They had swapped places. Sam was the audience, Ruby was the player. There were no looks of encouragement, no subtle little smirks. He just watched quietly, concealing all emotion as she sliced into the flesh of the monster ahead. He felt a little numb on the inside. Colder than usual. The slicing and dicing was hardly something that he felt all fine and dandy about, but Sam didn't do anything to stop her. He merely stood by quietly and watched. Nothing more. He sometimes forgot what she was capable of, he realized. That she was still a demon. He often joked and pointed that out to her, using it as defenses and such, but how long had it been since he really viewed her as one of the things that had crawled straight out of the pit? It was hard to, now that he knew her. Sometimes he really did forget. This was a bit of a memory refresher. He partially wondered how long it would last until he began to forget again.
Ruby stepped back. Sam met her gaze for a moment, if only to prove himself to her. He wasn't going to scare that easily. He might have been shaken, but it would take more to make him pry her off of that demon. Right now? He wasn't exactly concerned about the quivering heap in the corner anyway. He was a waste. Stupid waste, sitting around, waiting for someone to get rid of him. Sam tore his eyes away from Ruby and slowly walked over to the wall. That someone was him.
Grabbing the demon by the throat with one hand, he forced him to look at him square in the eyes. Sam was surprised to find that the demon was shaking in his grasp. He would have cared before, probably. Tonight whatever facility of concern that Sam held for others had been closed. This was about him. Him and control. Sam couldn't stop people from dying, the bad guys from coming, his friends and family from being yanked away. This place kept completely and totally fucking him over and he needed something - no, anything - that would make him feel like he wasn't just a useless lump of space.
The demon was scared of him. He stared at him in the eyes and saw nothing but fear pouring back out, begging for an escape. He should have known then that it was wrong. That this demon didn't deserve what he was dishing. Yet even as Sam hit him repeatedly, released his frustrations through physical action, Sam didn't even think about the fact that this demon was practically an innocent. He didn't think about anything but the pain he could cause and how wonderful it was that he was inflicting it upon a creature that could have easily torn him apart not too long ago. It was power. He had power.
The body toppled to the ground, head spinning onto the pavement a few feet away. The demon was missing an arm too, oddly. There was a lot of blood spilling onto the ground, between the two missing limbs. Blood. That was where his strength came from. The blood running through his veins, begging for more attention. Blood was power. He stared at the pool of dark liquid thoughtfully. That unsettling level of curiosity was back again.