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It's just a common mirror in a run-down motel outside of Tacoma, stained with rust at the edges, its surface cold and unyielding against Sam’s palms. He rubs his thumb over the side of Dean’s face - something he knows Dean would never allow if he were here in flesh and blood.
Dean, on the other side, smiles a crooked, lopsided smile. Sam, he says and nothing else.
Sam shakes his head. Don’t say it, Dean, he thinks. Don’t say it’s going to be all right.
Dean seems to read his brain. A flutter of his eyelashes, then with his eyes wide open, he nods.
Now that the excitement of finally seeing Dean, of talking to him, has faded and the horror of their distance has settled, Sam starts to notice the details. There’s crusted blood on Dean’s temple, and his hair is flat with water and mud and dirt, and there’s a pressure on Sam’s chest of air gone suddenly too heavy to breathe. Just then, the surface of the mirror ripples like a lake disturbed by a pebble; the contours of Dean’s face fade into Sam’s own reflection. Sam slabs some more of his blood on the seal that frames Dean’s face and the image on the mirror gets sharp again. The part of Sam that’s childish and scared wants to ask Dean to stay. It wants to grab and cling with both hands and never let him go. He’d bleed himself dry to keep the window open because surely nothing bad will happen to Dean if Sam is watching over him.
He straightens his back instead, mouths, Stay safe.
Dean’s nod gets lost in his own, and the slant of Dean’s brittle smile disappears in the downward slope of Sam’s mouth, in Sam’s reddened eyes, in his stupidly floppy hair.
Stay safe, Dean, Sam tells to his own reflection. Let me get you back.
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