Chapter 8: What It Is To Burn

Absolute dread filled the members of team RWBY as they ran as fast as they could. Blake held Gambol Shroud in its pistol form and fired behind her, killing as many Grimm as she possibly could in her rush. However, the beasts were relentless in their chase, and for every Grimm she felled another took its place. "We're in a tight spot, guys!" Blake called from the rear.

"Just keep running!" Yang yelled back. "We'll make it back to the cliff shortly."

"Just how exactly do we plan on climbing back up with all of those things chasing us?"

"I don't fucking know, just run!"

"Maybe we should stop and kill a few of them. Try to slow them down?" Weiss added, panting all the while. Of the four girls, Weiss had the least amount of stamina when it came to sprinting.

"No!" Ruby exclaimed. "We can't stop! Cerberus is here!"

"Cerberus?"

"You mean the giant three headed Grimm?" Blake asked.

"He's the worst monster out of all of them! By himself, he will be responsible for most of our casualties!"

"Why are we just now hearing about him?" Weiss asked.

"Because I thought we had time! He's four months too early!"

"Four months? How?" Yang asked.

"I...I don't know, okay! I've predicted as much as I can, but at this point everything is completely different. I don't know what to expect anymore!" Ruby was frantic. Just as she had just explained, she didn't know what to expect anymore. She was confused and somewhat disoriented by what was happening. This should not be happening.

"Girls!" Blake called. "We need to call Roman! There's no way we're getting out of here alive without a Bullhead drop!"

"Agreed!" Weiss stated, switching her mission microphone to be on Roman's channel.

Roman felt sick at his stomach. It wasn't a stomach virus, or food poisoning. No, it was the feeling you get when something had just gone wrong, but he couldn't figure out what it could possibly be. He knew that team RWBY had set out earlier that morning on a recon mission, and so he and the rest of SMMR were on standby inside Roman's prized Bullhead. Sun was pacing impatiently in the cargo hold behind the cockpit. Roman grabbed a nearby pocket sized notepad and hurled it at the faunus boy. "Will you cut that out! You're getting on my nerves!"

Sun dodged the small pad of paper and gave Roman a sheepish look. "Sorry. I'm just...worried, I guess."

The thief sighed. "That makes two of us."

"Don't worry, Sun," Militia said, approaching him and placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. This elicited a curious look from Melanie. "I'm sure our friends are just fine."

"Yeah," Roman said. "They'll come back without our help, tell us everything's okay, and then I'll tell Red that she might not have looked hard enough, which will force her to tell me that her name isn't Red, which will..." A crackling sound came over the Bullhead's speakers; someone was trying to contact him.

"Roman!" came the voice of the heiress, Weiss.

Roman grabbed the dashboard microphone. "Good afternoon, Princess," he greeted. "What can I do for you?"

"No time! We need an extraction in the Emerald Forest immediatly!"

Roman's eyes narrowed. "Roger. Tracking your scrolls now...we'll be on our way shortly." The Bullhead was already running, just in case, so he buckled in and began to make the aircraft climb. "What seems to be the problem?"

"Grimm! Hundreds of them! And something else!"

"Something else? What kind of something?"

A brief pause filled the void of conversation. "Some new monster. Ruby called it Cerberus."

Cerberus? Roman thought. He recognized the name. Really, anyone should. It was a name found in a piece of classic literature, and deep seated in legend. Roman was a classy man, he liked to think, and would often kill time by reading classic literature. So, when it came to Cerberus, only one thing stuck in his mind:

Cerberus, a monster fierce and strange, with three throats, barks dog-like over those that are immersed in it.

His eyes are red, his beard greasy and black, his belly wide, and clawed his hands, he clutches the spirits, flays, and piecemeal rends them.

-Canto VI, Dante's Inferno

If the real Cerberus was anything like what Dante described in his epic, which Roman had read before, then fear was the proper emotion to be experienced at this moment in time. Roman, not one to miss an opportunity of any kind, felt the pit in his stomach drop even lower. One of Hell's guardians, the master of the realm of Gluttony, was just beyond Roman's doorstep. Roman wasn't too thrilled to meet him, either. "We need to hurry," Roman whispered at last, forcing the Bullhead to speed along even faster.

A lone Beowolf had snuck past the prey. It had abandoned its pack at the command of the master, whom told it to ambush the four feasts that attempted to escape from their clutches. It wasn't far ahead of them, but it wasn't worried about that. After all, they were the ones being chased, not it. It tried its hardest to suppress its primal instinct to growl, snarl, howl, and bay at the oncoming enemy; it didn't want to gain their attention too soon.

Here they came, into its view. The front most one was in all white with white hair; the master told the Beowolf to ignore that one. The next was wearing black with a red cloak. Feast! the master commanded. The Beowolf couldn't reply back, nor did it feel the need to do so. The Beowolf was just a monster, with no true desires of its own except for the need to feed. The order to feast upon the red one was all the information it needed to make its move.

"Roman's on his way!" the White said to the other three.

"Good!" answered the Black, who was in the far end of the Pack-of-Four.

"We need to move faster!" the Red stated. The Beowolf stared hungrily at her, ready to make its move. They were getting closer and closer, and they were too distracted by the Beowolf's pack behind them to notice it in front of them. Closer. Closer. Closer.

The Beowolf leapt from the shadows, hurdling its body towards the Red one as quickly as possible. Fangs exposed, claws at the ready, it swiped at her right side, attempted to flay the flesh from her bones.

"Ruby! Look out!" called the Yellow one in the middle, just behind the Red. She shoved the Red out of the way, but not as well as she'd hoped. The Beowolf's claws managed to tear into the flesh of her right arm, eliciting a cry of pain. It landed with a loud thud, upset that it had failed to kill its prey, but pleased to have slowed them down for its brethren to finish off.

The four girls stopped and turned on the lone Beowolf, and the Yellow charged at it. "You bastard!" she screamed, her eyes turning red. An instant later, the Beowolf felt nothing below the neck. It saw the ground approaching and felt confused. It rolled it's eyes to look up after it hit the ground, and saw its own body standing headless before it fell limp to the ground. Darkness slowly consumed it's vision as it attempted to howl, but no sound escaped.

The four of them found a relatively flat treetop that was safe away from the Grimm, 'safe' being a term up for debate at the moment. Ruby had a nasty looking gash on her right arm from where the Beowolf had caught her off guard. "You okay, sis?" Yang asked, voice full of sisterly concern for Ruby's wellbeing.

Ruby poked at the wound gently, causing her to wince and hold back a pained moan. "It should be fine," she said. "I've had worse."

"Not much worse," Yang pointed out. "Here, let me fix that up for you." She quickly and easily removed the orange scarf from around her neck and began to tie it around Ruby's gash. She was as gentle as possible in making the scarf be as tight as it could be to protect the open wound. "You know, I take it back," she said when she finished, admiring her handywork. "This isn't so bad." She flashed her sister a charming smile. "It'll heal up in no time. You're a tough cookie, sis. It'll take more than this to put you down."

Ruby felt as though she was going to go into shock. Those words...those were the same words that Yang had said to her in her premonition. She looked over at the scarf, watching as a small spot of blood leaked through the fabric, and felt horrified. "No, Yang. No! No, no, no, no!" she cried.

"Sis, what is it? What's wrong?" Ruby met her sister's gaze, but she slowly drifted back to the scarf and stared at it sadly. Yang understood at this point what Ruby was so upset about. "Is...is it today, Ruby?" she asked. "Is today the day that I...?"

"Don't!" Ruby commanded. "Don't you dare finish that question, Yang." Tears filled her eyes. "I'm going to save you this time. Cerberus and the other Grimm can be damned to Hell all they want, but they aren't dragging you with them. Not this time!"

"I hate to interrupt," Weiss stated. "But we seem to be overstaying our welcome up here! More Grimm are coming."

"Right," Yang agreed. "Let's go, sis. We have a school to warn, don't we?"

Ruby nodded, determined to see to it that everyone made it back home. Overhead, the engines of a Bullhead could be heard. "SMMR to RWBY," Roman's voice cracked over the communication system. "I see you on my screen, but I can't get you there. Too many trees. There's a clearing north of your position that's currently free of Grimm. Care to take a little hike for me?"

"We'll be there, Roman!" Ruby answered.

"Glad to hear you're okay, Red. Don't keep me waiting!" The engines faded slightly, but they could still be heard in the distance.

"Let's go!" Ruby ordered, and the four of them leapt down and began running north.

After a few moments, it became clear that this would prove difficult. Blake's superior hearing detected dozens upon dozens of Grimm were starting to catch up and surround them. They had waited in the treetop for too long, it would seem.

Roman set the Bullhead on the ground, and the other members of team SMMR set out to stand guard against any possible Grimm threats. "Hey, Roman," Sun called from just outside. "What's a Cerberus?"

Roman deeply inhaled from his cigar. "Literally, I haven't a clue. I've never seen a real Cerberus before. It's supposed to be a fictitious and mythological creature from the belief system of a long dead civilization. Centuries later, a poet wrote an epic depicting the stages of the afterlife, and in the first part, the Inferno, he describes a great three headed beast who reigns over the realm of Gluttony, one of the circles of Hell." Inhaled again. "It was described as monstrous beast with an unending appetite. It devoured the sinners who committed the sin of Gluttony, and they were damned to an eternity within its belly."

Sun gulped. "And...that thing is real?"

Roman shrugged. "I don't know, Sun. But Ruby named this new Grimm 'Cerberus' for a reason. Anything with that sort of name worries me. I don't want to say this out loud...but I truly expect the worst."

A loud, howling roar erupted from within the forest. The sound was like nothing any of them had ever heard, and it forced Roman to quickly turn his head in the direction of the source; he could see nothing, which worried him even more than if he could see something. "Be on the look out!" he exclaimed. "Team RWBY should be coming from that direction." It was south. Sun, Melanie, and Militia readied their weapons, unsure of what to expect.

"What the hell was that?" Yang asked, taking the risk of looking back; she saw nothing, but continued to hear to roar. To her, it sounded like the howls of Hell, yet it seemed to be coming from a single beast. "Was that Cerberus?"

"Don't think!" Ruby yelled. "Keep running. We can deal with them later!"

"Ruby," Blake called. "We're not gonna make it! We're already surrounded."

"What!?" Weiss and Yang both exclaimed.

"They're keeping their distance, but there is no escape for us; they've got us surrounded from the east, south, and the west. We can keep going north as we're supposed to, but they're most likely going to cut us off before we make it to the Bullhead."

Yang looked around in all directions, at first continuing to see nothing. But then, just barely, she noticed the bright, glowing red eyes of the various Grimm that had them surrounded. It was just as Blake had said. She looked forward to her team mates. She stared intently at each of them from the rear, gauging up their chances for survival.

Weiss was strong and intelligent, but she lacked the level of stamina a fight of this magnitude would require. She would be dead within a matter of minutes. Blake was clever and agile. She could avoid any major damage for a long while, but even she would have to reach her limit eventually. Outnumbered as they were, she would tire out and die as well. Ruby was fast and strong, but her speed was far greater than her muscle. Her best bet was to keep running, but if any of them stopped to fight she would too. Thus, her fate would be sealed and she would die alongside her friends.

Yang, however...Yang wasn't as fast as Ruby, wasn't as smart as Weiss, nor was she as clever as Blake. But she was the strongest. She had the highest level of stamina, her punches without her aura, semblance, or gauntlets could shatter a full grown man's ribs in an instant. The weapons and fire that she always had would greatly multiply her damage output. She could destroy more Grimm singlehandedly that any other member of team RWBY. Yang remembered what Ruby had told her the night of the premonition, back when they thought it was all a nightmare.

"Ruby, your reaction to seeing us...what happened?" Weiss asked, ignoring Blake and Yang.

Ruby began to tear up again. "You...you all died. Yang died protecting the three of us, Weiss died to help me and Blake escape, and Blake..." she paused and turned to face the cat faunus. "I'm so sorry, Blake." Ruby began to cry again.

Yang knew what she had to do. Why she had died in Ruby's premonition. I have to stay behind, she thought. "I have to stay behind!" she yelled loud enough for the others to hear. She grinded her feet to a halt and deployed Ember Celica, prepared to fight off the Grimm.

Ruby and the others paused in their escape and saw Yang standing, battle ready with a look of determination on her face. "Yang?" Ruby asked softly. "Yang, don't do this! We can escape together this time! You don't have to stay behind like you did before!"

"She's right, Yang," Weiss added. "We know how this is going to end if you stay behind. We won't sit by and let that happen!"

"You don't understand," Yang said. "This was always going to happen. There is no escape. Blake already said as much. One of us has to stay behind and distract the Grimm long enough for the others to escape. I've already figured it out in my head; I'm the only real option."

"Yang," Blake said quietly. "I...I don't want to lose my partner." She paused. "My closest friend."

Yang put a hand on Blake's shoulder. "Hey now, kitten," she whispered, adding her pet name for Blake. "You know that this has to be done." Blake wanted to argue, but she couldn't form a rational argument. She knew that Yang was right.

"Sis, please!" Ruby pleaded, tears streaming down her face. "Don't leave me again! Don't! Just don't!"

"Sis, I..." Ruby slapped Yang.

"No! You listen to me, Yang! I'm not just you're little sister! I'm also your leader! Your commander! I order you to escape with us! You're no good to anyone dead, Yang! You...you can't protect your family if you're gone!" Her tears came stronger and stronger.

Yang was going to argue against her sister, but another idea came to mind. An idea that made her sick at her stomach and went against everything she'd ever known and done...but she had to do it. "You're right sis. I'm sorry." She pulled her sister into an embrace. "I'm so sorry," she said again.

"Y-Yang?" Ruby asked. In that moment, Yang did something she'd never once done in her life; she punched her sister as hard as she could in the stomach. Ruby made a gross regurgitating sound as the impact forced her to puke and cough trace amounts of blood before passing out half a second later.

Yang caught her body before it hit the ground and shoved into Weiss's arms. "Get to Roman and go home," she ordered, her eyes full of tears." She turned away so that Weiss and Blake wouldn't see her cry; she didn't want their last memory of her to be of tears and sadness, but of bravery and sacrifice. "Weiss."

Weiss choked up at the sight of the older sister. "Y-yes, Yang?"

"Remember that promise you made to Ruby? To be the best team mate you can be?"

Weiss nodded. "Of course," she answered, her voice cracking as she fought back tears.

"I need you to do more than that now. I need you to be there for her when I can't be. Be the shoulder for her to cry on, and the friend that she celebrates with. Be a sister for her to love. Be...be the best you that you can be, Weiss. For both me, and my sister."

"I...I promise, Yang."

Yang nodded. Her voice cracked from her crying as she said one final thing to Weiss. "Take care of her."

Weiss and Blake nodded, both of them trying to fight off tears. Both of them were failing. Weiss hefted Ruby's limp, unconscious body over her shoulder and the three of them escaped to the north.

Yang felt her aura flaring up. She had been staring at the ground with her back to her friends, facing south. A sound made her look up; she was surrounded by Grimm, just as Blake had said. "I'm going to make you all burn for your crimes," she said menacingly. "Because today you're going to make my sister cry. Nobody, and I mean nobody, makes my sister cry." Through the tears, Yang's eyes shifted color to Red. The Grimm charged her, and she let her aura explode, enveloping everything in flames as she began to fight back. With every Grimm she had slain, she felt herself growing happier and happier. Every dead Grimm gave her sister more and more of a chance to escape, and she also avenged Cardin piece by piece.

Several dozen more Grimm showed up, taking the place of the ones she'd killed, but she never let up. Every wound she received was a reminder that her sister would hurt. Every drop of blood she lost was a copy of what would survive through Ruby. Every swing of her arm was a dead Grimm at her feet. Every dead Grimm was a minute added to Ruby's escape time. Bloody, weak, and damaged, Yang saw that she was still surrounded. She charged up her aura once more, readying for the final stand. She smiled defiantly at her foes. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!" she said dryly. "And this woman knows how to burn like Hell!"

Roman's bullhead was ascending. Three of the four members of team RWBY were on board and they told him to take off. Almost immediately, the forest was engulfed in flames. Yang, he thought. "How's Red? Is she hurt?" he asked, trying to distract himself from the older girl's apparently struggle.

"She's just out cold," Weiss stated. "Yang knocked her out so that we would escape with her." Weiss's eyes were puffy and red, and so were Blake's. Roman knew what that had to mean; Yang had said her final goodbyes.

"Nng," Ruby groaned as she woke up. She coughed and spit a few drops of blood; Yang really hit her hard to knock her out. "What happened?" she asked groggily. She looked around the Bullhead. "Yang? Where's Yang?" A large exposion erupted below, engulfign even more of the forest in flames. Ruby recognized those flames; they were the flames of her sister. "Yang? Yang!" She tried to crawl out of the Bullhead. "My sister! My sisters in that!"

"Ruby!" Weiss yelled. "It's too late for her! She's gone!"

"No! I have to save her! I have to save her! I promised her that we'd all make it! I promised!" Her tears streamed anew as she screamed. "No! No! My sister! She's burning! She's burning!" Weiss almost tackled Ruby, but it wasn't to stop her. Weiss embraced Ruby in a tight hug; a hug that she'd never given anyone before. She hushed and tried to sooth the screaming girl.

Blake looked out of the door of the aircraft and watched the flames grow smaller in the distance as Roman flew them back to Beacon. "Goodbye, my partner," she whispered as a final parting.

And somewhere in those flames, Yang smiled as she burned with the rest of the Grimm she fought. Long dead at this point, she knew that her sister was safe and sound. Her task in this world was over. And, she was right. She was the only one who truly knew what it meant to burn, for she was flame, and the flame was her. Now, her flame was extinguished, but the flame of another was lit.

It was faint, and even she didn't realize it was there, but the flame of revenge was lit on this day. It only needed time to grow into a blaze.

What It Is To Burn-Finch

Author's Note

Here it is: the dreaded chapter. I'd wager alot of you hate me now. Well, I'll tell you this: I'm depressed now. I had an incident where I accidentally foreshadowed Yang's death in the previous chapter. Which I did alot anyway (sort of), but this one was direct and unintentional. It was so...I dunno...aweful? It wasn't bad per se, but as soon as I wrote the words I actually had to stop writing for about thirty minutes. I felt physically ill, like I was going to throw up. That's how much the decision to kill her off has affected me. As I've said before; I don't make these choices lightly. I just hope I handled it well. That being said, I've actually had this planned for a very, very long time. There are references to the song used here in other chapters. They're probably obvious at this point, but there is one in an author's note that I'm particularly proud of. See, I wanted it to be sort of surprise, but sort of not surprise. I guess I wanted people to ease into it a little bit...maybe because I wasn't as ready myself as I wanted to be. Who knows.

From here, the timeline will stay similar to the original, while also being different. The events that Ruby foresaw will happen, but they won't happen when she thinks they will (much like Cerberus), and the outcomes will change at times, while some outcomes may stay the same. Like the Doctor said: Fixed point in time.

I've been begging since the beginning not to be lynched, and here is why. Please, don't lynch me! At the risk of being hated on, I will sincerely ask you to please review this chapter: It's been a long time in the making, and I want to know how I handled it. I've been looking forward to writing it, and I've also been the most worried about it.

Till next time. (I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.)