Her desperate wheezes for air were useless. Somewhere, within the mix of imploding neurons and screaming tissue, she realizes the damnation scarcely. But she can't help the way her body pleads for air, the way it begs and burns and cries for anything to silence the scream curling around the length of trampled lungs, stricken flesh, splintered bone. Even if oxygen was a resource available underneath the purgatory of rock, concrete and steel, her punctured lungs leave little hope of relief, and it would only serve as faux solace from her torment.
A honed stalactite scrapes against the back of her skull with every unwilling convulsion, its column spearing through and resting against her right eye socket, and she thinks she lets out another wave of tears, but it's hard to tell through coagulated blood, which pools and clumps enough to choke on and drown.
She had always thought hell would be an inferno; the wrath of flames that rivalled the ardent of those spat from the coils of the writhing sun. Now she understands better. Concrete dust lines and sews her left eye shut, the more she tries to pry it open, the less she sees of the world, and the effort and dark and tragedy warps her definition of hell into another form, though the torment is the same.
Something is nestling itself between her ribs, barely grazing her heart, and with every regrettable beat, she endures it, scrapes that drag her down a path of pain; a fate enacted by stone, roughly masoned and terrible.
Unable to breathe, unable to fathom, unable to escape, unable to die.
'Please … let me die,' she screams, though she can't quite curve the words around the gnarled blood trampling her tongue, and her mouth lifts aimlessly in the pursuit of a cry.
It doesn't matter.
I hear her just fine.
'Not until she does,' I reply.
And I revel in her horrific revelation; that her pain is but the barest echo of what is to come.
Rain. It was always rain that delayed them, but never had it been this damning.
It came down like the drags of an oil painting, heavy and viscous, water and desolation blending past each other into the hues of intricate sorrow, something cementing and scarring with no hope of recovery, for the greatest fear had already come to pass. It came down on the tent in muffled incessant raps, like static in her ears, noise and clutter that had her clutching to the pulse of her breaths for calm.
Light as she knew it came from the single dust fuelled lantern fastened to the metallic skeleton that lined the tent's interior. It was far from adequate, the way the flame hitched, sending light spiralling into the corners of the tent, only to wrest it back violently, the shadows allowed to return.
It was probably the dust, subpar as it was.
Then again, subpar was a term that could have been branded onto every piece of equipment they had been spared.
"I'm sorry Ruby, I really am. But we have a duty to rebuild Remnant, and the longer we deprive the people, the larger the cracks in our foundation grow. The council-"
"Fuck you."
Sorrow drove her words, but they remained hidden in the throttle of her voice, and she made a choice to wield her anger as the driving force of her snarl. But it hurt so much, to stare into blue eyes so much like hers, with those strands of white hair that dangled at their peripherals.
It was all too much. The glances of pity thrown at her when they thought she wasn't looking, the way the refugees adored her for finally putting an end to the war, the way Yang and Blake threaded their words with caution around her, like she was made of fractured glass, ready to snap and shatter at a moment's notice.
She was their face now, the face of Remnant's success. She knew she didn't look like what victory should look like; she didn't care. They could stare at her, unravel her skin and peel back the legend to reveal someone fallen, and they would whisper amongst themselves, the notes and melancholy of hushed tones about this 'great' Huntress, the one who had triumphed and died in the same breath.
"We failed her back then, and you're failing her now. You don't deserve her, you never did."
If anyone ever confronted her, she would say she didn't care about the way blues fell, how they cracked and smeared. She would affirm that she hadn't cared when she ended the call and left the room, that she hadn't begun to care when she returned to the site of her greatest failure, that she had remained indifferent when she had rolled her sleeves up to re-join rescue efforts, her partner living in the ache of calloused hands as she scrambled for a glimpse of white.
But she knew the truth, and she was damn sure Winter knew it too.
That had been nearly 3 weeks ago; the fact they were still being sent provisions was not something she had to request for, not yet.
She was exhausted, but she had no right to be.
The moon had peaked by now, she could tell from the way the shadows seemed to shade blue, an undercurrent of ethereal tint barely filtered by the tent's tarp, allowed to seep through the fabric, slipping between the shadowed layers of dark, gloom, and sorrow, like a glue barely holding it all together.
It was a tranquil sight.
She hated it.
Damn the night, weather, and all the restrictions that came with them. Were it up to her, she would've directed the rescue operations herself, ensured that they worked day and night and in-between.
I guess that's why it's not up to me.
In a way, this rain passed for a finale. That's what these past weeks have been, a collection of bruised knees and torn skin just dreading for a signal that they had to stop, praying that it would never come. It was like being adrift in a thunderstorm, waves crashing around and swallowing her whole only to spit her out before repeating, watching as lightning cracked closer and closer, anticipating when it would finally crash upon her skull.
In a way, the rain was a seal, decorated in wax, the sanctioning of a death warrant, with each name that spanned its pages gnawing ever closer to Ruby's heart, with one name spearing through it entirely, underlined and boldened and sharpened in crimson.
No one could survive this weather, if they somehow hadn't already died of blood loss, or starvation, or suffocation, the rain would seep through the rubble, find them where the rescue party could not, and their suffering would end at the behest of more suffering.
Her chest was hollowed out, her throat squeezed and set alight, all the while wrestling a mind on fire, kindled with pain and memory, blessings and demons. She relented another sob, salt and bitterness overwhelming as it left her tongue, shivering into her arm where she had buried her face, sinking into her and bleeding between the vessels.
She pressed herself into the aged wood table, despite hating how the coolness of wood only seemed to burn against the image of fresh white, bloodied, crushed, and tainted by stone and storm. These days, she couldn't sleep without seeing her, couldn't eat without thinking that she could be out there searching for her, couldn't breathe past the thought that she (possibly) wasn't.
She deserved it, she was content with it.
And that was terrifying, how her pain threatened to define her.
She had almost gotten used to the band of crushing sorrow that had wrapped itself around her heart, how it strangled, hurt, and ruptured, how it always seemed to trample the air from her lungs, like each breathe was missing the life that it was supposed to provide, like she was siphoning them from a corpse. Ruby thought she had been familiar with loss, thought she had been familiar with the weight of it, how it dragged you down and threatened to swallow you whole if you turned the other way.
But loss had never felt like this before. No one could have prepared her for how a part of her wanted to drown in it, to betray hope and love and memory. Anything to alleviate the noise in her head, the crushing of her lungs, the inferno that had nestled itself between the crevices of her ribcage.
She didn't hear it at first, the shrill ring that existed a tone beneath the tinnitus in her ears, but eventually it became an all too abnormal constant in the otherwise silent tent. Ruby raised her head apathetically, bleary eyes casted in the direction of her bed, tracing over the outline of her scroll beneath her woven cotton blanket, a dimmed light patterned by an open weave design pulsating in turn with each chime.
She stared at it for a moment, contemplated ignoring it all together, if only to spite her.
She hated her pity, especially on a night like this.
And she waited, and waited, an assertion growing stronger by every ring, a line stretched to the length of every enunciated tone coaxed around her heart, leading it to the depths of her defiance.
It was almost a shock when the ringing ceased, the tent falling silent save for the tapping of the rain once again. The pulse of guilt that speared through her did little to reason her small act of rebellion, and when the scroll erupted into the beginnings of an encore, there was much less resistance to be found.
Willing strength to her laden legs, she stalked over to the bed, sweeping aside the blanket to reveal her scroll, its chimes sent unmuted and blaring into the corners of her tent. She lifted it like a burden, a finger raised to hang precariously over the answer button, before she heaved a sigh, relenting the button a graze of her index.
"Blake."
The Faunus' expression was warped into a shade of worry, furrowed brows and wide uninhibited ambers raw and showing. "Dust Ruby, you look horrible."
Ruby pulled her gaze away from the screen, her eyes sharpened as she resisted the urge to snap a response, instead opting to pace back to the table, pulling the chair back before setting the scroll down.
It took a sigh to extract the acidity from her response, to sate the urge to hurt, to silence the part of her which reasoned that it wasn't fair that she was the only one hurting.
"Losing the wrong person will do that to you."
She hated how brittle she sounded. She hated how ambers melted just a touch.
Blake opened her mouth, but her words didn't find a way out, their meaning dead and ashen, unable to struggle past the sight of Ruby's pain. Eventually, she found her words, a question with wicked undertones: "… Are you ok?"
And all Ruby could do was laugh bitterly, her eyes dipped and tortured. "You know the answer to that."
Blake cantered her head to the side, her eyes darting scrutinizingly, silence settling like snow on a bed of thorns. There was the peak of breath, from somewhere off screen, before it settled into a faithful rhythm, the highs and lows of deep sleep.
Blake glanced back at the screen, an unspoken request for silence to which Ruby acknowledged with the barest of nods. A passing mess of tentage and warping lights followed as Blake shifted locations, preceding a jolt as Blake settled down and relenting a clear image of her teammate sitting on grass, accompanied by nothing but a canvas of midnight studded with stars as her backdrop.
It was clear Blake expected a reaction from this conversation, something disordered and tumultuous, something worth keeping prying eyes and ears from hearing. Ruby hated how everyone paid attention to her now.
"I … I've received comments on my report from-"
"Orders. You received orders Blake."
Blake winced, but she kept her voice steady for the most part, tone careful and infuriating.
"They know. They know that our search operations in all sectors have shown up empty for the past week."
Ruby snarled, a barely contained growl clawing at her throat, her words acid-lined and barbed. "So that's it? They want us to pack up just like that? Leave her buried and broken?"
"Ruby-"
"I've bled for them; I've killed for them. Yet when it comes to the one person I want back, they can't even let me dig her out with my own two hands?!"
"And you know how much I hate them for it, but we've-"
"No. I'm not leaving her Blake. Just because you still have your partner doesn't mean you can throw mine away like she's a fucking statistic."
She hated the aftertaste of the words as they left her mouth, a bitterness and bite of venom on her tongue that scraped and scalded as they rolled off. And when Amber eyes flared, she hoped they would burn through her, because Blake had always been the least deserving of her anger.
Rarely had she seen Blake with this intensity, with fury thicker than blood and a glare this serrated, a shake that spoke to her fury. "Don't you ever say that shit again. We've been through too much for you to throw this onto any one of us. I may not have loved Weiss the way you did but-"
Blake bit back a choke, forcing it back through clenched teeth. "I loved her Ruby, we all did. She was my sister in everything but name."
Blake spoke of Weiss like a memory, with toned remorse misting her eyes, forging the way of her wretched words. She spoke like Jaune had for Pyrrha.
Ruby dipped her head, a bitter coagulated mass amounting in the hollow of her throat that she had to coerce her words through, the truth of a corpse scratching itself into her brain. "You agree with them. You think she's dead."
"I know she's dead Ruby. We've been searching through rubble long enough for us to see blisters come, burst, heal, and return. It's been what…nearly a month since we started? For the last two weeks, we've found nothing but corpses."
"But, its Weiss."
"None of us could live through that."
"I…I…"
She tried. But thoughts failed where words died, reasoning and logic laid to rest on a bed of thorned memories.
What else could she have said?
What else could she do now that she should have done earlier?
Still, she tried.
Her voice crashed, anguish like a calamity in the swell of her eyes, the heat that lined her lungs, fractured blue eyes ricocheting off the walls of her skull, gazing into the depths of despair and desperation.
"Blake…"
She felt it; loss overwhelming, wounds that time would never heal.
And Blake had to look away despite the tears in her eyes, had to be the better of them, because she knew Weiss would have brought shards of the moon down on them if they enabled her death to deprive Remnant any longer. So she forswore her hope, another name etched into her definition of sorrow.
"They…"
She choked on her words, struggling to wade past their burdens, still refusing to meet silvers, as ruptured as they were.
"It's not up to me. I'm sorry."
She thought she heard something snap, like a rope gone taunt, or a fragile soul fissuring upon heartbreak. Or there might have been no sound at all, maybe it was just her own heart snapping another piece off to throw in the well where friends like Sun had gone to rest.
A small chime signaled the end of the call, its monotone chime still far too mockingly cheery for what she just had to do.
And she was left alone, with nothing but the sneering of wind past her ears.
Oscar was sounding more like Ozpin every day, and his words had tasted as vile as she had expected slithering off her tongue.
She had hated them; she hoped Ruby knew that.
She was alone now.
She had never been alone like this, never had she experienced anything as permanent and ruining as this.
The rain had stopped some time ago, she hadn't noticed when. Silence hissed a riot in her ears, and Ruby struggled shaking fingers around her necklace, a single dust bullet lined and marked with initials. She swept a thumb over the markings, tumbling over the last breaths of her name, before she pressed the metal close to her chest, like it could blur through skin and bone, lodge Weiss' name between her ribs; a pain to remind, a pain to grieve.
And she had ignored it, but it had always been there, the fervent whisper somewhere in her head that had snaked through the mush and inferno and terror. When the first week had passed, her heart had already known to mourn.
Blake's words just made it real.
Author's Note:
Been a hot minute. Feel free to let me know what you think of the chapter, constructive criticism is most definitely welcome. Here's to hoping I find my pen faster for the next chapter. See you guys soon.