Heya guys! Back with a new chapter! Been almost a month since I updated this, wow! Anyways before we dive into the story just wanted to throw a quick poll out there for you guys:
If I were to make another variation of the Flame and Crimson story where Blake is the main girl (love interest) for Odyn what should I call it?
A: Forsaken and Faunus (Blake x Oc)
B: Black Flame x Blue Haze (Blake x OC)
C: Thief's Respite (Blake x Oc)
D: A Cat's Guard (Blake x Oc)
Also one more poll for you guys:
In that story where Blake is the main girl for Odyn what should the other pairing look like? Here are some options, vote for which ones seem best:
Weiss x Roy
Yang x Eleryc
Ruby x Shallot
Xander x Emerald
Valvaderhn x Cinder
Giblet x Sarai
Khanna x Yatsuhashi
Baron x Flare (simply because these two work well together lol)
Aiko x Mercury
Beat x Jinjer
Note x Sun
Hailfire x Neptune
Or...
Eleryc x Weiss
Shallot x Yang
Giblet x Ruby
Xander x Cinder
Sarai x Mercury
Valvaderhn x Aiko
Hailfire x Sun
Zero x Emerald
Roy x Flare
Baron x Note
Let me know your thoughts in the reviews and/or comments on these two polls relating to each other. Now, without further ado... onto the story!
Disclaimer: I don't own anything other than the Oc's minus Tarro and Daikon those I got permission to use in my stories from a fellow writer (ComparedDreadX (wattpad)or ComparedDread12 (Fanfiction.net) if you're wondering).
Opening:
Opening theme: Alive by REona (Prelude to Dawn: Arknights anime)
Visuals: Replace the Arknights characters with the cast of this story and replace the reunion with Grimm and Atlas soldiers. The opening depicts the divide between the elves and the humans, while Huntsman and Huntresses fight off the Grimm. The chorus shows Odyn and the other elves struggle against the humans, the same with the faunus and Saiyan characters. The song ends as it zooms to a shot of Odyn and Weiss look off into the distance before the dark elf turns to look at Weiss. Weiss, noticing his gaze just smiles as the title card for the story comes up after the screen goes black.
FLAME AND ICE
Chapter 7 — The Badge, The Burden, and Complicated Feelings
She was eight years old in the dream.
The Schnee estate gardens in summer had a quality of light that Weiss had tried, at various points in her life, to describe to people who had not seen them. She had never managed it to her satisfaction. The best she'd arrived at was like standing inside a painting that has not yet decided whether to be joyful or sad — which was accurate, in the way that descriptions of dreams are accurate, which is to say imprecisely and from the wrong angle.
She was running. He was running behind her, and ahead of her, and somehow simultaneously in both places, because dreams have their own geography. The garden path wound through the hedge maze her grandfather had planted before she was born, and at the centre of the maze was the fountain with the stone bird at its apex, and they had always ended up there eventually — in the memory as in the dream, every path in the garden resolved to that fountain.
They sat on the fountain's edge. His feet didn't quite reach the ground. Her feet didn't quite reach the ground either, but she was eight and he was ten and there was a dignity differential she was not prepared to acknowledge.
He said something she couldn't hear in the dream, but she knew what it was. She had known what it was for nine years, carrying it the way you carry things that are too important to put down.
She said something back. He smiled.
The fountain's water caught the light and turned it silver.
Then a whistle went off directly beside her ear and the dream ended.
She hit the floor.
The floor of the Team RWBY dormitory was neither soft nor forgiving, and it made no apologies for this, and Weiss sat up from it with the specific expression of someone who has been woken suddenly and is identifying the responsible party.
Ruby Rose was standing in the centre of the room with a metal whistle, dressed in full uniform, beaming with the energy of someone who has been awake for some time and is on the wrong side of this fact relative to everyone else.
"Good morning, Team RWBY!"
Weiss looked at her.
At her teammates, who were also dressed and ready — Yang in the posture of someone who has been awake long enough to find this funny, Blake in the posture of someone who has been awake long enough to find it slightly unfortunate.
At the whistle.
At Ruby.
"What," Weiss said, "is wrong with you."
Ruby moved on in the brisk way of someone who has a schedule and has decided that reasonable questions about the schedule can be addressed later. Weiss pulled herself from the floor with the controlled dignity of someone who refuses to let a floor win, and pressed her palms flat against the dormitory's windowsill, and breathed.
Try to help her, Odyn's voice said, in the part of her mind where she kept things she was working on. For me.
She breathed again.
"Right," she said, to herself, quietly. "Deep breaths."
The dormitory arrangement had been a project.
Yang's contribution had been enthusiasm and a poster of six young men in various stages of athletic posturing, which she mounted on her section of the wall with the confidence of someone making an interior design decision that did not require consensus. Blake's contribution had been methodical — her books found their places on the shelves with the deliberation of someone who has a system — though she did briefly hold a particular volume, amber eyes going momentarily wide before returning it to the shelf cover-inward with the care of someone hoping no one had seen.
No one had.
The furniture problem was addressed the way most of Ruby Rose's logistical challenges were addressed: with a solution that was technically correct and practically exciting. Weiss objected. Yang approved. Blake assessed the structural merits. The voting went as it was always going to go, and the sound of improvised carpentry filled the dormitory corridor for twenty minutes.
The result was functional, which was the generous assessment. Ruby's bed hung from the ceiling on a rope system that she had engineered with the focused confidence of someone who has studied the problem and arrived at an unconventional answer. Yang's was elevated on a platform of Blake's scholarly novels, which Blake had allowed with a calmness that suggested she had made peace with it. Blake's own bed occupied the space beneath Yang's, and Weiss's was on the ground, which Weiss accepted as the least interesting solution and therefore probably the safest.
They were stepping back to survey this arrangement when the knock came.
Weiss answered it.
Odyn was in Beacon's uniform — the dark jacket and slacks, the white undershirt, everything about it worn in the exact way it was intended to be worn — and the effect, Weiss discovered upon opening the door, was something she had not sufficiently prepared herself for. She stood there for a moment longer than she had intended to.
"Is there something on my face?" he asked.
"No." She collected herself. "You — you look well. The uniform suits you."
She was aware that this was not her most articulate response to anything she had said in her life, and she was also aware that Odyn knew this, and that he was doing her the courtesy of not acknowledging it while simultaneously smiling in a way that acknowledged it completely.
"We're heading to class ahead of you," he said, tilting his gaze past her to the dormitory's interior, where the bunk arrangements were visible. He looked at them for a moment with the expression of someone who has decided not to comment. "You may want to hurry."
Behind him, Hailfire began: "We should be going, Mi—" and corrected course mid-syllable with the slight internal emergency of someone who has caught themselves, "—I mean, Odyn. We're going to be late."
Ruby, who had been listening, tilted her head at the hitch in Hailfire's sentence with the transparent curiosity of someone filing something away without knowing why.
Odyn cleared his throat. Roy waved at Ruby. Sarai's team filed past in the hallway behind them. JNPR peered out from their own dormitory door with the confused expressions of people who have been woken by the echoes of carpentry and have not yet established what is happening.
The door closed.
Weiss turned to find three pairs of eyes on her.
"What," she said.
Yang had the expression of someone who has arrived at a hypothesis and is pleased with it. Blake had the expression of someone who has arrived at the same hypothesis and is being polite about it. Ruby had the expression of someone who has arrived at approximately a quarter of the hypothesis and is going to ask about it now.
"Are you and Odyn more than just friends?" Ruby asked, with the guileless directness of someone for whom tact is a concept she has encountered but not yet fully integrated. "Because the two of you seem awfully close for just being childhood best friends."
"It's like," Yang said, "you two know each other in a way that takes longer than friendship."
"I've been wondering the same thing," Blake said, which was unhelpful and accurate.
Yang's expression achieved its mischievous configuration. "So — are you two an item?"
The warmth arrived in Weiss's face without her permission.
"We are not," she said, firmly and with great conviction, turning toward the clock. "We are childhood friends who have known each other for a very long time and I would thank you to — what time is it."
Ruby looked at the clock. "Nine o'clock at—"
"It is eight fifty-five," Weiss said.
Ruby processed this.
"We're going to be late," Weiss said, already in motion.
Ruby processed this faster.
"To class!" she announced, and they ran.
◈ — Professor Port's Class
Peter Port was a man who had been a huntsman for a very long time and had the stories to prove it — all of which he had organised into a rotating curriculum that was, in structure, a lecture, and in practice, a solo performance with educational elements.
The classroom was full when Teams RWBY and JNPR arrived at its door in the breathless, slightly dishevelled configuration of people who have been running and have not quite achieved on time but have achieved not quite late enough to be formally noted. Port raised his eyebrows at them with the benevolent expression of a man who has seen this before and has decided to use it as a teachable moment.
"Miss Rose and friends. Glad you could join us."
Ruby rubbed the back of her head. "Sorry we're late, Professor."
"We lost track of time," Jaune added, which was an explanation rather than an excuse, but Port received it as both.
"I shall let it pass this once. First days are a particular kind of complicated. Take your seats."
They did.
Roy, already seated beside Odyn, watched his brother's expression as the latecomers settled. Odyn was watching Weiss — specifically the way she found her seat and opened her notebook with the composed efficiency of someone who has already redirected this morning's indignities into the productivity of the present moment.
"Ice princess holding up?" Roy murmured.
"About as you'd expect," Odyn said. "I'll talk to her after."
"Good luck."
"I know where this is going," Odyn said, which was not luck but observation.
Port's lecture had the quality of something that had been delivered before in approximately these words and had arranged itself into a comfortable groove. The Grimm species on the board behind him were accurate. His delivery of them was enthusiastic. The story of himself as a young man that occupied the lecture's middle third was detailed in the way that stories about oneself are always more detailed than stories about other people, and Port inhabited it with the full authority of someone who has told it enough times to believe every word of it.
The dark elf teams received this with varying expressions. Khanna's eyebrow went up early and stayed up. Sarai's team exchanged a sequence of glances that communicated we are being polite with impressive simultaneity. ORHZ occupied themselves with a mixture of genuine attention and the practiced neutral expression of people who have sat through military briefings and know how to manage their faces.
In the front row, the four members of RWBY had arranged themselves on a spectrum of engagement. Blake and Yang were upright and attentive. Weiss was taking notes in the precise, left-tilted script she had inherited from her father's study habits and maintained out of stubbornness. Ruby had her chin in her hand and was creating something on her notepad.
The something revealed itself when Ruby showed it to Blake and Yang — a round, limbed drawing of the professor with stink lines and Professor Poop written below in Ruby's round handwriting. Blake suppressed a smile with her usual competence. Yang did not suppress hers at all.
Odyn, seeing this from his angle across the room, did not look at Weiss. He looked at the board.
Weiss, in the front row, had seen.
In the row behind Khanna's team, Giblet murmured something to Shallot about the timeline of the inevitable, which Lazuli revised to forty-five seconds and Baron politely asked them both to stop, which Flare seconded, which Sarai counted down with her fingers because she knew Weiss well enough to have a precise estimate.
Port cleared his throat.
The class fell into the specific quiet of an audience being called to attention.
"Now — who among you believes themselves to be the embodiment of the traits I have described?"
A hand went up.
It was precise, decisive, and white-gloved.
Odyn pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead.
Port beamed. "Excellent! A volunteer! Let's find out, shall we?"
The Boarbatusk was a dense, armored creature with the specific temperament of something that has been contained and has opinions about this. It charged with the full commitment of something that does not do things by halves, and Weiss met it the way she met most things — with her blade forward and her footwork already in motion.
She was good. The technical foundation was excellent and had been for years, and the use of Myrtenaster showed the kind of practice that produces reflexes rather than decisions. The Glyphs came up with the ease of long repetition. The audience of her classmates watched with the attentive silence of people who are seeing genuine ability and recognise it.
And yet.
Ruby tried to cheer.
"Go, Weiss!"
"Ruby." Flat. Sharp. The cadence of someone who is managing their temper and the temper is winning. "I need to focus."
Ruby recoiled slightly. Tried again a few exchanges later, her instinct to help overriding her read of the situation.
"Go for the belly — there's no armour underneath—"
"Stop it," Weiss said. "I know what I'm doing."
The I know what I'm doing was not delivered as information. It was delivered as a door, and it closed in Ruby's face with an audible sound that wasn't audible at all but that everyone in the classroom heard anyway.
Ruby sat back.
Odyn watched this from his seat with the expression of a person who had been hoping for a different outcome and had not received it. He said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say from across the room while a match was ongoing. He looked at Roy, who was already on his feet in the peripheral way of someone who has identified where he'll be needed when the moment arrives.
The match resolved. The Boarbatusk went still. Weiss stood over it with the slightly ragged composure of someone who has fought through frustration rather than with clarity, and the class applauded, and Port declared the lesson concluded.
And then the classroom was emptying, and Weiss was moving toward the door with the purposeful stride of someone who has decided that forward motion is the answer to being looked at, and a tail came down on the floor in her path with a sound that was final.
Zero Kazamaki was, in most contexts, measured. He brought the same contained precision to his opinions that he brought to his combat — aimed, deliberate, arriving exactly where he intended.
"Explain something to me," he said.
Giblet was behind Weiss before she'd finished turning. Shallot at his side. Lazuli to the left, Aiko at the right, Khanna somewhere behind all of them with the specific stillness of someone whose disappointment is more significant for being quiet.
"We know leadership isn't what you expected," Lazuli said. "We understand that. What we want to know is why that means Ruby deserves what you just gave her."
"She was trying to support you," Aiko added. "From where I was sitting, she looked like someone trying very hard to help a teammate who'd decided she didn't need any."
Scarlett: "And the face she made when you told her to stop it — you missed it, standing up there. I didn't."
Weiss had the expression of someone who is going to respond to this with the full force of several generations of Schnee composure, and she had drawn breath to do it, and then Odyn stepped forward and the breath came out of her without going anywhere.
"Enough," he said. Not loudly. He didn't need to be loud. "I have this."
Sarai started: "Nii-san—"
She saw his expression and reconsidered.
"Everyone go on ahead," Sarai said. "My brother handles what my brother handles."
There was a moment of collective recalibration. Then they went — not without the glances, not without the weight of their individual opinions still visible in the way they moved — but they went.
Hailfire paused at the door. "Roy," she said quietly.
Roy had already seen it.
He nodded, and slipped out after the others, and went to find Ruby.
Weiss stood in the emptying classroom with Odyn and the specific interior experience of someone who knows they have messed up and has not yet decided how to hold that.
"You're not going to agree with me, are you," she said. It was not quite a question.
"No," he said. "But I'm not angry with you either. I want to be clear about that first."
"You're disappointed," she said, because that was more accurate and also harder.
"I'm concerned," he said, which was more accurate still, and she absorbed it in the way she absorbed things from him — without the armour that she wore against everyone else, because with Odyn the armour had never quite worked. He had always been able to see around it, and she had, over nine years, decided that this was a feature rather than a flaw.
She moved to the window. The morning light across Beacon's grounds had the quality of something indifferent to the interior drama of first-year students.
"I know I should've been chosen," she said. "That's the truth of it. I know my capabilities, I know my training, I know the precedent. And instead they chose—"
"Ruby Rose," Odyn said. "Who ran into a Nevermore's neck at the top of a cliff yesterday and took its head off with a scythe, and then stood there in the cliff wind with the rose petals settling around her and every person below looking up at her, and the first thing she did was look down to check if everyone was all right."
Weiss was quiet.
"I'm not telling you your qualifications are wrong," he said. "I'm telling you that qualifications and leadership are different languages and you're fluent in one and still learning the other." He came to stand beside her at the window. "What does a leader need most?"
"Competence," she said, reflexively.
"The people behind her to follow her," he said. "Competence earns respect. The willingness to be followed is earned differently." He paused. "Do you think anyone in that classroom this morning wanted to follow you?"
The silence had a specific quality.
"...No," she said finally.
"Ruby's team was already following her before Port finished his lecture." He looked at her. Not with judgment — Odyn's gaze never carried judgment, which was one of the things about him that had always made Weiss feel simultaneously entirely seen and entirely safe. "That's not nothing. That's the thing itself."
Weiss pressed her hands flat against the windowsill.
"She was irritating me," she said. It came out smaller than she intended.
"I know."
"She doesn't think before she acts—"
"She thinks differently than you do. That's different."
"She—" Weiss stopped. Tried again. "I said things to her in that classroom that I shouldn't have said. In front of everyone."
"Yes."
"I need to apologise."
"Yes." A pause. "But first you need to know why you're apologising. An apology that comes from I was wrong is different from one that comes from I was embarrassed to be seen being wrong. One of those is useful to the person receiving it."
Weiss looked at her reflection in the window glass — the pale girl with the Schnee ponytail and the Schnee posture and the Schnee composure, and somewhere underneath all of it, the eight-year-old sitting on the garden fountain with her feet not quite reaching the ground.
"I was wrong," she said, to the reflection. "Not just embarrassed. Actually wrong."
"I know," Odyn said.
"I hate that you knew before I said it."
"I know that too."
She turned away from the window and found his eyes, which were patient in the specific way of someone who has been patient about this for a long time and intends to continue.
"I was also unfair to her," she said. "She was trying to help me and I treated her like she was in the way."
"Yes."
"She—" Weiss hesitated. Then: "She came back. After the forest yesterday, after I said what I said about her mother, she came back and apologised first. She didn't have to do that. I would have — I wouldn't have—" She stopped. "She came back first."
"She always does," Odyn said, which was an observation rather than a verdict. "That's who she is. The question is who you are in response to it."
Weiss breathed. Set her shoulders.
"Walk with me?" she asked.
He offered his hand.
She took it, in the way she always had — without ceremony, without making anything of it, simply because it was there and it was his and it was right — and they walked out of the classroom and into the corridor's light.
◈ — Roy and Ruby
He found her in the way he usually found things he was looking for — by moving toward them with the direct intention of a person who doesn't stop to question the impulse.
She was walking down the corridor with her head slightly down, which was not a Ruby Rose posture. Ruby Rose's natural posture was forward, with the particular quality of someone who is moving toward things rather than away from them. The current posture was the other kind.
He came up beside her and pulled her gently behind a corner, two fingers on her hood's edge. She would have said something about Weiss but saw him put a finger to his lips, and he tilted his head around the corner.
She looked.
Weiss and Odyn were walking down the corridor at the far end, and they were holding hands, and Ruby looked at this for a long moment.
Then Roy guided her away from the corner in the other direction, and they walked until the corridor opened into a small courtyard with a stone bench that faced a view of Beacon's grounds, and he sat, and he looked at her.
She sat beside him, because he had patted the space with the quiet certainty of someone who knows you'll come if invited, and she had come.
The courtyard had the particular quality of a place that has been designed for exactly this — for two people to sit in the open air and say things that are easier to say when the sky is available as an alternative focal point.
"That didn't go how you wanted it to," Roy said. Which was not a question but had enough room in it for an answer.
Ruby was quiet for a moment. Small tears made themselves present at the corners of her eyes, and she blinked them away with the determined efficiency of someone who has decided that crying is acceptable but prefers to decide when.
"I don't understand what I did wrong," she said. "I was trying to help her. She got angry anyway." A pause. "Maybe Ozpin made a mistake. Maybe I'm not—"
"Stop there," Roy said, gently but with the firmness of someone who has identified where a thought is going and has decided it shouldn't get there. "One day. It's been one day, Ruby."
"A day where my teammate—"
"A day where your teammate is working through something that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with who she was before she got here," he said. "Weiss isn't angry at you. She's angry at a situation and you're the nearest available target. That's different."
Ruby looked at him with the expression of someone who wants to be convinced and is not quite there yet.
"It doesn't feel different," she said.
"I know." He looked at the grounds below them — the stone paths, the trees, the students moving between buildings. "Odyn told me once that the hardest part of leading people isn't the enemies outside. It's learning to be patient with the people on your side who aren't ready yet."
"And what if they're never ready?"
"Weiss?" Roy considered. "She's ready. She just doesn't know it yet." He looked at Ruby sideways. "And between us — Odyn will have talked to her by this afternoon. He always does."
Ruby absorbed this. Then, quietly: "What is their relationship? They're holding hands and she looks at him like—" She stopped. "Is it more than just childhood friends?"
Roy looked at the sky with the expression of someone who is navigating a boundary he has been trusted with.
"That's Weiss's to tell you," he said. "When she's ready." A pause. "But I'll tell you this: the way Odyn has been there for her across some very hard years — the kind of years that could've made her a completely different person — is the reason she came back after the forest yesterday. It's the reason she apologised first." He looked at Ruby. "Someone showed her what it means to come back. She learned it from somewhere."
Ruby sat with this.
Then: "Do you think she'll apologise today? For the classroom?"
"I think," Roy said, "that Weiss Schnee, when she decides to do something, does it completely." He stood, and offered his hand to pull her up, which she took. "Are you all right?"
She was on her feet now, and the posture was returning — the forward posture, the Ruby posture, the one that moved toward things.
"Yeah," she said. "I think so."
"Good." He let her hand go, which took a moment longer than strictly necessary, but neither of them commented on this. "Then let's go find something to eat before the afternoon gets complicated."
Ruby managed a laugh that was small but genuine. "The afternoon is always complicated."
"Welcome to Beacon," he said.
◈ — The Common Room: Afternoon
The common room had the quality of a space that is used in different ways by different people — some of the armchairs occupied by students with books, some of the tables claimed for study sessions, the light coming through the tall windows in the golden-hour angle that made everything look more significant than it was.
The teams had assembled there in the loose, unplanned way of people who have ended up in the same place because there is nowhere else to be. JNPR at a table near the window. Khanna's team spread across two armchairs and a section of floor. Sarai's group at the back. Odyn and Roy and Hailfire and Zero arranged in the configuration they habitually used — a loose semicircle that looked casual and was actually quite deliberate.
Nora was doing something with a chess piece that Ren was politely failing to discourage.
Ruby was on the couch between Yang and Blake, nursing a mug of something warm that Yang had procured with the confidence of someone who is good at locating kitchens. She was quiet — not the subdued quiet of someone who has given up, but the focused quiet of someone who is waiting for the right moment.
The door opened.
Weiss came in.
She stood for a moment just inside the doorway, and the room's ambient conversation reduced itself in the way that rooms do when something is about to happen. She looked at Ruby across the room, and there was a directness in her gaze that was different from the morning's sharpness — this was the directness of purpose rather than frustration.
She walked to the centre of the room.
"Ruby," she said, and her voice had the specific quality of someone who has decided to do something entirely and is doing it entirely. "I owe you an apology. A public one — because I behaved badly in public, and you deserve the correction in the same register."
Yang sat up. Blake lowered her book. Nora stopped fiddling with the chess piece.
"In Professor Port's class today," Weiss continued, "you were trying to be a supportive teammate. You offered encouragement, and then tactical information you had every right to offer as team leader, and I responded to both with contempt." She held Ruby's gaze. "That wasn't a mistake. It was a choice, and it was the wrong one, and I'm sorry."
The room was quiet.
"I came to Beacon," Weiss said, with slightly less certainty and slightly more truth, "expecting certain things to be a certain way. You are not those things. You're something I wasn't expecting, and I've been using that as a reason to be unkind, and that is not — it is not acceptable. You are my team leader and my partner and I have not been behaving like I understand what either of those words means."
Somewhere toward the back of the room, Khanna's expression had the quality of someone who is very pleased and is not going to make a noise about it.
Ruby stood.
The room braced.
What happened was that Ruby Rose, silver-eyed and red-caped and still slightly damp around the edges of her day, crossed the room in three steps and wrapped both arms around Weiss Schnee with the full commitment of someone who has decided that the correct response to an apology of this quality is not a handshake.
Weiss's expression, for approximately two seconds, was the expression of someone who has not prepared for this.
Then her arms came up and she returned it, and the room breathed.
Nora made a sound that was extremely emotional and immediately received Ren's hand on her shoulder in the reflex of someone who has learned to manage Nora's emotional responses preventively.
"You're still a bit of a disaster," Ruby said, from inside the hug.
"I am aware of that," Weiss said, with great dignity.
"But you're my disaster now. Partners stick together, remember?"
"I remember." A pause. "Please don't tell anyone I'm going to be nicer to you."
"Too late," Blake said, from behind her book.
"Absolutely too late," Yang confirmed.
Weiss pulled back and straightened her jacket with the determination of someone restoring order to themselves, and Ruby was grinning in the way she grinned when something has resolved correctly, and for a moment the afternoon light through the common room windows made everything look like it had always been going to arrive here, which was perhaps accurate.
Roy's suggestion of cookies had been received by the group with the enthusiasm of people who have had a difficult day and have correctly identified that sugar is one of the available solutions. By some combination of Nora's persuasiveness and Yang's confidence and the kitchen staff's decision that this was not a battle worth having, the common room transformed over the following hour into something that smelled like butter and warmth.
Weiss found herself at the edge of it — not outside exactly, but at the margin of the celebration, watching the room with the expression of someone who is learning a new kind of participation. Odyn materialised beside her in the way he sometimes did, without announcement, simply present.
"Well done," he said.
"Don't," she said. "You'll make me feel like a child who's learned a lesson."
"You're not a child," he said. "You're a person who did something hard and did it well. Those are different things."
She looked at the room — Ruby animated and warm, passing cookies to people she was still technically meeting for the first time but who had decided to receive her as though they'd known her for years; Yang presiding over a corner of the celebration with the effortless authority of someone who was born to preside; Blake at a window, ostensibly reading, visibly smiling.
"I had a good teacher," Weiss said, which was an admission rather than a deflection, and she knew it, and he knew it.
He did not make anything of it.
She was grateful for that.
◈ — Yang, and Other Observations
Yang Xiao Long was, by her own honest assessment, a fairly subtle person.
She had maintained this assessment for years despite substantial evidence to the contrary, and she maintained it now while standing across the common room from Ruby — who was talking with Roy, who had said something that made Ruby laugh, and Ruby's face was doing the thing it did when she was attempting composure and had already lost the argument.
Oh, Yang thought, with the warm satisfaction of an older sister recognising something that the younger sister has not yet found the language for. This is going to be absolutely wonderful.
The warmth in Ruby's face when Roy leaned in to catch her response to something. The way Ruby's hands came up in the gesture she used when she was enthusiastic about something and was trying not to be too obvious about it. The way Roy was listening — not waiting for his turn to speak, actually listening — with the quality of someone who finds the person speaking genuinely worth hearing.
Yang had been watching Roy across three days of initiation and dormitory negotiations and the shared chaos of the Emerald Forest, and her assessment was: steady, genuine, capable, and currently looking at her little sister with the specific expression of someone who has noticed something and is being careful about it.
Good instincts, in other words. Ruby deserved good instincts.
She was in the middle of mentally drafting the teasing schedule when she became aware that she was standing close to the common room's back corner, and that close to the common room's back corner was where a group of unfamiliar students had settled — and that one of them was, from the angle where Yang was standing, extremely well-constructed and also currently doing a stretch that should probably not be allowed in a shared common area.
Yang became very interested in the cookie on her plate.
The cookie was interesting for approximately three seconds.
"Are you all right?" Blake said, appearing at her elbow with the stealth that Yang would never fully make peace with.
"Studying combat techniques," Yang said, without looking up from the cookie.
"Of course you are," Blake said, in the tone of someone who believes none of this and is not going to pretend otherwise. She looked toward the corner and then back at Yang with an expression that was too composed to be anything but amused. "Studying them very attentively, from what I can see."
"A good huntress is always observant."
"That's true. Blake Belladonna says it, right here." Blake took a small bite of her own cookie and did not say anything further, which was, in Yang's experience, far more pointed than saying something.
"What I'm not," Yang said, with the dignity of someone who has decided to stake a position, "is as obvious as Ruby."
"No," Blake agreed.
"Because Ruby is incredibly obvious. She's like... a semaphore signal. She might as well be holding little flags."
"She dropped her cookie when he smiled at her from across the room," Blake said.
"Exactly. That's the level. I'm nowhere near that level."
"You walked into a door," Blake said, "during the training observation session on Monday."
Yang opened her mouth.
"He was demonstrating a footwork sequence," Blake added.
Yang closed her mouth.
"I'm just saying," Blake continued, with the precise enjoyment of someone who has been on the receiving end of observations of this kind and has banked the currency for appropriate use, "that glass houses are a consideration."
Yang looked at the ceiling. The ceiling did not help.
"We're not talking about this," Yang said.
"We're absolutely not," Blake agreed, with a smile she wasn't quite managing to suppress.
"I'm going to go tease Ruby about Roy," Yang said.
"Probably safer for both of us," Blake said.
Yang pointed at her. "I like you."
"I know," Blake said.
◈ — Ruby, Later
Blake appeared beside Ruby with the timing of someone who has selected their moment carefully.
"You're not very subtle," Blake said, conversationally.
Ruby was going to protest, but Blake held up a small cookie and continued: "I happened to be in the library yesterday afternoon. He was there also." A pause. "Reading a book of poetry. The page was marked."
Ruby looked at her.
"The poem was titled Silver Eyes in Moonlight."
Ruby nearly choked. She managed not to, which she counted as a significant personal achievement given the circumstances.
Blake's amber eyes had the specific quality of warmth that appeared in them only when she thought no one was going to see it, which was the moment when Blake Belladonna was actually quite funny.
"I'm not saying anything further," Blake said. "I just thought you should know."
She drifted back to her window.
Ruby stood in the middle of the common room holding a cookie and conducting a private internal crisis of the kind that arrived when information confirmed something you had been carefully not quite confirming.
Silver eyes in moonlight.
She looked at Roy, who was talking to Sarai, and he glanced up and caught her looking, and smiled in the way he smiled — unhurried, direct, the smile of someone who is not trying to produce an effect but is producing one anyway.
Ruby looked very carefully at her cookie.
The cookie was not helpful.
The celebration wound down in the gentle, gradual way of evenings that have been good — the attendees drifting away in pairs and small clusters, the energy settling from animated to warm, the conversations dropping from performance to the quieter register of people who have decided to stay a little longer because the alternative is going back to their rooms.
Nora had achieved sleep on Ren's shoulder, which he had accepted with the resignation of someone who has learned that resistance is a waste of energy he could use for other things. Blake was at the window with her book, reading with the occasional small expression that she was not aware she was making. Weiss was beside the fireplace with Odyn, and the quality of their conversation — the ease of it, the specific shorthand of two people who have been finding ways to talk to each other across nine years of distance — was visible in the way they sat, the way they didn't need to face each other directly to be paying complete attention.
"Walk you back?" Roy said, appearing beside Ruby as she was gathering empty plates with the helpful instinct of someone who defaults to being useful.
The question was simple. Ruby's heart treated it as a complex matter requiring immediate processing.
"I'd like that," she said, and was pleased her voice didn't do anything embarrassing.
Yang, passing with her own stack of plates, deployed the wink. Ruby absorbed the wink with the practiced tolerance of someone who has been absorbing Yang-related commentary for fifteen years.
The corridors of Beacon at night had a particular quality — the moon through the high windows, the stone quiet around the sound of their footsteps, the occasional lamp burning amber in an alcove. They talked about small things: Port's class and what they each actually thought of the lecture underneath the politeness, and the Boarbatusk's weak point that Ruby had identified and would have been very useful to deliver at a different moment, and weapons in general because this was a direction that Ruby was always willing to go.
Roy listened in the way he had — attentively, with the occasional question that showed he was actually following rather than waiting — and Ruby talked, and the conversation had the easy quality of something that was not trying to be anything other than what it was.
At the door to the RWBY dormitory, they stopped.
"Ruby," he said.
"Yeah?" She turned, and the moonlight from the corridor's window was doing whatever it was doing, and she was aware that she had zero composure left for this evening and was operating entirely on instinct.
"What I said before — that I'd be there, anytime." He looked at her with the directness that was just his natural mode, unperformed and uncalculated, which was the thing about it that she found most difficult to manage. "I meant it."
"I know you did," she said. Then, because there was courage somewhere in her that had apparently decided this was the right application for it: "There's a modification I've been working on for Crescent Rose. The firing mechanism on the third configuration — I keep losing about fifteen percent efficiency in the conversion. I've been trying to figure out where the loss is happening and I can't quite—"
"The forge is open at seven," he said. "I'll be there."
Her smile arrived in the way of things that have been waiting for the right occasion.
"Is that—" he said, and stopped, and the stopping was very deliberate. "Would that be— I want to say that correctly."
"Yes," she said. "That would be."
He smiled.
Inside the dormitory, Yang was not pressed against the door because she had told Blake thirty seconds ago that she was absolutely not going to press against the door, and Blake had given her the look, and Yang had taken a principled stand on the matter that had lasted until Roy said Ruby's name in the corridor and then she had compromised her position somewhat.
Blake was sitting on her bed reading, choosing not to address any of this.
Ruby came in on the specific cloud of someone who has had a day that started badly and resolved somewhere considerably better than expected. She looked at Yang, who was standing with an expression of profound contained delight two feet from the door.
"Not a word," Ruby said.
"I'm not saying anything," Yang said.
"Your face is saying things."
"My face is simply existing in this room. I can't control what my face does."
Blake turned a page. "She dropped the plates she was carrying when he said her name," she reported, without looking up.
"I didn't—" Ruby stopped. "You were watching—"
"I have good peripheral vision," Blake said. "It's a faunus advantage."
Yang made a sound that was the sound of someone who has found this deeply personally satisfying.
Ruby pulled her hood over her head and surrendered.
The dormitory settled into its night configuration — Yang's soft light still on for another half hour, Blake's lamp burning over her book, Weiss's breathing from the ground-level bed already the slow, even rhythm of someone who has spent her emotional reserves for the day and gone to sleep early. Above them all, in the ceiling-suspended tent of Ruby's rope-hung bunk, a small smile remained for quite some time before it too followed everyone else into quiet.
Through the high window, the shattered moon traced its arc across the Vale sky.
Below it, Beacon Academy continued its first night of being whatever it was going to become.
— To Be Continued —
Next Time: Chapter 8 — Budding Things; The Forge, the Fairgrounds, and What Gets Said Sideways.