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Ruby, to no one’s surprise, had been experiencing some not insignificant degree of emotional turmoil following the events at Beacon at the end of her second semester. For any normal student this would have been something related to failing grades, or perhaps a return to a less than satisfactory home life after a year away. It could have been related to the growing distance between her and her family, her most loved ones, after a long time spent in comfortable proximity. But unfortunately for one heroine—traveling in forced proximity to a team she wasn’t even a part of—it was none of these things.
Much to her own dismay, Ruby Rose had been thinking not about her crippled sister, nor her repatriated partner, nor even her runaway friend. Ruby Rose, to her own infinite chagrin, had been thinking about nothing but one Cinder Fucking Fall nearly every single night since she had seen the woman at the top of Beacon tower, obliterating Pyrrha Nikos like some kind of wrathful goddess.
Gods and Maidens?
Magic and Monsters?
Secret Conspiracies?
The End of the Freaking World?
Not important enough. Not to the great hero Ruby Rose. Not more important—apparently—than her stupid crush on a stupid sexy upperclassman from Haven that just so happened to be the orchestrator of the single biggest tragedy that had ever befallen the kingdom of Vale.
Maybe this explained her fascination really. The cool and mysterious demeanor, her odd familiarity, and even Cinder’s own fixation on Ruby herself.
It wasn’t like Ruby hadn’t noticed. Cinder’s teammates, Emerald and Mercury, had been fairly close to her team during the run up to the Vytle festival. When she considered it they were actually the next closest transfer team to them after team SSSN. Team CMEN (pronounced “cement” for some god’s awful reason) had been considered friends to team RWBY well before the actual events of the Fall.
Ruby had even been considering asking Emerald to dance at the prom, although that was only because she couldn’t even consider approaching Cinder herself. The woman had shown interest in Ruby for most of the semester, often seeming to have eyes on her from across crowded rooms or be suspiciously conspicuous when their teams passed in the hallways. But unlike Emerald’s cheery ease, or Mercury’s disaffected snark, Cinder always just looked at her with quiet intensity. Ruby never felt comfortable under that gaze, like she was the only one in the room who could possibly matter to a woman who very clearly could have gotten up to just about whatever she wanted with whomever she chose.
It never made sense, the way that Cinder’s attention would skate over the world around her like glass, only to stop dead the second her golden eyes locked onto Ruby’s silver. But regardless of the how or why, Ruby had noticed. It made her uncomfortable at first, always sending a shiver down her spine when she felt that heated gaze on the back of her neck, aura rising to protect from a threat that never came. But eventually she got used to it, and in her own time she began to look back.
Whenever Emerald and Mercury were conducting their back and forth with her and her team Ruby found herself paying only half an ear, dedicating the majority of her attention to their dark and sullen team leader. She found herself looking for Cinder across those crowded rooms and in those packed hallways. She noticed, after some time, the little details that gave away her facade. A little sneer here or there, an eye roll when she thought no one was looking. The cock of her hips when someone walked up to her, as if challenging their very right to speak with her. While Emerald seemed friendly, and Mercury was just nice enough to not come off as a dick, Cinder seemed to be quietly hiding the most intense personality Ruby had ever seen. She never lounged around her friends, at least in public, she was always either reading a textbook or practicing her semblance with one hand while she thought everyone was too focused on one another to notice.
Her glass work was stunning. Once Ruby had caught her out of the corner of her eye—under a dining table at lunch no less—crafting with one hand a flower that was so lifelike as to seem real. Ruby had stopped dead in her tracks and nearly knocked Weiss’s lunch off her tray in her distraction. An awkward and blushing Ruby had walked away from that moment with both lame excuses and a profound fascination with the beauty Cinder was hiding away from the world.
All this and more, Ruby found herself struggling to reconcile with the monster she saw at the top of Beacon Tower that fateful night.
Who was Cinder Fall? How could she do that? How would Ruby’s hands feel wrapping around her neck? How would Ruby feel pouring out her anger and frustration on what must be the single most deserving target in the whole world of Remnant? How could that target be her once innocent and youthful crush: Cinder Fucking Fall?
These questions had plagued her sleepless and frustrated nights all the way from Patch to Haven. Across continents and struggles, trials and tribulations, Ruby had been unable to let go of the stubborn fascination with the woman who so quickly and completely betrayed everything Ruby had ever known and thought about the world. The very woman who had thrust her and all her friends into a world suddenly much bigger and darker than any of them could handle.
The very woman who she now stood before in the grand entrance hall of Haven Academy.
She knew there were things she should say, things she should be doing to stop this wicked thing in front of her.
She knew that there were questions she should ask, interrogations to be conducted in the name of unraveling the twisted mystery that was Cinder Fall.
She stood instead, lock jawed and steel eyed, staring at the woman she almost thought she could love. The woman she had imagined and pondered. The woman for whom she had fantasized and agonized. The woman who stood relaxed and self assured in a room full of armed warriors, friend and foe alike, who were otherwise all tensed to pounce at even the slightest provocation.
Cinder’s lips were moving in slow languid patterns. Ruby assumed she must be making some grand speech about their doom or something. Like she had at the Fall of Beacon, Cinder was likely trying to gloat and preen in her own contemptible glory. Ruby’s ears were full of nothing but static as she watched. Cinder swayed her hips, moved her arms in some vague manner suggesting ease and grace. Her eyes were locked on Ruby’s the entire time. They almost seemed to glow with her own internal fire as she tried to show up the teenage hero before her, the same intensity from before, now given awful context.
Ruby was snapped out of her stupor by movement and sound, not across the room but just beside her. Jaune had started to shout, started to step forward, tears brimming in his eyes, towards the woman he hated nearly as much as Ruby herself did.
Ruby’s had slammed into his breastplate before he made even one step. Voice dying in his throat he turned to the Reaper, betrayal in his heart, only to find that she hadn’t even broken her gaze from the Maiden before them. She couldn’t let anyone else have this. She couldn’t let anyone else try. None of her friends or teammates could do what needed to be done. Not for want of desire, but for want of need.
Taking her own step forward Ruby finally found her voice. With only a steadying breath for comfort she looked that monster in the eyes and said the only thing she could think of.
“Shut. Up. Did you come here to talk? Or to fight?”
She knew she was being impatient. That it would have been smarter to try to reason with these villains, or at least try to separate their group before opening hostilities. But none of that mattered, not when she was so close to getting her hands on Cinder after all this time. Her nails practically itched with need, and she could feel her heavy-breathed fixation mirrored in the woman before her.
Cinder merely smirked a reply, half a chuckle huffed past her lips:
“Oh little red, I thought you’d never ask.”
They were on each other in a heartbeat, before anyone could hope to react.
Cinder had been through 8 months of hell following her grand victory at Beacon Academy. She had toiled for more than a year, getting all the right pieces in all the right places.
She had made bets, sacrifices, alliances, and put in hard work with her own two hands, all for the sake of achieving something truly great for the first time in her miserable life.
For just one moment at the top of Beacon Tower, with an arrow through the heart of the would-be Fall Maiden, Ozpin neutralized dozens of floors below her, she had felt like she had done something. For that one perfect, crystalline moment it seemed like all of the hardships she had experienced, the suffering and the abuse, had all been worth it. It was like she could see a shining path through every moment of her life, lighting up those dark corners she would have sooner forgotten, all in the name of this one perfect victory. One brilliant point proving that she meant something, that she had been destined for greatness and that she was not the worthless wretch that others had made out to be.
Cinder had felt right in her skin, the Grimm burrowed in her felt like an extension of her purpose, her own semblance and the powers of the Fall Maiden together felt like a perfect pairing of dinner and fine wine. Everything was right with the world as she looked at that naive redhead and watched the light begin to fade from her eyes. She had even been feeling so generous as to put the girl out of her misery, igniting every cell of her body all at once in a perfect burn that ended with no pain.
That perfect moment came crashing down just as quickly as it had come. The stupid idiot of a freshman had appeared out of nowhere yet again and dashed all of Cinder’s hopes. With one white hot blast of unpredictable magic she singlehandedly ruined the victory that Cinder had been working towards with every miserable choice she had made in her stupid miserable life. Every scrap of dignity and recognition she had fought tooth and nail for had been ripped away in one single agonizing action by one Brothers-cursed teenager who had a habit of getting in her way whenever things seemed like they were going well.
Ruby Rose would burn for what she’d done.
It had taken five months before Cinder could speak again. Two more for her to come to grips with the use of her Grimm arm. There was not one day of that time that she did not think of Ruby Rose.
The girl had maimed her worse that any other opponent she had ever faced, and made her question her strength in ways no one had ever come close to. In her spirals, Cinder had looked back at her time in Beacon with new eyes, trying to find the warning signs she should have seen before it had been too late.
Ruby had been getting in the way of her plans since day one, with that busted robbery job she’d had to bail Torchwick out from. Combined with the time that team RWBY had interrupted a White Fang meeting and destroyed the stolen Atlas tech she had been counting on for the Mountain Glenn job. A job which Ruby and her team had ALSO RUINED!
How could she not have seen it? How had she missed the way Ruby had wormed her way into every plan Cinder had come up with? But when she thinks back she remembers all those times between the missions and the high stakes, when she had sat around with Emerald and Mercury in some cafeteria or classroom, and observed the bumbling airhead that was to be her undoing.
There had never been one moment outside of combat where Ruby had seemed to be anything resembling a threat. She had been silly and distractable and all around the worst role model of a team leader that Cinder had ever seen. The fact that Ruby had made it past the first week of classes at all seemed like a miracle, and even after her repeated involvement with Torchwick’s ne’er-do-wells she had still seemed like an affable fool around her friends. And then just when Cinder would convince herself that girl couldn’t possibly hinder her plans there would be a night like the dance.
Cinder had been sure that every single student would be so distracted by that inane dance that no one would notice her leaving. She had assumed that Ruby Rose, inane distraction extraordinaire, would have been the least likely of all people to leave that dance. But she had been there with Cinder at the top of the CCT tower all the same. They had their own private dance that night, one Cinder hadn’t been all too put out by, given that her hack still went through perfectly.
It should have opened her eyes to the Ruby that existed behind the vibrant mask and silly behavior. Cinder knew that Ruby tested highest for combat skills in her year and had been assigned as a leader despite being two years younger than everyone else. She knew that RWBY was Ozpin’s next pet project outside of grooming the next Fall Maiden.
But in her pride she had ignored all the warning signs, and she had payed a dear price. Ruby had hurt Cinder in ways she thought she had overcome years ago, awakened doubts she thought she had erased. And Cinder would never let her do anything like that to her again.
Which brought her to the conflicting sight before her now, on the day of her next great act.
Cinder knew by now that the little red menace would have found her way to Haven by some twist of fate no matter what happened, so she had prepared herself. The accompanying merry-band of co-eds was something of a surprise, although not much of one, and her own posse would be a suitable match for them in any case.
Instead, what surprised Cinder the most had been Ruby herself. Where she had expected to see a student barely out of her pubescence, she instead found an honest-to-the-gods young woman. One who had apparently shed her baby fat over the past year and developed some noticeable muscle. Some other noticeable developments had Cinder’s remaining eye tracing up and down as she delivered her rehearsed speech, attention as always drawn to the walking contradiction before her.
Cinder managed to restrain her inspection, instead maintaining consistent eye contact with Ruby. The girl hadn’t moved an inch after arriving, and Cinder couldn’t identify the emotions simmering beneath those hard silver eyes of hers. What she did know was that she finally caught Ruby in the act, prepared for the girl’s interference and planned to stop the hopeful idiot dead in her tracks.
All she needed now was one more little victory, that extra step that would secure her place as above that of the great huntress Ruby Rose. For the start of her grand revenge Cinder wanted nothing more than to make a crack in that shining facade. She needed more than anything to break that perfect armor of heroic bearing the girl put on when faced with villainy.
As Cinder’s ignoble speech drew to its meticulously planned and stunning climax she watched those silver eyes for any tremor of doubt, any sign that Ruby would take her bait and show her true colors.
When that blonde rando opened his mouth to begin a shout of challenge Cinder’s heart nearly broke in two. All that planning and work to get this opening, all her boasting and bragging right into the face of her greatest enemy would be redirected to some nobody, while her shining Rose held that steady gaze blank of all the spite she wished to see reflected.
And then her heart soared, as a pale hand stopped the boy before he uttered a single syllable. Like a valiant knight from legend Ruby stepped once towards Cinder. In that single moment the maiden saw every flicker and flame of passion that she had imagined over those long months of pain roar to life behind the girl’s cold visage.
And again Cinder felt a perfect moment, a clear path through her life that lead to this one moment, her whole life’s destination: the instant the Reaper’s calm face broke into an adorable scowl of anger.
And the girl before spoke at last into the suddenly silent room:
“Shut. Up. Did you come here to talk? Or to fight?”
It wasn’t much compared to Cinder’s oration, but that didn’t matter. The maiden felt a satisfaction soak through her whole body just to hear those words, that tone, the irate face on the beautiful girl.
“Oh little red, I thought you’d never ask.”
The two rushed one another in perfect synchronicity. Ruby popped out of her Petal Burst about two thirds of the way between them, Cinder reaching the same point via flame propulsion at the very same instant. Twin swords of molten glass met the gargantuan blade of of a sniper-scythe and they froze for a picture frame moment.
Closer now than they had been since the Fall, they spoke no words, only breathed the violent fury of resentment left simmering long enough to reduce into something thicker. A flare of Cinder’s Semblance, boosted no-doubt by her new magics, forced Ruby away for just a moment. But she had no opportunity to appreciate her last breath of cool air before Cinder was on her again and the heat engulfed her.
Ruby was wrapped completely in the older woman’s Scorching Caress. Heat poured off Cinder’s body in waves, like a tide of her emotions made manifest. The air choked Ruby’s lungs and clammed her skin, slicking her grip on the snath. Not that she would ever drop her weapon in a fight as important as this; she simply couldn’t afford to. Instead she swung again and again, through the thickening air and oppressive malice of her foe, discomfort and obstacles disregarded in her quest to win just this one fight.
They were too fast to follow. Crescent Rose was a red blur at the best of times, and now she almost seemed to be moving from place to place in the span of an instant. Cinder’s weapons glanced, shattered, formed and reformed, all at such a rate that shards of molten glass were as shrapnel from an explosion. At the epicenter the two women fought with a single minded dedication, to dare look away would risk immediate death.
Rather than watching hands and feet and blades, both women found themselves looking for the next tell in the other’s eyes. A glance here, a flinch there, the momentary widening of a plan forming in potentia, the chance to turn the hypothetical into reality. All of them could be seen in the clear eyes of Gold and Silver that bore down on one another in their heat hazed euphoria, more communication in both directions than either would care to admit.
Ruby would Petal Burst around Cinder only to be met with a weapon formed within a mere second of her reformation and feel the edges of her petals singed by the heat surrounding her. Cinder would feint with a disintegrating sword only for Ruby to call her bluff and swing with full force through the gap in her defenses.
They were well and truly matched, even with all of Cinder’s Maiden Magic and years of practice she only had one true advantage.
Crescent Rose was big as hell. And Ruby was getting winded.
She did a good job of not showing it. Having been conducting hours long hunts with the massive scythe since age 11, Ruby was my no means weak or lacking in endurance, but Cinder had been pushing her harder than she had ever fought before. Harder than any person had ever made Ruby had to fight in her life actually. And it showed in her heaving chest, and her slick hands, and her wary gaze that held Cinder at bay, an implicit distance that had grown since the start of their melee.
It was a chance to good to pass up.
So on the next swing of that massive blade, slipping past where it sang through the air in a deadly chorus, Cinder put a knife between Ruby’s hand and it’s death grip on the snath. She knew Ruby had enough aura that it wouldn’t cut her. And that Ruby could already see the move coming and would pull her hand away in time. But what they both knew was that doing so would mean letting go of Crescent Rose. Losing her hold on the one defense she had against the Maiden’s onslaught.
Cinder looked into the depths of Ruby’s gaze as the weapon fell away—cartwheeling across the room and very possibly sticking into the wall for dramatic effect—but what she saw there made her pause. Rather than the desperation and sinking hopes Cinder had seen on Ruby’s face in her dreams, she found a tightening of resolve, a minute shift in the hue from silver to steel. And then she was swept up in the Roses.
A power Cinder had seen but never felt had captured her. She felt like she was flipped upside-down and shaken as the room was everywhere around her and nowhere to be seen, at least not clearly. She felt the caress of Rose petals and the soft wind of summer all wrapped up in her own dizzying heat. And as soon as it had started it ended, with a thump, on the floor at the very center of the massive empty space that had become of the room in which they fought.
The younger woman sat astride Cinders hips, one hand each pinning the arms of the fallen Maiden, using all of her surprising weight to hold the woman down. Ruby gasped haggard breaths, and found in their momentary silence that Cinder too drew heaving gasps of air, unsure even of how long she had been fighting her own heat to do so. Ruby’s skin glistened with sweat everywhere that could be seen, her leather gloves wet on Cinder’s wrists, her blouse clinging to her skin in broad see-through patches.
Cinder took another moment in their stillness to consider the weight pressing down on her, how she had been surprised for an instant that it was so much greater than her own for a girl so much smaller than herself. But again she should not have let Ruby Rose surprise her, because with how heavy the girl’s weapon was and how little of her life she had spent starving, it was no wonder she was corded with muscle where Cinder was nearly skin and bone.
She looked back up to the face of the girl above her, and only then realized how long she had been staring. Ruby still wore her look of dogged concentration, but there was a hint of flush in her cheeks. The temperature that held high and humid in the space between them was less of Cinder’s influence and as much from Rose’s body heat drifting between them to steam their proximity like a sauna. Cinder held her gaze for one hot, heavy, moment as the whole world seemed to still.
And then, like when their fight began only minutes before, they both moved at once. This time however they were starting from a whole lot closer, and all the more quickly closed the gap between them.
Yang stood staring—dumbly—at the horrible sight before her, hands still poised to defend from attacks that were not coming. Emerald stood near her, weapons also raised as if to strike, staring just as dumbly as the brawler at the spot where both groups’ leaders lay in a pile making out in the middle of damn floor like horny teenagers. She supposed that one of them was a horny teenager but still. It twisted her gut.
When Ruby and Cinder had begun their presumed-to-be-mortal bout in the center of the room the other occupants had endeavored to give them as much space as possible. Ruby’s rapid movement and Cinder’s blistering aura made any space near them a no-go zone for combatants that didn’t want their heads inadvertently chopped of—and burned to ashes as well—so everyone else had made do with the space near the walls and by the entrance.
As usual, people had paired off somewhat thematically, Yang and Weiss taking Emerald and Mercury, Oscar taking Leonardo, and so forth. Things had progressed as expected, not smoothly but with a certain surety of eventual victory, all for things to come to a screeching halt.
Emerald had stopped first, mid-blow, when she noticed that Ruby had somehow pinned Cinder to the floor. Her attention drew that of Yang, her current target, and slowly that of Weiss and Mercury as well. They waited with baited breath to see what happened next, how the tables would turn or perhaps how it would come to an inevitable conclusion. That is: Weiss, Yang and Emerald waited with baited breath, Mercury stood watching impatiently as if he couldn’t care less about anything in the entire world, which may well have been the case.
Other battles around the room ceased as the various parties felt the stillness in the air. All of the sound in the room seemed to drain away as their focus drew towards the center, until all that could be heard was the curiously loud breathing of the two women on the floor.
Then just as all went silent there was movement. But not a movement to kill. No daggers were drawn or punches thrown. No escapes were attempted or thwarted in their turn. Instead the two women surged closer together, closing the already minuscule gap between their bodies in one awful moment that sent everyone around the room reeling with revulsion.
Lips crashed together with enough force that Yang winced. Ruby let go of one of Cinder’s hands to grip the back of her head, and that same hand of Cinder’s wrapped around the girl’s hip, long claws pinching fabric as the two pulled their bodies flush with one another.
The sight caused the blood to drain away from Yang’s face, horror overcoming shock the longer she stared. Before her, her own baby sister was doing something inconceivable. It would have been bad enough to see this with some random freshman, perhaps walking in on her when a door that should have been locked wasn’t. It would have been bad enough to be forcibly reminded of Ruby’s growing maturity in some normal and not-completely-fucked-up way. It was decidedly worse to see her sister rolling on the floor with the single greatest villain they had ever encountered, seemingly enjoying herself.
That was probably the worst part, the enthusiasm. As bad as it sounds to say, some part of her really would have had an easier time handling it if it was rape. The world would still make sense if that murderer had decided to add to her list of crimes with one more insult. But that wasn’t what was happening in front of her, not in the slightest. Instead:
The woman who killed Pyrrha Nikos moaned openly into Ruby’s mouth. The woman who killed Penny grabbed Ruby’s ass to ruck the girl up higher over her hips, both of them groaning in satisfaction at the increased friction.
Yang wanted to hurl more the longer she watched, her face rapidly approaching the color of Emerald’s hair (said girl still standing nearby and watching with a fury that Yang didn’t bother understanding—Mercury had wandered off somewhere).
When Cinder reached up to sink her teeth into the soft underside of Ruby’s neck, the optimistic team leader let out a breathy squeak that sent a shiver of disgust down the whole length of Yang’s spine. She had to leave before this got out of hand. The idea of getting between the two to break them up was unthinkable.
Just as she was considering her best escape route, a less than happy sound came from Ruby. A yelp of pain resounded in the room after Cinder’s claws raked a quadruplet set of slashes down the younger girl’s tender back. Before Yang could step in—or form the necessary coherent thought to do so—she saw a short burst of petals ending in a similar position as before only with Ruby holding both of Cinder’s hands above her head with one of the girl’s own. Sharply, she slammed the pinned wrists down on the floor to emphasize her message.
“Hey! Hands where I can see them.” Ruby’s voice was a growl none had heard from her before, but despite the stern injunction Cinder still seemed all smiles.
“Of course… Officer.” She was laying on the sultry tone so thick that Yang could smell it in the air like bad perfume. “Is there any thing I can do to get away with just a warning?”
“You want a warning?” Ruby put on extra gravel in her incongruously high voice, for added effect. “How about: You keep quiet and do what I say, and I wont have to get out my nightstick and make you regret getting caught.”
Cinder let out a peel of laughter with the clarity of a bell. “Oh Officer! I think your nightstick is exactly what I was hoping for!”
That was it.
Yang had to leave.
She managed to completely shut out the rest of that cursed interaction by turning sharply towards the door and walking away, heedless of the other threats in the room. Said other threats turned out to be rather un-threatening since it seemed like all but Emerald had already made their way out.
Yang met Weiss as they approached the door, both looking like sleepwalkers having a particularly bad nightmare. Just as they reached the door however, a stunned Blake appeared before them—possibly some illusion crafted by the cruel Brother of Destruction to torment them further.
“What are you guys doing here? What’s been happening? We only knew about the White Fang attack. Is that Emerald?”
The onslaught of questions at least partially broke Yang out of her stupor, but unable to manifest any enthusiasm through the miasma of denial and frustration she only said: “Don’t ask, we’re taking this outside. You don’t want to see whats going on in there.”