Okay, this may sound like a really weird au but imagine - a (platonic) Pushing Daisies au for Ruby Redfort.
Let me explain - if you don’t know, during 2007-2009, there was an amazing TV show called Pushing Daisies which was about a piemaker named Ned. Ned could bring things back to life for a minute just by touching them - if he didn’t touch them before the minute was up, they’d stay alive but somebody else in proximity would die in their place. A Private Investigator named Emerson Cod finds out about Ned’s ability by accident, and the two start working together - Ned using his abilities to revive the victim for a minute to ask who killed them/for clues and then touching them after the minute is up so they die again. Soon after, Ned revives his childhood sweetheart Chuck in order to solve her murder, but can’t bring himself to kill her, so he lets her live and hides her in his shop, the Pie Hole (as in, shut your). Another character is Olive Snook, Ned’s employee who is madly in love with him and deeply upset by the arrival of Chuck whom she presumes faked her death. Olive accidentally ends up befriending Chuck’s grieving aunts, Lily and Vivien. I’d really recommend watching the show if you can, but there is a fair amount of mild body horror and obviously talking corpses, although the aesthetic and charm of the show is fantastic! Anyway, I think in a PD!au for RR, the plot of the TV show wouldn’t really factor into the au nor would the characters really stay the same as it’s a platonic au - there might be romance, but not with the same ‘characters’ as in the show. So here’s the idea - Ruby has the same powers as Ned and as a child realised the rules of her powers by testing them out (not through reviving one of her parents as in the show) and revived Bug, whom she can never touch again. Clancy is the only person to know about her powers as she confided in him as a child and her parents are absolutely unaware. One day, Ruby stumbles into what is most clearly a serious gunfight and watches in horror as a man gets shot in the chest and dies, his assailant running away with only a scarred eye. Ruby revives the man, who identifies himself as Hitch and while Ruby knows that she really shouldn’t let him live, he’s such a genuinely kind and nice person to her in that minute that she can’t bring herself to kill him - so she doesn’t (and one thieving Hogtrotter dies over in the alley nearby after robbing a jewelry store). Hitch arrives at Ruby’s house after the Redforts have been robbed and pretends to be a butler, as he can’t go back to Spectrum without everyone finding out about Ruby’s powers. Unfortunately, Spectrum ends up scouting Ruby anyway and she has to work the case with them without anybody finding out that Hitch is still alive. Ultimaely, the plot would be the same as the books with only a few exceptions:
Spectrum doesn’t know Hitch is alive, so Ruby has to keep zipped about her zombie Butler/Agent while at work, occasionally slipping up and saying things that confuse LB and Blacker, things about Hitch that she couldn’t/shouldn’t know, e.g he plays clarinet to a Grade 7 degree.
Del is our Olive - the character who is in love with our Ned/Ruby and who is very suspicious of Hitch, this time not because of romantic rivalry (that would be weird and gross no thanks) but because she finds his whole backstory odd and his inability to touch Ruby - for example, he ‘refuses’ to rescue her from falling, his weird habit of saying ‘coming through’ when he enters a room with her in it, the fact that he sometimes wears a bell - is not normal, even for people who hate touch. Same with Olive however, she ends up befriending Chuck/Hitch’s family - meeting LB and Blacker and somehow becoming close to them - and believes that Hitch faked his death, a secret she only keeps for Ruby’s sake at first, although she warms up to the slightly eccentric butler.
Ruby uses her powers to help solve the cases Spectrum is working on and often comes up with weird, complicated lies to explain to Del/LB and Blacker why she knows the things she knows, using her charm to get her out of tricky situations.
A non Pushing Daisies plot point I want to add in is that LB actually isn’t that freaked out when she finds out about Ruby’s powers as Bradley Baker also had supernatural abilities. He recieved messages from animal objects that told him to do things like giving people objects back or going certain places, which he later realised were helping him solve Spectrum cases. When he and LB got together, he told her about it - side note, this is from Wonderfalls, another great TV program made by Bryan Fuller I recommend you watch!
That’s as much of the au as I have mapped out in my head, but I dunno, I think it’s pretty cute and I’m pretty fond of it!
