had picked him up and carried him over to the table top. Without Sam’s help, he wouldn’t be able to get down. He trusted his little brother without question, but the degree to which he was now reliant on him was a little scary. The ribbing, he could take. He would’ve been more concerned if Sam hadn’t taken the opportunity to tease and insult him. But a Ken doll? Really? Dean’s eyes widened as a truly frightening thought crossed his mind and he surreptitiously lowered his hand to his groin to make sure that his boys were still there; he sighed in relief when he confirmed that he wasn’t as junkless as a Ken doll.
Above him, Sam cleared his throat. “We’ll figure this out,” he said. “I promise.”
--
Two hours later and Sam was regretting his promise. There was nothing in the Oz lore about residual magic, nothing about the witch’s magic, period, except for the repeatedly stated fact that if you got zapped by her, you died. Sam rubbed at his forehead, trying to soothe the brain-buzzing that was demanding his attention. Charlie had been zapped, he knew she had. Maybe the witch hadn’t been at full strength after seventy-five years in some kind of suspended animation. Or maybe…had she zapped Charlie before or after Dean shot her with a poppy bullet? Dean had been a little vague on the sequence of events. And then there was that name Dean had shouted, Zeke. The brain-buzzing intensified and Sam closed his eyes and regulated his breathing, letting wave after wave of calmness and strength wash over him. He couldn’t deny that he was feeling better in every way than he had for a long time, but his spidey-sense kept tingling. Or maybe that was just paranoia; part of the same set of fears that kept him from making a real home in the bunker.
“Sammy?” Dean’s voice was small and tinny. Sam opened his eyes and stared down at his doll-sized brother who was standing on the pages of the book Sam had been reading, peering up at him uncertainly.
Sam cleared his throat and attempted a smile. “Think we’re gonna have to research a little farther afield. I’m gonna head down into the archives,” he paused and ran a hand through his hair. “Is there, uh, anything you want me to do for you before I head down? Food? Or you want me to put a DVD on for you?”
Dean ran a hand over his jaw and then nodded. “Food sounds good.”
Sam left his brother sitting on the kitchen bench with a plate of ham, cheese and bread, cut up into really, really small pieces, and a forlorn expression on his tiny face.
Sam’s first port of call was the Archives. The Men of Letters filing system was easy to work with. It used a standard subject filing system, for example, A1 for Cryptozoology, A1.1 for Ahuizotl, A1.2 for Banshees and so forth. The first time Sam had ventured down into the catacombs, it had taken him a few hours to figure out that although most of the file names were in English, some were in Latin and some were in Enochian, and if there was a system to determine which language should be used, Sam hadn’t yet worked it out.
Sam didn’t find anything relevant filed under Magic or Magus, nor under Shrinking or Incididunt. There was no file for Other Worlds or Alios Mundos, but when he tried Mtif Londoh (Enochian) he scored pay dirt. Apparently the Men of Letters held keys to, not only Oz, but also Wonderland, Narnia, The Dreamlands, Pern and Earthsea. Sam very nearly geeked all over himself, but he reined himself in before he could start planning an Other World holiday to see some real dragons, and focused on the task at hand. Maybe an Archmage from Earthsea would be able to counter the Wicked Witch’s magic; the file on Earthsea listed the box and vault where the Earthsea key was kept. Sam made a note. He scanned the synopsizes of each Other World and the lists of artifacts from each world that were held in the vaults and when he glanced over the list of Wonderland artifacts, the word shrink leapt out at him: Vault 12, Shelf 28, Box 39-1 x bottle of Drink Me Potion. Known effects: causes a person to shrink. 1 x small Eat Me cake. Known effects: causes a person to grow.
“Yahtzee!” Sam scribbled down the vault, shelf and box number and hurried to retrieve the artifact that would see Dean restored to his proper size.
--
The chunks of ham and cheese that Sam had cut for him were as big as Dean’s hands and without the benefit of utensils he had no choice but to hold them up to his face and gnaw on them. It was…undignified as fuck was what it was. And even worse, on his last shopping trip Dean had brought home a Mississippi Mud pie and Sam hadn’t even attempted to cut him a tiny slice of that. Dean wiped his cheesy hands on the back of his jeans and sighed. If he were going to get any pie today, he was probably going to have to stand in the damn pie dish and tear chunks off of it with his bare hands. Hmm. Dean inclined his head and looked at the refrigerator.
It wasn’t actually all that hard, getting down from the bench. Dean lay on his belly and lowered himself off the ledge, down onto the wide chrome handle of the highest kitchen drawer. He then lowered himself from one drawer handle to the next until he was down on the ground. His plan was to break the door seal on the fridge with his hands and then use his whole body weight to push the door open. From there, he should be able to climb the shelves to the pie without too much difficulty; the one hazard would be keeping the door from closing on him. He would have to prop it open with something. Maybe Sammy’s big-ass tub of natural yoghurt. Dean pulled a face. That stuff was nasty. He ran across the kitchen floor, intent on his destination, deep in thought, and as hyper-vigilant as a hunter always was, which meant that he noticed the armored hunk of scuttling legs and waving antennae in his peripheral vision immediately. A cockroach. The size of a freaking Rottweiler. You know, comparatively speaking.
Dean hadn’t even been wearing shoes when he’d gotten shrunk, let alone a side arm or a knife. Were cockroaches carnivorous? Should he be worried? The cockroach tilted its head to one side and wiggled its antennae, and okay, that was enough for Dean. He slowly unbuckled his belt and pulled it out through the loops. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was something. The cockroach stepped forward and Dean snapped the belt at it. It wasn’t really easy to read the facial expressions of a cockroach, particularly when you were trying pretty damn hard to avoid looking at the fugly, shudder-inducing thing in the first place, but Dean kind of thought the cockroach seemed a little surprised. It took another tentative step forward and Dean snapped at it again. The cockroach froze. And then it turned around and ran, fast, straight into a small hole in the wall.
Dean pumped his fist. “Yeah, that’s right, bitch,” he crowed. “Roaches check in, they don’t check out!”
And then the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and he just knew that something even worse than a cockroach was standing behind him. He spun around just in time to dive sideways, narrowly avoiding the descending fangs of a big-ass spider. Dean wasn’t an arachnid expert by any means, but he’d helped Sammy do a project on spiders back when the kid was in middle school and if he was remembering right, this was an American Wolf Spider. And if he’d thought the cockroach was fugly, that was nothing compared to the horror of the spider. Too many eyes, too many legs and, fuck! Dean snapped the belt at it as it attacked him again. He managed to roll out from under, scrambled to his feet and followed after the cockroach, into what he hoped was the relative safety of a disused mouse hole.
“What the Hell, Men of Letters,” he grumbled, “You create the most powerful place on Earth, you ward it against any evil ever created, but you can’t keep the damn bugs out!”
--
Sam arrived in the kitchen, small case containing Drink Me potion and Eat Me cake in hand, just in time to see his brother dash into a hole in the wall with a wolf spider hot on his tail.
“Dean!” he shouted. “Dean! What the Hell, man? Get out in the open!”
There was no response.
Crap.
Maybe there was some insecticide in one of the cupboards? Sam smacked himself on the head. No. He couldn’t spray poison into the hole, not when Dean was only eight inches tall. He could make him really sick.
Why had Dean run into that mouse hole? Was he already hurt? Had the spider bitten him? There was nothing for it; Sam was going to have to go in after him.
Sam set the case down on the kitchen bench and unlatched it. He took the Drink Me potion out of the case and uncorked it. He lifted it to his lips and then paused. If he was going after a spider, he was going to need a weapon. When Dean had shrunk, his clothes had too; and as far as Sam could remember, so had Alice’s. If he was holding a weapon, would that also shrink down? Sam couldn’t see why not. He quickly grabbed a couple of big knives from the second drawer down and held them tightly in one hand while he drank down the potion.
Shrinking was weird. It hurt and it was disorienting, leaving him dizzy and nauseous, but finally, he was comparable in size to Dean. And the knives had indeed shrunk down with him.
Sam took off at a flat run. He found Dean deep in the mouse hole dueling with the spider, which was up on its rear legs, waving its fore legs frantically as Dean snapped at it with his belt like some kind of bizarre lion tamer.
Sam sank the knife into the spider’s back. It tried to twist around and attack him, which gave him the opportunity to slash at its legs with the other knife. The spider fell to the ground, its torn legs curling up, as it spasmed and twitched before finally, falling still.
“You okay, Dean?”
“Peachy.” Dean peered through the dark at him. “Oh man. You got witch goop on you too, huh?”
Sam shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly. I found Drink Me potion.”
Dean stared at him. “And you…?”
“Drank it. Yeah.”
Dean edged past the dead spider and made his way to Sam’s side. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but what the fuck, Sam? You were supposed to be figuring out a way to make me normal-sized again, not shrinking yourself!”
Sam gestured at the spider with his knife. “You were gonna get eaten! Besides, I got Eat Me cake out there too. Enough to make us both big again.”
“Eat Me cake,” Dean echoed. “Okay then. Lead on Dormouse.”
They walked out to the kitchen in silence.
“Where’s this cake, then?”
Sam rubbed a hand across his chin. “I left it up on the bench.”
Dean raised an eyebrow. “Genius move.”
“Well I didn’t want to leave it on the ground in case a mouse or something got to it. Besides, you got down from up there, so we should be able to get back up.”
The climb up was tougher than the climb down. Pulling yourself up a vertical incline with your bare hands was hard work, and Dean tried not to feel emasculated by the fact that Sam, the chin-up junkie with the bulging Arnold Schwarzenegger-biceps, barely broke a sweat.
“So,” Dean puffed, as he watched his brother brush his hair out of his eyes. “If I’m a Ken doll, does that make you Barbie? I mean, you’ve got the hair, right?”
Sam rolled his eyes and pulled a couple of chunks of cake loose, handing one to his brother.
“Why couldn’t it have been Eat Me pie?” Dean asked before swallowing down the dry, tasteless cake. He watched Sam swallow down a piece too and waited.
Nothing happened.
“How long’s this supposed to take?”
Sam shrugged. “The Drink Me potion worked straight away. Maybe we need to eat a bit more?”
They ended up eating the entire cake and it didn’t make any difference. Dean picked up a business card-sized note that was tucked inside the case. He read it and then tossed it at Sam with an irritated huff. “Stored May 1946. Cake may be subject to deterioration. Ingestion post 1947 not recommended.”
Sam had the good grace to look sheepish. “Okay. So I didn’t read the small print.”
“Great,” Dean scowled, “Just great. You know, my memory foam isn’t gonna recognize me like this and G.I. Joe-ing it into the fridge every time we wanna eat is gonna get old real fast. And how long before the crap in our cupboards is ‘not recommended for ingestion?’ How the Hell are we supposed to get more food? And who’s gonna take care of Baby? Goddammit, Sam!” Dean swung an arm. “We’ve got Crowley in the basement, a bunch of damaged angels topside with their tape measures out, Kevin’s drunk, Cas’s God knows where, and we’re eight freakin’ inches tall! Reading the small print before going all ‘Honey, I shrunk the Winchesters’, would’ve been a good idea, Mr Stanford Law School!”
Dean wondered briefly if Zeke could help them, but he didn’t want to risk calling for the angel. He’d really plumbed the depths of his tattered powers saving Charlie and besides, Sam was already getting suspicious. He was also sporting an epic bitchface.
“Okay, Dean,” he said, arms wide and angry, “next time you’re about to get eaten by a giant spider, I’ll make sure I sit down and read through all the paperwork before I try to save your life!”
Dean stared at him. “We,” he said slowly and clearly, “are eight inches tall. Eight inches! And that cake, it was just messing with us: ‘Oh, you wanna be big again? Eat me!’.”
Sam ran a hand through his hair. “So we’ll just have to get some fresh cake.”
Dean frowned. “Where are we gonna get fresh Eat Me cake from?”
“Wonderland,” Sam said. “I have the key.”
Part Two>>
Back to Masterpost
“Ow! Son of a bitch!”
Dean shook out his hand and glared at the thin layer of viscous green goo that had just oozed out of the cupboard where he kept the fry pans and given his fingers an electric shock. That Wicked Witch of the West bitch had really done a number on his kitchen. He’d been finding bits of residual magic for a week and that stuff had quite a bite.
“You okay, Dean?”
Dean jumped and caught his head on the edge of the kitchen bench. “Ow! Goddamn it, Sam!”
Sam was leaning in the doorway, arms folded across his chest. He grinned when Dean rubbed at his head and Dean glared at him. “I thought you were up to your neck in Oz lore?”
Sam grimaced. “Yeah. I just came across a little-known passage about the reproductive proclivities of Howler Monkeys; figured it was time for a break.”
Dean raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like they kept all the good stuff out of the published stories,” he rinsed his hand under the tap, ignoring Sam’s disgruntled mutterings about reality and porn. “I was just about to make bacon cheeseburgers,” he said. “You want one? Or…” he crossed to the clunky old Frigidaire and pulled open the door, “we have eggs and tomatoes too. I could make you an omelet with a side of bacon, if you want?”
When he turned back to look at Sam, his brother was wearing a fond expression on his face that Dean didn’t like one bit. “What?” he growled.
Sam broke out his dimples. “Look at you, goin’ all 1950s Housewife. It’s adorable!”
“I have a wooden spoon,” Dean said calmly, producing the implement from somewhere behind himself with a flourish. “And I ain’t afraid to use it.”
Sam held his hands up, palms out in a gesture of submission. “An omelet sounds great. You want some help?”
Dean regarded his brother for a moment, gauging his seriousness, and then nodded. “Sure. You can beat the eggs.” He turned away from Sam to get the mixing bowl and when he opened the cupboard where it was kept a flood of green goo gushed out of the cupboard, drenching him from head to foot. “Son of a bitch! I freakin’ hate witches!” Dean wiped the goo from his eyes and spat it from his mouth.
“Uh, Dean?”
“What?” Dean glared up at Sam.
And up.
And up.
And…what the hell?
“Dude!” Sam’s voice held a slight note of hysteria. “You’re shrinking!”
--
Dean paced the wooden table top, watching with unconcealed irritation as Sam pored over a weighty, leather-bound Oz tome.
“Anything?” he demanded.
Sam sighed. “No, Dean, in the two and a half minutes since the last time you asked, I haven’t found anything that could help us reverse the shrinking.”
“Goddamn it, Sam! You gotta read faster!” Dean kicked at the base of the table lamp and then hopped away, rubbing at his toes. Why couldn’t he have been shrunk with his boots on?
Sam’s look was a combination of pity and amusement. “It could’ve been worse, Dean. You could’ve shrunk down to microscopic size. At least you stopped at doll size,” he inclined his head and looked at Dean with a pensive expression. “You know, you look like one of those Ken dolls.”
“I will stab you,” said Dean.
He turned to the big black ashtray in the center of the table, now filled with paperclips, pen caps, rubber bands and packets of post-it notes, and grabbed hold of a paperclip, which he began to un-bend.
“Found something!” Sam said.
Dean dropped the paperclip. “Really?”
“No. But if you try to stab me with a paperclip, I’m gonna pick you up and put you on top of that bookshelf. Just sit tight, Ken, and let me do my thing.”
Dean stared at Sam for a moment and then sat himself down on the edge of the ashtray and put his head in his hands. His throat was sore from having to shout everything at Sam in order for the giant Sasquatch to hear him, and he was still aching all over from the ordeal of shrinking. On top of that, he was feeling completely humiliated. Earlier, when he’d finally stopped getting smaller, Sam had picked him up and carried him over to the table top. Without Sam’s help, he wouldn’t be able to get down. He trusted his little brother without question, but the degree to which he was now reliant on him was a little scary. The ribbing, he could take. He would’ve been more concerned if Sam hadn’t taken the opportunity to tease and insult him. But a Ken doll? Really? Dean’s eyes widened as a truly frightening thought crossed his mind and he surreptitiously lowered his hand to his groin to make sure that his boys were still there; he sighed in relief when he confirmed that he wasn’t as junkless as a Ken doll.
Above him, Sam cleared his throat. “We’ll figure this out,” he said. “I promise.”
--
Two hours later and Sam was regretting his promise. There was nothing in the Oz lore about residual magic, nothing about the witch’s magic, period, except for the repeatedly stated fact that if you got zapped by her, you died. Sam rubbed at his forehead, trying to soothe the brain-buzzing that was demanding his attention. Charlie had been zapped, he knew she had. Maybe the witch hadn’t been at full strength after seventy-five years in some kind of suspended animation. Or maybe…had she zapped Charlie before or after Dean shot her with a poppy bullet? Dean had been a little vague on the sequence of events. And then there was that name Dean had shouted, Zeke. The brain-buzzing intensified and Sam closed his eyes and regulated his breathing, letting wave after wave of calmness and strength wash over him. He couldn’t deny that he was feeling better in every way than he had for a long time, but his spidey-sense kept tingling. Or maybe that was just paranoia; part of the same set of fears that kept him from making a real home in the bunker.
“Sammy?” Dean’s voice was small and tinny. Sam opened his eyes and stared down at his doll-sized brother who was standing on the pages of the book Sam had been reading, peering up at him uncertainly.
Sam cleared his throat and attempted a smile. “Think we’re gonna have to research a little farther afield. I’m gonna head down into the archives,” he paused and ran a hand through his hair. “Is there, uh, anything you want me to do for you before I head down? Food? Or you want me to put a DVD on for you?”
Dean ran a hand over his jaw and then nodded. “Food sounds good.”
Sam left his brother sitting on the kitchen bench with a plate of ham, cheese and bread, cut up into really, really small pieces, and a forlorn expression on his tiny face.
Sam’s first port of call was the Archives. The Men of Letters filing system was easy to work with. It used a standard subject filing system, for example, A1 for Cryptozoology, A1.1 for Ahuizotl, A1.2 for Banshees and so forth. The first time Sam had ventured down into the catacombs, it had taken him a few hours to figure out that although most of the file names were in English, some were in Latin and some were in Enochian, and if there was a system to determine which language should be used, Sam hadn’t yet worked it out.
Sam didn’t find anything relevant filed under Magic or Magus, nor under Shrinking or Incididunt. There was no file for Other Worlds or Alios Mundos, but when he tried Mtif Londoh (Enochian) he scored pay dirt. Apparently the Men of Letters held keys to, not only Oz, but also Wonderland, Narnia, The Dreamlands, Pern and Earthsea. Sam very nearly geeked all over himself, but he reined himself in before he could start planning an Other World holiday to see some real dragons, and focused on the task at hand. Maybe an Archmage from Earthsea would be able to counter the Wicked Witch’s magic; the file on Earthsea listed the box and vault where the Earthsea key was kept. Sam made a note. He scanned the synopsizes of each Other World and the lists of artifacts from each world that were held in the vaults and when he glanced over the list of Wonderland artifacts, the word shrink leapt out at him: Vault 12, Shelf 28, Box 39-1 x bottle of Drink Me Potion. Known effects: causes a person to shrink. 1 x small Eat Me cake. Known effects: causes a person to grow.
“Yahtzee!” Sam scribbled down the vault, shelf and box number and hurried to retrieve the artifact that would see Dean restored to his proper size.
--
The chunks of ham and cheese that Sam had cut for him were as big as Dean’s hands and without the benefit of utensils he had no choice but to hold them up to his face and gnaw on them. It was…undignified as fuck was what it was. And even worse, on his last shopping trip Dean had brought home a Mississippi Mud pie and Sam hadn’t even attempted to cut him a tiny slice of that. Dean wiped his cheesy hands on the back of his jeans and sighed. If he were going to get any pie today, he was probably going to have to stand in the damn pie dish and tear chunks off of it with his bare hands. Hmm. Dean inclined his head and looked at the refrigerator.
It wasn’t actually all that hard, getting down from the bench. Dean lay on his belly and lowered himself off the ledge, down onto the wide chrome handle of the highest kitchen drawer. He then lowered himself from one drawer handle to the next until he was down on the ground. His plan was to break the door seal on the fridge with his hands and then use his whole body weight to push the door open. From there, he should be able to climb the shelves to the pie without too much difficulty; the one hazard would be keeping the door from closing on him. He would have to prop it open with something. Maybe Sammy’s big-ass tub of natural yoghurt. Dean pulled a face. That stuff was nasty. He ran across the kitchen floor, intent on his destination, deep in thought, and as hyper-vigilant as a hunter always was, which meant that he noticed the armored hunk of scuttling legs and waving antennae in his peripheral vision immediately. A cockroach. The size of a freaking Rottweiler. You know, comparatively speaking.
Dean hadn’t even been wearing shoes when he’d gotten shrunk, let alone a side arm or a knife. Were cockroaches carnivorous? Should he be worried? The cockroach tilted its head to one side and wiggled its antennae, and okay, that was enough for Dean. He slowly unbuckled his belt and pulled it out through the loops. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was something. The cockroach stepped forward and Dean snapped the belt at it. It wasn’t really easy to read the facial expressions of a cockroach, particularly when you were trying pretty damn hard to avoid looking at the fugly, shudder-inducing thing in the first place, but Dean kind of thought the cockroach seemed a little surprised. It took another tentative step forward and Dean snapped at it again. The cockroach froze. And then it turned around and ran, fast, straight into a small hole in the wall.
Dean pumped his fist. “Yeah, that’s right, bitch,” he crowed. “Roaches check in, they don’t check out!”
And then the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and he just knew that something even worse than a cockroach was standing behind him. He spun around just in time to dive sideways, narrowly avoiding the descending fangs of a big-ass spider. Dean wasn’t an arachnid expert by any means, but he’d helped Sammy do a project on spiders back when the kid was in middle school and if he was remembering right, this was an American Wolf Spider. And if he’d thought the cockroach was fugly, that was nothing compared to the horror of the spider. Too many eyes, too many legs and, fuck! Dean snapped the belt at it as it attacked him again. He managed to roll out from under, scrambled to his feet and followed after the cockroach, into what he hoped was the relative safety of a disused mouse hole.
“What the Hell, Men of Letters,” he grumbled, “You create the most powerful place on Earth, you ward it against any evil ever created, but you can’t keep the damn bugs out!”
--
Sam arrived in the kitchen, small case containing Drink Me potion and Eat Me cake in hand, just in time to see his brother dash into a hole in the wall with a wolf spider hot on his tail.
“Dean!” he shouted. “Dean! What the Hell, man? Get out in the open!”
There was no response.
Crap.
Maybe there was some insecticide in one of the cupboards? Sam smacked himself on the head. No. He couldn’t spray poison into the hole, not when Dean was only eight inches tall. He could make him really sick.
Why had Dean run into that mouse hole? Was he already hurt? Had the spider bitten him? There was nothing for it; Sam was going to have to go in after him.
Sam set the case down on the kitchen bench and unlatched it. He took the Drink Me potion out of the case and uncorked it. He lifted it to his lips and then paused. If he was going after a spider, he was going to need a weapon. When Dean had shrunk, his clothes had too; and as far as Sam could remember, so had Alice’s. If he was holding a weapon, would that also shrink down? Sam couldn’t see why not. He quickly grabbed a couple of big knives from the second drawer down and held them tightly in one hand while he drank down the potion.
Shrinking was weird. It hurt and it was disorienting, leaving him dizzy and nauseous, but finally, he was comparable in size to Dean. And the knives had indeed shrunk down with him.
Sam took off at a flat run. He found Dean deep in the mouse hole dueling with the spider, which was up on its rear legs, waving its fore legs frantically as Dean snapped at it with his belt like some kind of bizarre lion tamer.
Sam sank the knife into the spider’s back. It tried to twist around and attack him, which gave him the opportunity to slash at its legs with the other knife. The spider fell to the ground, its torn legs curling up, as it spasmed and twitched before finally, falling still.
“You okay, Dean?”
“Peachy.” Dean peered through the dark at him. “Oh man. You got witch goop on you too, huh?”
Sam shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly. I found Drink Me potion.”
Dean stared at him. “And you…?”
“Drank it. Yeah.”
Dean edged past the dead spider and made his way to Sam’s side. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but what the fuck, Sam? You were supposed to be figuring out a way to make me normal-sized again, not shrinking yourself!”
Sam gestured at the spider with his knife. “You were gonna get eaten! Besides, I got Eat Me cake out there too. Enough to make us both big again.”
“Eat Me cake,” Dean echoed. “Okay then. Lead on Dormouse.”
They walked out to the kitchen in silence.
“Where’s this cake, then?”
Sam rubbed a hand across his chin. “I left it up on the bench.”
Dean raised an eyebrow. “Genius move.”
“Well I didn’t want to leave it on the ground in case a mouse or something got to it. Besides, you got down from up there, so we should be able to get back up.”
The climb up was tougher than the climb down. Pulling yourself up a vertical incline with your bare hands was hard work, and Dean tried not to feel emasculated by the fact that Sam, the chin-up junkie with the bulging Arnold Schwarzenegger-biceps, barely broke a sweat.
“So,” Dean puffed, as he watched his brother brush his hair out of his eyes. “If I’m a Ken doll, does that make you Barbie? I mean, you’ve got the hair, right?”
Sam rolled his eyes and pulled a couple of chunks of cake loose, handing one to his brother.
“Why couldn’t it have been Eat Me pie?” Dean asked before swallowing down the dry, tasteless cake. He watched Sam swallow down a piece too and waited.
Nothing happened.
“How long’s this supposed to take?”
Sam shrugged. “The Drink Me potion worked straight away. Maybe we need to eat a bit more?”
They ended up eating the entire cake and it didn’t make any difference. Dean picked up a business card-sized note that was tucked inside the case. He read it and then tossed it at Sam with an irritated huff. “Stored May 1946. Cake may be subject to deterioration. Ingestion post 1947 not recommended.”
Sam had the good grace to look sheepish. “Okay. So I didn’t read the small print.”
“Great,” Dean scowled, “Just great. You know, my memory foam isn’t gonna recognize me like this and G.I. Joe-ing it into the fridge every time we wanna eat is gonna get old real fast. And how long before the crap in our cupboards is ‘not recommended for ingestion?’ How the Hell are we supposed to get more food? And who’s gonna take care of Baby? Goddammit, Sam!” Dean swung an arm. “We’ve got Crowley in the basement, a bunch of damaged angels topside with their tape measures out, Kevin’s drunk, Cas’s God knows where, and we’re eight freakin’ inches tall! Reading the small print before going all ‘Honey, I shrunk the Winchesters’, would’ve been a good idea, Mr Stanford Law School!”
Dean wondered briefly if Zeke could help them, but he didn’t want to risk calling for the angel. He’d really plumbed the depths of his tattered powers saving Charlie and besides, Sam was already getting suspicious. He was also sporting an epic bitchface.
“Okay, Dean,” he said, arms wide and angry, “next time you’re about to get eaten by a giant spider, I’ll make sure I sit down and read through all the paperwork before I try to save your life!”
Dean stared at him. “We,” he said slowly and clearly, “are eight inches tall. Eight inches! And that cake, it was just messing with us: ‘Oh, you wanna be big again? Eat me!’.”
Sam ran a hand through his hair. “So we’ll just have to get some fresh cake.”
Dean frowned. “Where are we gonna get fresh Eat Me cake from?”
“Wonderland,” Sam said. “I have the key.”
Part Two>>
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