VII Dean was a man of many stories. You could never be certain of the role he played until the very end, constantly surrounding himself with pretty lies and prettier women. They called him the man of diamonds, due to the hundreds of small, glistening scars that were scattered across his body. Every woman seemed hypnotised by them, drawing their manicured nails across them in revelation, cooing over him as though they had the right to. He shunned them all, telling them all different stories about how he achieved such 'heroic' looking scars, as one woman had told him. "It looks like you were hit by fragments of a grenade." she sighed, looking up at him dreamily, no doubt wondering if she could be his Florence Nightingale. He sneered at the memory of her every so often. That was all they ever saw him as. A broken toy for them to mend, and god only knows how a woman enjoys changing a man. Which was why when Dean met Summer, a young college student with enough of her own troubles, he had been struck dumbfounded by her denial of his scars. "Diamonds? They don't look like diamonds." she had retorted, once he had told her his nickname and the reason for it. They had been sitting at the bar, in some club that he could never the remember the name of, but he would always remember her. Plum coloured hair, silver eyes to boot and the cockiest smile he'd ever seen on a girl so naive. "Well, what do they look like?" he had asked, smiling nonchalantly as she scooted over to get a better look at his forearms, where the more prominent scars were hiding beneath his hair. He was expecting her to take one look and change her mind, or perhaps say they didn't look like anything but scars, but when she dug her fingers into his forearm hair and actually felt the scars, he felt a shiver run up his spine, and he stared at her wondrously, as she seriously considered the small silver specks. "Tears." She said, pursing her lips as he withdrew her fingers and returning to holding her drink. "they look like tears, which I would much rather have than diamonds." She mulled over this last statement carefully, looking down at her own arms as though she had the choice of either. Her eyes lifted to meet with his own, and she laughed. "I'm sorry, that came off really odd. I'm forever saying dopey thing like that. What I meant was that while diamonds are all very poetic and all, which you could say the same about tears, I suppose," -she added quickly after an eyebrow raise from Dean, "I'd rather see these as tears rather than diamonds. Tears are so much more precious than diamonds. Diamonds can be bought at any jewellery store these days, but years are reserved for only the most important of occasions, good or bad. Men throw away diamonds on women to console them and please them. But tears are never given lightly." She took a sip of her drink, eyes still attached to him instead of his scars, and blushed. "That won't make sense, I know, sometimes I just blather on-" "-No, I get it. I totally get it." And he did. Usually he would let the women talk and passion ally chime he when he felt the conversation lag, but Summer was interested in him, and he wanted to reciprocate by asking her questions too, but after years of just letting the women come to him, he found it was much harder to keep a woman interested when he didn't know how to begin. So she began for him, sensing his willingness and his hesitancy, and asked him more questions. "So where did you get those cuts?" she asked, avoiding the word scar. He remembered tasting blood in that moment, he had inadvertently bitten his lip as he almost told her the truth, something he had never done before. It seemed as though it was a night of many firsts, as Summer grabbed a napkin from nearby and handed it to him, allowing him to care for himself. "It's okay, you don't have to tell me. It wouldn't change my opinion of you. " she said, shrugging as he pawed at his bottom lip, staring at her in disbelief as she ordered two whiskeys to a guy behind the counter. "Besides, I like not knowing." she admitted, grinning. "it means I have a story to look forward to."