new Sam/Ruby fic + 2 covers
This is my one and only contribution to this pairing.
I hope there are a few of you who'll give it a look. Possibly - enjoy it.
General warning....I don't find it interesting when Sammy is a good boy.
Title: You Won’t Make a Saint of Me
Wordcount: ca 8200
Pairing: Sam/Ruby
Rating: R
Timeline: pre 4x01
Inspired by not-at-all-gentle exchange of R&S in 4*09 (when he shoves her against the wall and puts the knife to hear throat). I’m also of the fans who think it was much more than a one-time drunk, desperate thing.
POV; 2nd, Sam’s.
Wincest warning: blink and you miss it, though I think some hints are thick. In fact, what degree of brotherly love is implied - it’s up to you to decide.
Beta: LID, you've made it much better than it was. The rest of mistakes are mine.
A long, drawn-out moan comes out of your mouth before your awareness catches up, you raise your arms above your head, grab the headboard and stretch.
“Never met a Mid-West boy who could fuck like this.” Ruby swings her legs down from the bed. “Just...perfect.” The sight of your bare shoulders is enough to get her biting her bottom lip as she darts you a quick look, dirty.
The muscles of your legs are thrumming dully. Where she just lay, ground her thighs against your pelvic bones, across your midsection, is a trail of colorless sticky wetness.
Perfect. Hell, sometimes that's more of a curse than a blessing. A student whose every A was well-deserved and mostly straight, you’re just not used to doing anything half-heartedly.
Through half-closed lids, you watch her pin her hair up, leaving one stray lock to fall down in between her shoulder blades, artless. Her small breasts rise, following the movement of her arms upwards, gracefully. You have never shared (Dean’s) appetite for spray-tanned, pussy-waxed bimbos with cleavage bursting boobs. You liked when breasts nestled on your palms like apples, their size not distracting your attention from the rest of was in the sack with you. Touching them felt like picking up a new born puppy from the basket, extra careful, lest you break something essential that you could feel through the pliant, liquid flesh - a small and firm core inside.
You swallow a yawn and she’s nearly too sympathetic, watching your thumb stroke the bridge of your nose. She sways a little as she walks into the door-less bathroom, fingering the red smack mark on her buttock. The color of her skin shows that it must have never been sun-kissed.
Listening with half an ear to the water running, you sweep sweaty hair off your forehead, right the amulet on your neck, its string skin-hot and sodden. The gulp of stale, flat Coke from the can on the bed stand washes down the sour-milk-like taste lingering in your mouth. You’ll deny it if asked - maybe, probably, you wouldn’t be asked because no one really gives a shit now - but yeah, you’ve missed this, the tang of a begging-to-be-fucked pussy or the salt-tinted smoothness of a cock ready to shoot. So there is a good use for that big mouth of yours after all.
The sheets are soiled; the bed smells like a whorehouse after happy hour. There are psychedelic magenta spirals running up to it on the faded lettuce-colored wallpaper, triangles and broken lines along the window panes and door frame.
You fix your gaze at the knob of broken sprinkler in the center of the ceiling, painted reassuringly yellowish white. Once, you would have been filled with disgust to stay in a room that resembles a porn set stocked with splatter movie props, but what you truly loath now is that you can’t learn faster, can’t will the nose bleeds and migraines away and that you just…can’t make yourself… fuck less.
You peel the sticky sheet off your backside as it trails behind you on the way to the shower. Sex is only dirty when it’s done right.
Ruby’s wringing her hair dry, standing with her back to the rhombic mirror. There's a tangle of wet towels left like an offering to a water-sprite across the bathroom floor. The transparent shower curtain with frolicking trout has almost been ripped off the hooks.
You bump into her in the doorway, and don’t apologize.
****
She sits with her leg drawn up, flashing black, barely-there knickers between her legs.
“Chinese or pizza or maybe…tacos?” she asks, fingering through the phone directory.
“Whatever you like.”
You barely glance at the local take-out offerings, standing with your bare knees touching the bed’s edge, applying fresh band-aids on your split knuckles. Grazed skin takes forever to heal. Your rage management has really improved lately. A fuck a day keeps anger at bay. You'd give Dean a run for his money soon in the experience department if this keeps up.
You understand him better now, how he coped with the shit he’d carried inside, never sharing, never splashing it out except through his piss slit. How it is, when you bend someone over and fuck till your balls are empty and your head too, and your hands stop shaking and the switch flips off in your head and you sleep, deep and dead to the world.
“You wanna a beer with it?” Ruby's voice is throaty and soft, it glides against your skin like a massage washcloth, scraping off the dull cells, leaving a pleasant burn.
“Coffee’s fine,” you shrug, spit out a strand of wet hair sticking to the corner of your mouth. You keep it together. Reality is no longer an illusion caused by lack of alcohol. While not convinced anew that the world is a fine and joyous place, at least you are no longer in the ninth circle of hangover hell every morning.
Finger-combing your hair that needs to either be cut or tied up, you survey your limited wardrobe options. The plain blue shirt you want to put on has a bloody stain on the collar; the green striped one reeeks of stale sweat and swamp. The right sleeve is ripped off the third one, the white and black checked one that was your (his) favorite. You ball it, the fabric familiarly soft in your fist. The jeans you’ve worn for the last few days stink of gasoline, the knees are grubby with roadside mud acquired after you’d spent an appalling amount of time fixing the Impala’s tire. A shotgun, a dagger, a crowbar sit familiar in your palm. Nothing chips at your intellect like mishandling a cross wrench.
You fish out the last clean black tee and black corduroy trousers, the last time you wore them… it was a lifetime ago. They've gotten too tight so you have to suck it in a little to zip them up. Nice. With your sunglasses on you’d look like the Unabomber.
“I’ll take it when I go out.” Ruby says from behind your back, nodding at the bag you stuff the dirty clothes in. She must have dry-cleaning powers. She has two sets of tight-fitting dark clothes and a purple leather jacket and they are always clean when she comes back from wherever her demonic agenda takes her every day.
You wonder if a demon knows how to operate a Laundromat.
*****
“You should go heavy on the carbs; you'll need the fuel,” she remarks, watching you picking at fries one by one.
“Please.” You pack enough scorn in your voice to make any other person back off in a hurry, or shut the hell up. “What are you, my wife? You may come from times where they tied the knot early, but…I’m not that type of guy.”
“I think…you’re exactly that type of guy, Sam Winchester,” she states flatly and fuck her for looking at you like that. You don’t wanna see the concern in her eyes as she studies you, stares dead into your eyes as if she can divide you from the meat you wear if she just stares at your pupils long enough.
“Think again.” You snap, more out of habit than out of intent.
She could beat (Dean) at a pigging out contest. She's finished off an entire half of a large-sized Chicken and Roasted Red Peppers while you are nipping on your second slice. She eats enough for two but remains as wraith-thin as when you first read all her bones with your fingers. You cupped her pelvis like a vase, her ribs encased a chalice you visualize to be brimming with viscous, dangerous brew and her elbows dug painfully in your sides.
“Sam, this is not normal,” her voice changes from acerbic to considerate,” You should eat more, because if you don’t…”
You look up sharply from the plastic plate, suck in a god-give-me-patience breath and she brings the sentence to a halt. She wipes the pizza crumbs off her lips, fidgets on the chair, then shrugs - what -the-fuck-ever - and drips more ketchup onto her fries.
Normal is for other people, if she’s a bit too fucked out to forget that. Yeah. People. Eating, washing, fucking….You’re not sure why she does it, imitates the normal. You’re not even sure why you do it, but it’s not like motivations actually make a damn bit of difference, so the uncertainty doesn’t bother you.
In fact, you have no one to explain yourself to, why you do the fucking things you do.
You can’t stand to be reminded of that.
****
“Can he become like you?” You grind your teeth, watching a fat fly zipping across the room.
She stops drawing patterns in the spilled ketchup with her fork, crosses her legs and props her chin on her arm. “I was wondering how long it was going to take for you to finally ask me that.”
You rip fiercely into another package of sugar substitute, spilling half the contents across the countertop strewn with debris: ads leaflets, crumpled paper napkins, rags you polish the guns with and half an empty salt packet.
“Sorry, Sam. I don’t know the answer.”
“You seem to know much less than you made me think you did,” you say darkly. Her hands writhe at her sides like she doesn't know what to do with them. To listen to her, you guess she doesn't, at that.
“And you don’t know who and where you’re going to need to be, better think of that instead,” she counters. “What we are inviting in, how far we’re planning to take it…. Sam, you’re not ready. You're not trying hard. The opposition's going to have your head for wall décor. At best.”
“Can we not talk about that for once?”
She cocks her head at you. “But that’s why you do this. Because you want to talk about it. You do know that, right?”
You swallow another mouthful of the bitter coffee that no amount of sugar has been able to sweeten and don’t answer. There is no point in lying to a demon. But talking doesn’t earn you extra brownie points either.
“I’ve never been close with the big puppet masters who rule the demon mass production,” she says eventually. “I got lucky, managed to escape the attention of the big guns while they had bigger fish to fry. Slipped through the cracks. Sometimes having friends in high places works.”
After a minute, you realize she meant that literally. You wonder exactly what made her decide to switch sides, and if it was permanent.
“I will…go to Hell too, sooner or later. Right?” You ask tightly, trying to hold back the tremor you feel threatening to break your carefully controlled tone.
“You never know till you get there.” She lounges on the shell-like, spine-numbing armchair that might have time traveled from the plastic-chic of the early 70s and studies the toes of her bare feet. You can fit them both flat on your palm. “Only the scorecard keeper knows.”
You don’t want to die, but at times like these you wonder if you deserve to live. If it’s better than the alternative if you lose control over that thing inside you. And if you knew, like…sure for sure. You look at another bag shoved under the table, the dull glimmer of (his) your arsenal wrapped in the heap of cracked, brown leather jacket that’d fit you snugly, if only the sleeves weren‘t too short.
“Sam…forget it! Going down before your time won’t change a damn thing!” Her voice is not sharp enough for you to snap back on automatic. The first spark of real rebellion flares in Ruby’s eyes as she intercepts the direction of your look, quickly extinguished.
“And what will change a damn thing?”
“Patience.”
“Right.” A painful grin splits your face. Next thing she’d propose… temperance? Forgiveness? Or maybe humbleness that has always been a just shell for your ambition.
“Hell is not…a prison where you might meet your buddy on a morning walk. It’s…infinite.” Ruby makes an encompassing gesture with her hand, “Like…the cosmos. A hundred years might pass and no one would look in the tiny dark corner where they’d keep you nailed to the floor.”
Damn, you nearly slice the side of your thumb as you test the sharpness of the consecrated knife. Why, thank you. Your reactive imagination immediately supplies you with a visual to fit her words.
“You do the cha cha cha with the home team…. The toughest shatter, the coolest bend over.” She pauses, throws back her hair. She falls silent, brow furrowed, fingers twitching.
You watch closely, mesmerized. Moments like these…when she remembers something, she looks like she’s shifting within her body, as if testing its boundaries.
When she looks up, her face is disturbingly wide open, vulnerable in a way that makes your guts churn. “You’re part of the… damnation. The whole deal. All of it. Envy. And wrath. And…hunger.” She glances at the piece of cherry pie you took only one spoonful off.
“I should start appreciating Stouffer's more.”
“You do that,” she says, her eyes dead serious.
You pass her the plate. The pie tastes like it is two days old anyway.
You used to imagine Hell is like…an alternate version of the way society's collective intelligence would have it. Like a horror movie; a dark fantasy, unreal somehow. Swarms of black flies, skeins of worms…
What if hell's a real place where real people spend a real eternity?
****
She pours dark beer into a glass and drinks in long swigs. You like her acting like a man in some essential ways, not wasting time for disappointments or awkwardness. Like her better than the bratty, spunky blonde with too much lip-gloss and thick eyeliner. This Ruby blends in by your side. She fits. Tough on the outside and dark, like...no. She's like no one but herself.
She knows her way around a dick. She digs it, Sammy, inside her and buried up to the balls. She's full on a-dick-ted. A bitch in bed, ready and ripe, there are chicks like that. You frown at the rhyme. You used to cringe at crude jokes and frown at articles about sexual harassment at work. You used to be sweet and thoughtful and sensitive and valiant.
All of which adds up to a little boring, in reality.
It’s worth mentioning that in your old world women did not simply turn up and put out. You bought your girls machiattos and eclairs and even a soft stuffed teddy bear (it had been too much of an embarrassment, and only once, when you had been in high school).
You must have been so sweet their teeth would chatter when you pulled your dick out.
You’d tiptoe around them, hold them gingerly, aware of being six and a half feet tall, most of that legs. And monkey arms. (Dean said that, and grinned sparkingly, and you nearly put his eye out with your elbow, squishing toothpaste all over his fist; jostling at the narrow sink, memorizing the curve of his stubborn freshly-lathered jaw). Fabulous arms (Jess said that, and leaned on your shoulder), you could model in the arts class, go apply, you'll earn us a few extra bucks (that was Jess too, and you couldn’t make the eye contact. A model, yeah right, she's jsut playing silly.), but ouch, lay off a bit, Sam, let me breathe, you brute.
You imagined sex on the floor could be arduous and painful, but not when she's up and begging for it. Splinters of pines biting your knees, chafing her back must be ten times worse (if you still cared), but you don't, and she fucks like she’s been to dark, desperate places, she bites and scratches, licks at the wounds and nips at your skin all over again. You fuck her like she’s unbreakable, fast and furious, legs hiked up on your shoulders; up against walls, fingers clamped over her mouth because a life spent in motels has turned being quiet almost an instinct. Once - on the table (and fuck it, it breaks right after you come, drives a five inch splinter through Ruby’s arm which she pulls out without a flinch when you point at it, shakily).
And - once - in the bathroom: she stood fixing her hair, topless and thoughtful, you’ve cut yourself shaving and she just…whipped your belt out of the loops, and jumped on you, for fuck’s sake. Her eyes were large and inky, she was sucking breaths like a hunting beast settling in for a kill. You were socked full in the stomach by a wave of lust as visceral as a gunshot wound, and fear cold and shocking as a head-first dip in frost-covered lake. Two notions you’d thought were mutually exclusive. She needed it bad and you needed - not this, not her - but something else - that comes pretty close to what you want, what you’d lost having hardly tasted. But at least this gives you an illusion of still having it.
You block the temptation to ask if Ruby’s ever been in a male body, felt the balls drawing up and that heavy ache in the groin that built up and made you itch, cringe, made you hit something because some urges were arbitrary, you made yourself think so; and because cold showers were not available at every turn, and because when you packed ten inches and a half, even loose jeans felt tight.
Now, a gender swap fantasy was something you didn't need to share.
****
You need the time, the quiet inside your own head so you can figure out what the hell you are supposed to do, how the fuck you were supposed to go on. Through such stretches of charged silences she sits, hands folded in her lap like a neat schoolgirl’s, or twirling a lock of hair on her finger, eyes fixed on dead TV screen or the center of the ceiling. Ceiling fans enthrall her. Unlike Coke machines that are infuriating: she can’t break them open with the look only.
“How was it …being back there?”
Her eyes go black and she bares her teeth at this sudden break in your silence. You right yourself.
“I mean. Back in the past. You said…you were…old.”
“You know how to flatter a girl.” She sneers, but the tension is gone from her pose.
“Well, I do. Nothing usually improves with age.”
You watch her profile while she sulks. Her features are sophisticated, and simple. Too-wide flaring nostrils, lips too full to be perfect, brows that never seemed to have been touched by tweezers. The southern European blood - Spanish? Greek? - must have run in those veins, from those lands where you can’t tell if a woman is twenty or thirty three at the first nor the second look. She looks… ageless.
“Do I have something…crawling out of my ear?” She gives you a look over her shoulder and you frown.
You shuffle your feet, drop your gaze to your laptop, covering up your interest.
“The past was dark…and dirty.” She speaks up in a few, furrows her brow. “Everything stank. Air, food, clothes…men.” Her look like the imprint of her hand on your cheek when you glance up. Squeeze and glide and that slow drop of eyelashes when she blisses out just for a few secs.
You hold her gaze, quirk your brow, and the corners of her lips crawl up. You two have a peculiar way of complementing each other. Her look seems to convey more than she's saying, and suddenly you have a hunch about what she's hinting.
“How long ago was it? Long enough that you ran into trouble of the Salem variety?” Chicks with her abilities weren't exactly treated well then. You don’t have to believe her, but you’d not miss a chance to prompt her speak about herself.
She taps her finger on her nose. You guessed it. “I was no more a witch than you are a wizard, though. Signs, spells, herbs… that was all my friggin’ magic. Folks came to me, they wanted …simple things.” She starts to count on her fingers. “Thy neighbor’s wife. Your old man to leave you alone. A baby. No baby. To look nice. To suffer less. Basically, same stuff folks want now.”
“Oh, I get that. Nothing really changes except the trappings.” And the fees they’d pay.
“Basically, yes. People are the same inside, but society was different. Everyone wore layers and layers…you couldn't show an ankle without causing a scandal.” She puts her legs on the opposite empty stool, pulls down her top, scratches at the corner of her mouth. Her mimicry is impeccable. “Now a walk down the street puts devil’s best dreams to shame. Everywhere I look is…an obscenity parade.”
You can’t help but smirk at that one. She probably hadn't even seen Baywatch yet.
“I used to look in the mirror and feel shame. I was taught to." She pauses, stretches, eyes fixed on a point behind you. You know there's nothing but a battered wardrobe, but you barely manage not to turn and check. Just in case. She runs her hands over her hips and purses lips, content, her look like a lick of hot tongue in the v-collar of your shirt. "I look in the mirror now and I absolutely love myself. It gets better…every time.”
Vanity is not a mortal sin, and if you were asked, it’s utterly forgivable. Lust though…maybe she’s put some friggin’ spell on you. How else to explain that you really want to bite that skin where her neck becomes shoulder. Mark it up, leave messy red imprints of possession. It's your turn to swallow through the flooding wetness of your mouth.
“But that's in the past. The long past. The time before this one I tripped up to the surface…” she deliberates while you try to focus on her words, not on the even edges of her teeth sinking into her lip-flesh in the effort to recall, “The Statue of Liberty was still in France.”
“What did you come up for that time?”
“You’re gifted. But not the first of your kind. There was one…self-taught amateur. I was summoned to do some…scouting. Trading.”
Her poignant look is like a rough stroke to your ego. Professional soldiers are predictable; the world is full of dangerous amateurs. You’ve known this all along, but in your family it wasn’t a popular opinion.
“What happened to…the amateur?”
“To put it gently…they strung him up…eventually. His comrades tipped him off. He was…too generous in his desire to help.”
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. That’s why you wanted to become a lawyer at some - it seems like…a hundred years old - point in time.
“I’m different. I’m goal-oriented,” you say. That's not going to happen to me, you mean. You hope.
She seems not to get the joke.
“Why do you pretend you’re not scared?” she asks. “You know you don’t fool me.”
You don’t look at her. “Because I need to.”
She looks up at you, her eyes dark and a little dangerous and, this close, not as empty as you thought they were.
“I’m just trying to tell you that you have choices. It doesn’t always seem like it, and sometimes you don’t spot it until afterwards, but they’re there. You can always pick which way you want to go...and just because you’ve chosen one thing doesn’t mean you have to stick with it all the way to the end. That end.”
She's trying to reassure you. Comfort from a demon? You'll take it any way you can get it, at this point. That goes for a lot of things.
The conversation is getting too serious. The perfect moment for a piss break.
When you come back from the john, Ruby’s handing you your cellular. You don’t know the caller’s number and there is no voice mail left. Since the grim end of Winchesters-to-the-Rescue brigade, you don't take risks of returning strangers' calls. You erase the number and pocket the phone.
“One gets spoiled with the gifts of the 21st century,” she comments. “Cell phones, fabric softeners… skincare…Google. Life is easy. You can get soft if you don't watch yourself.”
"Speaking of modern conveniences,” you reach out for your laptop. “This needs the battery replaced.”
You take out your wallet, that’s thinned out considerably - Dean had a stash for a rainy day, and then another one - for a cyclone. You're this close to thinking lack of money is the root of all evil. The gas prices are soaring and you must have been ripped off by at least twenty bucks when you got the oil changed the other week. You’ve never been a dab hand at forging or had the right eye for hustling pool; you’re too easy to pick out in a crowd and too chicken shit to pickpocket. You've been told you'd make a good con artist - you've got an honest face; people believe you - but aside from passing for priests or cops in the line of business, you're unwilling to exploit that. It would only make your self-loathing worse.
“I ordered online; it needs to be picked up from…” You open the browser to show her the computer shop address within a walking distance.
She darts a quick glance at the screen.
“Allright. I’ll get it,” she says.
“Wait. The money.” You wave the wallet at her.
She turns at the door, her movements liquid and measured, shakes down her hair as a dark wave spilling over her shoulders,
“Remember. Share and care.”
“Please tell me you’re taking shifts at the local post office.”
“Some things never change. Men in all times believe the quickest way for a woman to make a buck…is by whoring.”
“If you say so.” You can’t help but bark a short sharp-edged laugh. In fact, your theory is that she just scares them - whoever she meets - shitless by blinking black and then takes the spoils.
She picks up the laundry and bangs the door to stress that you’re an asshole. You smirk bitterly at the irony of fate. You are discovering your darker side, like the moon, going hot and heavy with a patronizing demon chick who’s waiting on you, including doing your laundry.
When did you piss off someone upstairs enough to put you through all this?
You should’ve told her you needed more Advil.
****
You pour a fresh salt line at the door every time she leaves. Anything you do can get you killed, including nothing. Not an idle threat, they attack regularly.You hardly manage time to clean the dirt from under your nails. Getting rid of bodies wasn’t your job before. Sometimes you have to do what you don't like to get to where you want to be.
You kneel. You don’t know if this is prayer.
If anything, it feels like silence. Like memories. Like rest. A stillness you can’t find when confined by the Impala or when all (his) memories and fears rebound from the walls, driving you mad by inches with their echoes.
You usually sleep for a couple of hours after she’s gone. When she’s out for longer, you get edgy. You feel like a caged dog, pacing, restless; she's insistent that you're not safe on your own and after being jumped by demons twice in a row, you're inclined to agree with her, at least until your control gets better. They know where you are but you can't see them coming: it doesn't seem fair, somehow. And it doesn't mean you have to like it.
She finds them as if she's a bloodhound. It’s their faces; she knows somehow. Like is drawn to like.
You ask when you will have the sight. She shrugs. No one knows. Maybe never.
You wish, you remark.
If you got a glimpse of her true face, you know you'd work harder on your abilities. As it is, you work harder on Ruby.
****
Her eyes never stop sizing you up, from every angle, like…every day something changes in your appearance but you can’t see what, no matter how closely you watch yourself in the mirror.
“What was her name? The…girl you are…” You’re finished with the charger and the battery. Ruby looks up from an involved study of tattered Vanity Fair where Nicole Kidman Bares All on the cover.
“I told you, I don’t know. She was empty like a Halloween pumpkin when I moved in.” She scratches her knee. Under the black denim, you know, there are several old, puncture-like stitches. There is also an appendicitis scar on her side and a flat big mole two inches below her right breast.
You have to remind yourself again and again that it’s just a shell, a replica, she’s riding someone shotgun. There is only black dust inside her, from top of her skull to the tips of her toes. It’s pointless, but your memory skips through many, many faces, - and some bodies - that you’ve known to connect to her personality. It is similar to seeing someone that you recognized and couldn't place. There were dozens of girls like her in Stanford, who wanted to become famous or to be taken seriously or to make a difference in the world. You wonder if she could be someone you’ve passed on a street, left a tip to, maybe have saved her parents or a sibling. (Maybe Dean had fucked her).
“You can call me whatever you fancy.”
You snort. She is a demon in disguise, but her whims sometimes…are like any girl’s. You wonder exactly how much of her is like any girl. Technically, she is not dead. You have her around day in day out for nearly a month, in different states of undress. You haven't seen her buy tampons, but that doesn't mean she doesn't need them. Somehow, you haven't been brave enough to ask, despite knowing her intimately.
You decide to wait and ask her when you're good and drunk.
Too late. She gets a fixed idea, she won’t let you off the hook.
“No, Sam. You like games. I like games. We’re damn good at them.”
“No,” you raise your voice a notch, though you know she won’t stop. Ruby might as well be a mirror image of you sometimes. That bloody-minded, inflexible streak goes right to the bone. She's more than a match for your stubbornness.
“So…should I start….A?”
“I’m filled up to here with an R.” You keep on flickering through the sites, killing the pop ups. Miraculous meds, two inches extra without surgery, five tips to get a flat stomach, three months membership for the price of two.
“C?” She pops the soda can open, takes a long swig, licks her lips. She’s not very subtle. Lately you've been finding her directness in all matters a turn on.
Your fingers are hard-tipped, deft on the keyboard, you flick hair out of your eyes, you can hear a child wailing somewhere down the other end of the hotel, a horn blasting rudely outside…
“K?” She slams the notebook cover, squeezing your fingers in.
“What the…” Irritation makes a vein throb in on your forehead. She catches your hand mid air.
“S?” Her lips are warm and wet from the drink against the tips of your fingers. A different anger starts building inside you like another powerful headache. Power games get you hard. It hasn’t been her who’s taught you this lesson, and it’s not with her you’d prefer to rehearse it again.
“Stop. We’ve already gone once today.” Suddenly you’re not sure your concept of safe sex is intact. Hell, the question is on the tip of your tongue. It’s a little too late to worry for knocking up a demon.
“Sam Winchester, it’s a little too late to be careful.”
“It’s never too late for safe sex.” You counter because you are stubborn and you are used to having your word be the last because why the hell not? Fuck, she’s supposed to be dead inside. It doesn’t get in the way of her body being capable of multiple orgasms, no.
“Bullshit,” she states with grating surety. “There is no such thing as safe sex. And you hate rubbers. And I - her - can’t get pregnant.”
“How do you know?” You cross your hands critically on your chest, towering over her. She's been tampering with you head again. You've warned her the hard way before that the next time she does, you'll gonna cut her down for real. You can practically see straight down her top gray stretch top, loose over her collarbones. You snap your eyes to her face that wears a schooled expression of watchful compliance.
“I just…do.” She shrugs. “Like I know she used to smoke like a chimney, is allergic to shellfish and had an abortion at sixteen with complications.”
So much for tiptoeing around the subject.
“Well, aren’t you a perfect BFF?” In fact…she comes pretty close. She orders extra onions, doesn’t tell you off when you bite your nails and doesn’t mind when you skip the preliminaries. She doesn’t talk feelings.
“Yeah, the hell I am. Should have met you in 1629. We’d have loads of fun a-hexin’. And you’d have made an excellent blowtorch, they’d see you burning from the back row.”
A few minutes pass when she paces the room, studies the sluggish traffic outside the window, squints at the rays of fading sun.
You start and erase a two-line email to Bobby for the tenth time. You should finally write to the old man. You owe him. On the 40th day after, he dropped you a message saying *rememboar yoru brothur* instead of mentioning (Dean’s) name. He must have been fully stoked on Wild Turkey; to have these typos in three words.
Bobby didn’t seem to belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church to commemorate departure of the soul on the 3rd, 9th and 40th days, though he surely knew the tradition.
“I remember. Still alive,” you eventually replied.
“M?” The top button of your fly pops off. She lingers on the button, palm pressed flat against your crotch. Ruby’s the first demon (woman, demon-woman) you've ever met who has a button fly fetish. You once walked in on her fingering buttons on your jeans. She looks kinda… perplexed by zippers and aggravated by bra hooks.
“You…are getting obnoxious.”
“J?” She’s smiling, but there is wariness in her eyes, something you have only caught glimpses of before. "No...not getting close?"
“Last warning.” You grip her wrists, twist her arms down by her sides. She tiptoes and targets a kiss on your mouth but you balk back, and get teeth grazed down your chin.
Her eyes go black coal, fingers crooked like claws in the back of the plastic chair. Your jaw locks, carnage barely held at bay when you clasp your arms around yourself.
When the stretch of silence gets to be too much, she flings at you,
“D? Or...no, D?”
Next moment, before you mind catches up, you shove her away with force that propels her backward and she hits the wall with a thud.
“Why, Sam.” Her voice is petulant, but her eyes prick like daggers. “It’s just…a letter.”
“I told you, stay out of my head, bitch!” Doesn't she get the last warning? Your voice drops the lower the more enraged you get. The skin on your face pricks hotly.
“I try. But there is…a certain smell on you when you as much as think of Dean, sin and suffering. Like that Obsession perfume...you catch a whiff of it once, you want it again…and again and again."
“You mention my brother's name again…” You force yourself to relax, and she buys it. Simmers close, her hip nudges between your legs, small cool hands opening your shirt.
“And what?” she holds your gaze, stubborn to the end. “I’m the only one who can understand you. It's a good thing you're doing. I'm not saying you might have been able to save your brother...” But she's hinting it, all right, and it's more than you can stand...” But you can save the world. If you keep at it. You gotta trust me.”
When you grip her under the chin, she makes a small surprised oh, and goes up on tiptoes, reaching for your face again. Clicking her teeth into yours. She sucks your tongue. Really sucks it, cupping your chin. It feels thick and over-sensitive in her mouth. She must already be hot, slippery wet inside.
“Sam, don’t feel guilty, you loved him, this ain't the worst sin out there." Her words pour in your mouth, like bitter and hot liquor, you can't spit them out, must not swallow them or you'll get sick right here, "....and if he wasn’t so mulish, if you listened to me, instead of…”
You growl and your hands search over her long hair and cheek and neck- You jerk your head away, without letting her chin go. Your eyes lock and you watch the flicker of emotions on her face - excitement, incomprehension, fury… resentment.
"You don't think I've been where you are?" She snarls, up in your face again all of a sudden with white-knuckled fists in your stomach. "That I honestly don't get it? How it is to want something, that you should not, must not..."
Still so calmly, fucking eerily disconnected that it makes your own skin crawl, you say, "No."
The pounding in your head increases as you look inside her, searching at random, as if fumbling for a ring dropped in a sink. Her eyes roll up in their sockets. She’s like a dove, flutters and shudders, warm and soft... Fragile, human. It’s always different with demons: some take an exorcism like an electrocution, for some - it's like being flogged to death. She sounds and looks like drowning.
When the first thick tendril of black dust slithers down her chin from her slack mouth, you let her throat go, and catch her sagging body.
You stand in the middle of the room, with her cradled in your arms, an armful of lightweight bones and wicked substance. The last time you held someone this close, so familiarly, rocking the stiffening body in your arms, your legs boneless. You couldn’t see straight. Snot clogged your nose, tear tracks long, thin and cold seeped under your shirt. His (Dean's) eyes, fixed at some point of terror and so dead, like glass pebbless in a fishtank. There was pungent crimson in thick smears oozing down your front from (his) ripped abdomen.
Your eyes start to burn.
You fold backwards on the bed, the wrench in your stomach opening up, widening, forming a pit. Her hair in your face, clinging cobweb-like, smells nothing like home.
****
When Ruby comes around, curled on the side of the bed, the first thing she does is slip her arm around your waist, pressing her face to your back.
“Ouch. That hurt...” She sounds a little startled but not nearly as startled as you expected her to be. She rubs cool, bony knuckles along your spine. It feels good. You can’t suppress a shiver.
“Try that again,” you say, but not low enough, not urgent enough, “and there won’t be enough of you left to torture when I send you back.”
“You’re not good at this…letting people help you!”
“I appreciate what you have done for me...everything you've done. But I need to stay focused. You’re so not crossing this line any more.”
She breathes “Okay, right and ready” and maybe means it too.
You jaw’s still ticking with anger, but it feels like something has released inside of you at last, something ugly and tight and leeching that has been building in your stomach for three years, made you a little more haggard, a little more wild, and you needed this, somebody to make you face it. And skip over it.
“You found someone…useful?”
“I can’t find the pattern. They’re just all over.”
“Meaning?
“Like…Lilith is trying to throw us off the trail. Meaning…she’s sensing you are becoming dangerous.”
“What do we do?”
“Suppose…we play along? While you gain more...powers?"
You shake your head slowly. Ruby’s good at playing along. That could become a problem later.
You’re not used to playing along, you love to be the one inventing the games.
“We’ve been fucking around enough. Other options?”
“Interrogation then,” Ruby says without missing a beat, “and since you need practice, it’s like killing two birds with one stone.”
You pull down the sleeves of your shirt.
You don’t usually hurt people. Good people.
When they are people. When they don't spit black foam, countless obscenities, foul oaths of putting you through the whole spectrum of fun your brother's already enjoying at Down There spa.
Dad would have been proud how good you've gotten with the knifes.
Dean probably wouldn't stomach watching you doing what you must.
****
You’ve made a choice to do this - do it any way, do it on your own - and the means might be a little messy, but you know that about life too. One thing you must do now for your plan (and life) not to get suddenly interrupted, it's think on your feet.
Being a 21st century guy, you are aware of the development of modern forensics and criminology. There are pretty useful things you have no chance forgetting because you are the only Winchester remaining now and you won’t be granted a second chance, if incriminated, to pull the blink-and-gone trick from the electrical chair.
Wearing latex gloves as a regular habit is not a ridiculous idea any more. Five bodies in two weeks, the body count still could go up. Not paranoid, just being sensible: burning the bodies takes longer, but leaves fewer traces, and the car …could you choose something less conspicuous, like a well used but reliable brown Ford? A turdmobile.
You make it about half a mile out into the interstate before the excruciating headache comes back up on you and your empty stomach heaves. Tonite…you’ve almost made it happen. You pulled the dark fucker out and sent it back to where the sun doesn’t shine. The host - a fifty something mousy-mustached, pot bellied man who looked like anyone's next-door neighbour - has kicked the bucket. Heart failure.
For a change, this one went head first, a boulder on his chest, right to the bottom of a lake. It was Ruby’s idea, and her execution, her ability to move heavy objects handy as never before.
You jerk the Impala to the curb and stumble out into the grass because there’s no way you’re upchucking in (Dean’s) car. Your arms quiver and you fight for the strength to not go face down in your own sick as your diaphragm twists and heaves.
The rankness is thick on your teeth. Your lips taste earth as you try to wipe your mouth with the corner of your shirt. Despite the queasiness your empty stomach rumbles. Gotta have some real food tomorrow, you swear. Think of medium-rare steak with chili and lime sauce.
You jackknife back to the driver’s seat, right in the middle of Fly Me To the Moon. Ruby listens with the volume turned to the eardrum-blasting max. The crooning voice vibrates through the car, the warbling sound resonates in the metal as if the vehicle itself protests.
“I can drive,” she offers after a brisk look at your face. You try to grin incredulously at her gall around the bile in your throat.
“Don’t blaspheme.”
Ruby brings eye-rolling as a communication means to a new level. You try to keep your eyes focused on the blackness ahead, gulping down the heaves of your stomach.
You let Ruby choose the music; you don't really care, and you're not used to being able to pick. You're not going to think about why. You temple-throb through Don’t Leave Me That Way, take the wheel and drive imperturbably through What’s Up, Pussycat, lipsync through Funkytown. It’s You Shook Me All Night Long you just can’t stomach, having listened to it about 428 times in your life, and for the last ten times… Ruby’s been like a teenager, she takes crass come-on lyrics literally, acts them out, and it's not that you mind profiting from Brothers Young getting her hot and bothered, but now…you’d say that her timing is not exactly the best.
At the next gas station you get out for a breather of cool air, buy a bottle of water, Altoids, a packet of Oreos. Buying food or pumping gas provides just the right amount of social interaction to stop you from going insane.
It’s Love Hurts wailing, welcoming you back to the salon. Plucking the radio out seems like the good idea. You can read Ruby’s budding intention in the way her hands curl, in the bend of her neck when she stares out through the rolled-down window, her hair inseparable from the night’s soot, her mouth moving silently as if she’s counting mile markers.
You take a swig of water, cough abruptly, breaking her mood. For once, her body is not on your mind. Other bodies are. The price of saving the world...supposedly. "This practicing…It's not really working for me. Don't know what the fuck I’m supposed to do, but it's failing."
„There's enough material around for you to learn on. You’ve made your point today - you don’t stop half way. That’s how students become masters.” She watches your mouth contort wordlessly. You are always ready to learn although you do not always like being taught. She hurries to add, “You do it for a greater good.”
“Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity.” It’s you, snarling.
“Virginity is like a bubble - one stiff prick and it's gone.” She gives you that look again, moves in that catlike way, and you respond without wanting to.
“Fuck you.” You throat clicks when you swallow. Tempt not a desperate man…
It’s her, ready to laugh. Your hand around the small of her back, your knuckles scraping away her jacket as she peels your mouth with her teeth.
“That…can also be …a powerful motivator.”
Her hand, swift through the fabric, slides down and trips up against your belt buckle. You suck in a hurried gasp, drawing your stomach away but Ruby’s already pushing up your shirt to get at bare skin, drags the dry edges of her fingers across the flickering muscles of your stomach.
No messing around in the car, Sammy.
“Hey. Don't motivate me when there's oncoming traffic. One of us can't body-hop, and if we crash, there goes your project.” It's an excuse, but you're not going to tell her whose voice in your head is making you suddenly coy.
She guesses what’s going on with you; she's pissed by the sudden blockpoint. She gets her revenge by just staring fixedly at the dial to switch stations; it gets on your nerves. The last one she hits, is some all-night Christian talk radio station.
"Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." The fervent, low (not unpleasant) male voice booms from the loudspeaker.
“Leave that one on,” you chuckle, tuck your shirt in and start the engine again. There's a worry in the back of your head that death is starting to lose its meaning for you. You don't want to become completely unshockable.
“It was not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused the trouble in the garden.” Ruby grumbles at the radio.
A handful of Oreos buys you a long stretch of silence. She doesn’t talk when she eats or fucks.
****
You drive for an hour more before stopping at a motel. In the room with no mind-boggling decors on, in the clean bed with plain crisp linen; unbroken curtains drawn, salt at the door step and all, you fuck her in the ass, face down, supporting yourself on one arm, the other locked against her waist. Frowzy darkness clings to your skin like a damp sheet. You break your rhythm, stare at your dick, lost in her body.
And there she makes little motions, quick little stabbing movements that make your cock take and take and take- Her entire body jerks like it's been shot through with lightning when you twist your hips.
You feel it filthy in your balls, tightening up. And then you are shooting hard inside her. That wet, shaking rupture that makes you cry out, hold her still with sure hands.
She’s spilling dark hair on the striped pillow, usually stubbornly silent till the very last moment. She moans at the feeling of you going off deep. Then she bursts into deep, keening cries, rubbing herself between the legs, and clenches, everywhere, calls out somebody else’s name - if it’s even a name, - and you thrust in her one more time, a rough friction shooting another spike of razor-sharp satisfaction throughout your backside.
“Y’know...back in my rotten time, conjugal buggery was subject to divorce and stocks for the better half,” she mumbles, damp soft skin of her buttocks melting between your fingers like cheap wooden pulp they used to print porn on that leaft print dye stains on your palms.
"You're such a hopeless romantic." You turn to your side, hiss in a breath when she drags her ass too close to your still oversensitive dick.
"Wasn't trying to be," she mutters, and rolls her hips in a quiet taunt. “Want me to be?”
“You know what I want.”
“You’ll get it. It’s a done deal.” Her breath's warm on your face and waking too many thoughts, too many feelings, too warm and too fast and God, too much, too much by far.
“When I do, I might remember this,” you say. "We’ll be strangers again."
“Everybody starts out as strangers.” She leans in, buries her face on your chest, “It's where we end up that counts.” Then she’s practically nuzzling upwards, her face fits perfectly into your neck, and your arms come up without the hesitation.
“I’m so close,” she says, frustration and desperation lacing her voice. “I can almost remember what it feels like.”
You’re afraid to ask her what she means. She plants her sharp elbow on your chest, opens up her mouth to…
“Not a word,” you warn, the darkness of your tone not quite disciplining the turmoil you feel under your skin.
“Of course not,” she replies, and then she’s kissing you, so hard and fierce that it really should be called something else, and neither of you speak.
“What is this?” she asks after it’s over. Maybe it’s the cool and detached tone in which she says. it, or maybe it’s the strange, paralyzing dread that begins to take up residence in your heart.
“I don’t know,” you say, swallowing around the ash in your throat. “Does it matter?”
But part of you thinks that maybe it does.
/end
Ummm. So. Disaster? No? Tell me?
I hope there are a few of you who'll give it a look. Possibly - enjoy it.
General warning....I don't find it interesting when Sammy is a good boy.
Title: You Won’t Make a Saint of Me
Wordcount: ca 8200
Pairing: Sam/Ruby
Rating: R
Timeline: pre 4x01
Inspired by not-at-all-gentle exchange of R&S in 4*09 (when he shoves her against the wall and puts the knife to hear throat). I’m also of the fans who think it was much more than a one-time drunk, desperate thing.
POV; 2nd, Sam’s.
Wincest warning: blink and you miss it, though I think some hints are thick. In fact, what degree of brotherly love is implied - it’s up to you to decide.
Beta: LID, you've made it much better than it was. The rest of mistakes are mine.
A long, drawn-out moan comes out of your mouth before your awareness catches up, you raise your arms above your head, grab the headboard and stretch.
“Never met a Mid-West boy who could fuck like this.” Ruby swings her legs down from the bed. “Just...perfect.” The sight of your bare shoulders is enough to get her biting her bottom lip as she darts you a quick look, dirty.
The muscles of your legs are thrumming dully. Where she just lay, ground her thighs against your pelvic bones, across your midsection, is a trail of colorless sticky wetness.
Perfect. Hell, sometimes that's more of a curse than a blessing. A student whose every A was well-deserved and mostly straight, you’re just not used to doing anything half-heartedly.
Through half-closed lids, you watch her pin her hair up, leaving one stray lock to fall down in between her shoulder blades, artless. Her small breasts rise, following the movement of her arms upwards, gracefully. You have never shared (Dean’s) appetite for spray-tanned, pussy-waxed bimbos with cleavage bursting boobs. You liked when breasts nestled on your palms like apples, their size not distracting your attention from the rest of was in the sack with you. Touching them felt like picking up a new born puppy from the basket, extra careful, lest you break something essential that you could feel through the pliant, liquid flesh - a small and firm core inside.
You swallow a yawn and she’s nearly too sympathetic, watching your thumb stroke the bridge of your nose. She sways a little as she walks into the door-less bathroom, fingering the red smack mark on her buttock. The color of her skin shows that it must have never been sun-kissed.
Listening with half an ear to the water running, you sweep sweaty hair off your forehead, right the amulet on your neck, its string skin-hot and sodden. The gulp of stale, flat Coke from the can on the bed stand washes down the sour-milk-like taste lingering in your mouth. You’ll deny it if asked - maybe, probably, you wouldn’t be asked because no one really gives a shit now - but yeah, you’ve missed this, the tang of a begging-to-be-fucked pussy or the salt-tinted smoothness of a cock ready to shoot. So there is a good use for that big mouth of yours after all.
The sheets are soiled; the bed smells like a whorehouse after happy hour. There are psychedelic magenta spirals running up to it on the faded lettuce-colored wallpaper, triangles and broken lines along the window panes and door frame.
You fix your gaze at the knob of broken sprinkler in the center of the ceiling, painted reassuringly yellowish white. Once, you would have been filled with disgust to stay in a room that resembles a porn set stocked with splatter movie props, but what you truly loath now is that you can’t learn faster, can’t will the nose bleeds and migraines away and that you just…can’t make yourself… fuck less.
You peel the sticky sheet off your backside as it trails behind you on the way to the shower. Sex is only dirty when it’s done right.
Ruby’s wringing her hair dry, standing with her back to the rhombic mirror. There's a tangle of wet towels left like an offering to a water-sprite across the bathroom floor. The transparent shower curtain with frolicking trout has almost been ripped off the hooks.
You bump into her in the doorway, and don’t apologize.
****
She sits with her leg drawn up, flashing black, barely-there knickers between her legs.
“Chinese or pizza or maybe…tacos?” she asks, fingering through the phone directory.
“Whatever you like.”
You barely glance at the local take-out offerings, standing with your bare knees touching the bed’s edge, applying fresh band-aids on your split knuckles. Grazed skin takes forever to heal. Your rage management has really improved lately. A fuck a day keeps anger at bay. You'd give Dean a run for his money soon in the experience department if this keeps up.
You understand him better now, how he coped with the shit he’d carried inside, never sharing, never splashing it out except through his piss slit. How it is, when you bend someone over and fuck till your balls are empty and your head too, and your hands stop shaking and the switch flips off in your head and you sleep, deep and dead to the world.
“You wanna a beer with it?” Ruby's voice is throaty and soft, it glides against your skin like a massage washcloth, scraping off the dull cells, leaving a pleasant burn.
“Coffee’s fine,” you shrug, spit out a strand of wet hair sticking to the corner of your mouth. You keep it together. Reality is no longer an illusion caused by lack of alcohol. While not convinced anew that the world is a fine and joyous place, at least you are no longer in the ninth circle of hangover hell every morning.
Finger-combing your hair that needs to either be cut or tied up, you survey your limited wardrobe options. The plain blue shirt you want to put on has a bloody stain on the collar; the green striped one reeeks of stale sweat and swamp. The right sleeve is ripped off the third one, the white and black checked one that was your (his) favorite. You ball it, the fabric familiarly soft in your fist. The jeans you’ve worn for the last few days stink of gasoline, the knees are grubby with roadside mud acquired after you’d spent an appalling amount of time fixing the Impala’s tire. A shotgun, a dagger, a crowbar sit familiar in your palm. Nothing chips at your intellect like mishandling a cross wrench.
You fish out the last clean black tee and black corduroy trousers, the last time you wore them… it was a lifetime ago. They've gotten too tight so you have to suck it in a little to zip them up. Nice. With your sunglasses on you’d look like the Unabomber.
“I’ll take it when I go out.” Ruby says from behind your back, nodding at the bag you stuff the dirty clothes in. She must have dry-cleaning powers. She has two sets of tight-fitting dark clothes and a purple leather jacket and they are always clean when she comes back from wherever her demonic agenda takes her every day.
You wonder if a demon knows how to operate a Laundromat.
*****
“You should go heavy on the carbs; you'll need the fuel,” she remarks, watching you picking at fries one by one.
“Please.” You pack enough scorn in your voice to make any other person back off in a hurry, or shut the hell up. “What are you, my wife? You may come from times where they tied the knot early, but…I’m not that type of guy.”
“I think…you’re exactly that type of guy, Sam Winchester,” she states flatly and fuck her for looking at you like that. You don’t wanna see the concern in her eyes as she studies you, stares dead into your eyes as if she can divide you from the meat you wear if she just stares at your pupils long enough.
“Think again.” You snap, more out of habit than out of intent.
She could beat (Dean) at a pigging out contest. She's finished off an entire half of a large-sized Chicken and Roasted Red Peppers while you are nipping on your second slice. She eats enough for two but remains as wraith-thin as when you first read all her bones with your fingers. You cupped her pelvis like a vase, her ribs encased a chalice you visualize to be brimming with viscous, dangerous brew and her elbows dug painfully in your sides.
“Sam, this is not normal,” her voice changes from acerbic to considerate,” You should eat more, because if you don’t…”
You look up sharply from the plastic plate, suck in a god-give-me-patience breath and she brings the sentence to a halt. She wipes the pizza crumbs off her lips, fidgets on the chair, then shrugs - what -the-fuck-ever - and drips more ketchup onto her fries.
Normal is for other people, if she’s a bit too fucked out to forget that. Yeah. People. Eating, washing, fucking….You’re not sure why she does it, imitates the normal. You’re not even sure why you do it, but it’s not like motivations actually make a damn bit of difference, so the uncertainty doesn’t bother you.
In fact, you have no one to explain yourself to, why you do the fucking things you do.
You can’t stand to be reminded of that.
****
“Can he become like you?” You grind your teeth, watching a fat fly zipping across the room.
She stops drawing patterns in the spilled ketchup with her fork, crosses her legs and props her chin on her arm. “I was wondering how long it was going to take for you to finally ask me that.”
You rip fiercely into another package of sugar substitute, spilling half the contents across the countertop strewn with debris: ads leaflets, crumpled paper napkins, rags you polish the guns with and half an empty salt packet.
“Sorry, Sam. I don’t know the answer.”
“You seem to know much less than you made me think you did,” you say darkly. Her hands writhe at her sides like she doesn't know what to do with them. To listen to her, you guess she doesn't, at that.
“And you don’t know who and where you’re going to need to be, better think of that instead,” she counters. “What we are inviting in, how far we’re planning to take it…. Sam, you’re not ready. You're not trying hard. The opposition's going to have your head for wall décor. At best.”
“Can we not talk about that for once?”
She cocks her head at you. “But that’s why you do this. Because you want to talk about it. You do know that, right?”
You swallow another mouthful of the bitter coffee that no amount of sugar has been able to sweeten and don’t answer. There is no point in lying to a demon. But talking doesn’t earn you extra brownie points either.
“I’ve never been close with the big puppet masters who rule the demon mass production,” she says eventually. “I got lucky, managed to escape the attention of the big guns while they had bigger fish to fry. Slipped through the cracks. Sometimes having friends in high places works.”
After a minute, you realize she meant that literally. You wonder exactly what made her decide to switch sides, and if it was permanent.
“I will…go to Hell too, sooner or later. Right?” You ask tightly, trying to hold back the tremor you feel threatening to break your carefully controlled tone.
“You never know till you get there.” She lounges on the shell-like, spine-numbing armchair that might have time traveled from the plastic-chic of the early 70s and studies the toes of her bare feet. You can fit them both flat on your palm. “Only the scorecard keeper knows.”
You don’t want to die, but at times like these you wonder if you deserve to live. If it’s better than the alternative if you lose control over that thing inside you. And if you knew, like…sure for sure. You look at another bag shoved under the table, the dull glimmer of (his) your arsenal wrapped in the heap of cracked, brown leather jacket that’d fit you snugly, if only the sleeves weren‘t too short.
“Sam…forget it! Going down before your time won’t change a damn thing!” Her voice is not sharp enough for you to snap back on automatic. The first spark of real rebellion flares in Ruby’s eyes as she intercepts the direction of your look, quickly extinguished.
“And what will change a damn thing?”
“Patience.”
“Right.” A painful grin splits your face. Next thing she’d propose… temperance? Forgiveness? Or maybe humbleness that has always been a just shell for your ambition.
“Hell is not…a prison where you might meet your buddy on a morning walk. It’s…infinite.” Ruby makes an encompassing gesture with her hand, “Like…the cosmos. A hundred years might pass and no one would look in the tiny dark corner where they’d keep you nailed to the floor.”
Damn, you nearly slice the side of your thumb as you test the sharpness of the consecrated knife. Why, thank you. Your reactive imagination immediately supplies you with a visual to fit her words.
“You do the cha cha cha with the home team…. The toughest shatter, the coolest bend over.” She pauses, throws back her hair. She falls silent, brow furrowed, fingers twitching.
You watch closely, mesmerized. Moments like these…when she remembers something, she looks like she’s shifting within her body, as if testing its boundaries.
When she looks up, her face is disturbingly wide open, vulnerable in a way that makes your guts churn. “You’re part of the… damnation. The whole deal. All of it. Envy. And wrath. And…hunger.” She glances at the piece of cherry pie you took only one spoonful off.
“I should start appreciating Stouffer's more.”
“You do that,” she says, her eyes dead serious.
You pass her the plate. The pie tastes like it is two days old anyway.
You used to imagine Hell is like…an alternate version of the way society's collective intelligence would have it. Like a horror movie; a dark fantasy, unreal somehow. Swarms of black flies, skeins of worms…
What if hell's a real place where real people spend a real eternity?
****
She pours dark beer into a glass and drinks in long swigs. You like her acting like a man in some essential ways, not wasting time for disappointments or awkwardness. Like her better than the bratty, spunky blonde with too much lip-gloss and thick eyeliner. This Ruby blends in by your side. She fits. Tough on the outside and dark, like...no. She's like no one but herself.
She knows her way around a dick. She digs it, Sammy, inside her and buried up to the balls. She's full on a-dick-ted. A bitch in bed, ready and ripe, there are chicks like that. You frown at the rhyme. You used to cringe at crude jokes and frown at articles about sexual harassment at work. You used to be sweet and thoughtful and sensitive and valiant.
All of which adds up to a little boring, in reality.
It’s worth mentioning that in your old world women did not simply turn up and put out. You bought your girls machiattos and eclairs and even a soft stuffed teddy bear (it had been too much of an embarrassment, and only once, when you had been in high school).
You must have been so sweet their teeth would chatter when you pulled your dick out.
You’d tiptoe around them, hold them gingerly, aware of being six and a half feet tall, most of that legs. And monkey arms. (Dean said that, and grinned sparkingly, and you nearly put his eye out with your elbow, squishing toothpaste all over his fist; jostling at the narrow sink, memorizing the curve of his stubborn freshly-lathered jaw). Fabulous arms (Jess said that, and leaned on your shoulder), you could model in the arts class, go apply, you'll earn us a few extra bucks (that was Jess too, and you couldn’t make the eye contact. A model, yeah right, she's jsut playing silly.), but ouch, lay off a bit, Sam, let me breathe, you brute.
You imagined sex on the floor could be arduous and painful, but not when she's up and begging for it. Splinters of pines biting your knees, chafing her back must be ten times worse (if you still cared), but you don't, and she fucks like she’s been to dark, desperate places, she bites and scratches, licks at the wounds and nips at your skin all over again. You fuck her like she’s unbreakable, fast and furious, legs hiked up on your shoulders; up against walls, fingers clamped over her mouth because a life spent in motels has turned being quiet almost an instinct. Once - on the table (and fuck it, it breaks right after you come, drives a five inch splinter through Ruby’s arm which she pulls out without a flinch when you point at it, shakily).
And - once - in the bathroom: she stood fixing her hair, topless and thoughtful, you’ve cut yourself shaving and she just…whipped your belt out of the loops, and jumped on you, for fuck’s sake. Her eyes were large and inky, she was sucking breaths like a hunting beast settling in for a kill. You were socked full in the stomach by a wave of lust as visceral as a gunshot wound, and fear cold and shocking as a head-first dip in frost-covered lake. Two notions you’d thought were mutually exclusive. She needed it bad and you needed - not this, not her - but something else - that comes pretty close to what you want, what you’d lost having hardly tasted. But at least this gives you an illusion of still having it.
You block the temptation to ask if Ruby’s ever been in a male body, felt the balls drawing up and that heavy ache in the groin that built up and made you itch, cringe, made you hit something because some urges were arbitrary, you made yourself think so; and because cold showers were not available at every turn, and because when you packed ten inches and a half, even loose jeans felt tight.
Now, a gender swap fantasy was something you didn't need to share.
****
You need the time, the quiet inside your own head so you can figure out what the hell you are supposed to do, how the fuck you were supposed to go on. Through such stretches of charged silences she sits, hands folded in her lap like a neat schoolgirl’s, or twirling a lock of hair on her finger, eyes fixed on dead TV screen or the center of the ceiling. Ceiling fans enthrall her. Unlike Coke machines that are infuriating: she can’t break them open with the look only.
“How was it …being back there?”
Her eyes go black and she bares her teeth at this sudden break in your silence. You right yourself.
“I mean. Back in the past. You said…you were…old.”
“You know how to flatter a girl.” She sneers, but the tension is gone from her pose.
“Well, I do. Nothing usually improves with age.”
You watch her profile while she sulks. Her features are sophisticated, and simple. Too-wide flaring nostrils, lips too full to be perfect, brows that never seemed to have been touched by tweezers. The southern European blood - Spanish? Greek? - must have run in those veins, from those lands where you can’t tell if a woman is twenty or thirty three at the first nor the second look. She looks… ageless.
“Do I have something…crawling out of my ear?” She gives you a look over her shoulder and you frown.
You shuffle your feet, drop your gaze to your laptop, covering up your interest.
“The past was dark…and dirty.” She speaks up in a few, furrows her brow. “Everything stank. Air, food, clothes…men.” Her look like the imprint of her hand on your cheek when you glance up. Squeeze and glide and that slow drop of eyelashes when she blisses out just for a few secs.
You hold her gaze, quirk your brow, and the corners of her lips crawl up. You two have a peculiar way of complementing each other. Her look seems to convey more than she's saying, and suddenly you have a hunch about what she's hinting.
“How long ago was it? Long enough that you ran into trouble of the Salem variety?” Chicks with her abilities weren't exactly treated well then. You don’t have to believe her, but you’d not miss a chance to prompt her speak about herself.
She taps her finger on her nose. You guessed it. “I was no more a witch than you are a wizard, though. Signs, spells, herbs… that was all my friggin’ magic. Folks came to me, they wanted …simple things.” She starts to count on her fingers. “Thy neighbor’s wife. Your old man to leave you alone. A baby. No baby. To look nice. To suffer less. Basically, same stuff folks want now.”
“Oh, I get that. Nothing really changes except the trappings.” And the fees they’d pay.
“Basically, yes. People are the same inside, but society was different. Everyone wore layers and layers…you couldn't show an ankle without causing a scandal.” She puts her legs on the opposite empty stool, pulls down her top, scratches at the corner of her mouth. Her mimicry is impeccable. “Now a walk down the street puts devil’s best dreams to shame. Everywhere I look is…an obscenity parade.”
You can’t help but smirk at that one. She probably hadn't even seen Baywatch yet.
“I used to look in the mirror and feel shame. I was taught to." She pauses, stretches, eyes fixed on a point behind you. You know there's nothing but a battered wardrobe, but you barely manage not to turn and check. Just in case. She runs her hands over her hips and purses lips, content, her look like a lick of hot tongue in the v-collar of your shirt. "I look in the mirror now and I absolutely love myself. It gets better…every time.”
Vanity is not a mortal sin, and if you were asked, it’s utterly forgivable. Lust though…maybe she’s put some friggin’ spell on you. How else to explain that you really want to bite that skin where her neck becomes shoulder. Mark it up, leave messy red imprints of possession. It's your turn to swallow through the flooding wetness of your mouth.
“But that's in the past. The long past. The time before this one I tripped up to the surface…” she deliberates while you try to focus on her words, not on the even edges of her teeth sinking into her lip-flesh in the effort to recall, “The Statue of Liberty was still in France.”
“What did you come up for that time?”
“You’re gifted. But not the first of your kind. There was one…self-taught amateur. I was summoned to do some…scouting. Trading.”
Her poignant look is like a rough stroke to your ego. Professional soldiers are predictable; the world is full of dangerous amateurs. You’ve known this all along, but in your family it wasn’t a popular opinion.
“What happened to…the amateur?”
“To put it gently…they strung him up…eventually. His comrades tipped him off. He was…too generous in his desire to help.”
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. That’s why you wanted to become a lawyer at some - it seems like…a hundred years old - point in time.
“I’m different. I’m goal-oriented,” you say. That's not going to happen to me, you mean. You hope.
She seems not to get the joke.
“Why do you pretend you’re not scared?” she asks. “You know you don’t fool me.”
You don’t look at her. “Because I need to.”
She looks up at you, her eyes dark and a little dangerous and, this close, not as empty as you thought they were.
“I’m just trying to tell you that you have choices. It doesn’t always seem like it, and sometimes you don’t spot it until afterwards, but they’re there. You can always pick which way you want to go...and just because you’ve chosen one thing doesn’t mean you have to stick with it all the way to the end. That end.”
She's trying to reassure you. Comfort from a demon? You'll take it any way you can get it, at this point. That goes for a lot of things.
The conversation is getting too serious. The perfect moment for a piss break.
When you come back from the john, Ruby’s handing you your cellular. You don’t know the caller’s number and there is no voice mail left. Since the grim end of Winchesters-to-the-Rescue brigade, you don't take risks of returning strangers' calls. You erase the number and pocket the phone.
“One gets spoiled with the gifts of the 21st century,” she comments. “Cell phones, fabric softeners… skincare…Google. Life is easy. You can get soft if you don't watch yourself.”
"Speaking of modern conveniences,” you reach out for your laptop. “This needs the battery replaced.”
You take out your wallet, that’s thinned out considerably - Dean had a stash for a rainy day, and then another one - for a cyclone. You're this close to thinking lack of money is the root of all evil. The gas prices are soaring and you must have been ripped off by at least twenty bucks when you got the oil changed the other week. You’ve never been a dab hand at forging or had the right eye for hustling pool; you’re too easy to pick out in a crowd and too chicken shit to pickpocket. You've been told you'd make a good con artist - you've got an honest face; people believe you - but aside from passing for priests or cops in the line of business, you're unwilling to exploit that. It would only make your self-loathing worse.
“I ordered online; it needs to be picked up from…” You open the browser to show her the computer shop address within a walking distance.
She darts a quick glance at the screen.
“Allright. I’ll get it,” she says.
“Wait. The money.” You wave the wallet at her.
She turns at the door, her movements liquid and measured, shakes down her hair as a dark wave spilling over her shoulders,
“Remember. Share and care.”
“Please tell me you’re taking shifts at the local post office.”
“Some things never change. Men in all times believe the quickest way for a woman to make a buck…is by whoring.”
“If you say so.” You can’t help but bark a short sharp-edged laugh. In fact, your theory is that she just scares them - whoever she meets - shitless by blinking black and then takes the spoils.
She picks up the laundry and bangs the door to stress that you’re an asshole. You smirk bitterly at the irony of fate. You are discovering your darker side, like the moon, going hot and heavy with a patronizing demon chick who’s waiting on you, including doing your laundry.
When did you piss off someone upstairs enough to put you through all this?
You should’ve told her you needed more Advil.
****
You pour a fresh salt line at the door every time she leaves. Anything you do can get you killed, including nothing. Not an idle threat, they attack regularly.You hardly manage time to clean the dirt from under your nails. Getting rid of bodies wasn’t your job before. Sometimes you have to do what you don't like to get to where you want to be.
You kneel. You don’t know if this is prayer.
If anything, it feels like silence. Like memories. Like rest. A stillness you can’t find when confined by the Impala or when all (his) memories and fears rebound from the walls, driving you mad by inches with their echoes.
You usually sleep for a couple of hours after she’s gone. When she’s out for longer, you get edgy. You feel like a caged dog, pacing, restless; she's insistent that you're not safe on your own and after being jumped by demons twice in a row, you're inclined to agree with her, at least until your control gets better. They know where you are but you can't see them coming: it doesn't seem fair, somehow. And it doesn't mean you have to like it.
She finds them as if she's a bloodhound. It’s their faces; she knows somehow. Like is drawn to like.
You ask when you will have the sight. She shrugs. No one knows. Maybe never.
You wish, you remark.
If you got a glimpse of her true face, you know you'd work harder on your abilities. As it is, you work harder on Ruby.
****
Her eyes never stop sizing you up, from every angle, like…every day something changes in your appearance but you can’t see what, no matter how closely you watch yourself in the mirror.
“What was her name? The…girl you are…” You’re finished with the charger and the battery. Ruby looks up from an involved study of tattered Vanity Fair where Nicole Kidman Bares All on the cover.
“I told you, I don’t know. She was empty like a Halloween pumpkin when I moved in.” She scratches her knee. Under the black denim, you know, there are several old, puncture-like stitches. There is also an appendicitis scar on her side and a flat big mole two inches below her right breast.
You have to remind yourself again and again that it’s just a shell, a replica, she’s riding someone shotgun. There is only black dust inside her, from top of her skull to the tips of her toes. It’s pointless, but your memory skips through many, many faces, - and some bodies - that you’ve known to connect to her personality. It is similar to seeing someone that you recognized and couldn't place. There were dozens of girls like her in Stanford, who wanted to become famous or to be taken seriously or to make a difference in the world. You wonder if she could be someone you’ve passed on a street, left a tip to, maybe have saved her parents or a sibling. (Maybe Dean had fucked her).
“You can call me whatever you fancy.”
You snort. She is a demon in disguise, but her whims sometimes…are like any girl’s. You wonder exactly how much of her is like any girl. Technically, she is not dead. You have her around day in day out for nearly a month, in different states of undress. You haven't seen her buy tampons, but that doesn't mean she doesn't need them. Somehow, you haven't been brave enough to ask, despite knowing her intimately.
You decide to wait and ask her when you're good and drunk.
Too late. She gets a fixed idea, she won’t let you off the hook.
“No, Sam. You like games. I like games. We’re damn good at them.”
“No,” you raise your voice a notch, though you know she won’t stop. Ruby might as well be a mirror image of you sometimes. That bloody-minded, inflexible streak goes right to the bone. She's more than a match for your stubbornness.
“So…should I start….A?”
“I’m filled up to here with an R.” You keep on flickering through the sites, killing the pop ups. Miraculous meds, two inches extra without surgery, five tips to get a flat stomach, three months membership for the price of two.
“C?” She pops the soda can open, takes a long swig, licks her lips. She’s not very subtle. Lately you've been finding her directness in all matters a turn on.
Your fingers are hard-tipped, deft on the keyboard, you flick hair out of your eyes, you can hear a child wailing somewhere down the other end of the hotel, a horn blasting rudely outside…
“K?” She slams the notebook cover, squeezing your fingers in.
“What the…” Irritation makes a vein throb in on your forehead. She catches your hand mid air.
“S?” Her lips are warm and wet from the drink against the tips of your fingers. A different anger starts building inside you like another powerful headache. Power games get you hard. It hasn’t been her who’s taught you this lesson, and it’s not with her you’d prefer to rehearse it again.
“Stop. We’ve already gone once today.” Suddenly you’re not sure your concept of safe sex is intact. Hell, the question is on the tip of your tongue. It’s a little too late to worry for knocking up a demon.
“Sam Winchester, it’s a little too late to be careful.”
“It’s never too late for safe sex.” You counter because you are stubborn and you are used to having your word be the last because why the hell not? Fuck, she’s supposed to be dead inside. It doesn’t get in the way of her body being capable of multiple orgasms, no.
“Bullshit,” she states with grating surety. “There is no such thing as safe sex. And you hate rubbers. And I - her - can’t get pregnant.”
“How do you know?” You cross your hands critically on your chest, towering over her. She's been tampering with you head again. You've warned her the hard way before that the next time she does, you'll gonna cut her down for real. You can practically see straight down her top gray stretch top, loose over her collarbones. You snap your eyes to her face that wears a schooled expression of watchful compliance.
“I just…do.” She shrugs. “Like I know she used to smoke like a chimney, is allergic to shellfish and had an abortion at sixteen with complications.”
So much for tiptoeing around the subject.
“Well, aren’t you a perfect BFF?” In fact…she comes pretty close. She orders extra onions, doesn’t tell you off when you bite your nails and doesn’t mind when you skip the preliminaries. She doesn’t talk feelings.
“Yeah, the hell I am. Should have met you in 1629. We’d have loads of fun a-hexin’. And you’d have made an excellent blowtorch, they’d see you burning from the back row.”
A few minutes pass when she paces the room, studies the sluggish traffic outside the window, squints at the rays of fading sun.
You start and erase a two-line email to Bobby for the tenth time. You should finally write to the old man. You owe him. On the 40th day after, he dropped you a message saying *rememboar yoru brothur* instead of mentioning (Dean’s) name. He must have been fully stoked on Wild Turkey; to have these typos in three words.
Bobby didn’t seem to belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church to commemorate departure of the soul on the 3rd, 9th and 40th days, though he surely knew the tradition.
“I remember. Still alive,” you eventually replied.
“M?” The top button of your fly pops off. She lingers on the button, palm pressed flat against your crotch. Ruby’s the first demon (woman, demon-woman) you've ever met who has a button fly fetish. You once walked in on her fingering buttons on your jeans. She looks kinda… perplexed by zippers and aggravated by bra hooks.
“You…are getting obnoxious.”
“J?” She’s smiling, but there is wariness in her eyes, something you have only caught glimpses of before. "No...not getting close?"
“Last warning.” You grip her wrists, twist her arms down by her sides. She tiptoes and targets a kiss on your mouth but you balk back, and get teeth grazed down your chin.
Her eyes go black coal, fingers crooked like claws in the back of the plastic chair. Your jaw locks, carnage barely held at bay when you clasp your arms around yourself.
When the stretch of silence gets to be too much, she flings at you,
“D? Or...no, D?”
Next moment, before you mind catches up, you shove her away with force that propels her backward and she hits the wall with a thud.
“Why, Sam.” Her voice is petulant, but her eyes prick like daggers. “It’s just…a letter.”
“I told you, stay out of my head, bitch!” Doesn't she get the last warning? Your voice drops the lower the more enraged you get. The skin on your face pricks hotly.
“I try. But there is…a certain smell on you when you as much as think of Dean, sin and suffering. Like that Obsession perfume...you catch a whiff of it once, you want it again…and again and again."
“You mention my brother's name again…” You force yourself to relax, and she buys it. Simmers close, her hip nudges between your legs, small cool hands opening your shirt.
“And what?” she holds your gaze, stubborn to the end. “I’m the only one who can understand you. It's a good thing you're doing. I'm not saying you might have been able to save your brother...” But she's hinting it, all right, and it's more than you can stand...” But you can save the world. If you keep at it. You gotta trust me.”
When you grip her under the chin, she makes a small surprised oh, and goes up on tiptoes, reaching for your face again. Clicking her teeth into yours. She sucks your tongue. Really sucks it, cupping your chin. It feels thick and over-sensitive in her mouth. She must already be hot, slippery wet inside.
“Sam, don’t feel guilty, you loved him, this ain't the worst sin out there." Her words pour in your mouth, like bitter and hot liquor, you can't spit them out, must not swallow them or you'll get sick right here, "....and if he wasn’t so mulish, if you listened to me, instead of…”
You growl and your hands search over her long hair and cheek and neck- You jerk your head away, without letting her chin go. Your eyes lock and you watch the flicker of emotions on her face - excitement, incomprehension, fury… resentment.
"You don't think I've been where you are?" She snarls, up in your face again all of a sudden with white-knuckled fists in your stomach. "That I honestly don't get it? How it is to want something, that you should not, must not..."
Still so calmly, fucking eerily disconnected that it makes your own skin crawl, you say, "No."
The pounding in your head increases as you look inside her, searching at random, as if fumbling for a ring dropped in a sink. Her eyes roll up in their sockets. She’s like a dove, flutters and shudders, warm and soft... Fragile, human. It’s always different with demons: some take an exorcism like an electrocution, for some - it's like being flogged to death. She sounds and looks like drowning.
When the first thick tendril of black dust slithers down her chin from her slack mouth, you let her throat go, and catch her sagging body.
You stand in the middle of the room, with her cradled in your arms, an armful of lightweight bones and wicked substance. The last time you held someone this close, so familiarly, rocking the stiffening body in your arms, your legs boneless. You couldn’t see straight. Snot clogged your nose, tear tracks long, thin and cold seeped under your shirt. His (Dean's) eyes, fixed at some point of terror and so dead, like glass pebbless in a fishtank. There was pungent crimson in thick smears oozing down your front from (his) ripped abdomen.
Your eyes start to burn.
You fold backwards on the bed, the wrench in your stomach opening up, widening, forming a pit. Her hair in your face, clinging cobweb-like, smells nothing like home.
****
When Ruby comes around, curled on the side of the bed, the first thing she does is slip her arm around your waist, pressing her face to your back.
“Ouch. That hurt...” She sounds a little startled but not nearly as startled as you expected her to be. She rubs cool, bony knuckles along your spine. It feels good. You can’t suppress a shiver.
“Try that again,” you say, but not low enough, not urgent enough, “and there won’t be enough of you left to torture when I send you back.”
“You’re not good at this…letting people help you!”
“I appreciate what you have done for me...everything you've done. But I need to stay focused. You’re so not crossing this line any more.”
She breathes “Okay, right and ready” and maybe means it too.
You jaw’s still ticking with anger, but it feels like something has released inside of you at last, something ugly and tight and leeching that has been building in your stomach for three years, made you a little more haggard, a little more wild, and you needed this, somebody to make you face it. And skip over it.
“You found someone…useful?”
“I can’t find the pattern. They’re just all over.”
“Meaning?
“Like…Lilith is trying to throw us off the trail. Meaning…she’s sensing you are becoming dangerous.”
“What do we do?”
“Suppose…we play along? While you gain more...powers?"
You shake your head slowly. Ruby’s good at playing along. That could become a problem later.
You’re not used to playing along, you love to be the one inventing the games.
“We’ve been fucking around enough. Other options?”
“Interrogation then,” Ruby says without missing a beat, “and since you need practice, it’s like killing two birds with one stone.”
You pull down the sleeves of your shirt.
You don’t usually hurt people. Good people.
When they are people. When they don't spit black foam, countless obscenities, foul oaths of putting you through the whole spectrum of fun your brother's already enjoying at Down There spa.
Dad would have been proud how good you've gotten with the knifes.
Dean probably wouldn't stomach watching you doing what you must.
****
You’ve made a choice to do this - do it any way, do it on your own - and the means might be a little messy, but you know that about life too. One thing you must do now for your plan (and life) not to get suddenly interrupted, it's think on your feet.
Being a 21st century guy, you are aware of the development of modern forensics and criminology. There are pretty useful things you have no chance forgetting because you are the only Winchester remaining now and you won’t be granted a second chance, if incriminated, to pull the blink-and-gone trick from the electrical chair.
Wearing latex gloves as a regular habit is not a ridiculous idea any more. Five bodies in two weeks, the body count still could go up. Not paranoid, just being sensible: burning the bodies takes longer, but leaves fewer traces, and the car …could you choose something less conspicuous, like a well used but reliable brown Ford? A turdmobile.
You make it about half a mile out into the interstate before the excruciating headache comes back up on you and your empty stomach heaves. Tonite…you’ve almost made it happen. You pulled the dark fucker out and sent it back to where the sun doesn’t shine. The host - a fifty something mousy-mustached, pot bellied man who looked like anyone's next-door neighbour - has kicked the bucket. Heart failure.
For a change, this one went head first, a boulder on his chest, right to the bottom of a lake. It was Ruby’s idea, and her execution, her ability to move heavy objects handy as never before.
You jerk the Impala to the curb and stumble out into the grass because there’s no way you’re upchucking in (Dean’s) car. Your arms quiver and you fight for the strength to not go face down in your own sick as your diaphragm twists and heaves.
The rankness is thick on your teeth. Your lips taste earth as you try to wipe your mouth with the corner of your shirt. Despite the queasiness your empty stomach rumbles. Gotta have some real food tomorrow, you swear. Think of medium-rare steak with chili and lime sauce.
You jackknife back to the driver’s seat, right in the middle of Fly Me To the Moon. Ruby listens with the volume turned to the eardrum-blasting max. The crooning voice vibrates through the car, the warbling sound resonates in the metal as if the vehicle itself protests.
“I can drive,” she offers after a brisk look at your face. You try to grin incredulously at her gall around the bile in your throat.
“Don’t blaspheme.”
Ruby brings eye-rolling as a communication means to a new level. You try to keep your eyes focused on the blackness ahead, gulping down the heaves of your stomach.
You let Ruby choose the music; you don't really care, and you're not used to being able to pick. You're not going to think about why. You temple-throb through Don’t Leave Me That Way, take the wheel and drive imperturbably through What’s Up, Pussycat, lipsync through Funkytown. It’s You Shook Me All Night Long you just can’t stomach, having listened to it about 428 times in your life, and for the last ten times… Ruby’s been like a teenager, she takes crass come-on lyrics literally, acts them out, and it's not that you mind profiting from Brothers Young getting her hot and bothered, but now…you’d say that her timing is not exactly the best.
At the next gas station you get out for a breather of cool air, buy a bottle of water, Altoids, a packet of Oreos. Buying food or pumping gas provides just the right amount of social interaction to stop you from going insane.
It’s Love Hurts wailing, welcoming you back to the salon. Plucking the radio out seems like the good idea. You can read Ruby’s budding intention in the way her hands curl, in the bend of her neck when she stares out through the rolled-down window, her hair inseparable from the night’s soot, her mouth moving silently as if she’s counting mile markers.
You take a swig of water, cough abruptly, breaking her mood. For once, her body is not on your mind. Other bodies are. The price of saving the world...supposedly. "This practicing…It's not really working for me. Don't know what the fuck I’m supposed to do, but it's failing."
„There's enough material around for you to learn on. You’ve made your point today - you don’t stop half way. That’s how students become masters.” She watches your mouth contort wordlessly. You are always ready to learn although you do not always like being taught. She hurries to add, “You do it for a greater good.”
“Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity.” It’s you, snarling.
“Virginity is like a bubble - one stiff prick and it's gone.” She gives you that look again, moves in that catlike way, and you respond without wanting to.
“Fuck you.” You throat clicks when you swallow. Tempt not a desperate man…
It’s her, ready to laugh. Your hand around the small of her back, your knuckles scraping away her jacket as she peels your mouth with her teeth.
“That…can also be …a powerful motivator.”
Her hand, swift through the fabric, slides down and trips up against your belt buckle. You suck in a hurried gasp, drawing your stomach away but Ruby’s already pushing up your shirt to get at bare skin, drags the dry edges of her fingers across the flickering muscles of your stomach.
No messing around in the car, Sammy.
“Hey. Don't motivate me when there's oncoming traffic. One of us can't body-hop, and if we crash, there goes your project.” It's an excuse, but you're not going to tell her whose voice in your head is making you suddenly coy.
She guesses what’s going on with you; she's pissed by the sudden blockpoint. She gets her revenge by just staring fixedly at the dial to switch stations; it gets on your nerves. The last one she hits, is some all-night Christian talk radio station.
"Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." The fervent, low (not unpleasant) male voice booms from the loudspeaker.
“Leave that one on,” you chuckle, tuck your shirt in and start the engine again. There's a worry in the back of your head that death is starting to lose its meaning for you. You don't want to become completely unshockable.
“It was not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused the trouble in the garden.” Ruby grumbles at the radio.
A handful of Oreos buys you a long stretch of silence. She doesn’t talk when she eats or fucks.
****
You drive for an hour more before stopping at a motel. In the room with no mind-boggling decors on, in the clean bed with plain crisp linen; unbroken curtains drawn, salt at the door step and all, you fuck her in the ass, face down, supporting yourself on one arm, the other locked against her waist. Frowzy darkness clings to your skin like a damp sheet. You break your rhythm, stare at your dick, lost in her body.
And there she makes little motions, quick little stabbing movements that make your cock take and take and take- Her entire body jerks like it's been shot through with lightning when you twist your hips.
You feel it filthy in your balls, tightening up. And then you are shooting hard inside her. That wet, shaking rupture that makes you cry out, hold her still with sure hands.
She’s spilling dark hair on the striped pillow, usually stubbornly silent till the very last moment. She moans at the feeling of you going off deep. Then she bursts into deep, keening cries, rubbing herself between the legs, and clenches, everywhere, calls out somebody else’s name - if it’s even a name, - and you thrust in her one more time, a rough friction shooting another spike of razor-sharp satisfaction throughout your backside.
“Y’know...back in my rotten time, conjugal buggery was subject to divorce and stocks for the better half,” she mumbles, damp soft skin of her buttocks melting between your fingers like cheap wooden pulp they used to print porn on that leaft print dye stains on your palms.
"You're such a hopeless romantic." You turn to your side, hiss in a breath when she drags her ass too close to your still oversensitive dick.
"Wasn't trying to be," she mutters, and rolls her hips in a quiet taunt. “Want me to be?”
“You know what I want.”
“You’ll get it. It’s a done deal.” Her breath's warm on your face and waking too many thoughts, too many feelings, too warm and too fast and God, too much, too much by far.
“When I do, I might remember this,” you say. "We’ll be strangers again."
“Everybody starts out as strangers.” She leans in, buries her face on your chest, “It's where we end up that counts.” Then she’s practically nuzzling upwards, her face fits perfectly into your neck, and your arms come up without the hesitation.
“I’m so close,” she says, frustration and desperation lacing her voice. “I can almost remember what it feels like.”
You’re afraid to ask her what she means. She plants her sharp elbow on your chest, opens up her mouth to…
“Not a word,” you warn, the darkness of your tone not quite disciplining the turmoil you feel under your skin.
“Of course not,” she replies, and then she’s kissing you, so hard and fierce that it really should be called something else, and neither of you speak.
“What is this?” she asks after it’s over. Maybe it’s the cool and detached tone in which she says. it, or maybe it’s the strange, paralyzing dread that begins to take up residence in your heart.
“I don’t know,” you say, swallowing around the ash in your throat. “Does it matter?”
But part of you thinks that maybe it does.
/end
Ummm. So. Disaster? No? Tell me?