Author's Notes

Sorry for the delay. My computer auto-restarted when it updated, so the page was closed and I forgot to post this morning.

Happy rats, and don't do crime!

Chapter 15 – Ruby's Regret

Roman hadn't been quite right about Ruby being unable to escape the police. When the first sound of sirens filled her ears, she used her semblance to get out of there faster than a skeleton at a dog park. The mission was complete, as per Salem's instructions, but Ruby didn't feel victorious. Salem had manipulated Ruby into harassing a bunch of innocent Faunus who had nothing to do with the White Fang, and she'd somehow even tricked Ruby into feeling good about it for a second there.

It was a solid victory for both Salem and Ruby. On Salem's part, she'd pushed Ruby one step closer to doing evil things and being the villain she wanted the silver-eyed huntress to become. On Ruby's part, she'd managed to pull off her first action mission successfully and gained more of Salem's trust.

The next step was to meet up with Cinder, but with Tyrian off to do his own thing, there was no rush. She'd texted the woman on her scroll that she would only be free two hours from now, effectively buying her time to gather herself and prepare for the upcoming interaction with her girlfriend.

It's not that bad, what I did. Like, if Salem had told me it was a group of normal people and not terrorists, I would have done it anyways, because it was my cover.

The problem with that logic was that Salem perfectly anticipated the way Ruby would think. She'd taken comfort in the fact that the people she'd been telling off were terrorists, and upon learning that they really weren't, she'd retroactively tried to justify her actions. Salem had probably even planned for that.

This is her win, not mine. But…the whole thing is that I'm going to have to let her win until it all ends, so I guess her winning is my victory…

Ozpin had really outdone himself. The further Salem dug her claws into Ruby, the better off he would be. Everyone got to win but Ruby.

"White Fang? Of course it was the White Fang," Cinder assured Ruby. "Tyrian might be baffling, but he's also bafflingly competent."

"Are you sure?" said Ruby. "Cuz, like, they never game me any indication that they were evil."

"Would terrorists advertise themselves? The White Fang would not have survived as long as it did if they couldn't fit back into civilization at a moment's notice."

"Ok."

"I'm serious," Cinder said. "Adam Taurus, the most hateful one of the Brother Gods' creations' I've ever met, knows that there can come times when he must shake hands with the enemies and disavow his own cause. If he can do that, then does it surprise you that a handful of grunts ten miles down the chain of command are wise enough not to pick a fight with a human child in public?"

"I said ok."

"And I said I'm serious." Cinder pulled Ruby back towards her before she could turn away in frustration. "Ruby, this isn't some conspiracy to discredit you. If you'd been fed false information going into this mission, you would've been more likely to fail it. Salem cares more for success than anything else."

Except Salem's goal for me isn't just to have me do her bidding. She wants me to embrace the bad guy dynamic you all are already a part of.

Ruby didn't even for a second consider that Cinder was telling the truth, because the way things turned out was faaaaaar too perfect for Salem's goals to have been a misunderstanding. She'd lied intentionally about it being the White Fang, and she'd let Ruby figure out on her own that she'd done something horrible.

"Let's move on," Ruby said. "What's my next job?"

"Can't we just enjoy one another's company for a moment?" asked Cinder, batting her eyes coquettishly. Ruby would've thought it intentionally sarcastic if not for the fact that Cinder had the romantic sense of a dead reindeer. Cinder was stalling for some reason.

Still, she couldn't call Cinder out on it. Both girls were holding the truth hostage, and it was to neither of their benefit to expose the shallowness of their faux relationship.

"I would, but this is Roman's apartment, and I don't like the idea of relaxing around him."

"I'm right here," said Roman, leaning back from the couch on which he sat. "I can hear you."

"That's a good point," said Cinder, smirking at Ruby. "He's quite the disgusting little bug when you get down to it."

"He absolutely is. Do you have any other places to go beside our apartment that used to belong to him but doesn't when we're in it?" Ruby asked. "Anywhere else we can have some privacy?"

There isn't. The only other place she has is Beacon, and asking me to go there would be stupid.

"I'm afraid I don't, Little Rose. With your face as well known as it is, we no longer have the luxury of going out in public."

"Well, if that's the case…"

Cinder stepped away and shook her head. "It's not so simple. I know you're eager to get more achievements under your belt, but…"

"What's the problem?"

"Let's talk somewhere more private."

They didn't actually leave. Instead, Cinder just realized that she could send Roman away and did so, instructing him to steal some more Dust. Ruby had explained how she and Torchwick had successfully teamed up and that Cinder was tying his hands by asking him to do it publicly, and Cinder (beholden to Ruby's will due to Salem's maiden choice) had agreed.

When he was out and away, Cinder took Ruby into Cinder's own space and shut the door tightly.

"Do not summon your Scarab for any reason."

"I wasn't planning to."

"Good. Don't. It cannot hear us while within your arm, but when drawn outside by your will, it can fully perceive the world around it as well as any other Grimm."

Ruby recalled sending it down Torchwick's throat. Had Salem been seeing the thief's tonsils through her Grubbie's eyes? It wasn't a secret that she'd done it, but it might be awkward the next time she went to Evernight for a status update and had to come face to face with the woman who she'd forced to look into a grown man's gullet.

"C-Can Salem see it? W-What the beetle sees, that is."

Cinder softly shook her head. "No, her grace cannot see what the Scarabs see. However, they contain memories she can access if she were to command them to exit your body in her presence. She would have to be close."

"Okay," Ruby said. "Good to know."

Cinder looked at her questioningly. "Have you done something that shouldn't be seen by her?"

"No," Ruby said truthfully. "I used the beetle in a fight in a gross way, and I just wanna know if Salem was watching."

"You used the…huh. That's actually a rather interesting concept."

Ruby shrugged. "Besides, it you who's keeping things from Salem."

That got a reaction from the other woman, and a quite unpleasant one. Her yellow eyes departed from Ruby and flicked anxiously to the door. "I would never keep anything from our queen. What could possibly make you think otherwise?"

"Cinder, it's kinda obvious. You told me to keep my Scarab hidden. Unless we're gonna…d-do it, and you don't want anyone to know, it's gotta be something secret that would upset Salem."

Cinder surged forward and gripped Ruby's shoulders. "I-I am not going to try and harm you, Ruby. You know that, right? Ri–?"

"Relax, Cin." Ruby removed the hands that were on her. "I'm not gonna go telling to Salem on you. I know you would never backstab me."

Because Salem would wipe you off the face of Remnant, assuming you were even alive after your Scarab tried to eat you alive, Ruby thought.

"Because you love me," Ruby said.

Ruby got up on her tippy-toes to kiss Cinder. When their lips parted, she smiled.

"Good," said Cinder. "Good, good. Ruby…I want us to do something that Salem would absolutely approve of, but only if we succeed. Her grace thinks it's too early, and that you're not yet properly trained. I agree that you are still inexperienced, but in my opinion, that means we need to do this now, before your life is imperiled on any other missions. You've already been on two, and for every second of those short tasks, my heart nearly burst out of my chest with worry that harm would befall you."

Ruby grinned cheekily and wiggled her shoulders. "Awwwww, you care."

"Of course, Ruby, of course."

Ruby didn't doubt that Cinder was worrying her ears off every time Ruby went out into the field, but not out of any genuine concern for her charge's well-being.

"So, what's the job?" Ruby asked.

Cinder looked her dead in the eyes, her expression steady. "I think it's time you became a maiden."

"The Spring maiden?" Ruby asked, her jaw nearly dropping.

"No," Cinder said, her head pulling back. "Fall, actually. Why Spring?"

Ruby racked her brains to come up with the best excuse she could on short notice.

"Cuz it's the first one."

Cinder stared at her in confusion. "The…first…one. The first one? I don't follow."

"The first season in the year. Spring."

"The…oh. O-Okay. N-No, we're going to be hunting down the Fall maiden to get you her power." Cinder regained some of her composure, likely not wanting to appear flustered in front of her underling/boss/girlfriend/master/Ruby. "Emerald, Mercury, and I were able to locate her in a small pitstop of a settlement, Temeria, before she returned to Vale prior to arriving at whatever final destination she had in mind."

"Because of Qrow," Ruby said, knowing that Cinder was aware of this and aware that Ruby was aware of it.

"Because of your uncle, yes." Cinder nodded. "Our goal here is to visit Temeria, locate any clues as to the maiden's movements, and ideally figure out what the intentions behind her travels truly are. Well, ideally we'd run into her and kill her, but short of receiving the very Gods' favor, I think it's unlikely that we'll accomplish that today."

"How long do you think finding her will take?"

"I only have an excused absence of a week from Beacon," Cinder said. "Lionheart can remotely write off a single student for that long without it seeming suspicious. Mercury and Emerald will remain there in my stead, saying that an urgent family situation has arisen. With Qrow and Ozpin dead, though, Fall will never be more vulnerable – we've you to thank for that."

It's almost funny – Amber was out visiting family before she got called back, and now you're claiming the same.

Wait.

Wait, something about that seemed…off. Ruby scrunched up her brow.

Something that Cinder had said just couldn't be right, but Ruby was unable to put her finger on it. She didn't think it was any secret knowledge from Ozpin that she wasn't supposed to have, but just the way Cinder was speaking about her time in Beacon that tipped off Ruby's sense of wrongness.

Deciding to take the risk, she went for a direct approach.

"Cinder, uh…"

"Yes?"

"I don't follow. How are you getting time off from Beacon?"

"I'm only a transfer student, not an actual enrollee. Thus, Leonardo Lionheart is my headmaster, not Glynda Goodwitch."

Ruby's BS radar continued to beep, louder and louder.

She squinted, unsure of where this might be going. "Leonardo Lionheart…"

"Oh, I forgot that you didn't know. He's one of Salem's."

Ruby froze.

But he's…

Lionheart was supposed to be a hero. With equivalent power to the other headmasters, he was both one of the physically strongest huntsmen alive in the entire world and one of the most politically influential people out there, period. No ordinary Faunus was at the same level of prestige as the esteemed Ozpin and the Atlesian general of steel. The man managed an entire academy – by Dust, he managed an entire kingdom!

If he was on the side of the Grimm, that meant humanity had already lost.

Goodwitch needed to know this. Whatever maiden powers Ruby might get paled in comparison to the knowledge that one of the four headmasters was a traitor. There could be an untold number of lives lost if he remained in his position.

I'm already in Vale. I need to come in with this. Miss Goodwitch will understand why this trumps a single maiden's powers that I wasn't sure to get anyways. They said that no intelligence could be worth more than Spring, but they didn't think I would find out something like this.

Besides, the good guys might yet find the Spring maiden. My only job was to make sure that Salem's team doesn't find it first.

Ruby's mission could change. With Ozpin dead and Goodwitch so far away, there was no one to make decisions for her but her. She felt confident that if they knew what she'd just learned, they would concur.

One maiden can't be worth –

Ruby looked at Cinder, realizing that neither of them had said anything for nearly a minute.

"I know," Cinder said with a smile rich with understanding. "It's a bit of a shock to those not yet in the know."

It wasn't one maiden at stake here. It was all four.

If Salem's side got their hands on any of the maidens, like Amber who they were dangerously close to finding already, the power would go to Ruby. That meant that her mission to find the Spring maiden had already grown to encompass keeping any of the maidens from being stolen and controlled by Salem.

If I bail here, Salem will just go back to Cinder as her maiden host, and she'll track down Amber and become Fall.

Perhaps the knowledge that Lionheart was a traitor wasn't worth a single maiden. But it could easily be worth all four.

Assuming that Spring was the hardest maiden to find, given both side's difficulties in locating her, it was likely that Ruby would be tasked with accumulating the powers of the other three first. If she quit now, it would be no different than dangling those powers in front of Cinder and by extension Salem.

And Miss Goodwitch said Lionheart was spearheading Ozpin's search efforts for Spring. The good guys have no chance of finding her first if I don't stick around. If I call it in and spook him, he'd take all his leads to Salem, and I'd lose my cover with her.

But would she? Could Ruby somehow stick around with Cinder and also somehow leak the truth about Haven's headmaster to Miss Goodwitch? Was there a way to have both her cake and eat it to?

Ruby sighed and mumbled some sort of apology to Cinder for being so distracted. If there were such a way, it expired about a minute ago when Ruby reacted as she had.

Should she discreetly reach out to Beacon and have them remove Lionheart, Cinder would remember this exact conversation, where Ruby clammed up and entirely shut down for a full minute upon learning about Lionheart. There was no way she or one of the other minions wouldn't put two and two together to figure out Ruby was a spy.

On the other hand, if Ruby learned the truth and did nothing to act on it, they'd only trust her more. After all, what kind of spy wouldn't report back such valuable intel?

"L-Lionheart," Ruby said, still astounded. "I can't believe…"

Cinder smirked, but for the first time it looked more like she was smirking with Ruby than at her. "Their very leader is an ally of ours. The academies don't stand a chance."

Despite the horror she felt in knowing that statement to be entirely true, Ruby forced back an equally self-congratulatory smile.

With her resolve renewed and her decision made, Ruby and Cinder set out on the trail to the village of Temeria in search of Amber. Ruby already knew who the maiden was and what she was doing in that area (visiting family), but she couldn't reveal that information to Cinder. To prevent this, she'd taken to calling the maiden Pumpkin (because Fall) in her head, just so if she slipped up, she wouldn't say the name Amber.

Given that Ozpin described their powers as world-altering and able to shape the course of history as it was written, Ruby was oddly underwhelmed by the mundane path of A…Pumpkin's travels. This area was practically devoid of Grimm entirely, and there didn't seem to be many troublemaking bandits either. Ruby knew that the maidens had to be kept secret because…because…for some reason, and she accepted that, but if she had the magic Pumpkin did, she would at least travel the most Grimm infested route to clear them and protect others. And yet, as Ruby and Cinder traversed along the dirt trail with only a wooden fence on one side to remind her that civilization existed…

"I thought that the maidens were supposed to be Ozpin's protectors of humanity," she asked Cinder. "What the heck would she be doing this far away from…you know, humanity?"

"I can't say," said Cinder. "It shall be our goal to ascertain this from any clues."

Amb…darn it, Pumpkin had been visiting family, or at least she was planning to. That much was obvious. However, Ruby couldn't rightly recall ever having heard of miraculous weather phenomena saving the kingdoms or the settlements from Grimm. In fact, she often heard the opposite story quite frequently – swaths of innocent people falling to the Grimm. If the maidens were the secret protectors of mankind, where were they?

"Have you ever fought a maiden?" asked Ruby.

"No, or I would be one."

"Have any of Salem's people ever fought maidens?" asked Ruby. "Or her Grimm?"

"No, but I assure you, Little Rose, they do –"

"No, that's not it!" Ruby said, with more volume than she'd intended. "What I mean is, the maidens are supposed to be Ozpin's secret weapons against Salem. So why isn't he using them? Why are maidens traveling down dusty paths to the middle of nowhere when villages are being torn down every day by he– by our forces?"

Cinder scratched at her chin in thought. "Their secrecy is necessary to prevent the maidens from becoming sought after commodities by powerful individuals like governments or the wealthy…but you are right. It's rather peculiar that he doesn't deploy them."

"It's not just odd – if you have a weapon as powerful as the maidens, you'd be making a tactical mistake to just perpetually hide them away. Humanity is just barely holding out against the Grimm – he could at least send the maidens to remote corners of the globe, or have them fight people like us. If Pum…if the Fall maiden hunted down and killed me, it wouldn't compromise her secrecy."

"Then he's a fool," said Cinder. "Who doesn't deserve to win the upcoming –"

"He's not," Ruby interrupted. She was getting kinda tired of Cinder missing the point in favor of just assuming she knew what Ruby meant. "Ozpin is not…er, was not a…actually, since he's coming back, he is not a fool. He's managed to fight Salem's infinitely spawning Grimm despite her immortality making her actually immortal. He's smart, and clever, and crafty. And yet he doesn't use the maidens for war…"

"…which means he has a reason for hiding them," said Cinder, catching on with a grin. Ruby couldn't lean away in time as Cinder tussled her hair. "He's not the only one who's clever."

"It's not that he's using them for something else, since nothing else could be more important than Salem," Ruby reasoned. "And besides, he has more than one of them, so if he did have another project, he could just split them up."

"The vault keys?" Cinder said. "Perhaps he's not holding them back but merely keeping them out of action to protect the relics."

That wouldn't be it. Am…Pumpkin was being sent out to visit her family, so he was certainly willing to part with them. He just wasn't willing to send them out to fight any real battles.

Maybe is that he's too afraid to send them against Salem's minions and Grimm in particular. He lost Spring, which must've made him more timid with the other three. From Ozpin's point of view, the maidens are just lying low, pretending to be normal huntresses, and Salem's none the wiser. If he ordered them to engage the baddies, they might win, but they might also lose, and he'd rather just perpetuate the status quo. It costs Ozpin villages and human lives, but if his maidens just keep moseying about, their covers won't be –

SHIT!

"Vault key?" Ruby asked, turning away from Cinder to stare off into the trees. Her face would be showing terror at the near miss, and she couldn't risk her partner seeing it. "What, like from the video game?"

Ruby could feel Cinder looking at her funnily. "What?"

"What's a vault key? And what's a relic?"

Dang it, that was way too close. As Cinder launched into an explanation of the mechanics of maidenry that Ruby already knew, she let out a sigh of relief and pretended to be gazing out into the forests around them.

Jeez, Ozpin. You're playing it safe with the maidens, but it isn't working, and it certainly isn't anywhere near safe. Cinder's already hot on Pumpkin's trail, and she would've found her if it hadn't been for me and Qrow throwing a wrench into her plans.

And it wasn't just the maidens he'd endangered.

Ruby was out here, barely hanging on to her own skin. Had Cinder been a bit more skeptical, that might've been curtains for Ruby.

Not that Ozpin would care. I'm not some trusted, valued agent of his like my uncle. I'm just a child that he invested no time in and threw into the firepit at the first sign of usefulness there. If I die, it's merely the loss of a long-shot opportunity to recover Spring.

Ruby could see how expertly he'd played her. By asking a freshly traumatized child who just accidentally ended her uncle's life to double down and publicly murder him, he'd bound her to his cause. Miss Goodwitch was the only one who could exonerate Ruby of her crimes and her guilt. If she quit midway, it would be a life on the run from the law for Ruby, with her family hating her and the police perpetually chasing her.

Ruby hated Salem. She hated Salem for killing villages, for seeing her as nothing more than a tool to give Ozpin grief, for being the evil in the world that so many huntsmen and huntresses died to stop.

But in that moment of seeing Ozpin fail to protect the maidens, fail to protect the kingdoms, fail to protect Ruby, she hated him just the same.

Coming Soon – Ruby's Road Trip

And now, a tip from Ruby:

Ruby's Tip #802 – Always forgetting your car keys? Get your ears pierced, then hang them as earrings.

Ruby's Note – This tip does not work for rattlesnakes, as they have neither ears nor car keys.

Author's Notes

She's technically wrong - snakes have ears, but they're internal and can't be pierced, so we'll let it slide.

Ruby has discovered the cure to gaslighting - tell the truth to go fuck itself and remain absolutely certain of what you believe whether or not it's right or wrong. We'll never explicitly find out whether it was truly the White Fang or just some Faunus fellas, so it's up for you to decide. Personally, I like to think that it was really [Redacted - Death of the Author].

Ruby might be anthropomorphizing Ozpin a bit. He probably wasn't thinking it through that deeply, even if it did work out like it did. There was one meme I saw, where they compared the fandom's expectation of Ozpin with his actual canon motivations/goals. On one side, he was a manipulative mastermind who masterfully convinced Team RWBY to do his bidding with no regard for those hurt by his machinations. On the other, he was just like 'What the fuck is going on? Where the fuck am I?'

We're switching gears and doing a good old fashioned Amber hunt, now. That means bye for now to Roman, but he will return.

Happy rats, and don't do crime!