InsaneJournal

[ filtered against SPN demons (crowley & ruby) ]

So. Anyone who's been here for more than a few weeks should be aware that sometimes, the people-- or beings-- that come through the wormhole aren't always friendly. Some of them are very hostile, and we seem to be in agreement that we deal with those by defending ourselves. There's also a mostly unspoken agreement that anyone who doesn't pose a direct threat to anyone's health gets a second chance or a clean slate, even from a horrific past, a chance to have a different life in a new world.

I'm not going to argue with that, and from the things I'm about to write, it's going to be obvious why I won't. It'd be hypocritical. But there is someone that's arrived through the wormhole that's made me conflicted over whether that clean slate is a good idea. I'm not going to break the agreement, but I do want to warn you. I wasn't sure if I should do this, but since two of my friends, coming at this from two different angles, have encouraged me to do it, it's what I'm going to do.

This is Ruby. She's a demon from my home world, one of the black-eyed ones you may have seen during the invasion, but that's not the real reason why I wasn't friendly to her when she arrived. I [...] met her years ago, at a really difficult time in my life. I had died, stabbed in the back in a fight after being kidnapped by a demon, and my brother had made a deal with a demon to sell his soul and bring me back to life. I had one year to find a way to break his deal and keep him from going to hell. That was when Ruby stepped in, saved my life in a fight, and told me that she could help me save him.

She didn't, though whether she actually could have, I don't know. Dean objected, and we ran out of time. He [...] died, and I was on my own. I tried making another deal to trade places with him, but no demon would take it. They probably knew that having Dean in the pit and me up topside was the best way for their plans to play out. At any rate, that was when Ruby stepped in again. Got through to me, stopped me from drinking, and put me on the revenge path to get the demon that had killed my brother, which was about the only thing that could get me moving again. Dean ended up coming back a few months later, but if not for Ruby, I probably would have been dead by then. She saved my life, she earned my trust. But... there was more to it than that.

To understand the rest of it, you have to know that I was infected with demon blood when I was a baby. It was part of the plan, the big picture that I didn't understand at the time. It gave me... abilities. Death visions, at first. Telekinesis, once, but I never managed to do it again. And Ruby's plan for me to save my brother, to kill the demon that held his contract, was to learn how to use those abilities for other purposes. I had control over demons, I could exorcise them from their possessed hosts using only my mind and willpower. It seemed like a good thing, because it saved the host's life almost every time. Exorcisms are tricky, they give the demon a lot of room to wreak havoc before they're gone, and harming the demon by other means also hurts the innocent person possessed. It was worth the headaches and the nosebleeds and the feeling of playing with fire, to finally have a real weapon that I could use to fight them.

But there was a catch, as there always is. The amount of blood I had in my veins already wasn't enough to take on the really big, bad ones. Being more powerful meant I had to have more blood, to drink it. I resisted the idea for a long time, but there was an apocalypse beginning. Lilith-- the same demon who had taken my brother-- was starting to break the seals to free Lucifer himself from hell, to create hell on Earth. The angels had appeared on Earth for the first time in ages to stop him, or at least that was what they told us. That it was my brother's responsibility, as 'Michael's sword', to stop Lilith and Lucifer. Somehow. We didn't know how, but... they just expected him to follow their orders blindly, and that's never been our style. And it was obvious to me, at least, that some of it had to do with the fact that he... probably couldn't do it. That hell had broken him, and it was my fault he'd been down there at all. I had to be strong enough to do it for him. Maybe just as importantly... I still didn't see much of a future in store for us. I gave in. I drank her blood.

It was addictive. Once I'd started, I couldn't stop. Except for when I was forced to, when my family tried to intervene, and I did get clean eventually. But at the time, the stakes were high enough and the addiction strong enough that even after going through withdrawal once, I went back. I got to the point where I could kill demons without even touching them. I made myself strong enough to kill Lilith, even though I could tell that it was changing me on the inside. Making me more demonic. But I believed-- or hoped, at least-- that I'd be stronger than the blood, or at the very least that I'd be less harm to the world than Lilith was. So I followed Ruby to the place where the last seal on Lucifer's cage was supposed to be broken, because Lilith was supposed to be doing it herself. And I killed her.

That was when I found out that Lilith was the final seal, and that killing her had broken the cage wide open. And I also found out that Ruby had known that all along. She knew that Lilith and Lucifer both intended for me to do it, to break the final seal, to be there when Lucifer rose. She apparently thought Lucifer would reward me for it, as if that would make a difference. But as it turned out, the 'reward' was that Lucifer wanted to possess me, to use me to wreak even more destruction. I don't know if she knew that part or not, I didn't ask. Dean killed her, and I helped him.

I put Lucifer back in the pit, and I went down there with him. I figured that was a fitting punishment for everything I'd done. But I'm not saying any of this to plead my own case. I'm saying all of this as a cautionary tale: don't trust her. Yes, she went years without doing the usual murdering-for-fun gig that most demons from my world are so fond of (including Crowley, for the record), and there is every possibility that you'd escape an encounter with her unscathed, at least for now. She's the type to bide her time and wait for a bigger opportunity, to build connections, "allies" that she can manipulate. She's good at it, because she's honest even as she's stringing you along. I still believe a lot of the things she said to me were true.

But all along, I had an instinct that something was wrong. I wish I'd listened to it. If you talk to her, if you feel that same instinct, listen to it. If she asks you or tries to convince you to do something for it, at the very least, please question her motives. Make sure she's not setting you up for something you'll regret, even if it's only gaining your trust in order to use you for something later. By all means, give her a chance to change and to live her life differently now that she has a second chance at it, but just don't mistake falsehoods for real changes. For my part, I'll never trust anything she says or does, ever again.

And... what she said, about us being together, well. I did sleep with her. It's really the least important part of the story, because the emotional manipulation and the addiction was the worst of it, but I can't say that it didn't affect my choices. Obviously, she was willing to do whatever it took, from the subtlest to the most obvious tricks in the book.

Just... be careful. For your own sakes, and for mine. I'll figure out how to live with her here, for as long as she's not harming anyone. It'll be easier if I know that you've all been properly warned, and knowing that I don't have any more secrets for her to spill. I really hope she does change, and doesn't decide to ruin this world the same way she tried to ruin ours. And if anyone is reading this who might consider taking her side, remember that she ended up dead

That's all. Well, it's not all, but it's enough. [...] If you've made it this far, thank you for hearing me out. And if you've skimmed to the end, my point was: never trust a demon. As Ruby herself put it, lying and manipulation are in the demon job description.

I'm coming home now.

Getting comfy yet?