Notes: Apparently, nobody cares about this story. I reckon that's about the best thing I've ever realised, since it means I don't have to worry about offending anyone. :)
"You're spoiling her to death, dude."
Sam shakes his head, then looks at his brother rather than at the road. They're alone in the car, out on a supply run to restock the mansion's kitchen with perishables and basics. Dean is sitting in the passenger seat, leaning back and idly playing with the lighter he usually kept on him. The flame flicks on and off under Dean's fingers twice before Sam replies; "Dean, she's responding to everything perfectly. I don't see what the problem is."
"You spoil her too much and it'll bite you in the ass."
"I'm working on her," Sam says firmly, "she knows who's boss."
"Whatever you say, Sammy."
-
Two weeks are up way too fast. Ruby pouts in her new clothes as the Winchesters and Castiel get ready to leave. She sits on one of the fancy couches while they pack their bags again and stow them in the car.
It takes a little time for her to notice the smell. It comes on slow, needing time to seep in through the air. Ruby's nose wrinkles. She begins to feel sick as the smell grows heavier. A combination of stale vomit and human waste. It's absolutely disgusting, but perverse curiosity demands that she know where it's coming from.
Ruby stands and turns, immediately regretting it when she sees Sam appear from the door leading into the kitchen. The door catches on something, unable to close all the way, and it takes her a moment to realise that he's dragging someone, his fist closed in a knot around bottle-blonde hair. The woman is malnourished, thin, barely conscious, covered in grime and bodily fluids. She only has one shoe, the other lost somewhere between cellar and kitchen.
A male hand catches the kitchen door before it can swing closed, free of the obstruction caused by the woman's body. Dean appears, carrying two bottles of liquor in one hand, lighter in the other. Cas follows behind, dragging a grey-faced unconscious man by one of the man's arms. It doesn't look right, the angle is wrong, and Ruby belatedly realises that it must be dislocated at the shoulder.
Alarm rises as the three men work in perfect measured steps, propping the bodies together on the very couch that Ruby had just vacated. Dean splashes them with liquor, emptying one bottle over each of them. He grins and flicks the lighter open.
Sam pulls her away before the flame touches the woman's horrifically dirty skirt.
It hits her as she's hustled into the back of the black beauty. She can smell it, she could hear it, almost taste it. Cold hard reality creeps in on her, making her feel surreal in the backseat while the Winchesters tell jokes about barbecue and wonder if the fire department will get there before the whole house is ash.
The mansion is practically the only house on the block, the only other residence half a mile away across a newly sealed road and a massive expanse of garden.
This is the first time she'd considered what had happened to the original occupants of the big mansion, and it made Ruby feel very uncomfortable.
-
"Mom?"
They're at a rest stop somewhere. There's a gas station, a cafe/diner, a fruit shop, and a tiny little general store all sharing the same car park. There's also a pay phone, and Ruby stole a few quarters from the tip jar at the diner to use it.
"Ruby?" Her mother sounds shocked and relieved, like she didn't think Ruby was really calling. "Honey, oh my God. Ruby, where are you?"
Ruby looks around, both for identifying features and for the Winchesters or Castiel. "I don't know," Ruby says, unable to find any helpful signs, "I'm at a rest stop somewhere. I can't see any signs or anything."
"Are you ok?"
"I... don't know." Ruby bites her lip. She really doesn't know. She'd thought that she was having fun, but then...
"Are you hurt?"
"No. I'm just... I'm fine, mom."
"Are you sure you're OK, Ruby?" Her mother's voice sounds anxious, concerned and confused. It makes Ruby bite her lip harder. "We thought you'd been kidnapped. There was no note but none of your clothes or things were missing and Annie said the house looked like a hurricane had run right through the hall."
"I was, I think. The Winchesters -"
A hand slams down on the switch-hook and the line suddenly goes dead, her connection with her mother cut off by the dial tone. Ruby follows the arm up to a furious glare and yellow eyes. She drops the handset, letting it swing by its cord from the phonebox.
"Just what in the name of fuck did you think you were doing?" Sam's voice is low and dangerous, a tone she's never heard before that makes her take an automatic step back.
"Told you it would bite you in the ass, Sam."
"Shut up, Dean."
Ruby's eyes flick to where Dean stands, flanking her on her right. She has an odd feeling that if she were to turn around she'd only come face to face with Castiel. "You said I could -" She starts, about to remind Sam about his promise to let her call her parents, but she's interrupted by the same angry snarl;
"Shut up. Just shut up." A hand reaches out and clamps like a vice around her arm. Sam starts walking, pulling her towards the car in a manner that implies that if she doesn't keep up she's going to be getting dragged. The car door flies open before they get there and Ruby finds herself getting shoved inside. The door slams shut behind her, the child lock settling into place with an absurdly loud click.
She's left alone for what seems like a long time, presumably to let Sam calm down. When they finally return Sam slides into the driver's seat in complete silence, a stony glare focused out the windshield. Dean sits beside him in the front, and a calm-faced Castiel joins her in the back, an as yet closed straight razor held in one hand. He sees her looking and looks right back.
Ruby feels strangely small.
-
The car gets cramped, the silence stretching on way too long. Eventually someone turns the radio on, filling the car with country rock for a couple of hours before the frequency is lost. Somehow Ruby must have fallen asleep because when she wakes up it's dark and Dean is behind the wheel. She can't see Sam and assumes he must be curled up somehow on the front seat, maybe with his head pillowed on his brother's lap.
Castiel's eyes glint in the darkness beside her.
Ruby curls further into the corner against the door, wishing she had someone warm and welcoming to lean against.
The next time she wakes up is just before dawn, the twilight before the sun rises enough to let her see the rough little cabin before she even notices that the car has stopped. Ruby sits up, pain flaring in her neck and back from sleeping in such an awkward position against the door. She's alone in the car, and through the window she can see a figure moving towards her.
The door opens and Dean reaches in to pull her out, keeping a hand on her upper arm as if she might run away into the surrounding evergreens. The air smells like pine and feels much less dry. When she looks back over her shoulder she can see that the road is more like a driveway made of hard-packed dirt in two distinct furrows.
"Welcome to the cabin, chickadee," Dean says as he escorts her to the tiny wooden structure. "You better get used to it. We're going to be here a while thanks to you."
The cabin is only three small rooms and a bathroom that seemed to have been tacked on as an afterthought. The kitchen and living room are one and the same, and one of the two minuscule bedrooms was missing a door. The furniture was rustic and rough, the appliances all at least ten years out of date. The only consolation were the huge, fluffy blankets that she could see.
Dean pushed her in the direction of the bedroom with the door. "Since you're a girl, you get the one with the door."
"Where's Sam?" Ruby asks, hesitating at the door to her room.
Dean smirks, crossing his arms. "Chopping wood. He'll read you the riot act when he's done. You're not my problem, so I just get to tell you that if you try and run away we'll hunt you down and shoot you."
She doesn't think he's lying. Ruby retreats into her room, shutting the door on the space barely big enough to house the futon bed that it sports. There's only that, a rickety bedside table and a battered old lamp. Her tank top and pajama pants are already laid out on the bed, freshly laundered since the last time she saw them.
Ruby sits down on the bed and waits. She hears the door open and male voices speaking in an indistinct murmur but it's a long time before Sam opens her door.
He looks huge in the frame of the door, like a bear.
"I'm sorry," Ruby says quickly.
Sam steps into the room and shuts the door behind him. "Ruby, do you remember when I told you how there were no rules?" Sam begins, his voice measured and timed, as if he'd rehearsed this speech. "Except getting caught. I told you, there are no rules except don't get caught. What you did, calling your parents, that's well on the way to getting caught. See, baby, I'm sure you've guessed by now that we're not nice men. Lots of people want to see us in prison, and when you called your mother and told her you were with us the police can trace the call and find out where we were last."
He pauses, looking at her as if waiting for a reply. Ruby just bites her lip and looks away, staring at the lamp to avoid looking at Sam's face.
"So that's why we're here," Sam finishes. "And while we're here you don't get to leave the cabin. Understand, Ruby? You don't get to go further than the tree line before Dean, or Cas, or myself comes to drag you back."
-
It's boring. Incredibly claustrophobic and boring. Nobody else seems to have the same problem, all three men seemingly quite comfortable in their rustic surroundings. Castiel has taken over the kitchen, which has a wood stove and no microwave, and the Winchester brothers seem to divide their time between hunting small game in the surrounding forest, plotting over maps and newspapers in the other bedroom, and disappearing in the car for long stretches of time, sometimes with Castiel. One of the three always stays behind. To watch her.
-
The black beauty rattles along the driveway, the sound coming only from the boot - her suspension is in perfect tune, Dean makes sure of that. There's noise on the radio, mostly static, but when Sam reaches to turn it up the voices become clearer.
"... missing young woman, the FBI is now on national alert. If you have any information in regards to the Winchester brothers or their accomplice James Novak you are advised to call this hotline -"
Dean twists the dial, turning the radio off. "Celebrity status is a pain in the ass," he says.
"It'll blow over," Sam says, but sighs a little and slumps down in the passenger seat.
"Don't let it get you down, Sammy." Dean looks away from the road long enough to crack a smile at his younger brother. "Dad was officially wanted under three different names before he kicked the bucket. Anyway, it's not like they've built a prison that can hold us for longer than we want it to."
"I just didn't think she'd actually -"
"So you screwed up. So what? She learns or we slice her head off and start again."
"We have to keep pushing her while we're here. I don't want an adorable little liability tagging along in the back seat, I want - shit, Dean!"
"That's a new one."
"You almost hit a fucking deer!"
"I did not." Dean strokes the dashboard as if in apology, or maybe reassurance. "I'd never hurt my baby like that."
The conversation trails off into silence as the black beauty turns back onto a proper bitumen-covered road. Sam doesn't try to pick it up again, or to finish what he'd been about to say. Dean knows, after all, understands exactly what he means. Sam thinks about the deer, thinks about their father and the things they'd inherited from him.
"Hey," he says suddenly, "you want to go hunting later?"
-
Ruby always felt the least comfortable when it was a pair of blue eyes subtly tracking her movements and not green, or a warmer brown.
-
The only noise is the slight squeak of springs in the mattress, and the sound of muffled panting. The open door leads to a graphic scene of exposed flesh and tangled limbs. Castiel's head is thrown back, his face twisted into an actual expression; involuntary and foreign, it looks like bliss and pain all at once. Dean's mouth is pressed against Castiel's throat, tongue laving and teeth flashing.
Ruby turns away, a flush rising on her face, only to see Sam sitting casually on the couch with a well-thumbed book as if nothing at all is out of the ordinary. Ruby thinks about retreating back to the safe confines of her room but then Sam looks up and gives her a little smile.
"Animals," he says, and rolls his eyes.
"Fuck you, Sammy." The reply sails out from the open bedroom, rough and strained and still somehow holding a hint of laughter.
She starts to see it then, starting with the look she catches in Castiel's eyes as he rolls out of bed and reaches for a pair of jeans. He looks smug, and contemptuous. Ruby can tell now, she can see that when he looks at her he's thinking she's spoiled and stupid, she can see the strange fervour when he touches any knives, and the softness that he keeps solely reserved for Dean.
She'd actually used to think that they held staring competitions over the table or across the room, that it was just a waiting game to see who would speak first. Now she could tell that they held entire conversations without ever saying a word.
They hadn't been in such close quarters before. In the first house she hadn't spent much time outside her own little world, too self-absorbed to really notice what else was going on. The mansion had been huge, if she'd really tried Ruby could have gone days without seeing anyone else. The cabin was tiny. A world of its own, and they lived in each others pockets because of it.
Sam and Dean bickered constantly, seemingly as a source of amusement. One moment they'd have their heads together over a map, the next they'd be calling each other names and making physical threats that never ended in anything other than a quick scuffle and matching grins.
Ruby had to get up increasingly early to catch the bathroom while there was still hot water. One morning she'd staggered into the bathroom half-asleep at four in the morning only to see Dean and Castiel in the shower together. After that she decided that evening showers were better.
It took her at least a week to realise that she was jealous.