Chapter Text
Honestly, she can’t recall the date.
Someone should slap her, really, for not being able to remember the exact moment.
So much of Ruby Rose’s life has been about just running and running and moving forward without stopping to think. Her old track coach had called it her “down-blinkers”. She always told herself to keep her eyes on the ground just a few feet in front and focus on sprinting past that. And then the next patch. Then the next.
It helps her to manage.
Makes big things and long distances less scary. Com-part-men-ta-lise (a 20 point word that Yang had played out on the Scrabble board last week and then spent an hour crowing about).
But it also makes it such that there are times when she doesn’t see what’s coming up. Doesn’t know when she’s started something until she’s halfway through or maybe even near the end. Gets too far in and in too deep and only realising when she can’t get out.
Hence, it comes to no surprise that Ruby Rose doesn’t know when she started to fall in love.
“You can do this.”
But she sure as hell can pinpoint the second she realised she was.
“Another one in the bag, Rose, well done!”
“National team, here we come!”
“The scouts would have to be crazy to not to take notice of you by now.”
“You’re doing Mom proud.”
“Hey - stay with me Ruby. Stay awake. We’re almost home.”
It’s late at night, after the Maiden’s Day marathon. The post-run sweat and grime has already been washed off and she’s wrapped in the comfortingly warm maroon hoodie that her mom wore to the Olympics. A podium medal hangs on her chest and she looks forward to hanging it up on the wall next to the others. Beside the pictures of her and her mom, herself at uni, and the Vale recruitment posters that she keeps to remind herself to keep going.
But first, her world shifts.
Groggily following her best friend into their shared apartment, she doesn’t notice it till the tip of her splintered shoe has already caught on the rough doormat and she trips. But, she doesn’t fall. Someone catches her. Because someone who has always caught her, catches her.
She looks up and finally sees the finish line her fate has been racing towards. And-
Weiss, her partner of five years and best friend of four and roommate of one, is there. Tongue clicking but the faintest dimple pressed into her cheek as she holds the red-haired girl up by her upper arms. The dim hall light that they really should get around to changing shining a halo around her white tresses.
“You dolt,” Weiss chides, stepping forward to better support the bone-tired runner’s weight, the sweet smell of her natural perfume seeping into Ruby’s consciousness. “What if I hadn’t caught you?”
And at that second, when Ruby realises that her reflexive and very true response is “I don’t know” – that is when she crosses the line of no return. In first place, the true recipient of the gold – she’s in love with the best possible girl in the world - but somehow love feels nothing like the crowning achievement that her mom and Yang always said it would.
Because Weiss isn’t hers to love.
But-
Somehow, Ruby’s done it anyway.
“I knew you would.”
As with any race, everything begins long before the mounting block.
“Look out!”
A crash, the sound of shattering glass. Ruby’s board overturns and she’s flung to the side while the girl whose cart she’d run into falls front-first onto hissing chemicals.
She screams.
Her and Weiss have always been close, despite whatever the sharp-tongued businesswoman may say otherwise. Their lives were bound together in a literal chemical reaction. It all started on the fateful day a young freshman named Ruby Rose had accidentally skated into the trolley of volatile reagents that Weiss Schnee, esteemed double major in Chemistry and Business, was pushing across the Beacon U quad.
Ambulance sirens. A van striped red and blue swerving onto the block. Crying. Crying. Ruby’s sitting on her heels just out of the disaster zone, and the girl that she’d run into is having jugs of water poured over her arms and hands. Two men in HazMat suits are pinning her down. She keeps struggling. Half-crazed, googles askew and voluminous hair being thrown out of her ponytail and red patches blotching her cheeks as tears run freely down to her chin.
“It hurts!”
Guiltily accompanying someone to make up for time and progress lost on “a project of import well beyond your feeble understanding” while the burns on her hands healed would do that.
Sure, things were rocky at first. The older girl was put out that “a gauche imbecilic dolt” had delayed her experiments, and Ruby did not take well to being insulted at every other moment. But, somewhere along their compulsory partnership – sometime after Yang had to be restrained from snapping the Schnee’s neck because “nobody talks to my little sis like that I don’t care if she’s the Spring Maiden’s left shoe” – Ruby starts waking up in Weiss’ lab to the aroma of heavily-sweetened coffee.
Skin smells worse than sulphur when it peels. Blisters and pops and leaves blood streaks on the gravel. The ambulance is gone. All that’s left is her and her broken skateboard. She’s trembling. Sprawled out at the base of the two-storey steps, and staring, horrified, at the yellow tapes she’d gleefully ignored. They were cordoning the area off.
[STAIRWAY CLOSED. TRANSPORT OF CORROSIVE CHEMICALS TAKING PLACE.]
She remembers the first time it had happened. An irate heiress jabbing her awake with bandaged fingers. Ruby stammering apologies and almost falling off her stool because it had been a long day of track practice and lectures but then again she wouldn’t be in this predicament if she had just been watching where she was going and Weiss with her third-degree burns has it much worse and she’s sorry and-
“Shush,” the taste of iodinated gauze was sour, but Ruby Rose had stayed still. Half out of fear, because Weiss still looks quite cross with her narrowed blue eyes and tapping foot, but also half out of surprise, because buried in that well-defined pout was a tinge of…regret?
The hand pulls away from her lips, and Ruby falls forward a little, off balance. “How do you take your coffee?”
She isn’t allowed into the hospital room. Couldn’t find a good way to explain who she was to the stiff-backed woman with ice chip eyes standing guard at the door. Anger rolls off her in waves.
“Don’t you dare come near my sister, you pleb. Not with those flowers. Your ignorance has done enough.”
But she keeps coming back. Day after day. Being blocked off by the same severe woman with a sharp sword by her side and a pistol underarm who finally, one day snaps, “Do you have any idea what you did?”
Ruby had blinked. And started. Slowly, cautiously, “Um…I don’t…”
Weiss’s cottoned fingers clench and quickly release, pain flashing across the sophomore’s face before morphing into irritation. “Answer the question!”
Ruby hands are already wrapped around Weiss’ before the sentence is finished.
They both stare at their entangled fingers – bright white silk wrap contrasting starkly with sunburnt brown. Ruby looks up at Weiss, at this porcelain heiress. She’s surprised at her own actions as well but...
“She may never use her hands again.”
At that point she knows nothing about Weiss Schnee except that she’s bossy and uptight. And according to Blake, her sister’s new best friend, incredibly rich and with power to spare. She doesn’t know what Weiss does on the weekends, where she stays, or what she dreams of at night. What she does when she’s not in a hospital bed.
But, she does know that in Weiss, there is kindness. Vividly recalls the day she had inexplicably, gratefully, let the brunette tag along.
Ruby stops trying after that.
The only things she knows about the heiress are the rumours flying around. The side-eyes and whispers in the lecture halls. Unsigned emails, dropped into her inbox. A group of white-wearing young adults, cornering her near the fountain.
It’s almost a month later when the runner is called into the Headmaster’s office. She avoids the gaze of Professor Ozpin, who Ruby had only seen this close just once, when he was smiling and shaking her hand in congratulations for winning the Beacon sports scholarship. This time, he has his hands folded on his cane and his lips turned down.
The white-haired girl had quietly stood up with both hands still wrapped in rigid casts, catching the attention of a white-suited man who was ranting at the Headmaster’s table side and demanding Ruby’s expulsion.
“Father? May I suggest something else?”
Advocated for Ruby to be assigned as her assistant while recovering instead, despite the man sneering and turning to Headmaster Ozpin with the dark threat that he wished for true justice to be served.
“Preposterous, Weiss. A personal assistant? You want to offer a coveted position to this girl as “punishment”?”
Ruby knows that despite having all the resources and clout needed to ruin her life beyond what she, her dad, Yang and their nobody island of Patch can imagine, Weiss gave her an easy out.
“I will see that she is given her just desserts.”
The heiress hadn’t even asked Ruby to do anything, in the first few months after the accident.
The only reason why she’s here now is because the runner had stumbled onto the other girl late one spring evening. Trying to turn the fragile knobs on glass burettes alone and cursing when her fingers slipped. The heiress had listened, when Ruby had practically begged to be allowed to help because she knows what she did. Has heard the reports and read the articles – Weiss Schnee, former candidate for valedictorian, now being held back a year and losing her awards because her hands no longer hold steady.
She’d listened and relented. Obviously stubborn and reluctant to ask for help but…she had.
She listens when Ruby complains about coursework. Listens to her rambling about the pranks she and Yang pulled while growing up. Listens when Ruby says that she’s sorry and snaps back “what’s done is done, dolt” but nothing worse than that. She never asks for Ruby to stay, but never tells her to go either. They both know that Ruby is here mostly to feed her own remorse.
“You’ve done enough.”
There is a kindness in Weiss, Ruby knows. The cuts that the heiress’ sharp tongue lashes out across her shoulders are a lot less than what should be done.
Hence, at 3am in a chemistry lab where she’s surrounded by the reminders of the things she broke, Ruby finds herself weak. Caught in a spell, moving just based on instinct and feel, Ruby gently, reverently caresses the palms in hers. The damaged wounds that had all the power to take her life away, but hadn’t.
Softly, just as Ruby’s probing fingers reach the edge of one wrist, pulse hammering beneath, Weiss exhales. “I resented you, you know.”
Ruby startles, and her grip loosens just enough for the heiress to pull away. She crosses her arms. The tension is palpable, with the red glow from the mounted digital wall clock spilling over the older girls’ face and slashing another bloody scar across her left eye.
She’s looked haunted, and with a deep, gut-wrenching feeling, Ruby wants to know why.
“I wanted you to feel, just a little, of how much I going through.” Weiss turns back to Ruby. “But-“
The taut line across Weiss’ shoulders snaps. Sags, even, as the heiress lets go of her elbows and one hand moves up to brush the twelve-pointed star on her sleeve.
“This isn’t your doing.”
“I would have the girl pay for ruining my heir.”
Ruby blinks again but claws her fingers over her knees, clamping down the urge to reach out.
Weiss bites her lower lip, and shyly raises blue eyes to meet silver, shining softly in the twilight, “You’re a good person, Ms Rose. You didn’t have to do this for me.”
This is the conversation that makes Ruby step onto the track. Realise that there are hidden depths to this white-haired heiress girl. That there’s more than just mercy in her soul. That there are stories and shattered fragments and hairline fractures hidden behind perfect skin and a thin vertical scar.
Weiss straightens, and meets Ruby’s gaze head-on, and to those sapphire eyes Ruby promises to be the friend that she’s asking for.
“Let me get you some coffee.”
“Um.”
It’s the start.
“Cream and five sugars, please. Thank you.”
After that, slowly but surely, their relationship changes. What had once started off as a matter of retribution for ill fate soon changes into a peaceful acquaintance, then friendship, then something much more.
Lab nights spill into mornings. Ruby learns how to make chamomile cream. Weiss turns up at her meets. Yang is introduced to the Schnee and touches the heiress’ gloves with her prosthetic. Ruby holds Weiss, the day after she gets thrown out.
They move into a small apartment together after university. The heiress has managed to build up a stable enough enterprise from which to launch her recovery of her grandfather’s company, and Ruby’s training for a shot at the national team while helping out at her sisters’ music emporium.
It’s hard to tell where one life begins and the other’s ends. Ruby’s red sweatshirts and FBTs are mixed in with Weiss’ business shirts and gowns. Their takeout orders are only together complete. There are inside jokes with layers without end and natural positions that they adopt on a couch. Secrets and tough nights leaning on each other without a word because in the other person’s presence is all they need.
If they were anyone else and Weiss didn’t need to maintain her pristine image and focus for her dreams and Ruby was more than the barely working sports-nut who had almost crippled her – their relationship progressing into a romantic one would have been as simple as placing one foot in front of the next.
But this…is who they are.
She contemplates all of this on the morning after her realisation, calves and quads aching and her syrupy pancakes turning cold.
A noisy clatter breaks Ruby out of her thoughts, and she turns just in time to see Weiss sink back onto her soles, un-gloved hands clutched close to her chest and bottom lip trapped in a silent wince. Ruby jumps up and dashes over to the kitchen counter, hands fluttering around the heiress.
“Weiss! Are you okay?”
A haughty scoff, and Weiss quickly steps around Ruby, bending down to gingerly pick up the plastic mugs that she’d dropped. (Ruby’s pretty sure she’s not supposed to, but she notices that Weiss is using her right hand, the non-dominant and less injured hand, to reach and even that is trembling).
“I’m fine, Ruby,” Weiss sniffs. She brushes past the brunette and turns the coffee maker on, slipping the mugs beneath the spout. Ruby pouts. Weiss ignores her, instead watching the coffee beans mulch and swirl down the fancy glass funnel.
That won’t do.
Jutting out her lower lip, Ruby crouches slightly and places her face next to the coffee jug. Weiss looks up and away, right hand still clutching her left and turned in. Her tone is sharp and petulant.
“Ruby Rose it’s been five years. I’ll have you know that I’ve grown immune to that.”
Ruby waits.
“Go away Ruby, go sit down.”
Ruby waits.
“The coffee’s going to be done soon. I will pour it on you and it will burn.”
Ruby waits. (She knows she’s winning)
“Urgh – fine!” Weiss relents and surrenders her fists. The runner quickly catches them and cradles the businesswoman’s palms for inspection.
The silvery swathes that stretch across are a familiar sight. She sees them whenever their hands brush. She especially notices them on the days where Weiss will complain. When she says there’s a heaviness in her limbs and rests her forehead against Ruby’s shoulder, quietly groaning. When things fall from her grasp due to a lack of sensation or a muscle spasm.
Contemplative, Ruby traces one finger along the biggest scar – a spidery thing grows from a thin band at the outer corner of her left wrist to a bloom near her pinky. Notices the way Weiss grumbles, clearly tired of being coddled.
Still, it’s her duty to do what Weiss would never do for herself.
“Is it bad, today?” Ruby asks, looking up once satisfied that there are no new cuts or tears.
Weiss snatches her hands back, spinning around to forcefully grab the steaming mugs and pour the requisite cream and sugar into each.
“I’m fine, Ruby.”
Ruby rolls her eyes, and wraps one arm around Weiss’ shoulders, channelling a little bit of Yang courage into her demeanour.
“Please?”
Weiss turns in the embrace, and aggressively pushes the red and black coffee mug, the one with a cartoon depiction of Deadpool parodying The Scream, into Ruby’s chest. The ceramic is warm and Ruby will swear that that is the only reason why her heart starts beating faster when she realises how close she’s standing to the heiress, enough to see the faint smattering of sun freckles across her nose bridge.
“One coffee, with blaspemous amounts of sugar and cream, just for you.”
That’s all the warning she gets before Weiss starts moving and quickly Ruby is forced to let go of the heiress to catch the given mug. Weiss smirks triumphantly, and Ruby raises the mug to her lips, partly to hide her embarrassment at being caught off guard, mostly to hide her sudden urge to kiss that upturned corner of Weiss’ mouth.
Weiss brings her own coffee to the table and settles down, opening her tablet to flick through the morning news. Then, her left hand seizes; cramps abruptly, and the heiress makes a grimace.
Ruby slides into the chair beside Weiss and puts her coffee down, lips now scalded enough to warn her from doing anything foolish. Carefully, she reaches out.
“I know you’re fine, but…do you want me to wrap them for you?” Ruby asks, quiet and gentle, the way she always does when addressing the part of the heiress she’d wrecked.
Weiss pauses, then sighs, and nods just once, slowly. “Just for today.”
Ruby smiles and quickly fetches the cooling salve and thin cotton bandages that the heiress keeps on reserve. Weiss has already laid out her hands, palms-up, on the kitchen table, left hand twitching slightly to relieve the stiffness.
With practiced movements, Ruby applies the ointment. Weiss exhales, and rests her head against the back of her chair.
“Someday, I’ll pay you back for this.”
Ruby looks up at Weiss, making a face as she tucks in the small tuft excess cloth beside Weiss’ thumb.
“You don’t have to.”
Weiss pulls her hands back and wraps them around her mug. Her bangs fall across her brow. “I should, Ruby.” Blue eyes flick up to meet silver. “I should.”
Ruby frowns and closes her palms over Weiss’. Finds her heart skipping a beat when the heiress laces their fingers together and squeezes. She struggles to keep her feelings in check when the other girl tugs her a little closer, lightly glossed lips just out of reach.
Distracted, Ruby can’t help it when the truth slips out.
“I’d do anything for you.”
The sprinter’s eyes widen and she wishes she could stuff those forbidden words back into her mouth. Hurriedly, she releases Weiss’ hands and starts running her mouth.
“I mean – I can buy anything for you! Yang’s got me working the front counter today so I’ll probably be free in the afternoon, do you want me to fetch dinner on my way back there’s this new Thai place that I’ve been dying to try and-“
Weiss laughs. Ruby’s sentence tapers off. She pushes herself to stand and aggressively grabs both of their mugs to rinse and wash, the warm flush on her neck obviously giving her away.
(Damn, just one day in and she’s already losing control, huh?)
That restraint is tested even further when she feels Weiss briefly curl around her back. Minty breath whispers across Ruby’s ear, and she has to fight a full-body shiver when her partner says, “You’re my best friend, I’d do anything for you too.”
Ruby clenches her jaw.
(Friend. Best friend. They’re just friends.)
Maybe if she repeats it enough her mind will finally remember and she and Weiss can go on their merry way and she can keep on running on this looping track.
But, obviously, all races have an end.
Weiss touches Ruby’s hand, and once again, pristine white is placed against dark brown, except this time it’s different and Ruby knows that there is so much more to this girl that is worth protecting than just kindness.
Ruby looks up, and Weiss grants her a rare, full smile, “Thank you.”
The pounding in her chest returns. The shrill whistle of another lap run.
This was going to be harder than she thought.