Hey guys RoseSaiyan2 here again. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the last chapter, had to get creative in order to be more detailed. I'm not exactly the most detailed person or writer lol. I figured it'd be a change of pace to have Nova's parents around more often. Anyways... Ruby is probably going to be ooc compared to the cannon story and some other rwby fan stories, but for the purpose of this story I'll need her hand maybe some other rwby characters to be like that.
Eventually they'll develop into closer to what their actual characters are like. Anyways, enjoy the story!
I don't own Dbz/Db kai/ DBS or Rwby and their characters, those belong to Akira Toriyama and Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively. RoseSaiyan2 only owns the main oc's and has permission to use two OC's for his stories.
CHAPTER THREE
Weiss and Team RWBY's Dilemma
Part I — The Fifth Member
Location: Beacon Academy | Main Corridor | Morning
The hallway between the dormitory wing and the academic block had the particular quality of all school corridors at ten minutes to nine — purposeful foot traffic, the sound of lockers and conversation layered together into a kind of productive noise, the ambient pressure of people who have somewhere to be and are calculating whether they'll make it.
Team NDTS was moving through it in the loose formation they'd already developed without discussing it — Nova slightly ahead, Turuk to his left, Daikon a half-step behind on the right, Scarlett bringing up the rear with the unhurried stride of someone whose definition of late was more flexible than most. They were on time. Barely, and by a margin that would have alarmed a more anxious person, but on time.
They were almost past the eastern lockers when someone stepped into their path.
Not aggressively — not blocking, exactly, more in the manner of someone who has been waiting and is making themselves visible rather than forcing a confrontation. She was a compact woman with the particular energy of a teacher who has been doing this long enough to know that ambushing students in corridors is occasionally the most efficient available option.
"Professor Peach," Nova said.
"Good morning." She smiled — the kind of smile that contained an agenda. "I'm sorry to catch you on your way to class. Do you have a moment?"
The four of them exchanged a look that communicated, without words, a collective shrug.
"Sure," Nova said.
Peach gestured toward the row of lockers to their left, and that was when Nova registered what he'd subconsciously noticed thirty seconds ago and filed away without investigating — there was someone standing behind the last locker in the row. Not hiding with any great commitment, more in the manner of someone who has told themselves they're just standing near a locker and is maintaining this fiction with moderate success.
A tail was visible. Red, slightly bushy at the tip, and distinctly lupine in character.
Scarlett had gone still in the way she went still when she recognized something she hadn't expected to find.
She sighed through her nose. Walked to the front of the group with the unhurried certainty of someone whose geography of this situation had just become very clear.
"Aiko," she said. "You don't have to keep hiding. Come out."
The pause that followed lasted approximately four seconds. Then the girl emerged from behind the locker with the careful posture of someone who has been caught doing something they know is technically defensible but feels indefensible.
She was younger than Scarlett — visibly so, with the slightly unfinished quality that the mid-teens carry before experience starts filling in the edges. Dark skin, red hair cut to the shoulder, wolf ears the same color as her hair turned slightly inward in the universal faunus body language for this is uncomfortable. Blue eyes that moved across the group in the rapid, assessing sweep of someone cataloguing potential threats and finding, with evident relief, a lower number than expected.
Her weapon — a poleaxe, compact enough to wear on her back without being impractical — sat across her shoulders in the practiced way of someone who'd been carrying it long enough to forget it was there.
She came and stood beside the professor with the specific posture of a person who is doing something difficult and has decided to simply do it rather than find an elegant way in.
"Everyone," Scarlett said, in the tone of someone making an introduction they hadn't prepared remarks for, "this is my younger sister. Aiko." A beat. "She's a little nervous around new people. She's also — apparently — now in need of a team, which I'm guessing is what this is about."
Professor Peach nodded. "There was an odd number in the adjacent class. Aiko was transferred to yours, but without a team assignment. I thought, given the connection—"
"It makes sense," Nova said.
Aiko looked at him.
He looked back. He had the particular quality of attention — still, direct, not unkind — that some people find reassuring and others find unnerving, and he watched her process which category she was landing in.
She bowed. It was a slightly awkward bow, the kind produced by someone who has decided that formality is a reasonable fallback when you don't know what else to do.
"H-hi," she said. "Like my sister said, my name is Aiko. Aiko Reinhardt. I hope I... I hope I can be useful to your team."
The stammer was slight but present — not a chronic thing, he guessed, more the particular friction of an anxious person trying to push words through a moment that feels larger than it is.
Turuk stepped forward.
This was, Nova had already noticed, one of his brother's specific qualities — the instinct to close the distance when someone was uncomfortable, not in a way that crowded them, but in a way that said the space between us is shorter than you think. He offered his hand with the easy, uncomplicated warmth that Turuk deployed so naturally that people sometimes didn't register it as a deliberate act.
"Turuk Belladonna," he said. "Nobody here's going to give you a hard time, alright? Relax."
She shook his hand. Something in her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch.
"Daikon Koizumi," Daikon said from behind Turuk, with the economy of someone who considers introductions a formality but a necessary one. He raised two fingers in a brief gesture that was technically a wave.
"And this is my brother," Turuk said, gesturing toward Nova. "Our team leader."
Nova nodded. "Welcome aboard, Aiko."
She smiled — a small thing, tentative at its edges, but genuine underneath. "Thank you," she said. "All of you."
Professor Peach looked at the group with the expression of someone who had expected this to take longer and is quietly grateful that it didn't.
"Thank you, Mr. Belladonna," she said. "I appreciate you being so willing—"
"Eight fifty."
Daikon had his scroll out and was looking at it with the expression of someone who has just discovered a structural problem in a load-bearing wall.
Five pairs of eyes moved to the scroll. Confirmed the time. Arrived at the same conclusion.
"Sorry, Professor — we really have to—" Turuk was already moving.
"Go," Peach said, with the resigned fondness of a teacher who has watched students run to class for many years and found it consistently endearing. "We can talk another time."
They went.
Aiko ran with them, falling into the formation with the slightly surprised ease of someone who hadn't expected to be included in the we and has decided not to question it yet.
Part II — Professor Portman's Lecture
Location: Beacon Academy | Classroom 4B
They made it.
This was not guaranteed up to approximately the final eight seconds, but the door was still open when they arrived, and Professor Portman had not yet entered from the instructor's side, which meant the moral and technical definition of on time was still intact.
Team NDTS — now NDTSA, though the naming conventions would sort themselves out later — distributed themselves across two rows. Nova took an aisle seat. Turuk settled beside him. Daikon found a position near the back with the instinct of someone who prefers to observe a room before committing to it. Scarlett sat beside her sister, who was still running a low-level assessment of the classroom with her ears turned slightly forward.
Two rows ahead and to the left, Ruby Rose was in the middle of a drawing that appeared to be a highly detailed caricature of something she'd seen on the way to class. She was snickering at it quietly. Beside her, Yang was watching with the expression of someone who has found their sibling's sense of humor consistently funnier than they're going to admit.
Nova took in this information, filed it appropriately, and looked toward the front of the room.
Blake was reading.
Weiss was sitting very straight with her hands folded on the desk, which was the posture of someone who has made decisions about how to conduct themselves in a classroom and is enforcing them internally.
Professor Portman arrived.
He was a broad man with the bearing of someone who had been impressive in the field and was now channeling that impressiveness into an academic context with mixed success. He had the kind of voice that carried easily and the kind of story that went longer than the destination seemed to justify.
He began to talk.
Fourteen minutes into the lecture, Ruby was on her third drawing.
Daikon was running a whetstone along the edge of his blade with the focused patience of someone who has found a productive use for his hands during a period when the rest of him is not required.
Scarlett, beside him, had produced her own blade from somewhere and was doing the same thing, which produced a synchronized sound that was technically disruptive and practically very quiet.
Turuk was taking notes. This was either genuine engagement or an extremely convincing performance of it.
Nova was listening — actually listening, which required no visible effort and produced no external signs that would have been interesting to observe.
At the front of the room, Portman arrived, eventually, at a point that had a shape to it.
"Now then." He looked out over the assembled students with the air of someone issuing a challenge. "Who among you thinks they best exemplify what it means to be a huntsman? What it means to stand in the middle of danger and not flinch from it?"
Weiss's hand was up before the last word finished landing.
"I do, sir."
There was a quality to how she said it — not arrogant, exactly, but precise, the specific confidence of someone who has spent their entire life being the right answer to questions like this one and sees no reason to be modest about a fact.
"Excellent! A volunteer." Portman looked delighted in the way that teachers look delighted when they've been waiting for exactly this response. "The floor is yours, Miss Schnee."
Weiss rose, smoothed her dress, and descended to the front of the classroom with the composed bearing of someone executing a prepared plan.
Portman reached behind his lectern and unlatched a cage.
The grimm that emerged looked, at a glance, like a boar — compact, armored along its dorsal ridge, with the black and white markings that grimm wore like a uniform. It was smaller than what they'd encountered in the forest. It was not, however, small.
It looked at Weiss.
Weiss looked at it.
She drew Myrtenaster from her hip with a sound like a key turning in a lock.
She was good. Nova watched with the attention he gave to anything that told him something useful, and what he was watching told him several things.
Her technique was classical — structured, precise, with the efficiency of someone trained by teachers who knew what they were doing. The grimm charged and she met it with a block that redirected rather than absorbed, which was intelligent. She rolled away from its second charge with more grace than the situation strictly required, which suggested she was aware of being observed and had decided that was not entirely irrelevant.
"You can do it, Weiss! Show them what Team RWBY is made of!"
Ruby was half out of her seat, one fist raised, with the uncomplicated enthusiasm of someone who has not yet learned that cheering for your teammate during their combat demonstration is not always welcome.
Weiss's jaw tightened.
"Ruby." It came out clipped, with the undertone of someone managing several things simultaneously and finding the interruption specifically ill-timed. "I'm concentrating."
Ruby sat back down. The enthusiasm didn't entirely leave her face, but it relocated to somewhere more internal, which was its own kind of diminishment to watch.
Nova's expression didn't change. But something in his chest registered the exchange with a specific quality of displeasure that he set aside for the moment.
Weiss, to her credit, returned her full attention to the grimm without visible disruption. The boar recovered and rolled — a spinning charge, lowered head, the kind of attack designed to catch defensive footwork in a gap. She used a glyph to meet it, the white circle of light materializing at precisely the right angle to neutralize the momentum. The grimm stumbled. Myrtenaster found the opening.
The creature stilled. Dissipated. The class was quiet for a moment, and then applause moved through it with the particular quality of people who had genuinely been watching.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Portman said, with theatrical satisfaction, "a huntress in the making."
Weiss returned to her seat with the posture of someone who has completed a thing and is prepared to accept the assessment as accurate.
The bell rang.
Ruby waited until Weiss was beside her in the aisle before speaking.
"Weiss, that was incredible — the glyph at the end especially, I didn't know you could use it like that against a—"
"Stop acting like a child." Weiss didn't look at her. She was gathering her materials with the brisk efficiency of someone who has decided they are already in the next part of the day. "Your commentary during the demonstration was embarrassing and unnecessary. I expected better from a team leader."
Ruby opened her mouth.
"I'm disappointed, frankly." Weiss snapped her case shut. "If this is the standard we're holding ourselves to, I have concerns."
The aisle went quiet in a specific way.
Ruby didn't respond. She looked at her hands for a moment — the brief, interior adjustment of someone absorbing something that landed harder than they wanted to show.
Daikon stepped out of his row into the aisle. He did it without announcement, and he placed himself between Weiss and the door in a way that wasn't a block but was clearly deliberate.
Weiss looked at him.
"We get it," he said. His voice was even, with the particular quality of evenness that comes from choosing it. "You're more qualified. You think you should be leading your team. You're probably right that you're more technically prepared." A beat. "But I've been watching you for two days, and I haven't seen a leader yet. I've seen someone who's been the best person in every room they've ever walked into, and who has decided that entitles them to make everyone else feel it." He held her gaze without aggression. "That's not leadership. That's just loud."
"Excuse me—"
"The girl you just talked to caught a nevermore barehanded and decapitated it with a scythe at seventeen years old," Daikon continued, with the same composure, as though she hadn't spoken. "She's not your subordinate. She's your leader. And whether or not you agree with that choice, the least it deserves is basic respect." He picked up his bag. "If you can't find that, that's something worth examining. Not in her — in yourself."
He moved past her and into the corridor without a backward glance.
Weiss stood very still.
The classroom was mostly empty now. A few students were filing out around her with the studied nonchalance of people who had heard everything and were pretending otherwise.
Nova passed her.
He paused beside her for exactly one moment — not blocking her, not confronting her, simply present.
"I thought you were different from the reputation," he said quietly. "I still think you might be. But you're going to have to decide if you want to prove it."
He put a hand briefly on her shoulder — not a comfort, exactly, more the kind of contact that says I'm still here while saying something difficult — and then he was gone, and the rest of his team followed, and Aiko bowed her head briefly as she passed.
Ruby walked out last.
She didn't look back, which was somehow worse.
Yang said nothing. Blake said nothing. They walked out and left the classroom to Weiss and the empty chairs and whatever she was going to do with the silence.
Part III — A Long Walk Between Two Conversations
The corridors of Beacon had a quality in the empty afternoon hours that they lost when they were full — a kind of honest stillness, the architecture without the noise it was built to contain. Weiss walked through it without particular destination, which was unusual for her. She was, as a rule, a person who went places with reasons.
Right now she was going somewhere with a question.
She found Portman near the faculty lounge at the east end of the academic block, reviewing something on a scroll with the unhurried focus of a man with no class until after lunch. He looked up when she approached, and in the way of teachers who are good at their work, he saw something on her face before she said anything and adjusted his expression accordingly.
"Miss Schnee," he said. "What can I do for you?"
"Your lecture today," she said, because starting with a compliment felt dishonest, and she had decided somewhere in the last twenty minutes that honesty was the appropriate register for this conversation. "It was instructive."
"High praise," he said, with just enough warmth in it to make the gentle irony land correctly.
She almost smiled. Didn't, quite. "I've been thinking about something that's been bothering me since the team assignments."
"The leadership question," he said.
She blinked.
"It's not an unusual thing, for students at this level," he said, without making it sound like she was being managed. "Someone expects to lead, doesn't, and spends a period of time processing why that might be."
"I'm more qualified than she is," Weiss said. "Technically. By measurable standards. I've trained longer, my technique is—"
"Probably better in several respects," Portman agreed. "And?"
She stopped.
He waited.
"I don't understand why Ozpin chose her," she said. "He doesn't make arbitrary decisions — everyone says that, and I believe it, but I can't find the logic in this one."
"Tell me something," Portman said. "When you were in that classroom just now — when you were fighting the grimm — were you thinking about your team?"
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
"You were thinking about your performance," he said, not unkindly. "Which is natural. Which is correct, in a solo demonstration. But a leader, when they're in a room with their team, is always thinking about at least two things simultaneously — what they need to do, and what their team needs them to be." He looked at her steadily. "Miss Rose, from what I observed this morning, was thinking about you."
The silence held for a moment.
"Ozpin doesn't choose leaders because they're the most technically accomplished person in the group," Portman continued. "If he did, the academies would be full of outstanding soloists with very short life expectancies." He picked up his scroll again, which was the gesture of a man wrapping toward a conclusion. "The question isn't whether you're the right leader. The question is whether you're the best teammate. Whether you can put someone else's role ahead of your own ambitions for it." He glanced at her over the scroll. "That, I think, is what you're actually deciding."
Weiss said nothing for a long moment.
"Thank you, Professor," she said finally.
He nodded. "Door's open."
She walked away.
Part IV — Two Creams and Four Sugars
Location: Team RWBY's Dormitory | That Evening
Ruby was asleep.
This was not precisely accurate — she was in the early-stage sleep of someone who had been studying hard enough that the transition from reading with intent to resting with a book on my face had happened without clear announcement. Her notes were spread across the blanket in the organized chaos of someone who had a system and was the only person who understood it. A pen was still in her loosely curled hand.
Weiss stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at her.
Then she crossed to the small electric kettle on the room's corner shelf and put the water on.
The sound of it brought Ruby up from wherever she'd been. She came awake quickly — the reflex of someone trained to transition fast — and immediately went into the pre-emptive defense of a person who has been caught doing something they know looks bad.
"I'm studying," she said, before her eyes had fully focused. "I was absolutely studying and not sleeping, I just had my eyes—"
"Ruby," Weiss said.
She looked.
Weiss was standing at the shelf with her back partially turned, and if her posture carried any of its usual rigid architecture, it was doing so with less investment than usual.
"How do you take your coffee?"
Ruby's brow furrowed. "What?"
"Coffee." Weiss looked back at her briefly, and there was something in her expression that Ruby had not seen there before — something that had the shape of effort, honest and slightly uncomfortable. "How do you take it?"
"...Two creams and four sugars?"
Weiss turned back to the kettle. "That is an objectively catastrophic amount of sugar."
"It's the right amount," Ruby said, with the mild offense of someone defending a long-held position.
Weiss said nothing further on the subject, which was its own form of concession.
She brought the cup over when it was ready and held it out. Ruby took it with the expression of someone who is trying to calibrate a situation and finding the usual instruments insufficient.
Weiss sat on the edge of her own bunk across the room. She folded her hands in her lap, which was what she did when she was composing something rather than simply saying it.
"I owe you an apology," she said.
Ruby opened her mouth.
"Please let me finish." Not sharp — just direct, the voice of someone who has decided what needs to be said and is going to say it cleanly. "What I said to you in class today was unfair. It was selfish, and it was wrong, and I said it because I was angry about something that had nothing to do with you — or rather, something I was blaming you for that wasn't your fault." She paused. "I've been treating you as if being your teammate were somehow beneath me. It isn't. And the way I've been behaving isn't something I'm proud of."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Weiss..." Ruby set her coffee down on the bedside shelf. "You don't have to—"
"I want to," Weiss said. "I should. That's different." A beat. "I also want to say that I understand now, at least partially, why Ozpin made the choice he did. I don't think I fully understand it yet. But I think I was looking at the wrong thing."
Ruby considered this for a moment. "What were you looking at?"
"Who was best qualified to lead." Weiss held her gaze. "I should have been looking at who the team needed." She paused. "They're not always the same question."
Ruby was quiet. Her silver eyes had the particular quality they got when she was thinking about something seriously — the brightness damped down, something more considered underneath.
"Can I say something?" Ruby asked.
"Of course."
"I don't actually think I've been doing a very good job either." She said it plainly, without self-pity. "I got so wrapped up in wanting everyone to just be happy and get along that I forgot that leading sometimes means making calls people aren't going to immediately agree with." She looked at her hands. "You kind of helped me see that. Even if the way it happened was..." She made a small, vague gesture.
"Suboptimal," Weiss supplied.
"I was going to say kind of awful, but sure."
The corner of Weiss's mouth moved in something that was not technically a smile but occupied the same general neighborhood.
"I'm going to be the best teammate I can be from here on," Weiss said. It had the quality of a commitment stated rather than promised — precise and deliberate, the tone of someone who takes the words they say seriously. "That's what I can offer. If you'll have it."
Ruby picked her coffee back up and took a sip. Considered.
"You know," she said, "you're actually really interesting when you're not being terrifying."
Weiss blinked. "That is not the response I anticipated."
"I meant it as a compliment."
"...I know. I'm working on how to receive those."
Ruby smiled at her — the full one, the genuine one, the one Yang had noticed the previous night. It was, Weiss found somewhat to her own surprise, quite a lot to be on the receiving end of.
"Then we're good," Ruby said simply.
From the top bunk, in the dark, Blake's mouth curved in a line that only her cat eyes could have confirmed.
Beside her, Yang — who had been listening with the absolute composure of someone asleep — exhaled through her nose in a way that managed to communicate profound satisfaction without constituting actual speech.
They went back to sleep.
Part V — The Morning After
Location: Beacon Academy | Main Grounds | Next Morning
The morning was clear, which Beacon seemed to specialize in — the kind of sky that didn't do anything complicated, just offered light without commentary.
Team NDTSA had found a stretch of the outer courtyard where nobody was practicing anything, which made it available for their own purposes. Nova was running a kata he'd been working through since his father taught it to him at nine years old, and the repetition of it had the quality it always had — not mechanical, but meditative, each movement pulling the previous one forward like a chain being drawn hand over hand.
Aiko was watching him from the edge of the group with the focused attention of someone trying to learn something without asking to be taught. He'd noticed. He was letting it continue.
Daikon had his blade out and was practicing the energy-shaping technique he still hadn't named for them, which Nova found interesting in a way he wasn't in a hurry to press. Some things took their own time.
Turuk and Scarlett were sparring — the low-intensity kind that was more about rhythm than result, the comfortable push-and-pull of two people who had already established a mutual language of motion.
"Nova."
He came out of the kata in the last movement and turned.
Weiss Schnee was standing at the courtyard's edge with Team RWBY arranged loosely behind her in the manner of people who have been told they're here to observe and are complying. Ruby was beside Yang, which meant she was beside a visual demonstration of the phrase managed energy. Blake was slightly apart, with the composed attention that was simply Blake.
He looked at Weiss.
She had the posture of someone who has made a decision and is executing it, and who has decided that the execution doesn't require softening.
"Can I speak with you?" she asked. "And with Daikon, if he's willing."
Nova looked at Daikon.
Daikon looked at the blade in his hand. Then back at Weiss. Then he performed the brief internal calculation of someone deciding whether this is worth the interruption, and apparently concluded that it was, because he sheathed the blade and stood up.
They crossed the courtyard toward her, and the rest of both teams — because neither team had any intention of being somewhere other than where this was happening — rearranged themselves into the comfortable, unofficial staging of interested witnesses.
Weiss looked at Nova first.
"I said things to you yesterday that I shouldn't have said," she said. "And I behaved in ways that I'm not proud of. You were honest with me about it, which I didn't appreciate at the time." A pause. "I appreciate it now. I'm sorry."
Nova studied her for a moment. There was nothing in his expression that read as requiring additional persuasion.
"You don't need to apologize for things you've already corrected," he said. "I didn't hold it against you. I still don't." He meant it plainly, with the specific quality of someone for whom forgiveness is not a performance. "You came back around. That's the part that matters."
Something in Weiss's posture released a fraction of the weight it had been carrying.
Then she turned to Daikon.
He was looking at her with the expression of someone who is genuinely uncertain what's coming.
She held his gaze. "You were harder on me than he was," she said, "and you were right. I was behaving exactly the way I told myself I'd never behave. And you said it to my face, which took more honesty than I gave you credit for at the time." A beat. "So. I'm sorry for my conduct. And I'm sorry I didn't listen to you."
Daikon was quiet for a moment that lasted approximately one second longer than comfortable.
Then something shifted in his expression — the particular look of a person who has been caught holding a position that events have complicated.
"I—" He stopped. Started again. "For what it's worth, I jumped to conclusions about you that I shouldn't have. I assumed the name meant the person. That wasn't fair." The words came with the careful deliberateness of someone unaccustomed to making them in this direction, but making them anyway. "You're..." He paused, apparently looking for the right word. "You're not what I expected. That's not an insult."
Weiss raised an eyebrow. "Clearly."
He almost winced. "I mean that you're—" He exhaled. "I misjudged you. I'm saying I misjudged you."
"I know," she said. There was a warmth in it she hadn't quite intended to let through, and she calibrated back toward composed before continuing. "I'll accept your apology on one condition."
He regarded her with the cautious attention of someone who has been told there's a condition.
"Name it."
"You've been calling me Schnee." She held his gaze. "I'd prefer Weiss. The same way you address people you consider worth talking to."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"I can..." He stopped. Tried again. "I can do that. Wei— Weiss."
The name landed slightly awkwardly, the way a new habit does before it's worn smooth. They both heard it.
"See," she said. "That wasn't so difficult."
"It was a little difficult," he said.
"Marginally. You'll improve with repetition." She extended her hand. "Truce?"
He looked at the hand. Then at her face. Then, with the specific expression of a person acknowledging an irony that is entirely apparent to them, he shook it.
"Truce," he said. "Weiss."
She smiled — brief, controlled, but genuine at its core. "Good."
The tension that had been carrying itself across the last twenty-four hours exhaled itself out of the courtyard in a way that nobody announced but everyone registered.
Ruby, standing behind Weiss's left shoulder, looked at the handshake with the expression of someone watching something they've been hoping for arrive exactly when it was supposed to.
Nova caught her eye across the courtyard.
She smiled.
He gave the small, contained nod that was his version of the same thing.
The two teams separated as the morning moved toward its first class, waving each other off with the easy informality of people who had, somewhere in the last twelve hours, crossed from acquaintance to something that required a different word.
Ruby fell into step beside Yang as they headed back toward the academic block.
"So," Yang said.
"Don't," Ruby said.
"I'm just going to say one thing."
"Yang—"
"One thing. I promise." Yang looked at her sideways with the expression of someone who has been storing a sentence for the right moment and has decided the moment has arrived. "You looked at him and he looked at you and you both said absolutely nothing and somehow you both said everything." She paused. "I'm just observing."
Ruby stared straight ahead. "You said one thing. That was at least four."
"They were a unit."
"They were four sentences."
Yang smiled at the sky with the serenity of someone who has made their point and is content to let it stand.
Ruby kept walking with the slight extra purposefulness of someone who is definitely not thinking about something specific.
She was almost certainly thinking about it.
★ END OF CHAPTER THREE ★
Next: Chapter Four — "Jaunedice and Forever Fall"