Sorry it's been a long time everyone. Hopefully I'll get back to having ideas again soon, and hopefully will have something more fun in the next chapter :) For now, enjoy a very, very brief moment of Ruby's final thoughts as she falls from the golden bridges.
"Is this what death feels like?" Ruby thought to herself, a pleasant, floating feeling surrounding her as she plunged into the darkness. A wind whipped around her as she rapidly approached terminal velocity.
"It's not so bad..." she thought to herself as she willed her arms to stretch out, feeling the cold of the air, the last feeling she expected to feel. While the rest of her body hurt from fighting, fighting for days, weeks even, the cold air of the abyss that wrapped around her hands was comforting, and her weightless body felt relaxed for the first time in … well, she wasn't sure how long. Months? Years? When had this mess even started? Was it her fault for confronting Roman so long ago? Was that the reason that she, her friends, her sister, and so many others had to pay the cost?
Streaking through the darkness, she willed herself to open her eyes, tired as they were. Above her she could see the golden light of the platforms above. From the distance she could barely make out the red of an explosion, and then blue and red streaks through the sky, illuminating another shadowing descending into the depths.
Someone else had fallen.
A tear formed at her eye before it was ripped from her face and shot up into the air above her.
"I'm sorry" she thought to herself, "I'm sorry everyone. For everything..." she fought against it, but the tears flowed freely now, "I'm sorry I wasn't good enough!" A torrent of tears fell upwards, carried into the sky by the wind manifested by her falling body.
The further she fell, the colder it got, and the golden bridges that Creation had built faded to tiny golden specks amidst the darkness. Ruby squeezed her eyes closed to stop the tears and brought her arms back into her body, wrapping them around herself for comfort in the darkness.
Further and further into the darkness she sank, and as she did, a haze grew over her thoughts, a slow, winding fog that enveloped her in a comfortable blanket. Worries faded as the haze probed her mind. Fear dissipated and was replaced with the warm glow of memory. Memories of friends. Memories of family. Memories of people she had helped, thankful for her efforts, successful or not. She remembered her team, their smiles, their laughs, and how they picked each other up when one would fall. Together, they had done so much good...right? It didn't seem that way, as hundreds...thousands? fell from the bridges into the abyss, and countless more were left stranded in Atlas and Mantle, awaiting their fate as Atlas fell to earth.
All she had wanted was to help people.
The last thing Ruby remembered before she lost consciousness was a single image. An image of her and her team taken near the end of their first year at Beacon. Ruby had treasured the image of the smiling girls, but before she had a chance to frame it, Yang had gotten to it, writing a hastily scrawled "new friends!" across the top left corner with a red marker. In spite of the pain of failure, in spite of the tears, she smiled at that thought.
"I hope we'll be together again, somehow", she thought to herself, "I love you. All of you..." was the last thought she remembered as she lost consciousness.