Hello all,

I don't normally do this, but a lot of PM's have gotten me worried for those reading. So this chapter contains content that may be considered graphic or triggering. Read at your own discretion.

Ruby,

Sometimes I wonder what my world would be like if I had never met you.

It's horrible, I know. But on lonely nights like this with nothing but the icy cold breeze to comfort me and no love left to warm my frozen heart, I can't help but wonder whether my life would better or worse without the ghost of your memory haunting me forever.

What would it be like if we never had ice cream overlooking the kingdom of Vale? What if you had never held me close as I clutched at you, the last salvation I had from my own broken mind. What if you had never braided my hair? What if you had never kissed me under the light of a broken moon and made me feel that even when the world was falling apart around me I was still solid. Grounded. Loved.

I first thought it the day after I found out. After I wiped the tears from my cheeks for the last time because I had no more to weep. I had so much love for you and there was so much more pain I could never express, but the tears no longer helped. It was just me, afraid and alone, in a world without light.

I felt blinded. That world you showed to me that first day when you held my hand, when you showed me the world you loved and let a piece of it fall into mine - it was gone. Snuffed out like a flame on a candle desperately struggling to stay lit in the howling winds. And then I wondered… What if I had never seen?

I think that's the moment I knew I hated myself.

To question the gift you gave me? To reject the love and happiness you offered me with your heart bared and wide open? You were the summer rose that bloomed and made me realize that this garden of weeds could be beautiful. You were the one who made me think that maybe, just maybe, I could believe in myself. That perhaps I did not need to work at the SDC until I was old and withered and frail and used up, my courage and hope scattered to the wind like so many leaves in autumn.

And I begged for it all to be taken from me.

Upon your return, the biggest question I had was whether you would remember, and how much. I almost hope you don't know me. I hope that maybe you can forget all the pain and misery that I brought you. I hope you can forget me and put me out of your mind so you do not need to suffer as I have, in a world without the other half of your soul.

Yet, I send you letters.

I'm so sorry, my Rose. It must be a special sort of cruelty that has inspired me. To remind you of me, every day, but tell you I can never see you. I want to tell you to trust me, to believe that it is better this way, because I well and truly believe it is, but I don't think you could. Not if you don't remember me. Not all of me.

I was… Awful to you.

And even now, as I admit that I would do anything for you Rose, I write this letter. I write this letter to remind you of me. And I write it while I wish I could forget you.

In a way, I suppose I will. And you me.

I had a dream last night.

I was in a cage in a cave. It was dark. I was shackled so all I could see was the stone in front of me, grey and smooth. Unremarkable. It was just a stone wall. But the cave was not so far underground, and when the sun shone down, I could see shadows flickering across the wall. Silhouettes of the world. They excited me, if only because the long hours of the night were filled with nothing but darkness. Shadow, with no light to give it shape or meaning.

So I watched the shadows dance and play all day. I was enraptured, entranced by the beauty of their display. I never once wondered what made the shadows. They were all I knew. The shadows were my world.

Day in, and day out.

Day in.

Day.

Out...

An infinite repetition. Over, and over, and over.

And eventually the shadows grew dull, eventually they no longer excited me. Eventually the days were not so different from the nights.

Until one day a shadow arrived, bigger than the rest. It blocked out the other shadows, and I could hear clacking as it slowly shrunk, and then it was hidden within my own. And then beside my own. And then you were there, smiling at me.

You took my hands, broke my shackles. You set me free, and led my timid, bewildered soul towards the exit. How could something like that exist? All I had seen were those shadows, and now I saw the entrance of the cave from which they all came. The place from which the light came.

It shattered my world, but I allowed you to pull me forward, towards the exit. You left, but I was terrified to follow. I saw a rabbit, a nightingale, a dove... I knew them all from their shadows, but to see the essence of them, to see what was really there…

It was beautiful. It was a whole new world I would never have thought to see before.

And you led me to it.

But I was also scared.

To step past the edge of that cave, to cross that line… I knew there was no going back.

You were sad. You frowned, tried to encourage me, grabbed my hands, but I tried to back away. You kept encouraging me though, you held me, led me, told me not to be scared but I was scared and I wanted to cry.

So I took a step back. Turned away.

But to give up now that I had seen it all…

I turned back to rush to you, to hug you and kiss you and tell you I wanted to see this new world with you.

You were gone.

I could see the last vestiges of your sad, silver eyes as you turned to ash in the wind, scattering to the four corners of the world.

And in that moment I knew what true fear was. I fell to my knees sobbing as I saw you disappear, the one who guided me to the light, the one who showed me the world… How could you just be gone? How could I be weak for one moment and then turn around to find you missing? To find you had left behind nought but a hole in my soul.

So I scrambled back to my cage and tried to jam the shackles back together around my wrists but they were already broken, and no matter how much I wanted to, I could never forget the world you had showed me.

And the question remained - would it have been better to have never seen that world?

I… I know I'm terrible and broken. I know I can never forgive myself for what I've done. Even what I've thought. I don't know what it was you found buried within me that you found beautiful, but I find I can no longer see it, even if I caught hints of it when I was with you.

I don't want to live anymore, Rose. Not by myself. Not in this world where all I can see is shadows on a stone wall.

So I won't.

I hope you do not worry about me. Even if you do remember me, or wish to from the hints these letters give you, I hope you understand that I offered you nothing but pain. Perhaps if we could go back to the days of Beacon when it was just us whispering sweet nothings into the darkest shadows of the night, bringing along our own hopes as light, I could be happy again.

We cannot go back.

And that is why you can never see me again Rose. I give you this life in hopes that perhaps, if I cannot be happy, that you can. It's because I think the truth is that I shackled myself in the first place in my dream. Because I think I would chain you if I tried to set you free. I would clip your wings, and you would stay by my side anyhow.

I cannot survive this world where I have loved and lost. I am weak, I know that much now. I know that people have seen worse, been worse, survived worse, and come out stronger. I hold my family partially accountable for this - though more the name than any one person. When all is said and done though, I have no excuses.

Without you, knowing what I once had with you, I cannot survive.

And if there's any chance that living a life never having known me, Rose, means you can be happy, I do not offer myself the chance to deprive you of this. So, even as this resignation further twists the broken shards of my heart, I know I can never see you again.

The greatest mercy I can ask is that when you return, I will not be offered the temptation of a chance to do the same. I know what that means for me, and I would welcome it with felicity in my heart.

I… Miss you Rose. I will miss you forever, until the day you join me forevermore; though I am afraid at that time neither of us will be able to think or feel or be happy any longer. There will be only nothing.

Perhaps that is the greatest mercy of all.

-Weiss Schnee

Ruby clutched the scroll tightly, something that had been smouldering deep in her stomach spitting and sparking, igniting more fiercely. She had to find Weiss. The heiress was wrong. She had to be wrong. Ruby could scarcely remember anything, she knew almost nothing about the world now.

But she knew she was not better off alone. Without Weiss.

She would always be better with Weiss.

Steeling herself, Ruby tucked the scroll back into her pocket and looked up to the large, arching doors in front of her. She pushed them open to reveal a dark room, nothing more than an entrance hall that lead to a second set of doors lit from behind by a blinding, yellow spotlight.

As Ruby approached, the doors slid open to reveal a wide expanse of a room with a high ceiling under which hung a web of steel beams and scaffolding, holding hundreds upon hundreds of lights flicking side to side, back and forth in a dizzying display. The heavy thumping beat drove the mass of sweaty bodies sliding together on the glass dance floor, itself covered in neon lowlights.

A man in a black suit and fedora with scarlet glasses and tie held out his hand to her. Ruby eyed him as he scowled at her. A memory danced around the edge of her consciousness, but she didn't bother to pull at it.

"I.D. please." He said in a thick accent. Vaccuoan perhaps? Ruby looked at where his eyes would be were they not covered. She tapped Crescent Rose, hanging from the belt attachment she had on.

"I'm a huntress." His eyebrows shot up, and she saw him look around nervously. She followed his panicked glance to the side, where another man dressed identically was furiously shaking his head and waving his hands back and forth across his chest.

"Um… Please leave? We have a bad record with huntresses." Ruby tilted her head at him, but ignored his request.

She was there for a reason, after all.

"I need to speak with Junior."

Yang knew the human body.

Between the countless nights she had spent exploring the bodies of what she was hesitant to call lovers, and the medical training she received at Beacon, Yang knew the body very, very intimately.

She knew that there were countless ways to end her life with the long blade clenched tightly in her hands, so tightly it was drawing blood from the fist gripping the edge. She could feel it scraping against the bones of her fingers. The pain was refreshing. It cleared her mind. Made focusing on the question easier. The only question that mattered.

How would she do it?

The second that Blake had left the room, Yang knew what she wanted. She wanted to not care. She wanted to forget the world around her. Her life was worthless, meaningless, and a burden to those that had clung onto the last vestiges of love for the woman who had loved and cared for them in Beacon.

She was a coward for not having done it sooner.

The throat, they had been taught, was the most efficient way to kill someone besides beheading. If Yang were to kill another with the blade, it would be her first choice. The victim becomes so preoccupied with air for the few seconds they have that they would forget about killing her.

It seemed like it would be awkward to cut her own throat though. She considered impaling herself, all the way through, but that could be a lengthy process. Yang wanted it to be as fast as possible. She did not want pain.

She remembered Blake telling her a story at some point in time. Some time far off when the sun shone gold instead of a scorching red. Sometime before every inch of Yang's skin seemed to constantly burn.

It was a story about someone drowning. How they felt as the screaming and burning of their lungs slowly gave way to a calm and peaceful bliss. Except it didn't. There was no peace or grace to dying. The body doesn't really know how to die. Yang knew it would be a messy process, no matter how she chose to end it all. Had she not dropped that last pill, then maybe, maybe she could have gone in a narcotic-induced mess that she wouldn't have to actively experience.

But the death Blake offered her through the black steel gripped tightly in Yang's fingers, dripping crimson, was going to be intimate. Yang would feel every heartbeat, every tender moment.

She would feel the initial shock of the traumatic wound. The pain would not hit then. Her body, warped and twisted as it was, would be pumped up on so much adrenaline that all she would feel is an intense burst of energy. Fight or flight.

But the body can't escape it's own wounds. Yang knew she would go from blood loss. Once the body realized it couldn't get away, once the adrenaline wore off, she would start to feel it. Anything fatal was bound to be deep. It was bound to hurt.

Yang wondered if she would scream.

Then the body would begin to panic. Impulses beyond her control would writhe over her. But she'd be losing blood and oxygen. She would be losing her energy. If she was initially struggling against the death, she would find herself unable to. Soon, she wouldn't be able to move as her heart pump more of her life out with each throbbing beat. Each contraction would force more blood out of her, and each beat would get weaker and weaker as her vision blurred and darkened. The pain would begin to go - if she was still conscious, and it would just be darkness, all consuming, all enveloping.

It was those last moments that scared Yang. When she would know that she is dead, and she only has time for one last thought.

From the reports she had read and stories she had heard from those who had been resuscitated after that point, there were two kinds of people. Some people spoke of their last thoughts being of those they loved. The regrets they had. Embarrassment, sometimes, for dying, wasting so much potential of their life. Most urinated in furious frustration.

Very few people were like that though. Most said they were so terrified of dying that they couldn't think of anything but how they wished they could break through the dark curtain closing over them back to life. How they would give anything for a chance to do anything to not be bleeding out, covered in their own shit and dirt and grime and blood.

Part of Yang wanted to see those she loved.

A bigger part didn't. She didn't want her last thought to be of Blake and Ruby and Weiss and her dad. She didn't want the thought of them hating her, that screaming fury at herself for dying and wasting everything, driving her to take back the quick slit of…

Her wrists.

Yang looked down at the ghostly flash of the moon against her milky skin. The blade pressed gingerly against the throbbing inside of her wrists. Her pulse was quickening already at the thought of it. She was getting ready for the fight of her life… The last fight of her life. Once it started, she knew she would want to stop it. She would clamp down on the slice, try to undo it, scream for help, but Blake would have been sure to ensure none would come.

She knew once she tried, she would regret it. But this is what she wanted. She needed this. It was penultimate bliss, but first she had to pass through the trial of dying. On the other side waited death, dark, spectral, forever.

Eternal.

Yang took a breath. She thought it would be steady, level. It was shaky. She was beginning to hyperventilate. She was almost sobbing. Her lungs were constricting, the iron band of fear tightening around her. She wanted to be sick. Her legs were going numb and she could barely feel her fingers.

She tightened her grip, closed her eyes. Took another breath. Longer. Less shaky. Preparing.

She would have to be quick. In the seconds between when she made the cut and when the adrenaline died she would have to switch the hand holding the blade and slit her other wrist. It would have to be quick. Otherwise it would take her twice as long to bleed out.

Twice as much pain.

Yang squeezed her eyes tighter, starburst auras beginning to cloud her vision. She breathed again, around the choking lump in her throat, but she couldn't breath properly. She was gasping and sobbing. Salt trickled over her lips and Yang's tongue flicked out, catching the tears now falling down her face.

She needed to do it now. Or she wouldn't.

She took a breath. As she let it out she raised her arms, pressing the blade in, feeling the bite, but no cut. She kept it up as she sucked in a breath. Breath out, arms down. In, up. Out down. The pace quickened as Yang prepared. Her breaths quickened, suffocating and hyperventilating, growing in a fevered pitch as her stomach pinched and her lungs squeezed, nearly on fire from the lack of proper breath. Her nose curled as the breaths roared in and out, her pulse crashing in her ears, tempo getting faster and faster, desperate, fearful, fervent.

She raised her arm high.

She snarled out the final breath.

Grip tightened.

Blade bit skin.

Teeth clenched.

Yang tensed.

And screamed out the air in her lungs.

I'm normally not a fan of warnings. I feel like life is life, and sometimes there are things that happen in life that are horrible and ugly and unpleasant. These harsh realities are something you have to deal with, learn to overcome and bear. It's how you get stronger. If art is a reflection of our reality, than sometimes what we create will reflect the cruelty of the word. The bad things.

That said, I've gotten a lot of PM's that honestly worry me. This is the first and last time I will put a warning on this story, so if you're reading from here on out, please be aware of your mental state.

I also rarely feel my writing is good enough to warrant provoking that kind of response. So I assume people don't feel that way.

That's all beside the point though.

Anyways, don't lynch me right now. There's still plenty of story left. Ruby's investigation is underway!

Cheers,

-Unjax