Hey everyone, RoseSaiyan2 here again. So I will sticking with Rwby cannon story for major events up until volume 3, from there the story will take a different turn after the Haven/Mistral academy Arc. One of the tags for this story is Demons, so I will introduce the demons in the future.
One thing to note is when a character is referring to a demon in this story, they may call them a devil in another sentence. For story purposes Demon and Devil will be referring to the same type of creature in this story. This is also more of the Black Clover influence in the story. Also Magic will be introduced too. So everything from basic and advanced magic spells, to Mana Zone techniques and Spirit Magic will be thrown in there. But I'm doing sort of a blend between Db Xenoverse, Rwby, and Black Clover in this story so the magic and Ki may get fused in some instances... just forewarning for any of you readers.
Anyways, here are the current Pairings I'll be showing in this story:
Odyn x Ruby
Roy x Yang
Baron x Flare
Khanna x Mercury
Jaune x Pyrrha/ Spoiler
Hailfire x Oscar
Tarro x Sybrh
Daikon x Weiss
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Anyways that was just to show what the eventual pairings will be. Reason I neglected to mention the other option for Jaune is because it's a character that will appear at the end of Volume 3, just.. not through normal means.
That's all for now. Let's get on with the story!
Disclaimer: I don't own DBXV, Black Clover, Or Rwby and any of their series characters. I only own the OC's with permission to use two other oc's from a friend.
Chapter Four: Revelations and Secrets — The Dark Elven Race
Before the academy woke, before the morning bells and the clatter of breakfast trays and the particular sound that a dormitory makes when several hundred people are all attempting to be somewhere at the same time, the training ground behind the eastern wing belonged to four people.
Odyn sat in the center of it.
Not on the ground exactly — a few inches above it, in the particular stillness that is not sleep and is not quite waking, the kind that requires years to achieve and a specific kind of quiet to maintain. His breathing was slow and measured, his hands resting open on his knees. From the outside, he looked like someone who had simply stopped moving. From the inside, it was considerably more complicated than that.
The visions came in fragments.
They always did — not as a coherent sequence but as a collection of moments arranged without regard for order or mercy. Shapes covered entirely in shadow, the dark so complete it had texture. Horns rising from silhouettes that moved like men and did not move like anything human. The sound of something laughing from very far away and very high up, the kind of sound that does not need proximity to be present in the chest.
And then — Beacon.
Not as it was, but as it could be: the towers folding inward, the stone darkening, the sky above it splitting along a seam that should not exist and through that seam a darkness that was not merely absence of light but something with intention behind it. A figure floating in the space above the ruin — dark hair, elongated ears, red eyes, the black geometry of tattoos that moved down his face like script in a language Ruby had not been born yet when it was last spoken. His arms were open. His expression was the expression of someone who has been waiting for a very long time and has just watched the last obstacle remove itself.
Wings like the memory of wings spread from his back.
A portal opened behind him and the sky cracked and things with yellow auras moved through the falling debris of everything that had been standing before, holding lines against the tide of darkness pouring through—
Odyn's eyes opened.
He was sitting on the training ground. The morning was cold and pale and completely ordinary. Sweat was cooling on the back of his neck.
Roy crouched in front of him. "Brother."
"I'm fine."
"You're not." Roy said this without heat, the way he said things he was certain about. "Vision?"
Odyn nodded and pushed himself to his feet. Hailfire and Flare had stopped their own warm-up exercises and were watching him with the particular attention of people who have learned to read the difference between fine and fine. He looked at each of them in turn — at the careful concern in Flare's expression, at Hailfire's steadier, more practiced watchfulness — and understood that whatever he had seen, he was going to have to say it aloud, because the alternative was carrying it alone, and he had made a decision some time ago about not doing that.
He told them.
The silence afterward had a quality to it.
"Beacon," Hailfire said. Not a question exactly. She was processing the pieces, fitting them against what she already knew.
"One possible future," Roy said. "Not a certainty. Visions don't work that way."
"No," Odyn agreed. "But they don't show you nothing, either."
Flare had been quiet. When she spoke, her voice was careful and even, the voice of someone who is choosing to be useful rather than frightened. "If it's one possible future — then there are others. Which means it can be changed."
"Yes," Odyn said. "That's what we're here for."
He looked at her steadily. Flare was new to this — new to them, new to the weight of it — and he was aware that what he was about to ask was not a small thing to ask of someone who had, until recently, been a stranger.
"You don't owe us anything," he said. "You know that. Whatever agreement you've made with Baron, with us — it's not a contract. You can walk away from this at any point and no one will think less of you for it."
Flare looked at him. Then she held out her hand.
"I've never thought your people were what they've been called," she said. "I'd like to help. I made that decision when Baron asked me, and I've had enough time since then to know I meant it."
Odyn took her hand. The grip was firm and uncomplicated, the handshake of someone who doesn't add conditions to their agreements.
"Then we have work to do," he said. "And we should probably tell Kanna."
The thing about Ruby Rose was that she moved through the world with a quality of attention that most people spent their entire lives trying to acquire and never quite managed. She noticed things — not the large, obvious things that everyone notices, but the smaller ones, the things that live in the margins of other people's expressions. She had noticed, in the few weeks since the start of term, that Odyn's notebook was written in a script she had never seen before. She had noticed that Hailfire sometimes forgot she was doing it and stood with one hand on the pommel of a weapon that wasn't there. She had noticed that Roy's accent shifted very slightly when he was tired, toward something older and more deliberate, as though his native language was waiting underneath the one he'd learned.
She had noticed all of these things, and had said nothing about them, and had been turning them over privately in the way she turned over mechanical problems — not urgently, but with the patient attention of someone who trusts that the answer will surface if she gives it enough time.
It surfaced on a Tuesday.
She had been walking to class — she had been trying to get to class, she had been making a genuine effort, she had left the dormitory with an entire four minutes of margin — when she spotted the group ahead of her at the intersection of the east and south corridors. Both teams together, nine people moving at a pace that suggested the morning had already provided them with a considerable amount.
"Morning!" she called, and jogged to catch up.
The chorus of greetings that came back was warm and slightly mismatched, Hailfire's thank you for the other day overlapping with Flare's formal Miss Ruby that made Ruby wave her hands and laugh and explain that no, please, just Ruby, the Miss part made her feel like someone's grandmother.
Flare went slightly pink and apologized, which made Ruby feel immediately guilty for the laughing.
"I didn't mean it in a bad way!" she said quickly. "It's sweet, honestly, it's just — I'm sixteen, is all—"
"Seventeen," Flare said.
Ruby blinked. "What?"
"I'm seventeen," Flare said, with the expression of someone who has just realized the implications of this information. "You're... younger than me."
"Oh." Ruby considered this. "Does that bother you?"
"No! I just — I called you Miss."
"It's really fine—"
"She'll be catastrophizing about this for the rest of the day," Roy noted pleasantly, from somewhere to Flare's left.
"Roy," Flare said.
"I'm being supportive."
"That is not what support sounds like."
Yang, who had been watching this exchange from approximately ten feet back with the expression of someone who has found a very good seat at a very entertaining event, leaned toward Weiss and said, with deep satisfaction: "I like them."
Weiss, who was watching Daikon walk precisely one step ahead of her with his hands in his pockets and the air of someone who has already won a conversation that hasn't started yet, said: "I'm glad someone is enjoying themselves."
"You could enjoy yourself."
"I find it difficult to enjoy myself when I'm being called princess by someone who—"
"I know what your name is," Daikon said, without turning around, "Weiss."
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
The problem with Daikon Koizumi, Weiss had determined over the past several weeks, was not that he was unpleasant — he was, in his way, extremely competent, genuinely principled, and capable of the kind of focused intensity that she respected even when she resented it. The problem was that he appeared to have identified, with surgical precision, exactly the gap between her dignity and her composure, and had decided, for reasons she could not entirely explain, to live there.
Blake, walking slightly apart from all of this and reading a page of notes she had folded into her jacket pocket, smiled at the page.
Ruby caught up with Odyn specifically just before the corridor split toward the humanities block.
She had been trying to do this naturally, without it looking like she had been waiting for the opportunity, which was made more difficult by the fact that she had been waiting for the opportunity. She fell into step beside him and spent approximately four seconds thinking about how to begin.
"I wanted to make sure you were okay," she said. "From yesterday. You seemed — not bad exactly, just — I wanted to check."
Odyn looked at her. The morning light through the corridor windows was doing something with the planes of his face that made the expression harder to read than usual, which was saying something because he was not, under normal circumstances, easy to read.
"Nothing you or anyone else said upset me," he said. "I want to be clear about that first."
"Okay."
"What you saw was — the past has a way of making itself present when you're not expecting it. I didn't intend for it to come out the way it did."
"I know," she said. "But also — it's okay that it did." She looked at the floor briefly, then at him. "You don't have to be okay about everything all the time."
He was quiet for a moment. "I know that."
"Good." She paused. "Can I ask you something?"
"You've been building to it since you caught up with me."
"I have not—" She stopped, and then laughed a little, because he wasn't wrong. "Fine. Yes. What did you mean by 'my people'? You talk about them the way — it's like you're not talking about humans or Faunus. Like there's a third option you haven't mentioned."
He looked at her for a long moment. The length of it was not unfriendly — it was the look of someone deciding how much to say and in what order.
"Is there somewhere we can talk without half the student body walking through it?" he said.
She thought about it. "The south courtyard. It's usually empty before first bell."
The south courtyard, five minutes later —
The courtyard was bounded on two sides by the academy's older stone construction and on the other two by a low wall that overlooked the grounds. In the early morning it had the quality of somewhere that had been arranged for a very specific kind of quiet conversation, which either meant the architecture had foresight or Ruby had good instincts about locations.
Odyn checked both approaches, and then checked them again with the particular attentiveness of someone for whom checking twice is not paranoia but habit.
"What I'm going to tell you," he said, "I'd like you to keep between us. Not forever — but for now. Some of this is known by a few others, but the full version is ours to share on our own terms."
"I can do that," Ruby said.
"I know you can." He looked at her. "My people — the ones I came to Beacon with, the ones I grew up with — we are neither human nor Faunus. We're something older than the current distinction between the two." He paused. "The Arkynorean Dark Elves. That's what we are. What we've always been."
Ruby processed this.
"Elves," she said.
"Dark Elves, technically—"
"Like in the old stories?" Her eyes had gone to the particular configuration they got when she was excited about something and trying to contain it to a socially appropriate level. "The ones with the pointed ears and the forests and the—"
"Somewhat," he said, with the patience of someone who has had this conversation before. "The stories got some of it right and missed most of the rest."
"What did they miss?"
He considered where to begin. "We're warriors. Not by preference — by necessity. The conditions we were raised in shaped us that way. Mantle winters, isolation, the particular violence of being a population that everyone else has decided is convenient to mistrust." He said this plainly, without the particular weight that would have made it a complaint. It was simply description. "We're stronger than humans, faster to recover, and we live longer — significantly longer. A Dark Elf who has passed their sixteenth year doesn't show the same signs of aging that humans do. We don't grey. We don't slow. And this—" He lifted one hand briefly. "—makes people deeply uncomfortable."
Ruby's expression had gone through several transformations and had arrived at something fierce and indignant on his behalf. "That's terrible."
"It's the world," he said. "We learn to work within it."
"What else?"
He looked at her for a moment. "This part specifically stays between us."
She nodded.
"We use Dust," he said, "but not in the way Beacon teaches. We don't need the weapon as a conduit. The energy moves through us directly." He watched her face. "What you've been thinking of as magic is simply Dust in its most fundamental form, channeled through a body that has been trained to hold it."
Ruby's mouth opened.
He put a hand over it.
She made a sound behind his hand that was clearly meant to be a very excited sentence.
"I'll move my hand if you promise not to—"
She nodded frantically.
He moved his hand.
"Magic," she whispered, which was technically not shouting.
"Ruby."
"Sorry, sorry — I know, I know." She looked around the courtyard with the wide-eyed vigilance of someone who has just become the keeper of a secret and is taking this responsibility very seriously. The courtyard was empty. She exhaled. "Okay. Okay, I'm calm." A beat. "Magic."
"Ruby."
"It's out of my system now, I promise." She straightened up. "And the — the other energy? The one you use in combat? The one that looks like it builds up in your hands and then—"
"Ki," he said.
She looked at him. "What?"
"That's what it's called. Ki." He watched her work the word. "It's not specific to my kind — every living thing has it, in the same way every living thing has a soul that produces Aura. Ki is the body's own vital energy, independent of Dust, independent of the soul's projection. The difference between having it and using it is training."
She was quiet for a moment. The look on her face was the look she got when she was thinking about the internal mechanism of something complex and had found the part that interested her most.
"Can anyone learn to use it?" she asked.
"In principle."
"But?"
"But it's significantly more destructive than Aura in its raw form. You don't misuse Aura in training and lose a wall. With Ki — the margin for error is different."
Ruby looked at him.
He looked back at her.
"Can you teach me?" she said.
He had known, since approximately the third sentence of this conversation, that this was where it was going. He had known it the way you know something that is inevitable — not with dread, but with the particular combination of wariness and something that was, he had to admit, a great deal like looking forward to it.
"After the situation with Jaune is sorted," he said. "And carefully. And you listen when I tell you to stop."
"Absolutely," she said, immediately.
"Ruby."
"I'll listen, I promise."
"That," he said, "is the part I am least certain about."
She pointed at him. "That's fair," she admitted.
He almost smiled. She caught it before it finished forming, and her own smile was immediate and entirely unguarded and aimed at the middle distance so he wouldn't see how pleased she was about it. She was not entirely successful.
Neither of them noticed the small shadow at the edge of the courtyard wall — the shape that was smaller than a Grimm and darker than the stone it clung to, with red eyes the size of coins and a grin that had no warmth in it. Wings folded against a body made entirely of shadow. A tail that curled and uncurled with the slow, patient movement of something that is not in a hurry because it knows exactly where its targets are going.
It watched them go.
Then it followed.
In class —
The particular challenge of Professor Peter Port's lectures was that they were neither boring nor interesting in the conventional sense — they occupied a territory somewhere between the two, in which the content was technically valuable and the delivery was delivered at a pace calibrated to make the valuable parts feel further away than they were. Most of the student body had developed individual coping strategies.
Yang had developed sustained eye contact.
Blake had developed the ability to read and listen at the same time.
Weiss had developed note-taking so thorough that her pages were beginning to develop a secondary layer of annotations correcting her first annotations.
Ruby had developed doodling, which was not a strategy so much as a surrender, but an honest one.
The combat practical, when it came, was a welcome change in register.
Cardin Winchester stepped into the cleared space in front of the class with the comfortable arrogance of someone who has spent his entire life being told that his physical gifts are the most important things about him. Jaune Arc stepped in on the other side with the careful, self-conscious movements of someone who is trying very hard not to look like he's trying very hard.
The match was brief and not kind.
Jaune had skill — the foundation was there, visible in the way he held Crocea Mors and in the timing of his footwork in the early exchanges — but he was tired, and his Aura was lower than it should have been, and Cardin had approximately thirty pounds on him and the additional advantage of not particularly caring about the outcome beyond enjoying it.
When the buzzer rang and Glynda Goodwitch's voice cut through the room to call the match, Jaune was on the floor and Cardin was walking away from him with the loose-limbed satisfaction of someone who has just confirmed what they already believed.
From the front row of the audience, the mood was divided.
Ruby was watching Jaune with the expression she got when something was wrong that she couldn't immediately fix. Pyrrha's hands were folded in her lap with a stillness that was doing considerable work. Odyn was watching Cardin, and his expression had the quality of someone who has decided to wait rather than act, not because they don't have opinions, but because they have learned the difference between the moment to act and the moment to let something play out.
He was quiet through Goodwitch's assessment of Jaune's Aura management, quiet through Cardin's barely-concealed smirk, quiet through the applause for the next demonstration. He watched the room the way he watched most things: with the patient attention of someone who is taking inventory.
Beside him, Ruby had flipped to a new page in her notebook.
What she was drawing, when he glanced at it, was a small circular figure with approximate limbs and a dramatic mustache, surrounded by radiating lines that indicated either significance or strong smell. Below it, in Ruby's particular looping hand: Professor Poop.
He looked at the drawing. He looked at the front of the room. He looked at the drawing again.
Ruby noticed him noticing and tilted the notebook toward him slightly, in the manner of someone sharing something they are proud of.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Hailfire watching all of this with the specific expression she wore when she was storing something for later.
He looked back at his own notes.
The notes were in Arkynorean, which he had not noticed until this moment, and which Hailfire would absolutely be bringing up at the next available opportunity.
Cafeteria, midday —
The story of Nora Valkyrie's dream had been in progress since before most of them sat down, and showed no signs of approaching its conclusion.
"—and then," Nora said, leaning forward with the intensity of someone presenting evidence at trial, "we were completely surrounded—"
"Two," Ren said, into his coffee.
"—dozens of them, all closing in—"
"Beowolves."
"Ursai." She gave him a brief, patient look. "And then we fought our way through, and at the end, we sold the pelts, and do you know how much Ursa-skin rugs go for on the open market? I looked it up."
"She has been having this dream," Ren said, to no one in particular, "for nearly a month."
The table accommodated all four teams, which was a more accurate way of saying that four teams had arranged themselves around a table and several satellite tables and the overall configuration was held together by proximity and the shared understanding that they were all in some way waiting for the same thing, which was for Jaune to say what was obviously on his face.
Pyrrha was watching him. Odyn was watching him. Ruby, who was sitting beside Odyn in the way she often ended up sitting beside Odyn without quite deciding to, was watching him with the particular concern of someone who doesn't want to make someone feel watched.
"Jaune?" Pyrrha said carefully. "Are you alright?"
"What? Oh — yeah, fine. Totally." He held up a thumb. The thumb was not convincing. His gaze had slid sideways to where Cardin Winchester was currently sitting with a first-year student who had brown rabbit ears and an expression of someone who has learned to make themselves small and is currently doing that as effectively as she can while Cardin pulled at one of her ears and laughed about the structural integrity of her dignity.
The table went quiet in the way that tables go quiet when several people see something at the same time and are each individually deciding what to do about it.
Flare's tail had gone rigid.
Beat and Note had the specific stillness of people who are controlling something.
Daikon's jaw had set with the quiet, compressed quality of someone performing patience as an act of will.
Odyn watched Cardin's table. Then he watched Jaune. "Cardin's been doing this since the first week," he said. "Not just in class. Consistently."
"Oh, please," Jaune said, with the exhausted brightness of someone who has been arguing against a thing so long that the argument has become its own kind of admission. "He just has a particular sense of humor—"
"He launched you across the school in a locker," Roy said.
Jaune opened his mouth.
"There was also," Daikon said, "the hallway. Last Tuesday."
"The shield in the doorway," Odyn added.
"The thing with the notes in Oobleck's class."
Jaune looked at the table. "I didn't land that far from the school—"
"Jaune," Baron said, with the specific gentleness of someone who genuinely likes a person and wishes they would stop arguing against their own interests. "You're not doing yourself any favors by minimizing it. He's a bully. He's been a bully to you specifically since the first day of term, and he's a bully to her—" He nodded toward the rabbit-eared girl at Cardin's table, "—and he's going to keep doing it because no one has told him it's going to have consequences."
Jaune stared at the table for a long moment. Pyrrha's expression was the expression of someone who wants very much to help and has been told, specifically, to wait.
Khanna was already standing up.
Odyn said, quietly: "Kanna."
She stopped. Turned.
"Don't," he said.
"Someone needs to—"
"Someone needs to," he agreed. "But you're not going to be subtle about it and there'll be consequences that land on Jaune if it becomes a confrontation now." He held her gaze. "Let's handle it properly. Talk to him. Calmly. Make clear what the consequences are going to be if this continues."
Kanna looked at him with the expression she had when she disagreed with something and was going to do it anyway because the argument was sound. It was a very specific expression. "Fine," she said. "But if he keeps it up—"
"Then we address it."
She sat back down.
Odyn rose, and crossed to Cardin's table, and stood there until Cardin looked up. The moment their eyes met, something in Cardin's expression shifted — not fear exactly, but the recalibration of a person who has encountered something that has reminded him there are sizes of opponent he has not fully considered.
"Velvet, isn't it?" Odyn said, to the rabbit-eared girl.
She stared at him. "I — yes."
"Are you alright?"
She blinked. "I — yes, I—" She looked from Odyn to Cardin and back, with the expression of someone who has not been asked this question in some time and is not entirely sure what the correct answer is. "I'm fine."
"You don't have to say that if it isn't true," Odyn said.
Cardin's expression had cycled through several phases and arrived at contempt. "Mind your business, blue. She's—"
"A student at this academy," Odyn said. "Which means she's exactly my business." He turned fully to look at Cardin. "You've been here for a few weeks. Long enough to understand how this works. Long enough to understand that what you're doing right now—" He let the pause do its work. "—doesn't happen again. Is that clear?"
Cardin's mouth opened.
Khanna's voice came from behind Odyn, flat and informational: "I'd think very carefully about the next thing that comes out of your mouth, Winchester."
Cardin looked at Odyn. He looked at Khanna. He looked at the table that had clearly rearranged itself in the past sixty seconds in a way that suggested several more people were paying specific attention to this situation.
He looked back at Velvet.
"You're not worth my time," he said, which was directed at Odyn but sounded, even to Cardin, like the wrong thing to have said, so he stood up and left with his team trailing behind him.
Velvet sat at the table looking at the space he'd vacated.
Then she looked at Odyn. Her ears were flattened back in the manner of someone who has been in an adrenaline state and is only now beginning to leave it. "Thank you," she said. Her voice was steadier than her hands. "I — you didn't have to do that."
"Yes I did," Odyn said, simply.
She seemed not to know what to do with an answer that uncomplicated. "I'm Velvet," she said. "Velvet Scarlatina."
"Odyn Albanar." He held out his hand. "It's good to meet you, Velvet."
She shook it, and something in her expression shifted — not from nothing to something, but from careful to less careful, which was, in its own way, significant.
Later —
It was Pyrrha who asked.
She and Kanna were sitting in the corridor outside Oobleck's classroom, waiting for the after-class consultation to end. Most of the others had gone ahead — Nora and Ren to the dining hall, the various other team members to their own arrangements. It was quiet in the particular way that corridors are quiet when the day has mostly concluded and the building is digesting what it has held.
Pyrrha had been sitting with her hands around her knees, looking at the middle distance, when she said: "You're not human."
Kanna raised an eyebrow. "Observant."
"I've been trying to find the right way to ask." Pyrrha turned to look at her. "You're not Faunus either. None of you are. I've been watching all of you since the first week and there are — there are things. Small things. But they add up."
"What kind of small things?"
"The way you move," Pyrrha said. "Faunus have their own quality of movement, their own physical signatures — I've fought against enough Faunus to know what that looks like. This is different. All of you have the same quality to your movement, like it comes from the same training tradition, which makes sense if you grew up together, but that tradition is not anything I have seen before. And—" She hesitated. "Your ears."
Kanna went still.
"I noticed you tuck your hair forward," Pyrrha said quietly. "When you're in rooms with people you don't know well. Hailfire does it too, less consistently. And when I was sitting behind you in Port's lecture last week, I could see—"
Kanna reached up slowly and moved a section of her dark hair back from the side of her face.
Pyrrha looked at the ear that was revealed — the elegant taper of it, the length, the particular architecture of something that was built for a different purpose than a human ear. And then, as Pyrrha leaned slightly closer, the other thing: the scars. Not uniform, not accidental. The specific, irregular patterning of damage done deliberately over time.
Her breath caught.
"What happened?"
Kanna let the hair fall back. The motion was practiced and unconscious, the muscle memory of years.
"People who are frightened of things they don't understand," she said, "tend to express that fear in the language they know best. Which is usually violence." She said this without self-pity, which made it worse rather than better. "We're stronger than humans. We live longer. We don't age the same way. These are things that people find—" She considered the word. "—unsettling. When people are unsettled by something, they tend to try to make it smaller."
Pyrrha was quiet for a moment. The sounds of the building settling around them, somewhere a door closing, the distant voice of a teacher.
"That's not right," she said.
"No," Kanna agreed.
"It's inhuman."
"You'd think so." Kanna looked at her with the direct, measuring attention she brought to most interactions that mattered to her. "Most humans don't, though. Or they do think so, abstractly, and then they see us and the abstract understanding evaporates." She paused. "You're not doing that."
"Of course I'm not."
"I know," Kanna said. "That's why I'm still having this conversation." She looked down the corridor. "You remind me of someone."
Pyrrha tilted her head.
"My cousin's sister," Kanna said. "Sarai." The name arrived with the particular quality of names that belong to people who are no longer present to hear them spoken. "She had your kind of steadiness. The same quality of attention. Odyn's sister — she was the sort of person who made everyone around her feel like they were exactly where they needed to be."
"Was?" Pyrrha said, softly.
Kanna looked at her hands. "She died when we were very young. When the discrimination against our kind was at its worst." She paused. "There are things I don't talk about lightly. But yes. She's gone."
The corridor held this for a moment.
"I'm sorry," Pyrrha said. She meant it the way the people mean it when they say it and understand that the word is insufficient and say it anyway because it's all there is.
"Another time," Kanna said, "I'll tell you more. There's a lot to tell." She looked up as voices approached — Jaune's first, then Oobleck's receding footsteps — and stood up. "He's coming out."
As if on cue, the classroom door opened and Cardin shouldered past Jaune on the way out with the precision of someone who practices this specific form of dismissal. The result was Jaune going down, and Khanna's boot catching Cardin in the back of the knee as she passed from the opposite direction with the absolute conviction of someone who has done nothing at all.
Cardin hit the floor with considerable feeling.
He looked up. He found Kanna. She looked back at him with the expression of someone who has just arrived from somewhere entirely different and is mildly puzzled by the commotion.
"Goodness," she said. "You should watch where you're going."
He opened his mouth.
Something in her eyes — the flat, amber quality of someone who has made a decision and is comfortable with it — persuaded him to close it again.
He scrambled up and left at a pace that was technically not running.
Kanna looked at Jaune. "You alright?"
"I'm—" He blinked. "Yeah. Thanks."
"Pyrrha wants to help you," Kanna said. "You should let her." She turned toward the stairwell. "I'll see you both at dinner."
Pyrrha watched her go, then turned to find Jaune looking at the space Kanna had occupied with the expression of someone processing several recent events.
"Come on," she said. She offered her hand. "I have an idea."
Rooftop, above the dormitories —
The thing about the rooftop above Beacon's dormitory block was that it had been there for longer than anyone currently at the academy had been alive, and in that time had accumulated the particular silence of somewhere that has held a great many conversations that needed to be held out of earshot of everything else. The green lights of the central tower were visible from here, and the sky over them held the early signs of evening — the first stars, the crescent moon beginning its patient rise.
It was not a comfortable place to be honest. But it was the right one.
Jaune sat on the edge and looked at the lights and Pyrrha stood near him and waited, because she had learned, over the past several weeks, that Jaune's honesty operated on its own schedule and could not be extracted by pressure — only by the absence of it.
"I don't belong here," he said.
"—"
"I mean it. Not in the self-pity way. In the — I forged my transcripts way."
Pyrrha turned to look at him.
He told her. All of it — the transcripts, the family name that meant something he was trying to earn rather than something he had inherited, the gap between what he wanted to be and what he currently was, the weight of the gap and the way it felt heavier every time Cardin made it visible in front of an audience.
When he finished, he was looking at his hands, and Pyrrha was looking at the side of his face, and the rooftop held the kind of silence that means something is happening in it that needs time.
"Let me help you," she said.
"I don't want—"
"I know what you don't want," she said, and her voice was steady and direct and kind in the specific way that makes directness feel like support rather than criticism. "You don't want to be the person who needs saving. I understand that. But there's a difference between being saved and being trained. You have the foundation, Jaune — I've watched you fight. You have instincts and you have courage and you have, for the record, considerably more natural strength than you appear to know what to do with." She paused. "Let me help you build on what's already there."
He was quiet.
"You made it into Beacon," she said. "By whatever means — you're here. And being here is harder than getting here." She came around to where he could see her face, because she wanted him to see that she meant it. "Don't waste it."
He looked at her for a long moment.
Below them, in the building, the sound of a door opening — Ruby's voice, bright and slightly startled, and then Odyn's quieter response.
"You could've told me, you know," Jaune said, but he was not quite looking at Pyrrha when he said it.
"About?"
"That you were going to—" He stopped. "Never mind. Yes. Yeah, okay." He took a breath. "Teach me."
She pushed him over.
"Hey—!"
She stood over him with her arms crossed and the expression of someone beginning an assessment. "Your stance," she said. "It's wrong. Too high, too narrow. When you plant your feet, you need them wider — lower your center of gravity, here—" She offered her hand. He took it, and she pulled him up, and neither of them let go quite as quickly as the movement required.
The camera — if there had been a camera — would have moved upward, away from the two of them standing on the rooftop in the evening light, up to the crescent moon and the first clear stars of the night, up and up until Beacon was below and Vale was below and Remnant was a small thing in the dark full of people trying, in their various ways, to be better than they were when they started.
Meanwhile, in the dormitory corridor —
Ruby was already in her pajamas when she nearly walked into Jaune in the hallway, which made her laugh and him react in the specific way of someone who has had a longer day than he planned for.
"Long time no see," she said. "Did you lock yourself out again?"
"Nope." He held up his Scroll with a tired smile. "Got it this time."
She looked at him with the particular attention she brought to things she was concerned about and hadn't quite finished being concerned about. "You look—"
"Tired," he said.
"I was going to say better."
He blinked.
She grinned. "Whatever you did today — it looks like it helped." She paused. "For the record. Whatever's going on with Cardin — you don't have to handle it by yourself. That's what all of us are here for."
Jaune looked at her for a moment. Ruby Rose had a way of saying things that were very simple and meaning them so completely that they became more than simple. He was still trying to work out the mechanism of how she did that.
"Yeah," he said. "I know." He looked at his Scroll, then back at her. "Thanks, Ruby."
The Scroll beeped.
He read it. Something in his expression concluded and then rearranged itself into the specific resignation of someone who has just been reminded that the day is not actually over. He sighed, pocketed it, and turned down the corridor.
A door opened nearby.
"Jaune." Odyn.
Jaune turned. Odyn stood in his own doorway, and the look on his face was the particular look of someone who has read a situation accurately and is choosing to be direct about it.
"You know what you need to do," Odyn said. "And you know you already know what it is. The question is just whether you're going to let him stop you from doing it." He paused. "Don't."
Jaune stood in the corridor for a moment.
Then he straightened up.
The thing about Jaune Arc, which both Ruby and Odyn had seen and which Cardin Winchester had completely failed to understand, was that he was not a person who made brave decisions from a position of strength. He made them from the position he was actually in, which was almost always uncomfortable, and almost never secure, and this made them considerably more genuinely brave than the other kind.
He went back to his door and turned the handle and faced his team.
The next morning —
The forest of Forever Fall was the color of something that had decided to be beautiful about ending. Red leaves in every variation — cardinal and rust and the particular deep crimson that exists only at autumn's full extension — filled the canopy above teams RWBY, JNPR, OHRF, KDBNB, and CRDL, and the morning light came through them in bars of amber and rose that made the forest floor look like something out of one of Ruby's books.
Glynda Goodwitch led them in from the north and stopped at a clearing where the sap-heavy trees stood in a loose ring, each one marked with the bright red of its harvest season.
"Professor Peach has asked for samples," she said, holding up a full jar of the vivid red sap as illustration. "One jar each. The forest is active, so remain with your teams. We reconvene here at four o'clock." She looked at the assembled students with the expression of someone who has done this before and has opinions about how it tends to go. "Try not to make my afternoon interesting."
What followed was, for most of the teams, a pleasant hour in an extraordinary forest.
Ruby and Yang worked their way through their designated section with the easy coordination of sisters who have been navigating the same spaces for most of their lives. Blake sat with her jar in her lap and her book in her hand and managed both without apparent difficulty. Weiss collected her sample with the methodical efficiency she applied to most tasks.
Flare, working alongside Roy, had found a tree with particularly cooperative sap flow and was filling her jar with the satisfied expression of someone completing a task well. Roy crouched beside her and watched the process with the quiet attentiveness he brought to most things that Flare was involved in, which was a quality of attention she was doing her best not to make any particular note of and was not entirely succeeding.
"This is a good tree," she said.
"It is," he agreed.
"Structurally speaking. The bark is very — it's good."
"Very good," he agreed, without emphasis.
She looked at him.
He looked at the tree.
She went back to filling her jar.
Kanna, working alongside Pyrrha and watching Jaune from the corner of her eye with the patient attention of someone who has a theory about what's about to happen and is waiting to see if she's right, felt the moment Jaune made his decision the same way you feel a shift in weather — something in the quality of the air around the situation changed, and she glanced at Odyn across the clearing and he glanced back at her, and they both understood.
There he goes.
What happened next unfolded at two removes from most of the assembled students.
There was the moment when Jaune threw the jar.
There was the moment when Cardin — sap-covered, furious, wrong in the specific way of people who have always assumed they are the largest thing in any given room — raised his fist and brought it down.
There was the moment when something that was not quite Aura and not quite anything else surged through Jaune and turned the blow against itself, and Jaune looked at his hands in the aftermath of it with the expression of someone who has just discovered a room in a house they thought they knew completely.
And there was the moment when the forest produced its own opinion on the situation, in the form of an Ursa Major that emerged from the tree line with the patient confidence of something that has identified a great deal of red, sweet-smelling sap and the person wearing most of it.
The Ursa didn't particularly care about the human drama that had been preceding its arrival.
It cared about the sap.
Cardin ran.
His team ran.
Jaune did not run.
He stood with Crocea Mors in his hands and the Ursa advancing and the expression of someone who has reached the point in their own story where running is simply no longer the thing that happens next, and he fought it with what he had, which was the blade and his own stubbornness and the newly unlocked sense of something moving through him that he could not yet name.
He was not perfect. He was knocked down twice. The third time he got up it was with the specific quality of rising that means you have decided this is the last time.
The blade went through.
The Ursa fell.
Jaune stood in the quiet forest with the severed evidence of his decision at his feet, and when Pyrrha's hand stopped glowing behind him and she stepped forward with the expression of someone who had not, technically, done anything at all except possibly slightly adjust the angle of a shield, Kanna was beside her and her expression was the expression of someone who has been proven right about something and is very satisfied about it.
"You knew," Pyrrha said softly.
"I hoped," Kanna said. "Which is most of what knowing is, usually."
Odyn came to stand beside Jaune. "Knew you had it."
Roy: "Same."
Kanna, with the particular warmth she expressed to people she had decided to care about, which was different from its usual register in being entirely unironic: "Next time, don't wait until there's an Ursa before you decide to be brave."
Jaune looked at all of them. "Thanks," he said, and meant it the way people mean things when they've run out of more elaborate ways to say them.
Ruby put her hands on her hips. "What he said," she agreed. "Now can we please go somewhere without trees for a while? I've filled my jar three times and I've only got one jar and I think I need to think about what happened here."
Yang put her arm around her sister. "Pretty sure that's what jars are for, Rubes."
"The first time I filled it I dropped it."
"Ah."
"The second time there was a Grimm."
"Also Ah."
"So I have one jar, and it's full, and I'm going to hold onto it very carefully for the rest of the day."
"That seems wise," Odyn said.
"Thank you," she said, and turned to go, and the forest around them held the particular warmth of somewhere that has been the location of several things that mattered and is, for now, quiet.
That night —
Pyrrha pushed Jaune.
He went down with an indignant sound.
She stood over him with her arms folded and the expression of a teacher beginning from the beginning, which is where the best teachers always begin.
"Wider," she said. "Lower. Again."
He took her hand. She pulled him up.
He didn't let go quite at the moment when the movement was finished.
She didn't mention it.
"Again," she said.
Above them, the crescent moon completed another degree of its patient arc across the sky, and Beacon held its people in their various forms of trying, and the night was very still, and somewhere in the quiet of a distant place a shadow with red eyes and wings made from darkness folded itself into the dark between two buildings and waited, as shadows do, for morning.
End of Chapter Four
To be continued in Chapter Five: Off Day — Odyn and Ruby
The things we carry do not always announce themselves. A race's survival can look, from the outside, like a group of teenagers walking to class. A secret kept for a generation can fit inside a brief and careful sentence. And the beginning of something — a trust, a friendship, a quiet understanding between two people who have not yet found the word for what they are to each other — can arrive in a south courtyard on a Tuesday morning, in a conversation about magic, without either party quite recognizing it for what it is.
This is, perhaps, how the best beginnings tend to work.
Hey guys, hopefully you enjoyed that chapter as it covers a whopping 4 episodes! Next chapter will cover the end of Volume 1 of the Rwby story. Hopefully you guys liked that tidbit of an interaction between Khanna and Pyrrha, I see the two of them developing a very tightknit and close friendship. It also explained some of the backstory about why Dark Elves don't like humans very much, that'll be a point of contention further down the road in this story.
Lol I feel like Odyn would have to explain some things to Ruby since she's... well not the brightest in volume 1 🤣 But Ruby and Odyn's relationship has a nice feel to it so far so I'll try and keep it steady and build towards them becoming a couple, no need to rush it right?
Poll: Should there be a romantic rival for Ruby?
A. Yes
B. No
If your answer is yes, who should it be?
A. Comment suggestion
B. Velvet Scarlatina
C. Coco (CVFY)
Should Yang have a rival for Roy's attention?
A. Yes
B. Nah
If yes, then comment who it should be.
Anyways that's it for now guys! Have an awesome day!
Next time: Chapter 5.5: Off day- Odyn & Ruby