Fic: Southern Charm {Crane and Ruby teenageverse}

[glamorsongstress]

Atlanta was a city full of delights. During Ruby's whirlwind tour, she'd seen everything there was to see and met everyone worth knowing. Last night she'd been escorted by her cousin Landon - the top of his class at Emory - to a black tie dinner at that institution, and she couldn't help but think how jealous the other girls her age would be, knowing that she'd danced with college boys. Then she thought of what Crane might think, and she felt a little sad, and very guilty for how much she'd lapped up the attention. There hadn't been any kissing, though, and Ruby figured that, after all, just dancing was all right. It wasn't as if it was anything serious; they just wanted her to enjoy her stay in town over the summer.

Staying with the Atlanta Blauvelts had proven similarly wonderful. Ruby wasn't exactly sure how she was related to them, as her grandfather was an only child, so it had to be at least a generation before him if not more, but all the Blauvelts seemed to keep tabs on each other, and help each other out even if the family line had diverged before they first set foot in America all those hundreds of years ago. Ruby's own mother excepted, that is, but no one liked to talk about that sort of scandal. No, here she was being introduced as Anthony Blauvelt's granddaughter, and to everyone who was anyone. Why, she'd even shaken hands with Senator Russell, having met him briefly at the end of a luncheon that he was attending with Ruby's grandfather and some of the other big industrialists.

She continually found herself dazzled by the attention that she was receiving, and by the gentility and hospitality that everyone showed towards her. This is what she'd imagined the South to be like before she'd moved down here: a sort of chivalry that was inherent in the upper classes, fighting desperately to survive even as the civilization they belonged to had crumbled away a long time ago. It was such a counterpoint to the miserable decay of Arlen, with the plaster crumbling from the dirtied, once pristene white walls of the long abandoned plantation and Spanish moss hanging from the rotted hulks of the trees. Here everything was clean and ordered and the trees grew in neatly pruned rows along the sides of the road. Ruby found herself feeling neat and ordered too, finding comfort in having a place at the top here rather than having to scrabble about at the bottom of the social ladder in the much smaller social pool in a town where gentility had decayed years ago; a town where she had more or less chosen ostracization, she reminded herself, not that it made it any easier to endure.

That wasn't to say she didn't miss it. She hadn't been here a week, but already in the quieter times, when she wasn't surrounded with people and grand parties and good old Southern charm, she found herself almost pining to return to Arlen. It was as though the gnarled roots of the oak tree outside her school had risen up out of the ground and embedded themselves in her very essence. More than once she'd woken in the night and gazed out of the window, expecting to see the silhouette of the crumbling plaster angel outside the church opposite the house she'd lived in for the past year, and been very disoriented when she found a row of prim, three storey townhouses across the street instead. Atlanta was beautiful, but Ruby couldn't help but feel like its soul had been gutted out of it when General Sherman had burned the city to the ground nearly a hundred years ago. While it had rebuilt and moved forward, something had been lost that night, irrecoverably, something that Arlen was still clinging to fiercely even as it decayed in its grasp.

As she's ushered into the luxurious office suites of Covington Steel that afternoon, Ruby finds her grandfather in a heated discussion with the CEO, a shrivelled little man hunched over his desk in a way that makes him look even smaller. A young man with broad shoulders and slicked back blond hair stands awkwardly at attention at Covington's side, trying deliberately not to look at Ruby as the coloured servant closes the door behind her.

Anthony Blauvelt quickly beckons to her, grabbing at Ruby's arm as she moves closer and tapping at the small of her back with his cane so that she would stand up straight before pushing her forward into a patch of sunlight that streamed down from a sash window across the room. The light gleams in her hair, making it seem even more brilliantly red, and Ruby's cheeks redden with it, feeling as though she was very much on display here. She grits her teeth, clasping her hands in front of her and sticking her chin in the air, glancing between the two strangers and feeling immediately distinctly anxious.

"Well, what do you think?" her grandfather asks in his sharp, brisk voice.

Henry Covington doesn't even glance up at her. His eyes are firmly fixed on a paper that he holds in wrinkled, slightly tremorous hands, and Ruby recognizes the seal of her school in Arlen at the top of the page. "Her record is very average, Mr. Blauvelt. Very average indeed."

"I had hoped she would fare better in school than she had been under her governess," Blauvelt admits, looking rather distastefully at Ruby now, as though she is somewhere between an inconvenience he's forced to bear with and a chronic embarrassment that he resents having to discuss. "Part of why I consented to let her reside in the house I inherited out in the country, rather than here. I'd hoped she'd be top of such a provincial school, even if she would have done badly in one of the private girls' schools here in Atlanta. But don't despair on that account, sir. My cousin Hector's oldest girl, she wasn't too bright either, but he sent her away to Europe, to one of those finishing schools in Switzerland. They sorted her out, taught her ettiquete, hosting, that sort of thing. They'll sort Ruby here out, too."

"Necessary skills in Atlanta society," Covington concedes. He looks up at Ruby for the first time, remarking, "At least she'll provide handsome babies." He glances over at the young man next to him. "Well, Clay, what do you think?"

Clay Covington grins stupidly as he casts his eye over Ruby. It's clear from the look on his face that he thinks he's just about won the lottery as far as girls were concerned. "Don't matter if she's educated, Pa. That ain't what women's for anyway." He speaks with the broad Southern accent common to so many of the lower class people that Ruby had encountered here, rather than the smooth, genteel voice that belonged to his father and the majority of the Atlanta elite. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see her grandfather visibly bristle as Clay begins to speak, and she imagins that he must be inwardly despairing at potentially handing the future of his business over to him. His business, yes, for he hardly seems to care about the fate of his only grandchild. Clay shoves his hands in the pockets of his pants and slouches over to Ruby, that dumb grin still fixed on his face as he eyes her up. "I reckon she'll do just fine."

"And what about you, Ruby?" Henry Covington asks, looking at her over the rim of his spectacles.

Ruby doesn't respond for a moment, shocked that someone in this room would actually deign to ask her opinion here, especially after the comments this same man had made just a moment ago. She swallows nervously, looking over at her grandfather, not wanting to risk angering him if she said something wrong.

"Well, girl? Mr. Covington asked you a question. Are you going to answer him, or are you too stupid even to do that?" Blauvelt looks daggers at her, channeling his resentment of Covington asking Ruby's opinion into his disdain of her rather than cause friction with that gentleman.

Ruby's lips tighten into a thin line, and she looks desperately between the three men in front of her, knowing that this was the end of everything - that the place offered her in this society was one in which she could never be happy, with a man who viewed her as nothing more than a pretty face and a good pair of childbearing hips. Crane's face swims up in her mind now. Stroking her cheek with his soft, bony fingers and staring so intensely into her eyes, as though he was trying to dive into the mind and find the person hidden in there, piecing her together like a puzzle. Clinging to her and crying at Halloween. Shielding her when she'd been frightened at a movie he'd wanted to see. Sitting in their corner of the library and poring over the same passage of Shakespeare for three hours, never getting irritated or seeming bored, delighting in planting the seeds of knowledge within her. And even if she could put up with the life that her grandfather was so desperate to slot her into for his own convenience, for the sake of an assured future and the society benefits it would grant her, she suddenly knew that she would never, ever know true happiness without Crane in her life.

"I-- I can't--" The words come out in a stammer, like a frightened mouse, and as soon as she hears them she turns and bolts, her footsteps echoing down the stairs along with the enraged shouts of her grandfather. It's been a long time since she heard him sound that livid - not since someone had mentioned his daughter's HUAC trial at a dinner party a couple of years before - and Ruby shivers as she thinks how unpleasant things could get if she stays here any longer. She doesn't even return to her relatives' house to pick up the clothing she has here, she just dives into her car and slams her foot down on the accelerator, heading south and determined not to stop until she was back in Arlen. Once she was out of his immediate reach, and was just a distant inconvenience once again, his anger would subside and he would begin to ignore her again, at least for a while. But she couldn't stay in Atlanta, she was far too afraid of his wrath.

It's past midnight when she finally rolls into Arlen, and she doesn't go back to her own house, but instead parks near Crane's house - far enough away that his grandmother wouldn't suspect anything amiss, but near enough that she can still see his bedroom window from where she's parked up. With an exhausted sigh of relief, she passes out still gripping the steering wheel, feeling comforted knowing he's near, but distinctly anxious at the conversation she now knows she has to have with him.