The Wasteland Part V: This is the way the world ends [Complete]
Title: The Wasteland Part V: This is the Way the World Ends
Author: The Mad Tea Girl
Series: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Ruby, Lucifer, Meg, mentions of Sam/Ruby
Rating/Warning: R...ish, violence, language
Summary: Ruby finally faces Lucifer, leading to the conclusion of 'The Wasteland'
Author's Notes: Okay, wow, so this chapter took seven months to write. I kind of suck, I know. But it's finally finished ... and wow, this series only took me what? A year and a half to write? Argg... Moving on.
Slightly AU. As always, the Ruby in this work is Katie!Ruby, Should be read after Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. I must also, once more, send a huge round of love and thank to suchaprince, my amazing beta, without whom this series would be a grammatical travesty.
And also thanks to you, the little group of people who have stuck with me through this thing.
This is the way the world ends
**
“The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms”
- “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot
**
Lucifer was looking out at her through Sam Winchester’s eyes, and all Ruby could hear was the pounding noise of blood in her ears. Michael’s sword had begun searing the skin of her palm enough that she could catch a whiff of the scent of burning flesh. The sword reacted violently in the presence of Lucifer.
But she kept it leveled at him. She couldn’t feel the pain. All she felt was a terrible cold sensation, as if all the blood in her reanimated body had been changed to ice water. He took a step towards her, arms held out as if welcoming her into them.
"I knew that you would come, Ruby." Lucifer said, the smile still present on his, on Sam’s lips. "And you’ve fought harder and lost more than any of the others in order to come here. Everyone severely underestimated the strength of your affection for Sam Winchester."
Ruby tightened her grip on the sword’s hilt and squared her shoulders.
"Get. Out. Of. Him." She growled under her breath. Lucifer stopped approaching, and raised his hands passively.
"Out of Sam? Oh darling, I think you know that Sam was always supposed to be my vessel. He had to be."
"No." She shook her head "There has to be someone else. Michael chose a different vessel. If it’s just the Winchester blood line you want, take Dean."
"It doesn’t work that way, Sam is the only one strong enough to hold me. Michael just needed someone of the same blood. Me? Well I came out of Hell with more power than Michael anticipated. Do you know what would happen if I took Dean as my vessel? Let’s put it this way … have you ever microwaved a hot dog too long? That’s what it would be like, except I imagine it would be a great deal more disgusting having to clean up Dean Winchester bits than pieces of ballpark franks. Furthermore, have you really thought about what would happen if I left Sam’s body?"
"… What?" She already knew the answer. She already knew she couldn’t win this fight.
"Since I’ve inhabited Sam I’ve been shot, I’ve been stabbed, I’ve had countless acts of violence directed at me. But I hold this body together, I keep it in running order. No human could survive the things this body has been through, and if I left it - Sam would be dead within a matter of minutes."
"No…" She repeated, the overbearing sense of hopelessness was settling onto her again.
"You’re upset, of course you are. I understand how much you cared about Sam. I understand better than anyone else. You want revenge. You’ve come here with my brother’s sword to find me. But here’s the thing Ruby…" He told her as he moved even closer, touching the tip of his index finger to the point of her sword’s blade. "We both know that you aren’t going to use that sword on me."
His words sent a chill down her spine.
"I have no idea what you’re talking about." She said, fighting to keep her voice sounding calm, sure, confident.
"Dean found Michael’s sword with every intention of coming here to kill me with it. But not you Ruby. No, you never could. You never will. Because if you kill me, you’re killing Sam. There is no way that you could ever kill Sam, and that’s why you’re going to hand me my brother’s sword now."
The trouble of it all came from knowing that he was right.
And suddenly she was keenly aware of the burning, throbbing, feeling of the sword. This was how defeat felt. Lucifer took the last step to close the distance between them as she dropped her arm back to her side. One of his hands rested on the back of her neck, and he pressed a kiss to her forehead as his other hand took the sword from her yielding fingers.
"That’s my girl" He whispered against her hair.
**
With her left hand pressed to the freezing window pane, Ruby watched the snow fall in lazy drifts between her splayed fingers. Her right hand throbbed dully, a mess of burns and scar tissue.
It would still be snowing. She felt like the weather added insult to injury.
She saw his movements reflected in the glass even before he spoke.
"I’d have thought that would have healed by now." Lucifer said, with a vague motion towards her wounded hand. Ruby shrugged without turning around, she watched his reflection grow larger as he approached her. He gingerly took her right hand in both of his, turning it palm up, looking at it curiously. "Or can’t you do that anymore?"
"Probably not." She said dully, her eyes still fixed on the landscape outside. "So, are you planning to kill me now or later?"
"Kill you?" To his credit he sounded genuinely shocked "Why would I kill you? Because of your clumsy assassination attempt? Because of how long you’ve spent conspiring with the Winchesters? If anything I would say that those were a misguided, if not somewhat pathetic, cry for help."
She stayed as she was, watching the lazy drift of snowfall.
"He was fond of you, you know." Lucifer told her, and Ruby finally looked up at him. "Sam, I mean. He did care about you, loved you, even, in his own way. But family always came first with those boys; he was always going to choose Dean over you."
"How..." she had barely formed the word and Lucifer smiled, delicately tracing a finger over her ruined palm.
"I know because Sam knows." Under the touch of his finger the skin on her hand began to fuse together. "Besides, I've kept an eye on you over the years". His grin widened taking in her look of surprise. "Don't be so shocked, it's not like you've exactly kept a low profile."
When she remained staring at him with the same quizzical expression, Lucifer took it as encouragement to continue.
"Being locked in Hell makes you a little starved for entertainment at times, and you have been nothing if not entertaining. Sure, if it wasn't for you I probably would have been able to break out a few years earlier. You certainly got in Lilith's way, keeping Sam away from what she had in mind for him and all. That's why she buried you as deep as she did. She was counting on it taking you forever to crawl out, and she knew that by the time you did her little decoy would have already worked her way under Sam's skin" Ruby violently yanked her hand out of his grip.
"Shut up." she hissed through clenched teeth "Stop talking like he was just some sort of a plaything! Especially while you're using his fucking mouth." Her hand hadn't completely healed yet and she could feel the crisscrossing scars on her palm as she clenched her hands into fists.
Lucifer regarded her with a look of amusement that sent a wave of nausea through her, gritting her teeth together she headed towards the door. She didn't want any more of this. It was sick, it was cruel, and she'd had enough.
"It was snowing that day too." Lucifer said calmly, behind her, and she stopped in her tracks.
"It took forever for you to burn. They had to keep restocking the fire so that the snow wouldn't snuff it out. And they all watched, as it took hours for you to die in the middle of the Town Square."
Ruby felt a chill run up her spine as she turned back to him.
"How do you know about that?"
"I told you Pumpkin, I've been watching."
"Why are you even telling me this?" She said, shaking her head incredulously.
"Here's the thing Ruby," He paused standing with less than a hands width between them "I think you'll find that you and I really aren't all that different." Lucifer reached a hand out towards her and Ruby instinctively stepped backwards.
"I have to go." She mumbled.
"Go where?" She wanted to respond with some sort of flippant remark, but this horrible narcolepsy she had seemed to develop was having its own plans. She hated that she had unintentionally leaned forward, and into Lucifer’s open arms as everything starting getting dark.
**
The first body that Ruby had ever possessed she had taken over slightly under half an hour after she died. The girl she'd chosen had been a pretty blond tavern maid, well liked in the tiny village where Ruby had grown up. It had been a strange experience, drifting out of the body she had lived out her humanity in and hiding in another.
The girl had been watching the execution from the tavern window, and the first sight that greeted Ruby through her newly acquired eyes was the smoldering remnants of what used to be her body. Some of the villagers had begun to shovel snow over it to douse the embers. She took a deep breath to steady herself, to decide what she needed to do next.
She felt the powers within her that she had acquired through Witchcraft, but there was more as well. There was a stronger, darker power humming inside her, and as she opened her eyes she knew what she would do with it.
The tavern exited into the town square, and she stepped into the cold, brushing against people she had known her whole life. People who she had once considered friends and family were now just her executioners. The village priest knocked into her, his eyes had still been fixed on the scene of her death, and he nearly fell.
"Careful Father" She said lightly, catching his arm. Her new voice felt odd vibrating through this stranger's throat. She helped steady him and placed her hand against his chest. There was the tremble of his heart beneath her fingers and pushing slightly with her mind she felt something else grow there under hands. She could see through him, to the darkness that crept into his lungs under her touch.
"Thank you Child" he said with a slightly abashed smile. She returned his smile happily as he took his leave, she knew that soon what she had planted within him would spread to everyone in the village.
A little under an hour later Ruby took her final look at the place she had grown up in.
Everyone in the town lay crumpled in the square, where they had finally fallen and died choking on their own blood. Looking at the scene she felt nothing. No catharsis, no retribution, just an empty feeling like she had been completely hollowed out.
Two hours after Ruby had officially died she walked away from her former home in a stolen body, and the village burned to cinders in her wake.
**
"With the first of December coming just next week, we’re looking at what meteorologists are saying could be the harshest winter in decades." The Reporter chirped from the high-mounted T.V. set.
Ruby let out an annoyed huff, pushing her spoon around the crime scene on her plate that supposedly used to be blueberry pie a la mode. Though, you would never know by looking at it.
"Why is it, exactly, that you hate winter so much?" Sam asked, clearly amused by both her annoyance and the great pie massacre.
"I look terrible in parkas." She grumbled, shoveling a heaping spoonful of ice cream/pie/soup into her mouth.
"Aw, I bet you would look adorable all Nanook of the North-ed out" he said, no longer bothering to hide his grin. Ruby quirked an eyebrow at him.
"Sam Winchester, are you flirting with me?" Sam frowned, leaning back in the plastic booth and crossing his arms.
"Finish your pie or I won’t take you nice places anymore." He told her, earning a snort in response.
"Okay Dad, and have you told Uncle Dean about how you’ve been spoiling me with all these trips to fine dining establishments?"
"What Dean doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and it’s not like he’s exactly your number one fan, even if you are trying to get him out of his contract."
"Well, it’s not the first time I’ve been someone’s dirty little secret - Are you going to finish your milkshake?" That earned her a short laugh.
"Wow Ruby, you better hope that demons can’t get diabetes if you’re going to -
**
She bolted awake.
Ruby didn’t have any recollection of how she’d gotten into this bedroom. She rubbed at her cheek and she could feel the impression the tapestry covering on the bed had made there. Her right hand no longer hurt, but there was a pattern of scars that seemed to almost form a starburst on her palm, the scars themselves looked like they were at least five years old.
She really wanted to wash her hair. She felt like a wreck.
**
Ruby found her way downstairs, her hair still damp and sticking to her neck. The only clean clothing she had been able to dig out of the room was a dress that was too loose and too short, between its hem and the top of her boots her knees and thighs were riddled with bruises.
Lucifer was in the main ballroom again. Four other people, Meg included, were crowded around a table with him, studying and discussing something on its surface. Meg looked up at the sound of Ruby’s shoes clicking as she entered the room and leaned into Lucifer, whispering something with a look of disgust on her face.
Ruby stopped a few feet short of the table, regarding the group of them cautiously. When Lucifer saw her he smiled, Satan pulling the muscles of Sam Winchester’s face into a grin, and waved her over to him. Meg let out a small hissing noise, stepping away from the group as Ruby moved to stand next to Lucifer.
"Good Morning Sleeping Beauty" He said, looping an arm around her waist. She was starting to regain the numbness she had felt at Camp Chitaqua and didn’t bother to push him away from her. Instead she focused on the large, wrinkled, sheet of paper spread beneath Lucifer’s other hand on the table. An old, yellowed map, with thick black x’s drawn every so often across it.
She recognized the terrain immediately, and it gave her a strange feeling in her stomach.
"What is this?" she asked, already knowing the answer.
"Oh, this?" Lucifer drew his index finger across the drawing of a heavily wooded area, just an hour or so outside of Kansas City. "Somewhere in here is Dean Winchester and his band of merry men. However, my adorable kid brother, Castiel, must have shown Dean how to properly install Enochian wards around the camp, because I haven’t been able to get a fix on his location."
"Why do you care where Dean is? It’s not like he’s really any kind of threat to you anymore."
Lucifer looked down at her, studying her.
"You know where he is already, don’t you?" He asked and Ruby pulled back from him, not taking her eyes away from the map. "Will you all excuse us please?" Lucifer said under his breath. Meg’s head snapped up at that.
"Sir?"
"I said leave. Do it. Now."
Meg stared at him for a moment, teeth clenched, before nodding sharply and motioning for the others to follow her out of the room. He watched her go, waiting until the door banged shut behind her, before focusing his attention back on Ruby.
"Okay Princess, where is he?"
"I can’t." She said, still not looking up at him.
"And why not? What possible reason could you have to be protecting Dean Winchester? What has he ever done to deserve any kind of loyalty?"
"It’s Sam."
"What?"
"Sam is still in there, in you, somewhere. And if I turn his brother over to you, it’ll destroy whatever little bit of him is still there. I didn’t come all this way just to let that happen, sorry Lucy." Ruby told him, forcing a small, cynical, smile.
"Oh, you’ve got brass Sweetheart, I admire that in a woman. But there’s something that you’ve got to understand. Yes, Sam is still rattling around up here, and yes, he occasionally pipes up. But he doesn’t want the steering wheel back. When Sam said yes, well, I barely coerced him at all."
"You’re lying." She snapped. "I know why Sam made that deal. You were holding his brother’s life over his head, and you knew that he would always sacrifice himself to save Dean. That’s what the Winchesters are like, it’s in their blood."
Lucifer raised his hands as if in surrender.
"All right, fine, there was a bit of manipulation on my part. But do you know what the one emotion I felt from him when I took control of this body was?"
Ruby said nothing, scowling, hands tightening into fists, nails breaking the skin of her palms.
"Relief. He was glad to not have to fight anymore, Ruby, to not have to prove himself to anyone, or worry about the war. Any of that. He gave up."
"I don’t believe you." She said through her clenched teeth.
"Fine. You don’t believe me. But it’s the truth." Lucifer said, moving closer to her. "You see, I can hear him, up here" he tapped the side of his head "And you would not believe how glad he is to be sitting this one out."
"Shut up."
"You can tell me to shut up all you like, it isn’t going to change anything. Sam isn’t coming back. Because he doesn’t want to."
Ruby barely recognized the shriek that ripped out of her. And her fingernails were already tearing at Lucifer’s, at Sam’s face before she even realized it. She threw herself forward, into him, a frenzy of punching, clawing, ripping.
This was a mockery of her continued existence and she wanted to destroy it.
Lucifer grabbed both of her wrists, pressing her against a wall, his body pinning her to it. And he still had that same damn scent he’d had the last time she saw him, in the that rundown little motel. And his body was still just as hot pressed up against her.
And it was infuriating. Her eyes felt hot and stinging, and if she hadn’t felt so completely shattered she might have wondered at the fact that this body’s tear ducts were apparently still in good working order. Or the fact that the last time she had cried she’d been human.
"I don’t think you completely understand the way things work, sweetheart. You see, I’ve let you flounder around doing whatever you wanted, chasing after the lost Sam Winchester cause, but it was because it pleased me to see how far you would be willing to go to save him. But I’m the one who gives the orders around here, and while I do enjoy your pitiful attempts to throw your weight around you need to know that I could crush you like an insect, any time that I choose to." Lucifer told her in almost a hiss. Ruby clenched her teeth and looked up at Lucifer with narrowed eyes.
"So this is the ‘I brought you into this world and I can take you right back out of it’ speech? A little late honey, I hit puberty a couple centuries ago in case you haven’t noticed." She said, evenly. Ruby couldn’t be sure if was more infuriated by the position she had found herself in, or the fact that even with the devil wearing his skin part of her still wanted to grab onto Sam’s body and fuck him senseless.
"How fascinating you are." Lucifer murmured near her ear "All this hate inside you, you’re practically trembling with rage, and yet… that’s lust in your eyes, pet."
The fact that he had figured her out made her even angrier, and her entire vision had gone red, red, red. She wanted to tear that mocking smile off his gorgeous face, she wanted him to beg for mercy so that she could tell him ‘no’ just before she drove Michael’s sword into his heart. It would destroy Sam, but that had to be better than him being a meat puppet.
With a quick wriggle she managed to free her wrists from his grasp, and growling a short hex under her breath, knocked him backwards in a glow of white light. The momentum sent Lucifer sprawling, and Ruby was on him in a second. She straddled his hips, ignoring the heat of him under her as she grabbed onto his throat, squeezing for all she was worth.
"This was amusing for a bit, sweetheart, but now it’s just getting boring." Lucifer said, completely unaffected by her attempt to strangle him. He nonchalantly reached up, wrapping a hand around one of her wrists, and twisting hard.
The bones in her hand made a horrible snapping noise, and she fell forward slightly with a choked gasp of pain. Lucifer grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her head down close enough to him that their faces almost touched. Releasing her wrist he grabbed onto the side of her head with his other hand, pressing his palm hard against her temple.
Ruby let out a small groan, it felt like he was trying to pull the whole world out of her brain. And then it was over. Lucifer unceremoniously pushed her off of him as he got up. Ruby stayed on the ground, holding her broken hand, glaring up at him.
"Don’t be like that." Lucifer told her, running a hand affectionately over her hair. "You weren’t going to tell me what I needed to know, so really, you didn’t give me much of a choice. Once I kill off the rest of the little hairless apes I’ll let you pick whichever continent you want. You’d like that, wouldn’t you Ruby?"
"And then what? How long after there aren’t any more humans will it be before you decide that the demons are next? How long am I looking at before you’re bored of me?" Lucifer smiled down at her, and it was the most gentle, sweet smile she’d seen on that face. He tucked a hand under her chin, turning her face up to look at him.
"So keep me interested." He pulled her to her feet by her shoulders and reached out for her injured hand, Ruby flinched, taking a step backwards. He tilted his head at her with a slightly chastising look, and when he reached for her hand again, she reluctantly let him take it in both of his. She could feel the bones of it mending under his fingers. "Now, are you coming?" he asked.
Ruby narrowed her eyes at him, her hand finished healing and he laced their fingers together; like this was some ridiculous mockery of a date.
"Where?"
"Aren’t you curious to see if the world will look different after the end of mankind?" Ruby didn’t answer, but she also didn’t stop him as he led her out of the mansion.
**
She hadn’t gone with him.
For as little love lost as there had been between her and humanity, Ruby didn’t relish the idea of watching Lucifer slaughter the last little band of stragglers.
So she had stood in the snow; the horrible, hateful, sickening snow, in her too short dress, arms folded, and watched his silhouette disappear into the white.
Ruby had thought that there would be some sort of fanfare, some sort of universal disturbance.
At least a little fire and brimstone.
But there wasn’t.
There was nothing but the faint sound of wind stirring the snow up around her bare legs.
She lost track of how long she had been standing outside, eyes fixed on the same spot, waiting, but she imagined it must have been at least a few hours by the time he came swaggering back. Even at a distance she could tell that his designer suit, and the rest of him for that matter, was splashed in blood.
"You were waiting for me this whole time?" He asked with a grin. "I’m sorry I kept you waiting darling, did you miss me? Lucifer said, touching her face affectionately.
"Of course." She said quietly, and when he leaned down to kiss her she let herself be pulled onto the tips of her toes and pressed against him. Because it was better than nothing, and maybe someday she would find a way to get Sam dominance over his body again.
And because there were worse ways than this to spend forever.
"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
- The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot