Chapter 2: Painful Edges

'Crap, no semblance!' Ruby mentally screams as she falls from her spot on Weiss' lap into a total freefall. Wind whips the fox's hair around, and subconsciously Ruby moves her tail into a position blocked from the forceful winds. Angling towards a tree, she crosses her arms in front of her face and slam her eyes closed, the branches ripping at her jumpsuit. With an audible "oof" of pain she slams into the hard dirt and roots around the trunk.

"Ruby!" The voice of her favorite heiress gets her to roll over and look around until meeting a running Weiss' worried eyes. Her pretty white locks are frazzled and unkempt just from the one fall. She drops to her knees and skids up to Ruby, checking her for wounds.

"Weiss, I'm fine. Just help me up." That seemed to have an effect on the heiress, who stands and holds out her hand to pull her girlfriend up. Not even a second afterwards Weiss envelops the girl in a hug Ruby is much too happy to reciprocate.

"Don't do that again! You had me worried…" were the words Ruby felt more than heard from Weiss' position against her neck. The faunus senses a need to calm her girlfriend and pushes her from the hug. Seeing the slightly dejected expression her head bobs forwards with a minor smirk, capturing the heiress' lips in a kiss.

Breaking the kiss, Ruby uses her thumb to dash away a stray tear from Weiss' cheek. She takes a moment to inwardly chuckle at the role reversal. Usually Weiss is the one to cheer her up like this. "I should've been the one worried. I saw you break off towards the open field away from the trees. How'd you land anyways?"

That didn't have the intended effect. Weiss cracked her own cheeky grin and said, "I landed on some blonde kid's back, it was shockingly flabby."

Ruby's ear twitches at the sound of a far off bird screech. Her head snaps upward and looks around. "Weiss, I think I just heard a Nevermore? We need to go further into the forest." The heiress just nods and follows Ruby deep into the forest, not even feeling the need to question her girlfriend.

Little to their knowledge, someone else had been watching, following in curiosity, and disgusted at the thought of the Schnee heiress being with a faunus.

Ruby kept both pairs of ears to the sky while simultaneously on the underbrush around them. 'For a prison island, you'd think we would have dealt with a Grimm den by now?'

The earlier shriek never seemed to return to her relief but a sense of being watched seemed to permeate the air ever since the tree cover blocked out the sun with their overgrown size. Ruby began hearing a while back the sounds of heavy footsteps akin to a rather bulky human, their size to large to regularly remain stealthy, especially against a Faunus. 'Do I tell Weiss? We have so much to worry about already. I'd rather not, but…'

A soft wind blows from behind, gentle enough to be ignored but strong enough to carry the scent of an unbathed male. "Someone needs to bathe."

The heiress' head seemed to jump at Ruby's mumbled words, the noise having broken her deteriorating mind. "What was that?"

"I think somebody, you'd refer to as a 'brute,' is following us. We can either give him the slip-" as Ruby talked, a tall, well built boy with cropped brown hair jumped from the bushes, having given up on hiding once he heard his cover get blown.

"Fucking animal trash! Go die like the rest of your inhuman kind!"

"Excuse me?! That's my-" was all Weiss got out in retaliation before the brown haired brute interrupted.

"And you! What the hell is a Schnee doing dating a Faunus? And a female at that? I thought Schnees were the normal ones, not dating freaks or being freaks themselves!" He opened his mouth to continue, but Weiss landed a solid kick to his loins to take advantage of his slowly advancing walk. He staggered back a bit, before growling out, "Bitch, you're gonna pay for that!" The brute rushed her then and reached out and wrapped his hand around Weiss' neck, slamming her violently against the nearest tree.

Ruby visibly began panicking at the sight of her girlfriend struggling to breathe. The fox's eyes darted back and forth, up and down looking for something to help the situation, a stick wouldn't even get his attention, she needed anything better than her bare fists. Looking up, she noticed the sunlight bounce off a shiny red box in the tree branches, and without so much of a second thought jumped onto the brute's shoulder to try and get enough height to knock the box down. Successfully hitting it, she crashed back to the ground, the box flying off to hit the brute's hard head without so much as a flinch, clearly too absolved in removing the world of a 'freak.'

As it collided with the attacker, it flew open spilling what looked like a survival kit out around them all. Among the mess, Ruby sees a small blade, probably meant as a steak knife or something as it's not the most proper improv weapon but better than she could've hoped for. Rushing forward to grab the knife before anyone else notices, she carries through using all her weight to plunge the blade into his arm, but so engrossed in his torture, his grip doesn't slacken enough.

Seeing Weiss's eyes start to flutter, threatening to close, something inside Ruby snaps, and she drives the blade into his shoulder again, a howl piercing the sky as she savagely starts trying to sever the limb from his body to let Weiss go.. His grip falters and Weiss drops to the floor gasping for air.

The fox continues stabbing, no longer registering what's happening, her heart crying to protect Weiss, she pushes the man back against the very tree he had held her girlfriend nearly unconscious against. Stabbing she continued, stabbing over and over again. Ruby was crying, repeating something she barely recognized as speech at the top of her lungs. Stabbing until every single thought in her head came to the rhythm of the knife impaling flesh. Don't touch Weiss. Don't touch Weiss. Don't. Touch. Weiss!

Finally she stops, pulling the knife out and letting the body hit the floor, not even registering the amount of blood coating herself, the knife, or the tree.

In. Out. In. Out. Weiss repeated those simple two words to herself as she tried regaining her breath. Slowly sound started coming back to her. Then feeling. Then sight.

Steadily, a voice grew in volume saying, then yelling, "Don't touch Weiss," along with some nondescript squishing sound. She recognized the voice as Ruby's.

With sight finally regained, the heiress looks up just in time to watch Ruby pull a steak knife from that brute's stomach, and Ruby's wailing come to a quick decrescendo, barely able to be called muttering. Weiss watches as tears fall from her eyes and the body of that once living man drops like a sack of potatoes. Ruby then seems to register what just happened, staring at the blade in horror like some evil device that could kill millions. It drops from the girl's hand, and both can only stare at the blood running down her sleeves.

"R-Ruby?" Weiss says calmly, but even that was enough to startle the poor girl.

"Wei-eiss stay b-back!"

This only encourages the heiress to slowly walk forward more. "Ruby it's okay."

The faunus girl's ears and tail droop, and she looks towards the ground and to the side, "I don't want to hurt you…" She weakly says in quiet protest. Weiss takes this moment to rush forward and wrap her girl in a hug, waiting for the inevitable torrent of tears to let loose. It was her first kill, after all.

And flood the tears do. Ruby returns Weiss' gentle hug with a tighter more fierce one of her own desperately clinging to her reason to live and why she had to do it, why she had to keep going. To keep Weiss alive. For quite some time they stand like that, before Ruby finally calms down, the heiress continuing her comforting hold and whispering soothing words into Ruby's less sensitive set of ears.

"Weiss… I… I didn't even know his name." Ruby finally says, startling Weiss that she could even find it in her to speak up after that. She hesitates before responding.

"I think I saw his name on his jumpsuit before I was… choked. It said 'C. Winchester.' Why?"

"He may have been a bad guy, but mom taught me to never fight in vain, and to never kill without 'damn good' reason. He was my first… kill… I want to remember his name." All the heiress can do is mull over her reasoning, ultimately accepting it and making it her own goal to strive to do the same. To cling to that shard of good buried in this dark hellhole.

Not even subtly, Weiss changes the subject. "You wanna head away from here?" Ruby nodded against Weiss' collar. "Let's grab the knife and go."

Knife back in Ruby's hands, they emerge from the forest back into their Cell. Ruby's blood caked jumpsuit, skin, and hair deterring everyone away, not to mention the bloody knife dangling at her side. The duo sits against the nearest cabin wall, Weiss still straight up and Ruby laying in her lap.

When one is presented with such a situation, one can only stare in disbelief at the oddity. The Schnee daughter cuddling with a faunus covered in blood, backs against the wall of one of the… ahem, houses of this merry lot's cell in the twilight.

A cat faunus' ear twitched in minor annoyance as she tried to make heads or tails of the image before her. Having seen the damage the Schnee family had done to Faunus everywhere, her mind was convinced that what lay before her was an illusion, but her eyes and heart could tell how comfortable the pair was with each other, both clinging to each other with desperation and true love in their eyes.

That Schnee has to be faking it, right? Then why does she look so comfortable in the arms of a blood covered faunus girl?

A low grounding sounds out, surrounding Blake with its intensity. After recovering from the sudden noise, she looks up to watch the walls close. Browns and Reds shine from the cracks as its Dust mechanisms fill it in to prevent movement between cells, leaving her with an odd feeling of being completely trapped.

Trapped in a box of certain insanity.

Howls and growling can be heard just outside of her hearing, the Grimm sounding out from just beyond the walls.