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A/N: In case Chapter 7 isn't out by Easter Sunday, I hope you all have a Happy Easter! :)
Chapter 6
The enlarged, black-and-white Cat ran over and under earth, squares fluttering off them as they took secret paths and tunnels, and places inbetween. They knew almost everything about the Ever After and had mapped every secret possible route long ago, including those within the Abandoned Acre – they now used that to their advantage, ensuring there was no chance of that scary Neopolitan interrupting their work on their human future host, currently being carried on the Cat's back. They doubted their lightning had stunned Neo for very long. Though Neo had done excellent work on breaking Ruby down even faster, and now the Cat had a perfect opening to finish their work. But they weren't sure Ruby was quite broken enough yet – if the Cat tried to fill her now, there might have been enough heart in her that they couldn't force theirself all the way in. Ruby needed a little more push before the Cat could be certain their host was ready, and then they could go to Remnant at last.
The Cat entered a series of derelict train-carriages – on the outside, the train's tail-end appeared to be only three carriages which sunk into the Abandoned Acre's purple mud, but on the inside, the derelict train stretched for miles as the Cat sprinted through dozens of carriages. Reaching the train's front, the Cat's enlarged form emerged from a rotted bag that was sitting in the driver's seat of a rusted, weathered, lonely shell of a half-buried steam engine, with no carriages behind it on its outside like there were on its inside, miles on the other side of the Abandoned Acre from its tail end's outside. In three directions in front of the abandoned steam engine and the black-and-white Cat was a leafless wood of skeletal trees, which looked like jagged monsters during the occasional flashes of lightning. Mildly displeased by the light rain falling on them, the Cat trotted to a reasonably sheltered spot at the base of a tree with particularly thick branches, in front of the abandoned train. The Cat shrugged Ruby's unconscious body from their back, letting her half-crumple, half-rest with her back against the tree. The Cat shrank back down to their previous size, patterns and colours flashing as the blacks and whites were replaced by their normal purple, cyan and turquoise colours. The Cat had learned a very, very long time ago how to bend and shape theirself like clay; stretching theirself out if they wished to be larger and stronger, or compressing theirself down if they wished to be as small as a mouse – beyond that, they'd learned with time, practice and bursts of emotion under the right circumstances that they could mould theirself into even more different forms.
The Cat eyed the unconscious (weak) human girl, to be sure she wouldn't wake up imminently, before they deemed it safe for them to pounce back aboard the train through the steam engine's rotted bag, body stretching into 'pixel' squares as they hurried to collect what they needed. They'd known for years that the artefact they now sought had been on the train, but they hadn't had a potential use for it until recently. The Cat would use the artefact to check on what Ruby's human 'friends' had been doing since she'd left – the Cat had very little doubt that those wretched humans and that equally-awful Faunus would be caring little for their crimson-hooded, so-called friend's disappearance, and then the Cat would just have to cherry-pick which moments to show Ruby.
After all their many millennia trapped in the Ever After without answers, (after all their suffering and heartbreak); the Cat was almost ready to go. And this time, the Cat's escape would not be dangled and snatched away from them at the very last! They hadn't and wouldn't make the same mistakes that they had with Alyx.
Ruby faded discomfortingly out of an oblivion which had provided her some merciful respite. She saw a familiar, otherworldly Cat in her field of vision slipping out of a bag far too small for it by some abandoned structure, except the Cat's colours were replaced by stark blacks and whites and they looked far too large for a cat, with something held between their teeth.
Ruby blacked out again.
She ebbed back into consciousness. Wherever she was, it was dark and wet, apart from the bright face which was now very close to hers. A feline, purple face with lightning bolt-shaped whiskers, a faint cyan glow emanating from the wide eyes, expressive mouth and diamond-shaped facial patterns.
"It's alright, Ruby," the Curious Cat's light voice reassured her even as lightning flashed quietly above. "It's over now."
"Cat," Ruby forced herself to mumble. She could sense the warmth in their soft tone, yet she felt unworthy. (The Cat was what she'd wanted to be and had failed at being – a source of light and comfort.) "I'm sorry. I don't want to be me anymore…" She couldn't curl her body up with the Cat atop her torso, so she buried her face in her hands, wishing she could just hide there from the world forever as she sniffled and wept. She heard the Cat shushing her.
"Everything will be okay, little Ruby," the Cat soothed her. She vaguely felt tears lining down the sides of her face. "I can be you instead." Ruby nearly couldn't bring herself to react, but teary silver eyes blinked slowly open behind her hands as the words sank in.
"Wh… What?" she said in confusion, slowly removing her hands from her face. The Cat inhaled, but by the way they did it and the way they were smirking, Ruby doubted it was from any reluctance or painful effort.
"I'm afraid I have a confession to make, Ruby," the Cat said, and Ruby was growing more aware of how she was pinned with the Cat's smaller body atop her chest and a dead tree-trunk behind her back. The Cat, sitting up, seemed to loom over her. "You see, my motivations for helping you weren't entirely selfless. I'm not like the other Afterans. I'm cursed with curiosity." Ruby felt like a shudder should have run up her spine at the angry venom creeping into the usually soft, light, lilting voice. "I need to learn everything." They blinked, and their eyes changed – their pure-white slit pupils were now inside pitch-black sclera, like a pair of moons in a starless night sky. "But more than anything, I need to know why my two makers left me here." They bared their fangs in a feline hiss at something only they could see. "Leaving all of this behind to make all of YOU."
Ruby felt confusion. Followed by shocked realisation as lightning flickered and thunder rumbled overhead. Two makers… made all of US… The Two Brothers?! But…
"Wha- What do you want with me?!" Ruby weakly asked after a pause, fear welling despite her body's and mind's aching from the dead's assault in Neo's mansion and from… Little's death. Little…
"There is a door to Remnant at the Tree, but I can't pass through it myself," the Cat replied, their voice now cold and hard, leaning their head lower towards Ruby's face than the tips of their feline shoulders. "I need someone who has an attachment on Remnant to return to." Their eyes, reverting to cyan-and-white, narrowed. "I need a human host."
Ruby felt panic form in her core.
"Me…?" she whispered.
(At least then the world would be better off without her.)
"Yes," the Cat confirmed. "When a heart is weak or broken, I can give it a little bit of mine to give it clarity and direction. But if a heart is broken enough, then there's enough room to fill it with all of me."
Ruby was afraid, yes, but somehow not nearly as afraid as she felt she should be. (At least someone who knew what they were doing would be guiding her useless, incompetent flesh.) New, warm tears streamed down Ruby's pale and bruised face, yet she felt a strange detachment from the aches plaguing her.
"You lied to me," she said, voice cracking. The Cat shook their head and snickered.
"I needed you worn down, yes," the Cat replied, "but that doesn't make anything that I or Neo's dead people told you any less true, Ruby. Once this you is broken down, I can fill your heart with mine, and we can both make everything better for each-other." The Cat tilted their head slightly. "Did your friends and your sister do anything to help you while you were breaking in front of them? Or did they judge you as the one who's wrong for being anything less than the perfect, all-helping leader that they expect you to be?"
Ruby felt sick. But it wasn't her friends' fault, it was-
"Let's see what they've done since you left their insanity," the Cat stage-whispered with that friendly, amicable tone they'd been using throughout their time with Ruby, and they sauntered along her lower body and off of her legs. Though no longer pinned, Ruby didn't move. She couldn't take her eyes off the Cat's brightly-coloured, slender body which stood out in the acre's gloom as they used their dextrous forelegs to lift a mirror resting against the abandoned steam locomotive. It had an angular frame with sharp angles and edges, and a bird's head decorated the top.
"Show Ruby what her friends did at the Paper Pleasers' village after she left," the Cat said to the mirror's face. Despite the sick feeling in her stomach, Ruby couldn't take her eyes away as the Cat shifted the mirror to let Ruby clearly see. White light shone from the mirror's face, before it shifted like a magic mirror to form a familiar image against the light rain: the lagoon where the Paper Pleasers' villages had been. Ruby's three teammates, Jaune, and Jaune's steed Juniper were there in the mirror's image.
The mirror showed Ruby the crystalline star-shaped creatures which she realised could only be the Paper Pleasers' new selves. The mirror showed her four friends' brightly-smiling faces (as if all in the world was perfect, as if all in the world wasn't as far as could be from that). The mirror showed her teammates comforting Jaune (putting him before her AGAIN), _WBY group-hugging Jaune with the biggest smiles on their faces. As if her teammates didn't have the ruination of an entire kingdom just DAYS ago on their consciences. As if her being missing didn't even matter much…
She'd thought… But…
Not even her running off after she'd exploded at them was making them worry about her…
"Oh, Ruby," the Cat sighed, tone solemn. "You held them up for years. But did any of them ever do the same for you when you were the one who needed it?"
Maybe there was another explanation…
"No. They just keep taking and taking to help themselves, not caring about how little you would have left once they were done with you.
"You may have executed the plan to destroy Atlas, but they were the ones who ensured the problem got that far, and they pushed you towards that plan every step of the way," the Cat all but growled the last part, venom creeping into their voice again as if the thought angered them. "They were the ones who lied to Ironwood and even you about those Happy Huntresses. And they did nothing but push Ironwood until he snapped, even after he captured that evil doctor Watts without them."
"They didn't know…" Ruby said. Her voice almost felt like sandpaper in her neck.
"They must have at least suspected," the Cat said, words cutting into something inside Ruby. "How could they not with all the signs you were giving? I could see you were cracking from a mile away, as could Herb." Ruby had almost forgotten about the Herbalist. The Cat turned their tail to Ruby as they faced the mirror. "Look at them now. You, the one they always thought infallible, ran off a crying mess, and you've been lost in the woods for how long since then? But it's almost as if you never even existed to them." The Cat craned glanced out of one eye back at Ruby. "They aren't your friends, Ruby. They are your parasites. Leeching you dry and giving nothing back, until they abandon you."
"I…"
Ruby couldn't say anything. She had no retort. But she was dimly aware that a part of her she couldn't quite feel anymore was still wanting to protest inside her. Some part of her friends and her sister did care about her, they HAD to. (If they didn't, then she had nothing.)
"Let's look at your friends case-by-case," the Cat said as if they'd read her thoughts, unsmiling as they returned closer to Ruby. "Starting with Blake." Ruby almost didn't know why her eyes widened fractionally. The Cat shook their head and chuckled a little, crawling back atop Ruby.
"The 'impoverished survivor'-" They lifted their forelegs and made air-quotations with their paws. "-who ran away from a wealthy mansion with loving parents, who happily took her back the moment she went back to them." She was afraid, Ruby's mind wanted to say.
"The girl who rejoined you at Haven by pure accident rather than because she cared enough to seek you out." She would have looked for us eventually anyway, Ruby's mind wanted to say.
"The girl who left control of Menagerie to her parents, who were already ousted for being inadequate in that role once before." She… She… They were her parents! (That was a sloppy excuse and even Ruby knew it.)
"The girl who didn't learn from her earlier White Fang mistake that the path to Jabberwalker-stomach is paved with good intentions, when she went behind Ironwood's back and your back while Ironwood was extending a green-olive branch. Nor when she supported yours and your friends' plan for Atlas and Mantle." The Cat's forepaws were on Ruby's upper-chest, fangs half-bared and ears flattening. "You were there to see it. Did Blake bat an eye at forcing all of Atlas and Mantle's peoples from their homes into a desert, just like what was done to the Faunus before when they were sent to Menagerie?"
…
"Perhaps deep down, Blake wanted to hurt the citizens of Atlas and Mantle for what people before their time did? Oh! And let's not forget what that crazed Faunus boy did to Blake – poisoning her against her family, moulding her to be a mere extension of him who wouldn't think independently." The Cat closed their eyes, lips closed as their chequered body started shaking with a soft chuckle. A chuckle which exploded into a full-blown guffaw as the Cat tossed their head back, purple fangs on full display in their mouth. Lightning cracked, and the sound petering out into an almost broken-sounding chuckle. "And now Blake is doing the exact same thing with YOUR sister that he did to her!"
Moments flickered through Ruby's mind – moments where Yang had acted like nothing else mattered but Blake. Not least the moment Yang had glared daggers at Ruby while Blake had shrunk meekly behind her some hours ago. Or when they'd hung off of each-other or held hands over and over while Ruby had watched unnoticed. Moments in the Ever After, and moments before that on Remnant.
Blake would…
She…
…
Something inside of Ruby cracked and broke off forever. She hiccupped and sniffled, fresh tears running down the sides of her face as she cried and cried. She heard the Cat sigh and softly shush her, was aware of their paw rubbing circles on her.
"I know this hurts, Ruby," the Cat said, voice tentative again, sounding almost like a motherly nurse comforting an agonised patient; "but when the pain is over, you'll be fixed up into something better." They sat back on Ruby's midsection. "Let's think about Weiss. Your team partner, who promised to fight for her home kingdom one day, then the next she advocated that all of you run that same kingdom into the ground entirely."
…
But Weiss…!
The Cat snickered.
Ruby had seen Weiss looking at the fall of Atlas in the Punderstorm. She regretted it! (Regretted it enough to act completely like her usual self and as happy as anything in the Ever After where Ruby couldn't?) Maybe she was just better at it…
The Cat went on, "A spiteful, arrogant, rude mess of a girl who likes to find fault in everything around her. Who likes to cry about how unfair her life has been, living in a mansion with her cruel father and her distant mother – despite that she abandoned her little brother to the same fate, with no-one for him to turn to like she had turned to her sister." The Cat rolled their eyes. "Poor Weiss. Boo-hoo."
Ruby wanted to point out, "She didn't know… Whitley wasn't like their father…"
"And yet, Weiss only cared enough to reach out to him much later, when your friends had a use for him that served themselves – not because she cared about her brother enough to make amends with him outside of that." The Cat cut in, growling the last part in anger. "Is that a feeling you can relate to?"
…
(Yes.)
No, Ruby wanted her voice to whisper.
"Did Weiss herself intend to see you again when she ran away to Mistral?"
(Weiss was just as guilty as the others of doing nothing while Ruby was hurting. She didn't do anything when Ruby freaked out, she just shrank away… like she thought Ruby was the one being unreasonable.)
Something inside of Ruby cracked and broke forever.
She clenched her eyes hard enough that her muscles started to scream despite her throbbing body.
"Then there's poor, poor Jaune." The Cat spat his name contemptuously, and the disdain sounded almost alien on their voice. They softly leapt off of Ruby, and she was aware of them circling around her and the dead tree as they spoke: "That self-absorbed, self-hurtingwretch who insists on blaming you after he went along with your plan, after he let Neo take the knowledge Relic, and after he let Cinder kill the Fall Maiden at Beacon's fall! Poor Jaune, who's focused on making everyone around him suffer his self-inflicted pity-parties while he ignores the hurt of everyone and everything else around him!" Ruby couldn't even bring herself to feel the surprise that her brain registered at the spite boiling through the Cat's voice. As hurt as she'd been at Jaune's last words to her (words which were completely right), part of her still felt urged to defend him. No, that part of her was desperate to defend him lest something else be cut away forever. "Whereas you carried the weight of saving the world on your shoulders for so long. Then when you needed someone to hear you air your grievances, it was pushed back over and over again. And when you finally couldn't take it anymore… what kind of understanding did Jaune or your other friends show?"
…
Ruby wanted to scream wordlessly. It felt like she was a piece of meat being slowly ripped in two. The Cat half-crawled back atop her, forepaws on her shoulder.
"Let's not forget what Jaune did to Penny…" the Cat said. The images and sounds rushed through Ruby like an oil fire: Jaune stabbing Penny in front of her in Neo's mansion, the moment when she'd heard Weiss confirm Penny's death, her holding onto Penny when she'd still been alive at the Schnee Manor…
(HE killed her.)
"You felled Atlas because you wanted to save Penny," the Cat murmured. "And it was all for nothing because he ruined it. Poor, precious, useless, centre-of-the-world Jaune!"
Something inside of her cracked and broke forever.
Ruby didn't realise her hands had flown to her face until a wordless animal screech was ripping through her vocal chords – she didn't even register her nails digging into her forehead.
Elsewhere on the stormy plains, the echoing screech like that of a dying animal was heard.
Ruby wept under the dead tree in front of the broken train. The Cat was silent, seeming content to let her air. (Which was the one thing that NO-ONE ELSE had let her do in a long time. No-one except the creature who'd lied to her, like SHE'D lied to Ironwood.)
"And last but not least: your sister," the Cat murmured. Ruby's silver eyes shot open. No. No, no, no, please no. She didn't want to lose her too! "She raised you for years after your mother was gone, but as soon as she discovered she had feelings for a certain Faunus – who she'd only known for a paltry few years compared to the dozen years she'd had you for – she pushed you out. All for a girl who already abandoned her and you before."
(Yes.) No, no, no. Ruby couldn't lose her bond to everyone.
"But the storm…" Ruby croaked, then found a little more voice. "And the Tree. It helped her…" That was what Jaune had said Punderstorms did, and what the Cat had said the Tree did, wasn't it?
The Cat giggled, before exploding into head-tilting, unsettling laughter again. It was a mirthless sound that made Ruby want to crawl away from the Cat as instincts shouted danger. What was so funny?
"Oh, no, no," the Cat mumbled between laughs while shaking their whiskered head, sounding almost like an indulgent teacher amused at a student who'd said two plus two was three with confidence. "Don't you see what ascension is about?" Ruby wasn't sure whether she saw real warmth in their cyan eyes or if was just seeing things that weren't there – just like she'd seen competence in herself and love in her friends that weren't there. "The Ever After unwinds all those higgledy-piggledy feelings you keep inside until you're content doing something. It grants you a purpose that's fit for you to feel content rather than others around you. Unless, of course, you're me." The Cat added that last sentence under their breath in a tone as bitter as the night on Solitas, face souring for just a moment. "Such a purpose could be helping others to find their own purposes just like Herb did, or it could be something worse than cutting off heads that displease you. I've seen Afterans with unkind purposes come and go over thousands of years. The Tree doesn't care how your purpose affects others so long as it's a purpose that you feel satisfied in." Ruby felt sick – she wanted to vomit, yet she felt like she didn't have enough vomit in her.
"Yang loves me," she tried to insist, voice cracking. (Knowing it likely wasn't true. And really, did SHE love YANG all that much herself anymore? When Yang had fallen and she'd thought her dead on the bridge, Ruby hadn't reacted like Blake had.)
"Perhaps that was true once," the Cat murmured. "Then along came a sneaky, cowardly Faunus, and from then on, all that matters to Yang is herself and Blake. Not Atlas, not Mantle, not Penny, not the Relics… not you." The Cat slunk close enough that their face nearly filled Ruby's field of vision, that face which had usually seemed so cheery and at-home within this storybook world now thunderously dark. "She abandoned you, Ruby. Much like my Makers did to me." Ruby's eyes watered but the tears didn't fall, something crumpling and collapsing in her heart with a pain that vaguely made her think of old dust. (The Cat was right.) "Yang Xiao-Long, daughter of a bandit who betrayed her family, expects everyone else to be there for her when she wants them, but she never extends them the same rages against anyone who keeps truths from her, but doesn't accept blame when she's the one keeping secrets from you. She doesn't have any sympathy for others who have suffered even when they're her so-called family. And just like her mother, she turns her back on the very thing she professes devotion to!"
Something inside of Ruby cracked…
She thought about all the times Yang had read to her and tucked her in at night after Mum had gone. All the times Yang had made her meals, helped her get to school and back home and made her do her homework on-time when Dad and Uncle Qrow hadn't been able to. The times Yang had stuck up for her at Signal whenever she'd seen Ruby having problems. Ruby remembered how happy and proud Yang had been when they'd gone to Beacon together and gotten on a team together.
Crashing into the good memories like a trainwreck were less pleasant memories, and many of them were more recent. Yang scowling and hissing at Ruby for blowing up in front of her and Blake. Their squabbling in Atlas which led to them dividing (the very division which gave Salem strength, Ruby now noted) just after they'd divided their side of the war between themselves and Ironwood. Yang pushing Ruby away while she'd been wallowing in self-pity after Beacon had fallen. Smaller, pointless-seeming things like Yang leaving Ruby behind when they'd first arrived at Beacon, flicking food in Ruby's hair at dinner, cheating to win at a game, Yang pushing her to be more social while Ruby had been uncomfortable throughout… all of those memories which Ruby had once looked on semi-fondly were suddenly taking on new, darker hues as Ruby felt like she was viewing them anew.
There was a distance between Yang and Ruby that hadn't been there before, and not a healthy distance. The older Ruby and Yang had become, the more Yang had seemed… less kind, less mature, less thoughtful and less like she cared. Ruby had noticed her sister acting less and less concerned about others despite her claims to the contrary (case in point), and acting more and more concerned about Blake and her own feelings. As if Yang had been the only one who'd lost something or someone. Yang had had a rep for being a meathead because of her brawns and temper, one which Ruby had known since they'd been little was complete garbage. But now? When was the last time Yang had had empathy for anyone that wasn't… that wasn't…
…
…wasn't a weak, self-serving, abandoning COWARD?!
Heheheh. Hadn't Ozpin once said, in a time that now seemed centuries ago, teams were meant to forge new bonds, not break old ones? HEHHEHHEHEHHEHHEH!
…Something inside of Ruby broke forever.
She couldn't cry anymore – she had no tears left. Yang, Jaune, Weiss and Blake had all abandoned her, if they'd truly ever been there for her. Little and Penny were gone.
Ruby was alone.
She'd just wanted to be a hero… And what had she accomplished besides causing far more problems than she'd solved, leaving the world even worse off overall than it would've been if she'd never been born? Neo was right. Mum would be ashamed of her.
Ruby lay under the dead tree, staring dully at the overhead thunderheads, barely noticing the Cat's weight atop her anymore. The Cat sighed.
"You've put playing the hero before maintaining yourself over and over again," the Cat said. Their face was empathetic, much like when they'd helped the Herbalist ascend, but there was a little darkness in there now. "If you ever go back to them, how do you know they won't put you right back on the pedestal you fled from as if nothing had ever happened to drive you from it?" A pause passed. "If they take you back to Remnant with them, how many more allies and kingdoms will be sacrificed so that they can keep playing hero on their own terms?"
Ruby was reminded that she wasn't completely alone. The Cat was here for her. (The creature who had lied to her and pushed her to this was the closest thing she now had to anyone to rely on.) HehehehehehHEHEH. The Cat was right: who she was not only wasn't good enough to save the world, it was the last thing the world needed. And the people she'd thought were her friends… Well.
But something was still holding Ruby back from agreeing.
"If you become me… how is that any better?" Ruby asked weakly. "You lied to me. You just want to go to Remnant yourself."
"And…?" The Cat let the question hang as they leaned back into Ruby's face with a smile, noses nearly touching. Ruby felt anger bubble up within, her eyebrows drawing down.
"You're a villain!" she protested, voice scratchy and eyes puffy. The Cat chuckled with a shocking softness, like a vaguely amused grandparent.
"Do I want Remnant or the Ever After harmed, Ruby?" the Cat asked. "I just want to know why." Their amused tone faded like oil sliding off of water. "Salem at least did something wrong to provoke the Makers into abandoning Remnant. I don't know why my own creators left me or this place behind and never came back. Yet you humans still have their favour with their Relics even after you spat in their faces with rebellion! Did I do something wrong? Was I, or the Ever After, somehow not good enough?! WHY WERE WE THROWN AWAY?!" They shrieked in fury. Underneath that fury, Ruby sensed pain – the broken huntress felt the dullest ember of pity inside her dark, hollowed insides. (Verging on sympathy – they were BOTH broken and betrayed, weren't they?) "I'm doing this because I have no other choice left for me. There's nothing else in the Ever After that I haven't already learned. And I always have to learn more!" The Cat giggled very mirthlessly, and when they next spoke, their voice took on an unhinged tenor. "It drives me INSANE to have the same question niggling in my head, with the answers out of reach for SO many centuries piled upon centuries PILED UPON CENTURIES! But there's no-one to take me to the Tree to be fixed! Your friends, Salem, Neo and even you – ALL had the one thing I never had. The chances to change yourselves as you chose. And you all chose the worse paths for yourselves anyway!"
"You're… still hurting people…" Ruby forced the whisper past her lips. Her eyes widened in surprise when the Cat cackled loudly, so near Ruby's head that her ears vibrated, the Cat's eyes bulging as the laughter racked them. To Ruby, that laughter sounded like a noise of sickness.
"Do you know how many people from either of our worlds I've ever made die, since before your world even existed?" the Cat asked, baring their teeth in a razor grin at Ruby. The grin faded a moment later. "Two people. The first was Alyx when I realised that she'd betrayed me, while Lewis went back to Remnant alone." Ruby couldn't even bring herself to feel much shock at the revelation. The Cat hissed so viciously that Ruby almost felt like it was a Grimm sitting atop her, ready to rip her face off. "That cowardly, wretched girl dangled my only hope of peace in millennia in front of my face, and she snatched it away at the very last!" the Cat snarled, voice making the inside of Ruby's chest reverberate. "So I got angry and I broke her. And then… she never came back." The Cat trailed off, voice sounding slightly vulnerable. "The second person I ever made die was the Hawker, who I sent to his doom at the Garden to protect you. And I promise you, Ruby, I took no pleasure in that." Ruby felt shame at the reminder – though not as much as she would've if it were a human or a Faunus. (And maybe that was more evidence of what an awful excuse for a hero she was, that she judged Afterans' lives as so subpar.) "You've seen the Ever After. Have I, the villain, done anything to break it in all the decades that I've been trapped here since Alyx, Lewis and Jaune left me?" The Cat lifted a turquoise paw empathically. "Whereas your so-called friends forgave that illusionist Emerald girl, that brute Hazel and that chameleon Faunus criminal, not caring that each of them spent their lives hurting your friends and hurting how many otherpeople inside of a few years on your world?"
It was like the cogs in Ruby's brain were slowing to a stop. The Cat sighed, shaking their head as if this were almost as long and painful for them as it was for Ruby, and they rubbed circles on Ruby's shoulder again. The bright colours on their forepaw felt eyes almost like a beacon of light and warmth, guiding Ruby in from the cold, dead grey that was inside her.
"Isn't it time for a change?" the Cat asked in a stage-whisper, face solemn as they met Ruby's gaze. "It isn't wrong to question yourself, or to realise that you might have been wrong, Ruby – it's often wise. Why try to be what you know you can never be? Besides, you playing the hero hasn't helped anyone on Remnant or the Ever After, has it? You aren't an honest, simple soul, Ruby Rose, Huntress. I don't think you ever really were one. In here-" The Cat patted Ruby's left breast. "-I think you're selfish. Just like your friends, just like Alyx and just like me. But unlike all of you, I know what I am. I've hurt far fewer people in aeons than your false friends have hurt in a meagre few years. You can change, Ruby. Or you can keep being the same girl who destroyed Argus's defence, drove Ironwood to madness, brought the most important kingdom on Remnant to ruin, and snapped under the pressure that she didn't admit she couldn't take."
Ruby closed her eyes, and the nothingness behind her eyelids gave her the smallest crumb of refuge as she thought. The Cat was right, weren't they? She didn't have any friends, or a sister who cared about her. Just people who hadn't cared enough to reach out to her when she needed them, or people who used her to help themselves and who allowed more harm than good to befall everyone they touched, getting people who could have been saved killed. She felt her thoughts hadn't been so clear in a long time. Every time she'd tried to help, she'd broken something bigger in sum. Atlas, Mantle, Penny… What Ruby did have was the Cat. A selfish creature who had deceived her and wanted to use her too, yes, but that was honestly small potatoes compared to everything she and her friends had and hadn't done as 'heroes.' Besides, the Cat was also a hurting, lonely creature. They'd hurt far fewer people than her, and they'd suffered for far longer than her because of something they'd never been able to help or change. Was the Cat really so despicable like that? They didn't want money, or people hurt, or a world destroyed – they just wanted answers. And they wanted to feel right again – they wanted the hurt to stop. Wasn't that exactly what Ruby wanted too?
"Please…" Ruby whispered, not opening her eyes. "I just want things to be fixed."
The Cat wanted to smile from ear-to-ear.
"As do I, Ruby Rose Huntress," they murmured. Truthfully, as gleeful as they felt inside at finally having their host, they understood from first-hand experience what Ruby was feeling even if they knew better than to trust a human. "As do I." They kneaded their front paws against the chrome fabric of Ruby's top-piece. Leaning their head towards Ruby's again, they said close to her face, "This will hurt for a moment, but then everything will be better."
The Cat began pushing, forelegs first, into her heart. Ruby screamed as light and squares flared from the point of contact. The Cat felt a little resistance pushing back against them, but it was marginal. Their forelegs, head and shoulders slid inside like a sword into its sheath. YES! All their waiting, all their work, (all their suffering), and now they had their host. Perfect for them to fill! Their hindquarters lifted in the air as their torso stretched into the girl, their essence spreading outward from Ruby's hollowed heart into her eyes, her brain and all her other moist, squishy innards. In fourteen seconds, their tail slipped inside, and Ruby's screaming stopped.
For a moment, the Cat neither saw nor felt anything, as if they were floating in a void with their eyes closed. Eyes which felt… different on the closed eyelids, which were like warm blankets.
The Cat had only ever possessed an empty host once before. They'd been curious to know what would happen when they'd encountered an Afteran who'd been a very, very broken mess. The Cat had pushed, and had filled the other Afteran with their entire self, before with their questions answered, they'd parted from the poor Afteran and then helped them return to the Tree for repair. Possessing Ruby was not dissimilar to that previous experience – first, the Cat felt the staggering alien proportions of the non-feline body. Too large, weight distributed wrongly, a void where a tail should have been for that familiar sense of balance, spindly fingers with no claws, single-jointed legs ending in crooked, stubby feet. Such sensations had been felt in the Cat's first host but had meant nothing, as when the Cat had wanted to move that body a certain way, the body had moved with its own muscle memory in the best way to fit the Cat's mental commands. Much like in that Afteran host, the Cat could now feel the soul of their new human body wrapped around them while they were also wrapped around it, aching slightly like a sore throat or an aching chest-cough. So fascinating-
Clunk.
The Cat's new eyes snapped open at the sound of something hard and heavy hitting the ground. They looked towards their flank where the sound had come from, to see a familiar human standing on the barren plain past the decayed steam engine, as if she'd appeared from nowhere. The sound had come from her parasol-rifle falling to the ground. Neopolitan, wet from the Abandoned Acre's light rain pitter-pattering on her bowler hat and half-bare shoulders, was staring at the Cat's-and-Ruby's face. Staring at the eyes which had replaced Ruby's circular-pupiled, silver eyes. Neo had found them, perhaps by Ruby's scream when she'd lost her faith in Jaune, and the Cat was sure her sudden appearance was the illusion she'd masked her approach with shattering. Neo must have arrived just in time to see the Cat's work on Ruby finishing and then them filling her heart.
The look on Neo's face was a look the Cat had seen many times before. It reminded them of a look that had been in the Red King's face after he'd lost his game to Alyx. It was the gaze of an Afteran who'd realised that they'd lost their purpose. The CatRuby lifted theirself up to stand on their legs, their body telling them and itself how to ambulate perfectly. Their eyes never left Neopolitan, watching as her legs gave way and she crumpled into an awkward sitting position like a puppet with its strings cut. Her eyes were staring dully and listlessly ahead, and she didn't move any further, and from Ruby's memories, the CatRuby doubted this was another one of her illusory tricks. The human criminal's vengeful crusade had ended.
The CatRuby watched and thought on the pink,-white-and-brown themed human sitting across from them, lost inside her own head. If the Cat had known that Neo completing or losing her purpose would have left her like this, then they might have targeted her as a host. She would have been easier to puppeteer, whereas with Ruby, the CatRuby could now feel her throbbing, pulsating against and around them, could subtly feel her dimmest feelings of anxiety at what was happening around her. They could feel flickers of her memories, like flashes of light piercing closed eyelids. Still, they had the host that they'd worked towards taking.
"Hmph." The grunt from the possessed body was mostly the Cat's voice, but the feminine body's native, shriller-pitched voice was laid underneath. An unnatural urge seeped into the CatRuby like a cold ribbon-eel slinking into a pond – Ruby's feeling. It was pity. She felt pity for Neo. The CatRuby wanted to curl their lip at such twisted brokenness (like they'd once possessed). Ruby felt pity for the wretched creature who had slaughtered her precious mouse in front of her and broken her mind, just to spite her, not two hours ago, and who had the rare accomplishment of terrorising two worlds instead of just one. Who had killed how many people that Ruby had thought she was meant to save? Though the CatRuby couldn't have expected much better from a human – a broken, hypocritical, self-serving, pathetic and destructive creature, just like all of her kind who'd ever set foot in the Ever After. Humans had no empathy for Afterans or even their own kind; whom Neo had wounded or broken or killed in DROVES, seeing them all as nothing more than toys she could break on a whim rather than people with feelings. (Once, the Cat would have somewhat shared Ruby's sense of pity for a distraught creature, no matter if the creature had tried to hurt the Cat or their friends. But that was a long time ago, back when the Cat had still had many more pieces of their heart intact inside them to give.) Neo had seen the Ever After itself as nothing more than a sandbox where she could pick the wings off of horseflies without consequences, just as ALYX had. She was less deserving of Ruby's sympathy than some of the other broken humans Ruby had fought on her own world were. And it appeared that Ruby's feelings from her heart contaminating the Cat's own was the price they paid for taking the intended host. Bah!
No matter. The CatRuby shouldn't have been bemoaning, they should've been rejoicing!
They looked down at their new arms with the slender, spindly fingers and black gloves, making the hands clench. Feeling theirs (and Ruby's) curiosity pike, the CatRuby approached the discarded magic mirror on the ground, its face blank and reflective again. The face which the CatRuby saw staring back at them from the ground was Ruby's face – except for the cyan, feline eyes in her sockets which belonged to the Cat, and except for the mouth. The lips distorted into a cattish shape when the CatRuby pulled them back, and the teeth revealed inside the mouth were white like a human's, but long and sharp like a cat's. The CatRuby felt the dullest throb of feelings coming from Ruby: shock, the grungy taste of morose acceptance, anxiety… and the slightest sensation of anticipation. Anticipation for the future.
The CatRuby snickered in their dual-layered voice. They were very nearly there. All their work was about to pay off. They could leave, at long last. They tilted their head and sighed, feeling their fanged mouth as they spread it in a grin wider than what Ruby's original mouth would have been able to manage. Squeezing their body's muscle memory, the CatRuby was wreathed them in a mix of rose-coloured petals and purple-and-cyan squares of light as they triggered Ruby's Semblance and their molecules disintegrated. They shot out to the air of the stormy Abandoned Acre, leaving the catatonic Neo behind.
YES!
Neo was inside her own head. That wasn't normally something she hated – usually, it was a nice refuge. Everything outside her head was just blurring by. She wasn't sure how much time had passed. The light rain had completely soaked through her clothes and skin. She couldn't move herself. Roman's voice hadn't spoken to her in here since he'd urged her in a desperate tone that offing Red can't have been all she'd been after, and she'd realised in that moment why she couldn't move.
Killing Red, avenging him, had been all she'd wanted ever since she'd lost him. All that had given her meaning…
And now it was over. What did that leave her with?
Nothing.
…
Neo heard voices she'd never heard before, chattering outside her head, in contrast to the known voices which always sang and danced around her in here.
"…I don't like this. We should go back…"
Some if what was being said reached through the void between Neo's mind and her senses, though whoever was talking didn't enter her field of vision which remained facing the dead woods at the spot where Red had been erased.
"…Goodness! Hello?"
Neo could tell the speaker had seen her.
"…I feel antsy. You know it's awfully dangerous for us to even be here at all…"
"I'm going to get closer. … We can run if anything unpleasant appears. We're fast after all…
"How strange!" The voice grew more solid, signifying that the speaker had gotten much closer. "Why are you just sitting there? Aren't you going to respond?"
She couldn't.
~…~
Neo heard a third voice coming from somewhere behind her head. It sounded distant, yet it didn't so much carry through the air as whisper into her head, as if the voice wasn't really made of sound at all.
~scouring~ ~detecting~ ~FOUND~
She heard the voice's angry bark, while one of the first two voices coming from a different angle shrieked in alarm. She'd heard the third voice before. Panic surged in her, but her body still wouldn't move. She couldn't even look back to see how close it was.
She heard feet from the first two voices' direction, pitter-pattering close to her, then halting.
"What are you waiting for?! We need to go!"
"I…"
The latter voice's owner didn't run as far as Neo could hear. Once upon a time back on Remnant, Neo would have been derisive of that indecision, especially in a life-or-death situation where it was as good as signing your own death warrant. She could feel the indecisive gaze on her, contemplating.
~her~ ~charging~ ~HATING~ ~RIP~ ~TEAR~
It was getting closer. Neo frantically wanted to move, mentally screamed for her body to listen as she felt the monster's quadrupedal footfalls thundering close enough to reverberate into her skeleton.
~her~ ~kill~ ~RIP~ ~TEAR~ ~DEVOUR~
It wanted her. It wanted to avenge her taking it and locking it up. Just as she'd wanted to avenge Red taking Roman away from her, and just as she many years before that had wanted to avenge her parents being her parents towards her. She was the new Red, and it was her Neo now.
"WHAT DO WE DO?! Are you going to take that one or run now?!"
~KILL~
Neo was utterly at the mercy of one Afteran's choice between whether to grab her and run, or run without her.
The CatRuby had packing to do.
Under the power of Petal Burst and the Cat's knowledge of the Ever After's shortcuts, the CatRuby went back to the Garden's Acre. After asking one or two Afterans (Afterans whom they might not ever see again) for directions, the CatRuby retraced Team RWBY's steps back to the King's Acre, where several Afterans from the Garden had been granted temporary residence after the attack. There was a limit to how much the CatRuby could procure even without worrying about the Red Prince's dunderhead guards. Sadly but unsurprisingly, many of the displaced Garden Afterans, including old friends and comrades that the Cat had once known well, were crying messes. Some of them hadn't even been fit to voluntarily give the CatRuby the ingredients and materials they wanted. The CatRuby acquired hairs, leaves, nails, Swan Lake water, Ever-leaves, and over a dozen other potions' ingredients, crafting them together into homemade Ever After potions and spells. The CatRuby knew from the Remnant-folk that Remnant wasn't exactly safe, so they were taking magical ammunition from the Ever After with them to defend theirself.
The CatRuby was traversing the Cake Acre for another batch of ingredients, and there was a tickling tug on their host's flesh. They noticed it all of a few seconds before the silvery-lined, rippling, mirror-like form slid into being in front of their square-decorated Petal Burst form, too close for them to avoid impacting. They blasted through the glass-like surface, out of the pale and bright Cake Acre and into a darker, stormy and purple acre, the rose petals scattering and squares of light fading as the CatRuby deactivated Ruby's Semblance.
Sack filled with their handmade ammunition slung on their back, the CatRuby took in the Abandoned Acre once more. Surrounding them in their immediate vicinity, the CatRuby took in the fresh ruins of a building, which was gradually crumbling piece-by-piece into bright-pink fractals and then into nothing, roof long gone as the stormy sky above was open. The remains of Neo's Semblance-conjured mansion. The CatRuby had already seen its decaying state once just before they'd crossed out of the Abandoned Acre, to satisfy their curiosity after Neo had collapsed. The CatRuby's mind was running urgently half-a-mile a minute. Who had activated that spyglass spell, and how could it have summoned them-?!
Their eyes widened as they saw they weren't alone.
"Ahh, the Rusted Knight. Goodness, am I tired of your little sob-story."
A/N: "A hole. Gets bigger the more you take away." – God of War: Ragnarök
Only two chapters left now. ;)
I was actually going to add a bit to this chapter where the Cat criticises Qrow and Taiyang's negligence and failings too, but I left it out, since the Cat's plan can't work if Ruby doesn't have any attachments to Remnant to take them through the door, plus they already threw some subtle shade at Qrow and Tai to wear Ruby down back in the Garden's Acre. Besides, with how the show writes Ruby in the later volumes, it wouldn't surprise me if she just doesn't think of Taiyang or Qrow at all when they're not on the same landmass, much less the same dimension as her.
I bounced back and forth about Neo and the Jabberwalker's fates in this fic right up to when I was making the pre-publication finishing touches to Chapter 5. I do like the idea that Neo in V9 probably killed the Jabberwalker offscreen – maybe by having her Jabberwalker clones eat the original when she first summoned them – and in doing so she did the Afterans a long-term favour by enabling them to live free of the Walker. When I was first bouncing in the "Jabberwalker alive" court, the Curious Cat was going to snoop around Neo's mansion while Ruby was being tortured, find the Jabberwalker chained up, and set it loose to attack Neo while the Cat made their getaway with Ruby. Then when I was in the "Jabberwalker dead" court, I played around with the idea of giving the fic an epilogue where Neo remains permanently catatonic without possession by the Cat to shock her out of it, she's found by a pair of Tweedledee-Tweedledum Afterans before she can starve to death, and she spends several years suffering as their life-sized motionless doll. 'Cos let's be honest, if Neo isn't going to defect to the heroes and make any actual meaningful amends for all the crimes she's committed and aided, then she deserves SOME decent comeuppance, instead of getting off Scot-free without making up for anything like she did in the canon ending. But the whole "Tweedle-Afterans" comeuppance just didn't fit to my mind – the only thing that seemed for me like a really cathartic ending to Neo was the Jabberwalker finding and possibly killing her for what she did. So I gave her an Uncertain Doom – maybe the Jabberwalker ate her the same way she had her clones of it eat the Hawker and would've likely used them to eat any other Afterans that got in her way, or maybe that Afteran who found her grabbed her and ran at the last second.
(REPLIES)
Oscuro Oscuro: (SPANISH) Oh, sí, todo eso fueron en gran medida fallas de los llamados héroes, y realmente eran hipócritas al nivel de Philip Wittebane por guardar secretos en Atlas, entre muchas otras cosas. Un punto interesante sobre la ironía de que las muertes de Neo se realicen en su mayoría fuera de la pantalla en comparación con la masacre electoral de Tyrian y Cinder bombardeando el puente, aunque no creo que el personal de esa aeronave atlesiana en el Volumen 3 estuviera simplemente inconsciente cuando vimos a Neo sacando a Roman de su celda. . Sin embargo, creo que Neo en el Volumen 2 intenta apuñalar a Yang con una gran sonrisa en su rostro después de haber dejado inconsciente a Yang, y la forma en que Neo en el Volumen 8 no estaba exactamente reteniendo el extremo puntiagudo de Hush de Oscar después de que ella le robó el La Lámpara del Conocimiento que tiene frente a él, hablan del sadismo asesino de Neo, incluso si no es tan pronunciado como el de Cinder o Tyrian. Urgh, el final del Volumen 9 fue absolutamente repulsivo. Lo he dicho antes y lo diré de nuevo, lo más increíble es que los escritores NO intentaron deliberadamente sabotear la historia con esa "resolución". Buen punto sobre la pelea con el Gato Furioso: inicialmente supuse, sin pensar mucho en ello, que agregar un quinto oponente para el Gato a la pelea era suficiente para inclinar la balanza a favor de RWBY/J, pero tienes razón, parece como si Furious se debilitara demasiado para ser creíble cuando apareció Ruby; especialmente porque el número de oponentes del Gato nunca superó los cuatro durante toda la pelea, ya que Jaune ya estaba fuera de la pelea cuando Ruby se unió. ¿Quizás Ruby reapareciendo con su resolución narcisista original restaurada acaba de restaurar la coordinación instintiva del Equipo RWBY?
(ENGLISH) Oh, yeah, all that was very much the so-called heroes' faults, and they really were Philip Wittebane-level hypocrites for their secret-keeping in Atlas among many other things. Interesting point about the irony of Neo's kills being mostly offscreen compared to Tyrian's election massacre and Cinder bombing the bridge, although I don't think the staff on that Atlesian airship in Volume 3 were simply unconscious when we saw Neo busting Roman out of his cell. However, I think Neo in Volume 2 trying to stab Yang with a big grin on her face after she'd already knocked Yang unconscious, and the way Neo in Volume 8 wasn't exactly holding Hush's pointy end back from Oscar after she stole the Lamp of Knowledge off him, are all telling about Neo's murderous sadism, even if it isn't quite as pronounced as Cinder or Tyrian's. Urgh, the ending of Volume 9 was outright repulsive – I've said before and I'll say it again, the most unbelievable thing about it is that the writers WEREN'T deliberately trying to sabotage the story with that "resolution." Good point about the fight with the Furious Cat – I initially assumed without thinking much on it that adding a fifth opponent for the Cat to the fight was enough to tip the tide in RWBY/J's favour, but you're right, it does seem like Furious got nerfed a little too hard to be believable when Ruby turned up; especially since the number of the Cat's opponents never rose above four throughout the entire fight, since Jaune was already out of the fight when Ruby joined in. Maybe Ruby reappearing with her original narcissistic resolve restored just restored Team RWBY's instinctive coordination?