back to life

@sunnyxxmartin @swiiftbladcs @graysonberkshire @cadenlucca @levimadden @pjyxng

Ruby nodded slowly, holding in a small sigh of slight disappointment. She’d never tell P.J. how to move through his life, but she wished he allowed himself the kindness of his friendships. She knew he probably didn’t want to burden them with the knowledge of his departure, but Ruby also knew the people that cared about him most would probably want the proper chance to say goodbye, and better yet, would fight to keep him in their lives regardless. But maybe he’d just been through too much this last year, and he need a chance to start over. He wasn’t hopeless, she thought, when she took in the way he let her be a friend in this moment at least. Ruby’s brows rose slightly as he explained, though part of her thought maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised. “It’s not stupid, and I think you know that,” she said finally, gently. Her tone was careful as she looked at him with kind eyes, asking, “What do you feel, P.J.?”

She knows it’s true, and it’s something they’ve both come to accept since the start of the year. She wishes sometimes that she could be normal, that she’d have met him in another life where their worlds weren’t so fraught and they didn’t come from families that expected so much of them. But then Ruby remembers that this is the world where she’d found him, and had fallen in love with every piece of him in it. If this is their life, she’ll happily take it, because somehow, through all this mess, this boy is hers and she’d never risk the odds of ever losing that. Dreams are nice, but he breathes such loveliness into her reality that Ruby doesn’t need them. “Grayson, I don’t want to ever hurt you,” she whispers back, a soft hand reaching up to slip delicately against his jaw, her touch slowly more deliberate. He’s real, and he’s breathing, she thinks silently to herself. Her expression falters just a little bit, and Ruby tries to hear his words as consoling fact, but when she can still picture the way he’d looked with blood soaking through his clothes, it’s hard to keep steady. She gives a small nod to try to acknowledge it, and when his lips graze her hand, something in her longs for more, but she’ll wait until there’s more privacy. It’s enough that he’s here, it’s enough that she can hold him and share a dance with the boy she loves. “Yeah,” Ruby smiles softly, leaning into his touch, arms moving to rest at his shoulders. “That sounds like a good idea to me.”

Against all odds, a weak semblance of a laugh escapes her, and she wonders how he can be so casual about it. But then he says family, and her heart squeezes in her chest, frown pressed tight together to keep from crying as she nods in return to him. “Yeah,” Ruby answers quietly, voice hoarse. “We’re family.” She tries to take a steady breath, though it’s hard. She remembers that she hadn’t told him everything— hell, she’d barely talked to him in the last month and she’d tried to play off what had happened in D.C. like it was no big deal. Now she has to explain both what she hadn’t before, and how wrong she’d been. “Last time... in D.C., there was this man who attacked me and Ophelia and P.J., he tried to take her, and I was... I was so convinced it was about Ophelia, I mean he went for her, he grabbed her,” Ruby explained with growing frustration, needing him to understand that she hadn’t just been blind. But that intensity leaves her just a quickly to remember where she’d fit the pieces together incorrectly. “But I was wrong. It was a mistake. A-And yesterday, I was in Roseville and he came back for me, and I—” Her words hitched for a second, and she has to take another breath. “...He killed Hughes. And he shot Grayson. And I had his gun in my hands and I... I was going to kill him,” Ruby said weakly, but with no room for error in her voice, clear and absolute even in its fragility. She wears a faraway expression that hardly budges as she recollects the memory and the feeling of it all, though her eyes sting. “I thought things could be so simple... I thought you could just choose to be a good person, and that was it. You do the work, you do the right thing, and you just choose good.” Ruby’s vision blurs. “And then I thought this man was going to take away the only the only boy I’ve ever loved, and right or wrong didn’t matter anymore, and I put my finger on the trigger, and I swear to god, Caden... I was going to kill him.” Silently, as her head shakes slightly, small tears fall from her lower lashes and she finally looks back to him again. “And then I couldn’t even do that.”

Ruby had figured as much, but a small sigh escaped her anyway. “And you’re not going to tell her,” she said quietly, eyes cast a little bit downwards, not a question, but an observation. She wasn’t entirely sure what to do in this situation, even if she had been the one to bring it up. But Ruby knew that she wanted to be there for him, so she placed a gentle hand on his good arm, giving it a light squeeze. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

There’s a quiet exhaustion that comes after crying your eyes out that Ruby is becoming all too familiar with. Her breath is tired, eyes a little sore from all the sobbing, and parts of her body still hurt too. She’s trying to stretch her right palm out in front of her, the bruises on her knuckles a softer pink— she’s still not that good at punching, clearly. Ruby misses the text when he first sends it, and is only just then looking up from reading it on her phone screen when Levi comes through the door, and Ruby tries her to best not to look so tired for his sake. “Caden was supposed to tell you I’m fine,” she says lamely and innocently first, and she’s sure he probably did, but for someone like Levi, she should have known it wouldn’t have been enough. “I, um... I messed up, Levi,” Ruby starts quietly, lips scrunching into a tight frown, willing herself not to break from the memory again. If she hadn’t spent all her tears on Caden, she’s sure she’d be crying now, too, and thought the tears don’t come, the aching feeling in her chest does anyway.

Waiting for him to follow first, Agent Hughes’ expression doesn’t move; her job is not to react until necessary, though if she could, there might be an eye-roll for him. Ruby gives him that instead, annoyed beyond belief that he’s really going to have a smoke right now. “You can spare me another tired rendition of how much of an ass you really are, Tigs, I don’t need confirmation that you don’t feel remorse,” Ruby spits back, having come to that conclusion herself, unfair or not. “What I want is to know everything you know. Who contacted you first, how you found Ophelia, when exactly you told my father. I want to hear it from you,” she demands. She’s never been one to exude authority or have the first idea how to take on her title in a position of power. But without meaning to, Ruby begins to adopt the commandeering nature of her father, piercing eyes and strong determination. “So start talking.” A couple steps to her right, Hughes holds back a small smile.

“I’m certainly not the expert in the dorm, I’d defer to Lari,” she comments with a grin, then realizes that none of them really belong to the dorm anymore, and it’s even sadder to think of it now. “Thanks,” Ruby repeats, an earnest, prideful smile on her face, somewhat happy to have earned some of her approval this time. “Not while inside the grounds, no. But I’m managing fine. What about you? Having fun? Excited for tomorrow?”

Ruby still can’t bring herself to look at him, guilt holding her down, and she feels like the child she’s always feared she is for choosing to stay hidden in an embrace she doesn’t deserve. “You can’t— You can’t just forgive me like that, Caden,” she hiccups. “I was awful to you. I was supposed to be your friend,” Ruby says between the tears, and a part of this refusal to accept it is due to what she knows about herself now. “I missed you too,” she mumbles, and the words make her slowly lift her head up to him, because he needs to know that she means it. “I was...” she starts, staring up at him with wavering eyes, trying to pull at the memory from last night like it can be distilled into once sentence, like it isn’t the worst thing she’s felt in her whole life. And it all comes wrapped in fear and trauma and helplessness and the horrifying certainty that in that moment, Ruby had made a choice she’d thought she never could. Her breath stills slightly, sobs quieting as she gathers the strength to speak again. “...I almost killed someone yesterday,” Ruby whispers finally, the words barely audible, eyes filled with trembling trepidation to tell him the truth. All that time she’d spent turning a cold shoulder, angry with him for treating her like she was naive, like she didn’t know how the world really worked. And now here she stands, terrified of the way he might look at her, like she’s the disappointment now, like she’s exactly the person she’d made him apologize for becoming. But Caden hadn’t held that knife, and despite what had ended up happening, she’d meant to pull that trigger.

In another time, she definitely would have made fun of the rosiness starting to color his cheeks, but the two were closer in a new way now, so Ruby did him the kindness of pretending not to see that at least. She took in his words slowly, trying to test them for truth. It wasn’t an odd thing to tell your friends you loved them— she said it to Sunny all the time. But it didn’t quite seem like it was exactly that either. “Okay...” she started, trying to take his answer at face value. "So there’s nothing going on. Is that... because of Oxford?” Ruby lowered her voice slightly as she spoke her question. She didn’t think too many people at school knew, and she didn’t want to blow up his spot if that was the case.

She would have said yes anyway, despite the bruises hidden under her dress, because Martina’s presence was that inviting, and so she squeezes back, albeit far gentler. “I’m... fine, it’s all fine,” Ruby said, tacking on the later words a little quickly. She wasn’t about to dump all of her own mess onto her, and in the end she was fine. “Oh, yeah, it kinda felt like you two needed a moment, I wanted to give you guys some privacy,” she answered truthfully, hoping it didn’t put Martina on the spot. Regardless of anything that ‘wasn’t going on’, Ruby thought Martina and P.J.’s friendship was a close one, and it deserved peace and quiet like any other.

Ruby nods with a sad smile; she isn’t happy that her last memory of the town before summer begins will be one so traumatic, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’ll still be coming back in the fall. “Hopes answered,” she declares, turning her screen over so he can see the message of approval sent back by her parents. “There’ll be agents on the property, so not totally alone, but good enough for me,” Ruby sighs, slipping her phone into his coat pocket because she hadn’t thought to find a dress with pockets of its own. She knows he hasn’t spent too much time at her family home in Richmond, save for Thanksgiving, and the following Christmas before January had rolled around and they’d moved to the White House. It’ll be nice, she thinks, to have the time and privacy to be in her home with only him. No dinners to stress over, no family to worry about pleasing, though they’d all grown fond of him quickly— even more so now that the story of yesterday they’re privy to still involves his part in saving their daughter. She raises a brow as she glances back over to him. “I mean, it definitely doesn’t sound like you,” Ruby says, then a weak, nervous laugh escapes her and she shakes her head at the thought. “Grayson, don’t say that,” she protests, squeezing his right hand a little harder, like she needed to be able to feel his heartbeat against her skin.

“I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but, I mean, I was sitting right next to you,” she winced, because surely he had to know that. Her brows raised slightly, turning her gaze back to him with a look of incredulity. “The Shuo Yang says I love you to a girl and there’s ‘nothing going on’?” Ruby asked, finding it hard to believe. Had she ever heard him say I love you to anyone? She doubted it. She had to wonder what it was about Martina that either elicited those feelings from him or made an ‘I love you’ feel like a casual greeting with him. Both options perplexed her. Ruby pouted as she narrowed her eyes, debating on using the my-boyfriend-almost-died card in hopes of getting her way, though maybe that was pushing it. But that’s what friends did, right? And as Ruby looked back at P.J., she was happy to think of him as a friend again.

Ruby had wanted to say something, but lost her chance again as he turned back to the equipment, and se mentally kicked herself. When Drew came back to the conversation, she was determined this time to see it through. “That’s good to hear,” she responded genuinely, a softer, somber sort of smile on her face. Ruby nodded once, knowing that it was true, that it had been a good minute since they’d spent time together, and she knew it was mostly on her, and if she wanted to move forward, she was going to have to admit that, and pray he didn’t hate her for it. “I think...” she started, biting her lip as she stared down at his shoes for a moment. “I think that’s my fault. I’ve been a little distant,” she said, voice quiet. “I’ve been... unfair to you, Drew,” Ruby continued, meeting his gaze again with apology in her sad eyes. “And I’m sorry about that, I just— I’ve been having a hard time lately... trusting some people in my life. And on instinct, I did the same to you, even though you didn’t deserve it.”

It’s immediate, the way that she feels this pure release as soon as his arms wrap around her and it feels like walking into a familiar home all over again, like a beat had never passed where she’d been pushing him away, and she could still belong in the arms of her older brother. That release open the floodgates, and as much as she’d tried to prepare herself not to, Ruby begins to sob into the fabric of his shirt as she clings onto him, feeling the warm despair rise in her chest and fall from her eyes. She still feels guilty, like she doesn’t deserve the safety she feels with him right now, thinking her apology isn’t enough for the way she’d cast him aside, made him feel unwanted for the decisions he’d made under pressure, under trauma. She thinks of the gun in her hands again, and the choices she tried to make, and the tears continue. “I’m sorry...” Ruby mumbles into his shirt, between light sobs, almost too shameful to lift her head again in the blossoming daylight. “Caden, I’m sorry, I... Everything I said to you—” she goes on, words muffled and stilted, finding it so hard to get them all out past both her tears and her regret. “I should have been there for you, I should have— I-I didn’t get it, I got scared and I— I’m so sorry,” she keeps going, unable to stop repeating herself despite his insistence that she doesn’t need to apologize.