A/N: First up - this is the sequel/continuation of ANGELFACE, so if you want to know more about the origin story I suggest you read that first. This story can be read as a stand-alone, though some small references may not make as much sense.

This is an Alternate Universe, a 'darkfic', and a minefield of shoddy psychological torture. I hold no degrees, I just think way too much about how to crack people's heads open.

The story is inspired indirectly by toasters.

It's obscenely easy to kidnap Ruby Fields (and what the hell kind of a dumb, sinfully appropriate sort of name is that anyway?). They rented a house in a run down neighbourhood that wouldn't care much about the goings on of three men who dressed casual and appeared to have nothing of value, carefully setting it up 'her' room so that blankets lined the walls three deep to block out sound from the inside. Then the Winchesters didn't leave the house for three days, holing up with psychology textbooks and sheets of paper with scribbled-out ideas.

Castiel took that time to clean up the house, leaving to run essential errands and to slowly stock up on things that would be suspicious if bought in large quantities. When Dean instructed him to come back with twenty cans of shredded tomato and a dozen bottles of red wine, he just rolled his eyes and blandly told the surprised girl at the cash register that it was none of her business why he needed so much of each.

Eventually the brothers had settled on a course of action and that was when the stalking began. The three of them took overlapping shifts, each of them spending a third of the day watching her or her house. Castiel took from midnight to nine in the morning, which meant he saw Sam - who took the 'morning' shift - for only a few hours each day. The hour overlapping between Dean's shift and his was often spent in the back seat of the impala, paying only vague attention to what went on in the house and giving each other barely-there bruises that had faded by the time it was midnight again.

"How many times have you done this before?" Cas asks, straddling Dean's thighs in the back seat of the impala.

"What? Fucked you? Fucked a man?"

"Kidnapped people."

"Christ, I dunno..." Dean shrugs. "Four, five times...?"

"That's all."

"Yeah. We don't do the whole kidnapping thing too often, Cas." Dean grunts, shifting his grip on the other man's hips. "Why are we talking about this, angelface? We've only got an hour here."

"I want to know." Castiel leans back to look at his green-eyed lover, a curious tilt to his head. "Tell me what happened."

Seeing the stubborn tilt to the other man's chin, Dean sighs and slumps back against the back seat. "First time was when Sam was eighteen. We picked up a girl named Cassie on the road. She was a hitchhiker and we were bored, so we kinda just drove past where she wanted to go and that was that. She was, uh... quick."

"You killed her."

"Yeah... Then there was this Jess chick. Sam thought she was pretty, so we tailed her and did the whole thing proper. Wore her down a bit until she thought if she just played along for a while we'd let her go. She didn't last, Cas."

"And then?"

"Shit, angelface, I dunno. Some other girl. Brown hair, pretty eyes. We took her interstate and had to dump her when she tried to get away at a rest stop. Then," Dean finishes, "there was you."

"I am your only success story," Castiel smiles slightly, leaning in to press his lips against Dean's. His hands press against Dean's shoulders and the murderer smiles, thinking about the truth of that statement. It was proof of his success right there, that Cas could be sitting on his lap, talking about girls he's killed while stalking a young woman who would soon become number five. It was proof enough that Cas was even just sitting on his lap.

"Success with a fucking razor," Dean chuckles, "I don't even know what we did right with you."

Cas doesn't seem to have an answer for that and instead the last half hour before Dean has to leave is spent in a more productive means than just talking.

Ruby's routine is quickly mapped out between the three of them. She has a few deviations, but for the most part keeps to the same places. They figure she's most vulnerable in the half hour between when she gets home and when her roommate finishes work. On Wednesdays, they decide, when her closest neighbours - the ones who aren't stoners - go out to an early dinner with their in laws.

Cas elects to stay at the house and make the final preparations for Ruby's stay. The brothers are better at actually keeping people alive anyway, and he suspects her struggles would make him want to slice her throat open. Since that's not the objective, he decides it's better that he doesn't come along.

Ruby fights like a natural scrapper, on the defensive from the moment she saw that Sam had her cornered in her own hallway. She has her mouth open to scream when Dean pounces from where he'd been hiding in the bathroom, quickly wrapping his arms around her and pinning her hands to her sides. She kicks out when Sam approaches, one of her feet actually hitting his thigh, just a bit to the left of where she'd been aiming.

Sam looks down at himself, then back up at her. He grins. She screams, but one of his big hands is covering her mouth before she can even get the sound out. She thrashes in Dean's grip, shaking her head from side to side, kicking her legs, hands searching for places to scratch or pinch. Sam almost breaks the needle as it pushes into her arm where her straining muscles have made her veins easier to see.

She fights the drugs too, struggling to keep her eyes open. Eventually she droops, eyelids mostly closed, body limp. The brothers waste no time in wrapping her up in rope and duct tape, then bundle her into the car.

"Dude, you picked a fighty one," Dean says, casually driving away from the now empty house.

"This might work," Sam muses. "If she can learn to trust us, it might work."

"Or you could just do what I suggested and find a demon to stick in her."

"Dean, I'm not going to pin everything on happening to find a demon with some kind of kinky fetish."

"Your loss, Sammy. This way's going to take longer."

Privately, Sam thinks this way might be better.

They strap her into the chair while she's still unconscious, feet tied to the legs so she can't go anywhere, hands strapped to the armrests. They'd picked a hard-backed wooden chair so it would be difficult to sleep and hammered in a couple of nails through the back so that they'd poke her if she got too relaxed.

The only feature in the otherwise soundproof room was the TV. A huge flat screen that they'd put on top of a plain black box. An extension cord connected it to a DVD player outside the room, and a huge stack of disks sat innocently beside it. They were going to try something new this time.

Ruby was undressed, stripped down to nothing but her underwear. She was gagged, but only with a soft gag that would hinder, but not completely eliminate, her ability to make noise. The point of the gag was so she couldn't annoy them with complaints, the padded walls would stop the neighbours from noticing what was going on. The window had been blacked out. The light would never be switched on.

Sam turned the TV on and shut the door to the room. He put a DVD into the player and flicked the switch. When Ruby came to it would be to an otherwise pitch black soundproof room and a massive TV playing reruns of old fashioned heavy-on-violence cartoons.

The process would be slow, he knew, but if it worked... If it worked at all, it would just be perfect.

They rig their own schedules so that there's always someone home and watchful, attentive to Ruby's more human needs. They've decided she'll be pampered - comparatively - with regular bathroom breaks and enough food and water to sate hunger, if not desire for taste.

The bathroom across the hall is specifically broken in to see to her needs - the window barred and boarded, all sharp objects removed. Ruby is a fighter, but no match for any of them. She has a desperate ferocity, but no discipline, no real drive behind the thrash.

In those first few days Sam had the most patience for her, tolerating her ineffective kicking, her screaming in the bathroom when she succeeded in prising the gag off despite hard leather and a padlock at the back of her head. Of course, it helped that he could hold her down with his mind, could dampen the air around her limbs until it felt as if she were fighting with lead weights tied to her wrists and ankles.

"I think we should drug her food," Castiel suggested drily, eyeing the plain oatmeal mash that he was preparing. Blue eyes slowly moved from the pan to the cupboard where they kept the first aid kit, contemplating stolen morphine with a dangerous gleam. He was getting sick of hearing the thumps and muffled screams that came like clockwork every time any of them got near Ruby's room.

Dean had been debating between downing half a bottle of Jack and passing out on the sofa so he didn't have to listen, or going in and choking the life out of the girl. He shook his head, hating the pounding behind his eyes. "I'm starting to think this was a bad idea," he admits. It had only been a couple of days, yes, and she hadn't yet had the time to settle down... but Jesus Christ did she have a set of lungs on her.

"Morphine," Cas suggests, just a little hopefully.

"Yes please," Dean replies, rubbing his eyes.

"No morphine," Sam interrupts, walking straight past both of them and to the huge old fridge they'd salvaged from a garage sale. He pulled out a beer and twisted the cap off in his hand. "I need you lucid, Dean."

"For the girl," Castiel explains, even if he was sure that wasn't what Dean had meant with the 'yes, please'.

For a moment it looks as if Sam is struggling with the idea. He gives in with a sigh, leaning against the side of the fridge. "Fine," he agrees, "start dosing her with her food. But... just until she's calmed down. It's not a good idea to have a morphine addict on our hands."

They relish a scream-free night, and ruin it all in the early hours of the morning by dumping her into a bathtub full of what looks like blood and viscera. It's actually not, because filling a bathtub full of blood and guts would be a bit excessive, but she doesn't know that.

Ruby is doped up just enough to not really understand the difference between the reality of a tub full of skinned tomatoes and red wine and the idea of a tub full of blood and gore. She screams so loudly that the next morning Dean is making joking excuses to the neighbours about that horror movie marathon and Castiel hands Sam a mop and a bucket, telling him without any words whatsoever that he is not responsible for scraping tomato-crud from the bathroom walls.

Objects appear and disappear from the room as time goes on. A mallet lies innocently against the wall for a few days before disappearing again, a saw makes a brief appearance, a box labeled 'TNT' (that absolutely does not contain dynamite). A shotgun gets perched above the TV for a weekend of cowboy shoot-'em-up cartoons.

"Is there some kind of point to this?" Dean hisses as they carefully screw the bracket for the gun into the wall above the TV, quieter than mice while Ruby sleeps in her chair in a drugged-out stupor.

"The idea is to get her used to having weapons around," Sam explains, "to let her mind connect the images on screen to things in real life. Having her watch cartoons all day doesn't do anything unless she starts blurring the line between reality and what she watches."

"Christ, Sammy. Do you just absorb the textbooks through some kind of osmosis? Where do you get this crap?"

"Mostly?" They hang the shotgun on the wall and tiptoe out again. "From you. I just make it sound better."

They start instigating rewards for proper behaviour. Every time Ruby gets caught up in one of the cartoons and laughs at the explosions, she gets rewarded. If she gets a cow's heart tossed into her lap and doesn't scream, she gets candy.

"Candy." Castiel repeats, giving both Winchesters a look they've come to recognise as code for 'are you a complete dumbass?' He looks down at the shopping list he's just been handed, a long line of childish sweets that all come in brightly coloured wrappings. "Candy," he says again. And sighs. "And meat parts."

"So we're going for something a bit childish this time," Sam says, the puppydog look on his face. It makes him look simultaneously younger and much more trustworthy, like a virginal college boy who still sings in his local Christian choir.

"Meat. Parts."

"C'mon, Cas," Dean wheedles, rocking a bad-boy grin and a much different kind of 'innocence'. "It's not like you have to clean it up..."

Childish and bizarre. That's how it goes. If organs from the butcher's shop get thrown into her lap during the climax of a show and she laughs, the rewards only escalate.

"Did you see this?" Dean asks, dropping a slightly crumpled flier into Sam's lap. "It was hanging up at the post office. I thought you'd get a kick out of it."

"Ruby Fields, missing," Sam reads aloud, paraphrasing a little, "disappeared three months ago. If you have any information, please contact her parents Martha and Grady." The flier is photocopied, but the original is obviously hand-written. There's a black and white photo of Ruby's face right in the centre.

"There you go," Dean says, dropping down onto the couch beside his brother. "Now it's almost like you've met your in-laws."

"Martha and Grady." Sam raises his eyebrows, then crumples the piece of paper. "Nice to meet you."

When they pull the same trick as before and dump her into a vat of unidentified red goo, she whoops with glee and throws some of it with unerring aim right into Sam's face, then sits in the tub giggling as he gapes in surprise. It's about then that they decide she can stand to be untied and maybe given a little more freedom around the house.

Ruby moves around the room cautiously at first, touching the squishy, blanketted walls. She picks up the sledgehammer sitting by the TV, holds it in her hands a moment, then sets it down again. She pauses in front of the blacked-out window, and finally turns to the door. It's open a crack, and she tiptoes over in her bare feet to peer through the gap.

Nothing but the hallway greets her and Ruby carefully pushes open the door and steps into the hall. A bright blue arrow has been hastily spray painted onto the wooden floor. Curious, she follows it down to an open space that she guesses must be the living room. Everything there is ratty and old, obviously bought from second hand stores. The few exceptions stick out like neon lights.

Ruby zeroes in on the cake from across the room, her mouth instantly watering at the sight and smell of what is obviously freshly baked and heavily iced chocolate cake. She's half way across the room to the table before she notices that she's not actually the only person there and that behind the cake, on the opposite side of the table, are the three men who've been the basis of her routine for an indeterminable amount of time.

"We thought you'd like something different," the youngest, and tallest, says, getting up out of his chair. "For a change. My name's Sam, this is my brother Dean, and our... friend. Castiel."

"I'm Ruby," she replies, crossing her arms over her chest. She remembers that the last time she saw this guy he was still blinking in surprise from the squishy red stuff she'd thrown at him and relaxes just a little. "But I think you already know that."

"We do," Sam confirms, nodding. "Do you like chocolate cake, Ruby?"

"Yeah..."

"Then sit down, chickadee," Dean says, kicking a chair out and offering her a charming smile. "We're celebrating."

Ruby takes the seat carefully, all too aware that she's dressed in nothing but tiny little pajama shorts and a tank top and that these men are fully dressed. A huge piece of chocolate cake is put on a plate in front of her and she loosens up a little from where she'd started to tense. Cake is good. Cake is something she can get behind.

"What are you celebrating?" she asks, swiping off a little of the icing with a finger and licking it. The icing is rich, more like fudge than anything else. Whoever these freaks really are, they have good taste in cake.

"You," Sam replies, and smiles at her.

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. Your new-found freedom. See, Ruby, we're letting you out of the room."

"No more cartoons?" Ruby asks, actually a bit dismayed to think that she wont get to find out what happened to the red rabbit.

"No," Sam is quick to assure her, "you can still watch the cartoons if you want. But now you can sleep in a real bed and get up whenever you feel like it."

"Pampered." The single word comes from the blue eyed man, who looks neither happy nor interested. Only when she catches his eye he doesn't looked bored at all. "Eat your cake."

"Eat yours," Ruby replies. She picks up the cake, takes a huge bite, then pokes her tongue out at him.