Disclaimer: No money being made, purely for enjoyment of fans, etc.

GIVE AND TAKE

Chapter 8

"Ruby…"

"You're sure?" She pushed, seemingly determined that there would be no uncertainty.

"Yes." For a moment he saw her eyes cloud up with a strange mixture of emotions – regret, triumph, determination and a sort of wistful longing – but each flickered and was gone in microsecond-microsecond-microsecond to the point where he was half-convinced he'd imagined the lot of them. "I…now…please?"

In answer, Ruby slid off the bed 'her' side, nearest the motel door, and managed to unbutton and remove the bunched up skirt, seriously damaged blouse and jacket and bra, as Sam shucked his shirt and pulled his T-shirt over his head, the charm necklace of Dean's that he now always wore around his own neck almost seeming to prickle the skin of his chest underneath it hotly, which he knew was a purely psychosomatic reaction; yet another neurosis to add to his growing collection.

He stepped out of his jeans and Calvin Kleins™ just as Ruby placed her thumbs in the hems of her stocking top. "Leave them on," he ordered. "I want to take them off."

Naked apart from her long, slim legs clad in those stockings, Ruby hitched over on the bedspread, half rolling so she lay one on side facing him, resting her head on her hand, watching him, her face sombre and unreadable as Sam moved to lay down next to her, so they were facing each other. Lifting his hand, Sam brushed back her hair, then let the strands wrap around his fingers as he moved to press their bodies together and kissed her.

He took his time, making himself wait, building the anticipation of what he wanted, and concentrated on enjoying her. Ruby's helpless and wanton response to his first ever going down on her had been a surprise to him; she had given him head several times, and it was always amazing, but she had always been controlled in her actions and bizarrely for such an intimate act, slightly unapproachable, and she had never given him any indication she wanted the favour returned. But he liked enjoying a woman that way, almost as much as the actual act of penetrating her, and Ruby's overwhelming response meant it was definitely on the menu to stay.

As she quivered from the aftershocks of orgasm from him doing just that, he licked the liquid honey of her from his lips as he moved over her, entering her slowly to savour taking her; beneath him Ruby drew up her knees so her legs, now bare of those stockings, cradled his hips between her own thighs. He braced himself over her. "Ruby…"

She removed her left hand from his hair and uncurled the fingers, her eyes pure jet-black, but Sam wanted them like that, because being too caught up in the moment to control her eye-colour showed she was feeling instead of thinking. Thinking Ruby ordered him about, feeling Ruby was his to command. A small flick-knife floated out of her holdall over onto her waiting palm, and with her other hand, she picked it up, and made a tiny shallow incision – no more than a quarter-inch cut – at her left wrist, where the veins were near the surface.

"Careful…" she whispered with an underlying urgency, as if she wanted him to change his mind, but paradoxically also didn't.

Sam slid his fingers around her wrist and brought it to his mouth, licking the tiny droplets that trickled from the wound. Once again he felt like he'd swallowed a mouthful of sherbet candy, but now prepared, he concentrated on harnessing and controlling the wild euphoric surge that bubbled and seethed and thundered through every tiniest capillary of his body, channelling that energy into his own sexual delight – and Ruby's, hearing her gasp and moan in reaction. He revelled in feeling the delicious sweetness of every tiniest contraction of her inner muscles around his thick, steely shaft, every micro-ripple as he held her there at her peak of ecstasy, not yet, not yet…

The sheer bliss became too potent to be denied. She came again and again squeezing around him tight and hot as Sam surged into her over and over in hedonistic lust, thrusting and pounding and pumping, until he came close to blacking out again from the sheer pressure of his release, riding her hard like a wild stallion on a mare as Ruby screamed his name, her nails raking in glorious pain against the skin of his back as she bucked and thrust her own pelvis instinctively upwards from the sheer force of her climaxes, making her take every inch of him, spearing his cock to the hilt inside her, impaling her fiercely, until his own climax soared through him in maelstrom that left him gasping and shaking again. Never mind killing Lillith, he'd better concentrate on surviving his own orgasms first.

He moved slightly to one side so he didn't squash her, but that was his only concession; he nuzzled her hair as he got his breathing back under control, making a pleased murmur when Ruby, not objecting to his weight on top of her, or his still being in her, began to stroke his back with careful, delicate motions.

He could feel a faint 'hot' tingling, where his sweat stung the scrape marks of her nails. Fortunately they were shallow as Ruby's nails were habitually trimmed practically short. She was a hunter, not a socialite – her reaction when he'd explained 'fake nail treatments' had been an eye-roll of disgust and the opinion that 21st Century women were too pampered by half; in view of the world she'd grown up in, she definitely had a point. He raised his head to look at her with somnolent sexual satisfaction, grinning when she wrinkled her nose at him coquettishly, before relaxing against the warm, soft, snugly pillow she was beneath him, building his 'second wind'.

Ruby used her mind to increase the room's heating thermostat a little so they wouldn't notice any residual chill from being on top of the bed. They certainly weren't going to spend any time tonight in it. Sam was still inside her, and relaxed right now, but he was young and virile, he would soon quicken again and his not withdrawing from her body indicated his intentions; they wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight.

And as he used her as a living pillow, she allowed herself a minute to just experience combing his hair through her fingers, and permitted herself just for a few moments to pretend that this was real, because it was too easy to do. Because as a large man in a land of smaller men, with his shaggy sandy hair and bright blue eyes and pig-headed jaw line and his big hands with their short blunt nails and calloused and nicked fingers – workman's hands, not soft, podgy moist efforts like that lecher Piven – he was so, so much like another Sam, the Sam – a big man in a land of men who were little in more ways than one, often insolently treated by fools who equated 'big' with 'dumb'.

He'd shown no fear of her temper or trepidation over the gossip told about her and laughed at her sharp tongue, until the day he'd tumbled her in his forge, vigorous as the war stallions he shod and in the aftermath she had found herself caged in sinewy arms against a rock-solid but reassuring chest as she realised with a sense of shock that, for the first time in her life, she was actually being cuddled and in that realisation became utterly and completely his – the bass chuckle rumbling from that chest as he rubbed his chin lightly against the top of her hair had sent seismic shockwaves through her disarrayed emotions – for the first time in her life she was the nonplussed one, the one adrift who had no idea what she should say, or think, or feel or do…

"What a wondrous firebrand you are," he chuckled, stroking those long, talented fingers that had just been stroking over her, stroking within her, gently through the riotous curls of her unbound, burnished copper hair – he had had it cascading down immediately, as if knowing the way she wound it tight and flat to her head under her bonnet was another way she used to minimise attention to herself, and he was having none of it, "Hair as fiery as your passion, and exactly the colour of my smelting furnace's flame."

"Then maybe you should be ginger," she retorted waspishly, trying to regain equilibrium and control, wriggling futilely against the bands of his arms – it was like trying to move a stuck oxen cart with a feather.

"Copper," he corrected, "You are a treasure. All little and ruddy and beautiful, but with sharp edges for the unwary – you are just like my wonderful Ruby."

A raging jealousy unlike anything she had ever experienced ripped through her, alongside a howling inner anguish that he was just another feckless, faithless male. "Who's Ruby?" Not that I care she's welcome to him the silly trusting cow –

"My beautiful Ruby?" he smirked at her. "Oh she's just like you, tiny and bright and fiery. You'll really like her. Would you like to meet her?"

No she did not want to meet perfect little Ruby and if he didn't stop pointing out her diminutive stature she was going to turn him in a toad right now – in fact, she was going to turn him into toad anyway and –

He reached into his thick leather jerkin and brought out something from some inner pocket, rolling it slightly in his palm. It was very small – half the size of a garden pea at the most – and round, but it glowed brightly from the hearth fire and the bright afternoon sunlight coming into the forge. A little ruby – expertly cut and polished.

For a moment she couldn't speak for sheer relief, then her ire sparked – he had deliberately made her think - !

"Halford gave it to me in payment." He said blandly, with a knowing smirk at her flushed face.

She sniffed derisively, refusing to give him the satisfaction; she disliked Halford on principle. Not because the conceited, rotund little man was in any way evil, but because his great wealth meant he got away with his eccentricities, whilst she was followed by muttered gossip and whispers of witch – which was true – and whore – which wasn't, not least of which by that hypocrite lecher of a priest who uttered veiled denunciations of sluttish strumpets from the pulpit, because she brazenly sashayed into church every Sunday and sat right on down with the decent folks. Maybe one day she would stand up in the midst of the congregation like it said in the Good Book and tell them all about their dirty old clergyman hated her because she had refused to let him under her skirts; if they knew he was responsible for more than one swollen belly amongst the local girls, hah – not to mention that the charity he spent the alms monies on was himself, or that he guzzled the communion wine like it was water!

"…I think…my little gem for my little gem."

For a moment she was speechless, but… "I have nowhere for safekeeping. People would always be trying to steal it," she told him, unaware of the word-slip revealing her confidence in her own powers to thwart such thieves.

He grinned at her in a manner that made her instantly suspicious. "We could always follow the legend of the Pure Pearls."

"The what?"

"Halford allows me to browse his library – his ancestors travelled to many wondrous lands in the Orient and East, there are many books of times and wonders past, even books on the arts of love-craft between a man and maiden," he told her, slyly.

And he had obviously read them - enough to master her completely a few minutes ago. "What has that got to do with pearls?" she challenged, trying to be stern and repressive, and failing at both.

It didn't have any apparent effect on his good humour. "Ah, a young woman was very pretty and clever, but very poor; she had nothing except two very small, very rare black pearls handed down from generation to generation, but she knew sooner or later someone would rob her of them; so when she was forced to flee her village because of two fighting warlords, she took the pearls with her and hid them. When the group she was with was accosted by the victorious warlord, and rumours about her family's treasure had her summoned before him, she had no pearls on her or with her, and told him the pearls were magic – they were invisible to all men, and could only be seen by women who were pure of heart as well as body, and so she escaped with her treasures."

"She must have used magic, or the family lost the pearls long before," she pointed out with perverse argumentativeness, determined not to be so easily blandished. "And I have nowhere secure enough to hide it and nowhere on me that I would dare keep it either."

"You don't," he conceded gravely and then kissed her tenderly and thoroughly and for a moment she forgot all about the silly little jewel, "and neither did she, so she hid them…in her…" his kiss deepened as she felt his hand beneath her skirts, and then his finger and thumb slipped teasingly into her with something small and hard and cool, and then she was beneath him and he was thrusting authoritatively with no teasing into her with something large and hard and hot and oh he used his huge, fabulous sex to work that tiny stone back and forth within her so her world shattered into a billion pieces of pure, soaring bliss …

And as Sam stirred against her and within her, she steeled herself and hardened her heart against her yearning folly, because this was just too hard to do. Because with his principles and his clinging to 'right' and 'wrong' instead surrendering to the false virtue of 'values' and his fierce determination to help people and fight against things that hurt innocents, he was he was so, so much like another Sam, the Sam – and she simply could not endure the pain again. She had been consumed by despair when she knew he had learned she was a witch, hurriedly packing her essential belongings in the sealskin bundle, a prized payment from a grateful client, only to look up to find him standing in her doorway, his face not angry or scornful, but still terrifyingly stern and sombre…

"…my little ruby, I don't revile you, and I won't drag you to be burned…I don't hate you or condemn you, and I'm not angry with you…"

Such relief, such hope she almost collapsed with dizziness from the rush of it –

"…what I am is disappointed in you."

…those three little words…that had ripped her living heart out of her chest.

"…you are so gifted, you have so much wit and bravery and determination. Yet you throw it away like pearls before swine at the cloven hooves of some strutting demon who doesn't even know or care you exist other than as one of myriads of pawns. I cannot control you, or decide for you what to do. I am going to the forge. You know where to find me…"

Disappointed in you…and she had hesitated, stopped by her stupid, stupid pride and chained by her stupid, stupid fears that maybe he hadn't meant it? Maybe he was only luring her into town to be beaten and whipped, or to be driven out with cudgels and pitchforks. Maybe he would still cast her aside because she was in her third decade and his seed had still put no child in her belly and when her face wrinkled and her copper locks went grey and her breasts sagged and weren't pert…

And she had lost everything. She consciously unclenched her jaw, shoving it all back, deep inside, down and down. Yellow-eyed Azazel, her demon master, not a monstrous fool but a foolish monster, who had laughed at her anguish and dismissed her loss as nothing. Like all tyrants he viewed all other beings as either tools to be used or obstacles to be destroyed, so completely egocentric that he was incapable of comprehending that his grand scheme was as nothing to her as she was nothing to him, and giggling Lillith, oblivious in her Lucifer-fangirl babbling that she had let slip Ruby's means of escape, of real, actual freedom, of finally being safe, so consumed with her own cleverness.

Nor was this Sam free of blame. She had never lied, because she had never had to. She had always made it clear her sole aim and only goal was Lillith's death, and neither he nor his brother had ever cared enough to push, to necessitate her using one of her carefully constructed and 'verifiable' explanations. Over the last year both had been happy to use her and discard – or in Dean's case – destroy her as disposable; now Sam was happy to have the sex, but even at this point wasn't bothered enough to press her further. Neither had ever showed any concern about the host, poor brave Kat; Ruby had been unprepared for when Lillith had attacked her and driven Ruby out, possessing and killing her to make it 'look good' – for that grief alone Ruby would never forgive Lillith.

I told Azazel, I could not bear my beloved to be disappointed in me, and he didn't take me seriously. I told Lillith I wasn't cut out to be a minion, and she didn't take me seriously. I told you, Sam, I only care about killing Lillith and you don't take me seriously enough to stop playing too close to the big bonfire…

And the simple truth was she had no choice – she had come too far, worked too long. She would only be free once Lillith was dead, and Sam had to be the instrument of that. She genuinely regretted Dean's death – despite the danger he posed as the only creature, human or demon, who had ever seemed to recognise even if only instinctually, that she was working to her agenda and nobody else's. If he had been able to break the deal, Sam wouldn't be left alone, like he would be after…

No choice. Dean's killing of Azazel had opened up an opportunity she could not let slip through her fingers with the chance to also remove Lillith. Instigating sex with Sam was a calculated risk, but one that should protect her in the future now he had discovered how good her blood made him feel. The placebo effect would break down his self-imposed mental blocks, but once he grew powerful enough to kill her kind with his mind – when he killed Lillith and her 'betrayal' was revealed, the sexual tie should be enough to make him so enraged he lacked the mental control to kill her mentally and would resort to the dagger she'd given him – that she'd forged for that purpose – to 'end' her life in an undeniable way…

She responded to his kiss with a fervour that surprised him but which he reciprocated eagerly, his hands roaming her body as he took her to the heights of pleasure once more, and she held nothing back for his satisfaction, because I'm sorry, Sam. If there were any other way than for Lucifer to have to rise, for me to be able to give you back Dean, I would…but if I lose you too, I couldn't endure it, because I care more about you than I can afford to, because he was disappointed in me, and I won't be that disappointment for a moment longer than I have to…I'm sorry the plan is going to hurt you, the real plan, my plan, not what Lillith thinks is the plan, and I'm sorry that even if you survive what's coming, you'll spend your life alone, without Dean. I'm sorry, but just like you, I'm not sorry enough to care enough to stop…

© 2009 The Cat's Whiskers

Author's Note: This story is relevant to my story Having A Ball, but can be read as a standalone story. This story Give and Take is also a 'prequel' to my story The Rolling Stones, which will be posted shortly. The Rolling Stones takes place post-Season 4 and is not tied in to Having a Ball, which is set first half of Season 4 (pre-Sex and Violence).

SEASON FOUR SPOILER ALERT! SEASON 4 SPOILER ALERT!

I hope people find a bit of 'where Ruby's coming from' adds to the story. I know some fans liked Katie Cassidy's Ruby over Genevieve Cortese's Ruby and vice versa, and I hope my back story is realistic enough that both could 'play it' believably.

For me personally, Ruby over Seasons 3-4 was too much like Dean – too smart, resourceful, cunning and adaptable – to be one of Lucifer's vapid fangirl 'sheep' or Lillith's unquestioningly obedient patsy.

Her previous actions and attitude seemed inconsistent with Ruby going all soppy and girlie after Sam broke the final seal and Lillith was killed. I couldn't help but remember that Ruby had given Sam the special knife in the first place, or that she had never really had to lie to the Winchester brothers about her aim (kill Lillith) because they hadn't cared enough to demand real answers.

She knew Dean was breaking in a) with murderous intent and b) with the knife; she didn't run even though she knew Sam was devastated and enraged by her betrayal and tricking him into breaking the final seal. She even threw away her best leverage by admitting to Sam, as Dean was B&E, that her blood was physically little more than a placebo and his powers had always been his to command if only he had believed in himself to make them work. Dean was still under the impression Sam was addicted to her blood, and he would never have risked Sam's life by killing Ruby no matter the provocation if she had claimed instead that Sam would die if he went through a forced, fast withdrawal.

That scene seemed to me that either Ruby had taken stupid pills, or was deliberately letting Dean get to her, literally – with Azazel and Alistair dead, (some of) the angels just as corrupt as the downstairs contingent and the fact that Lillith was going to predecease her, what better time for Ruby to bring a plan to escape hell and her own servitude to fruition? What more impeccable audience to fake your own death in front of than Sam the super-psychic and Lucifer himself, especially if you know that 'World War III' is inevitable and you want no part of it – I also remembered that it was Ruby who told Sam that when it came to Godzilla (angels) versus Mothra (demons) the best thing was to get out of the way.