Notes: This is the last you'll see of the Angelface Universe for a while. My inspiration has temporarily wandered off into weirder pastures - yes, even weirder than unpopular versions of mass-murdering Winchesters.

To the one person who left a review - you rock. I'm glad I could make an impression.

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The only way Sam knows that he's got the right place is the sleek bright red sports car parked irreverently across several graves near the parking lot. He jumps out of the black beauty, leaving the keys in her ignition. His long legs eat up the distance between the parking lot and the centre of the graveyard; He can feel the disturbance in the air and he knows he s too late to stop whatever ridiculous thing that she needed the Colt for.

Distantly, like listening through a fog, Sam can hear Dean chasing after him. Heavy footfalls on the thin, dry grass, pounding over the top of graves with stones that date back hundreds of years. They're running over the tops of broken boxes and long-dead flesh. Sam can feel the corpses, can feel how the ones closest to the mausoleum in the centre are buried face down.

Ruby stands in front of an open gate.

Darkness is beginning to cloud the air, reaching up into the sky like a terrifying new kind of thunder storm. The Colt lies at her feet, discarded in the dirt. Sam wouldn't give it a second thought if he didn't already know that it had to be important.

"What the fuck did you do?" Sam yells over the cacophony of un-noise made by the dark.

Ruby doesn t look at him, dark eyes trained on the open mausoleum gates. "I cracked open the iron lines," she tells him, "and opened a gate to Hell."

Time has slowed down as Sam stares at the demon, anger warring with total disbelief. She turns her head slowly to look at him with a small smile that reminds him too much of a spoiled girl in a woman's body. He lashes out, slapping her across the face before he even realises that he's moved.

"If you go, you go. You don't steal the Colt and invite me to a play-date with Hell!"

"Does someone want to tell me," Dean's voice finally catches up with him, his brother standing beside him and staring at the open gate, "what the hell is going on here?"

Ruby laughs. She doubles up, hands folded over her stomach. Sam grabs the back of her collar and pulls her back up. "Hell is going on," Sam tells his brother, shoving the Ruby-demon at him, "take her and the Colt and get out of here. I'm shutting that gate."

Dean slams a hand over Ruby s face, covering her mouth and nose. She stops breathing, suffocating under his grip as he drags her away through the maze of tombstones and grave markers back towards the black beauty. A human would be dead by the time they reach the car, the demon is just staring straight ahead, her hands clutching his forearm, the rest of her body strangely limp. She's far too compliant, too easy to stuff into the back seat. Dean looks over his shoulder at Cas and sees why. Eyes hard, Castiel has the Colt aimed straight at the back of the demon's head.

"I'm not going anywhere," Ruby says, arranging herself so that she's sitting up on her own and not sprawled across the seat. "You can put the gun down."

"Screw you, demons lie."

"If I lie I do it with the truth. You can trust me."

"Yeah, says the bitch who took off with our valuable antique gun and used it to somehow open a direct line to Hell."

"There's only one demon I wanted out of Hell -"

"Dean." Cas' voice interrupts the demon, sounding odd.

Dean turns away from her to look back at the graveyard. The sky is an inky black that blocks out the sun as effectively as any eclipse. What little light came through was strange, casting odd shadows. Lightning flashes and roils in the cloud's darkness. A sound like stone grating on stone scrapes through the air. Thunder crashes through the graveyard, the sound seeming to scatter the darkness in the sky. Within moments everything was lit again with bright sunlight.

It takes Sam ten minutes to stagger into view, blood smeared under his nose and on the cuff of his right sleeve.

He cuts off any comments before they could be made by raising a hand that trembled with sheer exhaustion. "We're getting out of here," he says wearily, practically collapsing against the side of the car. "And we are never, ever coming back."

"Sam," Ruby speaks from inside the impala, leaning across the seat so she can see his face through the frame of the open window.

"Don't you even think about speaking to me."

"Would you like me to shoot her?" Cas asks drily.

"I'm still here," Ruby points out, ignoring the gun still trained on her in favour of staring Sam down from inside the car. Bent low over the seat she looks deceptively submissive. Sam isn't going to stake so much as a penny on the idea that she was actually submitting. "I could have just left," she adds, "I could have stolen the gun and left you without a single clue. I didn't have to spend the night with you, I could have slit your throat in the middle of the night and you never would have seen it coming."

"That's really reassuring, Ruby." Sam sighs, tilting his head back when he feels the headache beginning to build behind his eyes.

"And you've mastered the art of sarcasm."

Dean smirks. "Keep it up, bitch. I'd just love an excuse to have the angel here shoot you right between the eyes."

Ruby throws a look at the elder Winchester so sharp that it could have cut diamonds. She turns her gaze back at Sam and asks; "Can we have this conversation without Misters Todd and Hyde hanging on every word looking for an excuse to shoot?"

The world seems to fall silent for a little while. Sam blocks out the headache pressing behind his eyes as best he can and looks at his brother. Despite every change in their lives he can still read Dean like a book. "No," he says finally. "If you have a defence to make, you make it right now. We don't have secrets, Ruby."

The demon looks like she wants to protest, body taut and hands clenched into fists. She grinds her teeth and chews on her tongue until there are points of pain in her mouth, muted by the fact that the flesh isn't actually hers. "Fine," she says eventually, and offers her only defence. "I'm a demon, Sam. What exactly did you expect?"

"That's it? That s the only reason you ve got for stealing the Colt and running off to open a devil's gate?"

"My father, Azazel. He was in Hell. I owed him, now -"

"Azazel?" Sam cuts in, frowning, "the yellow-eyed demon?"

Dean whistles. He remembers the passages from their father's journal just as well as Sam does, remembers the discussions about why John was still Sam's father even if biologically Sam was the product of a demon. He remembers the circumstances under which John Winchester had banished the yellow-eyed demon to Hell. "Dude. Awkward."

Ruby rolls her eyes. "It doesn't matter for you whether he's out of Hell or not. Sam has no ambition, which our father will learn soon enough."

"It is not in a demon's nature to ask." Castiel lowers the Colt, an unlikely ally to offer aid to Ruby's defence.

"I'll bind myself to you," Ruby offers, stretching further along the back seat to hold out one of her slender, delicate hands in supplication, "and to this body. I don't love you. Sam. I think your choice not to pursue your talents is disgusting and weak, but being with you is better than being in Hell and more interesting than being alone."

The Winchester brothers exchange looks. Sam raises his eyebrows. "Back seat voudou?"

Dean sighs. He grabs Castiel's wrist and pulls the other man towards the black beauty. "Lets get the hell out of here and back to somewhere with indoor plumbing. I'm sick of looking at these goddamn tombstones."