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Nights in Vacuo are quiet, Ruby realizes. Not in the physical sense, of course. There’s a cacophony of noise that surrounds her, Yang’s snoring, Weiss’ restless mumbles, the low rumbling from Blake.
Outside, too, is loud. there’s still hunters making nightly rounds, refugees wandering the streets. if she bothers to focus she can catch the click of heels against gravelly pavement, hear the distant murmuring of the passerbys. So, no, it’s not quite silent outside of her mindscape. There isn't such thing as ‘silent’ anymore.
It’s her second week here and that’s become painfully obvious. It was easy to avoid at first, being bone exhausted from day in and day out hunting Grimm, protecting the people, distributing resources, convening with the circle of hunters and huntresses she’s come to trust to plan their next move, you learn to cherish the time you get off.
That would be fine, of course, but there’s always a stick in the mud. It’s expected, Ruby understands that much from her experiences. There’s always something. Just series of mishaps that’s taken the form of her entire life.
This time, it takes the figure of insomnia. Now, don’t get her wrong, the ways things are going she barely feels the energy to flip onto her side, let alone get up, but no matter how many sheep she counts or how many times she reminds herself of the duties she must preform tomorrow, she just can’t keep her eyes closed.
Maybe it’s because of the quiet, she assumes, staring accusatory daggers at the ceiling as if she could form the blade from the silver swimming in her eyes alone. Her team is asleep. No one is expecting anything of her right now. (They haven’t, not since getting back home. But habits are hard to break, so she still swallows down the lethargy and carries on with the problems she must handle as a leader.) It allows her mind to fill with the thoughts the constant movement throughout the day has scared away. And constantly, tirelessly, relentlessly, it comes to stop at one thing, one horribly painful topic.
Her mother.
It’s funny, right? There are millions of things to worry about, to dwell on, to predict, to deduce, plans to fortify, solutions to prove, strategies to improve. There are plenty she could be occupied with overthinking. But Summer Rose is the thing her sleep deprived brain decides on, cherry picked from the numerous people she could remember. Remember, because those people are dead. She mourns them, so saying she ‘thinks’ about them feels too light for what it is.
They seem to stack up— higher, and higher, and higher. It’s cruel, the way the world works, how it twists these innocents fate into a web, connected to her, entwined within her fingers, embedded under her nails, wrapped around her knuckles. She can’t escape the silk in which destiny is woven with.
She wonders, not for the first time, if Summer Rose felt the same.
She could have, perhaps inherited along with the striking steel in her eyes. Ruby Rose will forever have silver irises and a feeling of failure in her chest, no matter how many people she shelters. No amount of blood contained will erase the blood lost. It’s on her hands, even if she had succeeded in covering seeping wounds with her palms, to quench the flow of blood with pressure applied by her own fingers. It’s on her, forever, the tainting of red that mixes with her hair, with her cape, with the very blade she uses to keep others safe.
Red was also the color of Pyrrha's hair, her mind supplies with its wildly malicious nature of bringing her down deeper, it was also the color of Penny’s eyes as they glitched from lively green to fizzling crimson.
It might have been what Summer Rose bled, disregarding the ‘maybe’ that lies with the bellowing of the hounds, the maybe that means she didn’t get to rest in peace, that she’s still out there, under Salems claw. Salem, too, carries notes of red. Thinking about it now, under the shroud of peace that only arises under the light of the moon sinking pearly white in their room, she’s almost tempted to laugh at the misfortune of it all.
Red, like roses, like death, like eternity, like failure. It finds her, finds all those unlucky, staining them. Marring their lives. And it just so happens to be her color. But, while it means death, it could mean life too.
It’s what the survivors she protects see in her cape whipping around in the air as she strikes down Grimm. It’s in her aura, her semblance, both who work to keep her alive. It’s what healed the cuts and bruises and scrapes she had gathered on her way to becoming a huntress. It’s what has brought her from being nothing to being something. It’s red that pumps through her body, too. There’s a chance it means ‘good’, as objective as the word is.
Nothing is inherently evil, not color, or life, not even Summer Rose. Ruby would like to believe otherwise, just to not feel like she is the reason behind the choice her mother made, but it’s not true. Summer is still an enigma to her. For a mind that overthinks as much as it does, her memories fail her. It’s a scrambled puzzle, filled with input of Yang and her dad and Qrow, but the pieces are faded. She can fit them in place, but when all is said and done, taking a look at the product doesn’t yield any results. It’s blank, traces of faded times that feels far too long ago to just be years and not millenniums, but it doesn’t give her anything.
She recalls some things, vague and fuzzy around the edges as they are. Cookies with double the chocolate chips, an oversized white cape that inspired her own, hair that she sees in the mirror every day. She remembers silver. Pale, leaden silver that seemed to capture warmth like metal traps heat. It’s silver that hangs securely on her belt, picturing the last thing she received from her mother other than her features.
She looks at her pendant and wonders if her mom’s fingerprints still linger on it, all these years later. It’s doubtful, of course, but she holds the weight of it in her palm sometimes and shuts her eyes and pretends she can feel the warmth of her mother’s hand emanating from the metal.
She misses her mom.
She’s grown now. Her mind more mature than it should be for her age. Her voice has lost that squeaky pitch to it, her hair style changed, long since grown out of the stubbornness of baby fat and naivety. But her mother never took place in her development.
She never got to witness the moment Ruby activated her semblance or unlocked her aura. She never got to attend any graduation ceremonies, or had the chance to celebrate her early welcome to Beacon. She never laid eyes on Crescent Rose. Ruby grew up without her mom. She tries to resent her for that. Summer knew the risk when she left with Raven. She wants to ask her, ‘why?’ She wants to know if it was her fault. If her mom decided to go because she wanted a world where Ruby wouldn’t be targeted for her eyes. She wants to know if she would do it again, if they could go back.
Ruby, too, has missed out on a lot of things. Time has worn away the memory of her mothers arms around her, of the specific note her voice would hold when she sang her and Yang lullabies. She no longer remembers the sound of her laugh, of her favorite game to play with them, of how she loves. But, in a way, she carries it with her, infecting everyone she meets, but is it also not a curse?
Summer Rose loved. Brilliantly, eternally, boundlessly. She passed it onto Ruby, who handles it with such care, even as it burns her hands, as it leaks down the familiar web of lives she’s kept tied around her fingers. She handles it, careful, gentle, speaking what might’ve been Summer’s wishes as she unites people against one common enemy. She handles it, while flashing her toothy smile and declaring words of hope, of encouragement, of hope for a day of peace.
It’s Summer’s love that flows through her veins, that empowers her even as she felt betrayed by the luck of the universe. It’s what kept her feet moving after the fall of Beacon, after she had watched everything she so cherishes crumble like the structure of her beloved school. It’s also what brought her back from the brink of death. Of when she was so tempted to start anew, hopes of ‘maybe this time I can be better.’ It was her words, the love so plainly etched into the goodbye she spoke, that gave her the courage to try again as herself.
Her mother haunts her. She wants to hug her again, yearns to feel her lips on her forehead, to hear the whispery soft murmur of ‘goodnight’ against her hair one last time. She wants to have her mom here, above all else. She wants to be told what to do, how to move forward, what choices is right and which are wrong. She doesn’t know anymore. She just wants her mom to rid the pain from her heart and mind as if it was so simple as placing a kiss to a bandaged knee. Maybe it would be. But Ruby would never know.
She will never know her mom, such is the fault of the universe, of the witch that is as old as time, of the pieces that have fallen into place by the hands of the Gods themselves. That is irrefutable fact. But that doesn’t mean she can’t mourn.
Nights in Vacuo are quiet.
It gates the refuge her heart needs to settle with the law of life. She cherishes Summer Rose—the huntress she was, the mother she aspired to be, and the mother she never had the opportunity to become. She loves her, because Ruby, in some sense, is her.
She carries the love of Summer on her belt, in her heart, in each swing of Crescent Rose, in the way her eyes glow. She passes the love of Summer on with the color of red, with the shine of silver, with the legend she has been tasked to carry because of said love. But still, she handles it, with hands as tender as the ones who would stroke her head to sleep, as firm as the ones that folded the dough for cookies, as protective as the ones that swung her weapon for hopes that her daughter would never have to fall down the death ridden path she had to.
She handles it, with the love that Summer had in her hands the first time she cradled a baby named Ruby Rose with eyes of silver and a life of being cherished by a woman she would never know.