Archive of Our Own

On a Friday night, Sam sits at a local bar, unenthusiastic about his old fashioned. He can feel his blood pulse at his temples, the ever-present headache giving him unneeded reminders of his hunger. And he is hungry. The cavernous ache inside him is inescapable. It screams its throat raw at him, begging for more and more and more.

The sandwich and fries he’d had earlier didn’t make the hunger go away. The peanuts on the counter aren’t making the hunger go away. Sam just can’t give it enough. Nothing is enough.

The best he can do is down another round of demon blood.

Tracking down demons is easy enough. He doesn’t have to search far for another area teeming with violent crimes and murders, uncharacteristic for its prior suburban peace. It only took a couple hours to drive here. Good thing the gates of hell had opened briefly; across the earth a new walking buffet had opened just for him. For the past month since he’d left Dean and Bobby, he’s fared well on his own, feeding his appetite. He finds a demon, bleeds it dry and kills them quick—all that blood would last him a week. Until he needs his next fix. And it’s killing him. The guilt tears him up. The only time he leaves his house, this abandoned little run-down house in western Nebraska, is to buy food and bleed more demons.

He doesn’t even really need to do research to find the possessed person. If he really wants to, he can wait around until his skin crawls, since he can now sense demons by their proximity. Though he is far too impatient for that. He can sense this demon, somewhere in the bar, but he can’t distinguish where exactly it is yet. Sam cracks another peanut, gathers all the dust into a neat pile, then runs his finger through it to scatter it again. He takes another sip of his whiskey.

There. He feels a muted crackling at the back of his neck. The demon is walking past him, behind him. As Sam rolls his head to crack his neck, he sees the demon. A nondescript white man, wearing a brown corduroy jacket. Looks exactly like the images of the vessel, a security guard named Ted Asher, that Sam had seen online, but there’s a darker aura to him, a glint in his eye, a sinister twist to his grin. The demon’s personality, oozing through its human skin. It’s talking to a younger guy who hands it a crinkled twenty. The demon pockets the bill, and heads towards the back door. Alone.

Sam puts his glass down, and follows.

He withdraws a butterfly knife from the inside pocket of his jacket as he closes the door quietly behind him, entering a dimly lit alley. He flicks the knife open, approaching the corduroyed demon, and it turns around to face him.

“Think that little thing’s gonna hurt me?”

Sam shrugs. “It does the trick.” Just as he lunges forwards, something rams into him from his left, shoving him against the brick wall.

He whirls around, slashing at its face, and only grazes its cheek. The possessed human—a man with a patchy beard—sneers at Sam, its eyes filling with blackness. Sam sees the first demon swing at him, and he dodges to the right, now facing both demons. He twirls the thin blade deftly, cocks his head. He’d never had to take on more than one demon at a time, on his own at least, and it seems tricky, but he can probably manage. Or so he tells himself.

Before he can fully convince himself, the one in corduroy pounces, knocks Sam to the ground. Sam drives the knife into its neck, and while it doesn’t do much damage, it stuns the demon enough for Sam to kick him off. He goes for his other pocket but the second demon kicks him firmly in the side. Sam groans, curling up a little, but now he can more easily reach for the tiny water gun—purple, plastic, it perfectly fits into the palm of his hand. He rolls upright onto his knees and sprays the bearded demon in the eyes. It screams, stumbling backwards, but Sam is knocked off balance again when the demon behind him finally stumbles up and kicks him squarely in the back. Sam spins around, and the demon yanks the knife out of its neck and slashes wildly at him.

He throws his arms up in a last-ditch attempt at protecting himself, but then the demon screams, falls to the ground. It drops Sam’s knife, which falls to the ground and into his line of sight between the cracks of his fingers. He looks up.

A woman in a torn white dress and black leather pants smiles briefly at Sam, wielding a glimmering knife of her own. But hers is long and jagged. She thrusts the blade into the gut of the first demon, who had just been slashed along the back, and its eyes flicker with a dying, yellow light. She yanks it out, stabs it into the neck of the other demon as it rushes her. Sam can only watch as both demons fall over dead, easier than he’d ever been able to do. Almost impossible.

Then she turns to him. He awakes from his stunned silence to shoot a stream of holy water at her with his dinky water gun, but she barely flinches. He throws a punch, and she grabs his arm, twists it, pins him with his back against the wall. Her other arm presses against his chest. It’s very uncomfortable, and very effective.

She smiles. “Sam Winchester, in the flesh.”

He struggles against her grip. “Do I know you?” The brick wall at his back is damp.

“No, but I know you.” She shifts her arm so the knife, dripping with demon blood, is pressing gently against his neck.

Close enough that he can smell the blood. His face gets hot. “I’m not a demon.”

She smirks, as if she knows that’s not quite true—but not quite false. “A knife is still a knife,” she says instead. “This can still hurt you.”

“Are you a hunter?”

She tilts her head. “I guess so. Not the same way you are.” Then she lets go of him and steps back, wipes the blood onto her pant leg, shoves the knife still smudged with blood into the sheath attached to the thigh holster she wears. Her dress is so ratty and torn short, it barely counts as a dress. She also wears a harness with the same shine as her leather pants, a smaller knife tucked into a sheath by her collar.

“What does that mean?” he asks. He straightens up, brushes off his jacket, tries to act casual. Not guilty. He still can’t tell if she knows about his…habits.

“It means I was hunting the same demon as you, Sam. But that doesn’t make me a hunter the way you know them.” Her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, has loosened just a little bit. She takes out the elastic and starts tying it back up again, neater.

Sam nods slowly. “So what are you then?”

She finishes her ponytail and takes one taunting step closer to Sam. She grits her teeth, pushes her lip up with one finger, presses lightly, and a small, sharp, white fang sinks down from her gum.

“Oh my God,” Sam says, bringing his useless water gun back up.

“Oh, relax,” she rolls her eyes. “If I was going to hurt you I would’ve done it already.”

“Everyone says that.”

“Well, it’s fun to say. Listen,” she steps back again, glances backwards at the two demons lying in their slowly spreading pools of (human) blood. “I hate those fuckers as much as anyone. You and I are essentially on the same team here, if getting rid of those demons, fresh from the mouth of hell, is our top priority.”

Sam pauses. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“I guess you can’t know for sure. You just have to believe me.” She looks at him with a softer edge in her eyes. And that gets to him. Sam’s had enough people lose their faith in him, not believe him. Strangers, friends, family, everyone. He may be ignoring every safety precaution drilled into him since childhood by trusting her, but he’s a fucked up monster and he still keeps his word. He deserves to be believed in, and he doesn’t deserve to die. The same should go for her.

He loosens his shoulders and pockets his plastic water gun. She extends a hand for Sam to shake. “I’m Ruby. It’s nice to meet you, Sam.” He takes her hand, expecting it to be colder than it is.

Even as he invites her over to his place so they can talk more, there’s still a nagging whisper at his ear. It sounds like Dean. He pushes that aside. He’s still starving, having missed his chance at dinner, and there’s usually only one way to distract himself from that hunger.

“Can vampires get high?” he asks hesitantly.

“Sure,” she says. “We still breathe.”

“Do you want to get high then?”

Ruby smiles.

The abandoned house he’d found is only one bedroom, a dining room, kitchen, and one bathroom. All on one floor. There is a basement, too, but the concrete steps down crumble away into a pile of debris blocking the door from being opened. The only reason this place doesn’t feel cramped is because the ceilings are so tall. Well, and the fact that Sam doesn’t bring a lot of stuff around when he’s on the move. The spaciousness of the house borders on emptiness. That’s fine. Less things to jump out at him when he gets too blitzed.

Sam is packing his electric blue glass pipe in the living room of his tiny house, and Ruby just watches. They’ve already gotten past basic niceties: introductions, brief recap of the past couple months and why they were both hunting demons. Now they’re both sitting against the wall next to the window, which they’ve cracked open. There are no curtains or blinds on this window, and the cars passing outside the old house cast orange lights flickering and running along the wall.

“So how come you drink demon blood?” Ruby asks.

“Wow, getting right to it, huh?” Sam flicks the lighter, the flame licking at his fingernail as he inhales. He holds his breath for a beat, and exhales heavily. “It’s…not really by choice. It’s a long story.” Licking his lips, he hands the bowl and lighter to Ruby.

“Let me hear it,” she says, lighting the bowl. Her gaze is heavy on him, the weight of morning fog.

Sam debates it for a second, doesn’t know if he really wants to explain it all. But maybe it’ll be good to get it off his chest, or try to get an outsider’s perspective. As much as he’s explained to Dean, and as much as Dean had been there when it happened, somehow he still never understood why Sam couldn’t just stop. Somehow he always saw Sam as a monster, and nothing more. So he decides to tell her. A vampire. He can’t believe he’s confiding in a vampire.

“There was a demon, Azazel, who told me I was supposed to lead an army. He would come to me in my dreams. But I was just one amongst a dozen others.”

As he starts getting into the details of the story, he closes his eyes to focus better. He can almost feel the memories creeping in around him, like the cool tingle on your skin from coming indoors after hours under the hot sun. Azazel had held him and the other ‘Special Children’ captive for weeks, training them, feeding them. Sam choked down the demon blood. He had no choice. He’d had his choice taken away from him almost as soon as he was born, when Azazel bled into his newborn mouth. He was meant to lead an army, yes: he was going to be powerful and important. But only if he would drink this, Azazel said, if he would finetune his abilities, if he would let Azazel break him.

He broke him. “He made me…hurt people…kill them,” Sam mutters, eyes cast down as he packs the second bowl. He doesn’t want to say much more about that. Sam loved the power thrumming in his veins, a power he’d never been allowed to have in his whole life, but he hated how much he loved it. He doesn’t talk about that much, either.

“I was the best of them all, for a while. The strongest. But then there was Jake.” Jake. Stronger, better, more resilient and serious and unwavering in his devotion to the cause (keeping his family alive under Azazel’s threats). Azazel doted on Jake. He told Sam it was a shame; he’d spent so much time molding and bending Sam to his will, and Sam had come so far. But Jake was already built to Azazel’s standards. He needn’t waste any more time on Sam. So he ditched him. He almost killed him.

Sam remembers exactly what Azazel had said to him like he’s still whispering at his ear, as he lies bloody and beaten, face still pressed against the cold dirt. “I’ll keep you around, Sam. Keep an eye out. I might need you if Jake fails me, too.” Sam feels his voice like nails scraping the marrow from his spine. “But somehow I don’t see that happening.”

And it didn’t happen. Jake drank the blood obediently. He barely needed training. He didn’t need to be molded. He followed Azazel’s every order. And Sam, a month after he’d been taken, went home to Dean, who’d been planning with Bobby how to take the yellow-eyed demon down. Jake was well set up to lead the army of demons, to wage war upon the earth. Until Dean killed Azazel, and set Jake free. Sam had to beg his brother to let Jake go in one piece. The dark circles of his eyes, onset from the addiction, swayed his brother at last. Yes, he was addicted to the blood that whole, long time. Drinking demon blood in secret, but he knew that Bobby and Dean could tell. They would have interceded if it weren’t for Azazel and Jake.

It wasn’t their priority. “Well, uh. Azazel was gone. We closed the gates of hell. And I got out of there, ran away from them. I couldn’t let my brother lock me away and force me to quit the demon blood cold turkey. It wouldn’t have worked. It would kill me.” And it would have been another choice made for him. “I kept hunting. But only for demons.” He takes the bowl that Ruby offers him.

After he exhales his next hit, he turns to Ruby, who is looking at him intently. He’s relieved to see no trace of pity. “Enough with my sob story. What is it like being a vampire?” Because for all the vampires that have died by his hands, he never really stopped to think about their lives. Not even Lenore, one of the ‘humane’ vamps from earlier that year.

She’s quiet for a moment, fiddling absentmindedly with the torn edges of her white dress, bunched around her thighs. Sam is so high by now he can feel his blood course, cold, through his veins, and he almost sways to the beat of his heart. He wants to know if Ruby feels the same. Does her blood run?

“I was a witch in the 1700s or something.” She drops the bowl to the carpet, a couple burnt dregs tumbling out. “I was in a good coven. Really close, dependable, secret, small. A blood ritual went bad when we unknowingly drank blood from a vampire. We all turned.” She faces forwards, looking anywhere but at him. Sam almost feels bad for looking at her as she tells him something so vulnerable. It’s easier when they’re both looking at each other. Now he just feels like he’s intruding. But he doesn’t look away, even if it’s uncomfortable to have his head turned to face her for so long. “We were all bedridden for three days, shivering and sweating and shitting and sometimes vomiting. We died. And went our separate ways after that. Life was pretty bland for a while. I just tried to live as a person, with just one extra burden of needing to drink blood. It wasn’t until recently that I tried to take advantage of the situation. Which also, uh, wasn’t by choice.” She makes eye contact with Sam again as she says this. Like, we’re not so different, really.

He deflects the notion. “Did you ever turn anyone?”

“On accident.” There’s a tense unspoken truth hanging in the air. It doesn’t so much as snap as it does ease when she follows with, “I didn’t know that if you don’t kill them after drinking them, they turn, too.”

“Would you ever turn anyone on purpose?”

“Maybe. Depends.”

Sam swallows. His throat is so dry. “Would you turn me?”

She scoffs. “Why would you want that? The appeal of living forever kind of fades once you really go through it, you know.”

“No, that’s not it. I just.” A shiver starts in his gut and travels up his throat. “I just don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t.”

“Do what?”

“The demon blood thing. The constant hunger, the weakness. It’s so hard to resist the power I used to have that I know I can have again. There’s no other way to stop than dying, but I don’t want to die.” The edge in his voice has melted into a desperation. No one could ever understand what he’s feeling; he can only hope for compassion. Or being seen. Being a vampire would be better than this living hell.

Ruby picks up the lighter, holds it in her lap, flicks it once so the tall flame wavers in the gentle night’s breeze from the window. “I don’t know. I don’t think you’re worth saving, honestly,” she jokes dimly. But it makes even more sense when she says it. That’s what turning him would be. It would be saving him.

“Hell, I’m already drinking blood. And I don’t even need it.” Sam looks attentively at her, watching for any change in her stance. “It won’t be much of a difference to me, Ruby. This is just the difference between addiction and lifeblood.” In his intensity he’d gotten closer to Ruby, his voice softer. He’s staring into her eyes. And she’s staring back, a warm darkness in them.

“Lifeblood,” she laughs quietly. “Nice. You’re real funny.” She glances away. “How about we talk about this later, huh? There’s better things to do.”

Sam blinks. “What do you mean?” He hasn’t moved away from her at all, their thighs pressed against each other. Again she faces him, a strange smile ghosting over her lips. The cold ache in his gut that had been slowly building as they smoked together abruptly expands, closing up his throat.

Without much distance to close between them, she kisses him gently. He’s hardly taken aback, and the feeling in his gut fractures. He’d missed physical intimacy—of any kind. He winds a hand through her hair, it comes to rest on her neck, and Ruby drops the lighter, the glass pipe forgotten on the carpet. Her skin is cool, his mouth hot—it doesn’t matter if they don’t reach some equilibrium. If she saps the warmth out of him, it’d be one less thing to worry about. She can have it, for all he cares. And she takes it.

In the next three weeks, they spend so much time together that essentially Ruby has moved in with him, and they’ve settled into a comfortable routine. Aside from tracking down demons and getting high, they don’t do much. Life as usual for Sam, except Ruby acquires blood for him so he doesn’t have to suffer through it anymore. When Ruby’s out bleeding some demon dry before killing it dead with her blade, Sam is running scams to get some money. (Dean taught him how to run a good credit card scam just a few months prior, so that’s what he sticks with.) Other times when Ruby’s not around, Sam goes into town and browses the supermarket for anything that might stave off his hunger. But he eats and eats and never feels full or satisfied. Nothing new.

Ruby starts asking about Sam’s abilities. Tentative and nonchalant at first, but as Sam opens up more and more, Ruby becomes more and more insistent that he show her. “Come on,” she says, “I’m giving you a chance to show off a little bit. Show me what you’ve got.” Sam shakes his head, says that he doesn’t think he should go to that place again. Even as he says it, each time, there’s a curiosity of his own self gnawing at the inside of his lungs. The third time, she (playfully) threatens to leave Sam all alone again, let him suffer through his addiction and die in a ditch somewhere, strung out and starving. He knows she’s teasing, but it feels too real; he caves, at last, reluctant though he is, and they find a new demon to test his powers on.

They’ve got it tied up in the living room of the vessel’s own home, curtains closed. Ruby has gagged it with one of their rags that they use to wipe up blood after hunts. It’s staring daggers into the both of them, Ruby with her arms crossed as she leans against the dinner table, Sam as he shifts his weight between his feet, flexing his hands.

“You ready?” she asks. There’s an edge of concern to her dark and taunting voice. Unexpected. Sam almost wishes she would go back to being blunt and insincere.

He nods with resolution. “Yeah. I am.” Before they left, Sam drank whatever blood they had leftover in the fridge, and just to be sure, he drank a fresh pint from their current captive, carefully drawn by a needle. It should work. Sam feels a tingling euphoria in his limbs, though it’s already starting to ebb away. He has to get started, now.

Sam thrusts his hand out towards the demon, gathering the empty thrumming in his veins like a bushel of thorny briars. If he focuses all his energy to sync with some kind of imagery—a lightning storm, a venomous snake, a tidal wave—it usually helps. His Jedi hand trick helps, too, even if it might just be a placebo. Doesn’t matter. He’s gathered the thorns, and the demon’s breath is coming short and fast. He lights a match and the flame starts to spread. His head pounds. The demon chokes, it’s eyes flooding black. It starts to shout, but the sounds are muffled and gargled behind the gag.

Azazel had taught him to manipulate blood flow in other people. For the sole purpose of torturing them. There were a couple times during his month of training where he accidentally slipped up and somehow started expelling the demon from the vessel—and was met with swift punishment. He always knew he could do it but he’d never intentionally tried before now. And it’s been so long since he used any part of his abilities: it’s taking so much energy from him. His hand starts to shake and he curls his fingers into a fist to stop the tremor, and the demon jolts in the chair. It screams. The fire he’s set to the briars is burning taller than him, and he can feel the heat in his bones. He takes a step backwards, and lets the flame run wild, leaping onto trees to climb towards the sky. A hot rivulet of blood leaks from his nose into his mouth. He winces, but the demon, convulsing and shaking, starts to stream out of the vessel in thick black smoke. The sudden and sharp smell of sulfur stings, but abates swiftly once the black smoke pools around their feet and sinks into the ground.

Sam lets his arm drop to his side, panting and slumping backwards to rest on the table.

“Wow.” Ruby turns to him, dropping all pretense of nonchalance. She’s impressed. “That was…incredible.”

Sam flashes her a quick and weak smile of thanks, half-stunned by himself too, and tries to ground himself in reality again. Ruby steps closer to him and wipes away the stream of blood on his upper lip. She licks it off her finger. He feels weak all over again at the eye contact. But there’s also a new gathering of strength in him that he’s never had access to before. The drumming power in his veins is familiar, thrilling, satisfying. Though this time there’s an absence of guilt. He used his abilities by choice. And he wasn’t hurting anyone. In fact, he just saved someone.

The vessel—the person—is passed out in the chair still, but Sam can see that she’s breathing evenly, and she looks relatively healthy. Sam saved her life.

For a moment Sam reconsiders. If he stays on the demon blood he can do some real good for the world. He could expel demons from their vessels without killing innocent people. Maybe he’s being selfish for giving that up.

But he’s always too hungry. And he can’t take it.

Sam accepts the water bottle Ruby offers him, the cold soothing his dry throat. “Ruby,” he says. He stares at his scuffed boots. “I can’t do this. I know I could do good, but I just can’t.” Before he can stomach looking at her again, he takes another sip of water. She waits for him to continue, but he doesn’t want to say it.

“Please, Ruby. Will you do it?”

Ruby worries her bottom lip between her teeth, glancing away.

His chest aches looking at her hesitation. “You can…save me,” he says quietly. “I could live a better life. I could be free.”

She gets up, goes to the window and peeks out the curtain. Not for any reason, just for something to do. She lets the curtain fall but stands there for another moment, thinking. When she turns around to face him at last, she nods.

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

Sam’s entire body sags with relief, even as she continues talking. “You have to promise that you won’t act like I owe you anything for turning you. You can’t expect to live with me forever. You will owe me, so don’t ever think about trying to kill me, either.”

“Don’t worry about it, Ruby, I promise I can be normal about it.” He can hardly believe it’s happening. A wide and genuinely joyful grin breaks out from where it’s been hiding the past few months. “Thank you. Truly, thank you so much.”

Ruby’s veneer cracks, and she smiles back, crossing the space between them to lean over the table and press a chase kiss to his cheek. “Being a vampire is good, you know. It’s interesting. Yeah,” she shrugs, “some of the flavor of human life goes away. But there’s other stuff that replaces it. You’re stronger, more resilient. You get to reinvent yourself so easily. The sex is different, new.” She raises an eyebrow. There’s anticipation in her eyes; she’s excited for Sam. That realization makes him happy, somehow.

Once he does this, though, he can never go back to Dean again. If Dean thought he was a monster just for drinking demon blood, there’s no way Sam could live as a vampire and maintain any kind of relationship with his brother. He used to think he could live without Dean, but that was before their dad died, before they broke the world and ruined their own lives.

It’s the only thing giving him pause. So he has to go see Dean.

Sam calls a few people, careful to avoid those that would tell Bobby about their conversation. It’s difficult, since anyone in the hunter world who isn’t a close contact is always so damn prickly. Eventually he understands that no one really knows if Dean is still hunting, but apparently he’s hanging out with Gordon. Gordon Walker, vampire hunter. Tried to kill Sam, twice, before he was ever even chummy with a vampire. Killed his own sister when she turned.

He doesn’t care. Sam still needs to see Dean. They get Gordon’s address and head out at midnight.

To stay undetected, they park the car a block away, walk the rest of the way to the house across the street from Gordon’s. They break into the house, conveniently abandoned, going through the back door to the front porch, which is covered by a lattice fence stretching from the banister to the eaves. They’ve arrived just as Gordon—and Dean—are sitting down for a late lunch on the porch. Sandwiches, it looks like. Dean’s wearing a wifebeater smudged with dark grease, and Gordon looks like Gordon. Sam never really cared for him. Less layers in the summer, he supposes. Sam watches as Dean laughs at something Gordon says and eats another cucumber slice. He’s eating fucking cucumbers. And he looks happy enough. Unbothered.

“That’s your brother?” Ruby says.

Sam, peering through one of the diamond-shaped holes in the fence, nods slowly. “Yeah. He looks like he’s doing okay, doesn’t he?”

“Sure.” He can tell she’s restless, though. She recognizes Gordon, knows him. Hard to be a vampire and not know of Gordon Walker, really.

When Dean playfully flicks his beer bottle cap at Gordon, Sam decides he can’t look any longer. “Okay,” he says, brushing the dust on his hands off on his jeans. “We can leave.”

Ruby twirls her knife with a snap of her wrist, having been carving a row of parallel lines into the railing. “Are you okay?”

He nods again, his mouth tight. Seeing Dean with Gordon essentially seals the deal. If he’s spending quality time with the most ruthless vampire hunter anyone’s known, there’s no way he would take Sam back after this. It would take years for forgiveness to ever happen, if it is possible at all. He can’t lie to himself, it does break his heart a little, but with that pain comes a sense of finality and determination. He’s got to do this. As they leave the way they came, sneaking out the back, Sam beams his goodbyes to Dean, hoping that somehow Dean will feel some odd sense of peace, at the very least.

Then they wait two painfully long, wearisome days. Just long enough for Sam to finish the leftovers in the fridge. He’s so anxious to be done with it, but he still feels guilty at the thought of that demon blood going to waste.

Early afternoon, Sam wakes up to the stabbing pang of hunger in his gut. “Ruby,” he mutters, rolling over towards her. “Let’s do it, now.”

“Well, good morning to you, too,” she says, but without a word, Ruby pushes the sheets aside and kisses Sam, softly at first. Impatiently he climbs over her and kisses her mouth, jaw, neck—bites her bared shoulder. It’s not a hard bite: just a question, asking for permission. Asking to begin. She pauses, looks up at him with such an intense gaze that Sam is terrified to move. Then she smiles at him. One more soft kiss pressed against his mouth, and she’s leaning back again to let Sam see as her fangs sink down from her gums, gleaming white and razor sharp. His heart pounds, but he trusts her to not devour him right now. Her mouth could tear right through him, send him straight to hell. But she bites her own forearm and lays back, tugging Sam closer to her, and exposes her bloodied arm to him. An offer. Like blessed wine. Sam accepts. Even as he sucks at the open wound, a thrilling bone-deep reverence and prayer for being saved running through him, there’s a seed of doubt in the back of his mind. He can’t come back from this. What if it’s worse? Would he just kill himself somehow? Or get Dean to do it for him, if he can’t? But the blood slicks his tongue, and it’s too late to change his mind.

Ruby’s blood has a different richness to it than demon blood—it tastes like late summer evenings. Cold clove smoke and overripe fruit and some unseen thing withering in the corner of your eye, just out of sight. He swallows and closes his eyes. Ruby moves under him, turns them both over so she kneels above him, and licks into his mouth. Sam lets her take the reins, and save him from his mortal damnation.

In under an hour, Sam comes down with a fever and is bedridden for the entire day after. Ruby tries to tend to him by bringing him water and wiping away his sweat, but mostly leaves him be, telling him he just needs to get through this. He swears he hears her say the same thing to him at least four times, but it’s hard to know for sure. Everything is a kaleidoscopic blur, a deluge of complete sensory overload. The lights are too bright: he begs Ruby to turn them off. The rank smell of the weed Ruby smokes the entire time burns his nose. The blankets are too itchy, his skin always too slick and dry at once. Amongst the cold tremors wracking his body and sweat pouring out of every pore and the occasional wrenching pain in his gut that makes him keel over the side of his bed to vomit, he wishes he would just die already.

And then he does.

When he reawakens, sudden but quiet, it’s late evening. He still feels feverish and weak, still has a blinding headache and a strange hollowness inside him. He feels hungry, but it’s a normal hunger he’s felt his entire life. Sam could weep with relief, finally freed from the uncontrollable and insatiable desire for demon blood. He wants to stew in that feeling for a while, really appreciate all of life and death, but he’s fucking parched. He struggles to sit up in bed.

“Hiya, Sam,” Ruby says, looking up from where she’d been reading a book as she sat against the wall. “Welcome back to the land of the living. How’re you feeling?”

“Like I just threw up all my guts and died.” He reaches over to the bedside table for the glass of water there. The water is lukewarm, but in his mouth it feels more refreshing than anything he’s ever had before.

“And?” She closes the book.

Sam gulps down the whole glass, and collapses back into the bed. “And…I’m hungry.” He smiles, eyes drifting closed. “But in a totally normally way. It’s amazing.” Suddenly he’s smelling how rank and musty this room is, and he needs fresh air. He rolls out of bed and opens the curtains to the dark summer evening, and opens the window. The air is mostly stagnant, but it smells like cut grass and barbecue, drifting in from a couple blocks away. A dormant, distant childhood memory returns to him in vague feelings: ‘camping’ with Dean in the backseat of the Impala, a blanket draped over their heads as they eat hot dogs by the burning ember of one of John’s cigarettes, the smallest campfire in the world, which Dean holds by the open window.

He sighs, and finally turns away from the window. “Well, what do I do now?”

Ruby presents a freshly rolled joint. “Feel like celebrating?”

Next thing Sam knows, he’s swaying on his feet, still delirious from the death hangover and his newfound life, climbing higher with a more familiar high. Ruby’s dancing to some music she put on, and Sam doesn’t know if he’s really dancing. He’s moving, at least. He hasn’t danced since his first year of college. And he can’t help but wonder if he made the right decision, if becoming a monster is worth losing the addiction. If living is worth losing his life. But it’s just a tiny itch in the back of his mind now. Instead he focuses on the steady realization that the weed really doesn’t matter much to him anymore, since he no longer needs it as a distraction, and it’s not nearly as revolutionary a high as reinvention of the self. And anyway, Sam wants to mark the occasion with something bigger, brighter, louder.

He pulls Ruby close to him, kisses her deeply. “Let’s burn this place to the ground,” he rasps into her ear. This close, he notices for the first time that Ruby has a scent. She just smells like Ruby. He can’t explain it.

“Are you serious?” she says, incredulous but pleased.

“Yes, yes, I am.” He tugs at her hands, as if he’s itching to go up in flames right now.

“You know vampires are more…flammable than humans, right?” She pulls him close, pushes away, his body a pendulum in her glass case.

“I know. I don’t care. I need to destroy all of this, my old stuff, the past, the mess in that goddamn bedroom.”

She laughs. “Yeah, it’s a real mess in there. You need to take a shower, by the way.”

Sam grins, but he feels too wild to joke around. His eyes are heavy in their sockets. “There’s gasoline for a lawn mower out back.”

He’s so happy that Ruby enjoys sowing chaos as much as he is prone to; he’s learning to accept even that part of himself.

With the minimal amount of gasoline and alcohol they have, they soak the carpets and try to splash it on the walls, inside and out. If they get the bottom of the house well enough, it can collapse and bring the rest of the house down with it, they think. Before they leave the house for good, Ruby changes out of her dress into some of Sam’s clothes—just a t-shirt and a jacket, which hangs off her shoulders, baggy and loose. She keeps her leather pants and leaves the dress inside the house, spread out on the living room floor.

Ruby flicks her Zippo first. “That dress,” she says, gesturing towards the door, “is really old. I don’t know why I held onto it so long.” In a moment of rare sincerity for her, she looks at Sam and thanks him, “for thinking of this, and making me do it. It’ll be good.”

“It’ll be great,” he replies, and flicks his own lighter.

Ruby tosses her lighter through the doorway, and Sam drops his on the front porch, and they both dash away from the hungry flames to watch from the street.

At first there’s not much to see, a flickering orange in the doorframe, but once the porch goes up, Sam can really see it. He suddenly sees all the bones of the house and where it’s going to collapse when the fire eats it up. They won’t stick around long enough to see it fall, since those sirens are bound to sound at any moment. The rush of adrenaline makes Sam even more aware that he feels alive for the first time in a really, really long time. He almost wants to reach out to grab Ruby’s hand, but that might be too much for him to take right now. Together they watch the flames clamber higher as the sun just begins to rise, dots sparking in his vision like pressing in against closed eyes. But his eyes are wide open.