Chapter 5 – Ruby's Space
"Cinder," Ruby repeated.
"Cinder," said Salem, nodding with confidence.
"Cinder. C-Cinder?"
"Yes, Cinder."
Ruby pinched herself before she could repeat Salem's…Cinder's…her name once more. She had been so sure that this was Salem, but if this was just some terrorist who had nothing to do with the maidens and the Grimm, then it was all a waste.
Well, she'd come all this way, and it would've been a waste to give up too early. Cinder might actually be Salem, just giving out a pen name so she couldn't be traced by Ozpin. And if she wasn't, running with some plain old terrorists was probably the best way to get poached by Salem.
"So, Cinder," said Ruby, mentally cursing herself for sounding like a dummy. "I'm all for replacing the Huntsman Academies with something more fair, but that's a bit of a tall order. What makes you think that youuuuhaaaiigGGHHHEEEE!"
This time, Ruby's reaction was perfectly genuine, because a freaking GRIMM popped out of Salem's arm before she'd even asked her complete question. Salem (and now, Ruby was 100% sure that this was her, because it was a tad unlikely that there were two supervillainous women who commanded the Grimm) smirked the smirk of someone who took great pleasure in knowing more than you. She was relishing in the fear and surprise that Ruby showed when the beetle scuttled out of her fist, made a few rounds along her forearm, and then returned back to its burrow…its burrow inside of Salem's fist!
"Are you convinced?"
"What the heck was that?!"
"A Scarab. It may not seem powerful due to its size, but rest assured, it has its uses."
"Uses?"
Salem nodded. "Uses."
"It sucks young women," said Mercury, shrugging with a grin.
"Mercury!" hissed Salem.
"Sucks 'em dry," he added, for g̶o̶o̶d̶ bad measure.
"Sucks women?" Ruby asked, taking a few steps back from Salem and her suck-arm.
"Not like that. It can…this won't mean much to you, but it can steal a power that normally transfers upon death. It does not rob women of their chastity, or whatever my dear friend Mercury wishes to imply."
"Your tone doesn't make it sound like I'm a dear friend," Mercury said with a fake pout.
Power that transfers upon death…it had to be the maidens. Ruby was tied up in her own world at the jaw-dropping realization that Salem, the immortal Grimm Queen, wanted the power for herself. If should could get it, she would never die, meaning that she would have the maiden power forever, in theory. Ruby's desire to complete her mission grew more confident. She needed to do this.
She probably shouldn't have held her breath, as Salem had been correct in saying that the knowledge wasn't supposed to mean anything to Ruby, but she and Mercury seemed to be engaged in some minor contest of wills at the moment.
"I'm truly starting to not appreciate the way you flagrantly disobey me, Mercury. I gave you the greatest gift imaginable, my underling – a purpose. Without me, you would be floating through the world aimlessly…or worse. I brought you here when you were on death's door, Mercury. Your very life is owed to me rightfully. You will show me my due respect, Black."
Mercury squinted with a faltering grin. "Yeah, I would, 'cept your precious package of power didn't show when she was supposed to, and you didn't become the unkillable god queen you promise you'd become. I'm not going to lie, it does things to the troops' morale. Why, I'm sure that I've walked in on Emerald masturbating to you only twice this week. Only twice Cinder – down from five times last week!"
"Careful, boy. With young Ruby at our side, you might find yourself replaced soon enough."
Mercury squinted. "Mmmmmm, but she can't really go to Beacon as a transfer, now can she? Eh, Cindy?"
Salem was on Mercury faster than Zwei on dropped slices of Beacon. Er, bacon. One of her open hands caught him by the throat and began to glow, which somehow brought about a thin stream of smoke as she choked him. The other hand splayed out its fingers, and a glinting sword suddenly appeared out of thin air, its point aiming directly at Mercury's groin.
No, not out of thin air. The particles nearby were suddenly sucked in. Is it transformation? Mass conversion?
Ruby probably didn't need to analyze a magical witch's powers like a semblance, but old habits died hard. Either way, more knowledge would give her more to work with in the future, and if she could explain why she knew it as being the result of direct observations, it was all the better.
"Call me Cindy once more, and you'll discover that legs aren't the worst thing to have cut off."
Certainly Salem, if she despised the false name Cinder so much. I can't believe she approached me so fast. Ruby wasn't complaining about it, mind you.
"G-Got it. Ma'am."
"Good. I shouldn't have to –"
Emerald cleared her throat. "M-Ma'am. You said to remind you to…"
Salem turned her murderous gaze upon her second minion, but it returned to a more normal stare after a second or two. Releasing Mercury, she vaporized her sword back into the air or particulate matter from which it had formed and unruffled her dress.
"Thank you, Emerald. Miss Rose, I happen to be in need of womanpower at the moment. With Emerald and Mercury aiding me in hunting down some prey that recently failed to show up where it was supposed to, we are going to be unable to supervise a mutual acquaintance of ours. One whose incompetence is well known to you."
"Torchwick," Ruby breathed. If Salem expected Ruby to be familiar with someone, it pretty much had to be him. The two of them didn't really share anything else in common other than the night she'd helped him escape from Ruby.
"Precisely," said Salem with a nod. "I know it seems odd to partner you with him after you came to blows so recently, but after his numerous failures and your recent actions at Beacon, I'm inclined to trust you more than Roman. Or perhaps I trust him less. As a test of your abilities, I shall lend you to him for his next raid and –"
"Quick question," interjected Ruby.
Salem raised an eyebrow.
"Will you cancel the test before it starts and kick me to the curb on a whim?"
"…no?"
"Then I already like you more than Beacon," Ruby said with a grin.
Salem responded with one of her own, equally large but far more malicious. "Excellent. As I was saying, you shall both aid Roman in his acquisition of Dust and ensure he doesn't attempt to hide anything from me. Thrice in the past has Roman tried to keep me in the dark about secrets or failures of his. Had I not sent Emerald to spy on him, his little monster might've stayed under the radar for far longer." Salem shook her head. "But that is neither here nor there. I will give you more details when the time comes. I shall be in my space. In the meantime, Emerald will show you to your own."
Ruby looked around at the inside of the rather fine apartment. "Wait, I get to live here?"
Salem smiled. "I think you'll find I reward those under my command quite generously, Ruby. Emerald can attest."
And Mercury could attest to how she treated those who she didn't get on with. It was no matter, though; Ruby had every intention of being the best minion possible.
Ruby decided she liked Emerald the best. Of course, Emerald was still a criminal, and Ruby wasn't going to do something stupid like befriend her or fall in love with her, but that didn't mean she couldn't enjoy her presence while she was here. The alternatives were spending time with Salem – oh, excuse Ruby, she meant Cinder – or Mercury.
"Your space is your own," Emerald declared. "Anything you want to do in that space, you get to do. No one else can enter it."
"Cool," Ruby said.
"I know, right? Even Mercury, for all the shit he likes to pull, knows better than to enter someone else's space."
"My own room," said Ruby, smiling as she patted the bed on which they sat.
"Space," Emerald corrected.
She and Yang had always slept in beds opposite one another back in Patch, and even Beacon was said to house for hunters together in the same room – er, space. Ruby supposed that the alluring life of a criminal was already beginning to spoil her.
"You can eat any food in the fridge unless it belongs to Cinder," said Emerald.
"How can I tell which one belongs to S– Cinder?" asked Ruby. "Does she label it?"
"Everything in there belongs to Cinder."
Ruby considered asking what that was supposed to mean, but she had a feeling it would be better to just let it lie and eat out when she had the chance.
"Wait…" Ruby giggled. "So this is my space, right?"
Emerald nodded. "Right."
"And I get to say who comes in or not?"
"Right again."
"So if I, like, ordered you to leave, you'd actually have to? Even though I just got here?"
To Ruby's surprise, Emerald made a beeline for the door.
Ruby waved her hands frantically. "W-Wait, I wasn't saying –"
The older girl shrugged. "You never invited me in in the first place, so technically I'm not supposed to be here. The only reason this whole thing works so well is because Cinder wasn't lying when she said she rewards us generously. In our spaces, we are the queens, or kings in Mercury's case. There's no laws or rules or others to prevent us from doing whatever we want. I like to eat. Merc plays with drugs sometimes and occasionally cuts up small animals; no jokes, he's messed up in the head somethin' serious. And Cinder –"
The woman in question suddenly appeared. Slamming open the door to Ruby's space, she barged right in and roughly shoved Emerald out of the way. She went down with a hurt yelp, but Salem didn't even notice.
"YOU!" she screamed, her eyes glaring into Ruby's as she continued on her warpath.
Oh shit.
That sounded an awful lot like the scream of someone who knew Ruby's secret. A more prepared person might've had some extraction plan in place, but Ruby hadn't gotten that far and could only scramble backwards until her shoulders and neck bonked into the wall.
"YOU!" Salem screamed again.
"M-Me?"
"Your eyes! Color!"
"What? W-W-What?"
Salem's hand, the one without the beetle, wrapped around Ruby's throat and lifted her at least a foot off the ground as she rose to her full height.
"What. Color. Are. Your. EYES!"
Every word was gritted out with murderous intent. Ruby could tell that there was a right answer, something Salem wanted to hear, and if she got it wrong, she could actually die right then and there.
"S-Silver," she whimpered.
"Not gray?" Salem desperately asked, irritation in her voice – no, not irritation. Pleading. In that moment, Ruby realized that whatever the right answer was, silver was not it.
Ruby said nothing, but her silence was enough to confirm that her answer wasn't being recanted. Ruby had no clue what the big deal was, but whatever it was, it mattered a whole lot to Salem.
The hand on her neck flung her across the room, and Ruby's aura flared up as her head slammed into another wall with a wretched crack. The room itself was weaker than Ruby, and it broke first. It wasn't particularly painful – Yang herself tended to hit harder when they wrestled – but the fury of the attack sent Ruby into a mental tailspin as she entered fight or flight mode.
Flight wasn't an option. She was supposed to stay here and complete her mission. Except, she was almost certainly made…
Fighting would be no different than suicide, at this point.
Mercury briefly cracked open his door, peeked a small tuft of silver hair out at the commotion, then hastily retreated back to safety.
Fearing another strike, Ruby covered her face with her arms and curled up into a ball, but the dreaded attack never came. As quickly and as abruptly as she had entered, Salem stormed out the still open door, loudly raving as she did. Her furious screeches didn't sound like any intelligible speech, but they continued on as she went down the hall and out the door of the apartment.
"W-What the hell was that?!" asked Emerald, when she was sure Salem was long gone. She stared at Ruby. "What's wrong with your eyes?!"
"Nothing!" Ruby said. "I don't know?!"
Emerald scrambled to her feet, took one last look at Ruby's destroyed space, and hustled out the door.
Emerald came back a few times throughout the rest of the day to ask a few information-gathering questions as she tried to make sense of Salem's absence following her state of rage, but other than that, Ruby just sat silently and unmolested in her space.
Had Salem figured it out? If so, Ruby needed to get out of here before she came back and killed her…or worse. The Queen of the Grimm probably would take great pleasure in torturing little kids to madness.
But has she, though? Figured it out, that is. Because if Salem knew who Ruby was, there was no reason for her to leave the shared apartment without either a) taking Ruby with her as a prisoner or b) killing her in that instant. And the whole eye thing was still throwing Ruby for a loop. Silver eyes were the same thing that Headmaster Ozpin had abruptly brought up when he first met Ruby, and now Salem was interested in them. What…What was going on?
The right move would be to flee. The smart move would be to flee.
But if Ruby's cover wasn't blown…
At this point, it was a matter of weighing the risks and the benefits. Ruby's life was on the line, but so was that of every man, woman, and child on Remnant. Ozpin and Qrow had already given their lives for the cause – no, I can't misremember things like that, Qrow didn't give his life for anything! – and to give up now would be something she couldn't take back. If she ran, Salem would never let her back in.
Roll the dice and risk her own life, or run away and be sure to live to see another day.
The choice was Ruby's, and it wasn't much of a choice at all.
The next morning at around 5am, Ruby awoke to her door being slammed open. Salem stalked in with Mercury to her left and Emerald to her right, but the violent intent from before was absent.
Time to face the music, I guess.
"Come with me, Rose," she said.
Ruby nodded and followed wordlessly. She made sure to grab Crescent just in case before Salem led her out the main door of their apartment, down the stairwell to the bottom floor, along the street to the other side of Vale, past several cordoned off crime scenes that had Torchwick's name all over them…
Would it be normal to ask where we're going? Ruby wondered. Like, I'm going for authentic Ruby Rose, awkwardness and silliness and lack of awareness and all, and I would probably ask to be told our destination by this point. It's not weird to want to know where the four of us are heading…
Except every instinct in Ruby's body was screaming at her to stay silent. Salem's face was that of a Dust-keg, waiting to explode at the slightest of provocations. Both her supersecret spy side and her authentic Ruby side were telling her not to poke the barely restrained Leviathan. Maybe on a normal walk with the gang, but not on this 'subtext of instantaneous murder' walk.
She ended up following Salem all the way to warehouse in the industrial district of Vale, where most of the factories were. Lots of things that didn't fit well in the residential centers of the kingdoms like assembly plants and whatnot tended to be placed outside the walls and were responsible for their own defenses and employee shuttling, but this region was home to the facilities that were too important to risk losing to a Grimm attack.
Ruby looked around at the setting and found herself growing uneasy. This place was rife with smoke, making it harder to breathe and almost impossible to see further than a few meters ahead. If she tried to make a break for it, it would be sure to end in failure and capture.
She'd come this far. There was no backing out now.
At long last, they stopped. Salem looked like every step of the voyage had strained her mentally. Massaging her temples, she raised a well-groomed hand and snapped her fingers carefully, as though she didn't want to perform the action at all.
"Why, are those the delicate nails of Cinder Fall I hear?"
Ruby turned instantly, Crescent at the ready, but when Roman Torchwick sauntered out from behind them, Emerald gently placed a hand to her sniper-scythe to push it down. The nonverbal message was received, and Ruby let the weapon be lowered.
Roman smiled the crookedest of grins at Ruby as he approached their party, arms wide and cane twisting. "Ho ho ho, what's this? Little Red, c–"
"Another word and I kill you."
The threat from Salem was said with such emptiness, such lack of anger, that it somehow sounded scarier than Salem's earlier ruthless interrogation of Ruby. The way Salem spoke so neutrally, one might've thought Roman were a waiter at a fancy restaurant being given an order, not a man receiving a promise to end his life. If anything, the Grimm Queen sounded more tired, like she didn't have time to bluster or intimidate and was simply relying on her reputation to speak for her. Evidently, it did, since Torchwick shut his mouth and retreated to safe distance. However, in spite of her orders to stop speaking, he kept talking.
"Bullhead. Just down that way." He nodded off to the side with his head. "Your keys."
Salem waved a hand, and Mercury collected the fob for her. She continued to rub her head for a few seconds, then took the small item from her appointed middleman.
"Roman. Go. Emerald. Go with him. Watch him. Mercury. Just…busy yourself. Don't care. I'll be gone."
The curt sentences only filled Ruby with more and more dread, but somehow they reassured her as well. Salem hadn't killed her yet, and if she wanted Ruby dead, there had been ample opportunity. Emerald was being dismissed to what should have been Ruby's task, but it seemed more to Ruby that this indicated Salem was planning something else for her rather than wanting to get rid of her.
"Rose. On the bullhead."
Ruby looked out in the direction that Roman had nodded.
"Now," Salem snarled, the murderous look in her eyes returning.
Ruby marched.
In the end, when it was just the two of them on the airship (the very same getaway vehicle from the night Ruby had first encountered Salem, if she recognized it properly) with Salem at the helm, the villainous woman's shoulders finally sagged. She let out a deep, overly long sigh and threw her head back against the seat's rest.
"Ruby Rose. Silver eyes."
"T-That's my name, don't wear it…don't…y-yes? Er, ma'am?"
"You have been summoned to meet someone."
"Okay."
That didn't sound good. If this person they were meeting was troubling enough to make the immortal leader of the Grimm stressed out, Ruby wanted nothing to do with them. Who could bother the mighty Salem?
"Her name is Salem."
"I thought you were S–"
Ruby's heart nearly exploded out of her chest.
" – supposed to be in charge."
It was a fairly smooth save, with little to no time lost on the stutter, but Ruby's heartrate continued to remain in the high thousands.
Salem…Not-Salem didn't seem to pick up on the fact that Ruby had known Salem was in charge of her, instead just emitting a noise somewhere between a groan and a growl. Ruby chalked it down to either it being obvious that Salem was the boss from context clues, or just that Not-Salem was too jumped up on adrenaline and fear to even notice Ruby's slip.
"I am but a servant to the woman who is now our shared mistress. This is not information to which you or any of those beneath me should be privy, but Salem has requested your immediate presence, trumping all other concerns of my assignment. Your actions shall reflect on me, Rose."
"I understand…"
Uhhhhhhhhhm. What was Not-Salem's name again? Crap! Uh, Cindy? No, not that. Something really, really close to it, though.
"…Cinder."
That was it, Cinder.
"Good," said Cinder. "See that you do not embarrass me in front of her."
Cinder, Cinder, Cinder, not Salem – that was going to take some getting used to and a whole lotta repeating inside of Ruby's head.
Coming Soon – Ruby's Job Interview
And now, some tips from Ruby:
Ruby's Tip #71 – Worried about an unplanned pregnancy? Cover your roof in barbed wire – the stork won't be able to land.
Ruby's Tip #16 – For a cleanlier place to live, release some cockroaches and rats into your house to clean up any crumbs you spill.
Author's Notes
Well, so much for a slow build up. I guess we're diving straight into the deep end by Chapter 6.
Happy rats, and don't do crime!
