This was terrible.
This play was terrible, her costume was uncomfortable, her teacher was dumb and the fact that all of her friends didn't mind at all was confusing. Why did she have to do this, anyway?
It was minutes before Ruby's part was ready when Yang sat with her from backstage to comfort her.
"Come on, sis… it's not the end of the world!"
"Yes it is!" Ruby complained, crossing her arms and pouting on the wooden crate she was sitting on. "There's so many people in that audience and I'll never be able to find you!"
Yang sat down on the small crate, with a complete lack of leg room due to its clearly-intended-for-a-grade-schooler size. "Dude, none of them are gonna care about what you did like, a week after this is all over. Don't worry about any of those guys."
"There's a hundred seats in there! That's like, two hundred eyes!" Ruby leaned onto the giant mound of fluffy blonde hair next to her and asked, "How does anyone think this is remotely okay?"
"Just… imagine that everyone is in their underwear! That's what I did when I had to do this play." Yang told her as she patted her on the head.
"Even you?"
"If you want. I won't judge." Yang shrugged.
Ruby thought about her big sister's words for a moment before scrunching up her nose in disgust. "That's gross! I don't wanna do that!"
"Then I guess you'll have to come up with a new way to deal with your stage fright!" Before she left, she crouched down to give her baby sister a hug. "Good luck, sis."
Reluctantly, Ruby got up on the stage. "Just… focus on big sis, okay?" She told herself. She was the only one who was watching this that would be with her once this over, after all.
But where was Yang? Ruby looked around. There were so many people in the audience that she just couldn't find her.
"Come on, Ruby!" She remembered her big sister's words and shouted internally, "Underwear, underwear!"
Ruby tightly shut her eyes. She didn't want to see that! So she blocked it out of her mind, and when she opened her eyes up again, everyone else was merely a black blob in her vision.
And there was Yang, sitting happily near the bottom left corner, silently cheering her on.
Ruby was able to do her lines in a good enough way to make her proud. Never taking her eyes off of her sister in the audience. Her role was at the end of the play, so once she took her bow to the oil spill of an audience, she could go home.
Ruby ran right out of the auditorium to find her family, dashing past blot after blot of what were probably just the other kids' parents she never bothered to learn the names of anyway. Or at least that's what she should've done. It only took a few seconds for Ruby to start panicking again.
Yang was gone. Lost within the inky black void she herself had created.
"No no no no no! Yang, where are you?!" Panicking, she sorted through the crowd, pushing away anyone who didn't matter. Eventually, the blobs started blending together less and less, some of them even looking like people. Some of them looked just like Ruby, her friends, and even her family! But only one of those silhouettes had any color to them. Only one had the bright yellow hair that Ruby had known for as long as she could remember.
"Yang!"
Ruby clutched onto her leg, tears in her eyes, happy to be reunited with her sister and to finally be rid of this stupid play in her life.
"See, what did I tell ya?" Yang congratulated Ruby by picking her up in her arms. "All in their underwear, just like I said!"
Ruby shook her head. "No, that's not what I did."
"Oh… impressive."
From then on, well into her teenage years, she saw the world as covered in those same shadowy people, none of them bright with color in her eyes unless she interacted with them.
Crowds were no longer no longer an issue for Ruby, because the world was covered in shadows.