welkinalauda replied to your post Samulet anon again! I do feel like chuck admitting...
I just can’t imagine the scene, though.
Sam, upset over how many innocent people he couldn't save from the demons possessing them, there were just too many and the swarmed him and he couldn't get the exorcism out, and Ruby comes in to find him standing there surrounded by bloodied victims, knife dripping, and tells him... I don't know if you wanna try it, but there might be a way your psychic abilities could help...
It wouldn't be drinking blood right off the bat, but after a few minor successes and even more painful failures, she'd suggest maybe doing something to boost his power level just a bit, just until he learned to control it himself...
And he'd hate it and would tell her no, but she had time, and she waited until it seemed better than watching other innocent people die. She'd say "just a drop," or "just this once," and he'd cave. I mean, remember she'd also been seducing him in other ways, and the more he fell into her orbit, the more pliable and suggestible Sam became. And then once he had it once, he'd think it wasn't so bad, and it was EASY to save everyone now. He could actually threaten demons directly now. And Dean still wasn't there, and Ruby was, and Sam was doing the best he could with what he was left with, right? Because at the end of the day, that's what Sam will do, whatever he thinks it will take to save as many people as he possibly can.
He was at a point where he was literally tallying up the people he saved vs the ones he couldn't. He was DESPERATE to not be evil, you know? And his metric for not being evil was the human beings who could live their lives because of him.
(eta: Ruby had MONTHS to work on him, and she’d already been working on him for a whole season before that, getting him to keep secrets from Dean, even SAVING both him AND Dean that time in 3.09. In 3.12, Sam... didn’t immediately dismiss the “sacrifice the virgin” plan, and only agreed with Dean after he got upset about it. When there’s only ONE plausible option on the table to save everyone, it’s better than everyone dying... and Sam was open to the concept far more than Dean was back then. Yes, he learned some major lessons there, but he learned them the hard way. I have zero trouble imagining Ruby slowly chipping away at him until she’d convinced him it was the only right thing to do... until he was asking her for the blood as we saw in 4.20 and she strung him along. We saw something similar in s11 re: his visions he believed were from God, which turned out to be Lucifer. He has a willingness to believe in goodness, which is great, but he was CONVINCED that Dean was “weak” and only he was strong enough, and I think that was a BIG part of how Ruby manipulated him, giving him a sense of control and a conviction that he was in the right that he’d never had before.)
