Ruby Rose was an excellent cuddler.

It probably shouldn't have surprised Blake to learn that her Team Leader was a snuggler par excellence, but for once in her life she could actually enjoy the unanticipated. Yang could be pretty touchy-feely, too, but with the blonde it was all crushing bear hugs and bone-cracking backslaps. Ruby was…. well what was the right word, her inner author wondered. Soft? Tender? Loving? There was so little to it - a gentle brush of her hand here, a poke with her nose there - but there was a depth to those minute gestures that Blake could never have imagined existed.

They lay atop Ruby's bed, partially because Ruby feared that a twitch of her leg would dislodge the books propping up Yang's bunk, but mostly because Blake was enamored with the smell of her girlfriend's sheets. Like her touches, there was little complex about Ruby's scent. Her fruit-scented shampoo, the lavender smell of her blanket, the almost imperceptible traces of lubricant and gunpowder from when Ruby fiddled with Crescent Rose in bed. Strawberries. Alone, the smells were unsurprising, indistinct, forgettable. Together, they were… Ruby Rose.

Despite the differences in their sizes it was Ruby cradling Blake, her faunus girlfriend having arranged herself in Ruby's lap, the younger girl seated upright against the wall. Blake was softly inhaling the smell of Ruby's freshly-laundered pajamas, the touch of cotton rubbing gently against her cheek. She hummed indistinctly as Ruby's hands played through her hair; long, silky strands threading through the girl's delicate fingers.

It was a position Blake knew was suspiciously feline, amplified all the more by the absence of her bow, leaving a second set of fur-tipped ears uncovered. Ten times out of ten Blake hated doing anything that remotely validated the stereotype that faunus were imbued with animalistic traits. It was such a slippery slope, such a tiny leap to the justification of racism and denigration, to the insinuation that she was but one small step up from a domesticated pet, if that. There had been…. 'lovers' was the wrong word, but 'intimates'… who had known of her secret, none of whom she'd let handle her the way she let Ruby Rose. Perhaps it was the seclusion of her upbringing, the naiveté of her youth, but Ruby didn't - couldn't - see Blake as just a particularly clever animal, a well-disguised beast. She loved Blake's fuzzy ears the exact same way she loved every wholly human part of her. It took a simple soul to see no distinction between the human and the faunus, but... that was Blake's girlfriend, to a tee.

Ruby delicately traced one finger along the line where feline ear met scalp, and was rewarded with an atypically sensuous moan. Her eyes shut, Blake couldn't see the pleased grin that spread across Ruby's face, but she could feel the satisfaction that practically reverberated through her girlfriend's body. Ruby still didn't quite believe that she could make her girlfriend feel as wonderful as Blake made her feel, but every pleasurable groan and decadent sigh she elicited slowly chipped away at that doubt.

It had been maybe twenty minutes since they'd begun cuddling, Ruby's brushing over Blake with almost meditative serenity, Blake fluttering in the netherworld between consciousness and sleep, her universe scarcely larger than the bed she rested on. The realities of a shared dorm room meant that they still slept in separate beds as often as not - despite Ruby's overt and Blake's internal protests - but tonight the bedroom was theirs and theirs alone, and spending it transfixed upon one another seemed as good a use as any.

"Blake?" Ruby murmured, as if unsure if her girlfriend was awake. Blake rolled her head slightly, brushing up and down Ruby's thigh, demonstrating her consciousness with a vague hmmmm?

"Do you feel, uh, nice, now?" asked Ruby, as one hand slipped from Blake's head to brush the bare skin of the nape of her neck.

"More than I could ever describe," Blake quietly affirmed. Though a dozen-odd romantic fanfics under her nom de plume gave testament to her attempts.

"I was wondering if you could…. do something," said Ruby, her voice practically a squeak. For the first time Blake's eyes fluttered open, the roses emblazoned on Ruby's pajamas magnified by her proximity to them.

"Mm-hm?" The vaguely curios note was as devoid of emotion as Blake could make it, so petrified was she of sounding judgmental or critical of her girlfriend's requests. For weeks they (well, Blake, mostly) had been working on encouraging Ruby to enunciate her desires. Ruby was loving and generous, yes, but when it came to romance she was so uncertain and inexperienced that her throat tightened almost every time she asked something of Blake. That she could even have a girlfriend, much less one as beautiful as Blake Belladonna, was still an otherworldly concept to Ruby. That she could reasonably ask to be made even more happy was stranger still. Blake tolerated her girlfriend's shyness and recalcitrance for now, knowing it was part of what made her her, but Blake still hoped that she wouldn't have to guess Ruby's likes and dislikes quite so much in the future.

"I was wondering if you could….. purr," Ruby half-spoke half-mumbled, the last word sounding like someone had yanked Ruby far away at the last minute.

From her position Ruby couldn't see Blake's eyebrow rise in bemusement, but she could see the unconscious flutter of her feline ears, a not-so-subtle indication of surprise. Then a shot of adrenaline coursed through the Team Leader, panic flooding her mind, her hands flying off Blake's head as if it was the cookie jar and Dad had just come home early.

"I can't just purr for you, Ruby," said Blake, her tone soft, a note of humor almost inaudible in her voice.

"Oh my gods I'm so sorry Blake!" Ruby scrambled to sit up properly, causing Blake to unceremoniously faceplant into the mattress, to the older girl's distant annoyance. "I remember everything you've said about people treating faunus like animals just because they've got cute ears or tails or something and I still asked if you could be all cute and animal-y anyways and you know I really don't think of you as a pet kitty no matter what Yang says and I-"

Ruby's motor mouth was silenced only when another mouth was pressed atop it, Blake's lips sealing against hers in wordless interruption. Ruby's train-of-thought was irrevocably derailed as a pleasurable thrill of excitement raced down her spine, gunmetal eyes widening in surprise as Blake broke the kiss with a soft pop.

"Do you think of me as an animal, Ruby?" asked Blake gently, unthinkingly scratching the back of her girlfriend's neck as she did, the tips of her nails grazing over one of Ruby's most sensitive spots.

"No! Of course not!" stammered Ruby, unusually oblivious to Blake's touch. "Well unless you mean animal in the sense of like faunus - and humans! - are mammals so technically-"

"Do you believe that I think you think of me as an animal?" Blake's hand dropped from the back of Ruby's neck, coming to a rest folded in her lap.

That question was more complicated, and Ruby shuffled around in evident discomfort, one knee bouncing slightly with nervousness. "I don't… think… so," Ruby managed to eventually whisper.

"Do you know why, Ruby?" asked Blake. The younger Huntress visibly struggled for several seconds, before Blake supplied her own answer. "Because if I thought for a second that someone thought of me as an animal... I wouldn't even give them the time of day." Blake paused. "And I certainly wouldn't love them."

The sentence hung in the air for several seconds, like a petal floating lazily in the wind. "You… you love me?" asked a dumbstruck Ruby, sounding the word out as if it were made of glass, that it might shatter if spoken too loudly.

"Yes, my ladybug," hummed Blake, a satisfied smile on her face as Ruby was reduced to a sentient blush. She gently tackled Ruby to the bed, cradling her girlfriend in her arms atop her chest. "Honestly, Ruby, I must have said that a dozen times by now."

"Maybe by a thousand I'll get used to it," replied Ruby, just a little self-conscious at how stupefyingly in love she was with her girlfriend.

Ruby settled into position atop her faunus girlfriend, one finger tracing mindless patterns over the patch of bare skin between the folds of Blake's yukata. Her body rose and fell with each breath Blake took, a steady pattern that comforted Ruby with its familiarity.

"Soooooooooo," Ruby finally began, once she had emotionally steadied herself, "no cat noises going forward. Got it."

"Ruby." With an effortless gyration of her hips Blake flipped her girlfriend over, Ruby letting out a giggle at the sensation of Blake twisting them around so that the older girl was on top. Gold and silver eyes locked gazes scarce inches apart, each woman listening to the breaths of the other. "I can't purr for you because it's literally not something I can just do on demand."

"Oh." A concentrated expression crossed Ruby's face, mostly puzzled at Blake's words now that she was no longer fearful that she'd made some unintentionally racist demand. (Anyways she still had a long way to go before topping Weiss' collar-shopping…incident).

"The closest analogy I can think of is yawning. I can fake it a little if I try, but the action is inherently unconscious. A faked yawn never looks quite the same as a real one, right?"

"I guess," murmured Ruby, a faint note of dejection in her voice.

"I can purr," Blake confessed, and Ruby seemed to perk up again like it was Strawberry Pancake Sunday. "But it happens only when I feel extremely comfortable and completely safe. It's unconscious; I'm not even wholly aware of when I'm doing it."

"Whaddya mean, completely safe?" Ruby asked, that innocent soul that Blake found so invaluable poking out for a moment.

The faunus shrugged, as much as one could while horizontal. "I'm… not entirely sure," Blake conceded. "It's just a phrase I came up with. When I'm with people I'd trust my life with, is probably the more straightforward answer. When I look around and see nothing to distrust, nothing to be weary of, nothing to fear…"

Blake's voice trailed off, her eyes drifting from Ruby's, leaving her staring distantly into the ceiling. A silence filled the room for several seconds, before Ruby's gentle voice broke it. "That sounds… kinda beautiful, Blake."

"Thanks," Blake said with a half-embarrassed snort, her own romanticism having gotten the better of her again. "Please forgive me my more melodramatic moments, Ruby."

"You know it's actually something I love about you, right?" asked Ruby rhetorically, her tactical deployment of the l-word allowing her (for once) to get the upper-hand on Blake, Ruby pecking her on the lips with a lightning-strike kiss while her girlfriend was flush and flustered.

"It's just…" Blake's voice was just a little distant, as if her mind had wandered elsewhere. "The last time I really remember purring was with… was with my family."

...Now the memory was vague and blurry, half-faded like an old photograph, only a few elements remaining sharp and distinct. She didn't really know where they were, maybe it was home, maybe not, but there was a big, fluffy red rug that she clearly remembered. There was a lit fireplace, which to her younger self seemed like a roaring flame flickering twenty feet high. Everything else was… fuzzy. She knew she wasn't alone, but there was nobody immediately near her. Adults were having a conversation in the background, but she couldn't understand what they were saying. She knew she'd just eaten. Lying down before the flame, she felt a tension building up in her chest, for lack of a better word, and through some unthinking reflex she succumbed to it, feeling the vibration resonate through her entire torso, a pleasurable rumbling, like her bones themselves were being massaged. Someone - she could never place the voice - made a small joke about her noise, eliciting a few warm-hearted laughs. She was annoyed, but annoyed in the same way Little Blake always was whenever anyone called her 'cute' or 'adorable', annoyed in a way that came about only because she was loved…

"Sorry if that didn't really answer your question," mumbled Blake, the intrusion of the memory having slightly unsettled her. But whatever disquiet she felt faded into oblivion as Ruby's fingers gently began tracing the curve of her spine .

"It's okay," said Ruby with a half-grin, wrapping herself around her girlfriend in a cuddly embrace, closing the distance between them with a hug. The blanket enveloped them a moment later, Ruby's scent draping Blake once more.

"Sorry I can't purr for you," said Blake, the words coming out just a little sheepishly.

"It's okay," Ruby repeated, though this time there was a mischievous little grin on her face, one she was doing her damndest to conceal. Blake scowled at that. As if Ruby could play coy with her.

"Ruby." Her girlfriend's silvery eyes were practically shining now. "What." It was not a question.

"It's just…." Ruby squirmed a little. "I wasn't really asking if you, um, would purr for me." Ruby did that nervous thing with her lip which was so annoyingly-stereotypically-cute-girl-behavior and Blake hated herself for falling for it anyways. "I kind of was asking… if you had just purred." Ruby paused a moment, watching Blake's eyes widen. "'Cuz I'm pretty sure you did. Kinda...hard to miss that vibration, really."

This time Blake wasn't just momentarily stunned, she was positively dumbstruck, and Ruby took advantage to out-wrestle her girlfriend, the redhead positioning herself atop Blake so as to properly pepper her with kisses. That satisfied smirk had exploded into a full-blown grin, Ruby humming in excitement as she planted kisses on every inch of skin she could reach, the touches soft as falling petals.

"Ruby Rose," declared Blake, struggling to restart her train-of-consciousness. Then her brain completely failed to devise and ending to that sentence, leaving her to whither Ruby's bombardment of kisses utterly mute.

Neither girl knew how long they were like that, but some indistinct period of time later Blake managed to regain some semblance of her composure, intertwining her limbs with Ruby's, the mischievous expression on her face matching the adorable one on Ruby's.

"Do you love me?" asked Blake, feeling the warmth of Ruby's body against hers.

"'Course I do," said Ruby, planting a kiss on the tip of Blake's nose.

"And how do you know?" demanded Blake, though there was only adoration in her voice.

"'Cuz making you happy makes me happy," replied Ruby without a moment's hesitation. Their lips pressed, sealed, and broke off again.

"That simple?"

"That simple," Ruby confirmed, a small, sincere, perfect smile on her face for a few all-too-fleeting seconds.

They kissed, and snuggled, and whispered into each other's ears until the late hour of the night overtook them. Their bodies were intertwined, legs and arms and fingers all, Blake breathing softly into Ruby's chest. As the last conscious thoughts drifted from Blake's mind, she felt every worry slip from her body, safe and warm, the fears taken away…

And when only pale Moonlight lit the room, Blake distantly felt something escape her once more, a soft purring echoing through the dorm.