Chapter Text
They meet on a rooftop.
Ruby has barely settled into sitting on the roof’s edge, her legs dangling over, when a voice from behind her says, “You might not actually realize this, but this is mostly my place for avoiding people when I don’t feel like dealing with them.”
She looks over her shoulder. Her night vision isn’t exactly great and there aren’t any lights on up here – the party is in the actual building proper downstairs, and as far as Ruby knows, nobody’s supposed to be up here – but she can see that the other girl now occupying the rooftop is slender and a little taller than Ruby herself, with her hair secured in a ponytail. With it hanging behind the girl’s back, Ruby doesn’t really have any way of gauging how long it is.
There’s a sizable portion of Ruby that curls in on herself. She can practically hear herself mumbling “Oh, sorry,” even if the other girl was obviously joking. The part of her that deals with depression with inappopriate humor and the part of her that’s just plain depressed team up, briefly, to offer up the thought: Or I could just lean forward and topple down and eliminate the problem that way.
It's pretty fucking dark, but then, that’s nothing new. And if nothing else she’s learned to try not to ignore that kind of thinking when it happens. She certainly shouldn’t act on it, either, but she needs to recognize when she’s slipping into bad patterns.
“I didn’t see your name anywhere up here,” she finally shoots back, if a little weakly.
“You should have realized that butt-shaped impression in the roof you’re sitting in was left by somebody else,” the girl says, drawing closer and then moving to sit a few feet to Ruby’s left. Now, Ruby can see that the girl’s hair reaches all the way down to her waist, and this close, she can tell that it’s probably…brown, maybe? It’s gotten really dark.
“Oh, see, I was wondering why it was so comfortable here,” Ruby responds, doing her best to play along. This is definitely nobody she’s ever met. Which could mean anything. Probably not from Atlas or Mantle or Vale, but that could mean anything. She could be a Vacuo native or someone who came to help defend the kingdom from the outside.
“It’s good that you’re grateful. You know, for my residual butt heat keeping you warm on a cold night in Vacuo.” The girl kicks out with her legs one by one, seemingly heedless of any danger in the act. Her eyes are locked on the shattered moon overhead, but there’s a smile on her face that Ruby finds herself torn between admiring and envying.
Maybe it’s that she’s so caught up in the unexpected appearance of a new person. Maybe it’s that her moods are totally chaotic now and there’s simply no sense in trying to pin down how she’s feeling in a given moment. But when Ruby opens her mouth to respond, what she says is, “If your butt’s hot enough to leave heat that lasts long enough for it to still be around for me to appreciate tonight, either you have the weirdest Semblance I’ve ever heard of, or…uh…actually, I’m not even sure what I was going to say for the second thing.”
She doesn’t even have a proper span of time in which to be appalled with herself before the girl beside her redirects her gaze to Ruby and says, sounding thoroughly amused, “Holy shit?”
Ruby drags her legs up, plants her feet down in front of her, and braces her arms on her thighs to better cradle her face in her hands. “Oh, gods.”
“You’re human, right? Can you even see my ass?” the girl asks, giving her own rear end a pointed poke with one finger.
“I don’t say things like that. My sister says things like that. If that was going to rub off on me it would have happened while she was basically raising me, not now,” Ruby groans. “Her name is Yang and she’s at the party. Go punch Yang, not me, please.”
“Oh, I already ran into Yang down there. I’m practically up here running from Yang now. Well, her and Blake, anyway,” the mystery girl says, and then lets out a very particular sort of derisive, self-directed laugh that immediately has Ruby primed to feel a certain kind of kinship with her.
But her words also make Ruby curious, and so she lifts her head from her hands and asks, “So is it, like, personal, or are you running away from the scary all-consuming new couple energy they’re still putting off?” Ruby asks, and surprises herself with how non-bitter she manages to sound talking about it.
She’s rewarded when the girl beside her laughs delightedly, looking straight at her – does she have freckles? – with a wide grin. “You know, I guess it’s a little bit of both.” And then her hand reaches across the gap of a few feet between them, and she says, “I’m Ilia. And you’re…Amity Girl?”
Ruby makes a gagging sound, but takes the hand anyway. “Just Ruby, please. I think I need to start wearing a mask if I’m going to stick around in Vacuo.”
“I would say I’m surprised you’re not down there, but…actually, I’m not at all surprised you’re not down there. Not into it?” Ilia asks after releasing Ruby’s hand.
“Nope,” Ruby says. It’s all she’s willing to say by way of explanation right now, but for her it expresses a lot.
“Valid,” Ilia says, and her tone of voice, the finality of it – it makes Ruby smile. “It says a lot that the Schnee girl was the one I had the easiest time with down there. Although I’ve already done some work with her sister, so I guess I’ve already had some practice at that.” Ilia shrugs. “But hey, let’s not cross the streams as far as baggage goes. And heck, maybe I can leave the baggage alone for a little while in general.” She plants her hands on the ceiling behind her, then tilts her head back while leaning backward. “So if your butt heat is settling in now, is that like, the equivalent of those torches they keep lit for sporting events?”
Ruby lets out a supremely undignified snort. It feels pretty great. When she came up to this roof tonight, she wasn’t expecting to get some laughs in. “What, like, I’m keeping the eternal flame lit? Sure,” Ruby says, and it’s the easiest smile she’s worn in some time. “You know, I’ve been told I’m slow on the uptake when it comes to this sort of thing, but if you aren’t careful I might interpret that as flirting,” Ruby says.
“Ahh…” Ilia says, then flattens out the hand closest to Ruby, the one she used to shake Ruby’s, and wiggles it. “Don’t get me wrong…but not tonight. I’m mixed up. But I’m happy to talk until you go back down there.”
Ruby lets out a little bit of a snort again, but this time it’s less of a happy noise. “I don’t think I’m going back down there. I’d probably rather just find a fire escape and sneak back to where they dropped off our bags for tonight.”
“I get that,” Ilia says, and then for a moment she falls into a companionable silence. Not a long one, but long enough that Ruby can relax into it a little bit. But then, finally: “So did you do them wrong, or is it the other way around?” Ilia asks, her eyes firmly locked on the stars overhead when Ruby glances over.
Is she bothered? Does she think Ilia is being nosy? Or does this feel more like a lifeline? An offer, overt and freely given, to listen to what Ruby has to say. “Kind of all of the above. Can you say it’s all of the above if there were only two choices beforehand? I guess it’d just be ‘both’ if this was, like, a multiple choice quiz.”
“Is Blake and the blondie constantly macking on each other, like, involved in this clusterfuck, or is that just a side bonus only I need to get over?” Ilia asks, her gaze flicking over to Ruby again. She’s actually smiling a little as she speaks; it takes a lot of the edge off her words, makes it clear that there isn’t much anger there.
“Mmm, I think it’s a side bonus for both of us for different reasons,” Ruby says, and makes that same flattened hand wiggling motion that Ilia did earlier. It makes the other girl laugh, and Ruby’s heart leaps a little. “I don’t…have a stake in that? I crushed on Blake for like, maybe five seconds at Beacon. Someone else kind of grabbed my attention pretty quickly, even if I didn’t realize that was what was going on at the time…but anyway…” Ruby doesn’t try to resolve not to think of Penny – that seems like a lost cause and probably, like, wildly unhealthy besides. But she doesn’t want to wallow in the feeling either. “But they kind of went all in on…that…when I wasn’t in a good place and needed someone to, like…maybe not do the work of pulling me out, but at least notice that something was wrong?” Ruby shrugs. “It’s not, like…their fault…”
Ilia gets a weird kind of smile on her face, one that tugs at one corner of her mouth and makes it look a little lopsided. “I dunno, that kind of sounds like you at least a little bit feel like it is. Or want to.” Ilia pulls her hands back and extends her slender fingers outward in a kind of gesture of surrender. “No judgement here.”
Ruby smiles, then makes a helpless gesture with her own hands while shrugging. "If I do think it is, I'm not, like, consciously hiding it," Ruby finally says. "I just haven't thought it out enough, I guess. And it's not like it matters. I don't, like...want to be angry at them about that. I just want to get past it."
"I mean, I'm definitely not the person to go to about dealing with your anger healthily, but like...in my experience, you're going to want to express it at least a little bit, somehow, if you actually want to let go of it. If you're just repressing the hell out of it, it's just going to get worse." Ilia shrugs at that. "But honestly, we can just not talk about it. There's like, a million other topics, and I feel like it's wasting 'alone on a rooftop with a new, pretty girl' time to like, gripe about a couple we both know."
Ruby flashes her a fake glare, pointing at her with one index finger. "I thought you said, not tonight, you're all mixed up," she says, smirking a little.
"Clearly it's proof of how mixed up I am that I can't keep my head on straight about things," Ilia says, shrugging with a silly grin that makes Ruby's stomach flip.
And a second later, she's in her own head. Is she seriously flirting with someone she met, like, all of five seconds ago when she couldn’t even manage to tell Penny how she felt before she died? What does that say about her? Can she even complain about no one noticing how she's felt all this time if she's this shallow?
It's almost breathtaking, the sheer speed with which she plunges back into the patterns of thought she'd been in in the Ever After, after Weiss had given her the basic rundown on what had happened on the bridge. For a long, ugly moment, Ruby loses track of her surroundings completely.
And then there's a hand on her shoulder, and that grounds her enough to hear the words someone's saying to her from barely a foot away. "-- you there? Do I need to get someone? I'm not actually afraid enough of interacting with your friends to not get you help, so seriously, just say the word...or nod...?" And Ruby registers that Ilia is like, right there, looking at her with enough worry on her face that Ruby has to wonder how long she was out or how she must have looked.
"Sorry," is all she manages to get out at first. Then she brings her hands up -- careful not to knock Ilia's hand off her shoulder with one of her arms, because that really is helping -- and rubs at her face. To her shock and some degree of humiliation, her face is streaked with tears. "Shit, what's wrong with me."
"Hey, hey -- I'm not going to ask if you're okay because I'm not that dumb, probably, I hope, but like. Uhh." Her hand starts to pull away and Ruby's own moves on its own to seize Ilia by the wrist. Ruby's throat is too constricted to get an apology out, but Ilia looks more dumbfounded than angry, and she seems to see something in Ruby's face and instead of pulling away any further, she sort of sits up on her knees -- she'd clearly moved closer to Ruby during her episode, and they're a couple of feet away from the edge of the roof now -- and uses her other arm to pull Ruby closer to her, and Ruby finds herself with her nose smushed against one of Ilia's clavicles. It would feel sort of intimate, maybe, if Ruby's face wasn't hot with tears and if she wasn't actively crying right this second. The hand moves back to Ruby's shoulder and the other arm loops around her back
"Sorry," Ruby gets out, trying to tilt her head just right so that her lips aren't, like, moving against Ilia's skin. "I'm a headcase."
"A bunch of people died and for you unlucky bitches it was, like, yesterday instead of months ago," Ilia says, moving her hand in comforting little circles against Ruby's back and squeezing her shoulder. "Dude, do you have any idea how many weeks I spent, like, randomly crying on street corners after we heard about you fuckers? And let's be real, by you fuckers I mean that particular fucker, Blake. At least I was lucky enough to be doing it when literally everyone had lost somebody and if you had a random emotional breakdown while waiting to order street tacos, usually you could count on the the person in front of you or behind you either coming off their own freakout or getting triggered by yours, so either way it just wasn't as embarrassing because, like. Solidarity or whatever." It's an uninterrupted stream of words from Ilia and it has Ruby, to her shock, actually laughing. "Oh, is that funny? See, I was talking about misery loving company but you're here laughing at my grief. How could you, you monster --"
Ruby shoves Ilia off her, wiping at her face and not even trying to kill the smile on it. "You're a dork. I'm surprised Blake managed to be...the way she was at Beacon if she was friends with you for, like, even five minutes beforehand," she says.
Ilia's own smile falters for just a second, but then she turns her head and rolls her eyes. "It was kind of a crappy time. I was burying like. Most of my personality in wanting to set most of the world on fire and being mad at Blake for not noticing me. It was a miracle she gave a damn at all by the time we met up again on Menagerie." She makes a face.
Ruby wipes at her eyes again with the back of one hand, her own smile leveling out to something that isn’t deadly serious, but isn’t exactly a grin either. “No judgment here,” she echoes, her voice pointed. “And I’m not one to talk, but if there’s anything I’ve noticed from…maybe not being friends, but being in a team with Blake, it’s that she definitely seems to give a damn about things, she just gets so in her own head about them that sometimes she does dumb stuff?” She makes an unsatisfied noise. “That wasn’t well said, but whatever. I mean, you sorted stuff out, right? So you know.”
“Yeah,” Ilia says, and then they fall into a companionable enough silence. For a little while, anyway. Ruby catches Ilia looking down from the stars to squint at her once, and then a second time, before Ilia finally sighs and says, “Look, this isn’t like – a thing, I really did mean what I said. But do you want my scroll code? You…seem cool to talk to. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea to try and leave it up to chance and us having some people in common when I’m maybe wanting to avoid them for a little bit right now.” And Ilia’s holding out her scroll, contact nub outward.
For a moment, Ruby’s mouth hangs open, but then she lets herself smile. It isn’t anything as incandescent as one of Penny’s, but it isn’t fake, either. “Um. Yeah, sure,” Ruby says, and then she pulls her own off her belt and brings it into contact with Ilia’s, trading information. “Um…I’m not always great at reaching out first with new people?” Ruby says. “I mean, not to put all the pressure on you. I’ll try! But I’d love to hear from you soon.”
And for just a moment, Ruby is treated to the sight of what had looked rather like freckles on Ilia’s skin instead flickering with something halfway between a change of color and, well…actual glowing? Ilia’s actual expression zigzags for a moment or two from pleasure, to embarrassment, to irritation, to something like resignation before it finally evens out as she lets out a sigh. “It’s just Faunus stuff,” she says, with forced nonchalance.
Ruby remembers the girl referring to her as human – really, that should have gone right past hint territory and just told Ruby what her deal was. But she hadn’t really thought about it, any more than she’s thinking when she says, “It’s really cool, though?” before her brain catches up to her mouth and she presses her lips shut before cradling her face in both hands again. “Or, you know, you’re welcome to just never call me if you want?” She sighs, then looks at Ilia from between her hands. “But, I mean. I do want you to.”
Ilia gives her a kind of lopsided smile. “I’ll shoot you a message. And, you know…” She looks away for a moment, takes a breath, then looks Ruby dead in the eyes. “If you really don’t want to deal with your team, I can let them know you’re going home on your own on my way down?”
It’s both the nicest thing anyone’s offered to do for Ruby in a while…and, strangely, an nudge in the right direction, though she doesn’t think that Ilia means it as the latter. “Actually…I think I’ll tell them myself on my way out. But thanks anyway,” she says, and then – doing her best to ignore the slight tingle in both legs – she gets to her feet.
Ilia smiles at her and does a little flapping wave with one hand, folding it at the palm, open and shut. “Good luck. And remember to try and text me if I forget to.”
At the smile, Ruby feels her stomach doing something decidedly odd, something not far off from a flip. She gives Ilia a wave of her own, then turns around and heads for the door leading down from the roof, grateful in a way for the confusing feeling for helping to distract her from any nervousness at speaking to her teammates again so soon.