"Guys, did you hear?! You remember that Cinder chick? Turns out that her and her teammates were terrorists! They were working with those Faunus Scum in the White Fang and were planning to attack the school during the Vytal Tournament!" Those words were currently coming out of Russel Thrush's mouth as he explained the situation to the rest of Team CRDL in the Lunchroom, but he definitely wasn't the first to say it this morning even though everyone was barely eating breakfast. In order to shake up the timeline, Ruby had decided to do what she had thought of during her and Jaune's ill-fated assassination attempt on Cinder and Mercury and alert Ozpin that something wrong was going on in the school. All she had done was tell Beacon's Headmaster that she overheard Cinder telling her team something suspicious, and just like that, an investigation occurred resulting in the arrest of Cinder, Emerald, Mercury, and Neo.
"Still can't believe that they were planning on doing those things! They seemed like nice people!" Said Pyrrha in response to overhearing the conversation Team CRDL was having.
"Yeah, it's too bad. I really wanted to fight that Mercury guy. He looked challenging enough!" Replied Yang.
"Really? Terrorists infiltrate the school, and your only opinion on that is that your disappointed that you didn't get to fight them! Are you seriously not bothered by this at all?" Weiss snapped back.
"Oh calm down Weiss, you know I'm just joking around!" With that, Weiss stayed silent, continuing to eat her breakfast. The conversation didn't die there, however.
"Why do you think the White Fang were going along with this?" Blake asked. In hindsight, it was obvious that this fact had been bothering her.
As Yang finished responding to Blake's question, Ruby took a look at this Jaune from the past getting angry at Ren for getting his comic dirty, and was reminded of something that "Present Jaune" had told her during their aforementioned ill-fated fight with the infiltrators, and blurted out "Do you guys think Cinder, Emerald, Mercury, and Neo should be killed because of what they were planning?"
Everyone looked at Ruby with shock. Ruby sighed. She really didn't like being treated as the innocent baby of the group, but, as evidenced by Yang immediately beginning to tell Ruby to get the thought out of her mind, she really had no choice but to accept it at this point. It was her own fault. After all, because she always had a romanticized view of the heroes of the world and refused to see things differently, Yang, being the amazing big sister that she is, always did what she could to make sure that her sweet little baby sister kept on having that view.
Ruby laughed at the irony. She wanted Yang to stop doing that for her, yet Ruby herself still wanted to hold on to her view of the world and refuse to take a human life.
Like Blake with the White Fang, Jaune's words couldn't stop bothering her. What was she going to do if she saw Cinder, Mercury and Emerald again? Would she kill them? Was killing necessary in certain cases? While there was no way to confirm if she was dead or not, it definitely seemed like she had deemed Neo's life a necessary sacrifice when she essentially pushed her off the ship. And she hadn't even done that in order to bring her to justice. She just did that to survive.
Was killing right? Was it? Were their certain conditions that made it truly acceptable? Ruby sighed again. If this was like in the shows she watched, or the comics she read, this would be the point where the protagonist would have to deal with this, and there would be consequences in the aftermath. Was she going to have to kill someone soon? She hoped not. This wasn't a piece of fiction after all.
Apologies for the unannounced hiatus. Was suffering from both Writer's Burnout and Personal Responsibilities. Chapters will continue to (hopefully) come out every Sunday until the beginning of September.