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It’s cold in the dorms. Ruby, half-asleep, rolls sideways in search of someone warm to wrap herself around while she struggles into awareness and discovers Ren, presumably holding on to Jaune. He doesn’t protest when she latches herself onto him, which she takes as a good sign.
She doesn’t remember falling asleep last night. Yesterday had been a blur of relief and exhaustion — Raven finding them in the desert and portalling them back to Vacuo, tearful reunions (Winter sinking to the ground with Weiss in her arms, both of them somewhere between crying and laughing; Ren and Nora tackling Jaune to the ground as soon as they saw him; Qrow tucking Ruby and Yang under his arms and kissing their foreheads roughly), stupidly long explanations of how the fuck the five of them managed to survive a plunge into the void, and so on. Winter had commandeered one of the empty Shade dorm rooms and ushered them all inside, and that had been that.
Someone must have pushed all the beds together. Ruby lifts her head and discovers Ren holding Jaune holding Nora holding Oscar, Emerald curled up as small as possible behind him. Yang and Blake are on the other side of her, tangled up together, and Qrow is lying on what thin strip of mattress remains with his arms folded up behind his head. How he can sleep like that is beyond her.
Speaking of which. Ruby presses her face into Ren’s back, suddenly very aware of just how tired she is. It must have been a week since she last got to sleep properly.
She isn’t sure if she passes out again or just dozes, caught on the edges of sleep for another few hours, but either way, when she eases back into awareness the room is fucking freezing.
Opening her eyes, she discovers the source of the apparent drop in temperature — Winter, Weiss and Whitley curled up together in the corner of the room, half-buried under a pile of summons. Weiss is blinking awake, stretching her arms over her head and dislodging Whitley’s head from her shoulder in the process. Ruby offers her a small smile, which she returns.
“Good morning,” she whispers.
Weiss runs a hand down her face and peers at the light streaming in from underneath the curtains. “Good afternoon, more like.” She attempts to reach for her scroll for all of thirty seconds and then just gives up and removes Winter’s from her pocket instead. “Yep. One forty.”
“That’s not so bad.”
Weiss sniffs. “Vacuo could be tumbling down around us and we wouldn’t even know.”
“Uh huh,” Ruby says. “Hey, want some breakfast?”
Weiss sits up, disentangling herself from Winter, and flops onto the bed instead. Winter makes a small sound in protest, but otherwise doesn’t stir. “Dust, yes. Please.”
She clambers up the bed until her head is resting on Ruby’s legs and lets out a deep, deep sigh. Ruby reaches down to ruffle her hair, earning herself a groan instead of a sigh, and tilts her head back contentedly. “Tired?”
“Obviously.”
She lets go of Ren and sits up. Weiss wraps her arms around her waist. The world sways a little, just enough to be concerning. “Brothers, I’m hungry.”
“Mmf. Me too.”
“Feel like raiding the kitchens?”
Weiss blinks up at her, frowning the same way she did when Ruby first suggested it two years ago. “Are we even allowed to do that?”
“Well, we are, like, the most important people on Remnant right now, so —”
“Oh, please,” she huffs. “Third-most important at a stretch.”
“Not that your ego needs any more inflating,” Ruby says as Weiss lets go of her, giving her space to slide off the bed. Yang immediately rolls over to fill the space she left, tugging Blake over with her.
They’d slept like this once before, at Beacon. The night before Yang’s match. JNPR had pushed their beds together in the centre of the room and called them in, and they’d curled up together like that — Yang and Blake, Ruby and Weiss; like always. Blake slept in Yang’s arms and every time Yang shifted she shifted with her, like they were two halves of the same whole.
Ruby had thought, back then, that she was jealous of Blake for taking up so much of her sister’s attention. And then she’d felt horrible about it, because the last thing she wanted to be was jealous of her best friend. And now — well. Her eyes drift to Weiss, patting her knee companionably as she gets out of the bed, moving as quietly as possible to where her siblings are curled up in the corner, and she knows the source of that jealousy like she knows the feeling of her breathing in her chest.
“Winter?”
“Mm.”
“Ruby and I are going to get breakfast.”
“Mhm.”
“Do you want anything?”
“Mm. Coffee for Whitley.”
“When he wakes up?”
“When he… yeah.”
Weiss glances over her shoulder at Ruby, grinning. “I think this is the most sleep she’s gotten in months.”
“Years,” Winter hums, tugging Whitley closer to her. He makes a muffled, tired sound and burrows his head into her shirt. “Coffee?”
“Mm. Please.”
They step out of the room quietly, closing the door behind them. Ruby follows Weiss to the kitchens in amicable silence, trusting her to know where she’s going. She wouldn’t put it past her to have the whole layout of the building memorised by now.
The closest kitchen is clearly intended for students, a small boxy thing at the very end of a long corridor of empty dorms. There are dents and nicks in the smooth grey-green surfaces that can only come from weapons being handled by rowdy teenagers, and even a small scorch mark over the sink that Ruby attributes to a Dust cartridge misfiring. She hops up onto the island and ignores the eye roll this earns her.
Weiss sets about raiding the cupboards for mugs. The coffee machine in the corner rattles to life, just loudly enough that she has no hope of speaking below normal volume to be heard. “Okay, let me guess. Five sugars?”
“Four! What do you take me for?”
Weiss sniffs. “I’ve made your coffee for years, Ruby.”
“Maybe my tastes have changed since the last time,” she says, grinning. “You don’t know me.”
Weiss goes back to flinging open every single cupboard in the room. “Five sugars, then. And cream.
“And cream.”
She ducks under the island and surfaces with four cups and a tray. “Noted. What do you think Winter takes?”
Ruby scrunches up her nose, thinking. “Uhh. Pure black. That seems like her.”
Weiss snorts. For a moment, something flickers behind her eyes — a hint of worry, maybe, of that same self-contained anxiety Ruby sees in her own eyes in the mirror whenever she realises just how much Yang had sacrificed for her growing up — and then she blinks and it smooths away. “Yeah, it really does, doesn’t it?”
They lapse back into silence. When Ruby had brought this up to Yang she’d called it a partner thing , and it made sense — the idea that they knew each other so well they never needed to talk aloud. That existing in their natural states around each other was comfortable, intimate. Now she thinks it’s more of a being in love with your best friend thing.
Ruby takes her mug off the tray to give Weiss less to worry about balancing and holds open the door for her when they walk out. The corridor is silent, undisturbed. It feels almost blasphemous to make any sound, so she treads lightly, sticking to the carpet.
No one has stirred in the dorm when they make it back. Ruby takes the tray from Weiss and sets it down on a desk in the corner so she can go wake up her siblings, and sits back down on the edge of the bed as quietly as she can. At some point during the fifteen minutes they were away, Qrow has shifted to lie on his front, and Blake is now halfway on top of Ren thanks to Yang. It’s charming. It makes her ache for Beacon in a way she doesn’t quite know what to do with.
“Winter,” Weiss is hissing on the other side of the room, “Winter, stop pretending you’re asleep. I have your coffee.”
Winter shifts, making vague tired noises. “I know. I’ll get it in a minute.”
“It’ll freeze.”
“It’ll freeze anyway,” she mutters. “I haven’t had hot food in months.”
“That is a miserable existence. Now, wake up. Or I’ll pour the coffee all over you.”
“That will also freeze.”
“And yet you run hot,” Weiss says. Ruby wordlessly slips back off the bed and hands her Winter’s cup.
“Thank you,” Winter says, without opening her eyes.
Weiss’s head whips around to glare at Ruby. She grins sheepishly as she hands Winter the cup, and backs away with her hands raised once she’s taken it.
She sits back down on the edge of the bed as soon as Weiss is looking the other way, kicking off her boots and crossing her legs. Qrow has curled up into a ball against the pillows and somehow worked his way under the covers, leaving an extra few centimetres or so for her to slot herself into. She pats his leg when he stirs, grumbling to himself.
Weiss stands to her full height as if to join her, then pauses. If Ruby squints, she can just about make out her eyes flicking back and forth between her and her siblings. It’s her running calculations when things are going to shit look.
Winter yawns, stretching languidly. She’s never seen Winter tired before. It feels like she shouldn’t be looking directly at her. “I’m not going to pass away if you sit on the other side of the room, Weiss.” She wrinkles her nose. “Go kiss your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Weiss mutters, but she crosses the room anyway and drops down next to Ruby at the end of the bed. Winter yawns again and curls sideways around Whitley, pressing her cheek into his shoulder. He grumbles unintelligibly in his sleep.
Through some unspoken agreement, they shuffle back together until Ruby is lying propped up against Jaune’s legs and Weiss is lying propped up against her, head on her shoulder. The room stirs slowly to life around them — Qrow first, grumbling under his breath again and slouching off to find some coffee; then Emerald; then Winter and Whitley padding over to sit on the floor at the bottom of the bed once they realise they’re not interrupting anything particularly significant. Weiss kicks Whitley in the shoulder and calls them both attack dogs.
Jaune wakes up once his brain processes the people lying on his legs and, resigned to his fate, remains where he is. Nora and Ren abandon him for coffee.
At some point Yang sleepily detaches one arm from Blake and reaches over to ruffle Ruby’s hair. Remembering the tree and the Ever After and the way she’d hugged her when she came back, Ruby doesn’t even try to protest. Blake mumbles a good morning from Yang’s arms and drops unceremoniously back into sleep.
“‘S a good day,” Yang says. “First good day we’ve had in a while.”
Emerald hums. “I missed you guys.”
Somehow, she’s never felt so warm. Ruby tilts her head back to look at Emerald over Jaune’s leg and grins at her, and Emerald grins back, bright and eager and warm. The last three months have been good for her, it seems. She’s glad.
Weiss tilts her head up until she can see Emerald over Ruby’s shoulder and Jaune’s leg. Without quite meaning to, Ruby breaks Emerald’s gaze to follow the movement of her head, tracking her eyes all the way back up like it’s the most important thing in the world. She can’t even excuse it as being partner instinct. She wants to commit Weiss’s profile to memory, to carve the small gentle curve of her smile into the backs of her eyelids just in case this is their last real chance to have peace like this again.
“We missed you too,” she says, and her head settles back onto Ruby’s shoulder like it belongs there. She has the sudden urge to hide her face on the off chance that she’s blushing and Weiss notices, like it matters at all.
Blake, not quite as asleep as she was before, yawns and stretches and mumbles out, “I think you’re as good as family now, Em.”
Emerald’s head drops back down onto the pillow very suddenly. “What makes you say that?”
“Oh, y’know. The circumstances.”
Yang laughs and kisses the top of Blake’s head, earning herself an ear flicked against her chin. “She means Nora and Ren and Oscar have sort of adopted you, so you’re here now for better or for worse.”
“Worse, ‘cause you’re stuck with these idiots,” Whitely says. Weiss’s head turns to look at him, and Ruby follows the sharp line of her jaw and thinks, probably for the millionth time, that she’s beautiful.
“You’re related to me,” she points out.
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“You love me. You cried for hours when you saw that I was alive.”
Whitley nudges Winter, who could shove him back twelve times as hard but tactfully chooses not to. “She was face down in the sand.”
“A measured response,” Weiss says.
“I was not face down .”
“You tripped and fell,” Whitley nudges her again, which wins him a long glare that he laughs off.
“And then I flew, thereby solving the issue.”
“Suddenly I understand what you mean,” Emerald says seriously. Whitley laughs again, and so does Weiss.
“She’s practically Qrow’s daughter, too,” Winter mutters. “I would be advising you against associating with him if it didn’t make you both so happy.”
“One big dysfunctional traumatised family,” Yang grins.
“Speak for yourself,” Jaune says. It’s the first he’s spoken since he woke up, and it makes Ruby jump. He’s taken over Nora’s position, now half-wrapped around Oscar, and his eyes are still closed. He looks tired — deeply, deeply tired. This might be the most sleep he’s had in years. “I’ve never had a bad thing happen to me ever.”
“Never ever. Not once,” Ruby elbows his leg. He doesn’t even twitch.
“Uh huh. I had a great fifteen years.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Weiss hums.
They fall into peaceful silence. Ruby tilts her head back and stares at the ceiling, listening to Weiss’s soft, rhythmic breathing and the gentle humming that seems to follow all of Winter’s abominations around and somehow not quite falling back asleep. It must be nearly four in the afternoon now, and no one has come back into the room to wake them up yet. Oscar is still asleep, now tucked into Emerald’s arms.
(She’d admitted, earlier, that she thinks of him like a little brother. That she’d be glad to be part of their — whatever it is that they have.)
“I suspect they’re waiting for you five in the kitchen,” Winter says eventually, having migrated from the floor at the foot of the bed to the seat at the window.
Blake yawns again — she’s been doing a lot of that recently — and sits up. Yang mumbles quietly in protest, hooking her arms around her waist instead. “Do we wait for them to fetch us or just pretend we haven’t noticed?”
Weiss snorts. “Knowing Nora, she’s probably roped them all into cooking dinner to make up for last night’s disaster.”
“I tried!” Winter says defensively.
“And failed,” Whitley finishes. She glares at him. He seems to enjoy getting her to do that.
“I’ll go check on them,” Emerald announces. “If I don’t come back, I’ve been roped in.”
She rolls gracefully off the bed and opens the door to Qrow, hand raised as though he’d been about to knock. He yelps a little bit, hands flying towards the weapon on his back, and gives up halfway when he realises the entire room is staring at him.
“Uh. Robyn sent me.”
Winter sits up straighter. Both Weiss and Whitley hide their laughter. “Robyn?”
Qrow jerks his head towards the kitchen. “You’re wanted. All of you.”
“For what crime?”
Ruby throws the first thing within her reach, a largely ineffectual pillow, at Yang’s face. Blake catches it for her without even looking.
“The crime of making us think you were dead for three months,” Qrow says. “Come on. Before Nora burns the school down.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve been involved in school-related arson,” Blake mutters. Weiss snorts again, burying her face in Ruby’s shoulder.
One day she’ll tell her. She can’t keep putting it off forever. Ruby shifts to the side to give Jaune room to get up and Weiss shifts with her, seemingly unwilling to let go of her entirely — and that’s the thing, isn’t it? They’re never going to let each other go easily.
She sits up and Weiss sits up with her, swings her legs over the edge of the bed and Weiss loops an arm through hers without even looking at her. They’re partners. They’re family. Maybe she doesn’t even need to tell her.
They’re padding down the corridor again, this time at the very end of the quiet line of people making their way down to the kitchen, when Ruby turns to Weiss and kisses her on the cheek.
She doesn’t even blush. Just turns to her and gives her a look that says about time, idiot , and keeps walking.
Yeah , Ruby thinks, uncharacteristically calm, maybe saying something is obsolete. She turns to look down the corridor, to where Yang and Blake are walking with their hands tangled together, and very firmly decides to put it to the back of her mind for now.
For now.