RWBY Through Worlds (End)

BC85: Consumed (Menagerie)-4

[Opener: "Paranoia", Nathan Wagner. This is the last one I'll use with this title, okay? This one is the more hopeful one.]

Royal blinked and found he was in Menagerie again.

He still had Cinder by the wrist, and it seemed as if the whole vision had taken only a millisecond in real time.

Cinder, however, had her eyes glazing over.

Royal wasn't that surprised when a glass knife grew in her hand and she lunged at him with it.

If he had not been so perfectly sure this was not her but the Grimm, he might have been thrown off enough to lose his chance--but he was much too busy reeling from what he'd just seen, and focused on the situation, to let this psyche him out.

He caught her wrist with ease and twisted the knife out of her hand.

Now past the ability to see what was happening, Cinder fought back. She screamed while she was doing it, which was almost more painful than her attempts to attack were. She sounded terrified.

Everyone sounded terrified, but it was worse when it was someone you knew.

Fortunately, her Aura was too diminished for her to summon a whole host of glass shards, or Royal couldn't have dodged them all no matter how precise he was, but she made another knife in her other hand.

Royal grabbed that one also.

He knew he could overpower Cinder with sheer force if he had to, being stronger than her, but that might make her more afraid than before, and she might wonder if she was desperate. And he didn't wish her to hurt herself in the struggle to get free.

No, he needed to act quickly to stop this.

Hoping to prevent her having time to make any more glass, he shoved both her wrists together and twisted her around to prevent her breaking free and then shoved her--as gently as possible-- into the wall of the house.

Cinder squirmed, trying to break free. "Let go of me!" she began to say over and over. "Let go!"

"I'm not enjoying this either," Royal said, straining to keep ahold of her. "Not that kind of guy, trust me...but the alternative is worse..."

If she just stopped fighting, he could let her go, but she'd run for it as soon as he did.

He realized that the Deimos' effects seemed to be gone from him completely... Was it the vision? Was it even real?

But how could he have made that up? He'd never seen any of those people before. It seemed too clear to be just a hallucination.

Maybe it was a hint of some sort... He'd read about hose...

Pushing Cinder back against the wall, as she was trying to slip free again, he decided to try something else...the Aura transfer thing.

He actually wasn't sure how he was going to do whatever it was, but if there was any time to figure it out, it was now.

"Help me do the thing..." he muttered, "whatever it is, sharing the grace to resist this stuff...."

His Aura began to glow, so that was promising...or it was just him trying to power up...hard to tell.

But he took Cinder's hand, and then her Aura flashed into view briefly.

"Stop..." She took it as a threat, not surprisingly, and strained to break free.

But this might work, so Royal wasn't about to let her. He tightened his grip.

Cinder, not to be deterred by this, began to grow more glass shards into her hands.