Hey everyone, back with another new chapter for this story! Last chapter was like uber long due to all of the action it, but this one will be a little more relaxed. This will cover Weiss's personal episode in volume 1. Cardin will have a little more of an active role this time as I'm planning something a little bit different for him and his team this time around. Anyways before we get started just a few polls:
Who should Weiss end up with?
A. Kazuma
B. Toshirou
C. Max
D. Shoryu
E. other male character (write in suggestion)
Who should Blake end up with?
A. Shoryu
B. Kazuma
C. Max
D. Toshirou
E. other male character (write in suggestion)
That's all for the polls for now, onto the story!
Opening theme:
Tales of Bersia opening- BURN
Visuals: Main Cast introduced in the story so far (Dragonblade siblings, Ruby, Yang, and the Tokyoheim siblings) pans down from a calm sky towards Beacon where students some silhouetted fall down from the sky.
It then transitions to each character introduced so far fighting one grim, before the song picks up and they are seen fighting the grim together. The opening visual ends as Teams MKKH, MTSGY, JNPR, and RWBY then fight off an enemy presumably a villain before it pans back up to the sky.
Chapter Four:The Badge, the Burden, and the New Instructors?
Leadership is not the position at the front of the line.
It is the decision, made every morning, to stay in it.
I. Team MKKH Dormitory — Morning
Beacon in the morning had a particular quality of light — clean and unhurried, filtering through east-facing windows in long, level columns that made everything look slightly more permanent than it was. The campus sounds were beginning their slow accumulation: footsteps in corridors, the distant rhythm of the training grounds warming up, the smell of breakfast drifting from the lower halls.
In the dormitory room assigned to Team MKKH, most of these details were going unappreciated, because Kouga Dragonblade was locked in a struggle with his uniform tie and losing.
The tie had been doing what ties do to people who approach them with force rather than patience — tightening in the wrong places, coming undone at inconvenient moments, and generally behaving with the passive resistance of a small object that knows it has the upper hand. Kouga had been at this for six minutes. The tie did not appear tired.
"Dumb — stupid —" He yanked. The knot collapsed again. "Neck trap. This is a neck trap."
Honoo Tokyoheim looked up from the mirror, where she had been finishing the last pin in her own hair with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had been dressing themselves in formal attire since early childhood. She took in the scene — the sideways collar, the lopsided attempt, Kouga's expression of genuine personal grievance — and sighed in the particular way of someone who has made peace with being useful.
She crossed the room and took the tie from him without ceremony.
"Hold still."
Kouga went still. His face, which was usually reasonably composed, had taken on the slightly pink quality of someone who has been caught losing a fight with an inanimate object.
"Sorry," he said. "You'd think they'd design these things to be manageable for people with —" He gestured vaguely at his horns, which did present a genuine geometric complication for over-the-head knotting.
"You're nervous," Honoo said simply, without judgment. Her hands worked through the steps without looking. "It affects the fine motor work. It happens."
"I know, but still. First actual day of classes and I'm already —"
"Koga." Her voice was gentle and precise, the way she was when she wanted someone to actually hear her rather than just wait for her to finish. "You will adjust. And before the month is out, you will do this yourself without thinking about it. Right now, you are thinking about everything at once."
He exhaled. The knot, in Honoo's hands, resolved itself in approximately ten seconds.
"There." She stepped back and looked at him the way an older sibling looks at someone they have known long enough to be honest with. He had grown taller than her — she had noticed this happening gradually, the way you notice a tree growing only when you look at a photograph from two years ago — and she was, in the uncomplicated way of someone who did not overthink affection, pleased about it.
"Thank you," Kouga said. "I mean it. I'll pay you back for all of this, Hon'oo. Everything."
"Ko." She said his name with the fond, mild firmness of someone who had had this particular argument before and expected to win it again. "You don't pay back a friend. You just be one. That's all I've ever asked."
He looked at her for a moment, and the sincerity in his expression was the kind that young people wear before they've learned to be self-conscious about it — open, genuine, entirely without calculation. He nodded.
"Are you two ready?" Kazuma appeared in the doorway with the expression of someone who had been ready for approximately four minutes and was being polite about it. "We are going to be late if you keep standing there having a moment."
"Coming," Honoo said, and they went.
◆ ◆ ◆
II. The Corridor — En Route to Class
Team MKKH fell into its natural walking formation — Kazuma slightly ahead, Honoo and Kouga side by side, Shoryu on the outside with the easy, rolling gait of someone who moved as if the ground were slightly more cooperative than it was for everyone else — and made their way down the corridor toward the main academic wing.
They passed Team MSTGY's door at the same moment it opened, and the two groups merged into a loose column without discussion, the way people do when they are accustomed to sharing space.
Mist glanced at her younger brother's uniform with the evaluative eye of someone checking work.
"Better," she said.
"Honoo fixed it," Kouga said.
"I assumed."
Max fell into step beside Kazuma and Shoryu. The two teams moved well together — different in rhythm, complementary in instinct — and had been doing so long enough that the mechanics of it were invisible.
As they passed Team RWBY's door, Kouga slowed. He glanced at the others, then raised his hand and knocked.
A pause. Then Ruby Rose opened the door, dressed in her school uniform with the particular disheveled energy of someone who had been awake for a while but had been using that time for activities other than preparation. Behind her, the room appeared to have undergone some kind of structural intervention involving the beds.
"Oh — Koga! What — what are you all doing here?"
"Classes start soon," Kouga said. "Thought you might want to know."
"We know! We're just — we're sorting out the room, we'll be right behind you." She smiled the slightly-too-wide smile of someone who was more aware of time than she was prepared to admit.
"Of course you are," Kouga said. "We'll see you in class then."
"Absolutely! See you then!"
The door closed. The two teams continued down the corridor.
Honoo looked at Kouga sidelong.
"They are not going to make it on time."
"Probably not," Kouga agreed.
"Should we have been more direct about the hour?"
"I mentioned classes were starting soon. I'm not their alarm clock." He paused. "They'll figure it out."
Mist, who had been listening, permitted herself a small smile. Her brother had the particular quality of someone who worried about people while taking deliberate care not to let the worrying become management. It was, she thought, rather a good quality. She hoped it lasted.
◆ ◆ ◆
III. The Lecture Hall — Professor Port's Class
Professor Peter Port was a man who had clearly decided, at some point in the middle distance of his career, that anecdote was the highest form of pedagogy. He was broad-shouldered, abundantly mustached, and in possession of a weapon — a blunderbuss that also functioned as a battle axe, for reasons that were presumably his own — which he carried with the casual ease of someone who had long since stopped thinking about it. He had the bearing of a man who considered himself both the most experienced person in the room and the most entertaining, and who was not entirely wrong about the first part.
Behind him, a series of illustrated boards displayed the major Grimm classifications in clinical detail: King Taijitu, Death Stalker, Beowolf, Boarbatusk, Nevermore, and Ursa, each rendered with the precise economy of educational diagrams that would haunt practical exams for years to come.
"Monsters!" Port announced, with the conviction of someone making an opening argument. "Demons. Prowlers of the night. The creatures of Grimm have accumulated more names than most gods — but I, personally, refer to them as one thing only." He let the pause do its work. "Prey!"
He laughed at his own joke. The classroom received it with the silence of a room that had collectively decided not to be responsible for encouraging this.
The faunus students — Max, Mist, Kouga, and the others — had their notebooks open and were working through the material with the focused efficiency of people who had grown up learning to extract useful information from imperfect sources. Kouga's notes in particular were dense with diagrams: movement patterns, physiological weak points, and — Ruby noticed from two seats over, with the particular attention she gave to things that had nothing to do with the lecture — detailed illustrations of hand-to-hand combat forms annotated with what appeared to be references to the crystal pendant he always wore.
Ruby's thoughts:
He fights with his body and that crystal — I've seen it, but I still don't quite understand how it works. And he's a faunus, obviously, but not any type I've studied. The horns are one thing; the scale texture on his tail is another. I keep coming back to the pendant. It's not decorative. The way he referenced it during the fight in Vale — it responded to something, but I couldn't tell what. Something to figure out later, probably.
I should also probably be paying attention to the lecture.
End of Ruby's thoughts.
She tried. The lecture was on the history and classification of Grimm, which was genuinely important, but Port had a gift for burying the important material inside stories about himself, and Ruby's attention had the quality of a bird in a windstorm — frequently redirected, occasionally landing, mostly airborne.
She drew a small figure on the corner of her notes. It had a round body, stick limbs, lines emanating from it to indicate a powerful smell, and the caption: PROFESSOR POOP. She showed it to Yang. Yang nearly choked. Blake looked at it, looked away, and appeared to be thinking very hard about a neutral subject.
Two rows forward, Honoo leaned toward Max with the discretion of someone who had learned to have side conversations without moving her lips much.
"The heiress is about to snap."
Max did not look up from his notes. He held up two fingers.
"Two minutes," he said.
"One," Kouga said, without looking up either.
Weiss Schnee, in the front row, had been maintaining her composure with the white-knuckled determination of someone who regarded the public display of irritation as beneath her. The composure was real. The effort behind it was increasingly visible.
Then the door to the lecture hall opened, and the composure problem became temporarily irrelevant, because the woman who walked through it was not anyone they had been expecting.
◆ ◆ ◆
IV. The Lecture Hall — An Unexpected Arrival
She moved through the door with the unhurried authority of someone who had walked into rooms like this one many times before and had never once felt the need to announce herself. She was tall, dark-haired, composed — and she wore the white uniform of a Beacon instructor with the ease of someone who had decided to accept the assignment and then simply decided to be good at it.
Her horns curved gently forward to frame her face. Her tail moved with a slow, deliberate arc. Her red eyes took in the room with a single, comprehensive sweep that lingered for precisely as long as it needed to on each relevant point before moving on.
"Thank you, Professor Port," Yin Lang said. "I'll take it from here."
In the middle of the room, two sets of eyes had gone very wide very fast.
Honoo and Shoryu sat absolutely motionless, performing the specific stillness of young people trying to become invisible in real time. The thought that moved across both their faces simultaneously was visible to anyone who knew what to look for, and Max Dragonblade — who knew exactly what to look for — pressed his lips together and looked at his notes with the focused expression of someone who was not going to laugh about this right now.
Port stepped aside with the good-natured deference of a man confident enough in his own reputation not to feel diminished by sharing the stage. He gestured toward the room with the air of one professional acknowledging another.
"Now then," Yin said, taking up Port's thread without hesitation. "Who among you believes themselves to be the embodiment of the qualities Professor Port described? Honorable. Dependable. Strategic. Wise."
She asked this in the mild, interested tone of someone who did not necessarily expect a correct answer but was curious what kind of wrong answer she would receive.
The countdown that three separate faunus teenagers had been running in their heads arrived at its conclusion.
Weiss Schnee's hand went up — not tentatively, but with the decisive, arm-extended certainty of someone filing a claim they had prepared in advance. "I do, ma— " She caught herself. Took in the horns and the tail and the particular quality of stillness in the woman at the front of the room. Revised her register. "Ma'am."
"Miss Schnee." Yin said her name with neutral precision — not warmly, not coldly, but with the specific quality of a person who had already formed a preliminary assessment and was about to test it. "Splendid. Let's find out, shall we?"
She looked to Port.
Port, who had been waiting for exactly this cue, turned with considerably more enthusiasm than the moment strictly required, unlatched the cage at the back of the hall, and stepped aside.
"Face your opponent!"
The Boarbatusk emerged at a dead run.
◆ ◆ ◆
V. The Lecture Hall — The Match
Weiss moved well. That was not in question. She had the sharp, economical technique of someone trained from childhood in a tradition that rewarded precision over force — footwork that put her where she needed to be a fraction before the threat arrived, blade work that was all clean angles and controlled energy. She deflected the Boarbatusk's first charge with the blade of Myrtenaster, rolling to its off-side to break the line of attack, and came up in a ready stance without wasted motion.
Yin watched from the side with the focused attention of an instructor who was not watching the technique. Technique could be taught. She was watching other things: where Weiss's eyes went when she wasn't sure what was coming, how she held her weight in the half-second before a decision, and — most importantly — how she moved in relation to the room.
Not in relation to the Grimm. In relation to the room.
The Boarbatusk circled. Weiss tracked it with her blade.
From the front row, Ruby leaned forward.
"Hang in there! You've got it, Weiss, you've really —"
"I'm trying to focus." Weiss's voice came out sharper than a blade and twice as quick, and Ruby sat back as though she'd walked into a wall. The smile that had been on Ruby's face didn't die immediately — it just went quiet, the way a candle goes quiet when a door opens somewhere in the house.
In the rows behind them, expressions shifted. Not dramatically. Not loudly. Just — shifted.
Yin's eyes moved from the match to Ruby's face, and then back. She noted the shape of the problem with the efficiency of someone adding an item to a list.
The Boarbatusk leaped. Rolled. Became a spinning disc of armored weight moving at considerable speed.
Ruby, recovering herself, tried again. "Go for the underside — there's no plating on the —"
"Stop telling me what to do!"
The words landed in the room the way a stone lands in still water — not violently, but with a spread of consequence that moved outward from the impact in all directions. Ruby's face did something complicated and arrived at an expression that was trying very hard to be nothing.
Yin exhaled through her nose. Quietly. Once.
Weiss, unaware of the geography she had just created, returned her attention to the Grimm. She activated a glyph and launched herself upward, driving Myrtenaster into the Boarbatusk's unarmored belly as it came at her. It fell. She landed. She stood upright with the posture of someone who had proven a point.
Port applauded with genuine enthusiasm.
Nobody else did.
The silence had a texture to it. Weiss, slowly, began to feel it.
◆ ◆ ◆
VI. The Corridor Outside the Lecture Hall
Students filed out in the comfortable noise of a class that had been given something to talk about. Ruby went through the door quickly — not running, but moving with the purposeful speed of someone who has decided that a room they are currently in has become the wrong room.
Yang went after her, calling her name. Blake followed without needing to be asked.
Weiss stood near the front of the emptying hall with the expression of someone who had expected to feel vindicated and had instead arrived at something more complicated.
Kouga stopped in front of her.
He did not say anything immediately. He looked at her the way you look at something when you are deciding whether or not to say the true thing. Then he made his decision.
What he did next surprised everyone in the room, including himself: he reached out and flicked her on the forehead. Not hard. Not violently. But deliberately — the kind of gesture that says, more plainly than words can manage: pay attention to what I am about to say.
Weiss reared back, stunned. "What in the —"
"You embarrassed her," Kouga said. His voice was not raised. It did not need to be. "In front of the whole class. Ruby was cheering for you. She was trying to help you. And you treated her like a nuisance." He looked at Weiss without flinching. "I don't see a huntress. I see someone who's spent her whole life being told she's the most important person in the room, and hasn't figured out yet how much that's cost her."
He walked away.
Max paused beside Weiss on his way out. There was no anger in his expression — only the particular weight of someone who had expected more and was recording the gap.
"You made a mistake today," he said quietly. "I'd thought better of you than that." A beat. "I hope tomorrow's a different story."
He left.
Mist passed without speaking. Her expression said enough.
Kazuma stopped last. He was not someone who chose his words for comfort.
"Ruby Rose has one day behind her as a leader. One day, Weiss. And the only person who's made her feel like a failure so far is you." He let that sit for a moment. "The world isn't arranged according to your preferences. Neither are the people in it. Until you figure that out, you're going to keep pushing away the only people who actually want to be on your side."
He left before she could answer.
Weiss stood in the emptying lecture hall, alone with the particular quality of silence that follows a truth delivered without malice. She was angry. Of course she was angry. Anger was easier.
But beneath it, smaller and less convenient, something else had begun to stir.
Behind her, a hand appeared on her shoulder.
"Miss Schnee," Yin Lang said. "A word, if you would."
◆ ◆ ◆
VII. The Corridor — Yin Lang and Weiss Schnee
They walked in silence until they reached a courtyard alcove with a bench and the particular quality of privacy that comes from being technically visible but practically ignored. Yin sat. Weiss did not — not yet. She had too much energy for sitting.
"You're disappointed in me," Weiss said. It was not quite a question.
"I'm forming an opinion," Yin replied. "I try not to be disappointed in people I don't know yet. It's unfair to them." She folded her hands in her lap. "You beat the Grimm. Technically, the exercise was a success."
"Then what was the problem?"
"You beat the Grimm," Yin repeated. "Alone. In a room full of people who wanted to help you."
Weiss stopped moving.
"Teamwork is not a skill you acquire by tolerating your teammates," Yin said. "It requires trust. Trust requires the belief, however uncomfortable, that someone else might have something worth contributing. Even if they are younger than you. Even if they are less formally trained. Even if they are — " she paused, with the timing of someone who knows exactly what they are doing — " not the person you would have chosen."
"That's not —" Weiss caught herself. Tried again. "I don't distrust my teammates. I just — Ozpin chose Ruby. Ruby, who is two years younger than the standard enrollment age, who slept through the first lecture of the year, who has been at this school for fewer hours than it takes to —"
"You think he made a mistake," Yin said.
"I think — " Weiss's voice had the careful, clipped quality of someone editing themselves in real time. "I think there may have been better options."
"Put your back against the wall."
Weiss blinked.
Yin had risen from the bench and moved to the center of the alcove with the unhurried ease of someone who had done this particular thing many times. Her weight was back on her heels. Her hands were loose. Her expression had not changed in any way that should have been threatening, and yet something in the architecture of her stance had rearranged the air around her.
"If you believe Ozpin made an error in judgment," she said, "prove it. Come at me."
Weiss stared. "You're a teacher."
"I'm a woman standing in a courtyard. Either you have something to show me, or you have something to think about. Choose."
The anger that Weiss had been managing very carefully for the last twenty minutes made its decision for her. She withdrew Myrtenaster and moved.
She was fast. She was precise. The thrust she led with was exactly where it should have been for the distance and the angle, and it arrived at a point approximately six inches from Yin Lang's face — held there, completely motionless, by the tip of Yin's index finger, which had arrived first.
Not a weapon. A finger.
Weiss stared at the blade of her rapier pressed against a single extended fingertip and arrived, with some difficulty, at the conclusion that this was real.
"Wha — that's not —"
"It is, actually." Yin flicked the blade aside, clean and without apparent effort, and Weiss stumbled off her line. The follow-through — a fist that stopped an inch from Weiss's face — moved enough air to crack the flagstone behind her and leave a shallow divot in the ground.
Weiss stood very still.
"Your technique is excellent for your age and your training," Yin said, pulling her hand back. "Your instincts are good. Your footwork is above average. None of that is in question." She returned to the bench and sat down again as if the demonstration had not happened. "What is in question is this: your skill on the field is the second most dangerous thing about you right now. The first is your certainty."
"My certainty," Weiss repeated.
"That you know better. That you can see the situation more clearly than others. That your judgment — because it is yours, because it is careful, because it has been validated over and over by people who found it convenient to validate — is automatically more reliable than anyone else's." Yin looked at her without unkindness. "I have met many people who were very gifted and very certain. The gifts tended to survive. The certainty usually caused problems first."
The silence this time was different from the one in the lecture hall. That one had been uncomfortable. This one was the kind that comes when something true has landed and a person is deciding how much of it they can hold at once.
"What am I supposed to do with that?" Weiss asked. Her voice, for the first time in the conversation, had lost its edge.
Yin was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, it was in the measured tone of someone offering something they believed rather than performing an instruction.
"Stop fighting for what you think you deserve and start earning what you actually want. The people who will matter most to you in this place — they don't need you to be the best. They need you to be present. To be reliable. To trust them even when your instincts say they're going to let you down." A pause. "You have those people. Right now. Waiting to see what you'll do."
Weiss looked down at her rapier. Put it away.
"There is one other matter," Yin said, more quietly. "Your relationship with faunus. We can discuss that properly another time. But I want you to know that I've noticed it, and I haven't dismissed it, and I do intend to return to it."
Weiss looked up sharply.
"You are not subtle," Yin said, without cruelty. "That's all for today."
◆ ◆ ◆
VIII. The Western Courtyard — Ruby and Kouga
Ruby had found her bench the way people find places to be sad — not by looking for one, but by walking until her feet had used up the urgency and something quieter had taken its place. It was a good bench. It faced the gardens. There were birds.
She was not particularly registering the birds.
She had wiped her face by the time she heard the footsteps, and she had arranged her expression into something that was trying to be fine and mostly succeeding, and she looked up to find Kouga standing a few feet away with his hands in his pockets, looking at her with the particular quality of attention that she had noticed about him before — not demanding, not searching, just present.
"Thought you might be here," he said.
"Koga — I'm okay, you don't need to —"
"I know you're okay." He gestured at the bench. "Mind if I sit down anyway?"
She moved over, which was its own kind of answer.
They sat for a moment in the kind of silence that is companionable rather than empty. A cloud moved across the sun. The birds continued their business with the indifference of birds.
"Do you think she's right?" Ruby asked. She was looking at her hands, which she had folded in her lap with the careful attention of someone keeping them occupied. "Weiss. Do you think Ozpin made a mistake?"
Kouga was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone who didn't know what to say, but the silence of someone who was deciding how to say the true thing accurately.
"I think," he said, "that Ozpin has been running Beacon for a long time and has made a lot of decisions about a lot of people. I think he saw something in you that he decided was worth investing in. And I think —" he paused — "that it's only been one day. You can't assess a failure in one day. That's not how failure works."
"But what if I'm not —" She stopped. Started again. "What if the responsibility is bigger than I am right now?"
He turned to look at her, and she turned to look at him, and the afternoon light did what afternoon light does on faces that are being honest.
"Then you grow into it," he said. "That's what it's for." He leaned back slightly, thinking it through as he said it. "A leader isn't made by the title. The title just gives you the chance to prove you deserve it. And the way you prove it isn't by knowing everything — it's by being the kind of person your team believes in. That starts with how you treat them. The rest builds from there."
Ruby was quiet for a moment. Then: "How do I do that when one of them doesn't want to be on my team?"
"By showing up anyway. By being exactly who you are — the person who cheers too loud and studies too late and cares more than is strictly practical — and trusting that it's enough." A pause. "Because it is, Ruby. I've seen it from the first night."
She looked at him for a moment longer than she meant to, and then looked away, and her face had done something that she was glad he wasn't looking at just then.
"Thank you," she said. "You really — you always seem to know what to say to me. It's a little unfair, actually."
He laughed. It was a good laugh — unguarded, easy, the laugh of someone who doesn't laugh ironically.
"Lucky guesses," he said.
She shook her head, still smiling, and looked back at the garden. The birds had moved on. The cloud had too.
She felt, not for the first time and not for the last, that this was one of those friendships that had decided to exist before either of them had consciously agreed to it. The kind that do not require maintenance so much as simply — continuation.
◆ ◆ ◆
IX. Team RWBY Dormitory — Late Evening
Beacon at night settled in stages. The training grounds went quiet first, then the common rooms, then the corridors, until what remained was the hum of the building itself — pipes and ventilation and the distant ambient sound of a place that had been sheltering people for a long time and was comfortable with the work.
In Team RWBY's dormitory, Yang was spread across her bunk with the horizontal confidence of someone at peace with the universe. Blake's candle had been extinguished. The room was the quiet kind of dark — not empty dark, but lived-in dark, the kind that accumulates from familiar things.
The only light was the small reading lamp angled over Ruby's bunk-tent, where she sat surrounded by open books and annotated notes with a coffee cup that had gone cold an hour ago and a pencil she had been using for three hours without noticing that the tip had worn flat.
She was not entirely aware of how late it had gotten. She had that quality of focus — not always present, but, when it arrived, total — that made time pass without permission.
The door opened.
Weiss Schnee stood in the doorway in her pajamas, her silver hair loose, her expression assembled into something careful. She looked at Ruby under her lamp, surrounded by her books, still at it at this hour, and something crossed her face that had not been visible in the lecture hall. It was the expression of someone being forced to update an assumption they had been comfortable with.
She crossed the room quietly. Crouched beside Ruby's bunk. Looked at the notes.
Ruby startled awake with the small, flailing energy of someone who had been not quite asleep. "Weiss — I was studying, I was still — I didn't — "
Weiss placed her hand briefly over Ruby's mouth. One finger over her own lips. The room was still breathing in the soft rhythms of sleep; neither of them needed to be responsible for changing that.
Ruby went quiet. Watched.
Weiss looked at the empty mug beside Ruby's pillow. Reached under her own bed — where, Ruby noted with surprised curiosity, she had apparently been keeping a small thermal carafe — and came back up with a fresh cup, made to a specification she had apparently taken the trouble to learn.
She held it out.
"Cream," Weiss said, in a very low voice. "And five sugars. Which is excessive. But it's yours."
Ruby took the cup with the careful hands of someone receiving something that means more than its surface. She felt the warmth of it move through her palms.
"Thank you," she said. Just that. Two words, and she meant both of them completely.
Weiss sat on the edge of the bunk beside her. She looked at Ruby's notes — at the margins full of diagrams and questions and the small doodles of a person who thinks visually — and something in her expression softened in a way she would not have permitted in daylight.
"I owe you an apology," Weiss said.
Ruby blinked.
"What I said today — the way I spoke to you — that was wrong. It was beneath both of us, and it was unkind, and you didn't deserve it." Weiss said this looking at Ruby's notes rather than Ruby's face, which was the particular form this kind of honesty took for people who had not yet learned to make it easy. "I have standards. I expect a great deal. But I have been directing that at you as though you were a problem to be solved, rather than a person to be understood, and I intend to do better."
Ruby was quiet. Then, in the manner of someone who does not hold grudges because they have considered them and found them too heavy to carry: "Okay."
Weiss looked up.
"I think," Ruby said carefully, "that you're going to be an incredible teammate. I genuinely think that. I just — I need you to trust me a little. Even when I don't look like I know what I'm doing. Because sometimes I don't. But I'm trying. And I'll keep trying."
The silence this time was the good kind. The kind that means something has been said that needed saying and has been received properly.
"I can do that," Weiss said. "I will do that."
She rose, straightened her pajamas, and paused at the edge of the bunk with the air of someone who has one more thing to say and has decided, at the last moment, to say it.
"I always wanted bunk beds as a child," she said.
She slipped back to her side of the room before Ruby could answer.
Ruby sat under her lamp for a long moment, coffee warm in her hands, the notes spread around her, the dormitory breathing its quiet nighttime breath. She was smiling. Not the wide, immediate smile that she wore when something was simply good — this was the smaller, more careful smile that comes when something has been difficult and has resolved into something better than expected.
She put the pencil down. Picked it back up. Made one more note in the margin.
Then she blew out the lamp and went to sleep.
◆ ◆ ◆
X. The Eastern Garden — The Next Morning
The clearing in the garden east of the main dormitory block was the kind of place that existed because someone, at some point in Beacon's history, had decided that beauty was not incompatible with a military academy and had planted accordingly. There were trees. The light came through them at a good angle in the early morning, and the grass was still wet from the night before.
Weiss had asked everyone to come. They had come.
Teams MKKH and MSTGY stood in the loose, easy arrangements of people who had known each other long enough to not need to position themselves deliberately. JNPR occupied the near edge of the clearing with the slightly uncertain energy of young people who have been invited to something they don't entirely understand yet. And Team RWBY — Yang, Blake, and Ruby — stood together and waited to see what Weiss had arranged.
Weiss stood in front of them. Her posture was its usual precision, but something in her expression had the quality of a person who had made a decision the night before and was committed to it now that morning had come.
She turned to face Teams MKKH and MSTGY, and she bowed.
Not a small, perfunctory dip of the head. A real bow — the kind that requires you to mean it.
"You were right," she said, to Kouga specifically, and then to the room generally. "What I said and how I treated Ruby yesterday was wrong. I recognize that now. I am sorry for the inconvenience and the discourtesy, and I am sorry for requiring someone else to say it to me first."
She straightened. Looked at Kouga.
He rubbed the back of his head. He had the expression of someone who was not entirely comfortable receiving an apology for something he also owed an apology for, and was working through the order of operations.
"You're forgiven," he said. "And — I also owe you one. What I said had some truth in it, maybe, but the way I said it wasn't right. And I shouldn't have — " he gestured vaguely at his own hand — " done that. That was out of line."
Weiss blinked. She had not been expecting this.
"I shouldn't have lost my temper with you," Kazuma said, stepping forward. "You're different from the family name. I should have led with that instead of using it as a weapon. I apologize."
A moment of general recalibration moved through the clearing.
"I suppose this is us burying the hatchet," Kouga said.
"Is that the right expression?" Weiss asked.
"I think so."
"Then yes. That is what this is." She extended her hand to Kouga first, then to Kazuma. "And — for the record — I do have a name. It's Weiss. Not Schnee. Weiss."
"Weiss," Kazuma said, with the careful enunciation of someone relearning a word they had been mispronouncing. He shook her hand. "I'll use it."
Weiss turned to Kouga.
"You said you owed me a favor."
"I did say that, yes."
"Then here is mine." She looked at him with the direct, measured quality of someone who has thought this through and is not going to qualify it. "Look after Ruby. Not because she can't look after herself — she can, and she will. But because she is my partner and my friend, and you are the person she trusts most in this school right now. So look after her. Don't let her feel as alone as I made her feel yesterday."
The clearing was quiet for a moment.
Ruby, standing three steps behind and to the left, had gone the color of her cloak. Her hands were moving in the air in the manner of someone trying to preemptively retract a conversation she was not technically a participant in. "Weiss — it's not — that isn't — we're just — "
"Ruby."
"Yes?"
"I'm talking."
"Right. Yes. Sorry."
Kouga, who had been watching this with an expression that was attempting to stay neutral and was not entirely succeeding, looked at Weiss.
"If that's what you'd like," he said, with the simple directness that was characteristic of him, "then yes. I will."
"Good," Weiss said. "Then we understand each other."
Yang, who had been watching all of this from the edge of the clearing with the expression of someone attending an event she had not known she needed to see, leaned over to Max.
"Your brother's something else," she said, quietly enough that it was meant for him.
"I know," Max said.
"Good quality."
"He came with them."
Yang laughed, soft and genuine, and it spread through the clearing the way warmth spreads in a room when a window is opened — not dramatically, just gradually, until the light was everywhere and nobody quite knew when it had started.
Around them, Beacon caught the morning in its towers and held it.
End of Chapter Four
Coming Next —Chapter Five: Jaunedice
Ending theme:
Ending theme: Akeboshi (Demon Slayer Mugen Train Arc)
Visuals: it flashes the cast introduced so far; Teams MKKH, MTSGY, JNPR, and RWBY all going about their business. The song then transitions to Several Silhouetted beings with Grimm present around them. It switches to the cast fighting off Grimm before Koga is seen to be battling with what appears to be a demon and Ruby running towards and reaching for him.
Hey guys, it's been a minute! But I've finally gotten back to updating this thing lol 😂. I'm just going to foreshadow the first major villain our cast will face off against for a bit and.. it isn't Cinder this time! She may come into play later, but I'm not sure what role she'll play yet.
The two main pairings are locked in: Ruby x Koga and Max x Yang. But maybe you can help me with the other ones:
Blake x Shoryu?
Kazuma x Weiss
Mist x Cardin?
Yukikaze x Sun?
Toshirou x Gwynne
Hon'oo x Yatsuhashi/Neptune?
Pm or leave a comment on some alternate pairings I maybe didn't think about. Until next time guys!