Hey guys, Novaflame6_Badal here again! Hopefully you guys are enjoying my stories on here. Back at you with a new chapter now. Before we start going to throw a few quick polls at you:
Who should Baron end up with?
I. Flare K. (Oc)
II. Velvet S.
III. Blake B.
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Which of the girl characters should Roy end up with?
I. Yang X.L
II. Weiss S.
III. Blake B.
IV. Velvet S.
V. Pyrrha N.
VI. Flare K. (Oc)
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How should the relationship between Odyn and Ruby progress?
I. Steadily over the first two volumes
II. Start out as a friendship until volume 2 chapter 7 at the dance
III. Keep it as a friendship until late in the 2nd volume.
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Feel free to vote for any of the options and you can even give your thoughts as to why the option you picked would work.
That's all for now.
Let's get on with the story, shall we?
Disclaimer: I don't own Dbz, DBS, DBXV or RWBY and their characters those belong to Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation and Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively. I only own the OC's other than Tarro and Daikon.
Those are property of ComparedDread12, he's just given me permission to use them in my stories.
Chapter Three: The Badge, the Burden, and the Elves
There is a particular kind of morning that exists specifically to humble people who have spent the previous evening feeling accomplished.
It arrives before the alarm. It arrives before the light has properly committed to being light. It arrives, in this specific case, in the form of Ruby Rose in her school uniform standing beside Weiss Schnee's bed with a whistle.
The first sound was the whistle.
The second sound was Weiss hitting the floor.
"Good morning, Team RWBY!"
Weiss looked up from the floor at Ruby, who was standing above her with the expression of someone who has been awake for some time and has developed opinions about everyone else's relationship with sleeping. She was already dressed in the academy's dark brown uniform, her hair done, Crescent Rose leaning against the wall in its folded form at a precise diagonal angle that suggested it had been placed there with intention.
"What," Weiss said, "is wrong with you."
Ruby appeared not to register this as a question requiring an answer. "Since you're awake," she said, consulting something in her head that appeared to be a list, "we can begin our first order of business."
Weiss stood. She straightened her nightgown. She regarded Ruby with the expression of someone deciding, in real time, how they felt about the fact that this was now their life.
"Which would be," she said flatly.
Yang emerged from her corner of the room at this precise moment, carrying an armful of objects that included two pillows, a decorative candle-holder, several pamphlets, and what appeared to be a banner with "THE ACHIEVE MEN" printed above a photograph of six men in various athletic poses. She was already dressed. Blake followed with a suitcase that, when lifted, expressed its opinions about being lifted by opening immediately and distributing its contents across approximately four square meters of floor.
"Decorating," Yang said, with the satisfaction of someone announcing something obvious.
Blake surveyed the situation with the calm of a person who has already made her peace with it. "We still have to unpack." She looked at the open suitcase, then at the floor around it. "And clean."
Weiss's mouth formed a word that did not quite make it out before a knock at the door preempted it.
Ruby turned and opened the door.
Team OHRF stood in the hallway in their uniforms — all four of them, dressed and ready, carrying the specific energy of people who have been up for a while and are now waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Odyn's uniform sat on him with the slight awkwardness of clothes designed for people with different proportions, though he appeared entirely unbothered by this. Hailfire had her hair braided back from her face. Roy stood with his hands in his pockets and the relaxed alertness that was simply how he occupied space. Flare was slightly behind him and to his right, which was either coincidence or habit and was possibly both.
Ruby's expression went through several stages rapidly. "O-Odyn! What a — hi, sorry about the mess, we were just—"
"Don't worry about it," he said. "We're heading to class. Wanted to let you know so you're not caught off guard." He glanced past her at the room, which was in the early stages of becoming something ambitious. "You might want to hurry."
Roy: "Save you seats."
Hailfire: "Don't take too long."
Flare, briefly, looked at Roy, then at the middle distance, then added: "We'll see you there."
Odyn raised a hand in a half-wave to Ruby as the four of them turned down the hallway. A moment later, Kanna and Baron passed the door at a walk with their own team behind them, Daikon moving with the particular efficiency of someone who has decided that the correct pace is faster than this but is being patient about it. Note and Beat fell in behind them with the comfortable synchronization of people who have spent most of their lives walking in step with each other.
Ruby watched them go, then closed the door.
She turned back to her team.
"Aaaalright!" She raised her fist. The room was a mess. Their school bags were unpacked. The beds were in the center of the floor and occupied most of it. "Weiss, Blake, Yang, and their fearless leader Ruby have begun their first mission! Banzai!"
Yang and Blake, without particular hesitation, mirrored the gesture. "Banzai!"
Weiss lay back down on the floor.
What followed was a period of approximately forty-five minutes that produced, by any reasonable standard of assessment, a room.
Yang's contribution to the eastern wall was THE ACHIEVE MEN, installed with the careful positioning of someone who has strong feelings about where exactly a poster belongs. Weiss hung a reproduction of the Forever Fall forest on her section of the wall, adjusted it twice, and walked away. Blake shelved her books by a method that appeared systematic but whose organizing principle remained, to outside observers, unclear. She paused at one volume in particular — a slim paperback with a cover that had been changed at some point for reasons she elected not to examine — looked around the room with the practiced casualness of someone doing something they do not intend to discuss, and put it spine-in on the second shelf.
Ruby mounted Crescent Rose against the curtain at the precise angle where the blade's edge would catch the morning light without being dangerous, which was a narrower margin than it sounds.
When they stepped back to assess their work, the beds were still in the center of the floor.
The four of them looked at the beds. The beds did not offer suggestions.
"This isn't going to work," Weiss said.
"It's a bit cramped," Blake agreed.
"Maybe we lose some stuff?" Yang offered.
Ruby looked at the beds. She looked at the ceiling. Something in her expression shifted into the focused, slightly too-engaged look that meant she was either about to say something brilliant or something that was going to cause Weiss to use the word dangerous in a complete sentence.
"Or," she said, "we replace the beds with bunk beds."
Weiss opened her mouth.
"Super-awesome," Yang said, simultaneously.
"Efficient," Blake said.
Weiss closed her mouth. Opened it again. "I would like to formally note that this sounds—"
"Vote's already done," Ruby said.
Weiss looked at Blake's thumbs-up and Yang's double-handed gesture of affirmation, and then at her own hands, which were not doing either of those things, and performed the calculation.
"Fine," she said, which was not agreement exactly, but was close enough for construction to proceed.
The sounds that followed from within the room were not sounds that would normally be associated with furniture assembly. They were sounds associated with the sort of project undertaken by people who have confidence exceeding their technical knowledge but sufficient collective energy to compensate. When they emerged from the noise:
Weiss's bed remained on the floor, which was either the result of a structural decision or the result of her having removed herself from the process at the critical juncture.
Blake's bed sat beside her bookshelves, elevated above the floor on a base of hardcover novels arranged with the structural seriousness of someone who reads enough to know which spines are load-bearing.
Yang's bed rose above Blake's on a framework that technically held.
Ruby's hung from the ceiling on a rope system that was, by any reasonable engineering standard, improbable. A blanket draped across its edges created something between a canopy and a tent, which Ruby appeared to find deeply satisfying.
Weiss surveyed the result with the expression of someone who has spent years learning to find peace in situations they cannot control. "That is... incredibly unsafe."
"Should be fine," Ruby said.
She did not look like someone who had recently assessed the structural integrity of the ceiling.
"Allllright!" Ruby was cross-legged on her bed with a notebook open in her lap. "Our second order of business—"
She landed on the bed. A schedule fell into her lap.
"Classes." She picked up her pencil. "We have several together today. At nine, we've got to be at—"
Weiss had been looking at the clock on the wall. Something in her expression went very still.
"Ruby," she said.
"Yeah?"
"What did you just say."
"Nine o'clock, we've got—"
"It is," Weiss said, with the controlled precision of someone delivering news that has a countdown attached to it, "eight fifty-five."
Ruby looked at the clock.
Ruby looked at Weiss.
Ruby looked at the clock again, as though it might have changed its position in the two seconds since she last checked.
It had not.
"That's why the other teams already left," Weiss said, and there was a particular quality to her voice now — not quite shouting, because Weiss Schnee did not shout, but containing the same volume of feeling in a smaller space. "They knew what time it was. You insufferable—"
She was already moving, which was the most efficient thing she could do with the remaining seconds.
The door opened. Weiss went through it at a pace that was technically a walk and functionally something else entirely.
Ruby stared at the empty doorway for half a second. Then: "To class!"
She went through the door. Yang went through the door. Blake went through the door.
Down the hall, a different door opened. Jaune Arc, who had been in the process of existing in his room without any particular urgency, caught the word class from the hallway and experienced the specific awakening of someone realizing they have miscalculated something important. He moved toward the door and encountered, in sequence, Nora, Pyrrha, and Ren, who were also moving toward the door, and the resulting convergence was expressed primarily through the floor.
"We're going to be late!"
In the courtyard below, Ozpin watched both teams move through the academy grounds at speeds inconsistent with the institution's formal dignity. He sipped his coffee.
Glynda checked her watch.
He sipped his coffee again.
Professor Peter Port had been teaching at Beacon for long enough to have developed opinions about many things, and he had a pronounced fondness for expressing those opinions through the medium of his own biography. The boards behind him displayed a taxonomical survey of Grimm species — King Taijitu, Deathstalker, Beowolf, Boarbatusk, Nevermore, Ursa — rendered in careful illustration, and he stood before them with Blowhard over his shoulder and the expression of a man who has been waiting a long time to share this information and intends to take his time with it.
"Monsters!" He let the word expand in the room. "Demons. Prowlers of the night. The creatures of Grimm have many names — but I simply refer to them as prey. Ha-ha!"
In the front row, the assembled members of Team OHRF occupied four consecutive seats with the particular stillness of people who have been taught to pay attention regardless of whether the person speaking is making it easy for them. Odyn had his notebook open and was writing. Roy sat with his hands folded and his expression neutral. Hailfire was watching the boards with the analytical attention of someone taking inventory. Flare had her pencil moving in the margins of her own notes.
Behind them — and then, abruptly, not behind them, but arriving through the classroom door at speed and arranging themselves on the floor in a brief, untidy pile — Teams RWBY and JNPR made their entrance.
Professor Port raised an eyebrow.
Ruby rose from the pile and offered the specific laugh of someone who has prepared a version of this expression for exactly this situation. "Sorry, Professor — won't happen again."
Jaune, extricating himself from the bottom of the arrangement: "Lost track of time, sir."
Port regarded them both with the benevolent deliberation of someone deciding between several available responses. "As it is the first day, I shall be lenient." He waited. "Try not to make a habit of it, Miss Rose, Mister Arc. Now — take your seats."
Team RWBY navigated to the front row and settled into the four seats beside Team OHRF. Hailfire shifted slightly to make room. Ruby dropped into the seat beside Odyn and spent a moment recovering her breath, during which she noticed — with the specific, involuntary attention of someone who has not been looking for anything and has therefore found it — that his notebook was open to a page covered in writing that bore no relationship to any script she had ever encountered.
Not just unfamiliar. Completely, architecturally different. The characters moved in directions that English did not move in, and they were dense and deliberate, and they were clearly notes — the same page had diagrams in the margins, lines underscored, parenthetical additions — but the language itself was wholly other.
She stared at it for a moment.
He hadn't noticed her looking.
She made a mental note to ask about it later, and then Port's voice surged back to the foreground.
"—my grandfather, despite smelling strongly of cabbages, was a wise man—"
She picked up her pencil.
It would be unfair to say that Professor Port was an ineffective educator. He had significant practical knowledge, accumulated over decades of actual fieldwork, and he delivered it with genuine enthusiasm. He had simply developed, over time, a delivery method that traveled through the full story of his boyhood before arriving at any given point, and the boyhood was eventful enough that the arrival could take a while.
The class navigated this in its various ways.
Weiss was taking notes with the focused industry of someone committed to extracting utility from every minute.
Yang was sitting up and attending with the expression of someone who has decided that sustained eye contact with the teacher is sufficient participation.
Blake was listening with the quality of attention that does not require any particular posture to be evident.
Ruby had stopped listening approximately twelve minutes in and was now drawing.
Odyn, on the other side of Ruby, watched the room with the patient attentiveness he brought to most things. At some point he became aware that Weiss's pen had stopped moving and that Weiss's gaze was directed slightly to his right — specifically, at Ruby, who was showing Yang and Blake a drawing she had made of a small spherical figure with limbs, representing Professor Port, with notable stink-lines radiating outward and "Professor Poop" printed carefully underneath.
Yang pressed her fist to her mouth.
Blake's shoulders moved in a way that suggested contained laughter.
Weiss's expression had passed through several stages of response and arrived, with some difficulty, at the one she had decided was appropriate.
Port cleared his throat.
"Ah-heh-hem."
The room reassembled its attention.
He waited until he had it, then continued with the measured satisfaction of someone returning to a point he had not finished making.
"In the end," he said, "the Beowolf was no match for my sheer tenacity — and I returned to my village with the beast in captivity and my head held high, celebrated as a hero."
He took a small bow.
Beside Odyn, Hailfire leaned in slightly and murmured, without moving her eyes from the front of the room: "She's going to snap."
Odyn murmured back: "About to."
On the other side of the room, Kanna had assessed the same situation and arrived at the same conclusion with the directness of someone who has watched this particular sequence play out in different forms throughout her life — the noble child with the inflexible sense of what she deserves, the moment the world produces something that doesn't conform to it, and the resulting response that is less composed than intended.
She did not look forward to it. But she recognized it.
Port: "And who among you believes themselves to be the embodiment of these traits?"
Roy, seated at Odyn's other side, tilted his head by approximately two degrees.
"Aaannnd," he said quietly, to the air in front of him, "here it comes."
Weiss's hand went up.
The reaction moved through the Arkynorean students in a wave — not dramatic, not performed, but clearly involuntary. The palm-to-forehead had a physical quality to it, the specific frustration of people who have encountered this variety of pride before and have strong feelings about it.
Kanna, a row behind: "Ugh. Every time." She said this quietly, but not quietly enough to avoid the attention of several nearby students who turned to look at her. She did not appear to notice or care.
Port was already gesturing toward the cage at the room's back wall, where something large and red-eyed and unhappy was making itself known through the bars.
"Step forward," he said, with considerable enthusiasm, "and face your opponent."
What followed was a combat assessment, which Port appeared to regard as a natural extension of his lecture and the class appeared to regard as a welcome relief from it. Weiss had returned to her uniform and now stood in the cleared space at the room's front, Myrtenaster in hand, while her teammates occupied the front row in various configurations of support.
Yang cupped her hands around her mouth. "Gooo, Weiss!"
Blake raised a small flag that said RWBY, which she appeared to have produced from somewhere without anyone noticing.
"Represent Team RWBY!" Ruby added, with feeling.
Weiss lowered her sword. She turned.
Ruby, registering the look: "Oh — um. Sorry."
She looked down. The smile she'd been wearing pulled in on itself slightly, the way an expression does when it's trying to decide whether to hold its ground or retreat.
On the other side of Ruby, Odyn's jaw set. He put a hand on her shoulder — brief, solid, saying nothing — and looked back at the arena space with an expression that was doing the work of composure and not quite completing it.
The match itself was good. Whatever else Weiss Schnee was, she fought with the precision of someone who had been trained by people who took training seriously, and the Boarbatusk was a Boarbatusk — fast, armored, with the kind of straightforward aggression that rewards patience in its opponent. Weiss had patience when she chose to apply it. She lost Myrtenaster once, recovered it, used the glyph system in a sequence that was both technically correct and physically impressive, and finished with a drive that placed the blade precisely in the Boarbatusk's exposed underside.
It was well done.
Ruby thought so. She opened her mouth to say so.
"Weiss! Go for its belly — there's no armor underneath—"
Weiss turned.
The look she gave Ruby was the kind that contains several separate criticisms arranged in order of severity.
"Stop telling me what to do!"
Port declared Weiss the winner. The class applauded with appropriate warmth. Weiss stood at attention in the cleared space, composed, her breathing controlled, her sword back in perfect form.
Ruby sat with her hands in her lap and said nothing.
Odyn watched the side of Ruby's face. Then he watched Weiss, who was already moving toward the door with the brisk purpose of someone who has accomplished something and intends to leave before the conclusion is complicated.
He stood up.
Weiss did not expect him to be at the door. She processed the fact of his foot in the frame — not aggressive, not blocking exactly, but present in a way that did not invite simply walking past it — and looked up at him.
The expression he was wearing was not the one she had seen in the hallway yesterday, or at the cliff, or in the forest. It was controlled. It was the specific control of something that is being held in place rather than absent.
"I'm leaving," she said.
"You made Ruby doubt herself," Odyn said. "She was trying to show support for you. All she was doing was showing support for you, and you used it to make her feel small." He held her gaze steadily. "She's your team leader, Weiss. Ozpin chose her. Before you argue about whether he was right to, consider what it says about you that your first response to a decision you disagree with is to take it out on someone who has done nothing to you."
Weiss drew herself up. "If anyone should be leading this team—"
"Then prove it." His voice didn't rise. "Not by tearing Ruby down. By being someone worth following. There's a difference."
Kanna had come to stand a few feet behind him, and her arms were crossed, and her expression had the flat, unyielding quality of someone who has witnessed this particular variety of behavior before and is very tired of it.
"We expected better," she said simply.
Daikon, at her shoulder, was characteristically direct: "I don't care what your name is or how much your company is worth. What you did in there was the behavior of a child who's always gotten what she wants. That stops working eventually."
Weiss spun on him. "How dare—"
"He's right," Roy said, from behind her, and his voice had none of the sharpness but all of the weight. He put a hand briefly on her shoulder — not unkind, but honest. "For what it's worth: Odyn hates watching people use their position to diminish others. You found the thing that pulls his trigger. Congratulations." He looked at her steadily. "It might be worth thinking about why it pulls it so hard."
He stepped back, giving her space.
Flare bowed slightly — the reflexive, earnest sort of bow that embarrassed Flare herself slightly — and followed him out.
Hailfire paused in the doorway. The look she gave Weiss was not angry. It was something more complicated than that — the look of someone who knows what it is to be placed in a position you did not choose and to take it out on the wrong people.
She said nothing. Then she left.
Ruby had already gone. Yang and Blake departed last, together, and Yang's expression — which was usually the most readable thing in any room — was, for once, difficult to interpret. It had the quality of someone who wanted to defend her sister, and had just had that work done for her, and wasn't sure how to feel about it.
"We can't back you on this one, Weiss," she said.
Blake said nothing. She didn't have to.
Weiss stood in the emptied classroom with the silence that follows when everyone has left, and she stood there for a while.
Jaune Arc remained at his desk slightly longer than everyone else, because he had needed a moment to process the fact that Odyn — who had struck him, in their admittedly brief acquaintance, as someone with exceptional self-control — had briefly and entirely lost it, and had not particularly regretted losing it, and this had produced in Jaune a complicated set of thoughts about what exactly it was that Ruby Rose mattered to certain people. He eventually stood up, said nothing, because nothing presented itself, and left.
Weiss sat down at the desk nearest the window.
The classroom was very quiet.
She sat in it for a long time.
Ruby was sitting on a low wall at the edge of the academy's eastern courtyard when she heard footsteps approaching, and her immediate instinct was to look like she hadn't been sitting here doing exactly what she'd been doing, which was staring at the middle distance and thinking in circles.
She straightened up. She arranged her face.
Hailfire sat down beside her instead of Odyn, which was not what Ruby had been expecting, and put her hands in her lap and said, with the directness of someone who has already thought about how to say something: "He's stewing."
"Oh." Ruby looked at her. "Is he okay?"
"He will be." Hailfire paused. "He gets like this when he's angry at himself. He'll sit somewhere and stare at nothing and convince himself he handled something badly, and the only person who gets through to him when he's like that—" She tilted her head with a slight, private smile. "—seems to be you."
Ruby blinked. "Me?"
"I've known Odyn a long time," Hailfire said, "and I can tell you that he doesn't extend the kind of attention he gives you to very many people. I don't know what you've got that gets through that particular wall—" She shrugged, with the equanimity of someone who has decided not to analyse things she doesn't need to analyse. "—but it works. Would you go talk to him?"
Ruby turned this over. "I don't want to intrude if he needs space—"
"He needs to stop being alone with his own thoughts," Hailfire said. "There's a difference." She stood up, brushing off her uniform. "Besides, I tried for twenty minutes and he nodded at me twice. You'll do better." She stopped, and then with a slightly softer expression: "He hit her because of you, you know. Because you looked the way you looked when she said those things."
Ruby didn't quite know what to do with that.
"Oh," she said again. "...Okay."
Hailfire walked a few steps before stopping. "Also — just call me Hail. It's what my friends call me."
Ruby watched her go, and then stood up, and then went to find Odyn.
He was on the terrace along the academy's south-facing walkway, forearms resting on the stone railing, looking out at the view with the focused blankness of someone who is not looking at anything in particular and is using the view as a surface to think against.
Ruby came up beside him and said, carefully: "Hey."
He looked over. Something in his expression shifted — not quite relief, but the thing that is adjacent to relief when you haven't admitted you wanted company.
"Ruby." A beat. "What are you doing here?"
"Just... hanging around." She looked at the railing, then at him. "Mind if I—?"
He gestured at the space beside him.
She sat on the railing and looked out at the view, which was, she had to admit, very good. The rooftops of Beacon fell away toward the cliff edge and the sea beyond, and the afternoon light was doing something complicated and gold with the distance.
After a moment: "You think you were too hard on her."
He was quiet.
"I think," he said, eventually, "that I was right about what I said. And wrong about how I said it."
"There's a difference?"
"A big one." He looked at his hands, which were resting on the railing. "You can be right about something and still handle it wrong. I've known that since I was about twelve years old and it hasn't stopped me from occasionally forgetting it."
Ruby considered this. "She made me feel—" She stopped. "I mean, some of it... isn't wrong. I don't act like a normal leader. I don't even know if I know how to act like a leader. And maybe Ozpin—"
"Ruby."
She looked at him.
"Ozpin," he said, "has made decisions considerably more consequential than choosing a team leader, and has been doing it considerably longer than either of us has been alive. I think his judgment on this particular point is worth something." He looked at her with the steady, direct quality she had come to understand was simply how he communicated things he meant. "You were chosen because of something you are, not something you've learned yet. Those are different things."
She was quiet for a moment. "What if I can't grow into it?"
"Then you'll grow into something else," he said. "But I don't think that's what's going to happen." He pushed back from the railing slightly. "The thing about being a leader — it's not a title you carry. It's a weight you carry. A badge and a responsibility, always, not just in the moments when it's useful to you. If you treat it like the first thing, it means nothing. If you treat it like the second thing—" He looked at her. "People follow you."
Ruby sat with that. The afternoon light shifted. Somewhere below them, a class was letting out, and the sound of students in the courtyard drifted up.
"I'll try," she said.
"That's all it takes to start," he said.
She stood up from the railing, straightened her uniform, and then looked at him for a moment with the expression she sometimes got — the one that meant she was deciding whether to say something she had not said yet.
"Odyn. What you did — because of me. I—"
"Don't," he said. "You don't owe me anything for that. I made that choice. I'll address it."
She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, and turned toward the walkway.
"Thank you," she said, to the direction she was walking.
"Go prove Weiss wrong," he said. "I'll be watching."
She didn't quite run, but the pace she left at was faster than a walk.
Professor Port's relationship with sunset was that of a man who found it consistently philosophically useful, and he was engaged with it on the northern balcony of the academy's teaching wing when the sound of footsteps behind him announced the arrival of a student who was trying to sound less uncertain than she was.
He turned, and his expression arranged itself into the generous welcome of a teacher who genuinely likes students and is never quite able to hide it.
"Miss Schnee! To what do I owe this fine pleasure?"
Weiss composed herself. "I enjoyed your lecture today, Professor."
He beamed. "Of course you did — you have the blood of a true Huntress in you, my dear."
She smiled, and it was real, and it lasted approximately four seconds before the weight of what she had actually come here for reasserted itself in her expression.
Port noticed. Forty years of teaching had made him very good at noticing. He waited, with the particular patience of someone who has learned that students find their way to the actual question eventually if you give them the space for it.
"Professor," she said, looking at the railing rather than at him, "I think I should have been named Team RWBY's leader."
The pause he gave this was brief and considered.
"That," he said, "is preposterous."
Weiss looked up sharply. "Excuse me—"
"I have believed in Ozpin's judgment for many, many years," Port said, without heat, "and he has never once led me astray. Not once." He turned to face her more fully, and his expression had lost some of its theatrical warmth and gained something quieter in its place. "Your skill on the battlefield, Miss Schnee, is genuinely exceptional. I do not say that to flatter you. It's simply true." He held her gaze. "It is matched, however, by an attitude toward those you consider beneath you that will, if left unchecked, undermine every advantage your skill provides."
Weiss's hands tightened. "That is not—"
"Precisely my point," Port said. "You see — the young man with the tail made a similar observation. Rather more bluntly." His mustache moved in a way that might, in someone else, have been a suppressed smile. "I will not use his exact phrasing. But his substance was correct."
The defiant line of Weiss's posture held for a moment, then — the way something holds and then yields — slowly came down. Not defeat. Something more like honesty.
"Not entirely true," she said quietly. "That I always get what I want."
Port looked at her with the expression of someone who knows there is more there and is willing to wait for it.
He waited.
"The company," she said, to the view. "The name. The... expectations." She stopped. "No. Not always. No."
Port nodded, without saying anything about this.
"What Professor Ozpin wants from you," he said, after a moment, "is not the performance of a leader. He wants you to become one. And that requires you to stop competing with the person who was chosen and start considering why she was." He leaned on the railing beside her. "Hone your skill. Perfect your technique. But do not mistake those for the whole of the work." He looked at her sidelong. "Become the best person you can be, Miss Schnee. That is the assignment. Everything else follows from it."
Weiss was quiet for a long time.
Then, so quietly that the words almost belonged to the evening: "...Yes, Professor."
Port smiled, and patted the railing once, and looked back out at the view.
Three hours later —
The moon over Beacon was full, and its light came through the dormitory windows at an angle that made the room's interior look like somewhere slightly more significant than a room where four girls had argued about furniture.
Blake was asleep in her elevated nest of novels, one hand still resting on the cover of the book she had been reading. Yang had claimed most of her mattress and at least twelve percent of the surrounding air with the expansive confidence of someone who sleeps the way she does everything else. The room was quiet in the particular way of a place where several people have spent enough energy in one day to have nothing left.
The door opened.
Weiss's shadow fell across the threshold, and she stood there for a moment, looking at the room — at the sleeping forms of her teammates, at Ruby's ceiling-tent, at the empty coffee mug sitting on the edge of Ruby's small shelf with BEACON printed on its side in the academy's font.
She crossed to the bed. She lifted the blanket at the tent's edge.
Ruby was face-down in her notes, her pencil still loosely in her hand, her hair fanned across the paper in a way that was going to leave a crease. The books around her were open at varying angles, marked with corners she had folded down. Three separate pages of notes were visible, dense with her particular handwriting — broad, looping, occasionally trailing off into diagrams.
Weiss looked at this for a moment.
She reached in and shook Ruby's shoulder, gently, which was unusual for Weiss doing anything gently, and Ruby surfaced from sleep with the specific chaos of someone who had been in the middle of something and had lost the thread.
"Weiss! I was studying — I fell asleep — I'm sorry—"
Weiss put her hand over Ruby's mouth before the volume reached the others, and held one finger to her lips. Ruby's eyes went wide, then understanding, and she nodded and quieted.
Weiss looked at the empty mug. Then at Ruby.
"How do you take your coffee."
Ruby stared at her. "I... don't."
Weiss's expression did the thing it did when she was managing herself. "Just answer the question."
"Cream," Ruby said, slightly alarmed. "Five sugars."
Weiss looked at this information for a moment. Then she ducked under the tent, and the sounds of quiet movement followed, and she re-emerged with a cup that she had apparently been carrying from her own side of the room for this specific purpose.
She held it out.
Ruby took it with both hands and held it and looked at it and looked at Weiss.
"Ruby," Weiss said, and she said it in a specific way — not the exasperated version, not the clipped version, but the version that meant she had done several things she did not enjoy doing in order to arrive at this moment and was going to follow through. "I think you have what it takes to be a genuinely good leader."
The look on Ruby's face was the look of something that had been held in a somewhat uncomfortable position for most of the day and was now slowly being allowed to ease.
"That's funny," Ruby said, softly. "Odyn told me something similar. Earlier."
Weiss's expression flickered — a rapid sequence of reactions arranged and discarded — and settled into something that was either thoughtful or reluctantly fond and was possibly both.
"Did he," she said.
"Yeah." Ruby looked at her cup. "He said it was a badge and a responsibility. The leadership thing."
"That's—" Weiss stopped. "That's a reasonable way to describe it, actually."
They sat with this for a moment, the two of them in the small warm light of Ruby's tent, with the sounds of Yang breathing deeply on the floor below and Blake's book sliding slightly on its shelf.
"I am going to be the best teammate you've ever had," Weiss said. It came out with more conviction than she had expected, which was either the hour or the honesty or some combination.
"That's a high bar," Ruby said.
"I'm aware." Weiss stood, adjusting the hem of her nightgown. "Good luck studying."
She was halfway under the tent-edge when she stopped and turned back and pointed at something on one of Ruby's open pages. "That's wrong, by the way." She ducked under, and her voice came next from the doorway. "Ruby?"
"Uh-huh?"
"I always wanted bunk beds. When I was a child." She paused. "Just so you know."
The door closed softly.
Ruby sat in her tent with her coffee and her wrong answer and her notes, and she was smiling, and it was the kind of smile that tends to form when something that felt broken has turned out not to be.
Outside the door, Weiss stood in the hallway.
She looked at the wall. She looked at her own hands. She thought about the thing Roy had said — you just pulled his trigger — and about the look on Odyn's face before he lost his composure, and about what Port had said regarding whose substance had been correct.
There was one more thing she had to do.
It was going to cost her something.
She had already decided to pay it.
Morning arrived the way mornings do when something has been decided — with less ceremony than the decision deserved, and more light than the situation called for.
Weiss found them on the east walkway, both teams together in the particular way they seemed to congregate — not arranged, not formal, but present, the way people are present when they have spent enough time in proximity to have stopped performing proximity. Odyn and Daikon were slightly apart from the others, which Weiss recognized as a deliberate staging on the part of everyone who was pretending not to have been told this meeting was coming.
She walked up to both of them and stopped.
She was aware of her team behind her, and Jaune's team behind them, and the steady attentiveness of approximately fifteen teenagers who were pretending very hard to be looking at other things.
She looked at Odyn first.
"I was wrong," she said, "about Ruby. About what I said, and about how I said it. What I said in the classroom was beneath me, and I'm asking you to forgive it."
She looked at Daikon.
"And what you said," she continued, which cost her more, "was not entirely incorrect. I owe you an apology as well."
The silence lasted approximately four seconds, which, under the circumstances, felt considerably longer.
Daikon spoke first.
"I wasn't entirely right, either," he said. The words came out with the particular effort of someone who has rarely deployed them and is doing so now out of principle rather than practice. "I said things that were unkind when accurate would have been sufficient." He looked at her. "I'll make it right. Name what you want."
Weiss appeared genuinely surprised. She processed this, and then, because she was Weiss and she processed things quickly: "Call me by my first name. Not Schnee. Weiss."
He nodded. "I can do that." His expression shifted by approximately one degree. "And in return. Since you're making it mutual."
"Daikon," Weiss said, and managed it on the third syllable, and appeared faintly relieved to have gotten through it without incident.
They shook hands. The watching crowd was doing a poor job of watching something else.
Odyn stepped forward.
"I had no right to touch you," he said, plainly. "Regardless of what you said, regardless of how angry I was. I was wrong. I owe you for that — one thing, whatever you choose, within reason." He met her eyes. "Name it."
Weiss thought about this. She looked at Ruby, who was standing slightly behind Odyn's right shoulder with the expression of someone who has been listening and is now making eye contact with the sky in a studied way.
"Look after her," Weiss said. "Ruby." She paused, and the words cost something, but she said them anyway: "You're the one person our age that I trust with her. Don't let her be reckless. Don't let her doubt herself. Make sure she doesn't cry."
Ruby had turned the color of her cape.
"Weiss—"
"I'm not talking to you, Ruby."
"It isn't like that—"
"I'm still not talking to you."
Ruby appeared to consider several possible responses and settled on waving her arms in a way that expressed everything without articulating any of it.
Odyn looked at Weiss for a moment, then at Ruby, and the corner of his mouth moved.
"Reasonable," he said. "I can manage that."
"Odyn!" Ruby said.
"What?"
"You didn't have to agree so quickly—"
"It's a reasonable request."
"That is not the—" Ruby searched for the word. "Point."
The contained laughter that had been building across approximately fifteen people for the last thirty seconds found several exits simultaneously, and the east walkway of Beacon Academy was briefly considerably louder than institutions of higher learning typically prefer. Even Hailfire, who had maintained composure through several things this morning that might reasonably have cracked it, put her hand over her mouth and lost the argument.
Ruby looked at the group, at Yang's expression of pure delight, at Kanna's smirk, at Flare hiding behind Roy's shoulder and failing, at Baron's grin.
She looked at Odyn, who was doing the thing where he was trying not to smile and had lost.
She looked at Weiss, who was not smiling exactly, but whose mouth was doing something that, in someone else's face, would have been a smile.
Ruby Rose put her hands on her hips and stared at all of them.
Then she laughed.
A team is not a thing assembled. It is a thing that grows, at the pace of honesty and the rate of forgiveness — slowly, unevenly, in the moments between the important ones. It is built from disagreements resolved and apologies given, from coffee made at midnight and doors held open in the dark. It is, in short, built from ordinary things conducted with extraordinary care. The badge is only the beginning. The burden is the actual work. And the work, as it turns out, takes four years — at minimum — and cannot be rushed.
To be continued in Chapter Four: Revelation — The Legends of the Dark Elves
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Hey guys. Hopefully that chapter wasn't too... bad. Piecing this story together as I go. Yes, there are demons in this story, which is something of original content from me. We'll be sticking as close to rwby cannon as we can for now. Some things will be different since there are more teams a part of the main cast now.
As for pairings I do like the idea of Kanna with Mercury, which could be really interesting.
That aside, should Weiss be with Daikon? Or someone else this time around? If you're curious here are the possible pairing options:
Daikon/Weiss (or Deiss)
Baron/Flare (Blare)
Baron/ Velvet (Belvet)
Roy/Yang (Rang... lol. Ok, not funny. I know.)
Roy/Flare (Rlare)
Roy/Weiss (Reiss)
Roy/Blake (Rake)
Baron/Pyrrha (Paron)
Baron/Yang (Bang)
Roy/Velvet (Relvet)
Baron/Blake (Blaron)
Baron/ Weiss (Bweiss)
Daikon/Yang (Daiang)
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Anyways, that's all for now. Be safe, until next time!