#blake and ruby

(Well if you’re going to bandy about compliments like masterclass I’m gonna just lose my mind completely and continue it, even if that means only barely addressing the thing you actually brought up. Sorry about that. And it’s possible that neither of us knows what “blissful” means.)--

It takes the better part of an hour to coax Ruby away from Penny’s body.

(Or at least, Blake thinks it does. It’s a little hard know for sure, because time is weird here. Like when you get lost in a good book and suddenly look up and realize you’re sitting in the dark because the sun went down without you noticing, only somehow in reverse-- the shock coming not from the passage of time, but from the nagging sense that it refuses to. There’s a stillness here that makes her teeth ache; makes the hair on her upper arms prickle like she’s being watched.)

She doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing she can say, nothing that can make it better, and she knows that, but. She’s never felt quite so unequal to a task in her life. She’s not Ruby, with her usually-boundless optimism and hope; she’s not Weiss, all aggressive support and unexpected insight; she’s not--

She’s not---

(She’s not thinking about Yang, she’s not, because if she lets herself the thought will consume her, and it won’t leave room for anything else. She can’t fall apart. Ruby needs her, and Yang would want her to take care of Ruby. So that’s what Blake’s going to do.)

But everything she can think of to say feels hollow and cruel. What can they do? Bury her, in this place time’s forsaken? Promise to come back for her, as though escape is possible? The last time Ruby was this miserable, at Schnee Manor with Yang-- 

--(don’t think about Yang)--

-- well. Blake hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but her ears are sensitive. And thinking back on it now, it’s nothing anyone said that snapped Ruby out of her spiral. It was breaking glass and Jaune’s boots on the stairs; it was the thought that--  

That Penny needed her.

“Ruby, we have to keep going,” she says softly. Rubbing at the nape of Ruby’s neck the way her mom used to, when Blake was young and couldn’t sleep after a nightmare. 

As though there’s any waking up from this.

“I can’t.”

“I know it’s hard, but we have to, we--”

“I can’t. I-- I c-can’t find any more bodies, Blake. I can’t.”

(Blake knows what it feels like, to be impaled. This is worse.)

“We w--” (She swallows back her won’t. She doesn’t want to lie.) “I’m alive. You’re alive. If anyone else fell after us, they might be-- I mean at the very least, Yang’s probably--”

“I know,” Ruby interrupts-- not testy, exactly, just simple and clear. “No offense, but if I thought Yang were dead, I wouldn’t-- I mean, I couldn’t--”

Blake can relate to that feeling, too. She squeezes Ruby’s shoulder, hoping it comes across as reassuring instead of like the needy grasp for her own reassurance it really is. “Then let’s go find her.”

“But I...” Ruby looks mournfully back down at Penny’s body; at the way her own is now covered in Penny’s blood, from clinging to her so tight.

The question’s out of Blake’s mouth before she can really consider what it is she’s offering:

“Do you want me to carry her? Take her with us?”

(She would do it, if Ruby asked her to. Gladly. She’s done it before; she’s stronger than she looks.)

The question seems to take Ruby aback; knocks a little bit of life back into her vacant gaze. “No, I-- no. Thank you. We should... let her rest. She never got to--” Tears gather again at the corners of her eyes, but she holds them off, this time. “-- I always told her she never understood the glory of naps. I bet she was looking forward to that.”

It’s a horrifying thought, really, but it’s the best they have. So they pick themselves up, and off they go-- Ruby casting forlorn glances over her shoulder every few steps, but always, always moving forward.

They travel along the tree line, so they’ve got eyes on the beach and the forest at once. Occasionally they call names-- arbitrary, hopeless, unsure of who might be down here with them-- but mostly they sniffle, and keep to themselves.

It’s Ruby who spots the glint of metal first. “Crocea Mors!” she gasps, running, which-- seriously? Blake can see the sword, but taken out of context like this she has no idea how Ruby could tell what she was looking at from so far off. Only maybe it’s not so surprising; the only person with better recall for weapons than Ruby that Blake’s ever met is Velvet. Then: “Oh, no--”

It’s Crocea Mors, alright. 

Half of it. Covered in blood.

“Do you think--?”

They both saw the stab wound in Penny’s stomach; both saw the lack of burns accompanying it. If Cinder did this, if she broke Jaune’s sword in two and used it to cut Penny down, then Jaune-- Jaune’s probably--

(But no, she can’t think like that. She’s only carrying half a weapon herself right now, and she’s still standing. It doesn’t have to mean anything.)

(Only now she’s dwelling on it, thinking about the thin line of gold that knit Gambol Shroud back together once before. Thinking about the gold on his shield. And it’s unbearable.)

“It was the last he had of--”

“It was his great-great-grandfather’s,” Ruby says, pointedly enough that Blake realizes if she’d managed to say Pyrrha’s name aloud, the girl before her would have shattered like the sword in her hand. “We’ve lost-- so many people, and all we can do is get used to it, carve them up and carry the pieces like it’s normal, and--”

A voice cuts through the quiet, interrupting them:

“Weiss? Ruby? Anyone?!”

Jaune’s alive Weiss fell that’s Jaune that was Jaune--

They take off running into the woods.

They find Jaune in a clearing, Crescent Rose mounted safely on his back, bracing his mouth between cupped hands as he hollers. “Blake? Yang? Hello?”

When he gets a good look at Ruby when they emerge from the trees-- at the crimson painting her front, at the severed steel held in her hands-- he goes silent.

Then he falls to his knees, and sobs:

“She asked me to, she asked me to, I’m so sorry-- but Winter’s-- it worked, it’s what she wanted, please, I’m so sorry, she told me--”

The words don’t make any sense... 

... until suddenly they do.

Blake thought that surely, after everything, she knew all of the ways that devastation could paint Ruby Rose’s features. The pain and sorrow and grief and rage and impotent, helpless shock.