Dean blearily cracked his eyes open. The world was sideways and glimmering with red flashes on the wall and carpet... But it was normal. Normal! A huge knot evaporated from his gut, the relief hitting him like a tidal wave. He watched Jensen untangled himself from Jared on the other side of the crystal ball. It was surreal as ever, but a comfort. It was like a mirror image confirmation that he was really six foot one again. With him and Jensen restored, everything was the way it started.

Everyone was fixed.

Now the imp's true size was evident: no more than three inches tall, she was plastered to the outside of the radiating crystal, arms and legs spread at her sides. She wasn't trapped within, but she had the stiff look of being telekinetically pinned down- something Dean had been on the receiving end of too many times to count. And yet, she was beaming. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter.

"I don't know what you're smiling about. You're not going anywhere," Dean sneered, pushing himself off the carpet.

The imp giggled, raising her eyebrows at him. "Who says I want to leave? Then I'd miss the best part of the night. The show must go on." Her blue eyes drifted behind him, flickering to black.

Dean spun around, only halfway to his feet. His eyes sank lower and lower, locking with horror to a miniature Sam Winchester standing only two feet high. And he was still shrinking. It was a horrible rate to shrink at, too. Not too quick to cope with, but just slow enough that Dean could literally watch his little brother slip further away from him with every passing second. For a split second, they just stared at each other, each watching with a morbid fixation as the other transformed before their eyes. Sam passed the one foot mark, his descent not slowing down even as he sought strategic ground within his brother's ever-enveloping shadow.

"No," Dean rasped. "No, no, no- fuck me, where's the script?"

"I've got it! Sam, hang on-"

Jared's voice was cut short, like a cassette tape being snipped mid-play. Dean shot a look over his shoulder to see Jared and Jensen frozen in place. Jared was reaching for the script. Jensen was gaping at Sam in fear with wide green eyes that Dean felt oddly possessive of. The entire room seemed to desaturate and blur. Like everything but Sam and Dean had been paused permanently. No doubt the imp's doing... which meant something had gone wrong. She was still freely flaunting the powers that should have been restrained.

Snatching the script away from Jared's reaching hand, Dean flipped through the pages for the Latin incantation.

"Oh shit," he breathed, closing the space back to the other side of the trailer in three big steps... Where Sam was now barely noticeable at a dwindling four inches. Dean scooped him up into his hand hastily, cradling him possessively as he repeated the spell.

"Omnipote, regala, en nimbus me..." Dean announced boldly. He glanced down at Sam and nearly lost it- the love line of Dean's calloused palm now treated his barely inch and a half brother like a fleshy hammock.

Ever distracted by the diminishing body in his palm. Dean forced out every word, knowing nothing less than perfection would do.

The hardest part was how slow the shrinking happened.

When Sam had initially changed size, he'd been asleep. He had no idea how fast he or the Impala had shrank down, so to him it had been instantaneous. Considering the way he'd shot back to size just as quick, he doubted it had been a slow process.

This time, the imp was toying with them. The world ballooned around Sam, the frozen Jared and Jensen becoming matching monoliths. Dean's footsteps crashed nearby, calling Sam's attention to the panicked hunter that swept him up into a careful palm. Sam could almost recognize the moment he hit two and a half inches again, as his world seemed to normalize. A strange normal, but one he'd adjusted to for a time.

Dean's voice echoed loudly overhead, trying to spit out the spell in its entirety before Sam lost even more height.

Unfortunately, the shrinking didn't stop there. Sam clutched at one of the fingers towering above him, real fear showing through as his own increasingly small fingers sank into the wrinkles in Dean's skin. The hand became his world, the rest of Dean too large to comprehend as a single living being. Dean's finger twitched, in nerves or maybe because Sam's hands tickled it, and he was tossed to the ground, his fall cushioned by the spongy skin.

Sam scrambled up to his knees, staring up at what he could see of Dean in awe. The huge voice changing the invocation had become the rumbles of thunder overhead, the words lost to Sam's ears. He was less than an inch tall... then he approached a centimeter in length. If he got stuck like this, he wouldn't ever be able to talk to Dean again. He was a bug, his tiny arms and legs as thin as needles while Dean was the size of a mountain.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut, blocking out the terrifying sight in front of him. He said a silent prayer, holding his breath.

Then, everything stopped.

The spell was complete. Dean raised his frantic gaze: wind whipped around the room as the tiny demon was pulled against her will into the crystal. Sam was a mere crumb in his palm now, and Dean cupped both hands in horror around the precious dark spot that was his little brother. He couldn't even see if Sam was moving at this point. Nor could he feel him.

It was like Sam wasn't even there anymore.

With a final anguished gasp, the imp became trapped within the crystal ball. The wind dropped away. Extending his free hand, Dean seized the crystal and glared at its occupant.

"Fix him," Dean demanded, keeping his fury reserved to a whispered volume purely for Sam's sake. "Do it,now!"

The tiny black eyes glaring back at him within seemed to consume his entire vision. She was saying something, but blessedly, her voice was muted by the new walls of her crystal prison.

The world around him went dark, like a movie scene fading to black. Jared and Jensen vaporized into the pitch dark. The trailer vanished into a new plane of existence. Dean blinked- a new warmth crept in the corners of his vision. Warm, orange light from a bedside lamp. It took him a moment to recognize the new surroundings. The motel room. They were back in their motel room, in their own screwy universe.

He immediately looked for Sam in his hand.

The dark speck was gone.

Dean's heart dropped to his shoes. "Sam?" he whispered. He brought his hand right up to his eyes, analyzing all the lines and groves of his palm for the little speck of a person. An awful thought made his blood turn to ice. Maybe I wasn't fast enough. Maybe he's still there... and I can't even see him now.

Clenching the crystal furiously, he shook the imp within as he brought her higher to shout a new order. He stopped short when he heard a familiar, sleepy groan come from around the side of the bed. Inspired with a new hope, Dean leapt to his feet. A pair of slip-on boots were sticking out from the narrow space between the queen beds. And beyond that, long, denim clad legs...

A rush of wind was in his ears. Sam groaned, feebly making sure his arms and legs were still in one piece. The last image from before he'd been knocked to the ground flashed through his mind - an image of a desert stretching away from him, fleshy dunes rising in the distance and deep cracks he could slip into if he wasn't careful.

Dean's palm.

The rest of the hunter hadn't even been in sight anymore at that point, his flannel shirt in the distance just a blurry wall of color. Fingers arching over Sam's head cast deep shadows he could be lost in, columns almost the size of mountains that moved on their own from time to time. Dean could be careful all he wanted, but a single move on his part could kill Sam, sending him flying into the air or crushing him without noticing.

There was no movement around him. Shoving himself up, Sam took in a deep breath, opening his eyes. They widened at what he saw. Beds, nightstand, pictures on the wall... a regular, normal-sized motel room. He twisted around, searching out the person he knew would be there with him.

Green eyes met hazel. Sam's breath left him in a rush. He was normal. Dean was normal.

"Dean."

Sam had barely gotten the words out before Dean's knees thunked to the floor. The imp, encased in crystal, was dropped to the side and rolled away a few inches from impact.

Sam's eyes were still wide with shock as Dean swept him up into a bone-breaking hug. After a moment, the shock wore off and Dean felt Sam return the warm gesture. His fingers dug into the canvas of Sam's jacket, feeling how solid and real his little brother was. The way he was supposed to be. No tricks this time.

"Never thought I'd be glad to be looking up at you, Sasquatch," Dean scoffed out a disbelieving chuckle.

"I know what you mean," Sam choked out, gripping Dean back. "I don't think I'm a fan of being the short one."

He pulled away from Dean, staring around the room in surprise. Everything was just as they'd left it before heading out to the library before being hurled in that twisted dimensional reflection of theirs. Actors... their lives a TV show... "Strange lives," Sam said, almost to himself.

His eyes landed on the Impala, left alone on the bed. "Holy crap," Sam said, pulling away from Dean to stand up. "That's... that's how small the car is?" Funny to think he'd been driving her that size, racing around Dean's feet. He went over to the car, hovering a hand over it to compare sizes. The Impala didn't reach from the bottom of his palm to the tip of his fingers. She was that small. He could almost understand how Dean had nearly stepped on them without noticing.

Sam glanced back up at Dean. "You, ah... you know how to fix this?" he asked. He'd missed the end of the fight when he'd returned to normal. He hadn't even been able to hear the words being spoken by then, too small to understand what was being said far overhead.

Dean glanced down at the floor, snatching up the crystal orb. He twisted it around to get a look at the tiny demon encased within.

"I think she's bound to follow orders now." he said, peering in. It was a chilling sight within, having those tiny black eyes glued to him with such immovable hatred. The only thing between him and whatever world of demented size-play the imp favored was a few inches of crystal and a few words of Latin. Even despite that humbling fact, Dean smirked.

"Not laughing now, are you, bitch?"

He moved to hold her out pointedly at his shrunken car, then faltered. "Uh... maybe we should take her outside."

With the Impala in one hand and the imp in the other, the brothers strolled around to the back of the motel. The parking lot was, if possible, even more vacant than it had been in the evening. Dean could have laughed- all the shit they had been through, and it was barely sunset.

The toy-sized car was set down a far distance upon the asphalt, adjusted to make room for the full-sized vehicle. Dean glanced to Sam briefly out of the corner of his eye, still amazed that this relief wasn't temporary.

"Alright," he said, glaring in at the imp. "Fix my damn car."

Sam watched as the crystal sphere glowed a bright red. This time, instead of concentrating its fury on him, the red shards of light converged on the tiny Impala he'd been shrunk down with. Wind whipped around the brothers as the car seemed to implode in size, shooting up from a bare seven inches to all eighteen feet of black and silver glory. As the evening sun set on the horizon, the Impala's lights seemed to flicker at them, letting them know she was okay at last.

Letting out a sigh of relief, Sam turned to Dean. Then frowned. If he remembered right... "You... might want to have her fix your duffel bag. I think it's still in your pocket, downsized." Sam smirked. "Can't have those Busty Asian Beauties too small to read, now, can we?"

Dean gave a small start, reaching up with his free hand to pat his pocket. Sure enough, a little lump stuck out at him. "I forgot it was there," he mumbled, a bit sheepish in the admission. He had a feeling Sam might still be a little sore about the whole "too small to feel" thing. But that would be remedied soon, he hoped.

He reached in, fumbling to slip his index finger through the loops of the duffle bag straps to pull it out. He dangled it before his eyes, taking a long look at the last remnant of the bizarre adventure. It was just so tiny- barely an inch and a half long, at best. And to think Sam had barely been a few times that size...

Shaking his head, Dean set down the duffle bag on the hood of the Impala, where it landed with a delicate clink of metal and clothes.

The Impala's glossy exterior reflected the bright cherry red beams that came in the aftermath of Dean's final order. Less than the span of a blink, and the duffel bag was back to its normal size. Dean handed off the imp to Sam so he could ruffle through its contents. He pulled out his stash of skin mags at the bottom, under his clothes and boxes of ammo. He grinned in relief. The glossy pages were unharmed.

"Alright, I think that's everything." Dean zipped up his worldly belongings and slung the bag on his shoulder. His green eyes trained upon the imp, no shame in hiding his satisfaction upon seeing her dwarfed by Sam for once.

"Shame that script didn't have a line on how to kill her," Dean muttered. It seemed like no revenge he imagined could be near enough to match the terror of nearly crushing or eating his own brother.

Sam held the crystal up to the fading sun, letting it reflect the light into a thousand shards. "Well, maybe that's a good thing."

He hastened to explain himself before Dean complained he was being too easy on her. "As far as we can tell, she's immortal. So her being trapped in this crystal means she's been imprisoned… forever." He lowered it, closing his hand tight around the imp as he remembered what she'd done to him over the last few days. Treated like a toy, food, almost getting stepped on...

"She has an eternity to think about what she did and how she got trapped. You might say that's worse than death, in a way. Especially this kind of demon. Imps gravitate towards 'playmates,' which is what she tried to turn me, and later you and Jensen, into. Now she has no one to talk to, nowhere to go, nothing to do but remain imprisoned, forever." Sam nodded sharply. "A fate worse than death."

He tossed the crystal ball into the air with a casual flick of the wrist, catching it at the last second. "So, you think Bobby has a place to stash her away?"

"If anyone does, it's him," Dean remarked, giving Sam a slight nod of approval at last. He had to give his little brother credit- it wasn't a half-bad idea. Whoever said revenge didn't taste sweet had the wrong approach to the whole concept.

He shouldered his duffle bag and Sam tossed him the car keys, which Dean caught eagerly. A day and a half without driving his baby- that was flat out criminal. He slid a calloused hand along the glossy driver's side, all the way to the silvery handle. He popped open the door and slid inside. His bag was tossed to the backseat while he ran his hands over the steering wheel lovingly. Dean thought a dozen apologies at his car for nearly stepping on it, turning the keys in the ignition.

A familiar rumble sounded out as the engine purred in greeting. He was forgiven.

With that straightened out, Dean found reason to smile again. He leaned towards the windshield, looking impatiently at his little brother outside.

"Hop in, short-stop."