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The broadcast began abruptly, without fanfare, on the channel once used to showcase the Vytal Festival Tournament. Nobody was tuned in. The first viewers flicked past it accidentally, on their way from one station to another. Then they flipped frantically backwards, until they could resolve the flash of black and red and purple they had seen into a blasted, alien landscape, and two humanoid figures.
One was tall. Imperious. Deathly pale, with dark veins standing out starkly against her skin, and the hollow bloody eyes of a Grimm. Few of the observers had ever seen her before, but they knew immediately who she was. And they all knew the small young woman kneeling at her feet, draped in her signature red cape, head bowed so that her short-cropped hair was just brushing the barren rock beneath her.
"Can they see me?" asked the Queen of the Grimm. The question everybody always asked, so ordinary as to become absurd when formed by those bone-white lips, that flash of scarlet tongue. Even the end of the world had to check, "Is this thing on?"
"Yes, my goddess," said a man's voice. (He would soon be identified by those unfortunate enough to know his voice as Tyrian Callows.) His breathing was audible through the scroll he was using to record her. Quick, and ragged, the breathless panting of a prophet who knew he was about to witness a miracle.
"Good." Salem reached down, cupping Ruby Rose's cheeks between her palms. Her long, dark nails stood out starkly against the girl's skin as she forced her to raise her head.
The face seen all across Remnant—the silver eyes that met every pair in the world, all at once, and told them to band together and fight—was gone. A white bone mask covered her from her hairline to the tip of her nose. Bulging black veins crawled out from beneath it, burrowing under her skin, pulsating to the beat of her heart.
"Here she is," Salem said, framing the Huntress' face in a cage of bone white fingers. "Your spark. Your defiant hope. Your smaller, more honest soul. Now... we're going to play a little game, Ozma. The rules are very simple." She looked down, shifting one hand to stroke Ruby's sweat-slicked bangs back from her forehead. "I'm going to give you the same choice I gave your mother. You can have a break, at any time... all you have to do is tell me that it hurts."
Her hand jerked upwards, clawed fingers crooked. Tendons stood out beneath Salem's skin, the black veins seeming to writhe with the sudden motion, and her eyes glowed cherry red.
Ruby bit back a scream. She ground her teeth together as her entire body convulsed, joints locking up, black bristles erupting from beneath her skin. And then, abruptly... she relaxed. Her mouth opened in a howling shriek of agony, and she slumped against Salem's grip.
"Sorry," she gasped out, between shuddering breaths. "Sorry, I just—I just realized, I don't even know what I'm trying to prove, here. Like... duh. Of course it hurts. You're hurting me."
Salem's eyes narrowed. But she carried on smoothly, tucking a lock of red-brown hair behind one of Ruby's ears. "Would you like a break, then?"
"Yeah," said Ruby. "Yeah, I want you to stop. Anybody would want you to stop. And I—I get what you're trying to do, here. I'm supposed to be the example, right? Like... if you break me, you break everyone. Is that it?"
Salem's indulgent smile curdled, her hackles rising into a sneer. "You think I can't?"
"No." Ruby turned her face into her shoulder, a small shudder running through her. "No, I've... I've seen how this ends. I'm not going to be me anymore, when you're done. But that shining example of the perfect Huntress, that wasn't me either. And proving that you've won by making me admit that it hurts... it's just weird, that's all. I went so long without telling anybody how much I was hurting, and it wasn't because I was too strong to let myself show it. It was always because I was too scared."
"Is that so?" Salem's head tilted, and she placed both hands on Ruby's shoulders, lips quirking into a cruel smile when the touch made her flinch.
"Yeah," Ruby admitted. "I'm scared. I've been scared pretty much this whole time. And I think... I think sometimes we get so caught up in acting strong for each other, we forget how isolating it is to always be acting. We start to feel like we're just pretending to be brave, and deep down we're not really good enough."
She lifted her chin, turning her face blindly towards the camera. "It's okay if it hurts. It's okay if you're scared. I've been hurt and scared since I was four years old and my mom didn't come home, but it never stopped me from trying. And that's not because I'm special. I'm just a kid who wants to make it through this with as many people as I can, and every single person watching this is just as capable of changing the world as I am. I know that, because you thought I was dead for months, and look what you all did!"
Ruby paused, panting for breath. Then she smiled a thin, wobbly smile, and when she spoke again her voice was thick with tears she could no longer shed. "I know my mom probably told her it hurt. I know she probably died feeling like... like none of the good stuff she did mattered, because she couldn't live up to that perfect person she thought she had to be." She sniffled. "But she was enough, and I'm enough, and so are you. And it matters that we try."
Salem had been silent for a long moment. She drummed her long fingernails on Ruby's shoulders, her face as still and expressionless as if it had been carved from stone. Then... "I see. And when they fail, as you have failed? When there is no one left to care that you tried?"
Ruby shrugged. "If the world ends, and everybody dies, then... who's going to care that you won?"
A snarl contorted Salem's mouth, and cold white fingers wrapped around Ruby's throat. Black veins crawled and spread, sinking themselves deeper and deeper. Ruby screamed. Her back arched. She tilted her face towards a sky she couldn't see, and laughed into the uncaring dark.
"You don't get it," she gasped out, breathless with realization. "You can't get it, you don't die and you stopped caring a long time ago. I love so many people who are gone, now. Pretty soon I'm going to be gone too. And someday, hopefully a long time from now, everybody who ever knew me is going to be gone, and there won't be a single person left who remembers me or how much I loved them. And so what?" She laughed again, half sobbing, half giddy. "So what?! It still happened. If it means nothing, a thousand years from now, then who cares? Who cares when it's going to mean everything to me for as long as I exist? Why would I waste the finite time I have left the same way you chose to waste eternity, all alone and not caring about anybody? If trying is pointless, then—then what the heck is the point of giving up?!"
Salem drove her pointed fingernails into Ruby's back. Blood soaked the red fabric of her cape. Her ribs began to burst through her skin—they were long, curved, and viciously sharp, with toothy serrated edges. She writhed against the touch, struggled to crawl away. And when it was over she collapsed, panting and sobbing, on the unyielding stone floor.
"You will break." Salem pronounced the words as she might an incontrovertible law of nature. "You will renounce your naive hopes, and you will hunt those friends you love so much until every last one of them is dead at your hands."
"You can break me," said Ruby Rose. "You can rip out my soul and puppet my body around, and you can pretend like that proves something. But I said what I said, and I loved who I loved, and even you don't have the power to undo that."
Those were the final words she spoke before Salem snapped her jaw into an elongated muzzle, and for a long time after that the only sounds she made were howls of agony and the crunch of rearranging bone.
The Hound that had once been Ruby Rose got the last word. It sat obediently before the camera and said, "There is no hope." But the broadcast was live—and the world heard every word of it.