Story: i get my glory in the desert rain
Summary: It might take centuries, but sooner or later, Hell will burn away your humanity. Every hell-bound soul, every one, turns into something else. [Even demons were human once. Even Ruby.]
Notes: Alternative titles include The Fic That Never Died, Why Did I Even Bother To Give Ruby a Backstory, and Holy Fuck I've Been Writing This For So Long I Hate It. Uuuuugh. Die, hellspawn. Before you ask, Why, then, did you bother finishing this? let me tell you: It's because I liked S3 Ruby. I thought Katie Cassidy, considering what she was working with, was interesting and fantastic and snarky, and considering how god awful S4 Ruby was, I like to think that there's a reason why she changed (and not just because the actress playing her was atrocious). Call me crazy. (Really, call me crazy.)
In related news, this can be read, if you tilt your head very far to the left and squint, as a PSA aimed at keeping kids from having sex. TIS VERY VERY BAD, CHILDREN.
A note on historical accuracy/lack thereof: Frankly, by the time I got around to researching Cailleach, I didn't really care anymore. Apologies for inconsistencies.
Disclaimer: If owned SPN, Genevieve!Ruby would've been hit by a truck.
Riane grows up welcoming—expecting—the respect that they give her grandmother. She is bean feasa, a wise woman, and although there's talk of a new religion spreading in the south, Riane has never known anything but the ways she learns in the dark, smoky hut, chicken feathers hanging to dry over the fire. She plays Goblin Goblin Ghost with the other children (she always wins, never runs away, because there's something a little comforting about the dark spread of the forest). She braids her hair on her Name Day and when her grandmother dies and her mother becomes the voice of Cailleach, she snags the chieftain's son.
No one, not even her grandmother, knows what happens when she is thirteen, when she bleeds for the first time under heavy hands, and as she drags herself towards the safety of the trees with a slick shush shuuush shuushh of the grass caught under her legs, she swears that this will not be the end.
"This is the beginning," she rasps as she sprawls on her back, panting, and imagines his screams.
They are married in the spring (for luck).
Her mother blesses their bed (for fertility).
His mother lights a fat candle made of beeswax and rolled with crushed mint, lavender, and wintersbreath in their window (for safety).
She slices the throat of a scrawny chicken and, while everyone else is busy, slides wet, sticky fingers over the packed dirt underneath their new bed, making a very large circle thick with symbols (for power).
Riane is not the first girl in the village to learn the arts, and she will not be the last, and so her desperation is mixed with something else like tradition and expectations when her husband dies and she is left six moons pregnant and full of bitterness.
Her mother looks at her from deep, black eyes and says, "Yes, there is something we can do."
She tells herself that it's for her husband, for her child, for the tribe, but with his sickly, limp head in her lap, all she can think of is the pain.
No one is (very) suspicious when her husband recovers, at least until his father dies and he wins the vote for chieftan in a surprisingly unanimous fashion. Even his opponent crosses the line to join her husband's supporters, and though she stands with a determinedly shocked expression on her face, there is not a single woman in the village who doesn't know what she has done.
The best part—none of them dare say a thing.
It takes twelve years. Her daughter is ten, her sons nine, six, and four, and when she joins her friends (allies, acquaintances, followers, lackeys) for gossip and weaving, she wears drops of silver at her ears and her wrist. She loves life, the taste of goat crisped over a fire, the feeling of the threads of silk under her fingers and stretched across her loom. She coddles her children, sleeps with her husband with something a little more than a sense of duty, and wakes up early to take tea to her ailing mother.
At night, she etches the pentagram, surrounded by a few letters she doesn't know how to read, in the dust of the main living area. Her first spell always ensures that her children and husband are too exhausted to interfere.
That night (twelve years), she kills a man for the first time, and feels satisfaction. Deep, rested satisfaction.
His wife cries at his funeral as they burn his bones. Her tears drip onto the pyre, mix with the wormwood and salt that she is shaking from the blessed bowl that Riane's mother has prepared. The scent that rises is like cooked meat, seasoned over a spit, and though she has been to many funerals and scattered wormwood and goldenblossom and salt over her share of friends and family, Riane has never been as terrified as she is now.
Somehow, she knows; this is the end.
(Two days.)
"Thanks the goddess," she whispers when the sickness comes in the night and lifts her away.
"Not quite, darling," Lilith says, and then all Riane can hear are screams. Most of them are hers.
Time begins to twist in the bowels of the earth—everything that Riane feels is repeated in a sickening ring, slicing and wringing her soul into pieces, braided together like the loops of thick red hair that had crowned her head when she was handfasted to her husband.
She holds out for long enough, sustained by the hatred of the man she killed and her desire for power and—this surprises her—the love she has for her children and her mother and her grandmother. But the love withers first, and it is the hatred that fuels her longest, that and the first fear she felt, her thirteenth summer. Lilith reaches inside Riane and she exploits the thirst for vengeance, but she cannot touch that primal fear.
It's the sensation of having felt worse that keeps Riane (barely) together.
"What would you do for power?" Lilith asks companionably, running the whetstone against the curve of her claws. "Would you suck the marrow from the bones of a child?"
Riane remembers her daughter, ten winters, the fragility of her collarbone under star-kissed skin, red hair tangling through her fingers as she tried to braid the wormwood blossoms into neat plaits.
"Yes," she says.
"Would you cut the heart from a new mother?"
Riane remembers the wife of the man she killed, her tears sizzling against the heat of the pyre, the child that withered in the intervening days.
"Yes."
"Would you peel the skin from a good man?"
Riane remembers her husband, his calloused fingers pressing into her sides, the scratch of his beard against the curve of her neck, their talks deep into the night of politics and the trials of chieftain, the softness of her belly against his chest.
"Yes."
"Good," says Lilith. "I have a proposition." She has no mouth or eyes, but she smiles at Riane and it is terrifying in its simplicity. "But first . . ."
The first time Ruby crests the surface, she has not been human (Riane) in a hundred years. Things are different. People are different—sharper, brighter, younger, and through it all runs a vein of impetuousness that she recognizes but also somewhat despises. She sees in them her past, and her failures.
Human bodies are awkward and constraining after the freedom of Hell, but also liberating in that they do not feel pain—each breath is not a trial, there is no constant struggle to free oneself of constraints. Being human is very numbing, and after Hell she can appreciate numbness.
"Hello, darling," she drawls in an approximation of Lilith's croon, and as the child begins to cry, Ruby feels the smile crack and grow, clawing into her mind and laying waste. "Come with me, won't you, child? We've got sweets."
It is not the last child she kills, but it is the first, and so the blood is special. She casts a spell, and fuels it herself—the feeling, prolonged and rich, is addictive, and as tempting as it is to attempt something big, she does as ordered and sets the trap for the Hunters.
Killing them is a liberation of another kind.
She has been a human meatsack (Hunter blood, of course, which makes it thicker and bitter and richer than any other kind) for three months when she ensnares Nicolai Passau, who is young and bright and carves blades in the summer heat of his father's shop. She brings him peaches and lets him eat them from her hand, licking the juice from between her fingers, and his tongue is like a dog's but she feels it as through through a thick layer of velvet.
"I have an idea," she tells him one afternoon, and although he has been raised to be wary of women with ideas, he still listens and doesn't notice when she traces the marks in ash across the back of his hand—and like that, he is hers.
"We're going to make a knife," she tells him, slowly and clearly so that her words press through the haze of the binding spell.
"We?" he asks, his eyes unfocused.
"Yes," she says, and her lips curl. "We, you imbecile."
They work for three days, the waxing and waning of the full moon, and it is the sort of magic that Ruby has never channeled in her life, but she knows that she was made, she was born to create. She still remembers her first lessons with her mother and grandmother, their thick fingers and knobbled knuckles and sharp, brittle nails guiding her small hands. This is the work Cailleach always intended her to perform.
At the third dawn, Ruby plunges the hot dagger, for the last time, into the barrel filled with blood and sea water, and it hisses, and its hiss says Freedom.
"Where were you?" asks Lilith. Nothing gives away that she already knows, that this is being committed in the name of the Father that no one, except maybe Lilith herself, really believes exists, so Ruby lets impetus guide her.
"Oh, here and there," she says, and it hurts when Lilith drags her in chains to punish her for her disloyalty, but it's worth it: It's always worth it.
Ruby has been trained since she was a little human child, tiny and fragile and broken, that belief is a route to power, and this is no different. Eventually, as time passes, she starts to forget that she used to think the Father a joke; he becomes real, and in her head, as the claws pull at her mind and twist deep and hot inside of her, she recites what she will say when he is released: I was your most faithful. Give me what I desire.
It is a bright, sunny day in Lawrence, Kansas when Ruby crawls out of bed and peers into the mirror. She is wearing a lawyer, potbellied and spoiled, and she switches midway through the day to the young secretary that he is fucking recreationally. Together, they have lunch out on the town and watch a blonde mother struggling with a baby carriage and a towheaded four-year-old try to cross the street.
The four-year-old slips out of his mother's grasp and races towards traffic; he hasn't gone five steps before Ruby is there, catching him up in her arms and returning him to his mother. She is heavy with the fat from her new baby and Ruby feels disgust ripple up and down her spine, but she plasters the helpful smile on her face. "Here you go," she says in the thick, clumsy drawl of her human disguise. "Think ya lost somethin'."
"Oh, thank you," sighs the woman, and she grabs her son by the neck of his shirt and drags him towards the opposite side of the street. "Dean, come on."
"Coming," sighs the boy, and he grins toothily at Ruby and winks. She is startled enough to wink back, and it isn't the human she is playing who controls the impulse.
Time is a foreign concept to Ruby—when she was Riane, time was essential, important, tangible. She never had enough time, she was always scrambling for more, she could see the days written step by step in stars and in fields. But Ruby comes to realize that, in Hell, time is nothing more than Lilith's plaything.
"Everything falls under the domain of the Father," Lilith explains, petting Ruby's head with soft, gentle pats, claws catching against skin. "Everything we do, He sees. Every word we speak, He hears. And though He has been trapped by the Usurper, He can still act. He bends the world to suit our purpose."
Lilith is speaking of Azazel's pet project, Ruby knows, and she absorbs this bit of knowledge and stores it with all the others, deep inside, away from Lilith and from Azazel and from Alastair; where she keeps the bits of her that used to be human—roasted goat, red hair, the feel of weaving shifting through her fingers—stored and labeled like in a museum.
"We are nothing without Him," Ruby murmurs, and she knows she's played herself too deeply into the role of unquestioning follower because Lilith's hands become infinitely gentler against her head. "Good to know I'm actively useful," she adds a second later, and she's minutely salvaged the situation, but she still knows what is coming at the end of their conversation.
"Silly child," says Lilith. "We are all parts of Him." Lilith's voice, hissing through Ruby's mind and leaving a sludgy trail like a snail after it, has developed a rhythm to it, a sign that she is becoming one with her image of the Father, whatever that image may be. Ruby wonders, sometimes, but usually she has more important things to do—people to kill, souls to torture, and her knife needs constant maintenance to ensure that it works properly—so she doesn't think too hard.
"Even the weak parts," Lilith adds, and then her claws tighten and pierce through skin.
Ruby doesn't expect Sam and Dean to trust her (she is, after all, playing them false, but that is the way of the world, and they should know better by now), which is why she slips under their defenses. She lets herself be drawn into them—their light, the snap of their words, how Sam looks at her (sideways), as if she is just faking at being evil. The Winchesters are hard by human standards, but by Ruby's they are just like small, soft children.
She plays with them, and it takes her months to realize that they are playing back. By then, though, she has come to appreciate how lost Dean is and although she is beyond sympathy, she still lets herself understand his dilemma; she was there, once, after all, back when she was Riane and she was married and she was a moron. The only difference is that Dean has time to prepare himself, he has someone to love him, and Riane had—power.
They seduce her with their humanity, and she hates herself for it. Mostly, though, she is too busy laying tracks and building levels and weaving her way into their lives and their consciousness. She wants them to need her, to say to themselves, "Maybe we should ask Ruby," and if they don't trust her—that's fine. She doesn't need them to trust her.
She needs them to use her. It's all part of the plan, after all.
Ruby hasn't had sex—actual, consentual sex that didn't make her want to shed her meat sack like water and just drown the other participant in their own blood—in a very long time. There are ways that Sam reminds her of Riane's husband. His hands, jerking and hot and stumbling, are wide-palmed and catch on the same places. He tastes the same, stale alcohol and grain and sweat and the thick smoke of a close fire. When he touches her, she can feel it minutely more than she could in other bodies—there is no other consciousness to battle away from the surface.
As he bites (hard hard hard) on her neck and breaks the skin, she barely even feels the pain, but then his tongue touches the blood of the girl (Marie) she is wearing and Ruby is—oh my god, and she shudders with the first orgasm she has had since she was Riane, and suddenly every stroke and his fingers and his tongue and the sticky locks of his hair sliding across her skin are vivid and tight and closer, and she can feel the blood—her blood—demon blood as it coats Sam's mouth and she is rollicking and her hips jerk faster and she can smell the smoke and feel the grain of the chair underneath her knees and holy fucking hell holy fuck.
She should feel disgusted, but all she feels is human.
It's the sex that breaks her. Lilith never explained that fucking Sam Winchester and becoming his twisted version of a dealer would tie Ruby so deeply to her human shell. Suddenly every day is like Hell again—she gets splinters and papercuts and each slide of the knife against her forearm is riveting in how fucking painful it is.
The sex is good, of course, but it's not enough to make up for this pressing understanding that she is now all but human. After years of being It—the highest on her personal food chain, untouchable, the particular (if unacknowledged) favorite of Hell's High Bitch—she is now back to where she began, pathetic Riane, bleeding and pulling herself across the grass. Have her sacrifices been for nothing? Were the centuries of torture for this? A nice fuck and the spine-crawling sensation of herself sliding down Sam's throat as he compulsively swallows?
When she opens the hotel room door to Dean Winchester's scarless and pathetically hopeful face, she bites back the immediate response of "Long time no see, slugger," and shuffles past him out into the hallway.
It has to be worth it, somehow. I was your most faithful. Give me what I desire.
So. Yes. I know. Thoughts?