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Dean examines himself in the mirror, just like he does every morning when he wakes up and pads over to the stained sink in his bedroom. There's a small light overhead, and he turns it on; it casts a stark shadow over the features of his face.
He stares back at himself, wrinkles on his eyes starting to mark his age, muscle tone slipping, and scattered across his body, the scars of the hunter’s life.
Sometimes scars are just scars. A bump of raised skin that marks where the body’s surface was once marred by an injury. Lord knows he had enough of them. Even with all the times he'd been pieced back together by supernatural forces, he managed to accumulate new marks on every hunt.
A bite on his calf, scratches across his arm, nicks and small cuts on his back and torso. His knuckles are a mess from contact with teeth and fangs and close calls with knives. The one on his chin was pretty obvious, but it makes him look like Han Solo so he’ll take it as is. Sometimes, in the right light, he’ll shift his shoulder and he can catch a glimpse of the handprint that marked where Cas had dragged his soul from the pit, a physical manifestation of the will of heaven. He'd been disappointed when that had faded.
Backroom stitches of Sam’s design sometimes added character to the scars, little patterns around the healed flesh that helped when Dean was embellishing stories of how he'd received them. There's a gash on his shoulder blade that Sam hadn't quite so perfectly put back together, and it formed this neat lightning pattern against his smooth skin.
That isn't all Dean sees, though, in that tiny, dingy mirror in his room.
He sees in his eyes, hidden in between the flecks of golden green, the scars that don't show on the surface.
He sees the first moment he realized his Dad wasn't perfect, he sees the moment Sam found out about the life and his childhood was stolen from him. He sees the night Sam left him for Stanford, the day his Dad left him to chase the demon.
He looks into his eyes and can still see the echos of his time in Hell, what he did to those souls who didn't deserve it. He sees the apocalypse, Sammy plunging into the pit, Cas a bloody mess all over the grass. He sees the apocalypse that could have been, Cas stoned and hopeless, his own death at Sam’s hands.
He sees Kevin’s body, Charlie’s funeral pyre, Bobby laying in that hospital bed… he sees everyone he’s lost, and feels them like a lead weight in his stomach.
He sees his father’s funeral pyre, that first moment when mortality really caught up to Dean.
And to this day, he can still see the flames engulfing his childhood home.
When he looks hard enough, he can still see the black, just around the edges of his vision, the darkness of his demonic turn just begging for release.
He's been beaten, broken, chewed up and spat out by everything and anything in creation. And when he stands in front of his bedroom mirror like this, dressed in nothing but boxers, he can see all of it. He sees the outer damage, and he feels the inner damage.
He hates it, hates the pain, hates the vulnerability, hates that no matter how hard he tries he still can't make any of it go away, or hurt any less.
Lately, though, something has changed about his reflection. It's hard for Dean to notice behind the scars and the injuries, but he's getting quicker about it.
The small bruises in the shape of lips against his collarbones and sternum. Small teeth marks that were soothed with kisses and hot breath. His hair defying the laws of physics, and his lips that are abused in the best way. Some days, small finger shaped bruises on his hips will stand out above the rest.
In his eyes, he catches the smallest hint of hope. Small layers of emotions he wasn't accustomed to feeling, like happiness and affection, are helping to push back the demonic black.
Then, in the corner of the mirror, Dean sees movement, and following it the rarest sight that mirror sees on a daily basis, though they are becoming more frequent.
Dean smiles.
He smiles because he knows the mover, quite intimately. He recognizes the nuances and the grace, everything about them familiar and comforting. That person’s arms snake around his waist from behind, caressing his scars on his skin, and resting over his heart to soothe the scars that can't be seen. Their warmth chases away the pain and the doubt, and replaces them with wonder and joy. They don't make the bad go away, but they give Dean something good.
He smiles, because in spite of all of Dean’s blemishes and imperfections, the arms and their owner keep coming back. They accept the damage and don't shy away from it. They try to heal it.
It was only a few months ago that these arms first touched him this way, gently and loving, speaking through gesture and saying more than words ever could. But he's known them for years, he'd know their touch anywhere, out of everyone else in this world, because they've touched more than flesh and bone. They've touched his soul, pulling him back from the edge so many times and in so many ways.
Dean doesn't deserve it, to be held and loved like this, and yet they return. Over and over. And slowly, Dean’s starting to think that maybe he's wrong. He rests his hand against the flesh pressed to his chest, his smile widening when the fingers widen to accept Dean’s between them. If they can keep coming back, over and over, whispering praises and words of devotion into Dean’s skin, maybe there's some part of him that's worth that kind of love.
Dean will always look in the mirror and see his imperfections.
But he glances at the person behind him, the person who loves him in spite of every flaw, physical or emotional, and those imperfections suddenly don't seem so important.
And so, like he has done every morning since the first time their lips had exchanged the words they'd been holding inside for years, Dean turns from his reflection. He squeezes the hand that made the bruises on his hip, his eyes caress the lips that left the marks on his collarbone.
Dean breathes deep, smiling down at the pair of shining blue eyes that, day after day, are helping him heal from the inside out, the eyes that remind him he isn't alone in this. The eyes that speak of nothing but love for everything that Dean is and isn't.
Dean brushes lips against the small patch of skin between those eyes, lingering against the warm brow of the first person who has known all of him, and loved him for it.
And with two words, another piece of him is put back into place.
“Hello, Dean.”