Hey guys Rosesaiyan2 here. I hope you guys enjoyed the last chapter of this rewrite. For those of you checking this out who are from Fanfiction.net there will be some.things I will change from original story but it will mostly stay the same.
As you can tell already from the first chapter, Nova and Ruby's relationship will be more developed and fleshed out. I'll do my best not to rush it this time. Also you can see I kept Nova and Turuk's birth parents alive this time, I figured that'd be a nice change of pace. Plus they'd obviously want to meet Ruby once Nova and Ruby become romantically involved with each other, Sala especially would want to meet Ruby lol. Anyways, this was just a short note before the beginning of the chapter. Anyways, enjoy this next part!
CHAPTER TWO
New Friends — and Teams
Part I — The Morning Before
Location: Beacon Academy | Early Morning
The docks smelled like sea salt and engine exhaust, which Ruby Rose had decided was the official smell of new beginnings.
She stood at the edge of the platform with her hands folded behind her back and her hood down, letting the morning air do what it wanted with her hair, and tried to decide how she felt about today. The honest answer was somewhere between extremely nervous and completely unable to stand still, which meant she was currently managing a compromise that involved standing still on the outside and being extremely nervous on the inside.
The bullhead that would carry them to Beacon was still a few minutes out. She could see it in the distance, a dark shape against the pale early sky, growing incrementally larger with each passing moment.
"Ohhh, I'm so excited!"
Yang materialized beside her the way Yang always did — suddenly, completely, occupying more presence than her physical size strictly accounted for. Her golden hair caught the morning light with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for an audience. She threw an arm around Ruby's shoulders and squeezed.
"My little sister, coming to school with me! You are going to be the absolute talk of Beacon, I guarantee it."
Ruby made a sound that was not quite agreement.
"That's actually the part I'm worried about," she said.
Yang blinked. "What do you mean, worried? You skipped two years, Rubes. That's incredible."
"That's the thing." Ruby shifted her weight. "I don't want people to think I'm some kind of... special case. I don't want to walk in there and have everyone already have an opinion about me before I've done anything worth having an opinion about." She exhaled. "I just want to be a normal girl with normal knees."
Yang stared at her for a moment.
"Normal knees," she repeated.
"Metaphorically."
"Rubes, I love you, but that is the strangest—"
"There's the ship," Ruby said.
The bullhead was full in the way that things are full when everyone on board is either anxious, excited, or making a sustained effort to look like neither. Ruby found a window seat and settled in, pulling her knees up and watching the dock fall away below them as the aircraft lifted.
She was about to put her headphones in when she looked up and found herself staring at a pair of very familiar armor sets two rows ahead.
Black and green. Blue and white. Two sets of shoulders she'd last seen walking away from her in the Vale night four months ago.
The smile arrived before she'd made any conscious decision about it.
"Nova? Turuk?"
Both of them turned. The recognition on their faces was immediate — Nova's mouth curved in a way she'd already learned to identify as the closest thing he had to an unguarded smile, and Turuk gave her the brief, acknowledging nod of someone who is genuinely pleased to see a person and is willing to let their face show approximately forty percent of that.
"Ruby." Nova turned in his seat properly. "It's been a while. Almost four months."
"How've you been?" Turuk asked.
"Good! Really good. Busy." She settled forward on her knees, arms over the back of her seat. "I wasn't surprised to see you two, technically, since Professor Ozpin invited all three of us the same night — but I was still a little surprised, if that makes sense?"
"It does," Nova said.
"Who are these guys?"
Yang had materialized again with the same sudden completeness as before, leaning over Ruby's seat with her chin practically on her sister's shoulder, looking at the two boys with the frank, interested attention of someone who has just found something worth paying attention to.
Ruby startled. "Oh! Yang, this is Nova and Turuk — we met in Vale about four months ago, I mentioned them, remember? The whole dust thief situation?"
"Briefly," Yang said, which was not entirely accurate. She extended a hand over the seat back. "Yang Xiao Long. Ruby's much cooler older sister."
"One year older," Ruby said.
"Significantly cooler."
Nova shook the offered hand with the composure of someone who had decided to simply accept what was happening. "Nova Belladonna."
"Turuk," said Turuk, briefly.
Yang sat back and crossed her arms with the expression of someone completing an assessment. She had, in the roughly ten seconds of that interaction, catalogued several things she was not going to mention yet.
She was about to ask Nova something further when Ruby made a small, puzzled noise.
"Yang. Your shoe."
Yang looked down.
The next thirty seconds were among the more animated of the morning.
Near the front of the cabin, a blonde boy had found the open door and was using it for purposes the aircraft's designers had almost certainly not intended. Turuk watched him for a moment with the expression of someone who finds genuine suffering more interesting than entertaining.
That's rough, he thought. Some people just aren't made for altitude.
He turned back to the window and watched Beacon grow in the distance — towers of white and pale stone rising from the cliffs above Vale, catching the morning light with the unhurried confidence of something that had been standing long enough to stop needing to prove it.
Ruby had her face pressed to the glass.
"Yang," she breathed. "Yang, look."
Yang, who had finished with her shoe and was in the process of recovering her dignity, looked.
"Yeah," she said, with a softness that was genuine rather than performed. "There it is."
Part II — Arrival
They came off the bullhead in the middle of the kind of organized chaos that happens when a hundred young people who all believe they are exceptional arrive somewhere that will be testing that belief.
Ruby lasted approximately forty-five seconds before the weapons started.
It wasn't her fault, really — or it was entirely her fault, depending on how you felt about the relationship between personal responsibility and overwhelming enthusiasm. The first one she spotted was a dust-infused warhammer with a collapsible grip mechanism. Then a pair of tonfas with integrated propulsion. Then something that appeared to be both a shield and a howitzer, which she considered an extraordinary achievement on someone's part.
"Yang look at this one — and that one, and — oh, is that a chain scythe? Yang, it's a chain scythe—"
Nova watched this with the expression of someone witnessing a natural phenomenon they don't entirely understand but find genuinely interesting.
Is she always like this about weapons? he thought. Yes. Apparently yes.
He filed it away under Ruby Rose, specific and kept walking.
The collision happened because she had stopped looking where she was going approximately thirty seconds before it became a problem.
The silver-haired girl she walked into dropped her case. The case opened. The contents — dust vials, he assumed, from the brief multicolored scatter across the academy courtyard — distributed themselves across a generous radius.
"Ow — ah, I'm sorry!" Ruby scrambled upright, reaching for the nearest scattered vials. "I wasn't watching where I was going, I completely—"
"Hmph." The silver-haired girl dusted herself off with the controlled precision of someone who has been trained to manage displeasure without letting it become undignified. Blue eyes, sharp and cold. A white dress with a rapier resting at the hip. She looked at Ruby the way a person looks at weather they consider personally offensive. "You should be sorry. Do you have any idea how to conduct yourself in a public space, or is this some kind of—"
"Hey!" Yang's voice sharpened immediately. "She said she was sorry."
"And I said she should be." The girl turned the same cold assessment on Yang without apparent concern for its reception. "An apology does not restore the state of my dress or my—"
Ruby sneezed.
The dust vials she was still holding did what dust vials do when subjected to sudden kinetic energy and approximately two hundred milligrams of airborne nasal debris.
The small explosion was, in the grand scheme of things, minor. It scattered a cloud of multicolored sparkling residue across roughly a three-meter radius, coating portions of the surrounding courtyard, two other students who had been minding their own business entirely, and approximately forty percent of the silver-haired girl's previously impeccable white dress.
The silence that followed was the particular variety that happens after something so conclusive that commentary seems redundant.
The girl's expression had moved beyond displeasure into a territory that didn't have a clean civilian label.
She drew breath.
Nova flicked her on the forehead.
It was, he acknowledged privately, not his most measured response to a situation. But it was fast and it stopped the inhaled lecture before it began, which was the primary objective.
The girl stumbled back a half-step, less from the force — which was minimal — than from the sheer unexpectedness of it. She looked at him with the expression of someone whose entire worldview has been briefly reorganized.
"Ow. How dare — do you have any idea who I—"
"Yes," Nova said. "You're Weiss Schnee. Heiress to the Schnee Dust Company." He held her gaze steadily. "The girl apologized to you. More than once. You could afford to accept it with something approaching grace, considering that the accident was an accident." He tilted his head slightly. "Get off the pedestal, Miss Schnee. It doesn't suit you as well as you think it does."
Weiss opened her mouth. Closed it.
"Schnee?" Ruby asked, looking between them.
"The same company," said a new voice from behind them, dry and precise as a line drawn in ink, "known for its somewhat flexible approach to labor practices and business ethics."
The girl who'd spoken had black hair, amber eyes, and the particular quality of stillness that belongs to people who observe more than they advertise. She wore black and white with two sword-pistols crossed at her back, and a ribbon bow in her hair that did not quite succeed in making her look less like someone taking careful note of everything around her.
She was not looking at Weiss Schnee with anything approaching warmth.
Weiss turned the color of someone who has been handed a mirror at an inconvenient moment. Her expression cycled through several competing responses before settling on the one that required no engagement with the content of what had just been said — she turned, straightened her spine to its maximum operational height, and walked away.
Yang put a hand on Ruby's shoulder. "She'll come around, Rubes."
Ruby's face said she was not entirely convinced of this, but she appreciated the effort.
Nova glanced at the black-haired girl, who had already begun to move in the opposite direction.
"You weren't planning on saying hello?" he asked.
She stopped.
Turned.
The irritation that crossed her face had the specific texture of someone who has already done the calculation and knows they've been caught.
"Ugh." It was more resigned than hostile. "What are you two doing here?"
"Same thing you are, sis," Turuk said from beside Nova, with the particular serenity of someone dropping a small stone into still water and watching the ripples.
Ruby's head came up. Yang's eyes narrowed. Both of them looked at each other, then back at the group.
"Did they just—" Yang started.
"—say sister?" Ruby finished.
Blake's expression had moved into the particular shade of mortified that siblings produce in each other with minimal effort and maximum efficiency. "You can't possibly be—" She stopped. "Ozpin actually accepted both of you?"
"He did," Nova confirmed. "Seemed fairly deliberate about it, too. Besides, it's been too long since we trained together." He smiled slightly, which on his face was a notable event. "Just like old times, right? Big sis."
The color that came to Blake Belladonna's cheeks was, under the circumstances, deeply satisfying.
"Nova," she said, in the tone of someone composing themselves very carefully in a public place, "please stop it."
"Mm."
"I mean it."
"I know you do."
Yang and Ruby had not yet closed their mouths.
Blake sighed — the specific sigh of someone who has grown up with these people and has made peace with never fully winning — and turned toward the school.
"We're going to be late for the opening ceremony," she said, "which is the only reason I'm not continuing this conversation."
"That's fair," Turuk said pleasantly.
They walked.
Part III — What the Teachers Knew
Location: Beacon Academy Gymnasium
The gymnasium was large enough to hold the new student body with room to spare, which meant it was also large enough to hold all the particular energies that a hundred aspiring hunters and huntresses brought with them — restlessness, nerves, performance, and the concentrated ambition of people who had been training their entire lives for exactly this moment.
The faculty lined the elevated platform at the far end. Glynda Goodwitch stood with her riding crop at her side and the expression of someone who has identified seventeen potential problems in the room and is prioritizing them. Several other instructors were arranged beside her — some familiar to the students from reputation, others entirely unknown.
Two of them, positioned toward the far end of the faculty line, Nova found himself looking at for longer than he could account for.
Turuk nudged him.
"Yeah," Nova said, answering the unspoken question. "I see them."
He didn't know them. He was certain of that — their faces were not ones he recognized, and he had a reasonable memory for faces. And yet there was something — a frequency, almost, the way you can sometimes feel the subsonic vibration of a large engine through a floor before you hear the sound itself — that registered with the particular vague certainty of something known rather than learned.
He filed it away. There was no use pulling at that thread without more information.
Before he could look again, Ozpin walked onto the stage, and the room adjusted itself accordingly.
He was not a man who commanded rooms through size or volume. He moved with the unhurried certainty of someone who has never needed the room's cooperation and therefore always receives it. He let the quiet establish itself before he spoke.
"You came here expecting to learn," he said. "And you will — but perhaps not only what you expect." He paused, looking out across the assembled students with the expression of a man who is genuinely curious about what he's looking at. "What I see when I look at this room is energy. Considerable energy. Energy that, without direction, without challenge, without a purpose worthy of it, is simply noise." A beat. "We intend to remedy that. You will work harder than you have worked before. You will be challenged in ways your previous training did not prepare you for. We will hold you to standards that will feel, at times, unreasonable." The ghost of something crossed his face — not quite a smile, but its structural ancestor. "I find unreasonable standards tend to produce reasonable people. That is all."
He stepped back.
Goodwitch moved forward.
"Your orientation will begin tomorrow morning," she announced, with the crispness of someone who considers all ambiguity a personal affront. "Tonight — rest."
In the corridor behind the gymnasium, away from the assembled students, one of the newer faculty members was not resting.
Sala stood with her back against the wall and her arms wrapped around herself, which was the posture of someone attempting to perform calm while experiencing something considerably more complicated. Her breath was steady — she had made it steady by effort — but her eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the lighting.
Rhubar stood beside her, his hand moving in slow circles between her shoulder blades.
He had seen their faces. Both of them — Nova dark and serious, with the particular stillness that Rhubar recognized as his own stillness worn by someone younger; Turuk lighter-featured, his mother's architecture in the set of his jaw. They had grown. Of course they had grown — sixteen years was not a small amount of time, and saiyans did not grow gently. But he had not been prepared for what it felt like to see it with his own eyes after so many years of tracking it at a distance through the quiet signal of their ki.
He thought he had been prepared. He had not been prepared.
Sala was trying not to cry in a faculty corridor, and doing a credible job of it.
"I'm sorry," she said, voice rough at the edges. "I know it's — it was just seeing them like that, in person, so much bigger than — I couldn't—"
"You don't need to be sorry," Rhubar said quietly.
She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
A new voice came from the doorway.
"Is everything alright?"
The young man was standing in the corridor entrance with the careful posture of someone who has noticed something is wrong and is not certain of their welcome. He looked, in a way that Rhubar registered without comment, oddly familiar — the build, the way he stood, something in the line of his features that was not quite a match to anything but suggested a category. A brown tail moved behind him with the unhurried ease of something habitual. His armor bore a symbol Rhubar didn't recognize: two letters and a spiraling arrow.
"My wife is fine," Rhubar said. "She had an unexpected moment. It passes."
"I see." The young man stayed in the doorway, which was the considerate choice. "If there's anything you need—"
"You're new to the faculty as well," Rhubar said. It wasn't quite a question.
"As of this term, yes. My name is Tarro." He stepped forward slightly and offered a hand. "I was told there were two new additions to the staff. I assume that's you."
"Rhubar." He shook it. "And my wife, Sala."
Sala had composed herself enough to offer a small smile and a nod. Her eyes moved to the tail, then to the symbol on his armor, and something in her expression shifted into a particular quality of attention.
"Tarro," she said. "May I ask — are you by chance a—"
"I'm sorry." He said it gently, with the tone of someone who has been asked this question before and has a prepared answer they regret having to give. "My heritage isn't something I'm in a position to discuss right now. I hope you'll forgive me for that. I'll explain when I can."
Rhubar regarded him for a moment. Then he nodded.
"There's nothing to forgive," he said. "A person's reasons are their own until they're ready to share them."
Something in the young man's posture eased slightly.
"We should return," Rhubar said, touching Sala's arm. "Ozpin won't be brief forever."
Part IV — Letters and Goodnight
Location: Beacon Academy | Student Dormitories | That Evening
Ruby was writing.
The letter had started as one page and was currently threatening to become three, which she was blaming on the fact that she had a lot to say and her handwriting was generous with space. Yang was watching her from across the room with the expression of someone who finds their sibling's earnestness charming in a way they are not going to say out loud.
"What are you working on?" Yang asked.
"Letter. For everyone back at Signal." Ruby didn't look up. "It's weird being somewhere new where you don't know anyone. I couldn't exactly bring my friends with me, so — I figured I'd write."
Yang pulled her legs up on her bunk. "You know what Dad always says."
Ruby made a face. "Strangers are just friends you haven't met yet, yes, I know, but that's a lot easier to believe in theory than in practice, and I'm also fairly sure I made a minus-friend today with the whole dust-sneeze incident, so right now my net is not exactly—"
"You made two friends today, at minimum."
Ruby looked up. "Did I?"
Yang's expression was doing the thing it did when she had decided to be coy about something. Ruby found this deeply frustrating.
"Those two boys," Yang said, with the studied casualness of someone constructing something very specific. "The ones with the tails. You know them, you get along with them, and they came all the way to Beacon — same invitation, same night." She paused. "What are their names again?"
"Nova and Turuk. I told you earlier."
"Right." Another pause. "Nova especially. The dark one. He seems—"
"Yang."
"Interesting."
"Yang, please don't."
Yang pressed a hand to her chest with an expression of theatrical innocence. "I'm not doing anything. I'm just saying that it's nice you have people you already know here, given how concerned you are about being the talk of the school." She stretched out on her bunk. "And that Nova is very handsome, which I notice you failed to mention when you told me about him."
Ruby had developed a sudden intense interest in the letter she was writing.
"I don't see how that's relevant," she said.
Yang smiled at the ceiling and said nothing further, which was in many ways more effective than continuing.
Ruby went to find Weiss about twenty minutes later.
This was not, she acknowledged, the most rational decision she could have made with the evening's remaining hours. The interaction that morning had not ended in a way that suggested Weiss Schnee was sitting somewhere in the dormitory hoping Ruby Rose would come by and have another go at it.
But it was bothering her. The unresolved thing sat in the back of her brain like a splinter, and she had never been good at leaving splinters alone.
She found her in the common corridor near the dormitory entrance, which was either very good luck or the universe deciding to be efficient.
"Weiss! Hey—"
The Schnee heiress turned, identified the source of the voice, and performed a very controlled micro-expression that communicated something in the range of of course it's you without saying a word. She maintained her position, which Ruby chose to read as a form of permission.
"Hi," Ruby said. "I just wanted to — okay, I know today didn't exactly start well, and I know the dust thing was my fault, and I know Nova kind of made it worse—"
"He flicked me."
"He did, yes. But I wanted to say sorry again, properly, because I genuinely didn't mean to ruin your dress and I want to actually clear the air if we're going to be at the same school for the next four years."
Weiss regarded her with the cool evaluative attention of someone for whom trust is not a default setting. She was silent for long enough that Ruby was beginning to plan her retreat.
"Your apology is noted," Weiss said finally, in the tone of someone who considers this a significant concession.
From further down the corridor, Turuk's voice arrived with the subtlety of a dropped textbook.
"Would you just stop already?! Some of us are trying to think."
Weiss turned toward the sound with the look of someone preparing to escalate, then apparently reconsidered when she saw the expression on Turuk's face — the particular expression of someone who has run out of patience and is not performing the remaining supply of it.
Then Nova came around the corner and looked at her, and said nothing, and somehow the nothing was considerably more effective than anything that might have filled it.
Weiss huffed. Straightened her dress, which was still slightly damp from the cleaning attempts. And walked away.
Ruby hung her head.
Nova put a hand on her shoulder.
"Don't," he said.
She looked up.
"She'll come around. I'm not saying that to be nice — I'm saying it because it's true, and because you handled that with more patience than most people would have." He removed his hand, more comfortable in gesture than in sustained contact. "Give it time."
Ruby looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone deciding whether to say the thing they're thinking.
She decided to say the thing she was thinking.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"We're friends, right?" She said it with the directness of someone who has decided that uncertainty about a thing is worse than the vulnerability of asking about it. "I mean — I think we are. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't assuming."
He looked at her with the focused attention he gave to things he was actually listening to.
"Yes," he said. "We're friends."
She exhaled. "Okay. Good." A pause. "Then why are you so... I don't know. Nice. To me specifically." She made a vague gesture. "You don't have to be. You could just be neutral. Most people who don't know someone well are just neutral about them."
He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone searching for the right answer — more like someone deciding whether the right answer needs any softening before delivery, and concluding that it doesn't.
"Because you're my friend," he said. "And I don't like watching my friends feel bad when I can do something about it. It's not more complicated than that."
Ruby held his gaze for a moment. There was that sensation again — the one she'd been trying to identify since the bookshop four months ago, the one that didn't have a clean label and sat somewhere in the register between warmth and confusion and something I should probably think about later.
She decided to think about it later.
"Okay," she said, and smiled. "Thanks."
He ruffled her hair, which made her pout, which appeared to satisfy some internal requirement on his end.
"Get some sleep," he said. "Tomorrow's going to be long."
"Goodnight, Nova."
"Goodnight, Ruby."
He and Turuk walked back down the corridor, and she stood there for a moment watching them go before Yang materialized at her elbow with the timing of someone who has been waiting for exactly this.
"So," Yang said.
"Don't," Ruby said.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face is saying it."
Yang smiled. "My face is saying goodnight, Rubes."
Ruby went back to her letter and finished it in eleven minutes, which was a new personal record.
Part V — Into the Forest
Location: The Cliffside Above Forever Fall | Morning
Glynda Goodwitch was not a woman who complicated simple things unnecessarily.
"Partners are determined by the first person you make eye contact with after landing," she said, which was the simple version. "Teams will be formed from partnerships at the end of the trial. Make your way to the ruins at the center of the forest. Collect the relics. Return." She paused. "Use whatever means are available to you to survive the journey. The forest is not empty."
That was the understated version.
The launch pads made a sound like a warning before they fired, which was courteous in the way that things are courteous when the courtesy doesn't actually change the outcome. Cardin Winchester went first, taking three others with him in the manner of someone who considers momentum a personality trait. Blake went next, neat and controlled. Yang followed, producing sunglasses from somewhere with the theatrical timing of someone who had practiced this moment.
Turuk rolled his neck. Looked at Nova.
"See you in there," he said.
"Try not to wreck anything expensive," Nova replied.
Turuk went. The pad fired, and he was a point of blue-white light against the canopy before it closed over him.
Nova turned. Ruby was beside him, and the particular quality of her pre-combat expression — the focused, quietly thrilled look of someone who is nervous in all the right ways — was one he had already memorized without intending to.
"Good luck out there," he said.
She smiled, and the silver of her eyes caught the morning light in a way that was probably just the angle of the sun.
"You too."
He went over the edge.
The forest received him without comment.
He used his tail on the way down — caught a branch, absorbed the momentum, landed in a controlled crouch on a bed of moss that was softer than it looked. Silence, briefly. Then the distant sounds of the forest being inhabited by things that had been here long before any of them.
Find a partner, he thought. Find the ruins. Come back.
He started walking.
His mind, which had never been content to simply observe, went where it usually went when his hands weren't occupied. He thought about the people he'd met in the last twenty-four hours. Ruby — a study in contradictions, somehow both more serious and more genuinely joyful than most people he'd known, with a capacity for enthusiasm that could be disorienting if you weren't expecting it. Yang, her sister — loud in the way that people are loud when they're being honest rather than performing, with a watchfulness underneath the brightness that she didn't advertise. Blake, his adopted sister, same as always — present, guarded, thinking three things simultaneously and showing you approximately one of them.
Weiss Schnee. He reserved judgment. First impressions in stressful situations were data, not verdicts.
And the two teachers, standing at the back of the faculty line.
He still couldn't account for that. He put it away again.
The sound reached him before the clearing did — a sequence of concussive impacts, too heavy and too fast for one person, with the intermittent shriek of grimm in the specific register of grimm that were not getting what they wanted.
He moved toward it.
The boy in the clearing was fighting well.
Black-haired, red-eyed, compact and efficient in his movement with the particular economy of someone who had been trained to do this from a young age and had internalized it past the point of effort. He had a sword on his back that he wasn't using — his hands and feet were doing the relevant work. The grimm surrounding him were a dozen beowolves and two ursa majors that had apparently decided that collective intimidation was a viable strategy.
They were being disabused of this notion.
Nova watched for exactly long enough to make a useful assessment. The boy was handling it. He was also, in approximately fifteen seconds, going to have two ursa majors landing on him simultaneously from opposite sides, which was the kind of problem that handling the rest of the situation efficiently did not resolve.
Nova moved.
The first ursa got a heel to the side of its head that sent it cartwheeling sideways. The second took a ki blast at point-blank range and ceased to be a coherent object. The rest of the beowolves, confronted with a new variable in their calculus, made the kind of noise that grimm make when they've reconsidered their life choices.
The boy looked at him.
"I could have handled those," he said. He said it without heat, but with the precise firmness of someone stating a fact rather than registering a complaint.
"I know," Nova said. "Still seemed like a reasonable time to show up."
The boy held his gaze for a moment. Something in the assessment shifted — not approval, exactly, but a recalibration that moved in that direction. He sighed the sigh of someone who has decided to be practical about something.
"Don't get in my way," he said.
"Not planning to."
They looked at each other for another second, and in that second there was the particular mute recognition that sometimes passes between people who are, despite themselves, similar in specific ways.
Then more beowolves came out of the tree line, and the conversation moved on.
Nova had never fought alongside someone he'd just met and felt so immediately calibrated to them.
It was an odd thing to notice in the middle of a grimm encounter, but he noticed it anyway. The boy — Daikon Koizumi, as he introduced himself afterward, with the slightly reluctant courtesy of someone who considers names a reasonable concession — moved in a way that was architecturally compatible. When Nova moved left, Daikon covered right without being told. When Daikon committed to a deep engagement, Nova covered the angle it opened without calculation.
The energy blade Daikon summoned from his palm was something Nova had never seen outside of what his father had once described, years ago, in a training session that Nova had retained more completely than he sometimes let on.
He didn't say anything about it.
They shook hands once the last of the grimm had been dealt with, and both of them looked at the other with the specific expression of someone who has just been handed a question they're not ready to ask yet.
"The ruins are supposed to be north," Daikon said.
"Then we go north," Nova said.
Part VI — The Clearing at the Heart of Things
Turuk hit the ground running and had found his partner before the echoes of his landing had fully cleared.
He heard her before he saw her — a battle cry that was high, sharp, and categorically unconcerned with the number of things it was directed at. He came through the tree line into a clearing where a red-haired girl in gladiator-heavy armor was doing something extraordinary with her fists against a cluster of ursa majors that significantly outnumbered her.
She was good.
She was also, in about thirty seconds, going to be surrounded on three sides rather than two, which changed the geometry in a direction she probably hadn't accounted for.
Turuk accounted for it on her behalf.
He took the three beowolves that were flanking from the left with a sequence of strikes that prioritized speed over power — a knee to the first, a body rotation into the second's guard, a kick that used the third beowolf's own mass against it. He landed beside her, and she didn't look surprised to see him, which told him something useful about her.
"Thought you could use a hand," he said.
"I could have managed," she said, without inflection.
"Probably," he agreed. "I'm Turuk."
"Scarlett. Scarlett Reinhardt."
They looked at each other for exactly one second.
Then the ursa majors reorganized, and they went back to work.
She was not what he'd expected, which was fair because he hadn't expected anything specific. She fought like someone who had been taught a martial art and then spent considerable time deciding which parts of it she actually agreed with and throwing the rest away. Her footwork was precise. Her kicks carried force that her build didn't immediately suggest — until she set her feet for a heavy strike, at which point the geometry became clear.
He watched her shed her heavy armor when things got complicated with the king tajitu, and watched the reactions from the others who had arrived in the clearing, and kept his own counsel.
He could tell she was used to people underestimating her.
He had no intention of making that mistake.
The clearing at the ruins held, eventually, everyone.
They arrived in pieces — Blake and Yang together, moving with the easy coordination of people who had decided to trust each other; Nova and Daikon emerging from the north tree line with the composed posture of people who had fought recently and found it manageable; Jaune Arc arriving via cave ceiling, which was a story that apparently nobody present was ready to hear in full yet. Nora on her ursa, briefly. Ren, her partner, with the expression of someone who has learned to absorb Nora as a fact of nature.
And then Turuk and Scarlett, with a king tajitu behind them that had not been in anyone's plans.
Turuk drew it left. Scarlett grabbed the pieces. The grimm overcommitted, which was what grimm did when they were frustrated, and the overcommitment created the opening.
Then the deathstalker.
Then the nevermore, which was already a subject of conversation when Ruby and Weiss descended from it in a manner that was chaotic but demonstrated, under the chaos, the early architecture of genuine teamwork.
Yang had been composing a very specific sentence about all of this when the nevermore landed on the bridge.
"Can everyone just—" she started.
"Yang." Ruby's voice, patient and apologetic in the particular combination that meant she agreed with the frustration but not the timing. "The grimm."
"I know about the grimm, Ruby."
"There are quite a few of them," Turuk said.
"I know."
She moved.
What happened in the next eight minutes was, depending on where you were standing, either controlled chaos or the early proof of something that would take years to fully understand.
Nova and Daikon on one side. Ruby and Weiss on the other, moving toward the nevermore with the specific shared purpose of people who have just decided to trust each other. The rest distributed across the clearing's width.
Scarlett shed the last of her heavy armor. The ground cracked where it landed.
Turuk watched the reactions from the corner of his eye and decided he had chosen his partner well.
The nevermore came for Ruby at the end.
It shouldn't have been able to — by rights, the thing was too damaged, its wings too compromised, its movement too limited — but grimm did not always know they were beaten, and this one chose to not know at a particularly inconvenient moment.
It committed to her trajectory. She was committed to her trajectory. These two facts were about to produce a single, definitive outcome.
Nova hit the bird in the beak with an uppercut that had the full investment of his body behind it. The impact redirected its dive into a stumble, wings fighting for purchase, opening the gap Ruby needed.
She was already accelerating. He could see it — the semblance activating, the rose-petal scatter of red against the grey morning air, her scythe finding the cliff face with the precision of someone who had been training for exactly this since she was old enough to hold a weapon.
"Now, Ruby!"
She didn't need to be told. She was already at the top of the arc.
The blade came back. Clean. Final.
The nevermore dissipated into the forest air below.
Ruby stood at the top of the cliff with her weapon planted in the stone beside her and the morning light behind her, and for a moment nobody said anything, because there wasn't anything to say that would improve on it.
"Not bad," Scarlett said eventually.
"Yeah," Nova said. "Not bad at all."
Part VII — Teams
Location: Beacon Academy Gymnasium | That Afternoon
Ozpin stood at the podium and looked at them.
He did this for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, and it was the particular quality of looking that made people feel — correctly or not — that they were being read rather than observed.
"Cardin Winchester, Russell Thrush, Dove Bronzewing, and Sky Lark." A pause. "The bronze rook pieces. Well done. From this point forward, you will be known as Team CRDL, led by Cardin Winchester."
The applause was polite. Cardin acknowledged it with the posture of someone who considers it overdue.
"Nova Belladonna, Daikon Koizumi, Turuk Belladonna, and Scarlett Reinhardt."
Nova kept his expression still. Beside him, he felt Turuk straighten slightly.
"The silver knight pieces." Ozpin's voice carried a quality of satisfaction he didn't entirely contain. "You four will be known as Team NDTS, led by Nova Belladonna."
The applause was warmer. From somewhere in the room — he filed away the fact that he would locate this later — there were two specific reactions that were distinctly more emotional than applause generally warranted. He didn't look toward them yet.
He also didn't look toward Ruby, which was its own kind of effort, because he could feel her clapping in the specific way that people clap when they mean it rather than performing it.
Team leader, he thought, with the resigned practicality of someone accepting a thing they didn't ask for but can see the logic of. Fine.
"Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, and Yang Xiao Long."
Ruby was not expecting that either.
"The white bishop pieces. Excellent teamwork under considerable circumstances." The ghost of a smile. "From this point forward, you will be known as Team RWBY, led by Ruby Rose."
Yang's reaction was immediate and genuine — a whoop that caused several people around her to flinch. Blake offered a small, private smile. Weiss's expression cycled through several responses before settling on the one that suggested she was composing a memo of objections she would file at a more appropriate time.
Ruby's face did the thing it did when something was more than she'd prepared herself for.
She was still looking at it when someone appeared at her shoulder.
"Congratulations," Nova said. "It suits you."
She turned to look at him, and the feeling was back — the warm-confused-something she kept filing under figure out later — and was presently harder to file away than usual because he was right there and looking at her with the steady directness that she still wasn't entirely accustomed to.
"You think so?" she asked.
"I wouldn't say it if I didn't."
She smiled — the real one, not the reflexive one — and he registered it with the specific quality of attention he gave to things he was actually paying attention to.
At the back of the room, two members of the faculty who were not mingling with their colleagues watched the exchange between their son and the silver-eyed girl from a distance.
Sala's expression was the compound thing it had been since morning — pride and ache and something softer underneath both, the kind of feeling that doesn't have a name because the people who feel it most are usually too busy living it to name it.
"She's good for him," Sala said quietly. "I can tell."
Rhubar was quiet for a moment.
"She is," he agreed.
"And he has no idea about Blake." A soft sound that was not quite a laugh. "He's going to figure it out eventually."
"He will. When he does, it'll be its own conversation." His hand found her shoulder. "One thing at a time."
Sala watched her son stand with his new team. Watched him say something that made Ruby Rose smile like she meant it. Watched her niece, grown and present and carrying something in her posture that spoke of a life Sala didn't have full knowledge of yet, stand at the edge of a team that was already becoming something.
Sixteen years. The distance between then and now was not something she could measure in a unit she had a name for.
Soon, she thought. Not yet. But soon.
"You're right," she said. "One thing at a time."
Rhubar kept his hand on her shoulder.
They watched their sons begin their next chapter from across a room, and said nothing further, because nothing further needed to be said.
★ END OF CHAPTER TWO ★
Next: Chapter Three — "Weiss and Team RWBY's Dilemma"
Hey guys Novaflame6 here, hope you guys enjoyed chapter 2 of this story. In case you guys have forgotten, this is a rewrite or sort of reboot of my fanfiction.net story called The Legend of the Remnant Saiyans. Thought I'd add more of an interesting dynamic with Nova (Brussel is his saiyan name) and Turuk's birth parents being more of a prevalent presence in the story. Below I'll leave poll as to when I should have Rhubar and Sala reveal themselves as Nova and Turuk's parents in the story. I'd love to hear your answers regarding this.
Poll: When in the story should Rhubar and Sala reveal themselves as Nova and Turuk's parents?
A: Volume 2
B: Volume 3- During the fall of Beacon
C: Volume 4- when Yang meets Raven.
D: Volume 5- During the haven academy arc
E: Wait until Volume 6
Let me know which one and I'll integrate that choice into the story.
Anyways that's all for now, I'll see you guys in the next chapter!