Beautiful

Note: I wrote this a very very long time ago and just recently started publishing newer chapters/stories. I think this part is some of my lesser writing but I don't want to take it down because it was the first thing I ever got the courage to publish and I was proud of it at one time. If you don't like it, though, maybe consider reading the next one because my writing has changed a lot. Thanks, people for even opening this.




Beautiful


She stared into the bathroom mirror that had years ago lost its shine. She looked at her eyes, green and dulled by the day's hurts. She looked at her nose, small, round, like her mother's. She looked at her cheeks, chubby, childish, spattered with freckles that only added to her youthfulness. She looked at her mouth, lips pale, teeth crooked. She looked at her hair, falling in messy curls over her shoulders. Maybe she should cut it, take away its messy, untamed nature. She stared at the face looking back at her. She criticized every detail the same way they had. She detested the girl in the mirror for being too imperfect, for being herself.


She looked down at herself. Not thin enough, they'd said, but no one had ever said that before. Was she really overweight or were they just trying to hurt her more? Too short, they'd called her. But that had never mattered before. Was 5' 5" really that short? She'd never thought so. Her feet were too small, they'd mocked. But why did it matter? She looked at herself and hated her feet, her height, her weight. Everything.


She wanted to fix herself but what was she supposed to do? We don't carve ourselves out of clay. We don't decide to have freckles or curly blonde hair or small feet. We don't choose to be five feet five inches tall. We don't create our own bodies. We can't change them. But we can hate them. We can hate ourselves for them. And Anna did.


But only because they had first.


They had hated her from the moment they saw her and it hurt like hell because she hadn't been treated that way since she was six years old. It brought her back to that childlike vulnerability, made her wish to disappear, made her feel small and naive like she had when she was a little girl. She'd never been so viciously attacked. She'd never cried because someone made her feel so bad about her appearance of all things. She'd always lived in a world where appearances were unimportant. Until today. It made her feel weak to cry over those words, to cry over something that she'd been taught didn't matter. One more reason to hate herself.


She wanted someone to tell her that she wasn't as ugly as she felt. She wanted someone to love her because she couldn't find it in her to love herself right now. She just wanted someone who cared. But there was no one. Her brothers were still gone, working a case.


She could feel the tears rising again. She curled her hands into fists and roughly rubbed her eyes. She didn't get to cry. Not again. She was already too stupid, slutty, ugly, too short, too fat, snobby... worthless. That was what they'd said anyway. Every day. She wasn't going to be weak too. But the thought of everything that made her a loser made the tears well again.


She'd always been a tough kid. She'd spent her whole life dealing with loss, family problems, and physical pain. Mom. Dad. All the times she'd been injured on hunts or seen her friends and family injured. She'd seen blood pool around her own body. She'd come close to death countless times in her fifteen years of life.


But she'd never felt like this.


Like a disappointment. Like she wasn't worth it. Like she was an inconvenience to everyone. Like she had to fix herself.


She was angry and scared and sad and hurt and confused and she didn't even know what she was doing when she knelt in front of the toilet, stuck two fingers down her throat and threw up. She flushed the toilet, silently hoping the smell wouldn't linger.


She heard the door open, though, and she knew her brothers were back. She heard them talking about the case on the other side of the locked bathroom door. She stood shakily and looked at herself in the mirror, trying to push down the tears threatening to escape again. She couldn't burden them with her stupid problems. Appearances, she'd always been told, were the last thing that mattered. And she'd always believed it because she'd never really heard otherwise.


She saw the tear tracks on her face and wiped at them carelessly. 'No one wants to see you're ugly face,' they'd said. 'No one wants to look at you and no one wants to talk to you.' The ever popular, 'Go back to where you came from. Or better yet, just kill yourself, you slut.'


There was a gentle knock on the door. "Anna? You in there?" It was Sam.


She just said, "Yeah." She heard the shakiness of her own voice. She was weak. It hurt and she felt her eyes well up, so she clenched them shut and her throat worked against the sob trying to come out.


"It's 2:00." Sam said, tone soft. "School's not out yet."


Anna nodded then realized he couldn't see her. The door still separated them. Stupid, they'd said. And they'd laughed when it was the final blow that made her cry. It did the same now and Anna felt the sob burst out of her throat. She pressed a fist to her mouth but it was too late and there were big tears sliding down her face.


For the past week, everyone she'd talked to but her brothers had told her in their own way that she wasn't good enough. Even her teachers seemed to think she was an idiot. Anna hadn't cried though. Not until today. At lunch. Because they called her stupid, ugly, out of place. For the thousandth time and it still didn't hurt any less.


So she'd grabbed her backpack and run to the motel and locked herself in the bathroom and hated herself for awhile, wishing for her brothers. Now she had those brothers and was hiding from them because she was afraid they might confirm everything those kids had said.


So here she was, crying so hard her throat hurt and her whole body was shaking because she just wasn't good enough.


Anna had never felt this way, and she couldn't stop going back to that fact in her mind, like a vicious cycle of low lines that refused to be shaken. She'd never had a problem with the way she looked. She'd never thought of herself as stupid.


And that was why she really had been stupid.


"Anna, open the door," Sam requested, an urgency hiding behind the simple words.


Anna just kept crying while Sam tried to get her to let them in. Dean tried too. She was long gone, though, hating herself more with every hiccupped breath and sloppy tear.


"Anna, open this door or I'll kick it in," she heard Dean threaten.


God, what must they be thinking? That she was hurt or had been threatened? They probably though this was life or death. Little did they know this was what most people would call 'hormones.' Wasn't that cruel, though? To demean a person's pain because of their age, never mind that they were bent in half from the force of their own sadness?


He kicked it in easily. It swung open and Anna could only imagine the sight that met them. They'd stood frozen for a second before coming over to her in a rush. She'd somehow wound up sitting with her back to the sink and feet at the bathtub, rubbing her eyes to stop the endless storm of tears.


"Woah, what is it?" She heard Dean ask. "Are you hurt?" Anna just cried harder as they each pulled one of her fists away from her eyes. "Munchkin, you gotta tell us what's wrong. You're scarin' us." Anna tried to stop her crying but the word Munchkin- usually affectionate, and meant to be in this case as well- seemed to confirm their insults about her height.


"Anna," Sam started, putting a hand on her back. "Calm down, ok?" He hugged her to him and Anna clung to him, crying into his cheap FBI suit as he rubbed her back. She could tell, even as he hugged her, that he felt out of his league, because they'd never been here before.


She was a regular student at Lebanon High, had been since last year, and they'd had no reason to believe that her one week at another high school for a case in Massachusetts would leave her in shambles.


Anna's tears eventually slowed down and she managed to stop crying, feeling embarrassed over her meltdown as she pulled away from Sam. "Sorry. I'm sorry," She sniffed, not looking at them.


"Don't apologize, kiddo," said Dean gently. "What brought this on? I've never seen you cry that hard."


"I- I just- it's nothing."


"Nothing?" Dean said incredulously.


"Shortstop, 'nothing' has never made you cry before. You're too tough."


"Maybe I'm not as tough as you thought I was," Anna said sadly, making both of them frown.


"Alright, be straight with us here. What's wrong?" Dean demanded.


She didn't say anything.


"Anna, we can't help you if you don't tell us what's wrong," Sam told me. Anna didn't agree with that. She felt at least a little better just having them there.


"Come on, rugrat," Dean tried.


Anna shook her head. She felt embarrassed that she'd cried over it. Yeah, so her feelings got hurt, whatever.


"Anna, start talking," Dean demanded, his frustration coming out harshly.


"Dean..." Sam started to argue.


"Sam." Dean cut him off.


Anna couldn't believe they'd put her in a position where she wasn't given the choice to share her issues or not, but here she was. Normally, orders weren't the way to get her to open up. But stubborn as she was... sometimes they were the only way. She cracked. "It was just..." She didn't know how to phrase it. She thought about what they'd said and felt the self hatred return full force. "They said stuff."


Her brothers seemed to immediately understand. "Bullies?" They sounded sympathetic and angry at the same time.


"What did they say?" Sam asked gently.


"It doesn't matter," she said, voice shaking.


"Anna," Dean said in a pleading tone.


Never mind cracking, Anna fragmented. She told them everything. She told them what they'd said and how it had felt. She told them how she hadn't cried because it hadn't mattered until she had cried because it did. She told them how she'd been strong until she wasn't. She told them how she'd never felt as worthless as she did right now.


And Dean crushed her in a big bear hug. Sam was next.


Inside of ten minutes, they were all standing in front of the mirror and they were forcing her to see herself the way that they did.


"What do you see?" Sam asked me, pointing at my big green eyes.


"They're too big. Like the freakin hamster in Bedtime Stories," Anna said, self deprecating even as she gained some of her usual energy in the comment.


"Yeah?" Dean challenged. "Cause I see your mom's eyes. And I think they're beautiful. I think those eyes are gonna get you whatever you want in life." Anna saw him smiling above her in the mirror.


She looked at her eyes again. She remembered the picture of her Mom. Yeah. She did have Chloe's eyes. Things with Chloe were nothing short of insanely complicated and heart-wrenching, but having a part of her mother in her own reflection still felt... nice. Not to mention, her eyes were good for getting what she wanted. Sam taught her the puppy dog eyes before he taught her to say his name.


"What about there?" He pinched his sister's cheeks playfully.


"Stupid freckles."


Sam leaned down and said, "I don't think so. I think those just make you adorable."


Anna shrugged. She always thought her freckles were cute before, too. Until today.


"What else did they tell you?" Dean asked.


"That I'm too short and too fat and too stupid and I'm wor-"


Dean cut me off, "I hear you say the word worthless about yourself a second time, I'll personally kick your ass." He warned. Anna nodded in understanding, still feeling bad but less so than earlier.


Sam spoke up next, "You're not that short, anyway."


"You always call me shorty and stuff," Anna pointed out.


"That's because he's the size of a tree," Dean told her. She couldn't help but smile when Sam sent Dean a bitchface. "You're not fat, either, kiddo. Not even close. High school is the Chernobyl of insecurity, and anybody telling you that is fearing the same thing about themself."


Anna looked down at herself and he was right. She was pretty thin, and the other girls who were shoved against lockers and called sluts or fat-asses... they didn't deserve it either. There was nothing wrong their bodies, whether they really were overweight, were underweight, or just dressed in crop tops and short skirts.


"Anyway, there's nothing to be said for a person based on that. What you weigh, how tall you are- those things don't mean anything. You know that. You'd never judge anyone else for that so why should you feel different about you?" Dean asked. It was a rhetorical question so Anna didn't answer but when he asked it made her feel like an idiot for getting so worked up. She blushed slightly.


"And you're not stupid," Sam added from her other side, making her look over at him.


"Yeah," Dean agreed. "I'll bet your smarter than all those jerks who called you that." He tugged Anna's shoulder so she'd turn to face him. "Right?"


He clearly wanted a response so she nodded.


"Good. Now, you listen to me. You are not worthless. I ever hear you say that again and I'll-"


"I know, I know," Anna interrupted. "You'll kick my ass."


"Language," he chided but smiled. Sam chuckled too.


"You know," Sam said, making both of his siblings look at him. "You could have told us earlier this week. It didn't have to get this far. You didn't have to wait until you couldn't take it anymore."


Anna looked down at her feet when she answered. "I... I didn't wanna be weak. I'm supposed to be strong. I'm not supposed to cry. I felt like enough of a letdown without bawling like a baby. I'm sorry you had to see that." She explained and blushed at the thought of how childish she had been.


"Hey," Dean called and she looked up. "Everyone cries, Anna." She shook her head a little. Not Winchesters, she thought. As though he read her mind, he said, "Even Winchesters."


She looked at Sam who nodded. "Yeah. It's healthy, actually. Anna, words hurt. I know how you feel. Bullies have existed forever. Unfortunately they're becoming more and more cruel every generation."


Anna nodded sadly. It was always getting more personal.


"Just know that whatever anyone says, we're still here. We'll always think you're beautiful. Not just because we're your brothers though. Because we have to fight off the teenagers who keep chasing you. Because we have to say no to those eyes when you try to get us to give you a beer or take you shopping." Anna smiled shyly.


"Ok?"


"Ok," she said.


It was ok. Really. Maybe she wasn't perfect but no one was. And as long as she had her brothers, she would be ok. She wasn't worthless. No one was. Everybody had a hard time believing that, but it was important.


Maybe Anna couldn't look in the mirror and smile and tell herself kind things like I look great today. But she had people who could and would tell her she was beautiful-- inside and out. They cared about her. They loved her. That was all she needed. They were all she needed.


And maybe one day she would look at her reflection and love herself for all her imperfections.


La Fin


Note 2: Every one of you is absolutely and stunningly beautiful. Listen to Beyoncé and dance around a little if you don't believe me. (Also if you're not a Beyoncé fan, try Panic! At the Disco-- always a favorite for me )Much love.

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