Hey Everyone, RoseSaiyan2 here again. I hope everyone enjoyed last chapter, it took awhile to write and I wanted to keep as close in line with the Rwby cannon story as I could. Keeping that in mind when writing this story makes writing chapters extremely difficult for me lol.
Keep in mind that after volume 3, the story will deviate abit, but I'll do my best to include the major elements and story related events from the cannon rwby story. Following the fall of Beacon, I'm going to release a poll concerning future development betwe- you know, nevermind I'll just ask you guys what you think in a poll.
This will be a two parter and it may be shorter as it takes place in between episodes of volume 2. These next two chapter take place in between the end of episode 2 and the beginning of episode 3 of Volume 2. So this two parter is before volume 2 episode 3: A Minor Hiccup, but after the events of last chapter.
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Before we begin the chapter... please vote on this:
If Nova and Ruby end up having kids in the future what should their names be [I'm thinking 2 boys and 1 girl for now]?
Here are some options:(vote or suggest one plz)
I. Turrip
II. Sunchock
III. Korn
IV. Cumber
V. Other (suggest one/write in)
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Now for the girl name:
I. Cauri
II. Cassa
III. Jinjer
IV. Nion
V. Other (suggest one/ write in)
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Since that's out of the way, now we can get started.
Disclaimer: RoseSaiyan2 does not own Dbz/ Kai/ DBS or Rwby and their characters. Those belong to Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation and Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively. I only own 4 of the 6 oc's, with rights to use Tarro and Daikon. Those two characters are property of ComparedDread12.
CHAPTER NINE
Ruby's Complicated Feelings
Part I — Before the Others Wake
Location: Team RWBY's Dormitory | Early Morning
Ruby Rose had not slept well.
This was unusual for her. She was, as a rule, an excellent sleeper — the kind of person who was asleep within minutes of lying down and woke feeling like the previous day's events had been filed and processed by whatever efficient part of the brain handled overnight maintenance. Sleeping was not something she had ever had to think about before.
Last night she had thought about it for approximately two hours, which was two hours longer than it had ever required.
She was dressed now, in her training clothes, sitting on the edge of her bunk in the pre-dawn quiet of the dormitory and staring at nothing in particular while her brain continued doing the thing it had been doing since yesterday afternoon in the library. Which was thinking about Nova. Which was not, in itself, the problem — she thought about Nova fairly often, because they were best friends and best friends thought about each other. That was normal.
The problem was the kind of thinking.
She pressed her palms together and looked at them.
The library incident had produced a specific category of memory that was refusing to file itself away properly. Not the incident itself — that had been embarrassing, certainly, but comprehensible, the consequence of moving too fast and not looking where she was going. What refused to file was the aftermath. Nova's face when he looked at her. His voice, even, unhurried, telling her it was fine. His hand on her head.
The warmth that had gone through her chest when he ruffled her hair.
That warmth was the problem. It had been there before — she could trace it backward now that she was paying attention, could identify the specific moments where it had arrived and she had filed it under later and moved on. The moment on the docks when he'd caught her. The training session in Forever Fall when he'd put his hand on her shoulder to correct her posture. Every time he looked at her with that particular quality of attention that said she was the only thing he was paying attention to.
Later had arrived.
"Nova and I are just best friends," she said, to the dark window.
The window offered no confirmation.
She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them and thought about this with the uncomfortable thoroughness of someone who has been successfully avoiding a thing long enough that they can no longer claim it's not there.
She liked Nova. She had always liked Nova — that part wasn't new. But the thing she was feeling now was more specific than like, and it arrived in her chest rather than in her head, and it had something to do with the way he smiled at her and something to do with his tail and—
"Bad," she said, firmly, to herself. "No."
She shook her head. Stood up. This was not a productive direction for a training morning.
She would go to the forest. She would train. She would focus on ki and stances and the very concrete business of getting stronger, which was something she understood and was good at and which did not involve her noticing things about Nova's face.
She was going to be completely fine.
Part II — What She Overheard
Location: Forever Fall Forest | Early Morning
She heard the voices before she reached the clearing.
Two of them — one she knew immediately, the low timbre of someone who spoke with the economy of a person who didn't feel the need to fill silence, and one she recognized with a brief, surprised recalibration as Professor Koizumi, who was not supposed to be in the forest at this hour and whose presence therefore required some quiet investigation before she announced herself.
Ruby slipped behind the nearest substantial tree with the trained silence of someone who had been raised on stories of huntsmen and huntresses and had absorbed their habit of reconnaissance.
"—any time you have coming up," Professor Koizumi was saying, "I can help you work on a few things."
"I appreciate that, teach—" A pause, the kind that happened when someone caught themselves mid-word. "I mean, Professor."
Tarro chuckled. "No need for formality with me, Belladonna. Call me whatever feels natural."
She heard Nova relax — there was a particular quality to the silence after he exhaled that she had learned to distinguish from other kinds of silence — and then he spoke again.
"Say, teach?"
"What is it?"
"I've been having some trouble with my tail in combat. The control is inconsistent. I was wondering if you could help with that."
Ruby's hand came up to her mouth.
Not because of anything terrible. Because of the specific information that tail had triggered in the part of her brain that she had just spent twenty minutes attempting to discipline, which had apparently not gotten the message.
Don't, she told herself.
I know what you're thinking, she told herself.
Stop thinking it, she told herself.
She pressed her back against the tree bark and had a very firm internal conversation, which she kept at a volume that she was reasonably confident the two people in the clearing could not hear. The words she used in this internal conversation were not words she used out loud, which was fine because they were very effective.
By the time she finished, Professor Koizumi was walking past the edge of the tree line, apparently done with his portion of the conversation. She watched him go. Waited.
"You can come out now, Ruby."
She froze.
Then, because there was no alternative that didn't involve standing behind this tree for the indefinite future, she walked out.
Part III — The Training
Nova was standing in the clearing with his back to the tree line when she emerged, which told her two things: that he had known she was there the whole time, and that he had decided not to make it awkward by looking directly at her when he said it. Both of these things were very Nova.
"How long did you know?" she asked.
He turned. "From the beginning."
Her shoulders dropped approximately two inches. "Oh."
He looked at her with the gentle attentiveness that was his default setting when she was visibly unhappy about something, which she found simultaneously helpful and inconvenient. "Is something wrong?"
"No. Nothing's wrong. I just made kind of an idiot of myself standing behind a tree for five minutes and you knew the whole time." She made a vague gesture. "Don't mind me."
There was a brief silence of the specific variety that meant he was deciding whether to say the thing he was thinking. She had learned to recognize this silence over the past year.
He crossed the clearing and put his hand on top of her head.
Not firmly — more the way you rest a hand on something you don't want to fall over. The specific quality of contact that said you're fine without requiring anyone to argue about whether that was true.
"Stop that," he said.
"Stop what?"
"Being down on yourself over something that doesn't matter." He removed his hand. "Ready?"
She looked up at him.
The warmth was back.
She filed it under absolutely, definitely, later and adopted her training stance.
"Ready," she said.
What followed was an hour of the best sparring she'd done yet.
That was not coincidence, she knew — she was channeling something into the movement that she wouldn't have been able to articulate out loud, and it was making her faster than usual and more present than usual, her weight behind every strike instead of scattered across the intent of it. Nova noticed. She could tell from the quality of his attention, the way it sharpened when she did something right rather than just when she needed correction.
"Good," he said, after a sequence that had produced a genuine gust of air. "That's what your weight distribution should feel like."
"I felt it," she said. Not excitedly — just accurately. A fact she was reporting.
"Hold that sensation. That's what you're building toward every time."
She nodded and shook out her wrists and thought: I wish I could explain what's actually helping right now without it being incredibly embarrassing.
"I think that's enough sparring for today," Nova said.
She made a small sound of protest. "I was just getting into it."
"Which means it's the right time to stop and do something else." He sat down cross-legged on the grass with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this since childhood. "Sit down."
She sat.
He looked at her with the expression he used when he was about to explain something important. "You've been asking about ki for three weeks."
"I have."
"You're ready to start."
The disappointment-about-stopping evaporated instantly. Her eyes went to the particular brightness they reached when something genuinely thrilling had just been introduced. "Right now?"
"Right now." He settled his hands on his knees. "Close your eyes."
She closed her eyes.
She heard him exhale — the specific, calibrating exhale of someone who was organizing their thoughts into the right order before speaking.
"Cut off the surrounding noise," he said. "Not by forcing it out — just by letting your attention move past it, like it belongs to a different room. The only voice you're tracking is mine."
She let the morning forest fade — the birds, the distant sounds of the academy, the wind in the canopy above. She followed his voice instead, which was easier than she would have expected, which was information she was not going to think about right now.
"Search inside yourself. Not like you're looking for something specific — more like you're waiting for something to make itself known." He paused. "When you find it, it'll feel like warmth. Not heat — warmth. Like something that was always there and you simply hadn't turned toward it yet."
She breathed. Focused inward. Tried.
Nothing.
Tried again.
Still nothing.
She felt her hands tighten slightly.
"You're straining," he said.
She opened her eyes halfway. "How do you—"
"Your shoulders," he said. He reached over and placed his hand on her shoulder — lightly, the way he'd done it in their first training session — and she felt her muscles register the contact and, involuntarily, release something they'd been holding. "Relax. Your body already knows how to do this. You're trying to make it happen instead of letting it happen."
She breathed.
She let go of the effort.
She stopped trying to find it and just... waited.
And then, in the quiet of not looking for it, she felt it.
It was exactly what he'd said. Not heat — warmth. A deep, interior warmth, like something that had been sitting in the dark and was now being touched by light. Large, she registered with a distant surprise. Much larger than she'd expected. She didn't push at it, just acknowledged it, the way you acknowledge a door before you open it.
She drew the smallest fraction of it upward.
When she opened her eyes, there was a small sphere of blue light sitting in the space between her palms.
The sound she made was not composed or controlled. It was the sound of someone who has just found something they didn't know they'd lost.
"Nova—" She looked up at him. "I did it. Look. I did it."
His smile was the real one — not the small, contained expression that he offered in public, but the one that arrived when he wasn't monitoring it. She had seen it rarely enough that she had catalogued it. He looked genuinely, completely pleased.
"I see," he said. "That's—"
She started to fall over.
He caught her before she hit the ground — one hand at the back of her head, one supporting her weight — and held her up with the complete absence of drama that characterized everything he did physically.
"Careful."
She blinked. The sphere had disappeared, and she felt as though someone had reached into her chest and gently removed a significant portion of the air supply. "Why am I—"
"Tired," he said. "Your body just used a fuel source it's never accessed before. It's going to need time to adapt." He kept his arm under her shoulders as she tried to recalibrate. "Think of ki like a muscle. The first time you use it, you feel every ounce of it."
"It'll get easier?" she managed.
"Every time," he confirmed.
She allowed herself, briefly, to notice that she was essentially being held up by him, which — combined with everything she had been thinking about since last night — was an inconvenient configuration. His face was close because proximity was required by the physics of the situation, and his eyes were on her with that specific quality of attention she had been thinking about, and she became aware, with the specific mortification of someone watching themselves do a thing while being unable to prevent it, that she was staring at his mouth.
Stop, she told herself.
You are experiencing a completely understandable physiological response to a stressful morning, she told herself.
You are looking at his mouth, she told herself.
She heard the thought and attempted to redirect. She discovered that redirecting was harder than expected when the person she was supposed to be redirecting away from was currently supporting all of her body weight with one arm and looking at her with an expression she had never seen precisely that version of before.
"Ruby," he said. "Are you okay?"
"Completely fine," she said, which was inaccurate.
A silence.
She became aware that neither of them were moving.
She further became aware that this was because she had not moved, and he had not moved, and the distance between them had continued to decrease without any explicit decision being made about it by either party.
"Nova," she said, in a voice that had slightly different properties than her normal voice.
"Ruby," he said, in a voice that was slightly strained in a way his voice was almost never strained.
Their scrolls went off simultaneously.
The sound was so comprehensively ill-timed that it took Ruby a moment to process that it was real. Then she scrambled backward and he released her weight and they both sat very upright at a careful distance and looked at their scrolls with the combined attention of two people who had just been rescued from something they weren't going to examine yet.
"We have to get back," she said.
"Yes," he said.
Neither of them moved for three seconds.
Then she stood up, and he stood up, and they walked toward the academy path with the careful deliberateness of people who are not walking too close together.
Part IV — What Sun and Neptune Saw
They walked in silence for most of the path, which was the specific silence of people who are both thinking about the same thing and have agreed, wordlessly, to give each other room before they have to talk about it.
Nova apologized twice. Ruby told him both times, with increasing firmness, that there was nothing to apologize for, because there was nothing to apologize for, and she meant it — or mostly meant it — or was at least prepared to mean it by the time she'd finished saying it.
By the time the academy buildings were visible through the tree line, they had reached a functional equilibrium.
"Same time next week?" Ruby asked.
"I have some extra sessions with Professor Koizumi for the next few days," he said. "Turuk's been asked to attend some of them as well. I'm not entirely sure why yet."
She nodded. Told herself this was fine. It was fine. She was not disappointed.
She was slightly disappointed.
"Lunch, then," she said. "We can do a short session before Professor Koizumi's afternoon class. That works for both of us?"
"Yeah." He looked at her. "I want you to keep working on that ki, even when I'm not there. Don't push it — just sit with it for a few minutes every day and let your body get used to the access. Don't force it."
"I remember," she said. "Feel for it, don't reach for it."
"Right." He paused. "You did well today. Really well."
She was going to say something sensible, something that acknowledged the compliment without the particular quality of glow that it produced in her chest region, but what actually came out was: "Thanks."
They had reached the point where the path forked — right toward her dormitory building, left toward his. The moment had the specific character of a moment that is about to end in one direction or another, and she became aware of something moving in her chest that she didn't have a word for but recognized as belonging to the same category as the warmth she'd found during the ki meditation.
She turned to go.
Then turned back.
She wasn't sure, later, that she had decided to. It seemed more accurate to say that her body had made the decision and informed her afterward. She crossed back to him, put her arms around him briefly, and pressed her lips to his cheek.
Then the reality of what she'd done caught up to her.
She released him and started walking in the opposite direction at a speed that suggested she had somewhere important to be immediately.
Then that speed increased to something that was technically running.
Behind her, she heard absolutely nothing, which somehow made it worse.
Sun Wukong had been behind a building.
This had not been his plan for the morning — he had been on his way to find Blake to ask if she wanted to see the festival setup down by the docks, which was a thing he had decided was very casual and not at all romantic and was mainly just friendly. Neptune had been walking with him and had been providing opinions about the morning that Sun had not requested.
"That's," Neptune said, carefully, "quite a development."
"Yes," Sun agreed.
They watched Ruby's retreating figure disappear around the corner of the dormitory building at a speed that suggested she was either in an emergency or had recently created one.
Nova stood where he'd been, holding his cheek with one hand, with the expression of someone whose model of the current situation has just been substantially revised.
"So," Neptune said. "Are we telling people?"
Sun thought about the look on Ruby's face when she'd run. He thought about the specific quality of mortification that had been in it — not the usual Ruby mortification, which was loud and involved hand gestures, but a quieter, more genuine variety that belonged to someone who had done something that surprised even themselves.
"No," he said.
"Not even—"
"She'll tell people when she's ready," Sun said. "That's not our story to tell."
Neptune absorbed this. Nodded. "Okay. Yeah. Fair."
They walked on.
"We should at least let the others know we found them," Neptune said.
"Yeah," Sun said. "We can do that much."
Sun raised his scroll and considered who to message first, and thought, with the part of his brain that he usually kept quieter than this, that the way Nova had looked while holding his cheek — not confused, not upset, just very still and very careful with an expression that had no name for what it was processing — was exactly the look of someone trying to figure out where to put something new.
They'll be alright, he thought. Those two.
He sent the message and kept walking.
Part V — Daikon and Weiss in Vale
Location: The Streets of Vale | That Afternoon
The afternoon had produced a specific variety of misery that Weiss Schnee felt was highly disproportionate to whatever she had done to deserve it.
She and Daikon had been searching Vale for an hour and a half, had spoken to approximately twenty-seven people, had visited several locations she would not normally have visited, and had found nothing useful. Yang was unquestionably going to hear about this later.
"I'm beginning to think," Weiss said, "that Yang intended specifically to strand us together. The searching was incidental."
"Yeah, I know," Daikon said. "She looked far too satisfied when she left." He walked with his hands in his pockets, which was his default posture when he wasn't actively doing something, and which Weiss had noticed tended to make him look like he was performing patience rather than feeling it. "She also looked very eager to go find Turuk. So I think you and I both lost out in slightly different ways."
Weiss processed this. "Turuk and Yang."
"I have thoughts about that." He said it with the specific neutrality of someone who had several strong thoughts and was choosing not to express them.
"Does it bother you?"
"Turuk can take care of himself." He glanced at her sideways. "Does the idea of your teammate spending time with a male faunus bother you?"
She opened her mouth and then closed it again, which was as close as she was currently capable of coming to a concession on the speed of these conversations. "That is an extremely pointed question."
"I know. That's why I asked it."
She walked for a moment without answering.
"No," she said. "It doesn't bother me."
"Good," he said, without editorial.
She cut a look at him from the corner of her eye. He was watching the street ahead, which meant his expression was in profile and she could see the line of his jaw and the slight crease at the corner of his mouth that appeared when he was containing something. He was not bad-looking, she acknowledged, in the specific way she was willing to acknowledge things when no one could see her doing it. It was not relevant. His personality was a separate and independent issue.
"Why do you keep calling me princess?" she asked.
"Because it gets a reaction out of you."
"That is an extraordinarily immature reason."
"I know," he said. "I do it anyway."
She felt the vein again — not exactly, but the sensation adjacent to it, the concentrated frustration of someone who finds a person simultaneously deeply annoying and oddly compelling, and who has not yet reconciled these two things into a coherent position.
"You're the most aggravating person I have ever met," she said.
"Probably," he agreed.
A child stepped out from a side street. He was perhaps seven, with the specific self-assurance of someone very young who has not yet been introduced to self-consciousness. He looked at the two of them.
"Hey, lady," he said. "Is that your boyfriend?"
Weiss's face did something involuntary and comprehensive.
"What— No! He is absolutely—" She caught herself, became aware that sputtering at a seven-year-old was a specific kind of undignified, and restructured. "We are not—" She stopped again. Started again. "No."
"Then how come you're together?" the boy asked, with the guileless logic of someone for whom this was a simple inquiry.
Weiss opened her mouth.
Daikon crouched to the boy's level.
"Sharp eyes," he said. "The thing is, she's embarrassed to admit it because we haven't made things official yet. Family complications — you understand. But we're working on it." He delivered this with the complete straight-faced credibility of someone who had decided to commit to a thing and had no regrets about it. "And if you saw two people earlier, one with a hood and one with a black tail, could you tell us which way they went?"
The boy pointed toward the academy.
"Back that way. A little while ago."
Daikon gave the boy a fist bump, which the boy returned with the gravity of someone completing an important transaction. "Thanks, kid."
The boy ran off.
Daikon stood up.
Weiss stared at him with an expression that had graduated beyond the vocabulary available to her and was now operating on pure energy.
"You—" she started.
"We know where they went," he said.
"You told a child that we were—"
"It got him to answer. Do you want to stand here and process it, or do we go find our teammates?"
The very precise sound she made was not a word. It was a sound that communicated several things simultaneously, none of which she was going to put into language. She turned and walked ahead of him.
"You want me, princess," he said, from behind her. "You just haven't admitted it yet."
"I have never wanted anything less in my life," she said, which was a statement she was making with conviction while walking away from him to prevent him from seeing her face.
He smirked at her back.
She wanted to tell him that she could feel the smirk without seeing it, which was a piece of information she was keeping to herself.
They found a café, eventually, because Weiss decided that her nervous system required tea before she could face anyone, and Daikon followed because he found small acts of stubbornness amusing rather than tiresome, and they ended up across a small table from each other with cups that smelled like bergamot and a comfortable silence that was the specific kind of comfortable silence that belongs to people who have been arguing all day and have reached the place past the arguments where the actual person is.
Weiss looked at her cup.
She thought about her father. About the very specific way he talked about faunus — not loudly, not dramatically, but with the particular casual certainty of a man who had never been challenged on it by anyone who mattered to him. About the way she had grown up with that certainty embedded in the architecture of the world as she understood it.
About the past year.
About Daikon, specifically — who was blunt and difficult and occasionally infuriating and who had never once treated her as though her name meant she should be handled carefully. Who had called her out in front of a classroom with the straight accuracy of someone who didn't consider her family a reason to be gentle about the truth. Who had, for reasons she was still constructing, noticed when she was trying to do better and held her to it.
"You mentioned," she said, carefully, "that you have a code of honor."
He looked at her. "I keep my promises," he said. "That's different from having a code."
"Is it?"
A pause.
"Maybe not," he admitted.
She looked at her tea. "I've been thinking about what you said. When you said I wasn't like the rest of my family."
He waited.
"I would very much like that to be true," she said. She said it quietly, without dramatics — just the honest admission of someone who has not said it aloud before. "I've spent a long time trying to decide what the Schnee name means when I'm the one carrying it. Whether it means what my father says it means, or something else entirely."
He was quiet for a moment.
"And?" he said.
"I haven't decided yet." She looked up at him. "But I think the fact that I'm still asking the question is a reasonable indicator that I'm moving in the right direction."
He looked at her for a long moment — not the evaluating look he used in arguments, not the smug look he deployed when he was trying to get a reaction. Something more direct than either.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
She held his gaze for exactly as long as she could manage, which was longer than it used to be.
"You're still not calling me princess," she said.
"Give it a minute," he said.
She sighed with the resignation of someone who has accepted a fundamental law of nature.
He almost smiled. Not quite — but the area around his mouth suggested it was in the vicinity.
She picked up her tea.
Part VI — Nova's Observation
Location: The Streets of Vale | Late Afternoon
Nova had received Scarlett's message — confirmation that the search parties had converged, that Ruby and her team were accounted for, that the afternoon's unexpected dispersion had resolved itself without incident.
He was making his way back when he passed a café window, and through it saw something that made him slow down.
Daikon and Weiss.
Sitting at a small table near the window. Not arguing — or not actively arguing, which for those two was a distinct and notable state. Daikon had his hands around his cup and was watching Weiss with the particular quality of attention that suggested he had stopped assessing and moved into the different territory of actually listening. Weiss was looking at her tea and saying something. Her expression had the specific vulnerability of a person who was saying something honest that they didn't usually say out loud.
Daikon's expression, in response to whatever she was saying, had done something Nova had not seen it do before.
He looked at the scene for approximately three seconds.
He thought about Daikon — whom he'd known since the forest on the first day of Beacon, whose default mode was a controlled skepticism that warmed only when he'd decided a person had earned it, who had apparently decided that Weiss Schnee's particular brand of difficult was worth his continued engagement. He thought about Weiss — who had spent a year learning, in small and sometimes painful increments, that the world she'd grown up believing in was not the only version available.
He thought that the two of them looked, from outside a café window, like people who had found each other's frequency by accident and were now figuring out what to do about that.
Nova walked on without pausing, taking care not to catch either of their eyes through the glass.
Leave that one alone, he thought. It's working.
He continued back toward the academy with his hands in his pockets and the particular privacy of someone who has noted something he considers good news and has decided it belongs to the people it belongs to.
His hand came up briefly to his cheek — the specific place where, several hours ago, Ruby Rose had made a decision that seemed to have surprised both of them — and then he put his hand back in his pocket and kept walking with the expression of someone turning something over carefully, looking at it from different angles, not ready to put it down but not ready yet to name it either.
The afternoon light was doing something specific with the rooftops of Vale.
He walked home through it and thought about warmth.
★ END OF CHAPTER NINE ★
Next: Chapter Ten — "Ruby's Complicated Feelings, Part II"