Chapter One
Nothing else can compare to the serenity of sleep. It was freedom from pain, struggle, fear, and stress. The woman didn't know her name, her present, or her future, and she didn't care. There was something beautiful about that. Now, here in this limbo, she was free from the perpetual anxiety that had hooked her heart and threatened to tear its deepest recesses open.
That spell was broken when eyes of deep silver fluttered open. Screens cast rays of cold, deathly light across a sterile room as periodic beeps shattered awkward, unnatural silence. Her throat hurt, far worse than the worst flu she had ever had across her twenty years. Each breath was a painful rasp pulled across glass sandpaper, forced through lips so dry they felt fused in places; if her eyes were not so withered, they'd drip tears down her cheeks at the pain.
She was not alone. Statues of shadow stood at all edges of this hospital room, packed several degrees beyond what had been intended. She closed her eyes, mustering what little energy she had left. She breathed deeply through her nose, choking down a ball of cold, wet needles. With shaky hands, she pried herself free of the sheets, propping her torso up with shaky, atrophied arms. Her movement caught the attention of the shadows.
Five pairs of eyes swim around her, swarming like bottom feeders hungry to pick at a corpse salvaged from the void. Their cries of concerns and ignorant sympathy bite down to her bones, eagerly tearing at the wall that separated her from everyone else. Why does everyone do this? Why can't they understand that this piranha-hungry insistence on coddling her did not bring the comfort they so desperately claim to want?
Several of the eyes take a seat on her bed, and several more reach out to stroke her face and hair with shadowed hands. Voices flood her with even more words, almost a dozen different rapid streams of emotion crashing against themselves in an effort to reach her first.
This was supposed to cleanse her—to wash away the blood that almost stained her hands? All it did was choke her, weigh her down, take her away from the here and now, and threaten to drown her. Her throat, already raw, burned and throbbed under their attentions.
The nameless woman looked up, blotting out all that wasn't herself. She sighted, closing her eyes to savor a second's worth of respite. For a brief moment, she imagined swimming in the void once again. The comfort was a rush of blood to her head similar to a temple massage; eyes so lax they almost watered under their lids.
In this pitch black abyss, a second stretched unnaturally long; she could feel herself floating down. A world without light and sound was so serene, but it seemed she could not swim too deep. Not yet. A current snagged her flailing mind and dragged her closer to consciousness.
Rays of light pierced from overhead in triplets, each one a source of a distinct sensation of comfort and love. The brightest was motherly and warm, familial; another was colder, but refreshing, and promised lavish attentions; the last was dimmer than the other two, yet it promised acceptance and shelter from the overwhelming brightness of the others.
Those three beacons were the only reasons she had to breach the surface.
She opened her eyes again, but she was no longer in the hospital room; neither was she bedridden, now standing in a realm that was between dreams and reality. She wasn't scared. She felt something approaching familiarity here, but as to why, she could not say.
She braved this old but new world with all the certainty of a half-remembered dream, the locations around her blending into a single kaleidoscopic mass that could last either seconds or decades, for time was a mangled thing here. Regardless of what shape, the landscape around her was carved from crystalline memories. Sharp and jagged mountains of regret were veined with rivers of bloody insecurities and terror; relics of her childhood, rendered in chipped and battered crystal as if carved from fractured impressions, broke up the horizon everywhere she looked. She felt nothing for them.
As she walked, she passed giant statues of weathered bronze, armored in rust, sporadically scattered about like the last vestiges of a forgotten civilization. The first was of her sister; the next was a pair, her other two teammates, faces frozen in what looked to be terror. After a few seconds, yet traveling the length of a continent, she saw a woman buried to the waist in something neither sand nor dust, cradling an infant to her chest. She suspected it was her mom holding her infant self.
She walked this hallucination for what could have been either an eternity, or maybe it was just a few heartbeats. The woman without a name wandered in a random direction, heading deeper into what felt like the heart of this world. As she trudged across endless sands of time, some of the reflections of the past sparkled with scenes she did not know. No, it went beyond that—like visions of a different life.
She didn't turn to face these reflections or even bother questioning their existence. She felt nothing for them. They were always here, and, as with every other time she wandered this strange land, the deeper she got, the more abstract the visions became. After a few seconds, yet traveling the length of a continent, scenes of mountains and rivers that did not exist on Remnant gave way to grand mandalas of stars and planets beyond this solar system. Another hundred or so years, they too receded, replaced with even more abstract visions captured in crystal.
She was suddenly at the core a heartbeat later, standing at a hole in all things. She could not explain to herself how she managed to get here; whenever she tried to recall the direction to this pit, all she got was a blank blot smearing her memories.
At the edge of her bare feet was a twisting void plunging into an infinite abyss, with a black so true it consumed all form, light, and thought. There was no sound or temperature—a numbing feeling with no beginning or end.
A presence shook her from her trance. She felt it bearing down on her, as if its gaze were a physical weight tugging at her limbs, preventing her from taking the final plunge.
Wake up
The voice calling out to her was not coming from the presence; rather, it was coming from somewhere outside her own mind, shaking the land with thunderous might. Shivering, as if doused in water and left for a winter night to claim, the nameless woman peered over a pale shoulder with silver eyes.
What she saw had no physical form—it was an absence creating a two-dimensional silhouette, like shadows shaped by an absence of light. Within an otherwise beautiful mixture of nebulae, constellations, and galaxies, a void took shape. A great vulture blotted out a third of the sky, its skinny, bald head held high, while a thick body gripped the horizon itself, like a creature of the abyss perched on black waters.
Wake up
Something about its visage tore a cold pit in her gut, a primordial familiarity...
Wake up!
...
Eyes of beautiful silver fluttered open, registering the fuzzy sterility of a sparse, metal room. Someone has pulled her back from the ledge once again. There was a nagging hook in her head—a twinge of regret at waking up. There was an urge deep within her soul that wished to return to sleep, to return to not being anybody again.
Long, elegant fingers trailed across Ruby's cheek and nose in idle affection. "Everything alright?" Weiss asked softly, as if afraid of agitating the ghosts that haunt Ruby's mind. "You were tossing and turning pretty bad."
"... Yeah." Ruby grumbled, her eyes only half open, voice muffled by a satin pillow stained with morning drool. Weiss's face was the blur of a picture mid-development, yet it still managed to be so beautiful. As Ruby's eyes adjusted to the newfound light coming from their nightstand, the face crystallized into a delicate princess worthy of myth, azure eyes piercing through even the fog of deep sleep, her white hair spilling over her shoulder in its full, untamed glory.
"How are we doing on time?"
Before answering, Weiss crawled on hands and knees over their bed, over Ruby's form, and positioned herself up against the smaller girl underneath their blankets. When together, even with only two, their bed became toasty in the most blissful sense. With all four of them, it was heaven—euphoria, comfort, and love distilled into physical warmth that swaddled the soul just as much as the body.
"On schedule," she hummed into Ruby's ear. "Defiantly less than a half-hour."
"Who's driving?"
"Yang," Weiss replied, parting red-tipped hair from Ruby's face. Though, really, driving was a bit of an overstatement. This airship piloted itself and had been from the moment they hit the water sixteen hours ago. Standard operating procedure for a protracted flight like this was, so long as someone aboard the vessel was properly trained, to simply watch for course corrections or if they needed an emergency manual override. Other than that, it was common to not have anyone in the pilot's seat at all.
"Brave, princess, brave." Ruby giggled.
"Well, you needed the rest, and juggling by this," a pale thumb meticulously manicured, wiped dried, flaky drool from Ruby's chin. "You needed it worse than we all thought."
Ruby shrugged away the finger and the comment, eyes burning with the sting of aborted sleep. She had spent much of the preceding days organizing this mission, setting up everything from the cargo being pulled to the formation of the two other crafts following their lead.
She hadn't even been able to rest when finally departing from Vale, as flying across the continent of Sanus had to be done manually by someone with the proper aeronautical license, per kingdom regulations, to minimize risk to civilians. Among the four of them, Ruby was the only one to have such clearance—at least, officially. She had taught the three of them enough to help out during missions, but they didn't have the formal training or legal okay. It was only once outside of regulated airspace that she was able to switch on autopilot and hand the reigns to one of her teammates.
Weiss's fingertips slid across Ruby's chiseled stomach, a lover's caress tickling nerves she knew from memory. The pads of her fingers gently traced delicate lines over Ruby's abdominal muscles, sending warm shivers down the smaller girl's spine. Weiss's touch was slow and deliberate, savoring every familiar ridge she'd come to know so intimately. Those fingers groped Ruby's pert breasts, giving each a couple of comforting squeezes before resting flat between them, as if trying to cradle her heart through her sleep shirt.
Ruby hummed at the tender touches, nuzzling her back into Weiss as deep as it could go. "Too. Sleepy."
Weiss smirked against Ruby's black hair, enjoying the fruity scent of last night's shampoo. "You never did tell me what you were dreaming about," she whispered.
"Didn't ask," Ruby countered. Her voice was so heavy it was hard to tell if she was being playful or serious.
"I'm asking now."
"Already forgotten."
She rolled her eyes. "You're going to be a pest till we're all gray, aren't you?"
"To the grave, princess." Ruby mocked.
Something soft and wet suddenly traced the junction of Ruby's ear and head, nipping at the cartilaginous edge for extra effect. She gasped at the sudden feeling, shivering at the electric sparks licking down the curve of her spine. The tongue sank into the folds of her ear shortly afterwards. Hands gripped the one Weiss had pressed against her chest.
"Eeep! Stawp!" Ruby pouted in an adorably exaggerated way; it was hard to believe it was natural. She seemed wide awake now. "Every time! Why is it always my ears?"
The tongue withdrew. Weiss's voice blew gentle, warm air against her wet skin. "What a silly question, Rose. You make the cutest little sounds. You do the same to Blake." To add insult to injury, she snatched a lobe with perfect teeth and gently nibbled.
"Eeek!" In a childish flail of hands and elbows, Ruby accidentally hit her significant other in the chest.
She reached for the spot to cradle with a good-natured laugh. "Ow! My boob!"
"Oh my gosh, so sorry! I told you to sto-ah!" Fingers reached her underarms and a torturous tickle session commenced. Weiss was perfectly fine, the fibber! She had just been trying to lull her into a false sense of security!
"Sorry! I'm sorry! Have mercy!" She begged, pale face reddening with laughter, eyes glossy with water about to overflow. Fingers gave feathery, tender scratches along her stomach and sides, as well as the back of her thighs, sending tingling shocks up her back and neck. She tried to break free of the merciless grasp, but Weiss held her place with a smile.
"I don't know," Weiss teased. "That elbow could've done some serious damage."
Then, Ruby looked at her with the biggest puppy dog eyes she could muster. It was a broken attempt, with dimples high and flushed red in a rictus smile, highlighted by streaks of tears running to her jawline, it was more pitiful than anything else. A pick of ice pierced Weiss's heart at the sight; maybe she had gotten a little carried away.
Still, she tried to save face. "Mmmm… fine, I guess I can let you go." The fingers finally relented their attack, but they still pressed against Ruby's body, feeling the full rise and fall of her heavy breathing. In the chaos that was the last fifteen seconds, Weiss had come to be looking down at one of the loves of her life, straddling her exhausted body over her skewed pajama-clad legs, their comforter now bunched into a sloppy pile on the floor. It took a few seconds of quiet for words to be mustered. "Meanie! I was trying to sleep!" Ruby pouted, wiping wet trails from sore cheeks with her thumbs. She couldn't stop the smile or residual giggles, however.
"You say that, yet you look pretty happy to me!" Weiss laughed. She kissed Ruby's cheek for good measure.
A voice called to them, echoing of distant walls and corridors, disrupting their banter. A bright, energetic sound that Weiss never got tired of hearing, despite the aggravation it often brought. "Ten minutes 'til arrival, she up yet?"
Weiss groaned. "You could've at least waited a few minutes!" She called back.
"I did!" The voice called back.
"It been, like, three!"
"Last I checked, three is more than one, so it's a few!"
Weiss groaned. "Now, of all times, you start picking up a dictionary!"
Ruby groaned in annoyance. She was too tired for this. "I'm up, Yang! Stop the yelling!"
"Yelling?" Yang shouted from somewhere else in the ship. "I'm not yelling; this isn't yelling, right, Blake?"
Thankfully, Blake must have talked some sense into her, as she didn't shout anything else. Ruby curled up, raising her back from the one bed this ship had. Weiss was abruptly thrown off to the side with a squeak, giving Ruby enough room to swing her legs down to the floor.
"Welp," she muttered, voice leaden and groggy. Her mouth stretched wide in a yawning. "Time to get things moving."
End of Chapter One
Author's Notes: This is an odd project for me, very experimental. For one, I haven't done a polyamourous relationship yet, and it seems like a neat challenge. But, more importantly, if I continue with this story, my main goal is to experiment with different word lengths. I have this problem of trying to cram a lot of stuff in every chapter (with some exceptions), so I want to challenge myself and keep each chapter focused on one or two things. This 2.6k word document (not counting this A/N) is the shortest proper chapter I've ever written; my biggest is in The Undivided with around 15k. The other thing I want to try is to exercise my prose a bit. While I don't think my prose is bad, I feel that, at least in certain sections, I could benefit from not being so dry.
Also, as for the whole Ruby/Yang thing, I'm of two minds on it. I don't project real-life moral standards onto fiction; it's so damn boring. However, this story will be a lot to juggle (nothing I write is ever simple—trust me, none of you have any idea of where this thing is headed), and one less romance, a taboo one at that, seems a bit easier. Right now they're basically sharing Blake and Weiss, but I have a backdoor in the story to change it later if I find it necessary.
So, all this aside, what do you all think?