All That's Gold is Gilt || Ben & Ruby
One thing Ruby wasn’t accustomed to, or took kindly to, was being awoken at four in the morning, unless it was completely necessary. She had opened the door, standing in nothing but a dressing gown to find a boy of about ten, leaning against the wall panting. What do you want, she had snapped at him, for she was angry and agitated that she had been woken from her sleep. She was still half-asleep, so because of this, and the fact she had one eye still closed, Ruby didn’t recognize that it was one of the messenger boys the Macini mob used to deliver messages. After the boy caught his breath he explained the task in hand to her, that she was to take care of some business and that Ben Garland would be picking her up that night.
After bidding the boy farewell, and giving him a dollar to get the bus back, for she had a soft heart beneath her strong demeanour, she climbed back into her bed, but she could not manage to sleep once more, despite being exhausted. The business she had to take care of, was to take out two people who owed gambling debts and had been avoiding the mob. The reason it played on her mind was because sixteen years beforehand, it was her father on the receiving end of the Mob’s wrath for a gambling debt, and the only way Ruby had spared his life was by promising to join the Mob herself.
For most of the day she had lazed about, cleaning, trying to keep her mind occupied. Despite it affecting her personally, Ruby knew herself that she would be able to handle it. She was the one they went to when they needed something done. She was one of the strongest willed people in the Mob.
Ruby had been smoking a cigarette by the window, looking out onto the alleyways at back of her house, when the knock came to the door. She hadn’t heard Ben pulling up out front, but she guessed it was him now. She walked to the door and opened it, giving him a smile. Seeing someone else actually lifted her mood, as being alone all day had left her in a sombre mood. Ben was now one of her closest friends. She remembered a time when she first met him, her legs would nearly go weak upon seeing him.
“Come in." She said, stepping back and holding the door wide for him to pass. "Do you want a drink? Coffee, Soda, Hooch?" She said, closing the door, winking as she said the last one. Ruby crossed to the kitchen, stubbing out her cigarette on the island that divided the kitchen from the living area. "Be fast though, I want to get this done as fast as possible tonight. They are both on opposite sides of town, and I have had an early start." She said, pausing at the refrigerator waiting to see what it was he wanted.
The grin didn't falter as he stepped into the apartment; it only seemed to get wider as he followed Ruby into the kitchen, her hospitality contrasting with her ever-direct choice of words.
He had long since learned that a loose and open nature was not the sort of garment she often clad herself in, but oh, how it suited her when she did.
"In the icebox, Ruby? Really?" he laughed as he leaned against her kitchen counter, hands grasping the edge on either side of him. "Remind me to take you out to the Stingray; maybe they serve their whiskey and the like straight up without chilling it like a, well like a girl, I guess."
A hazardous choice of words, perhaps, but he held a teasing glint in his eyes. And it wasn't as if he did much better; she kept her own illegal provisions out of immediate sight; he failed to even bother, and filled and semi-filled bottles of amber and clear fluids that had been reaped from the left-over money of his old lucrative career were scattered around his own residence, hidden only out of slight guilt on the occasions that Letha dropped around.
Before he could be met with any sort of retaliation, he pushed himself from the counter and made his way back over to the door, where a coat-stand stood nearby that held what he could only assume was a jacket of hers. "We should make that a date, actually," he called back behind him. "It's been awhile since I've been able to wrangle you out of work."
He picked the jacket from where it hung, returning with it to the kitchen where he held it out to Ruby in offering, a signal that if she was ready to go, then he was ready to go- after she brought whatever she needed, of course.
Ready to go back into a cold and lashing rain, where at the end of city streets two men unknowingly waited with death and disaster behind their unturned backs.
"To answer your question, though; I'm fine, I stopped for coffee over at Elliot's before I made it here."
A lie. But when it came to driving people to commit the deeds he himself sought revenge for, well, isn't that already enough to stomach?
