#grimm!ruby

A painting of Crimson Silver's Grimm eye, used for absorbing that sweet, sweet Maiden Juice, as revealed in the most recent chapter of the WYCD AU!

Here’s the individual (unedited) frames of the above gif:

And here’s a better look-see at that gross eye:

“Ruby?”

Penny speaks her beloved’s name over and over again.  Her voice, a cracking repetition of a broken, almost hopeless recording caught on a looping tape.  The mechanical girl who had come and fought so hard can do nothing but stare.  She hopes the sight before her isn’t real, that she’s mistaken, that this isn’t how their story ends.

Some history books will say it is.  They will narrate the story of a miserable failure of a military project.  One who rebelled against her creators, her masters, and cost not only herself, but the one she loved her life.  These history books will be produced in the harsh, cold printing presses that remain loyal to the faltering Atlesian throne.  A desperate attempt to rewrite history in their favor, but not much more than that really.

Other books, ones with a bit more accuracy, will know better.  For even if there is a ‘happily ever after’ or a ‘the end’ to a story, there’s always a moment after that.  Something that happens next.  Right up until the final end of death comes for the characters.

And neither Penny nor Ruby are quite dead yet.

So it really would be a sad, sorry tale that reaches its conclusion here, wouldn’t it?

The rebels infiltrate the menacing fortress to save the innocent girl and are felled by her hand, now corrupted by the darkness that had ensnared her.  No hope of a happy tomorrow.  Simply a brutal, violent end and a laboratory awash in blood.

For that’s what happens when you wander into a spider’s web.  You tend to get caught by the spider.  And, you know, eaten.

The thing, the crucial detail, that must be taken into account about this tale, though.  The one thing those Atlesian history books will try to wipe away and conceal and keep the public from knowing.  The little detail that keeps this ending from being the true ending of the story.

It’s simply that Ruby Rose is not the spider.

Of course, she is something, and historians (and, after them, archivists) will have quite a wondrous time debating amongst themselves what exactly she is.  But, what she is not, is the spider.  The hungry arachnid who waits so long for its prey to come, who binds its meal tightly in silky thread for later consumption.

Some, and they will have fairly strong evidence for their cause, will argue Ruby was simply the first caught in the spider’s web.  Those ones have a valid, if not entirely understanding of the circumstances as a whole, point.

A spider’s web is a sticky, tricky thing.  When you’re all alone in it, you may see little hope of escape, of anything but the spider’s looming, menacing legs, its snapping jaws, or its eight dark, beady eyes.  But that’s only if and when the spider chooses to focus on you.  They are, after all, creatures that can be distracted.  Ones that can decide to eat something—someone—else.  So, maybe Ruby was the spider’s first chosen meal, but she was one left unfinished due to the arrival of an enticing, delectable follow up.

A spider’s web also happens to be a delicate thing and, if put under too much weight, may potentially collapse.

Let us now return to the scene and become observers, ceaseless watchers, to what happens when this particular web takes on quite a bit of weight.

Are you scared yet?  You’re probably wondering if you should be.  It’s natural, of course.  Debating whether or not you should trust the words you read.  Should you stop here?  What if it gets worse?  But, it’s pretty bad here.  Do you really want this ending to be the ending?

What happens when you don’t stop, though?  When you continue reading the words, bringing them into the reality of being Known?  Didn’t expect to be trapped reading a tale without recourse on how to know if the true end is horrible or not without going along with it until it reaches it’s natural conclusion, did you?

Have you considered that, perhaps, it is you who is trapped in the spider’s web?

So, tell me, how much do you really want to know?  You’re curious, aren’t you?  Driven.  Eager to witness all that happens here.  Why would you remain otherwise?

Let’s see how it goes, shall we?

Our story, our statement, resumes.

Ever so slowly, Ruby turns her head and looks at Penny.  There is no recognition, no emotion of any kind on her face.  Ruby blinks, or, rather, she closes her eyelids and opens them again in a movement that could be perceived as a blink.  A movement that makes her a stranger to Penny.

“Ruby,” Penny repeats, as if the simple utterance of the name will break the spell.  No such enchantment that can be so easily undone exists.  Not here.  Not now.

“Remarkable, isn’t it?”

New footsteps echo through the laboratory.  Penny spins around.  Dr. Watts makes his way over from the door.  Each step he takes is measured and calculated.  His past projects, those horrible menaces whispered about in fear, file into the room behind him.

Cinder looks at the scene laid out before her and smirks.  Tyrian laughs.  Hazel blocks the doorway with his bulk.

“For a super weapon, I expected you to be smarter than to simply walk into what was so obvious a trap.”  Dr. Watts chuckles at Penny.  “Foolish of me to underestimate the weakness of love, I suppose.”

“Let.  Ruby.  Go.”  Penny clenches her fists.  She raises her daggers.  She doesn’t have the advantage here, but that won’t stop her.

“If you insist.”  Watts waves a dismissive hand.  With his other, he takes a remote out from his pocket and clicks a button on it.  The clasps around Ruby’s wrists and ankles snap open.  He turns to walk away, but pauses before he exits the laboratory.  “Do try to leave at least some of them intact,” he tells Cinder, Tyrian, and Hazel.  “It would be a pity for so many good bodies to go to waste.”  He exits.

Penny turns to Ruby one last time.  “Ruby…”  This time it’s a begging sob that escapes her lips.  “Please, no.”

Ruby stands.  She reaches around herself, to the sheath attached to her belt.  Her fingers wrap around the hilt of the blade there.  Ruby withdraws the weapon.  There’s no sign she recognizes the desperate plea in Penny’s eyes.

The sword slashes through the air.

Penny dodges.  She retreats away from Ruby’s attack.  Her daggers hover around her.  She can’t bring herself to command them to retaliate.

“Ruby, please, it’s me, it’s Penny!  You have to recognize me!”

Ruby draws back.  For a brief, hopeful second, Penny thinks she’s gotten through to her love.  A small smile appears on Penny’s lips.  It almost immediately falls away.

Ruby lifts her hand not holding the sword.  Around it, thick, black sludge forms.  It branches out into a limb all of its own.  Bleached white claws emerge at its tips, like grotesque fingers.  There’s a second where the Grimm arm moves and shifts, as if adjusting to its own weight.  A twisted smirk appears on Ruby’s face.  She looks between her new appendage and Penny.

Penny’s daggers come to bear a defensive position in front of her without her telling them to.  The Grimm arm tries to dart around them, but the daggers cut through it like butter.  It disintegrates into dust.  Ruby screams.  Her voice is loud, hoarse, and pained.  Penny hesitates, doesn’t take the opening.  She can’t… she doesn’t…she needs to…but it’s Ruby!  RUBY!

She can’t just kill her.  Penny glances behind her, at where she knows her team is, but there is no aid to be found there.  Cinder, Tyrian, and Hazel are on the attack.  The less said about that carnage, the better.  Penny is on her own.  She turns back to Ruby and, with every fiber of her being protesting, she prepares to fight.

I’ll make it quick, Penny tells Ruby in her head.  You don’t deserve this suffering.  I’m sorry.  I’m so, so sorry.

Penny ducks Ruby’s sword, and feigns to the left.

I’m sorry that this is how it ends.

Penny commands her daggers to cut through the Grimm limbs Ruby keeps painfully forming and sending at her.  She refuses to allow herself to wince at the agonizing screams.

I’m sorry you didn’t get to live a long and happy life.

Penny sees her opening.  Ruby has faltered.  Penny allows herself a second to take a breath, and then she lunges.  Her daggers all are pointed forward, ready to complete the death blow.

I’m sorry you ever had the misfortune of knowing me.

Penny’s killing blow doesn’t make its target.  Ruby faked her out.  Midway into Penny’s attack, she dodges.  Penny has no time to change course.  Her eyes widen.  Ruby’s Grimm limbs surround Penny, grab her, hold her.

Horror takes over Penny’s face.  She knows what’s going to happen right before the final Grimm arm makes the plunge into her chest.  Her mind goes blank with the pain.  Whether or not she’s screaming, Penny has no idea.

Ruby’s darkness, her corruption, seeps into Penny, worming its way to the mechanical girl’s heart, her core.  For Penny can only be destroyed if it is.  The Annihilation reaches its target.  It circles its prey, completely surrounding it.  It surges in for the kill.

In that dreadful moment, Death doesn’t come.  It was never going to.  It has, shall we say, a feel, for these things.  It knew, all throughout this battle, how it would end.  Death knew it would not be necessary to send its Reaper here.

The Silver Eye, which had protecting Ruby’s soul and had waited and waited and watched for its opportunity finally found its chance.  When the Grimm entombing it reached out to destroy the one its guardian loved, the Silver Eye, for the first time in its existence, felt something.

Remember, the Eye, on its own, had never been a whole.  It was forged, by the King of Vale, out of the remaining half of the Staff of Creation.  Though it could exist on its own, it never truly stopped longing to find its missing, stolen part.  And, when its prison made that final, almost deadly attack, through those dark tendrils ensnaring it, the Silver Eye finally felt that echo, that reverberation, that it had ached for for so very long.

In that moment, it wakes up and reaches.

Blinding silver light shines out through the laboratory.  Every vestige of Annihilation’s power, every bit of Grimm, inside a person or out, is disintegrated.  For those who have long since opened their arms to Destruction and allowed its influence into themselves, this means Death finally comes for its dues.  For Ruby, who the Silver Eye loves and cherishes, this means purification from her corruption.  For Penny, this means her life is spared and, from within her, the Silver Eye is answered.

Once upon a time, the General King of Atlas found the blueprints for an old inventor’s creation.  He saw it as a grand opportunity to build a great weapon for the glory of his kingdom.  To fuel it, he saw no better resource than his kingdom’s relic itself.  He split the Staff of Creation in half, stored one part away for later use and fashioned the other into a core for the new automaton.

Unbeknownst to him, in doing this, the General King created a mirror to the Silver Eye; the Winter Soul.  A new entity all of its own, it was.  One curious, fascinated about the world around it, and ever so willing to learn.

Is it such a shock then, that was built to be a weapon of immeasurable power turned its back to this objective and instead chose to attempt to understand and love the world it found itself in?  Is it such a shock that it came to love one who would be later chosen to preserve life itself?

Much has been written and recorded about the Fall of Atlas.  There are numerous accounts of the sudden surge of blinding light that shone across the kingdom.  Many theorize, but they do not know the truth of its source.  What they do know is that it wiped out the city’s mainframe and, for the first time in history, Atlas was left vulnerable.  It didn’t take long for the Rebellion’s ships to rise from Mantle and begin that final, gruesome attack after that.

Later, the Rebellion’s charge into Atlas Academy, of their slaughter of the robotic forces of the Atlesian Military, will be dramatized into something far more glorious and far less bloody than it was.  The retellings will focus on the storming of the throne room, of the General King being forced to his knees in surrender, the capture of the notorious Dr. Watts.  They will applaud the victories of the day, and blatantly ignore the executions of the weeks to follow.

And so, Atlas’s web of power collapses, crumpling into a thousand twisting, tangled threads.  The spider, the warmonger, who sat at its center, weaving and warping the world into something that suited him and only him, and growing fat off the results, is squashed.

Those two who were responsible, who gave the world the chance it needed to rid itself of the boot pressing down upon its throat, they were never known.

For Ruby, now saved from the Grimm but forever scarred by it, looks down upon the sleeping form of her fallen beloved, sees the full extent of Penny’s injuries, gathers her up in her arms, and steals her away to where she can be repaired.