The sun set the sea of clouds on fire.
As Ruby Rose squinted her eyes against the glare and hung out of the open troop compartment door of a K-37 Nighthawk gunship, she realized she was looking at heaven on earth.
Oceans of shining cloud formations stretched out below her, obscuring the ground beneath a sea of shimmering gold and reflected sun-rays. The sky was muted: a dark blue mixed with a deep purple that contrasted with the amber clouds beautifully.
Ruby leaned out of the right side of the VTOL gunship as far out as she dared to, took off her re-breather mask for just a second, and took a deep breath of the cool pre-dusk air. It would be night soon, and the air was made even colder due to the fact that it was streaming past her at over five hundred kilometers per hour.
She looked behind her, and saw more Nighthawks following them in a flying V formation. They looked like metal birds of prey with down-swept wings, armed to the teeth with rocket pods, missiles, and rotary cannons. They bobbed and dipped in the unpredictable air currents this high up, but it was a matter of necessity. Nevermores couldn't reach this altitude.
After observing the deadly magnificence of the gunship fleet for a few more seconds, Ruby glanced into the troop compartment to check on the men and women she was flying with. A Nighthawk could hold a full squad, roughly twelve soldiers with all their accompanying gear and weapons. Eleven soldiers in full grey, solid-plated combat armor either cleaned their weapons, chatted with eachother, or slept. Although since she couldn't tell who was sleeping and who wasn't, since they all wore armored re-breather helmets with tinted yellow lenses and pointed chins, she thought a few might even be staring at her.
She returned to the compartment door and looked out over the clouds again. The view was peaceful, and helped keep her mind off of the upcoming battle. She had found that the waiting was the hardest part. Once you were actually in the storm of battle you disconnected, fell back on your training and muscle memory, and simply did what had to be done. But the waiting... that was the worst. A hunt was different, because you were in control of what happened and how it happened – or least any Hunter worth their salt was.
But she knew she had no control over the upcoming battle, aside from the swings and cuts she performed with Crescent Rose, her trusty sniper rifle-scythe. She knew she had control over the Grimm immediately surrounding her. But if the soldiers around her were slaughtered, and the Grimm surged forward like a black tide, she knew there was nothing she could do to prevent it from swallowing her whole.
She sighed and adjusted the thick plates of leather covering her torso, shoulders, and thighs. She didn't like wearing this much armor, but it was an absolutely necessity. When you were on the front lines, face to face with howling, screaming Grimm, you needed as much protection as you could get. At least leather was a good compromise between weight, flexibility, and durability. She could still use her semblance, which she doubted she would be able to if she was wearing something heavier.
As she watched, a cluster of large STOTS – surface to orbit to surface – missiles broke through the cloud layer, heading straight towards the sun like Icarus from the old stories. Then they reached their apex point, curved downward, and flew straight back towards the earth. They disappeared again once they reached the clouds.
She grinned and wondered how many Grimm they had killed.
The pilot yelled back from his compartment, and even then she could only barely make out his words over the roar of the wind. "Might want to shut that door! Descent starts in one mike!"
"It's fine!" she yelled back. "I'll keep it open if that's cool!" She looked at the other troops. "You guys cool with that?"
Some nodded, some gave a thumbs up, and others kept sleeping.
She stuck her head into the narrow passageway that connected the cockpit and the troop compartment. "Yeah, I'll keep it open!"
He shrugged. "If you get sucked out or some shit it's your funeral!"
She grinned and re-took her spot by the door, looking out over the closest thing to heaven she knew she would ever see for a long time.
A minute passed, and then the jet engines of the VTOL gunship began to whine louder as they started their descent. The nose dipped forward into a sheer dive, and next thing she knew they were pointed almost straight at the clouds. Her stomach lurched into her throat, and the sense of vertigo was almost overwhelming.
Her heart rate picked up as they fell. She grinned madly, then whipped her head behind her to see the other Nighthawks mirroring them in a metaphorical and literal fall from heaven.
They hit the cloud wall and everything went black; they might have been golden on top, but underneath there were brutal storm clouds. Lightning flashed through the darkness and rain whipped into the troop compartment, but she only laughed as an exhilarating feeling rushed through her body like the lighting itself was striking her.
She wasn't afraid of death. She was death.
They broke through the clouds, fell from heaven, and descended straight into a black hell of fire and death.
Battle raged from one end of the horizon to the other. Endless oceans of Grimm flowed and slammed into miles-long cliff faces made of armor and steel and men, and she could only imagine how many lives were being snuffed out with each second.
Nevermores circled and wheeled overhead, agilely maneuvering around surface-to-air missiles, clouds of flak, and red-hot streams of tracer fire. Formations of Nighthawks and other gunships performed strafing and bombing runs, some bursting into flame and spiraling towards the ground as they were picked out of the air by the massive black birds of death.
As she watched, a Nevermore slammed into a gunship with it's outstretched claws, dragged it several miles through the air, and then flung it into a horde of troops rushing towards the front line.
Fires raged, artillery rounds and missiles arced through the air, and even over the scream of the gunship's engines she could hear the massed roars of hundreds of millions of Grimm and the answering voices of the humans and faunus they fought.
They dove closer and closer to the ground, then leveled out at the last second. The battle rushed by below her faster than the eye could process, but she caught flashes of storms of machine gun fire, massive Grimm creatures, and brutal hand-to-hand combat.
The gunships were delivering her and the elite platoon she was with right into the heart of the battle, where the fighting was the worst and their need to win ground the greatest. That was all that really mattered in this war: ground. Even if you lost a hundred lives and only gained three inches, it was worth it. This war was being measured in yards and metres, not lives.
Ruby ducked her head as the rotary cannons mounted on the Nighthawk's wings started to spin up, before unleashing a blistering stream of white-hot rounds that joined with the fire of the other Nighthawks, raced ahead of them, and split apart the onrushing mass of Grimm.
"This is your stop! Good luck out there!" the pilot yelled.
The gunships slowed to a stop, hovering a few feet above the ground. Ruby waited for the rest of the soldiers to drop out of the troop compartment, then just as she was out about to jump, someone cried out "Crow!"
She whipped her head up just in time to see a Nevermore fill her vision with it's black mass. It slammed into the side of the gunship, and she squeezed her eyes shut as she was flung out and into open space. She hit the rocky ground hard and rolled for a long time.
When she stopped, she realized with a start that she couldn't hear the battle anymore. In fact, there was no sound at all.
In a panic, she opened her eyes.
And found hell. True hell, not the hell of combat.
She was in the middle of a street, and all around her stretched a dead, burning city. The buildings were old and crumbling, shattered stone and derelict wreckage. The burnt out husks of long-abandoned vehicles sat in the streets, like the lingering ghosts of a fallen monolith.
She picked herself up slowly, wincing as her hands dug themselves into broken stone and blacktop. The disorientation she felt was total, and she spun in slow circles as her mind tried to make sense of the place she found herself in. Vaguely, she realized that she was in another dream. She thought they would have become familiar by now: the dream-nightmares she had a consistent basis, but they were always so eery and disconcerting that she never grew used to them.
The burning light of fires in the buildings stung her eyes, and she shielded herself from the glare. As she looked closer, she realized she couldn't find any source of the flames. Something about this dead city told her that it had been this way for ages, if not aeons. And worse, she couldn't shake the feeling of something watching her. Her eyes were drawn to a distant shape on the shattered crown of a skyscraper, but just as she focused on it, it vanished.
She turned again, and found something from a nightmare.
Roughly a dozen feet away, standing in the midst of the decaying street, was a figure. A giant of a figure with skeletal limbs and a skull for a face, dressed in a tattered red cloak. Black fires blazed in the pits of it's eyes, and she found she couldn't look away, much as she wanted to.
As she watched in horror and fascination, it slowly raised a clenched fist towards her. It opened the fist, and a metal square cross fell out and hung in the air, suspended by a chain wrapped around it's wrist. As it stared at her with empty eyes, she felt the weight of timeless death and an impending doom. Whatever this apparition was, it was as ancient as the city, perhaps more so.
It opened it's mouth as if to speak, and a sudden terror seized her in a vice grip.
And then she woke.
Not suddenly, as she was used to this by now. The sharp pain piercing her heart was as familiar as an old scar, but that didn't lessen it at all. She clutched at her chest and breathed slow, closing her eyes and letting the real world seep it's way back into her consciousness.
The first thing she felt was the softness of a bed, sheets tangled around her body, and the abject emptiness of that bed. It felt strange and somehow wrong, like the bed shouldn't be empty, but was. Then she realized what it was missing.
Weiss.
Next she realized that the bed was gently swaying, rocking like a boat on the open ocean. Awareness rushed back into her, and she realized that she was on a boat in the open ocean. The small cabin she was in was familiar now, it was the small, well-furnished cabin of the boat she and Weiss had rented for their anniversary. Weiss had always had a secret love for the ocean, and when Ruby had suggested that they rent a boat and sail out into the waves to spend a few days together, the former heiress had practically jumped at the prospect. Which is to say that she protested far less than she did about most things.
Weiss' absence was like an aching hole in her heart, and she stood and began making her stumbling way out of the cabin, the need to find her girlfriend of nearly five years almost overpowering. She felt like a small child lost without her mother, although the love she felt for Weiss was far more than platonic.
She stood and flexed her right arm, listening to make sure the servos were whirring just right. The prosthetic limb was mechanical, part modern tech and part dust. It felt just like a regular limb, moved as well as one could too. But it was also faster and stronger. She marveled at the technology that had gone into it, and also at the fact that Weiss' mother had actually paid for it after Weiss had told her what had happened out in the Tural mountains. The former heiress' relations with her mother were steadily improving, and that made Ruby happy. Weiss deserved to have at least one good family member.
After adjusting her loose-fitting shirt and making sure that the locket Weiss had giver her was still securely around her neck, she stepped out on to the bow. The night air was calm and perfectly cool. The ocean stretched out in all directions, tinged with a strange teal-green where the water met the sky.
Weiss was there, glowing faintly in the starlight and moonlight both in the sky and reflecting off of the calm surface of the ocean. She was leaning against the metal railing on the starboard side of the ship, with her face upturned to the endless night. The former heiress was clad in a flowing white nightgown, one with open slits below the waistline on the sides that left most of her gorgeous, porcelain-like legs bare. Ruby remembered her saying something about wanting to feel the ocean breeze on her skin.
The older girl turned her head at the sound of approaching footsteps, and a small smile graced her terribly beautiful face. "Ruby," she greeted. Her Alice-blue eyes sparkled like the stars in the sky, stealing the breath from the one she had named.
Ruby came up behind her and wrapped her arms around the smaller woman's midsection. She buried her face in Weiss' sweet-smelling hair and let out a deep, long breath, full of unanswered questions and half-glimpsed premonitions of things to come.
"Another dream?" Weiss asked, as if she already knew the answer to the question.
Ruby simply nodded her answer against the other woman's shoulder.
"What was this one about?"
Ruby hesitated before answering. The dreams were hard to explain, but it wasn't due to them being difficult to remember. She could see them in her mind as clearly as if they were still happening. It just felt somehow wrong to bring them out into the waking world.
"Well," she started, "there was a battle first. It was massive, and there were so many Grimm that you couldn't even see the ground they were on. There were humans and faunus too, all fighting for their lives. I don't even know what they were fighting over."
"Were you in it?"
Ruby nodded again. "Yeah, I was in some sort of gunship or airship going to the front lines. Right when I got there though, a Nevermore crashed into us and I blacked out."
"And then?" Weiss tone was gentle, but insistent.
"Then I was in a city. A dead one, all abandoned. I got the impression that it had been that way for a long, long time."
Weiss clasped her hands over the ones Ruby had wrapped around her waist and squeezed them gently. It helped.
"There was something watching me too. When I looked at it, it vanished, but then it reappeared behind me. It was... It was some sort of skeleton. But not the spooky kind you use to scare children, this thing was like, genuinely terrifying somehow. Like I was looking at my own death. It had a cloak like mine, but all tattered and faded. It had something in it's fist too. It was my cross, the one that Jaerla told us about. I don't know what that means. Anyway, it opened it's mouth to say something, and then I woke up."
"Hmm," Weiss muttered. "I'm sorry."
"Sorry?" Ruby repeated. "Why are you sorry?"
"Because you keep having these nightmares. Because I can't help you, no matter how much I wish I could."
Ruby smiled for the first time that night. "You're helping me more than you know. Just by being here with me."
Weiss leaned back further into her embrace, and the feel of the older woman's body pressed up against her own was familiar, and yet still somehow new. They fit together like they had been designed to.
"I'm sorry I wasn't in bed when you awoke. I couldn't sleep."
Ruby fought to keep a rising panic from her voice, but failed. "Are you having nightmares too?"
"No, no, nothing like that. It was nothing special. Plus, I wanted to come out here and watch the ocean. Stare at the horizon. See the stars. I like the ocean best at night, you know. It and the sky merge together so seamlessly that you can't tell where one ends the other begins, and it feels like a place where anything is possible."
Ruby felt the tension leave her body as the words left the former heiress' lips, and she leaned her neck around the capture them briefly. The kiss was short, but conveyed everything it needed to: her love, her desire, her longing to be with the other girl and the happiness that she had Weiss all to herself.
Then she sat down on one of the cushioned leather benches lining the forward edge of the bow, and pulled Weiss into her lap. The older girl snuggled into her embrace, rested her head on Ruby's shoulder, and grinned. Their auras slipped together like they had a hundred times before, but that didn't make it feel any less special or breath-taking.
"Anything is possible, huh?" Ruby asked with a touch of humor in her voice. "Like a beautiful woman like you loving a dolt like me?"
"Exactly things like that," Weiss replied, her face close enough to Ruby's that she didn't have to do more than whisper. "Things like a dolt I met at a Hunting academy saving me from my family and giving me a new life with her."
Ruby giggled. "I think I'd like to hear that story."
"I'll tell it if you bring a blanket from the bed. I'm starting to feel tired again."
"But what if you fall asleep while you're telling the story?" she pouted.
"I won't you dunce. Now go get us a blanket."
Ruby complied, gently lifting Weiss off of her and retreating inside the cabin to grab a smooth white blanket off the bed. She stepped back out onto the bow, and smirked as she saw Weiss trying to make it look like she hadn't been staring at her.
She sat back down and pulled Weiss back into her lap, and the former heiress immediately snuggled into her warm, muscular frame. The older woman was blushing profusely by the time Ruby had finished wrapping them up in the blanket.
"So about that story..." Ruby began.
"Fine, just don't interrupt me. I hate interruptions."
Ruby giggled. "As you wish Princess."
"Dolt," Weiss scoffed. "So the story begins with the heiress of the Schnee Dust corporation, and her first day at Beacon Academy. She finally gets her cart of precious dust off of the airship without any major mishaps or spillages, and then lo and behold, an idiot of a fifteen-year old girl stumbles into the cart and spills the dust everywhere..."
The ocean breeze was cool on her face and Weiss' body was warm in her lap. There was a glow of heat in her chest as well, somewhere deep in her heart, one that was always there whenever she got the chance to hold Weiss in her arms. She smiled deep and sincere as the older girl talked. Not only did she love the sound of her voice, but this also happened to be her favorite story.
And thus begins a new chapter in Ruby and Weiss' story.
Chronologically, this takes place about two years after their graduation from Beacon, and one year after Bloodbirds. Ruby has a prosthetic limb replacing her right arm at this point, a wonderful fusion of modern technology and dust that is stronger and faster than her old arm could have ever been.
If you missed the story of how that happened, go read Bloodbirds on my profile.
If you're here from Can You Feel My Heart, be aware that this story will not be a copy of that one. This one will have much more action and combat; expect it to feel more like a military fiction novel than a romance novel. Rest assured the story will still focus on Ruby and Weiss, and I'll try to have at least one fluff scene per chapter. I know what you guys are here for. Blake and Yang will have their screen time too.
I have very ambitious plans for this story, and you'll see a lot of foreshadowing from CYFMH coming to fruition soon. Anyway, here's to the start of a brand new story, one I hope you all enjoy.
If you're wondering who made that sick-ass cover image, all credit goes to The Great Weiss Shark. You can find them either here or on tumblr, but I'd definitely suggest checking them out here. If you need a little Whiterose fluff, their story Where You Belong is definitely the antidote.
If you have the time, please drop a review and let me know how the battle scene in the beginning felt. I'm going to write a lot more of those types of scenes in the future.
Thank for taking the time to read.
