Who Do You Think You're Fooling? [SPN]
Title: Who Do You Think You're Fooling?
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Anna/Ruby
Rating: R
Word Count: c. 2,500
Notes: Set during the first part of ep. 4.21 - When the Levee Breaks, with the presumption that Anna finds out about Sam right after the events of this story. I wrote the original version of this a long time ago for a springkink prompt--and then forgot all about it. I found it while digging through my archives and thought it was worth sprucing up. Many thanks to arliss for looking over the final version of this and pointing out a couple of areas that needed fleshing out.
Summary: An angel and a demon walk out of a bar. It's not a joke. It's a might-have-been that never had a chance.
Anna recognized her at once, and not just by appearance. The demon's aura was familiar to her. Familiar, and therefore almost pleasant despite the repugnance.
Had she still been among the unfallen, she would have done her duty and eradicated the demon from existence. No hesitation. No questions.
What should she do, then, now that she was neither one of the angelic host nor was she one of the fallen? Her Grace had been returned to her, but her will and her freedom had not been taken away.
So what did that make her? Not human. Not angel. Not fallen.
Falling, maybe.
Or maybe, just maybe... rising.
Anna could not have said why she did what she did next. She did not want to call it destiny. Perhaps it was nothing more than a stray impulse that had her veil her own power and follow that flicker of dark, familiar energy. She followed and searched and followed again until she found herself outside a bar.
The place was a little shabby, but not seedy. Through the window she could see there was high-school memorabilia on the walls and a television over the bar turned to a baseball game. It had a feeling of a well-worn, but not quite worn-out pair of jeans. Anna Milton might have gone to a place like this with her friends, once upon another life.
The memories of that other life battered at her the instant she stepped through the door, and she had to stop for a moment. She heard the familiar music of Jeannie's laughter and saw the sharp, sudden bright of Tom's smile. She felt the warmth of Raj's arm around her shoulder and the smell of perfume and beer as Sue gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek. Could she get those things back? Should she even try?
Anna almost walked right back out, but a flicker of Grace dampened the memories just enough for her to ignore them. They were something she could revisit later.
Still veiled, she settled in to watch the demon. Her hand curled at her hip, instinctively pulling together the energy it would take to drive Ruby out of the body she was wearing. She wouldn't even need to make a token effort to spare the host; that soul was long gone from the body, leaving the demon the only inhabitant.
That sort of absence was rare. It was also intriguing. It would have taken effort for a demon to find a completely empty vessel.
Anna willed herself (for she could now do such a thing) to relax her hand. She was only here to watch and learn, nothing more. She wasn't sure what she hoped to learn, other than maybe some explanation for why this particular demon had caught her interest. There was a brief, shared history, yes, but it was so brief as to be irrelevant.
So, she watched as Ruby sat at the bar, paging through a fashion magazine and working her way methodically through a basket of fries. Anna did not need food, but she remembered the heat, the salt, the crispness and softness, and her rebuilt mouth salivated.
Anna watched. Patterns began to emerge. Every few minutes, Ruby flipped open her phone and auto-dialed someone. Each time, Anna heard seven rings and a snippet of This is Sam. Leave a-- before Ruby snapped the phone shut again. Then she would try to lose herself in the magazine only to succumb to anxiety again a few minutes later.
It all seemed so ordinary. It seemed like something Anna Milton would have done, once upon a time, when she was waiting for a call that seemed like it would never come.
It seemed like such a human thing to do.
And so, she let impulse lead her again. She stood behind Ruby and unveiled herself. Ruby knew at once she was there; Anna saw the stolen shoulders tense.
"Hey." Ruby didn't turn all the way around--just enough that Anna could barely see one eye.
"Hey right back at you," Anna said. Her hands were clenched in her jacket pockets and she bounced a little on her toes. She felt tentative in a way she hadn't since regaining her Grace.
"I kind of wondered what happened to you after you got your groove back." Ruby slowly shifted, turning the stool so she was facing Anna straight on. She checked Anna out from tip to toe, all the while remaining on guard. "Huh... you kept the same look. It's a good one for you, but you might want to tone down the red a bit. That sort of thing gets you noticed, and I don't think you want that."
Anna shrugged. "No, but you know what they say. Old habits die hard."
Ruby grinned and reached back to grab a fry. "I think it comes with the humanity thing."
"You were human once." It was not a question. Most demons were, and it was painfully obvious--painful in a literal sense--which ones were not.
Ruby studied Anna again, only this time she did not seem to be assessing a threat. "So were you. Heh. For a while, anyway."
Anna loosened her hands and let them slide from her pockets. Her hands still held the history of that human life. Even though they were newly created, they were the hands she remembered from that too-brief life. She even had a scar on the side of her thumb from the time her knife slipped when she was cutting a bagel. It was exactly the same, although this body had never been wounded.
She could have looked like anyone or anything when she took on corporeal form again. There was no need to have recreated all the old imperfections, but she had.
Just who did she think she was fooling?
"So you got your Grace back and you get to keep your body, too. That seems like a pretty sweet deal to me. So, what is it? Why am I being stalked by an angel?"
Anna sat down next to Ruby, ignoring the other woman's very knowing grin. "I didn't have a chance to thank you. For your help. This..." again, she looked at her hands and the carefully reconstructed scars. "This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't--"
"Hey, all I had to do was have Alastair work me over with a knife for a couple of hours." She popped another fry into her mouth. "No big deal."
Obviously it had been a very big deal.
"I'm sorry."
Ruby turned back to her magazine, and the way her hair fell alongside her face blocked Anna's gaze in a manner that seemed deliberate. Ruby turned one page and then the next. It was a little too deliberate. Whatever she was looking at in her memories of that night had nothing to do with the article on How to Adapt the Newest Size Zero Look for Your Failure of a Body Type. "Yeah. Whatever."
It was a dismissal, but Anna ignored it. She thought she knew what impulse had brought her here. Curiosity. She wanted to know why a demon would have risked its existence and its sanity to help an angel re-ascend, or why it would have gone to the trouble of taking an empty vessel.
"The least I could do is buy you a drink," Anna said.
Ruby gaped at her. "Uh, sure? Or is that angel-code for 'it's smiting time'?"
Anna laughed and ordered two shots of Crown. She slid one over to Ruby. She raised her own in a toast.
"To being human," she said.
After a second, Ruby smiled slowly and lifted her glass to clink it against Anna's.
Anna fell because she had wanted to know what it was like to be human. She had longed to feel. Longed to love. Longed to be loved. Not the sort of chilly, all-consuming love that surrounded the angels at all time, but a love she could hold close. A love that warmed rather than burned or froze.
When she regained her Grace, all she could think about was regaining that humanity. And regained it she had, risking everything to broker a deal with powerful beings who no longer acknowledged the Creator's dominion, but could recreate her body down to the last human imperfection.
Then there was Ruby. Ruby was what happened when a human was flayed clean of anything that was not an imperfection.
Ruby was a demon. Just sitting next to her urged something deep within Anna to lash out with a holy fire that would turn the bar and everyone in it into cinders.
She chose not to. Instead, she chose to sit next to someone else who enjoyed sitting at a bar and who liked to snark about the dating advice in a fashion magazine. They ordered a second basket of fries and laughed over the horribly wrong answers when they gave each other the "What's Your Passion Personality?" quiz. Ruby's laugh sounded a lot like Jeannie's. She even gave Anna a light shove in retaliation for a particularly outrageous answer, and it was so much like something Raj used to do that Anna felt a brush of old heartbreak from another life.
Then there were the flickers of irritation and fear she saw as Ruby kept checking to see if she had missed a call. It seemed like something Sue might have done, once. It seemed so human.
Ruby's willingness to sacrifice herself was still surprising, but now it was surprising in a different way.
Perhaps, if an angel could fall in order to become human, a demon might rise to do the same.
After their third round of drinks, Anna reached out and covered Ruby's hand with her own. They both flinched instinctively at the touch, but Ruby did not pull away and Anna did not let go.
"They're about to close up. Come on. Let's go."
Ruby cocked her head, studying her. Her expression was difficult to read at first, but then those lush lips bent into a faint smile. It seemed so natural it was hard to remember that she was looking at stolen flesh. But Ruby's hand felt warm in her own and Anna put remembering aside as irrelevant.
Giggling, they made their way to the alley next to the bar, finding a spot just out of reach of the light over the service entrance.
"Hey--Miss Wings. You're an angel. You're one of those good girls. You sure you should be doing this? Gettin' jiggy with a demon in a dark alley?" Ruby asked. She sounded like she was joking, but Anna suspected it was only bravado.
"No," Anna said. "But I want to."
Anna Milton had never been attracted to other women. As she-who-had-been-Hanael, the one with dominion over passion and pleasure, she now understood and appreciated the promise held in a body that was so like her own. It was human. It was good. It felt natural for Ruby's arms to circle round her back and pull her close. It seemed right for her hand to cup the back of Ruby's head as she parted her lips and invited Ruby to do the same.
The only thing that gave her pause was making contact with the darkness that was Ruby. In return, she could feel Ruby quail back from the light. Foul smoke wafted up hesitant and afraid from the host body. Anna reached out with herself, with searing yet gentle blue light, and held the darkness without extinguishing or dissipating it. She felt a delectable shiver of something both terrifying and arousing as a tendril of darkness tentatively extended into the light at the same time that Ruby insinuated a hand between them to fondle Anna's breast.
Anna sighed and rose further out of her body even as she pressed one of her legs between Ruby's. Light sparked from blue to yellow with laughter as Ruby ground against her and let her darkness spread thin and open to Anna's light.
Anna could feel the humanity in the warm body pressing against hers, and in her own response to the nip at her jaw or the thumb teasing against a nipple. It may have been her imagination, but as light pushed deeper into darkness, blackness resolved into deep, almost invisible color: the reds and blues and browns and sunny yellows that were the traces of the human woman who had been broken and defiled to become Ruby.
Together, they rose.
Their bodies collapsed against each other. Anna had just enough control left to catch Ruby and break her fall, settling them down so that Anna's vessel sat with Ruby's host curled up in her lap. Above the still, vacant forms light and dark twined around each other in an embrace far more intimate than anything involving bodies.
It was too much. The darkness started to quiver and fade, and so the light guided it back down, pushing it gently away from itself until they were completely separate again. Ruby all but fled into her body as Anna settled back down into hers.
Ruby tensed, but Anna stroked her hair and she relaxed. Anna tipped her head up and kissed her again, gently, slowly, reminding herself and Ruby of what it meant to be human.
We who have fallen can rise again, Anna told herself. She didn't dare say this to Ruby. All she could do was hope.
Hope that she wasn't fooling herself.
When Ruby's phone rang, Anna knew at once what had happened. She looked and saw Sam breaking free of some sort of prison cell. Whatever had been holding him in that warded cell had been dealt with, and he was free.
Ruby scrambled out of Anna's lap and dug into her pocket for the phone. Anna reached out for her hand one more time, and squeezed gently.
It was one last reminder of what they could both aspire to.
"Hurry," Anna said. She didn't say anything more.
Whatever was going on with Sam, she would find out. She would find out, and then she would deal with it. It was the least she could do.
Ruby just gave her a half smile and hurried off, flipping open her phone and trying to get a word in edgewise through Sam's panic. Ruby's own panic rose as it sunk in that Sam had not just been blowing her off, and she ran the rest of the way to her car.
For a moment, the old instinct raised its head. A demon was fleeing; an angel should give chase.
But Anna had once been human, and so had Ruby. She stayed where she was, running a finger over and over her old (new) scar and watching as the woman who had once helped her raced off to help someone else.
And if the old voice, the one who knew what demons were, told her she was fooling herself, well...
Maybe she was.
She still wouldn't have done anything differently.
After all, what she had done was the human thing.
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Anna/Ruby
Rating: R
Word Count: c. 2,500
Notes: Set during the first part of ep. 4.21 - When the Levee Breaks, with the presumption that Anna finds out about Sam right after the events of this story. I wrote the original version of this a long time ago for a springkink prompt--and then forgot all about it. I found it while digging through my archives and thought it was worth sprucing up. Many thanks to arliss for looking over the final version of this and pointing out a couple of areas that needed fleshing out.
Summary: An angel and a demon walk out of a bar. It's not a joke. It's a might-have-been that never had a chance.
Anna recognized her at once, and not just by appearance. The demon's aura was familiar to her. Familiar, and therefore almost pleasant despite the repugnance.
Had she still been among the unfallen, she would have done her duty and eradicated the demon from existence. No hesitation. No questions.
What should she do, then, now that she was neither one of the angelic host nor was she one of the fallen? Her Grace had been returned to her, but her will and her freedom had not been taken away.
So what did that make her? Not human. Not angel. Not fallen.
Falling, maybe.
Or maybe, just maybe... rising.
Anna could not have said why she did what she did next. She did not want to call it destiny. Perhaps it was nothing more than a stray impulse that had her veil her own power and follow that flicker of dark, familiar energy. She followed and searched and followed again until she found herself outside a bar.
The place was a little shabby, but not seedy. Through the window she could see there was high-school memorabilia on the walls and a television over the bar turned to a baseball game. It had a feeling of a well-worn, but not quite worn-out pair of jeans. Anna Milton might have gone to a place like this with her friends, once upon another life.
The memories of that other life battered at her the instant she stepped through the door, and she had to stop for a moment. She heard the familiar music of Jeannie's laughter and saw the sharp, sudden bright of Tom's smile. She felt the warmth of Raj's arm around her shoulder and the smell of perfume and beer as Sue gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek. Could she get those things back? Should she even try?
Anna almost walked right back out, but a flicker of Grace dampened the memories just enough for her to ignore them. They were something she could revisit later.
Still veiled, she settled in to watch the demon. Her hand curled at her hip, instinctively pulling together the energy it would take to drive Ruby out of the body she was wearing. She wouldn't even need to make a token effort to spare the host; that soul was long gone from the body, leaving the demon the only inhabitant.
That sort of absence was rare. It was also intriguing. It would have taken effort for a demon to find a completely empty vessel.
Anna willed herself (for she could now do such a thing) to relax her hand. She was only here to watch and learn, nothing more. She wasn't sure what she hoped to learn, other than maybe some explanation for why this particular demon had caught her interest. There was a brief, shared history, yes, but it was so brief as to be irrelevant.
So, she watched as Ruby sat at the bar, paging through a fashion magazine and working her way methodically through a basket of fries. Anna did not need food, but she remembered the heat, the salt, the crispness and softness, and her rebuilt mouth salivated.
Anna watched. Patterns began to emerge. Every few minutes, Ruby flipped open her phone and auto-dialed someone. Each time, Anna heard seven rings and a snippet of This is Sam. Leave a-- before Ruby snapped the phone shut again. Then she would try to lose herself in the magazine only to succumb to anxiety again a few minutes later.
It all seemed so ordinary. It seemed like something Anna Milton would have done, once upon a time, when she was waiting for a call that seemed like it would never come.
It seemed like such a human thing to do.
And so, she let impulse lead her again. She stood behind Ruby and unveiled herself. Ruby knew at once she was there; Anna saw the stolen shoulders tense.
"Hey." Ruby didn't turn all the way around--just enough that Anna could barely see one eye.
"Hey right back at you," Anna said. Her hands were clenched in her jacket pockets and she bounced a little on her toes. She felt tentative in a way she hadn't since regaining her Grace.
"I kind of wondered what happened to you after you got your groove back." Ruby slowly shifted, turning the stool so she was facing Anna straight on. She checked Anna out from tip to toe, all the while remaining on guard. "Huh... you kept the same look. It's a good one for you, but you might want to tone down the red a bit. That sort of thing gets you noticed, and I don't think you want that."
Anna shrugged. "No, but you know what they say. Old habits die hard."
Ruby grinned and reached back to grab a fry. "I think it comes with the humanity thing."
"You were human once." It was not a question. Most demons were, and it was painfully obvious--painful in a literal sense--which ones were not.
Ruby studied Anna again, only this time she did not seem to be assessing a threat. "So were you. Heh. For a while, anyway."
Anna loosened her hands and let them slide from her pockets. Her hands still held the history of that human life. Even though they were newly created, they were the hands she remembered from that too-brief life. She even had a scar on the side of her thumb from the time her knife slipped when she was cutting a bagel. It was exactly the same, although this body had never been wounded.
She could have looked like anyone or anything when she took on corporeal form again. There was no need to have recreated all the old imperfections, but she had.
Just who did she think she was fooling?
"So you got your Grace back and you get to keep your body, too. That seems like a pretty sweet deal to me. So, what is it? Why am I being stalked by an angel?"
Anna sat down next to Ruby, ignoring the other woman's very knowing grin. "I didn't have a chance to thank you. For your help. This..." again, she looked at her hands and the carefully reconstructed scars. "This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't--"
"Hey, all I had to do was have Alastair work me over with a knife for a couple of hours." She popped another fry into her mouth. "No big deal."
Obviously it had been a very big deal.
"I'm sorry."
Ruby turned back to her magazine, and the way her hair fell alongside her face blocked Anna's gaze in a manner that seemed deliberate. Ruby turned one page and then the next. It was a little too deliberate. Whatever she was looking at in her memories of that night had nothing to do with the article on How to Adapt the Newest Size Zero Look for Your Failure of a Body Type. "Yeah. Whatever."
It was a dismissal, but Anna ignored it. She thought she knew what impulse had brought her here. Curiosity. She wanted to know why a demon would have risked its existence and its sanity to help an angel re-ascend, or why it would have gone to the trouble of taking an empty vessel.
"The least I could do is buy you a drink," Anna said.
Ruby gaped at her. "Uh, sure? Or is that angel-code for 'it's smiting time'?"
Anna laughed and ordered two shots of Crown. She slid one over to Ruby. She raised her own in a toast.
"To being human," she said.
After a second, Ruby smiled slowly and lifted her glass to clink it against Anna's.
Anna fell because she had wanted to know what it was like to be human. She had longed to feel. Longed to love. Longed to be loved. Not the sort of chilly, all-consuming love that surrounded the angels at all time, but a love she could hold close. A love that warmed rather than burned or froze.
When she regained her Grace, all she could think about was regaining that humanity. And regained it she had, risking everything to broker a deal with powerful beings who no longer acknowledged the Creator's dominion, but could recreate her body down to the last human imperfection.
Then there was Ruby. Ruby was what happened when a human was flayed clean of anything that was not an imperfection.
Ruby was a demon. Just sitting next to her urged something deep within Anna to lash out with a holy fire that would turn the bar and everyone in it into cinders.
She chose not to. Instead, she chose to sit next to someone else who enjoyed sitting at a bar and who liked to snark about the dating advice in a fashion magazine. They ordered a second basket of fries and laughed over the horribly wrong answers when they gave each other the "What's Your Passion Personality?" quiz. Ruby's laugh sounded a lot like Jeannie's. She even gave Anna a light shove in retaliation for a particularly outrageous answer, and it was so much like something Raj used to do that Anna felt a brush of old heartbreak from another life.
Then there were the flickers of irritation and fear she saw as Ruby kept checking to see if she had missed a call. It seemed like something Sue might have done, once. It seemed so human.
Ruby's willingness to sacrifice herself was still surprising, but now it was surprising in a different way.
Perhaps, if an angel could fall in order to become human, a demon might rise to do the same.
After their third round of drinks, Anna reached out and covered Ruby's hand with her own. They both flinched instinctively at the touch, but Ruby did not pull away and Anna did not let go.
"They're about to close up. Come on. Let's go."
Ruby cocked her head, studying her. Her expression was difficult to read at first, but then those lush lips bent into a faint smile. It seemed so natural it was hard to remember that she was looking at stolen flesh. But Ruby's hand felt warm in her own and Anna put remembering aside as irrelevant.
Giggling, they made their way to the alley next to the bar, finding a spot just out of reach of the light over the service entrance.
"Hey--Miss Wings. You're an angel. You're one of those good girls. You sure you should be doing this? Gettin' jiggy with a demon in a dark alley?" Ruby asked. She sounded like she was joking, but Anna suspected it was only bravado.
"No," Anna said. "But I want to."
Anna Milton had never been attracted to other women. As she-who-had-been-Hanael, the one with dominion over passion and pleasure, she now understood and appreciated the promise held in a body that was so like her own. It was human. It was good. It felt natural for Ruby's arms to circle round her back and pull her close. It seemed right for her hand to cup the back of Ruby's head as she parted her lips and invited Ruby to do the same.
The only thing that gave her pause was making contact with the darkness that was Ruby. In return, she could feel Ruby quail back from the light. Foul smoke wafted up hesitant and afraid from the host body. Anna reached out with herself, with searing yet gentle blue light, and held the darkness without extinguishing or dissipating it. She felt a delectable shiver of something both terrifying and arousing as a tendril of darkness tentatively extended into the light at the same time that Ruby insinuated a hand between them to fondle Anna's breast.
Anna sighed and rose further out of her body even as she pressed one of her legs between Ruby's. Light sparked from blue to yellow with laughter as Ruby ground against her and let her darkness spread thin and open to Anna's light.
Anna could feel the humanity in the warm body pressing against hers, and in her own response to the nip at her jaw or the thumb teasing against a nipple. It may have been her imagination, but as light pushed deeper into darkness, blackness resolved into deep, almost invisible color: the reds and blues and browns and sunny yellows that were the traces of the human woman who had been broken and defiled to become Ruby.
Together, they rose.
Their bodies collapsed against each other. Anna had just enough control left to catch Ruby and break her fall, settling them down so that Anna's vessel sat with Ruby's host curled up in her lap. Above the still, vacant forms light and dark twined around each other in an embrace far more intimate than anything involving bodies.
It was too much. The darkness started to quiver and fade, and so the light guided it back down, pushing it gently away from itself until they were completely separate again. Ruby all but fled into her body as Anna settled back down into hers.
Ruby tensed, but Anna stroked her hair and she relaxed. Anna tipped her head up and kissed her again, gently, slowly, reminding herself and Ruby of what it meant to be human.
We who have fallen can rise again, Anna told herself. She didn't dare say this to Ruby. All she could do was hope.
Hope that she wasn't fooling herself.
When Ruby's phone rang, Anna knew at once what had happened. She looked and saw Sam breaking free of some sort of prison cell. Whatever had been holding him in that warded cell had been dealt with, and he was free.
Ruby scrambled out of Anna's lap and dug into her pocket for the phone. Anna reached out for her hand one more time, and squeezed gently.
It was one last reminder of what they could both aspire to.
"Hurry," Anna said. She didn't say anything more.
Whatever was going on with Sam, she would find out. She would find out, and then she would deal with it. It was the least she could do.
Ruby just gave her a half smile and hurried off, flipping open her phone and trying to get a word in edgewise through Sam's panic. Ruby's own panic rose as it sunk in that Sam had not just been blowing her off, and she ran the rest of the way to her car.
For a moment, the old instinct raised its head. A demon was fleeing; an angel should give chase.
But Anna had once been human, and so had Ruby. She stayed where she was, running a finger over and over her old (new) scar and watching as the woman who had once helped her raced off to help someone else.
And if the old voice, the one who knew what demons were, told her she was fooling herself, well...
Maybe she was.
She still wouldn't have done anything differently.
After all, what she had done was the human thing.