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Sam gets exactly one second to look at Ruby, horrified, and slap a hand over the wound that’s cut through his anti-possession tattoo, before his jaw is forced open by invisible hands and black smoke pours down his throat. He convulses, fighting every inch of the way, before he snaps to unnatural stillness, and his eyes flick to black.
“Fuck,” Ruby says, eloquently.
Not-Sam tilts his head and grins. “You bitch,” he says, the word grating through Sam’s throat and dripping between his teeth, “I’m going to tell him everything. Then I’m going to burn him from the inside so thoroughly that you’d have to spend a fucking eternity gathering all the pieces of him to put together—”
Ruby tightens her grip on her knife, carefully brings it into view. “Are you monologuing at me right now? Really? No wonder even idiots like the Winchesters have survived this long.”
“I have nothing but time.” The demon barks a short laugh. “You can’t kill him—not after you’ve groomed him for your god, made his body this temple that I’m going to enjoy defiling—uck!” He makes a wet, pathetic, hiccupping sound as, in one smooth movement, Ruby steps forward and sinks her knife into his abdomen.
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him,” Ruby says coldly, twisting her knife out where the serrated edges have caught against fat and sinew and scraped across bone. “Including this. He is destined for far, far greater things than to be your shield.”
Sam’s body lights up from the inside with the demon’s death throes, then he’s dropping to the ground, spilling guts and blood everywhere.
Ruby shucks off her jacket, falls to her knees and presses it firmly against the wound, trying very hard not to flinch at the inhuman, guttural sound of pain that Sam makes in response. He twitches uncontrollably, heels dragging across the ground, fingers scrabbling in the dirt. Blood coats his teeth and drips from the corners of his lips as he grits his way through short, gasping breaths.
“You’re going to be okay,” Ruby says, knowing the lie in her words just as well as she knows the power with which she had skewered him, the way she knows the catastrophic damage that had done to his all-too-human insides.
“R-rr-ruby,” Sam gasps, one hand twitching in her direction—a mindless entreaty for comfort even as his body shuts down, inch by excruciating inch.
Ruby doesn’t hold his hand, and watches him die, squirming, in the dirt.
She waits.
Before long, she hears footsteps, and looks up to see a stout, middle-aged man—utterly nondescript except for the way his eyes glint an electric blue when you look at them for too long—standing over Sam’s body. He tuts, shakes his head.
“For someone with such a monumental responsibility,” he pauses, smiling to himself as if enjoying his own pun, “you’re quite careless.”
Ruby’s mouth lifts in a snarl. “Fix him,” she says, “or get lost. Somebody else is bound to come anyway.”
The man regards her with infuriating smugness. “There are options,” he says. “I could bring back any of Azazel’s children. This one is…” he nudges Sam’s corpse with his boot, “too high-maintenance.”
Ruby goes very, very still. “The Apocalypse happens with Sam Winchester as the true vessel,” she says, “or it doesn’t happen at all.”
The smug smile slides off his face, and he stares at her for a few minutes. She stares right back, unblinking, each waiting for the other to break. For Ruby, there is no question: she has dreamed of Lucifer shining through Sam’s eyes for so long it might as well be history. She has built him up—with love and sweat and pain and her own blood, and there will be no other.
“Very well,” he says finally, starting to turn away, “we’ve been gardening the Winchesters for decades anyway. What’s one more resurrection?”
Everything, Ruby thinks.
Behind her, Sam gasps.