bittykimmy:

( This is my entry for the @brothersapart 2016 Contest:http://brothersapart.tumblr.com/post/136391836334/brothers-apart-contest-2016 . Enjoy! )

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Dean watched intently as Sam took the cut section of the alcohol wipe and examined it. The piece had felt the right size while Dean had sliced it, but now it looked large and cumbersome in Sam’s much smaller hands. Averting his eyes briefly, Dean tried to swallow the feeling of being out of place among the three tiny folk on the bed, even though the motel room was scaled to his size, not theirs.

He had started to get used to Sam’s height, but seeing his shrunken brother around other tiny people was something Dean hadn’t been prepared for that morning.

A hiss of pain came from the bed. Dean looked down in time to see Shay writhe in response to the alcohol seeping into her wound. Her eyelids fluttered weakly, almost undetectable from her size, but her voice was unmissable. “Z-Ziana…”

Sam moved to keep cleaning the cut, but Ziana wasn’t having it. She sprang to her feet and half-tackled him to get the alcohol-soaked cloth away from her friend’s arm. Dean balked at the sight of the tiny struggle. Sam clearly held back to keep from hurting Ziana, while she was putting all her effort into stop him.

“Ziana!” Sam huffed and held the cloth out of her reach, patience growing thin. “I’m trying to–”

“I thought you said this would help!” She grabbed his shoulder and took another swipe at the cloth. “All you’re doing is hurting–HEY!”

Unable to sit back and watch Sam’s attempts to help be impeded, Dean snagged the back of Ziana’s t-shirt and pulled her off his brother. She swung her fists and kicked at nothing, as if she was trying to beat the open air to a pulp. On of her small hands brushed the side of her pants in a grab for a weapon that wasn’t there.

As quickly as her struggle started, it ended with her looking down at the bed below with wide eyes. The distance to the surface was nothing to Dean, but everything to her.

“Easy,” Dean muttered, lowering her into his free hand.

As she sat up rigidly, he could practically see her internal battle to either stay where she was or leap over the side of his palm. She glanced down and seemed to reel back from the latter idea. Nonetheless, he cupped his hands halfway just in case she changed her mind. She didn’t respond well to his attempt at helping. He felt slightly sick to his stomach at her tiny cry of alarm and the feeling of her panicked squirming to escape.

Aiming to keep her from jumping out and hurting herself, he had no choice but to seal his hands all the way, trapping her inside and sparking even more distress. The sensation of her struggles brought back an unwelcome reminder of when he first caught Sam–before he had known it was Sam.

But this time, he knew exactly what he was doing. If Ziana kept getting in the way, it would take hours before Shay’s wound was wrapped up, and by then it might be too late.

“I said easy,” Dean said firmly. “Even if that cut doesn’t need stitches, it’s a pretty nasty one. That’s alcohol Sam’s putting on her. Sorry to break it to you, kiddo, but it’s going to sting Shay no matter what. It needs to be cleaned this way.”

He glanced up from his hands, glad to see Sam had proceeded with cleaning the wound, though Dean noticed a touch of worry on Sam’s face when his little brother peeked over his shoulder. After all, someone his size was trapped right in front of him between Dean’s hands, and Sam was just letting it happen. But they both knew it was for the sake of saving an innocent.

Judging by the squirms that hadn’t lessened in the slightest within the prison of Dean’s palms and fingers, Ziana was the only one who didn’t understand why she was trapped.

“Let me go!” Despite the toughness she displayed, there was no mistaking the pitch of terror in her voice.

Dean pursed his lips, knowing that it wouldn’t be easy for Sam to work while listening to Ziana’s frightened pleads. Cracking open his hands a bit, he half-expected Ziana to try and squeeze herself through the opening, but she scrambled back further into the hollow of his palms with her chest rising and falling deeply and rapidly. Rather than call out her fear with assurances and elicit a fresh wave of anger from her, Dean took a different approach.

“How ‘bout we find something productive to do, huh?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. Her only answer was a frown, so he went on before she could snap out of her confusion long enough to try and escape. “You said Shay has a fever, right? Well, since you blackened Sammy’s eye last night, we had to make an ice pack for it. We can make a couple more of those to try and bring Shay’s fever down.”

Without waiting for an answer, Dean stood up from the bedside, noting that Sam had almost finished wiping down the wound. Taking the lightest steps he could, Dean moved over to the table and took a seat. He lowered his hands to the tabletop and opened them, laying his fingers out so Ziana could climb off easily.

His attempt to be gentle went unappreciated, seeing as she tripped over his thumb in her mad dash to get off his hands. She whirled around to face him, brushing the side of her pants for her weapon again and backing up with slow steps.

“You look surprised,” he said, leaning back in his seat so he wouldn’t loom over her so much.

She stopped back-pedaling and narrowed her eyes at him. “Just always heard that a human would never let go once they get their hands on you. Guess you’re just weird or something.”

Hiding his wince with a snort, Dean knew at the back of his mind that Sam had been taught the exact same thing since he was cursed–that humans were nothing but a threat to the smaller folk. And in most cases, the lesson wasn’t wrong.

“Well, I kinda need both my hands for this,” Dean said.

Ziana flinched when he reached over her head to retrieve a roll of brown paper towels from the corner of the table. He leaned over to the mini-fridge, glad that he had gotten plenty of ice the night before. Straightening back up, he shook the bucket in search of smaller chunks of ice.

“Here. All you gotta do is wrap it up so it doesn’t slip out.” Dean tore a tiny piece of paper towel, trying to be more precise in his measurement than he had been with the alcohol wipe. He held it out to Ziana between a finger and thumb. She didn’t budge, looking between his fingers and his face. “C’mon,” he insisted. “If I wanted to grab you, I would’ve already.”

“Yeah, you did.” With that, she snatched the paper towel out from between his fingers and didn’t hesitate quite as much when he offered a sliver of ice on the pad of his index finger.

Rather than focus solely on wrapping up the ice, Ziana constantly peeked up at Dean, as if waiting for him to change his mind and be the evil sort of human she had been warned about all her life. It probably didn’t help that he sat there while doing nothing but watch her. He would have offered to make some ice packs of his own, but that would mean Ziana was less busy making them and more prone to have another fit over something or other.

And truth be told, there was something a little fascinating about watching such tiny hands construct something that would otherwise be mundane as Ziana paced a tight path on the table while she worked.

“Make sure you wrap it in a coupl’a layers so it doesn’t melt through,” he added.

“Yeah, I know,” she muttered, pretending she hadn’t nearly dropped the half-finished ice pack at the sound of his voice startling her.

“So, you and Shay have known each other for a while?” Dean asked. “What are you two? Sisters? Cousins? Friends?”

Ziana’s cheeks flushed so deeply that he would have believed she had a fever too. “F-Friends,” she said haltingly, looking up–though it seemed she was trying to look past Dean and at the bed rather than at him. She sighed. “We’re friends.” Clearing her throat, she held up the wrapped ice to show Dean. “Finished.”

Taking his curious frown away from her, Dean looked over his shoulder and found Sam getting ready to start wrapping the gash. Shay didn’t seem to have made any more outbursts, but to be on the safe side, Dean decided they could stand to make a few more ice packs.

Tearing another piece of paper towel, he held it out to Ziana. “Just a couple more.”