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It's exhausting in ways that nobody ever seems to expect. And Emerald is the one who expects it the least. She's not with the team at Beacon anymore, but she's never been able to shake the feeling of belonging that she'd felt there, with the four of them. It had been... months? Years? She can never actually tell, and she knows that that's as by design as everything else in her life.
Her chambers in Salem's castle, she guesses, are meant only to give off the appearance of comfort. The blacks and purples play havoc on her eyes, and maybe it's something that Tyrian and Watts and Mercury like looking at, but here, alone in her room, all Emerald can focus on is the inside of her eyelids. She hasn't had a good night's sleep since she got here, but the images play through her mind like a dream anyway.
And the first one that comes to mind lately isn't Cinder. It's Ruby, and she wishes so desperately that she could tell why. Ruby Rose stole Cinder's arm, mangled her body, and for all the vitriol Emerald knows she should feel about it, it never quite bubbles up in her throat the way it does when she thinks about Salem. When she thinks about Mercury. She's revised her memories by now, forced Mercury out of them even though they used to be so close, but after that fight...
Sigh. After it got more obvious than anything else that the two of them were at the end of their friendship, after Emerald knew that she couldn't follow Mercury down his path anymore, after she'd given up trying to pull him back to Cinder's side, she felt more alone than ever here. And she rolls over in her bed and tries to force those thoughts from her head, too, because right now she wants to focus on the last time she actually felt like she belonged somewhere. The last time that just existing didn't feel like a chore.
She's at Beacon again. They're getting ramen, the five of them, and she knows that Blake and Weiss don't trust her yet, but the sisters are getting along with her just fine. So she's sitting between Ruby and Yang, and she's got her stupid little school uniform on, and she's smiling. Blondie just got finished making some stupid pun and Em notices how she's got one eye on her food and one on Blake's face. She's laughing. It's the calm before the storm, but she wonders how often the hurricane gets to look back on its own wake.
She's lying. She's playing nice, she's pretending, she's doing everything she can to ingratiate herself, and that's why it doesn't feel like she's deceiving anyone. This is what she's always done. Smile, laugh along, agree. Avoid any conflict, make people happy. Do what she's told and she'll be accepted, she'll get what she wants, she'll get... validation, approval, a better life. A life that she'll never feel like she earned but that's just a guess because she's still never really gotten it. This is the closest it's ever come, and it's gone forever now.
And for what? Her fingers clench into a fist in the waking world. The comfort of never wondering where your next meal is coming from. The chance to make a mark with her life. The ability to make her own choices and do what she wants to do instead of being someone that things just happen to. But the marks she's leaving behind are scarring countless lives. Sowing ruin throughout the entire world. And just because she knows where her food is coming from doesn't mean it's not poisoning her.
It sickens her to think about it, to even consider throwing everything else away just like Mercury had, but this is what the real freedom to make a choice of her own feels like. She knows, deep in her heart, that she needs to set herself free and find a way back to the home she doesn't deserve. They might even forgive her; they don't know what role she played in the Fall, and reports from Atlas say that Penny's back and better than ever, so maybe it won't even matter. Maybe she can just keep lying about it (because it's not a lie if she just doesn't talk about it) and everything will be fine. Maybe she can just get out from under Salem and leave. Maybe the next time she runs into team RWBY, with Cinder still missing, she can just run away.
She rolls over to her side. It won't ever be that easy and she knows it, but a girl can dream.
...But a girl doesn't have to dream. Sitting up suddenly, Emerald focuses on a point in the middle distance, towards the locked door that she knows doesn't matter because Salem is always spying on her anyway. And in Emerald's own head, in the only place that Salem can't reach her tendrils, she forces herself to see the form of Ruby Rose in front of her. And the way that her chest swells even at the obviously fake image is all the sign that Emerald needs.
"You want to come with us?" she pretends Ruby is asking. Her lips are drier than she thought, and she nods.
"Yeah."
"You know what that means you're gonna have to do, right?"
"Yeah," again. Less confident. Barely above a whisper. She can't let herself speak too loudly, give away the game by saying too much. Salem is always listening and the pressure is inescapable. It makes Emerald's ears ring.
"You'll have to give Cinder up. Once you join up with us again, there's no going back." She nods. It's terrifying. But it's exhausting, too, trying to keep all this up. Lying to herself constantly. Lying to herself more than she's lying to the world.
"You're even lying to yourself right now," Ruby's voice cuts through her thoughts, and there's a dull ache behind her eyes. This isn't how it would go. This isn't what Ruby would say and she knows it, but at the same time, with this image in front of her, it's hard not to project. "We all know you killed her," she says. "It's been a long time and we've had a while to think about it. We know all about you. We know what your Semblance does now, and we believe Pyrrha." The ache is getting worse. "We'll never believe you. Even if you say you'll give Cinder up, are you really going to? Or are you going to run away from us as soon as you have to face a hard choice?"
Her teeth grit. She doesn't need to be berated by someone who isn't even real, but she keeps giving a false voice to her own thoughts anyway. Once she gets started, it's almost impossible to get her to stop.
"Whose side are you on? Cinder's? Salem's?" Ruby's shade takes a couple steps forward, and Emerald can imagine her voice deepening. "Do you really want to be on our side or are you just looking for someone who makes you feel good?" The pain is getting harder to hold back. "You think just being 'good' will make you happy? You think it's that easy? Like it's not a constant struggle to stay on the tightrope?"
Ruby looks down at Emerald's face and those damned silver eyes are meeting bright red ones and even if both of them are the invention of one person, she still doesn't know who's going to break first. And maybe it's taken this long, or maybe she just needed to frame it in a different way, but she's feeling the vitriol come to a boil.
"No," Emerald says, finally breaking her own silence. "You think what I do is easy? You think—" She stands up, plants her feet. "That I don't know what I'm doing every damn day of my life? You want to talk about walking a tightrope?" Her arm thrusts out, a sweeping gesture to the rest of her room that cuts directly through the illusion of Ruby Rose. Her face gets in close and her voice becomes icy.
"Do you know how careful I have to be to make sure everything doesn't fall apart around me? Do you know how easy it would be to give up and let her take everything over? Let her control my life again?" Her head is splitting, but she's too angry to care. "Do you have any idea how hard I have to work to hold onto the nothing that I have right now? When you've just had everything handed to you your entire life?"
"Not everything." Ruby continues, unhindered by the fist passing through her shoulder. "Not the things you stole from me." Her face stays steady. "Look at you. Look at how scared you are. We could've been friends. You could've run away from Cinder back then and gone to school. Gotten your license. But you didn't listen to yourself back then. You didn't care what you wanted, and you only care now because you think it's your only way out."
Emerald shuts up, shuts down, and the illusion continues. The voice inside her head fills her vision with whites and reds playing havoc on her thoughts. "Maybe it is. Maybe it is the only way out. Or maybe it's just the only way out that you see. Or maybe you really do want something better for yourself," Ruby's voice echoes. "Maybe you want to make amends. Maybe you want to eat ramen with all of us together again." And steadies. "Maybe we're ready to hear you out. Maybe we've all lost so many people that we'll take anyone we can get in our fight against Salem."
This hurts more than being yelled at did. Not in her head, not behind her eyes, but in Emerald's heart. There's a sinking feeling, heavy and deep, the kind that drags everything else down with it, the kind that brings her knees to the floor and hangs her head. And the thing that kills her the most is the final thought, the one deep inside her own mind that the figment of Emerald's imagination at last digs up and brings to light.
"You can't move forward without taking the first step."
And Ruby disappears. The illusion shatters without even giving her the satisfaction of being the one to break it, and Emerald lets go of less tension than she hoped. She doesn't know why she does this to herself. Being like this is exhausting. Losing arguments to her own psyche night after night. She doesn't know why she put a face to it this time, or why she thought it would be a good idea to end today crying into her bedsheets.
She doesn't know how long she spends like that, kneeled over, repositioned so she's just getting her arms wet instead of the bed she needs to sleep in. But when she's cried it all out, when she's done being exhausting and she's just exhausted, she gets back to her feet and puts a hand to her head. She'll feel this in the morning and she won't be able to hide it from anyone, but Salem has long since stopped caring about Emerald showing up with puffy eyelids and a massive dehydration headache.
Maybe tomorrow will be the day she finally listens to herself. Even while it's still a little hard to breathe, even as she has to work to re-establish her own baseline hallucination so Salem's spies, wherever they are, don't learn things about Emerald that they shouldn't know, there's hope in the back of her head. The argument with herself had been miserable, but maybe she'd put a face to it because the face is one that she's wanted to see again for far too long.
She crawls herself underneath the too-cold, too-thin blankets and stretches out on the mattress that fits the legal definitions of soft. She's still got a chance to ruin this, just like she does every day of her life. There's no sunshine around here, but that's never stopped the best plans of the night evaporating come morning.
If she starts walking, she might not like what's at the end of the road. She barely knows anything about team RWBY or who they're traveling with these days. A lot of things could have happened between Haven and wherever they are now—Atlas, right? As her eyes close again and she tugs the blankets up to her chin, she lets her mind wander. Ruby's probably dumb enough to forgive anyone for anything. Weiss might have some complaints. If the kid that pissed Hazel off so bad is with them, she's got some questions she'd like to ask him. Emerald yawns as the feeling of finally drifting off to sleep makes her thoughts swim.
If nothing else, it'd be nice to see if those stupid lovestruck idiots ever got together.