Ruby shudders as she hits the mattress, feels her head, neck, shoulders quiver from the force with which Sam threw her there. He stands before her and draws the hesitation out — dark eyes fixated on her wrist, on the little pool of red accumulating on the motel pillow. As he strips down to his bare chest and discards the sweat-stained shirt, she notices instead the blood still at the corner of his lips. Tonight, he has had more than she's ever given him before, and she can only guess what will come from it. She nestles into the mattress, the comforter that has God only knows what on it from the previous guests, and her eyes trail down his body, from his neck to his shoulders, to his arms — where little beads of sweat glisten — and through it all, the power radiates off him in surges more than in ebbs and tides.

He inhales, exhales — all his muscles tense and relax as what he swallowed pumps through him — that familiar doubt flashes across his face; his eyes widen and his lips grow slack, and Ruby can see his gears churning as he wonders if he can trust her, if something that's right should feel like this does. With a soft sigh, she slips an ankle between his legs, presses it into the muscle of his thigh, and snakes it up and down with an uncommon delicacy. After he's tried so hard to quit, now that he's out of the case with the magicians and that he finally has the glint in his eyes, that admission that he wants it, she has to be gentle with him; he's been through so much already. Underneath the fluorescent lights, all his scars seem to shine, a curling map of his history written in repaired skin. Her expression softens.

"Come on, Sam," she whispers, other hand clenching around the hilt of her knife, going white in the knuckles as a calculated note of desperation sneaks into her voice. "It's okay to want it."

Brushing against him, she cocks her foot at just an angle and rubs it up into his groin. She feels around, palming at him with her toes and the ball of her foot, until she hears him groan, until she can feel his erection through his jeans. Once again, he frowns and makes obvious the fact that he's thinking too much — of Dean, and the angels, and the thirty-four broken seals, and all the people who he has to save, and his future, and probably more that his downcast eyes don't reveal. I don't want to be doing this when I'm an old man, he told her before they got here; Ruby sits and leaves the knife by the flimsy motel pillow — she'll see to it that he won't meet that fate. Easing herself onto her knees, she laces the unmarred arm around his neck and coaxes him to the mattress. Like some penitent in church, he kneels before her, barely any space between them. She leans into him for just one moment, the warmth of his chest against the cold of hers — barely a flash of time, and they sigh in unison.

As she pulls back, she fills the space with her wrist, the bleeding one, and his pupils dilate at the scent of the blood. "Sam…" She leaves her wrist before his lips. "Just take it," she whispers, other hand running back through her hair. "Take it, it's yours. …You can stop her, you can save all of them, Sammy. …Just take it."

Sam caresses her arm with both hands and hesitates before wrapping his lips — and his teeth, careful as always, ever so gently — around her wound. When he bites, it's feather-light and only accidental. Resting her cheek against his neck, she strokes his hair with the other hand, whispering in his ear that it's going to be okay, that it'll be hard but she has faith in him, that this is right and that she'll stay with him through it all. She quiets only when, noticing a faded scar on his neck, she turns her head and leans in to kiss it — softly at first, then deeper, harder, with teeth enough to leave a bruise above it in the morning.

"You'll save them all," she promises, whispering just loud enough for him to hear.

"Scream all you want; no one's coming to save you."

The true forms of demons are curious things: on Earth, they appear as smoke, but in Hell, they appear in visages that have roots in how a demon looked in life — and that can change the landscape to suit their needs, provided the demon in question has power enough. Now chained up to a hand-crafted operating table, Ruby's true form did not have power enough to get her out of the trouble she had brought on her head. What she did have was sweat running down her knotted, ashen skin and pooling in her hair — brown and rigid like polished oak. She had her arms stretched out to full-length, and all her bones looked twisted, as though someone had broken them, reset them wrong, and repeated the process. All up and down her skin were ridges from so many times of having it ripped open and stitched back together.

Lilith's true form shone, cast in a halo of darkness so deep that the rest of the Pit looked light. She stood before Ruby, tall and lithe, and full of wounds. From a gnarled gash in her bicep, she had given birth to Wrath; from a similar curve down her forehead and her cheek, had come Pride; Avarice had come out of twin wounds below her eyes, and Sloth had followed Gluttony from an incision across her stomach; and from her breasts, which God Himself had crafted out of the earth, had come Lust and Envy. All those wounds were darker than the rest of her skin, so gnashed and tangled that Ruby's looked smooth. Black hair fell to her waist in serpentine tendrils, clumped up in sections that seemed to move on their own. Between her legs was a withered nothingness from which, in eons past, had sprung the hounds of Hell. The only unmarred thing about her was her white eyes.

She ran a disfigured finger through the sweat on Ruby's face, caressed her cheek with maternal care. Her hand froze like pins and needles. "You know, sweetheart," Lilith whispered, "all you kids fear Alastair, and I can understand it — I really can. After all, he is the torture-master." Lilith moved her hand down Ruby's neck, her shoulder, and finally settled it on Ruby's breast. For a moment, she cupped it gently — but then she dug in her fingers. Her expression stayed stoic. "But he'd be nothing without me. I killed his family — both blood and the village around them. Wearing his wife, I killed his mother, his brother, his daughter... I drank her blood, then I slept with his best friend, ripped him apart, and made him watch. I took everything from him. I broke him. ...And then, when he had nothing else to live for, I made him swear his loyalty to me. ...I took that kilt-wearing, ankle-biter out of his Scottish highlands and I taught him everything he knows. Compared to him..."

She jammed her hand through the breast, contorted her arm around, and squeezed at the black space where Ruby's heart had been once. Leaning in to Ruby's face, she hissed, "You're nothing."

Ruby screamed into the yawning void before her. Placid and unmoved, it said nothing back.

As he lets her wrist go, Ruby sees that Look in Sam's eyes again — that self-doubt, with hints of the old self-loathing creeping in after it — and leaning into him again, she kisses him. She drags them back onto the mattress, bringing his heavy warmth crashing down on her. Digging her nails into his shoulder-blade, she deepens the kiss, throwing into it everything she can and rutting her hips against his. Instead of going for his jeans, though, instead of taking them off and getting straight to the action, Ruby cleaves to him. She kisses that scar on his neck again, and holds him so close that, when he moves, she can feel all the marks on his chest — they're cold, not the way that she is cold but just in that they aren't as warm as the rest of him, and they rub on her skin like silk.

Turning her head away from the mark on his neck — even now, her work starts to leave its mark; underneath the angry red from her teeth, she sees something start to purple — she lets her eyes drift down his arm to one of the more recent scars, one given to him courtesy of Alastair. The holes from where Sam stitched himself up with dental floss are still there; he can't have had it out for more than a day or two, and the incision still looks like it might split apart. Like the skin where she's been kissing him, this scar is red, but unlike the marks of her teeth, there's no anger in it, no desperation. Passively, it just sits there, a glaring memory of a time he failed. Ruby lays her palm over it, squeezes his bicep, and in a swift, momentary show of her true strength, knocks him onto his back.

She kneels on his thighs, and runs a hand down from his shoulders. The first scar she pauses sits on one of his pectoral muscles — long, gnarled, and faded, it practically blends into his skin; time has probably relocated it as his body's changed, it looks so old. Ruby runs one finger down the length of it, then rests all four on the places where it's bumped, instead of smooth. "How did you get this one?" she asks softly.

"...I don't even really remember," he replies. "It was... not my first hunt. Later than that. ...I was ten or eleven, and I got knocked out... When I came to, my dad was talking Dean through how to stitch me up. ...That was my first drink, too. My dad thought that it'd hurt too much, so he gave me a hit off his whiskey."

Ruby trails her fingers down, ghosting over the marks from bullet holes and other sundry injuries, and finally coming to another home on a ragged curve around Sam's heart, the result of fighting off a former lover — "Her name was Madison," he explains, and she turned out to be a werewolf. Another werewolf injury, from when he'd been about fourteen, sat in the form of triplicate slashes just above his hip, and constellations of marks from smaller injuries slide easily beneath her fingertips. Every time she touches one too long, she notices his face contort, brow furrowing, nose wrinkling, a frown twisting his lips — all the hurt in it stays in the unasked questions.

"I want you, Sam," she tells him, tilting her head and laying her hand above his heart, on the scar and the unmarked skin alike. "All of you. I want your strengths, and your weaknesses, and all of the deepest, darkest things about you — even if you're afraid to share it with anyone else. ...Especially if you're afraid to share it with anyone else."

Her move to finally unzip his jeans gets cut off: "Ruby!" She looks up from his button and fly into Sam's puppy eyes, and his lip-quivering fear. "...What if this doesn't help? What — what if I'm not strong enough?"

"Out there, it matters." She undoes the button, then the zipper. She yanks his jeans down by the waistband. "But you should know me better than that by now."

For a moment, they lock eyes — she sees all his gears start turning again, but this time, he nods at her. He lifts his hips to help her peel off his underwear — then flips her back into the mattress. With a growl, he rips her panties off.

Having Lilith's claws inside her stopped feeling painful, eventually, after Ruby couldn't tell how long chained up to the white-eyed demon's rack. When Lilith entered her, Ruby bit her lip and any sound of pain came out in a choked, muffled whine — screaming did no good, no one came to help her and it just made Lilith more vicious; she stuck her hands all the way through Ruby, impaling her on her arms, and she dug her nails into the space where Ruby's lungs had been, where she still felt pain and a difficulty breathing, and she ripped Ruby open from nave to chops, flaying the gnarled flesh off her twisted, broken bones, and then just cackled as Ruby's form put itself back together. Since she would've done it all regardless, giving her another reason for her bloodlust just seemed pointless.

"Why are you doing this?" Ruby asked her once, while Lilith pawed around inside her with both hands. The creeping feeling and the sharp pangs wandered up from Ruby's thighs to her breasts, slowly, with calculation, plumbing deeper and deeper, clearly in search of something Ruby couldn't identify.

"I need the part of you that shines," Lilith told her in a snarl. "Every demon has one..." She'd tried looking in Ruby's breasts before, but this time, she dug deep enough, she peeled away the flesh and smiled as some light burst forth, illuminating Lilith's workspace. "There it is," Lilith purred, "I knew it had to be in here somewhere..."

"What," Ruby panted, dragging out the breathless questions. "What is it?"

She didn't need to ask that, though. Even before Lilith explained, "You love him. ...You're in love with Sam Winchester," Ruby recognized it.

Other lovers long since dead liked to entertain romantic notions about what they did, but Sam harbors no such pretenses. When he fucks her, he holds her leg under the crook of her knee and as he rocks his hips to his own rhythm, she tries to fall into it, to meet his thrusts and take him in deeper. Clawing at his back again, she hisses, "Harder," and with a deep breath, he obliges. Every thrust rises to her challenge, coming at her with more force, more speed, until it feels like he might tear her apart. Ruby feels all his rage and lust penetrating her deeper than he's ever gone before, going after her deep, dark secrets and the most twisted parts of her — he's knowing her in her readiness to shift the angle of her hips so he doesn't need to, in how she calls his name — Sam, oh Sam, oh God, Sam, Sam!, never yelling, but groaning, the sound dragged up from the pieces of Hell she carries inside her; he doesn't say anything, he never does — in the way she clenches her entire body from the jaw down when the pleasure starts to hit her — really hit her — amid the rough handling in her cunt and the dull throb as he holds her down, half by the arm, half by the shoulder. She tries to hold it off; the effort makes her eyes go black. Desperation clenches up his face, she thinks he must be close. But when she extends a hand, when once again she trails her fingers down the scar around his heart, she can deny herself no longer: the orgasm blooms throughout her like an oil spill, and Sam comes soon after with a groan to match hers, and, chest heaving, Ruby rolls out from under him in silence.

Some time later, when both of them have remembered how to breathe, she feels his fingers — warm and rough — trace down her arm, down to the ridges and raised skin on her own arms. Not all of them are hers, this meat-suit came with some wear and tear in it, but Sam doesn't stop on those. He barely brushes his fingers on them; as though he knows that Jane Doe put them there, not Ruby, he nigh ignores them.

But he stops on a long one, on the inside of her wrist, from the first time he drank her blood. "Demons don't scar," Sam whispers, pressing into her back. "...Do you?"

"Most of us don't live long enough," Ruby explains, her voice soft and her tone even. "Or we don't stay in the same body... But it's been known to happen."

Sam puts a hand on her shoulder and pulls her to her back. "This is hurting you." There are no questions in his voice, even unspoken ones.

"I can handle pain, Sam."

"Ruby, no, this... this is really hurting you."

"Yes, okay? It's hurting me." She looks up into his big, sad eyes, and runs the back of her hand down his cheek, pausing only to tuck his hair behind his ear. She rests her hand on the back of his neck. "But it's not wrong. I want it. You have to be strong enough." Pausing, she kisses him — comparatively chaste, by her standards. "And the pain reminds me of what it's like. ...To be human."

Sam returns the kiss, going at her lips so hungrily, and desperate, as though he has a point to prove. This time, when he fucks her, there's no delay between their orgasms and when he collapses on her chest, she cradles him in her arms, her face pressing into his neck, her small body's chest rubbing against the scar around his heart with its bumps and ridges and the chill it has compared to the rest of him, and her lips forming words she'd never say aloud, not even in a whisper — I love you, Sam. Oh God, I love you.

Lilith didn't ask before claiming Ruby in the way she had avoided until then; she only climbed up onto her operating table, straddled her thighs, and bent in close to Ruby and hissed, "You've been a very bad girl."

Pain like none other erupted through Ruby, starting from where Lilith's hand jolted between Ruby's legs and into her. Hand clenched in a fist, Lilith did not start slowly, or respectfully, or with pretensions: she just increased the speed of her thrusts, and the depth, going in and out again but never leaving, using the backward motion as a way to go in deeper when she rebounded, getting her arm in Ruby up to the elbow and still trying to go deeper — and it hurt, but Ruby's hands were bound to the table and she could only squirm beneath Lucifer's First, fruitlessly attempt to throw her off — and when Lilith opened her hand, extended her finger-claws to full-length, and when she angled her arm upward as though she might just rip it out through Ruby's flesh, and when she rotated her wrist just so, pain wasn't the only thing Ruby felt. It felt good, it felt warm, oh God, why did have to feel good — Ruby bit her lip, trying not to cry or moan in pleasure.

"Say you'll work for me," Lilith snapped. "Just say it and I'll let you go." Face contorted, blood coming out her eyes as tears, Ruby screamed her no. "Don't you want to save him, Ruby, you sweet little Sam? ...You know what he's doing up there, now? Without his brother, no one keeping him on the rails? ...He needs someone to save him, Ruby. And you can. Just agree to work for me."

Lilith shoved her arm in further than ever before, past her elbow and the places where Ruby had once had organs. Reaching into the pit of Ruby's former stomach, clawing at it so deeply that she might have caused new scars to form, she got her 'yes' — yelled in desperation, to the ever-placid void: Yes, Lilith, yes! Oh god, Lilith! Yes! YES! Despite her agreement, and her best efforts not to do so, when Ruby screamed next, notes of Lilith's hand did not come out.

But even as Lilith broke that promise, even as she kept feeling around and knowing Ruby intimately, finding all of her secrets and the twisted things she shared with no one else, the people she had willingly hurt in life and as a demon, the things that she regretted, the incidents she tried her best to forget — "Well, I can't let you go just yet, naughty girl," she explained. "I have to make sure you're really with me..." — even as Lilith wormed around in Ruby's cunt, flexing her arm and fingers and rubbing Ruby just right until she screamed again, in pain and in pleasure, Ruby couldn't help but noticing: something deep inside of Lilith shone. It was little, and looked twisted, but its light was unmistakable, a thing of unforeseen beauty.

Ruby cocked her hips, took Lilith's hand in deeper; reaching up, she fingered Lilith's hair. "You really love him," she bit out through the tearing pain of Lilith clawing at her insides. "Lucifer."

Lilith scoffed, and shook out her hair. She wrapped her hand around a bit of flesh and ripped — but didn't take her hand out. "Of course I do," she answered flatly. Twisting her hand around Ruby's memories of childhood and letting some boy in her village look up her skirt, Lilith continued, "I owe him everything, and I love him more than everything — more than life, more than myself. Soon, with some help from you and Sam, I'm going to give him everything." Ruby's brow furrowed in confusion; Lilith shrugged. "How do you think I found you out? I had to know that kind of love to see it in you."

Finally, she removed her hand. Black, smoking blood ran down it and, with a self-satisfied grin, Lilith licked her palm clean. "Now," she said, "here's how you need to make this happen..."