Ruby was awake, of course; as a demon, she didn't sleep. Sam did, though, and normally she might have been in the mansion with him, but with the way magic was acting up, she'd decided to make herself scarce tonight. She'd read enough on the magical journals to know that people were being turned back to humans, and not for long. Midnight to midnight.
Under other circumstances, she might have wanted to be near Sam when she became human. It was bound to be a disconcerting experience, if it affected her at all, and he would probably be able to help her through it. Now, though, the idea of being human around him made her feel vulnerable. Humans were much more easily killed, not that Sam would have any trouble killing her as a demon if he chose to do so.
But maybe more than that, she wasn't entirely sure she trusted her human self around him. Being human meant having a conscience again, a soul. Not that she'd been much for guilt even when she'd been human, of course, otherwise she probably wouldn't have become a demon in the first place-- but still, it was an unpredictable variable that she didn't much like. Sam's humanity had been a variable that she hadn't predicted properly, and her own? Well, she had no idea what would happen if she got that back. It was safer to plan ahead and not be anywhere near him around midnight, when the magic seemed to start, until she was sure that the danger had passed.
And of course, the magic didn't pass her by, because that wasn't how her luck worked. She felt it when it began: suddenly, she was fully a part of the body she was in, not just possessing it. Her heart was still beating-- thank everything for that, because she'd been half afraid that being turned human would mean turning back into a comatose, braindead girl, and then she'd just start rotting away-- and her lungs were pulling in air. And there-- that was the flood of emotion she'd been expecting, as her human conscience attempted to process everything that had happened to her.
She was cold, too, and hungry. That part was expected, at least. She'd brought human food, and snagged a blanket from one of the few empty rooms (she'd have taken Sam's, only he'd have found that suspect) just in case she had to deal with the temperature. She didn't know how this was going to work, but at least she could prepare for what problems she could foresee. There were some problems of the human condition that even a demon could predict, and others that they couldn't.
For example, she hadn't been able to predict how the guilt would feel. It seemed she had even more of a conscience now than she had when she'd originally been alive, a fact which was probably Sam's fault. She felt anger towards him, for having been her downfall, and even more unexpectedly, a fair amount of sentiment that had nothing to do with his use for her or the mutual back-stabbing situation they'd found themselves in. He was everything she wasn't. She'd chosen power to survive; he'd chosen it out of a sense of self-sacrifice, for the greater good. Even her loyalties to Lucifer were selfish; she wanted to be the angel's consort, his most loyal and most trusted. She wanted to be to him what she had been to Sam. Except that Sam was different.
Unexpectedly, she felt something she hadn't felt in so long that she almost didn't recognize the sensation-- her eyes were stinging, and her cheeks were wet. She was crying.
Exactly why, she didn't know. But tears spilled out of her, sobs wracking her body until she was very nearly sick with it. When she finally calmed down, she found herself curled up pitifully in the blanket she'd brought, and pulled it over her head as if to hide from the world. She tasted salt, which wasn't a flavor she was used to, given its ability to burn her to the core with its simple purity. Oh god, she'd turned herself into something so evil and cruel-- she'd just wanted to live, but she'd sacrificed everything that mattered about human life, so was it really living? It was just existence. A dark, cold, bloody existence.
Her stomach heaved at the thought of all the souls and bodies she'd carved into since her death, and she had to claw her way out of the blanket to avoid being sick all over it. There wasn't much in her stomach-- she hadn't even eaten fries for about a week, and she never bothered even drinking water-- but her stomach kept heaving even when nothing was coming out any longer. When it finally stopped, she weakly pushed herself to the side, to lean against a tree.
She sat in that position for a long while, she didn't know exactly how long, before her mind finally started working again, trying to process her new situation. Being human wouldn't last long; if the others' experiences could predict her own, it would only be twenty-four hours. Then she would be back to normal, back to not feeling any of this. It felt so awful that she was almost looking forward to that, but a part of her was terrified. Somewhere along the way, whether it was simply because she'd learned from her mistakes or because she'd learned from Sam, she'd acquired enough humanity to feel as though it would be better to die for good than go back to that. And she understood, finally, why Sam would not want what Lucifer could offer to him. In some cases, death was better than the alternative, at least for humans.
But the idea of death was still terrifying. Not quite so bad as it had once been, when it had been death by rats, by fever and gangrene and painful, swollen glands. All things considered, her death at Dean's hands would be far cleaner. And she knew for a fact that demons who died by her knife didn't reappear, even in hell. She didn't know where they went, but hopefully they simply ceased to exist. But dying right now wouldn't help anything-- if she died as a human, she would probably just go straight back down to hell. She deserved that, probably, but she'd just become even worse, wreak even more havoc. God, she just wanted it to be over already.
So it was better the way it had turned out, with the Winchesters ending her life. Except she'd started the apocalypse in the process, and left Sam to fight a war against the devil that wanted to possess him.
"Come on, Ruby," she said allowed, voice coming out raspy and barely audible. "Think."
Would Sam be angry enough to kill her, either now or as a demon, if she confessed everything? Would he be able to change anything, if he had all the information, or would it happen the same way? Either way, she was going to die, so it was the latter that probably mattered the most. There was no question that she had to tell him something; even as a demon, she'd been planning to do that, but once she lost her humanity again, there would be no telling when she'd actually do it or whether she even would. But she didn't want to risk him killing her in a fit of rage, and ending up in hell again. So she would have to keep her distance until the time was right, because she wasn't likely to survive if he came after her with intent to kill.
Trying to compose herself, she pulled the blanket close around her shoulders and reached for her journal. Now she just had to figure out what the hell to write.