A/N: Written for a one-word whump prompt on tumblr: scars.

Sam had had scars since he was little. The normal scars of childhood - falling and scraping a knee, getting too rough with his brother and bumping the back of his head into the coffee table, a baseball hitting him in the face and splitting his brow. When he grew older he acquired more scars. Scars from training in the woods, where branches and thorns snagged at his skin, the world hungry for his blood even then. Scars from messing up and getting punched in the face during sparring; Dean's fist could really hurt. Scars from dropping one of his dad's knives on his foot.

But those scars all faded, and he went to Stanford, wanting to escape marking himself further. There were scars in his head, things he couldn't let go, anger at Dad, resentment at the way he was raised, the word freak echoing in his mind.

Jess helped him forget about all those.

And then she was slaughtered, opening up a wound in his heart that scarred over raw and ugly.

He got back into hunting, facing the scars from childhood, staring at them until they were no longer hideous, until they were just a part of him.

Sometimes wounds Sam would thought would scar didn't, and for that he was lucky. He'd been clawed and slashed and shot and beaten. And each time he worried he would just end up looking like how he felt inside: a freak.

Ruby liked his scars. She would often caress them while they lay in bed together, kissing them and telling him she found them beautiful. This applied to any of them: the faint claw marks on his lower back from a Wendigo, the rounded reddish flesh just below his left nipple from a bullet, a white line on his thigh from a demon's knife. She found other scars, scars he hadn't realized he'd had. One on his calf that was a small half-crescent bump as if it had been made from someone's nail. Another on his palm that arced upwards towards his thumb and could've been from any number of things.

Sometimes he went to her with new scars, and sometimes she gave him more, faint ones that faded quickly, nails digging into his back.

He filled the scars in his heart up with her blood.

And then her betrayal, her death, ripped all of them open, like a knife had been taken to him.

Anger took its place, filling the scars in, the tissue raw and aching.

Castiel healed what he could, making Sam feel almost normal, but still he felt like he was walking around, marked by some evil.

And evil was ready to take him.

It came in the form of love: Jess. It whispered in his ear, and stroked his hair as it lay in bed with him. It admired his body, which was now free of any marks of violence thanks to Castiel.

It made a new one, on his mind, as it showed itself to him.

That evil that he'd lain with was Lucifer.

Sam fought back against it at first, but he knew. He knew that look in the Devil's eyes, calm patience and sickening yearning.

He'd make him a freak again, and somehow, in some way, this being was going to scar him beyond anything he'd ever experienced before.

But for now he could run, for now he could fight.

For now, Sam was free of the scars on his body, and he was going to keep it that way for as long as possible.