A/N: Pardon how long this is for a first chapter; I got a little carried away with the idea. FYI, you don't have to be at all familiar with the Midori Days anime to be able to read this weird AU—it's lightly inspired by it.
"What the flying fuck!" Dean fell out of bed, his ass hitting the floor with a loud thump. He stared at the place where his left hand should've been. And stared some more. Because attached to his wrist, by some freaky fluke, was a miniature Sam.
"Calm down, Dean! Christ, it's too early in the morning for this." Sam's tiny eyebrows knitted together, and he hunched his diminutive shoulders. "What d'you mean, calm down? I can't calm down. You try waking up and having your bitchy little brother fused to your arm!" Sam rolled his eyes at that, sighing so loudly that his bangs fluttered. "Shut up, you moron, I'm the one who's naked and puny and no longer in possession of my legs."
Dean eyed the spot where Sam's bare waist gave way to the slightly paler skin of his own wrist, and commented, "Looks like you've lost your big boy parts, too. Poetic justice, if you ask me." Sam's itsy bitsy cheeks flushed an angry shade of red, and Dean was suddenly taken with how his previously ginormous brother had shrunk to the size of a house sparrow. He felt like flicking his forehead, or pinching his cheeks, or something, but all things considered he'd probably end up giving Sam a concussion.
Instead, he asked him, "When'd you notice...this...situation? I mean, I'm running through the possibilities here and the obvious answer is fuckin' witchcraft. If this actually is a curse, It'd help if we had a timeframe to go by." Sam nodded and replied, "Uh, I woke up like an hour before you did and almost had a heart attack because I was shoved under your pillow. I thought I'd gone blind." He looked at Dean kind of accusingly, and Dean shrugged back at him.
"That give us exactly zilch to work with, other than what we already knew: that this shit zapped us sometime during last night. We could start looking for hex bags, at least." He pushed himself off the floor with his one functional hand and continued, "Ugh, if this turns out to be another magical bitch getting off on screwing with us, just because I looked at her wrong, I'm calling open season on every coven in town. Fucking witches." He cast Sam a hesitant look when he stayed worryingly quiet, and shook his right arm as gently as he could. "Dude, what's eating you? D'you have a better theory?" Sam looked up. "I...I don't...I'm not a hundred percent sure what happened, but I don't think garden-variety witches had anything to do with it. Look."
Sam pointed one infinitesimal finger at the bed he'd been occupying last night, and Dean did a double take. Because Sam's unconscious, overgrown body was still draped across it. Dean marched over and poked at Sam's shoulder a couple of times, and when that didn't rouse him, he slapped him on the face. "Hey!" Sam—the one attached to his arm—squeaked indignantly. Dean ignored him, fixating on his brother's comatose body. "This's goddamn freakish, is what it is. I can't think of an explanation that'd even begin to cover this." Dean checked again to make sure that Sam was still breathing, before rolling him onto his back and disentangling the sheets from around his legs to settle them over his torso. He shot an anxious glance at mini-Sam, who was looking at himself on the bed with an unreadable expression.
"Shouldn't we hook you up to an IV drip? This could last longer than a week, with our shitty luck." Sam shook his head. "We don't need to get ahead of ourselves. Supernatural jinxes are like second nature by now; odds are we'll figure it out before sundown." Dean narrowed his eyes, unconvinced. "Fine. But if we're still superglued together by tonight, I'm moving your body to the hospital around the corner." Sam gestured vaguely and then crossed his arms over a barely-suppressed shiver. Dean blinked, feeling the feeble motion all the way up his arm, and said, "We need to find you something to wear, huh."
He dug the needle and thread out of the first aid kit, along with a scrap of fabric he'd torn from one of his faded t-shirts, and twenty minutes later, he'd fashioned Sam a lopsided little tunic-thing. Sam pulled it over his head, tousling his hair in the process, and frowned down at himself. "I look like I'm wearing a dress." Dean smirked. "Aw, c'mon. Don't you like it? Not pretty enough for you, princess?"
"You're the pinnacle of wit."
"You love me."
To his rising annoyance, Sam was discovering that it was stupidly hard to eat when the food in question happened to be about twenty times bigger than you. Having brought takeout (a greasy carton of heart-clogging crap for Dean and a salad for Sam) back to the room with Sam hidden in Dean's stuffy jacket pocket while they were outside, Sam had been sitting and staring at his lunch for the past five minutes, at a loss as to how to undertake it. Dean, meanwhile, one-handedly shoveled fries into his mouth like his life depended on it, making all his usual obscene eating noises. Sam glared at him for a full minute before he noticed.
"What crawled up your ass? Eat, already." His eyes went from Sam's perturbed little face to the untouched salad, and he smacked his forehead in realization. "Whoops, sorry. This is so weird." It was the gajillionth time that day that one of them had said so. Dean ripped several pieces of lettuce into minuscule bits, though it was a bit of a struggle for him to do so without the use of both hands. He squeezed the tiniest drop of dressing onto the small pile of greens and held it up to Sam. "There. Have at it." Sam had never used his hands to eat salad before, but considering the lack of doll-sized cutlery they had lying around, he didn't have a choice in the matter. The thought struck Sam that if this...whatever it was...lasted for a good while longer than either of them were prepared for, they might actually need to buy girly, doll-sized stuff for him.
"This blows. I miss being taller than you," Sam mumbled forlornly around a messy mouthful of lettuce that tasted suspiciously of frying oil. "We'll figure it out," Dean said cheerfully, sucking ketchup off his fingers.
Predictably, two more hours had eclipsed and they weren't figuring it out. Dean had posited the idea that it was Sam's comatose body that held the root of the problem, and so they'd done everything they could think of—supernatural or
otherwise—to try and jar him awake. Completely fruitless.
"This is so not funny anymore. How the fuck am I supposed to jack off with you attached to my arm?"
Sam rolled his eyes so hard he nearly strained a muscle. "Play through the pain, Dean. I know it's hard to believe, but it is possible to go without jerking it for a day or two." Dean pouted, actually pouted, and said, "You know, I could still—"
"Over my dead body!"
"Come on, why'd you gotta be such a prude all the time? It's a perfectly healthy—"
"I am not gonna watch while you get yourself off, you sick bastard! We've got more important things to worry about than your dick!"
"Okay, okay. We'll talk about my dick later." Sam breathed in deeply and mentally counted to ten, seeking inner peace.
"Wait," Dean blurted suddenly, "We could try calling Cas." Sam was about to retort that the angel hadn't been answering their prayers for weeks at a time, but as soon as Dean had said the words, Castiel appeared in the middle of the room, looking as disheveled as usual yet oddly eager to help. "Hello, Dean."
"Hey, speak of the devil. You look...weirdly happy to see us."
"Yes, you've gotten me out of a conference call, of sorts. Most of my brethren are a colossal pain in the ass, these days." He nodded to himself with conviction before asking, "Where is Sam?"
"Uh, yeah, about that..."
"Hi, Cas," Sam squeaked from his vantage point near Dean's left thigh. Unless he craned his neck, he got an eyeful of the knees of Jimmy Novak's slacks, and not much else. Dean took a hint and lifted his arm up so that Cas could get a good look at Sam. "We woke up this morning and we were like this," Dean explained curtly as Cas's eyes bugged out of his head. Sam would have laughed if he weren't desperate for the comforting autonomy of his regular-sized body. "Can you maybe, I dunno, angel-mojo us back to normal?"
Castiel leaned in to examine Sam, looking at him up close from several angles. Sam fidgeted uncomfortably. "Bizarre," he declared authoritatively, lifting Sam's shirt-dress-thing up to scrutinize the place where Dean's wrist and Sam's tiny torso melded together. Dean snickered when Sam slapped at Cas's fingers like a scandalized schoolgirl.
"You're making me feel like a test-tube freak, for god's—I mean, for Pete's sake. Just fix me so I can go back to being able to eat by myself, okay?" Cas tilted his head and squinted, deep in thought.
"I can't."
"What," Dean exclaimed, at the same time that Sam demanded, "Why not?" Cas looked apologetic. "As you are right now, you are a single entity, rather than two that have been bound together. Undoubtedly, the states of each of your bodies have changed, but I am unable to undo whatever was done to you because your altered bodies are currently as one unaltered whole. It's all very complicated and supramolecular, believe me."
Sam pulled on Dean's arm, finding to his surprise that he could drag Dean's body slightly forward if he exerted a bit of energy. He tugged Dean over to the bed where his body still lay, directing Castiel's attention to it. "Would that have anything to do with this?" He indicated his comatose self, waiting impatiently for an answer. Cas frowned and touched a finger to Sam's inert forehead, silently assessing. "Ah, how interesting. A sizable piece of your soul is missing...and it appears to have become a part of Dean's, manifesting itself visually as a miniature version of yourself connected to his body."
Sam stared, jaw agape with disbelief. He probably had the worst luck in the galaxy. Cas continued, not even allowing them a moment to process the bombshell he'd dropped on them, "Can you think of anything that might have happened to incite this development? A ritual? A misread incantation, perhaps?" Dean spoke up when it was clear that Sam wasn't going to be of any help.
"Fuck, no, we mulled it over all morning and turned up empty. I thought it was just some witch yanking our chain again, and right now I'm thinking I'd love for this to be witchcraft-related. 'Least we'd know how to deal with that."
"This is definitely not the result of ordinary black magic. In fact, I would say it had to have been caused by something Sam himself did. The human soul is not easily tampered with." Sam felt stricken as Dean widened his eyes at him accusingly. "Think back, genius. There's no way I'm staying like this for longer than we need to."
"Dude, I've been wracking my brain—" He paused, feeling nauseated as a sudden occurrence came to him from the murky depths of his memory. "Uh, hang on. There...there might have been a thing." "What? What was it? Spit it out, Sam!" Sam avoided Dean's eyes, looking instead to Cas. "There was this statuette of, um. Of Eros, in a pawn shop we visited a couple days ago..."
"Aren't you the one who's always telling me to keep my hands off the magical trinkets?" Dean's voice was hardly more than a low growl. "Give me a break; it was a nice-looking statue, inconspicuous!"
Cas held up a serene hand. "Please, do go on." "Er, okay. I picked it up, and I remember thinking at the time about how..." He trailed off, casting Dean a wary glance. "About how Dean and I haven't been getting along as well as we used to. And after I'd thought it, the statue...stung me. I'd forgotten about it, until now." Cas's eyebrows drew together. "It seems unlikely that a mere statue could have brought about such a significant change." Sam shrugged. "Yeah, well. That's all I've got."
Dean made an inarticulate humming noise. "Isn't Eros the Greek version of Cupid?" Sam flushed and inwardly cursed his brother's continuously surprising repository of mythological knowledge. He felt even more flustered when he vaguely remembered bits of some academic paper he'd read about Plato's philosophical perspective on eros as an egocentric concept. Something about how it revolved around "conquering and possessing the desired object". Fucking hell.
"Yup, it's coming back to me now," Dean mused, "It also means 'intimate love' in Ancient Greek, right?" He raised his eyebrows questioningly at Sam, who kind of wanted to disappear. He wondered if being attached to Dean's arm meant that his brother could feel how fast his stupid hummingbird pulse was racing. "Um, wait, wait, I think I can explain," Sam sputtered, frantically piecing together something believable before Dean could start thinking too hard about any mortifying implications.
"The Ancient Greeks had four words that translated into 'love'; eros was only one of them. 'Philia' was the word for, uh, brotherly love."
"Yeah, so?"
"So, when I started thinking about us while holding the statue of Eros—which is the only one of the four Greek categories of love that has a figurehead associated with it—it must've worked on us because our fraternal bond would've also fallen under the Greek Cupid's job description."
He was slightly out of breath when he'd finished talking, eyeing Dean cautiously in case he called him on his bullshit. He stifled a sigh of relief when Dean simply said, "Huh, I guess that makes sense." Sam noticed that Cas didn't look so convinced; he was gazing intently at him as if he knew exactly what he was hiding. It made Sam squirm, especially because he couldn't exactly ask to speak to Cas alone, anymore. He changed the subject hurriedly.
"So what's the game plan, then?"
"You got me," Dean grumbled. They both turned to Castiel, who suddenly looked like he'd rather be bickering with his feathery, asshole brothers.
"Hard to say. I've never come across anything as ridiculous as this before. You two have a knack for getting yourselves into absurd predicaments."
"Gee, thanks for the input, Cas. Real helpful." Cas went on as if Dean hasn't spoken. "I think the only thing to do is to wait. If Sam's theory," here he gave Sam a furtive, probing glance that made him look sheepishly down at Dean's shoes, "is correct, then you most likely will not return to normal until your 'philia' is at a level worthy of the name."
"But what're we supposed to do while we wait? I can't be seen like this, and we can't just sit inside all day! We'll kill each other!" Cas shook his head at Sam. "You can go out without having to be hidden, actually. To any other human's eyes, Dean's right hand is still intact. This is because the connection between your miniature body and Dean's arm is not so much biological as it is spiritual. It is, as I said, a symbol of your partial soul transference."
"Wait, so if that's the case, do I even need to eat and sleep? Why do I still have physical urges?"
"Any bodily sensations you might have, such as of temperature and hunger, are echoic remnants left over from when you were in your true body. For instance: you might feel cold in response to the weather outside, but you aren't in any danger of catching a virus." Dean groaned, and Sam felt like doing the same. "I feel a migraine coming on," he said, miserably rubbing at his head.
"Except if Cas is right, then it only feels like you have a headache," Dean pointed out wearily. Cas gave each of them a tight smile. "This has been most fascinating, but I'm afraid I should be getting back. Infighting among the Cherubim is quite amusing to watch, but leave them at it for too long and they start getting pestilential."
Sam couldn't help but smile in return, despite his worry over the mess he'd gotten himself and Dean into. "Thanks, Cas. You've been a big help, really."
"You are welcome. Remember to get along; your philia depends on it." And with that, he was gone.
TBC