Chapter Text
Penny had a problem. She actually had multiple problems, and they all revolved around a singular focal point: a red-like-roses girl with eyes that shone like the shattered moon.
The girl was not the problem, nononono! That’s not what Penny felt!
…the way the girl made her feel was the problem.
Penny was a synthetic person capable of generating an Aura. She was…a robot. She was an automaton. She was an android, a step above the Atlesian Knights but on her worst days it didn’t feel like a very large step.
And many others felt that way about her, too, on their best days.
Penny had accepted there would always be human things she didn’t understand or get to experience. Who would design a robot that could have human faults? That was wholly insufficient. Her hiccup reflex was an invented mechanism to prevent her from lying.
Even as Dad worked his hardest to give her the experiences of a normal girl, Penny simply knew there would always be limitations, always be exceptions.
…this was why she cared so deeply for teams RWBY and ORNJ. Their easy acceptance of her condition, their total understanding and not even once bothering to question why she went from being a “normal girl” in Vale to suddenly the “robotic protector of Mantle”…Penny did not have the words to accurately or fully describe just what that meant to her, which was amusing in some way as she was a robot with a full thesaurus and dictionary in her core processor.
Penny loved her friends. After long talks with Dad over his late night cocoas, that’s the conclusion he’d helped her reach. Love.
Dad explained there were many, many different forms of love: ranging from love of objects, to concepts, to people, and different spectrums of love for every category, different ways to feel it and experience, no form better than the other, and with very extreme exceptions, no truly wrong way to feel love.
Dad also told her that love could be entirely left unexpressed. It could simply be felt, if she wanted, or if she was scared about expressing it.
The talks she had with her dad were among Penny’s favorite parts about being “alive.” Dad loved her so much and Penny was, just, so happy to have the capacity to understand it. To feel it and reciprocate it, with a kiss to his shiny bald head before they separated for the night.
Penny’s thoughts that night were swirling with lovelovelove. In direct spite of her dad’s words (unintentional, truly), Penny spent the entire night categorizing and defining the love she felt for everything in her existence.
She loved soft things, she loved the stars and the aurora and the moon, she loved flowers, she loved bright colors and she loved painting, she loved the ways that black and red complimented each other…
Oh. Penny’s hand stilled on the page. She had been drawing Vale with the aurora solitatis above it, a combination of her two favorite physical places, dad’s clinic half-sketched-in near From Dust Til Dawn. But something new had begun to be added to the sketch. Fireflies, and two anatomical sketches of people.
…Penny loved short, spiky hair that appeared almost wolf-like.
She loved bright silver eyes that looked at her like she was something endlessly fascinating. She loved hands that always found their ways to her shoulders, like they were made to be there, like they belonged there.
She loved the way those hands had cradled hers, the way silver eyes had shone, the way a soft face leaned in, black-and-red spiky bangs falling between silver eyes, and told her she was real. That she had a soul. That she was more than her nuts and bolts.
It was perhaps Penny’s fondest memory, that moment of acceptance and affirmation, that moment where Ruby treated her reality-shattering existence like the most natural thing in the world.
Penny loved Ruby.
The truth burned in her aura generator, the device thrumming to life and a pleasant buzzing forming beneath her synth-skin.
“I love Ruby.”
The words left her lips as a whisper, green eyes trailing upward to the blanket of stars above. Penelope, the North Star, glimmered brightest of all—the very star Penny had wished upon as a younger girl, the star that she was sure had fallen to Remnant and taken the form of a silver-eyed girl with a heart of gold.
The light of stars persisted for years after they winked out, Dad had said, so Penny’s theory was entirely possible. Her wish-star, her name-star, was walking Remnant as the singular most important person in Penny’s life bar her father. Her best friend, her first friend.
Her smile could light up the entire room and Penny loved that. She had spent hours learning all about Penny’s weapon back in Vale, and Penny loved that. Ruby went out of her way to find her after the doubles round at Vytal, and Penny loved. That.
She loved her other friends too! She was certain of that. But even an android like herself knew there was something different between the love she felt for her friends and her father and the love she felt for Ruby Rose.
Every moment they spent together competed for Penny’s favorite moment. Even the boring resupply missions, some part of Penny cherished those, too, because it was time spent with Ruby Rose. The girl who made Penny’s aura generator thrum with power, who made her chest feel light, who made her mechanical processes seem like…things to be envious of. To be proud of.
Ruby looked at her like she had personally hung the stars in the sky with her rocket boots, even when Penny rambled on about something completely inconsequential. Ruby treated every new detail of Penny’s chassis like it was the most fascinating thing but…but beyond all that…
“Oh. And…how do you feel about that?”
Ruby was the only person aside from her father to ask how things made her feel. To treat her like her feelings and opinions mattered.
Ruby made her feel like a girl in the form of a robot, rather than a robot in the form of a girl. And that distinction was everything to Penny.
Penny looked down at her sketchbook again, and found…Ruby’s face. Pulled entirely from her subconscious. The gentle upward tilt of her sharp lips, the subtle lift of one thin brow, her adorable pointed nose, the roundness of her cheeks and her scrunched eyes, shining pools of molten silver that reflected the fireflies all around them.
“You light up my life.”
A sentence that had crashed Penny’s operating system in that one singular second, and upon the reboot she’d called Ruby a “bioluminescent bug” but Ruby…Ruby had taken that as a compliment. Had smiled like it meant everything.
And so you understand Penny’s problems.
As her finger traced the lips of Sketched Ruby, realization lanced through her like a bolt of lightning. She made what can only be described as a squeak and shot to her feet, pacing the length of her room.
Penny doesn’t know what it means to be in love! OH! But the rest of the world might! Communications are limited to Atlas and Mantle and the surrounding settlements, but that’s far more than enough! Someone out there knows, surely!
How to confess and express love to Ruby R♥️se
a list by Penelope Polendina
- eye-contact (!!)
- physical touch (!!!)
- quality time (💖)
- flowers (🌹? 💐? 🌻?)
- compliments (!)
(doodles and sketches and hearts litter the entire page)
Ruby was in a sour mood.
The first day she had without any missions, and she’d been hoping to spend it with Penny.
The problem with this plan had revealed itself when Ruby realized she’d forgotten to tell Penny about this, as the intent was to surprise the ginger girl with it but she couldn’t find her.
She’d gone with her team and team ORNJ down to Mantle but hadn’t really enjoyed it that much. The disappointment at not getting to spend the day with Penny was pervasive and all-consuming, and the others had stopped trying to cheer her up eventually.
So they arrived back in Atlas and Ruby’s sour mood persisted as they trudged through the Academy campus, only to round a corner and—
Penny!!
…she wasn’t wearing her dress? Instead a soft green sweater that made her eyes seem brighter than usual, and gray Atlas Academy lounge pants, which Ruby had never seen before. Her hair was absent of the usual bow, too, and she just looked…entirely casual. Still very clearly Penny but…dressed way down, and it made Ruby’s heart beat almost obnoxiously loud. She could feel it pulse in her ears.
Ruby felt her face heating up at the same time she felt herself smile, her usual reaction to being in Penny’s presence, or even just having Penny in her line of sight, and her day drastically improved immediately and Penny was stepping closer, but her own usual smile was mostly absent, instead she seemed to be intensely focused on Ruby’s eyes.
Soft jade green eyes never even blinked as finally the two girls were close enough to touch, and Ruby’s heart sped up again, and Penny was leaning forward, and then kept leaning forward, and then Penny’s hands were on her face????
Whatever Ruby had been about to say was strangled and kicked down a well never to be found as Penny’s thumbs brushed along her heated cheeks, as her freckled face came close: framed beautifully by thick ginger curls the color of the setting sun, full rounded lips and thick ginger brows, an adorable round nose thickly dusted by freckles; so many freckles…like tiny stars.
Penny’s breath fanned across Ruby’s face as yet more distance was lost between them, as Penny’s eyes stared unwaveringly into her own, as her own hands hung limply at her side, as her tongue glued itself to the roof of her mouth.
Ruby’s eyes gave up the unspoken battle for dominance and instead trailed lower on Penny’s face.
She actually…stared at Penny’s lips for way longer than she intended, but then Penny’s eyes trailed down to her own lips and…and that’s when Penny finally pulled back, wordless and expressionless, and turned away.
Ruby was…she was completely stunlocked. Her feet were leaded weights, ankles shackled together while her face burned and her thoughts scrambled over each other, each one grabbed at the ankle and tossed off a cliff into the abyss like she’d read ancient Mistralians used to do. The world had narrowed to just Penny and herself, and further still to just Penny’s face and her hands, and now it all came rushing back in but still Ruby was rooted to the spot.
One thought did finally emerge above the rest, and it was entirely unhelpful.
‘I want to kiss her so badly.’
Penny did not stop until she was safely around several corners in various directions, long corridors and at least one large door.
Then she stood stock still and replayed every moment of that interaction over and over in her head, committing every iota of data into memory. A far larger file than would ever be typically associated with a single memory was uploaded to deep storage, marked for easy recall whenever she desired it. The size of entire days of memory, it was as if she was actually back there in Ruby’s presence again.
She was shaking. Her fans were whirring so loud she’d have to almost yell to be heard over them. Her cooling system was throwing up warnings as her core temperature exceeded safe limits.
But nothing mattered except the way Ruby’s eyes had trailed to her lips. A single honest movement had completely sapped all the confidence Penny had summoned since last night, and the only thing she regretted was not leaning forward for a kiss.