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Jaune can’t say when his opinion on Ruby shifts from ’she’s my amazing friend’ to ‘Oh’.
What he can say is that he first became aware of it on an average day of sparring, when one minute he's lunging to knock her off balance, and the next she's a slash of vivid red arcing above his head. Ruby is lithe and fast and fierce, and Jaune is the one who is knocked completely off balance.
This becomes a lot more literal when Ruby kicks him solidly in the back, and he faceplants shortly after.
Jaune takes a moment to blink dumbly at the ground, and another to register that yes, he has a crush on Ruby. Then, he groans and pushes himself up to some facsimile of upright, sitting cross-legged on the ground. He’s warm all over, both from embarrassment at being so off-game, when that hasn’t happened for quite a while, and because he’s startlingly aware of Ruby snickering behind him, because it’s adorable in a way that he was never conscious of before.
“Is everything okay?” Ruby asks. She runs her fingers through her bangs, pushing them out of her face as she continues, “You’re not normally this easy to knock over.”
Jaune just stares, stymied by the sweep of dark hair falling back over silver eyes. After a beat, when the silence is just starting to edge its way out of comfortable, he finally manages to stammer, “N-no. I’m fine. Just… just distracted, I guess.”
He smiles winningly at her and hopes that it’s enough to pass things off as normal.
It appears to work, because Ruby just giggles as she teases, “Don’t worry, we’ll train that out of you eventually,” before she extends her hand to him to help him up.
It’s an unconscious echo of their first meeting, and Jaune can’t help but grin as he takes her hand to stand up.
oOoOo
For all that Jaune is dealing with a new crush on Ruby (or rather, a newly realized crush on her), not much about their dynamic actually changes.
After the initial bout of awkwardness, in which Jaune alternates between smiling way too much and flailing as badly as he did in his early-Beacon days, he finally settles back into their old dynamic, with only a few differences.
Ruby is still Ruby, after all - cheerful and awkward and kind and resolute, she’s still easy to talk to, a joy to be near. It’s just that nowadays, Jaune is occasionally blindsided by how striking she is limned in sunlight and has the weirdest urge to buy her cookies and watch her eat.
She’s also, fortunately, completely clueless to Jaune’s feelings. He would very much like keep it that way.
He kind of wishes he could keep his feelings from the rest of his team, too, but Ren and Nora have apparently known about this since before he was aware there might even be something to hide, so yeah.
He’s staring at a wall, trying to bring his attention back to the letter he’s writing, when he finds this out. He’d already been failing earlier, since Ruby is a lot more interesting than writer’s block, but he gets well and truly derailed when Nora plunks down next to him, with Ren settling down sedately next to her.
Nora is completely and willfully blind to Jaune’s distress when she chirps, “Are you thinking about Ruby?”
The only reason they can even do this without fear of being overheard is because Ruby is out with her uncle and the shy new kid, Oscar.
That doesn’t stop Jaune from nearly falling out of his chair as he rushes to answer, “Wha - what? Haha, why - why would I be thinking about Ruby?”
Nora either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care, because she simply bowls over the entire conversation and continues, “I mean, obviously you are, since you have a giant crush on her and everything, but are you thinking about Ruby?”
“Wh - no, what are you - I don’t - okay, yeah, I have a crush on Ruby.” Jaune hangs his head. “How did you know?”
“Please,” Nora says, waving a dismissive hand through the air, “I’ve known since like, the beginning of our journey. You’re very obvious.”
At Jaune’s indignant squawk, Ren leans over and adds, “She just means that you’re very earnest, that’s all,” because he’s accustomed to comforting baffled bystanders when Nora storms her way through a conversation.
It’s… not exactly helpful, especially considering that he’s basically confirming everything Nora’s said, but he can appreciate the effort nonetheless.
“You wear your heart on your sleeve,” he continues, “so it wasn’t exactly hard to see. Especially not when we spent so much time in close proximity to each other.”
Jaune sighs and presses his face gently to the table. He might be getting ink on his face, but whatever. It’s not like it was doing much good on the paper anyways.
He’s just resigning himself to the fact that he is, indeed, very obvious, when he finally registers the implications of what Ren and Nora have just said.
Shooting straight up in his seat, Jaune panics, “Oh, no, have I been acting weird around her? Please tell me I haven’t been weird.” Then he frowns, and continues, “And what do you mean I’m obvious? I haven’t even tried to serenade her.”
Nora shakes her head at him, like she’s pitying his tiny, oblivious brain. Honestly, Jaune can relate. With a patient smile, she says, “You get this really adorable, dopey look on your face whenever you’re staring at her.”
Ren, ever helpful, says, “It’s more besotted, I think.”
“And I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but you don’t really talk about your family much? Except with Ruby. Yeah, I think half of what we’ve learned about your family is because you were telling Ruby about them on our way here.”
“You also like to stand close to her, and you smile at her a lot when she’s not paying attention to you.”
“I mean, you smile at her when she is paying attention to you, too, but it’s not quite as lovestruck then.”
Jaune buries his face in his hand and prays for lightning to strike him, right now. Actually, talking to Nora is startlingly reminiscent of being struck by lighting, so that might not be much of an escape. Maybe a hole could open up beneath him, and save him from this entire conversation? Yeah... yeah, that sounds good.
“Please tell me that Ruby doesn’t know,” Jaune begs, “I don’t think I could handle that.”
“Don’t worry, she’s kind of dense about these kinds of things,” Nora reassures him, which is nice of her, he guesses. Then she hesitates, for the first time this entire conversation. Ren, too, has fallen silent, contemplative instead of quietly amused, as evidenced by his small smile fading.
Finally, Nora asks, “You don’t want her to know?”
It’s phrased like a question, but for some reason it feels a lot deeper than that. Still, it makes sense, when Jaune thinks about what happened with Pyrrha. He’d been clueless to her feelings until the… until the end, when she kissed him, but Ren and Nora might not have been. They would have seen the hints that he blinded himself to, the things he was too afraid to see. They would have seen just how hesitant Pyrrha was, how she chose not to speak until it was finally too late.
There’s a risk, in not speaking up. And the thing is, Jaune knows this, but…
“I don’t want her to know,” Jaune confirms.
It says something about his relationship with Ruby, that he doesn’t feel like shouting about his feelings to the world, but he doesn’t actually know what. He’s only just figured out that he even has feelings aside from friendship for her, after all, he hasn’t really had much of a chance to reflect on it.
This much, though, he does know. “I like Ruby, and I like how our relationship is now. I love being her friend, and she has bigger things to worry about anyways. I mean - there are people after Ruby, people who are crazy powerful and want to bring chaos to the world. She doesn’t need to worry about how I feel on top of all that.”
Nora chews at her lower lip, probably thinking about the things she’d seen before. Ren, noticing her agitation, chooses to ask in her stead, “What if she feels the same for you, though? Do you still want to stay quiet, if that’s a possibility?”
Jaune shrugs. “I guess it could happen, but if she doesn't feel the same then she’s just going to worry about my feelings, when she already has so much to deal with. Even if she does like me the same way I like her, it’s still going to be a whole new dynamic to work out, so it’s still a lot to deal with. If she ever ends up approaching me about it, I’ll talk with her frankly, but otherwise? I think that as long as she doesn’t know, it’s better to keep it that way.”
“Are you going to be okay with that, though?” Nora asks.
At this, Jaune has to smile, just a bit. “Hey, don’t worry about it, I’m fine. It’s certainly not a misfortune, being her friend.”
Ren and Nora are still hesitant, but ultimately accept what he says. That’s good, because it’s all true, and… Well, this is unique, different from the crushes that he’s had before. In the past he’s had crushes like fireworks, that flared bright and faded fast, barely even worth thinking about, let alone reflecting on.
Even with Weiss, Jaune mostly felt the urge to wax poetic. His crush on her was a crush on an ideal, on someone who could be wooed with his charms, swept off her feet. It had been pretty presumptuous, in retrospect, treating her as if she just needed to give him a chance to show off his better self instead of recognizing her as a person with a will independent from his own. Just because he saw her gifts, and later recognized the soft snow she hid behind biting ice, didn’t mean that she owed him anything, especially when he never bothered to take her feelings into account with his flirtations.
He still admires all that is bright and sharp about Weiss Schnee, but his superficial crush has long since settled into a kind of wry, teasing friendship, something much more true and lasting.
With Pyrrha… with Pyrrha, he never really let himself think that far. Sometimes he’s not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse, but she’s gone now, immortal in her spirit and the lives she’s touched, and the spark that had been buried so deeply never really gets a chance to burn.
He’s calmer, with Ruby - his feelings for her are a slow and gentle simmer.
Rather than perform grand gestures, he wants to take her out on starlit picnics, treat her to her favorite foods and maybe kiss cookie crumbs off the corners of her mouth if she’d be okay with it. He wants to sit beside her next to a hearth fire, with mugs of cocoa warming their hands and soft snow chilling the winter scape outside, or he wants to just curl up with her under a blanket on the couch, talking until they both doze off, leaning on each other through the night.
Since the beginning, she’s always inspired him to be better - to be a hero, for what’s right instead of for ‘glory’ - and Jaune wants to support her in turn. He wants to follow her as she leads them to impossible heights, and he wants, more than anything, to see her shine.
She could technically be described as just a small girl, but it’s because of her simple and earnest heart that she’s so much more. Even then, she’s just one girl, facing a threat that could shatter the world, and there’s no way she can handle the entire thing on her own. She shouldn’t have to handle it on her own, and Jaune wants to be one of the people to help her, in any way he can, so she doesn’t have to carry the weight of the future on her shoulders alone.
Jaune loves Ruby, and that’s the only explanation for it. Friendship and romance, they’re all encompassed in that, so for as much as his revelation changes things, even more stays the same.
He’s happy, simply because he can stand by her side. He doesn’t need anything more.