Hiding from the cold. Hiding from the heat. Hiding from the rain and wind. Ruby was tired of hiding out from the belligerent and uncooperative weather. The last thing she wanted was to allow herself to be overcome by nature's forces of destruction, but they were making no progress this way. Nothing they did was of any consequence. They weren't any closer to finding out what had happened, where everyone had gone, and why they were the only two remaining. It was aggravating, borderline maddening, and it didn't help that fate had decided to leave her with only one companion who couldn't even so much as offer a 'hmm' in response to anything Ruby said.
The closet was a blessing, in its own way, as it turned out to be filled with dried foods that had for the most part taken both the extreme cold and the heat in stride, among many other goods that made their lives more plausible. It really was just a storage closet for someone who needed a place to keep all their things, like a big junk drawer filled with actually useful items instead of souvenirs from Vacuo. There was spare cloth, folded neatly in a box, just a bunch of large squares of various patterned cloth that wasn't too heavy or too light. With some scissors, a needle, and a lot of string, Ruby felt confident she could make spare clothes for them. All those materials, as it turned out, were in the smaller box right next to the cloth. A box filled with big tufts of cotton offered itself up as well, giving her all the ingredients for pillows.
After all that, coupled with the jugs of water she and Neo had collected, there was plenty of supplies to sustain them in the closet for a few days. Stepping outside to collect more rainwater every now and then was all they needed to stay put for weeks. A couple of battery lamps had revealed themselves, making their oil lamp obsolete, but she kept the oil lamp as their main source of light for as long as the supply of oil held out. She wanted to take the battery lamps with them when they left, as batteries were far easier to transport than spare oil. To top it all off, there was even a small shelf of bottles, mostly wine, and some of them were still intact.
Unfortunately, and much to Ruby's great chagrin, this had led to them getting comfortable and trying to wait out the storm. Unlike the deep freeze or the sweltering heat, the storm stayed right where it was. At first it had lasted through the night, and then all through the next day. Then the second day, once they were in the closet, passed without any change. Ruby was beginning to worry when she woke up on the third morning to the now familiar sounds of rain and wind beating against the walls of the dust shop. By that evening, she was restless. By day seven, she was distraught. By day fourteen, she was beginning to think she was actually losing her mind.
Ruby sat alone in the closet, which seemed to get smaller every day until it felt like an oppressive narrow space that wanted to squeeze the life out of her. Neo was collecting rainwater again, so Ruby was alone with her thoughts. She'd spent every moment of the last two weeks in this closet either taking care of the basic functions of living like eating and sleeping, or rambling on to her silent companion about what she would be doing instead of rambling on to her silent companion if she had been stuck with anyone other than the silent companion to which she was rambling. The feisty and definitely fun arguments she would be getting into with Weiss, the goofy and definitely fun games she'd play with Yang, and the insightful and definitely fun conversations she and Blake would spend time on. Then she went through Jaune, Nora and Ren. Then she extended it to her uncle Qrow, and her father, and Penny, General Ironwood, Weiss' sister Winter, the various villains and Neo's former cohorts. She caught herself before she started going on about Pyrrha, only to completely forget and do exactly that only two hours later.
She had just gone through the Ace Ops, starting with Marrow and Harriet, then Elm, then Clover, when Neo had stood up and taken the last of the water jugs, now empty, out to refill it. Ruby couldn't help but stew in the feeling, at least for a few minutes, that she'd missed one of the Ace Ops, but she couldn't think of who. After she shook the feeling off, however, she found herself sitting and staring at the door, waiting for it to open briefly and relieve her of the feeling like she was being swallowed by the closet, only for the momentary relief to once again collapse when the door closed. Lately, that had been the only thing occupying her mind when she wasn't talking about something, anything, other than their actual current situation. She felt trapped, and it was really starting to play tricks on her mind. She just hadn't noticed until now.
Fiddling with the rope in her hands, which she remembered finding early on in their confinement, Ruby pondered how it had gotten the way it was. She had found it in her restless rooting around earlier in the day, tied in a suspicious loop. She knew it hadn't been that way when she'd first seen it, but there was only the two of them, so it cast an air of uncertainty over her that had her on edge. Neo had been silent, as always, but had been increasingly responsive to her chatter. When they slept, it was often in a close embrace. When they talked, Ruby speaking and Neo writing, it was ever more with smiles. Neo looked happy enough, at least considering their state of living. So why was this rope tied in a noose?
The only two answers she could think of were both bad ones. It could be, as she had initially thought, that Neo was actually worse off than her when it came to her mental state, and was just good at hiding it. She didn't like this possibility at all, as it told her Neo was getting ever closer to removing herself from the scene, and it scared her almost as much as the second possibility. She had begun to wonder if, somehow, she had made it and just forgot. Ruby sat there, staring at the door in anticipation for Neo's return, struggling with the question of which one of them had tied a noose. It frightened her more than she knew how to say that, increasingly, she was not sure if she hadn't been the one to do it.
Neo opened the door and stepped back inside, closing it behind her. She set the filled water jug down and slid it over to the wall with her foot as she pulled her hair free from where she'd stuffed it down the back of her shirt so it wouldn't blow around in the wind. She looked across the closet, the walls dimly lit by the oil lamp hanging from one side, to see Ruby staring up at her almost like she hadn't expected to see Neo again. She was holding a piece of rope in her hands, tied in a noose. Ruby looked sickly tired, worried, and nervous. She had been deteriorating faster than, frankly, made any sense to Neo. Holing up in a well stocked closet for a few weeks shouldn't have had that much of a toll on her, but somehow it had.
It wasn't really like Neo could blame her. Every time Neo closed her eyes, she felt her skin crawl and itch. Every time the light went out, she felt like she was suffocating. Every time she woke up, she felt the ghost sensation of a vine wrapped around her throat. She hadn't mentioned any of this to Ruby, and she wasn't about to, but just the walls themselves were starting to feel like they were closing in on her, and every day she would sink further into the closet, closer to the back, where it would swallow her. She knew better, she knew that it was the result of their encounter with the plant monster in the sewer, and she knew that it was perfectly reasonable and not at all representative of what was actually happening around her, and that made it easier to handle. Easier, however, didn't always mean easy. Neo was still having nightmares, which she never shared with Ruby. She was still seeing things moving in the shadows and out of the corners of her eyes, which she never shared with Ruby. She sometimes found herself fiddling with things, idly working her hands over something, sometimes for hours without realizing it. That was why, when she saw the noose in Ruby's hands, Neo was scared that Ruby had made it with intent to use it, but she was more scared that she had made it herself and didn't remember.
She had to give Ruby something to do, to get her mind off of things. She picked up one of the empty water jugs and walked over to Ruby, thrusting the jug into her hands. Ruby nodded, understanding. She got up and headed to the door, stopping just short of opening it. She looked down at her hand to see she'd looped the noose around her wrist. Grimacing, Ruby glanced back to Neo. The rope trailed across the floor, past Neo's feet, and over the boxes near the back to where the rest of its length was coiled up on the floor in the back corner. Sheepishly, Ruby returned it to its place, dropping it out of sight before turning and hurrying out of the room to collect some more water for them.
Once she was out in the hallway, the door closed behind her, she took a moment to breathe. Ruby liked being out in the open well enough, but it wasn't like she had ever suffered from claustrophobia. Not until now, anyway, it seemed. Being free from the tomb-like closet allowed her time to breathe and think without it feeling like some great darkness was eyeing her hungrily, and after a minute, she was able to reasonably come to the conclusion that she had in fact not tied the noose herself. That was a tremendous relief, and lifted a great weight from her mind... only for the dreadful conclusion to bring everything crashing back down. If she didn't, then Neo had, and she'd just left Neo alone in the closet. She dropped the jug and frantically pulled the door open, rushing in to stop whatever might have been about to happen.
The air in the closet was filled with panic and struggle, Neo clawing at the rope that had closed around her neck, holding her several feet off the floor. Fast as lightning, Ruby grabbed Crescent Rose and opened it, swinging for the rope and cutting it in half, causing Neo to drop back to the floor, gasping for air. Ruby rushed to her side, helping her pull the rope off from around her neck, but the moment Neo had recovered enough to get up she clamored away from the back wall and towards the door. Ruby was left in the middle of the closet, holding the severed noose. She looked back at the terrified Neo, then to the rope that slowly fell back to the floor from where it had been looped over a rafter.
Slowly, the rope was drawn back into the darkness. A thick green cloud poured into the closet through the wooden back wall, carried on a warm breeze.