Author's Note & Polls
Hey everyone, RoseSaiyan2 here again. I hope everyone enjoyed last chapter; it took a while to write, and I wanted to keep as close in line with the RWBY canon story as I could. Keeping that in mind when writing this story makes writing chapters extremely difficult for me, lol.
Keep in mind that after Volume 3, the story will deviate a bit, but I'll do my best to include the major elements and story-related events from the canon RWBY story. Following the fall of Beacon, I'm going to release a poll concerning future development betwe—you know, never mind, I'll just ask you guys what you think in a poll.
This will be a two-parter, and it may be shorter as it takes place in between episodes of Volume 2. These next two chapters take place in between the end of episode 2 and the beginning of episode 3 of Volume 2. So this two-parter is before Volume 2, Episode 3: "A Minor Hiccup," but after the events of last chapter.
Before we begin the chapter... please vote on this:
If Nova and Ruby end up having kids in the future, what should their names be? (I'm thinking 2 boys and 1 girl for now).
Boy Names:
I. Turrip
II. Sunchock
III. Korn
IV. Cumber
V. Other (suggest one / write in)
Girl Names:
I. Cauri
II. Cassa
III. Jinjer
IV. Nion
V. Other (suggest one / write in)
Since that's out of the way, now we can get started.
Disclaimer: RoseSaiyan2 does not own Dragon Ball Z / Kai / Super or RWBY and their characters. Those belong to Akira Toriyama / Toei Animation and Rooster Teeth / Monty Oum respectively. I only own 4 of the 6 OCs, with rights to use Tarro and Daikon. Those two characters are property of ComparedDread12.
CHAPTER TEN
Ruby's Complicated Feelings
Part I — Before the Others Wake
Location: Team RWBY's Dormitory | Early Morning
Ruby Rose had not slept well.
This was a statistical anomaly for her. As a rule, she was an elite sleeper—the sort of person who hit the mattress and flatlined within minutes, waking up hours later feeling as though her brain's overnight maintenance crew had neatly filed and archived every event of the previous day. Sleep had never been an administrative burden for her.
Last night, however, she had spent approximately two hours staring at the underside of the top bunk—roughly two hours longer than sleep had ever required.
She was already dressed in her gear, sitting on the edge of her mattress in the pre-dawn quiet of the dormitory. She stared blindly at the opposite wall while her mind stubbornly re-ran the exact sequence of events that had hijacked her consciousness back in the library. Namely, Nova. Thinking about Nova wasn't the issue in itself—they were best friends, and best friends thought about each other constantly. That was standard operating procedure.
The issue was the texture of the thoughts.
She pressed her palms together, looking down at her hands.
The library mishap had left behind a stubborn, unarchived memory. Not just the embarrassment of crashing into him—that was simple clumsy physics. What refused to be filed away was the aftermath. The steady, unhurried cadence of his voice telling her it was fine. The calm, grounded presence in his eyes. And, most dangerously of all, the lingering phantom sensation of his hand on her hair.
The warm current that had rushed through her chest when he had gently steadied her.
That was the core of the malfunction. Once she started paying attention, she could trace that warmth backward across the timeline—identifying the exact coordinates where it had first flared up and where she had hurriedly slapped a "deal with this later" label on it. The night at the docks when he caught her mid-fall. The rigorous training drills in Forever Fall when his hand rested against her shoulder to adjust her stance. Every single time he looked at her with that intense, undivided focus that made her feel like she was the only anchor point in the room.
The future she had labeled "later" had officially arrived.
"Nova and I are simply best friends," she whispered firmly to the dark, reflective glass of the dormitory window.
The window offered zero endorsement of this theory.
She pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms tightly around her shins, forced to inspect the realization with the reluctant thoroughness of someone who had successfully dodged a truth for so long that the evasion strategy had finally collapsed.
She liked Nova. She had always liked Nova—that wasn't a revelation. But the current running through her now possessed a sharper, more specific frequency. It didn't live in her head; it settled directly in her ribs, tied entirely to the way his dark eyes softened when he spoke to her, the quiet cadence of his voice, and... well, the way his tail instinctively curled around her chair whenever he sat beside her.
"Stop," she hissed quietly to the empty room, shaking her head. "Not happening."
She uncoiled from the bed and stood up. Pre-dawn dwelling was not a valid training strategy.
She needed to clear the circuit. Head out to the perimeter woods. Put in heavy hours on ki control, footwork, and the concrete, quantifiable mechanics of physical combat. Things she understood. Things that made logical sense. Things that did not involve hyper-analyzing the structural anatomy of Nova's smile.
She was going to be completely fine.
Part II — What She Overheard
Location: Forever Fall Forest | Early Morning
She caught the low murmur of conversation long before she broke through the perimeter of the clearing.
Two voices—one instantly familiar, carrying that deep, deliberate resonance of a person who never wasted syllables on empty air, and another she identified with a start of surprise as Professor Koizumi. The older Saiyan had no business being deep in the forest at this ungodly hour, a scheduling anomaly that instantly triggered her tactical curiosity.
Ruby dropped into a low crouch, slipping soundlessly behind the thick trunk of a massive autumn-blushed tree, drawing upon the instincts of fieldcraft she had absorbed from a lifetime of exposure to active combatants.
"—whenever you have open hours in your training schedule," Koizumi was saying, his tone casual, "I can help you isolate those mechanics."
"I appreciate that, teach—" A brief, self-correcting hitch in his cadence. "I mean, Professor."
Tarro let out a low, gravelly chuckle. "Save the formalities, Brussel. Call me whatever fits the moment."
Ruby heard Nova visibly unwind—she knew the exact acoustic signature of his exhalations, the subtle deflation of muscle tension that marked when he felt safe enough to drop his guard.
"Say, teach?"
"Speak."
"I've been hitting a wall with my tail control during high-velocity engagements. The kinetic pivot is inconsistent. I was hoping you might have some pointers."
Ruby's hand flew straight up to cover her mouth.
Not out of fear. But because the mere mention of the word tail sent a traitorous, highly inconvenient flash of heat straight through the exact mental circuit she had spent the last twenty minutes trying to lock down and incinerate.
Do not go there, she scolded herself fiercely.
I know what your brain is planning, and the answer is no, she argued internally.
Shut down the operation right now, she commanded.
She pressed her spine flat against the rough bark, conducting a desperate, high-stakes internal intervention at a frequency she prayed was entirely inaudible to the two combatants standing fifty feet away. The vocabulary she deployed inside her own skull was strictly non-academic, but miraculously effective.
By the time she finished dragging her runaway imagination back to reality, Professor Koizumi had detached from the conversation, stepping past the opposite edge of the tree line with the measured stride of a man finishing morning drills. She tracked his departure. Waited a beat.
"You can come out of hiding now, Ruby."
She stiffened completely.
Then, recognizing the mathematical impossibility of pretending she hadn't been caught, she stepped out from behind the trunk with as much casual dignity as she could muster.
Part III — The Training
Nova was standing in the center of the clearing with his back turned to the tree line when she stepped out, which immediately communicated two distinct facts: that he had known she was there the entire time, and that he was granting her the grace of not forcing direct eye contact while she digested her embarrassment. Both choices were profoundly, characteristically Nova.
"How long did you know?" she asked, crossing her arms.
He pivoted slowly. "From the beginning."
Her shoulders slumped roughly two inches. "Oh."
He regarded her with that quiet, gentle attentiveness that constituted his default setting whenever she was visibly displeased with herself—a trait she found simultaneously comforting and intensely inconvenient. "Is something wrong?"
"No. Nothing is wrong. I just made an absolute fool of myself hiding behind a tree for five minutes while you sat there completely aware of it." She waved a hand dismissively. "Ignore me."
A brief silence followed—the specific, measured quiet that signaled he was weighing whether or not to voice an internal observation. It was a rhythm she had learned to identify over the past year.
He crossed the clearing, closed the distance, and dropped a heavy palm directly onto the crown of her head.
Not with a rough shove—more like the way you rest a comforting hand on an object you want to ensure remains upright. It was the exact brand of physical contact that communicated you're fine without demanding an oral debate over whether she actually was.
"Stop that," he instructed quietly.
"Stop what?"
"Being hard on yourself over something that doesn't matter." He lifted his hand away. "Ready?"
She looked up into his dark eyes.
The warm current in her chest immediately flared back to life.
She hurriedly filed the sensation under absolutely, definitely, deal with it later and dropped into her combat stance.
"Ready," she declared.
What followed was the most focused, high-yield hour of sparring she had ever logged.
She knew it wasn't a coincidence—she was channeling an emotional charge into her footwork and strikes that she couldn't have put into words, converting it into raw kinetic acceleration and total presence. Her weight stayed centered, driving through every blow instead of scattering her intent. Nova registered the shift instantly. She could read it in the sharpening of his focus, shifting from casual instruction to genuine, high-level engagement.
"Good," he said, stepping back after a collision of strikes that kicked up a mini-gust of autumn leaves. "That's precisely how the weight transfer should feel."
"I felt it," she reported, keeping her voice level—not out of excitement, but out of sheer clinical accuracy. A data point logged.
"Anchor that sensation in your muscle memory. That's the baseline you're building toward."
She nodded, rolling her shoulders and shaking out her aching wrists, while privately thinking: I genuinely wish I could explain what is actually fueling my performance right now without dying of mortification.
"I think we'll cap sparring here for the day," Nova announced.
She immediately let out a soft groan of protest. "Aw, come on! I was just hitting my stride!"
"Which means it's the exact right moment to shift gears and try something else." He dropped cross-legged onto the grass with the easy, boneless fluidity of someone who had practiced it since early childhood. "Sit down."
She obeyed, dropping onto the turf opposite him.
He looked at her with the specific expression he reserved for academic or philosophical breakdowns. "You've been asking about ki mechanics for three weeks."
"I have."
"You're ready to begin tapping into it."
The lingering disappointment over the end of the spar vanished instantly. Her eyes lit up with that bright, electric curiosity that always accompanied a major breakthrough. "Right now?"
"Right now." He rested his palms flat on his knees. "Close your eyes."
She shut her eyelids.
She heard him exhale—that slow, deliberate breath of a mentor organizing his thoughts into proper sequence before speaking.
"Cut out the surrounding noise," he instructed softly. "Don't force it out like a barrier—just let your attention glide past it, as if it belongs to someone else's room. The only frequency you're tracking is my voice."
She let the morning sounds of the forest recede—the birdsong, the distant rustle of the academy grounds, the wind whispering through the high canopy. She latched onto his voice instead, finding it dangerously easy to follow. Another piece of data she firmly chose to ignore.
"Search inward. Not like you're hunting for a lost object—more like you're waiting for something familiar to make its presence known." He paused, letting the silence breathe. "When you find it, it won't feel like burning heat. It'll feel like warmth. Like an ember that was always sitting there, waiting for you to turn toward it."
She inhaled. Focused her awareness inward. Attempted to reach.
Nothing.
She tried again, shifting her focus.
Still nothing.
She felt her fingers twitch, curling into the grass.
"You're straining," he noted.
She cracked one eye open. "How do you—"
"Your shoulders," he said. He shifted forward, placing a warm hand against her shoulder blade—light, steady, identical to the touch from their very first training session. Instantly, her traps and neck muscles registered the anchor point and involuntarily released the tension they'd been locking down. "Relax. Your physical form already knows how to do this. You're trying to force an outcome instead of allowing it to happen."
She breathed out slowly.
She let go of the mental grip.
She stopped hunting for the source and simply... waited in the quiet.
And then, drifting upward through the stillness, she found it.
It matched his description down to the letter. Not a scorching fire—just a profound, deep-seated warmth, like an inner hearth that had always burned in the dark, suddenly illuminated by her attention. Massive, she registered with a jolt of distant surprise. Far larger and denser than she had anticipated. She didn't prod it or crowd it; she merely acknowledged it, the way a person acknowledges a heavy door before turning the handle.
She drew a microscopic fraction of that internal energy upward.
When she snapped her eyes open, a brilliant, humming sphere of sapphire-blue light was hovering directly in the space between her open palms.
The sound that escaped her throat was completely uncomposed. It was the involuntary gasp of someone who had just discovered something magnificent they hadn't realized was missing.
"Nova—" She jerked her head up to meet his gaze. "I did it. Look. Look at this, I actually did it."
His face broke into that rare, unshielded smile—not the polite, contained expression he wore in public spaces, but the open, unguarded one that surfaced when he wasn't policing his own visibility. She had witnessed it so infrequently that she had cataloged every line of it. He looked completely, effortlessly proud of her.
"I see it," he said softly, his eyes reflecting the blue glow. "That's—"
Her center of gravity abruptly vanished.
He caught her before her upper body hit the turf—one large hand cupping the back of her head, the other sliding under her ribs to support her weight—bracing her with that complete lack of dramatic panic that defined his physical competence.
"Careful."
She blinked rapidly. The blue sphere had vanished, and she felt as though someone had reached into her chest cavity and siphoned out half her available oxygen. "Why am I suddenly—"
"Exhausted," he answered evenly. "Your nervous system just drew on an energy reservoir it's never accessed before. It requires an adaptation period." He kept his arm securely locked beneath her shoulders as she tried to force her limbs to cooperate. "Think of ki like an unconditioned muscle. The first time you flex it under load, you feel every fiber strain."
"It'll... get easier?" she managed, fighting the lightheadedness.
"Every single time," he confirmed.
She allowed herself, for one brief, catastrophic second, to register the fact that she was currently being cradled against his chest. Combined with the twenty-four-hour mental spiral she'd been trapped in since the library, this setup was a logistical disaster. His face was inches from hers because the basic laws of physics required it; his dark eyes were locked onto hers with that intense, undivided focus she'd been trying to eviscerate from her brain; and with absolute, agonizing clarity, she watched herself stare directly down at his mouth.
Stop, a frantic voice ordered in her skull.
You are merely suffering from a standard autonomic drop in blood pressure following energy expenditure, another part of her brain lied wildly.
You are looking right at his mouth, the truth screamed back.
She heard the thought echo and tried desperately to execute an emergency mental pivot. She quickly discovered that pivoting was mathematically impossible when the individual anchoring her entire body weight was looking at her with an expression that had zero historical precedent in their friendship.
"Ruby," he said, his voice dropping into a register that lacked its usual steady baseline. "Are you alright?"
"Completely, perfectly fine," she lied, her voice pitching slightly upward.
Silence stretched between them.
She suddenly realized neither of them was making any motion to fix the geometry of the situation.
Furthermore, she realized this stagnation was entirely because she hadn't moved away, he hadn't backed up, and the physical space separating their faces had continued to compress without either of them issuing a conscious command.
"Nova," she whispered, her voice carrying an unfamiliar, shaky texture.
"Ruby," he replied, his tone strained in a way she had literally never heard before.
Their scrolls chimed simultaneously.
The abrasive, cheerful ringtone was so catastrophically ill-timed that it took Ruby three full seconds to confirm it was a real sound in the physical universe. Then she scrambled backward in a blind panic, he instantly released her weight, and they both bolted upright at a mathematically safe distance from one another—staring down at their respective communication devices with the fierce, synchronized concentration of two people who had just been hurled out of a burning building and were pretending nothing had happened.
"We... we need to head back," she blurted out.
"Yes," he agreed immediately.
Neither of them moved a muscle for three agonizing seconds.
Then she scrambled to her feet, he stood up beside her, and they began marching down the academy trail with the rigid, hyper-controlled posture of two people who were making a massive, visible effort not to walk too close together.
Part IV — What Sun and Neptune Saw
They walked the remainder of the woodland path in silence—not an uncomfortable, strained quiet, but the specific hush of two people who were both wrestling with the exact same internal gravity and had reached a tacit, unspoken agreement to give each other a wide berth before discussing it.
Nova apologized twice during the stretch. Both times, Ruby countered with escalating firmness that there was nothing requiring an apology, because technically nothing had happened, and she firmly meant it—or mostly meant it—or was at least prepared to convince herself she meant it by the time the sentence was finished.
By the time the sprawling architecture of Beacon Academy hove into view through the thinning tree line, they had successfully negotiated a functional, if fragile, equilibrium.
"Same time next week?" Ruby asked, keeping her tone light.
"I have extended conditioning sessions scheduled with Professor Koizumi over the next few afternoons," he replied, glancing sideways. "Turuk has been ordered to attend a few of them as well. I'm not entirely clear on the curriculum yet."
She gave a small nod. Told herself this was entirely fine. It was completely fine. She was not even remotely disappointed.
She was marginally disappointed.
"Lunch, then," she proposed smoothly. "We can squeeze in a quick review before Professor Koizumi's afternoon seminar. That schedule work for you?"
"Yeah." He slowed his pace slightly, holding her gaze. "I want you to keep practicing that internal stabilization on your own, even when I'm not monitoring the flow. Don't strain or force it—just sit with the energy for five minutes a day and let your physiology adapt."
"I remember," she recited. "Feel for it, don't hunt for it."
"Right." He paused, his expression softening around the edges. "You did exceptional today. Seriously."
She prepared to deliver a balanced, neutral acknowledgment—something that accepted the praise without triggering the dangerous, incandescent glow it was currently causing in her chest. Instead, what bypassed her filters and fell out of her mouth was: "Thanks."
They arrived at the paved junction where the pathways branched—rightward toward the lower quad leading to her dorm, leftward toward the upper tiers. The moment carried the heavy, unmistakable atmospheric signature of an ending. She felt that strange, unaccountable momentum rising in her chest again—unnamed, yet clearly cut from the same cloth as the warmth she'd unlocked during the meditation.
She turned to walk away.
Then, without processing the command, she spun back around.
Later on, she wouldn't be entirely certain she had consciously made the executive choice. It felt far more accurate to say her body had made the executive override and simply informed her brain after the fact. She closed the distance between them, wrapped her arms around his shoulders in a quick, impulsive motion, and pressed a light, hurried kiss directly to his cheek.
Then the brutal, unadulterated reality of what she had just executed crashed down upon her.
She froze, released him as if he were electrified, and spun on her heel.
Without a word, she accelerated into a brisk walking pace.
Which immediately escalated into a rapid jog.
Which quickly dissolved into full-blown, undeniable flight.
Behind her, she heard absolute, unbroken silence, which somehow compounded the psychological horror of the situation.
Sun Wukong had been lingering behind the corner of an adjacent utility building.
This had not been his original itinerary for the morning—he had been en route to locate Blake and casually suggest checking out the new festival installations down by the docks, an outing he had thoroughly convinced himself was entirely platonic, casual, and friendly. Neptune had tagged along, providing an unrequested, highly irritating running commentary on his social strategies the entire way.
"That," Neptune remarked, dropping his voice to a careful, low whistle, "is quite a significant plot development."
"Yeah," Sun agreed quietly.
They watched Ruby's frantically retreating figure round the corner of the dormitory block at a velocity that suggested she was fleeing an active bomb threat or had intentionally created one.
A few yards away, Nova stood frozen in place. One hand was lifted to touch his cheek where the kiss had landed, his posture radiating the stunned stillness of a guy whose entire internal operating system had just been forcibly rewritten by an unpatched update.
"So," Neptune muttered, nudging Sun's shoulder. "Are we obligated to inform the rest of the team?"
Sun tracked the fading sound of Ruby's footsteps, visualizing the absolute mortification she was currently experiencing—not her standard, theatrical brand of panic, but a quieter, seismic realization that belonged to someone who had just shocked even themselves.
"No," Sun said firmly.
"Not even a hint to—"
"She'll talk when she's ready," Sun interrupted, crossing his arms. "That isn't our narrative to broadcast."
Neptune chewed on the inside of his cheek, absorbing the logic. He gave a slow nod. "Right. Fair enough. Code red, got it."
They resumed walking toward the main courtyards.
"We should probably let the others know we're heading back," Neptune noted, pulling out his scroll.
"Yeah," Sun murmured. He cast one final glance back toward the deserted pathway, a small, knowing grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. With the intuitive empathy he usually kept hidden behind his laid-back exterior, he could picture the exact look on Nova's face—not confused, not agitated, just intensely focused and remarkably gentle as he tried to figure out where to catalog this brand-new variable.
They'll figure it out, Sun thought to himself, adjusting his posture. Those two are a matched set.
He tapped out a quick message on his scroll and kept walking.
Part V — Daikon and Weiss in Vale
Location: The Streets of Vale | That Afternoon
The afternoon had settled into a very specific brand of localized misery that Weiss Schnee felt was entirely disproportionate to any conceivable crime she might have committed in this or any past lifetime.
She and Daikon had been canvassing the sprawling commercial district of Vale for an exact hour and a half, had interrogated approximately twenty-seven indifferent strangers, had navigated several alleys she would have preferred to pretend didn't exist, and had turned up absolutely zero actionable intelligence. Yang was definitively going to pay for this.
"I am mathematically certain," Weiss stated, her heels clicking sharply against the pavement, "that Yang orchestrated this assignment with the explicit intent of stranding us together. The search operation was merely a convenient alibi."
"Yeah, I figured as much," Daikon replied lazily. He was walking with his hands buried deep in his pockets—his default operational posture when he wasn't actively breaking something, which Weiss had privately concluded was designed to make him look like a spectator performing indifference. "She also looked entirely too happy when she detached herself from the group. So I'm guessing you and I both got short-changed in slightly different directions."
Weiss blinked, her analytical gears shifting. "Turuk and Yang?"
"I have operational theories." He delivered it with the flat, deadpan neutrality of a man harboring nuclear secrets he simply refused to unpack.
"Does it trouble you?"
"Turuk can handle himself in any theater." He shot her a sideways glance. "Does the conceptual reality of your teammate spending extended time with a male Faunus trouble you?"
She opened her mouth, checked her trajectory, and snapped it shut again—the closest approximation to a surrender she was capable of managing in public discourse. "That is an aggressively loaded inquiry."
"I know. That's why I deployed it."
She walked in silence for several paces, the rhythmic clack of her boots the only sound between them.
"No," she murmured finally. "It doesn't."
"Good," he said, offering zero editorial elaboration.
She sliced a critical look at him from her peripheral vision. He was staring straight ahead down the boulevard, leaving his profile exposed. She couldn't help but notice the clean, sharp line of his jaw and the micro-crease at the corner of his lips that signaled he was biting back a retort. He was conventionally attractive, a reality she was willing to concede strictly to herself in the total absence of witnesses. It was entirely irrelevant, of course. His personality remained a separate, catastrophic engineering failure.
"Why," she demanded, "do you insist on addressing me as princess?"
"Because it yields immediate, highly entertaining telemetry."
"That is an unmitigatedly immature motivation."
"I'm aware," he said smoothly. "I'm going to keep doing it anyway."
She felt the familiar, dangerous spike of blood pressure—that concentrated, blinding irritation reserved exclusively for individuals who were simultaneously profoundly obnoxious and inexplicably magnetic, leaving her entirely unequipped to reconcile the two.
"You are, without exception, the most aggravating human being I have ever encountered."
"Probably," he agreed without missing a stride.
A small child—perhaps seven years old, radiating that fearless, unearned confidence peculiar to kids who haven't yet discovered self-awareness—suddenly skipped out from a narrow side street. He planted himself squarely in their path, staring up at them with unblinking curiosity.
"Hey, lady," the boy blurted out, pointing a sticky finger. "Is that your boyfriend?"
Weiss's entire facial structure malfunctioned.
"What—No! He is absolutely not—" She caught herself mid-shriek, recognized that sputtering defensively at a primary-schooler was a new low in personal dignity, and furiously course-corrected. "We are most certainly—" She choked, stopped, and tried again. "No."
"Then how come you two are walking together?" the boy countered, armed with the undeniable, airtight logic of youth.
Weiss opened her mouth to construct a sophisticated defense.
Daikon casually squatted down to the kid's eye level.
"Sharp observation, kid," Daikon said, adopting the tone of a seasoned co-conspirator. "The truth is, she's too embarrassed to admit it out loud because we haven't made it official with the family yet. Complicated domestic politics—you understand. But we're working on the logistics." He delivered this utter fabrication with the terrifying, deadpan conviction of a career diplomat. "Now, between us—did you happen to see two people pass by earlier? One wearing a hood, one with a dark tail?"
The boy pointed a thumb backward over his shoulder.
"Down that way. A little while ago."
Daikon raised a fist; the boy solemnly tapped it with his own, executing the transaction with absolute gravity. "Appreciate it, partner."
The kid bolted off down the alley.
Daikon rose smoothly to his feet.
Weiss stood frozen, staring at him with a facial expression that had completely transcended vocabulary and was now running on pure, unfiltered kinetic rage.
"You—" she wheezed.
"We have a vector," he interrupted smoothly.
"You deliberately informed a minor that we were—"
"It yielded tactical results. Do you intend to stand here hyperventilating, or are we tracking down our targets?"
The sound that ruptured from Weiss's throat was not a human word. It was a concentrated acoustic manifestation of acute psychological damage. She whipped around on her heel and stormed ahead of him at a blistering pace.
"You secretly love it, princess," his voice floated lazily from behind her.
"I have never harbored a sentiment more violently opposed to my entire existence," she shot back over her shoulder, increasing her velocity to prevent him from observing her burning face.
He offered a low, exasperated smirk at her retreating back.
She didn't need to turn around to feel the smirk, which was a deeply irritating superpower she had accidentally developed.
They eventually ducked into a quiet, sunlit café tucked away from the main tourist drag, primarily because Weiss announced that her central nervous system required the immediate administration of Earl Grey tea to survive the afternoon. Daikon followed without complaint—partly because he recognized the tactical necessity of defusing her explosive state, and partly because her fierce, stubborn refusals amused him endlessly.
They settled opposite one another at a small round table. The ceramic cups emitted a comforting aroma of bergamot, framing a quiet truce that settled over them—the hard-earned silence of two stubborn combatants who had exhausted their ammunition and reached the quiet space beneath the friction.
Weiss stared down into the amber depths of her tea.
Her thoughts drifted unbidden. Back to her father. Back to the precise, chillingly casual tone he used whenever the subject of Faunus arose—not shouting, not performing theatrical hatred, but delivering bigotry with the suffocating certainty of a man who had never once been corrected by anyone whose opinion he valued. She realized how deeply that worldview had been baked into the architecture of her upbringing.
Then she thought about the past year.
She thought about Daikon specifically—blunt, stubborn, unapologetically abrasive, yet a man who had never once treated her pedigree as an excuse to handle her with kid gloves. He was the same guy who had publicly humiliated her in a classroom setting with the cold precision of someone who didn't care about the Schnee crest. And yet, he was also the one who had quietly noticed when she was trying to break out of her cage, holding her accountable to a higher standard without ever demanding applause for it.
"You mentioned earlier," she began softly, breaking the stillness, "that you operate on a code of honor."
He lifted his gaze from his cup. "I honor my word. That's a bit different from a grand philosophical code."
"Is it?"
A brief pause hung in the air.
"Maybe not," he conceded quietly.
She traced the rim of her cup with a fingertip. "I've been thinking about what you told me. Back when you said I wasn't like the rest of my family."
He listened, entirely still.
"I desperately want that to be true," she admitted, her voice dropping all its usual defensive armor, carrying the raw, unfiltered vulnerability of a truth she had never spoken aloud to anyone. "I've spent months trying to figure out what the Schnee name actually means when I'm the one holding it. Whether it's destined to mean what my father dictates, or if I can forge something entirely different."
He held her gaze for a long moment, the Vale sunlight catching the sharp angles of his face.
"And?" he prompted.
"I haven't reached a conclusion yet," she confessed, looking up to meet his dark eyes directly. "But I suspect the fact that I'm still keeping the question open... means I'm moving in the right direction."
Daikon studied her—not with the analytical coldness of a debate, nor the mocking glint he used to provoke her, but with an intense, steady respect.
"Yeah," he said simply. "It does."
She held his eyes across the small table, refusing to look away first—pushing past her old boundaries, lingering in a space of quiet, mutual understanding.
"You're still refusing to call me by my actual name," she noted, a faint, ghost of a smile touching her lips.
"Give it time," he replied.
She exhaled a long breath—half-exasperation, half-acceptance—surrendering to the immutable laws of nature that seemed to tether her orbit to his.
He almost smiled back. Not a full grin, but the subtle softening around the edges of his mouth that confirmed it was within reach.
Weiss picked up her teacup, took a measured sip, and let the quiet settle around them.
Part VI — Nova's Observation
Location: The Streets of Vale | Late Afternoon
Nova's scroll buzzed quietly in his pocket. He pulled it out, tapping the screen to check the incoming ping—a brief, encrypted confirmation from Scarlett verifying that the regional search grids had successfully reconverged, that Team RWBY was accounted for, and that the various wandering factions of their extended group had filtered back without casualties or collateral damage.
The administrative crisis of the afternoon was officially closed.
As he navigated the bustling sidewalk back toward the main transit line, his route took him past the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of a quiet corner café. A familiar flash of movement caught his peripheral vision, causing him to automatically reduce his stride and pivot his head.
Daikon and Weiss.
They were occupying a small table near the front window. Crucially, they were not shouting—or even actively bickering, which, for those two specific personalities, constituted a structural anomaly worth noting. Daikon had both hands wrapped loosely around a ceramic mug, his gaze locked onto Weiss with that rare, intense brand of focus that signaled he had completely dropped his defensive posturing and was actually, genuinely listening. Weiss was staring down at her own teacup, her lips moving as she delivered what appeared to be an uncharacteristically private confession.
In response to her words, Daikon's expression shifted into something Nova had never witnessed on him before—a quiet, unguarded softening that completely bypassed his usual armor of calculated cynicism.
Nova lingered on the sidewalk for precisely three seconds.
He mentally audited his history with Daikon—a friendship forged in the brutal survival conditions of their youth, built on a bedrock of skepticism and measured trust that only thawed for individuals who had earned it. The fact that Daikon had deliberately elected to invest this much patience into Weiss Schnee's high-maintenance orbit was staggering. Then he considered Weiss—a girl who had spent the better part of her life unlearning the toxic architecture of her upbringing, one painful, hard-fought revelation at a time.
Through the glass, framed by the warm amber interior lighting, they looked like two pieces of rough machinery that had collided by sheer accident and somehow discovered they fit each other's tolerances.
Nova stepped back into motion, intentionally avoiding catching either of their eyes through the pane.
Leave that variable alone, he told himself quietly. It's working.
He resumed his trek back toward the academy grounds, sliding his hands deep into his jacket pockets with the quiet reserve of a man who had just stumbled upon some genuinely good news and decided to leave it entirely undisturbed.
As he walked, his fingers brushed against his jawline—drifting instinctively toward the exact spot on his cheek where, hours earlier, Ruby Rose had thrown caution to the wind, executed an impulsive strike of affection, and fundamentally disrupted the physics of their universe.
He let his hand linger there for a fraction of a second before tucking it back into his pocket, his mind replaying the sequence with the cautious, analytical curiosity of someone turning a rare, uncut gemstone over in their palm—not quite ready to put it away, but not yet ready to assign it a permanent name either.
The late-afternoon sun was casting long, copper-gold angles across the towering spires and slate rooftops of Vale, setting the city ablaze in amber light.
He walked the remaining distance through the warmth of it, thinking quietly about what it meant to finally let something in.
★ END OF CHAPTER TEN ★
Next: Chapter ELEVEN— "Ruby's Complicated Feelings, Part II"