One-shot; companion to 4.09, I Know What You Did Last Summer, relaying Sam's flashback from Ruby's POV. Spoiler-ish through that ep. No warnings for content beyond brief mentions of sex and violence. Oh, and out-of-control drinking.
If you hate Ruby, you may want to turn around now. This ain't no Ruby love-fest, but she does narrate this one.
She'd forgotten frailty; she'd forgotten devestation. She emerged out of six hundred years of torture endured and inflicted with a little bit of the person she'd been not consumed by hatred but Ruby wasn't human, anymore, and there were many things that she'd forgotten or became incapable of understanding.
Like grief.
She hadn't quite realized it in her first encounter with Sam, After. She wasn't doing too great herself, then, all of seven days out of one of the the Pit's deepest and foulest holes. She hadn't quite realized that the playground changed on her until he'd asked her about the secretary. Perhaps it was just a handy excuse to get her to leave – the matter of Dean's death being a done thing – but it wasn't one she expected from him. It confused her; she was infuriated with him for striking such a low blow.
She'd found a safe body, because she'd been through too much and risked too much to give up now. She didn't make it out of six hundred years still remembering her human name by being a push-over; she didn't burn all bridged behind her by cheating and betraying Lilith just to lose sigh of what she wanted.
She had been so sure when she walked in, waving her moral clearance papers; she'd only began realizing what she was dealing with when she saw the three different bottles of liquer, all half-full, on the table amidst the guns; when Sam was too eager, and not at all Sam.
She'd hoped to make use of the eagerness: thought it'll be enough of a motivation for him to lay off of the alcohol. She had never been more wrong in her existance. Sam had never known how to care for more than one thing at a time: it used to be saving his brother and now she thought it had become killing Lilith. That was what Sam had claimed, but that was not what his behaviour had indicated.
Even when human, she'd never been one to get bogged down or give up. She had always found ways, even if they've gotten her a second life as a demon. Sam, though, didn't seem to be of the same ilk: she knew despair when she saw it. She could smell pain, even if the way her body responded to it – to her – wasn't entirely human.
She hadn't known she would have sex with him when she said, "You're not alone."; she hadn't known until she reached and touched his face – a practiced gesture – and then she had consented to how inevitable this was.
She was a demon, after all. She may need Sam lucid, but her nipples became hard at his pain; she may want him cold and calculating, but her throat tightened at his need; she may curse his human weakness, and she wanted to lick the desparation from his skin, desired the taste it like dark chocolate on her tongue, his hatred juxtaposed against it like a sprinkle of hot chilli.
If that would distract him from the death wish she sensed under his skin, then even better.
She expected him to resist; that was fine. She expected him to care for and need the reminder that she was alone in that body and it was all her but if that didn't matter to him, then fine also. She reminded him that she was a demon of the Pit, betting that intensity mattered more than the emotion that invoked it, and she was right.
If that body had a human soul in it, it would bruise: Sam had not been gentle with it – with her – not that night and not in the those that followed. There were times she was sure he'd bang her head against the floor, dislocate an arm, perhaps even break something: he never had. She knew better than to think that her relief at that was purely because of what it said of his mental state.
Everything she wanted depended on him. She was not demon enough to not begin to depend on him, herself: she was human enough to not want them all in permanent pain, and apparently it stretched far enough to allow her to want this part-human in peace. Relative peace, at any rate, or at least as little anguish possible.
He got sober, he got a little less slow on the uptake, but he wasn't going as fast as she hoped, as fast as she knew he could. She was getting worried. When he came up to her and said Lilith was in town and he was going after her, and wouldn't listen to reason, she realized that the death wish hadn't been pushed far enough. When he held her own knife to her throat she remembered that humans often killed one another, even loved ones, and Sam wasn't even pure human. He would've killed her then if she so much as twitched.
She went after him, because she had no choice. He was her one chance. If she wouldn't be captured or destroyed that day it would still eventually happen, if he died: she might as well try to protect him. He had become too precious an investment to lose, at any cost.
She'd never known giving up, and she'd forgotten despair; she'd rediscovered passion and she thought she'd rediscovered affection, too. Sliding down the wall with her breath coming short, wide-eyed watching Sam – who'd just had his most successful banishing to date – she realized how wrong she'd been.
He wanted Lilith destroyed, and he wanted his own death more than that. As much as she managed to diminish his death wish, that much hadn't changed: he hadn't been progressing. He would've let himself die – but he didn't let her.
Relief was her first emotion, and glorious happiness at having found leverage that would move him; and then an emotion that had taken her a week to identify:
Gratitude.
She had always been realistic, even as a human. Lying awake at night and watching Sam sleep, she knew that she'd come to need him in a way that was quite undemonic. When she let him have his way, it wasn't just out of strategic thinking, trying to appease him: it was also because she felt somewhat better if he did, too. She was human enough to care, human enough to feel affection and a distant kind of compassion, but she was pretty sure that she was demon enough to be incapable of any genuine concern.
She wasn't in the habit of regretting her choices – especially not choices that had kept her alive over six hundred years after her human death; she knew better than to doubt herself over a few nights of physical comfort, and one moment of misguided caring;
Sam had never been kind to her, and likely would never be, even if he grew into his Own; and yet –
And yet.