Hey everyone RoseSaiyan2 here. My apologies for not updating for several weeks. I didn't forget about this story, it's been on my mind to update. Just now getting to it. Hopefully you guys enjoyed last chapter. With these next two chapters we will officially come to the end of volume 1 of the Rwby story.
I might toss in some extra stuff to make this chapter the normal length though. Next two chapters will cover episodes 15 & 16 of Volume 1 , then it's onto volume two. This story's first main villain will be appearing either towards the end of Volume 2 or I may just save his debut until the extra mission I have planned for Ruby and the gang in volume 3.
Also, Tarro's dialogue with Nova will be quite a bit earlier than in the fanfiction.net story, I'm thinking somewhere in the middle of volume 2. What do you guys think?
1. Yes (mid volume 2)
2. No (stick with the original timing and have that be in volume 3 before the craziness surrounding the tourney)
Anyways, that's all for now. Feel free to vote either yes or no for the Tarro poll question. Onto the story!
CHAPTER SIX: The Stray
Part I — Vale in Festival Colors
Location: The Streets of Vale | Afternoon
The city had been decorating itself all week, in the way that cities do when they've decided something worth celebrating is approaching and want the architecture to know about it.
Streamers in red and gold and green had gone up along the main thoroughfares of lower Vale, strung between lampposts and shop awnings with the organized enthusiasm of a municipality that takes its festivals seriously. Balloons clustered at the corners of buildings. A banner — freshly painted, still being hung by the elderly shopkeeper of the corner goods store as Team RWBY passed — read WELCOME TO VALE! in letters large enough to communicate the sentiment to a Nevermore at altitude.
Weiss Schnee walked at the front of the group with her arms slightly raised and the expression of someone experiencing an aesthetic that meets her standards.
"The Vytal Festival," she said, with the reverence of someone naming a thing they consider genuinely important. "This is absolutely wonderful."
Ruby, walking beside her, tilted her head slightly. "I don't think I've ever seen you smile this much." She considered the face Weiss was making. "It's honestly kind of unsettling."
"How could anyone not smile?" Weiss turned briefly, gesturing at the decorated street around them. "A festival dedicated to the cultures of the entire world — the dances, the parades, the tournament. The organizational complexity alone is extraordinary. Do you have any idea how many committees—"
"And there it is," Yang said, from behind them. She had her hands behind her head and the expression of someone watching a good thing trip over itself. "You had it for almost four whole sentences."
"Quiet, you."
"Whatever you say, Ice Princess."
"Stop calling me that." Weiss turned on her heel and fixed Yang with the look she reserved for things she found specifically objectionable. "Whoever started calling me that should be—"
"Nova's team," Ruby said.
Both of them looked at her. She was looking through the window of a bookshop they were passing, her head slightly tilted, with the expression of someone who has identified something unexpected and is confirming it before commenting.
"Nova's in there," she said. "In the bookshop."
Yang's expression shifted into something with considerably more subtext. "Hm."
"It's just — it's a little unusual, that's all. I didn't know he—" Ruby stopped, apparently noticing the quality of Yang's attention. "Don't."
"Don't what? I didn't say anything."
"Your face said it."
"My face is just a face." Yang smiled with the serenity of someone who has made their point through tone rather than content and is satisfied with the result. "We should say hi, right? Since we're here. Out of pure coincidence."
Weiss adopted an expression of careful neutrality. "I suppose a brief detour wouldn't derail the afternoon entirely."
Blake looked at the window, at her teammates, and back at the window. "Why is everyone looking at me?"
"Do you mind if we stop in?" Yang asked. "To say hi to your brothers?"
Blake considered this. "Why would I mind?"
"We didn't want to assume."
"It's a bookshop, Yang. I'm not going to object to a bookshop." She walked toward the door. "I'm genuinely confused by this entire conversation."
Ruby followed her, which meant she was first through the door, which meant she had to immediately compose her expression into something that resembled casual.
The shop had the comfortable density of a place that had accumulated books over decades and resisted all organizational impulses that didn't serve the books' own preferences. Shelves ran at angles that suggested organic growth rather than planning. The light was warm and slightly yellow.
Team NDTSA was distributed across it in the comfortable way of people with nowhere particular to be. Scarlett was in the back, a spine in one hand and the expression of someone deciding whether this was worth the cover price. Aiko was beside her, turning pages with the careful attention of someone for whom browsing is a deliberate activity. Daikon was reading something with the focused stillness that he brought to most things. Turuk had found a chair.
And Nova was in the music and comics section, which was the back-left corner where the shelving changed character, holding a publication open with the particular expression of someone who finds themselves interested in something they hadn't expected to find interesting.
Ruby made her way there by a route that was slightly longer than the most direct path, which was technically browsing.
He looked up when she was close enough that not looking up would have been a choice.
"Ruby." He tilted his head slightly. "Didn't expect to see you here."
"Oh, you know." She gestured vaguely at the surrounding shelves. "Comics. I was just — browsing. For comics."
"Right."
She shifted her weight. Found something on the spine of a nearby shelf to be briefly interested in. Then looked back at him.
"Can I ask you something?"
He nodded, waiting with the patient attention that was simply how he listened.
"I never would have figured you for comics," she said. "It just seems — I don't know. I couldn't picture it. For you specifically."
He considered this. "Is there a reason I shouldn't be?"
"No! No, that's not what I — I just meant it surprised me. In a good way." She made the small gesture she made when she was trying to rewind a sentence and wasn't sure where it had gone wrong. "I was curious, that's all."
"It's not that I've always liked them," he said. He looked at the cover — something with a masked figure and a great deal of kinetic action in the illustration. "I just thought they sounded interesting. Figured I'd find out for myself."
"That's — yeah, that's very you, actually," Ruby said, and immediately wondered if that was a strange thing to say to someone.
He looked at her with the corner of his expression doing something that was not quite a smile but occupied its territory. "You're saying that like you've figured me out."
"I didn't say that," she said.
"You implied it."
"I implied that you like to form your own opinions about things. Which is a compliment."
"I know." He closed the comic at his current page and held it loosely at his side. "You're an odd person, Rose."
"You've said that before." She puffed out her cheeks slightly. "You say it like it's an insult."
"It's an observation. Odd isn't bad." He looked at her with the directness she still hadn't entirely gotten used to, the kind that came from someone who said what they meant and didn't add layers to soften it. "You're never boring. That's rarer than you'd think."
Ruby held his gaze for a moment, and the feeling that had been visiting her periodically for the last several months returned — warm and slightly disorienting, sitting in the region of her chest that she usually associated with things she was excited about. She filed it under later with the efficiency of someone who has been practicing this particular filing system.
"We're friends, right?" she asked.
He blinked. "Ruby."
"I know, I know. I just — I like saying it out loud sometimes. To confirm."
"We're friends," he said, with the measured patience of someone confirming a fact that requires no confirmation. "We've been friends since the night in Vale. Since before that, maybe."
"Since the bookshop," she said.
"Since before the bookshop," he said. "I thought you were worth knowing from the beginning. I just didn't have a word for it yet." He looked at the comic in his hand. "Now I'm told you're my best friend. Apparently you decided this and informed me of it after the fact."
Ruby grinned. "Is that a problem?"
"No," he said. "It's just very you."
She took the comic from his hand without asking, found the page he'd been on, and settled against the shelving beside him.
"Okay," she said, "here's the thing about comics — you have to understand the context first. Otherwise you're just looking at pictures of people hitting each other, which, fair, but there's more to it than that."
And for the next several minutes she explained the architecture of sequential storytelling to someone who had not asked to be educated and was listening with the focused attention of someone who actually found it interesting, which was perhaps the best possible audience for Ruby Rose when she had something she wanted to explain.
In the adjacent aisle, approximately one shelf-width away, the assembled members of both teams held themselves in the specific stillness of people who are listening very hard while pretending to browse.
Yang had both hands pressed to her mouth. Her eyes were doing something she wouldn't describe as sparkling but that definitely qualified.
Turuk was reading the same page he'd been on for four minutes.
Daikon was making a sound that was technically clearing his throat.
Weiss, to her credit, appeared to be genuinely reading the back cover of a history volume, except that the history volume was upside down.
Blake had lowered her book slightly and was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone trying very hard to be somewhere other than here.
Scarlett leaned to Aiko and whispered: "How long do you think before—"
Aiko whispered back: "Don't. Don't jinx it."
Part II — The Docks
The group emerged from the bookshop into the afternoon with the slightly rearranged social geometry of people who have spent time in close quarters and are recalibrating their distances. Nova's team had no particular reason to return to Beacon immediately, and Team RWBY's afternoon agenda had been loose enough to absorb a change, and so they were walking together in the comfortable formation of people for whom this has become natural.
Yang fell back beside Turuk, which she had been doing with increasing frequency and apparently didn't notice.
Weiss had resumed her festival-adjacent commentary, which had somehow evolved into a competitive analysis of the tournament's structural framework, and Daikon was listening to this with the expression of someone who is not going to agree but finds the argument interesting enough to follow.
"Remind me," Yang said, from the back of the group as the smell of salt water and something strongly marine arrived from ahead of them, "why we're going to the docks."
Ruby wrinkled her nose. "They smell like fish."
"They do smell like fish," Turuk confirmed.
"Students from Vacuo are arriving today," Weiss said, from the front. "By ship. It's our responsibility, as representatives of Beacon, to—"
"She wants to size up the competition," Blake said, without looking up from the book she had produced from somewhere on her person.
Weiss turned sharply. "You cannot—"
"Am I wrong?" Blake asked.
The pause that followed was approximately three seconds too long to be a denial.
Daikon made a sound that was technically a cough. "Just admit it, Weiss. You're not fooling anyone with the solemn duty framing."
"I don't know what you're talking about—"
"You're doing the thing with your chin," he said. "The slightly elevated thing. You do it when you're trying to sound more noble than your actual reasons."
Weiss wheeled on him with the affronted energy of someone who has been correctly read and objects to this on principle. "That is completely—"
"Is he wrong?" Ruby asked.
The chin came down approximately one centimeter, which was as close as Weiss Schnee could get to a concession on this particular point.
The rest of the group managed not to comment, in the way that people manage not to comment when they've already made their point and extracting more from the moment would be unkind.
"They'll argue like this for the whole afternoon," Aiko observed quietly, to no one in particular, "and then he'll say something that makes her smile, and then they'll argue again."
"And she'll keep coming back for more," Turuk said, equally quiet.
"It's very interesting," Aiko said.
"It really is," Turuk agreed.
The docks smelled, definitively, of salt and fish and the particular industrial undertone of heavy machinery meeting ocean water. Ships were at berth in various stages of arrival and departure, and the general atmosphere was one of organized motion — cargo crews, dock workers, the specific noise of large objects being moved by people who knew what they were doing.
A shout cut through it from the direction of a recently arrived vessel.
"Hey! Stop that Faunus!"
The group turned.
A boy was running down the length of the gangway with the loose, untroubled gait of someone who is being chased and has decided to find this less concerning than his pursuers had hoped. He was blonde, broadly built for someone moving that lightly, with a tail — golden, monkey-type — that served no apparent function except aesthetic as he reached the dock's edge and, without breaking stride, took the lamppost at the corner in one fluid motion, swung himself around it, and ended up sitting twelve feet above the pursuing sailors with a banana he had produced from somewhere.
"Thanks for the ride, gentlemen!" He peeled the banana with the ease of someone on a Sunday morning. "Very smooth crossing!"
"You no-good stowaway!"
"A no-good stowaway would've been caught," he said cheerfully, from his elevated position. "I am an excellent stowaway. There's a real difference."
One of the detectives from the dockside constabulary located a stone and communicated his displeasure upward. The boy looked down, registered the detective's expression, and apparently filed it under manageable, then dropped the banana peel with the precision of someone who had not aimed it but was not surprised by the outcome.
The detective looked at the peel on his face.
"Down! Now!"
The boy looked at them with the expression of someone for whom authority is an interesting concept he has decided to engage with on his own schedule. Then he looked down at the assembled group on the dock — at Yang, at Ruby, at the rest of the team — and his eyes moved specifically to Blake, who was standing slightly apart with her book.
The wink he gave her as he dropped from the post and hit the dock running was delivered at what appeared to be normal conversational speed but somehow felt, to several observers, like it had been in slow motion.
Blake's expression did not change. But the book in her hands was very slightly tighter than it had been.
He was already around the corner.
"Well," Yang said, "there's your competition, Weiss. In motion."
"Quick," Weiss said, already moving, arm raised. "We have to observe him before he—"
She turned the corner at speed, which was a mistake, because there was a girl around the corner who had apparently materialized from the municipal air supply and was in exactly the position required for a direct collision.
Weiss went down. The girl stayed down, which was less a function of the impact than a function of apparently not having decided yet whether to get up.
She was looking at the sky with the expression of someone who finds this interesting.
"Whoa," Yang said, arriving at the corner behind Weiss. She looked at the girl. "Hey — are you okay?"
"I'm wonderful!" the girl said, from the pavement. "Thank you for asking!"
The group exchanged looks.
"Do you want to... get up?" Yang offered.
The girl considered this as a genuine question requiring genuine thought. "Yes!" She came to her feet with a single motion that managed to be both abrupt and graceful, landing in front of them with the energy of something recently wound.
She had green eyes and copper-red hair and the quality of someone who is very pleased about being wherever they are. She wore what appeared to be functional clothing with non-functional color coordination.
"My name is Penny!" she announced. "It is a genuine pleasure to meet you!"
"Hi, Penny," Ruby said, easily. "I'm Ruby."
"Nova," said Nova.
"Turuk," said Turuk, with two fingers.
"Scarlett Reinhardt," said Scarlett. "And this is my sister, Aiko."
"H-hello," Aiko said.
"Name's Daikon," said Daikon.
"I'm Weiss," said Weiss, still recalibrating from the collision.
"Blake," said Blake.
"Are you sure you didn't hit your head?" Yang asked, then apparently remembered she hadn't introduced herself. "I'm Yang. Sorry."
"It is a genuine pleasure to meet you!" Penny said again, with exactly the same energy as the first time.
Several members of the group looked at each other.
"You already said—" Scarlett started.
"So she did," Weiss confirmed.
"So I did!" Penny seemed delighted by this observation. "Yes!"
Nova had been quiet through this exchange with the focused attention of someone running a calculation. Ruby, who had learned to read the specific quality of his thoughtfulness, glanced at him. His eyes were moving across Penny's presentation in a way that was less social and more... diagnostic.
"Weiss," he said quietly, as they turned to continue down the street, "please excuse us for just a moment."
He slowed his pace to let the group move ahead, and Ruby slowed with him because she'd read the signal and was curious.
"What is it?" she asked.
"The girl," he said. He was still watching Penny's movement in his peripheral vision — the way she tracked their group's departure, the specific quality of her responses, the slight processing-pause before each. "I think she may be an android."
Ruby's brow furrowed. "A what?"
"A constructed intelligence. A mechanical being built to present as human — or close to it." He searched for simpler terms. "A robotic person. A person built rather than born."
"Oh." Ruby processed this. "But you're not sure?"
"It's a guess. Based on how she responds. There's a half-second delay that doesn't match normal conversation rhythm — it's fast enough that most people wouldn't notice, but it's consistent." He shook his head slightly. "It might be nothing. People have unusual speech patterns for all kinds of reasons."
"But you think it's that."
"I think it's possible." He looked at her. "I'm telling you because you called her your friend, and I thought you'd want to know."
Ruby held his gaze for a moment. "Does it matter?" she asked. "If she is?"
He thought about it. "No," he said. "I don't think it does."
"Then we're on the same page." Ruby smiled and fell back into step with the group, and Nova followed.
"She was weird," Yang said, once they were far enough down the street to say so comfortably.
"I've met weirder," Ruby offered.
"Where?" Daikon asked.
"Signal Academy. There was a boy who collected grimm teeth."
"That's—" Scarlett started.
"Where did that Faunus boy get to?" Weiss asked, squinting ahead, and then yelped and stumbled backward, because Penny was in front of her again.
"What did you call me?" Penny asked.
Weiss looked behind her, looked in front of her, and looked at Yang for an explanation.
Yang spread her hands in the gesture of someone who does not have one. "She was just saying — I'm really sorry, I didn't realize you could hear—"
"No, not you." Penny stepped through the group with the purpose of someone who has identified a specific destination and arrived in front of Ruby, dropping her voice into something that had the shape of seriousness. "You."
Ruby blinked. "Me?"
"You called me friend." The green eyes were very direct. "Am I? Am I really your friend?"
Ruby looked at her teammates, who communicated through the medium of facial expression that she should deny this gracefully and they could all move on. She looked back at Penny.
"Yeah," she said. "Sure. Why not?"
Three of her teammates performed various forms of synchronized collapse, which the four members of NDTSA found much more entertaining than they let on. Aiko had to cover her mouth. Turuk looked at the sky.
"Sensational!" Penny clasped her hands together. "We can paint our nails, and try on clothes, and talk about cute boys!"
Ruby looked at Weiss.
"Is this what it was like?" she asked. "When you met me?"
Weiss looked at her with the measured expression of someone who has thought about this before. "No," she said. "You were considerably less coordinated."
"She's not wrong," Yang said.
"Hey!"
Part III — What the White Fang Means
They found the shattered dust shop three streets inland.
Two windows had gone out completely, their frames crossed with yellow constabulary tape. A detective was writing in his notebook at the entrance while his partner surveyed the interior through the open door.
"Second shop this week," the first detective said, to his notebook. "This city is turning into a jungle."
"Left all the money again," the second one said.
"Who needs that much dust?" the first asked, to nobody.
"An army?" the second offered.
"You thinking the White Fang?"
"I'm thinking we don't get paid enough for this."
"Hmph." Weiss had her arms folded and her chin up at the angle she used when she was composing a formal opinion. "The White Fang. What an absolutely awful collection of—"
"Weiss." Scarlett's voice had the quiet warning of someone who has identified a tripwire and is pointing at it.
"Easy," Nova said, half a second later, in the same register.
"What's your problem?" Blake had stopped walking. She was looking at Weiss with the focused attention of someone who is deciding how much of what they're thinking to actually say.
Weiss turned, apparently surprised by the directness of it. "My problem? I simply have no patience for criminal organizations."
"The White Fang isn't simply a criminal organization," Blake said. "It's a Faunus rights group that has made increasingly poor decisions about its methods. Those are different things."
"They want to wipe humanity—"
"The radical faction within it does. That's not the same as everyone who's ever—"
"Misguided is generous. The things they've done to my family's—"
"To your family's what?" Blake's voice had sharpened. "To the company that built its fortune on Faunus labor and treated its workers like—"
"Ruby suggested Torchwick," Yang said, to nobody in particular, in the tone of someone who is making a peace offering with limited expectations. "From a few months ago. We never actually confirmed whether he's connected."
"That's a reasonable angle," Nova said. He looked at Ruby, who was watching the escalating exchange between Weiss and Blake with the expression of someone trying to decide where to put their hands. "Blake has a point about the distinction between the organization and its factions. That's worth keeping in mind."
"Blake always has a point," Yang said, then caught Blake's expression and added, "which I say as a compliment."
Weiss opened her mouth.
From the direction of the docks, a familiar voice rose above the ambient noise of the waterfront.
"Hey! Stop that Faunus!"
They all turned.
Sun Wukong went past them at a run, having apparently transitioned seamlessly from one corner of the Vale docks to another in the past twenty minutes, which was either coincidence or a very small city.
"Faunus riff-raff," Weiss said, the words arriving more reflexively than intentionally.
The effect was immediate.
Nova's tail went still in the specific way that tails go still when the rest of the body is containing something. Turuk's jaw tightened. Daikon, who had been half-watching the argument between Weiss and Blake, turned to look at Weiss with a quality of attention that had changed temperature. Scarlett looked at Aiko, and Aiko looked at the ground.
Ruby opened her mouth to say Weiss, maybe—
"Why do you keep saying things like that?" Blake asked.
The question was quieter than what had come before, which made it hit differently.
Weiss blinked. "Like what? I'm simply—"
"Stop calling him riff-raff." The control in Blake's voice was doing a great deal of work. "Stop calling them degenerates. He is a person. That boy with the tail is a person. Every Faunus you look at and see a category rather than an individual is a person."
"I wasn't—"
"Would you call me riff-raff?" Blake asked.
Weiss stared at her.
"Would you?" Blake asked again. "Same tail. Same faunus heritage. Just a bow instead."
"That's — that's completely different, you're my teammate—"
"Why does that matter?"
"Because I know you!"
"You knew that boy for thirty seconds," Blake said. "And you'd already sorted him."
Weiss's jaw worked. "I'm a victim of what these people have done to my family. You can't expect me to feel neutral—"
"I don't expect neutral. I expect basic human decency extended to other kinds of people." Blake's voice was very even now, which was worse than anger. "Those are different bars."
The argument had gathered its momentum by the time they'd reached the docks proper, and it continued through the afternoon with the relentless energy of something that had been pressurized for a long time and had found a release valve. By the time the light changed toward evening it had covered the White Fang's founding, the Faunus Rights Revolution, the Schnee Dust Company's labor record, and several things that were more personal than either of them had planned to say in public.
Nova's team had given them space, which was the correct call. There was nothing to add to a conversation like that from outside it, and adding to it would have made it a different conversation — angrier, louder, less true.
He walked beside Ruby, who was watching her teammates with the expression of someone watching a storm from inside a building and hoping the walls hold.
"Is there anything we can do?" she asked.
"Not yet," he said. "Sometimes things have to get to the surface before they can be addressed." He paused. "It'll get worse before it gets better. But it'll get better."
"You sound sure of that."
"I know Blake," he said. "And I'm starting to know Weiss." He glanced at Ruby. "They're both people who care about being right. That makes them bad at arguments and good at learning from them."
Ruby was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're good at reading people."
"My father made me practice," he said.
She wanted to ask about that — about his father, who was apparently the kind of person who taught his sons to read rooms the way other fathers taught their sons to read books — but the look on her teammates' faces pulled her back to the present.
"Come on," she said. "We should probably stay close in case it escalates."
Part IV — What Blake Said
Location: Team RWBY's Dormitory | That Evening
By the time they were back at Beacon, the argument had gone somewhere more specific and more serious than its beginning, the way arguments do when they stop being about the surface thing and start being about the thing underneath it.
The dormitory room had the low-energy tension of a space where people are trying to continue living in proximity to a conflict they haven't resolved. Ruby sat on her bunk. Yang was on hers, watching. Nova had stayed — he'd walked them back and then hadn't quite left, sitting in the doorway with the quiet presence of someone who has decided that leaving would be the wrong call and is waiting to see if he's needed.
Weiss and Blake were standing.
"I just don't understand," Weiss said, for the third time, with the specific frustration of someone who genuinely doesn't and genuinely wants to. "Why does this matter so much to you? It's not as though—"
"That is the problem." Blake's voice was very contained and very precise. "You don't understand why it matters, and you don't understand why you not understanding it is the problem."
"You realize you're defending an organization that has committed acts of terrorism against—"
"I'm defending the concept that an entire species of people doesn't get to be reduced to the worst acts of a faction within a rights movement that formed because of how they were being treated." Blake's hands were still at her sides. "There's no such thing as pure evil, Weiss. The White Fang hates humanity because humanity spent generations giving them excellent reasons to."
"People like me," Weiss said, and her voice had gone cold in the way that meant something had been hit that she hadn't intended to expose. "You think I'm the reason."
"You perpetuate it," Blake said. "Whether you intend to or not."
"I am a victim." The word came out with more force than Weiss had intended, and the room absorbed it. "You want to know why? My grandfather built something, and for as long as I can remember, there has been a target on everything connected to it. Family friends disappearing. Board members killed. A train car full of dust, gone. My father came home furious every day of my childhood, and I didn't know why until I was old enough to understand it, and then I understood it and it made everything worse." She hit the shelf beside her with the flat of her palm, and the sound was small in the room. "So don't tell me I don't understand the cost. I have been paying it my entire life."
Ruby moved toward her.
"Weiss—"
"No." Weiss straightened. The composure came back the way it always came back for her — deliberately, layer by layer, as a chosen thing rather than a natural one. She turned to Blake. "But I want to know. I want to understand why it matters to you this much. Tell me."
Blake looked at her for a long moment.
"They weren't always like this," she said finally. "The White Fang. When it started, it was peaceful. Organized. People who'd been pushed to the margins their whole lives finding a way to push back through legitimate means — protests, negotiations, advocacy." She paused. "And then the world showed them that peaceful means weren't being taken seriously. And some of them decided that wasn't acceptable anymore." A beat. "I understand that decision, even if I don't agree with it. Because I was there."
The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough for Weiss to process what she'd heard.
"We—" Blake stopped.
"We," Weiss repeated.
Blake looked at her. At Yang. At Ruby. At the open door where Nova sat, and their eyes met briefly before she looked back at the room.
"Maybe we were just tired of being pushed around," she said.
The words fell into the room the way something falls when it's been held for too long.
And then Blake was moving — past Weiss, past Ruby's outstretched hand at the doorway, past Nova with her head down — and the door swung shut behind her, and her footsteps were down the hall and gone before anyone found a sentence to say.
Ruby turned to the hallway. "Blake—"
The corridor was empty.
She turned back.
Nova was on his feet in the doorway. His expression had the quality it had when he was containing something — the jaw, the stillness, the specific quality of his eyes. He looked at Weiss with the composure of someone who is choosing every word.
"She told you things she's never told anyone," he said. "Things about who she was before Beacon." He was quiet for a moment. "She trusted this room with that, and it didn't hold."
Weiss looked like she'd been struck. Her mouth moved.
"Nova—" Ruby was already beside him, one hand on his arm, her voice low and careful. "Please."
He looked at Ruby's hand on his arm. Then at her face. The thing behind his eyes shifted — not dismissing it, exactly, more like being asked to carry it somewhere else and choosing to. He exhaled slowly.
"You're right," he said. "This wasn't her fault. She didn't know."
He turned back to Weiss and bowed his head slightly — not deeply, just the acknowledgment that comes from recognizing you've aimed something at the wrong target.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I went too far."
"No." Weiss shook her head, and her voice had lost some of its architecture. "No, you — you were right. I knew this was a sensitive subject. I kept going anyway." She looked at her hands. "I need to find her."
"Tomorrow," Yang said, from her bunk. Not dismissively — as a suggestion, from someone who was reading the room. "Tonight she needs space. Tomorrow she'll be ready to talk."
Weiss sat down on her bed, and the composure that had been holding together for the last hour released something it had been managing, and she put her face in her hands for a moment without making any sound.
The room had settled into the particular quiet of people processing things that didn't resolve neatly when Nova became aware that his hand was resting on something.
He looked down.
Ruby's arms were around his waist. Both of them. She was standing behind him with her forehead against his shoulder blade and the grip of someone who had acted on instinct and had not yet thought about stopping.
He cleared his throat.
She lifted her head.
The silence lasted approximately one second.
"Oh!" She jumped back like something had surprised her, which in fairness was accurate. Her face went through several stages of arriving at a color that was not its default. "I'm — I didn't — that was — I wasn't paying attention to — I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, that was completely—"
"Ruby," he said.
"Yes?"
"It's alright." He said it with the complete absence of drama that characterized most things he said, which somehow made it worse, which somehow made it better. "Honest mistake."
"Right," she said, at high velocity. "Honest. Mistake. Completely standard. Happens all the time." She became extremely interested in the middle distance.
He looked at her with the patient attention of someone who has noted something and is choosing, for now, to leave it where it is.
Then, because it was there and because it worked and because he could tell it would restore some equilibrium to the situation, he reached out and ruffled her hair.
She puffed her cheeks out at him.
He almost smiled.
"Go find Blake tomorrow," he said. "She'll need you to show up for her."
"Yeah," Ruby said, from beneath her ruffled hair. "Yeah, we will."
He said goodnight to the room. At the door he paused — not dramatically, just in the natural pause of someone leaving — and looked at Weiss, who was still sitting on her bed.
"She knows you didn't mean it that way," he said. "Give her time. She'll come back to you."
Weiss looked up. The heiress of the Schnee Dust Company, in the quiet of a dormitory room, looked briefly and entirely like someone who was nineteen and carrying too much and didn't want to do it wrong.
"Thank you," she said.
He left.
Yang sat in the silence for a moment. Then she looked at Ruby, who was aggressively straightening her blanket.
"So," Yang said.
"Don't," Ruby said.
"I'm just sitting here."
"Your sitting here has an agenda."
Yang smiled at the ceiling and laced her hands behind her head. "Get some sleep, Rubes. Big day tomorrow."
Ruby straightened her blanket some more.
"Goodnight, Yang," she said.
Part V — The Weekend Search
Location: The Streets of Vale | Two Days Later
The weekend passed without Blake in it.
Her bunk was made with the precision of someone who made it every morning out of habit rather than occupancy, and her book was on her desk at the same angle it had been when she left, and the bow she'd worn every day since Ruby had known her was gone.
Ruby stood in the dormitory doorway and looked at the empty bunk and felt the specific weight of a thing that was her fault without being her fault — the weight of being unable to prevent something that happened in a room you were standing in.
"She's been gone all weekend," she said, walking beside Nova on the morning streets of Vale, Team RWBY on one side of him and Team NDTSA distributed around both.
"We'll find her," Nova said. He was walking beside Ruby with the easy, unhurried certainty he brought to everything, which Ruby found both comforting and slightly unreasonable in its consistency. "She's not gone gone. She's processing."
"Blake's a big girl," Weiss said, from ahead of them.
Daikon turned and looked at her.
It was a specific look — not angry, exactly, more the look of someone who is holding Weiss to a promise she made to herself and is reminding her of it without words.
Weiss absorbed it. Adjusted. "I mean — she's capable of taking care of herself. What I meant was that I'm concerned and we should find her."
"Better," Daikon said.
"You know," Yang said, "you've got a strange effect on her."
"She made a commitment," Daikon said. "I'm just keeping score."
"Is she one of your teammates?" Weiss asked.
"Not formally," he said. "But she's your teammate, and you're — adjacent to us now. So yes."
Weiss appeared to decide that this was satisfactory.
"What I want to know," Yang said, stepping over a gap in the dock planking, "is whether we're doing this systematically or just hoping we run into her."
"Systematically," Nova said.
"So you have a plan."
"I have a direction. We split up, cover more ground, and follow the most likely routes from Beacon to Vale. Blake walks when she needs to think. She'd head somewhere quiet." He looked at Ruby. "Where does she go when she wants to be alone?"
Ruby thought about it. "The library. Or the gardens. Or—" She stopped. "There's a statue near the south end of campus. She's mentioned it once. A huntsman and a huntress on a pedestal."
"Then someone should check there first."
They split the search by instinct rather than instruction — the kind of division that happened when people had spent enough time in the same spaces to understand how they each moved. Ruby and Nova went south. Yang and Blake-adjacent Turuk went toward the harbor. Weiss and Daikon took the market quarter.
They found her at the statue.
Not in the conventional sense of found — she had been found the previous evening, by a boy with a golden tail who had climbed a lamppost and seen further than most people. By the time Ruby and Nova rounded the corner, Sun Wukong was sitting on the pedestal with his legs dangling and Blake was below him, looking at the stone grimm at the monument's base with the expression of someone who has been having a very long interior conversation.
Her bow was gone. Her ears were visible in the morning light — black, slightly turned toward the sound of Ruby's approach before she turned her head.
"Hey," Ruby said.
Blake looked at her. Then at Nova.
"Hey," she said.
"You okay?" Nova asked.
"I will be."
"Good." He sat down on the base of the statue with the complete absence of ceremony that characterized most things he did. "Then we'll wait until you are."
Sun looked down at him from the pedestal. "You know her?"
"She's my sister," Nova said.
Sun's eyebrows went up. He looked at Blake. "You didn't mention—"
"I don't always lead with the complicated parts," Blake said.
Sun considered this. "Fair."
Ruby sat down beside Nova, which meant Blake was surrounded without having been cornered, which was the way of doing it if you knew Blake at all. The morning light came through the trees around the statue in long, flat angles.
"Weiss is looking for you," Ruby said. "I mean — we all are. But Weiss specifically. I think she wants to say something."
Blake was quiet.
"She's not what she presented as," Nova said, to Blake specifically, in a tone that was for her ears rather than the general group. "You know that. You were angry, and it was fair to be angry — but you know she's trying."
Blake looked at her hands. "I know."
"She said things that came from fear," he said. "You said things that came from history. Neither of you was wrong about what you were feeling." He looked at her steadily. "But you don't have to carry the whole history alone. That's what teams are for, right?"
Blake exhaled — the specific exhale of someone releasing something they've been holding tight.
"When did you get philosophical?" she asked.
"I've always been philosophical," he said. "You just haven't been listening."
"I listen," Ruby said, slightly defensive.
"I know you do," he said, and reached over and ruffled her hair without looking at her, which was becoming a reflex that he had apparently decided not to examine.
Ruby puffed her cheeks out. Sun watched this exchange from the pedestal with the expression of someone who has just arrived in the middle of a situation with a great deal of history and is cataloguing it for future reference.
"So," Sun said, "are we going back? Because I have a theory about the dust robberies that Blake thinks is interesting and I think at least seven people should hear."
"Eight," Ruby said, looking at the group. "And Sun."
"Nine, then," he agreed.
Blake looked at all of them — at her brother sitting on the base of a statue like he'd always been there, at Ruby with her hair sticking up in three directions, at the boy she'd met on a lamppost who'd found her at a monument in the middle of a city neither of them was from — and something in her expression settled.
"Alright," she said. "Let's go back."
★ END OF CHAPTER FIVE ★
Hey guys, hope y'all enjoyed that chapter. Decided to add some extra stuff to make a little different. Hopefully it was enjoyable.
Did you catch the subtle pairing hints in the chapter? Everyone probably noticed the not-so-subtle Nova x Ruby moments in there, if you did.. that's good cuz that was my intent. I'm taking a little more time to develop their eventual romance than I did in the fanfiction.net story where I rushed it. As you can probably tell, Nova and Ruby will start out simply as friends at first. Volume 1 was just to more or less establish their friendship. The earliest I picture Ruby starting to develop romantic feelings for Nova is around chapter 7 of Volume II, which would be probably chapter 12 of this story... unless I cram 2 episodes into 1 chapter, then it may be earlier.
If it is earlier it'll be more developed this time around lol. Also their are at least 2 other pairings I'm hinting at within this story, can you guess which ones? I'll leave a poll with a multiple choice below:
What other pairings am I hinting at in this story?
I. Daikon x Weiss
II. Yang x Turuk
III. Jaune x Pyrrha/Scarlett
PM me or leave a comment in the chapter about what pairings you would like to see aside from the main 2 of this story (those ones are untouchable). Here's a list of Characters I could rework for pairings:
Mercury
Emerald
Cinder
Yatsuhashi
Oscar( vol. 5=1st appearance in the series)
Velvet
Anyways that's all for now!
Next: Chapter Seven — "Black and White"