Psyche (Supernatural) [1/1]
Title: Psyche
Author: novin_ha
Pairing: Castiel/Ruby
Length: >3400
Rating: Strong R (this is mostly smut, actually)
Spoilers: Throughout Supernatural 4.10.
Warnings: Light BDSM, wing!kink, blasphemy.
Sequel to girlupnorth's Season of Mists, and has to be read after her story.
This was written for girlupnorth (who also beta-read this and enabled me all along the way) for making my days brighter, for enabling my Castiel obsession and for general awesomeness. I hope you enjoy. It's mostly me having fun writing these characters and checking how much sex I can write into one story. Turns out the answer to that is "a lot". Also, this is as close to fluff as I'll ever get (and that means very close, actually).
PSYCHE
She doesn’t sleep well for weeks after her run-in with Alastair. She wasn’t being entirely truthful when she told Sam the demon scared her more than the angels - it’d be a task to tell who had the upper hand in that respect - but the sick bastard cut her into pieces with her own knife, bringing all the memories of her time in the Pit back to the surface. She’d take to leaving light on at night if her nightmares felt any less real that way.
She sleeps fitfully and trashes about, and when she doesn’t, she curls into a ball around her still-aching stomach. The dead body doesn’t exactly want to mend itself, and it takes a lot of energy to repair it. She could of course use darker magic and speed up the process, but a part of her revolts at the thought. To be a demon with a conscience is an unenviable fate.
*
It’s her first dream in weeks that she enjoys; it starts with the sensation of warmth, spreading across her belly and down, between her legs. She smiles at the light filling the eyes of her dream-self and at the sound of her name, repeated in a gentle voice.
She wakes up with a start, and she is not alone in her bedroom. The panic is replaced by comfort in a split second, so fast that she almost considers mind-control, except she knows how proud the bastard is and how far beneath him he would see it.
“Shh,” he says, leaning down to her ear, his breath hot against her skin. “It’s alright.”
“Nothing’s alright,” she answers, while he spreads his palms and takes away the pain. She breathes the air deep into her dead lungs and there is no stinging, nor coughing. She feels pleasant tingling and makes a sound deep in her throat that is half a moan and half a sob.
“Castiel,” she says, and doesn’t know what to add. Should she apologize for taking part in the plan to lure him into a trap? For disobeying his orders and betraying Anna’s secret to the Winchesters? She regrets none of these things, only the suffering she endured. That is her nature.
“You were foolish,” he tells her. “But I should have known you would be that.” His hands continue to rub circles into her now completely healed stomach. She fights the urge to purr, and grabs him by one of his hands; pushes it lower, so that he is now touching the hem of her panties.
“Do this properly, angel,” she says. His eyes glitter in the dark.
“There is nothing proper about what you ask of me,” he replies, but it’s not a refusal. All pure intentions aside, he came into her bedroom in the middle of the night and groped her in her sleep.
“Please,” she adds. She hears him draw in a deep breath.
“Take them off,” he says, and she shivers a little at the combination of steel and concern in his voice. She takes the panties off and sits at the edge of the bed. He towers over her, and she reaches out to brush her fingers against his belt. She feels him touch her hair gently, hesitantly.
“Lie down,” he continues, and she does just that. She can’t see him, but she hears as he kneels down in front of her and places a hand on each of her knees. She feels the excitement building low in her stomach.
“Please,” she repeats, and he leans down, his hands spreading her legs, his tongue first on her thigh and then between her legs, his mouth hot and gentle. He has never done that to her before.
She arches her hips and gasps when she comes, his cheek pressed against her thigh. He gives her a moment to compose herself, before standing up and surveying her face in the dim light of the street lamps.
“I will be back,” he says, and then disappears with the sound of beating wings.
*
She doesn’t put much stock in his promise; it is enough that she wakes up well-rested the next day, her skin smooth and unscarred, her walk as light as ever. She discovers her protective spells intact, or maybe even strengthened. His kindness makes her uneasy, but she resists the impulse to turn tail. If he had come with the intent to harm her, she would have had no way of stopping him. No harm came, so reason follows that he wants something from her. That gives her chips to bargain with.
He doesn’t turn up that evening, nor over the next week. She drops by the Winchesters, but they’re busy running around the country, fighting demons unimportant to anyone but their victims, and it’s good work, but she’s not in this for the good or the work. She’s in this to level the score with Lilith and to stop the Apocalypse; because she likes walking the Earth in a stolen body, and because there are moments when it aches her to see pain. There’s a flaw in her design; it doesn’t mean she’s nice.
Sam flashes her looks of concern and she doesn’t care for his pity, so she takes off and returns to her hotel room in a far-away city, and indulges in sleeping and eating, satisfying the body’s needs while she can, still a little bit too shaken to go off and seek danger on her own.
*
She wakes up in the middle of the night to the sensation of his hands sliding up her thighs. She put no underwear on tonight, and he is teasing her bare skin in a way that makes her choke back blasphemous words. She doesn’t want to be punished tonight. She just wants him to go on.
She spreads her legs further, and he rewards her with first two, and then three fingers, working her towards an orgasm. She buckles her hips, and he uses his other hand to keep her steady.
“More,” she demands, and he chuckles in the darkness.
“So greedy,” he says, and replaces his hand with her own. “Don’t stop,” he adds before proceeding to undress.
She doesn’t stop, her own fingers are soon slick and she gasps a little. He leans down on the bed and takes her hand in his own, then licks at the palm.
“Fuck me,” she says, her voice higher and more pleading than she would have wanted. She bets it’s just the way he likes it, though, because it takes no more begging.
“Ruby,” he says gently, just as she gets close to coming, and the sound of her own chosen name, said without judgment by an angel, pushes her over. He comes a moment later and moves over to lie next to her, his palm splayed over her belly. She falls asleep like that and wakes up alone, no closer to knowing his intentions.
She ought to mind more.
*
The next couple of weeks fly by with no major events. She finally dares to stick her nose out and do the joke routine of “a demon walks into a bar”, but there’s little information to be gathered, Lilith lying low these days. The best thing that happens is that no one attacks her or even bats a lash at the sight of her. She guesses that whoever had designs on her life can’t have mentioned her dalliances to other demons. She’s not sure if that’s a good or a bad sign.
Castiel’s a no-show, and she sends most of Sam’s calls into voicemail, taking her time to bask in the loneliness and relative peace, until she becomes restless and itching for development (patience never having been her strongest suit) and she joins the Winchesters in a small town in Colorado.
“Good to see you, too.” She brushes off Sam’s greetings and gets straight to business, asking the boys to tell her everything about the seals and their attempts to deal with them. Just as she expected, they’ve made little progress, but apparently, so did Lilith.
“Time can work in favour of either side,” she says. “Does the angel stop by often?” she adds, in an afterthought.
“Too often,” is Dean’s grudging reply, and Ruby feels a pang of anger at the ungrateful boy. No one took her out of Hell; she climbed out thanks to her own cunning and wit, and more than once by now.
“What does he say?” she asks, and Sam fills her in on Castiel’s latest actions. She is pleased to realize that the boys know as little as her or less about Heaven’s current worries.
They’re checking out a school that might or might not be possessed by the ghosts of three students who hung themselves in their dormitory. She tags along; there’s nothing better for her to do, and Sam could bear reminding to practice his black magic.
*
“Is this like in mythology, where we can only do it if I don’t see you?” she asks the next time he appears in her bedroom uninvited and wakes her up in an altogether pleasant way. “Or do you just like not asking?”
“Do you mind?” is his entire answer, and she chuckles at that.
“You know I don’t.”
“Then I suggest you refrain from obnoxious questions.”
“Why do you continue to visit me? I thought… I thought I wasn’t useful anymore.”
He stops and remains silent for a moment, as though searching for the right words. Her stolen heart beats fast and loud in her chest.
“God doesn’t wish you ill, Ruby,” he starts, but she interjects.
“I’m a demon. It’s not as simple as with humans and ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’. There’s no boundary for me. I am what I do.”
She can’t be certain in the dim light, but she’d bet her ass that he scowls at that.
“Was it your pride that led you to damnation?”
“Will it be yours?”
She is playing with fire, she knows. A part of her never forgets that the creature whose fingers play with her hair and slip between her legs has the power to obliterate her. A part of her takes pleasure in the fear. She is, after all, a demon. Twisted comes with the packaging.
“Do you want me to harm you?” he asks. “Is that why you say what you mustn’t and jeer at what is sacred?”
“Will you harm me?” She avoids a direct reply.
“Not if you close your eyes.”
She closes them, but even through her eyelids the light is blinding when he changes right there, in the room. Then it dims a little and she no longer feels pain, just a vague discomfort at the display of divine power.
“Keep them closed,” he commands, but she would do so anyway. There are moments when she knows what’s good for her. “Are you afraid?”
She nods her head; a lie would be so easy for him to detect that there’s no point in denying.
“Good,” he says, and then she feels his wings.
He slides one of them up and down her naked back, and they are different to the touch than she would have expected, the feathers soft like skin and almost hot enough to burn her. A tremor runs down her spine, and she chokes back a moan when the wing touches the small of her back, the memory of their first time vivid in her mind.
“Do you like it?’ she asks, and then clarifies, “Do you like it when someone touches your wings?” She turns around and experimentally runs her hand through the feathers. He gasps then, so she squeezes her eyes tighter, and leans in to touch the wing to her face.
She continues to nuzzle it for a moment before his patience runs out, and he tells her to lie down on her back, and fucks her, with her hands still tangled in the mess of feathers that is his wings. He comes first and finishes her off with his hand. She is almost certain that she has clutched onto him too hard and torn a handful of feathers out, but in the morning there is no proof of his nighttime visit, apart from the pleasant soreness in her muscles and the tumbled sheets.
*
The demons are talking about a new power rising at some unspecified geographical direction. They don’t call it by any name and they don’t seem to know its origin. The vagueness of the matter drives Ruby nuts and she is tempted to dismiss it altogether on that account, but when she mentions it to Castiel, he tenses.
“What, is this important?” she asks, and he shakes his head.
“It might be and it might not. It is too early to tell.”
She’s quite sure he’s lying through his teeth at that point. Angels shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
“I’ll ask around some more,” she suggests, and he nods in agreement.
“Be careful,” he warns, and she hates him a little for making her enjoy the concern. For having to remind herself that, to him, she’s a tool in this game, not a player. Demons cannot be saved and thus they’re outside the realm of heavenly interest. The two of them are passing the time, nothing more.
“I’m always careful,” she replies, buttoning her shirt.
“You most certainly aren’t. Quite the contrary.”
She isn’t. But then again, she’s not looking forward to more torture, so she just might experiment with playing it safe this time.
*
He keeps her in the dark until the last moment, making her gather information and never letting her know about his suspicions concerning the identity of the rising demon leader. When she discovers the truth, when she first hears the name Anna, jigsaw pieces fall into place and she remembers what it is to feel truly angry.
She knows what he wants from her now and it’s no bargaining chip. It’s a millstone on her neck. It makes her dizzy with the bad kind of excitement.
She feels his presence in her hotel room before she even crosses the threshold. Waves of energy beat against her and reason suggest that running away would be the wisest option, but her temper trumps reason two times out of three.
“Hello, lover,” she greets him, and is rewarded by a flash of pure fury in his eyes. “I think there is something you’ve let slip.”
He leans back against the wall, motionless and silent, as if asking her to continue.
“It would appear Anna didn’t exactly return to the fold,” she says, parroting his enunciation.
“That is correct.”
Ruby takes off her jacket and hangs it by the door, then crosses her arms and looks him in the eye.
“Were you planning on telling me before or after sending me to her as a snack?”
“I was going to do no such thing,” he replies. “Though you might want to consider your responsibility for these events.”
“I was trying to save that girl from death. There’s nothing wrong with that.” Her pitch goes up at the end of the sentence when another wave of energy hits her. The feeling is not unlike that of standing in front of a burning furnace and feeling the heat.
“You were retaliating against me. Do not think me so foolish as to mistake your intentions.”
“You used me.”
“I gave you an opportunity to do good.”
“And if I wouldn’t, there was the unpleasant kind of smiting ahead. Not big on the free will, are you?”
“Would you rather me to do like most of my kind would and throw you into the Pit regardless?”
She takes a deep breath and a step back.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Castiel continues. “You want to use the messenger of God to forward your private agenda. You want to satisfy your short-term goals, and you have little regard for the big picture.”
“That’s a lot of self-righteousness, coming from a guy who fucks a demon.”
“I have been nothing but kind to you.”
“Does that include the death-threats, or are they off the table now?”
Her breath comes in shallow gasps now, and he has furrowed his brows. She has never found him more attractive. Surprised with her own cheek, Ruby takes a couple of steps forward and stands in front of him, then reaches out with her hand to touch him through the fabric of his pants.
“Our arrangement has been good,” she admits, running her hand up his chest and to the knot of his tie. “You have been good to me.” She notices the frown lines on his face and considers that he, too, might be tired. “Do you want me to undress?”
He smiles a little and the energy fades to a murmur at the back of her mind. The radio standing on the table stops buzzing; she hasn’t even noticed it was on.
“You’re extraordinarily single-minded, Ruby.”
She likes it when he says her name.
“It’ll be good for you,” she promises, taking off his tie and putting it down on the table, next to the morning paper. “I’ll make it good.”
He sighs wearily, then sits down on the chair and pulls her into his lap. “You enjoy making me angry,” he says. “Your own fear fuels your desire.”
“Does it fuel yours?”
She is fairly certain the answer to that is positive as his hand goes straight under her shirt. She rocks her hips.
“Not like this,” he says, pushing her off his lap. They walk to the bed, undressing on the way. She takes the tie from the table.
“I want you to tie my hands,” she says. He does just that before pushing her onto the bed. She lies on her back, hands above her head, and spreads her legs.
He kisses her mouth and throat for a good while before her begging and writhing gets the better of him and he fucks her, pouring out all the anger she had seen in him earlier. She knows she will have bruises on her thighs the next day. She enjoys the thought of bearing his handprint on her.
“I will give you the choice,” he says, later that night, after they have fucked the second time. She starts awake and listens to his promise. “You’ll risk your life only if you choose to.”
*
There is a lot about angels that Ruby learns later.
Grace God gives them is something more than a cheap artifact or prosthesis to be detached and reclaimed at will. When Anna took hers and attempted to return to Heaven, she was cast away from the Light into Darkness. Castiel says that he cannot be sure if she had known of the consequences when she decided not to subject herself to the just punishment for her sin of rejection; she would have been returned to Heaven then, but her pride was too great for her to accept judgment.
Either way, she lied to Dean and Sam in that as well as many other matters.
“She knows you, Ruby,” the angel tells her in the morning, when they are drinking coffee like their vessels would. “You’ve been of help to her, and she will consider you an ally.”
“How do we know these weren’t her demons after my life? What if she knows about our… meetings?”
He shakes his head with certainty she can’t help but trust. “Those had nothing to do with her. I took care of them.”
There’s no one else with half her chance to get close enough to Anna to have a fighting chance to kill her, except for Dean, and he cannot be trusted with this mission precisely for that reason.
“Once I attack her with this knife, all of her friends will fall on me like a ton of rocks.”
“You need to find a way to get out of there as fast as possible. I will be waiting for your call once you’re in the clear.” He watches her carefully when he adds, “This is not a path I can walk with you.”
Anna is not a human-turned-demon, like most of them. She is a fallen angel, one that has turned sides. She is as powerful as Lilith already, and willing to go to great lengths to free Lucifer. They need her dead.
Ruby sheaths the knife he had given to her when she accepted the mission. It’s the kind of weapon that can kill angels. That he would trust her with it is almost unthinkable.
He wishes her, “Godspeed,” as they part ways. She kisses him on the mouth and takes the high road.
Author: novin_ha
Pairing: Castiel/Ruby
Length: >3400
Rating: Strong R (this is mostly smut, actually)
Spoilers: Throughout Supernatural 4.10.
Warnings: Light BDSM, wing!kink, blasphemy.
Sequel to girlupnorth's Season of Mists, and has to be read after her story.
This was written for girlupnorth (who also beta-read this and enabled me all along the way) for making my days brighter, for enabling my Castiel obsession and for general awesomeness. I hope you enjoy. It's mostly me having fun writing these characters and checking how much sex I can write into one story. Turns out the answer to that is "a lot". Also, this is as close to fluff as I'll ever get (and that means very close, actually).
PSYCHE
She doesn’t sleep well for weeks after her run-in with Alastair. She wasn’t being entirely truthful when she told Sam the demon scared her more than the angels - it’d be a task to tell who had the upper hand in that respect - but the sick bastard cut her into pieces with her own knife, bringing all the memories of her time in the Pit back to the surface. She’d take to leaving light on at night if her nightmares felt any less real that way.
She sleeps fitfully and trashes about, and when she doesn’t, she curls into a ball around her still-aching stomach. The dead body doesn’t exactly want to mend itself, and it takes a lot of energy to repair it. She could of course use darker magic and speed up the process, but a part of her revolts at the thought. To be a demon with a conscience is an unenviable fate.
*
It’s her first dream in weeks that she enjoys; it starts with the sensation of warmth, spreading across her belly and down, between her legs. She smiles at the light filling the eyes of her dream-self and at the sound of her name, repeated in a gentle voice.
She wakes up with a start, and she is not alone in her bedroom. The panic is replaced by comfort in a split second, so fast that she almost considers mind-control, except she knows how proud the bastard is and how far beneath him he would see it.
“Shh,” he says, leaning down to her ear, his breath hot against her skin. “It’s alright.”
“Nothing’s alright,” she answers, while he spreads his palms and takes away the pain. She breathes the air deep into her dead lungs and there is no stinging, nor coughing. She feels pleasant tingling and makes a sound deep in her throat that is half a moan and half a sob.
“Castiel,” she says, and doesn’t know what to add. Should she apologize for taking part in the plan to lure him into a trap? For disobeying his orders and betraying Anna’s secret to the Winchesters? She regrets none of these things, only the suffering she endured. That is her nature.
“You were foolish,” he tells her. “But I should have known you would be that.” His hands continue to rub circles into her now completely healed stomach. She fights the urge to purr, and grabs him by one of his hands; pushes it lower, so that he is now touching the hem of her panties.
“Do this properly, angel,” she says. His eyes glitter in the dark.
“There is nothing proper about what you ask of me,” he replies, but it’s not a refusal. All pure intentions aside, he came into her bedroom in the middle of the night and groped her in her sleep.
“Please,” she adds. She hears him draw in a deep breath.
“Take them off,” he says, and she shivers a little at the combination of steel and concern in his voice. She takes the panties off and sits at the edge of the bed. He towers over her, and she reaches out to brush her fingers against his belt. She feels him touch her hair gently, hesitantly.
“Lie down,” he continues, and she does just that. She can’t see him, but she hears as he kneels down in front of her and places a hand on each of her knees. She feels the excitement building low in her stomach.
“Please,” she repeats, and he leans down, his hands spreading her legs, his tongue first on her thigh and then between her legs, his mouth hot and gentle. He has never done that to her before.
She arches her hips and gasps when she comes, his cheek pressed against her thigh. He gives her a moment to compose herself, before standing up and surveying her face in the dim light of the street lamps.
“I will be back,” he says, and then disappears with the sound of beating wings.
*
She doesn’t put much stock in his promise; it is enough that she wakes up well-rested the next day, her skin smooth and unscarred, her walk as light as ever. She discovers her protective spells intact, or maybe even strengthened. His kindness makes her uneasy, but she resists the impulse to turn tail. If he had come with the intent to harm her, she would have had no way of stopping him. No harm came, so reason follows that he wants something from her. That gives her chips to bargain with.
He doesn’t turn up that evening, nor over the next week. She drops by the Winchesters, but they’re busy running around the country, fighting demons unimportant to anyone but their victims, and it’s good work, but she’s not in this for the good or the work. She’s in this to level the score with Lilith and to stop the Apocalypse; because she likes walking the Earth in a stolen body, and because there are moments when it aches her to see pain. There’s a flaw in her design; it doesn’t mean she’s nice.
Sam flashes her looks of concern and she doesn’t care for his pity, so she takes off and returns to her hotel room in a far-away city, and indulges in sleeping and eating, satisfying the body’s needs while she can, still a little bit too shaken to go off and seek danger on her own.
*
She wakes up in the middle of the night to the sensation of his hands sliding up her thighs. She put no underwear on tonight, and he is teasing her bare skin in a way that makes her choke back blasphemous words. She doesn’t want to be punished tonight. She just wants him to go on.
She spreads her legs further, and he rewards her with first two, and then three fingers, working her towards an orgasm. She buckles her hips, and he uses his other hand to keep her steady.
“More,” she demands, and he chuckles in the darkness.
“So greedy,” he says, and replaces his hand with her own. “Don’t stop,” he adds before proceeding to undress.
She doesn’t stop, her own fingers are soon slick and she gasps a little. He leans down on the bed and takes her hand in his own, then licks at the palm.
“Fuck me,” she says, her voice higher and more pleading than she would have wanted. She bets it’s just the way he likes it, though, because it takes no more begging.
“Ruby,” he says gently, just as she gets close to coming, and the sound of her own chosen name, said without judgment by an angel, pushes her over. He comes a moment later and moves over to lie next to her, his palm splayed over her belly. She falls asleep like that and wakes up alone, no closer to knowing his intentions.
She ought to mind more.
*
The next couple of weeks fly by with no major events. She finally dares to stick her nose out and do the joke routine of “a demon walks into a bar”, but there’s little information to be gathered, Lilith lying low these days. The best thing that happens is that no one attacks her or even bats a lash at the sight of her. She guesses that whoever had designs on her life can’t have mentioned her dalliances to other demons. She’s not sure if that’s a good or a bad sign.
Castiel’s a no-show, and she sends most of Sam’s calls into voicemail, taking her time to bask in the loneliness and relative peace, until she becomes restless and itching for development (patience never having been her strongest suit) and she joins the Winchesters in a small town in Colorado.
“Good to see you, too.” She brushes off Sam’s greetings and gets straight to business, asking the boys to tell her everything about the seals and their attempts to deal with them. Just as she expected, they’ve made little progress, but apparently, so did Lilith.
“Time can work in favour of either side,” she says. “Does the angel stop by often?” she adds, in an afterthought.
“Too often,” is Dean’s grudging reply, and Ruby feels a pang of anger at the ungrateful boy. No one took her out of Hell; she climbed out thanks to her own cunning and wit, and more than once by now.
“What does he say?” she asks, and Sam fills her in on Castiel’s latest actions. She is pleased to realize that the boys know as little as her or less about Heaven’s current worries.
They’re checking out a school that might or might not be possessed by the ghosts of three students who hung themselves in their dormitory. She tags along; there’s nothing better for her to do, and Sam could bear reminding to practice his black magic.
*
“Is this like in mythology, where we can only do it if I don’t see you?” she asks the next time he appears in her bedroom uninvited and wakes her up in an altogether pleasant way. “Or do you just like not asking?”
“Do you mind?” is his entire answer, and she chuckles at that.
“You know I don’t.”
“Then I suggest you refrain from obnoxious questions.”
“Why do you continue to visit me? I thought… I thought I wasn’t useful anymore.”
He stops and remains silent for a moment, as though searching for the right words. Her stolen heart beats fast and loud in her chest.
“God doesn’t wish you ill, Ruby,” he starts, but she interjects.
“I’m a demon. It’s not as simple as with humans and ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’. There’s no boundary for me. I am what I do.”
She can’t be certain in the dim light, but she’d bet her ass that he scowls at that.
“Was it your pride that led you to damnation?”
“Will it be yours?”
She is playing with fire, she knows. A part of her never forgets that the creature whose fingers play with her hair and slip between her legs has the power to obliterate her. A part of her takes pleasure in the fear. She is, after all, a demon. Twisted comes with the packaging.
“Do you want me to harm you?” he asks. “Is that why you say what you mustn’t and jeer at what is sacred?”
“Will you harm me?” She avoids a direct reply.
“Not if you close your eyes.”
She closes them, but even through her eyelids the light is blinding when he changes right there, in the room. Then it dims a little and she no longer feels pain, just a vague discomfort at the display of divine power.
“Keep them closed,” he commands, but she would do so anyway. There are moments when she knows what’s good for her. “Are you afraid?”
She nods her head; a lie would be so easy for him to detect that there’s no point in denying.
“Good,” he says, and then she feels his wings.
He slides one of them up and down her naked back, and they are different to the touch than she would have expected, the feathers soft like skin and almost hot enough to burn her. A tremor runs down her spine, and she chokes back a moan when the wing touches the small of her back, the memory of their first time vivid in her mind.
“Do you like it?’ she asks, and then clarifies, “Do you like it when someone touches your wings?” She turns around and experimentally runs her hand through the feathers. He gasps then, so she squeezes her eyes tighter, and leans in to touch the wing to her face.
She continues to nuzzle it for a moment before his patience runs out, and he tells her to lie down on her back, and fucks her, with her hands still tangled in the mess of feathers that is his wings. He comes first and finishes her off with his hand. She is almost certain that she has clutched onto him too hard and torn a handful of feathers out, but in the morning there is no proof of his nighttime visit, apart from the pleasant soreness in her muscles and the tumbled sheets.
*
The demons are talking about a new power rising at some unspecified geographical direction. They don’t call it by any name and they don’t seem to know its origin. The vagueness of the matter drives Ruby nuts and she is tempted to dismiss it altogether on that account, but when she mentions it to Castiel, he tenses.
“What, is this important?” she asks, and he shakes his head.
“It might be and it might not. It is too early to tell.”
She’s quite sure he’s lying through his teeth at that point. Angels shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
“I’ll ask around some more,” she suggests, and he nods in agreement.
“Be careful,” he warns, and she hates him a little for making her enjoy the concern. For having to remind herself that, to him, she’s a tool in this game, not a player. Demons cannot be saved and thus they’re outside the realm of heavenly interest. The two of them are passing the time, nothing more.
“I’m always careful,” she replies, buttoning her shirt.
“You most certainly aren’t. Quite the contrary.”
She isn’t. But then again, she’s not looking forward to more torture, so she just might experiment with playing it safe this time.
*
He keeps her in the dark until the last moment, making her gather information and never letting her know about his suspicions concerning the identity of the rising demon leader. When she discovers the truth, when she first hears the name Anna, jigsaw pieces fall into place and she remembers what it is to feel truly angry.
She knows what he wants from her now and it’s no bargaining chip. It’s a millstone on her neck. It makes her dizzy with the bad kind of excitement.
She feels his presence in her hotel room before she even crosses the threshold. Waves of energy beat against her and reason suggest that running away would be the wisest option, but her temper trumps reason two times out of three.
“Hello, lover,” she greets him, and is rewarded by a flash of pure fury in his eyes. “I think there is something you’ve let slip.”
He leans back against the wall, motionless and silent, as if asking her to continue.
“It would appear Anna didn’t exactly return to the fold,” she says, parroting his enunciation.
“That is correct.”
Ruby takes off her jacket and hangs it by the door, then crosses her arms and looks him in the eye.
“Were you planning on telling me before or after sending me to her as a snack?”
“I was going to do no such thing,” he replies. “Though you might want to consider your responsibility for these events.”
“I was trying to save that girl from death. There’s nothing wrong with that.” Her pitch goes up at the end of the sentence when another wave of energy hits her. The feeling is not unlike that of standing in front of a burning furnace and feeling the heat.
“You were retaliating against me. Do not think me so foolish as to mistake your intentions.”
“You used me.”
“I gave you an opportunity to do good.”
“And if I wouldn’t, there was the unpleasant kind of smiting ahead. Not big on the free will, are you?”
“Would you rather me to do like most of my kind would and throw you into the Pit regardless?”
She takes a deep breath and a step back.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Castiel continues. “You want to use the messenger of God to forward your private agenda. You want to satisfy your short-term goals, and you have little regard for the big picture.”
“That’s a lot of self-righteousness, coming from a guy who fucks a demon.”
“I have been nothing but kind to you.”
“Does that include the death-threats, or are they off the table now?”
Her breath comes in shallow gasps now, and he has furrowed his brows. She has never found him more attractive. Surprised with her own cheek, Ruby takes a couple of steps forward and stands in front of him, then reaches out with her hand to touch him through the fabric of his pants.
“Our arrangement has been good,” she admits, running her hand up his chest and to the knot of his tie. “You have been good to me.” She notices the frown lines on his face and considers that he, too, might be tired. “Do you want me to undress?”
He smiles a little and the energy fades to a murmur at the back of her mind. The radio standing on the table stops buzzing; she hasn’t even noticed it was on.
“You’re extraordinarily single-minded, Ruby.”
She likes it when he says her name.
“It’ll be good for you,” she promises, taking off his tie and putting it down on the table, next to the morning paper. “I’ll make it good.”
He sighs wearily, then sits down on the chair and pulls her into his lap. “You enjoy making me angry,” he says. “Your own fear fuels your desire.”
“Does it fuel yours?”
She is fairly certain the answer to that is positive as his hand goes straight under her shirt. She rocks her hips.
“Not like this,” he says, pushing her off his lap. They walk to the bed, undressing on the way. She takes the tie from the table.
“I want you to tie my hands,” she says. He does just that before pushing her onto the bed. She lies on her back, hands above her head, and spreads her legs.
He kisses her mouth and throat for a good while before her begging and writhing gets the better of him and he fucks her, pouring out all the anger she had seen in him earlier. She knows she will have bruises on her thighs the next day. She enjoys the thought of bearing his handprint on her.
“I will give you the choice,” he says, later that night, after they have fucked the second time. She starts awake and listens to his promise. “You’ll risk your life only if you choose to.”
*
There is a lot about angels that Ruby learns later.
Grace God gives them is something more than a cheap artifact or prosthesis to be detached and reclaimed at will. When Anna took hers and attempted to return to Heaven, she was cast away from the Light into Darkness. Castiel says that he cannot be sure if she had known of the consequences when she decided not to subject herself to the just punishment for her sin of rejection; she would have been returned to Heaven then, but her pride was too great for her to accept judgment.
Either way, she lied to Dean and Sam in that as well as many other matters.
“She knows you, Ruby,” the angel tells her in the morning, when they are drinking coffee like their vessels would. “You’ve been of help to her, and she will consider you an ally.”
“How do we know these weren’t her demons after my life? What if she knows about our… meetings?”
He shakes his head with certainty she can’t help but trust. “Those had nothing to do with her. I took care of them.”
There’s no one else with half her chance to get close enough to Anna to have a fighting chance to kill her, except for Dean, and he cannot be trusted with this mission precisely for that reason.
“Once I attack her with this knife, all of her friends will fall on me like a ton of rocks.”
“You need to find a way to get out of there as fast as possible. I will be waiting for your call once you’re in the clear.” He watches her carefully when he adds, “This is not a path I can walk with you.”
Anna is not a human-turned-demon, like most of them. She is a fallen angel, one that has turned sides. She is as powerful as Lilith already, and willing to go to great lengths to free Lucifer. They need her dead.
Ruby sheaths the knife he had given to her when she accepted the mission. It’s the kind of weapon that can kill angels. That he would trust her with it is almost unthinkable.
He wishes her, “Godspeed,” as they part ways. She kisses him on the mouth and takes the high road.