Hey guys RoseSaiyan2 here again. Back with another update of this story! Sorry for the wait from last time. This chapter will start out a little differently than how Volume 2 of the cannon Rwby story started out episode 1 of volume 2. Since Ruby has asked Nova to train her and martial arts, we'll start with some interaction between the two of them first.
This will develop their relationship a little further. I will also highlight some of the other relationships surrounding the main cast (the 3 main teams of this story). You may have already guessed a couple of them: Turuk x Yang and Daikon x Weiss. Scarlett and Aiko are abit of the outliers here, I'll figure out what to do with them as the story progresses more. As for Scarlett, there is one option for her I think could be pretty interesting, just have to figure out how to make it work. I think I know what I'm going to do with Aiko though. But in case you guys want something different than what I was thinking, here are some options for Scarlett's Pairing:
Mercury (Reformed/Good)
Jaune (following the original story on fanfiction.net)
Fox (Team CVFY)
Yatsuhashi (Team CVFY)
Sage (Team SSSN)
Also, here's another poll: When should Nova and his team gain access to Super Saiyan?
Volume 3: fall of Beacon
Mission in volume 3
In training with the saiyan instructors
Volume 4
That's all for now. I'll put another poll at the end of the chapter too, so enjoy!
P.S.- I don't own Dbz/Kai/DBS or Rwby and their characters. Those are owned by Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation and Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively. I own 4 of the 6 oc's in this story and have permission to use the oc's of Tarro and Daikon from my friend ComparedDread12.
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CHAPTER SEVEN: Best Day Ever; The Food Fight?
---
Part I — Before Sunrise
Location: The Edge of Forever Fall Forest | Early Morning
---
Ruby Rose had a system for keeping secrets.
It was not a complicated system. It amounted, essentially, to leaving before anyone was awake and returning before anyone noticed she'd been gone, which required an early start and a certain willingness to skip the part of the morning where she stood in the dormitory kitchen waiting for the kettle and thinking about things. She was, on balance, willing to skip that part today.
She skipped through the lower streets of Vale with her hood up and her hands in her pockets and a feeling in her chest that she'd been filing under *nervous-excited* for the past week and was beginning to suspect deserved its own category.
Today was the first training session.
The thought of it had been sitting in the back of her mind since the night at the docks — not anxiously, but with the specific, charged quality of something anticipated. She was going to learn to fight without Crescent Rose. She was going to learn to use her ki. She was going to do something that her teammates didn't know about yet, and then at some point in the future she was going to show them, and she had spent a not-insignificant portion of the past week imagining their reactions, which ranged from *Yang falling over* to *Weiss making a very controlled face that meant she was deeply impressed but wasn't going to say so directly.*
These were good thoughts. She had them at a brisk walk through the pre-dawn streets of Vale and found them satisfying.
There was also, she was aware, the less tidily categorized element of this arrangement, which was that training with Nova meant being alone with Nova, which was — fine. They were friends. Best friends, by the accounting she had insisted on and he had accepted with good grace. Being alone with a friend was normal and fine and not a thing that required any additional attention.
She was aware that this line of reasoning was doing a certain amount of work.
She had been aware of it for several weeks.
She had filed it under later.
Later was a very large filing cabinet at this point and she was beginning to lose things in there.
She shook her head and walked faster.
---
Forever Fall in the early morning had a different quality than it did in the afternoon. The red-and-amber of the canopy was darker before the sun found its angle, and the light that filtered through was softer — less spectacular, more atmospheric, the kind of beauty that didn't announce itself.
Ruby stood at the tree line and looked around and found the clearing empty.
"About time."
She turned.
Nova descended from above the canopy with the complete casual ease of someone who has been waiting on a tree branch and has decided this is a reasonable way to spend fifteen minutes. He landed in front of her with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this enough times to forget that most people found it remarkable.
Ruby looked at him.
He looked at her.
"What's that supposed to mean?" She puffed her cheeks out. "I was exactly on time. I said I'd come and I came, as you can clearly see."
He had the grace to look slightly embarrassed, which on his face was a subtle thing — a faint warmth at the edges, a small clearing of the throat. "You're right. I wasn't trying to imply—"
She held the expression for approximately three more seconds before she laughed, which was how long she could hold it when he looked genuinely contrite, which was not long.
"I know," she said. "I'm messing with you."
He looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone recalibrating. "That was deliberate."
"I've been taking notes on what gets a reaction out of you," she said cheerfully. "Implying I'm upset is in the top three."
"That's very scientific of you."
"I'm a student. I apply the scientific method to important problems." She smiled at him. "Hi, Nova."
Something at the corner of his expression settled in the way it settled when he was specifically pleased about something and wasn't planning to say so. "Hi, Ruby."
He looked around the clearing — the habit of someone who checks their perimeter even when they already know it's clear. "Did anyone follow you?"
"I left before Yang was awake," Ruby said. "When Yang is asleep, nothing in the world could follow me."
"Fair point." He looked back at her. "Ready?"
She stood up a little straighter. "Been ready for a week."
---
Part II — The Scars
---
"Before we do anything else," Nova said, "I want to explain what we're building toward and why we're building it the way we are."
Ruby nodded, settling her attention on him with the focused quality she had when she was actually interested rather than just paying courtesy attention, which he'd learned to distinguish.
"Ki isn't separate from you," he said. "It's not a tool you pick up and put down. It's the energy your body generates — it runs through everything, every movement, every decision. Most people on Remnant have something like it — they call it aura, and they're not wrong about what it is, just about what it can do." He paused. "Ki is more versatile. More powerful. And because of that, more demanding. Your body has to be strong enough to carry it before you can direct it. If it isn't—"
He reached up and unclipped the top half of his armor.
Ruby had not been expecting this, which meant she had approximately two seconds before she realized what she was looking at, and approximately three more seconds after that before she had composed herself into something approaching neutral.
The scars ran from his forearms to his shoulders and continued past the line of his shirt, a landscape of old damage — deep channels that had healed wrong or healed slowly, the marks of something that had torn rather than cut. They weren't fresh. They had the pale, settled look of injuries from years ago, integrated now into the person he was rather than the person he'd been.
Ruby's hand came up to cover her mouth before she'd decided to do it.
He watched her face change and looked away briefly, which was the thing he did when something was difficult to look at someone while saying.
"I was young," he said. "Younger than you are now. I had a great deal of ki and a body that wasn't ready for it, and I was impatient." The laugh that came with this was small and forced at its edges, the laugh of someone who has processed something enough to find it almost funny. "Impatience has consequences. These are mine."
He wasn't looking at her.
Which was why he was surprised when he turned back and found her right there, her arms around him, her forehead against his shoulder, and the specific quality of warmth that Ruby Rose brought to everything she did when she had decided something mattered.
"I had no idea," she said, very quietly. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry you went through that alone."
He stood very still for a moment with the quality of someone who has been handed something they don't have an established way of receiving. Then, carefully, he raised one hand and set it briefly against the back of her head in something that was almost, but not quite, a return of the gesture.
"It was a long time ago," he said. "The point isn't to make you worry about it. The point is to make sure you don't repeat it."
She pulled back to look at him, and her eyes were bright in the way they got when she was trying not to show that something had hit somewhere significant. She reached out, tentatively, and ran her fingertips along one of the scars on his forearm — not intrusively, just the contact of someone who wants the person to know the wound has been witnessed.
"Then teach me properly," she said. "So I don't scar myself up before I'm ready."
Something in his face went very still for a second. Then: "That's the idea."
She stepped back to a respectful distance, which took more conscious effort than it usually did, and smoothed the front of her jacket.
"Okay," she said. "What first?"
---
The training outfit was already folded over the nearby tree root when he turned to retrieve it — red gi, black undershirt, matching pants and boots, with wristbands that had the faint appearance of something that had been very carefully constructed and weighed considerably more than it looked.
He held it out to her.
"You'll want to change," he said, and then he was already turning and walking toward the tree line with the particular briskness of someone who has made a decision about where to be and is executing it without further discussion, which Ruby found unexpectedly considerate.
"Nova—"
"I'll be over here," he said, not looking back, the back of his neck very slightly warmer than his natural tone.
She looked at the training clothes in her hands. Then at the tree line he'd disappeared into.
He's considerate, she thought, "when he's embarrassed about it, he walks away so fast that there's no time to comment on it."
She changed quickly, which was a skill you developed when your sister had no respect for the concept of privacy.
The moment she had the gi on properly — boots laced, wristbands in place — she understood what the weight was for. The clothing hit thirty pounds somewhere in the region of considerably heavier than anticipated and she had to consciously reorganize her balance to account for it, which she managed after two attempts at standing naturally.
She had been carrying Crescent Rose since she was fourteen. Crescent Rose was closer to a hundred pounds than to fifty, and she'd stopped noticing because her body had simply incorporated it into its sense of normal. Thirty pounds of clothing should have been nothing.
The difference was distribution. The scythe's weight was familiar and concentrated. The clothing wrapped it around everything.
"Oh," she said, to herself.
"Figured it out?" Nova emerged from the tree line, his expression carrying the specific warmth of someone who has watched someone arrive at a conclusion they were going to arrive at and has waited for it without spoiling it.
"You knew I'd adjust to it," she said.
"Your body already carries more than most people here know how to lift," he said. "I just redistributed the weight." He tilted his head. "How does it feel?"
She bounced on her toes once, experimentally. Settled. "Strange. But manageable."
"Good. That's the baseline." He looked at her steadily. "We'll increase the weight over time as your body adapts. But for now — show me your stance."
---
Part III — Fundamentals
---
She learned three things in the first hour.
The first was that she had been wasting energy for years. Her punching form was good — better than Nova had expected, actually, and she could tell from the quality of his attention when he was being genuine rather than encouraging — but she was putting power into blows that was going sideways rather than forward. She was dispersing rather than directing.
The second was that once you understood the correction, it was almost impossible to believe you hadn't been doing it right all along. Nova demonstrated once — set his feet, crouched his center of gravity down, shifted his body weight behind the motion, and threw a punch at nothing that produced a gust of wind she felt in her hair from three feet away. The mechanics of it were so obvious, watching them, that Ruby felt briefly embarrassed to have missed them for so long.
Then she tried it.
The crack her fist made against his open palm surprised both of them with its quality.
"Do it again," he said.
She did.
The gust of air that accompanied it this time was small — barely anything, a disturbance rather than a force — but it was there, and it was *hers,* and Ruby's eyes went to a size that communicated this clearly.
"That's ki," he said. "You felt it?"
"I felt *something,*" she said.
"That something is the beginning of everything else." He closed his hand from the palm-out catching position and looked at where her fist had connected with the expression of someone who has confirmed a hypothesis. "You have a lot of it, Ruby. More than most people at your level of training. Which means we need to build your body first — properly, deliberately — before we start directing it."
"How long?" she asked.
"Until your body tells us," he said. "Not a timeline. A condition."
She thought about this. "That's very—"
"Nova-like?" he offered.
"I was going to say "wise," she said, "but yes, also that."
The corner of his mouth moved. "Come on. Again."
---
They worked through the hour in the specific comfortable rhythm of two people who have discovered they make good training partners — Nova demonstrating, Ruby iterating, both of them adjusting in real time as she found her way toward the form rather than being pushed toward it. He corrected without diminishing. She absorbed without deflating. It was, Ruby thought, possibly the most effective teaching she had ever been on the receiving end of, and she had been taught by Qrow Branwen, which was a high bar.
It was the scrolls that ended the session, which was either the universe's sense of irony or a reasonable consequence of both of them losing track of time.
Ruby glanced at hers and made a sound.
Nova glanced at his and made a different sound that communicated the same information.
"We—"
"—have to be at—"
"—*yeah.*"
What followed was the specific controlled chaos of two people who are both very fast and are currently both in the wrong clothes trying to change back into the right ones while also being in a forest. Nova walked back to his tree. Ruby changed in the clearing in approximately eleven seconds, which was a new record that she filed away without telling anyone about.
She had also, she realized as she reached for her jacket, put her training clothes on underneath her uniform, which in the rush had seemed like an adequate solution to the problem of carrying them back.
This was not an adequate solution. The gi was thirty pounds and was now directly against her skin under the school jacket and she could feel every ounce of it and had approximately forty-five minutes of walking to do before she got back to Beacon.
She heard Nova's distant, muffled sound of a similar realization.
"I see you've also worn yours home," she called.
"Don't comment on it," he called back.
"Matching outfits," she said cheerfully.
"Ruby."
She grinned and started walking fast.
---
Part IV — The Binder
Location: Beacon Academy Cafeteria | Midday
---
The cafeteria at full capacity had the productive noise of a hundred students who had been in classes all morning and were now performing the necessary ritual of food and social recalibration before the afternoon.
Teams RWBY, JNPR, and NDTSA had arranged themselves around their usual pair of tables with the practiced ease of people who have been doing this long enough that the arrangement happens without discussion — Ruby and Yang on one side, Weiss and Blake across from them, Nova and Turuk along the end, the rest of NDTSA extending around to meet team JNPR where Nora was already telling Ren something with the specific hand-gesture vocabulary she deployed when the story required physical illustration.
Yang caught a grape in her mouth.
Nora loaded another one.
Blake was reading something with the attention of someone who was reading something and did not want to be asked about it, which was why Yang slid over to her side immediately.
"What are you reading over there?"
Blake's book closed with a speed that suggested it had been waiting for this. "Notes from last semester."
"Lame," Yang said, catching another grape.
"I can see your notes from last semester, Blake," Weiss said, without looking up from her own materials. "You have them in a red binder with the year printed on the spine. That binder has a brown cover."
Blake looked at Weiss.
Weiss continued reading.
Blake's jaw tightened fractionally.
Before this could develop further, the binder that landed on the table between them arrived with the specific certainty of a declaration. It was large. It was color-coded. The cover had been written on in two different hands — the original printing, VYTAL FESTIVAL ACTIVITIES: PROPERTY OF WEISS SCHNEE, neatly crossed out in red marker and replaced with BEST DAY EVER ACTIVITIES in handwriting that bore the specific energy of someone writing quickly while excited.
Ruby was standing on the bench.
"Sisters," she said, with the gravity of someone opening a summit. "Friends." She paused. "Weiss."
"Hey!"
"Four score and seven minutes ago—"
Across the table, Nova exchanged a glance with Turuk, who exchanged a glance with Scarlett, who was already beginning to smile.
"—I had a dream," Ruby continued.
Yang elbowed Nova with the easy confidence of someone who knows exactly how this is going to go and is going to enjoy it. "This ought to be good."
"Knowing Ruby," Nova said, with the tone of someone who has spent a year compiling evidence, "expect the completely unexpected." He paused. "I've more or less accepted that this is simply how it is."
"We all have," Turuk confirmed.
"There's never a dull moment when she gets an idea," Daikon said.
"Never," Aiko agreed, a little nervously.
"And I think that's great," Scarlett said. "I genuinely love whatever she's about to say."
"*A dream,*" Ruby continued, with the conviction of someone who has been working on this, "*that one day the four of us — all of us, actually, all seventeen of us — will come together as a team and have the most fun anyone has ever had. Ever.*"
Weiss looked at the binder. "Did you steal that?"
Ruby made peace signs. "I am *not* a crook."
"It has my name on the—"
"I'm talking about kicking off this semester properly," Ruby said. "Classes start tomorrow. Which means today is the last day we have before everything gets serious again. I have planned—" she opened the binder to a page that was color-coded by activity type "—a series of wonderfully fun events, optimized for team bonding and general excellent-time-having."
"I always kick my semesters off with a Yang!" Yang said, with the energy of someone who has been waiting to say that since the conversation started. "Eh? Guys?"
The silence that followed was the specific silence of people who have decided, as a group, not to engage with a pun.
Several hands met several foreheads.
Nova looked at the table surface.
"Should we say something?" Turuk murmured.
"No," Nova murmured back.
"But that was really—"
"I know. We say nothing."
An apple arrived from Nora's direction and contacted Yang's face with a flat sound.
"Boooo," Nora said.
Yang glared.
Ruby seized the moment. "Thank you, Nora! Okay — look. We have two weeks into the semester. The Vytal Festival is coming. Things are going to get complicated and serious and there are going to be exchange students from everywhere and tournament prep and all of that. But *today—*" She pointed at each of them in sequence, including Nova's team. "—today, we just have fun. All of us. Together. Yes?"
"I don't know whether to be proud or frightened," Weiss said.
"Both is fine," Ruby said.
"Look at it this way, princess," Daikon said, with the specific timing of someone who has been waiting for the right moment to deploy a word he knows will get a reaction, "whatever Ruby's got planned is guaranteed to not be boring. Which is more than can be said for—"
"Don't call me that," Weiss said, turning on him with the heat of someone who has had this discussion before and is prepared to have it again at full intensity.
"Oh? I thought I was forgetting something. What was the word I'm not supposed to use?" Daikon tilted his head. "It's on the tip of my tongue. Something regal, something elegant—"
"I will—"
"Princess?"
A crackle of invisible sparks moved through the air between them, which was the metaphorical kind but felt convincingly physical.
Yang looked at this, then at Turuk, then back at the ongoing confrontation.
"Does this ever actually go anywhere?" she asked.
"He gets her to smile eventually," Turuk said. "Takes a few more rounds."
Yang watched Weiss's expression cycle through several stages of furious and arrive, briefly, at the edge of something that was trying not to be amused. "Huh," she said. "How does he do that?"
"By caring enough to keep going," Turuk said simply.
Yang looked at him.
He was looking at the table with the composed attention of someone who has said what they meant to say and doesn't require a response to it.
She looked at the table too.
"Blake's still not going to commit to being enthusiastic about this, is she?" she asked, at a different angle entirely.
"Blake will have fun," Turuk said. "She just won't announce it in advance."
"That's very Blake."
"Yes," he said. "It really is."
---
Part V — What Sun Told Neptune
Location: The Corridor Outside the Cafeteria | Shortly Before
---
Sun Wukong was a person who talked with his whole body, which meant that the story of the dock fight, retold on the walk to the cafeteria, came with a complete set of physical illustrations that occupied both his hands and approximately twice his usual walking radius.
"—and then the banana peel landed on his head and he tossed it and looked up and there I was—"
Neptune Vasilias, walking beside him with the relaxed attention of someone who has been Sun's audience before and has calibrated his responses accordingly, nodded. "Smooth."
"It was smooth, thank you." Sun rotated to demonstrate the staff-deployment. "Then I came down on his face, feet-first, and—"
"And the girl? Blake?"
Sun's motion stopped. Started again, at a different pace.
"Yeah. Blake was — she was fighting the guy directly, which is wild because the guy with the cane is fast. Like, actually fast, not just regular fast." He paused. "She held her own for a while."
"But?" Neptune said, with the intuition of someone who has known Sun long enough to hear the shapes of sentences he hasn't finished.
"But then her brother showed up."
"Her brother?"
"Nova." Sun's expression shifted to the specific combination of impressed and slightly awed that he used for things that exceeded his reference points. "Bro. I have seen people fight. I have been in fights. I have watched Sun Wukong, that's me, fight people considerably larger than me and win. What I watched Nova do to that guy—" He shook his head. "The guy called him a monkey and it was like someone dropped a switch. It was incredible. And kind of terrifying."
Neptune digested this. "Good terrifying or bad terrifying?"
"Good. Definitely good. He was protecting Blake, and then he was protecting Ruby, and the whole time it was like—" Sun searched for the comparison. "You know how some people fight like they're performing? And some people fight like they're *working?* Nova fights like he was designed for it. But not in a scary way. In a way that makes you feel—" He stopped. "I don't know. Glad he's on the right side?"
"That's a good way to be," Neptune said.
"Yeah." Sun walked in silence for a moment. "He's one of Blake's brothers. Adopted, not blood — she told me. But you wouldn't know it from how they are with each other." A beat. "She loves those guys the way you love people who didn't have to choose you."
Neptune was quiet for a moment.
"You really like this girl," he said.
Sun's golden tail flicked. "Shut up."
"I'm not judging. I'm observing."
"You have a very annoying way of observing."
"It's a gift." Neptune smiled. "What's she like? Beyond the fighting."
Sun thought about it in the way he thought about things that mattered, which was more carefully than his general affect suggested. "Quiet," he said. "In the way of someone who listens more than they speak because they think more than they let on. She reads constantly — actual books, not scrolls. She has these cat ears under the bow she wears and she doesn't show them, but the ears move when she's paying attention to something, which means you can always tell what's actually got her focus." He paused. "She's got this thing where she acts like she's fine with everything right up until the moment she isn't, and then she runs instead of fighting, which—" He made a small frustrated gesture. "I think she's learning to stop doing that. But it's a process."
Neptune looked at his friend.
"Yeah," he said. "You really like her."
Sun looked at the cafeteria door ahead of them, through which the sound of what appeared to be food in motion was becoming audible. "I just don't want to mess it up," he said. "The people in there — Ruby, Nova, the whole team — they're good. The kind of people who make you want to be at your best, you know? Because they are." He reached the door. "So. Be cool. Please."
"I am literally always cool," Neptune said, and his teeth gleamed at a angle that Sun had never been able to argue with, no matter how many times he'd tried.
"Okay, good, because—"
The door opened.
Food was, at that moment, doing things that food was not designed to do.
A grape passed between them at velocity. Something that appeared to be a turkey struck the wall to the left of the doorframe. Jaune Arc made contact with the window to the right of it in a way that suggested he had not chosen this trajectory.
Sun and Neptune stood in the doorway and absorbed the scene.
"What the—" Sun started.
"I love this place," Neptune said, with conviction.
---
Part VI — The Food Fight
---
It had started, as most significant events in Ruby Rose's life tended to start, with good intentions and imperfect execution.
The pie had been Nora's contribution to the conversation — a conversational contribution, in the sense that it traveled through the air and arrived at Weiss Schnee's face with the specific certainty of a punctuation mark.
Weiss had stood very still for one long moment.
The smile that arrived was not, precisely, a happy smile. It was the smile of someone who has identified a course of action and is about to commit to it fully.
The twitch in her eyebrow was the countdown.
By the time Ruby had climbed onto the table with the binder and a gleam in her silver eyes, the cafeteria had already divided itself along lines that nobody had explicitly drawn but everyone had instinctively recognized.
"Justice," Ruby said, from atop her table, with the theatrical gravity of someone who has been waiting their whole life to say this in exactly this context, "will be swift. Justice will be painful." She crushed a milk carton in her hand. The milk went in several directions. "It will be delicious!"
On the opposite side of the cafeteria, Nora Valkyrie descended from her tower of stacked tables with the energy of a small and very enthusiastic natural disaster.
"OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!"
The room committed.
---
What followed was, by any reasonable measure, one of the more extraordinary eight minutes in Beacon Academy cafeteria history.
Ruby pointed at the turkeys on the floor with the command authority of someone who has been waiting to do this. "Yang! Nova! Turuk — turkeys!"
"On it," all three said simultaneously, which was the kind of thing that happened more often than anyone had commented on.
Yang rolled for the nearest turkey and drove her fists into it with the grin of someone who has just found the appropriate outlet for a great deal of compressed energy. Nova did the same thing on her left flank, which meant the two of them advanced on Daikon and Scarlett in a line that was more coordinated than a turkey-fist approach had any right to be.
Daikon had also grabbed a turkey.
Scarlett had also grabbed a turkey.
The four of them looked at each other across the cafeteria with the specific eye contact of people who have just recognized that they are about to do something completely ridiculous and are fully prepared to commit.
"This," Daikon said, "is the dumbest thing I've ever done."
"Same," Scarlett said.
They went at each other anyway, and it was *glorious* in the specific way that things are glorious when everyone involved has abandoned dignity in favor of something better.
---
Nora, at the height of her tactical arc, swung her melon-on-a-pole at the crimson-haired faunus who had materialized between her and Ren with a baguette that should not have been structurally capable of withstanding contact with a melon but apparently was. The baguette held. Aiko was moving with the compact, circular footwork her father had spent years drilling into her, and the bread moved like a weapon in her hands because she was treating it like one.
"That bread," Sun said, from the doorway, with genuine awe, "should not be that solid!"
Neptune, who was taking notes mentally, said nothing.
Yang took the melon hit meant for Aiko with the instinct of someone who moved toward impact rather than away from it, and went through the ceiling, which was not the planned outcome but was achieved with a great deal of conviction.
Nora looked at the hole where Yang had been.
Aiko looked at the hole.
"She's coming back," Aiko said, with the certainty of someone who has observed Yang Xiao Long at length. "She always comes back."
Nora grabbed a spare sausage link.
---
Meanwhile, the condiment situation had escalated.
Turuk and Daikon, having abandoned the turkey gauntlets in favor of condiment bottles somewhere around the third exchange, had been conducting what could only be described as a ranged combat exercise with mustard and ketchup as the primary weapons systems. This had been going extremely well for both of them, in terms of coverage area, until the floor became the problem.
Turuk's foot hit the ketchup patch at approximately the same moment Daikon stepped on the mustard spread, and the resulting collision had the specific kinetic energy of two people who had been moving fast in the same direction and were now experiencing its logical consequences.
The sound the three of them — Turuk, Daikon, and Scarlett, who had been in the way — made when they hit each other was, in fact, fairly similar to bowling pins.
Turuk got up first. Removed mustard from his face with the back of his hand. Looked at his brother.
"Never," he said, with great precision, "condiment battle with Daikon."
Nova was maintaining a straight face with what appeared to be significant effort. "Noted," he said.
Daikon, from the floor, said nothing, which was dignified under the circumstances.
---
The room had reached the stage where everyone was committed, which was also the stage where committed became chaotic.
Pyrrha, having been knocked into a soda machine, had apparently decided that this was an adequate surface from which to use her semblance, and the metal content of the cafeteria was now migrating toward her hands with the purposeful urgency of objects that have been given direction. Soda cans peeled off shelves. Metal serving trays lifted. The entire metallic ecosystem of the cafeteria lunch service was mobilizing.
Ruby watched this from across the room.
Then she looked at Nova.
He was already looking at her, with the expression of someone who has seen where this is going and is quietly prepared for it. The slight incline of his head said: your call.
She grabbed a lunch tray. Shifted her weight into her stance — the way he'd shown her that morning, the way that felt different now that she understood why it felt different. She looked at Nova. He looked at her.
He gave her one small, precise push of ki — not a shove, not a demonstration, just a nudge at the back of something that was already in motion.
Ruby's semblance ignited.
She hit the wall at a speed that had rose petals in its wake, angling up, catching the momentum and redirecting it outward through the cafeteria in a spiral that picked up every loose projectile — soda can, condiment bottle, spare melon — and wrapped it around her trajectory like a storm rotating around its eye.
She came off the wall.
The storm met the opposition in a single, comprehensive, colorful impact.
The cafeteria wall, for a moment, held the outlines of everyone.
Then they slid.
Ruby landed in front of her side of the room in a low, controlled crouch, one hand on the ground, the other raised in a peace sign, her hair doing something remarkable in the post-motion air.
"Victory!," she said.
She looked up at Nova.
He was looking at her with the expression he had when she did something that specifically pleased him, which she had learned to recognize over the past year as a rarer and therefore more valuable expression than his others.
She extended her fist.
He crossed the room and knocked his against hers without ceremony.
"Nice work," he said.
"You too, Nova-san," she said, because she'd been saving that one and it felt like the moment.
He tilted his head at the honorific.
"Don't start that," he said.
"Too late," she said. "It's started. It's happening."
He looked at her for a moment — the long, contained look — and then he ruffled her hair.
She beamed.
"I love these guys," Sun said, from the doorway, to no one in particular.
Neptune, drenched in soda from a can that had passed through his airspace during the spiral, said nothing, because he was composing himself.
---
Part VII — Glynda
---
The door opened.
The cafeteria went from full chaos to deathly silent with the specific speed of people who have been caught.
Glynda Goodwitch walked through the door with the measured pace of someone who is not running because running would suggest she had not already seen everything that had just happened, and she had, and she was dealing with it accordingly.
Her eyes moved across the room — the soda-soaked walls, the outline-shaped marks on the far surface, the turkey-gauntlet remains, the condiment topography, the general impression of a cafeteria that had experienced something unprecedented.
She looked at the students.
The students looked at her.
Nora burped.
Everyone else tried to compose themselves, with varying success that tended toward the lower end of the range. Ruby had her hand pressed to her mouth. Scarlett was looking at the ceiling. Turuk had found something extremely interesting to study on the floor beside his right shoe. Daikon's expression had not changed, which was an achievement that required active effort.
Weiss was attempting to look like someone who had not just participated in a cafeteria food fight. This was undermined by the pie residue that she'd never quite gotten out of her hair.
"*Children.*" Glynda's voice had the quality of something that has been very deliberately controlled. She reached up and adjusted her glasses with one finger. "*Please.* Do not play with your food."
The ceiling above caved in slightly as Yang crashed through it from the floor above, landing on one of the tables with the unconvincing composure of someone who has absolutely been up there the whole time and is definitely not returning from somewhere else.
Glynda looked at Yang.
Yang smiled.
Glynda made a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a structural complaint.
A hand settled on her shoulder.
"Let it go," Ozpin said.
"They are supposed to be," Glynda said, looking at the assembled students — at the laughing, flour-dusted, condiment-spattered group of them, teams RWBY and JNPR and NDTSA arranged in the specific disorder of people who have just had a genuinely good time — "*defenders of the world.*"
"And they will be." He looked at them too. "But right now they're children. Let them play the part while they still can." He turned. "It isn't a role they'll have forever."
He walked toward the door.
Glynda watched the students for one more moment — watched the way they were laughing with each other and helping each other up and throwing one last grape across the room before recognizing her presence and stopping — and then she looked away and followed Ozpin.
Rhubar and Sala fell into step beside them in the corridor.
Rhubar made a sound that was several things fighting each other — composure and genuine amusement and the residual force of something that required active suppression.
"You have to admit," he said, "that was—" he stopped to contain something "—*remarkable.*"
Sala turned to him with the expression she used when he was behaving undignifiedly but she agreed with him. "*Dear.*"
"I'm simply saying that the creativity demonstrated in the application of—" the sound that came out of him was somewhere between a word and a snort.
Sala pressed her lips together. Looked at the wall ahead of them. Looked back at her husband.
Gave up.
They were both laughing by the time they reached the end of the corridor, the quiet, unstoppable kind of laughter that arrives when something genuinely delights you and you're not prepared for how much.
Glynda walked ahead of them with the expression of someone who has decided to maintain professional standards as a matter of principle.
Then, at the corridor's end, she produced a very small and very controlled smile that she immediately removed before anyone could comment on it.
She was, after all, the school's strictest teacher.
But she had liked the binder.
---
**Part VIII — Mercury's Memory**
**Location: White Fang Warehouse, Vale | That Evening**
---
The warehouse had the functional darkness of somewhere that existed to hold things temporarily, and Roman Torchwick moved through it with the proprietary confidence of a man who considers all spaces he occupies to be his spaces, at least until instructed otherwise.
He found Emerald and Mercury at the entrance.
"Look at that," he said pleasantly. "She sent the *kids* again." He opened his arms with the theatrical warmth of someone performing enthusiasm at roughly half the required effort. "Just like the divorce."
Emerald's skin crawled visibly. She stepped away from him with the expression of someone removing themselves from a biohazard. "Spare us the thought of you *procreating.*"
"That was a joke," Roman said, producing a piece of paper from his jacket. He looked at it. Looked at Emerald. Looked at it again. "This, on the other hand, tells me you two have been somewhere you weren't supposed to be all day. *Why* do you have this address?"
"Wouldn't you like to know," Emerald said.
"I would! Hence the asking." He looked at Mercury, who was leaning against the wall with his arms folded and the expression of someone whose attention was located somewhere that was not this conversation. "Mercury. Focus."
"Hm?"
"*Where,*" Emerald said, with the practiced sharpness of someone who has been pulling this person back to the present all day, "*have you been all afternoon. Mercury.*"
He straightened. The internal distance collapsed back into the present. "We cleaned up one of your messes," he said to Roman. "The bookshop. The guy who was planning to run."
Roman made a face. "I had that—"
"Two packed bags and a ticket to Vacuo said otherwise," Mercury said. "Past tense."
Roman stormed up to him with the energy of a man who is aware that the person he is storming up to could end the conversation quickly but is choosing to make the point anyway. "*Listen, you little—*"
"Do *what,* Roman?"
The voice from above was pleasant in the specific way that extremely dangerous things are pleasant when they're not yet applying themselves. Cinder descended on the lift with the unhurried certainty of someone who knows the room has already arranged itself around her.
Roman laughed the laugh of a man recalibrating rapidly. "I was going to — *not* kill them. Definitely that."
"Cinder!" Emerald stepped forward with the eagerness she reserved for very few people.
Cinder's eyes moved to Roman with the specific attention of someone reviewing a ledger. "I understood you had already dealt with the Tukson matter."
"I was *going* to—"
"He was going to *Vacuo,*" Emerald said. "We decided not to let that happen."
"And that decision," Cinder said, looking at both of them with the pleasantness that preceded corrections, "was not yours to make. I was specific about keeping things clean in Vale. Was I unclear?"
"No, ma'am," Emerald said, with the specific tone of someone who means it.
"Then we won't have this conversation again." Cinder turned to Roman with the change in register of someone who has closed one topic and is opening another. "Phase two proceeds. You have what you need from the shipment?"
"Enough to work with," Roman said, with more conviction than he felt. "There were some... complications."
"The Belladonna boy," Cinder said. It wasn't a question.
"The kid hits like a *building.*" Roman touched his jaw, which still had opinions about the previous week. "And he apparently takes great personal offense at certain terminology."
"I've noted it," Cinder said, with the flatness of someone cataloguing.
She moved toward the upper level, and Emerald followed, and the conversation between them faded into the upper architecture of the warehouse.
Mercury stayed where he was.
---
He had been staying where he was — in the internal sense — for several days now.
It was getting harder to manage.
Emerald had been watching him and he knew she had been watching him, which meant whatever was happening on his face was visible, which was annoying because he had spent years getting very good at what was on his face. The fact that this was leaking through meant it was bigger than his usual control could accommodate.
He didn't know what it was.
That was the part that bothered him.
He knew his own history well enough — the specific version of it that began with Cinder and proceeded logically from there. What he did not have, and had not noticed that he was missing until it had started to surface, was anything before that.
Not nothing. That was the wrong word. It was more like — static. A frequency that occasionally resolved into something recognizable and then dissolved again before he could focus on it.
A house. Green grass in sunlight. Someone's voice — young, female, carrying the specific resonance of a memory that wanted to be heard.
*Let's make a promise,* the voice said.
*Okay,* young Mercury said. *What is it?*
*Let's promise that we—*
The headache arrived like an answer, sudden and total, and the memory dissolved into pain.
He pressed two fingers against his temple and breathed.
"*Mercury.*"
He looked up.
Emerald was at the top of the stairs. Her expression had the quality she got when she was managing something she hadn't decided how to approach. "We're moving."
"Yeah," he said. "Coming."
He pushed himself off the wall and followed.
The headache faded as he walked, which it always did, leaving the specific aftermath of something unresolved — a question without a shape, an answer without a question. Red hair. A voice he almost knew. A promise he couldn't hear the end of.
He was going to have to figure out what it was.
The alternative, he was discovering, was worse.
---
★ END OF CHAPTER SEVEN ★
---
Hey guys, hope you enjoyed the chapter! So I figured we'd go in abit.. of a different direction with Mercury. And yes, he is going to be good this time. Him and Emerald are just doing the ol' switcheroo of roles! Meaning Mercury turns good, while Emerald stays Evil.
Obviously from the flashback in his head, you guys may be able to more or less tell who the girl in his memories is. But for the plot's sake, I won't spoil it. I just have to come up with a way to have Mercury turn good. Let's just say his turn into a good guy or hero will be gradual, not immediate. There's a certain interaction in the future that will speed along his turncoat transformation from villain to hero.
Anyways that's all for now. Until next time!
Next: Chapter Eight — "Welcome to Beacon: Confrontation With the Past"