Victoria

title: halo in water
rating: NC-17
characters/pairing: Dean/Ruby, implied Sam/Dean
word count: 1406
spoilers: through 4.10
warnings: quite dark
summary: “You watched,” he says softly, somewhere behind her, away from the wall where she’s leaning. “You were there in the gallery when I was—racked, and you watched.”

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It’s Patti Smith on the stereo next door, beating and growling through the wall. Ruby thinks for a moment she could beat back, yell for them to turn it down, she’s had enough. It’s past four now, closer to dawn than midnight, that shimmery place between early and late.

“You watched,” he says softly, somewhere behind her, away from the wall where she’s leaning. “You were there in the gallery when I was—racked, and you watched.”

She shrugs. “So what if I was?”

She looks over and he’s sitting on the moldly old couch—and Christ, would it kill them to pick a place that doesn’t look like the last people to live there were a bunch of beatniks fifty years ago?—rolling a bottle of Jim between his palms. It’s one of those rent-by-the-month apartments, shabby and gray and full of worn furniture that smells like grease and melancholy. They’re all licking their wounds, trying not to let the angelic shit fester and God knows where Sam’s gone.

“Hell is Grey’s Anatomy,” Ruby says. “Alistair is goddamn Dr. McDreamy picking all through your brain and you’re wide awake.”

“You had to, didn’t you?” he wants to know. He’s staring down into the bottle, up through it when he takes a long drink. He drags the back of his hand over his mouth but he’s still glistening with bourbon that beads over his Adam’s apple. He doesn’t wince when he swallows.

“I picked a deep, dark, vile little hole afterwards and covered myself up in filth, if it makes you feel better. Flayed the skin off a boy who used to touch his little brother in the dark, and then I let somebody bigger and badder than me do it right back,” she says.

“Once you’re made outta smoke you don’t have skin to peel,” he says, sloshing the alcohol around.

“They can always find ways to torture you. It’s Hell,” she says. She has to look away then. She wants to take off her shirt, show him where she’s still shiny with blood because she’s smoke wrapped up in skin that’s unraveling.

She can feel his eyes on her now. It doesn’t feel like it did in Hell because this time he’s pleading and broken and what she saw down there was anger and spitting blood and grinning to bare red-washed teeth. He sets the bottle on the floor, careful not to spill, and pads over to her on bare feet. He moves like he has sand in his joints, like a man twice his age.

“I’m not having this conversation with you,” she says.

“I was playing demon while you were playing me,” he says, leaning in and running fingertips over her clavicles and his thumbs in the hollows underneath, boxing her against the wall. On the other side, the music fades out. “You were walking around topside, the badass in a leather jacket, holding Sammy tight, everything, and I was down there tormenting the damned.”

“Yes,” she breathes, turning her face away. He grabs her chin and pulls her eyes up to his, exhaling breaths more bourbon than saliva right across her lips.

“I think you’re probably in love with him,” he says, pressing in close and hot, running his hands down her arms. He noses under her jaw and inhales. She still smells like the blood caked in her hair, but at least he’s had a shower. He smells like Irish Spring and a still. “You better be, anyway.”

“I clawed my way out for him,” she says, shouldering around him and walking to the middle of the room, she pauses and locks eyes with him, her chin raised, him glaring through those long, pretty eyelashes. “I laid down and took it, I did things down there a rookie like you wouldn’t have dreamed of—and here I am, babysitting you for him because he just can’t touch you now.”

He slumps forward, forehead hitting the smooth paisley wallpaper with a cool snick. She leaves him there, heads for the shower. She pauses again, in the bathroom doorway, to watch him sink back down on the couch and pick the bottle back up, and they both shake their heads.

She’s watching brown water swirl around her feet, enjoying the little needling feeling of good water pressure against the back of her neck, when the bathroom door opens and she hears the glass bottle hit the marble counter with a clunk.

“Get out,” she says in a dull, flat voice. She can see a shadowy figure sit down on the toilet lid and stretch his legs out, just on the other side of the curtain.

“Did you get to poke bad people with sticks?” he wants to know, voice low and accusing.

“It doesn’t work like that,” she says, squeezing her eyes closed under the spray. “They only let the really special ones do that.”

He sucks in a painful breath. “Aw, now I thought we had an understanding,” he says in that too-forceful, too-bright tone.

“Get the hell out of my bathroom,” she says, trying for malice and mostly just hitting with exhausted frustration.

He jerks the curtain back, snapping unsteadily to his feet and glowering down at her like that’s supposed to be intimidating. She stares back, hair plastered to her face, warm water sluicing down her back. His eyes flick down the body, back to her face, to the bottle on the counter.

“Remember what it felt like?” she asks, leaning back against the cold tiled wall. “Spiny little hands reaching into your insides, tugging here, stroking something there, ripping everything to rashers?”

He steps into the bathtub and crowds her back into the corner. His whisper-thin Hanes shirt, worn threadbare and sweat-stained to match his skintone, goes instantly transparent with the pulse of water, his jeans turn into tight, night-colored wreckage. Everything is wet here, everything is stained, and the same, and she stares back defiantly.

“Is this going to feel any different?” she asks against his mouth, fisting this body’s tiny hands in the soaked shirt, skating blunt nails up under his clothes. His fingers are clumsy with whiskey as he pulls the jeans open and down, but they’re sure and smooth when he works his way inside her.

“Sweetheart, I’m the one with the power here,” he says, peeling his shirt off and throwing it with a wet squelch against the counter. It topples the bottle, which hits the floor and shatters. She watches over his shoulder as the last of the old gold runs across the dingy tile floor.

She arches against him, gasping against his neck. She thinks about sinking her teeth in but she doesn’t care to make him come up with excuses and she doesn’t need Sam to see the marks. Indignities don’t grow back overnight topside, no new pink skin glinting in dawn light, just asking to be torn up again. Up here it’s walking around with bruises and lacerations, and she hisses when he passes a hand down her sternum, between and ignoring her breasts, thumbs over the cuts on her belly.

She reaches down between them, brushes his hand away. He swings it up, smacks it on the wall next to her head, splattering little droplets of water against their faces. She palms his cock slowly, keeps the same pace she’s got going with her tongue against his the pulse point on his neck. He’s the one scrabbling for purchase.

Something in her knee pops when he boosts her up against the wall, and then he’s inside with a grunt. Her head thumps back against the tiles with the damp squish of freshly shampooed hair, his turn to run his tongue up the column of her throat.

She reaches around him, clings with her legs and one hand, and turns the water off. The pipes squeak and the showerhead drips, drips, and the water around his feet is clear, filmy with soap but free of blood.

“My next host is going to be a big, mean piece of meat,” she gasps, squeezing a hand in the soft swell of his ass, knees wrapped around his kidneys, pulling him in closer. “I’m sick of—oh, there, right there—being tiny.”

“You’re still doing this for Sam,” he says, lips brushing her cheek with each syllable. The first and last words are muffled as his thrusts bring him too close.

“So are—yeah, right there, harder—you.”


End.


Notes: Well, there you have it, my first NC-17 since my days in the HP fandom, not to mention my first piece with wincesty tones to it. I really, really have no idea where this came from, except that yesterday I had iTunes on shuffle, Patti Smith's "Spell" came on, and suddenly drunk!Dean and Ruby were sitting in a room talking, and then they were fucking in a bathroom.

Title and cut text from Vendetta Red. I don't think they have a single song that isn't about rape, death, blood, and whatnot, but the music somehow still sounds upbeat. Go figure.

Have a super time in London, pyrebi !