Chapter Text
It’s late afternoon, some time after the last intense bits of work for the day, and Ruby and Weiss are sitting on a sun-warmed ledge near the edge of the campus, spending their rare bit of free time winding down from classes and not doing anything with their aching limbs for a while.
They weren’t allowed a lot of time off, the clock was very much ticking what with finals and stuff, so what they do get, they cherish, whether alone or together.
Ruby was rambling on and on about something, voice loud and animated. Her points were illustrated with wide sweeps of her arms and exaggerated expressions like usual. Not even exhaustion could muffle her voice or her enthusiasm.
She was rambling about something , sure, but Weiss had lost track of what exactly she was talking about what felt like hours ago, although it definitely hadn’t been that long.
Ruby’s voice dulled to indecipherable background noise in her mind as she stared out in front of herself, eyes too stubborn or too lazy to move from watching how the specks that were people bustled around on the lower levels.
Then a hand flailed into her vision, way too close to her face, and Weiss startled back.
“Hey!” came Ruby’s voice, and Weiss turned to look at her belatedly. She looked annoyed, but that too only reached Weiss’s consciousness as something sluggish and unimportant. “You listening?”
Weiss blinked at her slowly. God, she hated how much her brain was refusing to start and catch up right now. “What?”
Ruby doesn’t answer immediately, just stared at her for what could’ve been seconds or whole minutes, Weiss really couldn’t tell. Her annoyance seemed to melt away into something else, either curiosity or concern or maybe something else starting with a “c”?
Weiss wasn’t sure, but she was almost entirely distracted by the fact that Ruby’s eyelashes were very pretty, and she has a truly unfair amount of them. If she didn’t know better, she would think that she used makeup. But she’d known Ruby long enough to know that that wasn’t the case…
Her thought process that was kind of just drifting around her head aimlessly was interrupted again by a hand against her forehead, specifically Ruby’s hand. It was only the backs of her fingers, pressing lightly into Weiss’s forehead, way more gently than what she was used to from Ruby in most scenarios.
Weiss shook her head and forced her eyes back into focus, and she was vaguely aware of Ruby pulling her hand back. “What the hell are you doing?”
Ruby shrugged. “Just checking.”
“Checking what?” She rubbed absently at her forehead, because she weirdly felt like Ruby’s touch was lingering on her skin. Way after she shook off the feeling, she recognized the gesture as Ruby checking her for a fever, maybe? But why would she do that? “I’m fine,” Weiss added, just in case.
Ruby didn’t look convinced. “Are you, though?”
Weiss just made a confused noise at her. She hoped it would suffice.
It seemed to, because Ruby shrugged again and kept talking. “I don’t know, you’ve just been zoning out all day and I actually had to remind you about the essay for Goodwitch. And when I asked for help with it you gave in, like, way too easily, and you didn’t even sulk about it!”
Okay, that one was definitely true. So maybe Weiss has had less focus today than on most days and didn’t feel up to making a fuss about losing. So what?
“And you look terrible!” Ruby continued, and wow, rude . Weiss wondered if her friend’s claim had any truth to it, though. She hasn’t looked in a mirror all day, didn’t really have the time. “I mean, not to be mean, but really! I didn’t think it was possible. You’re you!”
Weiss wanted to tell her to get out of here with that simplification, but her sluggish mind didn’t seem to have any sharp comeback in stock and she didn’t feel up to all of Ruby’s teasing right now.
Her mind was annoyingly fuzzy and the world around her felt like she was seeing and hearing it through frosted glass. When she opened her mouth to say what was definitely going to be a witty comeback, what came out instead was a yawn so big her jaw popped.
Ruby’s brow visibly furrowed at that. “How much did you sleep last night?”
What a dumb, irrelevant question. What was Ruby on about, anyway? But she didn’t feel up to arguing with her right now. She wondered why, but her mind came up blank, just like with everything else today. Annoying.
“I don’t know. Enough?”
“Weiss…” Ruby all but sighed, the exasperated kind, and okay, what was with that? Weiss felt like she was being pinned as the idiot here, which was just completely unreasonable. Ruby was clearly the idiot in this partnership.
She wasn’t. Not really. They were both idiots, while also they were very much not. Weiss wondered for a moment if that was why they worked so well together.
Ruby leaned in closer and searched for Weiss’s gaze, silver eyes flickering slightly from side to side until Weiss finally gave in and looked at her. Even with her red-tinged hair hiding half her face, she looked so sincere and gentle , and it made Weiss sigh and give in way too easily.
Because Ruby had these unexpected little moments when her rough edges and everything that made her almost overwhelming to be around day and night seemed to soften out. When her warmth felt less like Weiss was going to burn up any second, and more like a mug of hot coffee when you’d been out in the cold all day but forgot your gloves at home.
And Weiss is utterly and regrettably weak for Ruby letting herself go soft on her. And so she gave in.
“Okay… not much sleep,” she admitted, eyes flickering away before she forced them back to Ruby’s face. “But it’s fine!”
But by now Ruby knew how to see behind Weiss’s words and read behind her lines, in most cases anyway. She knew that Weiss always downplayed her own problems, because she was a big stubborn dumby, obsessed with thinking that she never needed any help.
Ruby was constantly swinging between finding it very worrying and just supremely irritating, like some kind of very distressed pendulum. And so she arrived at a worrying, but fairly obvious interpretation. “Have you slept at all?”
Maybe it was because she was so tired and her thoughts were all fuzzy in her head. Maybe it was Ruby still being all soft and warm right in front of her. Maybe it was both, Weiss wasn’t sure. But once again, her stubborn resolve crumbled like it was never there in the first place. “...no.”
Ruby did not at all look pleased about that. “So you haven’t slept. At all. In over a day.”
Okay, screw this. Weiss looked away for real now because he couldn’t keep looking at Ruby anymore, not when even with her tone flat and clearly displeased she was looking at her like that . She hoped her deadpan tone was a herald of their usual teasing returning, because she knew how to handle that.
Worst case scenario she could just pretend to be offended and leave and then apologize over terrible cafeteria food. She knew how to handle the teasing and shoving and the bad jokes. Serious schoolwork and well-honed teamwork and interactions that somehow maybe border on flirting. She knew all of that.
She didn’t know how to handle something like this .
In the end she just sighed, defeated, as if Ruby needed any more confirmation. “...Maybe.”
Weiss wasn’t sure if at this point she was expecting Ruby to call her an idiot and jump back into teasing her relentlessly. Or maybe she was just hoping that was what was going to happen so that she could finally return to her comfort zone of snark and stubbornness and never leave again.
As warm and delighted seeing Ruby go all soft on her made her feel, it also wasn’t something she could handle for long, or at all really. She might handle it okay as long as she didn’t think about it, she wasn’t sure, because that blessed state of mind never tended to last her long.
But instead of going back to their usual dynamic and leaving Weiss to stew in her confused feelings in peace, Ruby sighed and for a moment she looked downright… worried? Weiss wasn’t sure, and the next moment that expression was gone, replaced by a look of fond exasperation that she was very familiar with, and so she decided that it must’ve just been her tired brain misinterpreting things.
“Alright. Okay,” Ruby started, talking but not saying anything like she tended to when devising some over-the-top plan to sneak her dog into the dorms that would definitely get her caught by the RA’s. “You’re going to bed. Right now.”
First of all, no , because Weiss was not a child anymore, and thus no one could tell her when her bedtime was. Okay, maybe Goodwitch could, but Goodwitch was kind of her own category in everything.
Ruby, who was an absolute menace on her best days, was two whole years younger than Weiss. And she was technically a freshman, and so had no rights. Especially no right to order her to go to bed.
Second of all, why the hell did she sound so determined?
Weiss wanted to tell her all that, especially the first part, as in screw you, Ruby Rose , but of course her brain and whatever part of it was supposed to handle her eloquence was not currently up to the job. “Ruby-”
“Nope! I don’t care, Weiss Cream, you gotta sleep.” She finally leaned back, which Weiss was grateful for, because she didn’t know how much longer she could’ve taken Ruby staring at her like that without straight up melting probably.
Ruby rocked back as she gathered momentum, and stood up annoyingly quickly when Weiss herself felt comparable to a sack of potatoes that somehow figured out how to grow legs. “Come on. Let’s get you back to your room.”
Weiss stared at the hand extended her way for a moment before she succumbed to her fate and let herself be pulled up.
She didn’t know what to do when Ruby was like this, and she especially didn’t know now. She’d had Ruby go soft on her before, sure, but she’d never had her gently pushing and herding her around like this, the way Winter sometimes did and maybe something like the rare moments her mother did, too.
She’d always managed to brush Ruby off or get out of the situation before things could come to this, rushing back to the security she found in teasing or rolling her eyes or sulking in her dorm for a while. Not that her roommate was ever a big help in that regard. If Ruby was loud, her sister was unbearable.
But now she was in it and too tired to come up with anything and plan ten steps ahead, and so she had no choice but to go with it.
She swayed with vertigo once she was on her feet, the world before her eyes blinking out in blotches of colour and black. She vaguely felt Ruby’s arm around her back, her side pressed against hers, the only solid thing as the world came back into focus and the ringing in her ears subsided.
Ruby didn’t let go once they started moving, and Weiss didn’t have the energy to shove her off. If she’d been honest with herself, she’d say she didn’t want to either.
She was barely paying attention to the walk back to her room, the pavement passing beneath her feet, the familiar faces they passed, and the corners they turned when Ruby pulled her this way or that. She was mostly just aware of Ruby’s movements, a rhythm that matched her own, and the warm presence still pressed against her side.
Her mind was a pleasantly sleepy fuzz despite it still being light out and it not even being dinner time yet, but she trusted Ruby not to lead her stray or let her run into any corners or any people.
The next thing Weiss knew, she was being guided down onto her bed on top of her comforter in her blessedly roommate-less dorm room. Gentle pushes and nudges laying her down, and Ruby’s arm was still around her like she was worried she was just going to fall over on her own. Honestly, she might.
The moment she can, Weiss curled up on her side, eyes shut. Because despite how she’d been holding up okay all day, now she felt positively exhausted all of the sudden. And being back in her own bed only seemed to make that even more obvious. Ruby was right for once, she really should go to sleep early.
She felt comfortable and heavy, her mind pleasantly blank and slow and fuzzy with sleepiness. She just about heard Ruby still moving around her room, her footsteps light without any conscious thought. But Weiss was too comfortable to open her eyes again or move at all, or even to just make a single sound to thank her.
Doing anything at all right then felt like it’d take incredible effort to achieve, and Weiss was entirely content with not doing anything at all. Just hanging on the edge of falling asleep.
She was too out of it to even feel surprised when she felt a blanket settling over her, warm and smelling like sunshine because she’d had it draped over her desk chair by the window. She felt the bed dip as Ruby sat on it near her knees, arranging the blanket over her better.
Her friend folded back the edge of it over Weiss’s shoulder neatly, carefully, in a way Weiss couldn’t remember Winter ever doing, but how she thought her mother maybe used to, once upon a time. She followed the feeling of Ruby smoothing the blanket down over her one last time, a gentle pressure against her shoulder before it slipped away.
She expected Ruby to stand and leave now, her self-assigned job already more than done, but she didn’t feel any movement. Then-
“Would it really be so hard for you to stop worrying me for just, like, two days?” Ruby sighed, her voice gentle and fond and so quiet that Weiss’s fuzzy mind could barely make out the words. She was certain that were she actually asleep, this wouldn’t have woken her up at all.
Weiss wondered absently if Ruby thought she was already asleep, too. “Because I do worry about you, y’know?” She heard the girl murmur, and vaguely felt a hand brush her bangs away from her face. “You wouldn’t believe me if you were awake, but I do.”
Oh.
But Weiss did believe her, as scary as it was to admit sometimes. As much as she didn’t want to interpret the signs most days because she didn’t know what to do with them. But Ruby had said it, and Weiss believed her.
And her heart ached, because Ruby sounded so sad and Weiss didn’t know why , but she knew that she wanted to help and to fix it. But she couldn’t bring herself to move, to do anything at all. Her body and mind and everything was too heavy, too close to the edge of sleep. And so she did nothing.
“I wish you trusted me enough to ask for my help sometimes.”
Ruby lingered for another moment after that, and Weiss found herself trying to commit her words into memory. Then the mattress shifted and leveled out again, Ruby’s weight gone from it.
“Night,” she said, from further away now, her voice still quiet enough to let Weiss sleep over it, but sounding maybe a little bit more fond than sad this time. And then Weiss heard the door open and close as quietly as it could, just barely over the sleepiness filing her head.