Chapter 4
Winter had never considered herself immune to the dark; midnight currents a crushing vexation, adrift in an ocean with no idea of what prowled below crashing waves, ripples of fear building, crashing, amounting to that one final bite. Trialed and laden as she might have been, the graininess of the dark never ceased to unnerve, the static in her vision likened to pustules, contorting around a fresh image past corners, horror and blight threatening to turn her body septic with the weight of a body on soil.
She had never thought she would see this again. This should've been buried in the past, the acrid smell of smoke interlacing with blood that seemed to rush with her own, burying itself deep within her lungs, finding familiarity in which she had desperately tried to cut out. The crackling of flames, a clock ticking past expiry, each snapping note underlining the hammering of her chest; time meant nothing to the dead scattered before her.
This should not have been possible, the bodies that scattered the dirt – cracked against misshapen log cabins and gorged upon rock, more than a few sporting claw marks across their chest, more than a few eyes startled open by the suddenness of untimely death – defied the very finality of the war her sister had died stopping.
This scene, this twisted painting concocted by a tormented artist, savagery unbound and set alight on the hairs of a brush, warped the very reality they had stood by these last two years since the war.
It wasn't over, and she dreaded if it would never be.
The village had stood on the western edge of Solitas, bordering the ocean where Grimm activity had been all but purged. She had known a few of her troops to relocate here, the prospect of it all sweetened by the features of the ocean, menial labor a small thing for a soldier aged from war and a happy thing to celebrate in the presence of a thriving community.
Standing in the village center, her eyes grazing over mutilated bodies and ashen incomplete scaffolding and soil stained reddish-brown, she could recognize none of the dead so far, and her feet remained rooted lest she discover what she knew lingered around corners, beneath the rubble.
"Captain, we've conducted the routine 400-meter sweep. We have one reported low urgency anomaly, and are standing by for your orders."
Still, her gaze lingered; the body of a woman, dressed in gold from a nearby blaze, her green frock stained with the dregs of her torment, the rake of claws a pestilence down the length of her back, the set of her mouth slackened with the same hollowness written in her purple eyes, and she prayed she would never become numb to it, like Ironwood had.
"Do you think there's an afterlife planned for us all Morrow? That for all the good we do, all the suffering we experience, do you think compensation is a factor the Brothers have considered?"
The conversation invited the breaking of military hierarchy, the ignorance of rank and formality welcomed for this moment in time; in war, respect of the individual would determine the cut of the battle before the day's end.
Winter turned to her friend, the last remaining survivor of the original ace-ops, burdened to carry their deaths with her till the end. In some ways, he was much unchanged from the rookie he used to be when she had been a specialist, but he had been on the frontlines with her when they stormed the land of darkness, and he had witnessed her collapse and anguish when yet another Schnee had been laid to rest.
The war was an affliction they both suffered, and the meaning of the word had long since been warped into the spitting image of their nightmares, plagued with the echo of friends lost early enough to have fallen to the edge of a blade, or the screams of flame.
He was much unchanged, yet the dip of his eyes spoke to his losses, the glassiness of them reflecting the gossamer image of a team forgotten by most.
"They better have. With how much we clean up after their messes, I won't stand for anything less than a grand reunion of everyone it took to get to reach today. Despite…all this, don't you think Remnant is as close to peace as ever?"
Winter set her mouth in a grim line, tearing her eyes away from the woman, leaving her to revel in her own private afterlife.
"For the price of everyone we gave, I had desperately hoped so."
The source of the anomaly was from an old cellar door, sunk into the earth, segmented vertically into rustic planks, bronzed metal flats bolted and secured across. It had remained mostly untouched by the flames, though a short inspection would produce the marks of embers, darkened spots scattered indiscriminately across the canvas of wood. The Aura meter rang a growling tune, dark in pitch and tame in urgency, far too low to be considered a threat, yet considering the circumstances, nothing could be that easily overlooked.
There were two teams of three stationed outside the cellar door, their rifles trained on the wood unwaveringly, the slightest bit of movement all that was needed for the twitch required to trigger an assault.
Close quarters, my confidence is in swords.
"Specialist Morrow, you'll follow me in. The rest of you keep watch to make sure we are not ambushed."
Morrow nodded, though his eyes held a question, his mouth lifting in the barest utterance, yet it was all she needed to lock eyes with him.
"…"
"Speak your mind Specialist."
"The sweep has produced no threats, and the aura reading is too low to be considered a grave threat. Regardless, it is my opinion that the rest of us should deal with this Captain, there is no need to put yourself in the domain of injury."
Winter nodded, his suggestion taken into account, appreciation written into the palm raised to his shoulder, a firm grasp to ossify her conviction.
"Were this a normal Grimm attack, I would agree. But we are acting outside of the protocols for Grimm on this one."
Marrow eyes darted at that, scanning, suddenly cognizant of the pockets of shadows, the possibility of whispers thinning the wind, keening ambushes from the zagged cracked walls.
"The claw marks…?"
"And yet, flames lay waste to their houses."
Pupils forming incisions, backs hunched and Auras blooming fractals in the dark, assuredness rent by the sliding of metal against metal, the notion of war freed from its housing.
Morrow gritted his teeth, his eyes a flurry as he darted between distant forests, decrepit houses, festering bodies. "The Grimm don't raze villages."
"No, they do not," she confirmed, a certain grimness in the flat of her tone.
The doors opened easily enough, hinges alight with creaks and protesting groans their only admonition as the she pulled on the masses of wood. Then, she could do nothing better but still, if only to confront the start of her heart.
"Shit…" Despite the roughness in language, she found herself chasing the same threads.
To call it darkness was a disservice beyond the pale. Ask her and she would've described the doors like portals, gates to the underworld, a realm where the dark rendered the blind and the mute and the god on equal footing, all of them sentenced to stumbling through a cimmerian shroud. Blood treaded the air, almost as thick as the hollow inside, a coat of iron lining her lungs, the choking coughs she and the others gave null and void in their attempts for respite.
"Sp…cough…Morrow, visors on. Room clearing formation with the maximum Threatcon, adopt delta measures."
The visor fit snugly on her face, and the world came alive under a tint of monochrome green. She could forgive the limited field of vision she supposed, considering she could now see past the steps that lead down into the cellar, concluding in a stone floor and a backdrop of toppled shelves and shattered glass bottles, the string of a missing bulb dangling from the ceiling, swaying in slow taunting waves.
"Ready when you are."
Their descent was relatively uneventful, boots on concrete a jarring symphony against the mutedness. The scent of copper was a constant, swimming in her lungs, waves of paranoia tangible in the way she gripped her swords, tracks of Aura swimming around the hilt.
The silence that they maintained was heavy, not quite with trepidation as it was lined with caution, hand signals their only adopted means as they moved through rooms, each segmented by a flung open door. Their steps were crescendoing notes in the otherwise still dark, the pockets of dust swept up by their feet an accompanying flare to their production, marred by the dark and green and dilapidation.
There was an implication of a path previously trodden, strewn about furniture, boxes of old clothes and tangled mementos the stepping stones of someone stricken, caution lost to fear. All they had to do was follow the tide of ruin.
It wasn't long before they arrived to what seemed to be the final doorway, and though this one was shut, the knob was balanced on a nearby box, far too much humanity in the way it had been placed upright, yet the screws that had secured it to the door were bent with their threads severed, a savage sort of animalistic frenzy contained in their mangled nature.
Winter met Morrow's knowing gaze, her hand thrown into a signal, approximating their best move without a word.
Door front, Eisen Invicta.
The code for a new formation was easily understood, and Morrow moved swiftly, positioned on the left to their entryway while Winter maneuvered herself over to the right. There was a look between them, the beats of a clock hand a thunderous rhythm in her head, a moment spared to prepare for whatever resided past the door.
She squinted past the glyph she contracted at the tip of her sword, the weave of patterned snowflakes an abnormal bloom, a dissonance to the decrepit, blurring the dark, the propensity of its light barely skewed by dust and gloom. Under tinted green, it looked and played like a force of nature, something powerful and tempting barely contained in its subdued thrum, the test of her finger on a trigger, the same twitch capable of manufacturing faux life just as capable of taking one, disaster and beauty separated only by intention.
Yet, for all their power, being a Schnee didn't exclude them from the affliction all Hunters suffered.
Old age was a myth, their bodies were just as likely to stain feculent dirt roads as they were to rest in the midst of a howling forest. The recovery of their bodies wasn't an assurance, and sometimes, just knowing where they had taken their last breaths was a blessing.
…
Even if rock marred their tombs, splintered their skulls.
you ready?
She came rushing back to the cellar, pulled from her untimely musings by a series of taps and drags against the door, the dip of her chin an attempt at a convincing nod. Her left hand came up quick, fingers stiff and locked into the beginnings of a count down, the rush of blood before conflict a roar in her ears, a fury in her chest.
The count concluded, her finger twitched, the spike of blistering ice spearing towards the door's bolt assembly but an afterthought as the door was flung open.
The first thing she noticed was the smell – copper rolled in waves, a churning mess in her gut, harsh and climatic in the way it brought about the scent of battlefield, a tone like a storm in her head whistling its decree, full of strife and bereavement – and how it seemingly clung to everything.
Then, she saw despair, and Winter realized that the world was still as broken as ever. A woman sat against the wall; the thin arms of a young boy wrapped around her waist, wracking her body with his wretched cries. His sobs were dry, forsaken, lacking hope nor delusion, hopelessness nestled into the dip of his eyelids, the blankness of his pupils.
Winter didn't need to check for a pulse; it was apparent in the way the woman hung her head, the stiffness of her fingers, and the sorrow lacing the air. And it there was a snap within the confines of skull, something akin to whiplash in nature; the woman looked familiar, though fleeting visages were all that flashed through her head, none of them potent enough to stick to the corpse.
"Fuck…", the curse was muttered loose next to her, and despite its volume, the sentiment thundered of the walls of her skull, an ache like tragedy nestled next between the bones of her ribcage, effervescent and damnatory.
And she swam in copper, the smell omnipresent, licking the paint off the walls, breathing into the dirt under her nails, crawling beneath her skin, creeping into her skull and unearthing memories best forgotten.
The night vision goggles revealed nothing betraying the smell. But there was a dead woman, a weeping boy, and there was copper, so much of it.
Under night vision, blood has the same significance as water, both are translucent and often unheeded.
"Morrow, masks off."
Without looking back to see if her order had been followed – she didn't care if he left it on; she just needed to see for herself, the visage of a horrifying scene igniting a sort of morbid affliction, a contemporary cancer pulsating and writhing, alive with the need to unearth the root of what plagued Remnant even after so much of the rot had been cut out – she ripped her mask off, a glyph forming, alight with grizzled flame set to reveal, set to enlighten.
She had expected blood; she had made peace with its signs. Yet, she endured the plummeting of her heart, a strangled noise tearing loose as she took in the room, streaked in red.
It layered the cobbled walls, a tide between the crevices, a twisted sort of intricacy in the splash patterns on the walls, the variation of age and freshness between each one a fresh horror for her to ponder.
All this hadn't been done at the same time. This was meticulous, meant to draw out suffering and torment, a catered tour through despondency, a gallery walk of apathy.
There was no other way to describe cruelty this founded, this intimate.
This had been torture.
"…"
Winter approached cautiously, her sword held at an off angle, her glyph set far off to the left – a sudden burst of light would stun him, this had to be slow, gentle, though the circumstance was anything but – as she treaded towards him, kneeling down as she approached.
"I…I am Captain Winter of RA," there was a certain lack of faith in her words, she could taste it as they rolled off her tongue, like there was a lie or a mockery hidden somewhere between the gaps of the bejeweled title.
He was smeared with blood, stains on his arms and hands having existed long enough to coagulate, hazel hair dyed dark, yet she saw no sign of a cut.
"Are you hurt?"
The boy stared blankly at her, apologies dying on his lips, the murmur of something faint and forgotten a passing fog.
"How did this happen?"
Almost inconsequential, an action so faint it could have said to never have occurred at all, but the slightest rustling of clothes was all she needed for her eyes to flicker, down to the tightening of arms around the woman's waist.
Still, he gave no reply, his eyes bearing through her, the ghost of tragedy swimming.
"Why did this happen?"
His eyes widened, the dart of his eyes frantic and aimless and loose as he clutched the woman closer to his chest, the shreds of something fallen and shamed tumbling from his lips.
"I didn't know! I'm s- sorry Mum please, there was no…hic…I could've known…"
"I'm sorry my sweet child, for leaving you and your sister so soon, just when I've finally started to come back."
Winter gritted her teeth, the eruption of wistfulness a compromising thing; an attempt to push it back under, to sink it beneath the tides, as low as a grave.
"I need to know who did this." She paused, trying to fit herself to the occasion, to revive the piece of her that died with Weiss. "If they are close by, we can catch them. We can give them what they deserve for this."
The boy looked at her, some faint version of sanity in the dark of his eyes, though the wake of calamity still sapped the color from his cheeks, an underlying whisper of something forsaken and lost in crackling tones, decaying blood. "Do…do you think she hates me? For not being able to answer?"
"No, no of course n-"
"Listen kid."
The voice came from behind her in rush -she started at its momentum, how it jumped and halted between breaths, two words given weight and destiny through fury - steel lined and forged in rage. And just like that, pressure treaded air, and it dug into the depths of her potent heart, like she knew what was going to happen.
"Your village is ash, and your mother is dead. Your friends and family, were slaughtered in their homes, and in the street, like animals for game. All this death, so much lost, and yet I can't help but wonder…"
The kid was staring now, at Morrow, his breaths coming out wheezed and tormented, guilt blooming in the hollow, blood painting a sordid picture. His arms wrapped just the bit tighter, like he was reminding himself to hold on, like he refused to relieve himself of the touch of death.
"What made you so special? What did you say?"
"Nothing! I had… gave, nothing."
"Do you regret it? Giving nothing?"
The dip of his head whispered ruination, balled fists trembling in turn with the writhing shadows, lacking restraint in the way he spat the words out, casting the venom off his tongue.
"Silence, the inability to act, stillwater till tragedy echoes back in turn. Think hard before giving us nothing, you've already tried it once before. Think of your mother, think of who did this, and decide."
Winter closed her eyes, a prolonged breath slipping free from her lips – not so much out of exasperation as it was out of jaundiced understanding; the war had instilled triggers in them all, just waiting to be pulled – as she winced.
It was a dangerous game to sic the temptation of revenge on a person so buried in anguish, to plant the lull of its caress next to their heart, scions of vengeance watered with the promises of blood.
She had thought those days were over.
Winter watched as the boy's eyes dipped down to his mother, his expression coiled, the cross of his brows betraying his rumination. There was a shade over his eyes, a finishing of twilight, and she understood it all too well, the way it shuddered through your body, setting nerves alight with the need to see death repaid.
"It…It cut her, over and over and over, each one deeper than the last."
Winter glanced at Morrow, he was as she had thought.
His arms were crossed, weapon hilted and folded having secured the basement. His face was slanted off to the side, the set of his mouth razor wire taut, the swerve of his eyes grazing the ground aimlessly, anything to avoid looking at the boy, or at her.
Guilt.
It didn't absolve him in the slightest, and she held his gaze till he knew it, though she had a feeling it was unnecessary. A conversation, struck with a flow through pointed eyes, gritted teeth.
There was no reason to go so harsh on him.
…
No one went easy on us.
She turned her attention back to the boy, her head poker-sharp and ready.
"Why?"
"It wanted to know things, things I couldn't have known. But it kept asking, over and over and over, till…till the blood ran dry."
They had to know better than to question a kid of all people.
"I'm sorry, truly. The person that did this, can you-"
"Why do you keep saying that?"
Winter paused, regarding pleading eyes.
"What?"
"Person. You keep saying that, but it wasn't."
He spoke it in a fervor, something manic and rabid lancing through tones and meaning; he spoke like he hadn't believed what he had seen, that the words that flowed were stitched together by fragile credence.
"You mean to say that a Grimm did all this? That a Grimm questioned you?"
"It wasn't a Grimm. It never spoke, but it moved like-"
"I'm sorry, but you said it asked you questions. How?"
The lift of his finger was treacherous, burdened by a tremble that laid testament to his horror, and it directed her gaze to the corner of the room, to a piece of unassuming wood canted between the wreck of a shelf and storage crate.
"It…wrote."
Even as she made her way to the board, there had already been a sense of dread – a pressure in her chest, a weight like the end of a life crawling up her throat from the caldera of her guts – and she treated breath with fragility, held in each breath for as long as she could lest she lose it all to whatever was waiting for her.
She picked it up, turned it over, and the world's illusion of peace crumbled to ash; the vision of blood on white satin a good look for calamity.
Her heart ratcheted in her head like gunshots, untamed horror screaming the notes of a tragedy, aligned with the tempo.
"Wh-what did it look like?" Her voice faltered, the inflections of alarm not something one would have expected from a woman of her experience. But she could hardly gather the thought necessary for calm, not when her eyes roamed over the peaks and dips of a name she had once cursed with her greatest indecision, the one that had her torn between duty and heart.
"It…there had been no light, no…it had been all darkness down here," he despaired, then added as an afterthought: "-and it all happened so fast."
"Please, I need anything you can give." There was desperation in her voice now, a frantic edge. In the blur of her peripheral, the glyph dimmed, the claws of darkness skulked a little closer, raking across creviced stone, but she struggled to bear the consequence in mind.
The boy's eyes watered anew, the heaving of breath shallow, yet purposed with memory; the consequences of her pleads a nebulous, blaring mistake in the corners of her skull, tactfulness traded for urgency.
"It started with a yell, something about a girl, with a black arm. A few people rushed out of the gates to help her, calling for the healers to come because she was covered in blood, then there was more shouting, a noise like … like a roar, then screaming-", the body shifted, curtains of hair a veil across vacant eyes; the weight of it all taxing on quivering arms, but he held on, fingers splayed across ashen shoulders.
"- and- and then we ran and mum tried to hold the door closed. And when it broke through, all I saw were flashes of its eyes, blue and…and red, burning like fire. Mum tried to fight it, but it's been years since her last mission! And…hitting it was useless and I screamed for mum to run because it…", a glance down, and the quake of his eyes imitated the reverb of damned screams, wide and hemorrhaging and crackling, "please don't make me-!"
No matter the cost.
"Tell me!"
"Because it had Aura!"
She should have stayed.
It would have been the right thing to do, the kind of thing she had promised she would become acquainted with, the kind of thing the council would prop up and disperse, infectious like sin.
It would have been the kind of thing Weiss would have done.
"We failed her back then, and you're failing her now. You don't deserve her, you never did."
Morrow followed her hasty retreat, leaping up the steps two at a time as he barked orders at the stunned men, though the words slipped past her conscience.
(She would revolt against principle later; how morales tended to be just as pliant and malleable as the rules of war.)
"Winter! Winter slow the hell down, what was that?! What did you see?"
Winter whipped her head around, her breath heavy and wrathful in her chest, the press of her lungs too uncomfortable for the squeezing of her ribcage.
"…"
"Just … tell me."
He was pleading at this point, not out of concern for the mission, but out of concern for her.
He was worried for her, as a friend.
And there were so many things she could've said.
She could've told him what she read, how that … thing recited the unspoken, the impossible, quoted from the Grimoire of shared memories, scarring pages glued to the black of her eyelids.
She could've confided in him, he would've understood, how threats came alive in the mind, fogging the mind with scalding steam, the enactment of nightmares alive and vivid and terrifying, melting the peace off the walls.
Instead, she defaulted to what she knew best, her only salvation and final solution, instilled by Ironwood.
The ballet of her mind was a fucking parasite.
"… Call for a priority extraction back to HQ Specialist Morrow."
His shoulders dipped, subtle, but she felt her heart drop the distance. And with the notion of peace stretched to its thinnest, the uniform inkiness of the night formed a condemning canvas, good for nothing but to slip tragedies - such as this one - between the layers of midnight.
"I … yes Captain. May I request knowledge of your impending actions, so that I might align my agenda with yours?"
At that, Winter felt it all, the static in her fingers, the dread blistering the air, the volatile mass in her chest; the last time they had met, she had made it clear what she thought of Winter, and there was nothing Winter would have preferred than to honor the implicit demand to stay away. But this was different, this time it was Ruby's life on the line, and Winter wasn't going to endure her past mistakes this time.
"I'm going before the council, and I'm going to request for an urgent Mobilization order for Ruby Rose."
She thinks hard, about how their cries had stained the wind, wonders if they had been carried far, ruminates if there had been a destined end to the notes of suffering. She looks up to the sky, notes the constant pitch of the dark, admires the lack of stars in the sky, bathes in the familiarity of it all.
The time under the rubble had given her insight, nothing to consult but memories and plans, and it had led her to one simple truth. Ruby Rose is a sentimental creature – it's this knowledge that led her here after all, from the siphoned memories that enlightened her – one that she knows how to hunt.
She's drawn to tragedy, cursed with the need to interfere, her heart too naively noble to let it slide; especially one crafted to the ink of a storybook travesty, like a child losing his mother.
The faint ache in her head sizzles again, of a low pitch like strain, and she doubts it's due to the frozen tundra that she currently walks. Every once in a while, a ghost acts up, believes it is owed more control over their actions, and it strains, against the confines of their mind, it fights to save the lives to be lost.
But its spirit had been fractured a long time ago, and the faintness of it all is something to smirk at.
She pans over the sky, soaks in the dark, and her gaze wanders up to the floating city of Atlas, adrift amongst the clouds, an aimless monolith in the way it splits the heavens, yet its mortality is nothing short of proven.
It tempts ruination, the way it defies the laws and mechanisms of the natural world, and it's a prospect that her heart leaps for. Though she's set on one goal for now, and the tone in her head sings a melody of hatred, discordant with her grin.
Author's Note:
Don't worry, this isn't going to be a slow story. Next chapter is already planned, and I do think it is what most people have been waiting for. As always, constructive criticism is always welcome!