supernatural: eye of the beholder
Feb. 6th, 2013 12:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaI wrote slash! I'm pleased with myself. I also just like the story.
I like a lot more of what I write these days; I feel like I'm able to set out to write a story, and then I write it, and it doesn't turn out perfectly but it's close enough. There is always room for improvement, I'm not saying there isn't, but I'm happy that I've gotten good enough to write things that I like.
This was also just a really fun story to write! If I'd been trying to write something that had a lot of canon support, I would have gotten too hung up on specifics, and plausibility, and whether I was seamlessly building off of the existing narrative in exactly the right way; with this, I'm working with two characters whose interactions are largely left implied, so I don't feel obligated to make it as absolutely, unswervingly integrated into canon as I would if it was something like Sam/Ruby. I was able to have fun with it and show all the steps necessary to get the characters together.
Title: Eye of the Beholder
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Ruby/Anna
Words: 3.3K
Rating: PG
Summary: Ruby may look like other demons, but looks can be deceiving.
Ruby isn’t like other demons. (Not in the ways that matter, anyway. Like other demons, Anna can see the skeletal, half-melted face beneath the beautiful woman she wears like a mask; and like other demons, Anna can smell the sulfur clinging to her like yesterday’s perfume.) But Ruby treats Anna with a gruff sort of deference — more than she affords even Dean Winchester, the chosen one — and, more than that, she saved her life.
Is saving. Will have finished saving shortly, Anna hopes. At the moment, Ruby is driving her down back roads in a car that Anna is sure has been stolen, breaking speed limits wherever possible. Anna has to clench her hands into fists to stop them from shaking with adrenaline that spikes every time they round a curve.
“Where are we going?” she asks, to distract herself.
“Somewhere safe,” says Ruby.
Anna looks out the window. The roads they are driving now look anything but safe; the houses sag with age and disrepair, junk cluttering the yard and rusty cars piled into driveways surrounded by woods in which it would be all too easy to get lost. She shivers. “There’s a — a church about a half an hour from my father’s,” — no, the demons had found her in the church, hadn’t they? — “Or we could try the morgue” — somewhere she would never go, they wouldn’t be expecting that.
“Are you stupid? Do you want to put more people in danger, attract even more attention?” Ruby snaps.
“No — sorry.” Anna tucks her elbows against her sides and presses her knees together, fingers twisting in her lap.
Ruby is silent for a few seconds. They take a sharp right turn at a stop sign almost totally consumed by dried-out vines, down another bumpy unmarked road; Anna hangs onto the handle of the door to avoid being thrown out of her seat.
“Sorry,” Ruby bites out. Anna stares at her, surprised, but she continues, “It’s not your fault you’re stupid.”
The way she says it, like Anna is a child trying to talk to a room full of adults, nettles her. “I don’t know what’s going on!” she protests. Anxiety buzzes under her skin, and in the shrill overtones she hears in her own voice; she tries to control it because it seems like it will only prove Ruby’s point. “I was just a normal girl, and then I was crazy, and now there are demons after me because I’m not crazy after all, I’m an angel radio!” Her hands fly to her temples, like covering her head will block out the static.
Ruby hits the top of the steering wheel and throws herself back into a slouch. Her eyes are fixed on the road. “I didn’t mean — god, get a grip. I’m sure you’re great at math or something like that, but you’re stupid when it comes to surviving if demons are after you. Anywhere you think of as safe, it isn’t — get that through your head right now. The more it looks like the set of a horror movie, the better. Unless it’s an actual horror movie set. Got it?”
Anna tries to smile at her in spite of her terrifying features. She is only trying to help. “I think so. It’s a lot to take in.”
Ruby turns on the radio, fiddling with it until it’s playing static-filled commercials for a local furniture store, all without taking her eyes off the road. “You’ll learn.”
Safe, Anna learns shortly thereafter, means parking the car in the woods and walking out in the open air down the gravel driveway to a house with bright orange signs which proclaim it to be condemned.
“Condemned means empty. We like empty,” Ruby explains, plowing through the front door. The reek of stale dust and mold hits Anna like a wave in her wake.
“I’d guessed,” Anna stammers. “How will Sam and Dean find us? Are they okay?”
“No idea. We need to hunker down and wait a while, anyway. Give them time to regroup — trust me, they’re going to need time to stitch themselves up before they’re going to be any use at all.” Ruby speaks as though she’s been in a thousand situations like this one, so Anna just nods and lets her lead her into the stuffy back room. It might have been a living room at some point, but now the only things left are some moldy blankets piled in the corner, and a faux leather couch against the far wall. Anna’s knees are trembling, but she still hesitates before she rushes to sink down onto them. The whole house is filthy, full of dust, and despite Ruby’s warning, her nerves are still screaming out that this isn’t safe. She shouldn’t be here, this is trespassing, the house could collapse, it was probably condemned for a reason. She wants to go home and curl up under her bedspread, not sit in a drafty house full of mold with a creature from hell to keep her company.
Ruby has no such hang-ups. She heads straight over to the pile of blankets and curls up on it, catlike, then lifts her head to address Anna. “Come on, there’s nothing in here’s going to bite you. Might as well try to relax while we wait.”
Anna doesn’t see how she would ever be able to relax when there are demons after her, actual demons, and she can’t bring herself to ask Ruby for one of the filthy blankets, but she forces herself to sit down on the couch at least. The springs press awkwardly against her legs, and dust fills her lungs when she breathes in, adding to her discomfort. She coughs a couple of times, tries to suppress it because she can feel Ruby, who apparently has no such difficulties, watching her, and it’s embarrassing. Then it occurs to her that maybe she should be as quiet as possible to avoid attracting attention, and she tries to breathe only through the fabric of her shirt before giving up. Outside, crickets and flies fill the air with a low background hum not unlike the static she hears from the angels in her head. Or maybe it really is the angels again. She can’t quite tell the difference.
After a while, Ruby sighs and bangs her head against the wall. “Say something. I’m getting all twitchy over here.”
Anna shifts position to answer, only realizing after she nearly falls off the boxes that her legs have fallen asleep. She struggles to hide it and maintain her dignity. “Why are you helping me?” she asks, careful to phrase it like an honest question and not an accusation.
“I was thinking, like, icebreakers or something,” Ruby grumbles. “Not existential motivation questions.”
“I figured. But I want to know. You aren’t with the other demons; why?”
Ruby shifts around in her seat, wrapping herself in a pastel quilt that makes Anna cringe to see. There are probably all sorts of diseases trapped in between the layers of fabric, and it’s not nearly cold enough to be that desperate for warmth. It is yet another reminder of how far away Anna is from the clean white walls of her room at the hospital.
Finally, Ruby answers. “I follow Sam,” she says.
“But why? The angels don’t talk about him as much. They never have anything good to say about him, anyway,” she amends. From the way that they had spoken about him, Anna had been expecting a demon, or worse, to be riding shotgun with the man the angels had chosen for their own.
“That’s because angels are assholes,” Ruby says with unusual venom. “Sam is awesome. Kind of stupid a lot of the time, especially about his brother.”
Anna smiles.
“And don’t tell him I said any of that.”
“I won’t.”
“He’s like — like the quarterback in high school, and I’m the nerdy girl with the hopeless crush who helps him with his math homework. Except he doesn’t know he’s the quarterback, so he thinks he’s the school nerd, so it’s not actually as tragic as I just made it sound. Whatever.”
Anna tries to study her in the fading evening light coming through the window, both the human body and the demon underneath. She’d like to tell Ruby that that isn’t really true, high school isn’t like that, but she supposes that Ruby is a demon and a demon wouldn’t know about things like ordinary life any more than Anna knows how to hide from the forces of evil. So what she settles on is, “You don’t look like much of a nerd to me.”
Ruby snickers at that. “Okay, so it’s not a great metaphor.” When she laughs, the sound is pleasant, but the blackened corners of her lips on the face under her skin curl upwards to reveal teeth stained dark red. Anna suppresses a shudder. If she looks away, though, it’s easier to put the image out of her mind. Then she can pretend that Ruby is just another human girl like her, and not the unholy creature curled up on the blankets in the gathering gloom.
“I didn’t know that demons could fall in love,” she admits, addressing the tops of her shoes.
“You know how we get to be demons, right?”
Anna nods, her stomach turning over. She’s heard the angels talk about it enough — discussing the what-ifs and the possible complications which might have arisen from saving Dean Winchester, if they’d gotten to him before the demonic had been able to cement its hold on his soul — to grasp the concept. The nurses at the psych ward had thought her nausea a result of the soured milk she had drunk with lunch.
“You’ve got to make a deal. You wanna guess how many people who made deals for love are the same ones stringing up sinners on the racks right now?”
Anna doesn’t. She hugs her knees closer and looks at the floorboards.
“So it’s not like we never knew how to. It’s just that everyone else forgot.” Ruby shrugs.
It takes a moment for Anna to understand the words, and the implicit admission behind them. “But you didn’t.”
Ruby doesn’t respond. Anna is still afraid to look at her, so she doesn’t. She shuts her eyes instead. After a while, she hears Ruby get up. The floorboards creak, coming closer to her, and then the couch cushions sink next to her with an additional weight.
“Kjalvor,” says Ruby.
Anna opens her eyes.
“That was my — I don’t even know what you’d call her. My girlfriend? Mistress? Whatever. She was killed in battle, and I made a deal to bring her back. That’s my story.” Ruby says it like Anna dragged the story out of her with meat hooks, but after spending the better part of the day with her, Anna has begun to suspect that she’s the sort to grumble about everything, regardless of how unimportant it is.
Anna is not. Her parents hate grumbling, always tell her to express herself so that issues can be resolved rationally, and aside from a streak of rebellion as a teenager, she has taken their words to heart. “I don’t think that I would have had the courage for that,” she admits.
Ruby snorts. “It didn’t take a lot of courage. I’m pretty sure I just panicked,” she says, but Anna shakes her head.
“I still think that counts.” She doesn’t know what she would have done, knowing what she knows about the part of the deal that comes after the ten years’ lenience has been granted.
“Thanks,” says Ruby.
They lapse back into silence. Anna wants to ask her more questions — was it worth it? What else does she remember about being human? — because if she’s paying attention Ruby, and thinking about Ruby as another human to befriend, then she’s not thinking about the shadows growing longer on the wall, in a shack in the middle of nowhere, while she waits and has time to be homesick and tired. But Ruby is busy fiddling with her hair, face turned away from Anna, so she holds her tongue and tries to picture the human Ruby might have been. It isn’t easy: every few seconds, she remembers the demon which she saw as Ruby dragged her out of the closet in her father’s church; and then she remembers the demon in the psych ward, wearing the face of the orderly who had bought her a set of watercolor pencils last month. She doesn’t know what happened to him either. She doesn’t know if the demon left him alive, and Anna doesn’t want him to die, especially not on her account.
A hand on her knee brings Anna out of her thoughts and blinking back to the present. She discovers that she has begun tapping furiously on the floor with her shoe while her hands twist of their own accord.
“Relax,” Ruby tells her. “I’m gonna go tell Sam where we are so he and Dean can find us. It means I’m gonna leave the body for a moment, so don’t freak out — I haven’t died, all right?”
Anna nods, throat closing. She forces herself into immobility. Ruby scoots further away from her and tips her head back. With a roaring sound muffled as though heard through earmuffs, the demon skeleton behind her skin dissolves, and pours out of her mouth in the form of black smoke that fills the room with the scent of rotting eggs. Anna jumps. The black smoke hovers in the air for a moment as the body next to Anna slumps against the wall, limp; then the smoke vanishes, and Anna is alone in the room with an empty vessel.
The dark is even less inviting without company to fight it off, and the lamp does nothing to banish the shadows at the windows and in the next room. They seem to crawl, and now that Anna knows what a demon looks like outside of its host, she can’t help but stare at every dark space in the corner, waiting for it to detach itself from the wall and cram its way down her throat. She hugs herself tighter, then wonders if she should be standing up and ready to fight. She decides against it because even though it’s probably what Ruby would want her to do to survive, she’s just Anna Milton, artist and bookworm, not a savior of the world or a demon from Hell. Her odds of survival are just as good sitting down, curled into a shivering ball, as they are standing up and pretending she knows what the hell is happening to her.
When the dark becomes too threatening for her to look at it, Anna looks at Ruby instead. The body next to her, anyway. Without the demon behind her eyes, she can tell that the girl who used to live in this body had been pretty. It would be nice if she were able to stay like this in Anna’s eyes, extraordinary only in human terms and not because of the demon inside, but as the minutes stretch on, Anna finds herself wishing that the disfigured face behind it, moving the features as her own, was back. Even the pitch black of Ruby’s gaze had held consciousness behind it, someone who looked at Anna with something like kindness. This body’s eyes are glassy and undeniably devoid of life. Anna takes the hand of the corpse sitting on the couch beside her, fingers working without effect to rub life back into the body.
“Please come back,” she whispers into the darkness. “I don’t like being alone — I don’t even know where we are. What if they come while you’re gone? I can’t fight them off. I can draw pictures of them and hide in a closet. That’s what I’m good at, that’s it. Anna Milton listens to angels and hides from demons.”
A rustling noise silences her at once. She clenches Ruby’s hand with both of hers as though it will protect her. It’s probably just the wind, she tries to assure herself. Outside, the trees stand stiff and still.
Anna nearly screams when the hand she is holding tightens around her fingers; she would have, were it not for Ruby clamping her other hand over her mouth.
“They’ll be here in an hour or two. Idiots.”
Anna is too busy hyperventilating to answer. She shuts her eyes and rocks back and forth, trying to control her racing heartbeat. Ruby’s hand slips off her mouth. “Oh god,” she whispers. “Oh god, you scared me. I didn’t realize you could just come back like that.”
“It’s a lot easier to get in than it is to haul yourself back out again,” Ruby says. She pauses. “It was also a lot easier for this body to repair itself when it was still alive, so please don’t actually break my fingers.”
Anna withdraws her hands, flushing. “Sorry.”
“Um.” Ruby’s voice sounds funny to her ears. “You don’t have to — you know, if it’ll help you keep cool until Starsky and Hutch get here, whatever it takes.”
“Okay.” But now that it’s been mentioned, Anna is too anxious to move; she returns to clasping her own hands in her lap and looking around the room. In the time that Ruby was gone, which can’t have been more than half an hour, night has fallen completely, deepening the shadows on the walls that the lamp cannot banish. Anna studies the filth accumulated on the floor for a while, but eventually her gaze settles on Ruby, whose gaze is also wandering. Her visage still makes Anna shudder, but she forces herself to become acquainted with it. This is, after all, the face of the person who saved her life, and spent hours talking to her when Anna was ready to descend into hysterics. Anna studies the charred flesh underneath the face of the beautiful coma patient, the melted skin which sags across one cheek towards a stump of a nose.
“What?” Ruby asks, when she catches Anna staring at her. She sounds offended.
Anna presses her lips together. “I was just thinking — while you were gone, the body, it didn’t have you in it. I couldn’t see your face, just her.” She makes an up and down gesture at Ruby, whose eyebrows only climb higher.
“Yeah, okay, thanks.”
“I didn’t like it. It didn’t look like you.” She smiles at Ruby, hoping that she will understand what she’s trying to say. Ruby returns the smile like she isn’t quite sure whether she is allowed. Anna leans in, pulse pounding with fear, and kisses her on the cheek. She forces herself to keep her eyes open. When she sits back, Ruby is watching her with an amused expression.
“I’m sorry,” says Anna, looking away. The tips of her ears go hot. “I’m not — I’m not the kind of girl who does things like that, usually.” Up until everything had gone to hell, Anna had been more the sort of girl who never did anything for fear of standing out, some sort of instinctive fear she was never able to overcome. It seemed a little silly now.
“Hey, it’s okay with me.” Ruby touches her hands with still-cool fingertips. “You’re definitely the nicest person who’s ever tried to kiss me.”
A peculiar new brand of fear uncurls itself in Anna’s stomach. “And you don’t mind?” she asks.
Ruby raises her eyebrows. “What, that you’re nice, or that you kissed me?”
Anna looks at their hands, where they are folded together in her lap. “Both, I guess.”
In response, Ruby leans forwards. The fake leather of the couch squeaks under her, the springs creaking as she presses her lips to Anna’s mouth. Anna breathes in sulfur and dust and grave dirt. For a moment, she kisses the demon who is maybe not as frightening as she looks, kisses Ruby, and relaxes.
Only as she stops to breathe does she remember something. She draws back. “Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t thank you for saving me yet, so thanks.”
Ruby scowls at her. “You’re ruining the moment. Thank me later, okay?”
Anna doesn’t fight the smile that forms on her lips as she meets Ruby’s eyes. “Okay,” she agrees, and lets herself go once more.
I like a lot more of what I write these days; I feel like I'm able to set out to write a story, and then I write it, and it doesn't turn out perfectly but it's close enough. There is always room for improvement, I'm not saying there isn't, but I'm happy that I've gotten good enough to write things that I like.
This was also just a really fun story to write! If I'd been trying to write something that had a lot of canon support, I would have gotten too hung up on specifics, and plausibility, and whether I was seamlessly building off of the existing narrative in exactly the right way; with this, I'm working with two characters whose interactions are largely left implied, so I don't feel obligated to make it as absolutely, unswervingly integrated into canon as I would if it was something like Sam/Ruby. I was able to have fun with it and show all the steps necessary to get the characters together.
Title: Eye of the Beholder
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Ruby/Anna
Words: 3.3K
Rating: PG
Summary: Ruby may look like other demons, but looks can be deceiving.
Ruby isn’t like other demons. (Not in the ways that matter, anyway. Like other demons, Anna can see the skeletal, half-melted face beneath the beautiful woman she wears like a mask; and like other demons, Anna can smell the sulfur clinging to her like yesterday’s perfume.) But Ruby treats Anna with a gruff sort of deference — more than she affords even Dean Winchester, the chosen one — and, more than that, she saved her life.
Is saving. Will have finished saving shortly, Anna hopes. At the moment, Ruby is driving her down back roads in a car that Anna is sure has been stolen, breaking speed limits wherever possible. Anna has to clench her hands into fists to stop them from shaking with adrenaline that spikes every time they round a curve.
“Where are we going?” she asks, to distract herself.
“Somewhere safe,” says Ruby.
Anna looks out the window. The roads they are driving now look anything but safe; the houses sag with age and disrepair, junk cluttering the yard and rusty cars piled into driveways surrounded by woods in which it would be all too easy to get lost. She shivers. “There’s a — a church about a half an hour from my father’s,” — no, the demons had found her in the church, hadn’t they? — “Or we could try the morgue” — somewhere she would never go, they wouldn’t be expecting that.
“Are you stupid? Do you want to put more people in danger, attract even more attention?” Ruby snaps.
“No — sorry.” Anna tucks her elbows against her sides and presses her knees together, fingers twisting in her lap.
Ruby is silent for a few seconds. They take a sharp right turn at a stop sign almost totally consumed by dried-out vines, down another bumpy unmarked road; Anna hangs onto the handle of the door to avoid being thrown out of her seat.
“Sorry,” Ruby bites out. Anna stares at her, surprised, but she continues, “It’s not your fault you’re stupid.”
The way she says it, like Anna is a child trying to talk to a room full of adults, nettles her. “I don’t know what’s going on!” she protests. Anxiety buzzes under her skin, and in the shrill overtones she hears in her own voice; she tries to control it because it seems like it will only prove Ruby’s point. “I was just a normal girl, and then I was crazy, and now there are demons after me because I’m not crazy after all, I’m an angel radio!” Her hands fly to her temples, like covering her head will block out the static.
Ruby hits the top of the steering wheel and throws herself back into a slouch. Her eyes are fixed on the road. “I didn’t mean — god, get a grip. I’m sure you’re great at math or something like that, but you’re stupid when it comes to surviving if demons are after you. Anywhere you think of as safe, it isn’t — get that through your head right now. The more it looks like the set of a horror movie, the better. Unless it’s an actual horror movie set. Got it?”
Anna tries to smile at her in spite of her terrifying features. She is only trying to help. “I think so. It’s a lot to take in.”
Ruby turns on the radio, fiddling with it until it’s playing static-filled commercials for a local furniture store, all without taking her eyes off the road. “You’ll learn.”
Safe, Anna learns shortly thereafter, means parking the car in the woods and walking out in the open air down the gravel driveway to a house with bright orange signs which proclaim it to be condemned.
“Condemned means empty. We like empty,” Ruby explains, plowing through the front door. The reek of stale dust and mold hits Anna like a wave in her wake.
“I’d guessed,” Anna stammers. “How will Sam and Dean find us? Are they okay?”
“No idea. We need to hunker down and wait a while, anyway. Give them time to regroup — trust me, they’re going to need time to stitch themselves up before they’re going to be any use at all.” Ruby speaks as though she’s been in a thousand situations like this one, so Anna just nods and lets her lead her into the stuffy back room. It might have been a living room at some point, but now the only things left are some moldy blankets piled in the corner, and a faux leather couch against the far wall. Anna’s knees are trembling, but she still hesitates before she rushes to sink down onto them. The whole house is filthy, full of dust, and despite Ruby’s warning, her nerves are still screaming out that this isn’t safe. She shouldn’t be here, this is trespassing, the house could collapse, it was probably condemned for a reason. She wants to go home and curl up under her bedspread, not sit in a drafty house full of mold with a creature from hell to keep her company.
Ruby has no such hang-ups. She heads straight over to the pile of blankets and curls up on it, catlike, then lifts her head to address Anna. “Come on, there’s nothing in here’s going to bite you. Might as well try to relax while we wait.”
Anna doesn’t see how she would ever be able to relax when there are demons after her, actual demons, and she can’t bring herself to ask Ruby for one of the filthy blankets, but she forces herself to sit down on the couch at least. The springs press awkwardly against her legs, and dust fills her lungs when she breathes in, adding to her discomfort. She coughs a couple of times, tries to suppress it because she can feel Ruby, who apparently has no such difficulties, watching her, and it’s embarrassing. Then it occurs to her that maybe she should be as quiet as possible to avoid attracting attention, and she tries to breathe only through the fabric of her shirt before giving up. Outside, crickets and flies fill the air with a low background hum not unlike the static she hears from the angels in her head. Or maybe it really is the angels again. She can’t quite tell the difference.
After a while, Ruby sighs and bangs her head against the wall. “Say something. I’m getting all twitchy over here.”
Anna shifts position to answer, only realizing after she nearly falls off the boxes that her legs have fallen asleep. She struggles to hide it and maintain her dignity. “Why are you helping me?” she asks, careful to phrase it like an honest question and not an accusation.
“I was thinking, like, icebreakers or something,” Ruby grumbles. “Not existential motivation questions.”
“I figured. But I want to know. You aren’t with the other demons; why?”
Ruby shifts around in her seat, wrapping herself in a pastel quilt that makes Anna cringe to see. There are probably all sorts of diseases trapped in between the layers of fabric, and it’s not nearly cold enough to be that desperate for warmth. It is yet another reminder of how far away Anna is from the clean white walls of her room at the hospital.
Finally, Ruby answers. “I follow Sam,” she says.
“But why? The angels don’t talk about him as much. They never have anything good to say about him, anyway,” she amends. From the way that they had spoken about him, Anna had been expecting a demon, or worse, to be riding shotgun with the man the angels had chosen for their own.
“That’s because angels are assholes,” Ruby says with unusual venom. “Sam is awesome. Kind of stupid a lot of the time, especially about his brother.”
Anna smiles.
“And don’t tell him I said any of that.”
“I won’t.”
“He’s like — like the quarterback in high school, and I’m the nerdy girl with the hopeless crush who helps him with his math homework. Except he doesn’t know he’s the quarterback, so he thinks he’s the school nerd, so it’s not actually as tragic as I just made it sound. Whatever.”
Anna tries to study her in the fading evening light coming through the window, both the human body and the demon underneath. She’d like to tell Ruby that that isn’t really true, high school isn’t like that, but she supposes that Ruby is a demon and a demon wouldn’t know about things like ordinary life any more than Anna knows how to hide from the forces of evil. So what she settles on is, “You don’t look like much of a nerd to me.”
Ruby snickers at that. “Okay, so it’s not a great metaphor.” When she laughs, the sound is pleasant, but the blackened corners of her lips on the face under her skin curl upwards to reveal teeth stained dark red. Anna suppresses a shudder. If she looks away, though, it’s easier to put the image out of her mind. Then she can pretend that Ruby is just another human girl like her, and not the unholy creature curled up on the blankets in the gathering gloom.
“I didn’t know that demons could fall in love,” she admits, addressing the tops of her shoes.
“You know how we get to be demons, right?”
Anna nods, her stomach turning over. She’s heard the angels talk about it enough — discussing the what-ifs and the possible complications which might have arisen from saving Dean Winchester, if they’d gotten to him before the demonic had been able to cement its hold on his soul — to grasp the concept. The nurses at the psych ward had thought her nausea a result of the soured milk she had drunk with lunch.
“You’ve got to make a deal. You wanna guess how many people who made deals for love are the same ones stringing up sinners on the racks right now?”
Anna doesn’t. She hugs her knees closer and looks at the floorboards.
“So it’s not like we never knew how to. It’s just that everyone else forgot.” Ruby shrugs.
It takes a moment for Anna to understand the words, and the implicit admission behind them. “But you didn’t.”
Ruby doesn’t respond. Anna is still afraid to look at her, so she doesn’t. She shuts her eyes instead. After a while, she hears Ruby get up. The floorboards creak, coming closer to her, and then the couch cushions sink next to her with an additional weight.
“Kjalvor,” says Ruby.
Anna opens her eyes.
“That was my — I don’t even know what you’d call her. My girlfriend? Mistress? Whatever. She was killed in battle, and I made a deal to bring her back. That’s my story.” Ruby says it like Anna dragged the story out of her with meat hooks, but after spending the better part of the day with her, Anna has begun to suspect that she’s the sort to grumble about everything, regardless of how unimportant it is.
Anna is not. Her parents hate grumbling, always tell her to express herself so that issues can be resolved rationally, and aside from a streak of rebellion as a teenager, she has taken their words to heart. “I don’t think that I would have had the courage for that,” she admits.
Ruby snorts. “It didn’t take a lot of courage. I’m pretty sure I just panicked,” she says, but Anna shakes her head.
“I still think that counts.” She doesn’t know what she would have done, knowing what she knows about the part of the deal that comes after the ten years’ lenience has been granted.
“Thanks,” says Ruby.
They lapse back into silence. Anna wants to ask her more questions — was it worth it? What else does she remember about being human? — because if she’s paying attention Ruby, and thinking about Ruby as another human to befriend, then she’s not thinking about the shadows growing longer on the wall, in a shack in the middle of nowhere, while she waits and has time to be homesick and tired. But Ruby is busy fiddling with her hair, face turned away from Anna, so she holds her tongue and tries to picture the human Ruby might have been. It isn’t easy: every few seconds, she remembers the demon which she saw as Ruby dragged her out of the closet in her father’s church; and then she remembers the demon in the psych ward, wearing the face of the orderly who had bought her a set of watercolor pencils last month. She doesn’t know what happened to him either. She doesn’t know if the demon left him alive, and Anna doesn’t want him to die, especially not on her account.
A hand on her knee brings Anna out of her thoughts and blinking back to the present. She discovers that she has begun tapping furiously on the floor with her shoe while her hands twist of their own accord.
“Relax,” Ruby tells her. “I’m gonna go tell Sam where we are so he and Dean can find us. It means I’m gonna leave the body for a moment, so don’t freak out — I haven’t died, all right?”
Anna nods, throat closing. She forces herself into immobility. Ruby scoots further away from her and tips her head back. With a roaring sound muffled as though heard through earmuffs, the demon skeleton behind her skin dissolves, and pours out of her mouth in the form of black smoke that fills the room with the scent of rotting eggs. Anna jumps. The black smoke hovers in the air for a moment as the body next to Anna slumps against the wall, limp; then the smoke vanishes, and Anna is alone in the room with an empty vessel.
The dark is even less inviting without company to fight it off, and the lamp does nothing to banish the shadows at the windows and in the next room. They seem to crawl, and now that Anna knows what a demon looks like outside of its host, she can’t help but stare at every dark space in the corner, waiting for it to detach itself from the wall and cram its way down her throat. She hugs herself tighter, then wonders if she should be standing up and ready to fight. She decides against it because even though it’s probably what Ruby would want her to do to survive, she’s just Anna Milton, artist and bookworm, not a savior of the world or a demon from Hell. Her odds of survival are just as good sitting down, curled into a shivering ball, as they are standing up and pretending she knows what the hell is happening to her.
When the dark becomes too threatening for her to look at it, Anna looks at Ruby instead. The body next to her, anyway. Without the demon behind her eyes, she can tell that the girl who used to live in this body had been pretty. It would be nice if she were able to stay like this in Anna’s eyes, extraordinary only in human terms and not because of the demon inside, but as the minutes stretch on, Anna finds herself wishing that the disfigured face behind it, moving the features as her own, was back. Even the pitch black of Ruby’s gaze had held consciousness behind it, someone who looked at Anna with something like kindness. This body’s eyes are glassy and undeniably devoid of life. Anna takes the hand of the corpse sitting on the couch beside her, fingers working without effect to rub life back into the body.
“Please come back,” she whispers into the darkness. “I don’t like being alone — I don’t even know where we are. What if they come while you’re gone? I can’t fight them off. I can draw pictures of them and hide in a closet. That’s what I’m good at, that’s it. Anna Milton listens to angels and hides from demons.”
A rustling noise silences her at once. She clenches Ruby’s hand with both of hers as though it will protect her. It’s probably just the wind, she tries to assure herself. Outside, the trees stand stiff and still.
Anna nearly screams when the hand she is holding tightens around her fingers; she would have, were it not for Ruby clamping her other hand over her mouth.
“They’ll be here in an hour or two. Idiots.”
Anna is too busy hyperventilating to answer. She shuts her eyes and rocks back and forth, trying to control her racing heartbeat. Ruby’s hand slips off her mouth. “Oh god,” she whispers. “Oh god, you scared me. I didn’t realize you could just come back like that.”
“It’s a lot easier to get in than it is to haul yourself back out again,” Ruby says. She pauses. “It was also a lot easier for this body to repair itself when it was still alive, so please don’t actually break my fingers.”
Anna withdraws her hands, flushing. “Sorry.”
“Um.” Ruby’s voice sounds funny to her ears. “You don’t have to — you know, if it’ll help you keep cool until Starsky and Hutch get here, whatever it takes.”
“Okay.” But now that it’s been mentioned, Anna is too anxious to move; she returns to clasping her own hands in her lap and looking around the room. In the time that Ruby was gone, which can’t have been more than half an hour, night has fallen completely, deepening the shadows on the walls that the lamp cannot banish. Anna studies the filth accumulated on the floor for a while, but eventually her gaze settles on Ruby, whose gaze is also wandering. Her visage still makes Anna shudder, but she forces herself to become acquainted with it. This is, after all, the face of the person who saved her life, and spent hours talking to her when Anna was ready to descend into hysterics. Anna studies the charred flesh underneath the face of the beautiful coma patient, the melted skin which sags across one cheek towards a stump of a nose.
“What?” Ruby asks, when she catches Anna staring at her. She sounds offended.
Anna presses her lips together. “I was just thinking — while you were gone, the body, it didn’t have you in it. I couldn’t see your face, just her.” She makes an up and down gesture at Ruby, whose eyebrows only climb higher.
“Yeah, okay, thanks.”
“I didn’t like it. It didn’t look like you.” She smiles at Ruby, hoping that she will understand what she’s trying to say. Ruby returns the smile like she isn’t quite sure whether she is allowed. Anna leans in, pulse pounding with fear, and kisses her on the cheek. She forces herself to keep her eyes open. When she sits back, Ruby is watching her with an amused expression.
“I’m sorry,” says Anna, looking away. The tips of her ears go hot. “I’m not — I’m not the kind of girl who does things like that, usually.” Up until everything had gone to hell, Anna had been more the sort of girl who never did anything for fear of standing out, some sort of instinctive fear she was never able to overcome. It seemed a little silly now.
“Hey, it’s okay with me.” Ruby touches her hands with still-cool fingertips. “You’re definitely the nicest person who’s ever tried to kiss me.”
A peculiar new brand of fear uncurls itself in Anna’s stomach. “And you don’t mind?” she asks.
Ruby raises her eyebrows. “What, that you’re nice, or that you kissed me?”
Anna looks at their hands, where they are folded together in her lap. “Both, I guess.”
In response, Ruby leans forwards. The fake leather of the couch squeaks under her, the springs creaking as she presses her lips to Anna’s mouth. Anna breathes in sulfur and dust and grave dirt. For a moment, she kisses the demon who is maybe not as frightening as she looks, kisses Ruby, and relaxes.
Only as she stops to breathe does she remember something. She draws back. “Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t thank you for saving me yet, so thanks.”
Ruby scowls at her. “You’re ruining the moment. Thank me later, okay?”
Anna doesn’t fight the smile that forms on her lips as she meets Ruby’s eyes. “Okay,” she agrees, and lets herself go once more.
