The fire rained down. Cinder fell with it. She crashed. Through the sand she crawled on her knees until she reached him, surrounded by fire, fire cupping them, fire making a nest.
His abdomen was drawn open in a sick mockery of a wound. He seemed dead already, even under the firelight. Eyes closed. Mouth slightly open, taking short shallow breaths. All that blood. Both of her hands were covered in it as she ran them over him, felt around where Carmine had carved into him. It was not a weapon, not really, nothing so well made as to be called that. It was ugly and untempered, sharp and crude, the Summer Maiden's last gift. There was nothing she could to do stymie the blood. Her hands shook and it got on his armour. Then her tears. The worn socket and the dry scarred skin of her left eye could still cry. Big fat tears drew out against the dark and the dry.
This was her best torment. She hoisted him up against her. She searched him for an answer as to what to do. They could not run. There was no one who could put him back together. This was not the thing she was equipped for. She killed. What had she ever grown, and what had she ever nurtured? She could not save him. She knew that terribly. Then someone else better than her would have to do it.
Someone with strong yet soft hands, the ones meant for healing even after killing. Bloody hands that came from tending to a wound, not inflicting it, searching for where it hurt to make it better. That was him, not her.
She put her index and middle finger to his pulse, like it would do any good. She had liked listening to it. It came slowly. It was there, weak, but it was going. She felt cheated. She had worked so hard at this, and managed so well so far.
"I was keeping you alive," she said through gritted teeth, to his deafened ears.
She could not help rocking him back and forth in her arms. If she shook him hard enough, then maybe it would do something. It would make something happen. Maybe something other than the fire pouring down. She did not really know where it came from, but it felt familiar yet wilder than she had felt before. The more she began to understand it, the less she knew.
What did she really want? She thought she knew. But then, he had disrupted her course enough such that it all fell away. Just as she had easily resigned herself to protecting him, he ruined it all again. Her mouth twisted sourly. It was like he did it on purpose. But she felt no anger. She only felt that old longing, the one she tried to bury. She ran a hand over his mouth to feel for his breath. It was still there.
Her own came hard and quick through her chest. It hurt to cry so hard, her tears again coming thick and fast, and then she cried so loudly she heard silence begin to fall around her. The flames swelled, and she let them, because it hurt. It had been so dark before and hard to see, and she just wanted it to burn and burn.
She kept crying. He kept bleeding. Her hands were soaked in it, and the rest of her. It was like she were bleeding too.
She longed to go back. She had accepted that she could never go back. Then, frightfully, as she felt him dying, she wondered where they could have gone. Maybe somewhere green. Maybe Vale. Like in that dream once, where she had seen him before, sleepy and pretty.
His slack body was heavy in her arms. She tucked his head under her chin and stuck her nose in his hair. He smelt of ash. Ash marked the way, she remembered. Ash brought you home. Find where the fire was and the rest would follow. She felt like she had been waiting for him her whole life and she finally figured out where the path was going. She did not want it to end here. She wanted to find out where they could both go. She looked up at the sky. Then she looked down at the earth. Then she looked at him. Then she closed her one-eye. Then she hid inside him. Then she begged and begged. Then she said that she was sorry, but what good that would do. Then she wished that she could make things better. The wish of a little girl waiting for someone to save her and nobody did. Now she wanted to save the little girl. She wanted to save him and she wanted to stop killing, just once. Let the rain come down in the desert this once, and smell the fragrant blossoms, the perfumery of vivid pinks and purples, colours so intense you could smell them. Let them dry up and die, deepen and darken, pull them out, and then start again. Then come rain. Then come home again.
She sobbed and sobbed. She thought her tears might have dried up but they did not. Her hand pressed against his neck, feeling around for his pulse, and for some skin to touch. His armour was in the way, and then, below, the wound.
Her eye opened. It came so slowly and she waited to see him dead. If he had died, then it was the dying of leaves in autumn, the colour of her Aura washed over him, a gentle glow. As surely as they died as surely as they lived again. She let out a confused sob, searching for him to tell her the answer, but he said nothing. But her Aura poured over him. Her human hand touched his jaw, then, his cheeks, his eyes, his hair, his shoulders, his chest, his waist, his hips, testing somewhere for the catch, but the evidence was there. She hid her face again in his hair, and felt her own curtain of hair cover him, like a shroud. She could not stop crying. Madame tried to beat it out of her. Salem usually just sent her to her room for it. She had got good at beating it down, but it came free-flow now. She kissed the tuft of his fringe which sat over his forehead, shaky, unsure. She could not do tenderness very well. She was unpractised at it. She was not sure if it were the right thing to do, but it felt like it. His hair was just as soft against her lips as it was against her fingers, brushing against her as light as baby's breath.
It came so easily to him. He doled out hugs with ease and he knew what to say and when, even when she did not like it. All her muscles for love were atrophied. There was just the one, hollow in her chest, weakly thudding as his tried to beat quicker, and if she could have taken hers and given it to him she probably would have. But she did not need to.
The fire danced. Her Aura pushed into his. It felt different, the other way around. She wondered if this was what it was like for him. It felt like nestling inside something perfectly fitted for her. She was unused to it, though. She was borrowing his little trick. She knew the feeling of his Aura against her maybe as well as her own now, and it throbbed and opened up to her.
She whispered the truth of what she knew now into his scalp. She could accept it, now. She ran from it, and tried to call it anything but what it was, but she could see it, as clearly as she could see the pulse in his neck hasten. The watery refraction of his Aura met hers, finally. The yellowing of leaves.
Carmine's gift protruded through his abdomen. At least Cinder's had the decency of a half-life. She had to remove it. Everything was burning and the Maiden power inside her felt like it had doubled itself, tripled something infinite, and somehow she had to focus intently and closely, hands like scalpels, to pull the damned thing out.
She rested him against her knee and put her hands Semblance-hot over the deformed mound and wrested it out. If you took an arrow through your Aura you were supposed to leave it and not yank it out on instinct. That would just cause trouble. But she was pretty sure she had to do this. Not that she had much precedent. Cinder did not help people. Anyway: she had enough Aura for the two of them.
His chestplate was broken now. Cinder had seen worse sights than this, but she felt like a small child seeing her first blood. But she had seen plenty of that. Plenty of that. All the more by her own hand.
She could see little else other than him, and at the edge of her vision everything was a scattered fury in the dark. Screams and yells. Half were her own, she was sure, but she was usually screaming and yelling when she was angry and when she was sad. She wanted him to hear her and he was still dead-white. She picked him back up and nursed him.
The smooth side and the rough side of her cheeks were both tearmarked and salty, and on her lips she tasted the ocean. The bright green-blue one, the one he carried the scent of, the amniotic brine clinging to him. Oceans and oceans and oceans, at night, in her head, where he came from. Sometimes she thought she could hear the waves, even if she had not been able to see them: in and out, in and out, in and out, the way his chest rose and fell.
His fair eyelashes had turned golden in the firelight, and they flickered as he opened his eyes, one blink, two, like a newborn. He said, "Sweetheart?"
Jaune must have called anybody that. She was no sweetheart.
His voice was rough and he sounded confused. She did not mind it. He was not dead. She had won. She wanted to smile so hard she frowned, caught between a peculiar sensation of abject sorrow and pure happiness. She did not know what to call it. When he turned his head against her and burrowed his nose against her chest, she found herself doing the same against him. She closed her eye. She did not want to fight. She wanted to stay here.
"I've got you," she said very quietly.
She watched his Aura, water-slick, mend the wound new. Her Aura. Her lip wobbled.
She did not want to leave him again. Her throat hurt, with its crying knot, and her nose was runny and the mask tight. In a fit of frustration she reached up to tear it off, the straps unfastening with angry ease. Then she tossed it away and scrubbed at the skin with some relief. The hot air was bliss, and her hair sprung free from around the tight straps.
"This is the part you're supposed to be good at," she said.
"What's mine is yours," he murmured against her chest.
Over the sound of the firestorm, she could only hear him because he was so close to her. The storm was hers, she realised. She had forgotten. She had gone mad.
One of his hands found hers, but then he went to tear off his gauntlets so he could touch her skin to skin. Such a silly little thing, yet it pulled her belly low. Perhaps she could write it up to near post-mortem delirium. He had a taste of it himself now. She did all sorts of crazy things when she nearly died. Not least let him heal her.
"I missed you," he said.
Cinder's one-eye widened and she hid her mouth in his hair again so she did not have to speak. She did not want to answer. Not especially if he were just saying nonsense.
"Did you miss me," he asked, no rising tone, just near-dead and sad.
"Of course I missed you," she grumbled.
"But you kept telling me to go away."
"Because we weren't supposed to see each other," she said. "Stop doing this now."
"You're going to leave again," he said with a whine.
It was funny, in an absurd sort of way. Vacuo was burning and Salem was back and he was worried about her going.
"I'm here," she said, softer than she wanted anybody to know, half-choked.
He pressed his nose against her chest, and now he was crying.
"It hurts?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said. "I want you to stay."
She sighed. "I am."
"Really?"
"Yes." She put her hand up to the back of his neck and readjusted her claw-grip on his hip. She added, "You won."
That at least made him smile. She felt it press against her. One of his hands found her waist, like he was trying to keep her against him instead of the other way around. She let him pretend. She flicked her gaze down and saw the flesh. No scar. Her own face and arm had scarred because Salem said it took a long time for her Aura to return. It had to be suppressed to let the Grimm arm sink its teeth in, and carve the hole inside her that he inserted himself into. She was still a monster.
Even yet, she stayed.
"What's with all the fire?" he asked, croaky.
"I don't know." She did know. At least instinctually. But it was too hard to explain.
"You do know."
She bit her tongue.
"Cinder," he went on, "you've burned up the place. I just see fire and glass. I don't hear the other Maidens fighting anymore."
It was quiet. He was right. "It may have got out of control." After a beat she said, "You nearly died." What a sour poetry that had been. Sung wrongly.
He was staring blankly, somewhere his friends had been before. Somewhere the Maidens ran and the Crown splintered itself and Tyrian stalked it, searching. They were safe where they were, if she had anything to say about it.
"What…" he started and stopped, thinking better of it.
"What what?"
"What changed?" he asked, eyes flicking from the fire-bright to her.
Her mouth twisted. She looked away from him guiltily and then back, trying to think of the right answer. Of course he would doubt her. It was right to doubt her.
Eventually she said, "I tried to play both sides. Clearly it didn't work."
"This wasn't Salem. Carmine betrayed her. You'd have every reason to go back to her." He said it like it was a logical sequence of events.
Like Cinder cared about split hairs like that. "It's bigger than her," she said.
"But you know what this means, right? It doesn't stop here. I want— I want you to come with me. I meant it then and I mean it now. But coming with me means stopping Salem and cleaning up this mess. Do you really want that?"
Cinder ground her teeth, and tightened her hands against him. "Yes."
"Can you… can you say it again?"
"Yes," she said again, unblinking.
She never killed because it was personal. She liked tricking people and ruining things. It was easy to go with what Rhodes had taught her, what Salem refined. It was easy to be cruel. It was the same greased wheel, turning every day, and it could have kept spinning if she had let it.
It was harder to be kind, and it hurt to let him in the same way it felt good, and yet: as hard as it was, the highest price, it came with the sweetest boon. For the way he looked at her then, she would have done just about anything to earn it again.
More than that, though. There had been a foreign sense of triumph before. She liked the feeling of turning up in surprise and burning it all down. She did it just the same this time, with a different pitch. It had felt good. It had felt right. Like a song on the wind she finally tuned in to hear.
"I want to go where you're going," she said.
He sat up against her and watched her long and hard. It was still dark, of course. She was not sure what he could see, or what he was looking for. Then he pulled away from her, searching, and said, "What happened?"
The fires. The glass. The peculiar silence, and distant calls. She said, sheepish and lying, "I don't know."
"Yeah, you do."
"I really don't," she said, and then at his shrewd gaze, she relented and added, "I think it was your Semblance."
It started before that. He would know. He knew already.
On the other hand, she was mildly impressed with herself for the destruction. Put aside the grief and she had wrought something fierce. She slyly drew her own gaze across the landscape and she thought it good. Just because she wanted to play nice did not mean she stopped liking the burn. The fire curled serpentine and happy, but it had grown weak. Against each other she could see his outline and the worry lining his face.
"Don't look so worried," she said. "Your friends will be fine. If they were smart enough they'd have avoided the storm."
"They probably think I'm dead," he said blankly.
"Then you'd best correct them of such a notion." As smooth as she tried to be, she had to admit that her shaking hand belied the sentiment.
Cinder stood and pulled him up with her. There was a strange sensation that ran through her, amidst the worry, the feeling that they were together and she was going with him, and she was no failure but in fact very good at what she had set out to do. It felt good.
"Come on," he said, taking her hand. "If you really want to."
She squeezed his hand in response, mostly because she did not know what to say. It was foreign to her. No one came for her and no one wanted her to come with them away, and here he was, asking her again and again. She liked the sound of his voice, that sweet timbre, that she almost wanted to keep goading him just to keep hearing his pleads.
"Why hasn't Ruby used her light trick?" Cinder asked. They had begun to walk vaguely in the direction where his friends were before, but ambling around in the dark was still ambling around in the dark. Other than the remnants of her temper tantrum.
There was a thoughtful pause before he replied, uncertain. "She's… had difficulty. They're not exactly light switches."
If only it were as simple as a switch.
Then he added, "Aren't you afraid of her?"
She made a noise of disgust. He had read her like a book back then. It had made her angry because no one knew her like that, saw straight through her.
"It's the only way we're going to see anything," she said evasively. "Not unless Salem's new puppet makes an appearance again."
"It might hurt you if she does it."
Just as she felt him lose his balance she righted him, and then went over a hilly dune. "Then I'll run."
"Or you could stay," he said quietly. "You could stay and… it's not like it can hurt the rest of you. It's only the arm. You know what happened at Beacon—"
"I know," she said. "I know."
"But do you really know? Your eye—"
"How do you know that?" she snapped. She halted and searched for him in the dark to glare.
A long breath. Then, "Tyrian told me. To mess with me."
"When did you see Tyrian?" she then demanded. She had all of her delusions of his being safe and he was cavorting with Salem's most dangerous. He certainly made a terrible habit of that.
"Oh," he said very carefully, "um. That's kind of a long story. We should find—"
"Quit it. What did you do?" She stepped closer until they were abreast.
He told her in starts and stops. First there was the nonsense with Theodore: Cinder's good brow rose high and her scarred one tried.
"I don't know why I expected anything less of you," she said. "I mean, really. Heedless self-sacrifice seems exactly up your alley."
"Well it worked," he muttered.
Then he explained the part with Tyrian.
"Using you as bait," she flatly repeated.
"Pretty much."
"That was why— that was why—" she floundered, hands on her hips, doing the sickening mental arithmetic. Carmine wanted to hurt you the same way you wanted to hurt him. If she had not foolishly run like she always did then she would have known. If she had considered that Carmine were just like her, then she would have known what was up her sleeve.
Carmine had made a calculation back in the crypt that she might have once been impressed by.
"You got away because I used the Relic?" she said, to distract herself. Her one good eye twitched.
"So you saved me anyway."
Her distraction failed resoundingly. "Saved?" she spat. "Saved. You know what Carmine and Tyrian did to you is the same I did. The only reason you nearly pulled a fast one on me is because she recognised a spot to press not even my commitment to Salem could hide. And you want to call that saving?" Cinder tore at her hair.
"You came back," he said, like that explained everything. He put his gloved hands on her shoulders. Voice firm. "Don't do this to yourself. I only wanted you back. There's no saying what would've happened otherwise and you saved me. I thought it was going to be me doing that, you know." He was starting to cry.
Cinder thought she heard movement nearby, but she hoped they stayed blind. She shook.
Then he drew her closer, so close the outline of his face became clearer, and said, "You used my Semblance."
He did not need to say anything more. She already knew what he meant. A Semblance was personal. A Semblance was yours and no one else's, and when hers had first burnt it had been the first thing to ever really belong to her. The slow curl of smoke when she tried burning anything, clothes, paper, the end of her hair, just to see if it would take, so familiar that in the faintest, faintest echo of fire across the hidden landscape, she could smell it still. It was the same respite.
His was different. It meant something different.
"I just borrowed it," she mumbled, feeling silly.
"Yeah, just." He sounded sniffly but like he was smiling too.
"But it's yours," she said haltingly. "You can't just take someone's Semblance."
"You didn't take it. I gave it to you."
Her brow furrowed. "You were busy dying."
He simply shrugged. "I think the bond kind of counts as— tacit permission?"
"I'm sure that was in the fine print."
"Didn't need it." He took her hand again. "Whatever you need from me I'll give you."
Cinder, wick worn, was going to combust. What could she even say to that. I took everything from you. What else. I'm a monster. Her arm hurt. You should run instead. She was a hungry, greedy, jealous, murderous, insecure, unhinged, mad, crazy, broken thing. Give and give and give and she would only ask for more, would she not?
Yet the other Maiden powers did not call to her. So maybe she knew satiety eventually. She could put to rest the childlike longing inside her and content herself with what he could give her for now. Fine. Jaune was still alive. Good job. She had not messed this one up.
"Cinder?" he asked quietly.
After another uncertain pause she said, "And you can have what you want from me."
Me me me me me me me me.
She was broken.
His expression was illegible. Grimm-disguised, mysterious, only the dimmest of dim glimmers marking the gentle frown of his mouth and sparkle of teartracks. Let me see, she wanted to say, let me see him.
That was the irony of Cinder's life. Ruby Rose was their one way out. Lucky that she never managed to kill her, anyway. It would have been so difficult to find another silver-eyed warrior with half her tenacity.
"Why don't her eyes work?"
Jaune started off again, hiding from her. "She has to… you know… think of stuff."
"Like what? Puppies and rainbows?"
"Well, yeah, I think something like that."
"I don't kick puppies," Cinder said, apropos of nothing. "I know it might be a stereotype—"
"What, like an induction for working for Salem—"
"— is you have to like kicking puppies, sure."
"I can't believe I'm laughing right now," he said as he was laughing.
"It's a litmus test. Clearly I failed."
In the middle of a blackened desert with nowhere to see and nowhere to go was precisely the right time to point out that, on all accounts, Cinder passed being just morally questionable enough for Salem with flying colours. Like killing his partner.
But he laughed anyway. She had not really ever felt like she was evil, or that she was wrong, or if she were wrong then she did not want to be right anyway. The rest of it did not matter. None of it mattered. Of course it would punch her in the gut when she realised that on paper, writing all her deeds down, that would be there in big fat red letters: KILLER. Forget kicking puppies.
So she saved him once. Big deal. That was her job now.
They moved on, but the way was still unclear, and whoever was in their right mind would have run from Cinder's fireshow. She tried to listen, but she heard nothing. She turned her nose to the air for a moment, sniffed once, twice.
The smell of smoke disappeared and to anybody else that would have been a good sign. Finally, the flame abating.
Not quite. She smelt something acrid. Her feet stopped. The sand beneath her feet was the same sand stretching hundreds of miles in every direction. The fires were all the same. The distant moans too. The smell of the Grimm was familiar enough to her. The sulphuric stench of Evernight was hard to forget.
Sometimes she would enter a room— the receiving hall, a hallway, an errant room with an errant door left open, teasing to the eye— and a faint acrid smell would linger. Acidic enough to burn the nose, and not the good burning, a bad type of burning which made her eye water. It was bad news. Tyrian would sit at Salem's feet and contentedly listen to whatever topic Salem had chosen to lecture about that day. Usually Cinder had heard it before. Salem repeated herself.
So she knew that smell, the scent of venom. It made her angry. Other times she would hear his distant laugh before she would smell him, so she knew how to dread that, too. But today he was quiet, and the dark would not give him the same trouble as it would them.
"Tyrian's nearby," she said, because it would not do to remain silent. She sparked a fire in her hand as Jaune's went to his sword.
"So when you did the big awesome fire splodey thing do you think it hit him?"
"I'd hope so." She would consider his wording another day.
They stood back-to-back. Then waited. The smell lingered. Tyrian thought himself so clever putting a collar on her. Keep her down and keep her quiet. Screaming too loudly would upset everybody else.
Cinder raised her fist and then thumped the sand to send out an inviting wave of fire. The yelp and growl she needed to hear came to her left.
"Good move," Jaune said.
It was only for a moment, but she sent him a self-satisfied grin. She liked being good for him.
The sight which greeted them under her casting was a strange tableau, a composite painting of the grotesque. Tyrian kneeling, growling. Carmine nursing an unknown wound, arguing with him back and forth. A head hiding behind an upturned crate covered with scorchmarks. Her doing. Unmoving bodies. White Fang, Crown, students. Tyrian's doing, from the looks of it, limbs all wrong and bleeding. She knew what it looked like when he swept through. He was remarkably unsubtle, but Tyrian did not care for subtlety, and it was hard to hide when you enjoyed something.
"Well, well, well," Tyrian sang, neck twisting. "My perpetual thorn in my side. And the boyfriend."
"We can't take Tyrian," Jaune said, ignoring him. "But Carmine betrayed—"
"I was just thinking, Cinder," Tyrian barrelled through, rolling back and forth on his haunches, "I wanted to be a Maidenmaker. What say you take Carmine here? Then when you're done I can kill you too, and the boy can watch, and then we can play a new game of finding the next Fall Maiden. Because you don't love anybody. The Maiden has to think of someone whom she loves, yes? When she dies?"
The grate of his voice was an old type of torment and made her blood run cold.
"Where's Gillian?" Cinder heard Carmine say weakly.
They had a few options. Trying to fight Tyrian was one of them, and not one with a particularly good outcome. Cinder was exhausted and barely allowing herself to recognise it. Tyrian ran on fumes. There was no telling what Carmine would do: Jaune was supposed to be dead and he was standing there hale, and Cinder could see an angry, angry pull of her expression forming.
"How the hell are you alive?"
The next would be running. Cinder had done enough running, and Jaune was too stubborn. Their problems would just follow anyway, Tyrian and Carmine both.
Jaune seemed to be thinking what she was thinking, so he went with what she usually did, which was taunt: "You know Carmine used the Sword of Destruction on Salem."
What a sly little thing.
"What?" Tyrian snapped, high-strung and vicious.
"She betrayed her. I watched it happen."
"You asshole!" Carmine yelped, then coughed blood up. It lessened the effect.
"Salem? Salem, who gave you everything? The power you carry? The power you held here? The crown for your delusion? You KILLED her?" Tyrian's attention drew away from them, but all the poorer for it.
Cinder almost felt sorry for her. It was very dangerous, of course. It was playing with fire. But Jaune had the same terrible thought as her, so maybe they were as bad as each other.
"We don't need Salem," Carmine said to him. The golden Maiden fire danced. The air grew leaden.
But it was a weak call, as graceful as a sledgehammer, and it was a threat Carmine was not going to follow through on. It was dangerous to be too confident, as Cinder had learnt to her disgruntlement; even so, it took a Maiden to know a Maiden.
"You dare BETRAY her? You, weak pitiful little thing— with your squabble in the desert, like rats— rats— rats—" Then he began to howl and cry. Like the fury that had gripped him returning from failing to capture Ruby. That was when she truly believed that he was mad in any way.
He only wanted you to believe that he was really crazy.
"RATS— RATS—"
Carmine was very badly wounded, the closer they stalked. Whatever she was trying to call on was not doing much. It just made Cinder's skin tingle.
"And why are you alive?" Carmine rasped out. "I thought I put a hole in you."
She was speaking to Jaune, barely audible over Tyrian. He was beginning to mangle a corpse nearby now. Cinder wanted to tell him Salem would come back soon anyway. But in the madness and in the flesh he ripped open she could see that in his own perverse way he loved Salem, not just worshipped her but loved her. Respected her, adored her; Cinder had always thought the way he sat at her feet was the same way you fed a treat to a dog, but she was sure now that he did it first, that he came without the invitation.
Cinder needed the carrot and stick alike to stay with Salem. Tyrian went to her without question. Maybe that was why she had always hated him, because he had never made sense to her. It was only now, knowing something unconditional, that she could see it for what it was.
"RATS RATS RATS RATS RATS RATS—"
"Do we help her?" Cinder asked Jaune lowly. After all, they both knew too well what a dying Maiden meant.
It was getting harder for her to hold the light up. She would have to cover him whilst he did it, and that was a bitter taste. Cinder wanted to kill her just to kill her, not for the Maiden power, not for that at all.
He knew that without her saying it, he must have, from the tense set of his body beside her. But if Cinder wanted revenge just like he had wanted from her, no one but him would believe it. They would think her the Maiden hunter she had been for so long. That was all she would ever be. She scowled something fierce.
When they tried to approach, stepping around bleeding bodies, black blood seeping into sand, Tyrian drew himself back on his haunches and growled, "No, no. Cinder, come. You must kill her. For Salem… RATS!"
To her left she held Jaune back just a little. Then she said, "The Relic's out of the Vault. We don't need her. Run away and find somewhere to hide, and I'm sure Salem will find you and kiss your wounds better."
"But you always wanted the power," Tyrian said, voice high with a mix of sincere confusion and something else bordering on hysteria. "Maiden this, Maiden that, wilt the rose and make a necklace of her innards—"
"I think that was you," Cinder interrupted.
"— kill kill kill, rats rats rats, but now you've got this— GROWTH, the TUMOUR— what good is he, what does he do exactly— do you shake him and candy comes out? Go on, kill her—"
Cinder wondered why he did not try to kill her instead, only threaten her. But he was right, that was the funny thing. Who would her power go to? He would disappoint Salem so much, and so glad she was that he did not know she had no intention of returning to Salem. She could not help smirking.
Carmine, on her side, no room to bargain and all the room to taunt added, "Aren't ya gonna do it?" She let out a long gasp and coughed up blood, lungs trying to claw out. "If I were you, I would. It'd be so easy. I remember what it sounded like when Tyrian tried that toy on you. You're a screamer. It'd be loud."
What a bizarre truce. Cinder stepped forward and as she did, as she thought about just taking the opportunity to slit Tyrian's stupid throat, to be the monster she really was. It was then that she heard a scuffle, like a clever rat. She turned her ear to the noise, hearing sharpened.
She thought they must have been one of the students hiding, who did not listen when she told them to flee. No, it was somebody quick on their feet and listening intently, and now aware that Cinder was stalking them.
"There's nowhere else to hide," she said, as Jaune skulked behind her, his shield up on instinct.
"What is she doing?" said Tyrian to Carmine.
Carmine and Tyrian had laid their own waste to what remained in this pocket. The scattered bodies were a testament to that. Such quick killing they must have made, aimless, after Cinder decided to burn Vacuo. It was not really conscious, in her favour.
This one was either clever or very stupid, but at least they were a quiet one, blending into the silence and the blindness. Cinder summoned a sword and held it pointed out, ready to figure out who it was. They came to face each other, the weak fireshower brightening for just a moment as a girl dressed in desert-ruined white reared a whip in their faces.
"Ilia?" Jaune said suddenly.
"Jaune?" said this Ilia.
"Do you have the Sword still?" he asked.
"I— I do," she said. "Jaune— I just— I just saw— so many—"
The day had been long. It was no day, though, and so time wore on without any sense or reason. Even Tyrian grew tired, head hanging in his hands, watching their interaction with interest and maybe even perverse intent. Who was hiding? Who wanted to come out and play?
Carmine was bleeding out. Not long for her now. She wondered if it would simply passed onto Gillian. At least they would know who.
"He squeezed their eyes out in front of me—" Cinder heard.
She was tired. Her body ached and her Aura waned, as weak as the light, and Salem would be back and would call through the arm. It would be painful.
"I'll kill her myself!" Tyrian called. "I'll make sure she doesn't remember anybody! I'll make sure it scatters, I'll make sure you never find the Summer Maiden and Summer will die— Summer will die— Summer dead— RATS!"
"Would you just shut up already?" Jaune said back, turning with heaving shoulders.
She recognised that look, and she remembered what he had said to her. He could exercise his own restraint when he wanted, but she wondered if he wanted to at all. What he had said to her that night, in his room, that he would have killed Tyrian for her— but she could not let him. She could not. He might have wanted to do that for her, and it made her heart beat a strange beat, except what he needed was her of all people to tell him to stop.
Cinder had to follow him. Not a fight. She did not want to fight Tyrian. When she watched her back she saw Ilia following, the Sword at waist mirroring Cinder, and her funny little whip out, garnished with a hard frown and a furrowed brow.
Who was this girl?
"I'll do it," Cinder lied, pushing Jaune aside gently, trying to affect carelessness.
He was as hard and as stubborn as a statue.
"Don't," she told him. "I'm telling you to step aside, Jaune."
"Oh! Oh! I see! He intends to kill me," Tyrian said, watching their stand-off, as Cinder hovered at his shoulder. "No, please, I'd like to see you try."
"I'll tell Salem you failed," Cinder snapped. "Between losing Mercury and the Relic, and me returning with the others— she won't care for you."
Like she had been, when Tyrian had found Carmine, and when Salem introduced her to her new friend.
Tyrian frowned. "Little girl, do you think you scare me? I'm only being gracious enough to let you have the Maiden power—"
"Do you SHUT UP?" Carmine said, but they all ignored her.
"That you can't have," Cinder reminded Tyrian. "Too bad for you even the Maiden power wouldn't make her love you. Salem doesn't care about the Maiden power. Only I ever did."
"But she did. The Maidens are daughters to her—"
Jaune moved back behind her, but his body language had not shifted. He was taut, and though he may have been as heedless as he was when she met him again at Haven, he was a little more calculating.
Surely Jaune knew her bluff. She continued, trying to talk Tyrian down somehow, "Salem doesn't even care about you at all. You're a means to an end. Every time she dies she doesn't think of you. Do you think this world ever meant anything to her? It's just her and the old man. It's always them dragging us into their mess." Her lip upturned with disgust. "You're not special. She's already found a replacement attack dog."
"Bitch!" Tyrian shouted, and lunged, quick as a knife and as smart as one, which was not at all.
Jaune repelled him with a heavy blow. So much for not fighting. He had the air of bloodlust about him. She could feel it.
But Carmine used whatever was left inside of her to blast Tyrian back, knocking him senseless. A swift wrist flick, like she had been feigning the state of her injury. It left him gasping and spitting out sand, as Cinder towered over Carmine, as if with the real intent to kill her.
"See what you are?" Carmine said. "Even if you wanna run from it you still wanna kill me. Standing there towering over me. You're the same as the rest of them."
Cinder would have said to her that she was just bluffing. That the power was not hers and she had to bow to the power she herself had taken and not the other way around. It would have been clever. But the arm— the hungry thing attached her that made her a monster— had a will. It wanted as much as she did, and for a time they had been bound, curse to curse.
It hungered and it wanted to feed, and it no longer feared her, because she was not a fearsome thing anymore. Cinder had let herself grow soft in Jaune's bed and she had rolled over to show her belly. The arm only obeyed her because it was afraid of her, and Cinder, most of all, had been scared of herself.
Now it would not do as she bid, not especially when she deprived it of its sustenance. She was so hungry. She knew how it felt.
The arm sprung out and stretched itself tissue-thin. The claws dug through Carmine's chest. Her skin gleamed with sweat and the blood ran. Cinder could only watch, her body not her own. She tried to tug and pull, shrieking. The power would not go to her, but it feasted anyway. Carmine's Aura flowed through the arm as it grew bulbous, and thick boils sprouted, growing finger-like shapes up and down, as if growing more hands from itself. After all, she had been a Grimm-human monster, and it had gone two-way.
This was what Cinder really was. The girl beside her watched on in shock, and she could hear Jaune yelling, caught between Tyrian and her. Everything he wished to deny right there. The arm. The thing that made her inhuman.
She used the last sense she had to summon a dagger. It would be impossible for him to do it.. Not on her, not now he would not touch a Maiden.
Beside her she ground out, broken and pleading, "Cut the arm."
Ilia took it and did not wait to repeat permission, or nod her head solemnly. The rainbow glint of her eyes was hard, and it was with the sensibility of someone who had known how to cut off your own tail to free yourself from the cage that she brought the obsidian dagger down and cleaved the Grimm arm-hand-finger-abomination in half, leaving it to smoke. The hand in Carmine's chest turned to nothing.
Cinder screamed. She screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. All she did was scream. One pain after another after another after another after another and by herself, always by herself, and was this her lot? Pain and more pain and giving it out because she had too much of it?
The arm smoked. She lost track of her surroundings and whether the light sung out or whether it shut its mouth was not known to her. Only the arm. Only the arm she knew now, and really, her whole life. She gritted her teeth and she fell to her knees.
"Shh, shh," came in her ear, to soothe her. "You're alright. I'm here, I'm always here."
The pain eased. He was holding her again as he always did and it began to go away, even as the arm tried to grow back. Jaune's expression turned dark-light sour, and he squeezed his eyes shut.
In the brief return of her senses, Carmine said, "Pass me that damn thing."
Tyrian moaned.
Ilia did as Carmine bade, passing it by the sharp end as it cut her palm open. The only person with a clear head in the near vicinity. The only woman.
Cinder's dagger, the cut of it clean, the shine of it glass, went in Carmine's hand where it did not belong. Weak-wristed now and hand shaking.
"What are you doing?" Ilia asked quietly.
"You think I get a choice in this?" croaked the Summer Maiden, "you think I knew everything I was signing up for? It blows. Gillian's gone. Salem—"
Cinder knew what she was going to say without her saying it. Salem will come back, and be so, so angry with them, Carmine especially, since her open rebellion was to her face.
Ilia knelt with them. She said, "Do you have someone you could think of—? I could get you help, there are still people who could—"
"Shut up," Carmine bit out. "I'm done. Salem's going to kill you all anyway. Gillian's— Gillian—"
The pain had abated. Cinder turned to Jaune to glare at him as a silent tear dropped. He was doing something. She hated him so hotly for one moment. Let her feel it. It was her burden, not his.
"You'll find out— one day— to your sorrow—" Carmine said through gritted teeth, dagger raised high as if to inspect it, "that it wasn't worth it."
Ilia was shaking her head no when Carmine drove the dagger through her own breast, where the claw had been. The cutting of flesh was clean and hard. She did not die immediately, but she had been close enough to it already that it came in slow, slow gasps.
"… get yourself a girlfriend," Carmine gurgled.
Ilia held her hand. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry…" she kept saying, "I'm sorry—"
That was the way of the Summer Maiden. Destruction. Death. Killing. Dying. Ilia closed Carmine's eyes for her when her head thumped soundlessly against the sand. In the cloud of Grimm, the sulphuric not-deadness righted itself when the stench of sickly blood superseded it. Then Ilia turned to Cinder and Jaune, where they both felt the Grimm trying to rise up, and the Maiden fire trailing from her crying eyes was a kaleidoscope.
"Your first act as a Maiden," began Cinder, "is to cut my arm again."
She held out a copied dagger, spun glass, and tasked her with it. A shaky nod, another swipe, another cry. That was the swift hand of the Summer Maiden.
Jaune hid his face in her shoulder like he was the one who needed protecting. He was.
"You need to stop," she tried to command.
But he would not listen.
Ilia stood and paced around them, sizing up Tyrian, surveying the waste. They two laid intertwined.
"If this is only half of it then there's no way I'm letting you feel it by yourself," he said shakily. "You let me in and I'm staying here."
It went like that for a time. Ilia would come over and cut her arm, and the light surrounding them grew dimmer and dimmer, but still the only beacon for anybody to follow.
"What do we do with him?" Ilia asked. "Do we tie him up?"
"Would you kill him?" Cinder asked back. Their gaze met, Maiden to Maiden.
"I don't want to do that anymore."
"Yet so many he has killed. Including your own people. If there's one person who might mete out death… do you know what you're supposed to protect?"
Ilia shook her head.
"Destruction," Cinder ground out. "So would you do it? Would you look him in the face and kill him?"
"Cinder, what are you doing?" Jaune said in her ear.
"It's a test."
"What kind of a test?" said Ilia.
"Do you know who I am?"
"I… you're… you're Cinder, aren't you?"
"And you know what I did?"
A brief pause, then, she said "Some of it." There was creasing at the eyes with her squint.
"Would you kill me?"
"No!" Ilia sounded borderline scandalised.
Cinder wondered what she meant by not anymore. "Then there's your quandary. Kill him and then kill me? Kill him and not me? Or not at all? You know they tried to put him away in chains twice, and twice he escaped. He's wily. What would you do with him?"
"What would he choose?"
"Oblivion!" Tyrian cried out, waiting for the perfect spot. "Exultation!"
"Cut my arm again," she instructed once again. It was growing too fierce.
Of course she knew who she needed and what had to be done. The arm no longer answered to her, and the bane of her existence was now her only balm. That was why she had kept the fire singing out. She was hoping that it would lead Jaune's little friends to exactly where they were. Follow the fire and you will find where you need to go. If Ruby Rose's eyes were not working, then they had the Maiden fire beckoning.
Then Ilia said, very quietly, whilst they waited for the silver-eyed warrior, "I once had a choice. Whether to keep going the way I was or to turn around. I thought it was too late…" Her stare was somewhere else, as she watched Cinder's arm try to grow back. "It hurts that she thought it was."
"It's too easy to," Cinder ground out.
"I know it's easier," Ilia agreed sadly. "I don't know what I'm doing now. This isn't my place."
Cinder wanted to laugh. A Maiden afraid of her power. "It's yours now. Use it the way you wish. What do you want to do with it?"
A killing blow of her own, but that sweet sort of killing, that let new things grow: "I want to help."
Cinder did laugh then, but not at Ilia. She thought of the dead earth giving way to the rains and the magenta wash, and it went on and on and on.
That was how Ruby and her league found them, in their pocket. They had followed the weak call eventually. There was Tyrian groaning still, as deathless as his mistress. Ilia with Cinder's glass in hand. The weak fire. Cinder and Jaune pressed together, head to toe, pain shared.
"Blake?" said Ilia, "Blake— are you and the others alright—?"
A cacophony of gasps at all the twisted dead; Tyrian; they all; the new Summer Maiden, shaken and unsure, but her voice steady and her stride true. It was difficult for Cinder to parse who was what and where. They all bled into one another, except for the rhythmic slicing of her arm, Ilia's intense focus.
"But Cinder's here," said Ruby Rose. "Why are you the Maiden?"
When Ilia told the tale it made her sound more heroic than she really was, sweating and crying. Cinder was not one for heroics. All she did was give Ilia what she needed, so at least Cinder, selfishly, did not have to carry the Summer Maiden's blood on her own hands.
"Ilia," she called.
Ilia knew. The arm only came back. It refused to die because it could not die if it had never lived.
Ruby stuck her scythe in the sand, looked down at her as her cape billowed in the still air, and the sight of pity made Cinder angry, as it always did.
"We thought you were dead," she said to Jaune.
"Take a guess," said Jaune.
"You didn't die."
"Bingo."
"How?"
At each stop and start, he could scarcely get a word out. He gripped his arm the same as she gripped hers, mirrorlike. What a fool. What a troublesome, troublesome fool.
"Let go," she said. "Stop."
"I don't want to," he said back.
"I'm serious," she growled, "I'm not watching you suffer it for another moment." She pushed against his shoulder where hers hurt, able to speak through the pain better than he.
"Do you think I can stand it?"
"I'm sick of your martydom." She thrust again at his shoulder, and pushed him out of her, where he lapped at her. The full force of it nearly knocked her out. Grimm and human were never meant to mix, yet he let her sleep in his bed.
Cinder was at Ruby's mercy. She wondered what sort of mercy she deserved from her now.
When Jaune told Ruby what she did— and her friends and their little gasps punctuated his telling, perfunctory, and all too sympathetic— she let the arm carry her. He kept shooting her worried glances, and the fire around them was growing weaker and weaker.
A flame, middling. A flame dying. She would have to die to get this thing out of her, she was sure, and it felt like dying, felt familiar. The Summer Maiden brushed a worried hand over her head. What a strange girl.
See, not so scary a thing Cinder was now. Just a creature, mewling. Stripped bare as the branches, as cracked and hollow as the fallen moon, strewn across ground which forgot the whole shape of it. Find me here, and here, and you'll see the fall and the crash. I'm dying.
Hands carded through her hair and a nose pressed to her scalp. See, my turn.
"You saved him," said Ruby Rose.
"Ruby, please, we've got to do something—"
"— I have to keep cutting it, it's out of control—"
"It's meant to fear me," Cinder snapped, voice rough, eyes closed. She did not want to look. She was scared. "Clearly— I'm not so fearsome—" Crying as she was.
But when Ruby spoke again, it was not to Cinder. It was to Jaune. She was saying, "…I thought you were lying, or confused, or that Cinder would betray you anyway. I didn't trust you, because you trusted her more than us."
"Ruby, please," Ilia said quietly.
Again Ilia cut the arm. It grew back with a sick sort of resilience. The light faded and where the flame was disappeared. Her lazy, familiar Maiden fire burnt out and went inside her. It was pitch black again, Grimm on the skin, Grimm threaded through her until she choked. She would never see light again, she would never feel pleasure…
Ilia held onto the Grimm arm, and Cinder slumped against Jaune. She could not see the troupe, though she could hear Tyrian taunting Emerald and Mercury. Cut his throat already.
"You know what you need to do," Cinder said to Ruby. "You knew before you knew. It's there. You had it even before I had the Maiden power. Stop overthinking it. Listen."
She gritted her teeth. The Grimm arm wanted to eat her whole.
"Listen!" she ground out. "Do you hear it?"
She must have sounded mad, madder than Tyrian: what nonsense, she would have once thought. Power was power and that was it. Die or kill. Scream or run. Cinder knew better now. Her Aura bond with Jaune was more powerful than anything, and it was because of that she knew why and how to use it. She did not need the Summer Maiden power. She had herself. Ruby had forgotten that.
An endless beat passed. "I hear it."
If she found out that Ruby really thought of puppies and rainbows when she used her eyes, she was going to lose it.
Everything went white with relief. Where there had been nothing there was now everything. Silver kissing this and that, letting light and shadow in, welcoming them home. The arm reached up and up and up, like it could run. It could not. It was part of her and in the same breath it burnt away.
The pain surged through her body and then it became something else. She passed out.
Water lapped against the shore. It was an easy in and out breath. Up ahead at the end of the cove, where the waves curled, a red and white lighthouse sprung up proudly. The sky was bright blue, so blue it nearly hurt. Her feet made tracks in the sand, bare-footed. Her shoes were somewhere, she was sure.
The path back to the house was long and hot. Any other person's feet would have burnt on the path back, but she was lucky. It was still hot enough to cook an egg, sizzling. The birch trees kissed each other in the breeze. Vale was verdant at this time of year. On the breeze came the sweet smell of jasmine, rows and rows of it growing wild.
Cinder went up the secret entrance right through the throng of bushes, which left blossoms in her hair and down her clothes. She dusted them off her skin and kept walking, minding the wasp's nest. Even such nuisances did their own pollination, so she was not about to smoke it out yet.
It still felt like sneaking in, the way she used to go in through his window, when she slipped in through the backdoor, past the attempt at a vegetable garden and the azaleas he was so proud of. She almost climbed through the window instead of the door, just for the sake of it.
Cinder set about making tea. Ruby would want hers with the same amount of sugar as Cinder would have it, and Blake took hers black and with milk. Mistrali tea was the brew they both insisted on. Jaune would drink his the way however Cinder made it, if she did so— though he insisted on not turning her into a housewife, he was really a borderline househusband— with few complaints. So she made it sweet.
She would be going out to Solitas soon, so he was being extra clingy. He could have come with her if he wanted, but they were short on staff in the city, and they had the bond anyway if he really got clingy. The unspoken knowledge was that she was more clingy than him, but he was nice enough not to comment on it. Other than sending her secretive glances.
The kettle boiled on the stove, high and whistling. Jaune called to her and came through the front door and kissed her on the cheek, then the mouth, as tenderly as he did when she was sleeping in the morning.
It took a while for her one-eye to adjust to the light. Blinking and nascent, so sharply clear it burnt her vision, so beautiful she nearly wept. The head of the school ziggurat piercing the sky, the curve of Vacuo's horizon, sand dunes on dunes on dunes. Glass, hers.
She was leaning against him, and her left arm was gone. Her skin felt raw and fresh, the barest sensation feeling like being set on fire, jasmine blossoms against her skin pressing here and there.
Two hands in the dream, not one of them Grimm. How odd. For just a moment she felt a phantom limb, the sensation passing quickly. She had been able to see so well, too, all the depth there. How had she seen? Gripped things with two hands all needy? She had not caught her reflection, but her left hand has shone so brightly in the sun, a refracted rainbow splintering through it, that she had not seen what it was.
"Cinder? Cinder?" He was clutching her to him, his Aura a sweet touch. He had caught her.
The day was long and she was tired, and her feet were burning…
"I had— a very strange dream," she said.
As his lovely, dark blue eyes searched her, she found herself childishly, childishly blushing, when she looked at the soft flush of his lips.