Ruby Redfort Fanfiction: Look Into His Eyes And Take Your Last Breath

Freezing

Hitch greeted Ruby with a smile and her a glass of banana milk early on Monday morning. Ruby didn't normally have banana milk for breakfast, but Hitch reckoned Ruby needed a treat before a long, tiring day at school with plenty of questions about her absence. Ruby returned the smile with her usual grin. She took a seat at the table and began to munch on her toast smothered in butter and jam. Dan, who Ruby had readily avoided for the entirety of the two weeks, he had taken a backseat since Froghorn had found Blacker. Neither of them looked up from their breakfasts. Dan was to move to a Spectrum apartment later. Hitch had got one for him, he could see Ruby couldn't stand him. Hitch was worried about Ruby. She had suffered a lot, but the discovery of an almost friend and best friend's love for her would be enough to weigh down her thoughts for a long time, and with Blacker dead, Hitch felt Ruby was stuck inside her own mind, trying to come up with a plausible explanation for something that didn't have one. Ruby looked the same on the outside, but completely different on the inside. Ruby looked up at Hitch's concerned face, and suddenly felt like the luckiest girl alive when she really wasn't at that moment. Hitch was like an older brother, really annoying sometimes, but she loved him to bits. She flashed him a genuine smile and he relaxed a little. Ruby would get through this, and he would help her. Ruby grabbed her school bag and slung it onto her back, whistled for Bug and left out the back door. She cycled all the way to school at top speed. She didn't stop.

----
Mouse and Red were in the hallway outside of class when they saw Ruby. Red beamed in delight and Mouse did that thing when she smiled with her eyes. Ruby raised her hand, her normal greeting.
"Where were you?" asked Red, "Del was raving when you missed that big basketball game." Ruby shrugged,
"Oh, one of my parents good friends and their daughter died in a car crash, I went to their funeral." the mood among the group immediately sobered.
"Sorry." whispered Mouse. Ruby shrugged again like it didn't really matter.
"It's alright. I didn't really know them anyways." Ruby seemed to be successful in keeping the wobble out of her voice because Mouse and Red said no more about it. Then Del Lasco stormed into the hall,
"Redfort, where were you when we played Bugwart on Friday huh? Off on another one of your studies on Swiss medical help?"
"I was outta town." Ruby told her breezily, "but not on one of those Swiss study things, no." Del seemed to simmer in rage like an erupting volcano,
"If you think that's an excuse Redfort, you're talking to the wrong person-"
"Cut her some slack Del, Ruby was at a funeral for one of her and her parents friends." Red cut in. Del went from boiling hot to an embarrassed red in less than a second. She rubbed the back of her neck awkwardly.
"Ah...sorry Ruby, I was just kinda annoyed ya know?"
"Yeah," said Ruby, and she really did know. "It's okay Del, let's just get to class already and speak nothing more of it." Del offered a weak smile,
"Now you're talking."
---
You could have knocked Miss Drisco down with a feather when Ruby, Del, Mouse and Red sauntered into a pretty empty classroom ten minutes before the bell. She had never seen Ruby come in to class before the bell, let alone school. Ruby winked at her as she took her usual seat at the back. That's when Clancy walked into class, looking the same as ever. Del, Elliot, Mouse and Red looked happy to see him as well, and were suspicious about his coincidentally simultaneous absence with Ruby. Clancy simply said his father had taken him and his sisters to an ambassadorial function in DC, to meet with the Senate, a trip he had been really excited about and had told Clancy and his siblings that the trip was far to good to miss. As Clancy had predicted, the trip was infuriatingly boring, and Clancy had spent two weeks locked up in a hotel room with only the TV and room service to keep him company. It was a solid cover and Ruby couldn't help admire how he so easily jested and joked with his friends. He too, she was sure, had a lot of stuff to run through his mind too. He finally pushed through the crowd of friends and took his allocated seat next to Ruby. Miss Drisco had put them together at the back because if they were at opposite sides of the room, they would tap out maddening Morse Code to one another, and when she told them to stop, Ruby would look up, a picture of innocence and asked Miss Drisco what she was talking about. When Miss Drisco told her impatiently she was distracting the class, Ruby bugged her eyes and said she had made no noise at all and Miss Drisco should get her ears tested. The rest of the class would stuff their fists in their mouths and try their best not to laugh. There had already been several episodes with Elliot's uncontrollable giggling,so it was much easier if she put them together at the back out of harm's way. Clancy dropped his bag onto the floor and said politely.
"Good morning Ruby." But he was seemingly addressing his table as he did so, and Ruby replied with the unusually cool reply of,
"Good morning." For a moment no one said a word. Then Del Lasco whistled.
"Man is it me or is it suddenly freezing cold in here." The crowd snapped out of the stupor immediately and went back to their seats.
As Miss Drisco started registration, she suddenly decided to have one last shot at separating Redfort and Crew. She put them at opposite ends of the room, at the front where she could watch them carefully. For the entire registration, there was not a peep from either of them.
-----
Ruby and Clancy avoided one another for the four classes that came before lunch. They said nothing to one another, never met each other's eyes, and for the first time, Ruby was completely concentrated on her school work. During Maths, Ruby shot through the questions like a rocket. She was finished the entire old, out of date, thick textbook that students in her form had been using since the beginning of time and moved on to her teacher's book for higher level maths intended for the highest form. During Science, Ruby wrote down a five page essay on the periodic table and its elements and read all of Albert Einsteins published papers on time relativity. During geography, Ruby drafted out Christopher Columbus' entire trip on a map and labelled the points of interest. During Chinese, Ruby drafted a letter to Mao Ze Dong, the well known dictator of all of the Democratic Republic of China and taught the unassuming Del Lasco to say, 我是很不總明 (translates as: I am not very clever). Needless to say, Ruby Redfort was keeping herself busy.