fic: untitled
So Dean's got a thing about angels. Fourth season, spoilers through, um. 4.10, I think. R, Sam/Ruby, and apologies for theology. 2,940 words.
It shouldn't be anything, maybe shouldn't have happened, but it does, and it ends, or maybe starts (all things being equal, all things being the same in the end, ash to dust and so forth), like this:
He's flat on his back on the dusty floorboards of one more half-burnt farmhouse, the walls creaking like ghosts and the windowpanes cracked and warped. Flat on his back, his pistol out of reach beneath the shredded upholstered chair that might have been blue, once, and there's a waterstain on the wall opposite him that he mistook at first for a shadow, and these are the things that he notices as the demon stalks towards him with steps far too heavy for the little-girl frame it uses to smile.
He's trying to push himself up, because he'll be damned if he's gonna die like that, on his back staring up at fate and maybe not flinching, not at all, but all the same, what would his father have said if he didn't even try, if he couldn't even say he tried to stand, for this, this literal one-last-stand, and something's rattling loose and jagged in his chest, splintered-spear feeling like a broken rib, and there's a crack like lightning, a thunderclap like the voice of god almighty himself, though really it's no more than a door kicked in, smashed down, Sam's mouth wide and his eyes narrow as his big hands wrap around his shoulders, trying to pull him up and then, at the noise that slides from his traitorous throat, hold him down, heel of Sam's palm, sweaty and smeared with dirt, sticky against his skin.
The demon's mouth curves up; the hem of her dress swirling, spinning on some unseen wind, the breeze that comes out of nowhere, rising up like breath as the blade glints flame and arcs smoke across pale-white skin, eyes flooding black and it's not the sigh of a little girl's soul that spills up towards the ceiling as lace and skin and earthbound bone crumple downward, and behind that, revealed like a revelation, like goddamn Revelation itself, dark-haired woman in a leather jacket whose name is demon, is damned, and whose wings are sharp and stark and outlined maybe black as sin for one instant, angels-on-a-pinhead-second, wings like fall to your knees, like the great I-am, like footsoldiers and soldiers of light.
One instant and then there is nothing, there is a woman with a knife and the empty body of a child, vessels both, and Sam clutching at him, saying his name like an invocation, a chant, holy dervish-words.
Blood on his tongue, choking up out of his lungs, and he shudders. He turns his face away, rests his head against Sam's arm, the quiet familiar dark and the heartbeat pounding in his brother's chest and the smell of gunpowder and sulphur and gasoline like home but never peace, and he passes out.
--
In a motel room that looks out on the interstate, Dean opens the door and lets her in. Her boots are muddy, leave prints on the carpet. It hasn't rained for a week.
He doesn't say anything and she crosses her arms when she sees that he's alone. "Where's Sam?" she demands.
"It's just me," he says, spreading his hands wide, showing his palms. No threat, no harm. Her gaze falls upon the phone he filched from the pocket of Sam's coat, in full view on the bureau.
"What, then," she says, and when he doesn't answer, she turns her back to him. He steps forward; the leather is cool beneath his hands for a breath before the wall shudders under his weight and the paintings rattle in their frames.
He swallows; he meets her eyes. He owes her for saving Sam's life, maybe for saving his own. "Show me," he says. "I saw them."
"The hell are you talking about?" she asks, flicking hair out of her eyes, maybe examining her fingernails, like it's nothing that she shoved him back, that he called her here.
"Wings," he said, and if his voice rasps, it's only because his ribs are screaming, his eyes watering. This still-new skin knitting together too slowly.
She regards him for a moment, the rise and fall of her chest utterly human but her expression unbearably old, and then shrugs out of her jacket, letting it fall to the floor. She lifts her t-shirt, turns around; her back is smooth, unscarred, unmarred. The curve of her shoulderblades, the division of her spine; there is nothing. Nothing.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she says, tugging her shirt back down, lifting her hair out of the collar. "Don't go blaming me for your near-death hallucinations."
She reaches for her jacket. From the doorway, Sam says, "Ruby?" and Dean can move again, meets his eyes, a forced and awkward smile, wondering how long Sam has been there, wondering if he should feel guilty, if this is betrayal or protection.
He had to be sure.
Has to be sure.
--
"I told you I didn't want you seeing her anymore," Dean says, using the remains of his bread to soak up the syrup spreading across his plate.
Sam's eyebrows lift and then curve together. "Seeing her?" he echoes. "She's not my girlfriend, Dean. Besides, you're the one who called her, not me." His knees bump Dean's beneath the table.
"To tell her to stay away from you," Dean says, and Sam looks away. "How'd she know where to find me, to find you, anyway?" He doesn't need to specify when, to clarify.
"Sammy," he says, prompting. Sam's jaw is set, stubborn.
"I heard you," Sam says, bowing his head to add sugar to his coffee.
--
The worst nightmares are the ones without screams, the ones about the minutes after. When everything is silent except for the dripping, except for the last shuddering breath, when there is nothing left except for what he has done, when he sees his work and knows that he will do it again, because that is when he perceives eternity.
The parking lot smells of oil and metal. The sign from the fast food place next door splashes vibrant neon colors across the asphalt. He tastes bile and tips his head back against the grimy brick, forcing air into his lungs.
"Are you so sure you're on the right side?" Ruby asks, and his eyes snap open. She stands a few feet away, hands in her pockets. "I mean, that your god would choose someone who hates himself so much to be a leader."
"Fuck you," he says. "You'd better not be here to see Sam."
"I'm not," Ruby says, blinking at him. "You're not the only one who's done time there, you know."
She looks almost kind, for a moment, and he shudders. He does not need benediction from a demon, doesn't need her to absolve him of his sins. Would kill her now, easy, in the shadows of the overpass, except for she has the knife.
"I wouldn't be so worried about him, if I were you," Ruby says. "Your brother's not the one who spent his summer vacation flaying people alive."
"Are you okay?" Sam asks, sitting up in bed, when Dean slams the door.
Dean doesn't look up from shoving laundry into his duffel. "We're leaving," he says.
When he guns the engine, Sam in the passenger seat still half-asleep, the parking lot is deserted again.
--
Lost in hell for forty years, everything burnt away, nothing left of anything human, any fragment of a soul. And then they give you faith on your way out, burn it onto your body so you don't forget who or why or how. A choice, then. To believe in a god, in God, who does things for reasons, who has his reasons, maybe incomprehensible in any dimension, to any faith, or to believe in nothing, in coincidence and chance, in the random fall of dice, and haven't you always been a gambler, baby, born and bred?
"He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully," said Lucifer himself, the way they taught it in Sunday school, where you never went but you heard about it, heard the voices raised while you skinned your knees on the gravel going down on somebody with your mama's name. "They will lift you up in their hands," maybe all the way to heaven, back to solid ground at least, sure, sure as hell, sure as name and truth.
So even the Devil can quote scripture for his own purpose, sure, make you feel all good and holy inside, but who better anyway than God's own, God's beloved, God's second in command? Lucifer the best and the bravest, the first to question, to deny, best-loved skeptic of all.
Or maybe it's like this, okay. Stack the cards one way, let 'em fall, and you wander in hell for forty years before your god saves you, 'cause there's a lot of shit going down and he's got priorities, or maybe it just took that long to find you, lot of souls in hell, screaming and slicing and sinning still, and he's not in a hurry anyway, because maybe your good intentions led you there, offering yourself up body and soul for your brother, or maybe it was faith in your father, your own if not the one and only, but once you made it down, it's not like you didn't roll with it, roll with the punches like you been doing all your life, become one of the best and brightest, shining little fallen-star.
But stack 'em another way and you're not lost, not at all. He, and I do mean He, just wants to know what you're capable of.
--
He knows he's dreaming. The fall of light is summer and it hasn't been summer for so long. He forgets, sometimes, that he was gone the last time it came 'round. That, or maybe Persephone just decided to stay down for good.
He shrugs out of his jacket, ties it around his waist. His boots raise small clouds of dust as he walks down the dirt road.
He remembers that. But not what comes next. Not the wide part in the road, the gravel turn-off, where she sits on the hood of a parked car just inside the shadeline, a cigarette raised to her mouth. She doesn't move when she sees him, waits for him to approach.
"You're a liar, but you're not a demon," he says, standing in front of her, out of her reach.
"He shoots and he scores," she says, shifting her weight, drawing one of her legs up to her chest.
His mouth is dry. He wants water. There's a gas station ahead, a little red building with a broken window. He knows this, but, too, he has to know. "How long have you been . . .?"
She rolls her eyes. "Spit it out."
"An angel." He says it like a curse.
"The promotion went through last week," she says flatly, and then, "Always, Dean. He doesn't like what he can't control."
"You say he, you mean God," Dean says. He feels sweat forming on the back of his neck, trickling down his shirt. He does not ask if she chose this memory, or if he was already here when she found him.
"One name among many," she says.
"Is yours really Ruby?" he asks, and she shrugs.
"Your room's registered to Richard Sohl," she says, and he raises his eyebrows. "It's what works," she says. "Angel of the Lord, Dean. Cryptic's kind of a thing."
He works his jaw. "Does Sam know?"
"He doesn't need to. He believes anyway. You can't tell him, by the way. That would change things."
"Why can I know?" he asks. "Why did . . . whoever, let me see?"
She smiles, takes another drag from her cigarette. He licks his lips and leans against the car, next to her, the metal bumper warm through his jeans. Sunlight slants across her face. There are freckles, faint across the bridge of her nose.
"Does Cas--" he begins.
"There are levels," she interrupts. "He has his orders, I have mine. We don't interfere. Which is also an order."
When she passes the cigarette to him, their fingers brush and he feels a crackle like electricity.
He thinks he can see sunset in the distance. Blinks again and it's the streetlight in front of their motel, slanting yellow glow through the windowpane.
--
"Dean," Sam says, the map crinkled between his hands. They should have taken a left turn a mile ago, but there was no road, only undergrowth. The man who sent them here, who called them a week ago, died yesterday, was found on the floor of his house beneath a devil's trap painted in his own blood.
"I'm going as fast as I can," Dean grinds out, the back of his neck prickling, drawn tight. Something rattles loose in the engine, but he doesn't dare slow down. The man was a priest and a scholar. His death marked the opening of a seal. If they do not find the turn, his will not be the only one.
Something's coming. He can feel it, curled around the pit of his stomach like a snake. The ink just over his heart itches.
Two miles later and there's nothing, still. Sam's shoulders slump, the corners of his mouth heavy, shadows sliding out from the creases around his eyes. "It's -- it's over," he says. "It's okay."
"How is that okay?" Dean says, slowing down, unable to loosen his grip on the wheel.
Sam turns to look out the window. "We tried."
--
All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. All of this is preordained, predestined, yet free will is my gift to you. Do the best with what you have, scream at the contradictions you do not understand and fall on your knees at my failings, get drunk in dirty bars and make sloppy promises you will never be able to keep, curse me in the morning when the sun shines bright and cruel and someone else is dead and your wallet is empty and you're running out of gas and your brother your life this too a gift does not believe when you tell him that it will be all right, because you have said it before and maybe you couldn't have made it true but you should have, when sorrow and dread and guilt and shame twist around your stomach, raw in your gut, and burn your throat, when you are choking on tears but will not let them fall for this, too, is an order, is who you are, and there are days when this is the best that you have, when this is all that you have and all that you may ever hope, and you may hate me for it, but never forget it is I who created you, my name in which you act, my words you speak and my air you breathe, my blood you spill and my arms to which you will return, so sayeth the Lord.
--
In the room behind them, Sam washes blood from his face with shaking hands. Ruby chews on a thumbnail, stares out at the night.
"Why?" Dean demands, his voice hushed. "Why the fuck didn't you do something?"
"I'm not justice," she says. "I'm not a blunt instrument. That's your job." She smiles a little as she says it, but her voice doesn't change.
"Then why are you even here?"
"What good would I be as a soldier if I didn't understand the war?" she asks, and he does not imagine the bitterness in her voice, for it is there, real as the bruises on his knuckles, the scar across his shoulder, the voices of the dead that ring in his ears. "Now get out of my way. I'm not here for you."
He glances back at the room. "You--"
"He called," she says. "He needs me."
Dean opens his mouth a little, shoves his hands into his pockets. "Isn't that a little . . . human?"
She cracks her neck, sighs. "Surely those words, that devotion and lifting ecstasy, are as holy as prayer, as any number of hours spent on your knees?" she asks. It doesn't sound like her voice, like her words, but the inflections ring true, and he grins.
"Was that meant to be dirty?" he asks.
"Dean," she says, when he doesn't move. "If He wanted Sam dead, Sam would be dead. That's not my role."
He bites his lip, steps out of the way.
--
And the second angel appeared to them, and they did not fall on their knees, for they had been raised better, stronger than that. And they saw, and they knew, and still they fought. And that, at least, was good.
--
For two months, things are quiet. They drive from town to town, crossing the country twice. They exorcise six demons, put four ghosts to rest, kill a zombie. They do not say that things are moving faster, that there are more than there should be. They do not say it is a sign.
Dean drives fast and Sam laughs. The sunsets are golden and the sunrises are bloody, and the hours between are sharp and sacred.
When Ruby appears before them in their motel room, across the street from a cathedral whose bells rang all night, echoing in Dean's dreams like an undertow, a current, a vein, he swallows, and across the room, Sam comes to his feet.
She goes to Sam first; she looks up at him and then she kisses him, her hands on the back of his neck, her hair like a sweep of feathers across her shoulders.
When she comes to stand before Dean, he does not flinch, waiting, and is surprised all the same when she brushes her lips to his forehead.
"It's coming," she says. "Be not afraid."
--
end
It shouldn't be anything, maybe shouldn't have happened, but it does, and it ends, or maybe starts (all things being equal, all things being the same in the end, ash to dust and so forth), like this:
He's flat on his back on the dusty floorboards of one more half-burnt farmhouse, the walls creaking like ghosts and the windowpanes cracked and warped. Flat on his back, his pistol out of reach beneath the shredded upholstered chair that might have been blue, once, and there's a waterstain on the wall opposite him that he mistook at first for a shadow, and these are the things that he notices as the demon stalks towards him with steps far too heavy for the little-girl frame it uses to smile.
He's trying to push himself up, because he'll be damned if he's gonna die like that, on his back staring up at fate and maybe not flinching, not at all, but all the same, what would his father have said if he didn't even try, if he couldn't even say he tried to stand, for this, this literal one-last-stand, and something's rattling loose and jagged in his chest, splintered-spear feeling like a broken rib, and there's a crack like lightning, a thunderclap like the voice of god almighty himself, though really it's no more than a door kicked in, smashed down, Sam's mouth wide and his eyes narrow as his big hands wrap around his shoulders, trying to pull him up and then, at the noise that slides from his traitorous throat, hold him down, heel of Sam's palm, sweaty and smeared with dirt, sticky against his skin.
The demon's mouth curves up; the hem of her dress swirling, spinning on some unseen wind, the breeze that comes out of nowhere, rising up like breath as the blade glints flame and arcs smoke across pale-white skin, eyes flooding black and it's not the sigh of a little girl's soul that spills up towards the ceiling as lace and skin and earthbound bone crumple downward, and behind that, revealed like a revelation, like goddamn Revelation itself, dark-haired woman in a leather jacket whose name is demon, is damned, and whose wings are sharp and stark and outlined maybe black as sin for one instant, angels-on-a-pinhead-second, wings like fall to your knees, like the great I-am, like footsoldiers and soldiers of light.
One instant and then there is nothing, there is a woman with a knife and the empty body of a child, vessels both, and Sam clutching at him, saying his name like an invocation, a chant, holy dervish-words.
Blood on his tongue, choking up out of his lungs, and he shudders. He turns his face away, rests his head against Sam's arm, the quiet familiar dark and the heartbeat pounding in his brother's chest and the smell of gunpowder and sulphur and gasoline like home but never peace, and he passes out.
--
In a motel room that looks out on the interstate, Dean opens the door and lets her in. Her boots are muddy, leave prints on the carpet. It hasn't rained for a week.
He doesn't say anything and she crosses her arms when she sees that he's alone. "Where's Sam?" she demands.
"It's just me," he says, spreading his hands wide, showing his palms. No threat, no harm. Her gaze falls upon the phone he filched from the pocket of Sam's coat, in full view on the bureau.
"What, then," she says, and when he doesn't answer, she turns her back to him. He steps forward; the leather is cool beneath his hands for a breath before the wall shudders under his weight and the paintings rattle in their frames.
He swallows; he meets her eyes. He owes her for saving Sam's life, maybe for saving his own. "Show me," he says. "I saw them."
"The hell are you talking about?" she asks, flicking hair out of her eyes, maybe examining her fingernails, like it's nothing that she shoved him back, that he called her here.
"Wings," he said, and if his voice rasps, it's only because his ribs are screaming, his eyes watering. This still-new skin knitting together too slowly.
She regards him for a moment, the rise and fall of her chest utterly human but her expression unbearably old, and then shrugs out of her jacket, letting it fall to the floor. She lifts her t-shirt, turns around; her back is smooth, unscarred, unmarred. The curve of her shoulderblades, the division of her spine; there is nothing. Nothing.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she says, tugging her shirt back down, lifting her hair out of the collar. "Don't go blaming me for your near-death hallucinations."
She reaches for her jacket. From the doorway, Sam says, "Ruby?" and Dean can move again, meets his eyes, a forced and awkward smile, wondering how long Sam has been there, wondering if he should feel guilty, if this is betrayal or protection.
He had to be sure.
Has to be sure.
--
"I told you I didn't want you seeing her anymore," Dean says, using the remains of his bread to soak up the syrup spreading across his plate.
Sam's eyebrows lift and then curve together. "Seeing her?" he echoes. "She's not my girlfriend, Dean. Besides, you're the one who called her, not me." His knees bump Dean's beneath the table.
"To tell her to stay away from you," Dean says, and Sam looks away. "How'd she know where to find me, to find you, anyway?" He doesn't need to specify when, to clarify.
"Sammy," he says, prompting. Sam's jaw is set, stubborn.
"I heard you," Sam says, bowing his head to add sugar to his coffee.
--
The worst nightmares are the ones without screams, the ones about the minutes after. When everything is silent except for the dripping, except for the last shuddering breath, when there is nothing left except for what he has done, when he sees his work and knows that he will do it again, because that is when he perceives eternity.
The parking lot smells of oil and metal. The sign from the fast food place next door splashes vibrant neon colors across the asphalt. He tastes bile and tips his head back against the grimy brick, forcing air into his lungs.
"Are you so sure you're on the right side?" Ruby asks, and his eyes snap open. She stands a few feet away, hands in her pockets. "I mean, that your god would choose someone who hates himself so much to be a leader."
"Fuck you," he says. "You'd better not be here to see Sam."
"I'm not," Ruby says, blinking at him. "You're not the only one who's done time there, you know."
She looks almost kind, for a moment, and he shudders. He does not need benediction from a demon, doesn't need her to absolve him of his sins. Would kill her now, easy, in the shadows of the overpass, except for she has the knife.
"I wouldn't be so worried about him, if I were you," Ruby says. "Your brother's not the one who spent his summer vacation flaying people alive."
"Are you okay?" Sam asks, sitting up in bed, when Dean slams the door.
Dean doesn't look up from shoving laundry into his duffel. "We're leaving," he says.
When he guns the engine, Sam in the passenger seat still half-asleep, the parking lot is deserted again.
--
Lost in hell for forty years, everything burnt away, nothing left of anything human, any fragment of a soul. And then they give you faith on your way out, burn it onto your body so you don't forget who or why or how. A choice, then. To believe in a god, in God, who does things for reasons, who has his reasons, maybe incomprehensible in any dimension, to any faith, or to believe in nothing, in coincidence and chance, in the random fall of dice, and haven't you always been a gambler, baby, born and bred?
"He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully," said Lucifer himself, the way they taught it in Sunday school, where you never went but you heard about it, heard the voices raised while you skinned your knees on the gravel going down on somebody with your mama's name. "They will lift you up in their hands," maybe all the way to heaven, back to solid ground at least, sure, sure as hell, sure as name and truth.
So even the Devil can quote scripture for his own purpose, sure, make you feel all good and holy inside, but who better anyway than God's own, God's beloved, God's second in command? Lucifer the best and the bravest, the first to question, to deny, best-loved skeptic of all.
Or maybe it's like this, okay. Stack the cards one way, let 'em fall, and you wander in hell for forty years before your god saves you, 'cause there's a lot of shit going down and he's got priorities, or maybe it just took that long to find you, lot of souls in hell, screaming and slicing and sinning still, and he's not in a hurry anyway, because maybe your good intentions led you there, offering yourself up body and soul for your brother, or maybe it was faith in your father, your own if not the one and only, but once you made it down, it's not like you didn't roll with it, roll with the punches like you been doing all your life, become one of the best and brightest, shining little fallen-star.
But stack 'em another way and you're not lost, not at all. He, and I do mean He, just wants to know what you're capable of.
--
He knows he's dreaming. The fall of light is summer and it hasn't been summer for so long. He forgets, sometimes, that he was gone the last time it came 'round. That, or maybe Persephone just decided to stay down for good.
He shrugs out of his jacket, ties it around his waist. His boots raise small clouds of dust as he walks down the dirt road.
He remembers that. But not what comes next. Not the wide part in the road, the gravel turn-off, where she sits on the hood of a parked car just inside the shadeline, a cigarette raised to her mouth. She doesn't move when she sees him, waits for him to approach.
"You're a liar, but you're not a demon," he says, standing in front of her, out of her reach.
"He shoots and he scores," she says, shifting her weight, drawing one of her legs up to her chest.
His mouth is dry. He wants water. There's a gas station ahead, a little red building with a broken window. He knows this, but, too, he has to know. "How long have you been . . .?"
She rolls her eyes. "Spit it out."
"An angel." He says it like a curse.
"The promotion went through last week," she says flatly, and then, "Always, Dean. He doesn't like what he can't control."
"You say he, you mean God," Dean says. He feels sweat forming on the back of his neck, trickling down his shirt. He does not ask if she chose this memory, or if he was already here when she found him.
"One name among many," she says.
"Is yours really Ruby?" he asks, and she shrugs.
"Your room's registered to Richard Sohl," she says, and he raises his eyebrows. "It's what works," she says. "Angel of the Lord, Dean. Cryptic's kind of a thing."
He works his jaw. "Does Sam know?"
"He doesn't need to. He believes anyway. You can't tell him, by the way. That would change things."
"Why can I know?" he asks. "Why did . . . whoever, let me see?"
She smiles, takes another drag from her cigarette. He licks his lips and leans against the car, next to her, the metal bumper warm through his jeans. Sunlight slants across her face. There are freckles, faint across the bridge of her nose.
"Does Cas--" he begins.
"There are levels," she interrupts. "He has his orders, I have mine. We don't interfere. Which is also an order."
When she passes the cigarette to him, their fingers brush and he feels a crackle like electricity.
He thinks he can see sunset in the distance. Blinks again and it's the streetlight in front of their motel, slanting yellow glow through the windowpane.
--
"Dean," Sam says, the map crinkled between his hands. They should have taken a left turn a mile ago, but there was no road, only undergrowth. The man who sent them here, who called them a week ago, died yesterday, was found on the floor of his house beneath a devil's trap painted in his own blood.
"I'm going as fast as I can," Dean grinds out, the back of his neck prickling, drawn tight. Something rattles loose in the engine, but he doesn't dare slow down. The man was a priest and a scholar. His death marked the opening of a seal. If they do not find the turn, his will not be the only one.
Something's coming. He can feel it, curled around the pit of his stomach like a snake. The ink just over his heart itches.
Two miles later and there's nothing, still. Sam's shoulders slump, the corners of his mouth heavy, shadows sliding out from the creases around his eyes. "It's -- it's over," he says. "It's okay."
"How is that okay?" Dean says, slowing down, unable to loosen his grip on the wheel.
Sam turns to look out the window. "We tried."
--
All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. All of this is preordained, predestined, yet free will is my gift to you. Do the best with what you have, scream at the contradictions you do not understand and fall on your knees at my failings, get drunk in dirty bars and make sloppy promises you will never be able to keep, curse me in the morning when the sun shines bright and cruel and someone else is dead and your wallet is empty and you're running out of gas and your brother your life this too a gift does not believe when you tell him that it will be all right, because you have said it before and maybe you couldn't have made it true but you should have, when sorrow and dread and guilt and shame twist around your stomach, raw in your gut, and burn your throat, when you are choking on tears but will not let them fall for this, too, is an order, is who you are, and there are days when this is the best that you have, when this is all that you have and all that you may ever hope, and you may hate me for it, but never forget it is I who created you, my name in which you act, my words you speak and my air you breathe, my blood you spill and my arms to which you will return, so sayeth the Lord.
--
In the room behind them, Sam washes blood from his face with shaking hands. Ruby chews on a thumbnail, stares out at the night.
"Why?" Dean demands, his voice hushed. "Why the fuck didn't you do something?"
"I'm not justice," she says. "I'm not a blunt instrument. That's your job." She smiles a little as she says it, but her voice doesn't change.
"Then why are you even here?"
"What good would I be as a soldier if I didn't understand the war?" she asks, and he does not imagine the bitterness in her voice, for it is there, real as the bruises on his knuckles, the scar across his shoulder, the voices of the dead that ring in his ears. "Now get out of my way. I'm not here for you."
He glances back at the room. "You--"
"He called," she says. "He needs me."
Dean opens his mouth a little, shoves his hands into his pockets. "Isn't that a little . . . human?"
She cracks her neck, sighs. "Surely those words, that devotion and lifting ecstasy, are as holy as prayer, as any number of hours spent on your knees?" she asks. It doesn't sound like her voice, like her words, but the inflections ring true, and he grins.
"Was that meant to be dirty?" he asks.
"Dean," she says, when he doesn't move. "If He wanted Sam dead, Sam would be dead. That's not my role."
He bites his lip, steps out of the way.
--
And the second angel appeared to them, and they did not fall on their knees, for they had been raised better, stronger than that. And they saw, and they knew, and still they fought. And that, at least, was good.
--
For two months, things are quiet. They drive from town to town, crossing the country twice. They exorcise six demons, put four ghosts to rest, kill a zombie. They do not say that things are moving faster, that there are more than there should be. They do not say it is a sign.
Dean drives fast and Sam laughs. The sunsets are golden and the sunrises are bloody, and the hours between are sharp and sacred.
When Ruby appears before them in their motel room, across the street from a cathedral whose bells rang all night, echoing in Dean's dreams like an undertow, a current, a vein, he swallows, and across the room, Sam comes to his feet.
She goes to Sam first; she looks up at him and then she kisses him, her hands on the back of his neck, her hair like a sweep of feathers across her shoulders.
When she comes to stand before Dean, he does not flinch, waiting, and is surprised all the same when she brushes her lips to his forehead.
"It's coming," she says. "Be not afraid."
--
end