If I Were A Book I’d Be A “For Dummies” Manual

last night me and my friend were like haha what if they were age swapped

and then I was like 👁👄👁 what if they were age swapped

Rated Teen; M/M; No Archive Warnings apply; tagged Gabriel/Dean Winchester, Castiel/Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Castiel & Gabriel (Supernatural); Alice in Wonderland AU/crossover; by HeyAssbuttImBatman (aka @curlsofsagesmoke here); Complete work.

Basically it's just really really good and so entertaining and cute so you should go read it <3

Summary (copypasted from the ao3 work):

He hopes Sam is faring better than him, wherever he is. Sam is clever, much cleverer than Dean, and adaptable in the way that children often are. He should be fine. He’d better be fine.

You should worry about yourself at the moment, says some frightened little part of his brain. He’s been walking for a while now, long enough that his feet are beginning to ache and the back of his neck is beginning to sweat and he’s worried—really, truly worried—that he’ll never find his way out of here.

Which is of course when he runs into the first of the strange creatures who inhabit this place.

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Dean Winchester follows his younger brother down a rabbit hole and finds himself in Underland, a strange world filled with stranger people. Separated and lost, the brothers soon find themselves drawn into the political strife of two sister queens, a rebellion, and a prophecy which they just might be able to fulfill.

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.