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This is how the world ends.
Not Remnant. (Not yet.)
But her world.
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thisishowtheworldends
This is how Weiss Schnee’s world ends:
With a scream yang falls over the edge and she’s gone she’s gone blake’s screaming ruby’s in shock weiss can’t even move, with a bang cinder blows ruby over the edge neo’s taking her with her she’s falling she’s falling blake saves her no they’re falling falling falling, with a burn of the barrel of gambol as she picks it up and shoots.
The world ends when she’s nineteen years old with a Huntress license and a duty to protect. The world ends when she’s got everything to give and everything to lose.
The world ends too soon.
Her world falls into the deep and dark and never ending abyss.
And as if she ever had any other chance, she falls, too.
This is how the world ends.
Weiss had spent a lifetime looking into mirrors.
(1.)
She looks in the mirror the night she gets her scar. The left side of her face is caked with bandages, trapping the blood underneath. It’ll scar the nurses had told her with a sympathetic frown. She had only smiled. I know.
Later, she removes the bandages. Dried blood stains half of her face red.
She can’t help but smile.
(2.)
She looks in the mirror the first night at Beacon. She isn’t alone, then. Her new team surrounds her, bustling and bursting with energy as they prepare for the night. They never sit still, she’s noticed. Her whole life has been a held breath, freezing and waiting for the moment she could let go. She watches herself exhale. She watches herself, staying still amongst the ever-moving team she can call her own yet is accepted all the same, and she knows.
That for the first time in her seventeen years, she has finally come home.
(3.)
She looks in the mirror her first night back in Atlas. Every inch of her is coated in dirt and grime. Blood that is not hers stands out stark against the white fabric of her dress - a morbid map of tragedy. Tear tracks tear through the dirt on her face.
Just last night, at this very moment, she had been fighting for a space at the mirror in their dorm. It had become routine. She had wiggled through Yang and Blake and shoved herself next to Ruby, surrounded at either side. A few months prior she would have flinched at the contact. But now she relished it. She lived for it. She surrendered her hairbrush to Ruby after she felt hands nudging at her own, allowing her partner to gently smooth the tangles out of her hair. She watched Yang wash her face and Blake remove her makeup, soft banter exchanged from one mouth to another.
She had smiled, then. A warmth had sparked in her chest, so soft she thought it might break her.
But not now.
Now, she doesn’t think she’ll ever smile again. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be warm again.
But worst of all, she’s alone. And she can never go back home.
(4.)
Atlas falls.
Atlas falls and takes her team with it and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it.
In the chaos she finds a mirror, a twisted reflection:
Team JNPR, Fall of Beacon, one dead, three remain.
Team RWBY. Fall of Atlas. Three dead. One remains.
It’s not a parallel she wants to live with.
(She’s Weiss Schnee - she’s not given a choice.)
She refuses to give that reflection another thought. She takes Gambol and shoots the mirror herself, shattering it into a billion unsalvageable pieces. She can’t break. Not right now, not anytime soon. So she’ll break something else instead.
She doesn’t care if this is how her story ends.
Atlas is a place for endings, she’s decided. It is here where her innocence died before it had a chance to even blink. It is here where her family had been broken by a man who dared name himself a father. It is here where Weiss Schnee died over and over and over again to the point where she no longer knew who she was.
It is here, in Atlas, where her family has fallen to a place she cannot follow.
It is here, in Atlas, where she makes a decision.
For the first time, Weiss is not fighting to protect or to live another day. She’s not fighting for the greater good or for a mission. She can’t bring herself to care if she dies here.
She’s not fighting to live.
She’s fighting to kill.
Cinder has taken too much from them - from Remnant. Beacon, Penny, Pyrrha, Yang, Blake, Ruby. It’s time for Cinder to fall.
(But though the gods are distant, they are not absent. They love a tragedy - they invented it, after all.
Weiss is not the one who walks away.)
(5.)
She’s the last of Team RWBY to fall and she’s the last to find them in the new world.
It’s dark on the beach, a starless sky framing a whole moon. Everything about this place is unnatural.
It’s clear that they had been waiting for her. When she broke through the treeline, relieved smiles graced their weary and tear-stained faces, her name tearing through their lips. When her legs refuse to move her any further, she stands and waits, arms outstretched, for her family to be in her arms again.
Ruby reaches her first with strong arms meeting around her middle, lifting her up and spinning her around, her face buried in her neck doing nothing to muffle her relieved cries. Her own arms come up to squeeze Ruby back with as much strength as she can muster. She hears Blake and Yang reach them and feels their arms join in Ruby’s embrace.
“Team RWBY’s back together again!”
Ruby’s small, choked up cheer was muffed from her place in the embrace, but her teammates heard it nonetheless. For the first time what seemed like years but they knew was merely days, they allowed themselves to smile, the words bringing them back to a simpler time - a simpler world.
Now, they were in a strange new world with no explanation as to why or where or to how to get out. The world they left behind was in pieces. The people they left behind were the same.
Later, they would have to find a way out of here. They would have to get off the ground they had sunk onto, detangle themselves from each other’s arms, and pray that whatever came next wouldn’t break them.
But for now, for this small instant, they could just be Team RWBY. Together again. A team who, despite the world trying to tear them apart time and time again, always found each other once more. They were magnetic, an inescapable cosmic pull that bound the four of them to one another. In this life and the next they were bound to have each other.
Eventually, they pulled apart just enough to see each other’s faces. (To see their chests move with each breath, to see their bodies beaten but not broken, to see them alive against all odds.)
Blake and Yang shared a look over Weiss’s head.
“Weiss…” Blake began gently. When she couldn’t find the words, Yang stepped in with a more blunt approach.
“What happened up there?”
Every inch of Weiss went cold. Her body went still, her breath frozen in her chest and she wondered if this was what Penny felt when she died.
Penny.
Slowly, Weiss looked up. She saw herself reflected in -
(Silver eyes.
That was the first thing that struck Weiss about Ruby. Not the explosion, not the rambling apologies, not the obnoxiously large weapon collapsed and strapped around her waist.
Silver eyes.
It was then that Weiss knew that her life had changed. Right here, right now. By meeting this girl whose name she had yet to learn, something had fallen into place. She didn’t know what, yet. She wouldn’t find out for a while. But still, right here and now, some part of her knew…
That her life had been changed the moment she saw those eyes.)
“...Weiss?” Ruby’s voice was small. She looked small. Weiss was suddenly struck by how young they all were. Faintly, she wondered where she’d be right now if none of them had met each other. She wouldn’t let herself think of that any further.
Focus on the here and now, Weiss.
She takes a shaky breath. Ruby -
(Extends a hand.
“C’mon Weiss, live a little,” she said, as if sneaking out is the most daring thing they’ve ever done, as if getting caught by academy faculty is the biggest and scariest consequence they can face. As if they’re normal teenagers away at school, not at war, not dying and fighting and surviving instead of living - like it was dirt under their fingernails instead of blood and friends they held instead of buried.
Weiss took her hand and squeezed. Smiled.
“Lead the way.”
And just for that night, they pretend.)
Weiss only manages to get out a single word.
A name.
(“Penny!” Ruby’s voice was elated at the sight of her friend. It was 5AM and they had a long day of missions ahead of them, but Ruby couldn’t be happier.
Penny was alive. She fit in with them easily, and after a bit, it was as if she was never not there. She made them laugh and brought them sweets, she scored new high records in game nights and smiled bright enough to even light up the eternal gloom of Atlas.
It was a miracle. To see the dead walk and talk…it didn’t seem real. It was complicated, the technicalities of it. It didn’t seem possible, either. But against all odds, it was.
And this was simple: Penny was alive. Penny was alive and she loved them, and they loved her back.
That was that.
(Looking back, Weiss will remember looking at Penny and Ruby together again and thinking that if they were to lose her again, lose anyone, it would break her partner. She was already so close before Atlas. She remembered how hard she fought at Brunswick and how dull her eyes had been on their journey. She remembered doing her best to hold onto her long enough until she could put herself back together again.)
‘But we’re safe now’, she had convinced herself. ‘Ruby won’t break tonight.’)
The night had passed. Atlas had fallen.
“Penny.”
Weiss watched as Ruby fell apart.
“She’s gone,” Weiss gasped out, face lax in shock and eyes dull with grief. She looked at Ruby and no longer saw the girl she once knew. She didn’t see the girl she ran into at Beacon and who lived for the hell of it, who laughed without burden and smiled and it reached her eyes.
“...She’s gone.”
And as Weiss looked into mirrored eyes, she knew that they lost more than Penny that night.