This story is part of the Angelface 'verse, and is set between the stories Shrapnel and The End.
Disclaimer: This work of fiction is not for profit. I do not claim ownership of any of the characters or settings used.
Notes: So it's been, what, two years since I last updated this series? And what a pathetic little update it is. I tried writing another full length story, I truly did, but it just didn't work out. Instead you get a snippet that does nothing but hint. I are fail.
Ruby paces back and forth across the oil and gasoline marked concrete floor of the basement level car park. The whole place is abandoned, condemned and just about ready to be demolished. The only car in there is hers - a bright red sports car with only two seats and a lot of trunk space. Ruby paces and she thinks about where chasing her father's ideals went wrong, and why there's something cold and insistent in the core of her telling her that she's made a mistake.
Twenty years ago and change a man named John Winchester made a deal, and Azazel the demon fathered a half-breed son with Winchester's wife. And that was where it went wrong for Azazel. Something about the bloodline, something about the timing, something that went wrong and allowed Winchester to find the information he needed to send the demon back to hell. And in the middle of it all a nameless demon who identified as female, Azazel's daughter hand carved to his own ideals. A zealot just like him. An opportunist, who had been curious about the halfblood since she'd first heard of her father's plan.
Sam.
Sam was where it all went wrong for her. She has a brand on the back of her right shoulder and symbols tattooed on the small of her back to prove it. Things that bind her to him, the significance of which she has downplayed as much as she can. She doesn't want him to know how much she's taken to lying when he demands to know if she holds any affection for him. She keeps hoping he'll never realise that if some part of her didn't care she never would have dared to let him bind her.
And now here she stands, kicked out of the motel where Sam's brother frantically cats about for a sign of his whereabouts, threatened with more than death and torn between two sets of loyalty. Father and maker, teacher, mentor - or the lover, stubborn and unforgivably human.
In the end it's not much of a choice.
Ruby jumps into the car and speeds out of the parking garage, aware that she could be there much faster if she chose to take the demon's way of traveling rather than a human's. But Sam was human enough not to be capable of that sort of travel and she had every intention of bringing him back with her. Alive. And - as laughable a concept as it was - out of harm's way. She called Dean's cell while speeding on the highway, gave him only two words; "Cold Oak" Then the phone was tossed into the foot well, forgotten.
She arrived to the scene of a massacre that under any other circumstances would have been familiar and comforting in its obscenity. Just a few bodies, all of them scattered around the main road of the tiny ghost town, some of them in pieces. An auburn-haired girl sat slumped against the side of a house; rocking back and forth while small wailing noises escaped the bloody hole of her mouth. There's no place like home.
Ruby got out of her car, slamming the door shut behind her, pristine in the center of this mess. She gave the killing ground a cursory once over to check for any sign of Sam even as she knew he was still alive. If he'd been dead she would have been free and she could still feel the threads that bound her to him. She followed those threads now, confident strides of her black motorcycle boots taking her towards the run down church in the center of the town.
A line of salt stops her at the entrance, barring the way where no door has hung in decades. She looked in the windows and it was there as well. No way in, she went back to the door and knocked on the frame. "Sam?" she called.
A tiny gust of wind from inside broke the line of salt just enough for her to step inside. Ruby walked carefully into the old church, dark and crumbling on the inside. She stopped in front of the altar and looked down suddenly, noticing the sticky substance under her feet for the first time. The black, tar-like substance clings to the bottom of her high heeled boot, sticky like a bar room carpet that hasn't been cleaned in a year. She knew what it is, she recognised the pattern, and a part of her is reluctantly impressed that he used a demon's remains to paint a devil's trap here. She wondered if it belongs to her father.
Her train of thought was cut short when she heard foot steps behind her. She turned to see Sam emerge from a doorway towards the back of the church. He didn't smile at her, didn't say a word. Just walked up to the edge of the trap.
"I told your brother where to find you," Ruby said, far more calm than she actually was. One wrong move and she could be the next paint he uses. She'd seen what he's capable of and did not want to be on the receiving end. "I would have brought him along but he'd decided not to trust me. Not that I blame him. I wouldn't trust me either."
Sam's mouth twitched. It was a tiny movement. She couldn't tell if it's a smile or a frown.
"I can tell you what he wants," Ruby offered, hoping to score points.
"I know what he wants," Sam replied coldly.
"You do..."
"It's not what I want," Sam added flatly.
Ruby was not going to declare her feelings. She was not going to ask for forgiveness or try and explain herself. That sort of thing is more human than she was comfortable with. Demons change alliances. She's not going to apologise for following her nature. "You could kill me," she pointed out, clenching her hands into fists so he wont see how they've begun to shake. Like all living things, she also didn't want to die. "You could send me back to hell, kill this body. If you're going to do it, then do it. Don't stand around wasting time."
"Take off your jacket."
Ruby stared at him. It was such a bizarre thing to demand that for a second she's sure he was joking, but there's no smile on his face and his eyes were hard with hidden threats. If she didn't do it, things would go badly. Ruby slowly shrugged out of the red leather jacket. She offered it to him, but he didn't take it, so she let her arm drop.
"Turn around."
She did, slowly, the black tar under her feet making tiny squelching noises as she moves. Ruby stood facing away from him, hiding how her borrowed body wants to shake and tremble - she told herself it was anticipation or excitement, but the cold reality was fear. A demon trembling in fear. If it wasn't her she would laugh. Ruby closed her eyes, expecting pain, expecting death. Instead a warm, calloused hand yanked up the back of her tank top and a blade scored a line through the center of the tattoo on her back. She gasped, shocked by the action as much as by the fizz of magic that winks out of existence now the symbols have been broken. The blade slashed through the brand on the back of her shoulder too.
She whirled back around, ignoring the blood that leaks from her borrowed body, and stared at him in shock. "What are you...?"
Sam shrugged, the pen knife he'd used to cut her dwarfed by his hand. "Him or me," he said calmly. "Time to choose. Are you Ruby, or not?"
The demon floundered, faced with exactly the thing it had been avoiding for the past few months. A part of her wanted to flee. To run before he can turn on her. Another part wanted to attack him, prove her allegiance and hopefully buy her way back into hell's good graces. The part of her that won out is perverse. She stayed, standing there in the devil's trap that's been smudged by their feet, looking up at a man that has always seemed to her more human than demon. "Ruby," she said. "I'm Ruby."
"Good." Sam flicked the pen knife shut and tucked it away into a pocket of his jeans. He grabbed hold of one of her wrists and tugged her out of the sticky black smudges. "So now we wait for Dean, and then we can go kill Azazel."
Ruby didn't feel particularly upset at the prospect of killing her father. It was his own fault for putting her in this position in the first place. "What about the whimpering mess outside?" she asked, referring to the girl she'd passed on the way in.
Sam looked down at her. "You didn't notice?"
"Notice what?"
"I cut out her tongue, and lopped off her fingers."
"Effective," Ruby approved. She linked her fingers casually with his, which was about as close as she's ever come to admitting that she likes being close to him. Except for how she'd just chosen Sam over Azazel and freedom. But she's going to pretend that never happened and hope he never, ever brings it up.
"It usually is," Sam agreed. His fingers squeezed hers.
Free, chained to the halfblood by choice, an outcast amongst her own kind, the Ruby demon considered her current predicament. She gave him fifty years at most, probably less given the reckless way in which the Winchester brothers lived. She could live like this for fifty years. And then, after that... she looked at Sam thoughtfully, imagining the ways he might react to the tortures down below. And then, providing he didn't change too much, she was sure she could live with that too.