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Ruby wanted to sketch. Normally she would be sketching, because it was just an icebreaker, it wasn’t like it was part of the class, but the teacher had told them they’d be quizzed on their answers later and you weren’t allowed to talk in ASL class because something something practice, and so Ruby had to keep her eyes on whatever student was introducing their partner, trying to work out the signs and, like. Keywords, hopefully.
Until blue haired what’s-his-face told the class that fluffy red hair’s name was Penny, and she was living with James Ironwood, and Ruby knew that name. There’d been an article about him last year in ‘Guns n Roses Weekly’, he had a legendary collection of guns. Penny was so lucky to get to live right next to that. Ruby would do a lot of things to see it for herself. Even socialize. Ugh.
Her dad had been making worried noises about her hanging out with friends more, anyway. This counted. It was a double win.
So she twiddled her thumbs and made a half-hearted attempt to pay attention to the other students struggling through their own introductions (it went about as well as all of her half-hearted attempts at paying attention to stuff). When the bell rang to let everyone out, she packed her things and then subtly lingered in the doorway, pretending to fiddle with one of the belts on her shirt, as Penny put her notepad and pencils in her bag agonizingly slowly.
When Penny got to the door, she stopped and gave Ruby a polite but confused smile. “Can I help you?” The words were bright but careful, as though she’d come out of a class on enunciation.
Okay, so maybe Ruby wasn’t great at subtle. She straightened up probably way too suddenly and waved her hands around before sticking them behind her back. It occurred to her she hadn’t actually thought about what she was going to say . Hi, you don’t know me but can you invite me back to your place so I can see your dad’s guns?
“Uh,” she said eloquently. “Hi!” She paused and thought, and then jerked one of her hands out from behind her back to stick it out in Penny’s direction. “I’m Ruby!” Which she probably knew already because she’d been at the icebreaker too! Great start, Ruby.
But Penny gave her a brilliant smile and said, “It’s nice to meet you, Ruby! I’m Penny.” And then she took her hand and gave it exactly two shakes and squeezed slightly too hard, and that actually made Ruby relax, a little bit, because maybe Penny wasn’t good at this kind of thing either.
Or maybe that just means it’ll be twice as much of a disaster.
Ruby concentrated on her hands wringing the life out of her backpack strap as she forced out, “I-think-you’re-really-cool-and-stuff” and then ran out of anywhere to go with that sentence.
Penny was silent for a long moment, and then she said, apologetic. “I’m sorry, Ruby, but I can’t understand you.” She lifted a hand up to her head as she said it, and for the first time Ruby noticed the little sphere sitting on her hair she’d taken as an ornament, but which had a little wire that snaked underneath her hair. Huh. “Could you say that more slowly?”
“Oh. Um. I.” Gah, it was even more embarrassing the second time! “Don’t worry about it. I, um. Wanted to, you know, say hi!”
Penny smiled. “In that case, salutations to you as well!”
That sure was the first time Ruby had ever been greeted with the word ‘salutations.’ “Um. Yeah,” Ruby said.” She fidgeted. “Soooooo. How ‘bout that class, huh?”
“This class? What about it?”
“Uh. You know. It was a… cool icebreaker? How are you liking the, uh… coursework?”
Penny paused before replying, and Ruby was getting the distinct impression she wasn’t catching all of what Ruby was saying. You’d think talking at a slower speed would be easy but apparently not. But then Penny nodded and said, “It’s very exciting. I have always wanted to learn to sign, but Father always said it would… hold me back. I need to learn to talk to people the way they do. But I’m not very good at lipreading without cues. It’s very hard.”
She wasn’t catching everything, then. That really sucked. “That sucks,” she told Penny. “You shouldn’t have to miss stuff just to talk to friends. What if I learned your cues?”
“Oh,” Penny said, clearly surprised. “That would be wonderful, Ruby. It’s called cued speech. There are videos online.”
“Right,” Ruby said. “I gotta get to my next class, but the next time we meet, we are doing this conversation over!” Ruby glanced behind her as she hurried off, not sure if she should have said something else, and saw that Penny was watching her leave looking… sad. The look changed to a smile and a wave when she saw Ruby watching, but Ruby was pretty sure she’d seen that.
~ * ~
All right, attempt one at Befriend Penny was a bust, but! Ruby knew what she needed to do to fix that, which was more than she could say for most social interactions that had crashed and burned on her.
Cued speech turned out to be a single page of hand gestures. Which was a lot less than she thought there’d be, and Yang did not have to make those comments about her actually finishing this as she peered over her shoulder at the screen.
Ruby could do schoolwork, sometimes, when she tried, and Yang helped.
When the page printed, Ruby snatched it up and secluded herself in her room and away from prying older sisters. She’d learn it now just to spite her. She’d be the best cued speech speaker person ever.
She threw herself onto her bed and then shimmied into a more comfortable position, resting her phone on her knees and cueing up some of the videos she’d spotted earlier.
Yeah, she had this.
~ * ~
She brought the chart to breakfast.
“Yang,” she said, carefully, peeking a glance at the paper before continuing. “My dear. Sister. Could you pass the salt?”
“You do not need more salt on those eggs. I saw you add some earlier.”
Ruby scowled at her. “They’re not—shit.” She started again, even as Dad turned around from the stove and said language , “They’re. Not. Eggy enough!” She slapped her outstretched fingers onto her other hand in emphasis when she was done, to underscore the travesty that was saltless eggs, their delicious eggy flavour forever dulled to tastelessness.
Yang lasted two seconds before her serious face split into a grin and she started giggling, and Ruby made a grab for the salt shaker while she was distracted, but Yang got there first and snatched it away, and the next five minutes were spent playing keep away until Ruby lost her balance and got an elbow full of egg when she caught herself. Both girls stared at the goopy mess in sudden silence, and then turned as one to look at their father.
Dad sighed, but there was a tiny smile playing around his mouth. “Go get changed. I’ll make you egg sandwiches, you can eat on the bus.”
“Sweet,” Ruby said, and then she remembered herself and repeated it with the sign. Then she dashed upstairs to change.
~ * ~
She kept it up, doggedly, for the rest of the week. She needed to be good at this ASAP, after all, and that meant constant practice.
Which would be easier if she had any friends. She wasn’t officially admitting that, though, because that was letting Dad and Yang win. Moving to a new school didn’t mean she had to immediately find fifteen people to talk to, who had time for that?
She tucked the folded chart into the corner of her tray at lunch, and then did her entire order without needing to consult it at all! The lunch lady stared at her when she finally finished, and then silently spooned her order out and waved her on. Ruby chose to take that as her being speechless with awe.
She hummed to herself as she found an empty corner of the cafeteria and sat down, queueing up some more videos on her phone to pass the time. She had a good feeling about this week.
That feeling froze in her chest when someone sat down across from her. She looked up, but it was just Penny, clutching her own tray and looking nervous.
Ruby’s hand flew to her chart, but she knew this one at least. So, “Hi!” she said.
Penny grinned. “Salutations!” she said. She pointed at Ruby’s chart. “I noticed that you’ve been practicing cues.”
“I mean, yeah! I said I would.” Ruby smoothed her free hand over the paper self-consciously, hyper-aware of all her pauses to check where her hand was.
“So you did!” Penny agreed. “So that I could talk to friends. Does that make us friends?”
“If you want.” Ruby vibrated in place, but quietly, because this was the moment of truth.
~ * ~
So it turned out Penny’s standards for considering people her friend were just “willing to watch a couple videos so she can actually talk to you” which was a pretty low bar. Ruby kept up her practice over the weekend, but she spent just as much time texting Penny, to the point that Yang had started to ask suspicious questions about who she was talking to.
Then, Monday after ASL, Penny had asked her if she wanted to come over to her house after school, which Ruby hadn’t done since middle school and which seemed fast, but she guessed that meant Penny liked her and that must be a good thing, right?
Also, Penny’s house was huge. It was the kind of house Ruby’s always imagined Weiss’s house looked like, if Weiss ever invited anyone over.
“Woah,” she said as she trailed slightly behind Penny through the entrance way. Penny turned, and Ruby continued, “your dad must be, like. A millionaire.”
“Oh, General Ironwood isn’t my father,” Penny told her cheerfully. “He’s just looking after me now. My father died last year.”
“Oh.”
Yeah, socializing was going great. Ruby watched Penny’s face as she turned and kept walking down the hall. She seemed… fine. A lot more chill about it than Ruby’d been a few months after her mom’s death, and Ruby’d been younger. She hadn’t known her as long.
She tried to think about what people had said to her back then, and then she tried to think about anything they’d said that she hadn’t hated.
She’d hated most things, the weeks right after Mom’s death.
"Do you, uh," she tried, "want to talk about him? Or, about General Ironwood, maybe? How'd that happen? Or we could talk about something else, too! Something less, uh, sad. Like those doors? The wood is really pretty." It was almost red. And Ruby had messed everything up again.
But Penny giggled. She was walking backwards now, apparently very sure of where she was going even without looking. "I don't know," she said thoughtfully, then hiccuped. "Maybe..." She paused, and then, "General Ironwood has me seeing a therapist. To talk about it. But I think that I would like to tell someone else about him. I would like that very much," she added, her voice resolved. "I loved him very much," she said, a note in her voice that Ruby didn't know how to read. It didn't sound very much like sadness the way Ruby was used to.
“Oh,” she said again. “Yeah! That would—I mean, I’d love to. I mean, um, thank you?”
~ * ~
They’d taken to going to each other’s houses after school to do their homework, because it was easier with two people. Theoretically easier, because you could ask each other questions, and help each other out, and they did that! But also, in some ways harder, because when Penny was sitting beside her Ruby found herself sneaking glances at her every few minutes, watching the way she frowned down at her paper, and made notes in that cute square handwriting she had, and fidgeted with the button on her sleeve all the time.
Penny was cute, and Ruby wasn’t sure why she found it so hard to keep her eyes off her.
“So.” Dad said when she’d wandered into the kitchen to get them some chocolate milk. “This friend of yours.”
“Yeah?” Ruby asked, milk carton held defensively in front of her.
“She’s nice,” he said, conversationally. Too conversationally. Dads didn’t just talk to you about your friends for no reason. “I like her. And, you know, if there’s anything… going on. You, uh. You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
Ruby peered at him, wondering where he was going with this.
“You know,” her Dad went on as the silence stretched on, even more awkwardly. “If you have. Questions, or anything, about the, uh. Dating. Or. Safety.” His voice had been getting quieter and quieter as he went on, and Ruby was suddenly very aware of the number of times she’d glanced at Penny through the evening, and the fact that her mouth kind of hurt a little? From smiling, even though Penny had only objectively said about four things so far tonight that merited a lot of smiling. Her face instantly went about 40 degrees hotter.
“I’m—” She said. “Penny and I aren’t—she’s myfriend, and we’re doing homework, and sometimes friends smile at each other! Sometimes friends have really nice smiles! And laughs! And we’re—it’s—” she’d been cueing without thinking as she said this, and then she threw both her hands out in emphasis and the milk carton landed on the ground with a loud thump.
She stared down at it in betrayal.
“Hey, hey,” Dad said, holding his hands up in mock surrender. He picked up the milk carton and put it on the counter, then turned around to get glasses out of the cupboard. “You might be right,” he told her. “Sometimes friends have nice smiles, and that’s all there is. But you know, when I was in high school I’d had crushes on at least half a dozen guys before I realized that’s what they were. I knew when I was crushing on girls, but I don’t know. I guess it’s harder to recognize when you don’t have examples.”
Ruby accepted the glasses of milk when he turned around to pass them to her. “That was really unhelpful,” she told him. She glanced out to where Penny was leaning back in her seat and looking out toward the window, her hand back at her button sleeve and a small smile on her face. She felt something in her stomach flip. “Mostly. Thanks.”
~ * ~
So it was possible, maybe, that Ruby had a crush. Theoretically, she knew she was supposed to do something about that. She wanted to do something about that. She also wanted to never speak of it again and hope it went away, because she knew (was pretty sure?) Penny liked her as a friend, but she didn’t know anything else. What if she said no? What if she never talked to her again?
As if mocking her pain, just weeks into Ruby’s world-shattering emotional crisis, her homeroom teacher announced that students should start preparing their Valentines cards. Valentines like Penny wasn’t.
Sure these cards were just to give out to the classmates Ruby still didn’t know the names of, but that just underscored who Ruby wasn’t giving a card to.
…. Or could she?
~ * ~
She cut out another piece of paper, small enough to tape to the back of one of her Gunmetal Panic valentine’s cards. Behind her, dozens of crumpled tiny papers were mostly piled in the garbage can. Then she stared at it, pencil poised above the paper. This time she would get it right. It couldn’t be just ‘will you be my valentine?’. Penny probably wouldn’t even realize what she was asking. It had to be personal. It had to be perfect.
What about swords. She knew Penny liked swords. Penny had two replicas of historical swords, and she wanted someday to have a whole collection. She could spend hours talking about the different stories behind how each sword was made, and who’d used it, and where it was today.
Ruby thought hard, trying to remember any names that might be relevant.
Come on, Ruby, she thought. This is no time to forget every sword except Excalibur.
~ * ~
Penny had taken to sitting beside her in ASL class, and normally that was great except that today it made everything awful. She couldn’t give Penny the card before the class, because what if she didn’t like it??? Then Ruby would have to sit next to her for the next hour. So instead she was sitting next to her, nervously fiddling with the card she’d put in her pocket until she started to worry she’d rip the paper she’d taped overtop, and then she pointedly kept her hands on top of her desk and instead started systematically dismantling her pens, seeing how fast she could go without looking.
Penny glanced at her curiously, and then started quietly reassembling the each pen as Ruby finished with it, also without looking, which was really impressive, wow, and also? Probably made a good Valentines note.
You can’t rewrite it now, Ruby.
Finally the class ended, and Ruby pulled the card out of her pocket, slammed it on the desk in front of Penny without looking, and then aggressively pulled at the little metal spiral from inside one of her pens.
She peaked at Penny out of the corner of her eye, to see her staring down at the note, expressionless. Oh no, she hated it, Ruby had ruined the friendship, what was she thinking—
“Um. It’s totally cool if you, um, don’t feel the same way, I mean everyone’s giving Valentines cards today and—”
Penny looked up and straight at her, cupping the card in her hands like it was something breakable, and she said, “Ruby Rose, I would be honored to be your girlfriend.”