Archive of Our Own

He comes back right before dinner. Ginevra comes out of the kitchen to kiss him as he hangs up his jacket and messenger bag on the hooks in the front hall. "Where'd you go?"

"Tell you later," he says, and returns the kiss, tangling his hands in her hair; his skin and brain are still buzzing, and it's a little like being drunk, except that everything's thrown into precise, intense relief, the world's scents and sights and noises devastatingly clear rather than muted and syrupy-slow. He can feel her, smell her—the peppermint of the soap she uses on her body and hair (shampoo, apparently, doesn't exist in her native world), the lemon in the detergent in her clothes, the sharp salt of her surprised arousal. God, he wants to lift her against the wall, take her upstairs, use his fingers and tongue until he smells like her, too.

He pulls back, draws her into a hug, hands stroking her hair rather than buried in it. Everything is still heightened, amplified, and it's as though he can feel each individual strand around his fingers, and he can still smell her—his breathing is nowhere near normal. He wonders whether this is what it's like all the time for vampires, what it's like for Spike—whether their desires, moods, even just what they've eaten are telegraphed to him by nothing more than breath and sweat. It would be a maddening way to live.

And is this normal in the aftermath of what he's had done? Faith's the only other person in the group with first-hand experience, but with their history—as long ago as it was, even though it only happened once—the idea of asking her seems intensely awkward. And this is one thing, now, that Sam has done that Dean hasn't, which is pretty much a first in the history of the world.

"You always do this," Ginevra says, low.

"Do what?" Sam asks.

"Pull away. It's always you, never me."

"I don't want it to be you," Sam says. "That's kind of the point."

"It wouldn't be."

He doesn't understand what she means, which his face must have revealed, because she gets that tell me you're not this much of an idiot expression on hers—and it's neither the first time nor, he suspects, the last that she'll remind him of Dean.

"It wouldn't be," she goes on, "because I don't want to. Don't you get it, Samuel? I want this as much as you do." Something bitter twists her face, and she adds, "Maybe more than you do."

"That," he says, "is unlikely." He slides his hand to the back of her neck, leans down so that he's speaking into her ear. "Ginevra, if this were a different circumstance—if there weren't all those people in the kitchen—I'd probably have had you up against the wall the second I walked in. As it is—" He takes a breath, lets it out. "As it is, it's not like there aren't other places in the house. I can smell you, Ginevra, and I want you so much I can barely breathe."

"Then why are we standing here?" she says, amber eyes gone dark in challenge.

"Because that's a line I don't think either of us are ready to cross yet—"

"Speak for yourself," she mutters.

"And because the people in that kitchen are some of the nosiest people on earth, and we'd never hear the end of it. Do you really want the Eyebrows of Doom from Faith, Veronica, and my gossipy old woman of a brother every time you walk downstairs in this house? Are you forgetting that this is a group who were placing bets on Dean and Hermione?"

Her shoulders shake—half a laugh, half a shudder of horror, he thinks. "Alright, I see your point. I won twenty quid on that wager." She looks up at him. "Really, though, where did you go? I thought you were at the library."

He was—but the library closed at six, and it's gone on past eight now. "Later," he says. "I'll show you later, I promise."

"Show me," she says. "Well."

"Hey!" Faith's voice rounds the corner just before she does. "You guys finished with your best impression of a Harlequin romance cover? There's potatoes that need to be peeled."

Ginevra makes a gesture of astonishing vulgarity, then stands on tiptoe, pulls Sam's head down, and kisses him ferociously, not stopping even when Faith crows, "Woot! Porn in my hallway!"

Sam, unfortunately, is in fact the one to pull away again, but only because he's laughing too hard to keep going.

Everybody else has scattered: Faith and Xander upstairs to bed, Spike back to Chelsea, Veronica to bed, Dean and Hermione to bed. It's just Sam and Ginevra downstairs, stretched out full and contented on the couch: Ginevra in his arms, head on his chest, the way she should be; Il Postino, his favorite movie, on low across the room. He's allegedly watching it—and he's fielding the usual variety of "why did they just do that?" questions—but he's seen it so many times that he doesn't mind missing this one. Instead his attention is on Ginevra: her warm weight on top of him, the slight tickle of her hair on his neck, the light pressure of her hand on his skin. He's got on his customary three layers, but she blithely bypassed them to spread a hand on his belly. He thinks that's maybe a metaphor for Ginevra herself: casually remaking the boundaries of her world if they do not suit her.

There's a demon to kill, and he could well die in the fight—he accepted that more or less the day he left Stanford. For now, though, he has everything he needs: Dean safe and happy two floors up, this strange patchwork family that seems to have sewn him into its fabric before he'd even realized what happened, and a girl with fiery hair and a fiery temper who jumps his walls and lowers her own for him. He doesn't want to die, but if he does, he can truthfully say that before he did, he got the things he really wanted.

"Are you actually watching this?" comes from Ginevra, sleepily.

"No," he admits.

"I should go home, then," Ginevra yawns. "I'm falling asleep."

He takes a breath and says what he's been wanting to. "Stay here. I mean, not for any...reason." He can feel himself blushing. "I just like...having you here."

"That's convenient." He hears her smile in her voice. "I like being here."

Faith keeps some extra clothes in the bottom drawer of the dresser in the room where he's been staying. He unearths a pair of sweatpants, a pair of shorts, and a T-shirt, and hands them to Ginevra.

She looks at them and shakes her head. "These won't fit. I'm shorter than Faith, and bigger around." His skepticism must show through on his face, because Ginevra adds, "Blokes never notice these things." She hands the clothing back to him. "Just give me one of your sweatshirts; that'll do."

"But you need something for your legs."

"You lived with a woman. Are you really dreadfully scandalized by the sight of bare female legs?"

That isn't the point, Sam thinks.

"You could always just Apparate back to your house and get whatever you usually sleep in," he suggests.

She yawns so delicately that he knows it's fake. "I'm so very tired," she says. "I might Splinch."

"And I might be Bugs Bunny," he says under his breath, but gives her one of his long-sleeved T-shirts. It's a faded grey, washed into sublime softness over the years; it's big even on him, so he tells himself that it'll practically be a muu-muu on Ginevra.

She goes into the bathroom to change. Sam puts on sweatpants and is about to strip down to a T-shirt; he thinks better of it, though, and keeps the flannel on in the event that he runs into someone in the hallway; this isn't something he wants to explain just yet. He takes Ivory soap (Faith's preferences veering towards scented shower gel as they do) and bacitracin out of the messenger bag, and a newly purchased, newly washed towel from the closet. Ginevra comes back in a few minutes and says, "So when are you going to show me whatever this is?"

"Come into the bathroom with me," he says.

She raises her eyebrows but complies. He locks the door and takes off the flannel, and her eyes land on the bandage. He pulls the tape off a piece at a time, then carefully lifts the bandage from his skin. The artist warned him that it might stick, but it comes away easily, and Ginevra's eyes widen when she sees the black linework that it reveals. "Sam," she exclaims, leaning in to examine it.

"Let me wash it off first," he says. "Then you can look. It's kind of gross right now." He was warned about this part, too: A design as intricate as this will look worse before it looks better, and there'll be a fair amount of blood, ink, and lymph that will need to be washed away over the course of the next few days.

The artist, a friendly, leathery lesbian covered in blackwork, had looked at the design—the seventh or eighth product of a series that Sam, Bobby, and Ash faxed and emailed back and forth for several days—and said, "Awesome. I can do this." Looking at her portfolio, full of complicated line drawings and precise lettering, Sam hadn't doubted it. She hadn't asked about the scar it was going over—had only said that tattooing over scar tissue was unpredictable, sometimes more painful, sometimes less, sometimes just weird from rewired nerve endings. She'd inquired as to the design's meaning, but when Sam answered, "It has spiritual significance to me," she hadn't pursued the line of questioning. He thinks that tattoo artists, like doctors and movers and funeral directors, see innermost secrets revealed on a daily basis, and know when to ask only the most necessary of questions.

Sam turns on the water, but Ginevra takes the bar of soap from his hand and says, "I want to."

"Ginevra, it's not— It's all bloody."

"Like I don't see that every month."

The things that come out of her mouth sometimes.

"And it's—there are diseases that get transmitted this way."

"Wait here," she tells him, and he does. (His father used to say that he couldn't follow an order if his life depended on it. For a number of reasons, Sam regrets that John Winchester will never meet Ginevra.) She returns with her wand, pauses in thought, and then recites a series of what must be spells, directed first at herself and then at him.

"Do I even want to ask what you just did?"

"They're intended as contraceptive spells, but in general they protect against fluid transmission of anything, regardless of the...condition or, um, mechanics. So now I'm protected against you—not that I was particularly concerned there—and you're protected against me."

"Are you sure they work?"

"Your brother hasn't got Hermione up the duff, now, has he?"

Sam coughs. It's better than choking. He's pretty sure that's one of those idioms that, while he's never heard it before, needs no translation.

Ginevra washes her hands, rinses them, then works up more lather with the soap and spreads it gently over the area covered by the design. She doesn't touch the reddened, sensitive skin directly, but moves her hand to pass the soap over it several times. Then she turns the water back on, cups her hands, and rinses away the soap suds. The water becomes a slightly disturbing black-and-pink, and though there's very little that turns Sam's stomach anymore, he has to look away to keep from getting queasy.

She takes the towel from him and carefully pats everything dry. The skin is still inflamed—as the artist warned him it will be for a day or so—but everything looks considerably less messy now.

She traces a finger down the side of his arm, near the design but not over it. "It's a devil's trap," she says.

He nods. "Bobby and Ash helped me work out the design." It's not as complicated as the Great Pentacle in the Key of Solomon, or the amalgam that Bobby maintains on his floors and ceilings at this point as a matter of course, but despite the size, it's still fairly complex: a Star of David inside a circle inside a seven-pointed star inside a septagon inside a larger circle. The Great Name, in Hebrew, is inside the interior circle; the only other lettering is within the lines of the exterior circle, part of a Bible verse in Latin. He doesn't believe, has never believed, that Latin is at its root any more effective than any other language for casting out demons (or keeping them out)—it was, after all, nothing more than a dialect spoken in Rome at a particular point in history—but he does believe in tradition, and in the power of belief itself.

Ginevra presses herself against his side, and he puts his unmarked arm around her. "What do the words mean?" she asks.

"That's the name of God, in Hebrew. And that's from the Book of Psalms." He says it out loud, liking the roll of the sturdy Latin consonants from his tongue: "'Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare et a flumine usque ad terminos orbis terrarum.'"

"What does that mean?"

He gives her the version from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, his favorite translation if not necessarily the most accurate one: "'His dominion shall be also from the one sea to the other, and from the flood unto the world's end.'"

"You believe that?" she asks.

He stops, decides not to prevaricate. "Yes."

"Hmm." She looks at it a moment more, then picks up the bacitracin and squeezes a bit onto her fingers. "This comes next, right?"

He nods. "Not very much, though. Just enough to cover it—not very thick."

She spreads it carefully onto the skin, a thin transparent layer that reflects the ceiling light back at them. When she's done, she puts the cap back on the tube, then washes her hands again. "It's beautiful," she says. "How did you find the person?"

"I searched online, and then went in and looked through the portfolios."

"Tattooists keep portfolios?"

"Good ones do."

"Did you like the person who did it?"

"Yeah, she was cool." At another raised eyebrow, he adds, "And about as gay as the day is long."

"Did you have to get it over the scar? I mean, for it to work?"

"No. And I could have gotten it bigger, been able to do more lettering, if I'd put it somewhere else. But getting it there seemed appropriate, somehow."

"Do you have to put a bandage back over it now?"

"No. She said to keep it clean and do the bacitracin two or three times a day for the next couple of days, but to let it breathe."

Ginevra steps around, into him, presses her face into his shirt. After a moment she looks up again. "And this will keep the demon from...doing anything to you?"

Not necessarily, is the answer: They were able to contain Meg with a devil's trap once, but according to Dean and Bobby, it didn't work the second time, when Meg had possessed Sam. Meg was a child of this demon, and it would stand to reason that its powers would be greater than hers; they do know that it's immune to exorcisms and holy water. There's no reason for a devil's trap to be an exception.

"Nothing's for certain," he tells Ginevra. "But I believe in it, as a form of protection, and belief is probably fifty percent of the power behind all of this stuff."

"I said that I won't let it have you," Ginevra says, "and I meant it. I'll kill it with my bare hands if I have to. Don't tell me that's impossible," she interrupts him, "because I'll find a way. I will, Samuel."

Her voice is determined, but he can feel her shaking. It's not laughter this time. He's pretty sure it's fear.

He wants to tell her not to be scared, that everything will turn out OK, but the fact is that he can't: She's got good reason to be scared, and they have no reason to believe that everything will turn out OK. They have all the strengths and allies Faith said they did—with the exception of Illyria, who's still mysteriously unsummonable, and Faith has been oddly tight-lipped on that subject—but they're still a bunch of humans going up against one of the most powerful, ancient, and evil demons in Creation.

He tilts Ginevra's head up, cups the side of her face in his hand. "We both need some sleep," he says, and kisses her forehead, her temples, each eyebrow. She keeps hold of his hand as they walk back to his room.

They curl up together in bed, with one of Ginevra's scandalously bare legs over Sam's hip, but he doesn't sleep, and he's pretty sure she doesn't, either.