Five Ways Ruby Told the Truth (M)
Title: Five Ways Ruby Told the Truth
Author: utsusemia
Disclaimer: of course I don't own anything and, in fact, could conceivably claim to have lost my mind just by posting this
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Ruby, Dean, Lilith
Rating: M
Spoilers: Through 4.22
Word count: About 2,300
Summary: I found myself really fascinated with Ruby in "Lucifer Rising". It made me think about how the last year had been for her. Thus, the fic.
A/N: My God, I really can't believe that I wrote a fanfic for another show. But there you go. Hope you like it.
1.
Good french fries are fresh cut. She likes them with the skin, but doesn't mind it if they've been peeled, so long as someone was holding an honest-to-Satan spud in their hands no more than thirty minutes before the fries arrive on the table. Battered fries are a joke, something some particularly sadistic demon dreamt up in some forsaken corner of hell-- and she should know, because she's spent her own eternities in those places, her soul rendered in fires so hot nothing human could survive, and they definitely don't serve any decent fucking food down there.
Sam likes good fries, too. He and Dean have crossed the country so many times, traveled down so many back-country roads, it's like they know every shithole diner in the lower forty-eight. Sometimes, when they're deciding between cases, he and Dean will get into arguments over which place has better food. "But there's Joe's Pub, just outside Biloxi," Dean will say, pointing at the map. "Burgers the size of your fucking head. Two pounds of dead cow. I could really hit that." And Sam will roll his eyes and say, "Food and sex. Not the same activity." And Dean will start to laugh and say, "Closer than you think, Sammy boy," but he'll trail off at the distant look in his brother's eyes, at the way he suddenly looks away-out the window, but farther than that, and wonder what it is he said. Sam won't see her out there, but he'll know. He'll suck in his lips, maybe run his hand through that mop of hair. And later that night his hands will shake as he puts on his jacket, slides out the door of their shitty motel, hunkers behind the flickering fluorescent glow of the RC Cola vending machine and dials her number, always by memory, because otherwise Dean might see. And he doesn't tell her so, but she knows that's the thing that scares him most in the world. Not becoming a demon-- oh no, that he almost longs for-- but what Dean might see.
The next morning, he'll be sated and too wide awake, even before Dean makes the coffee run and they pile back into the Impala. He'll tap his finger on the dash and flip through the road atlas for no good reason, except he likes the sensation of the paper, rough against his fingertips.
"Come on, Dean," he'll say, with just a hint of a whine in his voice, though he'll never admit it. "Let's do Peoria."
"It's an extra three hundred miles, Sammy."
"There's a place, in an old boxcar, you remember? Dad took us there, after that ghoul..."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Sweet potato fries, right? Really crunchy on the outside, but soft and warm in the middle--"
"Food, Dean. It's food."
"Exactly my point, Sammy."
Two days later, she'll sit across from him in a booth in a tiny boxcar diner. Sam will be jittery, needing the fix that only she can give. The plate of sweet potato fries will be untouched, but still warm, and she'll hope he was saving them for her.
2.
She remembers her first life with unusual clarity, for a demon. All demons might once have been human, but that doesn't mean that every soul in the pit has the juice to make the jump. Applications are carefully considered, the interview process is lengthy and strenuous. What Dean learned from Alistair on the rack? Not even enough to get a gig in the demon mailroom. A promising start, young grasshopper, talk to me again in a thousand years. Torture was Alistair's thing, but that's the least of what she's done. There's a lot of time down in the pit-- more than a hundred years for every one up above. Plenty of time to learn every strumming nuance of pain, to grasp the transcendent glory of a force so pure it turns every emotional extreme to religious ecstasy. In hell, she was born again, and she took Lucifer into her heart as her Lord and Savior. She was baptized with the blood of virgins, with the chorused screams of a thousand souls rent limb from limb, the fragments of their shattered psyches showering down like rice at a wedding.
She had been married in her human life. She was sixteen and he was thirty seven, and she had hated his foul breath, his gouty feet, his distended, old-man's belly. She begged with her parents not to force her, but they shut their ears and their eyes and swore that she'd be happy with such a wealthy husband. When the old woman who raised hens in the village gave her a grimoire, she didn't hesitate. She offered her soul to the demon in the book with hardly a twinge. She'd get absolution from a priest, she thought, she'd be given last unction and no devil would dare drag her to hell then. Soon after, her husband fell ill with a flux of such implacable force that it left him dead after two days. No one ever guessed. Later, when the black death swept through the small town, they would blame it on witches. She remembered watching the men build the pyres for seven women-- one of them the old woman who had given her the grimoire. She tried to use the book to save them, but the spells were twisted, they made wrong things happen no matter how hard she tried to right them. A sudden cloudburst doused the pyres, but the men just slaughtered the women anyway. Her harvest was plentiful, but then rot got into the stores. She managed her late husband's business affairs just as all his former partners lay dying. No one in her village survived the plague, though she was of the last to succumb. She regretted that, for there was no one to lay a cooling hand on her forehead, no one to change her soiled sheets--
--no one to call the priest, to deliver the last rights, to save her from the pit.
She loved no one in her first life. In her second, she loves Lilith. "Care for him," Lilith tells her. The first demon is nearly immobile, bound in this deepest pit of hell by the combined excrescence of a million doomed souls, a billion fractured years. Lilith will be free, Azazel has promised her. And then, Lucifer.
"Lilith, how can I? I'm only--"
And so the first demon kisses her. "Shh," she says. "You are the strongest. You are the purest. He will see that in you. You have always been meant for him."
3.
Angels scare her; they are Lucifer's brothers and sisters, and they are beautiful and terrible and strong in a way she knows she can never be. It isn't just that they can kill her-- plenty of things can kill her. That colt, before the Winchester brothers lost it. That knife. She gave them those tools, so no one can say she hasn't gone into this with her eyes fucking wide open. She knows she'll probably figure out if there's an after-afterlife before this party's over.
But angels are different. They're not death, they're light. It's not that they're so different from her, it's that they're so familiar. Their cruelty, their singleness of purpose, their implacable will...when she negotiates to give the fallen angel back to them, she finds herself staring at Castiel. Fascination, of course, is the other side of fear's coin. "Did you know him?" she wants to ask. "What was he like, before the war, before the Fall, before hell was anything more than the angels' dark playground?"
For a moment, Castiel levels that uncanny gaze at her, his expression of fey devotion making her back up, wonder what her chances are of making it out of here alive, and fuck, if she'd known it would be this close, she would have taken Sam right there in the abandoned shack, just pulled it out and slid down, and damn whoever was watching. Can Castiel read her thoughts? Can he see Lilith and Azazel and her brief glimpses of Lucifer's angelic light? Can he see Sam's muscled back, Sam's ecstatic face, Sam's cock as she forces him to come?
Castiel turns away. She gasps. No, it's impossible. Even an angel can't see into a demon's soul.
4.
After all he's done, she doesn't understand why Sam still cares about the hosts. Admittedly, his version of saving the world and hers differ on a few particulars, but the point remains: the end result has got to give you some moral leeway with the collateral damage. But she can see him hold on to this last vestige of his humanity like a drowning man grips the edge of a boat.
When she first comes back in this pert little body she spent hours hunting down just for its resemblance to what she knows of Sam's type, she thought he'd be happy. She liked her first one, but it's two months rotting in the ground by the time she manages to crawl back out of the pit, and, gross, she has standards. But Sam's a wreck, a basket case, more strung out than a heroin junkie past due on his methadone, and it throws her a bit. She didn't expect that, somehow. Of course she knows about the Winchester boys' whole epic bromance-- at this point, who doesn't?-- but she hadn't understood just what it meant. She hadn't recognized the self-destructiveness that would lead to Sam's drunken crossroad dares, just waiting for a demon dumb enough to disobey Lilith on this one thing.
"Take care of him," Lilith said, and so she does, the only way she can: she offers herself. She finds him a body one hundred percent cruelty-free-- brunette, but what can you do, and at least she has a nice ass-- and tells him that only he can save the world. She knows that Sam is planning on checking out at the end of his tour of duty, but she tells herself that it doesn't matter, that by the time they get there he'll have changed his mind. He'll understand what she's done, he'll see and he'll forgive her and he'll realize that it was never about the blood, not really. It's only a symbol of what lies between them.
"Your appetite is growing," she says to him, months later, after Dean has come back and angels are making shit of her plans. Sam glances at her then looks away, guilty and scared. Fucking touched-by-an-angel brother of his. This would be so much easier if he were still in the pit, still Alistair's star pupil. She can't believe what a hold Dean still has over Sam. The bond between them is as inexorable as gravity, and as intangible. Nothing anyone does can quite tear it apart.
"No, that's a good thing," she says to him, hastily, and she can feel the tension in his shoulders uncoil. She says what she has to. Always.
But it's true, she's glad he's drinking more, even if it makes her meatsuit lightheaded and weak. It means that their bond is growing stronger. It means that when the end comes, she might be enough to save him from himself.
5.
She likes being topside. She likes the long stretches of road, the longer stretches of sky. She likes the clouds and she likes the stars. She likes the smell of warm rain on hot asphalt and the sound of cicadas droning when the sun goes down. She likes the warmth of the Impala's hood on her naked back as Sam pushes her up against it, wordless and savage and drunk and punishing. She lets him in. Two sparrows are nesting in the branches above her head; on the gnarled trunk of the tree she can see a few dozen scurrying longhorned beetles. They'll have killed their home within a year, and the sparrows will probably be dead then. Maybe she will be, too.
The thought makes her laugh. Sam pauses, opens his eyes, stares at her. "What's that about?" he asks.
"Why do birds suddenly appear," she says, and pulls him in again, hard. Her heart pounds. For the first time, she understands those phrases that were cliches back even in her first life: the swelling in her chest, the giddy joy, the feeling like she might just float away.
She cuts herself for the first time on the hood of that car. She offers her arm to Sam with a tentative shyness she knows she shouldn't feel. He's disgusted but he's curious. After the first taste, she knows she has him.
But, "You poisoned me!" he'll say, long months later. The betrayal will be like a garrote in his eyes; she'll struggle frantically to escape, to make him understand all that she's done for him. All that they could have.
How could it be poison, she will want to say, when it was all I could give you? All I had to keep you safe and alive and tied to me so I could lead us here. So we could save the world?
And then the door will break open and she will turn on Dean, who always hated her, and she will think herself safe because she cannot see the look in Sam's eyes. She will be sure he'll protect her from his brother, because he always has, and why would he stop now, when they're so close to having everything?
It's not the knife in her gut that will hurt her, but the strength in his arms as he holds her close.
END
Author: utsusemia
Disclaimer: of course I don't own anything and, in fact, could conceivably claim to have lost my mind just by posting this
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Ruby, Dean, Lilith
Rating: M
Spoilers: Through 4.22
Word count: About 2,300
Summary: I found myself really fascinated with Ruby in "Lucifer Rising". It made me think about how the last year had been for her. Thus, the fic.
A/N: My God, I really can't believe that I wrote a fanfic for another show. But there you go. Hope you like it.
1.
Good french fries are fresh cut. She likes them with the skin, but doesn't mind it if they've been peeled, so long as someone was holding an honest-to-Satan spud in their hands no more than thirty minutes before the fries arrive on the table. Battered fries are a joke, something some particularly sadistic demon dreamt up in some forsaken corner of hell-- and she should know, because she's spent her own eternities in those places, her soul rendered in fires so hot nothing human could survive, and they definitely don't serve any decent fucking food down there.
Sam likes good fries, too. He and Dean have crossed the country so many times, traveled down so many back-country roads, it's like they know every shithole diner in the lower forty-eight. Sometimes, when they're deciding between cases, he and Dean will get into arguments over which place has better food. "But there's Joe's Pub, just outside Biloxi," Dean will say, pointing at the map. "Burgers the size of your fucking head. Two pounds of dead cow. I could really hit that." And Sam will roll his eyes and say, "Food and sex. Not the same activity." And Dean will start to laugh and say, "Closer than you think, Sammy boy," but he'll trail off at the distant look in his brother's eyes, at the way he suddenly looks away-out the window, but farther than that, and wonder what it is he said. Sam won't see her out there, but he'll know. He'll suck in his lips, maybe run his hand through that mop of hair. And later that night his hands will shake as he puts on his jacket, slides out the door of their shitty motel, hunkers behind the flickering fluorescent glow of the RC Cola vending machine and dials her number, always by memory, because otherwise Dean might see. And he doesn't tell her so, but she knows that's the thing that scares him most in the world. Not becoming a demon-- oh no, that he almost longs for-- but what Dean might see.
The next morning, he'll be sated and too wide awake, even before Dean makes the coffee run and they pile back into the Impala. He'll tap his finger on the dash and flip through the road atlas for no good reason, except he likes the sensation of the paper, rough against his fingertips.
"Come on, Dean," he'll say, with just a hint of a whine in his voice, though he'll never admit it. "Let's do Peoria."
"It's an extra three hundred miles, Sammy."
"There's a place, in an old boxcar, you remember? Dad took us there, after that ghoul..."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Sweet potato fries, right? Really crunchy on the outside, but soft and warm in the middle--"
"Food, Dean. It's food."
"Exactly my point, Sammy."
Two days later, she'll sit across from him in a booth in a tiny boxcar diner. Sam will be jittery, needing the fix that only she can give. The plate of sweet potato fries will be untouched, but still warm, and she'll hope he was saving them for her.
2.
She remembers her first life with unusual clarity, for a demon. All demons might once have been human, but that doesn't mean that every soul in the pit has the juice to make the jump. Applications are carefully considered, the interview process is lengthy and strenuous. What Dean learned from Alistair on the rack? Not even enough to get a gig in the demon mailroom. A promising start, young grasshopper, talk to me again in a thousand years. Torture was Alistair's thing, but that's the least of what she's done. There's a lot of time down in the pit-- more than a hundred years for every one up above. Plenty of time to learn every strumming nuance of pain, to grasp the transcendent glory of a force so pure it turns every emotional extreme to religious ecstasy. In hell, she was born again, and she took Lucifer into her heart as her Lord and Savior. She was baptized with the blood of virgins, with the chorused screams of a thousand souls rent limb from limb, the fragments of their shattered psyches showering down like rice at a wedding.
She had been married in her human life. She was sixteen and he was thirty seven, and she had hated his foul breath, his gouty feet, his distended, old-man's belly. She begged with her parents not to force her, but they shut their ears and their eyes and swore that she'd be happy with such a wealthy husband. When the old woman who raised hens in the village gave her a grimoire, she didn't hesitate. She offered her soul to the demon in the book with hardly a twinge. She'd get absolution from a priest, she thought, she'd be given last unction and no devil would dare drag her to hell then. Soon after, her husband fell ill with a flux of such implacable force that it left him dead after two days. No one ever guessed. Later, when the black death swept through the small town, they would blame it on witches. She remembered watching the men build the pyres for seven women-- one of them the old woman who had given her the grimoire. She tried to use the book to save them, but the spells were twisted, they made wrong things happen no matter how hard she tried to right them. A sudden cloudburst doused the pyres, but the men just slaughtered the women anyway. Her harvest was plentiful, but then rot got into the stores. She managed her late husband's business affairs just as all his former partners lay dying. No one in her village survived the plague, though she was of the last to succumb. She regretted that, for there was no one to lay a cooling hand on her forehead, no one to change her soiled sheets--
--no one to call the priest, to deliver the last rights, to save her from the pit.
She loved no one in her first life. In her second, she loves Lilith. "Care for him," Lilith tells her. The first demon is nearly immobile, bound in this deepest pit of hell by the combined excrescence of a million doomed souls, a billion fractured years. Lilith will be free, Azazel has promised her. And then, Lucifer.
"Lilith, how can I? I'm only--"
And so the first demon kisses her. "Shh," she says. "You are the strongest. You are the purest. He will see that in you. You have always been meant for him."
3.
Angels scare her; they are Lucifer's brothers and sisters, and they are beautiful and terrible and strong in a way she knows she can never be. It isn't just that they can kill her-- plenty of things can kill her. That colt, before the Winchester brothers lost it. That knife. She gave them those tools, so no one can say she hasn't gone into this with her eyes fucking wide open. She knows she'll probably figure out if there's an after-afterlife before this party's over.
But angels are different. They're not death, they're light. It's not that they're so different from her, it's that they're so familiar. Their cruelty, their singleness of purpose, their implacable will...when she negotiates to give the fallen angel back to them, she finds herself staring at Castiel. Fascination, of course, is the other side of fear's coin. "Did you know him?" she wants to ask. "What was he like, before the war, before the Fall, before hell was anything more than the angels' dark playground?"
For a moment, Castiel levels that uncanny gaze at her, his expression of fey devotion making her back up, wonder what her chances are of making it out of here alive, and fuck, if she'd known it would be this close, she would have taken Sam right there in the abandoned shack, just pulled it out and slid down, and damn whoever was watching. Can Castiel read her thoughts? Can he see Lilith and Azazel and her brief glimpses of Lucifer's angelic light? Can he see Sam's muscled back, Sam's ecstatic face, Sam's cock as she forces him to come?
Castiel turns away. She gasps. No, it's impossible. Even an angel can't see into a demon's soul.
4.
After all he's done, she doesn't understand why Sam still cares about the hosts. Admittedly, his version of saving the world and hers differ on a few particulars, but the point remains: the end result has got to give you some moral leeway with the collateral damage. But she can see him hold on to this last vestige of his humanity like a drowning man grips the edge of a boat.
When she first comes back in this pert little body she spent hours hunting down just for its resemblance to what she knows of Sam's type, she thought he'd be happy. She liked her first one, but it's two months rotting in the ground by the time she manages to crawl back out of the pit, and, gross, she has standards. But Sam's a wreck, a basket case, more strung out than a heroin junkie past due on his methadone, and it throws her a bit. She didn't expect that, somehow. Of course she knows about the Winchester boys' whole epic bromance-- at this point, who doesn't?-- but she hadn't understood just what it meant. She hadn't recognized the self-destructiveness that would lead to Sam's drunken crossroad dares, just waiting for a demon dumb enough to disobey Lilith on this one thing.
"Take care of him," Lilith said, and so she does, the only way she can: she offers herself. She finds him a body one hundred percent cruelty-free-- brunette, but what can you do, and at least she has a nice ass-- and tells him that only he can save the world. She knows that Sam is planning on checking out at the end of his tour of duty, but she tells herself that it doesn't matter, that by the time they get there he'll have changed his mind. He'll understand what she's done, he'll see and he'll forgive her and he'll realize that it was never about the blood, not really. It's only a symbol of what lies between them.
"Your appetite is growing," she says to him, months later, after Dean has come back and angels are making shit of her plans. Sam glances at her then looks away, guilty and scared. Fucking touched-by-an-angel brother of his. This would be so much easier if he were still in the pit, still Alistair's star pupil. She can't believe what a hold Dean still has over Sam. The bond between them is as inexorable as gravity, and as intangible. Nothing anyone does can quite tear it apart.
"No, that's a good thing," she says to him, hastily, and she can feel the tension in his shoulders uncoil. She says what she has to. Always.
But it's true, she's glad he's drinking more, even if it makes her meatsuit lightheaded and weak. It means that their bond is growing stronger. It means that when the end comes, she might be enough to save him from himself.
5.
She likes being topside. She likes the long stretches of road, the longer stretches of sky. She likes the clouds and she likes the stars. She likes the smell of warm rain on hot asphalt and the sound of cicadas droning when the sun goes down. She likes the warmth of the Impala's hood on her naked back as Sam pushes her up against it, wordless and savage and drunk and punishing. She lets him in. Two sparrows are nesting in the branches above her head; on the gnarled trunk of the tree she can see a few dozen scurrying longhorned beetles. They'll have killed their home within a year, and the sparrows will probably be dead then. Maybe she will be, too.
The thought makes her laugh. Sam pauses, opens his eyes, stares at her. "What's that about?" he asks.
"Why do birds suddenly appear," she says, and pulls him in again, hard. Her heart pounds. For the first time, she understands those phrases that were cliches back even in her first life: the swelling in her chest, the giddy joy, the feeling like she might just float away.
She cuts herself for the first time on the hood of that car. She offers her arm to Sam with a tentative shyness she knows she shouldn't feel. He's disgusted but he's curious. After the first taste, she knows she has him.
But, "You poisoned me!" he'll say, long months later. The betrayal will be like a garrote in his eyes; she'll struggle frantically to escape, to make him understand all that she's done for him. All that they could have.
How could it be poison, she will want to say, when it was all I could give you? All I had to keep you safe and alive and tied to me so I could lead us here. So we could save the world?
And then the door will break open and she will turn on Dean, who always hated her, and she will think herself safe because she cannot see the look in Sam's eyes. She will be sure he'll protect her from his brother, because he always has, and why would he stop now, when they're so close to having everything?
It's not the knife in her gut that will hurt her, but the strength in his arms as he holds her close.
END