  Topological color codes are among the stabilizer codes with remarkable
properties from quantum information perspective. In this paper we construct a
four-valent lattice, the so called ruby lattice, governed by a 2-body
Hamiltonian. In a particular regime of coupling constants, degenerate
perturbation theory implies that the low energy spectrum of the model can be
described by a many-body effective Hamiltonian, which encodes the color code as
its ground state subspace. The gauge symmetry
$\mathbf{Z}_{2}\times\mathbf{Z}_{2}$ of color code could already be realized by
identifying three distinct plaquette operators on the lattice. Plaquettes are
extended to closed strings or string-net structures. Non-contractible closed
strings winding the space commute with Hamiltonian but not always with each
other giving rise to exact topological degeneracy of the model. Connection to
2-colexes can be established at the non-perturbative level. The particular
structure of the 2-body Hamiltonian provides a fruitful interpretation in terms
of mapping to bosons coupled to effective spins. We show that high energy
excitations of the model have fermionic statistics. They form three families of
high energy excitations each of one color. Furthermore, we show that they
belong to a particular family of topological charges. Also, we use
Jordan-Wigner transformation in order to test the integrability of the model
via introducing of Majorana fermions. The four-valent structure of the lattice
prevents to reduce the fermionized Hamiltonian into a quadratic form due to
interacting gauge fields. We also propose another construction for 2-body
Hamiltonian based on the connection between color codes and cluster states. We
discuss this latter approach along the construction based on the ruby lattice.
