Hi everyone RoseSaiyan2 here again! Hopefully you enjoyed last chapter. This chapter will have some fighting scenes in it (finally!), so I will do best with describing them lol.
The events of a certain event in volume 2 will have to change now since there's been a little wrinkle thrown into the story that I wasn't anticipating. It mainly concerns Scarlett's character, but I'll figure it out. Decided to add a little cute embarrassed moment between Nova and Ruby last chapter (since they are the main pairing of this story).
Here's a quick poll and feel free- in fact, I strongly encourage you guys to vote on it:
Who should Scarlett end up with?
A. Mercury
B. Sage
C. Yatsuhashi
D. Oscar
E. Other (write in character)
That's mainly it for now, onto the story!
CHAPTER SEVEN: Black and White
Part I — What Blake Told Sun
Location: A Balcony Café, Vale | Morning
The tea had gone lukewarm without either of them noticing.
Sun Wukong had been patient for approximately forty-seven hours, which was, by his own estimation, a personal record. He'd found her at a statue in the southern quarter of the city, which hadn't been hard — he'd climbed high enough to see most of Vale from a lamppost near the docks, and Blake Belladonna moved through a city the way someone moves through a city when they're not trying to be found but haven't decided to disappear completely. Two nights. Small talk. Tea. The specific quality of silence that belongs to someone working up to something.
He put down his cup.
"Finally," he said, which was not polished but was honest. "She speaks. Almost two full days, and you've given me small talk and looks that could strip paint." He watched her. "Yeah. Like that one."
Blake rolled her eyes. Set down her cup. Looked out over the railing at the morning street below, where Vale was going about the business of its morning with the cheerful indifference of a city that has a lot going on and can't be expected to care about every individual conversation happening within its borders.
She had been turning the words over in her mind since Friday. Every version of them. Every possible order. The careful version, the honest version, the version that explained everything without requiring too much trust from someone she'd known for three days.
She'd decided the careful version was a form of cowardice she was tired of practicing.
"Sun," she said. "Are you familiar with the White Fang?"
His expression shifted — the easy grin settling into something more serious, the way a face does when a subject it has opinions about arrives without warning.
"Every Faunus alive has heard of them," he said. "Bunch of holier-than-thou creeps who decided that violence was a more efficient argument than reasoning. Freaks, if you want my honest opinion." He paused. "Which you apparently do, since you asked."
Blake took a long sip of her tea. Set the cup down precisely in its saucer.
"There are only four people who know what I'm about to tell you," she said. "I'd like to keep it that way."
Sun went still. Then he nodded, with the specific weight of someone who has decided to mean it. "Okay."
She looked at him for a moment — assessing, in the way she assessed everything, measuring the distance between what a person said and what they were.
"I was a member of the White Fang," she said.
The tea went everywhere.
Sun coughed, grabbed a napkin, pressed it to his face, set his cup down with the slightly shaky hands of someone who has just processed a sentence and found it considerably larger than the packaging suggested. He took a moment. Several moments.
"You were a member," he repeated.
"For most of my life." She looked at her hands. "You could say I was born into it."
What followed was not a short story, but she told it without rushing — the way people tell things they've been holding for long enough that they've learned its shape, every corner of it, every place where it catches the light differently depending on the angle.
She told him about the beginning. The fallen weapons driven into the ground after the war, the cautious handshake between species that neither fully trusted, the White Fang in its first form — a voice, a banner, a symbol for people who had been told they were lesser and had decided, quietly and with extraordinary patience, to disagree.
She told him about the protests. The rallies. The young girl at the front of every march who believed, with the specific conviction that only the very young can sustain, that being right was the same as being effective.
She told him about the day the blue flag came down and the red one went up.
"Five years ago," she said. "The old leader stepped down. The new one had different ideas about what was working and what wasn't." She paused. "And in a certain light — in a very specific, very angry, very exhausted light — those ideas weren't wrong. We'd been peaceful for years, and the world had been taking notes and changing nothing." A beat. "So picket signs became blades. Negotiations became raids. Boycotts became fires." She looked at the street below. "And it worked. People started treating Faunus differently. Not out of respect — out of fear." She said the word like it tasted wrong. "That's what we traded dignity for."
Sun said nothing. He was listening with the focused stillness of someone who has decided that the most useful thing they can do right now is not speak.
"So I left," she said. "I decided that I didn't want to use my skills to help people be afraid of us. That wasn't what I joined for. That wasn't what any of us joined for, at the beginning." She picked up her tea. "I came to Beacon. I put on a bow. I started over." A small, dry pause. "And here I am — a criminal hiding in plain sight, with the help of a ribbon and a very consistent hat."
She wiggled her ears slightly, demonstrating.
Sun stared at the cat ears that had been invisible to him under the bow for three days.
"Okay," he said, after a moment. "That's — okay. That's a lot."
"I know."
"Have you told your friends any of this?"
She didn't answer.
"The team you were arguing with before you ran?" he asked. "Yang, and the girl in the hood, and the heiress? Have any of them—"
"My brothers know," she said. "Nova and Turuk. They've always known."
"Brothers." Sun looked at her with the expression of someone cataloguing new information. "I didn't know you had brothers."
"Adopted," she said. "Not by blood. But they're mine." Something in her voice shifted to a register she didn't usually use in public. "I love them the way you love people who chose you. The way you love people who didn't have to and did anyway."
Sun absorbed this. Then, with the patience of someone who has learned when to push and when to let things breathe: "But your team doesn't know."
The question sat between them.
Blake looked at her hands.
"No," she said. "They don't."
Part II — Searching
Location: The Streets of Vale | That Morning
"Blaaake!"
Ruby's voice carried through the street with the specific carrying power of someone who is not trying to be subtle and has made peace with this.
"Blake!" Yang called, half a block down.
"Big sister!" Turuk cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Blaaake! Where are you, sis?!" Nova.
"Blake! Come on!" Daikon.
"Yo! Blaaake!" Scarlett, from around the corner.
"Um — Blake? Can you hear us?" Aiko, slightly more tentatively than the others.
Ruby took a breath and tried again at what she considered an appropriate volume for searching an entire city. "Blaaaake! Where aaaaare youuuu?!"
Weiss walked beside her with her arms folded and the expression of someone who has several opinions about how this search is being conducted and is restraining most of them out of diplomatic courtesy.
"Weiss," Ruby said, turning around while still walking forward, "you are not helping."
"I suggested calling the police," Weiss said. "That remains a viable option."
"That remains a bad option," Nova said, from behind them, without heat.
"Really, Weiss," Daikon said. "Use your head."
Weiss opened her mouth, caught Daikon's expression, and recalibrated. "It was merely a suggestion," she said, which was as close to backing down as Weiss Schnee came in public.
"We talked about this," Daikon said.
"I know we talked about this." She tugged at her glove. "I'm talking about it again."
"Talking about it less would be—"
A sound arrived from behind them that did not belong to any member of the group.
"And I think Weiss's hair looks absolutely wonderful today!"
Ruby, Yang, and Weiss turned in unison with the unanimity of people who have been startled by the same thing at the same moment.
Penny beamed at them from the sidewalk.
"Penny!" Ruby pressed a hand to her chest. "Where did you — how did you — we didn't even—"
"Don't look at me," Nova said, raising both hands. "I didn't notice her until just now."
"Same," Turuk confirmed.
"Neither did I," Daikon said.
"I definitely didn't," Scarlett said.
"I-I'm sorry, I didn't notice her either," Aiko added.
Penny, apparently unbothered by being the subject of eight simultaneous startled assessments, tilted her head cheerfully. "What are you all up to?"
"We're looking for our friend," Yang said, having recovered fastest.
"Ooh!" Penny's eyes brightened. "You mean the Faunus girl?"
Turuk blinked. He looked at Nova, who looked back with the specific expression of someone deciding how to play this.
"Wait," Turuk said, leaning into the performance with commendable speed. "How do you know Blake's a Faunus?"
Ruby, still catching up, echoed: "Yeah — how did you know that?"
Weiss and Yang looked between Nova and Turuk with the evaluating attention of people who are noting something for later investigation.
Penny pointed at a spot above her own head. "The cat ears?"
Yang started to laugh at the implication — the bow, the ears, the month of not connecting these two things — and then the laughter ran into the wall of what Penny was actually saying and became a different, slower kind of realization.
"The... what cat ears? She wears a..." Yang trailed off. "Oh."
The tumbleweed that blew through the ensuing silence was metaphorical. The implication it carried was not.
"She does eat a lot of tuna," Ruby said, very quietly, apparently to herself.
"Where is she?" Penny asked.
Ruby's shoulders fell. "We don't know. She's been missing since Friday."
Penny made a sound of genuine distress, stepped forward with the urgency of someone for whom this is a solvable problem requiring immediate action, and appeared to be approximately two inches from Ruby's face before Ruby had registered the movement.
"That's terrible! Don't you worry, Ruby, my friend — I won't rest until we find her!"
"That's — really kind, Penny, we're — guys?" Ruby turned to find that the group had quietly redistributed itself while her attention was on Penny. Yang and Weiss had gone left with Turuk and Daikon in tow. Scarlett and Aiko had gone right. The street was, in the most relevant sense, empty.
Nova had stayed.
He was looking at the space where eight people had been standing thirty seconds ago with the expression of someone who has been left behind and is quietly calculating whether this was intentional.
"They're terrible people," he said, to nobody in particular.
"Are you okay?" Ruby asked.
"Yes." A pause. "I'll help you two look."
Penny turned to him with the brightness of someone who has just been given a gift she hadn't expected. "Nova! That's so kind of you!"
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
"I know," he said.
The tumbleweed returned.
"It sure is windy today," Penny said happily.
Nova pressed two fingers to his forehead and breathed.
Part III — Theory and Evidence
Location: Vale's Eastern Alleys | That Afternoon
Sun walked with his hands folded behind his head, which was his default posture for situations that didn't require immediate physical action, and Blake walked beside him with the focused internal expression of someone working through a problem.
"So what's the plan?" he asked.
"I still don't believe the White Fang is behind these dust robberies," she said. "Not directly. They've never needed quantities like this before — their operations have always been targeted, specific. This is..." She frowned. "This is a different scale entirely."
"What if they did need it this time?" Sun asked. He dropped his hands and turned to pace in front of her in the way he moved when he was thinking — forward, back, hands up for emphasis. "Okay — follow me here. The only way to prove they didn't do it is to go to the place they'd most likely go if they were doing it and not find them there. Right?"
Blake considered this.
"That's either very clever or completely circular," she said.
"Maybe both."
"The problem is I have no idea where they'd strike next if they were operating in Vale."
Sun smiled — the specific smile of someone who has been waiting to say a thing. "I might. On the ship over, I overheard some dock workers talking about a Schnee Company freighter coming in from Atlas. Big one. Biggest dust shipment Vale's seen this cycle."
Blake looked at him. "You're sure?"
"Sure enough." He shrugged. "It's a lead. If they're going to hit something in Vale, a Schnee freighter with a full cargo hold is the most obvious target."
She looked at him for a long moment, weighing the odds of the tip against the odds of accomplishing nothing.
"Alright," she said. "Lead the way."
Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, the search-and-find operation continued with varying degrees of success.
Yang came out of a shop in the commercial quarter to find Weiss standing outside with her arms folded and Turuk leaning against a lamppost while Daikon studied the street with the patient attention of someone who has decided the solution is here somewhere.
"Nothing," Yang said. "You?"
Turuk shook his head.
"Not a trace." Yang sighed and looked at Weiss, who was gazing at the middle distance with an expression that was trying to be neutral and not entirely succeeding. "You really don't care if we find her, do you?"
Weiss turned on her. "Don't be stupid. Of course I care."
"You've got a funny way of showing—"
"I'm afraid," Weiss said, and the word came out quieter than everything around it, which made it land harder. "I'm afraid of what she'll say when we find her. The innocent don't run, Yang. Whatever she was running from—"
"She was running from us," Yang said. "From the argument. Because she felt like she couldn't trust us with something important." She held Weiss's gaze. "And we have to decide what kind of team we want to be. One she can trust, or one she has to hide from."
Weiss looked at the ground. Said nothing.
Turuk placed a hand gently on Yang's shoulder — not to pull her back, just to anchor the moment. Yang looked at him.
"Go easy on her," he said, quietly enough that it was just between them. "She's dealing with her own history. It's not an excuse — but it's the reason." A pause. "Weiss has spent her whole life being told what the Faunus are. We're asking her to relearn something she's known since childhood. That takes time."
Yang exhaled. "I know." She looked at Weiss's profile. "I just hope we find Blake before Weiss runs out of it."
Turuk nodded.
He'd seen Yang watching him over the course of the morning. He'd expected the question, in the way you expect things you've been waiting for.
"You want to ask me something," he said.
Yang glanced at him sideways. "You knew she was Faunus the whole time."
"She's my sister," he said. "Yes."
"And the other thing." Yang kept her voice even. "The White Fang. You knew about that too."
Turuk's shoulders drew in slightly — not defensively, just the body registering the weight of something sensitive. "That," he said carefully, "isn't mine to tell. It's hers. When she's ready."
Yang was quiet for a moment. Then: "Thank you for being honest with me."
He looked at her with an expression that was simple and direct in the way his brother's rarely was. "Sure," he said. "Any time."
Ruby, Nova, and Penny had covered the riverside quarter and were now working their way back toward the commercial district, which was less a systematic choice than the result of following conversations in the direction they naturally went.
"So Blake is your friend," Penny said. It was technically a question.
"Yes," Ruby said.
"But you're upset with her."
"I'm not. Weiss is. It's... complicated."
Penny considered this with the focused attention she brought to most things. "But why would friends be upset with each other?"
Ruby sighed. "Because sometimes friends don't tell each other things that are important. And sometimes the things they don't tell each other end up coming out in the worst possible way." She paused. "And then someone says something they shouldn't, and someone else runs, and then you're walking around Vale for two days trying to find them."
Penny processed this. "It sounds very difficult."
"It is."
Nova had been walking slightly to Ruby's left with the comfortable presence of someone who has decided that this conversation doesn't need him to contribute to it but finds it worth listening to. He looked at Ruby's expression — the particular droop of her shoulders, the way her hands weren't doing anything, which was unusual for someone who normally moved through the world with her whole body — and stepped forward slightly, so that they were properly beside each other.
"She'll come back," he said. Not reassurance exactly — statement. "She's not gone. She's thinking."
"What if she decides the thinking is better than the coming back?"
"She won't." He said it with the specific certainty of someone who knows the person in question. "Blake doesn't walk away from things. She walks away from moments. There's a difference."
Ruby looked at him. "You know her pretty well."
"She's my sister," he said. "I should."
Penny was watching this exchange with the focused, data-gathering attention of someone for whom human interaction is a subject of genuine study.
"Ruby," she said. "You have many friends. Even if it doesn't feel that way right now."
Ruby looked at her.
"And," Nova said, "even on the off chance you're convinced otherwise — you have me. That's not nothing."
Ruby's eyes went briefly to a size that suggested she hadn't expected the directness of it, which was a reasonable reaction given that Nova delivered most things in the same tone he delivered everything in, which was to say without preparation or ornamentation.
"Nova..." she said.
"I mean it," he said. "Stop counting what you don't have. Start with what you do."
Penny beamed. "Yes! I agree completely. Any friend of Ruby's is a friend of mine as well!" She seemed pleased by this statement. "Nova is very wise."
"Don't tell him that," Ruby said. "He'll become insufferable."
"I'm already insufferable," he said. "You've just acclimated."
Ruby laughed — the real one, the one that arrived before she decided to, and she looked at him with the expression she wore when he said something that surprised her into feeling better.
The expression lingered approximately one second longer than she intended.
She looked at the street ahead.
"Come on," she said. "We still have half the city to cover."
Part IV — Nightfall at the Docks
Location: Beacon Docks | After Dark
The docks at night had a different quality than the docks in the morning. The same structures, the same smell of salt and industry, but the darkness settled between the cargo containers in a way that changed what they were — from working infrastructure to something more like a stage set, full of shadows that hadn't been there in the daylight.
Blake lay flat on her stomach on a rooftop overlooking a row of Schnee Company containers that had been offloaded from a freighter earlier in the evening. The containers were new enough that the white lettering still had its sheen. The dock below was quiet in the way that docks are quiet when they're not supposed to be.
She'd been waiting for forty minutes.
A sound arrived from behind her — the slightly theatrical entrance of someone who has been gone too long and knows it.
"Miss anything?" Sun dropped down beside her in a crouch, a paper bag tucked under one arm and two green apples in the other.
"Not really," she said. "They offloaded the crates. Now everyone's just standing around."
"Cool." He extended an apple toward her. "I stole you some food."
She turned to look at the apple. Then at him. "Do you make a habit of breaking the law without thinking about it?"
He pointed at her. "Weren't you in a terrorist organization?"
The look she gave him was long and cold and eloquent.
"Too soon," he said, pulling the apple back. "Okay. Way too soon. My bad."
She returned her attention to the dock below.
What happened next was not what she'd hoped for and was exactly what she'd feared.
The wind changed direction, and with it came the sound of turbines — not one aircraft but one large and slow one, descending through the dark with its searchlights sweeping the cargo yard below. It found a landing position between the containers and extended its ramp, and the man who came down it was wearing black and moving with the particular authority of someone who expects the space around him to comply.
The wolf emblem on his back — bloody red on black, teeth bared — was something Blake had hoped, in a quiet and private part of herself that she hadn't named, never to see again.
Her fists tightened against the rooftop surface.
"Is that them?" Sun asked.
"Yes," she said. "It's them."
The dock below organized itself around the new arrivals — White Fang soldiers taking positions, securing lines, moving crates with the efficiency of people who have done this before. And then a voice she also recognized, though for entirely different reasons, cut through the dock noise from the top of the ramp.
"What's the holdup?! We are not exactly the most inconspicuous operation in this harbor, so would you animals try to pick up the pace?"
Roman Torchwick descended the ramp with the proprietary ease of a man touring his own property.
Blake stared.
They would never work with a Human, she thought. The White Fang has always—
But there it was. The evidence of her own eyes, which had never been kind to her in the moments when she wanted them to be wrong.
She stood up.
"Hey," Sun said, urgency sharpening his voice, "what are you—"
She dropped from the rooftop.
The confrontation that followed lasted approximately ninety seconds, which was long enough for Blake to get a blade to Roman's throat, short enough for the situation to reverse itself comprehensively. More soldiers. More bullheads. Roman's cane doing what Roman's cane did.
Blake hit the ground hard.
She rolled. Got up. Ran. Used her semblance to leave shadows where she'd been, buying herself fragments of second, retreating behind containers and thinking at a speed that her body was trying to keep up with.
"Here, kitty kitty kitty..." Roman's voice bounced between the containers with the practiced ease of someone who finds themselves entertaining.
Something landed on his face.
A banana peel.
Sun dropped from the container above with the grin of someone who has been waiting for his entrance. He landed in a combat stance and pointed at Torchwick with the easy authority of someone who has decided this is his fight now.
"Leave her alone," he said.
What followed was Sun Wukong doing what Sun Wukong did in a fight, which was something between acrobatics and violence performed with what appeared to be genuine enjoyment. The red staff materialized in his hands and he went through the white Fang soldiers surrounding him with the specific energy of someone who is both very skilled and also finding this slightly fun.
Blake moved from behind the containers to rejoin the fight — close this time, close enough to engage directly, using both blades and her semblance to become something that was in multiple places at once. She drove Roman back. He parried. She found a gap. He recovered.
They went back and forth with the specific rhythm of two people who are both very fast and both very skilled, which meant neither of them was entirely winning, which was its own kind of grinding.
Then Roman landed three hits in sequence and she went down.
He stood over her with the satisfaction of someone completing a task.
The foot that connected with the side of his head arrived before he saw it coming.
Roman skidded. Caught himself. Looked up.
The boy who had hit him was dark-skinned and dark-haired and wearing armor that didn't correspond to any military or civilian organization that Torchwick could place. His tail was moving in the slow, controlled way of something that had made a decision. His eyes were at a temperature that Torchwick, who had spent considerable time in the company of dangerous people, recognized as the kind that preceded significant personal property damage.
"Are you alright?" the boy asked Blake, without looking away from Roman.
Blake stared. "Nova? What are you—"
"Looking for you," he said. "Why else would I be here? You scared everyone." A brief pause, still not looking away from the man in the white suit. "Ruby most of all. And Yang. And Weiss, even if she wasn't particularly good at showing it."
Blake lowered her head. "Nova, listen—"
"He's dangerous," she said instead. "Not physically — he works around that. Watch his—"
"I know what I'm doing." He cracked his knuckles. "It's past time this one ended up behind bars."
Roman had been reassembling himself during this exchange. He aimed his cane with the practiced nonchalance of someone who has fired it several hundred times.
"Stay back," he said. "I'm warning you."
Nova kept walking toward him.
"Don't come any closer!"
Nova kept walking.
Roman looked at the advance and made what he would later describe, to no one, as a tactical verbal error.
"Stay away, filthy monkey—"
The dock went very quiet.
Blake closed her eyes.
Sun, who had been watching from a slight distance, leaned toward Blake and said, in a very careful voice: "Is that... bad?"
"Do not," Blake said, eyes still closed, "ever call either of my brothers that. Unless you want to see what it looks like when a star falls on someone."
"MONKEY?!" Nova's voice had acquired a register that was not precisely anger and was considerably worse. "OF ALL THE ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS, PATHETIC—"
What followed was several seconds of Roman Torchwick discovering, with considerable personal cost, that there was a meaningful difference between fighting someone who was trying to defeat you and fighting someone who was genuinely offended on a molecular level.
The crater Roman ended up in was not large, but it was definitive. He lay in it with his suit in approximately the condition of something that had been through a weather event. He looked up at the boy standing at its rim with the expression of a man who has just substantially revised his threat assessment.
"Never," Nova said, with the particular quiet that follows the particular loud, "call me that again. We are absolutely, comprehensively clear on this point. Yes?"
Roman, from the crater, indicated that yes, they were comprehensively clear.
Sun stared. "Please remind me," he said, to Blake, "never to do that."
"I just told you not to," Blake said.
"I know, but seeing it really brought it home."
Nova stepped back from the crater, and the aura around him — which had been considerably more visible than usual for the past thirty seconds — settled back to something approaching its normal temperature.
Then more soldiers came around the corners, and the geometry of the situation changed.
"Ruby! Blake! Sun — and whoever else is here — grab onto something!"
The dock went briefly and completely still as the assembled White Fang soldiers registered the quality of Nova's voice. Ruby, who had arrived on the rooftop above with Crescent Rose in hand just moments before, had time to brace herself. Blake locked her grip on the edge of a container. Sun wrapped his tail around a line.
Nova crossed his arms in front of him.
The sound that came out of him when he pushed his arms wide was not loud in any conventional sense. It was the kind of sound that bypasses the ears and goes directly to the chest — the pressure of something releasing at a scale that the surrounding space had not been consulted about.
The wind that came with it was not wind exactly. It was everything in the dock's immediate atmosphere deciding it needed to be somewhere else.
White Fang soldiers went airborne in the specific way of objects that have been introduced to a force they were not designed to resist. They came down against cargo containers with the sound of problems being solved in bulk.
The dock went very quiet.
Roman, from the general direction of his previous position, had made a decision about the evening's return on investment and was engaging the emergency exit strategy.
"These kids," he muttered, pulling himself toward the last remaining bullhead, "just keep getting stranger—"
The hatch sealed. The aircraft lifted. The dock fell silent.
Part V — After
The police arrived with the efficiency of people who had heard a significant noise and were investigating the aftermath of it, which was a different job than they had been expecting when they'd started the evening. They cordoned the dock. They asked questions. They looked at the array of unconscious White Fang soldiers with the expression of professionals trying to maintain neutrality in the face of something professionally unusual.
Teams RWBY and NDTSA and one golden-tailed stowaway sat on cargo containers and waited in the specific silence of people who have done something and are now experiencing the logistical aftermath.
The constabulary continued its work.
Yang appeared at the dock entrance with Weiss, who had spent the walk here composing herself in the way she composed herself before anything that required precision — systematically, layer by layer, choosing each thing deliberately.
Weiss looked at Blake.
Blake looked back.
"Do you have any idea," Weiss said, "how long we've been searching for you?"
"Weiss—" Ruby started.
"Twelve hours," Weiss said. She said it without heat, which was somehow more effective than anger would have been. "Twelve hours. And in those twelve hours, I've been doing a great deal of thinking." She paused. "About what was said. About what I said. About what it means that I could say those things and not understand why they were wrong until someone explained it to me at length."
Blake was very still.
"And what I've decided," Weiss said, "after twelve hours of thinking, is that I don't care."
Blake blinked.
"I don't care," Weiss said again, more specifically, "about what you were. I care about what you are. You told me you're not a member of the White Fang anymore — that you left, that you came here, that you're trying to be something different." She looked at Blake with the specific directness she used when she meant something completely. "Is that true?"
"I haven't been part of it since I was young," Blake said carefully. "I—"
"Then that's enough." Weiss stopped her. "All I ask — all I want — is that the next time something this significant is happening, you come to your team before you run. That's it. That's the whole condition."
Blake looked at her. Then at Ruby. Then at Nova and Turuk, who were watching from a slight distance with the expressions of people who knew how this was going to go and had decided to let it go there without interference.
She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with the back of her hand, which was the only version of crying that Blake Belladonna permitted in public, and then she composed herself and answered.
"Of course," she said.
She stepped forward and Ruby met her halfway, and Yang closed the distance from the other side, and for a moment team RWBY occupied the same coordinates in the way that groups do when they've found their center again.
Weiss stood at the edge of it. Then, with the specific decision of someone who has decided to be a different version of themselves, she stepped in.
The moment lasted exactly as long as it needed to.
Then Ruby yelped in excitement and ruined it beautifully.
"Yeah! Team RWBY is back together!"
Weiss looked at Sun Wukong, who was watching all of this from his perch on a cargo container with the grin of someone who is very entertained and has absolutely no plans to hide it.
"I'm still," she said, pointing at him with the precision of someone filing an unresolved concern, "not sure how I feel about you."
Sun laughed. "That's fair," he said. "Very fair."
Nova appeared at Ruby's shoulder and ruffled her hair in the specific way that had apparently become his default method of expressing things he wasn't going to put into words.
Ruby's face went slightly pink.
She pressed a hand to her sternum, briefly, with the expression of someone noticing something for the first time that had probably been there for a while.
What is this? she thought. It's just — he just — this is a normal thing that people do and it shouldn't feel like—
She filed it under later and smiled so broadly that the filing became slightly unconvincing.
When she looked around for Penny, the dock was empty of one specific copper-haired girl.
Ruby turned to Nova. "Where's—"
He had already gone quiet in the focused way he went quiet when he was doing something that didn't have visible external signs.
"Give me a moment," he said.
In the backseat of a moving car, Penny looked out through the tinted window at the city moving past her and tried to decide what she felt about it, which was a question she found consistently difficult to answer with the precision she preferred.
"You should know better than to wander," the man in the front seat said, without unkindness. His face was in shadow, visible only in profile. "A strange city, at night, without proper supervision."
"I know, sir," she said. "I'm sorry."
She looked at the window. The city was very bright from here, all those lights organized into something that looked, from enough distance, like warmth.
"Penny."
She sat up straighter. It was a voice in her mind — clear, direct, recognizable.
"You can relax. It's Nova."
She looked around the car by instinct, then settled. "You can communicate this way?" she thought back, tentatively.
"When I concentrate, yes. Ruby wanted to know where you went. I told her I'd find out." A pause. "Can you tell me?"
"I was... asked to leave," she said, in the space of her own mind. "My guardian doesn't want me in uncontrolled situations. The information about why is classified."
"Understood." He was quiet for a moment. "Should I tell Ruby you'll see her again?"
Penny felt something that she identified, through extensive cataloguing of similar experiences, as warmth. "Yes, please. That would make me very happy."
"She'll be glad to hear it." Another pause. "You did very well tonight, for what it's worth. Whatever you are — and I have a fairly good idea — what you did on that dock was remarkable."
She processed this. "You know?"
"I suspected from the beginning," he said. "The processing delay in your responses. The way I couldn't sense your ki the way I can with people. The weapons tonight confirmed it." His voice was steady, non-judgmental, the way it was when he stated facts. "It doesn't change anything. You're Ruby's friend, which makes you a friend worth having."
She looked at the city lights outside the window.
"She is the first person who has ever called me friend," she said. "Without any condition attached to it."
"I know," he said. "She's like that."
"Yes," Penny said. "She really is."
The mental connection faded as the car moved into a different quarter of the city, and Penny looked at where the lights were thickest and thought about how friendship was a strange and wonderful thing to find in a city you'd never visited before.
Part VI — What Cinder Knew
Location: An Industrial Warehouse, Vale's Outer Quarter | That Night
The warehouse had the particular darkness of a space that has been chosen for its darkness — the kind of place where light is a choice rather than a default.
Roman set the case on the table and turned around and tried to look like a man who had not recently been in a crater.
He was not entirely successful.
"How very disappointing," said the voice from the shadows.
Cinder Fall stepped into the ambient light of the warehouse's emergency lighting with the ease of someone for whom darkness is simply a setting preference. The red of her dress caught the available light and did things with it that redder light sources didn't manage. Behind her, Emerald moved with the quiet focus of someone running constant background calculations. Mercury leaned against a structural column with his arms crossed and an expression that had decided to find this interesting.
Roman laughed. He did this when he was nervous, which was a habit he'd been meaning to address.
"Wasn't exactly expecting to see you so soon," he said. "Ha — ha."
"We were expecting more from you." Cinder's eyes moved across him with the specific attention of someone reading a situation through its physical evidence. The tears in his suit. The bruising around his jaw. The way he was holding one arm slightly differently than the other. "What happened?"
Roman's professional pride warred briefly with his assessment of the current situation.
"The plan was going fine," he said, "until nobody mentioned there'd be a Faunus kid guarding Little Red who hits like a natural disaster and takes being called a monkey as a personal affront." He touched his jaw gingerly. "Nova, I think they called him. I would have gotten away clean if he hadn't—"
"Nova," Cinder said.
The name landed differently than the rest of the sentence. She turned it over once, with the attention of someone filing something important.
"Describe him," she said.
Roman described him.
Cinder was quiet through the description and for a moment after it. Mercury uncrossed his arms slightly, which was his version of sitting up straighter. Emerald's eyes moved to her superior's face, reading it.
"Someone that strong," Cinder said finally, "who can wipe out a full complement of White Fang soldiers and put you in the condition I'm currently looking at—" She tilted her head. "That's information we need to take seriously."
"What do you want to do about him?" Mercury asked.
"Nothing yet." She turned back to Roman. "Your cooperation remains necessary. Don't let one complication discourage you from the larger objective." She summoned a small flame to one palm with the casual ease of breathing. "Leave the boy to us when the time comes."
Roman looked at the flame. Looked at his current physical condition. Looked at the trajectory of his evening.
"Yeah," he said. "Sure. Leaving it to you. Absolutely."
The flame extinguished.
The darkness of the warehouse settled back over the conversation, and whatever came next would be a story for another night.
Part VII — The Walk Back
Location: Beacon Dockside Road | Later That Night
They were almost at Beacon when Ruby fell back from the group and found Nova walking at its edge.
Yang watched her go with a smile she was doing absolutely nothing to conceal.
"Need a moment alone with him, Rubes?" she called, brightly. "To just, you know, chat?"
"Yang," Ruby said.
"I'll leave you two to it! No need to thank me!"
"Yang—"
"Bye!"
Yang caught up to Turuk, who was walking three paces ahead, and said something that made him glance back briefly with an expression that suggested Turuk also had opinions about this that he was keeping to himself.
Ruby turned back to Nova. "I'm sorry about her."
"Don't be. She's not wrong that you wanted to talk to me about something."
Ruby opened her mouth. Closed it. "That's slightly annoying."
"I know." He waited.
She cleared her throat. "I noticed — earlier — that you were flying."
The silence that followed had a specific quality.
"Yes," he said, after a moment.
"Flying," she repeated. "As in, off the ground. Above the dock. Without wings or a semblance that I've ever seen you use before."
"I was hoping you'd been occupied at the time."
"I was looking for your whereabouts so I could potentially find Blake and help fight criminals. I was paying attention." She looked at him. "Ki?"
He exhaled. "You were listening when I mentioned that."
"I always listen when you mention things."
He looked at her for a moment with an expression she couldn't entirely read. "Yes. Ki. The same energy that powers everything else — the blasts, the speed. With enough control, you can use it to negate gravity. Fly." He paused. "We don't advertise it because it tends to raise questions we're not ready to answer."
"That's fair." She chewed on her lip. "Can I learn it?"
"The flying?"
"All of it. The ki. The— what did I call them? The laser beams." She held up a hand before he could say anything. "I know that's not what they're called. I just like saying laser beams."
Something at the corner of his expression moved in the direction of not-quite-a-smile. "You'll need to master your fundamentals before any of that becomes possible."
"Then teach me the fundamentals."
He looked at her. "You're serious."
"I'm always serious about getting stronger."
"You're almost never serious," he said. "You're enthusiastic, which is different."
"I can be both," she said.
He was quiet for a moment, and she watched him think — the specific quality his stillness had when he was actually considering something rather than just pausing.
"Your hand-to-hand needs work," he said. "Not as an insult—"
"I know." She sighed. "I'm pretty useless without Crescent Rose and we both know it."
"You're not useless. You're just—"
"Nova."
"—operating significantly below your potential."
"That's a very generous way to say useless."
"I don't say useless," he said. "Nobody who moves the way you do in a fight is useless. You just have a gap." He looked at her steadily. "I can help with the gap. Training, in your spare time, nothing that conflicts with your regular schedule. We start with the fundamentals — form, footwork, force distribution. Once those are solid, ki becomes a natural extension of them."
Her eyes had acquired the quality they acquired when she was excited about something and was trying to decide how excited she was allowed to be. The answer was usually more excited than was strictly appropriate.
"Really?" She leaned forward slightly. "You'd actually—"
He cleared his throat. "Ruby."
"Yeah?"
"You're approximately three inches from my face."
She looked at the distance between them. Her face arrived at a color.
"Oh!" She stepped back. Several steps, possibly more than strictly necessary. "Sorry, I — I wasn't — I do that sometimes when I'm — sorry."
"It's fine." His voice was completely even, which somehow made it worse. He extended a fist.
She looked at it.
"Promise," he said. "We start during the next training break."
She looked at his fist, and at his face, and at the way the moonlight did something interesting with the Beacon towers in the background behind him, and filed all of that under absolutely think about later and extended her own fist to meet his.
"Promise," she said. "And I'm holding you to it, Nova Belladonna."
"I expect nothing less, Ruby Rose."
They walked back to Beacon in the comfortable silence of two people who have just agreed to something, and neither of them said anything else until the gates, and the moon was very full and very bright over the academy's towers the whole way back.
Ruby kept one hand pressed lightly against her sternum for reasons she hadn't decided to examine yet.
Later, she told herself.
Definitely later.
Part VIII — What Ozpin Knew
Location: Ozpin's Office, Beacon Academy | That Same Night
The scroll closed in Ozpin's hands with a soft sound.
The live feed had shown him everything he needed to see, and what he'd seen had confirmed several things he'd been carrying in the patient way he carried most things — quietly, thoroughly, without committing to a conclusion until the evidence was ready to support one.
He opened a communication channel.
The screen showed a contact designation with no name attached to it — just a codename and, beneath it, a single message, recently received:
QUEEN HAS PAWNS.
Ozpin set the scroll down and steepled his hands in front of his face and looked at nothing for a long moment.
Then he pressed a button on the edge of his desk.
They arrived in threes, which was a habit of people who were used to working together.
Tarro came through the door first, with the careful posture of someone who has been a guest in a superior's office often enough to have a practiced way of entering it. Rhubar followed, with Sala close behind him — her expression carrying the particular compound of something personal and something professional that she'd been navigating since the first day of term.
"You called for us," Tarro said. It was not a question.
"I have something I'd like the three of you to take on," Ozpin said. He looked at Tarro first. "You've been watching the Belladonna boy. Nova."
"I have." Tarro's eyes were careful. "He's extraordinary. Possibly the most physically capable student I've observed in years, and I don't say that lightly." A pause. "But there's something about how he generates and uses his power that I don't have a framework for yet. It's unlike any combat semblance I've encountered."
"Which is precisely why I'd like you to work with him directly," Ozpin said. "Formally, as a mentor. Find out what you can. Evaluate him on your own terms and tell me what you find." He looked at all three of them. "It's also clear that the three of you share some kind of connection to team NDTSA specifically, and to the groups around them. I'd like that connection to serve a purpose."
He paused. Then, with the specific care he applied to things that were delicate: "Nova and Turuk Belladonna are your sons. Yes?"
The room went very still.
Tarro's eyes moved between Rhubar and Sala with the expression of someone watching confirmation arrive.
Sala's composure held for exactly one breath longer than it needed to. "Yes," she said. "They are."
Ozpin nodded, without surprise, without judgment. "Then you have an opportunity here that most parents don't — to be present for them during this period, in a capacity that means something." He looked at her with the gentleness of someone who understands what a thing costs before he says it. "I know it isn't easy. And I know the timing isn't what you'd choose."
"We haven't been able to tell them yet," Rhubar said. His voice was steady, because it was always steady, but Sala's hand had found his and was holding on with the grip of someone who needed an anchor. "The time never seemed—"
"The time rarely does," Ozpin said. "But you're here now. And they're here. And that's more than many people get." He looked at all three of them. "When you're ready — when they're ready — you'll know."
A moment passed.
Then all three of them straightened — the specific posture of people who have been given a task and are deciding to carry it.
"We won't waste the opportunity," Tarro said.
"I didn't think you would." Ozpin reached for his scroll. "That will be all for tonight."
They filed out.
He waited until the door was closed.
Then he looked at the message on his scroll again — QUEEN HAS PAWNS — and thought about what queens do when they have pawns, and what that meant for a board that was already in motion, and whether any of the pieces he was moving were moving fast enough.
The moon through the office window was very full.
He thought about the boy on the docks who had cleared a yard of armed soldiers with a gesture, and about the girl with the silver eyes, and about the specific way they'd been standing when he'd watched the feed — side by side, neither of them quite looking at the other, both of them clearly aware.
He thought about the way storms begin.
He picked up his cane.
He walked to the window.
Outside, Beacon's towers were silver in the moonlight, and somewhere in one of the dormitory buildings, a group of young people was sleeping — or not sleeping, because some of them were thinking, about the things that had happened tonight and the things that were going to happen, and the space between those two things which was where most of life actually lived.
He watched the moon for a long time.
★ END OF CHAPTER SEVEN★
Next: Chapter Eight — "Best Day Ever: The Food Fight"
A/N: And done! Whew that was a long chapter! But there was a lot to cover and some things had to be edited to fit the saiyans in there lol. So... as you can tell Ruby has begun to develop feelings for Nova. I purposely made it this way to establish their relationship going into volume 2 which will start next chapter! Hopefully you guys liked the interaction between Ozpin and the saiyan instructors. Nova and Turuk will be meeting their birth parents soon... but they probably won't reveal it to them until a little later on.
Anyways, I'm doing something a little different this time around with Scarlett for her pairing, there's abit of a twist to it so be prepared. As for Aiko, I more or less know who she'll eventually end up with. Let's just put it on the back shelf for now cuz it won't be important until a little later in the story. Anyways, thx for being patient with me guys! Hopefully, the next update won't take nearly as long. Until next time, peace out and stay safe out there!