She stared at the wall. It was almost vacant, she felt. Her mind. Things, abstract and unformed, whispered through it at odd intervals. They weren't fully formed, but she didn't need fully formed. They were snippets of thought, but the ideas were there. She didn't need to put an exact definition on them to understand them.
She had been staring at the spot on the wall for longer than she cared to know. She wasn't sobbing the way most teenage girls did when their closest friend - or whatever he was - didn't want to be around them anymore. It wasn't angst, it wasn't necessarily quantifiable. Just as she was having issues focusing on her thoughts, so to did she have trouble understanding what she felt. It was new.
She longed for the ice.
In the weirdest of ways, being the way she had been before was easy. It was oh so easy. The more she distanced herself from everyone, the easier it was. She had been able to ignore him for the entirety of first year, then, one conversation on a bench changed her world. The foundation of it had been rocked.
She thought it had been for the better. Weiss knew that she hadn't been happy, quite the opposite actually. Misery was an overused word, but when broken down to its fundamental points, it had described her quite perfectly. She had never admitted it at the time, but, as things always are, it was clearer looking back. So, when she had felt the first twinges of some sort of cracking in her shell, she hadn't fought so hard. Weiss was not half as talented as she should have been, but one of the things she was nearly good enough at was hurting others. She was sure she could have turned him away with less than a single sentence.
Weiss had made the decision not to. She had slowly let him in, ever so slowly allowed her carefully cultivated carapace to be pried open. She had watched it in a sort of nervous anticipation, not wanting it but at the same time never, ever wanting it to stop. He had chiseled away at her until her heart had started to flare with a previously unknown heat. It had been a beautiful thing. Uncomfortable for a short while, but ultimately more ecstatically pleasant than anything she had ever experienced. He electrified her, and every time she was with him, she felt that ice fade into the ever so distant horizon.
The ice was never going to return, and there was nothing she longed for more. It had made her miserable before, but maybe misery was underrated. Because what she was feeling now was so much worse.
It was a void. An utter, inescapable, all consuming void. There was no emotion that made Weiss want to scream or break or run. It was the complete and utter lack of anything. When she ate, it was a mechanical motion, the fueling of the machine that was her body and housed absolutely nothing. Her mind was a binary organism, computing data but feeling nothing. Sentiment was a distant memory, and that warmth that had opened up in her world had been smothered; the brief flicker of hope doused and stomped on for good measure. She asked herself whether it was better or worse to have known that feeling and then had it ripped away from her, and she knew the answer.
It was irrefutably worse.
Weiss wanted to hate him for it, because hating would be something. She had tried screaming into her pillow, but it had been hollow and empty. She thought that maybe she would break down crying as her elevated voice died down, but she just lay on her bed, her body completely relaxing, and she had simply faded from the world.
Numb.
She couldn't hate him for it though. It was entirely her fault. It had been her who had shouted those disgusting, volatile words. They had seeped from her mouth like a snake's venom, but rather than sinking into his skin, it had found its way into her heart. It had festered and corrupted, and when she woke from the pain, she had found that there was no heart anymore.
There was the soft swinging of the door on its hinges, and though Weiss registered it, she didn't respond. She was still staring at the wall, noticing absently that there was a small circle on the wall near the center of her focus that seemed brighter. It was for no other reason than she had been staring at it for so long.
"Weiss?" It was Ruby.
"Yes?" She answered vacantly, still staring at the wall.
"That's the third day this week you've skipped classes."
"Is it?"
"Yep,"
"Funny, I hadn't noticed." It wasn't a lie. She hadn't paid attention to time before.
"Weiss, I don't know what happened, but this is important. School's important. You're the one in first year who kept telling me that I had to do my homework and pay attention in class. We have two more years after this semester ends; you can't just give up on all of that."
"School is a system for exposing you to knowledge. When I want, I can learn everything I need to."
"Catching up isn't the problem, we all know you're smart enough too."
"So then there's no problem."
"There is."
"What could possibly be the issue?"
"You don't care anymore. If you ever want to be a huntress, you're the one who said it was a job. If you don't care about your job, you can't be any good at it." A frown crossed Weiss' brow briefly. It wasn't that she was invested in the peculiarity, she was simply curious. Where on Remnant had Ruby gotten that idea?
"At what point in time was I ever going to be a huntress?" Weiss actually turned to look at her partner briefly only to find her crestfallen.
"Weiss..." It was the whisper of a breeze, so slight that Weiss only knew the word from the movement of Ruby's lips. "That's... Why we're here. Make the world a better place, do our job."
"As I always was going to, I'm going to work at the Schnee Dust Company. It was an inevitability from the day I was born. Being a huntress was a childish dream."
"Weiss," This time the voice was stern. Weiss thought that maybe at some point that might have made her more invested in the conversation. "I don't know what happened between you and Jaune, but you can't let it affect you like this." Weiss had nothing to say, so she stayed silent. Ruby huffed in exasperation. "Weiss, you need to talk to him. Every day in class he's been a statue. Whatever happened, it's ruining both of you, and the only way it will get better is if you talk it out. Fix this."
"I can't, Ruby." Weiss dropped her focus to a point between her feet.
"Of course you can."
"And what will that accomplish?"
"I don't know. Maybe you'll hate each other. Maybe you'll fix this. I don't know, but whatever happens, it has to be better than... This." Ruby said, spreading her hands to indicate the general space around Weiss.
"I don't think that Jaune wants to talk to me anymore."
"Why not?"
"Because he knows who I am now."
"What is that even supposed to mean Weiss?" There was genuine caring in the younger girl's voice. It was like she was pleading to Weiss, begging for answers to questions to vague to be asked.
"I'm poison Ruby. I wither away the life of anyone near me. I can blame my father, I can blame the White Fang, I can blame a million different things, but it won't change who I am. I'm venomous Ruby. I drag the life out of the world around me, and the best any of you can do is to stay away." She thought for a moment.
"The best thing Jaune can do is to stay away before I hurt him anymore."
Why can't I just write fluffy stuff? Next chapter will be happy, promise.
