Just a prestory A/N.

It's hard to read this nowadays, I started Remnants so long ago, and this is so rough in comparison to how I write now. Anyway, I just thought I'd throw this in. In many ways, I'm learning through trial and error in this story, and I'm taking my steps away from being a novice and towards acting as an intermediate writer. As you'll read along, know that it's people who left comments and gave me advice that allowed me to even get better in the first place. So please, always tell me if something bugs you or throws you off. It's one of the best ways to get better, is to hear what you're doing wrong.

Speaking of which, I just went back through and tried to get rid of my god awful habit where I'd jump from sentences to dialogue without making the appropriate change marks. I think I caught most of them, but if you see any I missed feel free to point them out. I got rid of that writing flaw by chapter nine, but I'm sure I missed a few between chapters one to eight. At around ten is where I started upping the chapter lengths, I found what I liked more than my usual four thousand word long chapter.

So if it's my writing's content that turns you off, I can't do much about that, although I do get somewhat brighter as the story goes on. But if it's my style and skill... I don't know, maybe stick around? I've gotten much better at writing since I started this story almost four months ago, and rereading these chapters... I almost find it hard to believe that I wrote them. Just something to think about, if you're on the fence after the first chapter.

Anyway, that's it, I'm gonna set you loose. I hope you enjoy!

Where do I begin? I haven't found clean paper to write out my thoughts on in months. And I hate writing in pen, I know the paper is going to look like a huge mess when I finish. But it was all I was able to find in this storeroom, along with some rusted push pins and a few stamps. I guess if I ever leave this for someone to read, I should start at the beginning...

I guess a name would be a good idea right? Kind of hard to say hello through paper, when we'll never actually meet...

But yeah, a name. Mine is Weiss Schnee. It doesn't matter if you recognize it or not, last names mean nothing now. I'm only a remnant of what the world once was anyways. I guess if you're reading this, and you want to say something too, you could sign your name at the bottom after mine.

I don't know how you wouldn't know, but I feel like writing everything down from the beginning… I should explain how all this began.

The world fell apart. Easy enough to say... but that leaves a lot out... I should be more descriptive than that.

We fell apart... and to disease off all things. It's funny how we thought Grimm would be our undoing now... really, that was such a small problem in comparison. It came on so fast, the sickness that we all should have feared. Once the fever took off it took weeks to wipe us out...

But we weren't worried; how could it hurt us? After all, we made it ourselves. As hunters slowly became unable to handle the Grimm menace, we turned to our scientists for an answer. We created a virus, born from an ant hunting fungus we had found in the western jungles, to kill off all the world's Grimms. We wanted to make ourselves safe from the threat that we were beginning to lose control over. When we saw nevermore falling from the sky, and beowolf packs lying dead in the forests, we celebrated for days on end! I was no better, and I cheered along with them all too, uncaring that I was going to be put out of my career. On a total fluke we had wiped out the sole risk to our existence since the day we first rose from dust ourselves. What we chose to do was a mistake. I think we all understand now that it is better to live with risk of a forest fire than to destroy every forest. We shouldn't have chosen to destroy every forest.

It didn't take long, after we destroyed the Grimms. In the north, very close to where my family lived by coincidence, reports of some new strain of the Grimm hunting disease was reported to be infecting the locals. We swiftly tried to eradicate the disease, although not to the extent we should have. At first the strain was just labeled as some viral infection similar HIV or the H1N1 disease. It made life difficult for those who were infected, as they always felt angry and distressed, living in a foggy world where they didn't know who or what to rage against. Sometimes a person was only irrational, and sometimes a person was a… danger, both to themselves and to others. It wasn't treatable, at least we never found out if it was in the beginning, but we thought it was livable, manageable. So we quarantined and observed the infected. If we had known better, we would have put a bullet in every infected's head, and burned the very ground where the disease began. Because unfortunately all this area served as was a petri dish for something far worse to grow out of.

The first true dead body was found somewhere near Balvian academy in the northern country of Atlas, a rival to my own school. At least, those are the rumors I've heard; information only travels by word of mouth now, and I've heard so many rumors that sometimes I just don't know what to believe. I do know the disease spread rampantly across all of Remnant, as spores were carried on the summer winds across the oceans to every one of the continents. Some people only needed to inhale a single spore, and it was all over for them. They would go insane, with rage and blood lust. On Ruby's twentieth birthday our celebrating was cut short when we hunters and huntresses were called in to stop the riots that were spreading uncontrollably across Atlas. All that did was get us infected as well. A body should drop from a blade or a bullet to the heart, but our enemies kept coming, rising off the ground when they should have been left immobile.

I lost one of my best friends, who I had come to think of as a sister, in those riots. We weren't even able to get her body back from the monsters. Before we were able to stop them she had been torn into so many pieces. A finger here, a leg there, and chunks of hair ripped off and strewn here and there in every other direction.

That came out wrong. It was devastating to watch, and I was glad that Ruby didn't see it. She had been around the corner helping other's evacuate the quarantine zone as the infected swarmed the scene.

After that the three of us retreated, and we advised our comrades to do the same. We didn't wait for an order. If anyone had noticed our absence, we would have been expelled from what was left of the hunter organization for treason. We didn't care. As we returned to Vale the three of us cried over our fallen sister, and we called out curses on Ozpin, Ironwood and the like, damning the leaders who had sent us in unprepared and ill-informed.

We returned to our home country just as the lights when out. It's amazing how little we valued things such as heating and electricity. And I'll admit it freely, as a spoiled brat for the majority of my life, I didn't take the changes well. I'm sure there were plenty of times when my two friends wanted to slap some sense into me, make me to understand that the lights just weren't coming back on. I held onto that hope for far too long, and I waited for close to a month before I had to understand that we weren't coming back from this. The world hadn't been crippled this badly even during the great war.

Very little information spread at that point, but one thing we did notice on our own was that the virus somehow damped magical power. As we fought, we noticed how we no longer felt the strength of the world pulsing through our veins. I personally think it was because Grimms were creatures of magic themselves. The fungus first targeted the energy rich bodies of the black monsters, leaching off of their life force to survive. When it lost that energy source, it migrated to the only other creatures that could channel the world's energy… humans, and their faunas cousins.

That part is only my speculation though. Makes sense, but no way to prove that. I just know that I found out too late. I wasted my stores of energy before the world even fell apart, and lost the ability to make glyphs. I'm just as weak as any other human now. Ruby and Yang were smarter than I was, and preserved the energy in their bodies for their semblances, hoping they would one day save us if we were ever in a pinch.

From there, the world fell into chaos, as martial law began to win out over governments who could no longer control the hordes of dead bodies that had once been their citizens. No one knew what to do, and as the spread of information died, so did hope. The world was ending; many of us thought it was the beginning of some kind of rapture, as the dead rose to consume the living. I was never religious, but even I sometimes wondered if this was some form of divine punishment. We probably deserved it.

And the hunters and huntresses, we who were supposed to protect and sacrifice for the good of the people, who were supposed to be the beacons of light when the world fell into darkness... we chose the selfish option. We all saw firsthand how out-classed we were by our new enemies, our old friends and neighbors. Some stood and fought for longer than others, but in the end, we all ran. We hid from the world as it began to rot. One out of every ten hunters survived the panics that followed the world falling apart. I'd guess it was close to one in ten thousand for civilians.

You can hate me and the organization I belonged to for letting the world die, because all of this probably is our fault. If we had stayed and fought, maybe science would have found an answer before everything fell apart.

And that's where the past for everyone ends. Now, if you're still interested, this is part forward is my story.

Left with no one else in the world to look to or rely on Ruby, Yang, and I just began to roam aimlessly. We supported each other. We actually did well, those first two years. We didn't live well though. We stole, we swindled, we bullied. The monsters we once defended people against… that was what we became. More names that probably mean nothing to you, but after all we did, Cinder and Roman were saints compared to us.

That was what it took to survive though. We were all harder people than we once were; we needed to be in order to continue on. But we were all the same too. I was still shrewd, Yang was still boisterous, Ruby was still kind. Maybe I'm being to harsh on myself. We weren't that bad, we helped people just as much as we hurt our enemies.

At least until we lost another.

I blame her for it. We'd been hiding out in this small no name city, in an old factory building used to hold refugees who wanted to actually enter the main city. I told her over and over that things were different now in this lawless world, and we needed to look unappealing and unassuming if we wanted to avoid trouble. And whenever I said those things, Yang always just laughed and say I was paranoid. She didn't believe me, and continued to prance around like a flirt. I know she did it more as an act than anything else. Ruby still loved to see her sister be her sister, brash and bold as always.

After what happened... I think it would have been better if she had just been turned.

She left us in the middle of the night, saying she wanted to get out and stretch her legs. I offered to go with her, but she told me to guard her sister instead. Ruby had already fallen asleep. When she turned me down, I even offered her my knife, our only weapon, the only one small enough to conceal as we were searched before entering this choke point. She shrugged that off as well, saying she'd be fine. Yang wanted to go and make sure where we'd hidden our weapons hadn't been found.

I nearly woke up half of the people in the room. I told her point blank no, it was a stupid risk to wander out into the wilderness over something so frivolous; we couldn't do anything if someone had stolen our stuff anyway. I told Yang that I wanted her back with us in less than an hour, whether her legs were 'stretched' or not.

When she didn't show up in two, I knew something was wrong. I woke up Ruby to go find her.

It didn't take us long; a crowd had already formed outside of the building, circling around a bloody figure left on the ground. We pushed through the circle, already knowing and dreading what we would find. Something broke inside of Ruby when she found Yang's body dumped against a wall that night, her clothes ripped and her throat slit. It was worse than Blake dying by far. At least when Blake died, we could say mindless animals had done it. It might be hard since you didn't know her, but Ruby was the forever kid, always hopeful and bright. She'd dedicated her life to helping people. How can someone like that come to terms with the fact that people are evil?

Screaming for blood, Ruby stood over the corpse, calling out for the person responsible to come forward. Of course on one did, and if anyone knew they weren't going to talk. Ruby didn't know who had done it, so she decided every man was equally guilty. I saw something snap in Ruby as we were all corralled back into the building for the night.

Ruby tried to hide what she had done from me. The next morning she tried to drag me off towards the woods away from the front entrance, lying while saying she just couldn't stand to pass through where Yang died. I saw through her lie instantly, and I walked back towards the entrance, unsure of what I would find. I expected some vandalism, or maybe a few injured gatekeepers nursing their wounds. But when I walked through the doorway, ignoring the girl behind me who had actually started sobbing while begging me to stop, I realized I should have listened.

I never got Ruby to tell me how she did it, I can't even begin to imagine how. But at some point last night, after they all foolishly went back to sleep, unaware who they had crossed, the kind, caring girl who had always been so important to me... hung them all. She hung 19 bodies off of the tree in front of the old metal refinery in the dead of the night. Ruby used up the last of her semblance to catch them all in their sleep. So when Ruby failed to stop me, and as I laid eyes on their bodies swaying in the winter breeze, the message that had tried to make it through to me for two years finally made it.

The world had ended.

I didn't think that because of the virus, nor did I label it on human cruelty. I knew those were never going away. But in one night, the two things that I relied on to keep reality fair and just were stolen from me. I lost the older sister who I had relied on to keep my thoughts bright, and I lost the partner I relied on to keep my soul pure.

I knew that I was just as stained as Ruby was by the culling, because in a way I thought her actions were fitting. The majority of my thoughts were horrified by what Ruby had done, but my darker side could sympathize with her. If she had asked, I know I would have been tempted to help.

It took an hour to hike far enough from the city to find a burial spot, just under a large oak where the ground hadn't frozen solid. I should have sent Ruby away and done everything myself, but Ruby said it was her responsibility as sister. We couldn't carry her properly; Yang's was still too heavy for our starving bodies to manage. So while I did carry our packs, weapons, and a shovel we had stolen from the warehouse, I... I also made Ruby piggyback her sister's corpse up the mountain. We didn't say anything as we dug the grave, and when we finished Ruby just laid Yang down deep in the earth, and slipped her sister's gauntlets on Yang's now deathly pale arms for the last time. At some point Ruby stopped crying, even when I didn't. And as we filled in the grave and covered up the world's most golden locks, Ruby's eyes only got harder. As we turned to leave that awful place Ruby became a different person all together.

I just can't believe that was four years ago. Ruby has been dead inside since, and I don't know if I can stay with her much longer. I just can't take this… silence. We don't talk anymore... after all we have seen and done together, what is there to say? The silence just leaves me feeling numb, and I don't know if I am any different to the clickers who we just dealt with less than an hour ago to clear out this building for the night.

I don't feel as though I'm living anymore... I'm just putting off my death.

'I need to do something about these' .Weiss sat with her legs crossed against the cold wall of the storeroom that she was guarding, feeling the chill spread from the brick wall through her jacket and into her shoulder blades. Her partner was sleeping over in the corner, curled under a desk that Ruby had leaned up against a wall, so that she wasn't immediately visible. Ruby felt slightly safer out of sight, and she usually didn't okay a room for the night unless the red-head had some way to hide while she slept.

As she looked over at where her partner had hidden herself, Weiss held the few sheets of paper in her hand and contemplating over what she should do about them. And more importantly, what they meant to her.

Weiss had gotten used to the feeling of depression over the years of living in this new world, and had written the diary pages in one of her darker moments. 'Still, six months ago I was upset with how things are going, and I can't say I'm any happier now'. Sometimes she didn't even feel safe around Ruby anymore; her partner had become unhinged, giving up her humanity to not have to feel the pain of Yang's death any longer. Weiss knew the red-head would always protect her, but Ruby had at some point became disconnected with reality.

'She definitely doesn't know when to quit.' Weiss smirked to herself, running a hand through her hair, contemplating cutting off her split ends herself or having Ruby do that. Weiss still cared enough about her appearance to fix her hair the second it started looking messy. 'I think I've made it perfectly clear that I'm getting too tired for all this...'

Weiss jumped, as she suddenly heard a loud screeching noise from across the room. It was the table Ruby was under, as the girl underneath it shoved the thin plywood over her away from the wall. Not wasting any time, Weiss quickly folded up the papers and shoved them into a jacket pocket. I'd rather not explain what I don't have to… it probably wouldn't go that well anyway.

Stretching her arms over her head and into the air, Ruby emerged from her hiding spot. Peering out of the side of her eye, Ruby just hummed a dull hello at the blonde across the room from her.

Weiss took in her partner, who had undergone some drastic changes over the past few years. Ruby had grown a few inches in the past seven years, and the extra height mad her appear drawn and thin, although pretty much everyone looked that way now with the scarcity of food. 'She's definitely lost the baby cheeks from all the sweets', Weiss thought to herself idly.

The lack of body fat gave the redhead the appearance of a hawk, her face composed of only hard angles and sharp lines. Her clothes hung limply from her frame as she stretched, and her once short-cropped auburn hair now hung down past her shoulders, the roots still black and the tips their iconic red.

Weiss called up to Ruby, who was trying to get her neck to pop and was pulling on her head to the right with both her hands. "You need to get some new clothes, you're starting to look more haggard than usual."

Ruby only looked down at her clothing, dusting her front off with a swipe of her hand, and then shrugged as a response. A grey, unreadable t-shirt that had once been some video game promotion was under a denim jacket that Ruby had taken to wearing recently. And a belt was pulled tight around a pair of faded blue jeans, which were frayed and going thin at the knees. She wore black hiking boots, which were falling apart and had lost their concealed knife a long time ago.

Ruby was still recognizable though, closer than Weiss resembled her past self. Sure she had lost the baby fat that had clung to her cheeks because of all the sweets, but anyone they had ever met before would know Ruby Rose, even after all this time.

'Except for one thing...' What had really changed about Ruby in the last six years, the only thing that anyone who had known her before the world ended would notice… Ruby's eyes. Once large, bright and full of hope, they had now become beady and small, constantly accompanied by a mad glint accentuated by the dark bags always resting under the orbs. The pretty silver shade that had once glinted whenever the redhead smiled had grown dull over the years, closer resembling the water collected at the bottom of a pail or bucket. They were the eyes of a corpse.

"Let's get moving" Ruby mumbled as she rubbed away the dust that had accumulated in her eyes over the night. Ruby didn't need much sleep nowadays, 4 hours being more than enough for her to keep going. She usually took first watch so that they could leave early the next morning, so that she wouldn't have to wait for Weiss to wake up. Weiss had learned over the years not to tell Ruby to sleep more; she had received a lot of death glares from the red-head that were simply followed by a cold: "I know what I need."

As Weiss nodded and began to repack the few supplies they had taken out of their rucksacks, Ruby observed her partner, just as she knew Weiss had been doing to her only a moment before. The blonde was similarly dressed, and just as thin. It was something that the pair constantly argued over, but Ruby couldn't get Weiss to see sense and abandon old habits. She was so much easier to spot while she stayed dressed in all white, but anytime Ruby tried to get Weiss to wear something else she only received the response: "bite me!"

Weiss's demeanor was the change anyone else would have noticed before anything else. Ruby didn't see Weiss smile anymore, didn't see her eyes role in the true Weiss fashion. Ruby really missed the days when Weiss would call her 'dolt', 'dimwit', 'imbecilic', and the dozen of insults that had been meant as anything but insults really. Sometimes when they talked to each other, Weiss didn't even feel like Weiss anymore. The once upon a time heiress walked with her head bowed and her shoulders hunched in, as if the weight of carrying on was just becoming too much to take. Maybe it had been for too long.

When they were both ready, the two readjusted their weapons and slowly moved the crate that they had used to block the door to the stockroom. They exited the room quietly, leaving behind nothing, so that no one would ever be able to tell that the room had been inhabited for the night. As Ruby lifted Weiss over a crumbling wall that they had vaulted over the night before to get into the apartment building, and then hefted herself up next to her partner, she began to miss the weight she used to keep strapped to her back. Ruby had been forced to abandon her scythe a long time ago; its bulk made it useless in the alley gunfights that the world had devolved to. She now had a hunting rifle slung over her shoulder, and kept a trench knife in her jacket pocket. Weiss had left her rapier behind as well, in favor of a pistol and a simple hunting knife; now that dust was almost impossible to find the one time heiress' weapon was no better than a razor sharp paperweight.

Climbing out of the building and hopping down from the second story balcony, Ruby and Weiss began to walk silently down the deserted street. They had arrived in this city three days ago, and had spent most of their time in the uptown, scouring rich apartments for supplies. Almost as large as the city surrounding Beacon, and definitely far more developed, the trade center had fallen apart a long time ago. It belonged to no one now. People had probably tried to reclaim the city in the past, but once clickers found their way in… they stayed.

As they walked down the street, sticking to the shadows as they went, Ruby kept on thinking she saw people watching them as they walked down the street from windows and side alleys. But every time she investigated, the dangers were always either figments of her imagination or just the hobbling bodies of infected. Nothing that posed a true threat to them. Still, the red head stayed sharp, and twitched at every motion she saw out of the corner of her eye.

'I swear, one of these days, I'm going to die because I'll think I'm aiming a clicker, and it's going to be an actual person aiming back. Gonna be a dumb way to die, I don't want to go out like that.'

Ruby kept a firm grasp on her rifle's shoulder strap, ready take aim at the drop of a hat. Weiss on the other hand wasn't too worried, nothing could sneak up on them while they were in the open like this, as they walked down the large city street filled with undergrowth. While they walked on she became more relaxed, and soon Weiss was swinging her arms back and forth in large arcs like a bored child while she took in the landscape. Tall buildings leaned above them, some fifty to sixty stories high. Crumbled walls, slowly being taken back by nature, with ivy, moss and lichen grew up the sides of the buildings in snaking paths. It was amazing how quickly nature had taken back the city. Bushes and trees were everywhere, growing from the streets, sidewalk pavement, and even out of some of the sky-high windows in the buildings. Weiss found the sight beautiful, even if it was in an archaic, minimalist way.

The blonde took sight of a particularly beautiful willow that had somehow found the nutrients it needed to survive almost forty stories high. Weiss daydreamed on what it might be like to swing from the branches of the tree so far over the highway, the view that must have been visible from so high up in the sky. She even tried to squeeze out some magic, to try and reach the tree. At the height of her power Weiss could have easily launched herself that high. It was foolish to daydream on such silly ideas, but as she waked she put a slight spring in her step, hoping with every fiber of her being that she would suddenly feel the wind pass by her face as she rocketed into the air. All she got was a startle when she suddenly felt Ruby guiding her away from the sidewalk and into the street by a firm hand on her shoulder.

Looking back at their path, she saw that in their route had been a clicker, one who had laid itself down and was preparing to release spores. It was odd that one had chosen this sunny street to lay itself out on. Clickers tended to stay in dark, closely cramped spaces where they could hear their own echoes. Mushrooms grew from its body as it was coming closer to reaching the final point in its new, warped life cycle. While it could no longer walk, the monster could have very easily reached out and grabbed one of them as they walked by. Nothing could save you from the bite of a clicker… except for a bullet to the head.

I wonder if that would actually make Ruby cry, if she had to kill me. I haven't seen her cry since Yang was with us... I wonder if I still matter enough to her to break that streak.

Once the clicker was out of sight, Ruby turned to Weiss, who was starting to lag behind again. "So… do you have anywhere you want to go?" Ruby was getting just as tired as Weiss of wandering aimlessly, even if she didn't show it as much. Sure it was depressing living without purpose, but at least Weiss was living. That was really all that mattered in the red-head's mind.

Weiss replied back dryly :"Everywhere's the same". Fall was just beginning to turn over to winter, and a cool breeze breathed over their backs from the east. As she rubbed her arms, trying to use friction to warm them, Weiss sighed sadly. "Why are we still traveling Ruby? We could, I don't know, maybe find a place… try to make it livable…"

"Because…," Ruby began, and then in a deadpan voice quoted: "I don't feel as though I'm living anymore. I'm just putting off my death."

Weiss stopped dead in her tracks. "...You went through my stuff?" Weiss should have been mad, even if she wasn't; the blonde just couldn't believe Ruby had found it in her to care enough to do something like that.

"I got worried." Ruby response came back in a matter of fact tone, as though she was just commenting on something plain, like the weather in a sunday newspaper.

"Over?" Weiss hated asking Ruby to elaborate. Nowadays it felt as though she was pulling teeth from the redhead every time she wanted a simple answer.

The redhead's eyes closed a fraction of an inch, while mulling over in her head whether or not she should start this. Sighing heavily, Ruby planted her feet in the pavement while still looking forward. "I went through your bag last week when I saw you practicing on a noose…," Ruby huffed, half turning to look back at Weiss through the side of her eye. At the shocked expression from Weiss Ruby continued on. "Yeah, I was awake for that, although I didn't know how to bring it up." Apparently she still didn't, because Ruby only sighed loudly, running a hand through her hair as though it was a stress reliever. "Would you really want to settle down somewhere?"

Weiss though about that for a moment, and then sighed: "no… no, not really".

After a nod from Ruby, they just started walking again for another few minutes. It wasn't long though before Weiss stopped again. Ruby looked back, worried for a half a second at Weiss's sudden halt. But that worry slipped from her mind when she saw the look on the blonde's face. It was the blank look of when Weiss had gotten lost in her own thoughts. Looking off into the distance, watching their shadows curving and warping over the cracked blacktop and becoming unrecognizable, Weiss asked her partner a question that had been eating at the back of her mind for a while now. "Do you really think this is some kind of rapture Ruby?"

"Why do you ask?"

"You were the only one of us on the team who actually believed in god… you still wear that cross from your old combat uniform." After a second of silence, with a tension that made it feel as though Ruby had no intention of answering, Weiss added: "I still see you praying every now and then."

Ruby looked forward again, her hand caressing the silver cross that hung in the hollow of her throat. Looking up to the sky, she began to walk forward at a slower pace than before. "I… I don't know anymore. But if there is one, he has a really demented sense of humor."

Following behind, Weiss began walking a little faster so that she was walking next to Ruby again. "How so?"

"Isn't it odd that our world named Remnant would fall apart the way it did?" At a puzzled look from Weiss the redhead explained herself in more detail. "We could have all been wiped out by a plague… or there could have been some nuclear explosion that destroyed the planet. There could have been an asteroid, a rogue black hole, a gigantic volcanic eruption… hell, we could have even been destroyed by aliens. It would have made a better story at least." Ruby looked back at her partner, whose brow had furrowed trying to make sense of Ruby's musings. "Instead we're left with this… just a few of us left… trying to cling on to a wasted life, one which I personally think is unfair and a little too hard. Just a Remnant of what humanity had once been."

That was a little too deep for Weiss, and she didn't know what to say. The blonde hadn't expected Ruby to have seriously though their predicament out that much. Ruby waited for a moment, wondering if Weiss had a differing opinion. It would at least be something worth talking about. When she didn't, Ruby closed back up again, and they both continued to walk in silence again for the next few hours.

As they walked through the city's downtown they took a detour from their planned route every once in a while to loot the odd store as they passed. Most food stores were gone at this point, but once in a while the two got lucky and stumbled across old cans or some preservatives. Ducking into a rundown convenience store, the pair found enough that morning to consider it a good haul, even though it was only a can of soup and a package of old almonds. In a window sill facing the rising sun they had also found a can of tomato sauce, but the tin's sides were bloated, and Ruby remembered from a long time ago not to trust any packaging that was deformed.

Getting to work on the soup can, cutting a hole in the lid with her knife, Ruby looked up to see Weiss rolling the tomato sauce can between her hands thoughtfully."Weiss, we aren't touching it, and that's final."

Grumbling angrily, Weiss dropped the can from her hands and kicked it across the floor of the shop they were standing in. "I know, I know... I'm just tired of being hungry..."

"No shit Weiss. Of course you are, so am I." Sawing around the edges of the can with her knife, until the entire lid was off, Ruby finished opening the can of soup. "But I'd rather be starved than dead." Peering down into the tin, Ruby groaned to herself when she saw the brown liquid in the can. "...Had to be onion, huh? Nastiest soup there is..."

The soup was foul, and the nuts crumbled into sand as soon as they hit the moisture in their mouths. Still, the meal would hold them over until tomorrow, and anything else they found for the rest of the day would be extra.

The two didn't waste their time on clothing or electronic stores, even though Ruby seriously needed to pick up a new pair of jeans somewhere. If any more of the fabric wore out she would begin to develop holes around the knees, which would lead to unnecessary injuries. But that was a detour they didn't need to make yet, and every time they entered a store Ruby considered it a risk on their lives. She did duck into a few shoe stores to check for a new pair of boots though, even if she was unsuccessful.

Weiss had been against it in the beginning, but a fair amount of what they looted came from dead bodies. The two would collect the ammo and clothing stored on the packs of those who died and weren't completely picked over by the time Ruby and Weiss found the corpse. As Ruby ripped the pack off of a rotting corpse, a woman who had probably only died a few weeks ago (and was still somewhat fresh by this worlds standards), Weiss listened with her back turned to the whole process. Ruby could be rough with dead bodies, and Weiss felt it was a little disrespectful to mutilate the corpses of those less fortunate. It bothered her to think that someday somebody might do that to their corpse's; just rip her arms off in hopes of finding a spare bullet. After searching for a minute, Ruby exhaled and sighed while throwing the bag back onto the woman's now mangled body. "Nothing."

Weiss could have just left it at that, she knew what Ruby was going to do if the redhead actually opened her eyes and noticed more than what she was looking for. Still, Ruby did need them more than the corpse did. "I don't think so," Weiss commented dryly over Ruby's shoulder, pointing down at the corpse's lower half. Looking down the redhead saw the dead women's feet, which were covered by a relatively new pair of beige hiking boots. They looked to be around Ruby's size.

Squatting down by the corpse's feet while pulling out her knife, Ruby quipped happily back to Weiss."You're a life saver Schnee."

And without another remark, Ruby began to cut at the woman's lower calves wildly, freeing the shoes from their rotting owner. Luckily the feet hadn't begun to rot yet, protected from the elements by the hard leather, and the shoes only stunk of rotting wood and mud. Ruby wasn't too keen on smelling like a corpse, although she would bear the stench if it was the practical approach.

Now walking along in new, beige boots, Ruby and Weiss continued on like this through the entire day, alternating between who was the looter and who was the watchman. The phrase "whistle while you work" wouldn't have applied to what they were doing. It was grisly business, and even though Ruby took it lightly, they were both serious about the job at hand.

Weiss thought to herself bitterly while she was looking through an old butcher shop. She could hear Ruby humming lightly to herself out front, as the redhead lean against the brick walls at the front of the building. Oh yeah, this is just some Sunday business trip for you Ruby, isn't it?

When dusk began to approach they decided to stop to find a place to rest for the night on the outskirts of the city. Neither the infected nor the clickers could see in the dark any better than the pair could, but it still wasn't safe to stay out in the open where they could be stumbled upon. The two would probably stay and continue searching through the city for the rest of the week, until they stopped finding enough food to survive off of and were forced to move on. Weiss had found an old bank, and once the two women cleared the premises Ruby was feeling pretty happy with their hideout for the night.

After Ruby checked out the bank vault and marked the spot as a terrible idea for the night (the red head found the idea of dying from suffocating inside of an airtight room unappealing), she walked through the main hall of the bank again starting to worry that maybe their marble stronghold wouldn't actually be the fortress the pair thought it could be. Taking in her surroundings again, shining a small hand wound flashlight on the walls, Ruby began taking in the graffiti. There had been no light for any plant matter to grow over the past six years, so the dozens of messages screaming things such as 'the end is neigh' and 'god has abandoned us' were still well-preserved. Ruby furrowed her brow as she read the walls, finding some sense of vindication at the whiny complaints. 'Seems like a waste of ink to me; anyone alive to read that would already be well aware'.

Someone, obviously talented with a can of spray paint, had left an after image of an ATM that had been ripped out of the ground some time ago. The idea of someone laboring to get the money out of the machine seemed funny to Ruby; money lost all of its worth almost instantly when martial law took over, so whoever went through all the trouble probably didn't get much out of their hard work.

Suddenly Ruby heard Weiss call from the back, leaning around a corner and shining her own light at her partner."Hey! I found a nice place for the night." After a couple of seconds, where Ruby just stood silently, Weiss raised an eyebrow at the brunette. "You coming?"

"Yeah… nothing anywhere else anyway…," Ruby mumbled as she trudged over to Weiss.

Weiss had actually found a decent place to hole up in. It was some manager's office, which had escaped the fall and the riots without ever being ransacked. There were no windows, a solid ceiling with no panels, and plenty of furniture to shift around to barricade the door. In short, it was perfect by Ruby's standards. Weiss sat with her back against the wall opposite the door while she watched Ruby push two heavy filing cabinets into place, struggling to move them quietly on her own. Usually she would help, but Weiss was feeling somewhat vindictive, and was perfectly fine with Ruby being the only one to put in the effort into barricading the door.

Dusting off her hands, Ruby turned to Weiss with the shadow of a smile on her face. "So how long do you want to sleep for?"

Weiss just shrugged her shoulders and answered her bluntly. "Just wake me when you start feeling tired."

Ruby only nodded, not hurt in the slightest by Weiss's cutting answer. Leaning against the door, and then sliding down to reach its base, Ruby reached into her pocket and began to play with a Rubik's cube she had found earlier in the day.

Weiss would have just fallen asleep at that point, but something had been chewing away at the back of her mind all day. "Were you really that bothered when you thought I might…?" Weiss wasn't able to voice the end of her question. She just raised her fist behind her head, and made the motion of someone hanging themselves.

Ruby absentmindedly nodded her head. "Rope is an extremely useful tool. I'd keep some around if I wasn't afraid you'd be tempted."

"Those who fight monsters should see to it that in the process they do not become monsters themselves.
For if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze back into you."

~Friedrich Nietzsche

So, first authors note. I hope you'll go forward, tell me what you think about the story. Just as an off hand topic, the zombies in this story are based off the fungi corticep- zombies in "The Last Of Us." It's also where the name of the story comes from. But I was thinking about it, and zombies are zombies, and they're all really the same. And besides, it's not the zombies that are ever the danger in an apocalypse... it's the people who you run into, who've become worse than the zombies. That's what the story embodies, and hopefully, that's what you'll see as Ruby slowly becomes more and more human. Just know that infected are fast, angry rage type zombies who can see, and that clickers are more like the slow, Romero style zombies, are blind and use echo location to find their prey. Also, infected can't infect, while clickers can.

So, favorite and follow, they mean a lot. And also, tell me what you think, I love reading comments and responding, getting to hear what different people take away from the story.

Anyway, thanks, and I'll see you all soon!