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
Song: Alive by ReoNa (Arknights: Prelude to Dawn Anime Opening)
Visuals
Introduction: The track surges forward with its striking, melancholic drive as the screen comes alive, substituting the original Arknights character models with the ensemble cast of this crossover narrative.
The Conflict: The visuals flash rapidly between the deep-seated, systemic political divide splitting the dark elves from humanity, juxtaposing tense, quiet standoffs against heavily armed Atlas military patrols. The tempo accelerates dynamically as elite Huntsmen and Huntresses plunge headlong into chaotic, fast-paced combat, slicing through massive waves of Grimm.
The Chorus: As the chorus hits its powerful, driving stride, the choreography widens to highlight the broader frictions of the world. Odyn and his fellow dark elves are shown locked in desperate, uphill struggles against human forces, mirrored closely by Faunus and Saiyan characters fighting fiercely for their place, survival, and autonomy.
The Climax: The music begins to soften into a resonant, echoing cadence. The camera glides smoothly to a windswept overlook, capturing Odyn and Weiss standing side-by-side as they gaze out over the horizon. Odyn turns his head to look quietly at Weiss. Catching his gaze, Weiss offers a soft, genuine smile.
Title Card: The screen cuts abruptly to black, leaving the dramatic, glowing crimson and icy blue title card to flash across the darkness:
FLAME AND ICE
Chapter 7 - The Badge, The Burden, and Complicated Feelings
She was eight years old in the dream.
The expansive gardens of the Schnee estate in summer possessed a specific quality of light that Weiss had tried, at various points in her life, to describe to people who had never actually laid eyes on them. She had never quite managed it to her satisfaction. The closest she had ever come was comparing it to standing inside a magnificent painting that hadn't yet quite decided whether it wanted to be joyful or melancholic-which was accurate in the peculiar way that descriptions of dreams are accurate, meaning it was imprecise and viewed entirely from the wrong angle.
She was running. He was running behind her, and ahead of her, and somehow simultaneously in both places at once, because dreams operate on their own fluid geography. The manicured garden path wound its way through the dense boxwood hedge maze her grandfather had planted before she was born. At the exact center of the labyrinth stood the classic stone fountain with the carved marble bird at its apex, and they always ended up there eventually-both in the memory and in the dream, every single pathway in the garden inevitably resolved itself to that central fountain.
They sat together on the wide stone lip of the fountain's edge. His feet didn't quite touch the ground. Her feet didn't quite reach the ground either, but she was eight and he was ten, and there was a dignified age differential she was stubbornly unprepared to acknowledge.
He said something quietly, a string of words she couldn't quite hear through the haze of the dream, but she already knew what they were. She had known what they were for nine long years, carrying them with her the way you carry things that are simply too important ever to put down.
She replied. He smiled.
The rushing water of the fountain caught the sunlight, turning the spray to liquid silver.
Then a sharp, piercing whistle went off directly beside her ear, and the dream shattered.
She hit the floor.
The floor of the Team RWBY dormitory was neither soft nor forgiving, and it made zero apologies for its lack of hospitality. Weiss pushed herself up from the cold wood with the precise, icy expression of someone who had been violently yanked from sleep and was currently searching for the responsible party.
Ruby Rose was standing right in the middle of the room brandishing a polished metal whistle. She was dressed in her full combat uniform, radiating the bouncing, boundless energy of someone who had been awake for hours and was currently on the wrong side of that fact relative to everyone else in the room.
"Good morning, Team RWBY!"
Weiss stared at her.
She looked over at her other teammates, who were already up and dressed-Yang wearing the amused posture of someone who had been awake long enough to find the whole spectacle funny, and Blake wearing the quiet, resigned posture of someone who found it mildly unfortunate.
Then she looked back at the whistle.
Then back at Ruby.
"What," Weiss said, her voice dropping an octave, "is fundamentally wrong with you?"
Ruby simply pressed forward with the brisk momentum of someone who had a rigid schedule to keep and had decided that any reasonable questions regarding that schedule could be addressed at a much later date. Weiss hauled herself up from the floor with the controlled, absolute dignity of a girl who refused to let a hardwood floor win, strode over, and pressed her palms flat against the dormitory's windowsill, taking a long, steadying breath.
Try to help her, Odyn's voice echoed gently in that quiet corner of her mind where she kept the things she was actively working on. For me.
She breathed out slowly.
"Right," she muttered to herself, her voice a soft hum. "Deep breaths."
Getting the dormitory room arranged had been an entire operational project in its own right.
Yang's primary contribution to the interior design had been boundless enthusiasm accompanied by a poster of six young men in various stages of intense athletic posturing, which she aggressively taped to her section of the wall with the supreme confidence of someone making a definitive aesthetic choice that required zero consensus. Blake's contribution was predictably methodical-her extensive collection of books found their proper homes on the shelves with the quiet deliberation of someone running a strict classification system-though she did briefly freeze over a particular volume, her amber eyes widening slightly in alarm before she quickly tucked it back onto the shelf cover-inward with the frantic care of someone desperately hoping nobody had witnessed it.
Nobody had.
The furniture crisis, naturally, was tackled the way most of Ruby Rose's logistical challenges were handled: with a creative solution that was technically within safety bounds and practically terrifying. Weiss had strongly objected. Yang had enthusiastically approved. Blake had calmly assessed the structural load-bearing merits. The democratic vote went precisely the way everyone knew it would go, and the sound of makeshift carpentry echoed down the dormitory corridor for twenty frantic minutes.
The final result was functional, which was the most generous word for it. Ruby's bed hung suspended from the high ceiling by a complex system of ropes she had engineered with the hyper-focused confidence of someone who had studied the physics problem and arrived at a wildly unconventional answer. Yang's mattress rested upon an elevated platform propped up by stacks of Blake's dense scholarly novels-an arrangement Blake had permitted with a tranquil calmness suggesting she had made peace with the potential literary catastrophe. Blake's own bed occupied the quiet space directly beneath Yang's, while Weiss's bed sat firmly on the ground, which Weiss privately accepted as the least interesting solution and therefore, thankfully, the safest.
They were all standing back to survey their handiwork when a sharp knock rapped against the door.
Weiss stepped forward and pulled it open.
Odyn was standing in the hallway wearing Beacon's standard uniform-the dark tailored jacket and slacks, the crisp white undershirt, everything worn with the neat, effortless precision it was designed for. The cumulative effect, Weiss discovered the exact second the door swung open, was something she had utterly failed to prepare herself for. She stood frozen in the doorway for a beat longer than socially acceptable.
"Is there something on my face?" he asked, a faint, amused twitch at the corner of his mouth.
"No." She frantically gathered her composure. "You-you look well. The uniform suits you."
She was instantly, painfully aware that this was not even close to her most articulate piece of conversational brilliance, and she was acutely aware that Odyn knew it too. He was currently doing her the massive courtesy of not calling her out on it out loud, while simultaneously smiling in a way that acknowledged her internal panic completely.
"We're heading down to class ahead of you," he said, shifting his gaze past her shoulder to peer into the dormitory's interior, where the gravity-defying bunk arrangements were fully visible. He studied them for a long moment with the expression of a tactician deciding it was entirely not his battle to fight. "You might want to hurry."
Behind him, Hailfire suddenly piped up, "We really should be moving, Mi-" She abruptly cut herself off mid-syllable, stumbling over her words with the subtle internal panic of someone who had nearly slipped up. "-I mean, Odyn. We're going to be late."
Ruby, who had been hovering nearby, tilted her head at the awkward hitch in Hailfire's sentence, displaying the transparent, weaponized curiosity of someone filing away a juicy detail for later use.
Odyn cleared his throat. Roy offered a cheerful little wave toward Ruby. Sarai's squad filed past quietly in the hallway behind them. Across the hall, Team JNPR peered cautiously out from their own open doorway, wearing the utterly bewildered expressions of people who had been violently woken by the sounds of indoor carpentry and had yet to figure out what dimension they were currently living in.
The door clicked shut.
Weiss slowly turned around to find three pairs of intense, highly focused eyes locked directly onto her.
"What?" she demanded, crossing her arms defensively.
Yang wore the triumphant grin of a woman who had successfully tested a hypothesis and was deeply pleased with the results. Blake wore the polite, neutral expression of someone who had arrived at the exact same conclusion and was trying very hard to be tactful about it. Ruby wore the wide-eyed look of someone who had figured out roughly a quarter of the puzzle and was fully prepared to demand the rest of the pieces right now.
"Are you and Odyn more than just friends?" Ruby blurted out, deploying the guileless, zero-filter directness of someone for whom tact was a theoretical concept she had heard of but never quite mastered. "Because the two of you seem awfully close for just being childhood best friends."
"It's like," Yang chimed in, leaning against a bedpost, "you two operate on a wavelength that takes a lot longer than friendship to build."
"I have admittedly been wondering the same thing," Blake added, which was entirely unhelpful and infuriatingly accurate.
Yang's smile slipped into its most mischievous configuration. "So-are you two an item?"
The heat rushed into Weiss's cheeks with terrifying speed, entirely without her permission.
"We are not," she snapped, her voice pitching up with absolute, defensive conviction as she spun around to glare at the wall clock. "We are childhood friends who have known each other for a very long time, and I would thank you to-what on earth time is it?"
Ruby glanced up at the clock. "Nine o'clock at-"
"It is eight fifty-five," Weiss hissed, panicking.
Ruby took a second to process the math.
"We're going to be late!" Weiss shrieked, already bolting for the door.
Ruby processed that a whole lot faster.
"To class!" Ruby yelled, and they all ran.
- Professor Port's Class
Peter Port was a man who had been a huntsman for a very long time and possessed the stories to prove it-all of which he had meticulously organized into a rotating curriculum that was, structurally speaking, a lecture, but in practice, a high-production solo performance with subtle educational elements.
The classroom was already packed when Teams RWBY and JNPR arrived at the doorway in that breathless, slightly disheveled configuration unique to people who had been running flat out and had achieved not-quite-late-enough-to-be-formally-penalized. Port raised his bushy white eyebrows at them with the benevolent, knowing expression of an instructor who had seen this exact panic a thousand times and decided to use it as a teaching moment.
"Miss Rose and friends. So glad you could finally grace us with your presence."
Ruby rubbed the back of her head, wincing. "Sorry we're late, Professor."
"We lost track of time," Jaune added, which was an honest explanation rather than a defense, though Port received it as a generous mix of both.
"I shall let it slide this once. First weeks are a particular kind of complicated. Find your seats."
They scrambled to comply.
Roy, already seated beside Odyn, watched his brother's expression as the latecomers settled into their rows. Odyn's dark eyes were tracking Weiss-specifically observing the way she located her desk and opened her notebook with the crisp, efficient precision of someone who had successfully redirected that morning's personal indignities into the immediate productivity of the present moment.
"Ice princess holding up okay?" Roy murmured under his breath.
"About as well as you'd expect," Odyn replied quietly. "I'll talk to her after class."
"Good luck with that."
"I know where this conversation is going," Odyn noted, which wasn't about luck at all, but rather long-term behavioral observation.
Port's lecture possessed the comfortable, well-worn quality of a routine that had been delivered in approximately these exact words for decades, settling neatly into a familiar groove. The Grimm classifications projected onto the chalkboard behind him were biologically accurate, and his delivery of them was undeniably enthusiastic. The sprawling, self-aggrandizing story of his youth that occupied the lecture's middle third was detailed in the way personal legends always are-vastly more elaborate than stories about anyone else-and Port inhabited the narrative with the full, booming authority of a man who had told the tale so many times he believed every single exaggerated word of it.
The dark elf students received this performance with wildly varying expressions. Khanna's dark eyebrow arched upward early in the speech and stubbornly stayed there. Sarai's squad exchanged a rapid sequence of silent glances that communicated we are maintaining polite decorum with impressive simultaneity. ORHZ split their attention between genuine attentiveness and the practiced, neutral mask of veterans who had sat through countless military briefings and knew precisely how to manage their facial expressions.
In the front row, the four members of RWBY had arranged themselves along a clear spectrum of engagement. Blake and Yang were sitting upright and attentive. Weiss was furiously scribbling notes in the precise, left-tilted script she had inherited from her father's rigorous study habits and maintained out of sheer stubborn pride. Ruby, on the other hand, had her chin planted firmly in her palm and was sketching something on a loose scrap of paper.
The true nature of her drawing revealed itself when she surreptitiously slid it over to Blake and Yang: a crude, round-limbed caricature of the professor complete with literal stink lines, labeled Professor Poop in Ruby's round, bubbly handwriting. Blake suppressed a smile with her usual practiced composure. Yang didn't bother suppressing hers at all, letting out a sharp snort of amusement.
Odyn, observing this quiet piece of mischief from his vantage point across the room, didn't look at Weiss. Instead, he simply stared at the chalkboard.
Weiss, sitting right in the front row, had seen the whole thing.
Back in the row behind Khanna's team, Giblet muttered something low to Shallot about the inevitable ticking timeline of an explosion. Lazuli revised the countdown to forty-five seconds. Baron politely asked them both to shut up, a sentiment Flare instantly seconded, while Sarai began counting down on her fingers because she knew Weiss well enough to have a mathematically precise estimate.
Professor Port cleared his throat loudly.
The classroom instantly snapped back into the tight, heavy silence of an audience brought back to attention.
"Now-who among my students believes themselves to be the living embodiment of the heroic traits I have just described?"
A hand shot up.
It was precise, decisive, and encased in a pristine white glove.
Odyn slowly pressed the heel of his palm directly against his forehead.
Port beamed, his mustache twitching. "Magnificent! A volunteer! Let us put your conviction to the test, shall we?"
The Boarbatusk was a dense, heavily armored creature carrying the volatile, aggressive temperament of a beast that had been violently caged and held profound, violent opinions about the matter. It charged forward with the total, unhinged commitment of a creature that didn't do things by halves, and Weiss met it the way she met most obstacles-blade flashing forward, her rigorous footwork already blurring into motion.
She was good. The foundational technique was exceptional, honed by years of private tutors, and her handling of Myrtenaster showcased the kind of grueling repetition that produces instantaneous reflexes rather than conscious decisions. Her Glyphs snapped into existence with effortless familiarity. The surrounding classmates watched in attentive, respectful silence, recognizing the genuine article when they saw it.
And yet, something was off.
Ruby tried to offer a burst of supportive encouragement.
"Go get 'em, Weiss!"
"Ruby," Weiss hissed, her voice flat, sharp, and laden with ice. It was the lethal cadence of a girl managing her rising temper-and losing. "I need to focus."
Ruby recoiled slightly, stung. But a few exchanges later, her relentless instinct to help overrode her read of the room.
"Target the soft spot on the belly-there's no armor underneath-"
"Stop talking," Weiss snapped back. "I know what I'm doing."
That I know what I'm doing wasn't delivered as mere information. It was delivered like a heavy iron door slamming shut right in Ruby's face-a sound that wasn't audibly registered by the physical ears, but one every single person in the classroom felt echoing in the air.
Ruby slumped back in her seat, silenced.
Odyn watched the exchange from across the room with the heavy, troubled expression of a man who had been silently hoping for a completely different outcome and had been denied. He said nothing, knowing full well there was nothing useful to shout from across the auditorium while a live combat match was underway. He glanced over at Roy, who was already shifting his weight in his seat with the subtle, preparatory posture of someone who knew precisely where he'd be needed the second the bell rang.
The match resolved. The Boarbatusk went still. Weiss stood over the motionless carcass with the slightly ragged, brittle composure of a girl who had fought through sheer frustration rather than clear tactical focus. The classroom politely applauded, and Professor Port officially declared the lesson concluded.
The moment the dismissal was given, the room began to empty out. Weiss marched toward the exit with the rigid, purposeful stride of someone attempting to outrun her own mounting panic through sheer forward momentum.
Then, a heavy, scaled tail dropped deliberately onto the floor right in her path, blocking her exit with a dull thud that carried an unmistakable finality.
Zero Kazamaki was, by nature, a man of profound measurement. He brought the exact same targeted, razor-sharp precision to his social opinions as he did to his combat forms-aimed, deliberate, and landing squarely where intended.
"Before you walk away, explain something to me," Zero said, his red eyes locked onto her.
Giblet materialized behind Weiss before she could even pivot to face him, with Shallot flanking his right. Lazuli stepped in on her left, Aiko hovered protectively nearby, and Khanna brought up the rear-carrying the heavy, still silence of a leader whose profound disappointment carried far more weight precisely because she refused to raise her voice.
"We know leadership isn't what you expected," Lazuli stated, crossing her arms. "We understand that transition is difficult. What we want to know is why that frustration justifies taking it out on Ruby the way you just did."
"She was only trying to support you," Aiko added, her voice laced with quiet disapproval. "From where I was standing, she looked like someone bending over backward to help a teammate who had already decided she didn't want any."
Scarlett chimed in from the side: "And the look on her face when you chewed her out-you missed it, standing up there in the spotlight. The rest of us didn't."
Weiss stiffened, adopting the icy, untouchable posture of a young aristocrat ready to deploy generations of Schnee conditioning to cut them all down to size. She drew in a sharp breath to unleash it-
And then Odyn stepped past the group. The breath vanished from her lungs before she could even form a single syllable.
"Enough," he said. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "I'll handle this."
Sarai started to step forward, brow furrowed. "Nii-san-"
She caught the absolute, unyielding look in his dark eyes and instantly stopped herself.
"Everyone else, head on out," Sarai instructed, turning to the others. "My brother handles what my brother handles."
There was a brief, tense moment of collective hesitation. Then they moved-not without casting lingering glares, and not without carrying the visible weight of their individual anger-but they cleared the aisle.
Hailfire paused right beside the doorway, casting a sidelong look. "Roy," she murmured quietly.
Roy was already on his feet.
He offered her a brief, silent nod, slipped smoothly past the departing group, and headed straight out into the corridor to find Ruby.
Weiss stood in the rapidly emptying classroom alongside Odyn, carrying the heavy, localized interior weight of someone who knew full well they had fundamentally messed up and simply hadn't yet figured out how to hold that reality.
"You're not going to agree with me, are you," she said. It wasn't quite phrased as a question; it was a preemptive surrender.
"No," he said smoothly. "But I'm not angry with you either. I want to make sure I'm crystal clear about that first."
"You're disappointed," she murmured, because that was intellectually more accurate-and significantly more painful to admit.
"I'm concerned," he corrected softly, which was truer still. She absorbed it the way she always absorbed truths from him-completely stripping away the polished, defensive armor she wore against the rest of the world. With Odyn, that armor had never really worked anyway; he had always possessed an uncanny ability to see straight through it. Over the span of nine years, she had quietly decided that was a vital feature rather than a flaw.
She drifted away, walking over to stand by the tall, arched window. The morning sunlight washing across Beacon's sweeping grounds possessed a cold indifference to the fragile, high-stakes interior drama of first-year huntsman students.
"I know I should've been chosen," she confessed, her voice tight. "That's the naked truth of it. I know my capabilities, I know my rigorous training, I know the historical precedent. And instead of any of that, they chose-"
"Ruby Rose," Odyn finished for her. "Who threw herself straight into a Nevermore's throat at the top of a cliff yesterday and hacked its head clean off with a scythe, then stood tall in the rushing cliff wind with rose petals settling all around her while every single person below looked up in awe-and the very first thing she did when she hit the ground was look around to make sure everyone else was completely safe."
Weiss fell entirely quiet.
"I'm not telling you your qualifications are wrong," he continued gently. "I'm telling you that formal qualifications and genuine leadership are written in two entirely different languages, and you happen to be fluent in one while still stumbling through the alphabet of the other." He walked over, coming to a halt right beside her at the window. "What do you think a leader needs most of all?"
"Competence," she answered automatically, out of sheer reflex.
"The people behind her actually wanting to follow her," he countered. "Competence earns you respect. But the willingness of others to follow you into the dark is earned entirely differently." He paused, letting the words settle. "Do you think a single person in that classroom this morning genuinely wanted to follow you?"
The silence that rushed in to fill the space had a sharp, biting quality.
"...No," she whispered finally.
"Ruby's team was already following her before Port even finished his lecture." He glanced sideways at her. His dark gaze was completely devoid of judgment-Odyn's eyes never carried judgment, which was precisely why being around him always made Weiss feel simultaneously entirely seen and entirely safe. "That isn't nothing. That is the thing itself."
Weiss pressed her small palms flat against the wooden sill.
"She was irritating me," she muttered. It came out sounding far smaller and more childish than she intended.
"I know."
"She never thinks before she acts-"
"She thinks differently than you do. That's a distinction, not a flaw."
"She-" Weiss choked on the words, stopped, and forced herself to try again. "I said things to her in that classroom that I had no business saying. Especially not in front of everyone."
"Yes."
"I need to apologise."
"Yes." He paused, letting a beat of silence pass. "But first, you need to understand why you're apologising. An apology born from I was wrong is fundamentally different from one born from I was deeply embarrassed to be caught being wrong. Only one of those is actually useful to the person on the receiving end."
Weiss looked down, watching her own pale reflection staring back at her in the window glass-the neat Schnee ponytail, the rigid Schnee posture, the carefully maintained Schnee composure-and somewhere underneath all those layers of aristocratic armor, she saw the ghost of an eight-year-old girl sitting beside a garden fountain with her feet dangling just an inch above the stone.
"I was wrong," she told her reflection, her voice dropping the defensive edge. "Not just embarrassed. Actually, genuinely wrong."
"I know," Odyn said quietly.
"I utterly hate the fact that you knew that before I even said it out loud."
"I know that too."
She turned away from the window, lifting her chin to meet his eyes-eyes that held the quiet, enduring patience of someone who had practiced being patient with her for a very long time, and fully intended to keep doing so.
"Will you walk with me?" she asked.
He held out his hand.
She took it instantly, sliding her fingers into his without ceremony, without overthinking it, simply because his hand was there, it was his, and it felt completely right. Together, they turned away from the window and walked out of the quiet classroom and into the bright, moving light of the corridor.
— Roy and Ruby
He found her the way he usually found things he was looking for—by moving toward them with the direct, purposeful stride of someone who never wasted time second-guessing an instinct.
She was trudging down the stone corridor with her head slightly bowed, which was entirely the wrong posture for a girl like Ruby Rose. Ruby's natural default setting was always tipped forward, radiating that signature kinetic momentum of someone actively moving toward things rather than away from them. This slumped, heavy-footed stance was the other kind entirely.
Roy materialized beside her, silently sliding two fingers beneath the edge of her red hood and smoothly guiding her behind the safety of a wide stone pillar. She immediately opened her mouth to snap about Weiss, but stopped when Roy pressed a single finger to his lips and tilted his head around the corner.
She peeked.
Further down the sweeping corridor, Weiss and Odyn were walking side by side, their fingers laced together. Ruby stared at the sight for a long, quiet moment.
Without missing a beat, Roy gently steered her away from the corner in the opposite direction. They walked in comfortable silence until the hallway opened up into a secluded outdoor courtyard featuring a stone bench overlooking the sprawling, sunlit expanse of Beacon's academy grounds. Roy sat down, patted the open space beside him, and looked at her.
She sat down next to him, responding to the quiet, absolute certainty of an invitation she knew she didn't want to refuse.
The courtyard had the distinct, peaceful quality of a space intentionally designed for moments like this—a place where two people could sit out in the open air and say things that somehow felt much easier to voice when the vast, open sky was available as an alternative focal point.
"That didn't go the way you wanted it to," Roy said. It wasn't phrased as an interrogation, but it left plenty of open space for her to step into.
Ruby remained quiet for a moment. Small, frustrated tears pricked the corners of her eyes, and she blinked them away with the fierce, determined efficiency of someone who accepted that crying was occasionally acceptable, but firmly preferred to schedule it on her own terms.
"I don't understand what I did wrong," she confessed, her voice tight. "I was just trying to help her. And she blew up at me anyway." She swallowed hard. "Maybe Ozpin made a massive mistake. Maybe I'm not—"
"Stop right there," Roy interrupted, his tone gentle yet carrying the immovable firmness of someone who saw exactly where a self-destructive thought train was heading and threw the switch to derail it. "One day. Ruby, it has literally been one day."
"A day where my own teammate—"
"A day where your teammate is actively working through baggage that has precisely zero to do with you and everything to do with who she was forced to be before she ever stepped foot on this island," he countered smoothly. "Weiss isn't actually angry at you. She's furious at a situation she can't control, and you happened to be the nearest available target. Those are two very different things."
Ruby looked up at him, wearing the vulnerable expression of someone desperately wanting to be convinced, but not quite all the way there yet.
"It doesn't feel different," she muttered.
"I know." He let his gaze drift out over the sprawling academy grounds below—the crisscrossing stone paths, the manicured trees, the scattered students moving between lectures. "Odyn told me once that the hardest part of leading people isn't dealing with the monsters outside the walls. It's learning how to extend infinite patience to the people on your own side who just aren't ready yet."
"And what if they're never ready?"
"Weiss?" Roy considered the question for a second. "She's ready. She just hasn't fully figured out how to admit it to herself yet." He glanced sideways at her. "And between us? Odyn will have talked some sense into her by this afternoon. He always does."
Ruby sat quietly with that revelation. Then, dropping her voice to a murmur: "What's the actual deal with their relationship? They're holding hands, and the way she looks at him is like—" She stopped herself. "Is it more than just childhood best friends?"
Roy tipped his head back to study the blue sky, navigating the delicate boundaries of a secret he had been trusted to keep.
"That's really Weiss's story to tell you," he said carefully. "When she's finally ready." He paused, softening his tone. "But I'll tell you this much: the way Odyn has been a steady anchor for her across some genuinely brutal years—the kind of upbringing that could have easily broken her into someone entirely unrecognizable—is the exact reason she turned around and came back after the Emerald Forest yesterday. It's the primary reason she apologized first." He looked straight into her silver eyes. "Someone showed her what it means to own your mistakes and come back. She learned that behavior from somewhere."
Ruby absorbed the words, letting them settle deep into her chest.
Then: "Do you think she'll apologize today? For what happened in class?"
"I think," Roy said, standing up and dusting off his slacks, "that when Weiss Schnee finally decides to do the right thing, she does it all the way."
He held out his hand, offering to pull her up. She took it without hesitation.
"Are you doing alright?" he asked.
She was back on her feet now, and the physical posture was naturally shifting back—returning to that forward-leaning, energetic Ruby stance that always moved toward whatever came next.
"Yeah," she breathed, a small, genuine smile breaking through. "I think I am."
"Good." He let go of her hand, taking a fraction of a second longer than was strictly necessary, though neither of them felt the need to point it out. "Then let's go find something to eat before the afternoon gets complicated."
Ruby let out a short, authentic laugh. "The afternoon is always complicated."
"Welcome to Beacon," Roy smiled.
— The Common Room: Afternoon
The sprawling common room possessed that distinct, multi-layered quality of a space constantly being repurposed by entirely different crowds—some of the plush armchairs occupied by students bent over heavy textbooks, several long tables fully claimed for aggressive study sessions, and the late-afternoon sun pouring through the towering windows in a golden-hour angle that made everything look vastly more significant than it actually was.
The various teams had naturally gravitated there in that loose, unplanned way people do when they've ended up in the same room simply because there was nowhere else left to be. Team JNPR was staked out at a large table near the window. Khanna's dark elf squad was sprawled across two armchairs and a comfortable section of the floor. Sarai's group held down the back corner, while Odyn, Roy, Hailfire, and Zero arranged themselves in their habitual formation—a loose, open semicircle that looked entirely casual and was, in reality, quite deliberate.
Nora was currently performing some kind of precarious architectural experiment with a polished chess piece, which Ren was politely, unsuccessfully trying to discourage.
Ruby sat on the central couch wedged directly between Yang and Blake, nursing a mug of something hot and sweet that Yang had procured with the supreme confidence of someone who instinctively knew how to locate kitchen staff anywhere on the planet. Ruby was quiet—not with the subdued, defeated silence of someone who had given up, but with the intensely focused stillness of someone simply waiting for the right moment.
The heavy wooden door clicked open.
Weiss walked in.
She paused just inside the threshold, and the room's ambient chatter instantly dialed itself down in that instinctive way rooms do when everyone realizes a scene is about to unfold. Her eyes locked onto Ruby across the room. There was an absolute, unwavering directness in her gaze that completely lacked the sharp, defensive edge of the morning—this was the clear, steady directness of pure purpose.
She strode right into the center of the room.
"Ruby," she said. Her voice carried the crisp, unmistakable cadence of someone who had decided to do a hard thing completely, and was executing it without reservation. "I owe you an apology. A public one—because I behaved abominably in public, and you deserve to be vindicated in the exact same register."
Yang instantly sat bolt upright. Blake slowly lowered her book. Nora stopped fiddling with her chess piece entirely.
"In Professor Port's class today," Weiss continued, her head held high, "you were simply trying to be a supportive teammate. You offered encouragement, and then tactical information you had every right to provide as team leader, and I responded to both with unmitigated contempt." She held Ruby's steady gaze. "That wasn't a momentary lapse in judgment. It was a conscious choice, and it was the wrong one. I am sorry."
The common room fell into a heavy, resonant silence.
"I came to Beacon," Weiss went on, her tone shifting to something slightly less certain and infinitely more honest, "expecting certain things to be a certain way. You are not those things. You are something entirely unexpected, and I have been using that as a petty excuse to be unkind. And that is simply not—it is not acceptable. You are my team leader and my partner, and I have certainly not been behaving like I understand what either of those words actually means."
Somewhere near the back of the room, Khanna's dark eyebrows arched upward, her expression betraying a deep, quiet satisfaction that she wisely decided not to voice out loud.
Ruby stood up from the couch.
The entire room subtly braced.
What actually happened was that Ruby Rose—silver-eyed, red-caped, and still slightly rumpled around the edges of a chaotic day—crossed the open floor in three quick strides and wrapped both arms tightly around Weiss Schnee with the total, unreserved commitment of someone who instinctively knew the only correct response to an apology of that caliber was not a formal handshake.
Weiss's expression froze for roughly two full seconds—the classic, deer-in-headlights look of a girl who had prepared a speech and hadn't factored physical affection into the rehearsal.
Then, slowly, her arms came up and she returned the embrace. The entire room collectively let out a breath.
Nora made a loud, deeply emotional gasping sound and immediately felt Ren's steady hand land on her shoulder—a preemptive reflex born from long experience in managing Nora's explosive emotional spectrum.
"You're still a bit of a disaster, you know," Ruby murmured from somewhere against Weiss's shoulder.
"I am well aware of that fact," Weiss said, clinging fiercely to her remaining shreds of aristocratic dignity.
"But you're my disaster now. Partners stick together, remember?"
"I remember." A tiny, reluctant pause. "Please, for the love of Oum, do not tell anyone else that I am going to make an effort to be nicer to you."
"Too late," Blake announced calmly from behind her novel.
"Abso-lutely too late," Yang cheerfully confirmed.
Weiss pulled back, smoothing down her immaculate jacket with the fierce determination of someone desperately restoring order to her universe, while Ruby beamed with the wide, blinding grin of a girl whose world had just clicked into its proper alignment. For a fleeting moment, the golden afternoon light streaming through the common room windows made everything look as though it had always been destined to arrive right at this exact spot.
Roy's earlier casual suggestion of tracking down cookies had been met by the group with the overwhelming enthusiasm of teenagers who had endured a brutally exhausting day and correctly diagnosed sugar as a medically valid solution. Thanks to a lethal combination of Nora's relentless persuasiveness, Yang's absolute operational confidence, and kitchen staff who quickly decided it was a battle they had no desire to fight, the common room miraculously transformed over the next hour into a warm, buttery haven.
Weiss found herself standing slightly on the fringe of it all—not entirely outside the circle, but hovering at the edge of the celebration, watching the room with the quiet, contemplative expression of someone cautiously learning a brand-new style of participation.
Odyn materialized beside her in that quiet, unassuming way he always did, offering no announcement, simply anchoring the space next to her.
"Well done," he murmured.
"Don't," she shot back under her breath. "You'll make me feel like a small child who has successfully learned a basic manners lesson."
"You aren't a child," he said softly. "You're a person who was handed something genuinely difficult, faced it head-on, and did it well. Those are two very different things."
She let her gaze sweep back across the lively room—Ruby animated and glowing, happily handing out homemade cookies to people she had technically only met twenty-four hours ago but who had already decided to embrace her like family; Yang presiding over a corner of the chaos with the effortless authority of someone born to anchor a group; Blake sitting near the window, ostensibly reading a book while a visible, soft smile played across her lips.
"I suppose I had a good teacher," Weiss admitted quietly. It was a genuine confession rather than a deflection, and she knew it, and he knew it.
He didn't make a big deal out of it.
And for that, she was profoundly grateful.
— Yang, and Other Observations
Yang Xiao Long was, by her own completely honest assessment, a wonderfully subtle person.
She had maintained this conviction for years despite a mountain of substantial evidence to the contrary, and she maintained it now as she stood leaning against the wall across the common room, watching Ruby. Her sister was currently deep in conversation with Roy, who had just dropped a remark that made Ruby burst out laughing—her face instantly doing that adorable thing where she desperately tried to pull off a look of profound composure while having already lost the argument entirely.
Oh, Yang thought, a wave of warm satisfaction washing over her as an older sister recognized a look her sibling didn't quite have the words for yet. This is going to be absolute gold.
She took in the soft flush of warmth rising in Ruby's face whenever Roy leaned in just a fraction closer to catch her reply. She watched the way Ruby's hands fluttered up into that familiar, animated gesture she used whenever she got too excited about something and tried frantically to tone it down. And she watched Roy—not just waiting for his turn to speak, but genuinely, deeply listening with the quiet, attentive patience of someone who found every single word Ruby uttered worth hearing.
Yang had spent the past three days of academy initiation, frantic dormitory carpentry, and shared Emerald Forest survival observing Roy, and her official verdict was: steady, genuine, fiercely capable, and currently looking at her little sister with the unmistakable expression of a boy who had noticed something special and was being very, very careful with it.
Good instincts, in other words. Ruby deserved good instincts.
She was right in the middle of mentally drafting a comprehensive, highly embarrassing teasing schedule when she suddenly became aware that she was standing near the far back corner of the common room—and that parked right in that corner was a group of students, one of whom happened to be, from Yang's exact angle, extraordinarily well-built and presently executing a post-training stretch that arguably violated several basic rules of common-area decency.
Yang suddenly found her cookie to be the most fascinating object in the universe.
The cookie held her undivided, intense interest for approximately three seconds.
"Are you entirely alright over there?" Blake murmured, materializing at her elbow with the supernatural stealth Yang knew she would never quite make peace with.
"Just studying advanced combat mechanics," Yang declared stoutly, refusing to look up from the baked good.
"Naturally," Blake replied, using the smooth, flat tone of someone who believed precisely zero percent of that explanation and wasn't going to waste energy pretending otherwise. Blake glanced toward the corner, then back at Yang with an expression far too composed to be anything other than thoroughly amused. "Studying them with a tremendous amount of focus, from what I can see."
"A good huntress never stops observing."
"True. Blake Belladonna notes that down for the record." Blake took a small, leisurely bite of her own cookie and let the silence stretch—which, in Yang's vast experience, was infinitely more pointed than actually saying something out loud.
"What I'm not," Yang said, adopting the injured dignity of a woman staking a desperate claim, "is anywhere near as transparent as Ruby."
"No," Blake readily agreed.
"Because Ruby is practically a walking billboard. She's like... a lighthouse in a storm. She might as well be waving glowing neon flags."
"She literally dropped her cookie on the floor when he smiled at her from across the room ten minutes ago," Blake pointed out smoothly.
"Exactly. That's the baseline amateur level. I am miles above that."
"You walked face-first into a structural pillar," Blake added, "during the tactical briefing on Monday."
Yang opened her mouth to argue.
"He happened to be demonstrating a high-speed footwork sequence at the time," Blake finished helpfully.
Yang slowly closed her mouth.
"I'm merely suggesting," Blake continued, a dangerous little sparkle in her amber eyes as she cashed in the conversational currency she'd been saving, "that people who live in glass houses should probably avoid throwing architecture."
Yang looked up at the ceiling tiles for divine intervention. The ceiling tiles were entirely unhelpful.
"We are officially dropping this subject," Yang announced.
"Oh, absolutely," Blake agreed, wearing a smile she wasn't even trying to suppress.
"In fact, I'm going to go tease Ruby mercilessly about Roy."
"Probably much safer for both of us," Blake chuckled.
Yang pointed a finger at her. "I like you."
"I know," Blake said.
— Ruby, Later
Blake materialized beside Ruby with the effortless timing of someone who always selected their moments with surgical precision.
"You're not particularly subtle, you know," Blake remarked conversationally.
Ruby immediately opened her mouth to mount an indignant defense, but Blake casually held up a half-eaten cookie and continued. "I happened to be browsing the library yesterday afternoon. He happened to be there as well." A brief pause. "He was reading a volume of poetry. The page was bookmarked."
Ruby stared at her, frozen.
"The poem was titled Silver Eyes in Moonlight."
Ruby nearly choked. She miraculously managed to swallow her breath just in time, which she privately counted as a massive personal victory given the absolute catastrophe of the circumstances.
Blake's amber eyes lit up with that rare, warm spark of amusement that only appeared when she thought nobody was watching—proving once and for all that, beneath the cool exterior, Blake Belladonna was actually quite funny.
"I'm not going to say anything further," Blake murmured, turning away. "I just thought you should be properly informed."
She drifted gracefully back to her spot by the window.
Ruby stood frozen right in the middle of the common room holding a half-eaten cookie, conducting a violent internal crisis of the kind that only arrives when new information instantly validates every terrifying suspicion you've been desperately trying to ignore.
Silver eyes in moonlight.
She glanced across the room toward Roy, who was currently chatting with Sarai. Just as she looked, he glanced up, caught her gaze, and smiled that signature smile of his—unhurried, direct, and utterly uncalculated, the kind of smile that didn't try to produce an effect, yet completely wrecked her focus anyway.
Ruby looked down and examined her cookie with intense scientific fascination.
The cookie offered zero assistance.
The evening celebration wound down in that gentle, gradual way good nights always do—the attendees slowly drifting away in quiet pairs and small clusters, the roaring energy shifting from animated to warm, and the conversations dropping from lively performance down to the quiet register of people who simply wanted to linger a little longer because the alternative meant going back to empty rooms.
Nora had completely fallen asleep leaning against Ren's shoulder, a development he accepted with the stoic resignation of a man who had learned long ago that resisting Nora's gravity was a waste of vital energy. Blake remained stationed by the window with her book, turning pages with an occasional soft, unconscious smile playing across her lips. Over by the crackling fireplace, Weiss sat quietly beside Odyn; the effortless ease of their conversation—that comfortable shorthand built across nine long years of shared distance—was entirely visible in the way they sat, close enough that they didn't even need to face each other directly to give complete, absolute attention.
"Walk you back?"
Roy appeared right beside Ruby just as she was gathering up a stack of empty plates with the automatic instinct of someone who defaulted to being useful.
The question was deceptively simple. Ruby's heart instantly treated it like a complex geopolitical crisis requiring immediate, multi-threaded processing.
"I'd like that," she said, genuinely thrilled when her voice managed to come out without doing anything deeply embarrassing.
Yang, strolling past with her own tower of dirty plates, threw a massive, unmistakable wink. Ruby absorbed the gesture with the seasoned, world-weary patience of a girl who had spent fifteen years surviving Yang-related commentary.
The stone corridors of Beacon at night possessed a magical, atmospheric quality—the pale moonlight streaming through towering archways, the soft, hollow echo of their footsteps against the stone, and the warm, amber glow of wall lamps burning in quiet alcoves. They talked about the little things: Port's bombastic class and what they really thought of the lecture beneath the polite veneer, the exact tactical weakness of the Boarbatusk that Ruby had spotted and wished she could have voiced earlier, and weapons design in general, which was a conversational highway Ruby would always willingly travel down.
Roy listened in his usual fashion—attentively, dropping in the occasional thoughtful question that proved he was genuinely following rather than just waiting for his turn to talk. Ruby talked animatedly, and the flow of conversation felt completely natural, carrying the easy grace of something that wasn't trying to be anything other than what it authentically was.
They finally came to a halt right outside the heavy wooden door of the RWBY dormitory.
"Ruby," he said softly.
"Yeah?" She spun around, caught in the soft wash of moonlight cascading through the corridor window, acutely aware that she had precisely zero remaining composure left for the evening and was operating entirely on raw instinct.
"What I said earlier—about being there, anytime you need." He looked at her with that intense, unperformed directness that was simply his natural state, completely lacking pretense, which was precisely why she found it so terrifyingly difficult to manage. "I meant every word."
"I know you did," she whispered. Then, driven by a sudden, unexpected surge of internal courage that decided this was the exact right moment to make its stand: "There's... actually a modification I've been trying to figure out for Crescent Rose. The gas-conversion firing mechanism on the third configuration—I keep losing roughly fifteen percent conversion efficiency. I've been trying to troubleshoot where the pressure leak is happening, and I just can't quite—"
"The forge opens at seven tomorrow morning," he replied instantly. "I'll be there."
A brilliant smile broke across her face, arriving with the effortless certainty of something that had been waiting for the right cue.
"Is that—" Roy started, then abruptly stopped himself, the hesitation deliberate and careful. "Would that be—I just want to make sure I'm saying this right."
"Yes," Ruby said, her silver eyes shining in the moonlight. "That would be."
He smiled, a warm, genuine expression that reached all the way to his eyes.
Inside the dormitory, Yang was definitely not pressing her ear flat against the heavy oak door—mostly because she had explicitly told Blake thirty seconds prior that she would never stoop to such middle-school tactics, Blake had given her a deeply skeptical look, and Yang had heroically maintained her moral high ground until she heard Roy say Ruby's name out in the corridor, at which point she immediately compromised her principles.
Blake sat cross-legged on her bed, quietly reading her book and choosing to ignore the spectacle entirely.
Ruby slipped into the room riding on that floating cloud reserved exclusively for people whose days started out as complete disasters and somehow landed somewhere vastly better than anticipated. She immediately caught sight of Yang, who was standing two feet from the entrance wearing an expression of profound, contained delight.
"Not one single word," Ruby warned immediately.
"I haven't said a thing," Yang innocent-pled, holding up her hands.
"Your face is shouting paragraphs."
"My face is merely existing within the spatial confines of this dormitory. I cannot be held legally responsible for what my facial muscles choose to do."
Blake casually turned a page. "She literally dropped the empty plates she was carrying when he said her name," she reported to the room at large without looking up.
"I didn't—" Ruby stopped herself, groaning. "You were actually watching?"
"I possess exceptional peripheral vision," Blake replied smoothly. "It's a distinct faunus advantage."
Yang let out a soft, highly satisfied sound—the unmistakable noise of a sister whose personal investment had just paid off tenfold.
Ruby pulled her red hood up over her head in total defeat and surrendered to her fate.
The dormitory gradually settled into its comfortable, nocturnal rhythm—Yang's soft bedside lamp remaining lit for another half hour, Blake's reading light casting a gentle glow over her open novel, and Weiss's steady, rhythmic breathing from her ground-level bed signaling the peaceful sleep of someone who had completely exhausted her emotional reserves for the day and turned in early.
High above them all, suspended in the cozy, rope-strung canopy of Ruby's custom-engineered bunk, a small, sleepy smile lingered in the dark for a long time before finally drifting off into quiet dreams.
Out past the towering windows, the iconic shattered moon slowly traced its pale arc across the vast Vale night sky.
And down below, Beacon Academy peacefully completed its very first day of becoming whatever history it was destined to write.
- To Be Continued -
Next Time: Chapter 8 - Budding Things; The Forge, the Fairgrounds, and What Gets Said Sideways.