Ruby sat on her back, her legs pointing straight up the side of the wall, staring at the ceiling as she waited for night to come. The heat outside the dust shop was sweltering, and she feared Neo would collapse if they tried to go anywhere in it. So they were staying indoors until night. She looked over to see where Neo was sprawled out on the floor, trying to cool off with very little success. The whole room was filled with a glow from the window where the sunlight was coming in. Neither of them wanted to be anywhere near the window, and all closing the curtain would really accomplish was trapping them in a hot and dark room, which was at this point the only thing worse than their current situation.
It wasn't until she got a sensation in her face like her head was filling up with blood that Ruby decided to roll over onto her side. Neo looked up to see what had happened, but when she saw it was just Ruby adjusting her position she went back to sprawling. It probably wasn't that long after, but Ruby wasn't sure since it felt like hours, when she heard a small tap on the window. She looked over at the window to see what had happened, but there was no sign of anything she could see. Then, just as she looked away, she heard it again. If this were to continue, Ruby was ready to assume she was just hearing things and losing her mind. It was when she was about to write herself off as a basket case that the sound started repeating a lot faster, turning from a slow tapping to a constant drumming, and the light pouring in through the window went dark. Ruby sat up, realizing that it was rain.
Approaching the window on her hands and knees, Ruby looked up at the sky to see it had become overcast with dark clouds. The window was very quickly becoming all blurry with raindrops, and every once in a while it would start shuddering from a blast of wind. A storm had brewed up without warning, and now they were stuck inside for a totally different reason. She looked back at Neo to see her companion also sitting up and staring in disbelief at the window. Ruby shook her head apologetically, then pushed herself up to her feet. She straightened out her clothes and headed for the stairs that would take them down to the ground floor, waving Neo over to follow her.
"Come on. We might not be able to get very far in this weather, but we can try and collect some water for ourselves."
Neo looked far more optimistic with that idea and scrambled to join Ruby. They grabbed two of the water jugs they had just emptied each and made their way down to the front door of the shop. The door, as well as the entire storefront window, rattled as they approached, the wind doing its best to dislodge them and break into the building. For now, though, they held firm, but Ruby couldn't help trying to figure out where in the building she might remember seeing a room with no windows. Regardless, she set her water jugs down on the floor and reached out to open the door. The moment she turned the handle, the door swung open and Ruby was knocked back by a ferocious gust of wind. The only thing that kept her from being sent head over heels was Neo standing right behind her, and between the two of them they managed to stay put.
Once the air pressure equalized inside the building and out, the wind died down somewhat, enough that they were able to stand alone. Neo nodded to Ruby and handed over one of the water jugs. Taking it, Ruby stepped forward, placing one foot out the door and holding the water jug out. She was sure this would take quite some time, but sure enough the rain started filling the jug. Her hair was soaked in an instant, whipping around her face mercilessly as the wind gave everything it had to move any and every thing in its way. Ruby stood firm. It wasn't that it was really a life or death situation, it was just that she didn't want to be out of water next time they needed a bath so badly. Having something to drink also had its appeal, so there was that.
It took a good while, but thankfully the rain didn't show any sign of letting up. By the time the jug was filled enough that Ruby's arms were getting tired from just holding it up, she considered herself as having showered enough for the next month. She knew her hands would have felt like ice and barely been able to grasp anything if it wasn't for the rain being quite warm. She ducked back into the house and collapsed to her knees, pushing the water jug off to the side where it was safe from being blown over. Neo held out another jug for her to fill, but Ruby just shook her head. Her arms were sore from holding an increasingly heavy load out in front of her for so long. She would need to rest, but she knew they couldn't rely on the rain to keep going forever. It would disappear just like the frost and the sunlight, it was only a matter of time.
"I'll hold onto your leg or something, but I can't do that again right now."
Neo shrugged. She stuck her foot in between Ruby's legs and leaned out the door, holding the jug up to collect rain. By the time she had filled it, Ruby was about ready to go again, so they swapped places after collecting the jugs Ruby had brought down, which had scattered to the back of the shop the moment they'd opened the door. Swapping back again for the final jug, Ruby began to wonder if it was reasonable to go and retrieve some more jugs and try to stock up, but she realized that there was a point where they were just hoarding water they wouldn't be able to carry with them, as if they intended to stay in this building for a long period of time. She shook that idea off. She knew they still had to find out what had happened, where everyone else had gone, and why. They had to get to Atlas.
Carrying the jugs back upstairs turned out to take two trips, as they were much heavier when full, but once they were settled in up in the dust shop's upstairs bedroom, Ruby's attention turned to how soaked through she was. Neo expressed Ruby's own thoughts with action, pulling her shirt up over her head and throwing it onto the bedside table. Ruby followed suit, and they both stripped down so as to avoid hypothermia. There weren't very many dry towels left after their long bathing process, but they definitely needed to use them right now. After toweling themselves down and leaving their clothes to dry, the two of them climbed into the bed.
It felt like the temperature was finally starting to drop again. Ruby hoped it wouldn't fall as far as it had last time, but to protect them from the damp and increasingly cool atmosphere they had to pull the blanket up around them. With nothing between them this time, it felt a lot different from the first night trying to survive in this hectic version of the world they knew. Instead of being wrapped by soft cloth all around them, Ruby had one blanket keeping her safe and Neo's soft little body nestled closely to her own. She reminded herself that this was for warmth while they slept, and it helped a little, but it was certainly distracting to be on the receiving end of someone snuggling their face into her chest. She remembered doing that with her sister a long time ago, and her mother even longer ago, but this was the other side of the equation and she wasn't quite sure how to react, especially since she was pretty sure Neo was older than her.
Neo let out a contented sigh, and her body relaxed in Ruby's arms. Ruby didn't know what to do about it, but it looked like Neo had fallen asleep pretty quickly. Trying her best to tiptoe the line between being comforting and being inappropriate, she pulled Neo into just a little bit tighter of a hug. Her face heated up as Neo, either intentionally or unconsciously, moved her hands around the small of Ruby's back. She knew she had to be blushing heavily, and Neo wasn't helping at all, pushing one of her legs in between Ruby's, sending a tingle up along Ruby's body.
She wasn't exactly sure when she fell asleep, but she woke up in pretty much the same position she'd fallen asleep. The difference, and probably what had pulled her out of her sleep, was the howling of the wind, blowing around the room like an angry animal let loose. Ruby pulled the blanket tighter around her and Neo, but looked up at the window. Sometime during the night, most likely just before she woke up, the glass had shattered into the room. Luckily, since the bed was in the corner of the room, it wasn't near enough to them that any glass shards had landed on the bed, but the wind itself was enough of a problem. She prodded Neo gently to wake her up. Upon waking, Neo took her own sweet time extricating herself from the tangled mess the two of them had become in bed. Once she was finished resisting Ruby's urging to get up, the two of them sat up in bed and looked out over the room. The glass had been cast across the floor everywhere, and the door had been busted open by the wind.
Neo grumbled silently as her hair began to whip around her face in a flurry. She climbed out from under the blanket and crawled to the dresser that was set at the foot of the bed, pulling out the drawers in search of any spare clothing, and when she found something sufficient she used it to tie back her hair. She grabbed a pair of pants that was altogether too large for her, but instead of trying to wear it she went about hitting the floor with it, sending the shattered pieces of glass into the corner of the room. Once she had cleared a path for them to get to the door, she threw the pants on the floor and crawled back across the bed and over Ruby to reach the bedside table where their clothes had been left to dry. Unfortunately, they were still quite wet, only colder now due to the wind blowing across them. After she discovered that, it almost looked to Ruby like she was ready to climb right back under the blanket and fall asleep again.
Ruby didn't want to be too forceful, but at this point they needed to get out of this room. She stepped out onto the floor, being careful to only step where Neo had cleared, and leaned over the bed, scooping Neo up in her arms. "Come on, we need to get out of here. It's not safe anymore." Neo didn't protest, so Ruby simply carried her out of the room, setting her down to the side in the hallway. Ruby ran back into the room and grabbed a pair of large shirts from the dresser. Whoever had lived here before them was a much larger person, but it would benefit them to borrow the unused clothing. She dropped a big white shirt on Neo's lap. "Here, it'll keep you covered at least." She put a grey shirt on herself, the bottom of the shirt hanging around just above her knees and the wide neck slipping down around her shoulder. It wasn't perfect, but it stayed on and it was dry, so it was enough for now.
There was a fairly sizable closet on the ground floor, so Ruby started moving the water jugs downstairs and into the closet one by one, then gathered up their weapons as well as the soaked clothes and moved them in too, hanging the wet clothing from a rack that was probably for magazines or something similar. She returned to the upstairs hall to find Neo, only to have to suppress a laugh when she saw how Neo wore the shirt. The neck slipped down around her shoulders, only her breasts preventing it from falling all the way down. Neo didn't look entirely impressed, but she didn't even resist when Ruby picked her up and carried her downstairs and into the closet. Ruby set Neo down, closed the door, and sat down beside her companion.
The closet was dark, but it had something they just hadn't had before now. An old oil lamp. Ruby lit it, and basked in the soft glow. She hung the lamp from a hook on the wall and sat back down. She saw that Neo had wasted no time in finding a mostly empty book to write in and was wasting no time in jotting down something to tell Ruby. Once she was done, she handed it over, and Ruby read the comment out loud.
"You're warm. You make a great pillow." She looked over to Neo, somewhat amused by this confession. "Uh... thank you, I guess. I do drink milk." Neo drew her finger across her throat and shook her head. Ruby frowned. "Well, then what do you mean?" Neo rolled her eyes and just lay down, resting her head on Ruby's lap. Ruby didn't know what to do, but if closeness was a good metric for how much someone minded you, then this probably meant Neo was warming up to her. "Okay, I guess that's fine." She patted the top of Neo's head cautiously, relieved to see a small smile forming on the woman's lips in response.