RWBY Through Worlds (End)

BC44: New (Emerald & Co.)

[Opener--"Beautiful Things", Gungor]

"You're going to babysit for Pyrrha?" Cinder asked.

"Yeah...so?" Emerald said.

"Nothing.... She doesn't find that...weird at all?" Cinder asked.

Emerald took a second to remember what Cinder meant.

"Oh...because of Penny? That's so odd--I haven't thought of that in months."

"How do you not think of that?" Cinder said.

"You mean you still think about what you did?" Emerald said.

Silence.

The answer was pretty obvious.

"You think that you're not a part of all this because of what you did?" Emerald guessed. "I can see that.... I used to feel that way. I think it only went away because I've worked on making their lives better, and getting to be up close...well, I think that's why I keep telling you to just reconnect with us, kind of. Being alone, unable to forget what we did, it just makes it keep haunting us. You forget by replacing it with better memories. That's what I think anyway...and, if it helps, you might feel guilty for trying to ruin their lives, but if you hadn't decided to let go of that magic in the end and say no to the gods, they wouldn't be here either. The magic might not have gone totally. Cinder, just as much as the rest of us, you gave us the chance to have this life."

Cinder turned to stare at her in astonishment.

What hit her was that this was probably the most absurd thing she'd ever heard--and yet oddly, the logic was impossible to argue.

The bare facts were that all of them had had to unite to make that happen, even if it wasn't for that reason.

"Why do you think they let you in there?" Emerald said. "That was them showing friendship and saying 'thank you'. To all of us."

She thought Cinder had a very odd, very un-Cinder-like, fragile look on her face.

But she was still utterly shocked when Cinder started sobbing right there on the street.

"Cinder?" Emerald stared at her.

Cinder didn't know why she was bawling. Emerald had just set off some deep trigger in her soul somewhere. Maybe some unspoken thing she'd been carrying all this time.

Emerald tentatively hugged her. To her shock, Cinder didn't shove her away, though she didn't exactly welcome it. She just stood stock still.

"It's okay." Emerald wasn't sure what to say. "It's not a bad thing..."

Cinder had no words to explain herself, so she just wordlessly kept crying.

It didn't last long. She wasn't one to give in to tears often or at length.

But that it happened at all was enough to rattle her and Emerald both.

Cinder pulled a handkerchief of all things out of her pocket--she was kind of old fashioned about that, probably because she'd never had access to things like tissue boxes growing up--and it wiped her face off with it.

"Are you...okay?" Emerald asked.

Cinder gave her a warning look.

"Fine." Emerald held up her hand. "You don't have to explain that to me. I'm not judging you, I'm just asking."

Cinder sighed. "Between the two of us, Emerald," she said in the most un-like herself tone Emerald had ever heard her use, because it sounded so oddly matter of fact, "I don't really know how I fit into this group, or this world at all, anymore. I tried one thing, and now it's cut off for at least a couple months.... This just made me feel all the more how unlike all of them I am, and I never will be like them."