Who Do You Think You're Fooling? [Supernatural, Anna/Ruby, PG-13]

[sophiap.livejournal.com]

Title: Who Do You Think You're Fooling?
Author: sophiap
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None. Just some not-very-explicit sensuality.
Word Count: c. 1,500
Summary: An angel and a demon walk out of a bar...
A/N: For the prompt Supernatural, Anna/Ruby, healing sex - I'll make you pure again. Set during the first part of ep. 4.21 (When the Levee Breaks).


Anna recognized her at once, and not just by appearance. The demon's aura was familiar to her. Familiar, and almost pleasant simply for being familiar.

Had she still been among the unfallen, she would have done her duty and eradicated the demon from existence. No hesitation. No questions.

But Anna was no longer one of the angelic host. Nor was she one of the Fallen. Her grace had been returned to her, but her will had not been taken away.

So what did that make her? Not human. Not angel. Not fallen. Falling, maybe.

Or maybe she was rising. Who knew?

And who knew why she did what she did next. It was nothing but impulse that followed that flicker of dark, familiar energy and found herself in a bar.

She veiled herself at first, and contented herself with watching the demon. Her hand curled, instinctively mustering the energy it would take to drive Ruby out of the body she was wearing.

She watched Ruby page through a magazine and work her way methodically through a basket of fries. Ever few minutes, she picked up her cell phone and auto-dialed someone. Each time, Anna heard the rings and a snippet of This is Sam. Leave a-- before Ruby snapped the phone shut again.

It seemed so ordinary. It seemed like something Anna would have done, once upon a time, when she was waiting for a call that seemed like it would never come.

And so, she let impulse lead her again. She stood behind Ruby and unveiled herself. Ruby knew at once she was there; Anna saw the borrowed shoulders tense.

"Hey." Ruby didn't turn all the way around. She just kept looking warily over her shoulder.

"Hey right back at you," Anna said. She felt tentative in a way she hadn't since regaining her Grace.

"Wondered what happened to you after you got your groove back." Ruby slowly shifted, turning the stool so she was facing Anna. She checked Anna out from tip to toe all while remaining on guard. "I see you kept the same look. Looks good on you, but you might want to tone down the red a bit."

Anna shrugged. "You know what they say. Old habits die hard."

Ruby grinned and reached back to grab a fry. "I think it comes with the humanity thing."

"You were human once." It was not a question. Some demons were, and it was sometimes possible to tell which.

"So were you. For a while, anyway."

Anna looked down at her hands. They were familiar to her. She had even re-created the scar on the side of her thumb from where a knife had slipped when she was cutting a bagel.

She wondered why she had dug down to that level of detail. She could have looked like any one or any thing when she took on corporeal form again.

Just who did she think she was fooling?

"So you got your Grace back and you get to keep your body, too. Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me."

Anna sat down next to Ruby, ignoring the other woman's--the demon's--suspicious look. "I didn't have a chance to thank you. For your help. This--" she looked at her hands, and the carefully reconstructed scars. "This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't--"

"Hey, all I had to do was have Alistair work me over with a knife for a couple of hours." She popped another fry. "No big."

"I'm sorry."

Ruby turned back to her magazine. "Whatever."

It was a dismissal, but Anna ignored it. She thought she knew what impulse had brought her here. Curiosity. She wanted to know why a demon would have risked its existence and its sanity to help an angel re-ascend.

"The least I could do is buy you a drink," Anna said.

Ruby looked at her, wide-eyed. "Uh, sure?"

Anna ordered two shots of Crown and slid one over to Ruby. She raised her shot glass.

"To being human," she said.

After a second, Ruby smiled and lifted her glass and clinked it against Anna's.

* * *

Anna fell because she had wanted to know what it was like to be human. She had longed to feel. Longed to love. Longed to be loved. Not the sort of chill, all-consuming love that surrounded the angels at all time, but a love she could hold close. A love that warmed rather than burned.

When she regained her Grace, all she could think about was regaining that humanity. And regained it she had, brokering a deal with powerful beings who no longer acknowledged the Creator's dominion.

Ruby, though...

Ruby was a demon. Just sitting next to her made Anna want to lash out with holy fire that would turn this bar into cinders.

But Ruby also enjoyed eating. She looked at pictures in a magazine and pictured herself wearing that dress or lying on this beach. Then there was the phone, and the way irritation gave way to fear more and more as Ruby kept checking to see if she had missed a call.

Perhaps, just as an angel might fall in order to become human, a demon might rise to do the same.

After their third round of drinks, Anna reached out and took Ruby's hand. They both flinched instinctively at the touch, but Ruby did not pull away and Anna did not let go.

"They're about to close up. Come on. Let's go outside."

Ruby cocked her head, studying her. Her expression was difficult to read at first, but then those lush lips bent into a faint smile. It seemed so natural it was hard to remember that she was looking at borrowed flesh. But Ruby's hand felt warm in her own and Anna put memory aside as irrelevant.

They wound up behind the bar, just outside the pool of light cast by the bulb over the service entrance.

"You sure you should be doing this?" Ruby asked. She sounded like she was joking, but Anna suspected it was only bravado.

"No," Anna said. "But I want to."

Anna Milton had once been the kind of girl who would have hesitated to kiss another girl. As she-who-had-been-Hanael, the one with dominion over passion and pleasure, the bodies they wore made no difference. It was human. It was good. It felt natural for Ruby's arms to circle 'round her back and pull her close. It seemed right for her hand to cup the back of Ruby's head as she parted her lips and invited Ruby to do the same.

The only thing that gave her pause was making contact with the darkness that was Ruby. In return, she could feel Ruby quail back from the light. Back, and up, foul smoke streaming up hesitant and afraid from the host body. Anna reached out with herself, searing but gentle blue light.

Their bodies collapsed against each other. Anna had enough control to catch Ruby and break her fall, settling them down so that Anna sat with Ruby curled up in her lap. Above the still, vacant forms light and dark twined around each other in an embrace far more intimate than anything involving bodies.

But it was too much. The darkness started to quiver and fade, and so the light guided it back down, pushing it gently. Ruby all but fled into her body as Anna settled back down into hers.

Ruby tensed, but Anna stroked her hair and she relaxed. Anna tipped her head up and kissed her again, gently, slowly, reminding herself and reminding Ruby of what it meant to be human.

We who have fallen can rise again, Anna told herself. She didn't dare say this to Ruby. All she could do was hope.

Hope that she wasn't fooling herself.

When Ruby's phone rang, Anna knew at once what had happened.

Ruby scrambled out of Anna's lap and dug into her pocket for the phone. Anna reached out for her hand one more time, and squeezed gently.

It was one last reminder of what they could both aspire to.

"Hurry," Anna said. She didn't say anything more.

Ruby just gave her a half smile and hurried off, flipping open her phone and trying to get a word in edgewise through Sam's panic.

For a moment, the old instinct raised its head. A demon was fleeing; an angel should give chase.

But Anna had once been human, and so had Ruby. She stayed where she was, running a finger over and over her old (new) scar and watching as the woman who had once helped her raced off to help someone else.

And if the old voice, the one who knew what demons were, told her she was fooling herself, well...

Maybe she was.

But she still wouldn't have done anything differently.

She had done the human thing, after all.

Comments

[incandescens]

This is extremely touching, and works nicely for both of them. Anna's search for some sort of validation is . . . very human.

[sophiap.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much!

[emerald-embers.livejournal.com]

Oh, lovely - seeing the difference between Anna-as-a-human and Anna-as-an-angel laid out as simply and plainly as it is here is quite fabulous. Great work :).