Hey everyone RoseSaiyan2 here. I do apologize for abruptly ending last chapter. I couldn't really find a good place to end it lol so I figured I should end it with Daikon and Weiss going on a "Date" of sorts. They're still a little bit a ways from truly going on one.
I figured they should get a little bit more development in last chapter, they'll get more and more development in their relationship as the story progresses. Hopefully you guys liked the interaction between Yatsuhashi and Scarlett. That one may take a little longer to really develop into something, I'm thinking probably during the Vytal tourney/festival is when their relationship will really start to develop.
The most interesting pairing I think may develop sooner than even the main pairing of the story is Turuk x Yang. Given Yang's personality and her.... preference for Turuk, it feels like it's only a matter of time until that one becomes a true pairing.
Anyways, that's enough rambling from me. Here's a few polls to get you started:
Who should Weiss ask to the Beacon Dance?
A. Neptune
B. Daikon
Should I stick with the cannon events surrounding the Beacon Dance (Weiss asking Neptune, but getting rejected/ Jaune going to ask Weiss, but running when she asks Neptune to the dance)?
I. Yes, stick with the cannon events.
II. No, go in a different direction.
Should Yang ask Turuk to go to the Beacon Dance with her?
I. YES! TOTALLY DO THAT!
II. No. Have them meet at the dance, then continue from there.
Will Scarlett ask Yatsuhashi to the Beacon Dance?
A. Yes. It will further develop their relationship.
B. No
C. Nah, Yatsuhashi will ask her.
D. They both try to ask each other, but end up compromising and Just going regardless.
Anyways, that's it for the polls for now. I hope you guys vote for each one. I think Shallot will come into the story, but it might be a little but later. Also, I think I may change something regarding Mercury. I was setting him up for something with one of the oc's but I've changed my mind. Instead, I will change something with both Mercury and Emerald. It won't be till a little later though.
Disclaimer: I don't own Dbz/Kai/ DBS/DBXV or Rwby and their characters. I only own 4 of the 6 oc's. I have permission to use Tarro and Daikon from ComparedDreadX those are his characters.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ruby's Complicated Feelings, Part II
Part I — Questions Without Answers
Location: Beacon Academy | Morning
The morning arrived with the specific quality of mornings that follow nights during which you have made a decision without quite deciding to.
Ruby sat in her uniform on the edge of her bunk and looked at her hands and thought about what she knew, which was as follows:
She liked Nova.
She had liked Nova, she now understood, for considerably longer than she had been admitting to herself. The evidence was everywhere once she stopped arguing with it — every later she had filed, every warm thing she had refused to name, every moment where her attention had moved toward him before she consciously directed it there. It was all the same thing. It had always been the same thing.
She liked Nova, and she didn't know what to do about it, and she had kissed him on the cheek twice now, which was two more times than she had kissed anyone on the cheek in a romantic context, which was zero before this week, and both times her body had apparently made the decision independently of her brain, which was a development she found both mortifying and, in a very private corner of herself she was not ready to examine in daylight, not entirely regrettable.
She pressed her knuckles to her mouth and stared at the window.
The window showed her Vale in the early light and the distant towers of the city and the sky above them, which was doing something quietly beautiful with the clouds that she would have found absorbing on any other morning.
This morning she was thinking about a person's face.
She shook her head.
Okay, she thought. Here is what is happening. Here are the facts. Nova is my best friend and I have developed — I am developing — feelings for him that are different from the feelings you have for a friend. This is new information. I don't know what to do with new information of this particular kind because I have never had it before. Miss Sala said to cherish the person who makes you feel this way and let them know how much they mean to you. I have been doing the letting-them-know part in a way that was not exactly planned or dignified. I need to figure out what I actually feel before I do anything else.
She paused.
Also I need to stop kissing him on the cheek spontaneously.
That would be a reasonable place to start.
Yang's voice arrived from the top bunk with the specific quality it had when she had been awake for longer than she was letting on. "You're thinking very loudly over there."
"I'm not thinking out loud," Ruby said.
"You're doing that thing where you sit very still and your face does a lot of work," Yang said. "It's basically the same."
Ruby pulled her knees up to her chest. "I'm fine."
"You kissed Nova on the cheek again last night."
"I know."
"That's twice now."
"I know."
"How are you doing with that information?"
Ruby pulled her hood down over her face and stayed there for a moment in the dark of it.
"I'm working on it," she said, from inside the hood.
Yang was quiet for a moment. Then, with the specific gentleness that Yang kept in reserve for the times when Ruby actually needed it rather than the times when she was being dramatic: "You like him, Rubes."
"I know," Ruby said, smaller this time.
"That's not a bad thing."
"I know that too." She pushed the hood back up and looked at the ceiling. "I just don't know what to do with it. It's — these feelings are very big and I don't have anywhere to put them."
"Yeah," Yang said. "That's kind of how it works."
Team RWBY dressed and gathered their things for class with the particular efficiency of people who had been living in close quarters long enough to develop an unconscious choreography of the morning. Weiss moved with the precise economy she brought to everything. Blake had her book already in hand. Yang was managing her hair with the easy competence of someone who has had a lot of hair for a long time.
Ruby moved through the routine and thought about Nova and then thought about thinking about Nova and then thought about something else entirely, which lasted approximately fifteen seconds before she was thinking about Nova again.
They filed into the corridor. Yang immediately pivoted toward Weiss with the sly energy she'd been deploying since the previous evening.
"So," Yang said. "You and Daikon. In Vale. All afternoon."
"We were searching," Weiss said, with the precision of someone who has had this conversation prepared since the night before.
"For two hours."
"Searching takes time."
"And then you had tea."
"One requires sustenance—"
"At the same table."
"Proximity does not imply—"
"For an hour."
Weiss made the sound she made when she was being cornered by someone who had better evidence than she had exits. "We discussed several topics of mutual relevance and I maintain that the situation was entirely—"
"Cute," Yang said. "Admit it."
"I will not—"
"Princess," Daikon said, appearing from the direction of the adjacent corridor with the timing of someone who had been in the building long enough to know when this kind of conversation would be happening.
Weiss's prepared sentence evaporated.
"—I will not be having this conversation in a hallway," she said, which was not what she had been going to say.
Daikon fell into step with the group with the comfortable ease of someone who had identified the natural orbital position and occupied it. He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to — the word had already done its work, and the color it had produced in Weiss's face was information that Yang was collecting with the quiet satisfaction of a scientist confirming a hypothesis.
Ruby watched this. For a moment, watching it, she forgot about her own situation and felt something simple and warm: the specific happiness of watching people who didn't know they were good for each other slowly becoming aware of it.
She smiled to herself.
Blake appeared at her shoulder, which she did without apparent transit.
"He's training you," Blake said. Not a question. Not confrontational — just the particular directness she used when she wanted to skip the preamble.
Ruby looked at her. "You know."
"I asked you yesterday. You confirmed it." Blake kept pace beside her. "How long?"
"Two months," Ruby said. "Give or take."
"Ki?"
Ruby blinked. "How did you—"
"My brothers have been using ki since they were old enough to walk," Blake said. "I know what it looks like from a distance when someone is learning it for the first time. The way you move when you think no one's watching has been changing for weeks." She paused. "You're faster. More grounded. Like you've found a lower center of gravity you didn't know you had."
Ruby absorbed this. "Is it obvious?"
"To me," Blake said. "I've been watching you longer than anyone else has been watching you as a fighter." A pause. "You should tell Weiss and Yang. They'll find out eventually, and it's better from you."
"I know," Ruby said. "Soon."
"Soon," Blake agreed, in the tone she used when she considered something overdue.
Then, so quietly it was almost to herself: "He likes you back, by the way."
Ruby stopped walking. "What?"
Blake kept walking. "I know my brother," she said. "That's all."
She walked ahead, and her book opened, and the conversation was apparently concluded.
Ruby stood in the middle of the corridor for three seconds with the expression of someone who has just been handed information that requires immediate filing but has no file large enough for it.
Then she caught up to the others and spent the walk to class not thinking about this at all, which she was completely unsuccessful at.
Part II — What Professor Sala Noticed
Location: Classroom 3B | That Morning
Ruby was not, as it turned out, as subtle as she hoped.
The class was history of grimm engagement — a subject she normally found genuinely interesting, because the structure of how conflicts developed had always appealed to the part of her that wanted to understand why things worked rather than just that they did. Today the subject was the historical escalation patterns in grimm behavior during periods of elevated human emotional concentration, which was relevant and interesting and which she found approximately twelve percent of her processing available for.
The other eighty-eight percent was doing something else.
She didn't notice she was doing it — the specific quality of distance that appeared in her eyes when her attention was somewhere other than the room — but she noticed, approximately twenty minutes into class, that the teacher had looked at her twice in a way that had nothing to do with the lecture material.
Professor Sala was not an intrusive presence in a classroom. She taught with the same composed directness she brought to everything — clear explanations, genuine engagement with student questions, a patience that came from a person who understood the material well enough to meet students at wherever they were. She didn't perform enthusiasm. She didn't require it from the students either, which Ruby had appreciated from the beginning.
What she did do, which Ruby was beginning to understand, was pay attention.
After class, as the others filed out, the professor said: "Miss Rose. A moment, please."
Ruby stood in the doorway of the emptying classroom with the specific sheepishness of someone who has been caught at something they didn't know was visible.
Professor Sala waited until the last student had exited and the door had swung most of the way closed before she turned to Ruby with the expression of someone who has made a decision about how to handle something and is proceeding accordingly.
"You've been here in body today," she said, "but not entirely in mind."
Ruby opened her mouth.
"I'm not reprimanding you," Sala said, with the gentle clarity of someone closing a door before a defense can be prepared. "I'm asking if you're alright."
The specific quality of the question — not sharp, not intrusive, but genuinely concerned in the way that few questions she was asked by adults were genuinely concerned — landed somewhere in Ruby's chest and did something that she hadn't expected.
She relaxed.
"I'm okay," she said. "I'm just... thinking about something."
"Something," Sala repeated. She seemed to consider this, and her expression shifted slightly — not away from neutral, but toward a warmth that was more specific than the warmth of a teacher. "Or someone."
Ruby's face went through several phases quickly.
"I'm not trying to pry," Sala said. She crossed to the window and looked out at the academy grounds below — the paths between buildings, the students moving between classes, the ordinary architecture of a school morning. "But I've been teaching for a little while now, and I've learned to recognize the particular quality of a person who is carrying something new. Something they don't quite have words for yet."
She turned. Her eyes, when she looked at Ruby, had the specific quality of eyes that had spent years looking at things carefully.
"Would you mind if I ask you something personal?" she said.
Ruby blinked. "Sure. Yeah."
"Is there someone," Sala said, "who makes you happy in a way you haven't been made happy before? Someone whose presence makes the day feel different than it does without them?"
The answer arrived before Ruby had decided to give it — came out of her chest rather than her head, came as a warmth rather than a thought, and the warmth had a face and a name and a specific quality of attention she had been cataloguing for almost a year.
Her fist came up to her sternum. "There... might be someone like that," she said, very quietly.
Sala smiled. It was, Ruby thought, an extraordinary smile — one of those smiles that contained something more than just the moment it was responding to. "Then treasure that," she said. "Don't rush it, and don't dismiss it. What you're feeling is not strange or wrong or something to be embarrassed about. It belongs to you. It's yours."
Ruby looked at her hands. "I don't know what to do with it though. I've never — I don't know how any of this works."
"No one does, the first time," Sala said. "That's rather the point of it." She moved back toward her desk, which was the gentle signal that the conversation was moving toward its end. "What I can tell you is this — the confusion you're feeling right now is not a problem to be solved. It's a process. Give yourself time to feel your way through it without demanding that it make sense immediately."
"Did you ever feel like this?" Ruby asked. "Before you understood it?"
Sala laughed — a small, genuine sound that had a note of memory in it. "Completely," she said. "I was an absolute mess about it for quite some time. My husband will tell you the same." Her expression went somewhere briefly and specifically warm. "I had to learn to stop treating it like an obstacle and start treating it like information."
Ruby thought about this. "What kind of information?"
"The best kind," Sala said. "The kind that tells you something about yourself you didn't know before."
Ruby looked at her teacher — at the expression she was wearing, which was a thing she had been trying to place since she'd first been in this woman's class. It was the expression of someone looking at something they were invested in in a way that went deeper than professional concern. It was the expression of someone who cared — not in the general, dutiful way of good teachers, but in the specific, weighted way of people who had personal reasons.
"You remind me of someone," Ruby said, before she'd decided to say it. "The way you talk to me. You remind me of what I imagine a mother would sound like."
Something moved through Sala's expression so quickly that Ruby almost missed it.
"I'll take that as a compliment," Sala said, after a moment. Her voice was even, but the warmth in it had deepened by a shade that Ruby couldn't quite account for.
Ruby's scroll chimed. Her friends were waiting.
"I have to—"
"Go," Sala said. "Don't keep them waiting." She turned back to the window. "We can talk again whenever you need to."
Ruby thanked her and left at a sprint that left three rose petals spiraling in the air of the empty classroom.
Sala stood at the window and watched the academy grounds below and said nothing for a while.
She's fallen for him, she thought. Hasn't she.
It was not entirely a question.
Rhubar appeared in the doorway, having heard the commotion of Ruby's departure.
"What was that about?"
"Guidance," Sala said. She turned from the window. "She came to me with something she didn't have words for yet, and I helped her find a few of them."
Rhubar studied his wife's expression. He had been studying it for enough years to know the difference between the composed face she showed the world and the one underneath it.
"It's about Nova," he said.
Sala smiled. "She likes him."
He absorbed this. "Does she know we're—"
"No," Sala said. "She doesn't know anything except that she trusts me, for reasons she couldn't explain if she tried." She began gathering her materials for the next class. "Which is rather wonderful, when you think about it."
He thought about it.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
They walked out together, and the classroom settled back into its ordinary quiet, and the rose petals on the floor stayed where they'd fallen.
Part III — Observed
Location: Beacon Academy Grounds | Lunchtime
The cafeteria was full in the specific way of a school's midday — loud enough to have a continuous undercurrent, quiet enough within small conversational radius to allow actual exchange. Both tables — RWBY and what had become their extended orbit of JNPR and NDTSA — were occupied, and the meal was proceeding with the comfortable informality of people who ate together often enough to have stopped thinking about it.
Ruby had been mostly quiet through lunch. Not the distracted quiet of the morning — something more interior than that, the quiet of someone who is trying to find the right approach to something.
Nova rose to his feet, collected his tray, and began moving toward the exit.
She made a decision.
"Nova, wait up!"
He turned as she caught up to him. The cafeteria noise continued around them. He looked at her with his standard quality of attention — focused, present, unhurried.
"Hey," he said. "What is it?"
"I wanted to talk to you," she said. "About something. And also I think you wanted to talk to me."
A small beat. "Yeah, I did." He looked at the hallway. "Walk?"
"Walk," she agreed.
They went out to the training grounds — not the full distance into Forever Fall, but the outer clearing that caught the afternoon light at a useful angle and was usually empty during lunch periods. The familiar space helped. She felt her shoulders drop slightly when they reached it.
They trained first, because the training was the reason they were both there, and because sometimes doing a physical thing together was the most honest way to talk about everything else — the ki came easier for Ruby now than it had two months ago, not dramatically, but definitively, the way a path becomes a path through regular use. Her aura blazed in the deep sky blue she had come to associate with this specific effort, and they traded strikes and blocked and broke away and circled with the comfortable rhythm of two people who knew each other's timing.
Nova called it after an hour.
"You're ready for the next phase," he said.
Her eyes went very wide.
"Flying?" she said.
"Flying," he confirmed.
The sound she made was technically a word. Several words. They overlapped in a way that communicated overwhelming enthusiasm.
He crossed to the open part of the clearing and stood in the center of it with the patient expression of someone who has decided to wait for the excitement to complete one cycle before proceeding.
She composed herself. Approximately.
"Okay," she said. "How."
"You already know the mechanics," he said. "You've been using ki for two months. The only difference between what you've been doing and this is direction." He settled into a neutral stance. "You've been directing your ki outward, into force. Flying is directing it downward, against the ground. The resistance creates lift."
She looked at her feet.
"So I push down," she said slowly, "and it pushes me up."
"More or less." He watched her face. "Don't think about flying. Think about the ki. Just direct it like you would for anything else, but downward."
She breathed. Closed her eyes briefly. Found the warmth — it was there immediately now, which was still something she found quietly wonderful — and drew a careful thread of it down through her body, through her feet, against the ground—
She rose approximately three inches.
She also immediately fell over.
He caught her. Again. This was, she reflected, a recurring motif in their training relationship.
"Good," he said.
"I fell," she said.
"You also rose," he said. "That's what mattered. You found it." He helped her upright. "Do it again."
She tried eleven more times over the next forty minutes. The results ranged from three inches and a graceful landing to six inches and a less graceful landing to inexplicably going sideways to, on the final attempt, a genuine four seconds of hovering at approximately knee height before she drifted back to the ground and stood there on slightly shaking legs with the expression of someone who has just done something for the first time that they were going to spend years doing.
"Nova."
"I know," he said.
"I was floating."
"You were."
"For four seconds."
"Almost five," he said. "But yes."
She looked at the ground. At the small impression her feet had left in the grass. At the sky above the clearing, which was very large from this angle, which was going to be very accessible from a much larger range of angles in the future.
"I'm going to be able to fly," she said.
"Yes," he said. "You are."
She looked up at him. He was watching her with the expression — the real one, the unmonitored one that she had catalogued — and she felt the warmth move through her in the specific way it moved when he looked at her like that, and she thought about what Blake had said, which was he likes you back, which was information she still didn't have a file large enough for.
"You said you wanted to talk to me," she said. "Before we started."
"I did." He was quiet for a moment in the organizing way. "I wanted to — I think I owe you an acknowledgment of the situation. The past week."
She felt her face doing something.
"The past week?" she managed.
"You've been..." He searched for the right word. "Dealing with something. And I think part of that something has involved me, or at least involved situations that I was present for. And I don't want you to feel uncomfortable around me because of it."
"I don't feel uncomfortable," she said.
"Okay." He looked at her. "I just want to make sure we're — that things between us are—" He stopped. Started again. This was, she noted, one of the very few times she had ever seen him search for a sentence. "That nothing has changed. Between us. That's what I wanted to say."
She looked at him.
He was watching her with the specific care of someone who had selected each word deliberately and was waiting to see how they landed.
"Nothing's changed," she said, which was true and also not entirely true and also the right thing to say for right now.
He nodded. "Good."
She waited for a moment, then said: "Can I say something?"
"Yeah."
"I'm figuring some things out," she said. "I'm not going to pretend I'm not. But whatever I'm figuring out — I don't want it to make things weird between us. You're—" She looked at the ground briefly, then back at him. "You're one of the most important people in my life. That's true regardless of anything else."
He looked at her for a long moment — the long, still look that she had learned was him being completely present in a moment rather than processing it from a distance.
"Same," he said.
The word was simple. It landed simply. Somehow it was the best possible response.
She smiled.
He reached over and ruffled her hair.
She puffed her cheeks out at him.
Part IV — The Watching
Location: The Edge of the Training Grounds | That Afternoon
They found them by accident, which was the story Yang would tell for the rest of the year because it was technically true and also managed to omit the part where Yang had been tracking Nova and Ruby's movements with growing curiosity for the better part of two months and had simply picked today to follow through on her investigative instincts.
The reaction, when the sparring started, was involuntary on everyone's part.
Weiss's mouth opened.
She did not close it for approximately forty-five seconds.
Nova and Ruby moved through the clearing in lines of emerald and sky-blue, trading exchanges with the fluid ease of people who had found each other's rhythm — not sloppily, not performing for an audience, but the clean, committed motion of genuine sparring between people who trusted each other's movements. Ruby's form had the specific quality of someone who had been taught something by someone who understood it, and it was different enough from her natural fighting style that it was clearly recent, and recent enough that the older habits still surfaced in certain transitions, and recent enough to be remarkable.
She was fast. Faster than she'd been before, and with a groundedness that hadn't been there — a lower center, more weight behind each movement, the specific quality of someone who had been learning to use their whole body rather than the parts of it that were naturally dominant.
"When did she—" Weiss started.
"A while ago, apparently," Daikon said.
Weiss turned on him. "You knew?"
"I told them I knew," Daikon said, gesturing at the rest of NDTSA with the composure of someone who has made his confession and is at peace with the consequences. "I've been awake when Nova left early. I put it together."
"And you didn't—"
"Their business," he said.
"She's my teammate—"
"And it was her business," Daikon said, with the specific patience of someone who has thought about this and arrived at a considered position. "Would you want someone following you around asking about your private training?"
Weiss opened her mouth.
"Think about it," he added.
She closed her mouth.
Turuk was watching the clearing with an expression that was the compound of several things — pride, the specific fondness of someone watching a sibling he has known well for a long time do something that confirms what he already believed about them, and something more private underneath those two.
"How much have they developed?" he asked Blake.
"More than I expected," she said honestly. "Nova's a good teacher. Ruby's a fast learner." A pause. "They're good for each other in that way."
He looked at his sister sideways. "In that way."
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're saying it with your face."
Turuk looked at the clearing and kept his face very still, which was exactly as effective as it sounds.
Scarlett had her arms folded and was watching with the evaluating attention she brought to combat technique. "She's got real potential," she said. "That's not just Nova's teaching. She was always going to be able to do this — someone just had to give her the framework to hang it on."
"He gave her the framework," Aiko said.
"Yeah," Scarlett said. "He did."
The training wound down — the sparring gave way to something that looked like a conversation, which the observers couldn't hear and politely elected not to try to. There was a quality to the two of them in the clearing — the specific quality of people who were being honest with each other in the particular way that honesty requires privacy — and without anyone saying anything about it, the watching party took a collective step back.
"We should go," Turuk said.
"Yeah," Yang said. She lingered a moment longer — watching her sister's face in the clearing, the specific expression Ruby wore when she was saying something true — and then she turned away. "Yeah, we should."
Part V — What She Did
Location: Outside Team RWBY's Dormitory | That Evening
They had lost track of time, which was something that happened when training went well and conversation followed training and Vale was doing something interesting in the late light and neither of them had been paying attention to their scrolls.
By the time they made it back to the dormitory corridor, the evening had settled into the particular quiet of a school building after the day's official business has concluded.
They stopped at the point where the corridor split.
"Good night," Nova said. "You did excellent work today."
"I floated," she said.
"You did."
"For almost five seconds."
"Four point eight," he said. "But effectively five."
She grinned. "I'll take it."
She turned toward her door. Then stopped.
I want to give you something, she thought. As a thank you. As a — I don't know yet what kind of thank you. But something.
"Wait," she said.
He turned back.
She looked at him in the hallway light, with the specific deliberateness of someone who is choosing to do a thing rather than being surprised into it, which felt important — this time she was going to do it on purpose.
"Is there something you wanted to—" he started.
"Do you mind if I say something first?" she said.
He waited.
"I've been trying to figure out what I feel," she said. "And I haven't figured it all out yet. But I know that you are one of the best things in my life right now. I know that I like spending time with you more than almost anything, and I know that training with you has been one of my favorite parts of this entire year." She held his gaze because she had decided to hold it. "And I know that I want to keep getting to know you. However that looks. Wherever that goes."
He was very still.
"And," he said, after a moment.
"And." She stood up on her tiptoes. She pressed her lips to his cheek. The third time. This one deliberate. This one chosen.
She settled back to her normal height and looked at him.
"Goodnight, Nova," she said.
She turned and went to her door. Her hand on the handle. Pushed it open. Walked through.
Behind her, she heard nothing. No movement, no word.
She closed the door.
From the top bunk, Yang's voice arrived in the dark: "Rubes."
"Give me a second," Ruby said.
She stood at the door with her back to the room. Her heart was doing something very emphatic. Her face was doing something approximately tomato-adjacent. The specific quality of having-done-a-thing-on-purpose was different from the quality of having-done-a-thing-by-accident, and she was experiencing the difference, and it was both better and considerably more terrifying.
"I did it on purpose this time," she said.
"I know," Yang said, with considerable warmth. "We saw."
Ruby turned. The room had come to attention — Blake's book was down, Weiss was very carefully not looking toward the door, Scarlett and Aiko and Pyrrha were all present with varying configurations of expression ranging from delighted to trying to look like they hadn't been watching.
"You were waiting," Ruby said.
"We were definitely not waiting," Yang said.
"You were absolutely waiting."
"We may have had a general suspicion that tonight was going to be a notable evening," Weiss said, with the dignity of someone acknowledging a fact.
Ruby put her face in both hands.
The sound that came out of her was the kind of sound that happens when a person is experiencing several large emotions simultaneously in a relatively small body.
Yang was off her bunk and had her arms around her sister before the sound had finished. "Hey. Hey, look at me."
Ruby looked.
"How are you doing?" Yang asked.
"Terrified," Ruby said.
"Reasonable."
"Also—" She stopped. Started again. "Also kind of good?"
Yang smiled. It was the real one — the one behind the performance of it, the one that belonged to a sister who has been watching her little sister grow up and is specifically glad about how it's going.
"Yeah," Yang said. "That's also reasonable."
The conversation that followed — around the edges of getting ready for bed, in the specific comfortable format of women who have learned to talk about difficult things without making them heavier than they need to be — was the longest and most honest one Ruby had had about any of this.
She told them what she'd said to him in the hallway. She told them about what Miss Sala had said — the real version, the whole version, not the summary she'd given at lunch. She told them about Blake saying he likes you back, which caused Blake to make a sound that was the cat-faunus equivalent of I can explain and then not explain it, which was very Blake.
She told them she didn't know what came next.
"That's fine," Pyrrha said. "You don't have to know what comes next right away."
"You've been honest with him about where you are," Weiss said. "That's more than most people manage."
"He didn't run," Scarlett said. "That's also information."
"He said same," Aiko added, very quietly, and then looked at the wall as though she had not said it.
Ruby looked at her. "He said same?"
"When you said he was one of the most important people in your life," Aiko said, still looking at the wall. "He said same."
Ruby absorbed this.
"That could mean a lot of different things," she said carefully.
"Could," Blake said, which was not the same as does.
Ruby thought about the specific quality of that single word — same — delivered in his voice, in his register, with his specific economy of expression that meant every word he chose had been chosen.
She thought about the warmth.
She thought about the look on his face when she'd floated for four seconds.
She thought about a year of all the things she'd been filing under later, and she thought that later was getting very full and was probably going to require some kind of actual organization in the near future.
But not tonight.
Tonight she lay back on her bunk and looked at the ceiling and felt the specific quality of something that had been acknowledged for the first time — tentative, uncertain, very warm, belonging entirely to her — and let it exist without demanding that it be anything more than what it was.
"Miss Sala said it's information," she said. "About yourself. The best kind."
"Smart woman," Yang said.
"Yeah," Ruby said. "She really is."
Part VI — On the Other Side of the Wall
Location: Team NDTSA's Dormitory | That Same Evening
Nova sat on the edge of his bunk with his hands resting on his knees and the particular quality of stillness that belonged to him when he was genuinely thinking rather than simply being quiet.
His hand was against his cheek. The same place as before. The third time.
He thought about what she had said in the hallway — not just the end of it, but the whole of it. The I've been trying to figure out what I feel. The however that looks, wherever that goes. The specific honesty of it, the lack of performance in it, the decision behind it.
He thought about the warmth in his chest when she'd looked at him. The warmth that he had been filing under other things for a considerable amount of time.
He thought about what it meant that he had been filing it.
Turuk appeared in the doorway with the composed expression of someone who has decided to pretend he does not know what the expression on his brother's face means.
He succeeded for approximately three seconds.
"Don't," Nova said.
"I wasn't going to say anything," Turuk said.
"Your face was going to say something."
Turuk sat down on his own bunk and looked at the space between them with the thoughtful attention of someone considering his opening. "You like her," he said.
Nova did not answer.
"You've liked her for a while," Turuk continued.
Still no answer.
"She apparently likes you back," Turuk said. "Which is, I think, considered good news in this context."
A long pause.
"She's—" Nova stopped.
Turuk waited.
"She is exceptional," Nova said finally. Quietly. Like saying it out loud was placing it somewhere he couldn't take back. "She is genuinely extraordinary and she has no idea how much, and she is one of the most — I don't have the right word for it."
"I think you probably do," Turuk said. "I think you're just not ready to say it yet."
Nova looked at the wall. "She's seventeen."
"So are you."
"I'm older than she is."
"By months," Turuk said. "I know you're not using that as the real reason."
A pause.
"No," Nova said. "I'm not."
"What's the real reason?"
He was quiet for a moment. "I don't want to rush something that's still becoming what it's going to be." He looked at his hands. "She said she's figuring out what she feels. I'm — I'm also figuring out what I feel. I think we're both in the same place. I think we should be allowed to be in that place for a while before either of us does anything about it."
Turuk looked at him.
"That," Turuk said, "is the most careful, considered, and genuinely decent answer you could have given."
"Was it the right one?" Nova asked.
"I think so," Turuk said. "Yeah. I think it was."
Nova looked at the wall again. Then at his hand. Then at nothing in particular.
"She floated today," he said. "For four point eight seconds."
Turuk smiled. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." A pause. "She looked like—" He stopped.
"Like what?"
Nova was quiet for a long moment.
"Like she'd always been supposed to be able to do that," he said. "Like she'd just found a door that was always hers."
Turuk did not say anything for a while.
Then: "You're going to have to tell her eventually."
"I know," Nova said.
"Not the training," Turuk said. "The other thing. What we are. Where we came from. What that means." A pause. "She's going to be a big part of your life, brother. She deserves to know the true version of it."
Nova thought about this.
"Yeah," he said.
He lay back on the bunk and looked at the ceiling and thought about a girl with silver eyes who had told him the truth in a hallway and kissed him on the cheek with full intention and then gone to bed, and thought that the least he could do was eventually be equally honest in return.
The thought was frightening and right and belonged to a later that he was going to have to stop filing.
Soon.
★ END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN ★
Hey guys! I hope you enjoyed this two part filler. It was more focused towards the main pairing, but the others will get time to shine too.
This was just to develop the pairing between Nova and Ruby a little more. Don't worry Ruby isn't going to confess... yet at least. She'll be confessing a little later. I'm thinking towards the end of volume 2 will be when she finally confesses to Nova.
The reveal to Blake about Nova and Turuk's parents is fast approaching too. That one will probably be near the end of volume 2. So essentially, Blake will be wrestling for the whole of volume 3 whether or not to tell her brothers about their parents. This is partly due to the fact that she doesn't want to lose them , she loves her brothers.
Anyways that's all. See ya in the next one.
Next: Chapter Twelve— "A Minor Hiccup"