Author's Note: So, ages and ages and ages ago (no, seriously, the fact that this is Supernatural fic should tell you it was a while alone) someone prompted me to write Ruby backstory fic. And this is the result. Ruby is a fascinating character to me, and I rather wish (like with most of Supernatural's female characters) that more had been done with her.

This was me mucking about in what human!Ruby - before she was a demon, and at the beginning of this fic before she was a witch - might have been like, and how she ended up in the dark arts.

This was...peculiarly fun to write, for all it gave me conniptions sometimes.

She had precisely one memory of her mother. She wasn't entirely certain it was even real. Just a fragment of a thing, really, just someone humming quietly, the brush of hair against her cheek and a warm kind of smell.

Her younger brother killed her mother before she had a chance to know more than that, she learned later. And then her younger brother had died as well.

Unlucky marriage, her grandmother said, crooked old fingers making the sign against evil. To leave only a daughter. And such a scrawny little thing. "Your mam," she said, eyes sharp and critical, "She had the touch of the devil on her. You'd best pray, little one, that he didn't touch you too."

~.~

There were things that lived only in the dark. Everyone knew that. That was why you locked your doors after dark, why you buried the dead quickly and watched to make sure they didn't rise. Why you didn't go out after dusk when the moon was new or full, not for any reason.

She was six when she learned that not everything waited for dark.

A madness came upon the carter. The first anyone knew of it was when he stormed out of the house he shared with his wife and young son, covered in blood. She remembered because she was standing in the street then, buying a loaf of bread. His eyes fixed on her while everyone was still staring and the bellow he made was like an angered ox.

She ran, so she didn't see the rest. He'd killed his wife and child, she learned later. Beaten them until they were unrecognizable. The butcher's wife had put a cleaver in his head and he'd ripped it out and put it in her belly without stopping.

The priest had stopped it, eventually. Driven the demon out of him, they said, in whispers. The body was burned, and the smell lingered for days.

"How did a demon get in him?" she asked her grandmother. The old woman coughed wetly and pinned her with her cold, hard gaze.

"Left a door open, somewhere," she said. "No doubt. Did some great wickedness. Wickedness is like a sweet nectar to evil spirits. Draws them down to you. Stay pure and stay safe, child."

~.~

Her grandmother died when she was ten. She saw her before her aunt did and it took her a moment to realize that there was something wrong, because she didn't look so very different dead than she had alive. A little greyer, maybe.

She walked over carefully and touched one of the crooked, knobby hands. The skin didn't feel real. It felt thin, like it would tear just for her touching it.

"Oh god," she heard from behind her, and her aunt snatched her away, turning her face so she couldn't see. "Lord in heaven – don't look, don't look."

I already did, she thought. Is she going to steal my soul? The thought preyed on her mind, and she slept poorly, her dreams ragged flashes of those clawlike fingers reaching out to rend her to pieces. "I thought she would never die," she heard somebody murmur, and wondered how they were sure that she had.

~.~

It was the miller's daughter who showed her the first little things she could do, with a bit of string and a bit of blood, a few small bones. It was only a game to the two of them, an idle way to pass the hours. "I'll use this one," the other girl, Martha, would murmur, tying little knots with nimble fingers, "To make a great lord fall in love with me, and he'll take me far away to a big castle where I will be his lady." Or, "This one would bring me good fortune for the turning of a season."

Neither of them ever said spells or witchcraft but she never mentioned it to anyone either. "It's not wrong," Martha insisted. "Not if you don't do evil things. Right?"

When they got a little older, she stopped, finding herself fearful; it was possible Martha didn't, but she never asked.

Martha would never be plain, like she was, or scrawny. Martha was beautiful. Martha was the sister she'd never had. That was what Martha called her, too: 'sister,' and she'd say, "Sisters have to stick together."

~.~

She was thirteen when the widow Bartley's boy sweet-talked her into a hayloft. She wasn't the first girl to fall, she knew, but his fingers were warm on her skin and the way he touched her made her shiver. His mouth was warm and soft and sweet, his breath flavored a little like apples. Once she'd given in, it was faster than she'd expected. Done and over in moments, really, with a little ache between her thighs and a bit of blood the only things to say it had happened at all.

The hay itched. She smiled dazedly up at him, and he plucked some hay from her hair. "You're the sweetest girl in this whole village," he said, sounding so perfectly sincere.

The next day, he ignored her entirely. Looked away when she tried to smile at him. That night she woke up in the dark feeling sick with guilt. You've done a wicked thing, she imagined she heard, in her grandmother's voice. You're going to let the devil in. The body is weak, the flesh is sinful.

Ill luck child.

She told Martha, because she told Martha everything. Martha's expression went hard, her lovely dark eyes glinting like a beetle's back. Martha didn't say much, but the day after the widow's boy almost died from a cut to his arm that wouldn't stop bleeding.

She did not let herself wonder.

~.~

She was fifteen and Martha was seventeen when she first heard the hiss of witch murmured behind Martha's back, caught a glimpse of the sign against evil in their direction as they walked through the village. Both of them unwed, to the continual lamenting of her aunt. (But not surprise. "No hips, no breasts," her aunt said bluntly. "Not much to commend you as a wife, girl.")

Martha laughed at her fretting. "You don't want to wed," she said. "It sounds an unpleasant business to me. I have no wish for children or a man. My life is my own."

She was sixteen and Martha was eighteen when the village began dying. A sickness, seeping in among them and snuffing out lives like little candles. The young, the old, those in their prime – it did not seem to care.

It did not take folk long to start whispering of witchcraft.

It took them even less to turn to Martha. Martha, her father now dead, unwed, vulnerable.

"Sister," Martha said, just once. "Sister, save me," but she was scared. She was scared.

They burned her. It seemed to take Martha a very long time to die, howling curses, fragments of things that made shivers crawl down her spine. She crept away before it was over, went to the river and found a piece of grass to knot, sliced open her finger and bled and murmured the words for revenge, revenge, revenge.

~.~

The village continued to die. After her aunt fell ill, she took the money there was and left. No one seemed to mark her departure. The streets smelled like rot. There was a little bit of fear in her, remembered warnings (it's not safe for a woman alone) but she'd seen, hadn't she? It wasn't safe anywhere.

She stole a knife from the butcher's, and it felt heavy and clumsy in her hands, but she packed it anyway. Stole a few other things and packed them as things to sell. After a moment, took some leather cord and knotted herself a necklace for vegeance.

She walked south, for no particular reason.

There was no one on the road. The air shimmered with summer heat. She whispered the familiar rhythms of spells as she walked, and did not get hungry.

~.~

She met him in an inn by a crossroads where she was trying to sell some of the things she'd stolen from her village. People took one look at her and looked away as if ashamed.

"Business slow?" she heard, and looked up to see a man leaning against the wall beside her. "Mine too. What's that around your neck?" He stood up and reached out, and she shrank away. He laughed. "I'm only curious. I haven't seen work like that in years."

She wrapped a hand self-consciously around the leather talisman and set her jaw. "It's not for sale, m'lord," she managed to say.

"I shouldn't think so," he murmured, and leaned back against the wall. "Oh, you are an interesting one. Where are you traveling to?"

She looked away, feeling a little curl of nervousness in her stomach. "Nowhere in particular."

"Mmm. Well then. Would you consider coming with me? I have an offer I think you might like." She wrapped her hand around the hilt of her knife under the table.

"I don't think-"

His voice dropped to a murmur. "Witchcraft, my dear. Would you like to learn the real thing?"

(It was her grandmother's voice in her head, best pray. It was Martha screaming and the smell of cooking flesh. It was all the times she'd been looked at and found wanting.)

She kept her fingers around the hilt of the knife. And nodded. Just once.

~.~

It wasn't what she'd expected. True enough, she hadn't known what to expect – something like what she'd done with Martha, she supposed, charms and knots held together with blood, but that wasn't what he taught her. He taught her how to invoke spirits and make them do her will, how to bring good fortune for herself or others – and the reverse.

She hesitated over that, her fingers flinching from the sound of small animal bones crushed under a pestle. "Isn't it evil?" she asked, hesitatingly, and he smiled kindly at her and only laughed a little.

"It's witchcraft, my dear. Neither good nor evil. It simply is. Knowing how to harm someone does not mean you must."

It was easy for her. She learned quickly,memorized incantations and for the first time felt like she was good at something. It made her heart race and her breathing quicken so she felt truly alive. How could this be bad, she told herself. God had done nothing for her, all her life, but now finally she could do something for herself.

If Martha had known this, she thought, she would have lived.

~.~

When she kissed him in the flush of victory, it was nothing like it'd been with Widow Bartley's boy. He touched her gently, and when he carried her to bed his hands had her writhing before he was unclothed. "You're mine," he whispered in her ear. "Always. Do you understand that?" and brought her gasping to completion.

Is this wickedness? she thought, after. No. The world was full of wickedness. She'd seen it.

This was freedom.

"You beautiful creature," he murmured. "Fire hair. Amber eyes. Ruby lips. You'll go far, my dear. You'll go far."

~.~

"What do you want," her lover said, twining his hands into her hair and planting a kiss on her throat. "Tell me what you want."

"I want the world," she said. "I want everything open to me."

Her lover laughed. "Well," he said, and in the candlelight his eyes looked black. "It's a start."