A steady beeping filled the air.
The three girls had long since grown accustomed to the noise, and barely noticed it anymore. It no longer distracted Blake from her reading, Weiss from her studies, or Yang from whatever it was Yang did.
Blake was seated on the left hand side of the infirmary bed, some unknown fiction book in her hand. Weiss was on the opposite side, a textbook in her own hand, and Yang was on the floor beside Blake with her face pressed into the mattress.
The blonde made a muffled string of noises, and Weiss glanced at her. "What was that?"
Yang turned her head. "I said, why the hell hasn't she woken up yet?"
"They said there's nothing to prevent her from waking up physically, she just won't. Maybe she isn't ready yet." Blake reminded her partner, golden eyes trained on the younger girl on the bed.
"What if she never wakes up?"
Weiss threw her textbook at the blonde. "Don't doubt her like that. Ruby is strong; she can make it through this."
Yang blinked, surprised by Weiss's faith in the girl.
"Uh, guys?" Blake's voice cut in suddenly, her anxious tone making them both turn to her. "Ruby's bleeding."
They followed the Faunus' gaze to the girl in the white sheets, noticing the growing pool of blood spreading from her midsection. Yang stood immediately and pulled the covers down to search for where the blood was coming from, while Weiss dashed out the door. "I'll get the doctor!" she called as she went.
Blake stood beside Yang now, book forgotten on the floor beside the thrown textbook. "Can you see what it is yet?"
"Her sides are scratched. Badly." Yang told her, expression morphing into a mix of worried and completely confused. "How did that happen with her just laying here?"
"Ouch. Those are deep." Blake commented. "But it isn't possible to just suddenly sprout wounds like this…"
Weiss returned, followed by one of the nurses and Glynda.
"Professor Goodwitch?" Blake gave her a confused look.
"I heard Weiss tell the staff what was going on, and decided to come look." The strict professor explained, earning a nod from the Faunus.
She looked at the scratches for a moment before the nurse set to work cleaning and bandaging them, an odd look of recognition and worry crossing her face. There was silence in the small, white room for several minutes, until finally Ruby's scratches were dressed to the nurse's approval and she left.
Glynda turned to the Faunus and the heiress. "Can you two step outside for a moment? I need to speak to Miss Xiao Long."
Blake and Weiss exchanged a look, but nodded and left the room anyway, leaving Yang alone with the professor and the comatose Ruby.
"Yang, there's something important I need to tell you about." Glynda's tone was gravely serious.
Hearing the strict professor use her first name made the blonde uneasy. "Yes?"
"There's an uncommonly known fact that Death Stalker venom… Does things to people." She started. "The victims of injuries from that creature always fall into a coma-like state for an undeterminable amount of time, but they're not asleep, oh no. They're very much awake."
"So she's dreaming?"
"Sort of, but it's not within her own head. Right now, Ruby is in a very dangerous place and if she isn't careful, it will kill her."
Yang was silent for a long moment. "Professor, where is my sister?"
Glynda took a deep breath, and leaned back in her chair.
"Many years ago, when Ozpin and I were just students here at Beacon, we were sent on a mission. Ozpin was injured by a Death Stalker, and I carried him back here for treatment despite being injured as well. However, as soon as we made it back, I collapsed as well.
"I woke up in a strange place. I expected to see a room like this, but instead, I was in some sort of underground dungeon. There was no light and I could barely see, and even when I did find candles there, there was a thick dust in the air that the light just bounced off of. It was hard to see anything in there, and that made the creatures there that much worse.
"We had our own team back then, the two of us and two others. Then, much like your team is with team JNPR, the four of us were friends with your uncle Qrow's team. And all of these people showed up in that dungeon with me, except they'd been twisted into monsters.
"It wasn't long before I ran into Ozpin there. He asked me if I was really there, and if I was going to try to kill him too. Of course we figured out that we could indeed trust each other, and started trying to find the way out together. For each of our friends and us, there were little metal copies of each of our personal symbols. We found out along the way that finding these symbols was the key to escaping, but it wasn't going to be easy to find them all.
"The monster versions of our friends were trying to kill us the entire time. Qrow was the most dangerous one, sometimes. He wandered the halls with his scythe and if he saw us, we'd have to run for our lives, and he was fast. At one point he actually managed to catch us, and slashed me across the back. There were others too, like ones that only moved when we didn't look at them, and crying paintings.
"There were two symbols we didn't find. They both belonged to members of Qrow's team, and one of those members was Summer, Ruby's mother. We found all of the others except those two, and once we found all of the symbols for our own team, we woke up.
"When I woke up, I was in agony. Despite having sustained my injury in the dream, the slash on my back had appeared in the real world. But we were alive, and that was all I cared about at the time. That was, until half of Qrow's team died. The same two members whose symbols we couldn't find ended up dying after Ozpin and I woke up."
Yang was staring at the older blonde in horror.
"Right now, Ruby is in that same place. She's probably looking for yours and JNPR's symbols right now, and those scratches are the result of one of the monsters hurting her. Since injuries in that world transfer over to this world as well, if she dies there, she will die in the real world as well. Furthermore, if she doesn't collect all of the symbols outside of team RWBY, the owners of the unfound symbols will also die."
"Okay, okay… First, how do you know Summer's death was related to all this? She died years after graduation." Yang asked.
"The first member whose symbol we didn't find died a few years after we woke up. She died the exact same way she had in that place, which was why we thought it was related. When Summer didn't die, we figured we were just being paranoid, but when she did eventually, she died the same way as in the dream too.
"Ozpin and I, and Ruby too, aren't the only ones to end up there. For years there have been cases of Hunters and Huntresses ending up in this state from Death Stalker stings, and the survivors always tell the same story. Anyone whose symbol they didn't find, died sometime after the victims woke up, in the same way they did in the dream."
Yang seemed to be ready to ask another question, but they both turned to the girl on the bed when the heart monitor sped up drastically. Ruby's face twisted in pain, and a shudder passed through her body, making her jolt harshly. Then she fell still for a moment, and the two blondes started to relax until the beeps fell into one long, relentless tone.
A/N: DONT PANIC THIS FIC ISN'T OVER YET