Hey guys RoseSaiyan2 here gain. So this may be a bit of a shorter couple of chapters due to this just being filler until Chapter 7 when we'll go over the last 2 episodes of Volume 1 of the Ruby story.
Thinking about how things will go later in the story I'll be using some of my own kind of logic to explain what happens. It'll make sense when we get to that point. And... although Dark Elves don't like humans very much, I think their anger would be more towards Cinder and ultimately Salem, though they still don't like Humans very much.
Anyways enough of me blabbing, onto the story!
I don't own dbz/kai/dbs, Black Clover, or Rwby and their characters. Those are property of Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation, (forgive me if I mess up his first name) Yuki Tabata/ Studio Pierot, Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively.
the opening theme for volume 1 of this story: just imagine it with the characters of this story: Team OHRF (Odyn's team), KDBNB( Khanna's team), Rwby, and JNPR
Rising Hope- Opening 1 (Irregular at Magic Highschool)
Chapter 5.5: Off Day — Odyn and Ruby
There is a specific quality to weekends at Beacon that is different from every other kind of time the academy produces.
During the week, the building has a purpose, and that purpose organizes everything — the flow of students through corridors, the rhythm of bells, the particular sound of several hundred people all moving toward the same general objectives at more or less the same time. On weekends, the purpose suspends, and what replaces it is something looser and more honest: people being themselves, without the structure to perform themselves into.
Ruby Rose, on the first genuinely free Saturday since term began, stood in the dormitory corridor in her civilian clothes — red hoodie, dark leggings, her boots — and held a small list she had made the previous night of things she could do with an entire day that belonged entirely to her.
The list read:
1. Find Yang. 2. Find Blake. 3. Find Weiss. 4. Other.
Yang had already gone somewhere unspecified, with the specific energy of someone who has plans and has decided those plans are nobody else's business.
Blake had looked up from her book when Ruby knocked, said "I'll be here," in the tone of someone who considers this a complete answer, and gone back to the book.
Weiss had said errands with an air of finality that suggested the errands were either very important or very private, and had left the dormitory at a pace that precluded follow-up questions.
Ruby stood in the corridor with her list and looked at item four.
Other, she had written.
It turned out other was Vale.
She had not intended to run into anyone.
She had been walking through the commercial quarter of the city — the section near the central market where the dust shops clustered together with their glowing window displays and the particular smell of compressed elemental potential that Ruby had loved since she was small enough that her father had to carry her past them to keep her from pressing her face against the glass — and she had been doing this in the pleasant, unhurried way of someone who has no agenda and is enjoying the absence of one, when she saw him.
He was on the other side of the street, moving in the direction of one of the larger dust vendors, with the focused purposefulness of someone running a specific errand that they intend to complete efficiently and return from. He was alone, which was unusual enough that she noticed it before she quite registered who he was.
Then she registered who he was.
"Odyn!"
He turned, and the expression that moved across his face when he saw her was — she filed this away without entirely knowing she was filing it — genuine and immediate, the unrehearsed kind.
"Ruby." He waited as she crossed the street toward him. "What are you doing here?"
"I was going to ask you the same thing." She fell into step beside him as naturally as if they had arranged this. "You're never in Vale by yourself. Where's everyone else?"
He considered this. "Hailfire wanted time with Baron. Roy was—" A brief pause, during which something that might have been amusement appeared and was suppressed. "Roy was pulled into your sister's plans."
"Oh." Ruby processed this. "That's what she was being mysterious about."
"Flare went with Hailfire and Baron." He glanced at her. "And your team?"
"Weiss has errands. Blake has a book. Yang has—" She gestured at the general concept of Yang having plans. "Whatever Yang has." She paused. "So I have the day."
"So do I."
They both arrived, by the natural logic of the situation, at the entrance to the dust shop. Odyn held the door. Ruby went through it, and stopped just inside the threshold, because the shop had a new display — a full catalog of custom dust weaponry configurations, open on a stand near the entrance — and Ruby's attention had left the conversation and committed entirely to the catalog.
Odyn went to the counter to discuss his order.
Ruby turned pages.
The shop was the kind of place that Ruby had strong feelings about in the way she had strong feelings about very few things — deeply, specifically, with the quality of attention that most people reserved for things that mattered considerably more than a collection of material objects. The dust crystals in their display cases caught the light from different angles and produced different colors in the turning, and the catalog in her hands was full of weapons she had not built and configurations she had not tried and ideas that produced smaller ideas in rapid succession.
She was on page thirty-seven when she became aware that she was being watched.
She looked up. Odyn was at the far end of the display case, waiting for his dust order to be packaged, and he was looking at her with the expression he sometimes got — the one that was hard to describe because it wasn't quite one thing. Amused, maybe. Something adjacent to fond.
"Is there something on my face?" she asked.
"No," he said. "It's just—" He stopped. Started again. "It's good to see you like this. You've seemed—" He seemed to be choosing words with some care. "You always seem to find a way to make the people around you feel better just by being present. I don't think you know you do that."
Ruby stared at him.
The blush came in with no warning and very little dignity, which was how blushes generally arrived for Ruby Rose.
"O-Oh," she said. "You — I mean — you didn't have to — that's not—" She stopped. Composed herself. "Thank you," she said, which was the honest answer, even if it was smaller than what had come before it. "But you didn't say it just to make me feel better?"
"I said it because it's true," he said. "Those are different things."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she went back to the catalog, because she didn't quite know what to do with the version of herself that was currently standing in a dust shop at noon on a Saturday feeling the particular warmth of having been seen accurately.
He came and stood near her. Not beside her exactly — a few feet of distance, browsing the adjacent display — and the silence between them had the easy quality that silence tends to have between people who have gotten past the stage of filling it.
When he turned to look at something in the far display, Ruby looked at the side of his face without entirely deciding to.
She knew, objectively, that she did not know him very well yet. She had known him for a matter of weeks. She had, in those weeks, learned certain things: that he was careful with his words and meant the ones he chose, that he was protective in a way that was not possessive, that he had a particular way of being still in a room that made the people around him feel steadier. She knew that he wrote his notes in a script she couldn't read and that he had a sister who was gone, and that there was something behind the patience in his eyes that had been there long enough to become part of how he looked at things.
She did not know, yet, what had put it there.
Someday, she thought, with the quiet certainty of someone who is patient about the things that matter to them, I'll find out who you are properly. And I want it to be on your terms.
She thought also: I haven't told him much about myself either. That seems unfair, if we're calling this friendship.
"Hey, Odyn?"
He turned.
"Can I ask you something?"
"As long as it's something I can answer," he said, which was the answer he always gave, and which she had come to understand meant yes, carefully.
"Why don't Dark Elves trust humans?" She paused. "Or — why do humans treat you the way they do. Both, I suppose. I've been trying to understand it and I can't make it make sense."
The question landed the way she had suspected it might — not badly, but with weight. His expression shifted, not into anger, but into the particular set that meant something difficult was being held steadily.
"That's not a question I'm upset to be asked," he said, reading her correctly. "It's just — not a simple one."
"I have time," she said.
He looked at her for a moment. Then he turned to the counter, collected his packaged dust, and said: "Walk with me."
The street outside the shop was busy in the mid-morning way of a city going about its weekend, and they moved through it at the pace of people who are not going anywhere specific and therefore have no reason to hurry. The foot traffic thinned as they moved away from the central market toward one of the quieter eastern streets, and by the time Odyn spoke, there was enough space around them that the words belonged to the conversation and not to anyone passing.
"Fear," he said, simply. "That's the root of it."
Ruby walked beside him and listened in the way she listened to things she meant to understand — completely, without preparing her response while the other person was still talking.
"Humans build their sense of security from knowing where they stand relative to everything else," he said. "Their position in the order of things. And we disturb that — not deliberately, not because we're trying to, but simply by existing the way we do." He kept his gaze ahead, on the street, the way people do when they're working through something as they say it. "We're physically stronger. We recover faster. We live longer — significantly longer — and we don't show the outward signs of it. A Dark Elf who has passed their sixteenth year looks the same at thirty that they looked at sixteen. At fifty. At a hundred." He paused. "To a human who has built their entire understanding of time and age and mortality around the way their body works — that is deeply, instinctively unsettling."
"But that's not your fault," Ruby said. The indignation in her voice was immediate and genuine, the kind that arrives before the speaker has had time to decide whether to express it.
"No," he agreed. "It's not. But humans don't generally respond well to things that aren't anyone's fault. It's easier to assign blame. Easier to decide that the thing causing the discomfort is the problem, rather than the discomfort itself." He was quiet for a moment. "So we became the problem."
She was quiet too, because she was thinking, and she thought better in silence.
"We reached out," he said. "Several times, across several generations. Extended agreements, offered knowledge, tried to build something that worked for both sides. Each time—" He stopped. "Each time, it ended the same way. With us trusting and them finding that trust convenient until it became inconvenient."
"That's—" She was searching for a word. "Awful."
"Yes," he said. "It is." He glanced at her. "So we withdrew. Built our own places. Learned to live quietly. And over time, the generations that had interacted with us died, and the generations that came after had no memory of us at all. To them, we are — at best — old stories. At worst, things to fear without quite knowing why."
Ruby's hands, at her sides, had curled into fists. Not at him — she was clearly not angry at him, and she had the expressive transparency of someone who does not know how to direct a feeling at a wrong target when the right target is available. She was angry at the situation, and the situation was the kind of thing that deserves anger and cannot easily receive it, which was the most frustrating variety.
"It's wrong," she said.
"Yes."
"All of it. Not just the history — the now. Cardin and what he says about Faunus, and the way your people were treated, and — we're all people. That's all. We're all just — people. Why does it have to be so—"
"Ruby."
She looked up at him.
He was looking at her with the expression she had learned was what it looked like when he meant something very much.
"I know," he said. "And it matters that you know. It matters that you're angry about it." He paused. "The world doesn't change because the situation changes. It changes because people decide it should. Not the powerful people, usually — they have too much to lose from change. The ordinary people. The ones who are just—" He considered. "—just people. As you put it."
She held his gaze. Something in the way he'd said it made her feel simultaneously very small and very necessary, which was an odd combination but not an uncomfortable one.
"You said your people can't forgive humans yet," she said. "Does that include me?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said. "You're — you don't fit the pattern." He seemed briefly uncertain about how to continue, which was unusual for him and therefore interesting. "Humans who have genuinely surprised us have always been rare. You're one of the rare ones."
She looked at the street ahead of them. She was doing the thing she did when she was pleased about something — directing her attention at a fixed point and keeping her expression carefully neutral, which was not particularly successful because Ruby's expressions did not respond well to management.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay," he agreed.
They walked in silence for a moment, and it was the kind of silence that is also a conversation.
The dust shop errand was complete, which meant the day was technically open, and it was Ruby who navigated them through the quieter back streets of Vale toward a part of the market quarter that she clearly knew well and moved through with the ease of someone who has done it many times. She pointed things out as they passed — the bakery that made the cookies Yang liked, the street that led to the eastern park, the bookshop where she and Yang used to come when they were younger and their father was doing business in the city.
He listened, and asked occasional questions, and she found herself talking more than she had planned to, which was generally how talking with Odyn went — he listened in a way that made talking feel worth the effort.
At some point she realized she was telling him about Signal, and then about her mother, and then about the particular shape of the years between those two things, and none of it had been planned. It had simply arrived the way things do when you trust someone.
She stopped on a corner and looked at her own hands.
"I just realized," she said, "that I've told you things I don't normally talk about."
"I noticed," he said.
"Does that bother you?"
"No." He said it simply, with the same quality of certainty he brought to most things he meant. "I'm glad you told me."
She looked up at him. "You told me about your people. About what was done to them. That wasn't easy to say."
"No."
"So I figured—" She stopped. "It seemed wrong to know things about you without you knowing things about me. That's not how friendship is supposed to work."
He looked at her for a moment with the expression that she had still not entirely catalogued — the one that existed in the territory between recognition and something more careful than recognition.
"Your mother," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Thank you," she said. It came out steadier than she expected, which meant that either the years had done their work or she trusted him enough that the usual difficulty wasn't present. Possibly both. "She was — from what Dad and Yang told me, she was very brave. She died doing what she believed in." A beat. "I want to be that."
"You're already on the way," he said.
She laughed a little, the slightly uncertain laugh of someone who is not sure whether they believe that but is glad to hear it said. "You don't know that."
"I've watched you for a few weeks," he said. "I have a reasonable estimate."
She looked at him. He looked back at her with the mild, steady expression of someone who has said something that is simply true and doesn't feel the need to add to it.
She pointed at him. "You can't just say things like that."
"Why not?"
"Because then I don't know what to — I mean — it's—" She made a brief, comprehensive gesture that expressed the difficulty. "Odyn."
"Ruby."
She turned and walked forward. He fell into step beside her. She could hear him not-smiling, which was a quality she had come to recognize.
They were on their way back through the commercial quarter when Odyn said, without particular prelude: "You remind me of her."
Ruby looked at him.
"My sister," he said. "Sarai." The name arrived differently than other words — not heavier exactly, but with more mass behind it, the kind that accumulates from years of being carried. "She had your kind of — the way you're present with people. The way you make them feel like they matter to you specifically, not generally." He was looking ahead, at the street. "She was the same."
"Was," Ruby said softly.
"She died when we were young." He said this with the particular economy of someone who has been saying it long enough that the words have become the shape of the thing rather than the raw material of it. "Discrimination was at its worst then. There were — there were people who had decided that fear was a reason to act, and they acted." A pause. "I wasn't there. I couldn't—" He stopped.
She didn't say anything, because she had learned that the most useful thing in moments like this was presence rather than response, and she was good at presence.
After a moment, he looked at her. "You would have liked each other."
"I think I would have," she said.
He nodded, once, and then he said something that she would turn over for days afterward, in the way you turn over something that doesn't quite fit the space you've been given for it: "Who knows. Perhaps you'll have the chance to meet her yet."
Ruby looked at him. "What do you mean?"
He seemed to realize what he'd said and retreated from it with the smooth, mild efficiency of someone who has had a great deal of practice not answering questions they've opened by accident. "Nothing. I was thinking aloud."
"Odyn—"
"We should probably head back," he said. "Your team will be wondering where you are."
"My team is scattered across Vale and a book," she said, "and you know that. What did you mean by—"
"Ruby."
She looked at him.
He looked back at her with an expression that was not closed exactly, but was the kind that means not yet. The kind that is a door with a handle on both sides.
She held his gaze for a long moment.
"Fine," she said. "But eventually."
"Eventually," he agreed.
They met their respective teams at the same intersection, which was either coincidence or something more carefully arranged, and which Ruby correctly suspected was the latter the moment she saw the expression on Yang's face.
Yang's expression contained several separate things: satisfaction, affection, the particular quality of someone who has been watching something they predicted would happen and has been proven right, and — underneath all of that — something quieter and more genuine, the look of a sister who is glad.
Roy was beside her, and Roy's expression contained considerably fewer things, but they were of similar variety.
"Rubes!" Yang swept her into a brief, comprehensive hug. "How was your day?"
"Good," Ruby said, which was an understatement.
"Do anything interesting?"
"Showed Odyn around. Went to the dust shop." She paused. "Talked."
"Talked," Yang repeated, in the tone of someone emphasizing quotation marks that do not technically exist.
"Yes, Yang. Talked. That's a thing people do."
"Of course it is." Yang was smiling. "I'm just glad you had company."
Odyn, nearby, was receiving his own version of this from Hailfire, who had apparently returned from her time with Baron and had opinions.
"You were in Vale all day," Hailfire said.
"I had dust to purchase."
"And then you stayed in Vale."
"I had company."
"Ruby Rose kind of company?"
Odyn gave her the look he gave her when she was being accurate about something he was in the process of not confirming.
Hailfire's expression was the expression of someone who has just received the confirmation they were looking for.
Roy, beside Yang, was watching this with the easy attention of someone who has known his brother long enough to have opinions about what this particular sequence of expressions signifies.
"Ruby!" Yang said, brightly, leaning close to her sister's ear. "How was your date?"
"Yang."
"Did anything interesting happen between you two? Did you—"
"IT'S NOT LIKE THAT WITH US," Ruby said, at a volume that several nearby pedestrians registered and politely ignored. Her face was the particular shade of red that exists between embarrassed and mortified. "I have told you, it's just — we're friends, and even if — I mean, not that I — not that he — it's just—" She pointed at her sister. "You're doing this on purpose."
"I absolutely am," Yang agreed warmly. "But you should have seen your face."
"I'm going back to Beacon," Ruby said, with great dignity.
"We're all going back to Beacon," Yang said. "It's the same direction."
"Then I'm going in front of you."
She walked ahead, her hood pulled up with the specific compression of someone managing their face, and Yang followed her with the easy, fond smile of a sister who loves someone very much and expresses it primarily through targeted emotional disruption.
Odyn walked with Roy, a few paces behind the sisters, and Roy was quiet for a moment before he said: "You stayed in Vale."
"I had dust to purchase."
"And then you stayed."
Odyn looked at the back of Ruby's red hood, which had been pulled up with some feeling and was now expressing itself through the brisk pace of its wearer.
"She asked good questions," he said.
Roy nodded in the manner of someone who considers this information rather than argument. "She usually does."
They walked back toward Beacon in the amber light of the late afternoon, and the city moved around them with its ordinary Saturday energy, and somewhere between the market quarter and the academy gates, Yang glanced back at Odyn and caught his eye for just a moment, and the look she gave him was not the teasing one.
It was the other one.
The one that said: I see what this is. Take care of her.
He held her gaze for a moment. Nodded, once, with the steadiness of a promise that doesn't need words.
Yang looked forward again, satisfied.
Later, in the dormitory —
The common room of Team RWBY had the comfortable disarray of four people who have spent a day being themselves and are now reassembling in one space. Blake had arrived from her book. Weiss had returned from her errands with a paper bag whose contents she did not explain and left on the table. Yang was on her bed with her legs in the air, examining her nails with the thorough attention of someone reviewing a completed project.
Ruby sat cross-legged on her bunk with her chin in her hands, looking at nothing in particular.
She was thinking about who knows, perhaps you'll have the chance to meet her yet.
She was thinking about the way he'd said it — not as a figure of speech, not as a comforting nothing-phrase, but with the quality of something that was either a mistake or an intention, and that he had immediately retreated from in a way that suggested it was the second one.
She was thinking about the way he listened to her, and the way he talked to her, and the particular quality of the afternoon — the easy back-and-forth of it, the way it had felt less like a tour of the city and more like a conversation that happened to be moving.
She was thinking, and she did not quite know what she was thinking about, which was its own information.
"So, Rubes," Yang said, from her bed, without looking up from her nails.
"Don't," Ruby said.
"I was just going to ask—"
"Don't."
A pause.
"You were smiling the whole way back," Blake said, from behind her book.
Ruby looked at her.
Blake looked back with the mild, interested expression of someone who is reporting an observation rather than making an argument.
"I was having a good day," Ruby said.
"You were."
"That's all it was."
"Mm."
Weiss, at her desk with her paper bag and whatever was in it, did not say anything. But the small, precise smile she directed at her homework was not about the homework.
Ruby looked at the ceiling of her bunk.
Eventually, he had said, when she'd pushed on the thing he'd almost told her.
She decided that eventually was a reasonable timeline for something that would probably make sense when it arrived.
She closed her eyes.
The evening settled over Beacon with its particular quality of Saturday evening quiet, and somewhere down the hall, four Arkynorean teenagers were having a version of the same conversation in a different configuration, and the moon was already visible at the window's edge, patient and familiar and entirely unbothered by any of it.
End of Chapter 5.5
To be continued in Chapter Six: The Stray and Hidden Truths
There is a kind of trust that does not announce itself. It does not arrive in grand moments or in the particular clarity of a decision made. It accumulates instead — in small exchanges, in questions asked and answered, in the willingness to say something true to a person who will not use it against you. By the time you notice it has arrived, it has generally been there for some time. This is not a problem. It is simply how the good things tend to work.
Ending is above just switch it with characters of this story lol
Seirei Gensouki -Ending 1: Elder Flower
Hey guys I hope you enjoyed this chapter! It was a little bit shorter, but I wanted to build a little more foundation into Ruby and Odyn's relationship, which is why I decided to have a shorter chapter just about them. Once their eventual pairing comes to fruition, their relationship will be more detailed in length.
As you can tell by the relations between humans and dark elves, it may be a little rocky once they go public with it. Humans and Dark Elves don't exactly like each other very much in this story, this will be accentuated throughout the story. This may change some of the events that occur down the line. The important events of rwby cannon will be there, but this story is kind of a hodge podge anyways so why not have it be a little crazy? Lol.
As you can expect, team crdl may play a part in the human- elf conflict throughout the story... at least at Beacon. I have some crazy ideas for future events in this story, so stay tuned!
Next chapter will continue Volume 1 of rwby cannon and will mostly stay in line with the show with... some obvious differences. That's all for now see ya in the next chapter!