Chapter 41 – Ruby's Return

Salem, now fully recovered from the injuries she'd sustained during Hazel's rebellion, greeted Ruby warmly upon her return to Evernight. Ruby knew why; Watts had phoned ahead and explained the gruesome details of how she'd tossed Fell Pickerel's head into his lap upon reboarding the airship. To know that Ruby had not only murdered a good man in cold blood but also mutilated him as a trophy for her queen must've raised her spirits as much as it drove Ruby's down.

Evernight was still unlivable, as Salem had only just regained her unbreakable control over the Grimm in the days Ruby and Watts had taken to hunt the hunter, but repairs were underway. It mattered little; all Evernight had ever been was a base of operations to return to in between missions. Until it was back up and running, the minions would just be sent by Salem on back to back missions.

"Dr. Watts, I would like for you to probe the defenses around the Winter maiden. If she truly is in Atlas, find her, and find what resistance is to be expected when Miss Rose eventually comes face to face with her. We've heard nothing of a new or old Winter in decades, and I fear this implies a veteran host."

Watts nodded obediently.

"Tyrian, go to Shade. Young Ruby has the power of the Summer maiden, but unlike the other kingdoms, we have no 'in' for Vacuo. Bring about carnage and weaken the academy as greatly as possible, but do not risk your own reveal. I trust you combat discretion."

He, too, nodded. The scorpion tail on his back began to wag like a dog.

"Ruby, I will be sending you to the White Fang once again. Though Adam has fallen, I intend to fully repay my debt to his surviving comrades in arms. Provide them the aid they need, and see if a new contract between us can be negotiated. Their aid may prove useful, especially when spreading fear among humans is concerned."

Ruby didn't nod, but Salem didn't seem to notice.

"Each of you shall take a Seer with you. This way, I may provide you new orders without the need for you to return to this sundered castle." The Grimm in question floated their way as Salem waved a hand. "Report back to me at regular intervals."

"Did it hurt?" Ruby asked all of a sudden.

Three pairs of eyes turned to look at her. Even Salem didn't seem sure what to make of her unexpected question. Partial silence was the only sound within the castle for a moment, broken up only by the occasional clatter of a Beowolf hauling solid rocks into position or a Seer carefully adjusting them.

"Hurt?" asked Salem.

"Hazel. He tore you in half. You say you're still a human at the core, but you didn't react. Did it hurt you to be injured?"

Ruby looked up at the Grimm woman with curious eyes, careful to mask any emotion that might give something of value away.

Salem looked away, towards the open wall where a picturesque view of the Grimmlands in its entirety was visible. "Pain is something I've learned to control over the many long years. While I once sought to avoid it like a craven, I eventually realized it was inevitable and embraced it. But, to answer your question, yes. I still feel everything. It did hurt."

Ruby nodded once, curtly.

"Why do you ask?" Salem inquired.

"Oh, no reason. I guess, you mentioned the whole debt to the White Fang thing, and it reminded me about you saying you're still human at your core. I just got curious. It's no big deal or anything."

Salem clearly wasn't buying that, but Ruby was already making her way towards her designated airship with a Seer in tow. The White Fang awaited.

Winter had been stabbed in the chest with a scythe.

The people of Hibernance were burned alive.

Pickerel the huntsman was decapitated.

Just three for now. It's not much, but it's a start. I'm sure I'll kill more people along the way and find out new ways as I go. Salem may not feel pain right now, but the list will get longer and longer, and by the time my mission is over, I'm sure I'll eventually have something on it that can make her cry.

The last time, Ruby was sent to Atlas to join a ragtag band of mercenary-style fighters representing a fraction of the White Fang's full strength.

This time, she was sent to meet them at the mightiest source of their power at the island of Menagerie, the supreme fortress from which they ruled.

It ended up being just as lame, to be honest.

They didn't have anyone waiting for her at the beach when she arrived, having left the Seer at the airship when she parked it in Mistral to take a ferry the rest of the way. Menagerie didn't have an airport, making the extra steps a burdensome necessity. Still, Ruby had no idea if the White Fang was expecting her or not, and it was actually quite possible that they hadn't even been notified she was coming. After all, it wasn't like Salem was just going to send them a text message or something. Tyrian spoke in tongues that only the crazy understood, and Watts was racist. Well, Ruby didn't know if he was, but he seemed like the kind of person who was.

Anyway, the point was, enough if Ruby wasn't expected, it was an outright mistake of them to not be aware of the presence of an armed agent of a potentially hostile enemy force on their own island. Sure, Ruby wasn't hostile, but the White Fang obviously didn't know that if they hadn't reacted to her arrival.

Ruby got a good view of city as she walked to the military base's location, and it was just crawling with White Fang grunts that didn't want to be alive. None of them were watching their backs, several of them were walking alone through the streets, and some of them weren't even carrying weapons. Just for giggles, Ruby had retreated into an alleyway at one point, shifted Crescent Rose into a sniper, and lasered four or five of them as she walked just to see if they would notice her. Not one of them did.

The White Fang were civilians here, then. Ruby supposed that would be a good thing, as it was more likely that she wasn't going to be assigned some crapsack mission like last time with an idiot out of his league like Adam in charge.

Seriously, why didn't we just blow up the tracks? Why did we sabotage a hundred trains when that would've done the job just as easily? Or poison the food when we had access to it?

It was because Adam was a manchild who wanted to have the visceral joy of using his sword to tear things and sometimes people apart. It was a feeling Ruby had last experienced when she'd fought her way down the hill of Beacon after everything went wrong, when her opponents were still just stupid mindless waves of Grimm.

The world's better off with Adam dead. I almost regret that I didn't kill him myself, if only to add another method to my list of ways to hurt Salem.

Forcing herself to sigh, Ruby shook her head. She needed to be careful.

Rescuing that huntsman had been the start of a downward spiral that still threatened to swallow her whole. Never before had she felt such dreadful negative thoughts, and it was nothing like the petty anger or rage that she'd felt in her childhood over silly things like a lost videogame or a scuff on her favorite pair of boots. This grim feeling of hopelessness was the kind of quagmire that could make her lose all perspective on what was right and what was wrong, and her own self-control was the only thing keeping her from devolving into some empty shell of a human.

She'd been at the worst of it when she'd killed Pickerel himself, nearly believing the nonsense she'd been using to justify her own cold actions, but with him gone and that entire affair in the rear-view mirror, things were coming back into perspective. The world wasn't devoid of warmth, and Ruby didn't need to dispassionately make decisions by counting lives on an abacus. People's joy, suffering, pain, and love of the life they lived mattered too.

Rescuing Pickerel that first time around may have been a mistake – no, it was a mistake – and it may have amounted in his death just the same, but his life had mattered. Providing him those few extra days of freedom had mattered. He'd probably felt a rush of joy at being freed from torture at the claws of a madfaunus, relief that a young huntress cared enough to save him from the castle of pure evil rather than leave him to rot, and pride in his final moments. He'd died thinking that his debt to Ruby was repaid, and that mattered.

It's horrible to think, but I'm glad he died not knowing it was me who did it. His last memory on Remnant was knocking a Beringel off of a struggling young huntress, and then he got knocked out with that taste of victory still on his tongue.

She shouldn't have saved him, but that didn't mean it was all pointless. Ruby was not going to fall into that abyss.

I won't let Salem win. I…I'm hurting, and it's only going to hurt more the more people I have to kill, but I won't let her make me lose myself. I don't like killing, and I'm still going to try to minimize it while I complete my mission.

She'd fallen off her horse after Hibernance, briefly believing that saving the most lives was all that mattered, even if that meant condemning those who were deemed unsalvageable to horrifying pain and suffering. She'd lost herself and done a horrible thing, and she would never get to take that back, but she refused to give up on herself or on humanity. Her soul was stained with blood that would never wash off, but compounding tragedy with even more tragedy would only make it worse.

Ruby was going to do her best to move on and to forgive herself.

It feels wrong, to forgive myself when the dead wouldn't choose to forgive me for killing them, but I can't let hate or self-hate turn me into a cold person. I need to keep hold of my compassion and treasure it like it's solid gold, because it's all I have left.

No more doing edgy, dark shit like scoping the White Fang from alleyways or pretending to be dismissive of them because they weren't all trained killers or making a list of ways to take out her own guilt over killing people on Salem. Well, maybe she would make Salem pay a little bit when this all ended, but only because she was an evil witch that threatened all of Remnant and needed to be stopped. The point was, Ruby was going to get through this.

Or at least, she wasn't going to stop trying.

The High Leader of the White Fang, Sienna Khan, was apparently too busy to meet with Ruby, so she delegated the task to her subordinates, Corsac and Fennec Albain. They, too, were preoccupied at the time, so the job was sent to one link down the chain of command to a Faunus named Bane. Ruby would give you one guess if he had plans at the time.

In the end, it wasn't an officer that met with her but the local squad leader of the strike force they'd decided they wanted her on. Ruby's fake spider arm was now back in effect, giving her the appearance of a spider Faunus just like last time.

"The soldiers from your last mission speak highly of you," said Captain Cassius, her point of contact. "Well, they spoke highly of you. Most of them are dead from other assignments, but I trusted those who vouched for you with my life back when they still had their own."

Ruby wanted to ask about Ilia and if she was one of the 'most,' but she held her tongue. Ilia had been talking about leaving the White Fang at the time, so Ruby would just have to trust that she managed to get out. As for Trifa, the only other Fang whose name wasn't just a hazy blur in Ruby's memories, Ruby was basically sure that she was dead. That woman had been on a quest for martyrdom, and this organization was one that lent itself well towards the completion of those.

Cassius, the Faunus in charge who had rabbit paws for feet as his trait, gestured to the rest of Ruby's new temporary squad that filled the small room they'd been assigned to. Not one of them looked a day older than thirty. Their traits were all equally prominent, ranging from moose antlers to an entirely animalistic face that had a bird's beak and eyes.

"These are Venne, Hyacinth, Cory, and Richu," Cassius declared, his hands proudly resting on his hips. "None of us have our aura unlocked, but we guaran-damn-tee you that we'll fight like huntsmen."

Richu coughed.

"…and huntresses," Cassius amended. "Now then. How about you tell us about yourself, Rose?"

She nodded. "Ruby Rose. I work for my queen, Lady Salem. I was a huntress, but now I fight like…something more."

There was a momentary pause, during which Ruby realized that he'd been expecting something more, but the captain's professionalism was enough to catch on that she wasn't going to be sharing much more than that.

"Excellent. I hope the legends are true."

Ruby raised an eyebrow. "Legends?"

"A-About you and Adam."

"Heh." Ruby couldn't suppress her little laugh fast enough. "And pray tell, what legends of me are there?"

"Well, it was said that you and he charged headfirst into a trap set by the Atlesian military only to turn it against them, slay all their specialists, and use their own explosives to destroy their hardware. It was said that you two rode together into combat like you'd fought together for a thousand years."

Huh. I wasn't expecting the legends to basically be true, albeit exaggerated. We did trip their ambush, and he did win the fight that came next with my help.

"And that you rode him like you'd lain together for twenty years," added the birdfaced Faunus, elbowing the soldier next to him. Ruby wasn't sure if he was Hyacinth or the guy he elbowed was; Cassius hadn't been clear when pointing them out.

"Okay," said Cassius. "I think we've had enough of that. This is a visiting dignitary from our greatest and most respected ally, and we'll be sure to treat her as such." He cleared his throat. "Regardless of her relationship with Adam, Gods rest his soul."

The Faunus' eyes all dropped down, as did Ruby's IQ for having been in their proximity. These men and women were behaving like a rowdy bunch of children, not like the hardened strike force she'd expected after her time in Atlas. Ruby supposed that it made sense; Adam wasn't here to whip them into shape, and the comforts of home weren't going to do so in his place.

"So, what're the six of us going to be doing together?" she asked the captain. "Somethin' local? Patrolling the island?"

"Nope," he said. "We're going to be heading over to Mistral. Those SDC bastards are going to be putting down foundations for a new refinery not two hundred miles from Menagerie, and we're going to be sending them a clear message: go away!"

The five Faunus cheered, and Ruby did her best to do the same after another momentary pause. They were going back to Mistral…after she'd taken a ferry from the mainland over to the island of Menagerie to come and meet them.

Deep breaths, Ruby. Deep breaths.

Riding a quaint little boat from kingdom to kingdom was fun and all the first time around if only for the novelty of it, but the novelty was gone the second time. Ruby almost wished there would be a sea monster or something breaching through the serene surface of the ocean if only to break up the monotony. Sadly, it was not to be; Salem had given the Grimm in the waters orders to take a day or two off, knowing Ruby would have to pass through the channel.

"…be our first mission with the White Fang, but it sure as shit is going to also be our first success!"

Ruby smiled at the silly little Faunus. He clearly had no idea how these things went. None of them did.

I'm going to have to do everything on this mission and also keep them safe. This time, though, I won't have an attack dog Bull Faunus to set upon my enemies.

It wasn't all bad news, though. Atlas itself was the pinnacle of military discipline, whereas the SDC was known only for throwing its vast pool of resources at the problem. In a world where Ruby could avoid bullets with her semblance and tank the stray shots that hit her, quality was more of a threat than quantity.

The worst case scenario –

Don't tempt fate.

A bad scenario would be if the White Fang jumped out into the thickest bits of the fight to seek glory despite lacking aura, but hopefully her status as a folk hero of some sort would be enough to persuade them to at least let her go in front. It was getting closer to dusk, and there was little likelihood any sunlight would remain by the time they landed; perhaps Ruby could get a head-start by beetlewalking around the SDC construction sites.

Cassius was still going, and his prodding of Ruby's arm broke her out of her thoughts. His face was bright, though, so she just responded with an affirmative cheer to satisfy him. Although he and his people were all older than Ruby, it was impossible for her to look at his face and not see an exuberant child.

It was almost funny. Back when she'd been an equally naïve wain herself, the White Fang had seemed like the greatest threat to the world, one she'd hated with all the hate her little heart could muster. Now, they just felt like…people.

I suppose that tends to happen when I spend all my time with real monsters.

Coming Soon – Ruby's Broken Ground

And now, some tips from Ruby:

Ruby's Tip #808 – The best way to shuffle a deck of cards is to just buy a new one.

Ruby's Tip #746 – Is your storebought pizza too oily to enjoy? Scrub off the oil with soap and a sponge before eating.

Authors Notes

I know, it's whiplash to the neck after Ruby turned evil but then turned not evil again, but there's no way Ruby could do one truly intentionally evil thing and then decide to entirely abandon all of her morals that have been the only thing she's known for her entire life. You have to keep in mind that while she might have these dark moments one after the other from our perspective, she isn't just jumping from major event to major event. There will be time in between during which she can decompress, think about what she's done, and realize that life isn't utterly pointless. In the heat of the moment, with Watts and Salem bearing down on her insisting she be the villain, she might truly believe their rhetoric, but without their presence, Ruby will think for herself and come to what is (to her) the right conclusion.

So, she's accepted that she might have to pretend to be evil, but she knows she isn't going to be evil. Definitely not, no way...

But hey, we've got some new characters! All OCs, of course, so I think we know what happens next.

Happy rats, and don't do crime!