Work Text:
It was a warm June morning, when Ruby realised that the prototype was staring at her.
She’d been working through morning checks when those huge green eyes swiveled, sluggish and sleep-crusted, to focus on her.
The prototype was half-awake and almost at the end of his fuel pressure, sprawled drowsily out on the workshop table for ease of access as she connected and disconnected various instruments. He’d recently started struggling with their six a.m. starts, his sleep schedule beginning to shift towards later mornings. He was growing up.
Eighty percent of his blueprinted height, according to the chart marked out on the workshop wall.
There was such a strange dichotomy to trainlets. Double-oh-three (Hydra, as he now insisted on being called) was four times her height now and could have crushed her like a bug. But he was also thirteen, as of last week, chubby-cheeked and spotty and just barely beginning to grow into gangling limbs. Next to the other trains on staff it was obvious, no matter how huge and intimidating he’d initially seemed when she met him.
One massive hand came up to rub at his eye. He yawned, nose scrunching up, then looked back at her.
“Wassat?” he slurred, pointing vaguely in her direction.
“What’s what?”
He blinked his way a little more awake, the electric currents on the multimeter picking up as he wiggled his fingers, one of the little exercises he’d learned as part of his exams.
“On your jumpsuit thingy,” he said. “Can I sit up yet? I can’t see.”
“On my…” Ruby patted herself down, confused, then realised— “Oh, these?”
They were nothing big. Just two little pins, god only knew where she’d got these particular ones at this point. The she/her pin she remembered— a little bookshop down in Brighton, when they’d been hunting for picture books for her baby niece — but the scratched, dented little tricolour could have come from anywhere, rust and use marring its once-bright pink, purple, and blue.
“They’re pride pins,” she said, carefully. “One more sec, lemme get a look at your gauges?”
He shifted obligingly, but kept his eyes on her.
“What are pride pins?”
Oh, so they were having this conversation then, fantastic; what a wonderful thing to navigate before the sun was even properly up.
“It’s like… You know how Sam up in accounts is in a civil partnership with another man?” She noted down temperature, lading stats, fuel tank pressure, and realised with annoyance that the last was a bigger drop than yesterday— he’d probably hit a growth spurt soon. “And he loves his husband, just like any married couple loves each other— some people think that shouldn’t be allowed. Pride is about telling those people that they’re wrong, and that we deserve respect, and we’re here to stay.”
It was harder than she’d thought to keep her voice calm, to stay in that pleasant educational register they were all supposed to use to maximise information retention and avoid freaking him out. She finished checking the gauges and stepped back, nodding to him that she was done.
Really, it should have scared her to see so much metal move as quickly as he did in his scramble upright, but he negated the effect almost immediately by squinting down at her again, studying the pins on her chest.
“So you have a husband?”
“No-!” Oh god. She was terrible at this, actually, and Dev Psych was going to kill her if she got this wrong. He’d know the concepts, somewhere, socially— but the language was iffier. “No, I’m a woman, so homophobes don't want me to have a wife, not the other way around. This one—” she tapped it, “Means that I’m bisexual. I’m single right now, but I might have a husband or a wife someday, if the law changes so they'll let me. And this one—” a gesture to the other. “Just means that you say ‘she’ and ‘her’ when you’re talking about me. So people know, no matter how I look.”
“Oh, I see…” he trailed off, contemplative. Shuffled his skates back and forth across the floor, wheels squeaking slightly, his papery sleeping clothes rustling with the movement.
Then, he sighed. It was quite possibly the saddest sound Ruby had ever heard him make outside of testing.
“I wish,” he proclaimed, mournfully. “That they made those for trains.”
The kid had fueling and breakfast and morning classes after that, which was good.
It gave Ruby time to prepare.
The shop here was a lot cleaner than most she’d worked in. it was reminiscent of a hospital— white walls, steel fixtures, nothing old enough to be rusted or worn out or dirty. But outside the dedicated “clean” part of the room, it was still a workshop. Spare parts and half-used tins of paint piled up in the corners out of range of the machines, overflowed their shelving and were stacked precariously on any free surface. As soon as you got across the little line of yellow caution tape, it was fair game.
Ruby had to dig around to find what she was looking for, but she knew that they were there— signs. Bigger than dinner plates, bearing various warnings, DO NOT MOVE and OUT OF SERVICE and RISK OF DEATH. She considered leaving risk of death, at least, because they might need that one— then decided to order another on filemaker while nobody was looking.
Scraping the plastic coating off took her a while, and led to a couple nicks in her fingers, but nothing plasters couldn't handle. She sanded down the metal to rough it up a bit, found an almost-empty tin of the primer they used on his panelling.
Technically, this was a waste of company resources. The project had a strict budget, and one wasn’t supposed to dip into funds or supplies for other arms of it. But this was definitely going to count as enrichment, and she could always think of ways to justify it. Building his fine motor skills. Discerning colour. Cultural education, that was a good one.
So by the time Hydra was back to the main building— grouchy about the uselessness of whatever niche bit of rail safety code they’d had him going over this week— she was ready. Drop cloths on the floor, paint in every colour she could find, the big roller that might just be navigable for him to hold.
Because… Well. None of them could know for certain. A cynical little part of her wanted to say he’d probably moved on, forgotten completely in the bustle of the day. But…
She’d been thirteen once.
Thirteen, with nobody to turn to.
The difference just one person could have made then. One person, making sure she knew she wasn’t alone—
“Are we doin’ an Activity?”
He’d snuck up on her, twenty-something tonnes of steel and supercooled liquid dropping into a squat to see from somewhere near her level.
“Something like that.” Hydra did not like Activities; he’d recently cottoned on to the fact that almost every game was secretly, somehow, a test of reasoning or movement or a hundred other things and on top of that decided they were ‘stupid’ and ‘cringe’. “I figured since you were asking about my pins earlier, we could make some together?”
He stared for a second, taken aback, before his face broke into a wide, giddy grin.
“Forreal?”
The tanker rocked smoothly onto his knees, leant forward to begin examining the materials.
“So, I, I- what’s like, uhm, you know Kryon next door?”
Oh did she ever. The training yard had been a raging hive of petty tween-age gossip after that incident, because apparently the little EMU was already as spoken for as they could be at fourteen. But it had been awfully sweet of them to send back paper flowers.
“Kryon’s— if someone married Kryon, they’d not be a husband OR a wife, right?” Hydra continued, oblivious to the way the tips of his ears were flushing green. “They’d be something else, so, like, what’s the colours for a husband or a wife or something else?”
“Here, I printed this…”
Ruby started in on converting the former RISK OF DEATH sign to He/Him, watching as Hydra worked. He was intently focused, smeared with paint where he’d pushed the sleeves of his jumpsuit up, glancing up for approval every now and then when he thought she wasn’t looking. It turned out that painting with tools that much too small for you was rather tricky; she would have to make time later to strip the splatters of pink, yellow and blue from his fingers with turpentine.
She couldn’t have cared less about that.
Because he was happy, maybe happier than she’d seen him in months, the constant stroppy pout swapped for a look of utter concentration as he tried to get the lines straight. He’d burst into a familiar, sunshiny smile whenever he got something perfect, an expression that was so much more hard-won these days. Eventually, the hints of tension left his body completely.
She’d done it, she realised, glowing with pride as sturdy metal fingers wobbled through the blocky calligraphy of T-H-E-Y.
She’d helped this kid feel safe.