Handfasting? Ruby wanted to handfast with him? Being who he was, Sam wasn't exactly all too experienced with the ceremony in itself. Yeah, he wasn't experienced with traditional marriages either, but at least he had a good idea on what that was in comparison. Though that was Ruby just expressing herself; it wasn't like she had flat out said that she wanted to drag him off and do something like that on the spot. It was just...what? A possibility for the future? They couldn't get married, but maybe they could do something, as Ruby had said, 'witchy'? "Oh. I'd never...huh. Handfasting." Sam looked at Ruby, then shook his head in amusement. He didn't need to get all weird about it, did he? It was just talk. He had been curious and he got his answer. "Thanks for clarifying." She was trying. With Dean. Sam knew that she was. Ruby wasn't exactly progressing in the way that Sam would have preferred for her to, but she certainly wasn't going out of her way to try and kill him or anything and that was a definite improvement in his eyes. He didn't want them to pick at each other anymore and he would have been pleased by a positive or even neutral conversation exchanged between the two every now and again, but maybe that was asking for too much. Maybe Sam should have just been grateful for what he had now; the two weren't waging war against one another and Sam didn't have to step in between them on a constant basis. It was a good place to be, considering how bad he knew they were both capable of getting when they wanted to. "Dean is trying, too, you know. If he wasn't...he'd have tried to kill you by now. And I mean really kill you." No exorcisms. No holy water in the face. Knife to the gut, straight to wherever demons went whenever they died kill. Which Sam was very certain that he wouldn't have appreciated. At all. Dean was trying, too, and that was something that he had to give his brother credit for. Quite honestly, he'd had no expectations for Dean in that regard whatsoever. A want, yes, but not something that he'd set in stone for Dean to touch. He had no bar raised for his brother, basically. Dean had every reason to hate Ruby and he had every reason to disapprove. To find that he'd already gone this far out for him, even after having been in Hell? It meant a lot to Sam. More than Dean would ever know, even.
"I'm not doing it to pretend that we're normal," Sam clarified, "I'm doing it because I want to. I want to treat you right, Ruby. You deserve it. After all those years that you spent in Hell? You deserve to be happy and, I swear, I'm gonna do whatever it takes to make sure that you are." He didn't like thinking about Hell. What they did to her down there, how she was twisted inside because of it. She was twisted and Sam had learned to accept that. He just wished that there was some way that he could make that side of her feel loved more often. That, even in spite of the monster that she had become, he still felt that she was beautiful. Not because he had seen her true face - Sam didn't know what to expect in that regard - but because of who she was. He loved her. "You don't have to worry about dragging me down. I'm already beyond the average normal expectation limit anyway. Dating, for me, is just as rare as it is for you. Going out, doing nice things...I mean, c'mon, Ruby, I spend most of my time picking up take-out for dinner so that I have enough time to measure out my rock salt and research my next monster hunt before the day is out. You really think that you're bringing me down by being a demon? Really?" Even without the added bonus of the demon blood (both the consumption and the fact that it was coursing through his veins), he was still far from normal. If Ruby thought that she was making his 'normality' more complicated than it already was, she had another thing coming. "I feel better that you're different, you know."