Inspired by someone hitting me with "What if Adam met V9 Ruby" and my brain latching onto that angst potential like a moth to flame.

Broken Young Thing

"What are you?"

Herb's rainbow smoke washed over Ruby like smog, invading her lungs before she could think to hold her breath. Her chest shuddered as she fought the urge to cough and tried to look for an exit, but the strength left her and she fell to her knees. Her friends tumbled out of her hands. She tried to reach for them and collapsed instead.

"No," she managed, reaching for something, anything, her vision too blurry and full of smoke to even see the ground beneath her.

Herb's voice, coming from everywhere, echoed in her mind: "Are you sure you know? You have to be sure of what you are and of what you're going to be."

Tears leaked from Ruby's eyes but, as she blinked and rubbed them away, her vision finally began to clear. The smoke receded from around her hands and knees, replaced with stone. Midday sunlight streamed down from a cheery sky speckled with puffy white clouds. In front of her, a waterfall crashed down past the stone bridge upon which she kneeled with a dull, ever-present roar. Pine trees and scrub laden with snow stood watch over the cliff face, particularly stubborn sentinels dotting the sheer drop.

None of that caused panic. What did: there were no signs of Yang, Weiss, or Blake.

Unable to shake a sense of familiarity and unease stirred by her surroundings, Ruby coughed a couple more times to clear her throat and got to her feet. She went to the edge of the stone bridge, the smell of saltwater growing stronger as she got closer until it finally drowned out the lingering smell of Herb's smoke. She peered over. Vertigo reached up from the hundred-foot drop into the water below, accompanied by a voice from behind her:

"I wouldn't do that, if I were you."

She jumped back from the edge and spun around, one hand going to where Crescent Rose did not rest on her belt.

The speaker was a man seated with his back to her and with his legs dangling over the other side of the bridge overlooking the ocean. A white crest she didn't recognize was emblazoned on the back of his black jacket, on top of which lay a single jagged red rose. His spiky red hair shifted in the ocean breeze, but two strips of black nestled among the strands did not.

Horns. A faunus? Or an Afteran?

Ruby swallowed and walked in a wide circle towards his right; she was already on that side anyway. He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she warily closed the distance. His lips curled into a small, wry smile when he got a good look at her face.

"Not who you were expecting, huh?"

There was a bit of scar tissue stretching across the bridge of his nose, but from her angle, she couldn't see the other side of his face. The eye that she could see was both startlingly blue and expectant. She bit her lip, unsure how to even begin.

"I don't know what I was expecting. There was a room, a giant caterpillar, some smoke, and then—this."

He tilted his head in a tacit fair enough. Since he didn't seem to be a threat, she got a little closer so she wouldn't have to speak up to be heard over the waterfall. She stopped a few steps away. "Who are you?"

His eyebrow shot up. "She never even…?" He cut himself off and sighed with a quiet, pained chuckle coming in its wake. "No, of course she wouldn't."

"Who—"

"I'm Adam," he said. "You're Ruby, right?"

That prickling feeling of unease returned, stronger than before. "How do you know me?"

"After Blake escaped at Beacon, I did some research on the humans she cared about so much. Those eyes of yours make you stand out."

"I…I guess they do."

"Your look was also the easiest to remember." He gestured to the black and red banner looped through his belt as though to emphasize their shared colors. "Not that all that got me anything, in the end."

"Where are we?"

"You don't know?" He sounded genuinely surprised. "Even if you were never at this spot, you should recognize it."

She looked around again, quick, darting glances, unwilling to take her eyes off him for too long. The last of those looks down the coastline finally filled in the last piece of the puzzle: "Argus? Why?"

"Seems the both of us made a choice here that we shouldn't have. Mine was the last one I ever made. And yours…yours set you on the path to where you are now, same as my choice back at Beacon. The beginning of the end." Far out towards the horizon, a dark shape broke the ocean's surface. Bony spines streaming water glimmered in the sun before retreating back under the waves. "Looking back, it's all so clear."

"What does this place have to do with the Ever After?" Ruby asked. "What do you want?"

He chuckled again, but the sound was colder now. "It's not what I want, it's what you want to be. What we both wanted to be. Heroes."

She flinched but rallied. "That doesn't explain anything."

"Does that?" He pointed to the right, past the trees, to where smoke she hadn't noticed before was rising into the sky. Dark shapes swooped and twirled around it, the survivors of a long and painful dogfight.

"What…?"

"It was such a simple plan, but it went so wrong, didn't it? The leader is the one who takes responsibility for that. Tell me, Ruby. How many people got hurt? How many innocents? How many, because you decided you knew best?"

"I—" she looked away, towards the water. More dark shapes were rising up and sinking down in the currents. "We beat the leviathan. It didn't breach the shields. They were safe."

"Its attacks got through. All the other flying Grimm, too. Do you think one military base can hold back that many from a city of tens of thousands? Of course not. Grimm got through and people died. Because of you."

"We did everything we could."

"No, you didn't. You lectured an old woman until Grimm attacked and she let you steal a ship. What a grand plan. What leadership. Truly, you are an inspiration to huntsmen everywhere."

"We had to get the relic—"

"You did," he snapped. "You couldn't give it to anyone else, could you? It had to be you. The chosen silver-eyed prodigy."

She swallowed down the shame brewing in her stomach. "Stealing the ship wasn't my idea."

He cocked his head. "Blaming others now?"

"No! I just—"

She blinked and he was gone. A shadow to her right had her turning to see him standing there, and her renewed protest died when she saw his left eye, or what remained of it. Three letters she'd seen all over Weiss's Dust and belongings were burned into the flesh over his eye. The eye itself was as red as the worst bloody skin, the iris and pupil discolored and gray.

He'd known that the sight would derail her, and he seized control in the silence.

"I told myself the same. Back against the wall, an enemy I couldn't defeat, an easy way out that only required me to compromise a bit of what I believed. Just for a little while, I'd do what I needed to do so my people could survive. So we could do what we needed to do. So I could still call myself leader."

He stepped forward. She stepped back.

"One compromise is easy, and the ones that follow, even easier. A little here. A little there. One sacrifice, one crossed line, becomes dozens. Remember when you first decided you were going to be a hero?"

She blinked and he disappeared again. Again, he reappeared behind her. This time, he took slow steps away from her.

"I was a prodigy too, you know." He raised a thoughtful hand and summoned his aura to cloak it in softly swirling lines of light. "More aura than anyone else I knew, better aura control, quick to pick up weapons and"—he clenched his hand into a fist, dispelling his aura—"unmatched at putting down anything that threatened the people I was charged to protect." He turned to face her. "Prodigies get expectations, not hopes. Pedestals, not foundations. And when we've started to believe all that we've been told, when we try to be all we've been told, there's sand where there should be stone."

Too late, Ruby realized the ground under her feet had made that transformation. She plummeted, sand in her mouth and eyes and nose, until she slammed into another bridge below. Her aura flared and she fought to breathe until her lungs finally expanded with a great gasp.

Adam strode up to her as she coughed out more sand and got onto her hands and knees. He kneeled down to her level, poised on his toes, eyes boring into hers. "You want to save the world, but you can't even save yourself. Trade those eyes away, let someone else do what you can't. It was too much for me and it's too much for you."

"It's too much?" Ruby whispered, his words echoing in her mind until there was no room for anything else. "I'm—I'm seventeen, and I don't know what I'm doing, and everyone expects me to know exactly what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to feel, but everything I try to do makes things worse."

Adam's expression softened with sympathy. "You aren't the hero you wanted to be. Neither was I. How could we be? When we fell, when we doubted, who was there for us?" He gestured at their surroundings. "I had nothing. I gave it all up, destroyed it, because I was convinced I had to do it my way. I had strength for a reason, right? Everyone encouraged me, believed in me, for a reason. Right?"

He stood, gaze going to the waterfall. "In my eyes, they believed in me because I was right, not because I did the right thing, and anyone who doubted me was wrong. Maybe you're that far gone." He glanced back at her, that sly smile coming back with a mocking edge. "Maybe not. But you're as alone as I was."

He left a gracious opening for her to protest. She managed to say, "That's not true," but like the jar with hope she couldn't fill that sentence with belief. He knelt back down in front of her and didn't speak until she raised her head.

"I know you want to believe in them, but you're just telling yourself what you want to hear. Your friends are cruel. They care more about each other than you. Wait. Watch. You'll see—they'll leave you behind. They've noticed that you're struggling, but they don't care, because they know the truth of what you are, what you've always been, and what you will be."

Another expectant pause.

"What's that?" she asked, small and quiet and scared.

A cloud passed in front of the sun and Adam grinned a wide, unnatural grin.

Ruby's vision ended when the Curious Cat burst through the smoke that formed it. That smoke dissipated quickly, leaving Ruby to stare at where the vision of Adam had stood, his answer stuck like a sword in her throat.